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WASHINGTON The Commerce Department said Thursday that the United States economy grew at an annual pace of just 1.3 percent in the second quarter of the year, showing that the recovery came close to stalling in the spring. The revision was down from the 1.7 percent rate the government reported in August. The economy grew at a 2 percent pace in the first quarter of the year and 3 percent at the end of 2011. With just 40 days to go until the election, the weak growth figure was sure to take on a strong political resonance. Mitt Romney has battered President Obama for failing to foster a robust recovery and has pinned the economy's weak jobs growth on his policies. Mr. Obama has conceded that the recovery has been anemic, but has argued that his administration put the economy on the right track after the worst recession since the Great Depression. Thursday's report underscored that the recovery has proved insufficient to pull down the unemployment rate, which has been stuck between 8.1 percent and 8.3 percent all year. The renewed weakness this month spurred the Federal Reserve to act to support the economy, putting in place a third major round of bond purchases designed to aid the nascent housing recovery and to encourage employers to add jobs. Much of the downward revision to the second quarter figures was because of the effects of the nation's worst drought in 50 years. Farm inventories dropped in the second quarter, after falling in the first as well. More broadly, cuts to state and local government spending have held down growth, and private firms have hesitated to invest during the poor business climate, despite the attraction of low interest rates on loans. A separate report Thursday showed the manufacturing sector, one of the brightest spots in the recovery, contracting as well. The Commerce Department said that durable goods orders, a key measure of manufacturing strength, plunged 13.2 percent in August, far more than economists had anticipated and the steepest drop since the worst of the recession in the winter of 2009. Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. Much of the drop was from orders for aircraft. Still, the economic news was not all bad. The Bureau of Labor Statistics issued revised numbers for employment that raised the estimate of jobs in the economy last March by 386,000, or 0.3 percent enough to make President Obama a net job creator over his tenure. The report, adjusting data that will be refined once more, follows a trend of the bureau underestimating job growth when the economy is expanding and underestimating job losses when the economy is contracting. That proved the case in the early 2000s recession following the collapse of the tech bubble, the massive recession that started in 2008 and the period of economic expansion in between. Indeed, the Great Recession proved much worse than government policy makers understood as it was happening, with the economy shedding hundreds of thousands more jobs than initially estimated. In August, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said that it had overestimated job growth in June and July, revising down the number of jobs added in those months by more than 40,000. Thus, the bureau estimates the economy added fewer than 100,000 jobs a month through the summer months not enough to pull down the unemployment rate, given normal expansion in the labor force. But housing has recently proven a surprising bright spot, with sales and prices starting to climb in many regions of the country. On Thursday, the National Association of Realtors said that pending home sales retreated slightly in August after reaching a two year peak in July. The level of pending home sales a measure of properties under contract but not yet closed on has risen more than 10 percent in the past year. Many housing experts expect a sustained, slow recovery in the market. On Thursday, the average rate on a 30 year fixed mortgage fell to a record low of 3.4 percent. Low mortgage rates, driven in part by the new Federal Reserve program, are expected to drive more Americans to refinance their homes and to encourage purchases as well.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
For those so inclined, there are many places to perch in Eli Zabar's four story Carnegie Hill town house. Options on the entry level: the beige butterfly chair and the chocolate brown Rogers Goffigon sofa that dominate what the family Mr. Zabar, his wife, Devon Fredericks, and the couple's 21 year old twin sons, Oliver and Sasha call the all purpose room, a k a the TV room, the home office, the yoga studio. Up a flight to the kitchen: bistro chairs with red accented woven backs and an oak armchair from a Paris flea market frame the table; Belgian linen covered easy chairs flank the window at the far side of the room. As for the third floor master bedroom, a favorite redoubt of the resident wheaten terriers, Mini and Gio Ponti well, there's a pair of easy chairs the same shade of white as the dogs. Sit. But understand that Mr. Zabar, 69, will probably not do likewise. The energetic owner of E.A.T., the Vinegar Factory and Eli's Manhattan, vaunted pantries where you can't go wrong but you can go broke, remains on his feet even while working at his desk. "If I'm sitting down," he said, "things aren't going well." Really, things seem to be going just fine. Mr. Zabar is crazy about his home and mad for his neighborhood. Though he grew up on Riverside and 81st Street, just a few blocks from the specialty food store founded by his father and now run by his two elder brothers, he has lived on the same skinny slice of the Upper East Side the territory between the 70s and 90s for more than 35 years. But what Mr. Zabar really loves is that his home is a house. "When I go downstairs in the morning," he said, "and get my coffee and get the newspaper and look at my computer, I love that amazing privacy." "Not long ago, I said, 'Someday, we won't need this house and we'll move,' " Mr. Zabar added. He's been contemplating the idea of an apartment on Fifth Avenue, for the great views of seasonal changes in the park, but on second thought, he's not so sure. "I'd have to say hello to a doorman and hear, 'What floor are you going to?' from the elevator man." "My wife is very practical. She came down the block and saw the for sale sign and said, 'This is it.' " The property had been owned by the Dalton School with an eye toward creating more classrooms. When the plan was abandoned, the couple stepped in. But they still live in a school zone. The back garden abuts the building that houses Dalton's younger pupils. "That's one of the most charming things about this house: you hear the children," Mr. Zabar said. "It's a wonderful pitter patter that starts at 7:30 in the morning." Of course, it's fine with him; he's always up at 5:30. Unsurprisingly, for first time visitors on the guided tour, the top of the must see list is the kitchen, a mix of shiny stainless steel (Thermador six burner stove, Miele dishwasher, and Sub Zero refrigerator filled with yogurt and cheeses from you know where) and warm wood (herringbone oak floor, a glass fronted oak cupboard filled with French pottery and jars of apricot jam that Mr. Zabar makes with the housekeeper at his vacation home in Provence, and a oak topped island with bowls of produce from the greenhouse atop the Vinegar Factory). "Isn't this a beautiful tomato?" he said proudly, as if showing off his firstborn. "This is the only room we use," said Ms. Fredericks, who describes her occupation as "working for Eli." "We could rent the other ones out." At Passover, the island is disassembled to make way for the 35 family members who congregate to dine on food prepared at Eli's Manhattan. "We used to have three tables," Ms. Fredericks said. "But then word got back to me that people felt there was an A Table and a B Table, so now we just have a giant U shaped table so that everyone is at the A Table." She and her husband aren't disciplined enough to be collectors, Ms. Fredericks said. But they like thermoses, so they've picked up some vintage models, and on the shelf above the dishwasher is a lineup of pitchers. Meanwhile, the wine cellar is stocked with several bottles of burgundy that Mr. Zabar gathered in 1991, the twins' birth year. "We'll open them," he said, "when my sons are old enough to appreciate them."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
There is little point in assessing "Redistribution" as a movie, even an experimental one and that seems to be the idea. Billed by the Metrograph as a "hybrid, open form essay film," it had its origins in a video of a lecture that the artist Seth Price delivered at the Guggenheim in 2007. Price has since used that recording as glue for this wider ranging video collage, which has evolved over the years and been presented in multiple versions. What is screening at the Metrograph is a moving target. Right now, the piece exists somewhere between installation art it can be engaged with in excerpts, and its duration is irrelevant and a compilation of artist talks. But if calling "Redistribution" less than cinema sounds condescending, Price addresses the matter directly.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Why Are These Foxes Tame? Maybe They Weren't So Wild to Begin With In the 1950s, Dmitri K. Belyaev began one of the most famous experiments in animal domestication. Dr. Belyaev, a geneticist at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Russia, selectively bred foxes that he had acquired from a fur farm, concentrating only on reducing their fear of humans. Within 10 generations, he wrote in 1979, "Like dogs, these foxes seek contact with familiar persons, tend to get close to them, and lick their hands and faces." In a new paper in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, several scientists have challenged a common interpretation of Dr. Belyaev's results, and have questioned whether scientists who study domestication have any common understanding of what the word means. The authors don't dispute the essence of Dr. Belyaev's work: the selection for tameness, which is regarded as profoundly important in exploring the genetics and evolution of behavior. The authors of the new paper argue that this idea is undermined by an intriguing sub chapter in the long history of the fur trade in Canada. The reaction to that criticism from other scientists has been mixed, reflecting contentious but cordial disagreements about what domestication is and how it happens. The average pet lover may know the story of the foxes from a book by Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut, who collaborated with Dr. Belyaev, called "How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog)." Far fewer people probably know about the development of fox farming on Prince Edward Island, Canada's smallest province. This history is buried in plain sight, you might say, since you can learn about it easily if you visit International Fox Museum and Hall of Fame on the island. The museum is not a common destination for evolutionary biologists who specialize in domestication. But one of them did visit back in 2015, and he was taken aback. The late Raymond Coppinger, a biologist at Hampshire College in Massachusetts who was a major contributor to the study of dog evolution, toured the museum and returned full of questions. "He saw these pictures of spotted foxes, and they looked just like the Belyaev foxes," recalled Kathryn Lord, an animal behaviorist at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., and the first author of the new paper. Dr. Coppinger was her mentor at Hampshire College. There have been academic reports as well, suggesting that the Russian foxes hailed from Prince Edward Island, Dr. Lord said: "Different pieces of the story were all over, but nobody had put it together." As it turned out, genetic tests showed that Dr. Belyaev's foxes did have roots in eastern Canada, which almost certainly meant Prince Edward Island. So the question bothering Dr. Coppinger and Dr. Lord was this: How much domestication had gone on before the famous fox experiment began? Dr. Belyaev had plainly stated that his foxes were from farmed stock. So some domestication must have occurred before his experiment, said Anna Kukekova, a geneticist at the University of Illinois who researches the genetics of Russian foxes and has collaborated with Dr. Trut. Dr. Belyaev recognized that fur farmers would have chosen animals that were at least somewhat tolerant of people, Dr. Kukekova said. But Dr. Belyaev also described his foxes as mostly uncomfortable with people, virtually wild animals. Now, Dr. Lord and her colleagues suggest otherwise. Fox farming pioneers on Prince Edward Island began by breeding wild caught black foxes, also called silver foxes, a color variant of the red fox (Vulpes vulpes) common all over the world. They were bred mainly for the look of the pelts. In 1910, one company sold 25 skins for 34,649.50, according to "Silver Fox Odyssey: History of the Canadian Silver Fox Industry." Then breeding stock became more profitable. "Old proven breeders of good quality were valued during the last months of 1912 at from 18,000 to 25,000 a pair," according to a 1913 report by the Canadian government quoted in "Silver Fox Odyssey." Eventually the industry declined, and there are only traces of it remaining. The museum on Prince Edward Island has old photographs that show foxes looking very comfortable with human beings. And as Dr. Lord took a deep dive into fox farming history, she found other sources suggesting the animals were already somewhat domesticated, including "The Black Fox Magazine," a publication for people who hoped to make their fortune raising foxes for their pelts. Hearsay, of course, but a good story, given the other evidence. Dr. Belyaev's claims in his landmark article were twofold. One, he had shown how quickly one could select for tameness and tolerance of human beings. The second was that breeding, or selecting for lack of fear in the presence of humans, also had brought about other changes, like floppy ears, spotted coats and differences in tail carriage. He didn't use the term, but that suite of physical traits came to be known as domestication syndrome. And it was thought to cross species, showing up in cows and goats, for example, as well as foxes. The idea of domestication syndrome, said Dr. Larson, has been appealing but not thoroughly examined. He, Dr. Lord and their colleagues looked at 10 papers that defined domestication syndrome and found that there wasn't one trait that was included in all the definitions. "What the hell are we even talking about here?" he asked. The authors argue that the foxes already showed some of the physical traits that Dr. Belyaev described by the time he got them. His breeding may, however have affected how frequently the traits appeared. The researchers also note that different species show different combinations of the traits that were proposed to be in the syndrome. Dr. Wilkins has argued that mutations in cells in a part of the embryo called the neural crest are linked to behavioral and physical changes. "The fact that different kinds of domesticated animals have somewhat different sets of the affected traits is perfectly consistent with the idea of a 'syndrome'," he wrote in an email. Asked if there was a working definition of domestication, Dr. Sanchez Villagra replied, "There are as many as there are authors who have provided a definition." Despite their differences, the spirit of collaboration and scientific discourse among researchers in the quite small field of canine evolution might best be captured by Dr. Wilkins at the end of his letter. He tempered his criticisms with a friendly note, concluding, "We clearly share a strong interest in the subject and I suspect a love of dogs. Here, I attach a picture of my personal favorite domesticated animal, my dog Wolfie."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
The dish was a delicacy in ancient Rome. It was prepared by gutting the mouse, filling it with pork mince, and baking it. The dormouse had previously been fattened in a special jar that had tiny ledges molded inside, so it could run around before it was slaughtered. One such jar is on view in "Last Supper in Pompeii," a new exhibition that runs through Jan. 12, 2020 , at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Pompeii is perhaps our most important window into ancient Rome. When Mt. Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79 , this ordinary Roman town was buried under superheated ash. The heat killed the townspeople almost instantly, even as the ash preserved their final moments for all time, offering us a glimpse into the everyday life of ancient Romans including what they ate, and how they ate it. Food was a crucial part of Roman culture; Pompeii alone was surrounded by some 80 farms and vineyards. Meals were served in frescoed dining rooms, but also in bars and restaurants, and offered to the gods. Dormouse is one Roman specialty that has persisted: It is still served in Croatia and Slovenia. As the exhibition demonstrates, the food and culinary culture of ancient Rome endure in myriad other ways, too. "People used to modern Italian cuisine would be very surprised by ancient Roman food: No tomatoes for a start, and no pizzas and pasta," said Mary Beard, a professor of classics at Cambridge University, in an email. Yet, she added, "There are some underlying continuities." "The seafood from the Mediterranean is a major element in both," Professor Beard said, noting that Roman cesspit excavations had revealed widespread consumption of sea urchins. "So too are olives and wine." The 300 objects on display in the exhibition range from the banal to the beautiful. There are wine jugs and kitchen utensils, chamber pots and tiny toothpicks carved from bone. One fresco shows a well preserved sign for the Phoenix tavern, one of Pompeii's many places to eat out. A typical Pompeian tavern might have served grilled pork, chicken or goat with bread and vegetables, said Paul Roberts, the exhibition's curator, who heads the Ashmolean's antiquities department. Elsewhere is a reconstitution of a dining room, or "triclinium," in which wealthy Romans reclined on a three sided masonry couch at meal times. Meals eaten there might start with eggs, olives, savory pastries, and sometimes dormice. Then came seafood: An exquisite mosaic in the exhibition shows a goggle eyed octopus surrounded by countless other varieties of fish and crustaceans. The main course was meat, mainly pork, goat or sheep, and it was followed by fruit: grapes, apricots, plums, peaches and pears. The woods around Pompeii were filled with grazing pigs, and one is on display at the Ashmolean, in the form of a replica of a cast that was produced by pouring plaster into the cavity it left in the ash. The animal lies on its side with its mouth open, no doubt emitting one final squeal. Pig meat was served hot in tavernas and homes, but also cold, and the Romans also ate a lot of sausage, Dr. Roberts explained. The present day Italian fondness for prosciutto and salami has ancient roots. "The essential Mediterranean diet has not changed, and will never change," Dr. Roberts said. "Wine never dies out, bread never dies out, and olives continue." The other essential legacy of Roman times is "the love of food, the culture of food, the fact that food is your be all and end all," he added. At its height, the Roman Empire stretched all the way from Egypt in the southeast to Britain in the northwest. Roman conquests introduced plenty of foods to previously foreign territories, such as Britannia (Britain), which is the focus of a section of the exhibition. These included cabbage, cherries, rabbits, chickens, but also plums, pears and eating apples, said Dr. Roberts; even beer came from breweries started by the Roman legions in Germany. Some other aspects of Roman dining might sound unsavory. One is a pungent fish sauce called garum, that was put on everything, including desserts. The condiment was made by leaving the uneaten parts of a fish gizzards, gills, heads, tails, fins in a vat to ferment for two or three weeks. "The smell would have been indescribable," said Dr. Roberts, who said he has sampled Roman style garum. "But oddly enough, when you draw off the liquor from this, it tastes delicious, and doesn't taste fishy." Ms. Beard agreed that garum must have been tastier than it sounded. "People usually say 'yuck,' and students planning Roman banquets always have trouble with it," she said. "But maybe it was more like some Thai or Vietnamese fish sauces, which are excellent." Garum was dispatched all over the Roman Empire in stoppered bottles. You can see a branded bottle in a mosaic in the show: It's from the house of its maker Scaurus, a fish sauce tycoon who became one of the richest people in Pompeii. The most repellent aspect of Roman food culture was, paradoxically, the kitchens themselves. They were "hot, stuffy, dark and smelly," said Dr. Roberts mainly because the toilets and latrines were there, too, sometimes right beside the cooking area. Slaves poured everything from food waste and broken crockery to the contents of chamber pots directly into the latrines. "The Romans didn't understand the connection between hygiene and health," he explained. They had no awareness of "the concepts of germs and cross infection."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
That was one takeaway from New York Times readers when asked to tell us what shows our critics overlooked on their Top 10 lists. But in widening the scope to include work outside New York, too, we heard about productions in Atlanta, Boise, Rochester and Washington, D.C. not to mention Off Broadway. Here's a sampling of edited responses, with one very passionate "Hadestown" fan standing in for several others: Theatrical Outfit in Atlanta performed "The Laramie Project" in repertory with "Our Town" as its season opener in September. The masterful cast played multiple roles in both productions, giving life to the townspeople of Laramie and Grover's Corners as they went about their daily lives. The common themes of ordinary life and tragic death made the pairing particularly meaningful. ALICE TENOLD, Milledgeville, Ga. "Grief Is the Thing with Feathers" at St. Ann's Warehouse moved me to tears. Enda Walsh is one of the most creative artists working in the contemporary theater. MELISSA STERN, New York "Hillary and Clinton." Am I the only person who found this a deep and moving exploration of relationships and love? CHARLES BEHLING, Dublin, Ohio "Enter Laughing: The Musical" at the York Theater Company. Very modest in scope, and charmingly old fashioned, it was one of the funniest shows I have seen in the nine years that I have been obsessed with theater. As a side note, someone in the production must have been obsessed with diction, because this is one of the few shows in which I could understand all the lyrics. MARIA CARMICINO, New York City ACT Theater in Seattle staged a remarkable "Romeo and Juliet" that had every young visitor swooning. The beautiful actor Joshua Castille is deaf and so was his Romeo, taking his isolation to a whole new level. Sign language by Benvolio and the Friar to translate and communicate with him was incredibly touching, as were young Juliet's attempts. A really special interpretation. SOFIA TAYLOR, Seattle As a gay millennial, I've never felt a piece of theater heal something in me and break me at the same time the way "The Inheritance" did. RYAN HAMMAN, Chicago Ardent theatergoers, my daughter and I saw "Tootsie" three times. She thought it should have been called "Jeff" just loved Michael's best friend. Sorry it is closing prematurely. May this comedic gem enjoy a long life through many touring companies! MADELINE FARRAN, New York City I live in Alabama so I see many more local/regional shows than Broadway. I challenged myself to see 52 live events in 2019. Favorite new shows were "Ever After" and "Becoming Nancy" at Atlanta's Alliance Theater. LAURA LEE VANN, Birmingham, Ala. "The Royale" by Marco Ramirez at Geva Theater Center. The way the fight scenes were staged with foot stomping to represent the blows of the boxers was phenomenal. The actors were strong and the pacing kept me on the edge of my seat. IRENE STUMBERGER, Rochester, N.Y. Roundabout Theater Company's production of "Toni Stone" by Lydia Diamond was the year's best play. April Matthis's performance as Toni Stone was transcendent. It's a poignant story about race, gender, sports and Jim Crow America. The audience was on its feet. ANN ROMBERGER, Deerfield, Mass. "Hadestown" is by far the most electrifying, heartbreaking, heart wrenching piece of theater I have ever had the pleasure to witness. ERIKA SCALES, Ocean County, N.J. The world premiere of Sharyn Rothstein's timely, issue driven "Right To Be Forgotten" about the potentially disastrous effects of contemporary social media on individuals' lives, and about moral compromise in the pursuit of the greater good made excellent use of Arena Stage's Kogod Cradle venue. CHARLIE FONTANA, Washington "The Wrong Man" at MCC Theater was one of the most powerful, beautiful and wrenching plays I've ever seen. The singing, the dancing, the acting was superb. Devastated but totally captivated. LAURIE SAMMETH, New York City I loved "The Wrong Man" so much that after seeing Ryan Vazquez in the lead role I made another trip to New York to see Joshua Henry as Duran. I hope it will make it onto a Broadway stage. I would love a cast recording with Joshua Henry as lead. LINDA LEWIS, Gainesville, Fla. Standouts this season at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival were Christina Anderson's "How to Catch Creation," with indelible performances by Christiana Clark, Chris Butler and Kimberly Monks. And Lauren Yee's "Cambodian Rock Band" absolutely deserves all the attention and positive press it's getting. It's just a knockout. CAROLE FLORIAN, Ashland, Ore. I loved the outdoor production of "Million Dollar Quartet" at the Idaho Shakespeare Festival. The setting is sylvan and the sunset on the musicians is lovely. DEB EISINGER, Boise, Idaho Definitely add "Seared" to your list. Here's why: great performances, especially Raul Esparza, who ranges from spluttering with rage and indignation to simmering over betrayal and defeat. MYRNA WALSH, Duxbury, Mass. "Yen" at Raven Theater in Chicago. Elly Green's direction of an incredible cast of actors took Anna Jordan's script and brought out every emotion fathomable. I was a wreck leaving the theater. REBECCA SILBAR, Chicago I want to give a shout out to Trinity Repertory Company's production of "The Prince of Providence," a spot on examination of Providence's most famous mayor, Buddy Cianci. The ending was one of the best I've seen in theater a perfect summation of a deeply flawed man who was larger than life, even after death. ANNIE VOSS ALTMAN, Providence R.I. "A Woman of the World" by Rebecca Gilman, with Kathleen Chalfant. Whether it was the play or the actress both in my mind it totally captivated me. GERRY CORNEZ, New York City "Do You Feel Anger?" at the Vineyard Theater was caustically absurd in the best way possible. The play highlights the cult of masculinity and the ways women have to adapt to it, which was something I hadn't even noticed I was doing and had accepted as a fact of life. The playwright Mara Nelson Greenberg's dialogue ingeniously walked the line between hysterical and unnerving. ROMY NEGRIN, New York City Despite including some serious topics and themes, "Love in Hate Nation" at Two River Theater still had upbeat songs, lighthearted moments and a happy ending. I enjoyed every second. MELANIE RAUSH, New Brunswick, N.J. Aaron Posner's "Life Sucks." was a brilliant reworking of "Uncle Vanya," presented by Wheelhouse Theater Company. I laughed, I was sad, and the play provoked a lot of thought about the complexity of the human condition and how, really, nothing has changed in the last hundred or so years. I bought the coffee cup emblazoned with "Life Sucks," and when I'm having a bad day, I use it. MARJORIE WOODRUFF, Weehawken, N.J. I don't understand how I got an email from you all about the best of 2019 and "Ain't Too Proud" wasn't mentioned once? GREGORY BROWN, Washington	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
The record setting television deal was, in hindsight, far too good to be true. The billion euros the upstart media company had promised to pay to televise French soccer matches each year represented an increase of 60 percent on the league's previous television deal, and much more than any other bidder had offered. It was a sum so large about 1.2 billion a year that it led officials from the league and the club executives on its board to ignore obvious warning signs; to brush aside the fact that the company making the offer, MediaPro, had no history in French soccer; and to close an agreement without the type of bank guarantees that might have ensured that all that money would eventually arrive. And then the deal simply vanished. Last week, arbitration talks between the Ligue de Football Professionnel (L.F.P.), the governing body for professional soccer in France, and MediaPro, a Spanish broadcaster now controlled by Chinese interests, ended with the company handing back the four years of rights under its control and less than a third of the more than 300 million euros it owes for games this season. The resolution has left league officials frantically searching for a new television partner, and teams facing a very different financial future. One team director described the situation as "a total disaster." The chief executive of another one said the situation coupled with the continuing financial effects of the coronavirus pandemic was "hugely damaging." The president of the French champion Paris St. Germain, Nasser al Khelaifi, asked the league's new leaders to conduct a full investigation into the process that ended in catastrophe for France's teams. Al Khelaifi is also chairman of beIN Media Group, a rival to MediaPro for rights. What may hurt most, at least from the teams' perspective, is that it is a crisis of their own making. The trouble began in the spring. As all of Europe's major soccer leagues plotted ways to reboot, the French league announced it would be the only one not to complete its suspended campaign. A government decree ended the season early, forcing Ligue 1 to tap a national loan program to ensure its teams did not fall into financial ruin. Only the prospect of record breaking broadcast revenues, set to take effect with the start of the MediaPro deal this season, softened the blow. The agreement, signed in 2018, had been trumpeted as groundbreaking then, a contract worth more than a billion euros per season (about 1.2 billion) for rights to matches in France's top two domestic divisions. That symbolic figure was one that team executives had long hoped to realize, and one so large that it led them to part ways with the league's partner, Canal . But the financial boost MediaPro had agreed to pay almost 60 percent more than the previous agreement also led teams to spend more on recruitment in the last off season, a decision that many are now regretting. "They had anticipated the higher TV rates, and this comes as a shock for most people," said the chief executive, who asked not to be identified because talks to stabilize the league's finances continue. He predicted some clubs would look to foreign investors to bail them out in return for heavily discounted equity or outright sales. Some of the comfort that led the clubs to spend freely can be traced to ebullient comments made by MediaPro's chief executive, Jaume Roures, at the height of the pandemic's first wave in the spring, when global sports had stopped and the French league's main broadcast partners at the time, Canal and beIN Sports, announced they would suspend their rights payments. In April, Roures, in an interview with the sports daily L'Equipe, vowed to take over the broadcast rights to French games early if the season restarted in the summer and the league's partners, Canal and beIN Sports, opted out. "To be a good Samaritan is to pay what you owe," Roures said at the time. But a closer look at the deal French league officials signed with MediaPro, a company started by Roures and two partners that is now largely controlled and financed by a little known Chinese group, suggests several red flags were ignored in pursuit of the richest offer. MediaPro would not have been allowed to enter the auction for the French rights, for example, had the league not changed the tender process to allow agencies like MediaPro, which did not have a platform in France to broadcast games, to take part. Then, after the agreement was struck, it took several months for an official contract to be signed, and when it was it did not include the type of bank guarantees that would have proved MediaPro would be able to make good on the payments it had promised. There were other warning signs, too. Another huge deal signed by MediaPro, the stunning capture of rights to Italy's Serie A, collapsed around the same time it was in talks about its French acquisition. Part of the reason was the company was unable to provide a guarantee for much of the amount it had promised the league. And four years ago, the company's business practices came under further scrutiny when a United States affiliate, Imagina Media Audiovisual, was implicated in the FIFA bribery scandal. Earlier this year, Gerard Romy, one of MediaPro's founders, was charged with wire fraud, money laundering and racketeering conspiracy in connection with the case. Roures had looked to blame the impact of the coronavirus when he called for the French league to renegotiate its MediaPro deal in October. But with stadiums largely off limits to fans, viewing figures for soccer have remained robust across Europe; in some cases, ratings have soared. Didier Quillot, the L.F.P. chief executive who led the tender process, left his post in September with a payment of about 1.8 million, much of which was based on his negotiating the deal with MediaPro. Quillot in recent days has said he is prepared to repay any bonus he received that was linked to the rights sale. MediaPro's troubles started when it failed to secure 100 percent of the rights, losing a crucial package that included the first pick of the week's top game to beIN Sports, a Qatar backed broadcaster. BeIN sold those rights to Canal , reducing the need for the network, France's biggest pay television operator, to make a deal with MediaPro for the other games.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
A special edition of The Atlanta Journal hit newsstands on July 30, 1996, a pivotal headline splashed across the front page: "F.B.I. Suspects 'Hero' Guard May Have Planted Bomb." It was three days after a lethal explosion killed one woman and injured more than 100 people at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park. The story would change everything for Richard A. Jewell, the security guard in question even long after his name was cleared. Before the report came out in the paper, now named The Atlanta Journal Constitution, officials had used eyewitness accounts to compile a sketch of a man believed to have planted the pipe bomb in the park. But the F.B.I. wouldn't release the sketch, and it wouldn't yet name any suspects. A photo of a man near the blast site was too grainy for officials to make out any facial features. Spectators in Atlanta and around the world, unnerved by violence at an event that celebrates global unity, were anxious for answers. Enter Jewell who seemed to fit the bill of a lone wolf, as some news organizations began to speculate. Maybe he wanted to play hero for 15 minutes. (Never mind the lack of evidence.) Jewell was first referenced in The Times on July 28, 1996 not by name, but as "an AT T security guard," in the paper's initial story on the explosion. AT T had hired Jewell and others through a security firm to keep an eye on its five story sound and light tower in Centennial Olympic Park. Jewell, then 33, had noticed an abandoned backpack under a bench near the tower and alerted an agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Together, they helped clear 75 to 100 people away from the area, the agent told The Times. The pipe bomb, inside the bag, exploded minutes later. Alice S. Hawthorne, a spectator from Albany, Ga., died in the blast; Melih Uzunyol, a Turkish cameraman running to cover the explosion, died of a heart attack soon after. Jewell's life turned upside down after The Journal named him as the focus of the F.B.I.'s investigation. While the newspaper did not cite its sources for this information, Eastwood's movie depicts a female reporter offering sex to an F.B.I. agent in exchange for it. Government officials and news organizations descended on the apartment Jewell shared with his mother. Dozens of F.B.I. agents scoured the home and towed away Jewell's truck. In an apartment complex overlooking his building, four stations ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC paid a tenant 1,000 a day to set up a command post in her unit. Yet he was never charged. Inside, Jewell watched TV. He read. He played video games. He couldn't go outside not without setting off a high speed car chase of government vehicles and media vans, anyway. But beyond his walls, in the news, his case seemed to worsen. Details that appeared to support his guilt began to emerge: The Journal article quoted acquaintances of Jewell's, who recalled him owning a backpack similar to the one that held the bomb. Officials at Piedmont College, a small Georgia school where Jewell had been a security guard, had called the F.B.I. the day of the explosion with concerns that Jewell was "overly zealous." If The Times's reporting showed restraint, focusing more on the local frenzy than the man himself, it was thanks to hard won lessons in sourcing, Max Frankel wrote in the paper's magazine. "The Times had learned from its own sad transgressions over the years that whispered accusations against named individuals must not be trusted." The Wrong Man, and the Legal Aftermath Three months later, in a letter to one of Jewell's lawyers, the Justice Department made it official: Richard Jewell wasn't the man they were looking for. It would take time for officials to track down the right one: Eric Robert Rudolph, an anti abortion militant who, in 1998, was linked to other bombings, but evaded police for years. In 2005, he pleaded guilty to the bombings and received four life sentences. The Justice Department admitted some fault in how federal agents handled the investigation into Jewell specifically an early interview in which officials intentionally misled Jewell to ask him questions about the bombing. Their interrogation, agents told him, would be used for a training video. In a memo first reported by The Journal and later confirmed by The Times, the department said that the deceptive tactics used for the interview constituted "a major error in judgment" from the F.B.I. Jewell also sought legal action for the way he was characterized in the press, winning settlements from CNN and NBC. His libel suit against the company that owned The Journal lingered in the courts for years before the final claim was dismissed. 'A Man Cleared, but Not His Name' "He feels the stares of strangers in restaurants," The Times's correspondent Kevin Sack wrote one year after the bombing, "knowing they still wonder if he is the one." It had been nine months since the Justice Department cleared Jewell of any involvement. Still, the constant media attention he received at the height of the investigation had turned him into a public figure. Children asked for autographs. A woman he took on a date published a written account of the evening in a city magazine. "I'm a lot more cynical than I used to be," Jewell said in Sack's story. "I'm not as trusting as I once was. And I don't think I'm as outgoing as I used to be." Jewell died in 2007 at his home in Woodbury, Ga., after months of serious medical problems following a diabetes diagnosis earlier that year. He was 44. In the headline of his Times obituary, Jewell was remembered how people knew him in those first days after the explosion: "Hero of Atlanta Attack."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
The final season of "Game of Thrones" arrives April 14. Before then, we're getting prepared by rewatching the first seven seasons. Sign up to get these straight to your inbox. Bingers, we offer our services once again. We will shield your back and keep your counsel and give our lives for yours if need be. Welcome back to our epic "Game of Thrones" rewatch. If you're just joining us, you can catch up with recaps of past seasons with our ultimate watching guide, which also includes suggested episodes to rewatch in Season 7. Who Played the Game Best? Bye bye, Boltons your words will disappear, your House will disappear, your name will disappear. All memory of you will disappear (at least according to Sansa) game over. House Stark, what a comeback! Welcome once again to Winterfell and congrats on the new title. House Lannister might seem solid after the wildfire plot Cersei got the chair she's always wanted, but she's still isolated, with few friends (or armies) to support her. House Targaryen is the winner this round, as Dany has friends galore (House Martell, House Tyrell, rebel Greyjoy, the Dothraki, the Unsullied, three dragons), giving her superior numbers plus air and naval support. She can either host an invasion or a really great party. Bran is astonished when he sees the confrontation at the Tower of Joy. Not because he is witnessing his father and his bannermen winning a fight against members of the Kingsguard, but because the incident is not happening the way he has heard that it did "a thousand times." The myth of the honorable Ned Stark is the foundation of Bran's family, and part of why the Starks are the heroes of this story. But Ned left out some details, one of them being how Howland Reed stabbed Arthur Dayne in the back. Bran's understanding, for all these years, was that his father beat "the best swordsman" and was perhaps the better man. Arya, too, gets a rude awakening and is forced to adjust her understanding of her father, her sister and the Lannisters after she sees a Braavosi play reconstructing the events of King's Landing. Her father her hero is portrayed as a buffoon. "The past is already written," the Three Eyed Raven tells Bran. But it's still open for interpretation, and that will always depend on how the story is told, and by whom. Tyrion realizes this when he decides Dany needs to take credit for the (temporary) peace in Meereen, even though she has been absent from the city. After all, there are many who perceive Dany as an invader not a liberator, as a sex worker tells Varys. Tyrion recognizes that the Sons of the Harpy have "a good story," so Dany needs a better one, perhaps as practice for when they go to Westeros, where once again, she could be perceived as a foreign invader. To that end, he enlists the Red Temple to help sell Dany as the Chosen One. Dany is the ultimate example of the fungibility of stories. Considered one way, her story sounds a lot like Jon Snow's hero arc: Her mother dies in childbirth. She's of noble birth, but an outsider. She joins up with an unusual group of warriors who give her the opportunity to lead. She finds purpose championing another group on the lower rungs of society against dark, insidious forces that would keep them in thrall. She tries to do the right thing, but her own people try to kill her. She experiences a mystical event that leaves others in awe, and goes on to save people in the direst straits. But through a different lens, she's Cersei: She grows up without her mother; her father is killed by someone close to him. Her family is into incest. She's haunted by a witch's prophecy. She has no problem letting someone kill her brother on her behalf, because she perceives him as a threat to her child. She defines herself as a mother, but she can't really control her savage offspring because they have more power than she does (especially that biggest one). When things don't go her way, she threatens to burn cities to the ground, and she takes violent revenge against the men and women who've wronged her or confined her, even if they were not violent toward her. She confines people indefinitely. She executes others without due process. She takes control by incinerating her enemies inside their holy temple. She destabilizes. She destroys. Which version of Dany will prevail? It will depend on how her story ends. At times it seems like she could go either way. She could be on a triumphant journey, or she could be following in the path of her barmy father, the Mad King. At the very least, her tendencies should make us uneasy. She imagines herself to be a decent person. But as Edmure points out to Jaime Lannister during the siege of Riverrun, "all of us have to believe that we're decent, don't we? You have to sleep at night." Everyone believes they are the hero of their own tale. But that also makes everyone the villain or buffoon of someone else's story. A Few Words from the Dearly Departed Hodor, he of the large frame and small vocabulary, was a figure of fun, not much more than Bran Stark's source of travel plus comic relief. But that was until his death "holding the door" revealed what he had lost long ago, via a time loop that made his service to Bran seem even more tragic. We talked to the actor Kristian Nairn about filming one of the most poignant death scenes in Season 6. (Adapted from an earlier interview with Nairn.) How did you find out about your character's death? I actually found out from a fellow cast member. We get the scripts pretty much in order of our first appearance in that particular season. I called my friend Finn Jones, who plays Loras, and joked, as many of us do every year, "So, did I make it to the end?" I received an awkward silence in reply, so I knew that my number was up. A few days later, I received the call of doom from David Benioff and Dan Weiss that signals your character's demise, and the rest is history. What's your favorite memory from your last day on set? Isaac Hempstead Wright who plays Bran and I have grown very close over the years, and I dreaded the moment of leaving. Our little group Isaac, Ellie Kendrick, Thomas Brodie Sangster, Natalia Tena, Art Parkinson and others felt like a little odd family, so I knew I was going to miss it. They let Isaac be the one to wrap my last filming day, so that was definitely a special moment. Did you read any of the fan reaction to your character's death? I didn't at the start. It took me a while to feel O.K. with it. It's just a beautiful thing to see a character you worked hard on, and did your best to breathe life into mean so much to so many people. Particularly a character as unique as Hodor was. It's a humbling experience watching people hurt and cry along to something you have done. How do you feel about how Bran approaches his powers and people now, post Hodor? Did he learn his lesson? I'm frustrated by that, as Bran's ex carer. He needs to take his studies more seriously. If anything comes from Hodor dying, it should be that Bran realizes he can affect things in a major way. By being bored, he killed Hodor, the Raven, Summer and a whole race of tree people. Think about what he's doing! Like the Raven told him, the ink is dry. The past is not supposed to be tampered with. How did being on the show change your career? Not only did it change my career in every conceivable way, but it changed my life! I was working as a club DJ when I took the role, and I was doing pretty well in my field, but "Game of Thrones" expanded the field into a planet. It shattered my horizons, even some of my self imposed ones. No matter what happens in life, I will always be eternally grateful for the changes it brought, and the continuing opportunities. Who had your favorite death on the show and why? Honestly, I would be biased to say my own, but I was such a fan of our story line. I enjoy a little magic, and ours was also steeped in mystery. The Red Wedding was painful to watch, though. Michelle Fairley who plays Catelyn gave a showstopping performance in that scene. Is it just us, or did an awful lot of characters die in Season 6? Fortunately, the many actors culled from the cast were able to find plenty of work elsewhere. (Although there's no word yet on the baby who played Ramsay's infant brother.) Here's a memorial survey: Alexander Siddig (Doran Martell) avoided violence as the Prince of Dorne, but became one of its biggest advocates as the assassin guild head Ra's al Ghul on "Gotham." Ian McShane (Brother Ray) has ascended from Septon to actual god. He's the All Father Odin otherwise known as Mr. Wednesday in "American Gods." And he'll be back in the Gem Saloon on the upcoming "Deadwood" movie on HBO. Iwan Rheon (Ramsay Bolton) played a more complex villain in the short lived "Inhumans." And recently took a turn as the most mature member (relatively speaking) of Motley Crue in "The Dirt." Natalie Dormer (Margaery Tyrell) has gone from studying scripture with the Faith to raising hell as a shape shifting demon in the upcoming series "Penny Dreadful: City of Angels." Finn Jones (Loras Tyrell) bolted from the Sept of Baelor to get back into fighting shape as the lead of the since canceled Netflix series "Iron Fist." Jonathan Pryce (High Sparrow) is capitalizing on both his experience playing religious figures and his resemblance to Pope Francis in the upcoming Netflix film "The Pope." That scene in the show in which Dany steps out of the temple, emerging from the flames naked and unburnt? That set off a firestorm with fans, because even though that scene hadn't yet happened in the books, it went against what George R.R. Martin had said previously. Dany survives Khal Drogo's funeral pyre (possibly aided by the witch Mirri Maz Duur), but even that fire burns the Khaleesi's hair away. And when Dany is around a fire breathing Drogon, it burns her hair yet again and gives her burns and blisters. Dany is also somewhat afraid of Drogon. "If I run from him, he will burn me and devour me," she thinks, and with good reason. "TARGARYENS ARE NOT IMMUNE TO FIRE," Martin once explained in a webchat (all caps his). In another interview, he clarified further: "No Targaryens are immune to fire. The thing with Dany and the dragons, that was just a one time magical event." Bran's greenseeing reveries also have a limit. Greenseeing is a kind of warging, except it's linking into a network of tree consciousness. The heart trees the trees with carved faces are spiritual CCTV surveillance cameras all around Westeros, and the greenseers using the godswoods became gods, gaining a sort of omniscience. The trees don't share the same sense of time as humans their database covers past, present and future. But there are no trees available to help Bran see the vast majority of his visions in Season 6. Bran's visions in the books are augmented by becoming the tree or rather, eating a white paste with red streaks that look like blood, said to come from weirwood seeds (and believed by some to actually be the blood of Jojen Reed). As in the show, Bran starts to discover that he can reach out to people in the past during these visions. When he says, "Winterfell," Ned looks up. "Who's there?" he asks. But Bran's voice sounds like a whisper in the wind, a rustle in the leaves. Theon hears the wind whisper "Theon" when he's in the godswood, and it's therapeutic. ("Let me die as Theon, not as Reek," he prays.) "Words are wind" is a common phrase in Westeros so common Martin's editor tried to get him to cut the number of times it's used in the books. Martin refused, though, possibly because this connection between words and wind is foreshadowing a larger part of the story yet to come. Bran isn't the only Stark with magical abilities, but his are the most developed. Both Jon and Arya are able to warg into their direwolves, mostly though what they think of as "wolf dreams." The direwolves also share a telepathic link of some sort, and this connection could benefit their humans, once the Stark kids learn to master their abilities. In the books, Arya gets a boost while blind in Braavos, which is much less about being attacked with sticks (as it is in the show) and more about developing her other senses. Instead of getting kicked out of the House of Black and White, Arya continues her classes. A cat follows her one night, and through its eyes, she is able to cheat on her midterm and earn her sight back. Both Bran and Arya are taking beginner's magic, of a sort. The more advanced Melisandre studied long ago, and she pays the price for using her powers in the form of physical pain. (The ruby at her throat burns her. Blood trickles down her thighs, black and smoking.) Euron Greyjoy, too, is a practitioner of dark magic in the books. He doesn't merely seek a marriage alliance with Dany, as he wants to do in Season 6; he plans to bind her dragons to his will. He has a magical horn for this purpose, but it requires blood, too whoever blows it will die. Recipients of magic also suffer. Jon Snow's resurrection hasn't happened in the books yet, but Beric Dondarrion's experience gives us a preview being resurrected from the dead has consequences. Beric loses his memories and feels less himself each time. When it happens to Jon Snow in the books, he won't recover as quickly as he does on the show. "Magic can ruin things," Martin said in an interview. "Magic should never be the solution. Magic can be part of the problem." As one of his characters explains, "Sorcery is a sword without a hilt. There is no safe way to grasp it." The show is grasping it with both hands and trying to hide the blood. How Did You Get Your 'Game' On? This week, readers wanted to know more about the undead uncle, Benjen Stark. "How has Benjen remained dead but free of the influence of the White Walkers?" Carrie Leadingham "Benjen is severely underused. He did not need to sacrifice his undead life to save Jon. There was room for two on that horse. But really, why didn't the showrunners use White Walker Benjen more?" Grace Green Yes, Uncle Benjen was the Jack to Jon Snow's Rose, and his horse was the raft. But sadly, like in "Titanic," the powers that be decided that one life was more valuable or more interesting? than the other. If "alive" is even how we should describe the state of Benjen's existence. (He's still human, though, not a White Walker.) As Benjen explains it in the show, a White Walker stabbed him in the gut with a sword of ice, and left him there to die, to turn into a wight. The Children of the Forest "stopped the Walkers' magic from taking hold" by shoving dragonglass in his heart. Dragonglass which seems to be a magical cure all can create a White Walker, kill a White Walker, kill a wight and prevent someone from becoming a wight. Perhaps it's like electricity: A little lights something up, a surge can make it explode? Either way, it left Benjen in this in between state, both dead and not dead. Benjen seems bound in service to the Three Eyed Raven's mission. How does Benjen know where to find everyone? There is a lot about Benjen we don't know, but we can get a few more clues with Coldhands, a mysterious character in the books. (George R.R. Martin has claimed Benjen is not Coldhands, but the showrunners refer to Benjen as Coldhands in an "Inside the Episode" piece.) For instance, Coldhands is able to speak the True Tongue, the language of the Children. He also can speak with ravens, understanding their squawks and using them as scouts. Cool, huh? The showrunners decided, however, they didn't have room to explore this. Uncle Benjen's purpose, David Benioff said in another "Inside the Episode" piece, is to save Bran and Jon. In other words, he's not a fully realized character.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Marvel and Waid declined to say why the page was changed. But in an email message, Waid expressed frustration at how his original text was being presented. "I'm disappointed that the cherry picked quotes circulated by the media severely mischaracterize what was actually written," he wrote. While the essay was critical, he added, "As written, Cap is supportive of America as a whole." The change to the Captain America text comes nearly two weeks after The Guardian reported that the cartoonist Art Spiegelman said he was asked to remove criticism of President Trump from a foreword for the upcoming book "Marvel: The Golden Age 1939 1949," published by the Folio Society. The essay, which The Guardian published, included the line, "In today's all too real world, Captain America's most nefarious villain, the Red Skull, is alive on screen and an Orange Skull haunts America." Spiegelman said he was told by the Folio Society that Marvel was trying to stay apolitical. Folio and Marvel didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the change. Captain America, who made his debut in 1940 (though the comic had a cover date of 1941), has a long and tangled relationship with American politics. In the issue of his own title that came out Wednesday, written by Ta Nehisi Coates and drawn by Jason Masters and Sean Izaakse, he finds himself at the Southern border of the United States, helping to guarantee safe passage for a group of migrants. When one of them asks why they were being hunted, Cap answers: "Ignorance. Ignorance and hate." In 2016, a story twist made the hero an operative of Hydra, a Nazi like organization that was out for world domination. Fans of the character did not like seeing the patriotic champion in such a light, prompting Marvel to issue a statement asking readers "to allow the story to unfold before coming to any conclusion."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
