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It's been a while like, forever since anyone claimed to have discovered life on Venus. And truth be told, the scientists who announced on Sept. 14 the discovery of phosphine, a gas, in Venus's atmosphere did not claim to have discovered life, either only that they could not think of anything that might have produced it other than microbes in the clouds. "We're not saying we discovered life on Venus," Sara Seager of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said in an interview a few days before the announcement. On Earth, anyway, the only natural source of phosphine is microbes; the gas is often associated with feces. But it would hardly rank as a surprise to find out that scientists don't know everything there is to know yet about the geochemistry of Venus, our nearest but rarely visited neighbor in the solar system. Nor would it be the first time that the search for life on another planet has foundered on ignorance of the local chemistry. Experts still argue whether some experiments on the Viking landers in 1977 detected signs of life on Mars, but the main lesson from that adventure was that scientists had tried to run on Mars before learning to walk there: They went looking for Martian biology before they had mastered Martian chemistry. One of the strengths of science is that interpretations can turn on a dime with the addition of more data. In the case of Venus, opinion has turned and turned again. In the mythology that served as the narrative backbone of classic science fiction, Venus was often portrayed as a cloudy, swampy rain forest kind of planet a water world, a plantation world, humid but habitable, in some accounts even inhabited by docile natives. Mars was a dying, desert civilization a vision promoted in the early 20th century by the Bostonian philanthropist Percival Lowell, who thought he could see canals on Mars. That was long before either place was actually visited and their inhospitable natures revealed: Venus with its crushing carbon dioxide atmosphere, surface temperature of 800 degrees Fahrenheit and sulfuric acid clouds; Mars with its frozen wisp of an atmosphere. Both of them bone dry, at least on their surfaces. Venus is the brightest object that most people will see in the sky, after the sun, the moon and the infrequent supernova. It is also the celestial object most likely to be mistaken for a U.F.O. Venus had another pop culture moment in the 1940s. An all purpose scholar and psychoanalyst named Immanuel Velikovsky, inspired by biblical accounts of such events as the sun standing still in the heavens, proposed that Venus had been spit from Jupiter 3,500 years ago and had careered through the solar system, sideswiping Earth and dosing it with plague viruses from its comet tail, then collided with Mars before settling into its present orbit. Never mind the laws of celestial mechanics. The publication in 1950 of Velikovsky's "Worlds in Collision," a best seller, scandalized astronomers. As it turned out, Velikovsky's theory made two correct predictions for all the wrong reasons: that Jupiter is a source of radio noise, and that Venus is hot. By then, the founders of what would be the American space program had already set their minds and hearts on Mars as the likely abode of life, and the ultimate destination. In 1954, Werner von Braun published a long article in Colliers magazine that was a blueprint for a human expedition to the Red Planet. In a particularly perceptive aside, he anticipated that a century would pass before this happened; lately NASA has been discussing the 2030s as a realistic time frame for such a trip. Carl Sagan, then a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, provided an accurate explanation for Venus's torrid temperature, in his 1960 Ph.D. thesis. The planet's crushing carbon dioxide atmosphere had created a runaway greenhouse effect, he concluded. Venus was a lifeless desert, at least on the ground. Sagan, who died in 1996, was always optimistic about the prospects for life in the universe, championing the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. In 1967, he and Harold Morowitz, a biochemist at Yale, pointed out that conditions in the clouds of Venus seemed more hospitable, with pressures of just one atmosphere and temperatures of about 40 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on where in the clouds you go, conducive to life. "If small amounts of minerals are stirred up to the clouds from the surface, it is by no means difficult to imagine an indigenous biology in the clouds of Venus," they wrote in a paper in Nature. The notion was not particularly popular. "The idea encountered much resistance and some ridicule back then," said David Grinspoon, a planetary scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz., who has championed the idea for more than 30 years. In recent years the discovery of extremophiles, bacteria that live in nuclear reactors, hot ocean vents and other unlikely places, and of exoplanets has spurred new work and ideas about habitable planets. If Mars can have microfossils, why not Venus? Moreover, Dr. Grinspoon said, new studies of Venus have led to the conclusion that the planet might have lost its oceans rather recently, only 700 million years ago, allowing plenty of time since the formation of the planet for life to have evolved and then escaped to the clouds. What kind of life would that be? In 2004, Dirk Schulze Makuch, an astronomer at the Technical University Berlin, in Germany, and his colleagues suggested that microbes floating in the clouds could be coated with a compound called cyclooctasulfur that would act as a sunscreen and convert ultraviolet light into visible wavelengths for photosynthesis. Earlier this year, Dr. Seager and her colleagues expanded on this idea and sketched out an entire possible life cycle for such organisms. The microbes could inhabit droplets of sulfuric acid in the clouds, they proposed; as the droplets collided and merged, more and more microbes would be enclosed together, metabolize and divide. Eventually the drops would grow too heavy and rain down from the clouds, but they would evaporate before hitting the ground, causing the microbes to dry out and go dormant. Dr. Seager noted that Venus is known to have a layer of haze. "It's very stable, and people don't know what the particles there are, but they remain suspended for a very long time," she said. "So I postulated that some of those particles, not all of them, but some of those particles might actually be dried out life spores." These spores would be light enough to drift back up to the clouds on currents called gravity waves, where they would serve as seeds for new droplets to condense around, restarting the whole cycle. Dr. Seager pointed out that microbes also exist in Earth's atmosphere, they just don't stay aloft as long. "Well, I definitely would not say there's life on Venus with certainty," Dr. Seager emphasized. Among other things, she said, biologists still do not know which intestinal microbes produce phosphine or how they do it. And what sort of life could endure the kinds of conditions in a sulfur cloud? Probably not the DNA based organisms that we are, Dr. Seager said. If it were discovered that nature has an alternative way to produce life, that would be the signal event of 21st century science. And so the race for new data is on. NASA and other space agencies are considering sending new probes to our long overlooked twin planet. Yuri Milner's Breakthrough Foundation, known for its 3 million prizes to scientists, has already said that it will finance research into Venusian life. If you listen carefully, you can hear a new solar system mythology being born. In this narrative, life emerged on Earth, Venus and Mars back when all three worlds were flush with water. When Mars dried out and froze, the microbes went underground, where they wait to be found by our robot rovers. On Venus they took to the air. On Earth we occupy a plush, naive middle ground. Walk through the woods on a summer night and the wall of sound from invisible creatures, crickets and peepers, the white noise of life, is overwhelming. We know how it will end. In a half billion years or so, as the sun evolves and brightens, Earth will lose its oceans and go the greenhouse way of Venus. But perhaps life in some form will persist even then. That's quite a lot to hope for, but a little hope is what we need these days. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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The biggest book publisher in the United States is about to get bigger. ViacomCBS has agreed to sell Simon Schuster to Penguin Random House for more than 2 billion in a deal that will create the first megapublisher. Penguin Random House, the largest book publisher in the United States, is owned by the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. Adding Simon Schuster, the third largest publisher, would create a book behemoth, a combination that could trigger antitrust concerns. The deal announced on Wednesday includes provisions that would protect ViacomCBS in the event that a sale is squashed by authorities. Bertelsmann would pay what is known as a termination fee if the deal does not go through. The sale of the company will profoundly reshape the publishing industry, increasingly a winner take all business in which the largest companies compete for brand name authors and guaranteed best sellers. The book business has seen wave after wave of consolidation in the past decade, with the merger of Penguin and Random House in 2013, News Corp's purchase of the romance publisher Harlequin, and Hachette Book Group's acquisition of Perseus Books. This fall, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced it was exploring a sale of its trade publishing division, and could be an attractive target for a large publishing company like Macmillan or Hachette. Simon Schuster, which publishes prominent authors like Stephen King, Don DeLillo, Bob Woodward, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Walter Isaacson, had long been rumored to be the next big company to be put up for sale, and it made an attractive prize for larger publishing houses seeking to grow through acquisitions. It has a vast backlist of more than 30,000 titles. Founded in 1924 by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster, the company began as a publisher of crossword puzzles. It eventually grew into a sprawling company with more than 30 publishing units, and a backlist of literary treasures like the works of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James and Edith Wharton. The past year has been tumultuous for Simon Schuster. In March, it was put up for sale, just as the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic hit, destabilizing the economy and forcing bookstores to close, hobbling a major sales channel. In May, Carolyn Reidy, the company's beloved chief executive, died suddenly, and was later replaced by Jonathan Karp, who was formerly the publisher of Simon Schuster, the company's flagship house among dozens of imprints. The company also faced lawsuits from the Trump family and administration, as the president tried and failed to prevent the publication of books that were critical of him, by John Bolton and Mary L. Trump. The company had a profitable year, in spite of such hurdles. Revenue grew to 649 million through September, an 8 percent increase, and profit before tax rose by 6 percent to 115 million. For Simon Schuster's owner ViacomCBS, the all cash deal will help the company pay down its 21 billion debt load and keep up dividend payments to shareholders. The sale of Simon Schuster is part of a great unwinding taking place across the media industry as conglomerates cleave off or close down ancillary businesses. ViacomCBS, which also owns Paramount studios and Nickelodeon, has bet its future on streaming, and books won't play a big role in that strategy. 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. Mr. Karp and Dennis Eulau, Simon Schuster's chief operating officer and chief financial officer, would remain the heads of the publishing house under new ownership. In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Karp said that Simon Schuster would maintain its editorial independence and would continue to publish the same volume of books under its new ownership. "This is a company that respects the creative autonomy of publishers," he said. "We'll all still be competing against each other. Publishing is a business driven by individual passions for books and for writers." Mr. Karp said it was too early in the process to discuss whether there would be staff reductions or streamlining of editorial and marketing departments, or if Simon Schuster's print distribution networks and warehouses would be absorbed into its parent company. Markus Dohle, the company's chief executive and a member of the Bertelsmann executive board, said in an interview that Simon Schuster would retain its editorial identity. He noted that Penguin Random House's imprints compete with one another for book projects and that that practice would apply to Simon Schuster as well. "We've done this before, so we have proof of concept," he said, citing the merger of Random House and Penguin. "We keep the creative side of the business basically untouched." Mr. Dohle said that concerns that his company's acquisition of Simon Schuster would create a competition stifling monopoly are based on "politics and perception" rather than data. "The book publishing industry is very unconcentrated and fragmented compared to other industries," he said. "We are very confident we'll get clearance for the deal, and we are also confident that we can increase the service level for authors, agents and retailers." Still, some authors and literary organizations expressed alarm at the news that the largest publishing company could gain even greater market share. "I worry that it's going to force authors out of the industry, and I worry that it's going to force really great people who work in the industry out," said Jason Pinter, an author and the founder and publisher of Polis Books, an independent publishing company. The Authors Guild, in a statement, said it opposed the sale, and it called on the Justice Department to challenge the deal. "The number of large mainstream publishing houses will go from five to just four, further reducing competition in an already sparse competitive environment," it said. "For authors, it means there will be fewer competing bidders for their manuscripts, which will inevitably drive down advances offered." ViacomCBS received more than half a dozen inquiries from interested buyers, including financial firms and the French media giant Vivendi, which holds a minority stake in Hachette through the publisher Lagardere. The top three contenders were Bertelsmann, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, which owns HarperCollins, and Vivendi. News that Bertelsmann was close to a deal was reported earlier by The Financial Times. The merger will be reviewed by President elect Biden's team, according to Erik Gordon, professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. The incoming administration, he said, "will be tougher than the prior administration's team and more sympathetic to the plight of authors who will have less ability to negotiate deals or even get published." He added that regulators could seek what are known as "structural remedies" where Penguin Random House would have to sell off other divisions or imprints as a condition of the merger. The company would have to spin off or sell a large enough chunk to create "viable competitors," he said. A spokesman for Bertelsmann said Penguin Random House had lost market share in recent years and cited Amazon as a competitive threat to the overall book market. The combination of Penguin Random House and Simon Schuster would be "below 20 percent," the company said, citing data from the Association of American Publishers, an industry trade group. The sale could also have a ripple effect throughout the literary ecosystem. The biggest houses are better equipped to negotiate favorable terms with major retailers like Amazon, Barnes Noble and the big box stores, and are also able to develop direct to consumer marketing and sales networks so that they are not as dependent on retailers. For literary agents and authors, the wave of consolidations has meant fewer potential buyers for books from authors without a proven track record. "There are projects that would have sold for 150,000 years ago that might not sell at all now to the big five, whereas the book that would have sold for 500,000 might go for a million," said the literary agent David Kuhn. "They would rather go in bigger for the thing that they have the most consensus on." Some industry analysts say the sale will accelerate a long running trend that has taken hold over the last decade, as publishers have grown more dependent on blockbuster titles and backlist sales, resulting in fewer opportunities for new writers and midlist authors.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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The actor Ron Leibman outside his home in Los Angeles in 1979. Although he was seen frequently in movies and on television, he was first and foremost a stage actor. Ron Leibman, an actor whose career of more than six decades in film, television and the theater was highlighted by a Tony Award in 1993 for his electrifying performance as Roy Cohn in the first part of "Angels in America," died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 82. A spokeswoman for the actress Jessica Walter, his wife, said the cause was pneumonia. Mr. Leibman already had Drama Desk Awards for "We Bombed in New Haven" (1969) and "Transfers" (1970) as well as an Emmy for the short lived CBS series "Kaz" (1979) when he took on the role of Cohn in "Angels in America," Tony Kushner's monumental two part play about homosexuality and the age of AIDS. Cohn, a conservative lawyer and closeted gay man who was once chief counsel to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and who died of AIDS in 1986, is a central figure in the work. "Mr. Leibman, red faced and cackling, is a demon of Shakespearean grandeur," Frank Rich wrote of the performance in "Millennium Approaches," the first part of "Angels," when he reviewed its Broadway premiere in The New York Times in May 1993, "an alternately hilarious and terrifying mixture of chutzpah and megalomania, misguided brilliance and relentless cunning. He turns the mere act of punching telephone buttons into a grotesque manipulation of the levers of power." So striking was Mr. Leibman's portrayal that no less an actor than F. Murray Abraham, an Oscar winner, found him a hard act to follow when he took over as Cohn in 1994. "I found myself doing Ron," Mr. Abraham told The Times. "Doing his voice. His mannerisms. It was exasperating." Mr. Leibman was often asked what it was like to play a widely reviled real life figure like Cohn. "If, as an actor, you're going to portray any human being, you'd best not have an attitude about that person," he said in 1993. "If I had to make a moral judgment about every character, I wouldn't play Richard III, I wouldn't play Macbeth, or Coriolanus, or King Lear. Cohn was a human being." Ron Leibman was born on Oct. 11, 1937, in Manhattan to Murray and Grace (Marx) Leibman. His father worked in the garment industry, and his mother was a homemaker. After a childhood that included several serious illnesses, he enrolled at Ohio Wesleyan University, where he discovered his love for the theater. After graduating, he spent time with the Compass Players, an improvisational troupe that performed in Chicago and St. Louis in the mid 1950s, then returned to New York and joined the Actors Studio, supporting himself with work as a shoe salesman and cabdriver. Mr. Leibman was first and foremost a stage actor. His first professional role was in a summer theater production of Arthur Miller's "A View From the Bridge." One of his first New York appearances was in 1959 as Orpheus in a production of Jean Anouilh's "Legend of Lovers" at the 41st Street Theater. He made his Broadway debut in March 1963 in the comedy "Dear Me, the Sky Is Falling," and over the next year had minor roles in two other Broadway plays, "The Deputy" and "Bicycle Ride to Nevada." In 1967 he was in the premiere of Joseph Heller's antiwar black comedy "We Bombed in New Haven" at the Yale School of Drama Repertory Theater in New Haven, along with several other actors who would soon be better known. "Stacy Keach evokes a terrible tattered passion as the ramrod straight, chicken hearted captain," Clive Barnes wrote in a review in The Times, "and he is perfectly matched by Ron Leibman, moving from the flip to the hunted, as the sergeant who doesn't want to die." Estelle Parsons was also in the cast. Mr. Leibman stayed with the show when it moved to Broadway in 1968. His next Broadway appearance was in 1969 in a one act, "Cop Out," which was most notable for his playing opposite Linda Lavin. They married that year and divorced in 1981. Mr. Leibman's other Broadway credits included the Neil Simon comedy "Rumors," in 1988, joining a cast that also included Christine Baranski. Mr. Rich, in a mixed review, found the play amusing "provided that either Ron Leibman or Christine Baranski is kvelling at center stage." Mr. Leibman's "Angels" performance, his last on Broadway, was still reverberating in the Manhattan air in 1995 when he played Shylock in "The Merchant of Venice" at the Public Theater. "This is a harrowing, fierce and complicated performance," Linda Winer wrote in Newsday, "one that, consciously or not, makes a seductive ancestral connection between oppression and accommodation, between the hurt Jewish moneylender with his demand for a 'pound of flesh' and Cohn, the flamboyantly amoral New York lawyer." Mr. Leibman's television and film career was less extensive than his stage work. Among his film highlights was "Slaughterhouse Five," the 1972 movie version of Kurt Vonnegut's novel, in which he played the prisoner of war Lazzaro. Kevin Kelly, writing in The Boston Globe, called his performance "fierce and frightening." His character in "Kaz," the CBS series for which he won an Emmy (and which he also helped write), also had an edge; here he was an offbeat lawyer who earned his law degree in prison. In an April 1979 interview with The Times, Mr. Leibman vented about the network's handling of the series, which had made its debut the previous fall but was not given a consistent schedule. In a 2011 interview with the website AV Club, Mr. Leibman said it was his stepdaughter who had encouraged him to take a part on television that he had initially rejected, not being familiar with the show. It was a recurring role on "Friends" as the father of Rachel Green, Jennifer Aniston's character. He was a little confused at first. "When I first came on," he said, "I didn't know who was who, because I'd never seen the show. So I started talking to Lisa Kudrow, thinking she was Jennifer Aniston. I had no idea."