In July 2013, two nautical enthusiasts from two totally different parts of the world decided to try their luck at obtaining a lottery like spot for a weeklong boating trip, called Yacht Week, which started and ended in Croatia. The trip offered spots on 100 boats, with each consisting of friends or family: five women and five men. Jacqueline Spagnola, a native New Yorker, was in her final year of law school. Guido Wolff lived in Amsterdam and was finishing his degree in business hospitality. Both just wanted to hone their boating skills, travel with friends and have a little fun. Neither expected to find a soul mate alongside their shipmates. Ms. Spagnola, now 28, met Mr. Wolff, who is 29, on the third day of the trip. "At any given time, you can have 20 boats docked and tied together and everyone walks from one boat to another," she said. After hearing loud music that morning, Ms. Spagnola went on deck to see where it was coming from and spotted a group of handsome men two boats from hers. "I was mesmerized by the best looking guy I'd ever seen," she said. "I told my friends, 'We have to go over there now.' I quickly retreated to my cabin, did a beauty transformation and went with my friends to Guido's boat." Mr. Wolff was equally charmed. "She wore a captain's hat and a green bikini," he said. "I knew she was the pretty girl that people wanted to talk to, so I left her a little space." Hours later, the two boats traveled together to the evening activity, which was a party at Fort George, an abandoned castle overlooking the Adriatic Sea. "Her table was next to mine," Mr. Wolff said. "I was so attracted to her. I never lost sight of her." They drank and danced, and at midnight they kissed. "I remember looking out onto the crowd, being very happy, and thinking this is exactly where I want to be," Ms. Spagnola said. "Kissing him felt very special." It was that kind of special that transcended back to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, where Ms. Spagnola was living while finishing her law degree at Brooklyn Law School. Her mother visited the day after she returned home. "I didn't think she would meet anyone, it was a singles trip, and she went with friends," said Victoria Spagnola, 57. "But she couldn't stop talking about this man she met. She was 100 percent sure she loved him. She had boyfriends before, but she had never spoken about anyone the way she was speaking about Guido. When she said he was from Amsterdam, I thought, 'How are they going to do this? Is it just vacation thing? Who is going to move where?'" And thus, problem No. 1: location. Ms. Spagnola grew up in Todt Hill, Staten Island. Her parents also own an apartment in Murray Hill in Manhattan. Her mother is a retired accountant, and her father, Fred Spagnola, 58, is a financial adviser for UBS. She and her brother, who went to school in Manhattan, had strong ties to New York. Moving to Amsterdam for love seemed impulsive. Mr. Wolff grew up in Abcoude, a small town in the Netherlands, until he was 4. Then he moved to Madrid with his older brother and parents. "My mother was a homemaker and my father was the C.E.O. of a record label," he said. They returned to his hometown six years later, and by then there were four Wolff children. Still love has a way of steering the ship, so to speak, and after that first kiss, the couple's course was set. When the night was over, they departed to their separate yachts, hoping they would continue finding each other along the same route and schedule. She replied, and phone numbers were exchanged. The next several days turned into a texting frenzy. Then came the phone calls and Skyping. Two months later, Mr. Wolff was visiting her in New York. "You always have to be cautious with your heart, but I didn't want any regrets not following it," he said. "I might as well go and see if she felt the same." Ms. Spagnola did. "When I saw him again, I knew I was looking at the man I would marry," she said. "It was one of the happiest weeks of my life." Mr. Wolff stayed with Ms. Spagnola for 10 days, during which time they each said "I love you." The two also went to see a lawyer who informed them about visas, immigration laws and working internationally. Their desire to be with each other superseded the obvious roadblocks. In November 2013, she visited him in the Netherlands, and again for the New Year's holiday. In March 2014, Mr. Wolff stayed with her for three months. That October, Ms. Spagnola passed the bar and Mr. Wolff visited to celebrate. But the couple understood they would not often actually be in the same room, let alone live together full time. "I lived in constant fear we wouldn't be together," Mr. Wolff said. "There's also the fear of not knowing when you'll see the other person or that you'll lose them because they're not in the same city or even the same country with you." Ms. Spagnola felt similarly. "I never knew you could miss someone so much that it caused physical pain," she said. "Guido had unwavering confidence in us and the value of our love." In December 2013, Mr. Wolff obtained a sales job with a denim company that would sponsor him to work in the United States. Ms. Spagnola refused to let him miss the opportunity. "It was an 18 month program," she said. "I knew he couldn't pass it up, so I really encouraged him to take it. " For the next four months the couple fell back into a long distance relationship, each visiting the other monthly. In January 2016, Ms. Spagnola, unable to live without him, found work by persuading a law firm that it needed an international person in its Amsterdam location. Another visa, this time for her, was obtained. "Everyone told me not to go, but I would have regretted not meeting the people who made him the person that I love," she said. After a year, Ms. Spagnola was unfulfilled with her job. Knowing that Mr. Wolff would return to New York after graduating from school in September, she came home in May 2017. Mr. Wolff was able to secure a job in New York as an account executive at Harver, a Dutch technology company. "Everyone says how great we've managed doing a long distance relationship, but it's been extremely hard and painful," Ms. Spagnola said. Eduard Sabbagh, who was part of the groom's boat and a guest at the wedding, saw the couple's determination from the beginning. "Within a week the relationship escalated very quickly," he said. "It was difficult, but they did it. If Guido sets his mind to something, he'll figure it out. They're very similar in that respect." The couple were married Oct. 7 before 190 guests at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan. The Rev. Andrew King, a Roman Catholic priest, performed the ceremony. Later in the evening, guest were greeted by two trumpeters in medieval attire at the Metropolitan Club on 60th Street. The couple's 15 bridesmaids and groomsmen descended the grand stairwell of the club, and then waited as the newly Mr. and Mrs. Wolff entered the reception. "They were instantly drawn to each other," said Morgan Manousos, who was on the bride's boat when the couple first met. "It didn't matter there was an ocean between them and different continents, they both love fiercely." Indeed, in the last four years, between the two of them, they have taken the eight hour flight between New York and Amsterdam more than 35 times. "We're both big dreamers," said the bride, who clutched her husband's hand before they walked into the dining room for their first dance. "But he's here, and we're here. Today has been better than my wildest dreams. Everybody we love is here. It was the fairy tale wedding I always wanted."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
More than 140 years after it made its debut, in English soccer, the whistle is the most recognizable sound in sports. From soccer fields and football stadiums to basketball arenas and wrestling mats, from youth sports to the pros and from one continent to the next, the whistle is the thread that winds its way through global sports. It often marks the beginning and the end of an event, signals pauses and restarts in tense moments, and acts as an exclamation point after a big play. In the symphony of sport, the whistle is the soprano: crisp, distinct and capable of leaving one's ears ringing. But in the age of coronavirus, the whistle may face an existential challenge, or, at the very least, a serious rethinking. To use almost any whistle requires a deep breath and then a forced burst of droplet filled air things that, during a pandemic, deeply concern medical experts. Is there a better way? That is what people keep asking Ron Foxcroft. Foxcroft, a former N.C.A.A. and Olympic basketball official, is the most trusted name in North America when it comes to whistles. His company, Fox 40, sells about 15,000 a day mostly the so called pealess whistle, which accounts for the bulk of his business. About a decade ago, Fox 40 also began making and marketing an electronic whistle. It operates with the push of a button, and its tones can be adjusted by a switch on the side. The current versions on the market produce sounds that range from 96 to 120 decibels (or from the sound of a lawn mower to that of an ambulance siren). It is this version that in recent months has come to dominate Foxcroft's conversations, emails and text messages. None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. "There's two questions," Foxcroft said of the inquiries he has received in the past few months. "No. 1: 'Ron, you're a referee. Tell us what you think of the electronic whistle.' No. 2: 'We'd like to experiment with the electronic whistle. Can you send us some?'" Fox 40's version is one of a handful of models available; Windsor and iSport, among others, make their own versions. But Fox 40's position in the industry its clients include the N.B.A. and the N.F.L. and even the White House, where multiple presidents have used its whistle to start the annual Easter Egg Roll means it has seen a surge in both inquiries and orders. Before mid April, the Canadian company's largest order for electronic whistles had come from a European train company, which bought 3,000 for its employees. Since May 1, though, Foxcroft estimated, the company had received orders for about 50,000 more. Most are headed to sports officials. Many of the referees who receive them will be trying one for the first time. Verne Harris, a Division I men's basketball official for the past 32 years, said in an interview that he did not know the electronic whistle existed until this spring. But during his coronavirus imposed refereeing hiatus, he said, he has been pondering what changes might be coming to the profession. "I didn't really think of anything that would be an alternative, but I was like, 'How in the world?'" Harris said of the conundrum of reducing transmission risks during games. "The minute they touch the ball and then we touch the ball and then we kick it out and turn around and put the whistle in our mouth. "And when you blow on the whistle," he added, "then all of those particles are coming out into the air." Some leagues are making plans to use them. Hockey Quebec, the governing body for the sport in the province, recently included the mandatory use of electronic whistles by referees and coaches in its protocols for a return to play. And the N.C.A.A.'s chief medical officer this spring raised the idea that game officials be included along with trainers and some coaches in the group of people required to wear masks at games. While the push button whistle, which looks a bit like a small flashlight, certainly addresses some virus fears, head to head comparisons with the sounds of more traditional whistles can sometimes be unsatisfying. And in interviews over the past several weeks, veteran referees raised more practical concerns. "Are they weatherproof? Do they work in the snow? Do they work in the rain? You know, those sorts of things," said Steve Shaw, the national coordinator of officials and secretary rules editor for college football, who tried out Fox's electronic whistle in May. "And do we have to carry a spare battery around with us?" Other officials wondered how an electronic whistle would be synced with the Precision Time System, a relatively new mechanism that uses the sound of referees' whistles to stop the game clock. Experts say this system can save 30 seconds or more of playing time during the average 40 minute college basketball game, and it is used in the N.B.A., the W.N.B.A. and the men's and women's N.C.A.A. basketball tournaments. "When you put air in the whistle it triggers the clock to stop at that point like instantaneously," said Donnie Eppley, a Division I men's basketball official since 1997. "I'm not sure how they would do that with an electronic whistle." Shaw said he thought the electronic whistle could be a good alternative if sports officials determined that referees should shift away from traditional models. But the most difficult part in using the new whistle is just that, Shaw explained: using it. He and several other officials interviewed raised concerns about what is considered to be one of the graver sins in their job: the inadvertent whistle. "We have that momentary time lag between taking your whistle from your hand to your mouth, and that little instance sometimes can save you from blowing an inadvertent whistle," Shaw said. "And this has none of that kind of delay built into it because it's right there in your hands. And right there, your thumb is on the button. So we'd have to really talk through being patient." Eppley added: "I can see, maybe, a lot of inadvertent whistles where people are just running up and down the court and you've got this thing in your hand and you just inadvertently touch the button." He called it a challenge of "whistle discipline."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
On Oct. 11, 2012, with only a few weeks before the presidential election, Wall Street was rooting for Mitt Romney, the Republican challenger from Massachusetts. That was the assessment of a team of analysts at UBS, the giant financial services firm, who issued a report that day that now makes fascinating reading. They handicapped the election correctly, saying President Obama was nevertheless the overwhelming favorite. But they also gave practical advice to prepare investors for a victory by either candidate. The analysts created two model stock portfolios. One contained stocks they believed would prosper under the status quo a divided Congress and the re election of the president. The other was the Romney portfolio, containing a separate set of stocks that they expected to excel if there were an upset a Romney victory accompanied by a Republican sweep of Congress. That would mean fewer regulations, more fiscal austerity and more military spending or so they believed and they picked stocks that should benefit. Those two model portfolios were buried in the files until last week, when they were unearthed by Chris Costelloe, an analyst with Birinyi Associates, a stock market research firm in Westport, Conn. "I ran the numbers, and thought the results were remarkable," he said. It turns out the Obama portfolio has beaten the stock market by more than two to one. Since the publication of the report through Tuesday, it gained 57.8 percent compared with 26.2 percent for the Standard Poor's 500 stock index. (Mr. Costelloe assumed that each portfolio was made up of 100 shares of each of the stocks in it.) The Romney portfolio's rise was 32.2 percent. "We never expected the overall stock market to do as well as it has," said Jonathan Golub, who wrote the report when he was still chief United States equity strategist at UBS. Mr. Golub is now the chief United States market strategist at RBC Capital Markets, and he had forgotten about those election projections until I called him about them last week. "In hindsight, it's clear that we were wrong on some points but we got a lot of things right," Mr. Golub said. Why has the Obama portfolio performed so well? It contained 14 stocks, and the logic for some of them was straightforward. One was First Solar, the manufacturer of photovoltaic modules, chosen for Mr. Obama's tilt toward alternative energy. HCA, the hospital company, and Alkermes, a pharmaceutical firm, were on the list because of the Affordable Care Act. The health care law was expected to bolster those stocks by increasing the number of people with health insurance a result that may eventually occur, but hasn't been obvious so far, given the initial problems with the new federal website. The group of stocks included Aflac because of Mr. Obama's economic policies. Its insurance goes after "middle to lower income individuals," who were expected to have more discretionary spending under the president than under Mr. Romney. Those were some of the obvious choices. But the portfolio also included Alliant Techsystems, a military supplier that claimed a berth because of the perverse logic of Wall Street. Alliant is a leading manufacturer of bullets. "Gun control concerns could lead to people stockpiling bullets," the report said. In the Obama portfolio, Alliant shares rose 131.4 percent, second only to First Solar shares, which gained 155.5 percent. The Romney portfolio has done better than expected, even in the absence of a President Romney. That wasn't predicted by the UBS team, nor was the extraordinary performance of the overall market. "I don't think it's anything that President Obama has done," Mr. Golub said. "It's mainly the Federal Reserve." By keeping interest rates low even now, despite an increase in long term rates the Fed and other central banks have kept the bull market roaring, Mr. Golub said. That has helped the market over all, and it has fueled financial stocks like Goldman Sachs, American International Group, State Street and U.S. Bancorp, included in the Romney portfolio because the UBS analysts believed Mr. Romney might roll back financial regulations. These include the Dodd Frank Act and the Volcker Rule, which was finally approved last week and was intended to bar regulated banks from using customer money to trade for their own gain. Under Mr. Romney, financial institutions would presumably have had more flexibility. Yet market returns suggest that the banks have no trouble enticing investors, even with Dodd Frank. The analysts had so many attractive alternatives for the Romney portfolio that they included 28 stocks in their selection, double the amount in the Obama portfolio. "The list reflects what investors were really thinking about then," Mr. Golub said. "The perception was that Romney would be better for the market, that there were many stocks that would be winners under Romney, and not so many under Obama." Military suppliers like General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin were on the Romney list. So was a mining company, Joy Global, which was expected to flourish with fewer environmental restrictions on coal; and tobacco companies like Altria, Lorillard and Reynolds American, which pay high dividends. The analysts were concerned that taxes on them might rise under Mr. Obama. A Romney victory could set off an immediate market rally, they projected. Instead, taxes on dividends have not risen, and while the market fell the day after Mr. Obama's election, it has rallied extravagantly since then. Why has the market boomed? The Fed, declining deficits and corporate profits are the usual answers. Would the market really have done better under Mr. Romney? That was the consensus on Wall Street but it's difficult to make that case today. Calculations by the Bespoke Investment Group through Friday show that in President Obama's first 1,788 days in office, the Dow Jones industrial average has gained 15 percent, annualized. That's the fourth best for an equivalent period among all American presidents since 1900, behind Bill Clinton, a Democrat; with 19.8 percent; Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, with 19.4 percent; and Calvin Coolidge, a Republican, with 18.6 percent.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Gleaming through these crimson gas clouds are rarely seen, short lived stars. Classified as O type stars, they only burn for tens of millions of years before disappearing. For every three million stars in the Milky Way, only one is O type. They are shrouded not only in dust, but also mystery. Astronomers are unsure how these giant stars form, and they don't often get the chance to observe them. The ones buried in the red nebular cloud RCW 106 seen at the center of this image released Wednesday are some 12,000 light years away, according to the European Southern Observatory. They measure dozens of times bigger than the sun and are nearly a million times brighter. Researchers are interested in understanding how they devour enough gas to sustain their size and power.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
WASHINGTON The Obama administration, teaming with private partners including the Gates Foundation and JPMorgan Chase, announced initiatives on Tuesday to expand banking services to millions of Americans and others worldwide who lack essentials like checking or savings accounts and access to credit. "More than two billion people around the world rely solely on cash transactions, and basic financial services are out of reach for one in four individuals on earth," the Treasury Secretary, Jacob J. Lew, said at a two day financial inclusion forum of government, financial industry, academic and nonprofit leaders at the Treasury Department. "Even in the United States, with greater access to conventional financial services, one in five households continues to use alternatives like check cashers or auto title loans," Mr. Lew added, and millions do not have enough financial history despite years of paying rent and bills to have the credit score needed for access to loans. Many of the 10 initiatives announced to reduce the ranks of the so called unbanked were intended to harness technological innovations to provide access to financial services for low income people.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
American buyers are gravitating toward S.U.V.s these days, but for those who value fuel efficient cars, the Toyota Prius has become the gold standard over the years. Never known for engaging driving dynamics or passionate design, this is the fourth generation. (ON CAMERA) Just so you know, there's a plug in hybrid version coming in late 2016. Called the Prius Prime. It seats four, has an estimated all electric range of 22 miles and gets... slightly... different... styling. Certainly, you've decided whether the polarizing lines appeal to you or not. Give Toyota credit for going all in. After hours of photographing it, I understand the lines better. I want a set of these tail lamps in my home as art. (SOUND UP?) The silhouette is among the most aerodynamic you can buy and Prius sits on Toyota's new TNGA platform that the next generation Camry will ride on. (ON CAMERA) Prius is a hybrid and it does those hybridy kinds of things. As before ,coasting and braking charges the battery. Remember this model doesn't get plugged in. (SOUND UP) The gas engine shuts down at stoplights. Typically Prius (SOUND UP) initially pulls away on electric power before the gas engine smoothly feathers in. Careful drivers can keep track of their efficiency almost like a game, much safer than playing Pokemon Go at the wheel. The hybrid components and transaxle that includes a continuously variable transmission are all more compact. The 1.8 liter gas engine is more efficient too. All Prii except the base model use a new lithium ion battery tucked under here now. Total power output from the four cylinder and two motor/generators is 121 horsepower. (ON CAMERA) Remember, on start up (beep) there is no engine sound) A happy little show on a far better display greets you. The transmission selector remains pretty much the same. (SOUND UP PULLING AWAY) A leisurely 0 60 time of about 10 seconds remains the same. GFX On a well charged battery, EV Mode allows electric only travel for short distances at low speeds (ON CAMERA) Under hard acceleration the engine is quieter now. There's less of that rubbery elastic dynamic from the transmission though it is still there a bit. Prius may not look like a conventional car but it definitely drives more like one now. (ON CAMERA) Toyota has been promising better handling from their cars for years now and Prius delivers. It no longer corners like a damp rag. It's not a sports car but it's definitely better. The brake feel is improved, transitioning from power regeneration to the physical brakes being used is fairly seamless. (ON CAMERA) Visibility is great in this car, if you haven't noticed, lots of glass, like a big bubble. Kind makes me want to try driving a Pacer. GFX E.P.A. rated fuel economy is 54 city / 50 hwy Eco model is 58 city / 53 hwy But most people are primarily interested in fuel economy and once again, Prius improves. I'm easily seeing 52 miles per gallon without changing my driving habits. Impressive. Drive modes are available, I didn't notice a huge difference, "power" is certainly not "ludicrous" mode. Perhaps you noticed the color way used inside the cabin. For those who don't want to be reminded of their first iPod or an Orca whale, black and beige are available. And yes, dirt does show. Materials are a HUGE step up from the utilitarian plastics in the outgoing model. Toyota's user interface is very straightforward and a backup camera is standard. (ON CAMERA) Prius is not a small car. The back seat is actually fairly roomy, though your very tall friend may want to ride up front. Two average adults will be very comfortable, three will be fine when not testing out Prius' estimated 588 mile range. The cargo hold is roomy for those who think they need a crossover to lug stuff around. (ON CAMERA) No TP Trunk test this week, something a little bit practical, I have chores to do. My wife's been after me to donate this stuff for weeks. Who doesn't have a beanbag chair that needs to be unloaded. Without issue, Prius gobbles stuff up handily. I think I'll run into the house and get that old printer too. Prices start at 25 thousand dollars for a Prius Two (there is no One). This Three model with Advanced Tech package stickers 30 grand. Prius remains the best way to save gas without having to plug in. Polarizing design? Well it's not as if it's alone. Right? Other than opinions on that, there's no arguing that Toyota has improved the Prius experience all the way around.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
With so many of its customers struggling during the pandemic, UnitedHealth Group, one of the nation's largest health insurers whose profits have not suffered during the crisis, is offering modest relief. On Thursday it said it would make 1.5 billion worth of premium credits and fees for doctor's visits available to people enrolled in its plans. "People are hurting right now," said David S. Wichmann, UnitedHealth's chief executive, in a call with reporters on Wednesday night. "Employers are hurting. Individual consumers are hurting." Employers and individuals in its commercial plans could receive credits toward their premium bills for June, ranging from 5 to 20 percent of their May bills. The credits, which would be targeted to those in areas of the country hardest hit by the virus, would not apply to the plans UnitedHealth administers for employers that are self insured. For people enrolled in its Medicare Advantage plans, the company said it would waive all cost sharing for visits to primary care physicians and specialists through at least the end of September. The company said it wanted to encourage people to get any care they need and had put off during the crisis.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
As animation has trended toward the precision that comes from working with computers, it has become refreshing to encounter throwbacks to less "perfect" styles. The adventure plot in the Brazilian feature "Tito and the Birds," directed by Gustavo Steinberg, Gabriel Bitar, and Andre Catoto, is no great shakes it wouldn't be out of place on a Saturday morning cartoon but visually, the movie leaves room for the viewer to synthesize, and to dream. Combining work in oil paint with digital artistry, the film is unafraid to let brush strokes or impasto show. It blends backgrounds and effects that look vaguely post Impressionist with character features that suggest a demented, taffy stretched "South Park." In a sense, even the movie's subject is imagination. The plot finds the world gripped by an epidemic: A virus is paralyzing people with fear, shrinking them into blobs and eventually turning them into rocks (or so we're told). Although it's not clear to everyone, the disease's spread appears to be abetted by a steady diet of news media scaremongering. A self interested real estate developer (voiced by Mateus Solano) is pulling the strings.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
A dead elephant inspected by a soldier in Chobe, northern Botswana, in September. Poachers, mostly from Zambia, now are operating in Botswana, conservationists report. The news had international repercussions. Botswana had been one of the last great elephant refuges, largely spared the poaching crisis that has swept through much of Africa over the past decade. The country is home to some 126,000 savanna elephants, about a third of Africa's remaining population plentiful enough that they are increasingly in conflict with villagers in the northern part of the country. Following the announcement in September, Botswana's ministry of the environment denied that there was a poaching crisis of any sort, and in May the government lifted a ban on trophy hunting that had been in place for five years, provoking worldwide condemnation. Even some scientists wondered whether the illegal ivory trade really had found its way to Botswana. Now, the researchers have published data in the journal Current Biology that seems to confirm their initial findings. Based on aerial surveys and field visits, the authors report that fresh elephant carcasses in Botswana increased by nearly 600 percent from 2014 to 2018. Samuel Wasser, a conservation biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle who was not involved in the research, said that "there's no question" about the authors' findings. "The work was exceptional in every way," he said. "There were so many features they carefully and meticulously documented. And they also looked at alternative hypotheses, and none were supported by data." Such careful documentation of poaching is sorely needed across Africa, Dr. Wasser added: "This is an example of how to do it right, and hopefully others will learn from it." Reached by phone, Cyril Taolo, director of research at Botswana's Department of Wildlife and National Parks, said that he and his colleagues "are still interrogating this paper and coming up with a response" to the concerns raised by the conservationists. The survey was led by Michael Chase, founder and director of Elephants Without Borders, a nonprofit conservation organization based in Kasane, Botswana. Squeezed into a fixed wing Cessna, Dr. Chase and his colleagues crisscrossed 36,300 square miles of habitat, counting and photographing all living and dead elephants they spotted 300 feet below. They recorded 156 carcasses they believed to be poached, clustered at five hot spots. One criticism of the earlier report had been that an elephant's cause of death is impossible to determine from the air. Scott Schlossberg, a data analyst at Elephants Without Borders and co author of paper, disagreed: "When an elephant's face has been chopped off, you can often see that from the plane." But to assuage such concerns, he and his colleagues used a helicopter to make field visits to 148 carcasses. About half were fresh, the rest at least a year old. The findings revealed a 593 percent increase in the number of freshly killed carcasses, compared to survey results from 2014. Extrapolating the numbers, the researchers estimated that a minimum of 385 elephants had been poached in Botswana between 2017 and 2018. "Those scientists and colleagues who cast doubt on our initial findings I hope now find that the science and evidence that we describe in our paper is indeed convincing," Dr. Chase said. The results of this "state of the art" study speak for themselves, putting to rest any doubt that Botswana has a poaching problem, said Keith Lindsay, a collaborating researcher at the Amboseli Trust for Elephants, a nonprofit research group in Kenya, who was not involved in the study. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. "The few people who did speak against Mike's original results were researchers who have a history working in Botswana and who want to be seen as supporting the government," Dr. Lindsay said. "My own interpretation is that they wanted to support their future position in Botswana." While 400 elephants killed out of a population of 126,000 does not sound like a lot, the study authors warn that the situation could quickly escalate. Small increases in poaching similar to the rates now being seen in Botswana have preceded dramatic elephant declines in other places.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
One of us tested positive for the coronavirus. The other one probably had it, too we are married and live together although symptoms were mild. We both were fortunate to recover. Some public health experts suggest that if we could show that our blood has antibodies to the coronavirus, we could be given a "certificate of immunity" that would enable us to resume normal lives. Chile is already taking this step, and officials in other countries, including Italy, France, Germany and Britain, have considered it. We would welcome knowing whether we had antibodies and, of course, would be happy to be able to resume something like normal life. But we worry about the effects such certificates could have on people's rights to privacy, work and freedom of movement. Antibody testing is certainly a useful thing. If research shows that people with antibodies have significant immunity, medical personnel with antibodies could choose to be on the health care front lines, taking on such dangerous tasks as intubating or resuscitating seriously ill Covid 19 patients. Other people with immunity might offer to assume riskier jobs facing the public in retail, transport or services. That would help to protect people who are currently taking great personal risks in these sectors. And as more people felt safe to venture from their homes, they would be more likely to help revive the economy. We are nowhere near the herd immunity that would enable us to avoid a second or third round of the virus. And a vaccine is still far away. Masks, social distancing, testing and contact tracing will be parts of our lives for some time. If we are going to try to gradually restart our stalled economy, people who know they are probably immune to further contagion from the coronavirus could play a part. Moreover, studies using antibody testing would give us a good idea of the percentage of a given population that remains vulnerable to infection an important factor in deciding how rapidly to ease social distancing. Questions surrounding the Covid 19 vaccine and its rollout. If Covid 19 isn't going away, how do we live with it? Katherine Eban writes that a clear eyed view is required to organize long term against an endemic virus. Why should we vaccinate kids against Covid 19? The president of the American Academy of Pediatrics explains how vaccinating kids will protect them (and everyone else). Jessica Grose spoke with experts to find out what an off ramp to masking in schools might look like. Who are the unvaccinated? Zeynep Tufekci writes that many preconceptions about unvaccinated people may be wrong, and that could be a good thing. But using antibody tests for the purpose of issuing certificates or "passports" is another matter. The threats to people's rights posed by a system that distinguishes between those with and without coronavirus antibodies should make governments considering such systems proceed with caution. To begin with, we should rarely force someone to take an antibody test or reveal the result. Like all health matters, the decision whether to know one's antibody status should be presumptively voluntary and confidential. There may be the rare employer that can justify insisting on its workers having antibody certificates such as to work with people who are especially at risk but these should be the exception, not the rule. It's too easy to imagine antibody tests becoming a new form of discrimination: Employers might insist on antibody certificates simply to minimize absenteeism or medical costs among their workers; employees might find it easier to work with colleagues who have antibody certificates rather than to continue with face masks and social distancing. Workers in grocery stores and other essential services have already taken risks by working throughout the crisis; imagine if they lost their jobs for want of an antibody certificate. It would be one thing for an antibody certificate to, say, exempt a person from the need to wear a mask, but quite another to allow employers to insist on a certificate as a cheaper alternative to testing, enforced social distancing and other preventive measures. An antibody certificate should not relieve businesses of their duty to ensure the safety of their staffs and customers. Nor should it be used to restrict travel and other liberties when less discriminatory precautions are available. The norm should be for one's antibody status to be a tool for enhancing the risks that a person voluntarily feels comfortable assuming rather than a mark to limit the possibilities that government allows. Yes, it might be easier and even safer to permit only people with antibody certificates to re enter society, but do we really want such a two tiered society? The cost for a large majority of people who have not been exposed to the coronavirus could be enormous. There are some situations today in which vaccinations are required, for measles for a child to attend school, for example, and for yellow fever to visit certain countries. But requiring people to have been exposed to a dangerous virus is an entirely different matter. It raises worrying possibilities, like people trying to catch the coronavirus to develop the antibodies needed to obtain a certificate. That would not only put those individuals at risk but also could undermine efforts to "flatten the curve" of infection, potentially creating a dangerous surge of patients and prolonging the isolation of older and other at risk people. If an antibody certificate were to become a prerequisite for work or travel, it could spawn a black market in counterfeits. And because we are likely to encounter shortages of antibody tests similar to the shortages of the coronavirus test itself, the difficulty of obtaining access might exacerbate inequality for people in poverty, undocumented immigrants, prisoners, older people and people with disabilities. Equitable, low cost availability would be important. If proved effective, antibody testing is likely to be seen by governments and the public as an important part of the path toward resuming normal lives before a coronavirus vaccine is widely available. But before anyone rushes to issue certificates or passports and require them for work, travel or other activities we need to stop and ask ourselves if we're ready for a society divided between new classes of "haves" and "have nots." Kenneth Roth is the executive director of Human Rights Watch. Annie Sparrow, a critical care pediatrician, is an assistant professor of population health science and policy at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
John Carroll, left, of the East Village said he did not want to go through the pain of divorce. Eric Routen, right, of Westchester County said couples today have less pressure to stay together. When the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act in June, Brian Blatz, 47, marched into the kitchen of Fiddleheads, the restaurant in Jamesburg, N.J., that he owns with Dan Davis, 58. "DOMA is dead," Mr. Blatz said, before the pair turned their attention to opening the restaurant for lunch. And last month, when a judge in New Jersey ruled that same sex marriage should be legalized, their reaction was similarly muted. "I said 'wow' and he said 'yea,' " Mr. Blatz said. "And then we went right back to work." It's not that Mr. Blatz and Mr. Davis are not in love. They have been together for 18 years and swapped rings in a ceremony in their backyard nine years ago. But the couple sees little point in marrying. "We are in all senses married, and it isn't going to change anything in terms of how we feel about each other," Mr. Blatz said. They are not unique. Now that same sex couples in 14 states have all the rights and responsibilities of straight married couples, gay couples are rushing to the altar, right? Not exactly. Plenty of gay couples do not want to marry, and their reasons are as complex and personal as any decision to wed. For some, marriage is an outdated institution, one that forces same sex couples into the mainstream. For others, marriage imposes financial burdens and legal entanglements. Still others see marriage not as a fairy tale but as a potentially painful chapter that ends in divorce. And then there are those for whom marriage goes against their beliefs, religious or otherwise. "It's a very, very archaic model," said Sean Fader, 34, an artist in New York who is single and asked to be identified as queer. "It's this oppressive Christian model that says 'Pick a person that's going to be everything to you, they have to be perfect, then get a house, and have kids, and then you'll be happy and whole.' " "There are many heterosexuals who feel the same way," he added. After all, not all heterosexual couples choose to marry. But same sex couples do seem more inclined to be marriage holdouts. According to a Pew Research poll released in June, 60 percent of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender adults are married or said they wanted to marry, compared with 76 percent of the general public. Some of the opposition among gay men and lesbians is rooted in a feminist critique of marriage, which sees it not as a freedom to be gained but as an institution that has historically oppressed women. That feminist strain held firm in the earlier years of the gay rights movement. The late Paula L. Ettelbrick, a leading lesbian and gay rights figure, was among the vocal opponents of same sex marriage, and held a more expansive view of relationships and family. "I do not want to be known as 'Mrs. Attached to Somebody Else,' " Ms. Ettelbrick wrote in a 1989 issue of the now defunct Out/Look magazine. "Nor do I want to give the state the power to regulate my primary relationship." But that was before same sex marriage became a reality, first when individual states extended some rights to same sex couples, and then in June, when the Supreme Court gutted the Defense of Marriage Act and gave same sex couples the same federal rights and responsibilities as any other married couple. Up to that point, many gay couples had refused marriage, believing it was a watered down version. The playwright and AIDS activist Larry Kramer, for example, had once dismissed state laws permitting same sex unions as "feel good marriages" because they conferred few benefits. But he changed his mind after the Supreme Court decision, and married David Webster in July. "I don't want to deny anybody the right to marriage," Ms. Schroeder said. "But I don't really want it to exist." And Jack Halberstam, 51, a transgender professor at the University of Southern California, said he viewed marriage as a patriarchal institution that should not be a prerequisite for obtaining health care and deeming children "legitimate." "The couple form is failing," he said. After coming out, Mr. Halberstam said he was "frankly relieved" he would not have to get married and enter into a conventional family. This holds true even though he lives with his partner of five and a half years, a fellow sociology professor in Los Angeles. "I don't feel the pressure" to marry, he added. The absence of that pressure is also shared by older same sex couples who grew up in more homophobic times and embraced their role as social outliers. Catharine Stimpson, 77, a former dean at New York University, said one delight of being a lesbian was sometimes feeling like a quasi outlaw. Though she has been with her partner, Elizabeth Wood, for 38 years, getting married, she said, would betray her "edgy nonconformist streak." "Having the choice doesn't meant you have to do it," she added. Even as most gay men and lesbians have come to support the right to marry, if not always for themselves, the progressive minded among them grumble that the fight for marriage has come at the expense of pressing issues like AIDS prevention and the safety of gay youths. "After people with good health insurance could have treatment for H.I.V., the community sort of abandoned AIDS as a priority," he said. Mr. D'Emilio follows his own philosophy. Although he has been with his partner, Jim Oleson, 75, a retired caseworker and community educator, for 32 years, there are no plans to marry. Mr. Oleson was married to a woman and has no desire to wed again, while Mr. D'Emilio said he sees no need. "We love each other and have lived together for 30 years," he said. "Why do we need to get married?" Indeed, many older gay men and lesbians came of age with the belief that their relationships bested heterosexual couplings. "For people in the '60s, '70s and '80s, there was a feeling that L.GB.T. people can do better than marriage, that relationships can be more egalitarian" when built around untraditional families, said Mary Bernstein, a professor at the University of Connecticut and an author of "The Marrying Kind?" which examines the marriage debate in the gay rights movement. Or as the filmmaker John Waters once said: "I always thought the privilege of being gay is that we don't have to get married or go in the Army." Longtime same sex couples also have practical reasons for not marrying, Ms. Bernstein said, as their households and finances are already intertwined. She cites herself as an example. Although Ms. Bernstein, 50, and her partner of 15 years, Nancy Naples, 61, are raising twin 9 year old daughters, they see little tangible benefit in marrying. They already share legal rights as co parents, the full support of neighbors and peers and an unwavering commitment to each other. "Some people feel the need for external validation," Ms. Bernstein said. "For us, I don't think we could be more committed." The prospect of paying higher taxes may also take the luster out of marriage. Couples comprised of a higher income earner and a lower earner often have to pay thousands of dollars more in joint taxes (the so called marriage penalty), according to Jennifer Davidson, an accountant and financial adviser in Dunstable, Mass., who advises same sex couples. "Nobody I know makes that decision purely because of taxes," Ms. Davidson said. "But a secondary factor may be tax consequences." Conversely, other same sex couples want to determine first if there are tax benefits before deciding to marry. That includes Mr. Blatz and Mr. Davis of New Jersey, who said they may yet marry, especially after Gov. Chris Christie announced that he would not appeal the court ruling that paved the way for same sex couples to marry in the state. Not only are some gay couples rejecting marriage, they are also choosing to live apart. Erin McKeown, 36, a singer and songwriter, lives in a cottage in a rural hill town in Massachusetts; her girlfriend of three and a half years, Rachel Rybaczuk, 36, lives 17 miles away in a one bedroom apartment. They relish the time they spend together, but they also like having their own spaces. For Ms. McKeown, an integral part of identifying as queer was creating an alternative family, rather than following the well worn path of pairing off, cohabiting and having children. But as more of her friends do just that, she feels that alternative group dwindling. Ms. Rybaczuk, for her part, said she was worried that relationships like theirs, deeply committed but not traditional, would be further marginalized, even from other gay people. People think "that because we don't want to get married that we're less invested in each other and less committed," she said. "And that's not true." And then there are those who see themselves as part of a post marriage generation: gays in their 20s who grew up with "Will and Grace," and the full support of parents and friends. For them, same sex marriage may be a defining civil rights issue of the day, but it's also about the freedom not to marry. This is especially true for the children of divorce, who may not see marriage as the key to happiness. John Carroll, 23, who is single and lives in the East Village, said that the amount of time and resources his parents spent on divorcing was "obscene." The last thing he wants to do is go through the same torturous process, he said. "Any time you mix emotions into that, it's just a risky venture, emotionally and financially," he said. Instead, he thinks marriages should be like cellphone contracts, "renewable every two years with an option to upgrade." The sentiment that marriage is not the end all is shared by other millennials, even those whose parents remain together. "It's a very disillusioned generation," said Eric Routen, 24, a student at New York Medical College who is single and lives in Westchester County, N.Y. Unlike his parents, who have been together for some 30 years, he said that couples today have fewer social pressures to stay together. "No one expects marriage to last," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
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. 'BLUE RIDGE' at the Atlantic Theater Company at the Linda Gross Theater (previews start on Dec. 12; opens on Jan. 7). Classroom management is one thing. Anger management is another. In this comedy by Abby Rosebrock ("Dido of Idaho"), directed by Taibi Magar, a high school teacher with rage issues lands at an Appalachian halfway house. The production stars Marin Ireland, an actress who specializes thrillingly in difficult women. 866 811 4111, atlantictheater.org 'CLUELESS, THE MUSICAL' at the Pershing Square Signature Center (in previews; opens on Dec. 11). Amy Heckerling has adapted her 1995 movie, a zippy, quippy clotheshorse update of Jane Austen's "Emma," into a musical for the New Group. Kristin Hanggi directs, with choreography by Kelly Devine. Dove Cameron stars as Cher, with Ephie Aardema and Zurin Villanueva as her friends and Dave Thomas Brown as her ex stepbrother. 212 279 4200, thenewgroup.org 'THE JUNGLE' at St. Ann's Warehouse (in previews; opens on Dec. 9). In Calais, France, refugees gather in an encampment and share their stories with aid workers and the audience. Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin direct a script by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, playwrights who created a theater in the real refugee camp at Calais. When Ben Brantley saw it in London, he described the feelings it conjured as "oddly inspiring." 718 254 8779, stannswarehouse.org 'NASSIM' at Stage II at City Center (in previews; opens on Dec. 12). The Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour, last seen with "White Rabbit Red Rabbit," hares after another improvised theatrical experience. At each performance an unrehearsed actor opens a sealed envelope and performs Soleimanpour's script, creating a meditation on intimacy and empathy. Omar Elerian directs and Soleimanpour cameos. 212 581 1212, barrowstreettheatre.com 'NOURA' at Playwrights Horizons (in previews; opens on Dec. 10). The Iraqi American writer and actress Heather Raffo's new play is set at a family Christmas dinner. A silent night? Unlikely. Raffo ("Nine Parts of Desire," which The New York Times called an "impassioned theatrical documentary") stars as Noura, an Iraqi matriarch who has resettled in New York City and is now trimming the tree. 212 279 4200, playwrightshorizons.org 'THE PRISONER' at Theater for a New Audience (in previews; opens on Dec. 10). In Peter Brook and Marie Helene Estienne's fable, developed at the Theatre des Bouffes du Nord and seen at London's National Theater, a young man sits outside a prison, forbidden to accept help from passers by. A parable of incarceration, physical and otherwise, and eventual redemption, the piece stars Hiran Abeysekera. 866 811 4111, tfana.org 'TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD' at the Shubert Theater (in previews; opens on Dec. 13). A small town courthouse drama that weighs a nation in its scales, Harper Lee's novel arrives on Broadway adapted by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Bartlett Sher. (The adaptation was briefly involved in its own courtroom drama.) Jeff Daniels stars as Atticus Finch, with Celia Keenan Bolger as Scout, Will Pullen as Jem and Gideon Glick as Dill. 212 239 6200, tokillamockingbirdbroadway.com 'APOLOGIA' at the Laura Pels Theater at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater (closes on Dec. 16). Will you forgive yourself for missing Alexi Kaye Campbell's play? Stockard Channing stars as Kristin, a celebrated art historian who has a fraught relationship with her adult sons. Ben Brantley called her character "complex, contradictory," writing that Channing's excellence compensates for a work that never "moves you as much as it should." 212 719 1300, roundabouttheatre.org 'LEWISTON/CLARKSTON' at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater (closes on Dec. 16). Samuel D. Hunter's intimate diptych, with a barbecue dinner served in between, ceases its exploration. One play follows a descendant of the expeditioner Meriwether Lewis; the other, of his fellow explorer William Clark. Both are directed by Davis McCallum. Jesse Green called "Lewiston" "lovely but mild" and "Clarkston" "devastating." 866 811 4111, rattlestick.org 'SCHOOL GIRLS; OR, THE AFRICAN MEAN GIRLS PLAY' at the Lucille Lortel Theater (closes on Dec. 9). The girls of Jocelyn Bioh's hilarious and devastating comedy about colorism, directed by Rebecca Taichman, are again about to graduate. When the play, set in Ghana, had its premiere last fall, Jesse Green wrote that the "nasty teen comedy genre emerges wonderfully refreshed and even deepened by its immersion in a world it never considered." 866 811 4111, mcctheater.org 'THOM PAIN (BASED ON NOTHING)' at the Pershing Square Signature Center (closes on Dec. 9). A lonely, logorrheic man finally runs out of words as the Signature's revival of Will Eno's career making early work ends its run. Ben Brantley found that in this word drunk monologue, now starring Michael C. Hall and directed by Oliver Butler, "it's Mr. Eno's love for and grasp of rhythmic language that most impress here." 212 244 7529, signaturetheatre.org 'WHAT TO SEND UP WHEN IT GOES DOWN' at A.R.T./New York Theaters (closes on Dec. 16). The playwright Aleshea Harris's new work a synthesis of dialogue, monologue and participatory celebration performs its final rituals. Ben Brantley wrote that Harris ("Is God Is") "has a gift for pushing the familiar to surreally logical extremes" and that her piece is "truly sui generis, truly remarkable." themovementtheatrecompany.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Deep in the Malls of Texas, a Vision of Shopping's Future DALLAS Scott Beck, the chief executive of a local real estate company, remembers riding his bike as a child to Valley View Center, a shopping mall in North Dallas. Cars filled the vast parking lot and anchor stores like Bloomingdale's, J. C. Penney and Sears teemed with customers. Now, the bustle of shoppers has been replaced by the din of construction led by Mr. Beck, whose company is clearing the way for a new 3.5 billion development of restaurants, offices and housing. "We're not trying to repurpose the mall," Mr. Beck, 43, said. "We're simply repurposing the land." Many malls across America have hit tough times, squeezed by changing demographics and competition from e commerce, discount stores and newer malls with more diverse offerings. Morningstar Credit Ratings recently called the changes in the industry a "seismic shift" and warned of more financial pain ahead. Hundreds of department stores, mall anchors for decades, are expected to shut their doors this year. "Dining and entertainment is the new anchor not Sears, not Macy's," said Allan Davidov of Misuma Holdings, based in Beverly Hills, Calif., which is transforming two shopping centers in Austin, Tex. At Grapevine Mills, a popular shopping destinations in North Texas, the "experiential" formula is a major part of the marketing strategy. Owned by Simon Property Group, one of the country's biggest retail real estate owners, Grapevine Mills feels almost like an amusement park. In addition to more than 200 retail outlets and restaurants, it has a Sea Life aquarium, a Legoland and a Round One Bowling and Amusement, which includes 24 lanes of bowling, billiards, video games and a karaoke studio. What was once a J.C. Penney Store is now Fieldhouse USA, a 106,000 square foot indoor sports complex with nine volleyball and nine basketball courts. The mall, about two miles from Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, is one of 16 Mills branded shopping centers nationwide. Gregg Goodman, president of the Mills division of Simon Property, said Grapevine Mills drew from a "very wide distance," including surrounding states, with a strategy focusing heavily on families and intended to encourage repeat visits and longer stays in the mall. On a recent Friday morning, dozens of schoolchildren escorted by teachers and parents trooped through Entrance Five to visit the aquarium and Legoland. "You get the kids here, the parents here, everybody's happy," said Stephanie Zafiridis, a preschool teacher from nearby Flower Mound. About 200 miles to the south in Austin, Highland Mall is getting a different kind of makeover. It is being reincarnated as the 11th campus of Austin Community College, under a nearly 900 million public private initiative that has stirred new life into the surrounding North Austin neighborhoods. In 2009, RedLeaf Properties paired up with Austin Community College to convert the mall buildings into a campus to ultimately serve up to 20,000 students. The first phase opened in 2014 in a former J. C. Penney anchor store and serves about 6,000 students per semester. The campus, four miles from downtown Austin and the Texas Capitol, will serve as the center of an 81 acre development that will include retail stores, offices, about 1,200 residential units and three new parks connected by jogging trails. The overall vision, said Matt Whelan, the founder of RedLeaf, was to transform a dying mall "into an academic anchored mix use area where people could learn, people could work, could live, and play and recreate." The vision Mr. Beck had for Valley View Center in Dallas is even more ambitious. The project is called Dallas Midtown and is often described as a city within a city. Renderings show clusters of office and residential towers overlooking parks and other green space. It is expected eventually to include boutique shopping, high end restaurants, two luxury hotels, a branded surgical center, a 10 screen movie theater, an athletic club and a 20 acre park that Mr. Beck described as "our version of Manhattan's Central Park." That is a far cry from the Valley View that opened in 1973, riding a wave of retail expansion and grabbing national attention when a shoe store at the mall offered a free eight ounce steak with any purchase of 5 or more. About a decade later, Galleria Dallas popped up as a competitor. And while the two coexisted for many years, the Galleria eventually won out. "What effectively happened over the subsequent 15 to 20 years thereafter is that you had two malls," Mr. Beck said. "The new shiny object, which was the Galleria, sucked the best tenants out of the Valley View Mall." The rest of the mall, much of which has been closed off for demolition, was virtually devoid of foot traffic, except for a pair of security guards and a few other pedestrians. Colter's Barbecue, which has operated at the mall for more than two decades, had served only four or five customers by the middle of the afternoon. "When we opened in 1995," recalled the manager, Santos Castro, "we had four registers open all day." Louis Schultz, 71, a retired Navy officer, walked down a near deserted corridor after seeing a movie at the AMC theater. "You can walk around and it's like a ghost town," Mr. Schultz said. "It's an area that just sort of got neglected." Mr. Beck said he had mixed emotions about all the changes, as he remembered Valley View in its glory days and looked ahead to the vast new development about to replace it. "What I'm excited about," Mr. Beck said this week, "is being able to restore this portion of Dallas to the stature that it really had when I was a kid, and the opportunities it brings to the surrounding neighborhoods."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Dr. Donald L. Rasmussen, who was lured to Appalachia as a fledgling physician by a help wanted ad and set off a grass roots movement that won benefits for coal miners afflicted with black lung disease, died on July 23 in Beckley, W.Va. He was 87. The cause was complications of a fall in May, his stepdaughter Julia Holliday said. "In the annals of American labor history, there is no one, no union official or a physician, who exceeds the accomplishments of Dr. Rasmussen in substantially reducing the causes of such a widespread and deadly disease as black lung or in enhancing the treatment of a group of afflicted workers," said James Green, professor emeritus of history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and author of "The Devil Is Here in These Hills." The advent of X rays established that black lung disease, or pneumoconiosis, was caused by breathing coal dust particles from drilling and blasting. But Dr. Rasmussen proved that even when X rays did not find evidence of black lung, the disease could also be detected by breathlessness measured while on a treadmill and by blood tests vastly expanding the pool of miners eligible for benefits. Conducting field research with public health services and evaluating insurance claims, he eventually examined as many as 50,000 miners. He said he found signs of black lung disease in 40 percent of them.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
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. Most of us are stuck at home at the moment, so here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now. During a Wednesday news conference at the White House, President Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power if he loses the election, saying, "We'll have to see what happens." "Well, so much for that Nobel Peace Prize," Jimmy Kimmel joked in his Thursday night monologue. "'See what happens?' For someone who wants to be a dictator, you sure sound like a spectator. You're coming off like Ryan Seacrest on 'American Idol': 'We'll see what happens after the break.'" SETH MEYERS "So, Trump is threatening violence unless we get rid of the ballots. He is threatening a coup d'etat, even though I'm sure he has no idea what the phrase 'coup d'etat' means. He probably thinks it's a lyric from 'Moulin Rouge': 'Voulez vouz coucher coup d'etat, ce soir?'" SETH MEYERS "I bet even if Joe Biden wins they're going to find Trump in the White House basement someday living that 'Parasite' life." TREVOR NOAH "I mean, when Time Life releases a box set of Trump's craziest moments, this will be on it." JIMMY FALLON "The peaceful transfer of power is one of the pillars of our democracy, and Trump treats it like a brunch he might bail on: as Trump 'Game time decision have to see how my day's going. Not sure.'" JIMMY FALLON "Holy expletive , I never thought I would see the day where an American president would threaten to not accept an election defeat. Because let's be honest: this is something you hear about in a random country where America steps in to enforce democracy. I feel like now it's only fair that those countries should send peacekeepers to the U.S.: 'Well, well, well. Refusing to give up power, rampant disease and high unemployment. Who's the expletive hole now, huh?'" TREVOR NOAH "Can you imagine how fun it would be if the incoming president always had to fistfight the outgoing president? Yeah? Biden and Trump are gonna be at the White House recreating the geriatric fights from 'The Irishman,' while Kamala Harris has Mike Pence in a head lock? imitating Mike Pence 'Oh no, my hair grazed her bosom. Now I'm going to hell.'" TREVOR NOAH "So if Trump loses the election, getting him out of the White House will be like trying to get a bird out of your living room. It's like, 'Oh, I got 'em. Hold on, OK.? Nobody move he's behind the curtain! Nobody move! Shut the door! Shut the door!'" JIMMY FALLON "So, the president of the United States won't commit to leaving office if he loses the election. Ah, you'll have to excuse me, I think I left the stove on in New Zealand, and I'd like to stick my head in it. I'm joking, obviously New Zealand won't let our planes land there." STEPHEN COLBERT "Folks, you know you're going through a bit of a dark patch in your nation's history when the president not endorsing the peaceful transition of power is the feel good story of the day." STEPHEN COLBERT "I'm getting the feeling this year is going to end with Trump locking himself in the Oval Office while yelling into the phone, 'Space force attack!'" JIMMY FALLON "I think the mistake was phrasing the question that way. You should have asked, 'If Joe Biden wins, do you commit to playing even more golf?'" SETH MEYERS "He doesn't just look like a Cheeto; it's his motto." JIMMY KIMMEL "This does give me an idea for a new sitcom, though Trump refuses to leave the White House, Biden moves in anyway: 'Our Two Presidents,' this January on CBS." JAMES CORDEN "If you've paid attention to Donald Trump over the past five years, it's no surprise that he likes the idea of being a dictator. I mean, he's written more love letters to Kim Jong un than his own wife." TREVOR NOAH "Jimmy Kimmel Live" took its Lie Eye Witness News segment back to Hollywood Boulevard for the first time since the pandemic, asking pedestrians for their thoughts on Trump's fictional replacement of Ruth Bader Ginsburg with his daughter Ivanka.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
As Brookhiser's compact and balanced account makes clear, Marshall famously transformed the judicial branch into one fully equal to the president and Congress in stature and legitimacy. And he did so by declining to pick political fights he couldn't win in the short term while declaring broad constitutional principles that would shore up the authority of the courts in the long term. This narrative, familiar to law students, has certainly taken on new relevance in the age of Donald Trump, when battles between the president, the chief justice and the courts are once again provoking talk of constitutional crisis. Brookhiser, a senior editor of National Review and the author of several books on the founding fathers, draws no present day parallels, but it's impossible not to think of our current vexations when reviewing 19th century Republican efforts to impeach Federalist judges. The House did indeed impeach a Federalist justice, Samuel Chase, for being "highly arbitrary, oppressive and unjust," but after Marshall testified for Chase, the Senate acquitted him. Congress then expanded the size of the Supreme Court from six justices to seven, to give Jefferson the chance to fill vacancies with Republicans. But Marshall won over the Republican justices by convincing them of the court's institutional legitimacy. At a time of tribalism and polarization, culminating in threats by the states to nullify federal laws and secede from the Union, Marshall's central idea, shared with his Federalist heroes George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, was that "we the people" of the United States as a whole are sovereign and united, as opposed to "we the people" of the individual states. "Our Constitution is not a compact" of states, Marshall wrote in an anonymous pamphlet defending his own opinion upholding Congress's power to charter the Bank of the United States. "It is the act of a single party. It is the act of the people of the United States." (Abraham Lincoln invoked the same argument in denying the South's power to secede from the Union.) In an opinion echoing Washington's Farewell Address, which had defined the United States as "one people," Marshall wrote an eloquent paean to national unity: "In war, we are one people. In making peace, we are one people. In all commercial regulations, we are one and the same people." Insisting that America was a republic rather than a direct democracy, he criticized Jefferson as a proto Trumpian demagogue: "His great power ... is chiefly acquired by professions of democracy. Every check on the wild impulse of the moment is therefore a check on his own power. ... He looks, of course, with an ill will at an independent judiciary." Jefferson's allies, led by Senator Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky, responded by proposing to attack judicial independence by limiting the tenure of federal judges, preventing the federal courts from hearing cases, making judges removable by Congress, allowing the Senate to overturn the Supreme Court and increasing the size of the court to 10 justices. Although Johnson was a populist legend for having killed the Shawnee chief Tecumseh, these proposals went nowhere because of the bipartisan unity on the court that Marshall managed to inspire. Could the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts, who has embraced Marshall as his model, play a similar unifying role in defending the Constitution against populist threats to judicial independence today? That depends on his fellow justices. And although Brookhiser's biography reminds us that American politics has always been polarized, today the polarization threatens to transform the deliberations of the court. The life of Marshall reminds us of the urgent importance of Roberts's efforts to persuade his colleagues to unite around a shared commitment to defending the legitimacy of the court by rising above partisan politics.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Staying up until midnight before release day to grab copies of the latest "Harry Potter" book straight from the shipping box became hallowed tradition for a generation of young readers. Now, the New York Historical Society is offering a late night Potter fix of a different kind. The museum announced Friday that it will extend its hours during the final week of "Harry Potter: A History of Magic." Beginning Jan. 21 and continuing through the exhibition's final day (Jan. 27), the museum will be open until 7 p.m. Monday through Wednesday and until midnight Friday and Saturday. It will close at 6 p.m. on Thursday and 7 p.m. on Sunday. "Harry Potter: A History of Magic" has proved a blockbuster exhibition for the museum, which has devoted considerable resources to it through additional programming, such as trivia nights led by a costumed staff member complete with a cash bar and J.K. Rowling inspired cocktails. (Those eager young midnight release Potter fans have long since turned 21, of course; some may take advantage of the extended hours to bring along children of their own.) Check out Our Culture Calendar here. The exhibition unpacks Potter's origins, looking at Rowling's initial writing process but also at the history of magical myths in a broader sense through some of series' cultural and scientific influences.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
In "A State at Any Cost," Tom Segev argues that David Ben Gurion was an indispensable leader, "although not an omnipotent one." Ben Gurion is pictured here on Dec. 2, 1949, in the Negev Desert in southern Israel. A STATE AT ANY COST The Life of David Ben Gurion By Tom Segev On the eve of the establishment of the state of Israel, David Ben Gurion, who had worked tirelessly toward this goal, suddenly sought to postpone independence. He knew neighboring Arab countries were poised to invade and he feared his underground army wasn't prepared to fight; so, at a nighttime meeting with Lord Chancellor Sir William Jowitt, Ben Gurion proposed that the British remain in charge of Palestine for another five to 10 years while working to increase Jewish immigration. Nothing came of this proposal and, on Nov. 29, 1947, the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. Full scale fighting broke out six months later. Ben Gurion's 11th hour meeting is one of the little known facts revealed by the Israeli historian Tom Segev in his deeply researched, engrossing and, in some respects, controversial biography, "A State at Any Cost." Segev has written several books on Israel, and he joins other noted experts who have mined newly released archival sources to re examine the life and legacy of the country's first prime minister. The timing makes sense: As Israel has transformed itself from a small, struggling society into a high tech player on the global stage, its people have become increasingly interested in the ideals that first guided it and the roots of problems that still confound it. And, like America's founding fathers, David Ben Gurion was the embodiment of his nation's complicated beginnings. Born David Yosef Gruen in the Polish town of Plonsk in 1886, Ben Gurion said he knew by the age of 3 that his home would be in the land of Israel. Hyperbolic as this sounds, his claim helps explain his lifelong mission to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. It also reflects the atmosphere in his home, where Ben Gurion's father was one of the town's first Zionist activists. Even so, as a young man he felt directionless: He moved to Warsaw, was rejected by a technological college there, and eventually became so despondent that he wrote a friend, "I can't find any interest in living anymore." To prepare himself, Ben Gurion traveled to Turkey to study law along with his friend Yitzhak Ben Zvi, who later became Israel's second president. After their studies were cut short by World War I, they eventually headed to New York City, where Ben Gurion met and married Pauline (Paula) Moonweis. Their union was not without its problems Ben Gurion had several lengthy affairs and was a distant father to their three children but the two remained together for 50 years. By the late 1930s, Ben Gurion and his socialist labor party had gained power not only in Palestine, but over the worldwide Zionist movement as well. Their goal was to establish a state with a Jewish majority in the biblical land of Israel. But in 1937, when the British Peel Commission recommended dividing Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, Ben Gurion responded with "burning enthusiasm," despite the tiny area allotted to the Jews. As he told colleagues, the fact of having a state was more important than its borders; besides, "borders are not forever." The Peel plan fell through, but 10 years later Ben Gurion accepted the partition resolution from the United Nations. Although he made attempts at peace with the Palestinian Arabs, Ben Gurion was pessimistic about ever achieving it. Long before the state existed, he met with a respected Muslim jurist, Musa al Alami, whom he assured that the Zionists had come to develop Palestine for all its inhabitants. Alami said he preferred to leave the land poor and desolate for another century until the Arabs could develop it themselves. Ben Gurion repeated this story again and again as proof of the futility of seeking agreement. At most, Segev writes, Ben Gurion believed the conflict "could be managed," not resolved. Segev is best when probing the human side of the complex leader. Often brusque in manner, outwardly self assured and iron willed, Ben Gurion poured his innermost emotions into his diaries and letters. "I am a solitary and lonely man," he wrote to Paula. "There are moments in which my heart is boiling and torn, and bitter and difficult questions plague me." He was periodically ill and bedridden, frequently unable to sleep. As Segev's title suggests, the price of creating the state was steep taking a personal toll on Ben Gurion while costing thousands of people their lives and homes. Where "A State at Any Cost" falls short is when the author injects his own ideology into the events of Ben Gurion's life. Segev has been associated with revisionist historians, known in the past as "new historians," who challenge Israel's founding narratives sometimes with bracing reality, often with controversial positions disputed by other experts. For example: Ben Gurion and comrades who arrived in Palestine in the early 1900s embraced the idea of "Hebrew labor." The term is widely understood to refer to manual work by Jews, rejecting centuries of work Jews did in the Diaspora as merchants and shopkeepers. The idea was to create "new Jews" who would cultivate the soil with their own hands. However, Segev defines the term differently. In his book, "Hebrew labor" is regarded not as a pioneer ideal, but as a means for Jews to displace Arab workers and control the labor market. He also makes a questionable connection between "Hebrew labor" and the flight of Arabs from their villages during the 1948 war, as though there were a planned and systematic scheme to push out the Arabs. In reality, the exodus of the Arabs from the designated Jewish state the origin of the Palestinian refugee problem is in itself a hotly debated subject. Scholars disagree about how many villagers left of their own accord and how many were expelled by Israeli commanders. There is no evidence that Ben Gurion gave a central order to evacuate them all. He seemed surprised at first by the emptying villages, only later regarding the Arab flight as a boon to the military. In 1963, David Ben Gurion retired as prime minister. He spent most of the next decade in Sde Boker, a settlement in the Negev Desert. There, in the study of his two bedroom house surrounded by almost a thousand books, he devoted much of the rest of his life to writing his memoirs. Through the drama of his life, and despite his failings both personal and political Ben Gurion emerges in Segev's book as a man of vision and integrity. These are qualities that Israelis, like the rest of us, long for in today's leaders.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
When the coronavirus shut the Metropolitan Opera's doors on March 12, the company was hours away from bringing up the curtain on a revival of Rossini's bubbly Cinderella adaptation, "La Cenerentola." Massenet's brooding "Werther" was to open a few days later. Those operas and others vanished with the final eight weeks of the Met's season. So we asked some of the singers who had been waiting years to perform them to give us some musical phrases that they and we lost. Here are their voices, and edited excerpts from the conversations. Erin Morley was going to sing a part for the first time. I don't know that it was a role that would develop my career so much. Sophie is a smaller part. She doesn't really have too, too much to sing, and she doesn't sing in a huge range of emotion or vocally, either. But she's a beautiful character. She's there to be the light amid the darkness. There's a real heaviness in the rest of the story, and she's there to break that up, for the audience and the characters. I keep going back to my piano wanting to sing this role. It's been hard to move on. Javier Camarena was going to try for more encores. We have an expression in Spanish: "parteaguas," a before and after, and I had one in my career singing "La Cenerentola" at the Met in 2014. It really put me in the spotlight. Singing the aria of Don Ramiro was one of the most precious memories I have in my whole career. At the end of the aria, I have to run upstage and go out, and I remember I was running, and suddenly it was like a huge tsunami, the clapping and the screaming; it was really like a rock concert or something. And then the second performance was even more excitement, so we did the encore and the third, it was even more. I hope I have the chance to sing this again at the Met. Next season I will be here with one of my love and hate roles, Gualtiero in Bellini's "Il Pirata." But I hope I have the chance to sing Don Ramiro, a part I really cherish, again. And if the audience wanted, I would be very happy to do an encore for them. This season I was supposed to sing Massenet's "Manon" in the fall. But by January 2019 I was pregnant and I said to Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager, I wouldn't be able to do it. But this character has a special place in my heart, so I said to Peter, maybe we should switch to Puccini's "Manon Lescaut" in spring. This happened maybe 20 days before he announced the season. It was a crazy thing, a miracle. It happened in record time. This was going to be my sixth role debut on the stage of the Met. The Met looks very scary, but it's one of the most comfortable places to be. And also to debut. The audience is so supportive. I'm looking forward next season to "Il Trovatore" and "Rusalka," both of them also for the first time anywhere. It seems a little bit crazy, but I'm not that kind of girl to be scared of what's happening tomorrow. I'm just going for it. Jamie Barton was looking forward to an onstage catfight. Queen Elizabeth is a fascinating character. If you ever saw the Meryl Streep movie "The Iron Lady," this is Margaret Thatcher in her heyday. I love me some Giovanna in Donizetti's "Anna Bolena"; I love me some Adalgisa in "Norma." But I feel like my face gets stuck in a perpetual expression of worry in those parts; how many ways can you express that? So to be able to switch it up and do Elisabetta, a character who is very flawed and yet so powerful and sure of herself, I was really looking forward to that. Brian Jagde had his first leading role. This "Tosca" was the biggest disappointment of everything I've had canceled. Especially as someone who is from here. The first opera I ever saw was at the Met. I did a small part here in "Arabella" in 2014. Since then I've performed all over the world, and I knew that at some point, the Met and I would meet each other. So I was just patient about it. But it's that big house everybody wants to sing at. The fact I named my dog Cavaradossi is a sign I like the role. It's been a really lucky part for me. I've made many house debuts in "Tosca." I appreciate his stand up guy kind of nature. I was going to be up there with a great couple of casts. I was going to be doing the HD broadcast. Everything was coming together at the right time. But luckily I do have many future plans at the Met, so I will make that debut. The Met sometimes casts five years ahead of time, and this "Simon Boccanegra" had already gone through shifts because of financial changes. But it would have been wonderful to sing a role I've done in Berlin and at La Scala in Milan, and finally be able to step into Amelia with a much more developed internal self. When the contract came, I was making decisions about going on the trajectory toward Amelia and also Verdi's Desdemona and Elvira in "Ernani." As a singer, as an artist, you want theaters to think of you as on a development trajectory. To have a staple repertory like "La Boheme," which I was doing performances of after "Boccanegra" and also new things you're adding. This would have been the opportunity to sing with the baritone Carlos Alvarez, who hasn't been at the Met in a while. Maybe that was too good to be true. I can't even begin to imagine what the musical and interpersonal chemistry would have been like. Tara Erraught was finally going to wear a dress. The second performance of "La Cenerentola" would have been St. Patrick's Day. That blew my mind, for an Irish person. The whole backstage was decorated in green and shamrocks. The Irish president was going to fly in, and the ambassador. It wasn't just a big thing for me, this time. It was one of the calmest, coolest rehearsal periods all people who had done the roles a thousand times. It was like a family coming together. And to go from tailored trousers for the two male roles I'd done at the Met to the most beautiful gowns I couldn't stop looking at myself in the gown. A few years ago, I did have the honor to perform "Madama Butterfly" at the Met. This role has become a very loyal friend and companion in my career, and I was looking forward to returning to give this performance once again, with all these added years of experience, hopefully imbuing it with even more depth. I grew up in New York; I went to Juilliard, always seeing the Met right there. She I'll say she is a muse to everyone in the art form. She's also been a part of my day in, day out history since the age of 6. I can't speak to decisions of who sings where. I learned, even as a child: Go where you're wanted, go where you're welcome. I trust, at least this is my belief, that I have been placed in the places I needed to be at that moment. For my personal growth, or whoever was in the audience on that particular day who needed to hear that performance. My career has taken me through the world, but not with a concentration at the Met. I'm just grateful for the times I've had there. Would I like to sing there more? Of course. But I have to emphasize that I am very grateful for every opportunity. What we do is a service. I am happy to serve.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
The Popcast is hosted by Jon Caramanica, pop music critic for The New York Times. It covers the latest in pop music criticism, trends and news. Does Lil Yachty know any songs by the Notorious B.I.G.? Should Lil Uzi Vert rap over a DJ Premier beat? Is mumbling what some people refer to as mumbling, at least a viable form of rapping? Like any genre, hip hop has its own internal culture wars, and the last few months have been overrun by them, with purist conservatives taking aim at a younger generation of rappers gloriously and exuberantly disconnected from the genre's traditions.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
WASHINGTON From her second floor bedroom window two miles north of the United States Capitol, Doris Newton can gaze across a grassy field and reservoir at the Founder's Library Clock Tower at Howard University, her alma mater. She fervently hopes the view won't change. Two blocks away, Diane Barnes has another perspective. She cares less about preserving Ms. Newton's view and more about a proposed mixed use project for the 25 acre site she says is badly needed to provide services and amenities to her rowhouse neighborhood. The McMillan Sand Filtration Site, an industrial artifact decommissioned by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1986 and sold to the District of Columbia government a year later, is emblematic of the potential and pitfalls of a city seemingly in constant change. The site is on the National Register of Historic Places, but it is also an undeveloped property in a market where the demand for more housing, offices and retail continues to grow. Washington has been trying for 25 years to develop it and, since 2007, has worked with three firms, joined as Vision McMillan Partners, to construct one million square feet of medical offices, 146 townhouses, 531 apartments in two buildings, a ground floor grocery store and other retailing space. A fifth of the housing is to be at below market rates. The plan also encompasses an eight acre park and a 17,000 square foot community center. The partnership consists of EYA, which specializes in urban infill housing and will build the townhouses; Trammell Crow, the large Texas developer, which will construct the medical offices; and Jair Lynch Development Partners, which is responsible for the apartments and retailing. Responsibility for the park, community center and infrastructure falls to the city. "We believe McMillan will be a vibrant, walkable, mixed used neighborhood that preserves the important history of the site while thoughtfully reimagining it," Aakash Thakkar, a senior vice president at EYA, said on behalf of Vision McMillan Partners. "It is rare that a project can seamlessly combine history, open space and world class design with such strong economic development benefits." The medical offices, at the upper end of the site, are to complement a three hospital complex directly north across Michigan Avenue, consisting of Children's National Medical Center, MedStar Washington Hospital Center and the Veterans Affairs Medical Center. The reservoir and filtration plant were constructed more than 100 years ago. The landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. designed the landscaping, including a perimeter pedestrian walk, which will be partly restored. The site was also used informally as a park by neighbors until World War II, when it was fenced in for security reasons. The tract is named for Senator James McMillan of Michigan, chairman of the Senate Park Commission, which in 1901 put forth a plan to redesign the city's monumental core and park system. Recognizing the site's history, the developers agreed to incorporate all 20 concrete silos that were used for sand storage and four small brick "regulator" buildings that housed the controls for the sand filtration process. The Army Corps of Engineers, which still operates the reservoir just west of the site, switched to using chemicals for water purification in the 1980s. Also abandoned were the underground chambers, where the water was filtered through the sand. All but two chambers are to be demolished one to be integrated into the community center and park, the other possibly for retailing and art space. Despite its promised benefits, the project has deeply divided the neighborhood. Opponents, organized as Save McMillan Park, say they have gathered 7,300 signatures against it. They argue that the development is too dense and want the site to become a park. Supporters include neighbors whose yard signs say "Create McMillan Park" and Kenyan R. McDuffie, the District Council member representing the area. Mr. McDuffie lives across the street in the rowhouse his grandparents bought in 1951 and in which he grew up. "The site has been completely unproductive in my lifetime," he said. Mr. McDuffie added that the site has been an unkempt refuge for the homeless and at one time was considered for a new jail. "My support is because as a resident and neighbor I want to see the fence finally coming down. The city acquired it to develop it." Before that happens, the city is paying Vision McMillan Partners 78 million in predevelopment costs, including fees to lawyers to obtain zoning and other approvals, and for site preparation, preservation and amenities. "Whether it's best policy to pay predevelopment costs, as general proposition, I would say not," said Phil Mendelson, the Council chairman, who was a citizen activist opposing developers before entering politics. The city has also paid for "community outreach," which at one point included 28,456 to a Baltimore public relations firm that mapped out a campaign to "maximize local support/effort while effectively discrediting opposition." That money was quickly returned to the city after campaign documents surfaced. The "VMP Grassroots Plan" also promised to "provide continuous political cover to local elected officials." Vision McMillan Partners signed an exclusive agreement with the city in 2007, after what critics say was a questionable process. The partners were originally chosen to develop a master plan, after which a second solicitation was to occur to choose the developer. But the second request for proposals never happened, as a new mayoral administration chose to forgo the second round of bidding. "There were some things that were not handled right," Mr. Mendelson said, "but a lot of the opposition has to do with a no build mentality more about preventing development than modifying it." "I'd like to see more of a park, but the horse left that barn a long time ago," he added. "It's too late to be unwinding that deal." Kirby Vining, a retired Foreign Service officer who lives on a side street near the site and is an active opponent, said his group conducted a door to door neighborhood survey about two years ago. "We got an astounding 85 percent of the people we talked to said they wanted significant park space, no high rises and specific use of these underground caverns."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
In its 20th year, Complexions Contemporary Ballet is most intriguing as a study in branding. Founded by the former Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater principals Dwight Rhoden and Desmond Richardson, the troupe prides itself on multiplicity claiming to champion "the artistic and aesthetic appeal of the multicultural" yet operates within a distressingly narrow aesthetic spectrum. The Complexions style, exemplified by Mr. Rhoden's hyperactive choreography, is aggressively showy, designed to flaunt the svelte musculature, extreme flexibility and athletic prowess of its ultrafit dancers. Far from highlighting diversity (though, yes, the cast is multicultural), it flattens individuality. But it sells. An adoring crowd packed the Joyce Theater last Tuesday for the opening night of the company's two week run. The two hour program began with a world premiere by Mr. Rhoden, "Head Space," to alternately bombastic and too smooth music by the New Orleans jazz composer Terence Blanchard. This structurally unimaginative work pivots on a relationship between two of the troupe's tall beauties, Terk Waters and Kelly Sneddon. In the opening scene, Mr. Waters stands facing us in front of a motionless ensemble. He falls forward into a crouch, gets back up and walks around looking confused before disappearing into the group. Maybe he's searching for Ms. Sneddon, the only dancer not wearing black spandex. He finds and loses her a few times over the next 30 minutes, amid an onslaught of overlapping, repetitive sequences that establish several Complexions trademarks: high high kicks in all directions; running and sliding as a means of getting onstage; evenly spaced, frontally oriented formations; an excess of tricks in place of emotional or formal complexity.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
The most famous shoe print in the world is not on this world at all. It's on the moon, probably still there in the gray dust. On July 20, 1969, the Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin took a step forward, backed up, then took a photograph. What he left behind on the moon and captured for the rest of us on Earth remains remarkable in its simplicity and timeless in its evocation. "Framed in the photo was evidence of man on the moon," Mr. Aldrin later wrote in Magnificent Desolation. "A single footprint, showing in perfect detail a reverse mold of the treads from the bottom of my moon boot." Mr. Aldrin's footprint is about an inch deep enough to cast a shadow from the dim sunlight over his right shoulder. It is straight on the sides and rounded at the toes and the heel, the shape of a racetrack. It is filled with lines, like rungs of a ladder, formed by eight flat, straight edged ribs. Who created such a historic sole? Who decided that straight, thick ribs are exactly what an astronaut needs for traction in the lunar soil? A man named Richard Ellis is the person who captured the perfect blend of form and function. More than anyone, he decided what all the footprints on the moon would look like. Mr. Ellis worked as a model maker for ILC Industries, now ILC Dover, the Delaware company that won the bid to create spacesuits for NASA's Apollo program. ILC, best known for its Playtex division, also had military contracts for things like inflatable rafts. Part of Mr. Ellis's job was to take the 80 measurements of the astronauts so that engineers could design their suits. His lasting contribution, however, came from the blue silicone soles of the lunar overshoes. Most called them moon boots. They slipped over the shoes worn in the spaceship, like galoshes for the rain. "It wasn't something that NASA dictated, 'You have to make the tread look like this,'" said Bill Ayrey, a retired ILC test engineer and longtime company historian. "It was him thinking, 'What kind of tread would it be? Well, let's do it like this, with full lines across, and that should keep you from slipping.'" " Moon Boot ," a book by David H. Mather about the design, suggests that the sole's wide ribs were meant to accommodate the ladder rungs of the lunar module, but Mr. Ayrey doubts it. It is more likely, he said, that Mr. Ellis, who worked for ILC for 25 years and died in 2006, just chose to make his job easier. "Maybe Richard's approach was, 'I have to make this mold, and I'm going to make it simple, and it probably works fine,'" Mr. Ayrey said. "And it did. It worked just fine." The tread was no afterthought of shoe design; in the 1960s, soles had become a focus of footwear fashion. Converse made its first All Star basketball shoe, with its complex rubber sole pattern meant to stick to hardwood, about 50 years before Apollo 11. But there were caveats. Before the Apollo missions, NASA had photos but no soil samples from the moon. The agency was not sure what kind of surface the men would be walking on. Was it deep? Was it slippery? Would it shift like sand or clump like clay? "In case the lunar soil turned out softer than they anticipated, they wanted something that would spread the weight of the astronaut on a pretty large footprint," said Cathleen Lewis, the curator of spacesuits and international space programs at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. When Neil Armstrong took his first step on the moon (soon trampled by subsequent ones), he clung to the ladder. No one was sure how stable the surface was, or if it "would be like quicksand, literally sucking a person down into a quagmire of dust," Mr. Aldrin wrote. He discovered it was like "powdered charcoal," and noted that he could create footprints and make out the treads. Only the last two men to walk on the moon, Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt of Apollo 17, brought theirs back. Other used boots remain on the moon, left behind to save room and weight for return voyages. Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin tossed their boots from the hatch, like children dumping muddy shoes to the porch. "They probably went much further than a normal toss given the one sixth gravity," Ms. Lewis said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
ROMEOVILLE, Ill. Brandon Williams arrived at an Amazon fulfillment center here, about an hour outside of Chicago, around 7:30 a.m. on Wednesday, one of thousands across the country who turned up for the company's first Jobs Day. While he appeared to wilt slightly during the five hours he waited before an M.C. summoned him for a tour, his enthusiasm did not wane. "What's not great about a company that keeps building?" he said, seated in a huge tent the company erected in the parking lot as a kind of makeshift waiting room. The event was a vivid illustration of the ascendance of Amazon, the online retail company that, to a far greater extent than others in the tech industry, has a seemingly insatiable need for human labor to fuel its explosive growth. Like other tech giants, Amazon is recruiting thousands of people with engineering and business degrees for high paying jobs. But the vast majority of Amazon's hiring is for what the company calls its "fulfillment network" the armies of people who pick and pack orders in warehouses and unload and drive delivery trucks, and who take home considerably smaller incomes. The event on Wednesday, held at a dozen locations including Romeoville, Ill., was intended to help fill 50,000 of those lower paying positions, 40,000 of them full time jobs. Those high low distinctions did not seem to bother the attendees of the jobs fair, many of them united in the conviction that Amazon represented untapped opportunity that a foot in the door could lead to a career of better compensated, more satisfying work, whether in fulfillment, I.T., marketing or even fashion. Mr. Williams, a military veteran studying computer network security at a nearby community college, said he hoped to eventually work his way up to an I.T. job with Amazon. But even those whose ambitions were more in line with the vast majority of available jobs could not hide their excitement. Victor Salgado, who makes 9 per hour with no benefits doing maintenance at an aerosol company and spent three years before that grouting floors, said he was attracted by the promise of an upgrade in pay and benefits. He said he would be willing to "do anything" at Amazon. Filling so many jobs is challenging, which partly explains the jamboree at Amazon's warehouses on Wednesday. The company's warehouse jobs, which typically pay 12 to 15 an hour, have a reputation as physically demanding and repetitive, with high rates of burnout. Amazon has successfully resisted union organizing that might introduce more worker protections. Amazon has said its wages and benefits are attractive. Five years ago, it introduced a program called Career Choice that pays tuition costs for employees seeking training to join higher paid professions, like airline mechanics, medical lab workers and computer aided design technicians. Jack Chasteen, who recently finished high school and is still living at home, said he had been planning to seek a job as a pizza deliveryman but that his parents urged him to turn up at Jobs Day instead. "They said it would be a good building block for stuff in the future," he said, citing Amazon's tuition assistance program, which he hoped might help him pursue a nursing degree. It is indisputable that the growth of e commerce, which Amazon captures a big chunk of, has devastated many physical retailers, leading to store closures and layoffs. There is debate, though, about how much the corresponding expansion of jobs related to e commerce has offset the decline in employment at physical stores. Amazon's remarkable head count growth stands in sharp contrast to its image as a job killer. It was the fastest American company in history to employ 300,000 people globally, crossing that threshold last year, its 20th as a public company, according to a paper published this year by the Progressive Policy Institute, a left leaning think tank. Walmart reached that milestone 21 years after it went public, the paper said. Amazon now has more than 382,000 employees globally. In January, it vowed to create 100,000 jobs over the next 18 months in the United States. It increased its domestic work force from 30,000 employees in 2011 to over 180,000 at the end of 2016. The figures do not include the thousands of seasonal workers that join the company to help it with the crush of holiday shopping. Some come in R.V.s as part of a group Amazon called CamperForce. The company pays for their campsites. Amazon hired 30,000 new employees in its last quarter alone. Facebook, in contrast, employed just under 21,000 people at the end of June, while Alphabet, the parent company of Google, employed about 76,000. Arun Sundararajan, a professor of information, operations and management sciences at New York University's Stern School of Business, said Amazon's employment needs are unique among tech companies. "Their business has always been a meld of the digital and physical," he said. "Retail is very different from digital products or music or social networking. The other tech platforms are, at their core, selling tech products." But there are questions about how long Amazon's fulfillment jobs will exist, as robots and other forms of automation become more capable at doing the jobs that now require humans.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
PARIS Just as the United Nations General Assembly's session began in New York, and President Trump met up with President Emmanuel Macron of France, Gucci convened its own international summit of sorts in a nightclub turned theater in Paris, under the leadership of its secretary general (sorry, creative director), Alessandro Michele. In the once abandoned environs of Le Palace, down the aisles of plush brown carpets, he brought together nerds and divas, Disney and Dolly Parton, Janis Joplin rockers and Josephine Baker boogiers. He mixed them in with sequined starlets and Velvet Underground backpackers; introduced them with a film clip that combined Shakespeare and Italian experimental cinema; and set them moving to the distorted tunes of Maria Callas, helicopters and sirens. He gave them a little time out to listen to Jane Birkin, a British expat in France, serenading everyone with a live rendition of "Baby Alone in Babylone." And he dressed them in his all at once wardrobe of Lurex, feathers, G logo canvas, leather, tennis sweaters, ruffled lounge singer shirts, jock straps, Chinoiserie, shine, cherry prints (you name it, boys and girls no matter) like an all star geek glamourama, the better to reconcile their multiple differences. To try to make order out of disorder, bridge high culture and low culture, demonstrate the beauty in difference and the harmony that can come from culture clash, and so on. Gucci unites the world with the language of clothes! Let no one say Mr. Michele doesn't have big ambitions, or the vision to make them come true. It's just that he's starting to seem more like a cult leader than a fashion diplomat. He well and truly upended the old order when he arrived, shooing sex out in favor of emotion, prioritizing the values of vintage over the jet set. He's got the podium. Now instead of indulging in the same baroque rhetoric, he has to figure out where he's going to go with it. And that doesn't mean just changing show cities, as he did this season though that did cause a bit of a cross border kerfuffle. Christian Dior, the vaunted French brand that had recently claimed the honor of opening the French shows, was not entirely happy that Gucci had decided to abandon its usual place on the Milan schedule to invade home turf, and in a fit of national pique leapfrogged forward, starting its show earlier in the day to keep its pride of place. And so the curtain came up on the final leg of ready to wear in a cavernous chamber constructed to the house's specifications at the Hippodrome de Longchamp, the racetrack on the fringes of Paris. The better to give a platform to a manifesto on liberation and the body by Maria Grazia Chiuri, Dior's women's wear artistic director. Enlisting the help of the Israeli choreographer Sharon Eyal and eight dancers, Ms. Chiuri set her collection amid a powerful display of calibrated movement that gave proof to her theory that, as she said backstage before the show, dance is "a language without words that speaks of freedom," one that is connected to the past and classical rules, but also tries to rewrite them for the modern world. That this also happens to be the goal of fashion and, in particular, of Dior, was the point. And though sometimes it was hard to concentrate on the clothes for the performance, as petals rained down and the dancers writhed and flowed across the floor like one harmonic organism (and the models did their best to avoid them), it was well made. Eschewing her more polemical feminism for leotard like body suits instead of her usual playsuits, Ms. Chiuri layered on Isadora Duncan dresses of draped jersey, macrame'd tulle tea frocks, combined it all with faded denim and folkloric work wear, and then brought on the unforced romance of tie dyed over embroidered florals and minutely layered feather appliques. With this, she negotiated her way forward, unlike Simon Porte Jacquemus, who seems to be stuck in an increasingly narrow French Riviera rut. Beachy slip dressing dangled lavish fringe, slithery silk knits plunged in deep vees at the breastbone and were slashed high on one thigh, and statement making (if entirely impractical) super sized raffia bags and cool costume jeweled heels accessorized it all. Mr. Jacquemus is often discussed as one of the leaders of a new generation of French designers; another is Marine Serre, who owes a great debt to Martin Margiela for her one off garments smartly upcycled from fancy toweling, Formula One castoffs and key chains. But who also has an ability to marry the strength of sneaker speed with the niceties of the cocktail hour; to connect the crescent moon spandex bodysuit to the sculpted pantsuit the better to appeal to a different, more multifaceted constituency, as this collection, entitled "hardcore couture," showed ("Futurewear" is her rallying cry, and it's not inappropriate). If Mr. Jacquemus is going to make it off the backbenches to speechify on the floor, he needs to extend his range.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Her Husband Did the Unthinkable. This Is a Play About Everything After. "I should let you know I am not O.K.," said the actress Maddie Corman, 49. She was in gray jeans and a T shirt, barefoot in a small studio on the first day of rehearsal for the play she has written and will star in, "Accidentally Brave." "This is not one of those shows where I'm here to tell you that I was O.K., and then I wasn't O.K., but now I am." Ms. Corman gestured behind her, where an image of her and her husband, the director Jace Alexander, would be projected onto a screen. They would appear alongside an article from The New York Times highlighting the couple's wedding 21 years ago. At the time, a friend described a young Ms. Corman as "incredibly open and loving" a rarity in the world of film, he said. "Oddly," he continued, "she's only become more so, which makes me fear for her at times, but I also admire her bravery." "Brave" was not what Ms. Corman set out to be. But three and a half years ago, while driving to work on a "semi terrible TV show," as she put it, she got a phone call that can't even be described as the kind of call nobody wants to get because it would never even occur to most people that this call would be possible. The police were at her house, her teenage daughter sobbed through the receiver. Her husband had been arrested on child pornography charges. What do you do when your husband of two decades father of your three children is suddenly revealed publicly to have a shameful and disturbing secret? If you're Ms. Corman, at first you think there must be a terrible mistake. This was a man who, as she says onstage, "listens to NPR and makes bad jokes and sings songs at the piano and reads The New Yorker and plans for the future and who doesn't flirt with my friends." How can this be? she recalled thinking. When the police made it clear it was not a mistake, she pulled over to the side of the road and threw up. She picked up her husband on a street corner in Brooklyn, after he was released on bail, and she asked him if it was true (yes, and he said he needed help) and if he had ever touched anyone (he swore he had not). Then she punched him, and she sobbed, and she called her kids and reassured them that everything was going to be O.K., even though, as she puts it in the play, "I do not recognize the voice coming out of my mouth." Ms. Corman returned to the set of the semi terrible show the next day, because she had to who knew if her husband would ever work again and she bummed a cigarette even though she didn't smoke, and she somehow did her lines, and she kept wondering, do I tell anyone? That question became irrelevant, because an article about the arrest would soon appear in The New York Post. But this was just the beginning of a journey "Oh my God, I hate the word 'journey,'" Ms. Corman said during rehearsal, opting instead for "thing" she would embark on, which is not yet over. Somewhere along the way, she began writing it all down, workshopping it with a friend, the director Kristin Hanggi, who reached out in one of Ms. Corman's low moments and who seemed not to be judging. Ms. Hanggi encouraged her to turn the writing into a one woman play, which opens this month at the DR2 Theater. It is directed by Ms. Hanggi ("Rock of Ages") and produced by the Tony winner Daryl Roth ("Gloria: A Life"), who said she had "admired Maddie as an actress, and am now equally impressed with her writing." The title "Accidentally Brave" is a reference to the people, the many people, who kept telling Ms. Corman "how 'brave' I was," she said. "I didn't mean to be brave, but this is what I was dealt." Oh, and here's what she calls the spoiler: Nearly four years later, after rehab, an ongoing 12 step program, couples therapy and much anguished wrestling with questions of ethics, family and the nature of forgiveness, she and her husband remain married. At home on a recent morning in Harlem, where she now lives with her husband and their 15 year old twin boys (her daughter is away at college), she sat cross legged on her bed, her husband beside her, ticking off her list of fears about making their story even more public than it already is. "I mean, a new fear pops up every day," she said. She is afraid she will hurt her children more than they've already been hurt. She is afraid of what people will say not just about what her husband did but of her decision to stay with him. She is worried that, by virtue of staying, she is somehow undermining the women who have so bravely spoken up to say MeToo of which she is also one. (Last year, Ms. Corman was one of nine women who spoke out against the playwright Israel Horovitz.) "And then there are the technical fears: How is it all going to come together," she said. "So it's the fears of a writer, the fears of an actor and the fears of a human all combined into one soup." Her husband, best known for his work on "Law Order," is now producing a documentary working title: "Tsunami" about the destructive forces of pornography. "You've had the worst thing you've ever done exposed to the entire world," said Mr. Alexander, who spent a month and a half in an inpatient rehabilitation facility and remains part of a 12 step program for sex addicts. "It was incredibly painful and incredibly destructive, but it allowed me to reinvestigate the way I lived my life." As for sharing that story with the world, he said, "Maddie has always said to me, a huge element of telling this story is service." But this play is not about the details of her husband's crimes, or what may have led him there (the play hints at "what happened to him in his childhood"). "That is not my story to tell," Ms. Corman said. Rather, "Accidentally Brave" is her story "my own messy truth," she said. While her husband, she said, has been entirely supportive of her doing it, she said he has not read the script. "It feels like there's this thing in our society where something terrible happens, and then you go away," Ms. Corman explained. "Nobody sees you for a while, and then you come back, and you either say, 'I'm married' or 'I'm not married' or 'I'm better' or 'I'm not better,' but here I am. I'm back, and let's not talk about what happened between then and now." "I was just so hungry to know what happened in the middle," she continued. "Like forget about the topic of what my husband did that's taboo enough. But in some ways even more taboo is how you deal with the mess and the betrayal and all of it." How do you repair a relationship that has been torn apart at the seams? What do you do with all that anger? And how do you cope with the everyday things that pop up moment to moment phone calls about removing your name from charity events, a request to return soccer equipment to the team because obviously your husband can no longer be your kids' coach, or your daughter needing childhood photos for a school project, which you no longer have because they were all on the hard drive that was seized by the police? It is not a play with a tidy happy ending, and Ms. Corman would not say now that she has a tidy, happy marriage. She is still working through deep feelings of shame and betrayal and suspects she will be for a very long time. "I'm not going to suddenly be the person that I was," she said. "I mean, I still wake up in the middle of the night. I have flashbacks. But because I've had this happen, I actually have a much bigger toolbox to deal with these feelings when they come." And there are times in the play and just in life when she can still laugh. She described a friend who tried to bring over sleeping pills but couldn't find them so instead brought their dog's Prozac. When Ms. Corman realized she would soon no longer be able to host trick or treaters at Halloween, she purchased 27 pumpkins and decorated them all. In one hilarious scene, she introduces her daughter to a young woman she hopes her daughter might be friends with and is convinced that she made a wonderful impression only to have her daughter point out that she had been gripping a book in her arms, cover side out: "Mending a Shattered Heart: A Guide for Partners of Sex Addicts." "We laughed hard," Ms. Corman says onstage. "I think we may have even sung." And then there were the text messages from friends, trying to be helpful, that read like a staccato of what not to say: "When are you filing for divorce?" "My husband has had a few hookers." "I hate having sex with my husband." "You should see what's on my laptop!" "Do you worry that he will kill himself?" "My husband died which I think is way easier than what you're going through." Let me be clear, Ms. Corman said later: Most of the time, it was not funny. "If I could have kept it a secret, I probably would have," she said. But she didn't have a choice. And so, the way she sees it, speaking about the unspeakable might help someone else whose life is turned upside down, who is forced to test the limits of her own capacity for forgiveness in the face of something terrible. "I wouldn't wish what happened to me or my kids on anyone," she said. "But the way that I feel, and honestly the way that my husband feels, is that when we keep things in the dark, that's when shame and pain actually grows." "Our family," she continued, "didn't just stop being because something terrible happened."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