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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"If I go, could they kill me too?" my 9 year old son asked. His question hung in the air like thick fog. Local activists had organized a caravan protest against police brutality in our small town in upstate New York, and I thought my son would be eager to join. I cleared my throat. I had to be honest. "I can't guarantee how the police will respond," I said. "Even peaceful protest can be risky." After a short pause he said, "Let's go." On the drive over, he was unusually quiet until he looked up from his comic book and asked another unexpected question. I explained that when black people protest, it's often unfairly described as a riot, which shifts attention away from our political grievances to the specter of violence. I told him we have to reject that diversion: "That's what Martin Luther King Jr. was trying to teach Americans in the 1960s when he said, 'A riot is the language of the unheard.'" As we pulled into the lot where the caravan protest was forming, he looked relieved. There were no police cars, just cars plastered with Black Lives Matter signs. We joined the rear of the long caravan and my son asked, "Can I roll down the window and yell, 'Black Lives Matter'?" The look on his face as he lowered the window was unmistakable. He felt empowered. The next morning, I came down to the breakfast table to find him tracing a black power fist from a template he'd found online. It was for a school assignment that asked him to choose a shape and fill it in with related words. He seemed determined, a rare response to homework in the age of coronavirus distance learning. "I want to fill the entire fist with the names and last words of black people killed by the police, but I can't find anybody else's last words." My heart sank. He thought that each black person he intended to honor had died surrounded by family and friends who had heard their last words. Over the next hour, we searched the internet but found only what are believed to be among Sandra Bland's last words left on a voice mail message to her friend and Michael Brown's. He added them to the fist's folded middle and ring fingers. But in the process of the search, my son came across so many others killed by the police and vigilantes. It felt as if each click was shaving a year off his childhood. When we got to Tamir Rice, the 12 year old boy in Cleveland who was gunned down by a white police officer, I said: "Tamir is why I don't ever let you play with toy guns. Black kids don't get the benefit of the doubt." A police officer on the scene described Tamir as "maybe 20" when he called across his radio. One study from 2014 found that a group of mostly white, female college students overestimated the age of black boys by an average of four and a half years. A co author of the study, Matthew Christian Jackson, said that "for black children, this can mean they lose the protection afforded by assumed childhood innocence well before they become adults." Without the protective shield of whiteness, our children are forced to grow up faster. When childhood pastimes like playing with toy guns or adolescent follies like jumping a subway turnstile or mouthing off to a police officer can turn deadly in an instant, we can't afford to encourage our children to stay children a little longer. For many black parents the transition from childhood to adolescence is marked by "the Talk," when we explain to our children how to stay safe, especially when confronted by the police. I didn't expected to have it for another couple of years. One of black parents' most difficult balancing acts is protecting our children while empowering them to protest. It requires an incredible amount of maturity from our children, too. My son experienced his first instance of racism in first grade at his public school in a leafy part of Boston. As the taunts continued, he only became more politicized. Halfway through third grade, his teacher told me that he was taking a knee during the Pledge of Allegiance. Fortunately, she defended him when a classmate harassed him for protesting. But by the end of the school year, I decided it was time to move back to upstate New York where my son had spent his early years. He needed to be surrounded by a loving community he could also turn to for support. For young black children in America, community is more than comfort it's a lifeline. What my son has gone through in the past couple of weeks feels different than the everyday racism that is built into the fabric of black children's lives. Rather than being a part of his childhood, the killing of George Floyd brought it to an abrupt end. I am left mourning the loss of his childhood, even as I swell with pride at his growing conscience. As he stared down at the fist, I could tell he was frustrated that he couldn't find more last words. He decided instead to write the names of the slain on the left side. And on the right side, different protest signs he liked best.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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Founded in Berlin in 2008, SoundCloud was embraced by rappers and up and coming musicians around the world as a destination for new tracks that might never appear elsewhere. Its most famous success story is Lorde, who began her career as a teenage SoundCloud user. By 2014, SoundCloud had become a streaming giant with 175 million regular users, making it one of the most popular music sites in the world. But it also faced pressure from the record labels to sign licensing deals and develop a paid subscription model to compete with Spotify and Apple Music. The result, SoundCloud Go, arrived early last year, to mixed reviews. SoundCloud has not updated its user numbers in almost three years, but analysts believe that it is far lower than 175 million. Spotify has 140 million users, 50 million of whom pay for subscriptions, and Apple Music has 27 million paying users. Amazon does not report how many people use its Prime Music service, but by some estimates it is a close competitor to Apple and Spotify. SoundCloud has valued itself as highly as 1.2 billion, and has had courtships with Twitter and Spotify. But its financial position has grown shakier as it has posted repeated losses. In its latest financial report, filed with British regulators late last year, SoundCloud said that it had enough cash to meet its obligations only through September; in March, the company secured a 70 million line of credit.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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AUG. 2 will be the 50th anniversary of the Pennsylvania Station picket line, and the familiar dirge will sound for the majestic structure, thrown away, it is said, by philistines blind to its value. But, even after half a century, is there no one to write an elegy for Lester Tichy's luminous, soaring, swooping 1956 ticket counter? Conceived as a way to revitalize the majestic space, it was instead condemned as a nail in the station's coffin, in Lewis Mumford's words "an indescribable botch." Poor Tichy a lifetime devoted to modernism, and he winds up remembered for what most people consider the final insult to McKim, Mead White's heroic 1910 station. Tichy studied at Columbia University, and, after travel through Europe, began work in 1926 in the office of the strict classicist John Russell Pope. He struck out on his own in the late 1930s, and joined the American Institute of Architects under the sponsorship of Alfred Easton Poor, who had worked with Pope. Poor was another traditionalist who later embraced modernism. By the time Tichy set out on his own, Penn Station's haughty classicism was a musty antique, and soon automobile and air passenger service began to encroach on the near monopoly of railroads. In 1948 La Guardia Airport hired Tichy for a streamlined metal and glass snack bar. But he was no air age partisan; in 1950 he designed a new color scheme for the Long Island Rail Road cars. The Pennsylvania Railroad was beginning to groan under the maintenance costs of its station, and in the same year it retained Tichy to design a garage for 923 cars and a seven story addition over the southeast court of the station. Four years later he collaborated with I. M. Pei on a 32 story structure that would have eliminated the aboveground portion of the station. In these years, Tichy's help wanted ads for employees described the firm as "progressive" and "contemporary," and he was designing shops, residences and retail structures in a fresh, modern style. Neither project went ahead, but it seems the railroad had not given up on the station itself. In 1956 it tried to update the place with Tichy's great soaring luminous arch sheltering a bowed ticket counter with advanced ticketing equipment. The steel canopy, suspended by cables from the station's classical columns, prefigured Eero Saarinen's swooping, birdlike T.W.A. terminal of 1962 at Idlewild Airport, which became John F. Kennedy International in 1963. The glowing fluorescent curve under the soiled classical space was like a jet plane next to a grimy locomotive. Critics saw no salvation in Tichy's addition, which was widely published and widely denounced. Architectural Forum described it as "how to turn a monument into cash." "A fluttery fatuous kiosk," fumed the historian Walter C. Kidney in a 1956 letter to the editor of Architectural Forum; "jukeboxes in Westminster Abbey." In a New Yorker column in 1958, Mumford didn't stop at "an indescribable botch"; he said it was a "great treason to McKim's original design." In a 1961 letter to Progressive Architecture, the architect B. Sumner Gruzen wrote that the ticket counter had "brutally raped" the station. But any one of its detractors would have embraced "tickets on the clamshell," as The New York Times soon called it, in place of the demolition of the station, announced in 1961. That provoked the greatest and most unequal preservation battle in New York history. In retrospect, The Times said, no one should have been surprised as soon as "the Age of Elegance bowed to the Age of Plastic." And from that flowed the mournful saga ending in rubble and regrets in 1964. There is no evidence that Tichy took the slightest notice of his reviews, and he continued his career with structures like the circular, spaceshiplike East New York Savings Bank of 1958 at Kings Highway and Rockaway Parkway in Brooklyn. It resembled a giant hatbox, with a circular brise soleil and huge irregular windows. If the bank had not been demolished about 10 years ago, it could be a landmark today. In 1966 Tichy redid the bottom of the 1930s Goelet Building at Fifth and 48th in a lean modern style, but this work was also swept away, by a restoration. That and the bank were the only entries for him in older editions of the A. I. A. Guide to New York City by Norval White and Elliot Willensky; now his name is entirely absent. Tichy died in 1981, just as modernism was in full retreat. Since then the reputation of much of the architecture of the 1950s has been rehabilitated, but his clamshell seems doomed to be an architectural untouchable it is difficult to illustrate the incremental insults to Penn Station, the ticky tacky additions, the grimy travertine, but a photograph of Tichy's structure is always ready to stand in. Anyone of the opinion that his light, jet age design did not contradict but instead complemented the magnificent interior of Penn Station well, such a person would be considered hopelessly romantic, against all common sense, just like the Penn Station protesters of August 1962.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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What's on TV Sunday: 'I Know This Much Is True' and 'Call Your Mother' None I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE 9 p.m. on HBO; stream on HBO platforms. This limited series, based on Wally Lamb's 1998 novel, stars Mark Ruffalo as the twins Dominick and Thomas Birdsey. Written and directed by Derek Cianfrance ("Blue Valentine," "The Place Beyond the Pines"), the six episode series follows Dominick as he tries to care for his brother, who has schizophrenia, and who cuts off his right hand in the opening scene of the book. To embody two distinctly different identical twins, Ruffalo told The New York Times that he gained 30 pounds during a six week filming break before shooting his scenes as Thomas. As the twins deal with familial trauma and mental illness, they grapple with the messy nature of care and conflict. CALL YOUR MOTHER 10 p.m. on Comedy Central; stream on Comedy Central platforms. It is, in fact, Mother's Day, and this documentary is a tribute to the mothers who are often the butt of their kids' jokes. Directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady ("Jesus Camp," "One of Us"), the film features Awkwafina, Fortune Feimster, Tig Notaro, David Spade and Roy Wood Jr., among others, as we meet the women who shaped them into the performers they are today. So watch it with your mother. Or give her a call? OK, fine, at the very least you could send her this article. FIND LOVE LIVE 11 p.m. on TLC; stream on TLC platforms. To fill the dating show shaped void that social distancing has created, TLC has created a new way to eavesdrop on a first date. Sukanya Krishnan hosts as the designated "singleton" of the week searches for love from home. In each episode, three potential suitors will flirt with the singleton over a livestream, while viewers watch, judge and voice their opinions on social media. Once the suitor is chosen, the pair will have their first virtual meet up on the following episode. Matt Green in "The World Before Your Feet." THE WORLD BEFORE YOUR FEET (2018) Stream on Amazon; rent on Google Play, iTunes and Vudu. When Matt Green set out to walk every block in New York City in 2012, he thought it would take two and a half years. Eight years and 9,000 miles later, he's still not finished. Though Green was not the first to set out on this mission, this documentary, directed by Jeremy Workman, follows him as he ventures through the nooks and crannies of the city to learn its history. "His travels have turned him into an extraordinary micro historian of the city, with expertise that spans architecture, horticulture and urban planning," Ben Kenigsberg wrote in his Times review. "He is a connoisseur of 'churchagogues' (synagogues that became churches), of barbershops that use the letter 'z' in their signs (as in 'cutz' or 'kutz') and of informal Sept. 11 murals."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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A great paradox of this pandemic is that while Covid 19 is overwhelming the health care system, health care spending is down a whopping 18 percent. This is because discretionary surgical procedures and the use of other health care services have plunged. Hospitals and doctors are suffering financially while Americans are suffering physically. But not all of the health care industry is hurting. Health insurers are doing just fine. Their revenues, based on premiums that were set in 2019, are stable. They are reporting high first quarter profits because the drop in covered health services overall more than offset the extra cost of caring for Covid 19 patients. Indeed, their profits for the rest of 2020 are projected to be just as healthy as last year's, which is why their stock prices are close to five year highs. Granted, this could change in the long run, as members lose insurance after losing their jobs, and providers roar back with more elective procedures. But for now, health insurers are thriving for the same reason that Americans and health care providers are suffering. So they should do their part in this crisis. They can become heroes alongside physicians, nurses and respiratory therapists. Health insurers as heroes? It may appear that we're being sarcastic, but insurers can take five steps to make this crisis and the longer term future much better. First, just as American taxpayers are providing trillions in financial relief to businesses and hospitals, health insurers should be offering financial relief to Americans. Auto insurers have provided premium rebates to customers because of reduced driving and accidents. Some health insurers have provided 60 or 90 day premium holidays, especially to small businesses. Health insurers should provide premium reductions for 2020, with larger premium relief or suspension of premium collection altogether for the next three months for low and middle income Americans. More than 30 million people have filed for unemployment benefits in just five weeks, and many of them will need health coverage, especially in states that have not expanded Medicaid. Insurers could offer greater leniency on coverage extensions for members who lose jobs and their health insurance it's feasible, because many community nonprofit insurers are already doing it. Second, many people are forgoing needed health care, including prescription drugs. The last thing we need in a pandemic is infected people not getting tested and treated, and spreading the virus to others, because they can't afford basic care. For those who do have coverage, health insurers should make getting care cheaper. While many have waived out of pocket costs for Covid 19 testing and treatment, they should eliminate deductibles and co payments for primary and preventive care and generic drugs for everyone, especially people with high deductible plans, and remove co payments for medications used to treat chronic disease. For those who do need emergency care or hospitalization, providing grace periods on collecting out of pocket costs could go a long way. Insurers should also be mailing their members masks and gloves, free of cost, by covering it as preventive care. Getting appropriate health care is hard enough with physical distancing policies; at least the financial barriers can be reduced. Third, health insurers should help primary care and other physician practices and smaller hospitals, which tend to lack deep cash reserves. With the decline in office visits and increased use of telemedicine, virtually all are losing money and many are going bankrupt. Health insurers have advanced billions to doctors and hospitals. But more substantial help is needed. Health insurers should switch from paying doctors for services rendered (the fee for service model) to paying them a fixed fee per patient they care for (known as capitation), with adjustments for quality provided and how sick patients are. The Hawaii Medical Services Association (the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Hawaii), did this a while ago, and guess what? Unlike doctors in other states, Hawaii's primary care physicians are not on the brink of bankruptcy. Previous physician resistance to capitation has changed under Covid 19. The Massachusetts Coalition of Primary Care called upon state health officials to do it, but private insurers should do it too. Fourth, health insurers should work with public health officials to prepare primary care practices and others to do Covid 19 testing and contact tracing. Many health insurers now employ doctors and nurses to develop clinical protocols, identify gaps in the quality of care, share data with physician practices on how they are doing, and directly work with patients through call centers. This system could be used to increase the public health response that is critical to saving our economy. For example, health insurer call centers could assist in contact tracing. Health insurers also should be working with hospitals and physician practices to set up sites for members with Covid 19 symptoms to be tested and cared for rather than languishing at home. We don't need more 20 and 30 somethings with strokes waiting it out at home because they are afraid of getting Covid 19 at a hospital. Finally, health insurers should aggressively help doctors understand why fewer people are seeking care for conditions other than Covid 19, and help ensure that members get the care they need, because more of them may be dying for lack of treatment. During stressful times people are more prone, not less prone, to experience heart attacks and strokes. Yet those patients are missing from our hospitals. Health insurers know which patients take drugs for chronic conditions. They should reach out to those who delay visits or miss prescriptions to get them what they need and let them know who to call for care. Health insurers are profiting from the pandemic. While this may not last forever and some are already taking some of these recommended steps, all insurers need to step up and demonstrate their commitment to the nation's health. They can help public health officials, health care providers and patients if they do. Then they could become heroes just like nurses and doctors. Amol S. Navathe and Ezekiel J. Emanuel are physicians who direct the Healthcare Transformation Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. 