City Center's Fall for Dance Festival came to a close on Sunday with a fifth and final program containing visions of the present and the past. According to a program note, the first piece, Wayne McGregor's "FAR," was inspired by the "controversial" Age of Enlightenment. The title is an acronym for Flesh in the Age of Reason. But even excerpted here without its high tech set of 3,200 LED lights, the work looks hyper modern, state of the art. The members of Mr. McGregor's British troupe, Random Dance, are hyper flexible, and the choreography keeps their undulant bodies hyper extended in a post Balanchine, post Cunningham, post Forsythe mode. The movement is detailed and inventive, with all its ingenuity applied to showy extremes. What's left of humanity isn't pretty. Often the dancers seem horrified by bodies, their own and others'; they point fingers at one another in blame. Presumably, the controversy concerns the progress of science (a voice in Ben Frost's score sings "After death nothing"), but the tone of dystopia prompts gloomy thoughts about the progress of dance. After this, what? In Program 5, what came after was a commissioned world premiere by Pontus Lidberg. "This Was Written on Water" is a duet for the American Ballet Theater principals Isabella Boylston and James Whiteside. The commissioned score by Stefan Levin, played live by a string trio, suggests the calls of sea gulls, which might also be represented by the pieces of paper swirling in the light. Ms. Boylston, unaffected and lovely, contemplates the falling paper until she runs into Mr. Whiteside. Their duet is handsome, though it sags in the middle, unchallenging in its vision of contemporary ballet but inoffensive, even admirable, in its sexual politics. The woman is in control here, repeatedly accepting and rejecting overtures of intimacy by the attentive man. Aakash Odedra's "Nritta" is more exciting. Mr. Odedra, a stringy dancer on the rise in Britain, is trained in the classical Indian form of Kathak. While his rhythmic footwork was merely adequate and not always audible, his spins, sometimes on his knees, had whirlwind flair. Better yet were his floating jumps and the luxuriance of his body angles at phrase endings. The way he kicked up his heels while advancing toward the audience was a delight. "Nritta" carefully expanded a tradition without rupturing it, while the program's final selection was all about the preservation of the past. Since 2007, under the direction of Iain Webb, the Sarasota Ballet has undergone a heroic and unlikely transformation from a provincial Florida troupe to an internationally recognized repository for the works of the great British choreographer Frederick Ashton. At the Kennedy Center in Washington last June, the company scored a hit with Ashton's "Les Patineurs," and Fall for Dance requested that work for the troupe's New York debut. Choreographed in 1937, it looks back further, imagining a skating party in the Victorian era of its Meyerbeer score, an idealized past warmed by the innocent humor of intentional falls. On a program with "FAR," it is bound to appear quaint, though its classical construction recalls what is lost in Mr. McGregor's postmodern jumble. The Sarasota dancers, led by the sprightly virtuosity of Logan Learned as the Blue Boy, performed it reverently, but I wished they were less stiff. Style is the hardest part of the past to keep alive.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Drama on the deck: The artist Huma Bhabha's installation for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Roof Garden, opening Tuesday, is "We Come in Peace." The title comes from "The Day the Earth Stood Still," and the two sculptures could stand for any balance of power or meeting. Step out onto the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and you are confronted by a towering figure, somewhat humanoid but with a ferocious face that looks like a primate mask. She He It They visually dwarfs the jagged Manhattan skyline and the treetops in Central Park. Kneeling before this behemoth is a second figure, bowing in supplication or prayer, with long cartoonish human hands and a scraggly tail emerging from its shiny black drapery. Welcome to Huma Bhabha's "We Come in Peace," a spare and unsettling sculptural installation for the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden Commission, which opens on Tuesday and runs through Oct. 28. While the figures aren't meant to be scary, in at least one way they can be interpreted as a warning sign. The title harks back to science fiction, the line an alien uttered to a human in the 1951 movie "The Day the Earth Stood Still" but it ripples with other associations: colonization, invasion, imperialism or missionaries and other foreigners whose intentions were not always innocent. Ms. Bhabha, 56, who was born in Karachi, Pakistan, and educated at the Rhode Island School of Design and Columbia University (she lives in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.), is a smart choice for the rooftop commission. Working in figurative sculpture or some version of it she provides a cross cultural approach that is needed particularly at this moment, making connections among histories, languages and civilizations, and our shared present and future. Her work has been included in large international exhibitions, including "All the World's Futures" at the Venice Biennale in 2015. Unlike recent years and other commissions, where the Met roof felt like a playground or an obstacle course, Ms. Bhabha's project is shockingly, refreshingly, simple. There are only two sculptures, arranged in a kind of dialogue with the open air roof serving, as Ms. Bhabha describes it in the accompanying catalog, as a kind of stage an elegant play on the traditional pedestals on which sculptures were customarily displayed. Both figures wre originally carved in cork and Styrofoam. Ms. Bhabha generally works in scrappy, ephemeral materials. But these would obviously not survive a season on the roof, so the sculptures have been cast in bronze. And yet they retain much of their original tactility and distressed appearance. The bronze is covered with patina color, and gouges and markings on the colossal, golemlike figure read either as symbols or language or perhaps a kind of cosmic wear and tear, harking back to sci fi aliens. But and this is particularly noticeable if you've been wandering the floors below the work is also a contemporary update of the Gorgons and Medusas in Greek and Roman Art, the deities in the Asian wing, or the warriors and spirits in the Met's current, excellent exhibition "Golden Kingdoms: Luxury Legacy in the Ancient Americas." The second figure is more puzzling. Titled "Benaam," which means "unnamed" or "without name" in Urdu, its humanoid hands which are reminiscent of Philip Guston's comic inspired figurative painting were carved in clay then cast in bronze. Its tail was crafted in phallic looking coils of clay and was peppered with electrical conduits, all of which have been cast in bronze. The main element here not entirely successful or exciting, for me is a surface covering most of the figure that looks like a trompe l'oeil trash bag, cast in bronze and painted black. Is it a body bag? Maybe a burqa. Clearly something protecting, preserving or obscuring the figure. Most important is the relationship between the two sculptures. It could stand for any balance of power or meeting: parent and child, or strangers meeting for the first time (say, over drinks on this roof). The towering figure clearly suggests our entry into the unknown, its gender morphing into uncertain post gender and post humanity, raising the question of what life in other galaxies and universes might look like if or when we make contact with sentient creatures. I was surprised not to see Eduardo Paolozzi mentioned in this round up because his sculptures are so formally similar to Ms. Bhabha's. A core member of the Independent Group in post World War II Britain, which served as the progenitors of British Pop Art, Mr. Paolozzi made bronze sculptures throughout the 1950s and '60s, such as his "Robot" (1956), that bear a striking resemblance to Ms. Bhabha's works, both past and present. Mr. Paolozzi was also friendly with the sci fi author J.G. Ballard. (An exhibition of Mr. Paolozzi's sculpture and seminal "Bunk" collages, made from popular magazines, is currently on view at the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin.) One of the highlights of the catalog is that it includes photos showing the production of Ms. Bhabha's project, from preparatory drawings to the initial clay, Styrofoam and cork sculptures; to the foundry in Kingston, N.Y., where the bronzes were fabricated; and finally to the snowy Met roof in early spring. Ms. Bhabha's installation is particularly successful for reactivating the sculptures inside the museum. In the galleries below particularly the sculpture court where the Met's collection of 18th and 19th century French and Italian figurative sculptures is showcased you see all kinds of dramas being played out, mostly derived from classical Greek and Roman literature. And with your imagination ignited to the possibility of objects existing relationally, rather than as singular artworks, you see other dialogues occurring. For instance, in the Great Hall entrance to the museum, a giant Hellenic marble sculpture of Athena Parthenos (circa 170 B.C.) faces off against an Egyptian pharaoh (crica 1919 1885 B.C.), carved in basalt, a material that Ms. Bhabha's Styrofoam and cork to bronze sculptures weirdly resembles. In all these cases, as in Ms. Bhabha's grouping, it is two figures confronting one another the Self and the Other not just the depiction of a hero, heroine, goddess or founding father. In the collision of traditions and forms on the roof, you sense possibility: the melding of cultures and aesthetics that might be harmonious rather than imperialist, or bent merely toward appropriation. Ms. Bhabha doesn't make specific claims for her work, but despite its ferocity and imposing presence, her title, "We Come in Peace," suggests that appearances both in art and the real world can be deceiving.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
This Is How You Escape a Cheetah, if You're an Impala Imagine you're in a high speed car chase. You're fast but the 12 cylinder Lamborghini behind you is faster. Flooring the accelerator and going in a straight line only spells certain defeat. So what's your best bet for escape? Not that we recommend ever getting into a high speed car chase. But say you were: drive along, not too quickly, and just as the other car is about to close in, make a sharp turn. That's the suggestion of a study published today in Nature, although instead of cars it looked at high speed pursuits between two pairs of predator and prey: cheetahs and impalas, and lions and zebras. The study, done over many years in Botswana, is the first to gather stride by stride data on how these animals hunt and flee for survival in the wild, said Thomas Roberts, a professor of biology at Brown University who was not involved in the study. "It wasn't that long ago that when biomechanists like us asked the question 'how fast can cheetahs run,' we would look at anecdotal evidence of someone driving next to a cheetah in a truck," he said. "Now we can track step by step what a cheetah is doing when it chases an impala, and what the impala is doing when it's fooling a cheetah isn't that cool?" In the new study, led by Alan Wilson, a professor of locomotor biomechanics at the Royal Veterinary College in London, researchers captured thousands of high speed runs by fitting five cheetahs, seven impalas, nine lions and seven zebras with custom collars that could record each animal's location, speed, acceleration, deceleration and turning performance many times per second. They also took tiny muscle biopsies from each animal. READ: In DNA, Clues to the Cheetah's Speed and Hurdles Though cheetahs and impalas were universally more athletic than lions and zebras, both cheetahs and lions had a similar advantage over their prey they were 38 percent faster, 37 percent better at accelerating, 72 percent better at decelerating and their muscles were 20 percent more powerful. This makes sense because the predators are always a step behind, Dr. Wilson said. They have to run faster to catch up, but they must also be able to decelerate quickly in case their targets decide to suddenly slow down and turn. The data also showed that impalas and zebras were typically moving at only half their maximum speed when running from their pursuers. To confirm why, the scientists created a computer model that simulated the last moments of a hunt, after a predator has closed in enough to capture its prey within two strides. The model showed that impalas and zebras have the best chance of making a getaway if they run at moderate speeds, because that leaves more options for maneuvering away at the last second. "If you're running flat out, there's not much you can do to stop a lion from anticipating exactly where you're going to be in two strides' time," Dr. Wilson said. Running at a lower speed, however, means an animal can speed up or slow down. It can also make far sharper twists and turns than if it were running at full steam. The consistent difference in athleticism between the cats and their prey helps maintain balanced numbers of each group in the savanna, Dr. Wilson added. Generally, cheetahs and lions are successful at catching their prey one out of every three hunts. "This research suggests that these predator prey pairs have been co evolving in an evolutionary arms race," said Talia Yuki Moore, a postdoctoral fellow studying biomechanics at the University of Michigan who did not participate in the study. "One's trying to eat, and the other's trying not to get eaten."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Less than 25 miles from Manhattan and near the Long Island Expressway, fieldstone walls edge the entrance of a 108 acre estate. A relic of a bygone era, it is among the last king size Gold Coast estates on Long Island's North Shore. "'Groton Place' is a vanishing breed," said Meredyth Hull Smith, an associate broker with Sotheby's International Realty in Manhattan, who shares the listing with Christina Porter and Lois Kirschenbaum of Daniel Gale Sotheby's International Realty on Long Island. The owners, Luis and Julie Rinaldini, wanted lots of land for their horses when, 23 years ago, they purchased the Old Westbury property, saving the expansive estate from impending development. Today they placed the estate, which has 10 fireplaces, seven bedrooms, seven and a half baths, plus staff quarters, on the market for 29.9 million. "They would like to sell the property to a single owner who could enjoy the property the way they had," Ms. Smith said. Concerned about preserving open space, Mr. Rinaldini, an architect turned investment banker, co founded the North Shore Land Alliance, a land conservancy, from his living room in 2002. A new owner would inherit an approved subdivision plan for eight houses none of which would be visible to the others with the main house remaining on 17 acres. "We had a fantastic time here for 23 years" said Mr. Rinaldini, 67. "We are older. it's time to think about simplifying some things." The driveway, more than half a mile long, winds past a 1751 farmhouse, an early 1900s dairy barn, rolling lawns, woods, perennial gardens, a children's playhouse and a stable nearly as grand as the main 12,000 square foot Georgian style whitewashed brick mansion house at the top of a hill. Designed by the architect Henry Renwick Sedgwick, the mansion was built in 1932 for Robert Winthrop, an investment banker and former president and benefactor of Winthrop University Hospital (now N.Y.U. Winthrop Hospital). From the foyer, a broad center hall runs nearly 42 feet to the back terrace. During the summer solstice, sunlight filters straight through from east to west and the dining room fireplace lines up perfectly with the fireplace across the center hall in the library, its knotty pine walls painted a hunter green. Both rooms have full height bay windows overlooking the 55 foot by 24 foot terrace and sweeping lawns beyond. Beyond the off center staircase hall, a ballroom size living room has an 11 and a half foot ceiling. Three sets of French doors open to a side terrace. Wide plank oak floors run throughout the downstairs, with French parquet in the owner's study, a later addition. "It is a superbly designed house," Mr. Rinaldini said. "Some of the Gilded Age mansions were over the top. This is restrained, but you can tell the quality is really good. The details are refined." The sizable kitchen has glass fronted cabinets, mahogany countertops and opens to an ample breakfast room. Pointing out the adjacent potting terrace on a FaceTime tour, Ms. Smith noted: "This is a serious country gentleman's estate." Upstairs, the main suite has an adjacent sunroom, two bathrooms and two fireplaces, one in the bedroom and one in a dressing room. Four family bedrooms and a nanny's room have en suite baths. A warren of smaller rooms was transformed to a family hangout. The estate has been a setting for films including the "The Bourne Legacy," Woody Allen's "Blue Jasmine" and "Cafe Society," and Sofia Coppola's upcoming "On the Rocks." On television, it has appeared in "Royal Pains," "Gossip Girls," "Madame Secretary," "Mozart in the Jungle" and "The Good Wife."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Over the last few years, the Trump administration has fought to shape the 2020 census to its political benefit and the benefit of the Republican Party. In 2018, it sought to introduce a citizenship question on the census itself, to reduce response rates among immigrant communities. Then, after that was rebuffed by the Supreme Court, it tried to exclude unauthorized immigrants altogether, in direct conflict with the Constitution, which calls on Congress to count "the whole number of persons in each State." Now it wants to cut the census short and deliver it uncompleted a last ditch effort to rig the nation's politics for the sake of its exclusionary political vision. The goal is to freeze political representation in place as much as possible; to keep demographic change the growing share of Americans who are Black, Hispanic and Asian American from swamping the Republican Party's ability to win national elections with a white, heavily rural minority. The census, as Trump and his allies correctly understand, is a critical source of dynamism within the American political system. A political majority (or in Trump's case, a minority) can try to insulate itself from demographic shifts and transformations, but the fact of mandatory reapportionment makes that difficult. New people whether immigrants or Americans moving from place to place will always mean new politics. It is ironic, then, that the origin of the census lies less in principles of democratic representation, and more in the interests of slaveholders, who wanted political recognition of their slave wealth, with constitutional assurance that this peculiar interest would always weigh on future apportionment. But in a perfect example of unintended consequences, the slaveholders' push for a census would help lay the groundwork for the end of the institution itself. The decennial federal census comes out of the fight over congressional representation at the Constitutional Convention. Upon gathering in Philadelphia in 1787, the delegates agreed quickly that the United States should have a bicameral legislature, in keeping with the Virginia Plan, James Madison's blueprint for a new national government. They agreed, too, that the lower house of Congress should be directly elected by voters, with the upper house chosen indirectly. But they disagreed, sharply, over apportionment. Madison's plan called for apportioning representation in both chambers of the national legislature according to "the quotas of contribution, or to the number of free inhabitants, as the one or the other rule may seem best in different cases." Proportional representation, he thought, would lead larger states like Pennsylvania and his native Virginia to join the union, since they would have greater say in government. As would the smaller states of the lower South North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia which were expected to experience rapid growth as a result of new migrants and the "natural increase" of slaves. Of course, it wouldn't be so easy. Under the original Articles of Confederation, each state claimed equal representation in Congress. Small state delegates like those from Delaware and Connecticut liked that arrangement and sought to preserve it as much as possible. Against supporters of population based apportionment who noted it was "the rights of the people composing" the states who deserved representation small state delegates argued that the federal government was to be formed for states "in their political capacity, as well as for the individuals composing them." Besides, they continued, larger states would dominate the government if the convention abandoned the principle of equal representation. The solution, as most Americans know, was the "Great Compromise," in which equal state voting would survive in the Senate and proportional representation would prevail in the House of Representatives. This was a momentous decision, not just because it kept the convention from falling apart, although it did, but because it dictated the shape of the compromise over how to actually proportion representation. At the time, Michael J. Klarman, a legal historian, noted in "The Framers' Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution," that "most elite statesmen believed that political representation ought to reflect wealth as well as population" and "several state constitutions provided for legislative apportionment based partly on wealth." As Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina argued, the South's "superior wealth" should have "its due weight in the government." And northern delegates like Rufus King of Massachusetts sympathized with this view, confessing he "had always expected that as the southern states are the richest, they would not league themselves with the northern unless some respect were paid to their superior wealth." If equal state representation which disregarded the size and wealth of each state was the rule for the Senate, then proportional representation in the House had to factor in wealth, including the ownership of slaves, the major economic interest for the South. This led us to the three fifths clause, based off a proposed "federal ratio" for taxation under the Articles, which ensured slave wealth representation. "The three fifths clause," the historian George William Van Cleve writes in "A Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the early American Republic," "was the explicitly chosen political security foundation for the constitutional bargain protecting the political economy of the slave states." Even still, in its initial apportionment of the House, the committee responsible gave the eight northern states a modest seven seat advantage over the five southern states, 36 to 29. More important, as the historian Jack N. Rakove explains in "Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution," the committee left reapportionment up to the discretion of Congress. "The Atlantic States having the government in their own hands, may take care of their own interest," explained Nathaniel Gorham of Massachusetts, "by dealing out the right of Representation in safe proportions to the Western States." This was a problem for the Southerners, who were already unhappy with their initial minority status in the Legislature. Discretionary reapportionment gave the northern majority control over the political future of the region. As I said earlier, there was broad expectation of rapid growth in the South and its western lands, including among enslaved people. Would a northern majority account for slave growth in its reapportionment? Would it give equal political representation to the migrants of the Southwest? Or would it entrench itself against demographic change? "Those who have power in their hands," warned George Mason of Virginia, "will not give it up while they can retain it." The solution was to take reapportionment out of the hands of Congress. "According to the present population of America," Mason declared, "the northern part of it had a right to preponderate, and he could not deny it. But he wished it not to preponderate hereafter when the reason no longer continued." Northern delegates resisted, but they lost. "The apportionment of representatives in the future," Klarman writes, "would be based on a census, which the Constitution would require Congress to undertake within three years of its first meeting and then again once every decade." And slaves would be counted on the same three fifths basis as they were for the initial apportionment of the House. To assuage a northern public that might object to representation for enslaved people, a Pennsylvania delegate, Gouverneur Morris, proposed a clause to tie representation to taxation, which had not yet been under discussion. Instead of saying outright that enslaved people would count for representation, they would link representation to "direct taxes" (which no delegate expected the federal government to ever impose) and link that to a population that included slaves. "The delegates could pretend that they were not doing what they were actually doing," the historian Robin L. Einhorn explains in "American Taxation, American Slavery." She quotes delegate James Wilson of Pennsylvania making this exact point: "Less umbrage would perhaps be taken" against "an admission of the slaves into the rule of representation, if it should be so expressed as to make them indirectly only an ingredient in the rule, by saying they should enter into the rule of taxation: and as representation was to be according to taxation, the end would be equally attained." In other words, as with so much of the Constitution of 1787, the census is wrapped up in slavery as an institution of significant political and economic influence. And the slaveholder gambit worked, for a time. As slavery grew to new heights in the first decades of the 19th century, mandatory reapportionment gave greater influence to the slaveholding South, providing it with a strong grip on the federal government. But what no one at the time of the founding could have anticipated was mass immigration to the Northern states and its territories. Millions of immigrants the bulk arriving from Germany, Ireland and Britain reached American shores between 1830 and 1860. Rather than settle in the South to compete with enslaved Africans, they remained in the North, moving to cities like New York and Boston or going west to states like Ohio, Michigan, Missouri and Wisconsin. These immigrants changed the face of American politics. Germans, in particular, would play a significant role in the mass antislavery politics of the 1850s. "German emigres joined existing radical movements, the labor movement, land reform, and abolition while others became free soilers," the historian Manisha Sinha writes in "The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition." German refugees from the failed revolutions of 1848 "formed alliances with abolitionists and brought a substantial section of the German immigrant population into the Republican Party." And the census, of course, helped ensure that these demographic and cultural and ideological changes would make their way into Congress. The decade before the Civil War saw an influx of antislavery congressmen into the House of Representatives, first as Free Soilers, then as Republicans. Indeed, it is the rise of a popular antislavery politics that sets up the legislative confrontations and political realignments of the 1850s that culminated in the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. The census is completely unassuming. Almost no one outside of politicians, bureaucrats and the professionally interested thinks about it, or about reapportionment. But these provisions are quietly powerful parts of our constitutional order. Their creation, Van Cleve notes, meant acceptance of the idea that the political majority "should be continuously represented in government, no matter where that majority was found within the nation's expanding boundaries." It meant that no existing political majority could ever fully insulate itself from the winds of change. Southern slaveholders were, among the delegates to Philadelphia, the least committed to popular government. South Carolina, to use one example, would be a planter oligarchy until after the Civil War. But in their drive to protect their political and economic interests, they introduced a mechanism for population representation that eventually helped fuel the forces of abolition. None of this was inevitable, and it was certainly unintended. If there is a greater lesson here, it has everything to do with chance and circumstance and the contingency of human affairs. It's a reminder that in the political realm there are no final victories or permanent defeats. At a time when just such dreams and fears are pushing our politics to dangerous places, this is very much something worth remembering.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
JUST in case the 2012 presidential election does not bring back 2 a gallon gasoline, as one contender has promised, this might be a good time to start considering fuel efficient two wheel transportation. Or, in the case of the Piaggio MP3 400, fuel efficient three wheel transportation. Though weather realities and cargo capacity will always limit their utility, motorcycles and scooters move millions of people, in cities from Kampala to Keokuk, every day. Still, a persistent drawback keeps them from being even more widely accepted: they can fall over at a stop, and sometimes even while at speed. There can be many causes for a tipover forgetting to put your feet on the ground at a red light will do it but the loss of traction is among the most common. A single front tire on a conventional scooter or cycle provides all the steering control and nearly all the braking force. In a panic stop, sliding the front wheel can cause a sudden crash, especially on slippery pavement or when the rider tries to brake and turn at the same time. Piaggio, the Italian conglomerate that owns the Vespa, Aprilia and Moto Guzzi brands, might have a solution. In the MP3 scooter, this longstanding challenge has been addressed with a patented design that uses two front wheels. It leans through corners like a conventional scooter or motorcycle, but adds the cornering stability and braking power of two separate front tires and disc brakes. To make the MP3's dual front wheels feel and act as one, Piaggio's engineers invented an elaborate parallelogram suspension and steering system that lets the front wheels tilt together with the machine, yet move independently over bumps. An electrohydraulic lock pins the linkage in the straight up position when the MP3 is stopped. The lock can be manually engaged at walking speed, eliminating the need for the rider's feet to be on the ground at a stoplight. When the light goes green and speed builds, the system unlocks automatically, returning the MP3 to its normal lean to turn mode. The MP3 design is available in models of 250, 400 and 500 cc engine sizes, with a 125 cc plug in hybrid version for Europe but not the United States. Once under way, there is no clue that the MP3 has two wheels in front. The machine is just as narrow over all as a conventional scooter, with the same lighthearted maneuverability that makes scooters and small motorcycles so good at slaloming through traffic. Having two front wheels is a revelation. It is hard to grasp how much concentration goes into steering and braking a two wheel machine until you ride an MP3 that handles essentially the same, but without the fear of crashing should a front tire lose traction. On a tight, curvy road, the MP3 can maintain a surprisingly fast pace, especially if that road happens to run downhill. Braking hard into corners is suddenly child's play. The MP3's twin front disc brakes deliver fierce deceleration, and the sticky Pirelli front tires and leading link front suspension keep everything hooked up and tracking. If one tire slides a bit, the other takes up the slack, creating a feeling of confidence not present on bikes with one front wheel. The urban oriented MP3 is not really designed for all day touring, so that was exactly what I set out to do. I fled north from Brooklyn on a steamy day, crossed the George Washington Bridge and headed for the Shawangunk and Catskill mountains on back roads, making my way toward the southern Adirondacks. The MP3's continuously variable transmission eliminates shifting, so you just twist the grip and go. The initial acceleration on my MP3 400 test scooter was sluggish, surprising considering its modern and otherwise capable 34 horsepower, liquid cooled single cylinder engine. Chalk that up to a hefty dry weight of 538 pounds. On the highway, though, the MP3 400 easily stays with the traffic flow, even at the 75 m.p.h. cruising speeds that prevail on the Interstate (Piaggio says the top speed is 88 m.p.h.) The front bodywork does a reasonable job of protecting the rider's legs from wind, bugs and rain, though the short windscreen left my head and shoulders exposed when a bruise colored afternoon thunderstorm cracked open. I took shelter under a gas station roof, filling the 3.2 gallon tank as lightning split the sky. The MP3 delivered an average of 58 miles per gallon. Like an open air version of a minivan, the MP3 400 may not be what many people want, but it might be exactly what they need. In its current, maxi scooter form, the Piaggio MP3 is a legitimate technological breakthrough. It's also hilarious fun to ride, with its feet up stance at traffic lights, shift free acceleration, surprising cornering ability, ample cargo space and even its space alien styling. The unique belt and suspenders front end design offers tangible safety benefits and perhaps just as important, may help riders feel more confident about emergency braking and avoidance maneuvers. According to motorcycle safety studies, many two wheel riders fail to brake hard enough or brake at all when a car lurches in front of them. Perhaps because of its unconventional looks, and the inherent challenge of creating a market for a radical new product, MP3s apparently move better through corners than they do through American showrooms. The 2011 MP3 400 has a retail price of 9,099, including the delivery charge. Piaggio dealers currently offer discounts on 2011 models as well as new 2008 MP3 scooters. In the image conscious motorcycle and scooter marketplace, the MP3 may turn out to be an idea that has arrived too far ahead of its time. Which is a shame. I had a great time riding tomorrow's technology yesterday.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
What books are on your nightstand? Randall Jarrell's "Pictures From an Institution," because I can open it anywhere, and it will make me laugh. We recovering professors owe him an enormous debt for his merciless treatment of academia. Richard Powers's "The Overstory," because I read it too quickly a few months ago and want to see again, more closely and with greater attention, how he works his magic. Two poets: John Donne and Elizabeth Bishop. Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how). I'm of a mind that serious reading is meant to be done while lying on the sofa. Late morning is a good time, as is late afternoon. I need a pencil. No paper: That smells of plagiarism. I read The New York Review of Books and The London Review of Books in bed, morning and evening, but sometimes I can't make sense of the cultural references because I've lived out of the country most of my life, and many new words are familiar but not understood. I'm also confused by famous people, most of whose names I recognize from my reading but of whom I have no real sense. Actors, rock stars, politicians, C.E.O.'s, sports heroes: Who are they? What's your favorite book of all time? "Great Expectations," which I first read in high school and have read and taught many times since then. The opening is a wham: A man appears from the fog and holds the hero aloft by his foot, thus turning his life upside down, as well. It's got everything: Miss Havisham waiting for death beside her spider eaten wedding cake; the spiritually shattered Estella, the love of Pip's life; and Magwitch, whose fate can still bring me to tears. Dickens will teach any writer how to plot and can turn a sentence into an incantation. Which books got you hooked on crime fiction? Ross Macdonald impressed me for the quality and beauty of his writing. I still, reading through them, come upon passages, especially his descriptions of characters, that I wish I had the courage to steal. He's also a master at the well honed plot that takes Lew Archer, and thus the reader, back a generation to find the source of the crime. He's compassionate, apparently well read, and decent. 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. Who's your favorite fictional detective? And the best villain? Lew Archer is my favorite detective, and I suppose Tom Ripley is my favorite villain. Good grief, I've no idea. Seems to me, the writer has got to persuade the reader that the quest (solving the mystery) is worth the effort and the cost. The crime should be of some importance; I prefer something of wider interest than discovering who stuck the Malaysian kris into Lord Binkley's back in the library. There should, I believe, be someone for whom the reader feels sympathy or affection; it's probably better to kill a person who is good and likable than to dispatch a villain. After all, if the reader doesn't care about what's happening to the people in the book, there's little reason to read it. What kinds of stories are you drawn to? And what do you steer clear of? I love hypocrisy above all other minor vices. There is so much of it around these days: We swim in a sea of it. Much crime fiction uncovers the hidden nastiness of characters in their offhand remarks. Ruth Rendell is wonderful at this; there's one scene where the owner of a country home, upon learning of the accidental death of a young girl, says something like, "But she was only a Pakistani." Rendell loves to have her well bred middle class characters dismiss the humanity of others, especially when their rancor is based on racial or religious prejudice. I could not write about bad things done to kids or about kidnapping: They are too horrid. What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves? "The Scarlet Pimpernel"; the novels of Patrick O'Brian, all of which I've read at least twice; Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," which I read for the style and opulence of his language; Harry Sidebottom's "Warrior of Rome" series. I cut up rough when a bookseller, asked to recommend good historical fiction, pulled down a paperback with a gorgeous, hunky centurion, his thick muscled body covered with blood and sand. What if I were to be killed in a train crash, and they found THAT next to me? The very thought. But he insisted, and 10 pages had me hooked. I spent last July devouring all of them. Who is your favorite overlooked or underappreciated writer? Flannery O'Connor is neither overlooked nor underappreciated, but she has of late grown out of fashion, and she's out of print in many languages. Her short stories are majestic presentations of human foolishness, weakness, vanity, self importance, viciousness, yet all of them are suffused with an awareness of and reverence for human worth. I've never figured out how she does this. What kind of reader were you as a child? I loved books about animals (and still do: Sy Montgomery's "The Soul of an Octopus" is a dream) and about ancient history. When I was about 7, I complained to my mother that I had nothing to do. She did not hesitate but drove me immediately to the local library and took me to the children's room and told me I could take home five books. The first was a book about Egypt, with pictures. I remember realizing that the whole world was there, in that small room. What's the best book you ever received as a gift? In the '70s, during one of the long periods when I claimed refugee status in graduate school, a friend gave me Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States." Oh my, oh my, oh my: It wasn't the land of hope and glory, was it? We weren't the good guys, were we? Well, I'd spent my youth in Cloud Cuckoo Land, hadn't I, but Professor Zinn was there to whack me upside the head. Bless him for that. Strangely enough, when I went to teach in China a few years later, his was the only book that disappeared from the box of books I'd sent myself. If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn't? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing? Oh, the danger of this question, the temptation. Shall we grant an amnesty to the living? Yes, better. Put Susan Sontag's "The Volcano Lover" in front of me, and I'd slide it back to you, unopened, unread. I tried, failed twice.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
"I do miss it. It's a wonderful thing to be a dancer," the former American Ballet Theater principal Ethan Stiefel said recently, in an uncharacteristic moment of quasi wistfulness. Mr. Stiefel was speaking by phone from Wellington, New Zealand, where, since September 2011, he has been the artistic director of the Royal New Zealand Ballet. The disconcertingly vast distance that separates him from his former home base and much of his family (including his fiancee, the Ballet Theater principal Gillian Murphy) is a constant reminder of the break between his previous existence as a globe trotting ballet star and his current life as artistic director of a moderate size, well respected national troupe. In late January, the company traveled to the United States for a four city tour (Los Angeles; Santa Barbara, Calif; Minneapolis; New York), its first in 21 years. It will be at the Joyce Theater in Manhattan starting on Wednesday. It's clear that Mr. Stiefel's standing has significantly raised the company's profile. Mr. Stiefel was about as famous as it is possible for a ballet dancer to be, having reached principal status at both New York City Ballet (in 1995) and Ballet Theater (in 1997). He appeared frequently with other major companies and did his bit to popularize the art. To a generation of girls, he was Cooper Nielsen, the narcissistic hot shot in the 2000 ballet movie "Center Stage." But dancers' lives are short: In July 2012, at 39, he bade his official farewell to the stage with a performance of "Le Corsaire" at the Metropolitan Opera House that was described by Brian Seibert in The New York Times as "daring, explosive," and laced with risk. Mr. Stiefel was never one to hold back. His dedication to the New Zealand Ballet appears just as full throttle. Since late 2011, he has spent almost all his time in his adopted home. He's had his hands full refining the dancers' technique (he teaches class at least once a week and spends copious time in rehearsals), scanning the horizon for new recruits (he has added about two a year and cut a few dancers) and expanding the repertory. "You can actually see people trying to take on some of the qualities of his dancing, like his fast sharp footwork," Lucy Green, one of the troupe's most promising young dancers, said in a phone interview. "There has been a focus on the classical technique," Mr. Stiefel said. "We can present a 'Giselle' on the level one would expect, and at the same time, we have some dynamic movers for contemporary and modern works." He recently hired the Danish ballet master Martin Vedel from the Royal Ballet of Flanders. The Danish connection runs deep; the New Zealand troupe was founded by a Dane, Poul Gnatt, in 1953. In 1962, the New Zealand born choreographer Russell Kerr took the reins; subsequent directors have come from Australia and Britain. Over the years, the dancers have performed a diverse mix of works, including classical story ballets as well as those by Bournonville, Ashton, Balanchine and various Australian and New Zealand choreographers. Why Mr. Stiefel, an American? In an email, the managing director, Amanda Skoog, wrote: "He showed real vision and had incredible energy. And he has brought new contacts and fresh ideas." Under Mr. Stiefel, the company is aiming to internationalize and update the repertory while holding onto the classics acquiring works from Larry Keigwin, Benjamin Millepied and, soon, the young Briton Liam Scarlett. Mr. Stiefel is keeping an eye out for local choreographers as well. This year, the New Zealander Daniel Belton will create a new work, "Satellites," using kinetic sculpture and projections. He has also brought the outside world to New Zealand. Stella Abrera of Ballet Theater and Amber Scott of the Australian Ballet have made guest appearances. Amanda McKerrow, a much loved American "Giselle" who spent over two decades at Ballet Theater often paired with Mr. Stiefel has visited three times to coach his ballerinas in the classical roles and set two works on the troupe. She fell in love with the company. "It's one of my favorite places to work," she said recently. Meanwhile, Mr. Stiefel has been indulging some of his own creative impulses. Two years ago he produced an ambitious "Giselle" with the Danish dancer turned choreographer Johan Kobborg, with pared down, naturalistic acting and sunny designs. (The company danced it in Los Angeles; a film version, by Toa Fraser, was shown at the recent Dance on Camera at Lincoln Center.) In 2013, Mr. Stiefel choreographed a comic Ballet Russe style one act, "Bier Halle," set in a Bavarian bar. It was well received by local critics "more Champagne than beer," one wrote. (The central pas de deux was to be performed in Minneapolis on Saturday night.) Another not insignificant boon has been the presence of Ms. Murphy, one of the top American ballerinas. She has joined the company as "principal guest artist," while retaining her position at Ballet Theater. "To have her next to you in the studio is insane really," Ms. Green said. (Other names to look out for during the tour include Abigail Boyle, Kohei Iwamoto, Antonia Hewitt and Qi Huan, one of the most senior dancers and Ms. Murphy's frequent partner.) The company's commitment to local audiences runs deep. In addition to frequent international tours, each year the troupe zigzags the islands for weeks at a time. Every two years, it splits into two groups and visits 50 locales. In the smaller towns, the dancers often find themselves performing in school auditoriums, gyms and town halls. Because there are no ranks (an anomaly), a dancer might perform a leading role one day, then melt into the ensemble the next. Life on the road builds a plucky spirit. "I think there's a lot of personality and gutsiness to the collective energy," Ms. Murphy said recently in a cafe near Union Square. At the Joyce, the company will perform a triple bill that shows off its range. Mr. Millepied's "28 Variations on a Theme by Paganini" is a crisp, neo Classical piece created for the School of American Ballet. (Ms. Murphy will dance in some casts.) According to Mr. Stiefel, "It has the aesthetics, dynamic and energy you would see in a Balanchine or Robbins work." "Banderillero," by the Venezuelan choreographer Javier de Frutos, is earthier, a vaguely ritualistic ensemble work set to percussion. And "Of Days," by Andrew Simmons, who was born in the Christchurch, New Zealand, is fluidly atmospheric and lyrical, in the manner of Christopher Wheeldon.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Full reviews of recent dance performances: nytimes.com/dance. A searchable guide to these and other performances is at nytimes.com/events. American Ballet Theater(through Nov. 1) Ballet Theater's fall season began with "After You," a premiere from Mark Morris (returning Friday, Saturday matinee, Tuesday and Thursday), Twyla Tharp's "The Brahms Haydn Variations" (receiving an encore Saturday evening) and Frederick Ashton's haunting masterpiece "Monotones I and II" (Sunday and Tuesday). Later in the week, a pair of war dances reflect different sides of conflict: Kurt Jooss's 1932 "The Green Table" satires the decision makers; Paul Taylor's "Company B," set to songs by the Andrews Sisters, dramatizes the impact on soldiers and civilians. Additional works by Fokine, Balanchine, Ratmansky and the company dancer Marcelo Gomes round out the mixed bill programs. Fridays and Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m., David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, 212 496 0600, abt.org. (Brian Schaefer) Ballet Memphis (Tuesday through Nov. 1) Ballet Memphis makes a concerted effort to ensure that the dance it presents is reflective of its hometown. Initiatives like the River Project and the Memphis Project have stocked the company's repertory with work inspired by the city (the "river" being the Mississippi, which flows right by). Six original works, many hailing from those initiatives, come to New York in the company's first visit since 2007. Choreographers include Matthew Neenan, Gabrielle Lamb, Julia Adam and several company members. Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday through Oct. 31 at 8 p.m., with matinees at 2 p.m. on Oct. 31 and Nov. 1, Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 242 0800, joyce.org. (Schaefer) BalletNext (through Nov. 7) Michele Wiles, a former dancer with American Ballet Theater and the founder of this adventurous company, continues to challenge ballet in new ways. Last year, she collaborated with Jay Donn, a flex dancer, to find harmony in their disparate styles. They're back with the premiere of "Don't Blink," which builds on that dialogue. Also in Program A, running through Saturday, is Ms. Wiles's "Ushuaia" and Brian Reeder's "Strange Flowers." For Program B, Tuesday through Nov. 7, Ms. Wiles turns to jazz, recruiting the Grammy winning trumpeter Tom Harrell and his ensemble for "Apogee in 3." Tuesdays through Fridays at 7:30 p.m., Saturdays at 2 and 7:30 p.m., New York Live Arts, 219 West 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 924 0077, newyorklivearts.org. (Schaefer) Monica Bill Barnes(Wednesdays through Dec. 16) Karaoke night meets office party in "Happy Hour," the latest concoction from Ms. Barnes and Anna Bass, best known these days as the dancers alongside the radio personality Ira Glass in the touring revue "Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host." Their new weekly gig, in a Lower Manhattan dance studio, features the cheeky duo playing two guys playing their everyday selves, as Ms. Barnes continues her love affair with awkwardness, failure and physical comedy. The audience gets drinks, prizes and the chance to sing. At 6:30 p.m., Studio G, Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, 280 Broadway, near Chambers Street, 646 837 6809, monicabillbarnes.com. (Siobhan Burke) Company SBB(through Saturday) The choreographer Stefanie Batten Bland joins forces with the jazz ensemble Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber to honor her father, Ed Bland, a contemporary jazz composer and filmmaker. Their collaboration, "Patient(ce) a Physical Requiem," features eight dancers from her Company SBB and a visual installation by Ms. Bland and her lighting designer, Alaric Hahn. Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Harlem Stage Gatehouse, 150 Convent Avenue, at 135th Street, Hamilton Heights, 212 281 9240, harlemstage.org. (Burke) Company XIV(through Nov. 15) This flirtatious company, which combines ballet and contemporary dance with elements of baroque and burlesque, specializes in sexy, spicy, opulent interpretations of fairy tale classics. This fall, the director and choreographer Austin McCormick introduces his take on "Cinderella," which comes with a dash of opera and vaudeville. Because of titillating costumes and scenarios, and free flowing libations, performances are for adults only. Tuesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 5 p.m., Minetta Lane Theater, 18 Minetta Lane, Greenwich Village, 800 745 3000, companyxiv.com. (Schaefer) Coyote Dancers(Friday through Sunday) Dudley Williams died in June at the age of 76 after a career that included the Martha Graham Dance Company and decades as a beloved dancer with the Alvin Ailey Dance Company, performing as recently as 2013. In his honor, Coyote Dancers, a troupe started by Maher Benham to preserve the spirit of American modern dance, will premiere "A Song for Dudley." Also on the program is "Eight for Martha," a recent tribute to Graham, and additional repertory with guest performers. At 8 p.m., Martha Graham Studio Theater, 55 Bethune Street, at Washington Street, West Village, managearts.com/coyote. (Schaefer) Jon Kinzel (through Oct. 31) Mr. Kinzel, a maker of gently convoluted dances, unveils a curiously titled new work for an intergenerational cast, "Cowhand Con Man." A meditation on "physical endurance and psychic restlessness," according to a news release, the piece draws on his almost 30 year history as a choreographer and improviser. Wednesdays through Saturdays at 7:30 p.m., Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, 280 Broadway, near Chambers Street, Lower Manhattan, 646 837 6809, gibneydance.org. (Burke) Jose Limon Dance Company(through Sunday) Jose Limon is a pillar of American modern dance, though perhaps the most unassuming of them. The work of the Mexican born choreographer is celebrated for its proud nobility, palpable spirituality and high drama. Marking its 70th anniversary, the company that bears his name presents 15 works spanning three decades, from 1942 until Limon's death in 1972. The works will be performed by companies and academies from around the United States, as well as South America, Europe and Asia. Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 242 0800, joyce.org. (Schaefer) Mina Nishimura(Thursday through Oct. 31) While reading "Sickened Primadonna," a biographical novel by Tatsumi Hijikata, the founder of the Japanese performance art butoh, the Tokyo born artist Mina Nishimura drew hundreds of pictures, including a character she called Princess Cabbage. That character in turn begat a work of the same name in which Ms. Nishimura undergoes what Siobhan Burke described in The New York Times as a "chilling" metamorphosis. "Princess Cabbage" is paired with "Celery of Everything," a quartet that, according to the venue's website, attempts to connect "internal landscapes and external forms." At 8 p.m., Danspace Project, St. Mark's Church, 131 East 10th Street, East Village, 866 811 4111, danspaceproject.org. (Schaefer) Okwui Okpokwasili (through Saturday) Ms. Okpokwasili revives "Bronx Gothic," an arresting solo about coming of age in the Bronx, haunted by the voices of her past (and present). Notes are passed and dreams recounted between the artist's teenage self and her confidante; other messages are held in shuddering dances. At 7:30 p.m., New York Live Arts, 219 West 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 924 0077, newyorklivearts.org. (Burke) Lionel Popkin(Thursday through Nov. 1) In Lionel Popkin's "Ruth Doesn't Live Here Anymore," the titular Ruth refers to Ruth St. Denis, a doyenne of early modern dance (Martha Graham was a pupil). St. Denis was known for her "oriental" dances, which Mr. Popkin wrestles with. Valid artistic influence or cultural appropriation? The Los Angeles based Mr. Popkin, who is half Jewish and half Indian, turns the question on his own work with help from three dancers, two musicians and a leaf blower. Thursday through Oct. 31 at 7:30 p.m., Nov. 1 at 3 p.m., Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand Street, at Pitt Street, Lower East Side, 866 811 4111, abronsartscenter.org. (Schaefer) Silas Riener(Friday, Saturday, Monday and Tuesday) The solo is a special strand of dance DNA, and Silas Riener, a celebrated former member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, knows how to command a big space. His new solo performance, though, takes pace in more intimate environs, offering a welcome opportunity to observe his calm intensity and physical precision up close. The show, called "Blue Name," is a compilation of short works made over the course of a year and a half. At 8 p.m., Chocolate Factory Theater, 5 49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, 718 482 7069, chocolatefactorytheater.org. (Schaefer) Sankai Juku(Wednesday through Oct. 31) Nearly a decade since its last visit to New York, the venerable butoh collective Sankai Juku returns with "Umusuna: Memories Before History." The 2012 work meditates on the geography of birth, both as a specific place and as a broader concept that includes earth and its elements (represented by rich colors). Bald and powdered white, crawling across the stage or floating in skirts, the performers evoke newborns and ghosts. Sand, cascading throughout, renders the stage a giant hourglass. At 7:30 p.m., Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, at Ashland Place, Fort Greene, 718 636 4100, bam.org. (Schaefer) Chris Schlichting (through Saturday) Visiting from Minnesota, Mr. Schlichting offers the New York premiere of "Stripe Tease." Created with the guitarist Jeremy Ylvisaker, his band Alpha Consumer and the visual artist Jennifer Davis, the work experiments with scale, teasing out tensions between the spectacular and the delicate. At 8 p.m., Danspace Project, St. Mark's Church, 131 East 10th Street, East Village, 866 811 4111, danspaceproject.org. (Burke) 60x60 Dance (Friday) In 2000, Robert Voisey started Vox Novus to promote contemporary music. In 2003, he created 60x60, an event in which 60 composers get 60 seconds to make a musical statement, and dance was added in 2007. With a clock ticking in the background to mark time, 60 dance artists have one minute each to make magic with a snippet of original contemporary music. At 12:30 and 8 p.m., Brookfield Place Winter Garden, 230 Vesey Street, at West Street, Lower Manhattan, 212 417 2414, artsbrookfield.com/60x60; free. (Schaefer) Spectrum Dance Theater(Wednesday through next Friday) In 1991 Donald Byrd created "The Minstrel Show" to critique the convention of blackface and to give historical context to the racially motivated murder of 16 year old Yusef Hawkins. In the more than two decades since, Mr. Byrd has updated the work to reflect on contemporary race relations and recent killings, like those of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and Michael Brown. In "The Minstrel Show Revisited," Mr. Byrd's Seattle dance troupe presents a provocative fusion of entertainment and social indictment. Wednesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m., next Friday at 8 p.m., Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, 566 La Guardia Place, at Washington Square South, Greenwich Village, 866 811 4111, nyuskirball.org. (Schaefer) Colleen Thomas(Friday through Sunday) The confluence of recent national conversations on police shootings and sexual assault on university campuses made Ms. Thomas think a lot about social inequality and what her obligation as an artist is in addressing it. Those considerations inform "Her(e) Repetitive Blueprint," in which her dancers become a canvas for exploring race and gender. Though she has been linking dance with a sense of humanity for years, this performance marks her first evening length work. Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 3 p.m., 92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue, 212 415 5500, 92y.org. (Schaefer) 'Where Sculpture and Dance Meet: Minimalism from 1961 to 1979'(through Oct. 31) This exhibition at Loretta Howard Gallery examines the interchange of ideas among choreographers and sculptors in the 1960s and '70s. Sculptures by Ronald Bladen, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Andy Warhol and Sol LeWitt share the space with videos of performances by Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Merce Cunningham, Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer. Tuesdays through Fridays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., 525 531 West 26th Street, Chelsea, 212 695 0164, lorettahoward.com. (Burke) Zullo/RawMovement(Wednesday through Nov. 1) In the collection of essays "Space Psyche," contributors consider the psychological impact of architecture. That book, and that idea, inspired "The Architecture of Proximity," a new work by John J. Zullo for his company. Drawing from elements of post modern dance and vogueing, Mr. Zullo explores the relationship of bodies to space a shared feature of dance and architecture in particular the space between dancer and audience. Wednesday through Oct. 31 at 8 p.m., Nov. 1 at 3 p.m., 14th Street Y LABA Theater, 344 East 14th Street, East Village, 646 395 4322, 14streety.org. (Schaefer)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
De'Shawn Charles Winslow's "In West Mills" and Chanelle Benz's "The Gone Dead" both ponder secrets: what drives some people to guard them with their lives and others to risk everything to uncover them. "In West Mills" explores the textured inner world of a fictionalized black community in North Carolina between 1941 and 1987. The story circles around Azalea Centre, or Knot, a teacher who finds comfort in corn liquor, men, and friends like Otis Lee and Valley, who care for her even as her decisions beget pain. From the first page, Winslow establishes an uncanny authority and profound tone that belie the book's debut status. The precision and charm of his language lure us in and soothe us, as in his description of a "hot biscuit that looked like it could be melted down and used to make a necklace and a pair of matching ear bobs." Or when he compares the full moon above Knot's head as she walks a lover home to "an usher leading the way down an aisle." He paints a community so tightknit and thorough it becomes easy to forget the people in it don't exist, that no one will be playing music later tonight at Miss Goldie's barnhouse juke joint, or traveling upbridge to Manning's General Store for candy. Knot is as complex and endearing a protagonist as Zora Neale Hurston's Janie. And Winslow is capable of retreating into the quiet of all of his characters' minds and hearts and sharing the contents with us, as when Knot decides to create for herself a sense of safety, "the only kind of safe Knot felt all right with. Safe by not having to worry about hurting a child's feelings, the way her mother had hurt hers. Safe by not becoming someone's wife just to figure out, years later, that she didn't want him. Safe to get a bit of joy from the moonshine something that couldn't hurt her or be hurt by her."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
The lighting designer Brandon Stirling Baker, whose work will take center stage with "The Choreography of Light," part of the Guggenheim's Works Process series. Credit...Vincent Tullo for The New York Times The lighting designer Brandon Stirling Baker, whose work will take center stage with "The Choreography of Light," part of the Guggenheim's Works Process series. It's easy to understand why lighting is essential to dance performance. Dancing in the dark is hard to see. But when Brandon Stirling Baker says he wants his lighting design to be essential, he means something different. For Mr. Baker, 31, who recently became the lighting director for Boston Ballet, good lighting design is integral to a dance, inseparable from its moods and meanings. It doesn't follow, however, that the lighting should grab attention. "Brandon's contributions are in support of the choreographer's vision," said Justin Peck, the resident choreographer at New York City Ballet. Their careers have risen together. Mr. Peck's first major work, "The Year of the Rabbit" (2012), was also that of Mr. Baker, and since then, they have collaborated on nearly 20 dances. "What I love about Brandon," Mr. Peck said, "is how thorough he is, how involved." Not all designers sit in on rehearsals, he added, but Mr. Baker is "woven into the development of the piece, and he has a lot of good ideas for the work as a whole, not just how to light it." Jamar Roberts, a choreographer and star dancer at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, agrees. When he and Mr. Baker were working on Mr. Roberts's "Members Don't Get Weary," set to John Coltrane, they discussed many things: Should a dance about the blues have any blue in it? Should a memory of the past look murky or clear? "And then things I had been thinking about would just show up in Brandon's lighting," Mr. Roberts said. "That's why I call him the wizard." Usually, Mr. Baker is the kind of wizard who stays behind the curtain. But on Jan. 18 and 20 he will draw attention to his own work for once with "The Choreography of Light," part of the Works Process series at the Guggenheim Museum. One solo for Patricia Delgado the former Miami City Ballet dancer, who happens to be married to Mr. Peck is about color. "Many choreographers are afraid of it," Mr. Baker said. Another solo moves through extreme angles of light, in an arc, as if from sunrise to sunset. A third, for the City Ballet principal Taylor Stanley, demonstrates the varieties of white light. "Choreographers will often tell me, 'This is a white light dance,' and I'll ask, 'what kind of white?'" Mr. Baker said. In a recent interview, Mr. Baker spoke about his essential but rarely discussed art: pointing out mistakes and misconceptions, revealing just how quickly he has to work and explaining the artistic satisfactions of service. "Just being part of this thing that's bigger than I could ever be is all I ever wanted," he said. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation. How did you get interested in something as specific as lighting for dance? I grew up as a musician playing in rock bands in Van Nuys, Calif., but I've always been deeply inspired by visual art. When I was 13, I went to see a musical and I was, like, "Wow, lighting is this beautiful bridge between the visual spirit and the musical spirit." In the same way that a painter may use a brush to create phrases and mix color, I'm doing that with light. And lighting also has rhythm and pace. My friends back home will say, "Why did you give up music?" But I never gave up music. I just use a different instrument now. But practicing stage lighting isn't quite like practicing the guitar. Right. I don't own any lights. I did study at the California Institute of the Arts. All my roommates there now work for Pixar. But one common misunderstanding is that people think of lighting designers as technicians. There's a whole different union in charge of that. So what is your role, then? To create a frame and a point of view. Like a cinematographer. I create a visual language and a color palette that is specific to each ballet. Each work should be a single statement, and the choreographer and I have to decide what it is. That sounds like getting out of the way. It can be. When Justin Peck choreographed "Rodeo," he was taking on this famous Aaron Copland score that has an enormous amount of color in it. I chose to approach it in a minimalist way, with a wide space and warm sunlight. As an artist, you have to decide what needs to come forward. The lighting for "Rodeo" is simple, but it's essential. It's probably my best work. When is a narrower frame appropriate? In Justin's "Everywhere We Go," the first and last movements have a massive amount of dancers, and I made it extremely bright, like an arena. But there's this pas de deux that's quiet, just solo piano, and I took that as a hint and used only two follow spots. It allowed us to focus in, with an intimacy almost like a campfire. You don't let the space stay dim for long, though, unlike many other lighting designers for dance. People do come up to me and thank me, saying, "It's good to see who's onstage for once." What are some other mistakes you see in lighting design? Sometimes it's very obvious that the lighting was an afterthought. Or is trying to cover something up. That's why it's so important to me to work collaboratively from the beginning. You're in on the planning all along, but how much time do you get in the actual theater before a dance has its premiere? Maybe three hours, six at the most. And usually we open that evening. It's like a cannon. First, I finally get to show the choreographer my ideas, with some people onstage who aren't the dancers, or maybe with coat racks. Then there's a run through that doesn't stop for lights. I make choices on the fly, narrowing things down, adjusting for spacing. You have to remain creative. You're the lighting director for Boston Ballet. What's the difference between a lighting director and a lighting designer? Those terms are often confused. A lighting director maintains old works in the repertory, making sure that the lighting stays as it was at the premiere. Repertory is this amazing collection of ideas not just of choreography but also of lighting design. Audiences are always seeing that but maybe they don't know it. And this Guggenheim event is to help make them aware? I hope to give the audience a closer look at what I do. The work is never about me. But I do want them to know that we lighting designers are there.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
It was "the fourth straight quarter that the social media giant has delivered sub 30 percent growth," said Jesse Cohen, an analyst at Investing.com, a financial markets platform, though he added that the business was doing well. Even as growth slowed, Facebook managed to wring more marketing dollars from the millions of advertisers who rely on its service, indicating that it has shrugged off some of the regulatory concerns and competitive pressure that have plagued it in recent years. "We had a good quarter and a strong end to the year as our community and business continue to grow," said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder and chief executive. "We remain focused on building services that help people stay connected to those they care about." Profits surged even as Facebook increased its spending on security, research and development, and other areas of the business. Its expenses rose to more than 12 billion in the fourth quarter, up 34 percent from a year earlier. The company also took a charge for settling a class action lawsuit concerning its biometric data collection, agreeing to pay 550 million to the plaintiffs. Mr. Zuckerberg is set to focus this year on securing the platform in the run up to the November election, aiming to avoid being caught off guard with disinformation and foreign interference as the company was in 2016. Election security teams have ballooned at Facebook, which is spending billions of dollars on the effort.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Bryan Thomas for The New York Times It has won the prestigious (and, with a 100,000 prize, profitable) Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. In other news this week, the soprano Julia Bullock I'm getting tired of calling her radiant, but it keeps coming to mind! organized a concert of settings of Langston Hughes's poetry about New York. The Yannick Nezet Seguin era opened at the Metropolitan Opera with "splendid" conducting and "essentially a traditional staging" of "La Traviata." And Osmo Vanska, who led the Minnesota Orchestra to new artistic heights and stood by its musicians during a painful lockout, announced he would step down in a few years. ZACHARY WOOLFE It's great to have Jack O'Brien's epic production of Puccini's "Il Trittico" back at the Metropolitan Opera after nine years, with the fervent yet nuanced conducting of Bertrand de Billy and exceptional casts. Placido Domingo shows deft comedic skills in the title role of "Gianni Schicchi" and the soprano Kristine Opolais brings out the fragility and torment of the title character of "Suor Angelica." In the grimly powerful "Il Tabarro," I was especially impressed by the soprano Amber Wagner as Giorgetta, a restless wife having an affair. Ms. Wagner won attention early on for her rich, powerful voice, suited to vocally weighty roles. Here she is in 2015, sounding glorious in Strauss's "Ariadne auf Naxos." She had a breakthrough in 2017 at the Met as Senta in Wagner's "Der Fliegende Hollander." But now, as Giorgetta, she is revealing new depths as an actress and more subtleties as a singer. ANTHONY TOMMASINI Looking for a holiday gift? This year the record label Marquis released the Canadian pianist Stewart Goodyear's survey of Beethoven's piano sonatas (recorded 2010 12) as a 10 disc set. It's a remarkable achievement for this brilliant pianist and composer who, at 40, has not been heard enough in New York. He plays these seminal works with pristine technique, infectious energy and fascinating attention to details, and uncanny clarity to the contrapuntal tangles of the gargantuan fugue in the "Hammerklavier." Here he is performing the "Les Adieux" Sonata magnificently two years ago in Frankfurt. And one of my favorite recordings of Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker" is Mr. Goodyear's 2015 version for solo piano his own impressively faithful arrangement of the entire score. ANTHONY TOMMASINI Just listen to him dispatching the Overture: Nostalgic operagoers have packed Lincoln Center these last few weeks for a peek at Placido Domingo's star turn in Puccini's "Gianni Schicchi," in his 50th season with the Metropolitan Opera. But while I share everyone's fond memories of the man's Cavaradossi and Otello, the bigger surprise for me on the night I attended was the ingenue who burst onto the stage behind Mr. Domingo. Making her Met debut in the role of Schicchi's young daughter, Lauretta she of the plaintive and elevator friendly "O mio babbino caro" aria the Russian soprano Kristina Mkhitaryan stopped time with her honeyed, robust voice. Suddenly, one could hear the sound of a thousand fluttering programs as the audience raced to find out who she was. Ms. Mkhitaryan is a relative newcomer to the world's big stages but is conquering them fast. Born in Novorossiysk and a 2004 graduate of the Galina Vishnevskaya Theatre Studio in Moscow, she honed her talent at the Bolshoi before placing in several major competitions, like Operalia last year. These last few months have been big for her: She debuted as Micaela in the Royal Opera's "Carmen" and, over the summer, made waves in "La Traviata" at Glyndebourne. Part of her appeal lies in her glamorous sound: She floats the high A flat as though it were made of mist. But the other exciting thing about Ms. Mkhitaryan is undoubtedly her seductive but bold presence onstage. As a review in The Telegraph wondered excitedly in May: "Is Kristina Mkhitaryan the new Netrebko?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Yolanda Daniels was born, raised and has lived most of her life in the Bronx, in a succession of large, old apartment buildings. For the most part, the rent was affordable. But the apartments which she found though newspaper listings and local real estate agencies were often in bad condition, and the neighborhoods not always the safest. It wasn't until she was in her 40s, and living in a domestic violence shelter on Staten Island with three teenage children, that she heard about the city's affordable housing lotteries. "I had been trying to look for apartments, but with my work schedule, it was hard to get to real estate offices before 5 p.m.," said Ms. Daniels, who was then working as a lab technician for Quest Diagnostics. "And I didn't want to take just anything. I wanted a nice a neighborhood, something that would be good for me and my kids." "It wasn't too crowded," Ms. Daniels said of that living situation. But it wasn't a long term solution either. Then, in August 2012, she got a call: There was a three bedroom apartment available at Via Verde, a low and moderate income housing complex in the South Bronx. The development, which has 150 rental units and 70 co ops, had opened just a few months earlier and was receiving a lot of attention for its thoughtful, sustainable design: The complex has courtyards, a large green roof planted with vegetable gardens and fruit trees, a sunny gym on a high floor, and apartments with cross ventilation and ceiling fans to keep them cool in the summer. "We watched it when they were in the process of building it up, and my granddaughter would say, 'I wish we could live there,'" Ms. Daniels said. The three of them moved in soon after, impressed with the building, the apartment and, perhaps most of all, the appliances more than just a refrigerator and stove. "It came fully loaded," Ms. Daniels said. "When they showed us it had a washer and dryer, I was like, 'This is heaven.'" The rent, which is now 1,194 a month, is close to what she paid in the past, but the apartment and the building are far nicer than anywhere else she has lived. The last place she rented before moving into the shelter was on the Grand Concourse, in the Mount Hope neighborhood. "It was all right," she said, but "not like this. To have teenage kids in that neighborhood wasn't great. The traffic that flowed in and out of our building wasn't great. There was a lot of drug activity. It was unsafe for them, but teenage kids want to be outside." And "if they hung out outside the building," she added, "the police would come and try to break them up, talk about loitering." While some of her new building's benefits were immediately obvious the appliances, the new windows, the generous size of the bedrooms others she noticed over time. Now she no longer had to worry about someone sneaking into the building behind her: There is an attendant at the front door who calls to announce visitors, and there are cameras in the halls. In almost every other building she had lived in, the halls and stairs were hangout spots for tenants and their guests, and were often strewn with garbage. Here, they were clean. "I think people, when they come here, they see how nice it is, and they tell their guests not to disrespect the building," she said. A number of features have struck her as unexpectedly thoughtful. On Halloween, people giving out candy sign up with the management, which distributes a list so children can go door to door in the complex, rather than going around to nearby stores, as they would otherwise. There are outdoor movie nights in the summer and events for children like face painting and slime making. And there are benches in the courtyard where she can sit and get some fresh air if she doesn't have time to go to a park. Ms. Daniels's younger daughter later moved in with her, bringing a son who is now 4. They share one of the bedrooms; her older daughter and granddaughter share another; and Ms. Daniels has the third. Last month, her son moved in as well, and has been sleeping on the sofa. But the apartment is large enough, and their schedules different enough, that it hasn't been an issue. "Everyone is comfortable, happy, working," she said. They trade off cooking and grocery shopping, as well as laundry days, and keep a shared savings account for paying the electric and cable bills. Ms. Daniels admitted that she is looking forward to having a little more space when her children move on. Even so, it has been nice to be under the same roof again for a little while. "We all get along." she said. "Well, except for the grandkids. They kind of get into it every now and then."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
What's on TV Sunday: The BET Awards and 'I'll Be Gone in the Dark' None 2020 BET AWARDS 8 p.m. on BET and CBS. While some awards have postponed their ceremonies, this annual show, which celebrates the work of black artists, athletes and entertainers, is still a go. Now in its 20th year, the BET Awards will feature performances by Alicia Keys, Future, DaBaby and more. Rather than sing from their couches, the artists prerecorded their own segments from all sorts of settings, using open venues, public spaces and, of course, their creativity. Drake leads with six nominations, followed by Megan Thee Stallion and Roddy Rich, who each have five. Other artists with multiple nods include Beyonce, Nicki Minaj and Chris Brown. The comedian Amanda Seales hosts. Michelle McNamara, in "I'll Be Gone in the Dark." I'LL BE GONE IN THE DARK 10 p.m. on HBO; stream on HBO platforms. For years, the crime writer Michelle McNamara investigated a serial killer who committed more than 50 sexual assaults and at least 10 murders in the 1970s and '80s in California. McNamara had been documenting her work in a book, from which this show borrows the title, but she was so engrossed in the search that she had nightmares and sleepless nights. She tried to quell her anxiety with prescription drugs, then, in 2016, she died from an accidental overdose. Her husband, the comedian Patton Oswalt, helped ensure her book would reach the public, and it was published posthumously in 2018. (The killer was identified and arrested shortly after.) This six part documentary series retraces the case in McNamara's words, featuring excerpts from her book and original records, as well as insight from detectives and survivors. UNSETTLED: SEEKING REFUGE IN AMERICA (2020) Stream on WorldChannel.org. Given that Pride Month is nearly over, and that President Trump recently issued an order that blocks thousands of foreigners from working in the United States, this documentary is particularly timely. The director Tom Shepard spotlights four L.G.B.T.Q. refugees and asylum seekers who fled persecution in their native countries and found support among organizations and communities in San Francisco. We meet a gay Syrian refugee who faced death threats from Islamic terrorists; a lesbian couple from Angola navigating American immigration courts; and a gender nonconforming gay man from the Democratic Republic of Congo whose search for housing is mired with hurdles. The film sends a sobering message: The subjects may have fled dangerous pasts, but their new lives are not without struggles. CHASING AMY (1997) Stream on Netflix. For a different take on L.G.B.T.Q. issues onscreen, watch this romantic comedy by Kevin Smith before it leaves Netflix on June 30. Ben Affleck stars as a comic book artist in New York who falls for another comic book artist, played by Joey Lauren Adams. The catch? She's a lesbian. The movie has become something of a cult classic, though it isn't exactly a film gay rights activists praise. Much of the language doesn't hold up, and some critics have argued that the movie is akin to a crash course on lesbians tailored toward straight men.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Cheese plays a tempting role in the Aesop's fable "The City Mouse and the Country Mouse," so it only stands to reason that a restaurant that takes its name from the tale does so well by dairy: lush feta style cheese from France, burrata from California that smoothly buddies up with crisp brussels sprouts, bold Cheddar in a bite called Country Mouse. The location may have played a part as well: City Mouse is in the dapper new Ace Hotel Chicago in a space that for decades was an Italian cheese factory called Anona. Ace has earned a reputation for showcasing standout local chefs at its properties; for its hotel in the West Loop neighborhood, the choice was the team from the restaurant Giant, including one of its chefs, Jason Vincent. Giant is actually pretty small it has 44 seats in a Logan Square storefront whereas City Mouse has more than 2 50 when its patio is open. But, Mr. Vincent said, the operating principle behind the menus is similar: "Food tastes better when it has something bitter, something sour, something salty, something sweet and something funky and it's got some texture." To make that happen at City Mouse, the Giant crew enlisted the chef Pat Sheerin, formerly of the city's much praised Trenchermen and, before that, the Signature Room on the 95th floor of the John Hancock Center.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
SAN FRANCISCO Eight of the tech industry's most influential companies, in anticipation of a repeat of the Russian meddling that occurred during the 2016 presidential campaign, met with United States intelligence officials last month to discuss preparations for this year's midterm elections. The meeting, which took place May 23 at Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., was also attended by representatives from Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Oath, Snap and Twitter, according to three attendees of the meeting who spoke on condition of anonymity because of its sensitive nature. The company officials met with Christopher Krebs, an under secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, as well as a representative of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's newly formed "foreign influence" task force. Neither the Department of Homeland Security nor the F.B.I. responded to a request for comment. Companies like Facebook and Twitter have been changing the way they operate to counter the kind of misinformation that plagued the two social services in 2016. But the May meeting was the first significant discussion between a group of tech companies and intelligence officials ahead of the 2018 midterm elections. But the people who attended described a tense atmosphere in which the tech companies repeatedly pressed federal officials for information, only to be told repeatedly that no specific intelligence would be shared. The tech companies shared details about disinformation campaigns they were witnessing on their platforms, but neither the F.B.I. nor the Department of Homeland Security was willing or able to share specific information about threats the tech companies should anticipate, the people said. One attendee of the meeting said the encounter led the tech companies to believe they would be on their own to counter election interference. American intelligence officials have offered blunt warnings that Russia and other foreign governments are already meddling in the closely watched midterm election campaign. Facebook, in particular, has been facing pressure to stem disinformation ahead of the elections. The company has been hit hard by reports that it allowed Russian backed agents to buy advertisements and manage Facebook pages with one notable goal: influence voters in the United States and stoke conflict on hot button issues like gun control. In public and behind closed doors, intelligence officials have offered scant details about what Russia is doing, prompting frustration from Silicon Valley to Capitol Hill. Officials in Washington have described problems that range from intelligence agencies losing track of Russian targets to the same kind of poor communication between various intelligence gathering agencies that hampered the response of Russia's meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Russia's Internet Research Agency has proved an especially vexing target in recent months, stepping up efforts to mask its activity, said an American official with access to intelligence reporting. Unlike in 2016, when Russian hackers left unmistakable footprints posting tweets that identified locations, for instance, or working in Cyrillic language documents they are now making much better use of virtual private networks and other tools that can hide their true identities and locations. At times, the official said, intelligence agencies have lost track of specific individuals they were tracking, and could not see what, if anything, the Russians were posting or trying to hack. "We're getting so many mixed signals, depending on what the agency is," Senator Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters last week. He said his committee was planning to bring together intelligence officials next month to figure out what was going on and how the government should handle it. "It compels us to bring everybody together in the same room and try to figure out whether or not there's some stovepipe issues," Mr. Burr said. Part of the problem, officials say, is that the White House has expressed little interest in the problem of Russian interference, and that the apathy has had a trickle down effect. Without pressure from the top, it can be difficult to bring together all the different strands of intelligence collected across America's spy agencies, and evaluate how to act on it. "What we would normally see in a normal administration is the principals meeting to discuss what are they doing individually, what are they doing jointly, or what they are communicating among themselves, what's the whole of government plan to protect the midterms," Representative Adam Schiff, Democrat of California and the top minority member on the House Intelligence Committee, said in an interview with Politico. "I just don't see any evidence that's happening."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
An 18th century depiction of the Battle of Actium, in 31 B.C., Johann Georg Platzer, an Austrian painter. The battle is generally seen as marking the end of the Roman Republic, as Mark Antony and Cleopatra's forces were defeated by Octavian, who consolidated power to become the first Roman emperor. Chaos and conflict roiled the Mediterranean in the first century B.C. Against a backdrop of famine, disease and the assassinations of Julius Caesar and other political leaders, the Roman Republic collapsed, and the Roman Empire rose in its place. Tumultuous social unrest no doubt contributed to that transition politics can unhinge a society. But so can something arguably more powerful. Scientists on Monday announced evidence that a volcanic eruption in the remote Aleutian Islands, 6,000 miles away from the Italian peninsula, contributed to the demise of the Roman Republic. That eruption and others before it and since played a role in changing the course of history. In recent years, geoscientists, historians and archaeologists have joined forces to investigate the societal impacts of large volcanic eruptions. They rely on an amalgam of records including ice cores, historical chronicles and climate modeling to pinpoint how volcanism affected civilizations ranging from the Roman Republic to Ptolemaic Egypt to pre Columbian Mesoamerica. There's nuance to this kind of work, said Joseph Manning, a historian at Yale University who has studied the falls of Egyptian dynasties. "It's not 'a volcano erupts and a society goes to hell.'" But the challenge is worth it, he said. "We hope in the end that we get better history out of it, but also a better understanding of what's happening to the Earth right now." Roughly 1,500 volcanoes are potentially active right now, meaning that they've erupted at some point in the last 10,000 years. While scientists today have sophisticated tools to monitor volcanoes, the vast majority of historical eruptions have gone unrecorded, at least by modern scientific instruments. Sussing out those eruptions requires patience and ingenuity, and a willingness to manage a lot of ice. At the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev., it's not unusual to find researchers in puffy parkas and wool hats handling chunks of ice in a minus 4 Fahrenheit "cold room." Ice cores, typically drilled vertically from glaciers, hide bits of volcanic material that rained down from long ago eruptions within their layers. Joseph McConnell, a climate scientist at the institute, and his collaborators are in the business of looking for that debris. Using an instrument they designed and built, they melt the ice and pipe the water into an array of sensors. With hundreds of feet of tubing, the setup looks downright chaotic, but it's exquisitely sensitive. The sensors pinpoint many substances, including about 30 different elements, and they do so by catching just tiny whiffs. "They have sensitivities of parts per quadrillion," Dr. McConnell said. Volcanic ash, more generally known as tephra, sometimes hides in ice. It's a special find because it can be geochemically tied to a specific volcano. "The tephra comes from the magma itself," said Michael Sigl, a chemist at the University of Bern in Switzerland who collaborates with Dr. McConnell. "It carries the composition of the rocks." Sulfur is also indicative of a past eruption. Sulfur dioxide, a gas commonly belched by erupting volcanoes, reacts with water in the atmosphere to create sulfate aerosols. These tiny particles can linger in the stratosphere for years, riding wind currents, but they, like tephra, eventually fall back to Earth. The ice also carries a time stamp. Dr. McConnell and his colleagues look for variations in elements like sodium, which is found in sea spray that's seasonally blown inland. By simply counting annual variations in these elements, it's possible to trace the passage of time, Dr. McConnell said. "It's like a tree ring record." Dr. McConnell and his collaborators recently analyzed six ice cores drilled in the Arctic. In layers of ice corresponding to the early months of 43 B.C., they spotted large upticks in sulfur and, crucially, bits of material that were probably tephra. The timing caught the scientists' attention. Researchers have previously hypothesized that an environmental trigger may have helped set in motion the crop failures, famines and social unrest that plagued the Mediterranean region at that time. But until now, "There hasn't been the kind of data that these scholars brought forth to really get those theories into the mainstream," said Jessica Clark, a historian of the Roman Republic at Florida State University who was not involved in the research. Gill Plunkett, a paleoecologist at Queen's University Belfast, set out sleuthing. After extracting 35 pieces of tephra from the ice, she pored over the rock chemistry of likely volcanic suspects. Nicaragua's Apoyeque. Italy's Mount Etna. Russia's Shiveluch. But it was Okmok, a volcano in Alaska's Aleutian Islands, that turned out to be the best match, at least on paper. Sealing the deal would require testing two tephra samples one from the ice and one from Okmok on the same instrument. Dr. Plunkett arranged for a tephra handoff at a conference in Dublin. A colleague from the Alaska Volcano Observatory, Kristi Wallace, packed four bags of Okmok tephra in her carry on luggage. The match was spot on, Dr. Plunkett said. "There are some events that are tricky. With Okmok, there's nothing else that looks like it." This eruption was one of the largest of the last few millenniums, Dr. McConnell and his collaborators concluded, and the sulfate aerosols it created remained in the stratosphere for several years. These tiny particles are particularly good at reflecting sunlight, which means they can temporarily alter Earth's climate. "They've created, for a short term, global cooling events," said Jessica Ball, a volcanologist at the California Volcano Observatory, who was not involved in the research. There's good evidence that the Northern Hemisphere was colder than normal around 43 B.C. Trees across Europe grew more slowly that year, and a pine forest in North America experienced an unusually early autumn freeze. Using climate models to simulate the impact of an Okmok eruption, Dr. McConnell and his collaborators estimated that parts of the Mediterranean, roughly 6,000 miles away, would have cooled by as much as 13.3 degrees Fahrenheit. Rain patterns changed as well some regions would have been drenched by 400 percent more precipitation than normal, the modeling revealed. That climate shock came at precisely the wrong time, Dr. Clark said. "This was a period of Mediterranean wide political, social and economic upheaval." These cold, wet conditions would have almost certainly decimated crops, Dr. McConnell and his colleagues said. Historical records compiled by Roman writers and philosophers note food shortages and famines. In 43 B.C., Mark Antony, the Roman military leader, and his army had to subsist on wild fruit, roots, bark and "animals never tasted before," the philosopher Plutarch wrote. For a society already reeling from the assassination of Julius Caesar the year before, such trying conditions might have exacerbated social unrest, the researchers concluded. They might even have kick started transfers of political power that led to the rise of the Roman Empire. "It's an incredible coincidence that it happened exactly in the waning years of the Roman Republic when things were falling apart," said Dr. McConnell, who published the team's results in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Karen Holmberg, an archaeologist at New York University who studies volcanic events and was not involved in the research, said she found the study "compelling and persuasive." Unfortunately, the archaeological record doesn't often record volcanic eruptions, she said, except in cases of very nearby eruptions when there's an obvious layer of tephra. The links in the study are probable, but not definite. "They're not being heavy handed and saying this is absolutely it," Dr. Holmberg said. But volcanic eruptions, even those on the other side of the world, could have disrupted that flooding, Dr. Manning and his colleagues recently showed. Using records from Cairo's Nilometer an octagonal marble column that was used for recording Nile flood height from 622 to 1902 A.D., the team found that flooding tended to be weaker, or entirely absent, during years when there was a large volcanic eruption somewhere in the world. Dr. Manning and his collaborators next mined roughly 100 papyrus records to qualitatively estimate flooding during the Ptolemaic dynasty, which lasted from 305 to 30 B.C. Again, they found that the Nile typically flooded weakly, if at all, at the time of large eruptions. The culprit, the team reasoned in a paper published a few years ago, was cooling caused by sulfate aerosols. When Earth cools after a large eruption, its atmospheric circulation patterns change. That can shift the invisible meeting point of Northern and Southern Hemisphere trade winds the Intertropical Convergence Zone that affects where monsoon rains tend to fall. When less precipitation falls over Ethiopia, home to a major tributary of the Nile, there's less water available for flooding that year. Ptolemaic era records revealed that this reduced flooding had socioeconomic and political consequences. Revolts increased in the years following "Nile failure," Dr. Manning and his colleagues found. Priestly decrees intended to establish the political legitimacy of Greek rulers also became more commonplace. Reinforcing elite authority during times of turmoil makes sense, Dr. Manning said. "Bad flooding is interpreted as having a bad king in office." Volcanic eruptions have left fingerprints on other societies, too. They've been tied to economic decline in sixth century pre Columbian Mesoamerica and famine induced migration in eastern China in the 10th century. Eruptions have potentially helped trigger widespread outbreaks of disease, such as the Justinian plague around 540 A.D. Just over a decade ago, an eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull led to the costly closure of a wide swath of European air space. Questions persist, however, for geoscientists, historians and archaeologists alike. Having more ice core records might reveal the identities of orphan eruptions, their sulfur signatures in ice cores still unpinned to a parent volcano, said Robert Dull, a paleoecologist at California Lutheran University who studies volcanic eruptions. "There are still large unsourced mystery eruptions up until the early 19th century." A better understanding of how societies were structured is also important. Increased knowledge of trade patterns, for instance, would shed light on how a crop failure in one geographic area would have trickle down effects throughout a wider region, Dr. Dull said. "You need to understand how human beings were connected." Right now, roughly a dozen volcanoes are erupting. In all likelihood, they're nothing to worry about it's doubtful you've even heard of them. But every once in a while, there's bound to be a really big eruption. How its effects ripple around the world awaits to be seen. "Okmok volcano is not exactly a commonly known threat," Dr. Holmberg said. "But then neither was Eyjafjallajokull."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
The White House announced on Sunday that Malia Obama, the older daughter of President Obama, will attend Harvard University, but before beginning college in the fall of 2017, she plans to take a gap year, when graduating students take part in an experience outside the classroom before continuing with their education or starting a career. "A gap year is about taking a time out after being in school for so long to do something different, usually in another country," said David Stitt, a founder of Gap 360, a gap year trip planning company based in Britain. The custom is common in Britain, where more than 200,000 students choose to take a gap year, according to Ethan Knight, at founder of the American Gap Association, a Portland, Ore., nonprofit that gives free advice on planning a gap year. In the United States, on the other hand, only 30,000 students less than 1 percent of those graduating from high school take the route. For those tempted to follow in Ms. Obama's footsteps, Mr. Knight and Mr. Stitt share their top tips on how to have a successful gap year. Research Your Options Well: There are numerous ways to spend a gap year volunteering, working abroad or learning a new skill are just a few and it's best to survey all the choices before settling on one. "The world is literally your oyster, and you can't even imagine the cool options that are available until you start reading about them," Mr. Knight said. "Who knew, for example, that you can volunteer with animals at a wildlife rehabilitation center in Bolivia while learning Spanish?" A popular pick at Gap 360, which plans 5,000 gap years annually, is to get a job in either Australia or New Zealand. "If you're between 18 and 30 years old, both countries offer a working holiday visa where you can work there temporarily without being a permanent resident," Mr. Stitt said. The jobs you can take on are diverse: It's possible to work in a bar or restaurant, at a department store or even on a farm. Another common gap year route, he said, is to pick up and apply a new skill like learning how to sail a 100 foot long sailboat in Australia before working with sailors, or training to become a ski instructor in Switzerland and then giving ski lessons. Get inspired and explore possibilities by visiting sites such as GoOverseas.com, GoAbroad.com, TeenLife.com and the American Gap Association all list options for what you can do with your time off; the first three also have peer reviews so you can get Yelp like feedback of the experiences. Plan Your Gap Year Through a Gap Year Travel Specialist: Mr. Stitt and Mr. Knight both said that planning a gap year through a reliable gap year travel company is a good idea. "Going through a gap year planner will give you support throughout your journey," Mr. Knight said. Though the services vary, some examples include access to a 24 hour emergency phone line, help with insurance requirements, visa processing assistance, medical advice, such as which vaccinations you need, and a safety briefing on the country you're in. GoOverseas.com. GoAbroad.com, TeenLife.com and the American Gap Association have links to various trip planners such as Gap 360. Expect Things to Go Wrong, and Smile When They Do: Your gap year, particularly if you're in a developing country, won't be seamless, Mr. Stitt said. "You're going to go through a bit of a shock, but embrace it," he said. Trains and planes won't run on schedule, the electricity may go, and the phone lines may not work well. Frustrating, yes, but these glitches are exactly the point of a gap year, according to Mr. Knight. "You build resilience and also get an insight into another culture and how things work in that country," he said. Don't Overpack: Ideally, you want to limit your luggage to two pieces: one small carry on and a medium size backpack you can check. A backpack is important, said Mr. Stitt, because you'll be toting your bags yourself and you don't want anything cumbersome. "If you forget something at home, you can always buy it wherever you are," he said. A Gap Year Doesn't Have to Be a Year: Data from the American Gap Association shows that 70 percent of students in the United States who go the gap year route actually take only a semester off. "Don't sweat it if you can't take a year off. Even a few months is enough to have a life changing experience," Mr. Knight said. Conversely, he added, you don't have to limit yourself to a year, either.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
What she seems to find most delusional in her fellow travelers is their sense of their own agency. Faye's own ideas gesture toward something darker and stranger. In "Outline," she wonders if it is possible "that one forges one's own destiny by what one doesn't notice or feel compassion for; that what you don't know and don't make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of." Her companion jokes that only someone raised Catholic could come up with such a terrible idea, but in fact it has many interesting echoes. There is something here of Jung's description of "shadow" life in which any aspect that isn't being attended to will increase in power and magnetism. Here too is a tinge of Freud's disheartening observation that people seem compelled to repeat and re enact their unhappiest moments in different guises. Perhaps most of all this idea of being "forced into knowledge" is reminiscent of the reversals and recognitions found in Greek tragedies. Faye's fatalist bent is an unpopular one in the modern Western world. Few people want to believe that they arrive at rather than create their own fate. More common is a desire to subscribe to something called the just world fallacy, which is the tendency to rationalize fortune or misfortune by believing that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get. This is a reassuring theory and one that seems newly ascendant in this age of scapegoating and fear mongering. Its main selling point is that it keeps the existential wind from blowing in. You can continue to believe that you are safe, that you deserve to be, right up to the moment you find yourself abruptly unhoused and thrust out into the rain with your fellow human beings. The profound thrill of Cusk's work is that she has no such illusions. She is deeply interested in the question of suffering, of whether or not there is value to it, and in this novel, she signals her inquiry right out of the gate. In modern usage, the word "kudos" means "prizes," but originally, Cusk says, it connoted an honor or recognition that could be falsely claimed. This adds a disquieting note to the old Greek idea that "we suffer unto truth." Even if this is the case, should we expect such insight to be consoling? Should we expect to be rewarded for surviving our ordeal? For telling other people about it? Faye faces this question directly in "Kudos." At a literary festival, she finds herself being interviewed by a woman she met once years before. This woman told her then of her ordered and seemingly idyllic family life in a small town where the hours were marked by the ringing of beautiful bells. The description has stayed with Faye; it has troubled her and she tries to explain why to the interviewer. "She had talked, I said, about her husband and two sons and about the simple, regulated life they lived, a life that involved little change and hence little waste, and the fact that in certain details her life had mirrored my own while in no way resembling it, had often led me to see my own situation in the most unflattering light. I had broken that mirror, I said, without knowing if I had done so as an act of violence or simply by mistake. Suffering has always appeared to me as an opportunity, I said, and I wasn't sure if I would ever discover whether this was true and if so why it was, because so far I had failed to understand what it might be an opportunity for. All I knew was that it carried a kind of honor, if you survived it, and left you in a relationship to the truth that seemed closer, but that in fact might have been identical to the truthfulness of staying in one place." The interviewer then tells how her own orderly story started to collapse until one day, stricken by loss herself, she found herself alone in the square listening to the famous bells. They rang for longer than she had ever heard them ring and their music seemed to become wilder and wilder, more and more nonsensical. It was raining and water streamed down her face, but she couldn't make herself leave until the cacophony ended. It's not entirely clear what happened to her that day. Did the sound of the bells change? Or had she suffered sufficiently that she could now hear another kind of music? Cusk doesn't answer such questions directly. She doesn't need to. In the course of this unforgettable trilogy, she has proved they are the same bells.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Elaine May's genius goes beyond her Tony winning performance in "The Waverly Gallery." The four movies she wrote and directed between 1971 and 1987 are among the strongest Hollywood films of the period. The first two, "A New Leaf" (1971) and "The Heartbreak Kid" (1972), were popular and critical hits; the last two, "Mikey and Nicky" (1976) and "Ishtar" (1987), were subversive buddy films that first mired and then ended her directorial career. While "Ishtar" is now acknowledged as perhaps the slyest political satire of the Reagan era, "Mikey and Nicky," revived at Film Forum in a new restoration, has yet to be fully appreciated. An exhilarating feel bad movie about a pair of desperate wiseguys, it was in production at the same time as Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets," a film with which it has numerous points of contact. Both concern low level hoods and draw on the personal history of their directors. (May grew up in Philadelphia, where "Mikey and Nicky" was shot; she has said that members of her family were connected to the mob.) Both are buddy films that deal with betrayal. And both, in their exuberant acting and freewheeling camera work, show the influence of John Cassavetes. Indeed, "Mikey and Nicky" actually features Cassavetes in a role analogous to Robert De Niro's Johnny Boy in "Mean Streets."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
"I came to my senses and realized that it's not my job to make theater if the conditions are right to make theater, but to keep making theater no matter what the conditions are," said Oskar Eustis, the Public's artistic director, who in April had announced cancellations of the "Richard II" production as well as a planned revival of a musical adaptation of "As You Like It." "It was easy to see we couldn't afford to let Shakespeare in the Park vanish completely from the cultural scene. These are not the ideal ways we would like to be in the Delacorte but in the absence of that, it feels like the right thing to do." The "Much Ado About Nothing" cast is all black, and the "Richard II" cast is predominantly made up of actors of color casting decisions made long before the current national unrest over racial injustice, but that will undoubtedly take on new significance now. The "Richard II" production will be dedicated to the Black Lives Matter movement, and the "Much Ado" production will be paired with some kind of documentary material about the long history of black actors at Shakespeare in the Park. "Particularly at this moment, when the entire country is focused on institutional racism, this is a great moment to be highlighting these plays," Eustis said. "And, as always with Shakespeare, there are incredible resonances that come out and grab you." The Public, like all nonprofit theaters, has been hard hit by the economic side effects of the pandemic. Eustis had in April announced a plan to furlough 70 percent of the theater's full time, permanent staff, but then got a 4 million loan through the federal Paycheck Protection Program that thus far has allowed the theater to avoid taking that step; Eustis said the federal money will run out July 17, and that "if we do not have any other government support, we will need to do furloughs." Although some nonprofit organizations around the country have announced their intentions to resume productions early next year, and others have canceled their entire seasons, Eustis said he is not ready to take either step, and declined to make any prediction about when the Public would return to staging live performances before audiences.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Cream Eric Clapton on guitar, Jack Bruce on bass, Ginger Baker on drums was a power trio of flashy virtuosos with big egos; it lasted only from 1966 to 1968. While its studio work was disciplined and cooperative, marrying blues to psychedelia, its live sets were improvisatory free for alls, with all three musicians goading one another and grappling for attention. This collection gathers three full California concerts from October 1968 along with Cream's last show, Nov. 26 at the Royal Albert Hall; half of the tracks, including an entire San Diego concert, were previously unreleased. The nightly set list barely varies, but the performances are explosive jams tempos shift (listen to the assorted "Crossroads"), vocal lines swerve and stretch, guitar solos take different paths each night. The California shows were carefully recorded, but with historic stupidity, the BBC filmed Cream's last shows yet only captured the music in muddy, low fi mono. Cream's members didn't think they played well at their farewell, and through the murk, that final show is full of wailing excess and rhythm section overkill. But it deserved better preservation. JON PARELES Elton John's "Jewel Box" is at least three projects side by side; its vinyl versions make them available separately. For two CDs of "Deep Cuts," John selects non hit album tracks; he likes sad songs with dark lyrics, collaborations with his idols (Leon Russell, Little Richard) and music that evaded his usual reflexes. Three CDs of "Rarities 1965 71" with five dozen previously unreleased songs detail his songwriting apprenticeship with the lyricist Bernie Taupin, a good argument for Malcolm Gladwell's proposition that expertise requires 10,000 hours of practice. At first they tried to write potential hits that were generic enough for others to cover; John once called them "pretty horrible." The duo learned by obvious imitation, with near miss mimicry of both British and American approaches: the Beatles, Motown, Phil Spector, country. They made and scrapped "Regimental Sgt. Zippo," an album of pop psychedelia. Gradually, they homed in on a distinctive Elton John style: openhearted, big voiced storytelling backed by two fisted piano. Two more discs are housekeeping an archive of B sides and non album tracks and the final pair, "And This Is Me ..." is a playlist of songs mentioned in John's memoir, "Me" which gives him a chance to end with his 2020 Oscar winner, "(I'm Gonna) Love Me Again." PARELES Platforms change, their overlords get finicky, they get sold to conglomerates that might not respect the historical legacies they contain. Which is why it is crucial for artist catalogs that live in only one place online to be spread as far as possible. It's a relief that the two key early Lil Peep albums, "Crybaby" and "Hellboy" (from 2016), have finally made it up from SoundCloud to other streaming services (fully cleared, with only minor tweaks). Lil Peep who died in 2017 was a critical syncretizer of emo and hip hop: He was swaggering, dissolute and deeply broken, a bull's eye songwriter and a rangy singer and rapper. During this era, he finally figured out how all of those pieces fit together, especially on "Hellboy," a pop masterpiece that pop just wasn't ready for yet. JON CARAMANICA Charles Mingus was stubborn, self righteous and open to just about anything. When this bassist and composer gave his first concert in Germany in 1964, at the Radio Bremen studios, he was leading one of the finest bands of his career: a sextet that could carry a ton of weight while turning on a dime, like a dump truck made by Maserati. With Johnny Coles on trumpet, Eric Dolphy on reeds, Clifford Jordan on tenor saxophone, Jaki Byard on piano and Dannie Richmond on drums, the band followed Mingus's plucky lead, leaping between Ellingtonian miniatures, bluesy hollers and extended avant garde improv. The group's now legendary performances on that tour might well have represented a high water mark. But when he returned to Bremen 11 years later, with a quintet, his penchant for misdirection and ludic sophistication had only grown stronger. Both shows are presented side by side in this four CD set, which features remasters of the original radio source tapes. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO By the end of the 1940s, the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker was only a few years into his recorded career as a bandleader but he'd already turned jazz inside out, contouring the next frontier in American modernism as one of bebop's lead architects. The impresario and producer Norman Granz recognized Parker's brilliance and he saw the potential to broaden his appeal, by shining a softer spotlight on his lemon cake tone and his richly coiled melodies. The 10 inch LPs that Parker recorded with Granz between 1949 and 1953, for the Mercury and Clef labels, offer portraits of the artist from many angles, including the steaming "Bird and Diz," the only studio session to feature the Big Three of bebop (Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk); the gauzy orchestral fare of "Bird With Strings"; and "South of the Border," mixing big band jazz with Mexican and Afro Caribbean styles. This boxed set features five newly remastered albums from that period, most of which have been out of print on vinyl since the '60s. Faithful to their original format, the albums come on 10 inch discs, packaged with David Stone Martin's now classic artwork, while the booklet includes new essays from the pianist and jazz historian Ethan Iverson and the Grammy winning writer David Ritz. RUSSONELLO In 1977, David Bowie restarted Iggy Pop's career by producing two albums for him "The Idiot" and "Lust for Life" and joining Pop's band on tour. Bowie admired Pop's pure id approach to songwriting and performing, but smoothed him out just a little supplying some glam rock tinged backup and spurred him onward, suggesting concepts and approaches. And the punk rock that Iggy and the Stooges had presaged nearly a decade earlier was taking hold in the United States. The alliance was fertile for both of them; Bowie would have a 1980s hit remaking their collaboration, "China Girl," a song about acculturalization, imperialism and lust from "The Idiot." This box includes the two studio albums, the howling 1978 live album "T.V. Eye" (with Bowie in the band on keyboard and backup vocals), a disc featuring rawer alternate mixes from the albums and three live Iggy concerts from 1977. Two of the live discs are low fi and redundant, but a fierce 1977 set from the Agora Ballroom in Cleveland documents a telling rock moment. PARELES The Replacements, 'Pleased to Meet Me (Deluxe Edition)' Like their beloved Big Star, the Replacements were never quite in the right place at the right time or maybe, whenever either band was on the brink of mainstream rock stardom, their self destructive tendencies kicked in. Regardless, the Mats's fifth album, "Pleased to Meet Me" from 1987, was at once their record company's last push for success (see the echoing "Jimmy Iovine Remix" of the great single "Can't Hardly Wait," which, apparently, even the Midas like producer couldn't turn into a radio smash) and a spiritual communion with their underappreciated heroes (the group recorded the album at Big Star's former Memphis stomping ground Ardent Studios, with their sometime producer Jim Dickinson). The resulting LP, naturally, was caught in the middle: It was too polished to ascend to the cult status of "Let It Be" from 1984, but too snarling and strange to be a hit. This fantastic and exhaustive deluxe edition (featuring 29 never before released tracks), though, finally puts it in its proper context: Raw and unvarnished demos (including the final recordings made with their original guitarist, Bob Stinson) restore these songs' barbed, punk energy, while a rich spoil of melodic leftovers reassert this period as a golden age of Paul Westerberg's songwriting. ZOLADZ For some mid 90s New York rap obsessives, the ne plus ultra collaboration is "The What," by the Notorious B.I.G. and Method Man. For others, it's "Brooklyn's Finest," from the Notorious B.I.G. and Jay Z. The connoisseur's choice, however, might be traced back to the night in February 1995, that Big L brought Jay Z up to the Columbia University radio station WKCR FM for "The Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Show," then the definitive proving ground for the city's MCs. The result is startlingly good an excellent showing from Jay Z, still shaking loose of the twisty syllables he leaned on in his earliest recordings. But Big L who was killed in 1999 is the radiant star here, delivering left field boasts in ice cold arrangements. Previously available only on hard to find cassette releases and online rips, it appears here in an official release for the first time (though sadly without the between verse banter). It's one of three unearthed freestyles on this EP the others are a Method Man and Ghostface Killah team up, and also the Notorious B.I.G.'s first radio freestyle, a hellacious rumble from 1992. CARAMANICA The beats used for many of the late 1990s breakout hits of New Orleans's Cash Money Records were head spinners, one after the next Juvenile's fleet, squelchy "Ha," B.G.'s prismatic "Bling Bling," Lil Wayne's chaotic "Tha Block Is Hot." This compilation gathers those and many others made mostly by the in house maestro Mannie Fresh for a set that lands somewhere between bounce futurism and avant garde techno. It's an expanded version of the label's "Platinum Instrumentals" compilation from 2000, but a less disciplined one, too the sleepy funk of "Shooter" is wildly out of place here, one of a few more straightforward Lil Wayne tracks that would have been better left off, inconsistent with the pure digital esoterica that made the label impossible to emulate. CARAMANICA	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Picture this before you plop yourself down in front of your computer to compose your college application essay: A winter lit room is crammed with admissions professionals and harried faculty members who sit around a big table covered with files. The admissions people, often young and underpaid, buzz with enthusiasm; the professors frequently pause to take off their glasses and rub their eyes. These exhausted folks, hopped up from eating too many cookies and brownies, have been sitting in committee meetings for days after spending a couple of months reading applications, most of which look pretty similar: baseball life, or debate life, or "I went to a developing country and discovered poor people can be happy." They wade through long lists of candidates, state by state, region by region. The best applications and the weakest don't come to committee. It's the gigantic stack in the middle that warrants discussion. The truth is, most essays are typical. Many are boring. Some are just plain bad. But occasionally one will make an admissions officer tear down the hallway to find a colleague to whom she can say, "You have to read what this Math Olympiad girl said about 'Hamlet.' " Your goal is to write an essay that makes someone fall in love with you. Once you commit the time and emotional energy to get your butt in the chair to write, you face a daunting task figuring out what to write about. If you're stuck, you're in good company. With so much freedom, this is a challenge for most students. Here's a tip: Choose a topic you really want to write about. If the subject doesn't matter to you, it won't matter to the reader. Write about whatever keeps you up at night. That might be cars, or coffee. It might be your favorite book or the Pythagorean theorem. It might be why you don't believe in evolution or how you think kale must have hired a PR firm to get people to eat it. A good topic will be complex. In school, you were probably encouraged to write papers that took a side. That's fine in academic work when you're being asked to argue in support of a position, but in a personal essay, you want to express more nuanced thinking and explore your own clashing emotions. In an essay, conflict is good. For example, "I love my mom. She's my best friend. We share clothes and watch 'The Real Housewives' of three different cities together" does not make for a good essay. "I love my mom even though she makes me clean my room, hates my guinea pig and is crazy about disgusting food like kale" could lead somewhere While the personal essay has to be personal, a reader can learn a lot about you from whatever you choose to focus on and how you describe it. One of my favorites from when I worked in admissions at Duke University started out, "My car and I are a lot alike." The writer then described a car that smelled like wet dog and went from 0 to 60 in, well, it never quite got to 60. Another guy wrote about making kimchi with his mom. They would go into the garage and talk, really talk: "Once my mom said to me in a thick Korean accent, 'Every time you have sex, I want you to make sure and use a condo.' I instantly burst into laughter and said, 'Mom, that could get kind of expensive!' " A girl wrote about her feminist mother's decision to get breast implants. A car, kimchi, Mom's upsizing the writers used these objects as vehicles to get at what they had come to say. They allowed the writer to explore the real subject: This is who I am. Don't brag about your achievements. Instead, look at times you've struggled or, even better, failed. Failure is essayistic gold. Figure out what you've learned. Write about that. Be honest and say the hardest things you can. And remember those exhausted admissions officers sitting around a table in the winter. Jolt them out of their sugar coma and give them something to be excited about. REPEATING THE PROMPT Admissions officers know what's on their applications. Don't begin, "A time that I failed was when I tried to beat up my little brother and I realized he was bigger than me." You can start right in: "As I pulled my arm back to throw a punch, it struck me: My brother had gotten big. Bigger than me." LEAVE WEBSTER'S OUT OF IT Unless you're using a word like "prink" (primp) or "demotic" (popular) or "couloir" (deep gorge), you can assume your reader knows the definition of the words you've written. You're better off not starting your essay with "According to Webster's Dictionary . . . ." THE EPIGRAPH Many essays start with a quote from another writer. When you have a limited amount of space, you don't want to give precious real estate to someone else's words. YOU ARE THERE! When writing about past events, the present tense doesn't allow for reflection. All you can do is tell the story. This happens, then this happens, then this happens. Some beginning writers think the present tense makes for more exciting reading. You'll see this is a fallacy if you pay attention to how many suspenseful novels are written in past tense. SOUND EFFECTS Ouch! Thwack! Whiz! Whooooosh! Pow! Are you thinking of comic books? Certainly, good writing can benefit from a little onomatopoeia. Clunk is a good one. Or fizz. But once you start adding exclamation points, you're wading into troubled waters. Do not start your essay with a bang! ACTIVE BODY PARTS One way to make your reader giggle is to give body parts their own agency. When you write a line like "His hands threw up," the reader might get a visual image of hands barfing. "My eyes fell to the floor." Ick. CLICHES THINK YOUR THOUGHTS FOR YOU Here's one: There is nothing new under the sun. We steal phrases and ideas all the time. George Orwell's advice: "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print." TO BE OR NOT TO BE Get rid of "to be" verbs. Replace "was" in "The essay was written by a student; it was amazing and delightful" and you'll get: "The student's essay amazed and delighted me." We've moved from a static description to a sprightlier one and cut the word count almost in half. WORD PACKAGES Some phrases free gift, personal beliefs, final outcome, very unique come in a package we don't bother to unpack. They're redundant. RULES TO IGNORE In English class, you may have to follow a list of rules your teacher says are necessary for good grammar: Don't use contractions. No sentence fragments. It's imperative to always avoid split infinitives. Ending on a preposition is the sort of English up with which teachers will not put. And don't begin a sentence with a conjunction like "and" or "but" or "because." Pick up a good book. You'll see that the best authors ignore these fussy, fusty rules.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