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.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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How does The New York Times decide which offensive comments made by presidential candidates are worth writing full articles about? Joe Biden's comment on "The Breakfast Club" radio show that voters "ain't black" if they are torn between him and Donald Trump was obviously a gaffe and he was right to apologize for it, but it was not the worst thing said by a presidential candidate this past week. The day before, President Trump visited a Ford factory and stated that the Nazi sympathizer Henry Ford had "good bloodlines." The comment was not even mentioned in your article about Mr. Trump's factory visit, despite being arguably more vile than anything Mr. Biden said during his "Breakfast Club" interview. Will The New York Times repeat its missteps of 2016, or will Mr. Biden's gaffes, of which there are sure to be more, be put into their proper context and held up against the words and actions of his opponent? Joe Biden has not made any public appearances outside his house since mid March except for an unannounced one to lay a wreath on Memorial Day.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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Even if President Obama and Republicans in Congress can reach a last minute compromise that averts some tax increases before Monday's midnight deadline, experts still foresee a significant drag on the economy in the first half of 2013 from the fiscal impasse in Washington. While negotiators in the capital focus on keeping Bush era tax rates in place for all but the wealthiest Americans, other tax increases are expected to go into effect regardless of what happens in the coming days. For example, a two percentage point jump in payroll taxes for Social Security is all but certain after Jan. 1, a change that will equal an additional 2,000 from the paycheck of a worker earning 100,000 a year. Many observers initially expected the lower payroll tax deduction rate of 4.2 percent to be preserved. But in recent weeks, as it became clear that political leaders were prepared to let that rate rise to 6.2 percent, economists reduced their predictions for growth in the first quarter accordingly. Largely because of this jump in payroll taxes, Nigel Gault, chief United States economist at IHS Global Insight, is halving his prediction for economic growth in the first quarter to 1 percent from an earlier estimate of just over 2 percent. That represents a significant slowdown in economic growth from the third quarter of 2012, when the economy expanded at an annual rate of 3.1 percent. Mr. Obama has pushed to preserve Bush era tax rates on income below 250,000 a year but Republicans have held out for a higher threshold, perhaps in the neighborhood of 400,000 a year. Republicans also favor deeper spending cuts to curb long term budget deficits a move many Democrats oppose. While hopes dimmed Sunday afternoon that a deal could be reached before Jan. 1, most observers said they did not expect the full impact from more than 600 billion in potential tax increases and spending cuts to swamp the economy right away. Indeed, a compromise could be struck in the coming weeks that heads off the worst of the fallout. In the event no compromise is found, however, the Congressional Budget Office and many private economists warn that the sudden pullback in spending and the rise in taxes would push the economy into recession in the first half of the year. Under this outcome, Mr. Gault said, the economy could shrink by 0.5 percent over all of 2013. With the clock ticking, some observers bolstered their criticism of Washington. "If we have a recession, it's unforgivable," said Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at the Economic Outlook Group. "For the first time in modern history, we will have a self inflicted recession in the U.S." But last week, stocks sold off as hopes for a quick compromise faded. More pressure on shares is expected beginning on Monday, especially if the fight does indeed slip into 2013. If anything forces politicians to act, Mr. Baumohl said, it could be a sell off on Wall Street. "The politicians need to be pressed by markets to be forced to the table," he said. 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. Payroll managers at many companies are also watching the negotiations closely but have already prepared systems for the two percentage point change in payroll taxes, said Scott A. Schapiro, a principal at KPMG. "We're primarily closed down from Christmas to New Year's," he said, "but our payroll folks are working. Payroll has to be around." "This is one of the most obvious effects of the fiscal cliff," Mr. Schapiro added, "because it will affect all taxpayers." The Social Security payroll tax applies to the first 113,700 of annual income, he said. It was first cut by Congress in late 2010 to help give the economy a jolt, and was extended again last year to cover 2012. Another big question mark is whether unemployment benefits for more than two million jobless Americans will be extended beyond Jan. 1. While there is still the possibility these payouts for the long term unemployed will be preserved as the negotiations go down to the wire, failure to extend them would deliver another sizable blow to a still fragile economy, experts said. "This is not just an inside the Beltway game," said Vincent Reinhart, chief United States economist at Morgan Stanley. "Both the payroll tax increase and the change in unemployment benefits would hit hand to mouth consumers hard. This has consequences for the whole economy." Consumer spending is especially critical right now, because many businesses have pulled back already, citing the fiscal impasse in Washington as a prime concern. Until recently, consumers have been more optimistic about the economy, although sentiment has eroded in recent weeks as anxiety increased about just what policy makers would do in terms of taxes and spending. If it were not for the uncertainty in Washington and the fallout from the fiscal impasse, Mr. Reinhart said, the economy would be growing at an annual rate of 2 percent to 2.5 percent. Instead, he estimated growth in the fourth quarter of 2012 at just under 1 percent, and said he expected it to edge up only slightly to around 1 percent in the first half of 2013. Unemployment, now at 7.7 percent, is about 0.3 percentage point higher than it otherwise would be, he added. To be sure, the impact from some other scheduled changes will not be felt right away and could still be reversed if a deal is completed in the coming weeks. For example, automatic spending cuts set to hit the Pentagon budget as well as nonmilitary programs are spread out between now and the end of the 2013 fiscal year in September, giving legislators time to change course and head off any major impact. But the longer the standoff continues, the deeper the economic damage, experts said. "Because the politicians couldn't get out of the way," Mr. Reinhart said, "growth in the last quarter of 2012 and the first two quarters of 2013 will be below trend. There is a real cost of not coming to the table."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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The Music Industry Is Wrestling With Race. Here's What It Has Promised. What's the fastest way to put music industry money into the hands of its Black creators? A small Swedish synthesizer manufacturer has a plan. Teenage Engineering, which makes sleekly designed, retro sounding machines adored by dance music producers, will soon begin sharing sales revenue with a set of Black musicians and other artists of color in the United States in recognition of their role in popularizing the company's products. "This is not charity," Emmy Parker, the company's chief brand officer, said in an interview. "Not only is it the right thing to do, it is also good for our business." Still, a thread of anger and impatience remains palpable behind the scenes. "If history is any indicator, this blows over," said Troy Carter, a longtime music and technology executive who is now an adviser to the Prince estate. Despite some cynicism about the promises for change, the predominant mood is one of a momentum that must be seized. Almost as quickly as the major labels made big pledges in the past few weeks, an advocacy group, the Black Music Action Coalition, was formed to hold those companies to account. "One of our main motivations is not to allow the record companies to get away with pledging money and not pledging systemic change," said Prophet, a manager of Asian Doll, Layton Greene and other acts, who is part of the group. "Even though their foot was not on the neck of George Floyd, that same systemic racism that plagues society plagues the music business." Here's where the industry's responses currently stand. On June 2, a campaign begun by two young Black women who work in music, Jamila Thomas and Brianna Agyemang, paused the industry for a day of reflection and grew into an internet phenomenon under the hashtag BlackoutTuesday. Within days, a deluge of donation promises from major music companies followed. Warner backed by a foundation connected to its parent company and Sony each pledged 100 million to charity. Universal committed 25 million and established a task force to examine its operations. Spotify, Apple, YouTube and SiriusXM made further pledges. In tacit acknowledgment of the industry's poor record of hiring minorities for top positions, each of the big labels has undertaken employment inclusion efforts. Sony and Warner began searching for top diversity officers in recent weeks; Universal began its diversity push in 2017. Universal is also a partner with the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California, which two years ago rocked the music world with a study finding scant representation of women in pop. Last week, the initiative said it would study the diversity of record labels, publishers, talent agencies, digital platforms and other companies. "I think the findings will be shocking," said Stacy L. Smith, an associate professor at U.S.C. who is the founder of the Annenberg initiative. One of the few concrete changes made so far has been contested. Three days after BlackoutTuesday, Republic Records, a Universal label that is home to Drake and Ariana Grande, said it would stop using the word urban in department and job titles, calling it "outdated." That term, once used by radio stations to evoke sophistication, has come under fire as pigeonholing Black music and stunting the career growth of Black executives. Last month the Grammys renamed its urban contemporary album category "progressive R B." Yet moves to retire "urban" have been called premature. Ethiopia Habtemariam, the president of Motown Records and a co chair of Universal's task force, said in an interview that addressing the word was not the task force's first order of business. The greater goal, she said, was "to make sure we are creating a diverse environment at our company, making sure we have Black leadership across all of the industry. That's the key." One complication: Many Black executives fully embrace the term, including Shawn Gee, the manager of the Roots, whose promotion company, Live Nation Urban, is a joint venture with the concert giant Live Nation Entertainment. The debate over "urban," Gee said, is a distraction from the industry's larger problem of a dearth of Black leaders. "Who in these companies has been able to greenlight Black culture?" Gee said in an interview. "That's where the real problem lies. The problem lies in the infrastructure, in the system not in the word." One goal of the newly formed Black Music Action Coalition whose public letter was signed by artists including Pharrell Williams, Nicki Minaj, Travis Scott and Lady Gaga was to address what it called "longstanding racial inequities in the music business." "There are not enough Black executives in the music business who have control of P L," said Binta Niambi Brown, a manager and executive who has worked with Chance the Rapper, referring to the profit and loss statements that measure a business's finances. Brown, who is part of the coalition, added, "But they are required to explain Black culture to white executives who do run that." Carter, now of the Prince estate, became Spotify's global head of creator services in 2016 a high ranking job covering all genres. But when he left two years later, Carter said, an Amazon executive offered him a job there as head of urban music. "That is the bias that is automatically built into our business," Carter said. "That if I am a Black executive, call me for the urban music job, which is completely unfair at the end of the day." An Amazon spokeswoman denied Carter's account, saying he "was never officially offered a role at Amazon." Looking Back at Old Deals Another question is the treatment of artist contracts from previous decades. Lisa A. Alter, a copyright lawyer who works on behalf of many older artists, said that in the past, Black artists routinely received poor contracts. "Historically there was less robust representation of artists of color from a legal point of view," Alter said. "That resulted in an inability to get advice and negotiate strongly in certain areas particularly the recoupment of advances and how royalties are calculated." Stories of poor contracts for older artists, particularly Black ones, are legion. Little Richard, for example, said that he waived his rights to many of his classic songs early in his career, though he regained them as part of a lawsuit settlement in the 1980s. "I didn't read my contracts right; I signed bad contracts," he told The New York Times in a 1992 interview. "I paid dearly for it." One company, BMG Rights Management, a midsize label and publishing group, has said it will review its past contracts to address "any inequities or anomalies." Yet the company's pool of contracts is far shallower than that of any of the major labels, which have catalogs going back a century. BMG's review also only covers its recording contracts, not those for music publishing, which are a majority of the company's holdings. In a statement, a Universal spokesman said the company recognized "there is more work to be done" and is committed to looking into legacy contracts. Compared to giant record companies and streaming platforms, Teenage Engineering is a tiny force. In 2018, it had about 11 million in net sales, according to its most recently disclosed financial statements. But the company is positioning its revenue sharing plan which it is calling an artist fellowship as a bold statement to recognize and quantify the contributions of artists of color. The program is set to begin on Sept. 1, and Teenage Engineering's contracts with artists are still being finalized. But Jesper Kouthoofd, its chief executive, said the company will pay at least 15 percent of sales revenue to four acts when customers in the United States use special links to the company's website. The four initial fellows are Underground Resistance, a long running collective from Detroit; Suzi Analogue, from Miami; and VoltageCtrlR and Baseck, both of Los Angeles. Other companies on music's margins have drawn acclaim for their efforts to put more money in artists' pockets. Bandcamp, an indie streaming and retail platform, has waived its fees on certain days during the pandemic. On Juneteenth, the site donated its share of sales to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Parker declined to give specific terms of Teenage Engineering's deals for the new program, but said the artists' share of company revenues "could be anywhere from 100,000 a year to, in some cases, close to a million dollars a year." "This will allow us," Parker said, "to make a shift in the economic model immediately."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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"Flipped" vials that had contained fruit flies in the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center at Indiana University.Credit...Kaiti Sullivan for The New York Times Fruit Flies Are Essential to Science. So Are the Workers Who Keep Them Alive. "Flipped" vials that had contained fruit flies in the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center at Indiana University. The rooms that make up the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center at Indiana University are lined wall to wall with identical shelves. Each shelf is filled with uniform racks, and each rack with indistinguishable glass vials. The tens of thousands of fruit fly types within the vials, though, are each magnificently different. Some have eyes that fluoresce pink. Some jump when you shine a red light on them. Some have short bodies and iridescent curly wings, and look "like little ballerinas," said Carol Sylvester, who helps care for them. Each variety doubles as a unique research tool, and it has taken decades to introduce the traits that make them useful. If left unattended, the flies would die in a matter of weeks, marooning entire scientific disciplines. Throughout the Covid 19 pandemic, workers across industries have held the world together, taking on great personal risk to care for sick patients, maintain supply chains and keep people fed. But other essential jobs are less well known. At the Stock Center dozens of employees have come to work each day, through a lockdown and afterward, to minister to the flies that underpin scientific research. To most casual observers, fruit flies are little dots with wings that hang out near old bananas. But over the course of the last century, researchers have turned the insect known to science as Drosophila melanogaster into a sort of genetic switchboard. Biologists regularly develop new "strains" of flies, in which particular genes are turned on or off. Studying these slight mutants can reveal how those genes function including in humans, because we share over half of our genes with Drosophila. For instance, researchers discovered what is now called the hippo gene which helps regulate organ size in both fruit flies and vertebrates after flies with a defect in it grew up to be unusually large and wrinkly. Further work with the gene has indicated that such defects may contribute to the unchecked cell growth that leads to cancer in people. Other work with the flies has shed light on diseases from Alzheimer's to Zika, taught scientists about decision making and circadian rhythms and helped researchers using them to win six Nobel Prizes. Over a century of tweaking fruit flies and cataloging the results has made Drosophila the most well characterized animal model we have. It's a big role for an unassuming bug. "When I try and tell people what I do, the first thing they usually say is, 'Why would you keep fruit flies alive? I try and kill them!'" said Ms. Sylvester, who has been a stockkeeper at Bloomington since 2014. If a few hitchhike to her house from the grocery store, her kids razz her, she added: "'Mom, you brought your co workers home from work again.'" The Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center is the only institution of its kind in the United States, and the largest in the world. It currently houses over 77,000 different fruit fly strains, most of which are in high demand. In 2019, the center shipped 204,672 vials of flies to labs in 49 states and 54 countries, said Annette Parks, one of the center's five principal investigators. It is "one of the jewels we have in the community," said Pamela Geyer, a stem cell biologist at the University of Iowa who has been ordering flies from the stock center for 30 years. Other model organisms can be frozen at particular life stages for long term storage; lab freezers the world over hold mouse embryos and E. coli cultures. But fruit flies can't go on ice. Caring for the creatures means regularly "flipping" them: transferring them from an old vial to a clean one that has been provisioned with a dollop of food. Quarantined with other members of their strain, the flies mate and lay eggs, which hatch, pupate and reproduce, continuing the cycle. "We have strains in our collection that have been continuously propagated like that since around 1909," across generations and institutions, said Cale