Seven years ago, Tacko Fall and Christ Koumadje were discovered by basketball scouts in a similar fashion. On the streets of Dakar, Senegal, the two 7 footers stood out. They were spotted by employees of the Flying Star Academy, a Senegalese training ground for several basketball players who have ended up on college teams in the United States. The employees chased after the teenagers, imploring them to try their enormous hands at the sport. Follow our live coverage of the N.C.A.A. tournament here. At the time, Koumadje, now a 7 foot 4 senior at Florida State, preferred soccer. Fall, now a 7 foot 6 senior at Central Florida, was more interested in devouring anime and manga series like "Naruto" and "Tokyo Ghoul." Both were, at first, indifferent to basketball. But their potential upside was difficult to ignore. To onlookers, they evoked thoughts of the next Hakeem Olajuwon or Yao Ming. Today, their size offers less promise. They toiled to become giant forces in the paint, only to watch as basketball evolved from a game that coveted height into a more freewheeling, 3 point centric game that deems their skill sets nearly as obsolete as a fax machine: nice to have, but no longer entirely necessary. "What's interesting about both, their advanced analytics, they play off the charts well over 1 point per possession, and that's really effective in college basketball," said Steve Kyler, the editor and publisher of Basketball Insiders, which produces weekly N.B.A. mock drafts. "When you dig deeper, in situational type things they grade really well, but the truth of the matter is the N.B.A. game isn't played that way anymore. It's all about stretch 5s, quickness." "I think they may get a look on the fringe based off their size," Kyler added. "But a guy 7 foot 6 being the first overall pick or top five is pretty rare now." Beyond that, whether they can find a place and purpose in the N.B.A. where the only active players who stand 7 foot 3 or taller are Dallas's Kristaps Porzingis, who has a far more diverse skill set, and Philadelphia's Boban Marjanovic remains to be seen. "Extending my range is something I definitely want to work on," said Fall, who helped the Knights earn their first N.C.A.A. tournament berth since 2005 by averaging nearly 11 points and 7 rebounds a game. "I'm not going to go out there and shoot 3s like a lot of bigs do now, but pick my spots. "But I feel like no matter how the game has changed, you still need somebody down low to do some damage." Basketball academies in Senegal like Flying Star now regularly send players abroad. After playing for a few months at the academy, Fall got a chance to join a high school team in the United States. His mother reluctantly let her son go, hoping he would receive a better education. Extremely raw when he arrived at Liberty Christian Preparatory School in Tavares, Fla., Fall almost quit basketball. But he refined his game while playing on a travel team alongside Ben Simmons, now with the Philadelphia 76ers. Fall also trained in Houston with Olajuwon, a Hall of Famer who emphasized the importance of footwork for a center his size. Occasionally, Fall watched Simmons at nearby Montverde Academy, where Koumadje landed after coming to the United States. Fall and Koumadje only briefly overlapped in Dakar Koumadje is originally from Chad but in high school they talked on the phone or via Facebook. Their discussions rarely veered into basketball. Instead, they commiserated about the difficulties of adjusting to life when you are over 7 feet tall and 4,500 miles from home. Koumadje, like Fall, grasps the unlikelihood that he will develop into a free shooting N.B.A. big man. Before his senior year in high school, he played pickup games at the University of Southern California with Andre Drummond of the Detroit Pistons. It was then, Koumadje said, that he realized he was more effective cemented in the post. "The game is evolving and that's what people want," said Koumadje, a two year starter who led the Seminoles in blocked shots this season. "But I play to my strength. That's what I do." Fall's turning point came after his sophomore season at Central Florida, when he contemplated entering the 2017 N.B.A. draft. Five teams told him he needed vast improvement adapting to the speed of the pros, particularly in guarding pick and rolls. Central Florida Coach Johnny Dawkins a former Duke guard who played with the towering centers Shawn Bradley and Manute Bol in the N.B.A. was hired before Fall's sophomore year, and created a three year plan for him. Increasing mobility and stamina came first, followed by catching the ball down low and learning to work out of double and triple teams. This season, Dawkins has moved Fall farther out on the perimeter defensively. Wherever he stands, Fall often forces opposing players to elevate more when they shoot, to get the ball over his arms. Teams have tried less inventive strategies to bypass Fall's 8 foot 4 wingspan. Fall, who is bulkier than Bol or Bradley, said that he had heard opposing coaches tell players to go after his knees. Though he is all but assured of breaking the Division I record for career field goal percentage he currently shoots over 74 percent; the record is 67.8 Fall converts only 36 percent of his free throws. Fall whose hands are 10 1/2 inches long said that when he shoots free throws it feels as if he is holding a volleyball. His shooting form, which involves using only his right hand while flinging his left arm in the air and then slouching, has drawn derisive comments on social media, where he is sometimes treated as a sideshow. After Fall had 13 points and 10 rebounds in a win over Houston that ended the Cougars' 33 game home winning streak, Fall got more attention for a GIF that showed him holding the ball over an opponent's head like an older brother playing keep away. Fall and Koumadje are accustomed to stares in airports and snide remarks from opposing fans. While both harbor N.B.A. dreams neither appears in most mock drafts they also envision a life beyond basketball, when their height won't dictate how others perceive them. Koumadje said he would eventually like to work for the United Nations, helping refugees in Chad. Fall wants to become an engineer. "Basketball's opened a lot of doors for me, but there's more to me than the ball, the hoop," Fall said. "I definitely don't want to be defined by that. I definitely don't want to be seen as an attraction, either."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
"Honor Wakanda's lineage with a breathtaking view of one of the nation's awe inspiring monuments to the ancestors! Each panther is crafted with the finest of natural elements found right within Wakandan soil. Lights are embedded as glowing eyes, meant to symbolize the ancestors watching over their descendants. The monuments inspire much folklore, some even saying they move at night or let out low roars as an omen." When "Black Panther" was released in theaters in February, it became a cultural phenomenon. Millions of moviegoers around the world became acquainted with Wakanda, the mythical African nation whose advanced society is hidden from the outside world behind a holographic camouflage. In the film, technology plays a big role, from the prevalence of vibranium to the use of kimoyo beads to remote piloting of planes. We asked readers to share their views of what Wakanda would look like if they could actually visit the country. Here are some of the best responses we received, with visions of the fictional country by the artists Richie Pope and Ojima Abalaka. Kacper Jarecki Using hologram technology, visitors can play and cuddle cheetahs. This is really popular with families. There is a cheetah gym facility where people get to experience running at 40 miles per hour! There is also a giant rainbow waterfall, which is the biggest water park in the world. Of course, this water park is not completely real, but the thrill is just as real, if not more so. The library is very beautiful and every person who lived in Wakanda has their own book, which is a computer generated biography. It's really fun reading about all the different people. And architecturally, the building is second to none. Then, of course, there is the amazing night sky, with close up views of the stars and planets. Tourists can actually zoom in with their fingers to enlarge and expand the night sky. The New York Times is free to everyone in Wakanda, and boisterous political discussions can be heard in cafes in the mornings ; ) Britni Rillera Start with three days in the city center on walking tours through the markets and riding the trains to chic destinations. Then I'd want a waterfall infinity pool tour! Possibly with snorkeling in cenotes? I imagine staying in an eco friendly boutique hotel in a cave with an incredible spa. And then a luxe resort high in the mountains with unbelievable star gazing, gorgeous hiking trials and an incredible chef. Jyhjong Hwang Here's a 10 day tour that showcases the variety of renewable energy sources adapted to different environments, along with traditional attractions. 1 . Hydropower plus natural infinity pool: Enjoy the view over the lip of the waterfall, like the Angel's Pool at Victoria Falls. Downstream at the waterfall where the ritual combat took place, see the run of the river hydropower plant, which is like the Gouina Hydroelectric Plant in Mali. 2. Geothermal plus hot springs: Because there was a meteor strike not too long ago, active geological activities gave rise to geothermal plants, like the Olkaria Geothermal Stations in Kenya. Then jump into hot springs infused with vibranium. 3. Wind turbines plus mountain gorillas: In the windy mountains where M'Baku's tribe lives, wind turbines line the snowy valley, as they do in some places in Alaska. Then visit the mountain gorillas below the snow line, just like you would at Virunga National Park. 4. Solar panels plus rhino safari: In the open plains around the borders of the country, there is a mix of photovoltaic panels and solar towers like they have in South Africa. Then a safari drive among hundreds of wild rhinos. All transportation will be via underground maglev trains, like Japan's Chuo Shinkansen under construction now, or electric/hybrid cars, which constituted over half the new cars sold in Norway in 2017. Wakanda does not produce crude oil (too much geological activity), nor does it import any from surrounding countries. If Wakanda had to rely on imported oil for all their development, they would have blown their cover long ago. This is not science fiction. This is and can be real life. Try harder, human. Make this one a better place so you don't have to escape to another. One should definitely attend performances from Wakandan griots that take place in neighborhood outdoor amphitheaters. These are generally small, casual spaces and allow the audience to mix in and participate. Depending on your interest, you can find griots specializing in history, engineering, design and aeronautics, as well as more traditional fictional tales. Performance schedules are publicized through fliers, posters (Wakandans take great pride in their graphic design traditions), in local media and on WakandaNet. Because of safety and national security concerns, there are no tours of the vibranium mines, but the Cave of the Winds was a small gold mine that was historically used for research and development, and testing for vibranium mining equipment and techniques; it later became a center for Wakandan airship technology, as gold mining became increasingly irrelevant to the Wakandan economy. The Cave of the Winds now boasts unique aeronautical adventure courses in which jetpacks, hovercraft, maglev transportation and other small air technologies are tested. The Amawele course (the twins course) is gentle enough for tourists to try with a "umoyashare," a two/four person aircycle that is commonly used by Wakandan teenagers. Those who prefer a more comfortable seat than the umoyashare offers can go to a virtual reality parlor where several courses can be experienced. Those interested in masks and other carving arts should note that as mining technology advanced in Wakanda, much of the older equipment was repurposed or redesigned for sculpture and modeling, so don't be surprised to see many Wakandan buildings with elaborate moldings and dioramas carved into the doors and entranceways of even the smallest buildings in the most remote parts of Wakanda. Casey Chon I've always imagined Wakanda having a Center for Languages where people can come and go and become fluent in any and all languages. It would be full of human interaction aided by technology, not the other way around. And then of course, you'd leave the center and go straight to the country whose language you've just learned. Debbie Smyth It should have lakes as blue as Tahoe, white sand beaches and beautiful wildflowers. The weather should be mild like Oakland, and it should have the best barbecue on earth.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
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. 'BECKETT IN THE CITY: THE WOMEN SPEAK' (performances start on Sept. 25). When audiences arrive at a secret location in Hell's Kitchen, they'll find women babbling, whispering, walking and rocking. Company SJ, which staged the premiere of this piece in Dublin, presents four short plays by Samuel Beckett, directed by Sarah Jane Scaife. Brid Ni Neachtain, Michele Forbes and Joan Davis star. 866 811 4111, irishartscenter.org 'CHARM' (in previews; opens on Sept. 18). For several years Gloria Allen, a transgender woman then in her 60s, ran an informal charm school for queer and transgender youths in Chicago. The playwright Philip Dawkins pays tribute to that exemplar of social grace with this comedy drama, directed by Will Davis and starring Sandra Caldwell as the etiquette expert, Mama. 866 811 4111, mcctheater.org 'THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THOMAS JEFFERSON, CHARLES DICKENS AND COUNT LEO TOLSTOY: DISCORD' at the Cherry Lane Theater (previews start on Sept. 19; opening on Oct. 1). All men are created equal, but some men think that their opinions may be a little more equal than others. In Scott Carter's new play, directed by Kimberly Senior, three great men meet in the afterlife and try to discover who is the greatest. Duane Boutte, Michael Laurence and Thom Sesma star. 866 811 4111, primarystages.org 'MEASURE FOR MEASURE' at the Public Theater (previews start on Sept. 17; opens on Oct. 10). Just when you think you've got the troupe Elevator Repair Service all figured out, it does something really wild. Like stage a Shakespeare play. Under John Collins's direction, the company takes a slapstick approach to Shakespeare's problem play about a would be nun and a couple of untrustworthy rulers. 212 967 7555, publictheater.org 'OH MY SWEET LAND' (in previews; opens on Sept. 17). Step inside a stranger's kitchen and immerse yourself in comforting smells and distressing stories. In the writer and director Amir Nizar Zuabi's solo show, performed by Nadine Malouf in volunteered kitchens across the New York City metro area, a woman cooks kibbe as she describes searching for her boyfriend, a Syrian exile. 866 811 4111, playco.org 'THE PORTUGUESE KID' at Stage I at New York City Center (previews start on Sept. 19; opens on Oct. 24). Jason Alexander, of "Seinfeld" fame, has never really been a romantic lead, but he'll star in a new romantic comedy from John Patrick Shanley ("Moonstruck," "Outside Mullingar"). He plays a lawyer who struggles with Sherie Rene Scott's tempestuous client. Pico Alexander, Aimee Carrero and Mary Testa also star. 212 581 1212, nycitycenter.org 'THE RED LETTER PLAYS' at the Pershing Square Signature Center (in previews; opens on Sept. 17). Signature Theater presents a study in scarlet as it revives Suzan Lori Parks's two reworkings of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter." The first play, which has a profane title, is a hallucinatory revenge tragedy about a woman named Hester who performs abortions; Jo Bonney directs. The second, "In the Blood," directed by Sarah Benson, centers on a contemporary Hester, an impoverished mother desperate for help with her five children. 212 244 7529, signaturetheatre.org 'TINY BEAUTIFUL THINGS' at the Public Theater (previews start on Sept. 19; opens on Oct. 2). Nia Vardalos's adaptation of Cheryl Strayed's "Dear Sugar" advice columns sweetens another Public Theater season. Last December, Ben Brantley called it "a handkerchief soaking meditation on pain, loss, hope and forgiveness." Thomas Kail directs a cast including Ms. Vardalos, with Hubert Point Du Jour and Natalie Woolams Torres as the advisees. 212 967 7555, publictheater.org 'BANDSTAND' at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater (closes on Sept. 17). Richard Oberacker and Robert Taylor's original musical about a group of World War II veterans who form a swing band is laying down its instruments. A Tony winner for Andy Blankenbuehler's vitalizing choreography, the show, which stars Laura Osnes, Corey Cott and a troupe of actors who play their own instruments, wavers between a serious minded inquiry into post traumatic stress and feel good nostalgia. 212 239 6200, bandstandbroadway.com 'THE FLATIRON HEX' at Here (closes on Sept. 30). James Godwin and Tom Burnett's hallucinatory and inventive puppet show returns for an eerie and icky encore. Last seen at Dixon Place, this solo piece performed by Mr. Godwin and lots of projections and puppets, shadows Wylie Walker, an I.T. expert and shaman, fighting to protect New York City from a weird, apocalyptic storm. 212 352 3101; here.org 'GROUNDHOG DAY' at the August Wilson Theater (closes on Sept. 17). Our chance to relive this stage adaptation of the mordant Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis comedy over and over and over again is coming to an end. Ben Brantley noted that the show, which has music and lyrics by Tim Minchin ("Matilda the Musical"), "reimagines a much loved film about instant karma with such fertile and feverish theatrical imagination that you expect it to implode before your eyes." 877 250 2929, groundhogdaymusical.com 'INANIMATE' at the Flea Theater (closes on Sept. 24). Nick Robideau's play about Erica, a young woman who discovers her "objectum sexuality," or objectophilia, and a wholehearted attachment to the sign at the local Dairy Queen, finishes its run. Ben Brantley praised this play, which also brings to life the objects of Erica's affection as a "sly and very likable comedy." 866 811 4111, theflea.org 'THE SUITCASE UNDER THE BED' at the Beckett Theater (closes on Sept. 30). Now that the Mint has staged them, these four short plays by the Irish writer Teresa Deevy (1894 1963) likely won't be going back into the luggage in which they were discovered. Andy Webster praised Jonathan Bank's direction, writing, "He clearly adores Deevy, and ultimately so will the audience." 212 239 6200, minttheater.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Following his 2014 film "Happiness," which profiles Peyangki, a boy in a Bhutanese monastery, director Thomas Balmes returned to make the striking new documentary, "Sing Me a Song." Here, Peyangki is 10 years older and living in what seems like a completely different world: one changed by the internet and television. Bhutan was the last nation to adopt these technologies, and Balmes's all seeing eye captures the profound impact they had on Peyangki and his hometown, Laya. In an opening flashback sequence, young Peyangki leads an idyllic life of meditation. After the "10 years later" title card, he is bombarded by the sound of his smartphone alarm. Balmes, who was also the cinematographer, weaves together startling footage of the aftermath of technological transformation. At the temple, a row of Buddhist monks can be seen chanting in unison with their faces buried in their phones. Later, some of the young monks engage in violent role play with toy guns.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Wading into the calendar for the Performance Mix Festival can feel like embarking on a convoluted mission. The curator Karen Bernard plays by no rules, other than rounding up an inspired multitude of genres and voices each year. For its 30th birthday, the festival returns to its original Lower East Side home, Abrons Arts Center, with 13 events featuring 40 artists over six days, beginning Monday, June 6. If there's any theme, it might be unexpected groupings and deliriously long titles. The week kicks off with "Like a Nova Star: Three Totally Different Trajectories Each Exploding Brilliantly Away from the Postmodern Center." This triple bill includes the feminist acrobats of LAVA, the audience instigated work of Clarinda Mac Low and Yasuko Yokoshi's re envisioning of classical Japanese dance. Monday also brings "Recess: The Ritual Experience Concept Event Spa Show," in which Michael Helland offers perception heightening tonics for the body and mind. And that's just opening night; experiments in tap, video and improvisatory music await later in the week. (212 598 0400, abronsartscenter.org.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
No matter what type of window you're dressing, be sure to choose fabric that has a nice draping quality, advised Kevin Dumais, an interior designer in New York, who combined drapes and Roman shades to frame a window over a desk. Roman shades, curtains, drapery or some combination? Here's how to figure out exactly what your windows need. The Best Dressed Windows and How to Get Them Hanging curtains or shades can have a transformative effect on a room, adding warmth and style to a drab space or hiding unfortunate views out the window. You can even create the illusion that you have more space than you really do by exaggerating the appearance of ceiling height. But figuring out which window treatment is right for your space can be tricky. What if there's no room for curtains on either side of the French doors in your tiny apartment? What's the best way to play up the lovely leaded glass in those prewar casement windows while keeping out the draft? How do you gracefully cover a bay window? We asked interior designers to share their tricks for dressing up a range of window styles. If you have casement windows, she said, Roman shades are an option. She recommended mounting them at least six inches above the casing, so that when the shade is up it doesn't block the light. But "my recommendation is to go with draperies," she added, "as you get the full view of the window when open." That's what she did for a library in Greenwich, Conn., where she chose a linen from Osborne Little in a blue and gray ombre, to complement the color of the walls. For the hardware, she used a clear Lucite rod with rings, brackets and end caps in polished nickel. As a general rule, she said, use a rod wide enough to allow at least six inches to each side of the frame for smaller windows; eight to 10 inches on each side of a double width window; and up to a foot on each side for larger windows. You should also avoid pushing the drapery past the window casing, she noted, as "it looks better when the drapes cover the casing on each side and frame the window." With bay windows, your options are more limited: You could hang stationary curtains on either side of the bay and install a shade inside each window frame, or you could hang curtains on each individual window. But if there isn't enough room for hardware, Roman shades are the way to go. "An advantage of Roman shades is that you do not need to have decorative or functional hardware," said Grant K. Gibson, an interior designer in San Francisco, who opted for flat panel shades in white linen from Clarence House for a bedroom overlooking Buena Vista Park. "We wanted the fabric to fade into the architectural details, and matched the fabric as close as possible to the already finished white wall color," said Mr. Gibson, who installed the shades on the outside of the molding to make sure they blocked out as much of the light as possible when closed. "Your eye would have too many places to look if there had been a color or pattern on the window treatments." What if your windows aren't that interesting, as in many postwar apartments? "Use floor to ceiling drapes, even if the window doesn't go to the height of ceiling," advised Alexis Alvarez, design director at Interior Marketing Group. "It will draw the eye up and make windows appear bigger and ceilings appear higher." To liven up the postwar windows in a Greenwich Village living room, Ms. Alvarez mounted the curtain rods above the moldings and beyond their width to create the illusion of higher ceilings and wider windows. "The light and airy, white linen fabric blends seamlessly with the modern aesthetic of the room," she said. Curtains that hang straight and just graze the floor tend to work well with sliding glass doors. "Generally you want to avoid blocking the doors in any way for function, and also for light coming into the space," said Jess Cooney, a designer in Great Barrington, Mass., who dressed a sliding glass door in an open kitchen with a simple rod and patterned fabric from Robert Allen. "The overall goal was to give the sliding door behind the draperies a more formal feel and to soften the space." Another benefit of drapes, she noted, is that they are good at absorbing sound: "Textiles help so much for acoustics, especially in a space with an open floor plan, where noise can easily echo and bounce around." If you are lucky enough to have a continuous stretch of windows or doors from one end of a room to the other, adding lightweight drapery panels between the doors or windows will help create the illusion of an unbroken expanse of glass. In a Manhattan living room with three pairs of French doors opening onto Juliet balconies, the interior designer Alexa Hampton installed simple, pleated panels in an embroidered Cowtan Tout fabric. Then, "we layered the panels with lacquered bamboo shades," Ms. Hampton said, "and two tone hardware with darkened bronze poles and antique brass rings and finials, for a collected look."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
BRUSSELS The European Union's top antitrust official warned Google on Tuesday that the American company might need to make further concessions to settle a case concerning its hugely lucrative online search and advertising businesses. Without those additional concessions, Joaquin Almunia, the European Union competition commissioner, told a committee meeting at the European Parliament that Google could face formal charges for violating European competition law. Mr. Almunia's comments, in response to a question during scheduled testimony at Parliament, highlight the pressure from rival companies like Microsoft to devise a tougher set of remedies with Google. Those proposed solutions were made public last month by the European Commission. If critics of Google in Europe remain dissatisfied with the settlement, they could go to court. They could sue the European Commission at the General Court of the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, accusing the commission of failing to push hard enough for an effective solution. Final judgments in such cases can take years. On Tuesday, Mr. Almunia told Parliament that he was still reviewing feedback from companies and organizations involved in the case. Market testing was undertaken to see if, among other issues, the proposed remedies addressed complaints that Google favored its own products in search results. But Mr. Almunia signaled his intention to make firmer demands in some areas of the proposed settlement. "After we have analyzed the responses we have received," Mr. Almunia said, "we will ask Google, probably, I cannot anticipate this formally, but almost 100 percent, we will ask Google: You should improve your proposals." Mr. Almunia said that the period of market testing, which was to have ended on Monday, had been extended by one month at the request of some of the participants in the case. In addition, Google would label results that pointed to its own services like Google Maps as its own properties and separate them from general search results with a box. The high cost of gas is forcing families to cut back on activities and essentials. Clearview AI does well in another round of facial recognition accuracy tests. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. Google's agreement would be legally binding for five years, and a third party, approved by the commission, would be put in place to monitor compliance. Al Verney, a spokesman for Google, said Tuesday that the company's proposal already "clearly addresses the four areas of concern that were raised" by Mr. Almunia. Google was continuing "work with the commission to settle this case," Mr. Verney said. Mr. Almunia also said that he expected to hold a series of "exchanges" with the search giant. Google would then need to "send us the proposals that we consider can solve the concerns," he added. Those proposals could lead to a legally binding settlement by the end of the year. Previously European Union officials have said that a binding settlement could be reached by the summer. Mr. Almunia also resumed threats to send Google formal charges, known as a statement of objections, "if these negotiations do not have a positive conclusion." Some rivals are already calling on Mr. Almunia to abandon the settlement efforts, calling them insufficient to solve their competition concerns and even unfair in some areas. "Google's proposals are so far removed from anything that could solve the commission's concerns that we can see no reasonable alternative for the commission other than to reject the proposals, issue its statement of objections, and insist on remedies that will end, rather than escalate, the abusive practices it has identified,'' Shivaun Raff, a co founder of Foundem, a British comparison shopping site that was one of the original complainants in the case, said Tuesday by e mail. Ms. Raff did not say whether she would bring an appeal against the commission to the General Court if Mr. Almunia declined to bring formal charges. Thomas Vinje, the chief lawyer for FairSearch Europe, a group of Google competitors including Microsoft, Nokia and Oracle, said he would be "very surprised" if some companies did not bring an appeal. Most complainants in the case regard the proposed remedies as "worse than useless," Mr. Vinje said. He did not identify the complainants. He said his group is not a complainant in the search case and would be unlikely to bring an appeal. Even if Google reached a binding settlement with Mr. Almunia, Google could face a fine of as much as 10 percent of its global annual sales, which were nearly 50 billion last year, if it broke its promises. But a deal would allow Google to escape the long, expensive antitrust battles that Microsoft fought in Europe over its media player and server software during the past decade.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Goffin, the seventh seed, can be described simply as a consistency player. On the court, he has the tendency to make his opponents hit just one more ball than they're comfortable with, leading them into unforced errors. Goffin has also shown his consistency in his results, finishing his U.S. Open runs in the fourth round for the last three years. Now, having reached the round of 16 once again, he'll be trying to make his first quarterfinal in Flushing Meadows by outlasting an in form Shapovalov. Although Shapovalov has been impressive throughout this tournament, reaching only his second round of 16 at a major tournament, he struggled to put away Taylor Fritz during a five set contest in the third round on Friday. His aggressive style, heralded by a powerful and pinpoint accurate backhand, makes him an exciting player to watch. The open question is whether or not he'll have the energy to hit ball after ball to the indefatigable Goffin. Shapovalov has spent 10 hours on court this week, not counting his doubles matches, and the wear and tear of the longer Grand Slam formats may make it hard for him to deliver the same performances going into the second week. Brady, the 28th seed, has reached the round of 16 at a Grand Slam event for the first time since 2017. Although Brady has been successful primarily on the doubles court, her run this year has been impressive. She has yet to drop a set at the U.S. Open in singles, and across three matches, she has only lost 14 games. However, she will face a much more difficult test in her first seeded player of the tournament, Kerber. Kerber, a three time major champion, including a 2016 U.S. Open title, has also looked as if she is at the top of her game. Although she has lost more games on her path to the round of 16, she has demonstrated that her counterpunch groundstrokes still have the capacity to overwhelm opponents. A former world No. 1, Kerber has not been past the round of 16 at a major event since her championship performance at Wimbledon in 2018. On current form, she has every right to feel confident that she can push for another Grand Slam title. Thompson, the world No. 63, will play in his first round of 16 match at a major tournament. Before Sunday, he had never been past the second round of a hardcourt major, and it will be interesting to see if the absence of fans at the U.S. Open helps ameliorate the nerves that players can feel upon their first time breaking into the second week at a Grand Slam.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Mayra Ramirez of Chicago, recipient of the first double lung transplant. "I want you to show the scars," she said. "I want people to see what this virus does to a person."Credit...Sebastian Hidalgo for The New York Times Mayra Ramirez of Chicago, recipient of the first double lung transplant. "I want you to show the scars," she said. "I want people to see what this virus does to a person." The last thing that Mayra Ramirez remembers from the emergency room at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago is calling her family to say she had Covid, was about to be put on a ventilator and needed her mother to make medical decisions for her. Ms. Ramirez, 28, did not wake up for more than six weeks. And then she learned that on June 5, she had become the first Covid patient in the United States to receive a double lung transplant. On Wednesday, she went home from the hospital. Ms. Ramirez is one of a small but growing number of patients whose lungs have been destroyed by the coronavirus, and whose only hope of survival is a lung transplant. "I'm pretty sure that if I had been at another center, they would have just ended care and let me die," she said in an interview on Wednesday. The surgery is considered a desperate measure reserved for people with fatal, irreversible lung damage. Doctors do not want to remove a person's lungs if there is any chance they will heal. Over all, only about 2,700 lung transplants were performed in the United States last year. Patients must be sick enough to need a transplant, and yet also strong enough to survive the operation, recover and get back on their feet. With a new disease like Covid 19, doctors are still learning how to strike that balance. "It's such a paradigm change," said Ms. Ramirez's surgeon, Dr. Ankit Bharat. "Lung transplant has not been considered a treatment option for an infectious disease, so people need to get a little bit more of a comfort level with it." On July 5, he performed a similar operation on a second Covid patient, Brian Kuhns, 62, from Lake Zurich, Ill. Mr. Kuhns spent 100 days on life support machines before receiving the transplant. Before becoming ill, he had thought Covid was a hoax, his wife, Nancy Kuhns, said, in a statement issued by the hospital. Mr. Kuhns said, "If my story can teach you one thing, it's that Covid 19 isn't a joke." Two more patients at Northwestern are awaiting transplants, one from Chicago and one from Washington, D.C., said Dr. Bharat, who is the chief of thoracic surgery and surgical director of the lung transplant program. A patient is to be flown in from Seattle next week, and the Northwestern team is consulting on still another case with a medical group in Washington, D.C. Other transplant centers are considering similar surgeries, Dr. Bharat said. Last Friday, a Covid patient transferred from another state underwent a double lung transplant at the University of Florida Health Shands Hospital in Gainesville, Dr. Tiago Machuca said. While other centers have also sought to refer cases, most of the patients had other serious medical problems that ruled them out, he said. In some cases, he said, insurers' reluctance to cover the surgery or to pay for travel to transfer patients has led to delays. "This is so new to our field," Dr. Machuca said. "It will be a challenge for physicians to determine which patients truly are candidates and what's the timing. We don't want to do it too early when the patient still can recover from Covid lung disease and resume with good quality of life, but also you don't want to miss the boat and have a patient where it's futile, the patient is too sick." He said that, in some cases, extensive rehabilitation has brought about recovery in Covid patients who were being considered as possible transplant candidates. Because the extensive lung damage in Covid patients makes transplant surgery especially difficult, most patients would be referred to major transplant centers that are best equipped to perform the risky operations and provide the intensive aftercare that patients need, the surgeons said. Mr. Kuhns was transferred to Northwestern from another health system. Before she became ill, Ms. Ramirez, a paralegal for a law firm specializing in immigration, was working from home and having her groceries delivered. She was in good health, but had an autoimmune condition, neuromyelitis optica, and took medication that suppressed her immune system and might have made her more vulnerable to the coronavirus infection. She was ill for about two weeks, and consulted with a Covid hotline about her symptoms. At one point, she headed to the hospital but then turned back without going in. She dreaded the idea of being admitted, and told herself she would recover. But on April 26, her temperature reached 105 degrees Fahrenheit, and she was so weak that she fell when she tried to walk. A friend drove her to the hospital. When doctors told her that she needed a ventilator, she had no idea what they meant. She thought it meant some kind of fan, like the word in Spanish. "I thought I'd just be there for a couple of days, max, and get back to my normal life," she said. But she spent six weeks on the ventilator, and also needed a machine to provide oxygen directly into her bloodstream. "The entire time, I had nightmares," she said. Many of the nightmares involved drowning, her family saying goodbye, the doctors telling her she was going to die. The disease was relentless. Bacterial infections set in, scarring her lungs and eating holes in them. The lung damage caused circulatory problems that began to take a toll on her liver and heart. The doctors told her family in North Carolina that it might be time to come to Chicago to say goodbye, and her mother and two sisters made the trip. But Ms. Ramirez held on, cleared the coronavirus from her body and was placed on the transplant list. Two days later, on June 5, she underwent a grueling, 10 hour operation. She woke scarred, bruised, desperately thirsty and unable to speak, "with all these tubes coming out of me, and I just couldn't recognize my own body." Because of concerns about infection, her family could not visit after the surgery. At a news conference on Thursday, Ms. Ramirez said, "The hardest part was going through this alone." She suffered from anxiety and panic attacks, she said. Eventually, the rules were relaxed, and her mother could visit. But it was wrenching to say goodbye each day. Before her illness, she worked full time and enjoyed running and playing with her two small, scrappy dogs. Now, she still feels short of breath, can walk only a short distance and needs help to shower and stand up from a chair. The dogs were overjoyed at her homecoming, but their energy was a bit much. Her mother, who lives in North Carolina, took time away from her job at a meatpacking plant and traveled to Chicago to help her recover. Ms. Ramirez said she was learning to use her new lungs and getting stronger every day. She is looking forward to getting back to work, but she still has a way to go. Her family is assisting her, and a friend started a GoFundMe page to help pay the bills. "I definitely feel like I have a purpose," Ms. Ramirez said. "It may be to help other people going through the same situation that I am, maybe even just sharing my story and helping young people realize that if this happened to me it could happen to them, and to protect themselves and protect others around them who are more vulnerable. And to motivate and help other centers around the world to realize that lung transplantation is an option for terminally ill Covid patients." The outlook for Ms. Ramirez is good, Dr. Bharat said, because she is young and healthy. She will be on anti rejection medicines for the rest of her life. Transplanted lungs can still be rejected, he said, but he has seen some last 20 years. And patients may be able to receive a second transplant. "I think from now on she'll continue to get stronger and stronger," he said. "She asked if she could go skydiving. We'll probably get her there in a few months."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
A thumb to suck in troubled times, "Summerland" offers a digit of nostalgia that many viewers will latch onto with something approaching relief. Set mainly during World War II, this picturesque debut feature from Jessica Swale is as uninterested in international conflict as Alice (Gemma Arterton), its distracted heroine. We find her in her shabby chic cottage on the Kentish coast, a crabby author who the film pointedly stresses deeply dislikes children. She's not at all happy, then, to be lumbered with Frank (Lucas Bond), a sweet natured schoolboy evacuated from London. I think we can all see where this is going.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
The pianist and singer Freddy Cole in concert in Basel, Switzerland, in 2006. He sang in a plain spoken manner, always eye to eye with his audience. Freddy Cole, a pianist and vocalist who spent much of his musical life in the shadow of his brother Nat King Cole, but whose durable talents carried him through a triumphant late career resurgence, died on Saturday in Atlanta. He was 88. The cause was complications of a cardiovascular condition, his manager, Suzi Reynolds, said. Mr. Cole leaned toward a more explicitly bluesy style than his brother, who started out playing lively jump blues in the 1930s before mellowing out his sound and becoming one of the most popular crooners of the 20th century. Freddy Cole sang in a plain spoken manner, always eye to eye with his audience, in a way that Nat whose voice was floating, mythic, serene never did. The title of Mr. Cole's debut album, "Waiter, Ask the Man to Play the Blues" (1964), reflected the smoky barroom aura of his music. Yet there was no mistaking the affinity between their vocal styles: warm and welcoming, every syllable enunciated with loving care and an inner glow. For Freddy, that resemblance proved a blessing and a curse. As he aged, he embraced it even as his voice accrued a slightly weather beaten quality that Nat, felled at 45 by lung cancer, never had the chance to develop. In Freddy's case, the markings of age only added to his elegance and expressiveness. In a 1999 profile for The New York Times, the critic David Hajdu called him "one of the few male jazz singers these days who is still, at 67, at the height of his powers." Mr. Cole was nearing his 60th birthday by the time he finally stepped forward and firmly declared his musical independence. And when he did, it was with a wink. In 1991, Sunnyside Records released "I'm Not My Brother, I'm Me," Mr. Cole's first album to get widespread attention. On the title track, a strutting second person testimonial written at the beginning of his career, he sings: Well, I'm here to entertain you, in my own special way And if I sound like Nat, well, what can I say? Now, I offer no apology, Because I am not my brother, I'm me. But at the same time, he included a medley of his brother's songs, followed by "He Was the King," a tender tribute. Backed by a guitarist and a bassist the format of Nat's renowned trio he sounded utterly willing to play ambassador and champion of his brother's legacy. With that album, he finally struck a comfortable balance: He made his disavowal a part of the act. "The case of Freddy Cole is unique in contemporary music," Mr. Hajdu wrote, "because his little brother status appears to be both his lifeline and a shackle." Lionel Frederick Coles was born in Chicago on Oct. 15, 1931. (Like his brother, he would lop off the last letter of his surname when he became a performer.) He was the youngest of five children, all of whom learned piano from their mother, Perlina Coles, and most of whom became professional musicians. Their father, the Rev. Edward Coles, known as E.J., was a Baptist minister. Freddy Cole is survived by a daughter, Crystal Cole; a son, Lionel, a professional musician; and four grandchildren. His wife of more than 50 years, Margaret Jones, died in 2015. Mr. Cole was an all state athlete in high school with dreams of playing professional football, but a hand injury derailed things. "I couldn't continue playing football, so the next best thing I could do was play the piano," he said in a short 2006 documentary, "The Cole Nobody Knows," which took its title from his 1977 album of the same name. "It came out to be my blessing." He refocused on music, performing in Chicago nightclubs and enrolling in the Roosevelt Institute there to study music. Nat, who was 12 years older than Freddy, had already scored multiple No. 1 hits by the time his brother began playing professionally. Aware of Freddy's talents, Nat encouraged him to try his luck on the New York scene. Freddy took his advice, enrolling at Juilliard. Two years later, in 1953, he had a minor hit on Okeh Records, "Whispering Grass," a dulcet pop recording that played up his vocal resemblance to Nat. He began working regularly as the pianist for major bandleaders like the saxophonists Benny Golson and Sonny Stitt while studying toward a master's degree at the New England Conservatory in Boston. He developed a close friendship with the vocalist Billy Eckstine, who became his mentor. Mr. Cole toured Europe in the mid 1960s and developed a small following there. In 1971, with the New York jazz scene sputtering, he moved to Atlanta, where he continued performing and recorded intermittently.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
'THE CREATION' at the Rose Theater (July 19 20, 7:30 p.m.). The pioneering Catalan collective La Fura dels Baus gives Haydn's oratorio a theatrical treatment, in which you can expect projections, acrobatics, puppetry and all manner else. Laurence Equilbey conducts the Insula Orchestra and the choir Accentus, with Christina Landshamer, Robin Tritschler and Thomas Tatzl as the vocal soloists. 212 721 6500, lincolncenter.org/mostly mozart festival MOSTLY MOZART FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA at Alice Tully Hall (July 20 21, 7:30 p.m.) and at David Geffen Hall (July 24 25, 7:30 p.m.). There are two programs this week from Mostly Mozart's resident ensemble: The first, on Friday and Saturday, sticks mostly to, well, Mozart. It features that composer's last symphony and his last piano concerto, and tacks on a Mendelssohn overture. Thomas Dausgaard, who will soon take over at the Seattle Symphony, conducts; Francesco Piemontesi, an excellent young musician, is the pianist. The second program, on Tuesday and Wednesday, is conducted by Louis Langree and includes the overture to Bernstein's "Candide," Gershwin's "An American in Paris" and Emanuel Ax playing Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 17 just as he will have done at Tanglewood a few days earlier. 212 721 6500, lincolncenter.org/mostly mozart festival NYO2 at Carnegie Hall (July 24, 7:30 p.m.). Concentrating on the inclusion of promising players from historically underrepresented minorities, this junior sibling of the National Youth Orchestra performs a concert of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5, a suite from Revueltas's "Redes" and Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1. Gil Shaham is the soloist; Carlos Miguel Prieto is the conductor. 212 247 7800, carnegiehall.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Reviewing a film after its lead actor's death is grim even when the movie is good. The best that might be said about "Abe and Phil's Last Poker Game," starring Martin Landau, who died in July, is that it might lead viewers to "North by Northwest" or "Ed Wood." Mr. Landau plays Abe, a physician who moves into a nursing home with his deteriorating wife (Ann Marie Shea), an experience he finds humiliating. (In a tiresome motif, he insists on being addressed as "doctor," not "mister.") But Abe becomes fast friends with Phil (Paul Sorvino). Each might be the biological father of a nurse (Maria Dizzia) who knows only that her mystery dad lives at the home. "Abe and Phil's" is the first fiction feature from its writer and director, Howard L. Weiner, a neurology professor at Harvard Medical School who founded a center for multiple sclerosis. That's noble work, and knowing of it provides context for the movie. The medical tidbits, however awkwardly presented, are the most distinctive aspects of the script. The flat direction, alas, is not the work of a filmmaker. The surprisingly many scenes devoted to Abe and Phil's discussions of their potency (and their efforts to reignite it) mostly just play as embarrassing. The emphasis on the physical tolls of aging might be excused as a bold confrontation of tough truths. It's as difficult to begrudge Dr. Weiner that effort as it is to watch the results.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Ariana Grande may have skipped the Grammy Awards two weeks ago, but that appears to have had no effect on her album sales, with her latest release, "Thank U, Next," topping the Billboard chart for a second time. Last week, "Thank U, Next" (Republic) became Grande's second No. 1 album in six months, with notably high streaming numbers for a pop album. In its second week out, its totals fell by more than 50 percent, with 169 million streams and 20,000 copies sold as a complete album, according to Nielsen. But that was enough to stay on top. Billboard reported that it was the first time that a solo female artist has had more than one week at No. 1 on the chart since Taylor Swift's "Reputation" notched four weeks at the end of 2017. (Last October, Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper spent three weeks at the top with "A Star Is Born"; this week, that soundtrack is No. 3.) Also this week, the "Bohemian Rhapsody" soundtrack rose one spot to No. 2; look for it to remain strong on next week's charts, thanks to the best actor Oscar for its star, Rami Malek. The duo Florida Georgia Line opened at No. 4 with "Can't Say I Ain't Country," and in fifth place is Drake's mixtape "So Far Gone," which first came out 10 years ago but was not commercially released until last week.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
FEW people in America walk to work. Most of us drive to the supermarket. But more older people these days are looking for a community where they can enjoy a full life without a car. Ben Brown and his wife, Christine, say they weren't thinking about retirement when they moved to Franklin, N.C., a small, lovely town nestled in the Smoky Mountains near Asheville, a haven for many East Coast and Midwest retirees. "We loved the idea of living in a small town in a rural mountain area," Mr. Brown recalled. "And we converted a summer house to a year round home to suit our tastes." Yet Mr. Brown, a 70 year old writer, and his 66 year old wife said they had second thoughts as they made the transition toward retirement. "We realized 'aging in place' means a lot more than just a comfortable house," Mr. Brown said. "So we began thinking more about 'aging in community.' That means an urban neighborhood where you can walk or take transit to just about everything you need." Then they discovered West Asheville, a vibrant, urban neighborhood that is brimming with trendy new restaurants, inviting shops and a number of bus routes into the larger city next door. Nearly every place they wanted to go was within walking distance, a major benefit for those who don't want to drive everywhere as they get older. "We always thought we'd end up in an urban environment," Mr. Brown added. "We're in one of the few places where you can comfortably live without a car in a growing, mixed use neighborhood." In the age of the Fitbit and a growing cohort of active, engaged retirees eager to take their daily 10,000 steps, retirement communities have been slow to change. Eighty percent of retirees still live in car dependent suburbs and rural areas, according to a Brookings Institution study. Developments for independent retirees typically come in two flavors: isolated, gated subdivisions or large homes on golf courses, often in the same bland package of multiple cul de sacs. Both require driving everywhere, which is a problem for those who either don't want to drive or can't. Enter a new paradigm: the walkable, urban space. It may range from existing neighborhoods in places like Brooklyn or San Francisco to newly built housing within city and suburban cores from coast to coast. Though not primarily for retirees, places like Reston, Va., and Seaside, Fla., were early examples of the new urbanism built from the ground up. Among senior housing projects, examples include Waterstone at Wellesley along the Charles River in the Boston area and The Lofts at McKinley in downtown Phoenix. The theme is simple: Get out and walk to basic services. Walkability, though, is much more than a hip marketing pitch. It's linked to better health, social engagement and higher property values. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' The researchers Philippa Clarke and Linda George found that walkable, mixed use environments could possibly reduce disabilities many face as they age. Pedestrian friendly communities promote walking to a grocery store, cafe or other services like a dry cleaner or library. Although there is clearly a growing demand for walkable, urban retirement communities, they are difficult to build within cities, said Christopher Leinberger, a developer based in Washington and a professor at the George Washington University School of Business. Mr. Leinberger noted that most mainstream retirement developers had traditionally favored suburban or exurban sites that involve sprawling "greenfield" building on relatively cheap farmland. The new approach, by contrast, is for dense, urban or town centered sites that are accessible for services and socially vibrant. "The model used to be to isolate old people on cul de sacs backing up to a golf course," Mr. Leinberger said. "The new model just beginning to rise is for walkable urban places." But there are many obstacles. Age friendly communities within cities may require extensive infrastructure improvements, including wider sidewalks, bike lanes, more public transportation options and longer pedestrian signal walk times. Local officials may not want to rezone or invest in the improvements or even permit them. Michael Glynn, a vice president with National Development in Boston, who has built walkable communities primarily for homeowners 75 and older, said he had faced many roadblocks in pursuing his projects. "Towns are frightened by density," Mr. Glynn said, referring to clustering housing units in downtown areas. "But if you build in the right, walkable location, it could do a lot of good for an 85 year old." Walkable areas in mature cities, though, may be unaffordable for retirees who are interested in paring their overall housing costs. Some of the most walkable cities are among the most expensive: New York, San Francisco and Boston top the list compiled by Walkscore.com, which also rates individual neighborhoods. New York's Little Italy and Flatiron Districts; Chinatowns in Boston, San Francisco, New York and Washington; Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square; and Chicago's Near North and West Loop all scored well. Although the price tags for these neighborhoods can be lofty, there is a financial upside. They promise higher home equity down the road, if you can afford to buy there. Mr. Leinberger, in a G.W.U. study, found that the walkability factor added more than 72 percent in increased housing value compared with car dominated developments, where he says prices will fall over time as America ages. The affordability issue may be a roadblock to many retirees looking to cut housing expenses, but it shouldn't be a high barrier to those already living in a city. They may be able to stay put if the neighborhood where they live can accommodate their changing needs.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Q. My iPhone running iOS 11.3 has more than 2,600 emoji characters. Is there a way to edit those down besides the "frequently used" ones? A. In the default iOS settings, using the emoji keyboard is an all or nothing affair, which means turning off the keyboard entirely is the only way to remove unwanted characters. If you want to do that, go to the Home screen, open the Settings icon, select General and then Keyboard. At the top of the next screen, tap Keyboards, then Edit in the top right corner so you get a Delete icon to tap next to Emoji. If you only use a few emoji characters but want to keep them, you can also create text shortcuts for them before you turn off the Emoji Keyboard. To do that, open the Settings icon, select General, then Keyboard and tap Text Replacement. On the Phrase line, enter the emoji character you want to use, and on the Shortcut line, enter a few text characters that will convert to the desired emoji character when typed.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