Whitworth, another stock center principal investigator. To keep their millions of Drosophila flipped and happy, the center employs 64 stockkeepers, as well as one media preparator think fly food cook as well as a kitchen assistant and five dishwashing personnel. At the stock center, as everywhere, the pandemic's first stirrings felt ominous. "I remember joking with people, 'We're the people in the beginning of the dystopian novel, and we don't know what's coming yet,'" Ms. Sylvester said. As case numbers rose, Dr. Whitworth packed a go bag with a pillow and a toothbrush, imagining the worst. "I was in the full on, 'Everyone's sick, last man on Earth' type thing," he said. "Like, 'How many flies can I flip in a 20 hour period, sleep for four hours, and keep flipping the next day?'" Instead, when Indiana University shut down on March 15, the stock center stayed open. Kevin Gabbard, the fly food chef, did an emergency shop. Although they eat the same thing every day a yeasty mash of mostly corn based products flies can be picky. Mr. Gabbard, risking nothing, ordered two months' worth of their preferred brands. "You think cornmeal's cornmeal," he said. "But it's not if it's not right." Around the same time, the employees had a choice to make. Deemed essential workers, they were authorized to come to campus. The university guaranteed them full pay even if they decided to stay home, or time and a half for coming in. (The center covers its costs through a combination of federal National Institutes of Health grants and its own earnings from fly sales.) The vast majority chose to continue working, said Dr. Whitworth even though the job was suddenly quite different. The center is usually a very social workplace, with birthday parties and group lunches. Hours are normally flexible, a big selling point for employees, many of whom are parents or students, or have retired from full time work. Now people work in masks, often in separate rooms. Shifts in one of the center's buildings became strictly scheduled to avoid overlap. "You can be working alone for quite a while, maybe all day," said Roxy Bertsch, who has been a stockkeeper since 2018. And for the first several weeks, the stockkeepers many of whom perform additional duties, such as packing, shipping and training spent all their time flipping flies, which is monotonous and hard on the hands. "All we were doing was coming in, feeding flies and leaving," Mrs. Bertsch said. "There is no way you are keeping me from work if I could be here," she said. Ms. Sylvester specializes in caring for flies whose mutations mean they need extra TLC. She also worked full time throughout the shutdown, buoyed by concern for her charges. "I mostly just love the flies and don't want them to die," she said. "I never thought I would love larvae so much." In mid May, the center began shipping stocks again. Dr. Parks passed along another batch of messages, many of them now tinged with relief. "Feels like Christmas," tweeted a lab at Denmarks' Aarhus University, with a photo of a box of vials. One message earlier in the spring from Tony Parkes, a biologist at Nipissing University in Ontario, had extolled all of those "who go about their work with few accolades, but on whom everyone counts as a foundational backbone." It also allows researchers to literally share their discoveries with each other. "You don't have to maintain your own library to have access to all of that information," he said, because the stock center is "there whenever you wish." The people who keep the center running think about this, too. "It means a lot to know that you're a part of that," said Mrs. Bertsch. But it adds some pressure. "We all feel this big weight to make sure the stock center is there for everyone," said Dr. Whitworth. The pandemic continues, of course, and more obstacles loom. Although the fall semester passed without incident, cases are rising in the area, increasing the potential for another shutdown. Mail delays, both domestic and overseas, have prompted the center to suggest that their customers turn to private carriers flies perish if kept in transit too long. Although they are no longer being paid extra, everyone keeps coming to work. And even if things take a turn, Dr. Whitworth is ready. "I never unpacked my bag," he said. "It's still sitting in the closet."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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An influential committee of the World Health Organization said on Tuesday that it would be "irresponsible" to try to create babies from gene edited human embryos. The panel called for an international registry to track all research into editing the human genome. The committee was created in the wake of the birth of the first gene edited babies the result of an experiment by a Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, who genetically altered human embryos and implanted them in a woman who gave birth to twins last fall. His actions stirred alarm among other researchers, ethicists and policymakers, because so little is known about the safety and health effects of editing the genome of a human embryo. Many fear that the technology could be misused to create "designer babies" genetically altered to heighten physical features, intelligence or athletic prowess. Scientific and medical institutions in the United States and around the world have pledged to establish clear guidelines and a system to monitor such research. On Tuesday, after its first meeting, the W.H.O. committee outlined some of the steps it intends to take.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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Here's to loving one of the least hip shows on TV. To its earnest parenting, its destabilizing cast changes, its long seasons. Get excited for a cameo from Colin Powell, as himself! Marvel at the variety of accents being attempted! Can we interest you in some passionate descriptions of diplomacy and an occasional mention of Thomas Aquinas? The CBS political procedural ended its six season run Sunday, finishing off an abbreviated 10 episode season that found our heroine, Elizabeth McCord (Tea Leoni), fighting for her presidency. It was fine but often cheesy, even for a show that has a strong affinity for cheese in general. Mostly this season struggled because there is nothing scrappy about being the president, and the show was always its most interesting when Elizabeth could justly play by her own rules. But there's nothing to subvert as president; breaking with protocol is not admirable and is, in fact, often criminal. And hey, the show was never called "Madam President." (Or "Commander in Chief" that was Geena Davis.) When it was at its best, though, "Madam Secretary" was a calm pleasure, a well fitted dress shirt, thick stationery, shortbread cookies. Give us heated arguments in the Situation Room, but please, also give us Bebe Neuwirth, Patina Miller and Erich Bergen singing about international relations to the tune of "The Longest Time."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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Charley Pride performing in Nashville in 2018. In the 20 years after his breakout hit, "Just Between You and Me," in 1967, 51 more of Mr. Pride's records reached the country Top 10. Charley Pride, the son of a Mississippi sharecropper who went on to become the first Black superstar in country music, died on Saturday in hospice care in Dallas. He was 86. His publicist Jeremy Westby said the cause was complications of Covid 19. A bridge builder who broke into country music amid the racial unrest of the 1960s, Mr. Pride was one of the most successful singers ever to work in that largely white genre, placing 52 records in the country Top 10 from 1966 to 1987. Singles like "Kiss an Angel Good Mornin'" and "Is Anybody Goin' to San Antone" among his 29 recordings to reach No. 1 on the country chart featuried a countrypolitan mix of traditional instrumentation and more uptown arrangements. At RCA, the label for which he recorded for three decades, Mr. Pride was second only to Elvis Presley in record sales. In the process he emerged as an inspiration to generations of performers, from the Black country hitmaker Darius Rucker, formerly of the rock band Hootie and the Blowfish, to white inheritors like Alan Jackson, who included a version of "Kiss an Angel" on his 1999 album, "Under the Influence." The reasons for Mr. Pride's appeal were undeniable: a resonant baritone voice, an innate ear for melody, an affable demeanor and camera friendly good looks. In interviews, however, he sometimes played down the role that his Blackness played in his career, especially when confronted with racial prejudice. Once his racial identity became evident, Mr. Pride wrote, he often had trouble securing bookings and sometimes endured the indignity of having Southern disc jockeys refer to him on the air as that "good nigra." To ease tensions during his early concerts he made lighthearted references to his "permanent tan." Despite his efforts to accommodate his white audiences, Mr. Pride was not country music's answer to Jackie Robinson, as some have observed. His generosity of spirit notwithstanding, his individual success never opened doors for Black performers in country music the way Robinson's did for other Black players in Major League Baseball. It was more than four decades, in fact, after Mr. Pride made his debut in country music that Mr. Rucker became the second African American to have a No. 1 country hit, with the single "Don't Think I Don't Think About It." Nevertheless, the dignity and grace with which Mr. Pride and his wife of 63 years, Rozene Pride, navigated their way through the white world of country music became a beacon to his fans and fellow performers. "No person of color had ever done what he has done," Mr. Rucker said in "Charley Pride: I'm Just Me," a 2019 "American Masters" documentary on PBS. Mr. Pride himself was more self effacing in assessing his impact but nevertheless expressed some satisfaction in having a role in furthering integration. "We're not colorblind yet," he wrote in his autobiography, "but we've advanced a few paces along the path, and I like to think I've contributed something to that process." Charley Frank Pride was born on March 18, 1934, on a 40 acre sharecropping farm in Sledge, Miss., the fourth of 11 children of Tessie (Stewart) Pride and Mack Pride Sr. His father had meant to name him Charl, but a clerical error on his birth certificate officially left him with the first name Charley. Rather than choosing to become a singer, however, Mr. Pride initially decided to pursue a career in baseball in the Negro American League, leaving home at 16 to pitch for the Memphis Red Sox, among other organizations, and the Boise Yankees, an Idaho affiliate of the New York Yankees. He married Ebby Rozene Cohran in 1956 and was drafted into the Army, interrupting his baseball career, which had already suffered a setback when he was injured while pitching for Boise. After his discharge from the service two years later, Mr. Pride returned to baseball in the early '60s, accepting invitations to try out with the California Angels and the New York Mets but was ultimately not offered a contract by either franchise. The Prides by this time had relocated to Helena, Mont., where Mr. Pride played both semipro baseball and music at social events for the local smelting plant where he worked. He and his wife started a family in Helena, where Mr. Pride came to the attention of the country singers Red Sovine and Red Foley. They eventually persuaded him to make a go of it in country music. The demo recordings Mr. Pride made on arriving in Nashville in the early '60s initially failed to attract interest. It was not until the producer Jack "Cowboy" Clement supervised a session of his in the summer of 1965 that Chet Atkins finally took notice and offered Mr. Pride a record deal. "Just Between You and Me," the third single from Mr. Pride's sessions with Mr. Clement, reached the country Top 10 in 1967, inaugurating a string of hits that extended into the late 1980s. In 1971, the year that saw the release of "Kiss an Angel Good Mornin'" his eighth No. 1 country single and sole Top 40 pop hit Mr. Pride was named both male vocalist of the year and entertainer of the year by the County Music Association. He also won two Grammy Awards that year, in the sacred and gospel performance categories, for a single with "Let Me Live" on one side and "Did You Think to Pray" on the other. In 1972, Mr. Pride was again named male vocalist of the year by the Country Music Association and won another Grammy, for best male country vocal performance, for the album "Charley Pride Sings Heart Songs." He became a member of the Grand Ole Opry in 1993. The only African American to precede him on the show's cast was the harmonica player DeFord Bailey, a star on the Opry from 1927 to 1941. (In 2012, Mr. Rucker became just the third Black performer ever to join the Opry.) In 2008, he and his brother Mack, along with 28 other surviving veterans of Negro league baseball, became honorary draftees of the 30 current teams in Major League Baseball, in recognition of their achievements and of the larger legacy of the Negro leagues. Mr. Pride was selected by the Texas Rangers, a franchise of which he was part owner and for whom he sang the national anthem before game five of the 2010 World Series. Mack Pride died in 2018. A former part owner of the team, former President George W. Bush, said in a statement, referring to the former first lady, Laura Bush: "Charley Pride was a fine gentleman with a great voice. Laura and I love his music and the spirit behind it." Mr. Pride received a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in 2017 and was honored last month with the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Country Music Association. His final public appearance was on Nov. 11, at the CMA Awards in Nashville, where he sang "Kiss an Angel" with Jimmie Allen, one of several Black contemporary country hitmakers to cite Mr. Pride as an influence. Organizers of the event said at the time that they were "following all protocols" for dealing with Covid 19, but some in attendance were not wearing masks. Mr. Pride's publicist said that he tested negative twice for the coronavirus after returning home. He was subsequently hospitalized for what doctors thought was double pneumonia, but which was determined to be Covid 19 Besides being an entertainer, Mr. Pride was a successful businessman, investing in real estate around Dallas and establishing Chardon, an artist booking and management company that helped launch the careers of country singers like Janie Fricke and Neal McCoy. He was also a partner in Pi Gem, a song publishing company owned with the producer Tom Collins. In addition to his wife, he is survived by his sons, Carlton and Dion, both of whom are musicians; a daughter, Angela Rozene Pride; two brothers, Stephen and Harmon; two sisters, Catherine Sanders and Maxine Pride; five grandchildren; and two great grandchildren. At the outset of his career, many of his fans, once they realized he was Black, would ask Mr. Pride why his vocal phrasing was less down home that is, more button down and less country than that of Hank Williams, Roy Acuff and some of the other white singers who inspired him. "I get a lot of questions asked me, 'Charley, how'd you get into country music and why don't you sound like you're supposed to sound?' " he explained to his audience during a 1968 concert recording released by RCA. "It's a little unique, I admit," he went on. "But I've been singing country music since I was about 5 years old. This is why I sound like I sound."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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The Guardian said on Monday that it intended to cut its costs sharply in an effort to reduce its losses and break even at an operating level in three years' time. The Guardian's editor, Katharine Viner, and the chief executive of The Guardian Media Group, David Pemsel, outlined a three year plan with the goal of reducing the news organization's 380 million annualized costs by 20 percent. The Guardian Media Group, which is supported by a trust worth more than a billion dollars, said in its annual report for 2015 that its operating losses had been 45.3 million pounds, or more than 64 million in current dollars. A recent report in The Financial Times suggested that the company would require a 9 percent annual return to sustain that kind of loss. "Against the backdrop of a volatile market, we are taking immediate action to boost revenues and reduce our cost base in order to safeguard Guardian journalism in perpetuity," Mr. Pemsel said in a statement.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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The coming out party will feature teenagers from Texas, journalists from Manila and a woman in Louisiana who spent 21 years fighting to free her husband from prison. Concordia Studio, a production company backed by the multibillionaire philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, will make its debut this week at the Sundance Film Festival, two years after Ms. Powell Jobs founded it with the Oscar winning documentary filmmaker Davis Guggenheim. Four of Concordia's nonfiction films will be among the 16 shown as part of Sundance's U.S. Documentary Competition, an auspicious start for a newcomer to the country's pre eminent festival for independent cinema. Documentaries have always been an emphasis at Sundance, which starts on Thursday in Park City, Utah. But they have become hot properties in the age of streaming, with YouTube shelling out 20 million for a 10 part Justin Bieber documentary series and Apple spending 25 million for a film about the pop star Billie Eilish. Nonfiction films that have nothing to do with celebrities can also score big, but with unpredictable story lines known to wreak havoc on production schedules, they can be tough to finance. Concordia is here to help, offering money, production services and expert advice to serious documentary filmmakers. "If there is a nonfiction story that is purely cotton candy, we wouldn't do it," Mr. Guggenheim said at the Concordia office, which has been carved out of a former Volkswagen repair shop in Venice, Calif. At the same time, he added, the studio is looking for films "that will reach a broader audience." Mr. Guggenheim, who won an Oscar for the 2006 documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," met Ms. Powell Jobs, the widow of the Apple co founder Steven P. Jobs, a decade ago and worked with her on the 2013 film "The Dream Is Now," a short form documentary on immigration reform. Ms. Powell Jobs suggested that they continue working together under the auspices of her firm, Emerson Collective, which owns a majority stake in The Atlantic magazine and a significant minority share in Anonymous Content, a television, film and talent management company. While thinking about what a new studio might look like, Mr. Guggenheim sought inspiration in a book that has become a bible of sorts in Hollywood, "Creativity, Inc.," by Ed Catmull, one of the founders of Pixar Animation Studios, and Amy Wallace, a journalist. Mr. Guggenheim decided to hire executives from the trenches of nonfiction film to help producers and directors navigate the often chaotic process from hatching an idea to finding a distributor. The name Concordia, meaning harmony in Latin, is also a nod to Concord, Mass., the hometown of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who inspired the Emerson Collective name. Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine, the husband and wife duo behind "The Overnighters," a documentary that won the Sundance Special Jury Prize for Intuitive Filmmaking in 2014, were at the top of the list of filmmakers Concordia wanted to work with. Their new film, "Boys State," will have its premiere at Sundance Jan. 24. The project began in early 2018, when Mr. Moss and Ms. McBaine sent a two page treatment on their interest in chronicling the Texas branch of a nationwide summer program run by the American Legion in which roughly a thousand 17 year olds gather to form a representative government. The company provided the filmmakers with an initial investment and committed to the project after seeing early footage. Mr. Moss said the experience of working with Concordia was "radically different in every way" from what he was used to. 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. "Time," another Concordia film that made Sundance's documentary competition, focuses on an African American woman who has spent 21 years trying to get her husband released from Angola prison in Louisiana. It was made by Garrett Bradley, a New York filmmaker who worked as a second unit director on Ava DuVernay's Netflix series, "When They See Us." The other films in Concordia's Sundance slate are "A Thousand Cuts," which documents the attacks on the news media by President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, and "Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets," about the last days of a beloved Las Vegas dive bar. "We are at a moment when cynicism and division are abundant, but we have seen that stories can bring people together," Ms. Powell Jobs said by email. "Concordia is a belief that film has the power to shine a spotlight on the important narratives of life that too often are overlooked." The studio also has two documentary series in the works at Netflix. And Concordia can already call itself an Oscar nominee, after its short film, "Walk, Run, Cha Cha," produced for The New York Times's Op Docs series, landed a spot in the short subject documentary category. Concordia won't limit itself to documentaries. This month, it started a division for scripted feature films led by Jonathan King, who spent 12 years at Participant Media creating popular movies that touched on social concerns. He said Concordia's scripted movies are likely to address education, immigration, the environment and civil rights. "Those are all things we care about and want to tell stories about," Mr. King said. "But it's never going to be an issue driven slate. It will be filmmaker and story driven." Joe Berlinger, a veteran documentary filmmaker, said it was wise for any studio with "good storytelling chops" to expand into multiple genres because of the seemingly bottomless appetite for material at Netflix, Disney Plus and other streaming services. "When I started in this business with 1992's 'Brother's Keeper,' if you didn't sell your documentary to HBO or PBS, you weren't selling your documentary," Mr. Berlinger said by email. Now, thanks in part to the demand brought on by the rise of streaming, he noted, A list directors like Ron Howard and Martin Scorsese are making documentaries, and independent documentary filmmakers like himself have signed on to direct fictional feature films.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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From left, Gary McNair, Annie George, Harriet Bolwell and Francesca Moody with one of the sheds used for "Shedinburgh," a livestreamed comedy and drama festival. LONDON David Chapple began planning his trip to the 2020 Edinburgh Festival Fringe a year ago, since you can't be too prepared when you hold the world record for the most Fringe performances attended in one season. Having seen a record breaking 304 shows in 27 days in 2014, he was planning another Fringe viewing marathon this year for his wife's 60th birthday. But in early April, the event the world's largest arts festival was canceled for the first time in its 73 year history, because of the coronavirus. For Chapple, a civil servant who estimates that he spends half of his income on watching live comedy and keeps chickens named after British stand up comedians, it was devastating. "Edinburgh is everything, really," he said. "It's the focal point of our year." Among them is Francesca Moody, a London based theater producer who took the original stage version of "Fleabag" to the Fringe in 2013 and had planned to stage three plays in Edinburgh this month. When the festival was called off, her fellow theater maker Gary McNair joked that he would have to stage a "Shed Fringe" from his garden instead a pun that "set cogs whirring" in Moody's producer brain. Six weeks ago, she came up with Shedinburgh, an online festival of comedy and drama that streams live from a garden shed for three weeks starting on Friday. In fact, there are two sheds, each measuring six feet by eight feet: one onstage at London's Soho Theatre, the other at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh. Both venues have been closed since March, when the British government ordered theaters to shut to help slow the spread of the coronavirus. Setting up the sheds inside is a nod to the questing spirit of the Fringe, which takes over every corner of the city of Edinburgh each August, transforming pubs and gardens, gyms, parking lots and lecture theaters into performance spaces. "The cancellation of the Fringe has left a massive hole," said Moody, who has attended the festival for 17 years. "This is an opportunity to acknowledge how magical the festival is, how important it is to me and to a lot of the artists who have had success there." Thanks to social distancing rules and space restrictions, the "Shed ule" is dominated by one person shows, from artists like Jack Rooke, Deborah Frances White and Tim Crouch. Audiences will watch on Zoom after donating at least 4 pounds ( 5) per ticket, and profits will go toward a fund for artists aiming to stage a show at the Fringe next year. Before planning was halted because of the pandemic, this year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival had confirmed more than 2,200 shows from 48 countries in about 230 venues, said Rebecca Monks, a spokeswoman for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society. They were preparing for a similar scale festival to last year's, in which over 3,800 shows were staged and more than three million tickets were sold. Edinburgh is "the way that arts organizations, venues, TV production companies find new work the fact that it doesn't exist this year will have a significant impact," said Moody, who knows how life changing a successful Fringe can be. When she and Phoebe Waller Bridge took "Fleabag" to a dank vault under Edinburgh's George IV Bridge seven years ago, they raised money on Kickstarter, didn't pay themselves, and gave away tickets for the first week to fill the 60 seater room. It became one of that year's most talked about shows, which led to a run at London's Soho Theatre, where it caught the attention of the BBC's head of comedy. "Shedinburgh" is just one way theater makers are keeping the Fringe flame burning. Fringe on Friday is a weekly hourlong cabaret streaming from performers' homes; Edinburgh Unlocked is a comedy festival in audiobook form from Penguin Random House, featuring 15 minute sets from stand ups whose shows were canceled; Zoo TV is offering on demand streaming of past Edinburgh performances; and Fringe of Colour is screening daily films by artists of color. Corrie McGuire, a comedy producer and agent who has staged the raucously interactive midnight show "Spank!" at the Edinburgh Fringe for the past 15 years, estimates that her agency lost PS60,000 "overnight" when the theaters closed in March. A quarter of that would have come from Edinburgh. Last week, she staged the first online "Spank!" with the stand up comedians Lauren Pattison and Emmanuel Sonubi performing from their bedrooms; Magical Bones, a break dancing magician, doing tricks in his kitchen; and Vikki Stone singing songs from her attic. To combat the "Zoom fatigue" that many people are feeling amid the plethora of online events and meetings during the pandemic, McGuire said, she created a virtual front row in which 10 audience members could volunteer to "sit up front" and have their microphones taken off mute so that performers could hear their reactions. "Being able to have people from all over the world watching the same gig gave it real Edinburgh energy," she added.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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LOS ANGELES Grand. Gutsy. Godlike. In the popular imagination, studio chiefs embody all of those qualities volcano tempered rulers who blurt out things like, "We're gonna make you a star, kid," and alter careers, and maybe even film history, in a hot second. But the reality of the modern day studio boss is much more mundane. Largely gone are the days of swashbuckling moguls with offices big enough to accommodate Cleopatra's barge. Instead, the job has become corporate in the extreme answering to parent company boards, serving up sequels so related merchandise keeps selling, cutting costs as DVD money vanishes. The real fun (and profit) for much of the Type A executive set has migrated up the coast to Silicon Valley. So when the former 20th Century Fox chairman James N. Gianopulos was tapped to take over the struggling Paramount Pictures he started last week it was no surprise. In an industry that tries to thrill audiences, the identities of the studio chairmen are almost mind numbingly predictable. Of Hollywood's eight biggest film suppliers, five are managed by someone who has held the same job at another one of those companies. Alan F. Horn was forcibly retired from Warner Bros. Now he runs Walt Disney Studios. Thomas E. Rothman was pushed out at Fox. Now he reigns at Sony. Stacey Snider, now leading Fox, formerly ran Universal. Adam Fogelson? Ousted by Universal, and currently STX Entertainment's movie chief. These are all talented executives who know the movie business inside and out no small qualification in such a unique mix of art and commerce. Mr. Horn, in particular, has led Disney to astounding success. But why does Hollywood keep recycling its studio bosses? The question has been percolating in the movie capital since Paramount hired Mr. Gianopulos. With pretty much everyone agreeing that the film business needs shaking up (the analyst Michael Nathanson released a report last week titled, "Film Industry: Don't Just Stand There, Do Something!"), why did Paramount go with the tried and true? In a column for the trade news outlet Deadline.com, Peter Bart, who was Variety's editor in chief for two decades, was generally supportive of Mr. Gianopulos. But Mr. Bart also seemed to side with Tom Freston, the highly regarded former Viacom chief executive, whom Mr. Bart quoted as saying that, if he were taking over an entertainment company today, he would "hire a motorcycle gang of rule breakers to reinvent the whole business." As Mr. Bart noted, "Gianopulos, thoughtful and cautious, does not fit that description." Hollywood loves nothing more than a sequel. In a topsy turvy business where new movies can cost 400 million to make and market, sequels are safe audiences are already familiar with them. The same holds true with film executives. As Janice Min, the former editor of The Hollywood Reporter, said in an email, hiring at "these increasingly corporate studios" does not involve innovation as much as self protection. "They hire people that have done it before," she wrote, "so no boss or board can ever say they took a chance on someone without experience!" Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. Most studios are not in the business of building anything. They are about protecting what they have. So they go with the safe choice. Some longtime Hollywood observers point to other forces that keep the same names in circulation. Film companies are not known for grooming a new generation of strong leaders. It has been part of Hollywood's hard knuckled executive culture dating back to those cigar chomping moguls of yore take a hatchling under your wing, and they may well "grow up to eat you," said Jeanine Basinger, author of "The Star Machine" and founder of Wesleyan University's film studies program. "It's not something unique to Hollywood," she added. "Show me the business or college, for that matter, or museum where the top man, and it's still almost always a man, aggressively grooms a successor." To some degree, there is a limited pool of people who even want to run old line studios. Some young turks see a better future in streaming companies. Scott Stuber, a producer whose credits include the comedy "Ted," just took a senior job at Netflix. Others are more interested in building their own companies. (Jason Blum, the horror film impresario, is one example.) Others have plum jobs outside the lumbering studios.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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Judit Polgar might be the one woman in the world who knows how Beth, the heroine of the hit Netflix series "The Queen's Gambit," really feels. Like Beth, Polgar, who is from Hungary, stood out during her career because she regularly beat the world's top players, including Garry Kasparov in 2002, when he was ranked No. 1. Polgar, the only woman to ever be ranked in the Top 10 or to play for the overall world championship, retired from competitive chess in 2014. Watching the series, which she described as an "incredible performance," gave her a sense of deja vu, particularly in the later episodes. But there was one respect in which she could not identify with Beth's experience: how the male competitors treated her. "They were too nice to her," Polgar said. When she was proving herself and rising in the world rankings, Polgar said the men often made disparaging comments about her ability and sometimes jokes, which they thought were funny but were actually hurtful. Though chess would seem like one area where men and women should be able to compete on equal footing, historically, very few women have been able to do so. Among the more than 1,700 regular grandmasters worldwide, only 37, including Polgar and Krush, are women. Currently, only one woman, Hou Yifan of China, ranks in the Top 100, at No. 88, and she has been playing infrequently, even before the pandemic. The superiority of men in the game is so well established that the best female players have freely acknowledged it. In a recent issue of Mint, in an article titled, "Why Women Lose at Chess," Koneru Humpy, an Indian player currently ranked No. 3 among women, said that men are just better players. "It's proven," she said. "You have to accept it." The dearth of women at the top of the game is one reason that there are separate tournaments for women, including a world championship; the World Chess Federation even created titles for women, such as women grandmaster. Karlovich said that the Netflix show has helped her indirectly: It has made the parents of her chess students look at her differently. "They have more respect for me. They understand better the life of a player," she said. While some men have speculated that the reason there are so few top female players is because they are not wired for it Kasparov once said that it is not in their nature women think the overriding reason is cultural expectations and bias. Polgar said that society and even parents can undermine their daughters' efforts to improve, though, in her case, her parents, in particular her father, did the opposite: They started teaching her chess when she was of kindergarten age. Polgar also has two older sisters, Susan, who became a grandmaster and women's world champion, and Sofia, who became an international master, to blaze the way and support her. Elizabeth Spiegel is an expert, a level just below master, and has taught chess for two decades at I.S. 318, a public middle school in Brooklyn that has won dozens of national championships. She believes that cultural stereotypes definitely affect how people learn and play chess. She noted that boys tend to be overconfident, but that is more of a strength than a flaw in chess. On the other hand, during class, when girls answer her questions, they often begin, "I think I am wrong, but ..." That creates and reinforces another problem that discourages women's participation: too few social contacts. Jennifer Shahade, a two time U.S. Women's Champion who has written two books about women in chess ("Chess Bitch" and "Play Like a Girl!") and is the women's program director at the U.S. Chess Federation, said teenage girls tend to stop playing chess because there are so few of them and they want the social support. That Beth is a loner is likely an important reason she does not quit playing in tournaments. Shahade said she actually did quit for a while, at about age 12, even though she came from a chess family. Her father, Mike, was a master and her brother, Greg, became an international master. "I was self conscious," Shahade said. "My brother was super talented and had become a master so early and so easily. I was a much slower learner." Shahade, who grew up admiring Polgar, said it was "totally inspiring" to see Beth's story unfold. Like Beth, who loses all her games to Benny the first time they play speed chess, she prefers slow, or classical, chess. Of 74,000 members in total, the U.S. Chess Federation said it has about 10,500 female members. Shahade wants to increase that number, as well as their participation. To that end, Shahade and the federation started an online chess club in April to keep female players engaged during the pandemic. In the last few weeks, there have been between 80 and 140 participants, with quite a few older players. The last meeting also had a special guest: Kasparov, who has become a big booster of women's chess since his retirement from competition in 2005. He was also a consultant on the Netflix series. To keep the momentum going, Shahade is launching a new online group called the "Madwoman's Book Club." The title refers to a pejorative name used for the queen in the 15th and 16th centuries after it became the most powerful piece on the board. The first meeting this Friday already has 100 people signed up.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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STAN HARRISON does not have your average driveway. It bumps and winds for seven tenths of a mile almost to the 2,400 foot summit of Mount Agassiz. His house is one of the highest in New England. When mud or ice slicks down the steepest sections, Mr. Harrison's driveway becomes a walkway. On occasion, he says, it has been necessary to scramble from tree to tree, pulling himself along on his homeward bound ascent. On a late fall day when the surface was only slightly slippery, I easily bounced and churned up to his home in a 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee. This suggests that given its off road ability the Grand Cherokee may be just the ticket home for Mr. Harrison. The question for Jeep, however, is how many other consumers feel they need such abilities? In a stark and swift shift, Americans now seem more interested in pleasant carlike manners than in off road rambles. So, when Chrysler engineers began designing the new Jeep they knew they needed to make it more civilized on the road. But Jeep's reputation is built on how well its vehicles can slog and thump through challenging terrain, and it didn't want to lose that distinction. Phil Jansen, the chief engineer, said, "If we give up the off road capability and just go only after on road in this market, then who are we?" For Chrysler engineers, the challenge was to find a balance between on and off road, conditions that pose conflicting engineering challenges. For about the first two years of the project, Jeep worked with Mercedes Benz, which was also developing a new edition of its M Class sport utility. But Robert Moran, a Mercedes spokesman, said the two automakers had "different customer requirements and model positioning" and eventually "went down different paths." Mr. Moran said only a few components were shared, like the front and rear axle subframes. The new Jeep, he said, is not a sneak preview of the M Class, which does not go on sale until next fall. My test vehicle was a Limited with the V 6 and 4 wheel drive. The base price was 39,995; two paint and wheel options pushed the sticker to 41,315. Mr. Jansen said Jeep knew the interior of the last generation Grand Cherokee introduced as a 2005 model was not competitive. "We had stepped back on the interior and we needed to make a big jump forward in terms of material and packaging," he said. The new interior remains practical but is far more handsome and upscale. There is comfortable seating for four adults and a huge sunroof. Standard safety equipment includes front and side impact air bags, electronic stability control and "active" front head restraints intended to reduce the chance of whiplash injuries. The Grand Cherokee received a Top Safety Pick rating from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety based on its roof strength as well as front, side and rear impact crash tests. Interior space improved significantly with a 5.3 inch increase in the wheelbase about 4 inches of it going toward more rear leg room. Cargo capacity is up to 35.1 cubic feet, from less than 30. While overall length has increased only about 1.8 inches, to 189.8, there are big changes down below. One of the biggest was replacing the solid rear axle usually found on trucks with an independent suspension common to cars. Jeep engineers used to defend the solid axle as an advantage in serious off road maneuvers. To compensate for its omission, Mr. Jansen said, they worked on ground clearance and traction. The 2011 model with the standard suspension now has 8.6 inches of ground clearance, only 0.4 inch more than before. To get more ground clearance one needs the optional (and expensive) Quadra Lift air suspension, which has air bladders at each corner. By pushing a button, the driver can increase the clearance to as much as 10.6 inches. Mr. Jansen says the 2011 Grand Cherokee is not designed to be the ultimate off road Jeep. "Grand Cherokee is not about being a Wrangler," he said. He acknowledged that the Grand Cherokee had a significantly lower approach angle than its predecessor. That means it cannot climb as steep a hill without grinding its front against the ground. To get more clearance even more than the old Grand Cherokee you need the Quadra Lift suspension. The least expensive way to get it is as a 2,125 option on the 39,120 Laredo X. Nevertheless, even with the standard suspension the new Jeep probably offers far more off road ability than most consumers will use. In addition to traveling Mr. Harrison's driveway, I found the Grand Cherokee easily handled a seldom used trail, rough and steep, in the White Mountains. While the standard Grand Cherokee comes with rear wheel drive, there are three alternatives. The base all wheel drive system is Quadra Trac 1, a full time setup that lacks a low gear range for rugged terrain. The next steps up are, in increasing order of their ability to detect slippery conditions and provide traction, Quadra Trac II and Quadra Drive II. A new feature called Selec Terrain lets the driver use a knob on the console to change how the transmission, engine and electronic stability control respond to pavement, sand, snow and rocks. It is part of an option package and costs 695 on the base 4 wheel drive Laredo. It was standard on my Limited test model, as was Quadra Trac II. Ford says it is convinced that most Explorer buyers don't care about severe off road driving and that its own version of Selec Terrain (called Terrain Management) will handle most chores. But Ford appears a bit insecure about off road comparisons of the new Explorer to the new Jeep. At a demonstration program for the Explorer in Michigan, Ford had a Grand Cherokee available for driving on pavement. When it was time for an off road course, the Grand Cherokee was quietly whisked away. On pavement this is the best Grand Cherokee ever, although that is not to say it is the best sport utility. The steering is adequately weighted, although a little more feedback would be good. For such a heavy and relatively tall vehicle it also heads willingly into all but the tightest turns; the agility is no doubt partly because the Limited carries only 52 percent of its weight up front. Jeep says the body's torsional rigidity has improved 146 percent, and indeed the structure feels solid and shiver free even on rough surfaces, where the ride quality remains acceptable. Where the Grand Cherokee runs into trouble with the standard suspension is on a road with an uneven surface, like a slight crown. Then the ride can become slightly annoying with the side to side rocking sometimes called "head toss." There are two engines, including a new Pentastar 3.6 liter V 6 rated at 290 horsepower at 6,400 r.p.m. and 260 pound feet of torque at 4,800 r.p.m. It replaces a 210 horsepower 3.7 liter V 6 and gets better mileage despite having 80 more horsepower. With rear drive, the new V 6 is rated at 16 miles per gallon in the city and 23 m.p.g. on the highway. With 4 wheel drive the rating is 16/22. The other engine is carried over: a 5.7 liter V 8 rated at 360 horsepower at 5,150 r.p.m. and 390 pound feet at 4,250 r.p.m. It is a 1,495 option. In either case the transmission is a 5 speed automatic. Maximum towing capacity with the V 6 has increased to 5,000 pounds from 3,500. The V 8's capacity is unchanged: 7,400 pounds with rear drive and 7,200 pounds with 4 wheel drive. My test vehicle had the V 6, which was pleasantly smooth and quiet. Jeep says 90 percent of the torque is available starting at 1,600 r.p.m. and that means a strong response almost any time. But the engine is dealing with a stout unloaded weight of 4,600 pounds, so even when worked hard the acceleration is only slightly more than adequate. Consumer Reports says zero to 60 m.p.h. acceleration takes 9.1 seconds. With the new Grand Cherokee, Chrysler has created a Jeep that has reasonable performance both on road and off, but that is not a benchmark on either front. It is a compromise, and of course that means giving up something on both ends.