STRATFORD UPON AVON, England "What does a black man think has happened since South Africa had democratic elections in 1994? What does a white man think?" John Kani, one of South Africa's most celebrated actors, posed the questions rhetorically, with characteristic gravel voiced resonance, while Antony Sher, another celebrated actor born in South Africa, looked on. The subject: Mr. Kani's new play, "Kunene and the King," which opened at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Swan Theater on April 3. In "Kunene," directed by Janice Honeyman, Mr. Kani, 76, and Mr. Sher, 69, reincarnate the black/white divide under apartheid that dominated their youth. Mr. Kani, who grew up in a township outside the city of Port Elizabeth, began to act in 1965 with a group that included Athol Fugard and Winston Ntshona. The three men began working on material together and wrote "Sizwe Banzi Is Dead" and "The Island," a pair of one act plays that helped bring the realities of apartheid to the world; it won Mr. Kani and Mr. Ntshona a joint best actor Tony Award in New York in 1975. When they returned to South Africa, they were arrested and placed in solitary confinement for several weeks. Ten years later Mr. Kani lost an eye (he wears a prosthetic one) after a beating by the police. He continued to write, and played South Africa's first black Othello in a contentious 1987 production. In post apartheid years he became the director of Johannesburg's Market Theater and he has recently appeared in "Captain America" and "Black Panther," among other movies. "Kunene and the King," produced by the R.S.C. and the Fugard Theater in Cape Town, is set in the present, 25 years after the end of apartheid which did not, Mr. Kani suggests, mean the end of racism or injustice. It tells the story of the relationship between Lunga Kunene, a black nurse taking care of Jack Morris, a famous white actor, who is terminally ill, but nonetheless preparing to play King Lear. It's the second time Mr. Kani and Mr. Sher have performed together; in 2008 and 2009 they played Caliban and Prospero in "The Tempest," also directed by Ms. Honeyman. Following a preview performance of "Kunene," Mr. Kani and Mr. Sher talked about their relationships to South Africa, and Shakespeare as a unifying force. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation. How long have you known each other? Antony Sher In 1995, I was part of a workshop run by the National Theater studio at the Market Theater in Johannesburg, and I remember many conversations and meals. We had known one another a bit before, but that was the real meeting. John Kani Tony was well known in South Africa because he was this famous English actor. We were proud of him! Then in 2008 and 2009, we had the chance to work on "The Tempest." During that time, I had an idea about a two hander for us, and we talked about it. Life went on, I didn't think about it, and then last year, the idea suddenly came back to me. I felt: We need to look at South Africa's democracy. We are littered with incidents, issues and geographical segregation that prevent us from becoming a united society. I wanted to write a story about two men who seem to be happy with what's going on, but when you bring them together, the rifts quickly surface. Do the different experience of the black and white characters in the play have parallels with your own lives? Kani A good friend of mine, Barney Simon, once said you can't write a play "about." You must tell a story from personal experience. When that's in front of you, all these things come in. How many times do we pretend to one another with a Colgate smile? I decided to put Lunga in Jack's house, and see what surfaces. Sher John and I went in completely different directions. I left South Africa and my South African identity behind. My family was typical of white families at the time, almost ignorant about apartheid, which sounds impossible, but it was true. When I became politicized in England, I couldn't believe that a Jewish family had made no comparisons between what had happened to them, with pogroms in Eastern Europe, and what was happening to black South Africans. Life is a dangerous business and if it works out well, you mustn't regret. But I celebrate the way it has come full circle, that John and I can be in this play together, marking a moment in South African history. Mr. Kani, what did you want to convey in the play? Is there a specific idea about what is happening as South Africa celebrates 25 years of democracy? Kani I was 51 when I voted for the first time in 1994, and I look at South Africa through those spectacles. I see a lot of progress, a lot of good. When I talk to my son, who was born in 1994, he sees so many things that were not fulfilled in the promises that were made. There are still many South Africans who think they had nothing to do with apartheid. But I am trying to talk about collective responsibility here.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Cable giants are increasingly pushing aggressively into the wireless industry. In the latest example of that trend, Comcast and Charter are negotiating with Sprint to offer wireless services to their cable and high speed internet customers, according to three people familiar with the talks who asked to be anonymous because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The talks were earlier reported by The Wall Street Journal. The discussions are early and could take on various forms, but we talked to industry analysts and consumer groups about the implications of a partnership between the cable and wireless giants. What is on the table? Sprint, Comcast and Charter have been talking about several potential partnerships, according to the people familiar with the talks. One scenario would involve the cable operators buying access to Sprint's nationwide wireless service in order to bundle mobile service with cable and high speed internet service. Why are these talks taking place? It's happening because of the convergence of tech, media and telecom. AT T bought DirecTV in 2015 and is now trying to buy Time Warner for 85.4 billion so it has a foothold in the mobile industry, television distribution and content. Verizon recently bought Yahoo with an eye toward mobile advertising and video.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Kevin Knox driving to the basket past the Lakers' Reggie Bullock on Sunday. Knox scored 19 points to get out of what Coach David Fizdale called a rut. In a rookie season that has resembled a seismograph, Knicks forward Kevin Knox needed a performance like Sunday's against the Los Angeles Lakers. He scored 19 points with an array of shots, slashing to the basket, hitting a step back 3 pointer while guarded by LeBron James and finishing with finesse on a driving, left handed layup. "Hello, Kevin Knox. It was good to see him play well," Knicks Coach David Fizdale said. "He's had his bumps. We know it's there, it's in there. It's just a matter of the ball going in and him getting his confidence up. But I really thought he came with a mind set that he was going to get out of this rut. The way he was attacking, the force he was playing with." Knox shot 8 of 14 from the field and 3 of 5 from 3 point range in the Knicks' 124 123 victory over the Lakers, their 14th win in a dismal season. "I'd been struggling a little bit, but the whole team and coaching staff had confidence in me," Knox said. "I came to work every single day, got up extra shots. I knew I was going to come out of the streak, so I just wanted to make sure I kept shooting." Last year the Knicks selected Knox, a freshman from Kentucky, in the first round of the draft, ninth over all. After an ankle sprain sidelined him at the start of the season, Knox's play took off in December, when he averaged 17.1 points and was named the Eastern Conference rookie of the month. Knox, 19, hit the rookie wall beginning in mid January, with a 20 game stretch in which he shot 31.8 percent from the field and 27.7 from beyond the 3 point arc. The slump started soon after he scored 31 points, his highest total in the N.B.A., during a game against the Philadelphia 76ers. Shortly before that, Knox had said that he was still learning how to adjust to the demands of the long N.B.A. schedule and its 48 minute games, compared with a 40 minutes in college and A.A.U. ball. "It's totally different," he said in late December. "Eight minutes doesn't seem like a lot, but it really is. That's a whole quarter almost. Eight minutes is a long time in basketball." To improve his fitness, Knox did extra sprints after practice and spent more time on the treadmill, running spurts of 15 minutes with the last two as fast as he could. King, who was with the Knicks for five seasons in the mid 1980s, and was known for his seemingly unstoppable baseline turnaround jump shot, has focused especially on mentoring Knox. In between their meetings early in the season, Knox studied online video highlights from King's career. "He helps my game, every time I talk to him," Knox said. "He's kind of like me, a wing that gets to the basket, loves transition. He kind of reminds me of myself." Perhaps the other way around, rook. Knox said he had sought out his own tutors as well, connecting with Chris Bosh, Grant Hill, Jalen Rose, Carmelo Anthony and former Kentucky players for bits of advice during the trying moments. After Monday night's 128 92 loss in Toronto, the Knicks had 11 games left in the season, all of them meaningless, except for their effect on the draft. The three teams with the lowest win totals will each have a 14 percent of landing the No. 1 selection in June, which presumably will be the Duke freshman Zion Williamson. "We had a lot of ups and downs this season," Knox said afterward. "It was big time win, the first sweep of the season. It's just a great way to win in the Garden, in the last 10 seconds, against one of the best players to ever play the game and we get a defensive stop with the crowd standing up yelling." At a critical stretch in the fourth quarter, the Knicks had its three rookies on the court Knox, center Mitchell Robinson, guard Allonzo Trier plus guard Kadeem Allen, who was just called up from the Westchester developmental team, and forward Lance Thomas, the longest tenured Knick. "There's a process that needs to happen, and ours is growth, making sure the young guys are getting the experience they need in order to be good in this league," Thomas said. "A lot of young guys don't get to play especially extended minutes in their first year. It's a learning experience for young guys. Our goal is to fast track them." Knox is sixth in the league among rookies in minutes played per game, at 28, despite shooting a subpar 36.4 percent from the field and struggling with weakside defense. He is averaging 12.3 points with 4.3 rebounds. Even so, Fizdale has never considered sending Knox to Westchester to work on his game in the anonymity of the G League "because our team was already like a glorified G League team," Fizdale told reporters last week. Because his rookies played substantial minutes all season, he said, he thought it was better for them to take their knocks against the best. Such as James on Sunday and Toronto's Kawhi Leonard on Monday. "Welcome to the league, kid," Fizdale said. "This is what it's about. This is why I wanted him in this. Take those lumps now. Later on in his career, no one will remember this stuff when he is the guy beating up on kids. This is all good for him."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
"A lot of live things mixing." That's what the choreographer and extraordinary improviser Jennifer Monson promised and delivered at Danspace Project on Friday night. The audience was clustered in corners of St. Mark's Church in the East Village, and Ms. Monson was explaining to one group the prompts and ideas that she and her colleagues would be playing with, improvisationally, during a performance called "in tow." She spoke very quietly. I thought I heard the phrases "anonymity without being hidden" and "productive unproductivity." During the next 75 minutes, a lot happened and also not so much. Periodically accessorizing with costumes (by Susan Becker) from a rack, the performers (all involved with the iLAND dance research organization) shifted the position of hollow wooden wedges (by Joseph Silovsky) and engaged in overlapping solos, duets and ensemble scrums all over the place. Every once in a while, someone called out "time," and everyone reset and tried again or moved on to the next prompt. Instead of metaphorical bells and whistles, there were actual bells and people whistling. More bells and haunting voices emerged from portable tape machines, switched on and off and moved around, at least once onto the lap of an audience member. The harpist Zeena Parkins, making electronic and acoustic contributions, conjured an atmosphere of mystery and at times of danger. The sounds and motion activated the entire church, but in an undemanding style, encouraging in viewers an open attention with room for the mind to wander and for skepticism to wax and wane. Taking in the whole, you might suddenly notice a performer in the balcony or upside down in a corner or behind you, dropping something or making a pillar squeak.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
With rising sea levels, higher carbon dioxide levels and plastic bottles glutting landfills and oceans, the issue of sustainability has become a hot topic. Hotels and resorts have started to act by ramping up efforts to reduce or eliminate completely their resource and energy consumption. "If big hotels can make small changes, the ripple can be huge," said Paula Vlamings, chief executive of Tourism Cares, a nonprofit that works with travel operators to mitigate tourism's environmental impact. "Sustainability is more than energy conservation or recycling; it is about sustaining communities for the tourism product." While Marriott International and other large chains have promised to eliminate items that never fully decompose, like plastic straws, there is still a lot more work to be done. "There are thousands of these one at a time initiatives, but these are not evenly spread across the lodging industry," said Bjorn Hanson, a clinical professor at New York University's Tisch Center for Hospitality and Tourism. Here are four ways that hotels and resorts are addressing climate concerns and contributing to Earth Day awareness. The 114 room Conrad Bora Bora Nui resort in French Polynesia has developed 17 different underwater coral structures around its resort with the mindset to regenerate them. This is done using a "Biorock" technique (passing a low voltage current through electrodes in the water) developed by the marine biologist Denis Schneider. The process is currently considered among the best ways to fight coral mortality. Sebastien Pisano, the hotel's general manager, said that he has seen a significant increase in the amount of coral around the resort, and this now spans a half acre (roughly the size of three tennis courts). "Coral feeds plankton and plankton feeds fish, so there's an entire ecosystem," he said. Guests of the resort can take part in a free snorkeling coral reef experience. The Mayakoba region in Riviera Maya, Mexico, is filled with lagoons and mangroves, and one luxury property there attempts to offer ecotourism experiences to guests. Fairmont Mayakoba, in alliance with a nongovernmental organization called Oceanus A.C., arranges a snorkel tour for 49 per person to underwater nurseries near the Puerto Morales national park area, where guests gather acropora palmata (a type of Caribbean reef building coral) detached by the force of the marine current. With assistance of the tour leader, they help transplant the coral to the sea bottom to ensure it is able to continue its growth. Some properties creatively tap into their natural resources. All of the water drunk and used at Jade Mountain in St. Lucia draws from a river in the Anse Mamim valley; the resort filters and conditions it in a treatment facility. The resort also designed open air rooms to allow natural breezes to cool the areas, eliminating the need for air conditioning. "We are still able to maintain our luxury experience," said Carl Hunter, the resort's property manager, adding that the potable water takes care of all the hotel's needs. Solmar Hotels and Resorts in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, heats water (including in its pools) using photo thermal panels. "We have close to 1,000 rooms and this renewable energy source produces a gas less heat," said Ricardo Orozco, vice president of operations. He said that this energy savings translates into fewer emissions into the atmosphere (or the equivalent of pulling 198 gasoline run cars out of circulation). Hostelling International USA became the first hostel company in the world to implement "smart showers" that limits showering time to seven minutes. The company plans to roll out more than 750 showers across its 50 properties, each with colorful LED lights to gently alert guests that time's up. "If each guest showers for 30 seconds less, we save around one million gallons of water each year," said Netanya Trimboli, the Hostelling International's marketing director. Kudadoo, a private resort island in the Maldives, became the first fully energy sustainable property there, using solar panels designed into the roof of its main building, The Retreat. This energy source is able to fully power the island. The 99 room Svart, on the Helgeland coastline in Norway, will open by 2022 as the world's first net energy positive hotel above the polar circle. The entire hotel is powered by solar panels; excess energy is saved for when the country has more darkness than light filled days. "We have also removed materials that consume more energy, including concrete, and focused on wood, natural stone or glass," said Ivaylo Lefterov, the project manager. With roughly a third of the world's food getting either lost or wasted, more hotels and resorts have begun efforts to curb squandering on their properties. The Spectator Hotel in Charleston, S.C., recently established a food waste diversion program where half eaten food items such as fruit and pastries are put into a digester that turns them into reusable water. "From the program's initial launch in August 2018, the hotel has diverted over 11,234.5 pounds of food waste from landfill while creating 944 gallons of water," said the general manager Carlo Carroccia. The Inn at Dos Brisas in Washington, Tx., won an industry award for its efforts in environmental sustainability, for composting the waste products of the inn's equestrian facility on a large scale and reviving the once depleted land. Combined with tree branches, this creates an organic fertilizer later sold at farmers' markets. Two Arlo hotels in New York City currently offer free monthly talks about sustainability, across various industries, with the aim of forming a community for eco conscious travelers. The next one in SoHo on May 15 explains wild harvesting, ethnobotany and how to lead a green lifestyle.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Fall for Dance, New York City Center's annual festival, will be digital this year, its 17th. Performances will be recorded at City Center and available on Oct. 21 and 26, and then on demand through Nov. 1. For many of the dancers participating, the festival will be their first onstage performance since March, when the coronavirus outbreak closed theaters across the country. With many performers unable to travel, this year's programs will focus on choreographers and dancers based in the city. A mission of this year's festival is to provide New York dancers, whose seasons have largely been canceled, an opportunity to perform onstage, Arlene Shuler, City Center's president and chief executive, said in an interview. While much online dance programming has been free, tickets are 15 for the Fall for Dance programs, consistent with the festival's prices for in person shows. Ms. Shuler cited the costs of "a very highly produced program, with very high expenses," like health and safety protocols in place because of the coronavirus, and emphasized the importance of paying dancers and stage workers. (Tickets will be free for schools partnered with City Center Education and Community Engagement, as well as Fall for Dance Lab participants.) Instead of the festival's usual five programs, there will be just two this year. Each program will showcase four works, two of which will be world premiere commissions.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
WASHINGTON America's economic recovery is in an uneasy pause, with key indicators of hiring, shopping and investment stalling or in retreat in the wake of a resurgence in coronavirus cases across broad sections of the country, and with Congress and President Trump showing no signs of progress on another stimulus deal. Real time measures of consumer spending, business sentiment, small business reopening plans and even available jobs began flatlining last month, suggesting that the wave of virus infections that swept across parts of the United States in June and July came with economic consequences. Small business data from the time management firm Homebase shows no improvement since the middle of the summer in employment or hours worked in crucial parts of the economy. Job postings from the online recruiting site Indeed slipped backward this week for the first time since May. Now, key policy supports that included a 600 per week unemployment insurance expansion have begun to lapse. Congress appears unlikely to pick up negotiations on a new relief package until September, and analysts are increasingly accounting for the possibility that lawmakers will fail to strike a deal before the November election. By that point, with the changing weather pushing many people back inside, public health officials fear a new wave of coronavirus infections. Those twin risks the path of the coronavirus and waning policy support loom over the country's fledgling recovery when the economy has yet to recover about 60 percent of the jobs lost since the start of the pandemic. More than half of those who are still out of work say they never expect to go back to their old jobs, according to polling from the online research firm SurveyMonkey for The New York Times. Without a new government package, "we could go back into recession," said Megan Greene, a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. "We built half a bridge, and we didn't bother to finish it." Congress initially poured money into the economy to help it deal with the pandemic, but its relief efforts were intended to counter a short term problem. One time stimulus checks and expanded unemployment insurance bolstered household finances, but the weekly 600 benefits lapsed in late July. A program that was funneling loans to small businesses, preventing bankruptcies, ended in early August. The pandemic, it has turned out, is around for the long haul. Mr. Trump has signed executive orders and memorandums that could temporarily extend some relief programs, but he cannot fully revamp them unilaterally. His plan to continue more generous unemployment insurance, for instance, will only partly replace the former benefit offering 300 or 400 extra per week instead of 600. Only 15 states have won approval so far to administer the benefit, and it will take time to get the money flowing. Once it does, the funds backing up the program could be exhausted quickly, depending on how many people are using them. "The lack of emergency unemployment benefits in August is going to have, I think, devastating effects both for families and the economy as a whole," said Ernie Tedeschi, an economist at Evercore who has tracked the effects of the supplemental benefits throughout the recovery. The steep decline in benefits will almost certainly hamper consumer spending, which makes up 70 percent of the economy. Mr. Tedeschi estimated that consumption could drop by as much as 58 billion this month, for instance. 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. That's bad news for a recovery that, up until recently, had been surprising many with its speed and robustness. Unemployment dropped sooner and faster than practically anyone predicted. Retail sales rebounded strongly through July. Most official government data, which are reported on a delay, have yet to show a reversal. Real time data, and more short term government releases, tell a different story. Initial state jobless claims jumped unexpectedly last week, according to data released Thursday. Figures collected by Opportunity Insights, a project run by a group of academic economists, show that consumers may have already begun to cut their spending slightly as expanded benefits lapse. Low income consumers had been spending at roughly pre coronavirus levels by midsummer, but pulled back in the first week of August. A slowdown is also taking hold across other income groups, which had never recovered their former consumption levels in the first place. Some economists are surprised that consumer data has not fallen off more starkly: Certain measures, like an index that tracks Chase credit card spending, are holding steady. That may speak to the success of the policies already in place. Consumers built a cushion using government payments and debt relief, and are using that to sustain spending now. Saving as a share of disposable income jumped to 25.7 percent in the second quarter, up from less than 10 percent in the first, Commerce Department data showed. "People saved a ton of money over the last few months," said Jesse Edgerton, a senior economist at J.P. Morgan. "It does look like it would be more of a gradual downslope." Still, the timing is bad for fiscal support to run short. The economic recovery was already facing a drag as a wave of coronavirus infections that started in mid June stalled the nation's reopening. Opportunity Insights data shows that small business revenues and openings, which had been recovering, began to decline again around early July. Service industry leaders in the New York region became more pessimistic about business activity in August, based on a Federal Reserve Bank of New York survey, after becoming more optimistic the prior month. Consumer sentiment has fallen to low levels, based on a survey conducted by the University of Michigan, reflecting continued uncertainty. If the recovery does stall out or reverse, the nation's most vulnerable people could be hurt the worst. Families with children have already been far more likely to report food insecurity and other types of financial hardship, based on one New York Fed analysis. Lower income and minority workers are also more likely to have lost work or hours, and are heavily concentrated in the service sectors like hotels and casinos that may struggle to snap back until the pandemic is under control. Most economists still project additional government support as the most likely outcome, but they are increasingly concerned that the money will not be forthcoming. "Markets appear to be taking a view that major fiscal legislation is inevitable," Goldman Sachs analysts wrote in a note published on Aug. 14. "While we still think a fiscal package is much more likely than not, we believe there is a roughly one in four chance that Congress fails to pass further aid until after the election."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
After just two years on the job, New York's subway chief, Andy Byford, has resigned, ready to move on from an impatient governor whose opinions on how to repair the ailing system often clashed with his own. He is too polite to say as much, stressing in an interview with The Times that the start of the new year is just a good time to go. "It is absolutely my decision to leave," he said. Mr. Byford, a British mass transit expert willing to be the public face of a troubled train and bus network, brought hope to beleaguered riders. On time train performance is now over 80 percent, up from 58 percent in January 2018, when he arrived. By the fall of last year, major subway delays on weekdays were down nearly 40 percent compared with a year earlier, according to data from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the subway and bus system. Mr. Byford was taking common sense steps like raising speed limits on the subways and increasing training for operators. What had become a crisis for New Yorkers a source of daily frustration if not anger as children arrived late to school and adults to work had eased substantially, and even begun to show hopeful signs of turnaround. Together with the authority's chairman, Patrick Foye, Mr. Byford, as president of New York City Transit, was overseeing a long overdue transformation of an aging subway system in dire need of investment.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Credit...Hilary Swift for The New York Times Bernie Sanders sat in a mostly empty room at a Detroit convention center four days before the Michigan primary on Tuesday, and he spoke softly about failure. "In the 1950s," he said, "this was a wealthy, prosperous community. And then ...." His eight guests, people whose lives have been touched by shifts in American trade policy, nodded. Then came the North American Free Trade Agreement, a broad treaty signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1993 that reduced tariffs and duties between the United States, Canada and Mexico. Mr. Sanders voted against it in the House and against its recent replacement, the United States Mexico Canada Agreement, as a senator. "I have done my best to oppose these disastrous trade agreements," Mr. Sanders said later at a public round table with his guests labor leaders, autoworkers, activists. "Joe Biden has supported them." To this day, he added, Mr. Biden doesn't consider his NAFTA vote a mistake. Still, he maintains his penchant for addressing broad, overarching themes. Mr. Sanders speaks of NAFTA as synecdoche for the ills of capitalism: the exploitation of workers, the "race to the bottom." Likewise, he speaks of Mr. Biden as synecdoche for the Democratic establishment, which united on the eve of Super Tuesday to halt Mr. Sanders's rise. Even now, the consolidation against Mr. Sanders continues. Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan, endorsed Mr. Biden over Mr. Sanders on Thursday. This despite the fact that Mr. Sanders stumped for her in 2018, delivering a fiery address in Ann Arbor laced with the very ideas Ms. Whitmer now considers divisive. 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 Biden campaign," Ms. Whitmer told me at a Detroit restaurant on Friday, "there is space for everyone." Mr. Biden, she said, is skilled at forming such broad coalitions. But ordinary voters or at least the ones I spoke to at Mr. Sanders's rally at Detroit's TCF Center on Friday night seem undisturbed by Mr. Sanders's brashness, or at least oblivious to it. With them, his message is what resonates the loudest. Jevon J. Johnson, a Detroit police captain who has been on the force for 21 years, happened to be stationed at the rally, working security. After Mr. Sanders shook his hand the senator routinely goes out of his way to greet workers at the facilities his campaign uses Captain Johnson told me he supports Mr. Sanders because "he's got a good agenda," including "reduced prices for education. I just think everybody should have an opportunity." Shannon Schenk Torres, a 48 year old banquet supervisor at the TCF Center, also supports Mr. Sanders. Mr. Sanders's platform seems the most robust to her, and the most extreme: "I am left, but now I'm twice as left as before" 2016, she said. "It's going to take someone twice as left to cancel out all the bad stuff that's happened over the last four years." Some 6,000 people, many hoisting aloft "Bernie" signs, packed into the convention center's auditorium. Most were young, and many appeared to be teenagers, arriving in groups of friends. They roared for Mr. Sanders, who used his time not only to make his usual case that money in politics has been a scourge on American policymaking and that many mainstream Democrats have an interest in maintaining the status quo but also to bring it to bear on Mr. Biden's record. Rallygoers booed when Mr. Sanders brought up Mr. Biden's support of the Iraq war, the bank bailouts of 2008, the credit card industry. The theme was, "Which side are you on?" The crowd seemed to intuit that it really is that simple it's either the way things have been or the way they could be. In the run up to Tuesday's primary, Mr. Biden has been scarce in Michigan, sending surrogates to stump and scheduling only two in person events the day before the vote. Mr. Sanders, by contrast, spent the weekend in Michigan, hosting events in Detroit, Dearborn, Ann Arbor and Flint. As Mr. Biden has pulled ahead in Michigan polls, Mr. Sanders has poured money into building a ground game in the state, with several field offices, paid organizers and grass roots canvassing efforts. After a bruising Super Tuesday in which he claimed only four states to Mr. Biden's 10, Mr. Sanders came to Michigan to fight for the same voters who delivered his narrow victory over Hillary Clinton in the state four years ago, in hopes of beating the establishment candidate once again. At the Sanders field office in Hamtramck, an immigrant heavy enclave in Detroit, I found volunteers preparing to go knocking on doors. As a field organizer addressed the crowd a mix of young and old, male and female, black, brown, and white a printer balanced on a folding table in the back of the room turned out stacks of fliers in Arabic, English and Bengali. With the pep talk concluded, I rode with Sarah Peslar, 47, to a street in Hamtramck where she would begin her day's work. She has been a social worker for some 20 years, she told me, and currently works at a free health clinic for children in Hamtramck. "My biggest issue is health care and the cost of health care," she said. Mr. Sanders sighed, as though the question has occurred to him, too. He does not look contemplative or melancholy when he meditates on these things, but rather furious. He brought up his supporters, the poor and struggling who send him slivers of their slim paychecks in raw, desperate hope. "It's not my style to give up," he said, finally, reflecting on his own nature. "I was born with a lot of endurance." The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
PARIS Milan's not the only city with a La Scala. This fall, a long lost theater of the same name reopened its doors here in Paris, and high profile collaborations are already putting it on the map. This month, La Scala Paris welcomed a production of "Dans la luge d'Arthur Schopenhauer" ("On Arthur Schopenhauer's Sledge"), by and starring the popular French author Yasmina Reza. This chamber work with just four characters was a fine choice for the intimate, 550 seat venue. Painted in shades of dark blue, the modern auditorium was designed by Richard Peduzzi and offers flexible seating configurations. In the case of Ms. Reza's exploration of one man's depression, composed mainly of monologues, the thrust stage allows the audience to be close to each actor. For La Scala Paris, this new act is just the latest development in a history full of twists and turns. It was designed as a smaller replica of Milan's grand opera house by the widow of a 19th century industrial tycoon, who had fallen in love with the original. La Scala Paris never presented opera, however. It started life in 1873 as a luxurious "cafe concert," or cabaret, famous for its glass ceiling. In the 20th century, it became a high end movie theater and then a pornographic multiplex before being bought in 1999 by Brazil's Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. The venue was rediscovered and restored by a couple, Melanie and Frederic Biessy. Ms. Biessy is the head of an investment fund and provided financial backing for the operation, while Mr. Biessy has three decades' experience as a theater producer. The theater's model is unusual in France: While La Scala Paris is run privately, without state funding, the programming tries to bridge the gap between the country's public institutions, which lean toward highbrow fare, and privately funded theater, considered less sophisticated. Crossover between the two remains limited, as artists mostly build their careers in one or the other. La Scala Paris has found a natural partner in Ms. Reza, a playwright who has also straddled that divide, and "On Arthur Schopenhauer's Sledge" is a creditable start. Frederic Belier Garcia's production, created in 2006 and reworked this season, doesn't make much of an unusual stage layout, with stairs leading down to the audience on three sides. It relies on the four actors to carry the scenes but doesn't always provide them with the most natural stage directions. Ms. Reza's wise, occasionally ferocious text is the real star. She has a gift for introducing details that bring out a character's quirks and perspective, and she put it to good use in the monologues, which are generally addressed to another, silent character. Ms. Reza plays Nadine Chipman, who sets the scene by describing how the hand of her partner, Ariel, who has fallen into a depression, hangs listlessly over the armrest of his favorite chair all day. "My husband has no radicalism," she sighs, the line at once odd sounding and arresting in French. The play's title is inspired by Ariel's journey. A specialist in the 17th century Dutch thinker Baruch Spinoza, who saw happiness as one of the goals of philosophy, he instead turns to the pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher of 200 years later, as his mental health suffers. Andre Marcon lends the role a gruff despondency, which perfectly contrasts with Jerome Deschamps's spot on comic turn as the oblivious Serge Othon Weil, a friend of the couple, who preaches optimism by way of well meaning platitudes. The fourth member of this bourgeois quartet is a psychiatrist (Christele Tual), who has little to do besides listening to the others. Her only speech, about becoming obsessed with an old lady who blocks her path in the street, is well constructed but feels somewhat detached from the rest. Ms. Reza herself has uneven moments as Nadine, but she adroitly brings out the character's exasperation and her shallow side as she considers cheating on her husband. We see the worst of her and Ariel, which makes the ending somehow more poignant. When he asks for simple kindness, and she hesitates before lying down against him onstage, their possible reconciliation rings true. As one theater opens in Paris, however, another is being threatened with closure. Le Tarmac, located in the northeast of the city, has been locked in a battle with France's culture ministry since last January, when the minister at the time, Francoise Nyssen, announced that the venue would be repurposed. The plan was to hand it over to Theatre Ouvert, a center supporting new writing, which will find itself without a stage in 2019 after its current lease ends. The irony is that the missions of the two rival artistic teams are mostly aligned. Le Tarmac, which settled at its current address in 2011, also focuses on emerging artists, specifically French speaking ones from around the world. The ministry's highhanded treatment of Le Tarmac's current residents prompted an outcry. A petition against the plan gathered over 15,000 signatures. Ms. Nyssen retreated, instead publishing an open call for projects for the venue last July. No results have been announced yet, and the departure of Ms. Nyssen last month as part of a larger cabinet reshuffle means it will now fall to her successor, Franck Riester, to solve the problem of what to do with Le Tarmac. It is set in the depths of winter, in a mining camp such as you would have found during the Klondike gold rush of the late 19th century. The first scene is captivating. As a woman, Ruby (Marina Keltchewsky), watches from a makeshift tent, a man wearing a heavy fur coat inches his way toward the front of the stage in near darkness. His face isn't visible, but the story he tells of survival in the mountains and grief after losing his child with Ruby to the cold is epic. Mr. Bah and Mr. Allaire were inspired by the works of Jack London as well as Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," and attempt to spin a philosophical parable out of the situation, as the small community around these two people is driven mad by the discovery of gold near the camp. It's ostensibly a tale about greed, but its construction isn't tight enough to explain the swings in tone, or the character's erratic reactions. When Zan, the father of Ruby's child, suddenly goes on a murderous rampage, neither the text nor the direction really clarifies why. It's a shame, because Jean Pierre Baro has real gravitas in the part, while Criss Niangouna and Malik Faraoun bring verve to their roles as miners. The less than half full auditorium was more worrying for Le Tarmac's hopes of a happy denouement to its current woes. As the only theater in Paris devoted to French speaking artists from outside the country, it has served an important purpose in identifying talents from territories including former French colonies in Africa, who may face systemic obstacles elsewhere. Leaving Le Tarmac without a venue to perform in would close a door to the Paris stage for them.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
CITY OF LIGHT The Making of Modern Paris By Rupert Christiansen 206 pp. Basic Books. 25. Witty, learned and informative at lightning speed (the author does the Commune in about 16 pages), Rupert Christiansen's "City of Light: The Making of Modern Paris" offers the fascinating story of a metamorphosis. The city of graceful spaciousness that we know today took shape during France's glittering Second Empire (1852 70), an era of mind boggling wealth and terrible destitution presided over by the man Karl Marx memorably called a "grotesque mediocrity": the Emperor Louis Napoleon, Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew. To keep his grasp on power, this "second grade dictator" (in Christiansen's words) needed to take control of his country's politically volatile, physically decaying capital. Enter Georges Eugene Haussmann, prefect of the Seine: Louis Napoleon's very own Robert Moses. Like his 20th century New York City counterpart, Haussmann was a razer. He wiped out whole (poor) neighborhoods to make room for roads and bridges. He knocked down and excavated old Paris and replaced its medieval crannies and narrow twisting streets so handy for throwing up barricades in insurrectionary moments with broad rectilinear avenues arranged like the spokes of a wheel, to establish links between the Paris railway stations and promote the expansion of trade. His watchwords were commerce, efficiency and ventilation. Christiansen speculates that his "choking asthma ... might go some way toward explaining his subsequent obsession with clearing blockages and opening up airflow." But whatever the psychic roots of Haussmannization, its political aim was to make Paris "a smoothly functioning machine that could be controlled and surveyed, generating the maximum of profit for a contented affluent citizenry controlled by a ruling elite." Along the sweeping new boulevards, five and six story apartment houses for the prosperous were built of "dressed and polished limestone from the quarries of the Oise," their facades a filigree of ironwork. The "architectural miracle" of the Palais Garnier opera house rose like a souffle at one splendid end of the Avenue de l'Opera. The city's cathedralesque department stores; its lovely public parks (the golden gated Parc Monceau, the Buttes Chaumont, the elaborately landscaped Bois de Boulogne); its new sewers, completed in 1867, whose "spacious tunnels had gaslit galleries that became a major tourist attraction, notably visited by both the czar of Russia and the king of Portugal" all these "marvels of the new Babylon" were brought into being, in the emperor's name, by Baron Haussmann. Whose career imploded, along with the whole Second Empire, in early 1870. That year, Louis Napoleon went seeking glory on the battlefield, only to be defeated and taken prisoner by the Prussians. There ensued political chaos, the siege of Paris, the Commune and the tragic massacre that ended it. For days, Paris burned.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
"In a Cloud, in a Wall, in a Chair: Six Modernists in Mexico at Midcentury" includes weavings by Sheila Hicks made in Mexico in the 1960s, foreground and center wall. CHICAGO They lived or worked in Mexico from the 1930s through the 1970s. Some were friends, some mentors, some colleagues. But all of their work, ranging from photography to furniture to weaving to sculpture, was transformed by their time there. The exhibition "In a Cloud, in a Wall, in a Chair: Six Modernists in Mexico at Midcentury," simply but beautifully presented at the Art Institute of Chicago's Modern Wing, highlights the work of six women: the Cuban born Clara Porset, the Mexican Lola Alvarez Bravo, the German emigre Anni Albers, and the Americans Ruth Asawa, Cynthia Sargent and Sheila Hicks (who at 85 is still actively working with fibers). Politics affected the geographic and artistic trajectories of all six, but they also influenced the curatorial decision to make the exhibition about many women rather than one. "In the beginning people said, 'Why don't you do a show on Clara Porset?'" Zoe Ryan, the lead curator, said. Ms. Ryan, who worked with the consulting curator Ana Elena Mallet and the research assistant Valentina Sarmiento Cruz, added, "We have tried hard to move away from the singular heroic figures." Ms. Porset herself has often been in the shadow of the heroic figure of the Mexican architect Luis Barragan; the low slung Butaque chairs in his own Instagram famous house are by Ms. Porset. From the beginning of their careers, these women worked collaboratively, and created opportunities to support the work of others. The exhibition's odd and unwieldy title was inspired by an illustrated spread in the catalog for Ms. Porset's influential 1952 exhibition, "Art in Daily Life: Well Designed Objects Made in Mexico," with black and white images of a cloud, a wall, the sea, and the sand. You have to take a moment to let it sink in. (I overheard one of the museum guards quietly reading the quotation off the wall: "'In a cloud ... in a wall ... in a chair. There is design in everything.' That's so true," she murmured. "I like that." A wall by the entrance shows a set of six photographs, taken by Ms. Alvarez Bravo for the exhibition "Art in Daily Life," which included printed fabrics by Ms. Sargent alongside new industrial design and significant works of folk art all made in Mexico. "Mexico in the 1920s, '30s, '40s, was like Paris, everybody was there," Ms. Ryan said. "It was a real robust environment for creative thinking." Mexican artists beyond the muralists were creating important new work, and international designers were coming for inspiration, and staying to learn. Ms. Alvarez Bravo, who frequently documented Ms. Porset's furniture, interior design and curatorial projects, is represented here by wall size reproductions of her 1940s and 1950s photomontages. These collages read as commentary on the pace of modernization in her Mexico, overlapping brains with computer innards and workers' bodies with lines of new cars. At a time when immigration from Mexico often dominates the news cycle, here we see immigration to Mexico. Ms. Hicks went to escape a North American art world in which "textiles were not seen as academic, as intellectual," Ms. Ryan said. Mexico, by contrast, had (and has) a "highly developed thread culture," according to Ms. Hicks. Ms. Albers, Ms. Asawa and Ms. Sargent were also drawn to the country's weaving traditions. Ms. Albers visited the country 14 times, starting in 1935, and the curators credit a visit to the Zapotec ruins at Monte Alban for the triangular motifs that turn up in her prints, wall hangings and commercial fabric for Knoll. "Everyone at the Bauhaus was searching for this abstract visual language," Ms. Ryan said. "By the time they go to Mexico they are like, 'These people have been modern for millenniums!'" Ms. Asawa, who was born in California to immigrants from Japan, took two trips to Mexico. The first, in 1945, was to study craft and included a class with Ms. Porset, who then encouraged her to go to Black Mountain College, the experimental school in Asheville, N.C., where Josef and Anni Albers taught after fleeing Nazi Germany. Ms. Asawa was herself at loose ends at the time; interned with her family from 1942 43, she had studied as a teacher, but anti Japanese sentiment prevented her from using her training. She decided instead to study art. On Ms. Asawa's second trip, in 1947, she taught art to children and adults in Toluca. In return, local artisans taught her what they knew: weaving wire into baskets to hold eggs. After much practice, what began as functional baskets the exhibition includes a long oval one that she gave to Ms. Albers, who used it for mail became bubbles, or continuous lines of connected orbs, or nested shapes, light enough to hang from the ceiling but solid enough to hold a corner. Ms. Asawa's drawings from the period show lots of undulating lines, as if she's working out the shapes on paper that she will eventually draw in the air with wire. The least known artist in the exhibition is Ms. Sargent, boldly represented by two hooked rugs from her Music Series, named "Bartok" and "Scarlatti." She was a brilliant colorist, aligning pink and red, olive and turquoise, in loop and lozenge shapes that dance across the woolly expanses. Ms. Sargent also studied with Josef Albers at Black Mountain. She drove to Mexico with husband, Wendell Riggs, and her son in a motor home in 1951. The couple set up their company Riggs Sargent, which made those rugs as well as upholstery fabrics, textiles for the home, and furniture. They also founded a market, the Bazaar Sabado, in 1960, promoting their own work as well as that of other designers and craftspeople creating neoartesania, or neo craft. Oddly, the one designer of the six whose work doesn't leap off the walls is Ms. Porset. Although she was the instigator for both this exhibition and the projects and travel that brought these designers together, it is difficult to get a sense of her more ambitious architecturally scaled projects from the photographs and drawings on view. That said, it is wonderful to have the opportunity to contemplate her chunky Totonac chair, designed in the 1950s and upholstered in purple fabric produced by Ms. Sargent and Mr. Riggs, next to a chunky seated Totonac figurine, made by that indigenous Mexican people in the fifth or sixth century. The two objects have the same stance and proportions, making the connection between folk art and modern life absolutely clear. "In a Cloud" pairs well with a second show at the Art Institute, "Weaving Beyond the Bauhaus," organized by Erica Warren, the museum's assistant curator of textiles. This exhibition also includes work by Ms. Albers and Ms. Hicks, and offers a separate, sometimes overlapping narrative of postwar design networks that first brought these weaving women and one man, Angelo Testa together. Standout works include Lenore Tawney's cloudlike "The Bride Has Entered" (1982) and Claire Zeisler's waterfall effect "Private Affair I" (1986). These dominating works, made of cotton, linen and hemp, show textile artists still fighting for attention decades after those trips to Mexico. A 1968 quotation from Ms. Albers printed on a platform neatly sums up what they were all fighting against: "I find this great problem that people are so inclined to think of textiles always in this useful sense. They want to sit on it; they want to wear it. And they don't like to think of it as something that might hang on the wall and have the qualities that a painting or a sculpture has, that you turn to it again and again and that it might possibly last for centuries." "In a Cloud," "Weaving beyond the Bauhaus," and the Museum of Modern Art's "Taking a Thread for a Walk," one of that museum's reopening shows, all convincingly propose fiber art as an entry into a canon that was long overdue for revision. Even better, they do so without slotting the weaving women into the same old heroic mode. It's fine to be part of a talented crowd! All great art doesn't need to be influenced by Europe! It is possible to be both beautiful and useful! There is indeed design in everything. In a Cloud, in a Wall, in a Chair: Six Modernists in Mexico at Midcentury Through Jan. 12 at the Art Institute of Chicago; artic.edu.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Clockwise from top left: aerial shot of Open Architecture's Tank Shanghai; exterior rendering of Bee'ah Corporation's headquarters in Sharjah by Zaha Hadid; Toshiko Mori's Fass school in Senegal; and aerial interior view rendering of the Aranya Art Center in Shanghai by Neri Hu. Architecture was long called a "gentleman's profession," which may have been true if by that you meant one that systematically excluded women for most of its existence. Before World War II, you could count the number of noted female architects on one hand. As late as the 1990s, the percentage of architecture firms owned by women in the United States was still in the single digits. Today, less than a third of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) membership is female, and a survey of the world's 100 largest architecture firms by the online design magazine Dezeen found that women occupied just 10 percent of the highest ranking jobs. The first time a woman won the AIA's Gold Medal, its highest honor, was in 2014. The recipient, Julia Morgan, had been dead for 57 years. There are signs of improvement, though. According to the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), the number of women in the field continues to rise: Women now account for nearly half of the students in architecture schools in the United States; they make up about 40% of those taking licensing exams up by nearly 50 percent in 20 years. In 1999, when Elizabeth Diller and her husband and partner, Ricardo Scofidio, won the first MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant ever given to an architect, they were known more for their brainy publications and art installations than for their buildings of which there were none. Today, Ms. Diller's office is a high culture juggernaut, responsible for some of the most renowned projects of the last decade, including the High Line in New York City, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and the Broad Museum in Los Angeles. With the Shed, a new multidisciplinary arts center at Hudson Yards in Manhattan, Diller Scofidio Renfro and the Rockwell Group, their design collaborators, have created a first of its kind, 200,000 square foot, reconfigurable event space for the Far West Side. The building's signature element is a striking 120 foot high, pleated glass enclosure on massive wheels that can extend or retract to accommodate varied programs concerts, exhibitions, theater and crowd sizes. Major construction is expected to end this winter. Though also an arts center, Deborah Berke's NXTHVN, in New Haven, is world's away from the Shed. Ms. Berke, who announced herself to the architectural world with a manifesto entitled "Architecture of the Everyday" and is now the first female dean of Yale's School of Architecture, has always eschewed the flamboyant. NXTHVN, which opens in December, occupies two former factories that were quietly renovated into studios and a community center founded by the artists Titus Kaphar and Jonathan Brand. A new tower clad in glass and scalloped concrete panels links the two buildings and creates a beacon of renewal for its frayed neighborhood. The architect Amanda Levete and the artist Anish Kapoor, both of London, pursue a similar goal with the subway entry plazas they have created for a neighborhood in Naples, Italy, that has suffered from municipal neglect. Two massive, contrasting sculptures one in reflective aluminum, the other in Corten steel now mark the two entrances of the Monte San Angelo station. Below ground, Ms. Levete incorporates the vaults of an earlier, failed transit station into the rest of her design. The 80,000 square foot project began while Ms. Levete was a partner at her previous firm, Future Systems, and is scheduled to open in early 2019. Next month, when a school that the New York architect Toshiko Mori designed pro bono for the remote Senegalese village of Fass opens, it will be functionally and architecturally momentous. It is the first school in a region with 30,000 school age children, and will serve girls and boys. Ms. Mori's oval design, plaster covered mud brick walls, and thatched roof are a modern take on local housing traditions an effort to make the building welcoming to its 200 students, ranging from 6 to 10 years old. "I'm fascinated with how we bring forward the vernacular with contemporary applications," said Ms. Mori, who in 2015 completed the Thread cultural center in the village of Sinthian, about an hour to the north. Magui Peredo and her partner, Salvador Macias, the principals of Estudio Macias Peredo in Guadalajara, Mexico, and finalists for this year's Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize for Emerging Architecture, elegantly reinterpret the Mexican building tradition of thick walls and courtyards for their mixed use apartments above commercial space Gonzalez Luna Building. "Walls are an enduring aspect of Mexican architecture in general, and our work in particular," Ms. Peredo explained. "Luis Barragan, who was from here, used walls to critique the thinness of glass, its impermanence. For us, the question was how to express the wall in a vertical building." Their solution was to puncture the exposed concrete perimeter structure with recesses that give visual depth and create private terraces and shade for the apartments. Tradition also inspired Neri Hu's brick clad, 17 room hotel in Yangzhou, China, which opened officially last month. The Shanghai architects, whose practice also includes a thriving design store and their own lines of furniture and objects, looked to Chinese urban and residential typologies to create a modern day "walled city," a collection of quiet courtyards and enclosed spaces linked by a grid of narrow pathways. Another of the firm's projects, the 25,000 square foot Aranya Art Center in Shanghai, is trying to become an urban destination in one of the hastily built, culturally arid suburban developments that characterize so many modern Chinese cities. "The situation in these developments is far from ideal," said Rossana Hu, the firm's co founder. "We're trying to create context where there is none." Creating context was not an issue for Huang Wenjing and Li Hu, principals of the Beijing based Open Architecture, with their Tank Shanghai project, which opens this month. It repurposes the fuel storage tanks of a former military airport into an art museum and cultural center in the booming West Bund arts district. There's a traditional museum in one tank and a restaurant, nightclub, and event space in individual tanks. The 110,000 square foot project also includes a tank with an open air oculus, for exhibiting large scale art. On a smaller scale, but equally striking, is the firm's 8,000 square foot Dune Art Museum, opening in October and named for its unusual location: carved into and mostly beneath a sand dune near the Chinese coastal city of Qinhuangdao. The subterranean siting strategy actually preserves a small slice of open sand in an area where mammoth development has all but erased a once sylvan beach. More than almost anyone, Zaha Hadid unmoored contemporary architecture from its affinities for right angles and male dominance. The first woman to win the Pritzker Prize (in 2004), she died at the height of her powers in 2016. Two of her later projects will finish major construction at the end of this year and extend her legacy. The first, 1000 Museum Tower, is a 900,000 square foot condominium in downtown Miami with an exposed structural system that climbs the 62 story building like the tendrils of a giant, otherworldly beanstalk. Hadid's 70,000 square foot headquarters for the Bee'ah Corporation, an environmental and waste consultancy in Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates, is even more organic in design: a 70 foot high, dunelike composition that looks as though it was swept into place by a desert wind. When Hadid opened her office in 1979, there was some question as to which was more radical: her work, or the idea that a woman could lead a practice that would grow to a staff of more than 400. Happily, today only the work continues to amaze.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