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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BRUSSELS European officials vowed on Tuesday to support banks that fail stress tests but left unresolved deep disputes that have held up a second rescue package for Greece. The results of the stress tests, which are scheduled to be released on Friday, could pose a headache for the 27 European Union finance ministers who met here to discuss ways to ease the region's financial turmoil. Olli Rehn, the European Union's commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, said that once vulnerable banks were identified they "must recapitalize themselves, or be recapitalized or restructured." In a statement, the finance ministers said that backstop mechanisms would aid struggling banks. "These measures privilege private sector solutions but also include a solid framework for the provision of government support in case of need, in line with state aid rules," the statement said. Officials insist that the exercise is more stringent than tests done last year, which failed to reveal a looming banking crisis in Ireland. The new tests will include a review of how lenders would handle a 0.5 percent economic contraction in the euro zone in 2011, a 15 percent drop in European stock markets and potential trading losses on sovereign debt. The officials insist that Europe's banks and governments are better prepared this time around. Jacek Rostowski, the finance minister of Poland, which holds the European Union's rotating presidency, argued that Europe now had "a banking system that is in much better shape than it was last year." A fresh example of the stress that banks will need to endure came late Tuesday. Moody's Investors Service cut Ireland's credit rating to junk status, adding it to Portugal and Greece on the list of euro area countries whose ratings are below investment grade. Ireland's rating was lowered to Ba1 from Baa3, and Moody's signaled that the country faced further downgrades in the next year. Standard Poor's and Fitch Ratings still have an investment grade rating for the country. Moody's said Ireland would most likely need another bailout and that policy makers would force the private sector to shoulder some of the burden. "The prospect of any form of private sector participation in debt relief is negative for holders of distressed sovereign debt," the company said in a statement. "This is a key factor in Moody's ongoing assessment of debt burdened euro area sovereigns." After the downgrade, the Irish agency that manages the country's debt said that it had sufficient money from the country's first bailout to cover its financing requirements until the end of 2013. The downgrade of Ireland was certain to raise investor fears that the Greek debt crisis would spread. European officials raised the stakes on Tuesday by pressing for an emergency meeting of euro zone leaders on Friday, the same day that the stress test results are expected to be announced. The plan represents a risky gamble by Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council. If the meeting is held on schedule and fails to answer the crucial questions about Greece that were left unresolved by European finance ministers on Monday and Tuesday, it could end up unsettling the markets even more. A gathering of finance ministers from the 17 countries that use the euro ended on Monday with a declaration suggesting that their bailout fund would be expanded and could be used to buy sovereign bonds from Greece and other deeply indebted countries. That kind of declaration rejected months ago because of German objections has forced its way back onto the agenda because of the growing turmoil in the financial markets and fear that Spain and Italy could also be victims of Europe's debt crisis. As the meeting on Monday was getting under way, George A. Papandreou, the Greek prime minister, sent a letter to Jean Claude Juncker, the prime minister of Luxembourg who leads the group of euro zone finance ministers. The letter was made public on Tuesday. "If Europe does not make the right, collective, forceful decisions now," he wrote, "we risk new, and possibly global, market calamities due to a contagion of doubt that could engulf our common union." " 'Crunch time' has arrived," he added, "and there is no room for indecisiveness and errors." At their meeting in Brussels, the finance ministers outlined multiple options to reduce the burden on countries like Greece that have accepted bailout loans. Options included cutting the loans' interest rates and extending loan maturities, as well as helping the countries buy back their bonds trading in the market. Those possibilities reflect a growing consensus that heavily indebted countries cannot afford their current obligations and need some relief to avoid being condemned to endless rounds of austerity and no growth. Crucially, however, the ministers left unresolved the continuing dispute over how much the private sector should help pay for a second Greek bailout. A large role could cause ratings agencies to declare the country to be in selective default. The European Central Bank has opposed a large private section involvement, and restated its position in the statement to the euro zone finance ministers. Germany and the Netherlands have pressed for a substantial role by the private sector something they see as essential if they are to sell the Greek bailout to skeptical voters at home. Jan Kees De Jager, the Dutch finance minister, said that a plan that might be classified as a selective default was no longer ruled out.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Global Business
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Gesture and choreographic structures may not be the first things one notices in a Hitchcock movie. But the right choreographer can unearth a vast inventory of both. In "Actual Size," which had its premiere on Tuesday at Roulette, Sally Silvers expertly plunders the Master of Suspense to construct her own kind of thriller: mischievous, furtive and constantly changing, exposing and exploiting the absurdities of the genre. The thrills in this roughly hourlong work and the humor have a lot to do with the superb cast. Dylan Crossman, Carolyn Hall, Luke Miller, Alicia Ohs, Melissa Toogood, Ms. Silvers and, in Tuesday's cameo (there's a different one each night), Pooh Kaye: These dancers are a joy to watch, as individuals and as parts of puzzles that refuse to be solved. No matter how quickly new scenarios come and go, they submerge themselves in the intricacies of every stunt and ruse. The sense of overlapping plots, of a story continuously outsmarting itself, also hinges on Bruce Andrews's sound design, a careening collage of clips from dozens of Hollywood film scores, mixed live with electronic layers by Michael Schumacher. When Ms. Silvers enters, first on her own and later with Ms. Kaye, Mr. Andrews shifts into talking mode, reciting what sound like a director's garbled notes. "Premonition caught in a revolving door," he asserts. "Roller coaster with consequences." Ursula Scherrer's black and white videos cut between noirish images of the dancers, shots of swarming crowds (presumably borrowed from Hitchcock) and speckled or bladelike geometric patterns. Projected onto black mesh panels that hang along three sides of the room, and enhanced by Joe Levasseur's lighting, these seem to multiply the dimensions of the otherwise unadorned space.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Recycling Helps, but It's Not All You Can Do for the Environment LIKE most households, we recycle pretty religiously. It's easy, though, because our town in suburban New York allows us to throw pretty much everything into one bin, and it gets picked up at the curb. Recycling has become so automatic that if we're out and there's no place to recycle that soda can or bottle, it feels slightly illicit to just drop it in the trash. It's like littering. You just don't do it. Lately, however, I started wondering are we really doing anything with all this recycling besides feeling better about the stuff we buy? Much of the discussion has focused on the economic impact. That issue has been batted back and forth with mixed results, although most experts now agree that cities have become more experienced and more effective and therefore made it more cost efficient to recycle most products rather than dump them in landfills. I'm more curious about what impact it has on other environmental behavior. And when I started looking at that more closely, I discovered that there's an intense debate going on about this issue. Recycling "is good civic behavior," said Samantha MacBride, an assistant professor of public affairs at Baruch College, City University of New York, but it's oversold as a panacea to a whole host of environmental ills, from overflowing landfills to global warming. "I wouldn't say that people who do recycling feel they've done everything they can by participating, but they think there's a lot more being achieved than there actually is," she said. Nationally, said Professor MacBride, who is the author of "Recycling Reconsidered" (MIT Press, 2011), recycling prevents only about one third of all trash from ending up in landfills. Partly, she said, that is because people are not recycling everything they can. Partly it's because the recycling model in most municipalities of picking up a bin with all the recyclables mixed together, especially the plastics, doesn't work well. "There's a huge range of plastic materials and hundreds of different resins," Professor MacBride said. "We need markets and processes to route them back into production and for the most part, those processes don't exist." So some plastics are sent in bales to China and developing countries, and some are disposed of in landfills. The emphasis, she said, has to be much more on regulating and recycling waste from manufacturers rather than consumer waste. The other problem is that while "recycling is a wonderful thing to do if we're comparing it to throwing stuff away, it has become a reward for consumption," said Michael Maniates, a professor of environmental science at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania. Gernot Wagner, an economist with the Environmental Defense Fund and author of "But Will the Planet Notice: How Smart Economics Can Save the World," (Hill and Wang, 2011), agrees. "There's a well documented phenomenon known as single action bias, where people do one thing and move on," he said. "People don't explicitly think, 'I've recycled a cup and solved global warming,' but rather once they've done an action like recycling, they feel consciously or subconsciously like they've done their part." Or as the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions, which is affiliated with the Earth Institute at Columbia University, says on its Web site: "Although recycling is important, it should be but one activity in a series of behavior changes aimed at reducing climate change. Switching to wind or other renewable energies, consuming less meat, conserving daily energy use and eating locally grown food are other effective ways to mitigate climate change, to name but a few. However, if individuals and institutions participate in recycling programs, they may be prone to the single action bias and feel like they are already doing enough to protect the environment." Hold on there, said Allen Hershkowitz, senior scientist and director of the solid waste project at the environmental organization the Natural Resources Defense Council. "I've never dealt with a person or company who said, 'We recycle so we don't have to do anything else.' It's, 'We recycle, what else can we do?' " In his role as an adviser to the National Hockey League, Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association, among others, he said he found that recycling was "an entry activity that leads to other activities such as buying recycled, energy effectiveness and fan education." Juliet Schor, a professor of sociology at Boston College, said that a number of European studies had demonstrated that people who bought green products or did some sort of similar "conscious consumerism" didn't stop there, but continued on with other types of environmental activism. A study conducted by Professor Schor and a graduate student, Margaret Willis, and published recently in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, called "Does Changing Light Bulbs Lead to Changing the World? Political Action and the Conscious Consumer" looked at the concern that "individual action substitutes or 'crowds out' civic and collective action." Part of the study included 2,271 survey responses from people identified as being "conscious consumers" through an ecologically oriented nonprofit organization the Center for a New American dream. These respondents, largely white, female and highly educated, were asked questions like how often (ranging from "never" to "very consistently") they engaged in such activities as choosing to drive less, contacting government representatives to express an opinion and buying local or green goods. While the study didn't look at recycling in particular, it found that those who chose to do individual green actions were also more involved in other broader political activism. But Professor Schor said she was troubled that recycling "is what they're teaching kids in school is going to save the world." And that was the point Professor MacBride wanted to emphasize. "We don't want to hear the bad side of recycling," Professor MacBride said. "That's a child's view of the world. It's time to grow up." So what can we do? Remember that there's two other Rs reduce and reuse that are far too often ignored. "As it has turned out 'reuse' is something that our kids learn in school as part of the 'three Rs,'" Professor Maniates said. "But it has no resonance or meaning in mainstream or popular environmental politics and living. I brought my hangers to the dry cleaner and said, 'Maybe you can reuse these' and they said, 'Sure, we'll recycle them.' "
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Your Money
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From Children's Books to Live Theater: Mo Willems and Oliver Jeffers Have New Tales to Tell Mo Willems and Oliver Jeffers two of the most beloved, and singular, creators of children's picture books working today have both seen their literary creations head to the stage. The musical "Elephant Piggie's We Are in a Play!," based on Willems's Elephant Piggie series, recently finished a run at the New Victory Theater in New York and is setting out on a national tour; "The Way Back Home," a puppet production based on Jeffers's book of the same title, will be at the New Victory from March 10 through March 26. The two authors talked to Maria Russo, The Times's children's books editor, about the thrills and embarrassments of children's theater and their books' very different journeys to the stage. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. Mo, you were very involved in the play, writing the script and participating all along. Oliver, you didn't even see this production based on your book until it was a done deal. Can you each talk about those different approaches? MO WILLEMS This show grew out of a healthy relationship with the Kennedy Center. They'd already done "Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Musical," based on my books, and that experience was really, really great. We've got another in the works too. Now I hope to be doing a play every couple of years, because it's the opposite of books. Books are really not collaborative, but with theater you get all these actors, they bring something to the table, you can steal it and pretend like it's yours it's really fun! OLIVER JEFFERS I don't feel like I know very much about theater. Mo, you've been on the stage a little bit. Some of the adaptations of my books that have been on film short films I've been much more involved with, because I feel comfortable in that arena. Acting is never something I have ever aspired to do. I've got a lot of friends who are talented actors, so I really know I personally am not one. But it's interesting; my work takes shape in many different forms filmmaking, sculpture, whatever. And the live theater stage never occurred to me until I saw this piece and could see the potential, the inner beauty of what you could do there. It's a different thing, so different from the book. WILLEMS: It's temporary. It completely disappears; it vaporizes at the end of each performance. Each one is this great dialogue with a particular group of kids. JEFFERS: And it's different every time. WILLEMS: This play, "Elephant Piggie," is basically Ionesco the kids are just not old enough to realize they should be intimidated by that. You're writing a piece that should be performed and performed well, but it also should be able to be scaled down . . . even in terms of ability. The songs have to be just singable. The set and design have to be able to travel. JEFFERS: Did you write the music? WILLEMS: I wrote the lyrics, but I worked with a composer. We came up with a list of songs I liked and genres, and I hummed into a tape player. That melody was taken away immediately it was horrible but they got a sense of the core emotion I was trying to get across. At the point at which you can't remember who contributed what to the song, that's when it's done. 