WASHINGTON Depending on how you look at it, fate has been either cruel or kind to the Watergate Hotel. When it opened in 1967, developers boasted that the hotel in the vast modernist complex along the Potomac River would be synonymous with luxury, its rooms filled by the capital's glamorous visitors. Instead, Watergate became a stand in for scandal, its last syllable endlessly tagged to nefarious acts. That has not bothered Jacques and Rakel Cohen, the new owners, who see in its history, however you spin it, a rare opportunity. Almost a decade after the Watergate closed its doors, the Cohens and their development company have reopened it on a bet that a 125 million renovation to restore its midcentury roots along with its scandal laden history can start a renaissance for the hotel and the offices and residences that surround it. Room keys instruct guests, "No need to break in." The voice of former President Richard M. Nixon will soon be heard in the public bathrooms and provides the soundtrack for the hotel's phone system which happens to get its number, 617 1972, from June 17, 1972, the day five men broke into the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex and changed history. Even the hotel's print font, a modified typewriter style type, draws inspiration from the 1970s era legal documents that chronicled so much of the scandal. "We didn't buy this hotel because of the scandal," Mrs. Cohen, who oversaw its redesign and marketing, said in an interview before its opening last month. "But because people were so curious about it, we said, 'We're known for that, so we'll bring it in, in a fun way.'" But if Nixonian ghosts haunt the hotel, the Cohens hope they will have company preferably people as well known as Elizabeth Taylor and Ronald Reagan, Watergate celebrity visitors from an earlier time. "People are always asking me, 'How do you bring back the scandal?'" Mrs. Cohen said. "But I always say that the scandal happened after," she added with some impatience. "Before that, the hotel was a glamorous place, was a playground for famous people. We're trying to bring that back to life." It is no small challenge. Once one of the city's most distinguished addresses, the Watergate complex these days is regarded as something of a yawn by most Washingtonians an island of office space and aging apartments unto itself, cut off from the rest of the city by the Potomac River and highways, and far from trendier neighborhoods. Only a smattering of shops catering to office workers and residents, including Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and former Senator Bob Dole, fill spaces that once held luxury boutiques. It was not always so. Rising on 10 recently cleared acres of riverfront property beside what would become the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the complex, with a cutting edge design and high prices, became a magnet for attention long before the first portions opened. The Italian architect Luigi Moretti's design (evoking the sails of a ship) was the subject of great debate in the city, as was the Vatican's partial ownership of the Italian development company behind the project. But neither fact bothered the legions of the rich and famous who made homes at the complex: Ms. Taylor, Placido Domingo, Senator Russell B. Long. The residences and hotel were so popular with the incoming Nixon administration that the complex came to be known as the Republican Bastille in certain circles. It would not take long, though, for that name to take on added meaning. On a fateful night in June 1972, some of the burglars a group that included James W. McCord Jr., a security coordinator for the Republican National Committee and the Committee for the Re election of the President checked into Rooms 214 and 314 of the Watergate Hotel under false names. They reportedly shared a lobster dinner at the hotel restaurant. And then, sometime after midnight, they set out to secretly break into the offices of the D.N.C. They were caught, booked and eventually exposed as henchmen for the president of the United States. When the police searched the men's rooms, they found electrical equipment, thousands of dollars in fresh 100 bills and a check written by E. Howard Hunt, a former C.I.A. agent who would eventually be exposed as the organizer of the break in. Watergate inspired history is nothing new for the hotel. By 1973, the year before Nixon resigned, the hotel and office building had become such tourist attractions that a travel writer for The New York Times observed, not entirely seriously, that the Watergate might have been approaching the Lincoln Memorial for annual visitors. Reports of thousands of dollars' worth of items with logos on them stolen from the hotel's rooms were common in the years that followed. Such acquisitiveness should come as no surprise, according to Carl Bernstein, who as a young reporter for The Washington Post worked with Bob Woodward to bring the scandal to light. "We live in an age of the commercialization of everything, so it just seems rather natural to me that in Washington you're going to have tourism around what is one of the great historical events in the life of the city," Mr. Bernstein said. Still, the Cohens remain far more interested in the glamour of the '60s than the hotel history of the '70s.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Even the greatest boxers don't always know when to hang up their gloves. The announcement this week that Mike Tyson (54, retired for 15 years) would fight Roy Jones Jr. (51, inactive for two years) in September called to mind the other boxing immortals who fought one (or two or three) times too often and added forgettable chapters to stellar careers. When the story of Ali is told, the last act is usually his loss to Leon Spinks and then his win in the rematch to earn the heavyweight title for the third time. But that wasn't the end for the Greatest. After a brief retirement, he returned in 1980 to take on the new titleholder, Larry Holmes. Ali was overmatched, and the fight was stopped by his corner in the 11th round. "Ali could not fight. He could not dance. He could not even punch," Dave Anderson wrote in The New York Times. That wasn't his last shot at a title. He went back into the ring again a year later at age 39. His opponent, Trevor Berbick, won a unanimous decision; ringside observers gave Ali perhaps one round at most. "You can't beat Father Time," Ali said after the fight. Dozens of big wins, championships in five weight classes, a culminating victory over Roberto Duran. Sugar Ray Leonard had done it all as the 1980s came to a close. But he didn't think he was finished. In 1991, he went up against 23 year old Terry Norris, and it was a fight too far. The result was a loss by unanimous decision. "Norris was simply too much for the 34 year old Leonard, too quick and too strong," The Times wrote. Leonard immediately announced his retirement. Still, six years later, he went back into the ring at age 40 to take on 34 year old Hector Camacho. It ended with just the third loss of Leonard's career and the first by knockout. "His footwork was awkward," The Times wrote. "His jab was ineffective and lacked snap. He missed badly with many right hands. And when Camacho applied pressure, Leonard wilted without much resistance." Boxing's other Sugar Ray is often considered the best pound for pound fighter ever to step in the ring. But the end of his career was similarly uninspired. Robinson was holding a world title, his last, in 1960, when he lost it to Paul Pender. At the time, the prolific Robinson was 38 years old and an astonishing 142 7 2 in his career. He would go on to fight 46 more times. But championship bouts at Boston Garden and Yankee Stadium became fights at Wahconah Park in Pittsfield, Mass., and the Community Arena in Steubenville, Ohio. And guys named Rudolph Bent and Memo Ayon replaced opponents like Jake LaMotta and Rocky Graziano. At the end, Robinson was losing as many fights as he was winning. The final fight was a unanimous loss at age 44 to Joey Archer in Pittsburgh. Worst of all for the all conquering Robinson, the reaction of most fans was pity. "The crowd gave the faded Sugar man an ovation for a gallant effort," The Associated Press reported. Tyson's own final bouts, 15 years ago, after a turbulent career that included reviving it after a rape conviction and biting the ear of an opponent, were hardly nights of glory. After getting knocked out at age 35 by Lennox Lewis in a final bid for a title in 2002, Tyson went back into the ring three more times. He beat Clifford Etienne before being knocked out by Danny Williams and quitting in the middle of a fight against Kevin McBride. "If this does not convince the public that Tyson is washed up, perhaps nothing will," The Times wrote under the headline "Tyson Quits Fight and May Quit Boxing Next." Tyson did quit, until this week's announcement of his unlikely comeback. For Jones's part, years after he last fought for a major title, he kept plugging away as the champion of two little known sanctioning bodies, the World Boxing Union, or W.B.U., and the World Boxing Federation, or W.B.F., fighting against no names as recently as 2018. A handful of the greats seemed to walk away at the right time. Joe Louis, for example, posted a record of 66 2, then lost to the younger Rocky Marciano, and wisely left the ring for good. And not every comeback story is a disaster. Floyd Mayweather made the smart decision in 2017 to fight someone with little boxing experience, the U.F.C. star Conor McGregor. The fight may have been a gimmick, but Mayweather got the victory to remain undefeated, and everyone made a boatload of money.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
You howled in protest, and Equifax had no choice but to respond. On Tuesday, the company said it would waive all fees until Nov. 21 for people who want to freeze their Equifax credit files. It will also refund any fees that anyone has paid since Thursday, though the company would not say whether this would be automatic. Before the announcement on Tuesday, many of the people who tried to set up freezes after Equifax disclosed a breach of up to 143 million Social Security numbers, birth dates and other personal data discovered they had to pay Equifax for the privilege of protecting themselves from the breach. And they were not happy about it. It's a logical reaction: You did not ask Equifax to vacuum up data about you, and then resell it to marketers and loan sellers. And it is not your fault that the company could not keep that data safe. So why should you pay for a freeze, which keeps new creditors from seeing your credit file and thus can keep thieves from applying for credit in your name? Somehow, that question did not occur to Equifax on Thursday, when it first announced the breach. It apparently thought a year of free credit monitoring would be enough to placate consumers. When I asked Equifax on Sunday why it was not making freezes free, Wyatt Jefferies, a spokesman, did not respond to that particular question. Here are just some of the other questions I've asked Equifax. I'm still waiting for replies. 1. Will temporarily lifting a freeze also be free until Nov. 21, or just placing a freeze? 2. Why not make freezes and the lifting of those freezes free permanently for everyone? 3. Failing that, why not make freezes and thaws free permanently for everyone whose data was stolen in this instance or, for that matter, anytime in the future? 4. Why not pay Experian and TransUnion, the two other large consumer credit reporting agencies, to freeze the credit files connected to every victim of the most recent Equifax breach? After all, that breach makes people vulnerable to thieves who apply for credit in victims' names with lenders who check applicants' credit histories only with Experian or TransUnion. Equifax would not address that last one with me, but a reader named Kimberly Casey forwarded me an email exchange between her and Dann Adams, the president of Equifax's global consumer solutions unit, where he apologized and said that a service to "lock" Equifax, Experian and TransUnion files simultaneously would be coming soon. That might be helpful, given the trouble that so many of you have had getting any of the company's websites or phone systems to work in recent days. (Please, keep trying. It's worth the protection.) But let's hope they give this new service away for free, for life, to all individuals who had their data stolen in this instance and that the lock will work identically to a freeze and not involve giving up the right to sue the companies. I've asked Equifax repeatedly in recent days what phone number people should call to request a new PIN for thawing their freezes. On Sunday, Mr. Jefferies told me the company would stop issuing PINs based on the date the freeze was initiated and would instead issue new PINs to anyone who wanted to replace the old ones. It is not clear, however, exactly how consumers can do this. Another reader today told me that a phone representative for the company said that people were going to have to cancel old freezes, request new ones, go unprotected for days and wait for new PINs to show up in the mail. It should not be that complicated. Several of you have asked via email (lieber nytimes.com, please keep the questions coming) and Twitter ( ronlieber) about TransUnion's free TrueIdentity product, which the company is pushing on consumers who are considering a freeze. The company sure seems to want people to sign up for that product instead of freezing their files. It's not clear whether the mechanism TransUnion says it uses to "lock" files with that product provides the same protection as a freeze, or whether it is a lesser form of protection meant to shield TransUnion from some regulatory or legal perspective. A giant hat tip, however, to the person on Twitter who pointed out the company's draconian terms and conditions. I'm also waiting for answers about whether TransUnion and Experian will make freezes free for a period as Equifax has now done (or forever, for everyone, as all three agencies should do). I reached out to Mr. Adams at Equifax to ask whether he would be resigning in the wake of the lackluster response to victims' outrage. He responded by email, using an exclamation point for emphasis: "No, but for the record I am considering dropping my NYT subscription and picking up the Wash Post!" In a statement on Monday on a website that Equifax created to deal with the most recent breach, the company included this: "We are listening to issues consumers have experienced and their suggestions. These are helping to further inform our actions, and we are now sharing regular updates on this website. Thank you for your continued patience and feedback as we continue to improve this process." Translation: They fell short, far short, even though they had weeks to prepare themselves for the reaction. They know it. And the correct response from all of us is a full throated roar that is anything but patient.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
SAN FRANCISCO When Snapchat's app was redesigned late last year, a viral rage gripped its passionate and young users. The social media star Kylie Jenner tweeted that she had not been using the app as much and called the changes "sad." More than 1.25 million people signed a Change.org petition to get the company to return the app to its old design. A complaint on Twitter about the Snapchat redesign became one of the most retweeted messages of all time. On Tuesday, Snapchat's parent company, Snap, said it would redesign parts of the app's redesign after the overhaul had dragged down its business. For the first three months of the year, the social media company reported Tuesday, it posted a narrower loss than a year earlier and a 54 percent increase in revenue, to 231 million, which was below analyst expectations. While Snap's number of daily users rose to 191 million in the quarter, that figure was also below what Wall Street had anticipated. And the company said its user numbers in March were even lower, though it did not release them. Evan Spiegel, Snap's chief executive, cited Snapchat's redesign as a major reason for the disappointing performance. "A change this big to existing behavior comes with some disruption," he said, referring later to "headwinds from the redesign." The quarterly results, which sent Snap's stock plunging more than 15 percent in after hours trading, were a reversal from the previous quarter, when the social media company had finally appeared to shrug off its losing streak with strong sales and user growth. Snap, which went public in March 2017 and is often seen as a competitor to Facebook, has been grappling with inconsistent results, casting a cloud over its prospects. The latest earnings indicated that Snap had not been able to capitalize on the woes of Facebook, which has been dealing with a backlash over data privacy. Facebook said last week that it had added 70 million monthly active users in the first quarter, bringing it to 2.2 billion. So now Snap will tweak its redesign. Snapchat began as an app to send disappearing messages to friends, but it later added professional content from media companies and other features. When the company changed the app last year, the goal was to separate chats and stories from friends from the content of media properties, such as celebrities and publications. In practice, that meant Snapchat had two sides. The left side of the app featured chats and stories shared with, or by, people's friends. On the right side was content from publishers, amateur creators and celebrities and stories that Snap curated from user generated videos and photos. The goal was to expand the more lucrative media side of the business and to increase the app's appeal to an older demographic. But over the past few months, the changes diluted the core chat experience, which became cluttered with user stories. Snapchat's users, who are mostly young, quickly rebelled. "Snap has their back against the wall," said Daniel Ives, the head of technology research for GBH Insights. "They need to work with their user community." Now the company is moving stories made by friends back to the side of the app that also has media content. This change is aimed at decluttering the app's chat function. The pivots have some analysts worried about Mr. Spiegel's leadership of Snap. "What I'm looking for is some direction," said Richard Greenfield, a media and technology analyst at BTIG. "Evan was so decisive in that your friends are distinct from influencers you're not friends with Kim Kardashian, so she shouldn't be in your friends list and yet now they seem to be wavering on that." Content, rather than chat, is "where the monetization potential is," Mr. Greenfield added. Anthony DiClemente, an analyst at Evercore ISI, said, "The app redesign is a question and an open debate." He added, "I don't know that the Snap leadership has proven itself to such a degree that you have high conviction long term investors in the stock right now."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Credit...Bob Stowell/Getty Images The Boston Celtics have produced some of the biggest names in basketball history: Bill Russell, Red Auerbach, Larry Bird. But among all those icons, Tommy Heinsohn was Mr. Celtic. A 6 foot 7 forward who smoked cigarettes and sank hook shots, he was a Hall of Fame player and coach who worked with the Celtics from the day he was drafted in 1956 to the day he died, this week, at age 86. That made Heinsohn the only person to play a part in each of the franchise's 17 championships, a record shared with the Lakers. Despite his starring role in one of sports' most dominant dynasties, Heinsohn became even better known and loved in Boston for being the Celtics' color commentator and unofficial mascot for more than four decades. Most New Englanders under 50 remember him not from his time as a championship player and coach, but from having his Boston accent booming into their living rooms every game day. He shouted regularly. He rooted unabashedly. And he excoriated the refs. He did just about everything modern broadcasters are taught not to do, and that was why he was so entertaining. As I grew up in central Massachusetts, my first narrators of the game were Heinsohn and Gorman. Gorman played the straight man, describing the action, while Heinsohn would yell at the Celtics to run the court and dive for loose balls. When a call went against Boston, Heinsohn sounded less like a suit in the broadcasting booth and more like a fan in Section 323. "Are you kidding me?" he would shout. "This is ridiculous!" While sportscasters in other locales had catchphrases to punctuate their teams' best moments, Heinsohn's memorable calls marked the referees' worst ones. That style made Heinsohn stand out in the modern era of sports media. He was one of the final voices in the old guard of broadcasters who weren't afraid to show their allegiance. Announcers like Hawk Harrelson of the Chicago White Sox and Phil Rizzuto of the Yankees openly pulled for the teams they followed, to the delight of the hometown fans. But increasingly, sports broadcasts strive for a more measured and unbiased tone, in part because announcers move around more often, have aspirations for a national gig, or worry about a clip going viral. "It's all of the above," said Mike Breen, who has called Knicks games for 28 years and is now ESPN's lead N.B.A. announcer. "Quite frankly, I think there's a lot of us that are envious, in that we wish we could call a game the way Tommy did." Heinsohn, Breen added, "was himself on the air, all the time, every single night. And there's such a beauty to that." That was true even when Heinsohn called national games for CBS in the 1980s, in the heart of the Celtics Lakers rivalry. "If you listened to the broadcast, and you were not a Celtics fan, you would not like him," said Doc Rivers, the Celtics coach from 2004 to 2013 and a former color commentator. "And Tommy was OK with that." Rivers said that in his first years in Boston, he would often look to the broadcast booth after a questionable foul call. Heinsohn, he said, would always signal that the call was awful. "So I would then go and tell the ref, 'What the heck are you doing?'" Rivers said. "And you find out later the refs got it right." In annual league meetings, Rivers said the referees always brought up Heinsohn. "Every year one of the refs would say, 'Can you at least just tell him that he doesn't have to be so hard on us all the time?'" Rivers said. "I used to laugh and say, 'That will never happen.'" Bob Ryan, the longtime Boston Globe sports columnist, was a Boston College student when he wrote his first article about Heinsohn in 1967. "I completely blasted him as a totally unprofessional announcer," he said. "Something along the lines of, 'That is why you don't want a jock announcing games.'" Ryan later changed his mind, and his final article about Heinsohn focused partly on his intelligence. Yet one of Heinsohn's most lasting legacies came from his years as the second president of the N.B.A. players' union. Before the 1964 All Star Game, Heinsohn organized a strike to demand better working conditions. The owners agreed, leading to the N.B.A.'s first collective bargaining agreement and, eventually, free agency. Although he was a ferocious competitor, those who knew Heinsohn described him as kind and serene when the game clock expired, and generous with his time as a mentor and a friend. Heinsohn was also an accomplished painter, partial to watercolors and New England landscapes. "We have a Heinsohn in our living room," Ryan said. "It's called Snowy Winter Evening." As basketball evolved, Heinsohn did not. When 3 pointers became the rage, he still loved the midrange jumper. When advanced statistics became sportscasters' parlance, he ignored them. "You know what metric I know?" he once asked Gorman during a game. "The final score." Instead, he invented his own stat to measure the immeasurable; he awarded thousands of "Tommy Points" for hustle plays. Tony Allen, the scrappy Celtics defensive specialist, admitted this week that he would rewatch games to count his Tommy Points. "Any Celtic that ever played in a Celtic uniform always was thankful for a Tommy Point," he said. Heinsohn believed his eyes over stats, Gorman said. Before their first N.B.A. game together in 1981, Gorman said, he was laying out detailed notes with statistics and player anecdotes when Heinsohn arrived and asked what they were.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
There's a little dust on the dialogue in "Leah, the Forsaken," but a rare revival by the Metropolitan Playhouse shines up this 1862 play just fine. Set in an Austrian village in the early 1700s, the story centers on Rudolf (Jon Berry), the son of the town's magistrate, who has fallen in love with Leah (Regina Gibson), who is traveling through the country. Because she is a Jew, the law prevents her from settling in that land, and before you can say "immigrant play with parallels to our current political climate," the locals rile one another by trading in stereotypes and hearsay, leading to tense confrontations. There's a whiff of "Romeo and Juliet," as well as moments that feel like precursors to "The Crucible," as wild rumors and a scheming schoolmaster (Jeffrey Grover) threaten to enrage and blind the townspeople. To be sure, Augustin Daly, the playwright, was generous with the melodrama: Characters deliver expositional soliloquies, and emotions run deep and syrupy. But Daly threw in a few ideas about tolerance, too, raising this story a notch above other stage works of his era. With a cast of 15, Francis X. Kuhn, the director, has his job cut out for him on the small Metropolitan stage. He manages well. Though a few of his actors overemote, that's not exactly a sin with this type of script, which preferred to holler its message rather than hint at it, to large audiences who expected nothing less.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
ATHENS In two weeks, Alexandra Mallosi, 29, will be packing her bags and leaving the quiet Athens suburb of Holargos for Abu Dhabi to start a job as a hotel sales manager. It was not a tough decision. Her experience in the Greek hotel industry had left her frustrated. "In other countries, young people are encouraged," Ms. Mallosi said. "In Greece, they are held back." Like Ms. Mallosi, an increasing number of young college graduates are leaving Greece as a deepening recession chokes a job market already constrained by an entrenched culture of cronyism. And the outlook for a turnaround is not good. The national debt, estimated at 300 billion euros (nearly 400 billion), is larger than Greece's gross domestic product, suggesting that years of austerity budgets lie ahead. On top of that, a string of political corruption scandals has left many young Greeks disillusioned about the future. According to a survey published last month, seven out of 10 Greek college graduates want to work abroad. Four in 10 are actively seeking jobs abroad or are pursuing further education to gain a foothold in the foreign job market. The survey, conducted by the polling firm Kapa Research for To Vima, a center left newspaper, questioned 5,442 Greeks ages 22 to 35. Some, like Ms. Mallosi, are leaving because they believe doors are closing in Greece. For many looking for their first job after college, those doors never opened. The latest official figures show that unemployment among 15 to 24 year olds was 29.8 percent in June, compared with about 20 percent across the European Union. The Greek figure was an improvement from 32.5 percent in May as summer jobs emerged but still well above the 22.9 percent in the month a year earlier. For Greeks ages 25 to 34, the figure was 16.2 percent in June, up from 11.8 percent in 2009. Overall unemployment was 11.6 percent, up from 8.6 percent. Yannis Gio, 22, moved to London in July after interviews with two architectural firms in Greece fell through. "I couldn't find a job because I didn't have any inside connections," he said. Mr. Gio is awaiting responses from three firms he interviewed with in London and has lined up more interviews for jobs there as well as in Paris and Beijing. Jason Kezios, who is 24 and went to school with Mr. Gio, went to London in April and has been working for an advertising firm for the last four months. "I earn twice as much as I would in Greece, and the prospects are much better," Mr. Kezios said. Graduates with work experience like Alexis Cohen, 35, are leaving, too. His 10 year career as a sound engineer has foundered recently because the singers and musicians who are his clients are staging fewer concerts. He has set up job interviews in California and intends to move there with his girlfriend next month. "If you want to have a decent life, you can't do it here," he said. "It's always been difficult. Now it's nearly impossible." In the 1950s and 1960s, thousands of people left Greece to seek a better life in the United States, Australia or elsewhere in Europe. During the booming 1980s and 1990s, after Greece joined the European Union, many returned to a thriving economy. The pride generated by the Athens Olympic Games in 2004 spurred thousands more Greeks to come home. Now it seems the country is on the verge of a new wave of emigration, with young college graduates at the forefront. "Today the people leaving Greece are not going to wash dishes in Astoria," said George Pagoulatos, an associate professor at the Athens University of Economics and Business, referring to a heavily Greek section of Queens. "They are graduate students in New York choosing to stay and work there." There could be a "brain drain" if talented young people see few prospects in Greece, he said. But he also expressed doubts about their prospects in other Western countries where unemployment is a problem as well. Another reason for the wave of emigration, he said, is a growing public discontent after the corruption scandals in 2008 that rocked the previous conservative government. "There was a general sense of crisis, of a blocked society, of a political system unable to function and a growing number of people stopped believing in the future of the country," Mr. Pagoulatos said. Alexander Kentikelenis, 26, is one of the disenchanted. He has a degree in international relations from Athens University and a master's in international development from the University of Cambridge in England, and is scheduled to return to Cambridge soon to start work on a doctorate in sociology. His original ambition to enter Greek politics has fizzled. "I realized that the system consistently favors the well connected over the talented," Mr. Kentikelenis said. The government has tried to persuade employers to hire young people by lowering the monthly minimum wage to 590 euros from 700 euros and by offering to subsidize the social security contributions of employers for new workers. Yannis Stournaras, director of the Foundation for Economic and Industrial Research, applauded the changes but said they would fail unless the government stimulated growth by encouraging investment in large scale development projects like renovating the country's airports and building wind farms and solar energy parks. And some experts say the Greek labor market cannot accommodate all the country's college graduates anyway. Ilias Kikilias, who heads the state run employment agency, said there were too many college graduates adrift in a sluggish economy that was generating too few jobs. Data from the agency, known as the O.A.E.D., shows that 600,000 college graduates entered the labor market over the last 15 years but only 250,000 jobs were created, most in the bloated state sector. Even this pool of potential jobs is dwindling because the government has frozen hiring and businesses are scaling back or moving some operations out of the country. Another problem, according to a study by labor economists, is that most positions in the private sector are for medium skilled workers, not college graduates. "Two thirds of university graduates are settling for jobs which used to go to those with high school certificates," said Mr. Kikilias, a co author of the study. And so unskilled workers face competition not only from college graduates but also from lower paid immigrants. More vocational courses would help, said Glenda Quintini, the author of a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on unemployment among Greek youth. But most economists agree that the flow of emigration among young Greeks will not diminish until the economy's structural flaws are addressed and growth resumes. The question is how long that will take. "The reforms will not start paying off until 2012," said Mr. Pagoulatos, the university professor. "With all this uncertainty, how many young Greeks are going to wait two years?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
How can women get the emotional support needed after an HPV diagnosis? I was diagnosed over a year ago and since then, I've developed a lot of shame and severe anxiety surrounding sex. Doctors just tell me to use condoms and get regular pap smears, which isn't emotional or comprehensive support. Have a question about women's health? Ask Dr. Gunter yourself. You are not alone. Many women find a diagnosis of human papillomavirus (HPV) very challenging, and doctors may not always offer the emotional support some patients need. Shame and anxiety can result from a lack of accurate information about the virus or related to the testing involved. Your doctor should be able to provide you with factual information to combat the myths that are weighing you down and do their best to reduce pain and stress associated with any procedures. If needed, they should also be able to refer you to a psychologist to help provide additional support. Tell Me More Human papillomavirus is the most common sexually transmitted infection in the United States: 42 percent of Americans ages 18 to 59 have at least one type of genital HPV. It is slightly more prevalent in men than in women. But unfortunately it is associated with shame and anxiety for some women (as well as men). Some studies show that concerns about sexual transmission contribute significantly to these feelings, but learning how common the virus is can help. Another source of shame and anxiety is that it is difficult to tell where an HPV infection may have come from. HPV can lie dormant in the body for years before it is seen on a screening. So, the HPV diagnosed today could have been acquired from a current sexual partner or any previous one. Adding to the confusion is that men and women under the age of 21 won't know if they are infectious as they are not routinely screened.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
The makers of plug in hybrids and E.V.'s have reaped billions of dollars in federal loans and energy grants. Buyers of the electrically enabled vehicles have also been given bountiful perks, from tax credits and the privilege of high occupancy vehicle lanes to home charging units underwritten by taxpayers. Yet vehicles that were once the antithesis of eco friendly are making far deeper inroads with mainstream consumers: fuel sipping, ultralong range diesel cars. Attracted by newly quiet and clean running engines that deliver some 15 to 30 percent better mileage than their gasoline counterparts, Americans flocked to diesels in 2012. Sales of diesel passenger cars and S.U.V.'s jumped by nearly 26 percent from 2011. That's despite the stubbornly high price of diesel fuel that, at 3.87 a gallon on average, is 23 cents more than regular gas (but a penny less than premium grade). Given that reality, some automakers are wondering out loud why new school diesel cars which in some cases burn even less fuel and produce lower levels of global warming gases than hybrids are getting no love or largess from Washington. "This planet will not be rescued by superexpensive technology for the few, but when the majority of mobility is clean," said Rainer Michel, vice president for product planning at Volkswagen of America. "Diesel is far less expensive than plug ins and E.V.'s, with better range and performance. This technology is available today." That assessment might be expected from VW or another automaker based in Europe, where roughly half of all new cars are frugal diesels. One in five new VWs sold in the United States today is diesel powered, making the company by far the nation's leader. But with automakers on a steep climb to the federal fuel economy target of 54.5 m.p.g. for 2025, even domestic automakers can no longer afford to ignore a technology with so much potential. For instance, the new Chevrolet Cruze Diesel, carrying a 46 m.p.g. federal highway rating, is officially the highest mileage nonhybrid sold in America. The Mazda 6 Skyactiv D sedan goes on sale this year. A Cadillac ATS diesel is in the works. The Jeep Grand Cherokee EcoDiesel, powered by a turbo V 6 with Fiat connections, is arriving in dealers. Jeep executives may expand that engine's availability, perhaps to the all new 2014 Cherokee or a 2015 Wrangler. Ford's Transit commercial van will also get diesel power. Despite remarkable advances in mainstream gasoline engines, the combustion cycle developed by Rudolf Diesel at the end of the 19th century continues to be more fuel efficient. For one, diesel engines squeeze the air in their cylinders to such pressures that the injected fuel ignites with no need for an electric spark. And gallon for gallon, diesel fuel contains some 12 percent more energy than gasoline. The upshot: diesels consume about 15 to 30 percent less fuel over all. Owners of heavy duty pickups have long relied on these durable, hard working engines, which have the reputation for running 300,000 miles and more. This fall, the 2014 Ram among the mileage leaders on the gasoline side will become the only light duty pickup to offer a diesel, a 3 liter V 6 shared with Jeep. That innovation, in a pickup class that accounts for more than a million sales each year, is sure to be closely watched by Ford and Chevy. About 6.7 million diesel vehicles were on American roads in 2012, according to R. L. Polk registration data, but barely 800,000 of those were passenger cars and S.U.V.'s; heavy duty pickups and vans account for most of the remainder. That compares with 2.3 million registered hybrid models. The number of available diesel car and S.U.V. models is expected to double by the end of 2014, to 34 from 17, according to the Diesel Technology Forum. An industry analysis firm, LMC Automotive, projects that diesel market share will double by 2018, from 3.7 percent to 7.5 percent. That would rival the 8.7 percent for all hybrids and plug ins combined. And battery only E.V.'s? They're expected to capture just 0.6 percent of sales. The Germans are going all out. New Bluetec versions of the GLK Class crossover and C Class sedan will give Mercedes Benz eight diesel models in its 2014 American lineup, including the E250 Bluetec, a 4 cylinder version of the E Class sedan. BMW will drop a 4 cylinder turbodiesel capable of 45 m.p.g. highway in its 2014 328d sedan and xDrive Sports Wagon in August, joining the X5 xDrive 35d S.U.V. and 535d midsize sedan in showrooms. Porsche, too, offers a diesel, in the Cayenne S.U.V. VW foresees increasing diesel sales to at least 30 percent of its total American sales. Within three years, Audi hopes to roughly triple its American diesel penetration, to nearly one in five sales. Like Audi, VW has publicly committed to offering a TDI diesel option for all of its mainstream models. The A8 TDI luxury sedan has joined the Q7 TDI S.U.V. in showrooms. This summer brings TDI versions of the Q5 crossover, A6 sedan and A7 premium hatchback. A new A3 TDI comes early next year. The fuel economy edge of diesel vehicles is most notable at higher speeds, making them a wise choice for Americans who commute long distances on highways. Hybrids, in contrast, shine in urban and suburban driving, where battery power and regenerative braking help them beat diesel mileage by a wide margin. But in terms of driving enjoyment, it's no contest: diesels, with their powerful surge of low end torque, make typical hybrids feel slow and spiritless in comparison. In widely publicized cases, the real world mileage numbers of some hybrids have been a disappointment. Owners of the Ford C Max and Fusion Hybrid have filed class action lawsuits over window sticker ratings that proved overblown. That has focused attention on the E.P.A.'s testing regime, which seems to credit hybrids for illusory mileage while understating diesel efficiency. "You'll never find a diesel driver complaining that they're not getting the posted mileage," said Allen Schaeffer, executive director of the Diesel Technology Forum. "They all brag that they're doing better." Such pleasant surprises have been borne out in my own testing. Several VW car models can achieve 50 highway m.p.g., whipping their 40 to 43 m.p.g. federal ratings. The Chevy Cruze Diesel showed 49 highway m.p.g., beating its 46 m.p.g. estimate. The Mercedes GLK 250 Bluetec, rated at 33 m.p.g. highway, returned 37. Notably, diesels do their thing without the hassle or inconvenience of hybridlike driving tricks, including obsessively avoiding the gas pedal. "You don't have to drive gingerly," said Doug Skorupski, manager of technical strategy for VW of America. "You can drive normally and still get big numbers." The limo size Audi A8 TDI sedan, in my testing, delivered 39 m.p.g. even at a 70 m.p.h. cruise, 3 m.p.g. above its estimate. Diesels, analysts add, also pay back owners with higher resale values than comparable gas models, and with driving ranges that read like misprints. The Audi A8 TDI can cover more than 800 highway miles, enough to drive from Chicago to New York without stopping for fuel. (Don't try that in an E.V.). Chevy's Cruze can top 700 miles. A clever VW television ad shows two friends learning to speak Spanish fluently in the 13 hours and nearly 800 miles it takes to drain the Passat TDI's tank. One long held assumption that Americans have bad memories of dirty, smoky, unreliable diesels of the '70s and '80s isn't supported by current research, automakers say. Most consumers are decades removed from diesel's Dark Ages. "Younger buyers, especially, don't have those notions of what diesel was like," said Wayne Killen, general manager of product strategy for Audi of America. The real barriers include unpredictable diesel prices, concerns over convenient access to filling stations and unfamiliarity with the technology. Diesel, Mr. Killen said, is still below the radar for many mainstream shoppers, even those seeking better mileage. Yet many objections are being washed away. About 52 percent of America's gas stations now have at least one diesel pump. The technology, said Mike Omotoso, an LMC Automotive analyst, adds roughly 1,500 to 3,000 to the price of a gasoline car, but the gap is shrinking.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Scott Perry will remain the general manager of the Knicks for at least another year after his contract was extended under Leon Rose, the recently hired team president, a source with knowledge of the matter said Wednesday. The extension was first reported by Newsday. It is unclear what personnel moves Rose and Perry will be able to make in the immediate future as the N.B.A. navigates an uncertain period because of the coronavirus pandemic. The league postponed its season in mid March, and when play will resume is an open question. The Knicks were 21 45 and in 12th place in the Eastern Conference when the season was halted. In a normal timeline, Rose and Perry would be preparing for the N.B.A. draft scheduled for late June free agency and potentially the hire of a new coach, should they decide not to keep Mike Miller, who has been the interim coach since David Fizdale was fired in December. The spread of the coronavirus, which has caused the deaths of more than 50,000 people in the United States, has hit close to home for the Knicks: James L. Dolan, the team owner, tested positive for the illness in late March. Perry was hired in 2017 to be the team's general manager after the departure of Phil Jackson as team president. At the time, Perry was the executive vice president for the Sacramento Kings, one of several front office positions he held before arriving in New York to work under the then president, Steve Mills. But in the years since, Perry's track record has been mixed. The Knicks are 67 163 since he took over as general manager, and the team has not signed a single marquee free agent, despite being in the country's largest media market and projecting strong signals that it would do so. Mills left his position as president in February.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
One day in 2015, Dan Bell left his home in Baltimore and drove into the suburbs to visit the Owings Mills Mall. It was a trip out of memory. As a 9 year old boy, he had attended the grand opening of this 820,000 square foot shopping emporium with his family. Gold dust and pink feathers rained down from the glass roof atrium that day as thousands gathered. Saks Fifth Avenue was an anchor tenant. The food court, lined with palm trees, was called the Conservatory. The NBC station in Baltimore dispatched its Copter Cam 2 to sweep over the parking lot and broadcast shots of the ocean of cars. Mr. Bell remembered his aunt driving around for 45 minutes to find a spot. This was 1986, a peak mall year in America. At least one new shopping mall had been built in the United States every year since the 1950s, and 19 opened in 1990 alone. To capture the spirit of the time, Esquire dispatched a writer to the Chicago suburbs to follow two teenage boys on a typical Saturday night of mall cruising. Movies of the era, like "The Blues Brothers" (1980), "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" (1982), "True Stories" (1986), "Clueless" (1995), "Mallrats" (1995) and "Jackie Brown" (1997), included key sequences set within these "cathedrals of consumption," a term coined by the sociologist George Ritzer to describe large indoor shopping spaces. If you were remotely involved in the booming consumer culture in those years, you spent hours circling indoor fountains and riding escalators while sucking down an Orange Julius. Even the eternally alienated Joan Didion wrote of buying two straw hats, four bottles of nail enamel and "a toaster, on sale at Sears," at the Ala Moana Center in Honolulu. At the time of his return visit in 2015, Mr. Bell had not been to the mall in Owings Mills, Md. or any shopping mall in more than a decade. Although he had heard that it was struggling, he was not prepared for what he saw. "The first moment kind of took my breath away, because it was this entire corridor of nothing," Mr. Bell said. The French marble floors still gleamed under artificial light. It wasn't quite a ruin, but it looked as if a viral outbreak had removed all life from the place. Others have found creative grist in the dead mall phenomenon. In her best selling thriller "Gone Girl," Gillian Flynn set a scene in a four story destination mall gone to seed in a Missouri suburb. What was once the beating heart of the community had become "two million square feet of echo." The author wrote the mall into the novel and kept it in her screenplay for the film adaptation, because, she said: "For kids of the '80s especially, dead malls have a very strong allure. We were the last of the free range kids, roaming around malls, not really buying anything, but just looking. To see all those big looming spaces so empty now it's a childhood haunting." Narrated in a low key voice over and set to a downbeat soundtrack of retro synth Vaporwave music, Mr. Bell's video shorts pay affectionate tribute to and try to understand a fallen world. They evoke the same fuzzy '80s nostalgia as the recent time capsule photo book "Malls Across America" by Michael Galinsky, even as they offer an unsettling visual document of the retail apocalypse that changing consumer habits, e commerce and economic disparity have wrought. A report issued by Credit Suisse in June predicted that 20 to 25 percent of the more than 1,000 existing enclosed malls in America will close in the next five years. Though upscale malls in wealthy communities continue to do well, Mr. Bell isn't interested in those; he visits dead malls, and among the deadest are ones in working class and rural communities. Filming at the Bristol Mall in Bristol, Va., Mr. Bell discovered 10 stores that remained open in the entire center; the rest of the retail spaces sat empty behind lowered metal gates. At the Rehoboth Mall in Rehoboth Beach, Del., he met a middle aged immigrant couple running a clothing alteration business in a space that had once been the food court. Weird moments abound in the series, as when Mr. Bell's camera fixes on a forgotten corner to underscore the desolation, and then a geriatric mall walker appears in frame, doing solitary laps. Watching the "Dead Mall Series" provokes in the viewer a conflicting swirl of emotions. You think of your own happy times in malls and feel sad for the loss, and then feel stupid for getting all emotional about what was an artificial and manipulative experience built around shopping. Malls are an emotional subject, Mr. Bell has discovered: "The things people write me are incredible. From young people who just love the retro aspect to people who experienced things in malls that are meaningful. First dates, meeting their husband or wife, their first job." The short history of malls goes like this: In 1954, Victor Gruen's Northland Center, often credited as the first modern shopping mall (though earlier examples existed), opens in Southfield, Mich. The suburban location is fitting because the rise of the automobile, helped along by the Federal Aid Highway Act, led to the widespread creation of large shopping centers away from urban centers. This, among other factors, nearly killed downtowns, and malls reigned supreme for some 40 years. By the 1990s, however, a new urbanism movement revived the urban shopping experience and eroded the dominance of malls. Next, the rise of big box stores and online shopping sounded the death knell for mall culture. "People who are in the malls, who went to malls, this is the mourning period right now, because we are losing a lot of malls," Mr. Bell said. "It's hard for some people." In the Marley Station Mall episode, filmed in January in Glen Burnie, Md., Mr. Bell related a personal story. Training his camera on a steel abstract sculpture, he says, "The shoe store was right in front of that sculpture. It's now a Spencer's, but at the time it was a Dolcis. And I worked there because my friend managed it. So I stared at that sculpture every single day from work." Marley Station was Mr. Bell's home mall. He could get there in 15 minutes if he managed to swing a ride, an hour if he walked. Like Ms. Flynn and a whole generation of middle and lower middle class suburban kids, for Mr. Bell the mall was the place to go. Chess King and Regal Cinema beckoned. "You would sit outside and smoke cigarettes and walk around inside and see who's there," Mr. Bell said. Mr. Bell's favorite store in the mall was Suncoast Motion Picture Company. He would spend half the afternoon digging through videotapes in the 10 rack and finding weird little cult films like "The Honeymoon Killers" and "Street Trash." Then he would stroll down to Walden Books and spend more happy hours in the film section. In his later teens Mr. Bell held various jobs at the mall: at Macy's, at the shoe store, at a leather goods boutique that sold the brown suede jackets with puffy shoulders that were all the rage at the time. "I don't know how I kept my jobs at the mall, because I was never in the store," Mr. Bell laughed. "I would just go around and talk to everybody. We were all losers, smoking cigarettes, drinking at work, hanging out with working class, cool, fun people. We all kind of looked out for one another. It made having a crappy job easier." In 1996, a blizzard shut everything down. Mr. Bell and a co worker were stranded inside the mall and spent the night walking the empty interior as the wind howled outside. The experience was a premonition of what he would film 20 years later. On a recent Friday, Mr. Bell met me at Voorhees Town Center, a mall in central New Jersey that was dealt a blow when an anchor tenant, a Macy's, closed. An image of malls in their heyday may be frozen in your mind if you haven't visited one in a while, and upon entering, the old sense memories rush back: the distinct smell of a department store (here, a Boscov's), at once fresh and synthetic; the inward thrill upon entering the open main floor; the childlike joy of riding an escalator. In the 1991 Paul Mazursky comedy "Scenes From a Mall," shot partly at the Beverly Center in Los Angeles, the main characters, played by Woody Allen and Bette Midler, relive the ups and downs of their marriage as they shop, eat and go to the movies "under the all embracing roof of this sparkly, neon glowing shrine to American consumerism," as the New York Times film critic Vincent Canby described the mall in his review. With apologies to that movie, here is Scenes from Voorhees Town Center: Advertising banners show young women smiling and having fun. "Something new starts here," say the banners, which hide the windows of vacant stores. A lone man sits in a massage chair, staring at his smartphone in an otherwise shopperless corridor. The employees of Keith's Classic Furniture, a secondhand furniture store, discuss the mall's precise state of deadness. "It's not quite dead, and it's not quite alive," one says to the other. "We're a zombified mall." The most happening part was the food court, which had six remaining restaurants and a small crowd having lunch among the palm trees under a skylight. "I have not been to a food court this populated in a while," Mr. Bell said. "In the heyday, you wouldn't be able to find a seat." A large man with short brown hair and a beard, Mr. Bell comes across as wistful for his youth. He agrees that mallgoing was lame in retrospect, but he nevertheless beams when he sees a still operating fountain. "I love the smell of pizza and chlorine together," he said. "It's like my favorite smell." His many visits to dead malls have not, however, aroused in him a renewed desire to be a mall shopper. Like so many, he hasn't purchased anything in a mall in years. "The stuff that interests me is really not in a mall," he said. "Plus, it's a lot cheaper to buy it on Amazon." His eyes widened when he noticed an older woman leaving the mall with a Great American Cookie box. "Now, see, that is right out of the '80s," he said. "That's an experience I have not seen lately, someone walking out with a Great American Cookie cake. She's probably getting it for her grandkid." Like some archaeologist of retail, Mr. Bell read the "label scars" on the facades of closed storefronts, the marks left behind by the uprooted lettering. One of them had been a Kay Jewelers, he determined. The upper level had an unlikely mix of tenants, including government offices, a cancer charity, a youth club called the Spot, and the Echelon Mall Ministry. "This is another way malls can redo themselves," Mr. Bell said. "At one time, this was probably five stores." Looking at potted flora in the corridor, he noted, "People are taking care of the plants at least." For all the time he spends visiting and filming these concrete carcasses, "malls do not make me sad," Mr. Bell said. In fact, he finds it calming to be in a large building among the familiar sights and smells of his childhood with the air conditioning cranked high and not many people around. "When I hear about malls that are in the series that have closed, there's a moment where I'm, like, 'That's a shame,'" Mr. Bell said. "But I don't mourn for malls." Instead, like some latter day Edward Sheriff Curtis, he is visually documenting a culture that is, if not dying out, then surely transforming. As he put it, "So 20 years from now, 30 years from now, people can say, 'Hey, that mall we used to go to, let's look it up,' and there will be a full video of me walking through it and talking about it." Only once was Mr. Bell truly unsettled during the course of his work. It happened two years ago, at the Rolling Acres Mall in Akron, Ohio. The place was not dying but fully dead and abandoned. Inside, he got a glimpse of end times. The first thing he heard upon entering the place, he recalled, was frogs singing as loud as could be. "They were in a pool in the elevator shaft," Mr. Bell said. "There was a bank of fog hovering midair in the food court. I was, like, 'You have got to be kidding me.'" "Who in the '80s could imagine this?" he added. "Can you imagine filming this and taking it back to the '80s and saying, 'This is what's going to happen in 30 years: There's going to be a frog in the food court'?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style

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