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. And "The Way Back Home" is the exact opposite of a musical it's completely silent, done with puppets in a black box stage. WILLEMS: Oliver's books probably have more words than mine do, so that's interesting. You know, children's theater and picture books are in many ways going for the same thing, so it's a shame children's theater doesn't have a better reputation. When you say, "I write children's books," people say, "OOOOHH!" When you say, "I write children's theater," they say, "Uuuuhhh. . . ." Because, you know, they're worried there will be balloons involved. Mr. Jeffers, left, and Mr. Willems speaking inside the New Victory Theater. JEFFERS: Would you say it's more accessible, easier to put on a production than it is to, say, self publish a book? Maybe that contributes to the reputation of children's theater. The range of quality can be much greater. WILLEMS: I also think there's some really great quality children's theater and people don't quite realize it, in the way that 20 years ago they didn't realize it with picture books. JEFFERS: Especially in the fine art world when I was fresh out of college, if you ever mentioned you were doing picture books no. WILLEMS: Or it was like, Well you gotta pay the bills! It's better than working as a waiter. JEFFERS: But that's totally changed. And maybe in 20 years it will be the same for children's theater. If there's one thing theater has that books do not, it's the ability to control time. We have no say about how long someone spends on a page, but with theater, you can hold someone in a moment as long as you choose to. You can make it slow or fast. WILLEMS: True. Also interesting about theater: In this show, there's a scene in which Elephant Gerald is deciding whether he should share the ice cream or not. And I've been told that when the school groups come, the kids yell: "NOOOO! Are you kidding?" But then when they come with their grandparents, they say, "Yes, share the ice cream!" Because the kids also know who they're performing to! JEFFERS: And you know, it hasn't occurred to them that they can leave the theater yet. That they can walk out. In the "Elephant Piggie" play, there's that moment when Gerald and Piggie look out at the audience and realize they're in a play, and it blows the kids' minds. WILLEMS: They've been there at that point 40 minutes so it's really a shocking "I" moment. You discover two thirds of the way through a piece, just like you discover two thirds through your life, that you have agency! And kids' honesty is really Watching the audience experience "The Way Back Home" was interesting too. Since there were no sounds coming from the stage, you could hear the kids in the audience saying, "What is he doing?" and "Is that his bed?" and just feeling their way through it by talking. JEFFERS: I've been to see it a couple of times, and once there was complete silence, but the other time the kids were much more caught up in talking. It was two totally random audiences. I think once the verbal engagement begins, it's a seal of approval for all the other kids. It sort of spreads and grows, the collective personality of an audience. And it does change the nature of the play. A friend of mine who's an actor says a Saturday night audience is different from a Tuesday night audience the Saturday night audience expects to be entertained; they're like "This better be good!" While Tuesday night they're just happy to be out of the house. WILLEMS: The audience is just a bunch of strangers, but they're communicating as well. It's magic. And what's so great about it is that it's impermanent; you don't have to document it, you just experience it. You can't ever relive it. You can only relive the feeling you had. Does having had these theater versions of your work out in the world inform how you approach making a picture book now? JEFFERS: To me, the process of making a book is not unlike making a film, but the process of theater is just so unlike all that. The lack of control in the collaboration, the blocking for time, the restricted space. . . . I don't think that translates to books. But with film, when the scene changes and when the page changes, the way you're looking at it is similar, whether you're above, up close, beside. . . . WILLEMS: I come from writing sketch, and I structure my books in a sketch structure. But I would think of the books in terms of animation before a play. What else have you learned from the theater experiences? WILLEMS: Adapting to the stage is always interesting, because you discover things. You have to fill time with what you've written, and you might realize that what you've done in the book may have some meat that you didn't even anticipate. JEFFERS: I think good stories are good stories, and the platform changes. WILLEMS: They're apples and elephants. For me the biggest thing is to go from being mostly solo to being super collaborative. It's nice to stretch different muscles that way. JEFFERS: It comes down to trust and mutual respect. WILLEMS: And time! When I worked in television, there was some money but no time. And in theater, there's no money, but there's time. So you can write the piece and come back to it six months later and workshop it over a week. There's all this time to let things marinate. That's one way theater is more like books than film is. WILLEMS: And that's why I much prefer theater over film or television. Time is an element, you get to be with people you trust and come back in a few months and revisit. JEFFERS: Normally when I'm making a book, I'm in the feeling, and I keep going to the end. Maybe I go back and review what I did. I recently collaborated on a book called "A Child of Books" with my friend Sam Winston. We were forced to take pockets of time as we sent the work back and forth, and it changed everything. Do you think you might get more involved in future theater productions of your books, Oliver? JEFFERS: A production of my book "Lost and Found" is being discussed with a company in England. But I don't know. . . . WILLEMS: I would encourage you to be involved. It's great. And it might just change how you work later, being in that collaborative space.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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Used as a selling point by real estate agents everywhere, an exposed brick wall the more aged and weathered, the better can add texture, character and a sense of history to a home. But the kind of brick that came with my house in upstate New York was more akin to what you might see in a 1980s pizza chain than the coveted exposed brick found in so many prewar buildings in the city. Years of unattended leaks had left water stains across the top half of my brick fireplace, and below the mantel, it was a garish fire engine red. So when it was time to repaint the living room, I decided to give the fireplace a makeover, too. At about 55 for a gallon of Benjamin Moore's Stonington Gray, the transformation was cheap, instant and effective. A 5 can of high heat Rust oleum in matte black applied to the brass fireplace screen finished off the new look. But there are any number of ways to deal with an ugly brick wall. Contractors and interior designers shared some of their favorite fixes. PAINT IT "If you are going to paint over an exposed brick wall, opt for a neutral color such as white, black or gray," said Andi Pepper, founder of Andi Pepper Interior Design, in New York. "The 1960s look" has seen a resurgence, she noted, "in painting brick walls white, as neutrals can really update the space." The "absolute worst decision," she said, "would be to paint the brick wall a color." CLEAN AND VARNISH IT "There are two steps to this process to preserve the brick and the look correctly," said Stephen B. Jacobs, who is Ms. Pepper's husband and whose firm shares offices with hers. He used this technique in the couple's Manhattan apartment, which has an exposed brick living room wall that extends out to a terrace. "The first thing to do is to use a wire brush to remove excess dirt, dust and any loose particles that may be on the surface. The second step is to apply several coats of a matte varnish." Do not, however, make the mistake of applying a high gloss varnish to the wall, he cautioned: "A glossy finish destroys the whole look of the natural brick." CREATE A CUSTOM FINISH Emily Harris, a decorative artist in Cummings, Ga., who works with the online design service SwatchPop!, uses a light mortar wash and a variety of brushes, trowels and putty knives to transform unbecoming brick walls and fireplaces into something more weathered, textured and aesthetically pleasing. When whitewashing brick, Ms. Harris recommended focusing on small sections, a bit at a time. "Step back, look at your work and decide where more needs to be added," she said. "You can always add, but not as easily take away." She also suggested starting in an inconspicuous spot, to make sure you are using the right color, technique and materials: "I never start with the area that will be the main focal point." COVER IT WITH TILE When renovating the living room of a farmhouse in Buckhead, Ga., Bradley Odom, founder of the Atlanta design studio and store Dixon Rye, removed a layer of pink veined marble from the fireplace to uncover the original brick, only to discover it was beyond repair. "It was very dated and had some damage to it in the forms of a crack," Mr. Odom said. So he covered it with 12 inch square limestone Crema Europa tile from Daltile (about 19 a square foot). Then he added a reclaimed cherry wood beam for the mantel ( 130 from Rare Woods and Veneers in Atlanta) and replaced the gas logs with concrete fireballs, a modern alternative to decorative logs (about 1,200). He had penny spaced shiplap installed over the drywall above the mantel, and hung a carved wood and polychrome eagle ( 1,000) that he found at a local antiques store to create a focal point, framed by a pair of Thomas O'Brien sconces from Visual Comfort ( 350). If you decide to go the tile route, Mr. Odom said, be sure to hire a mason to assess the brickwork before you start, to make sure it can be skimmed and covered evenly. "I would also advise having your designer draw up a sketch or rendering in advance to ensure you can visualize it," he said. "There really is no going back once you do this." Before: One bedroom wall in a 1950s Hollywood Hills home was outdated brick. Not all existing brick, of course, can be removed. "Some interior brick walls, such as the ones found in apartments, can't be knocked down," Mr. Krzyston said. In that case, he continued, "The best thing to do is to box up the wall with two by fours and add Sheetrock. You can then paint the Sheetrock with a fresh coat of paint, and your wall is an untouched canvas." And "it is much cheaper to put up a faux wall in front of the existing brick," he pointed out, than "knocking down the brick completely." MA Allen, an interior designer in Raleigh, N.C., took this approach when she was renovating her own living room fireplace. After removing the mantel, the brass fire screen and the gas logs, she had the brick wall covered in drywall. Crown molding (about 4 a foot at ITC Millwork) was added to enhance the illusion of height in the room; a similar cove trim in a smaller profile was used on the mantel to tie the room together. The brick hearth, which ran the length of the wall, was cut down at either end to align with the new mantel. The drywall was painted in Amazing Gray from Sherwin Williams, in a satin finish; Benjamin Moore's White Dove, in semigloss, was used on the trim. But "the existing brick was left intentionally exposed around the firebox and on the hearth for character and a sense of history," she said. "By going over the brick with drywall, I was able to design a fireplace that would showcase just enough of the brick and allow the rest to blend in." Her advice if you're doing it yourself? "Find a way to make the best of what it is that you have," she said. And "keep it simple."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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The fashion industry is in a state of emergency. This has been made clear not only by the mounting bankruptcies of big name retailers, but also by the closure of beloved smaller businesses. These are shops that won't bounce back. "This is going to be the center of New York City," Jeffrey Kalinsky thought, standing on West 14th Street during the summer of 1999, having his photo taken for an article on his namesake boutique's imminent opening. He remembers what he was wearing: a Lacoste polo, a Jil Sander belt, Gucci sneakers. Twenty years later, this scene would be unremarkable. Current social distancing restrictions aside, it has become nearly impossible to walk through the meatpacking district without bumping into a fashionable person posing for a picture. But Mr. Kalinsky made his prediction when the area was still an industrial zone populated by butchers and B.D.S.M. clubs. When he arrived, opening his modern designer boutique on his 37th birthday, "no cars would go down there," Mr. Kalinsky said. "Trucks would park in the middle of the street. It didn't matter."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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" The comeback starts now," said Haley Joel Osment, as he leaned across the pool table and lined up his shot for a middle pocket. He missed. Wildly. "It's a subtle comeback." On a recent Monday, Mr. Osment was in New York to promote the new season of "Future Man," a science fiction comedy on Hulu, and to audition for some new roles. He had met up with his college friend Nicole Pursell, an actress, at one of their undergrad haunts: Fat Cat, a scruffy, subterranean jazz bar and billiards hall in Greenwich Village that smells like spilled beer. Mr. Osment's freshman year dorm at New York University was around the corner, and he used to come here weekly, playing pool if a table was open and Ping Pong if it wasn't. Shuffleboard, too. He liked to come really late at night. "You could see people sleeping against the walls," he said nostalgically. Mr. Osment, 30, was a go to child actor of the late 1990s and early '00s, four feet plus of wounded innocence topped with meltwater blue eyes. See: M. Night Shyamalan's "The Sixth Sense" and Steven Spielberg's "A.I." But when he turned 18, he traded Hollywood for college, enrolling at the Tisch School of the Arts at N.Y.U., where he studied at the Experimental Theater Wing. He learned capoeira and modern dance, and had a teacher tell him he was pretending to walk through blood all wrong. People thought he had disappeared. "The irony is, all I was doing was acting all day, every day," Mr. Osment said. "Just nobody could see it." He and Ms. Pursell were scene partners in the first year, working through "Death and the Maiden," a play by Ariel Dorfman that involves a hostage situation. Their teacher provided a very realistic prop gun. "It was a good start, you holding that gun to my head," Mr. Osment said. "It was like the perfect way in," Ms. Pursell said. "Then we were friends." He now has a recurring role on "Future Man," as Stu Camillo, a post apocalypse "toxic nice guy," as Mr. Osment describes him, who just might destroy all of humanity. He has also filmed roles in Edward James Olmos's pollution thriller, "The Devil Has a Name," and the Ted Bundy biopic "Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile." So Mr. Osment doesn't really need a comeback, except when it comes to pool. He and his college friends are big into games: bar games, board games, trivia. He and Ms. Pursell are in two fantasy football leagues together. (They would not divulge their team names; according to Ms. Pursell, they may be "unpublishable.") In the years since college, Ms. Pursell joined a billiards league and Mr. Osment did not. She even arrived with her own pool cue and her own baby powder. "Otherwise my hands get too sticky," she said. "I just hope this is educational," said Mr. Osment, who wore a blazer and a tidy beard. After a quick catch up, Mr. Osment racked the balls and broke with something less than perfect confidence. Ms. Pursell chose solids and started clearing the table efficiently, while Mr. Osment struggled to sink a single ball. "Oh my goodness, who could have seen that coming?" Mr. Osment said with a deadpan. She sent her 8 ball into the wrong pocket, though, so Mr. Osment ended up winning the first game. In the second game, his break did not improve ("so weak," he muttered), but Ms. Pursell explained that as long as four balls touched the sides, the break was in play. He seemed pleasantly surprised when a striped ball went in. Ms. Pursell applauded. "Thank you," he said. "I need all the encouragement I can get." It wasn't enough. Mr. Osment missed his next shot and Ms. Pursell methodically picked off the solids, though she soon ran into a snag. So many of his stripes were crowded around a corner pocket that she couldn't sink her last ball. "Ah, the strategy of losing by so much, you can't get to your balls," he told Ms. Pursell. It took a little while longer, but she eventually made her shot before focusing on the 8 ball. This time, she won. A tiebreaker was in order. "Let me rack," Ms. Pursell said, before offering Mr. Osment some tips. She showed him how to pull the cue back, using the elbow as a fulcrum. "Do the robot." It worked. Mr. Osment did the robot and he sank one ball. Then another and another and another. The comeback was here! One more ball and the game could have been his. Alas, he missed and Ms. Pursell wasted no time in sinking her last two balls and then the 8 ball. To celebrate her victory, Mr. Osment bought a round of drinks (a Sixpoint for him, a Narragansett for her) and found a quiet table back behind the bar, where they could sit and reminisce about college. "It really was like the best time of my life," Mr. Osment said. "I had very rarely worked with people my own age, if at all, so to be only around people who were exactly my age was fantastic."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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Sugar cane is a source of biofuel. The hunt for biomass could change the world's land use. Does combating climate change require burning the world's forests and crops for fuel? It certainly looks that way, judging from the aggressive mandates governments around the globe have set to incorporate bioenergy into their transportation fuels in the hope of limiting the world's overwhelming dependence on gasoline and diesel to move people and goods. While biofuels account for only about 2.5 percent today, the European Union expects renewable energy mostly biofuels to account for 10 percent of its transportation fuel by 2020. In the United States, the biofuel goal is about 12 percent by early in the next decade. The International Energy Agency envisions using biofuels to supply as much of 27 percent of the world's transportation needs by midcentury. The reasons for such ambitions are clear: It is nearly impossible under current technology to run cars, trucks, ships and jet planes on energy generated from wind or sun. What is more, bioenergy is now being drafted to make electricity. Last November, officials at the Environmental Protection Agency issued a policy memo widely seen as encouraging the harvest of forests to produce power by treating it as a carbon free source. There is a big problem with this strategy, though. An economist would say that it ignores the "opportunity costs" of deploying vegetation as a source of energy. Others call it double counting. "Dedicating land to bioenergy always comes at a cost because that land cannot produce plants for other purposes," said Timothy Searchinger, a researcher at Princeton and the World Resources Institute and a co writer of a recent report that calls for a rollback of crops dedicated to biofuels. In a nutshell, says Mr. Searchinger, the energy from forests and fields is not, in fact, carbon free. The argument for aggressive deployment of bioenergy assumes that it is carbon neutral because plants pull CO back from the air when they grow, offsetting the carbon emitted from burning them as fuel. But diverting a cornfield or a forest to produce energy requires not using it to make food or, just as important, to store carbon. "Burning biomass instead of fossil fuels does not reduce the carbon emitted by power plants," a group of 78 scientists wrote on Monday to Gina McCarthy, the E.P.A.'s director, warning against the new power plant policy. "Burning biomass, such as trees, that would otherwise continue to absorb and store carbon comes at the expense of reduced carbon storage." Used cooking oil can be collected from restaurants, to be recycled into biofuels. If the critics are right, the hunt for biomass on a large scale could vastly change the world's land use, food supply and ecosystems while helping little to prevent climate change. The argument for caution has so far mostly fallen on deaf ears. The reason is that policy makers see little choice. Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change rendered its latest assessment of scientists' collective understanding of how to slow the pace of global warming. Riddled with the usual uncertainties of science, it seemed pretty certain of one thing: Doing it without biofuels would be much harder. Elizabeth Holmes Hones Her Defense in Day 2 of Testimony Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Absent a big increase in bioenergy supplies, the climate change panel's analysis reported, it would cost about two thirds more, on average, to prevent the earth's temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, generally considered the tipping point for climatic upheaval. The availability of biofuels makes more difference to the ultimate price tag, the panel concluded, than whether electricity generation can be harnessed successfully to the sun and wind. Only carbon capture and storage technology is more important. In most of the climate change panel's models that bring temperatures back under the 2 degree ceiling by the end of the century, biofuels are assumed to produce about 250 to 350 exajoules of energy a year. To put that in context, 300 exajoules is over half the world's current energy consumption. Today, the energy content of all the biomass harvested for food, fodder and everything else amounts to about 220 exajoules. The question is, Where will the land to produce all this additional vegetation come from? As a committee of the European Environmental Agency noted, to reduce the amount of CO in the air, bioenergy production "must increase the total amount of plant growth, making more plants available for energy use while preserving other benefits." Andre Faaij, an expert on energy systems at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and author of many important assessments used by the panel on the potential for bioenergy, argues that it is definitely feasible. The world could feed 35 billion people (the earth's current population is seven billion) if only the productivity of agriculture and livestock in the developing world were brought to developed country standards, he said. "Mozambique could feed all of Africa if it just increased its productivity to that of the Netherlands." Dried distillers grains are a byproduct of the making of ethanol. That could free up a lot of land. Deploying just 10 percent of the world's five billion hectares currently used for crops and pastures to grow biofuels could generate 100 to 150 exajoules by the end of the century. An additional 60 to 70 could be had from planting biofuels on currently degraded land. The rest could come from better harvesting of forests and the use of organic waste. In a recent research article, Professor Faaij and colleagues calculated that it would be technically possible to get about 100 exajoules by 2050 from what they call "surplus forest growth," meaning the bits of forest that are neither protected nor already exploited for wood, and wood waste. This sort of calculation drives Mr. Searchinger up the wall. "Surplus forest growth" he said, is already pulling CO from the air. Harvesting it for energy will provide no further benefit for climate change. The same could be said of idled agricultural land, where forest usually starts regrowing soon, capturing carbon from the air. "In many contexts, allowing a forest to grow will do more to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for decades than producing bioenergy," he told me. And he finds the estimates of future agricultural productivity unbelievable when applied to any reasonable understanding of the real world. Indeed, it will be hard to maintain the productivity growth of the last several decades, he says, let alone substantially increase it. "Because the world needs to produce 70 percent more of virtually all the products of land crops, grasses and wood by 2050, there is no additional room for bioenergy, and any capacity to increase crop yields and to make better use of any underutilized land is already needed for these other purposes," Mr. Searchinger said. Professor Faaij says the skeptics are wrong, arguing that the alternatives to a huge increase in biofuel production would be even more difficult to achieve. But it could be possible to produce the zero carbon energy the world will need without incurring such steep opportunity costs. Much of the transport fleet could be electrified, reducing demand for liquid fuels. Solar power could be used to produce hydrogen to burn in fuel cells. There is probably a limited role for biofuels from waste products. But the biofuels juggernaut which has helped garner the support of agribusiness in the battle against climate change could end up doing more harm than good. The United States used to rely heavily on bioenergy for transport: 100 years ago, tens of millions of acres were devoted to growing feed for pack animals. Since then, much of this land has reverted to forest. Razing it again for fuel is not the best idea.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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The record and concert producer Hal Willner at his studio in Manhattan in 2017. "All these styles of music, I thought they were different," a colleague said. "Hal just saw it all as one thing." Hal Willner had a dream of connecting musicians who couldn't possibly work together to play music that didn't obviously suit them, and he somehow made it all work, creating albums and concerts that obliterated the lines between rock, jazz, country and soul, or between the mainstream and the avant garde. And then on Tuesday, the experiment came to an end. Mr. Willner matchmaker, yenta, fan, longtime music coordinator for the sketches on "Saturday Night Live" had symptoms consistent with the coronavirus and died in his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where he lived with his wife, Sheila Rogers, a producer of "The Late Late Show With James Corden," and their 15 year old son, Arlo. He was 64. The death was confirmed by a spokesman, Blake Zidell. Mr. Willner was best known for assembling diverse casts of performers, including Rufus Wainwright and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, to play a slightly off center body of work, such as the Disney songbook or the music of Nino Rota, who scored Federico Fellini's movies. The music found a devoted following, but not breakout success. Maybe you've dreamed of hearing U2 with the horn section from Sun Ra's Arkestra in a one time only performance at the Apollo Theater. If so, Hal Willner made your dream come true. "These were his talismans, his vestments, because his heart was like a reliquary," said Tom Waits, a friend of 45 years. Lots of people own Popeye dolls. Mr. Willner's were a gift from the punk rock progenitor Richard Hell. Mr. Willner was born on April 6, 1956, in Philadelphia, to Carl and Etta Willner. His father and his uncle ran a delicatessen called Hymie's. The brothers were the only members of the family to survive the Holocaust, and their experiences became a part of Hal's childhood. "It explains everything," Mr. Willner said. "I just retreated into television and records, and that was reality for me." He moved to New York in 1974 to attend New York University, drawn by the sleazy Times Square milieu of "Midnight Cowboy." New York did not disappoint. The jazz scene was evolving, punk rock was just coming together, comedy was becoming more experimental, the city was heading toward fiscal crisis. Mr. Willner wanted all of it. "The city was rough," he said. "It had a smell to it." But it was also, he said, "still an era where most people that you'd meet what's the line? The people who didn't fit in anywhere else would move here." For Mr. Willner it was home. He was apprenticed to the record producer Joel Dorn, left college, drove a taxi and got an idea: What if the jazz musicians he loved recorded the music from Fellini movies? Mr. Bernstein became a regular in what Mr. Willner called his "renegade band of broken toys." As their relationship deepened, Mr. Bernstein said, they talked often about people they had lost: Lou Reed; Levon Helm of the Band; Robert Altman, on whose film "Kansas City" they had collaborated. "He carried a lot of pain with him," Mr. Bernstein said. In 1980 Mr. Willner joined "Saturday Night Live," where his job choosing recorded music for the sketches gave him a steady income and a chance to bring his esoteric enthusiasms to a large audience. Albums followed, and concerts reimagining the work of Leonard Cohen, Kurt Weill, Bill Withers and Charles Mingus. He worked with the theater director Robert Wilson, including on a 2010 production in Poland on the 30th anniversary of the Solidarity movement. When Lech Walesa, the movement's leader, walked onstage, an orchestra of Polish musicians played Sun Ra's "Watusi." The actor and musician Tim Robbins remembered that during a low point in his life, Mr. Willner pushed him to get back into music, recording him with a band and then taking him to see some favorites. "He curated a trip for me at a time I needed it," Mr. Robbins said. "We went to Lisbon to see Leonard Cohen, then to another part of Portugal to see Lou Reed, and then to Prague to see Tom Waits. He dreams of creating something that hasn't been seen before." Mr. Willner was both producer and close friend to Mr. Reed, who died of liver disease in 2013. In a statement, Laurie Anderson, who was married to Mr. Reed, called Mr. Willner one of her dearest friends "hilarious, so tender and compassionate," and "a soulful prince." He wanted to see everything, hear everything and he was devoted to his friends, said David Johansen, a friend and frequent collaborator. Usually someone he knew was performing somewhere in town, Mr. Johansen said, and Mr. Willner was there. When Mr. Johansen performed at the Cafe Carlyle in January, filmed by Martin Scorsese, Mr. Willner attended every night. "He complained that he wasn't seated with the beautiful people," Mr. Johansen joked. He had recently completed work on a tribute album to the British rock star Marc Bolan, featuring a cast of hundreds. He told Mr. Bernstein it was going to be the album that finally made him as a producer. In his dreams, he still had further to go.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Daniel Markowski, a bug scientist in a cowboy hat, has a phone that will not stop ringing. Now that summer has arrived, and with it the mosquitoes that carry the Zika virus, the services of the Arkansas based mosquito control contractor he works for, Vector Disease Control International, are in great demand. Its workers, the special forces of mosquito control, wield sprayers loaded with pesticide, mostly on behalf of local governments. "I've had people from literally all over the country calling," he said. "'What should we do?'" The federal government is trying to provide some answers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week released a 58 page blueprint for what to do if a homegrown case of Zika surfaces. The mosquito that carries the virus, the Aedes aegypti, is found mostly in the South and Southwest, and the C.D.C. says it is focusing much of its mosquito control effort on six states and one county most at risk: California, Texas, Florida, Hawaii, Arizona and Louisiana, and Los Angeles County. As far as anyone knows, the mosquito in this country has neither picked Zika up nor started to spread it. But that could happen anytime, experts warn, especially now that hundreds of Americans have been infected with the virus while abroad. (The virus can also be sexually transmitted; the C.D.C. is planning for that, too.) "Even though the percentages and the likelihoods are incredibly low, the outcome is awful," said Dr. Tim F. Jones, epidemiologist for the State of Tennessee. Dr. Anne Schuchat, the principal deputy director at the C.D.C., said the agency's plan "sketches out what we're expecting states and cities to need." That turns out to be a lot. Mosquito control, central to containing the spread, is spotty at best, particularly in impoverished areas with weak tax bases, common in parts of the South. In Tennessee, the overwhelming majority of counties and cities do not have mosquito control programs. In North Carolina, only about a quarter of counties have them. Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, who heads the C.D.C., said in an interview that although the disease was also transmitted sexually, "mosquitoes are how this is spread," and the agency is putting significant effort into helping states control the insects. (Mosquito control is a local responsibility, so the C.D.C. will not do the fighting directly.) What would actually happen, should there be a local case? The C.D.C. plans to help the local government investigate it and warn residents. The agency detailed how to define the area of transmission important for warning pregnant women what places to avoid and underscored the urgency of alerting blood banks. If asked, the agency will dispatch a team of experts to help with everything from logistics to lab testing. This year, many areas did not even know if they had the mosquito. The C.D.C. updated old maps, but these were pieced together using references from scientific literature and were not meant to be a real time representation of mosquito range. With that, states went to work. Mississippi, well within the mosquito zone on the C.D.C. map, started a statewide study of the Aedes aegypti population, testing five areas in every county each month. The result was a surprise: No aegypti. Dr. Thomas E. Dobbs III, Mississippi's state epidemiologist, said in an interview that while most counties did not have mosquito control programs, the state had a tiny number of imported cases three to date, all from Haiti and considering the fact that the state is so sparsely populated, the risk of transmission was relatively low. (The mosquito flies only about 500 feet in its lifetime, roughly a city block.) The C.D.C. plan stated that the risk of "prolonged widespread local transmission is not expected," based on the history of two similar viruses. Of 12 homegrown cases of chikungunya reported in Florida in 2014, for instance, only two appeared to be linked, it said. The other virus, dengue fever, has not spread beyond South Florida and southernmost Texas in the continental United States. Both are mosquito borne diseases. A study comparing Laredo, Tex., with its twin just across the border in Mexico essentially the same city separated by a river found the incidence of dengue fever was eight times higher on the Mexican side, even though the mosquitoes that carry it were more abundant in Texas. Researchers attributed the Texas advantage to air conditioning, windows that shut and less crowding within houses. "Everything we've seen from dengue and chikungunya suggests that it will not be a severe problem" in the continental United States, Dr. Frieden said. "Our best guess" is that "we'll see a singleton case that we won't be able to identify the source for, and possibly some clusters maybe in the Florida Keys or Brownsville" in Texas. Still, he noted that Puerto Rico, an American territory, was facing a public health crisis because of the virus, with potentially "dozens to hundreds of infected infants with microcephaly." One of the obstacles for Zika preparedness is money. Congress is still arguing over President Obama's 1.9 billion request, which was submitted in February. Dr. Markowski, who spoke by telephone from St. Croix, where he was working on a C.D.C. contract to control mosquitoes in the United States Virgin Islands, said his company had submitted contingency plans to about half a dozen states, including Mississippi, but none have been carried out, possibly because states are waiting for funding or an outbreak. Dr. Frieden said longer term projects were suffering as well, such as "coming up with better diagnostics, coming up with better ways of controlling mosquitoes." He said the funding holdup has likewise hampered efforts to follow infected pregnant women through their births for multiple years. Despite the gridlock on funding from Washington, some states, and even cities, are preparing their own plans. Tennessee is doing drills, giving staff members in local health departments surprise scenarios. "Instead of just letting people tell us theoretically what they think they'd do, we make them prove it," Dr. Jones said. He said Tennessee that had set up a Zika response center, but tight funding has meant that the state has had to poach workers from other programs including H.I.V. and immunizations to staff it. "People are enthusiastic about doing it, and it's the right thing, but it means we're diverting resources from something else," Dr. Jones said. "Our surge capacity is not unlimited." Dr. Markowski said that he was glad that people were paying attention, but that life should not grind to a halt. "We shouldn't live our summer in fear and hide inside," he said. "We should approach it with the appropriate level of respect that any mosquito borne disease deserves. But we should also be going outside and enjoying the Fourth of July."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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Two thousand years ago, the ancient Romans introduced public multiseat toilets, hand washing stations, sewage systems, aqueducts for drinking water, and heated public baths. A new study finds that despite these sanitation advances, Romans of the time suffered just as many, if not more, parasites and ectoparasites, like lice and fleas, as their counterparts in the preceding Iron Age. This may have been the indirect result of laws that required residents to remove excrement and rubbish from their towns, said Piers Mitchell, a paleopathologist at the University of Cambridge in Britain and one of the study's authors. "The excrement was used to fertilize crops, and the feces would have contaminated the crops," he said. Dr. Mitchell and his colleagues reported their findings in the journal Parasitology.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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On the way out of the building she drops the letters. She hurries and picks up the pages, reassembling them in a random order (and leaving one of the pages behind). So the remainder of the movie recounts Mori's adventures in random order. He had come to Korea, and taken a room in a bed and breakfast, to find Kwon and propose marriage to her. But she's nowhere to be found. Hanging out at a nearby coffee shop, whose name gives the movie its title, he develops a friendship with a woman there, and that evolves into a romance. He also hangs out with the blustery nephew of the woman who runs the B B. None of these interactions keep him from growing ever more downhearted over his inability to reach Kwon. The ingenuity of the movie's structure is stimulating and delightful, but there's one aspect of "Hill" that some may find a trifle exasperating: Even more than any of the sad sack men who populate the director's other movies, Mori is kind of a stiff. While something of an intellectual he expounds to a couple of characters on the book that he's carrying around, one about, yes, the nature of time he's almost stunningly passive in his personal exchanges. It's a testament to Kase's talent that he sells Mori's defining trait so convincingly.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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I was having dinner at some fancy beach side eatery in early March when someone said they had just moved to Downey, a Southeast Los Angeles suburb 12 miles south of downtown. The other Latinos at the table oohed. "You finally made it," someone said. "To the Mexican Beverly Hills." In many ways, that is what Downey represents. It's hoity toity, gilded and more conservative than surrounding neighborhoods a status marking place where the average household income, at 88,000, is significantly higher than in other areas in Los Angeles with a similar ethnic makeup. In East Los Angeles, which is also predominantly Latino, the average income is 56,000, according to census data. (If you're wondering, the average income in Beverly Hills is 191,000.) In short, it's a great example of a place that rebukes the idea of a singular Latino vote, or of any ideological uniformity among the nearly 61 million people of Latin American descent who live in the United States. Because even in the so called Mexican Beverly Hills, Latinos are not a monolith. In October, the city was trending on Twitter after a "Latinos for Trump" caravan rode through north Downey, drawing snarky social media criticism. That same morning in South Downey, a single horseback rider galloped down Imperial Highway, drinking beer and professing his disdain for the president in Spanish, as people cheered him on from their front lawns. The city of Downey itself has an interesting history: Home to the world's oldest McDonald's in operation and the site of the first Taco Bell (which is now a museum at Taco Bell headquarters in Irvine) Downey was also the birthplace of the Apollo Space Program. Today, many of Downey's fanciest restaurants are Latin American or are owned by Latinos. Spanish is the predominant language of people decked out in Prada, Gucci and Burberry. It is home to fantastically wealthy families, including the Saavedras, who own the Tapatio hot sauce company; the Flores family, who live in a giant estate rumored to be modeled after the Palace of Versailles; and the Infantes, Mexican musical and cinematic royalty. But there are also the Galindos. When my family moved here in the mid 90s, after years living in different spots in Southeast L.A. County's poorer neighborhoods, Downey was considered a mostly white, upper middle class oasis. It's still upper middle class, but the population is about 74 percent Hispanic, and the place where the space program was conceived is now a 24 Hour Fitness, adjacent to a luxury movie theater that shows most blockbuster films with Spanish subtitles. My immigrant parents scraped and earned and brought us to South Downey in 1995 to keep their five kids out of gangs. The schools in Downey were known for their prowess and the Downey Police for their severity. Back then, we were the only Mexicans on my block, living next to the only Cuban and only Asian American families for miles. As early as 1988, the city's edges became a gateway for working class Latinos seeking to spend their hard earned savings on a first home in a neighborhood with access to great public schools. The Downey Unified school district consistently ranks in the top 20 safest districts of L.A. County. For parents like mine, who had bought into education as the key to a life of American exceptionalism, Downey was a beacon. South Downey was considered the poor part of town which Beverly Hills also has, by the way because it's right on the border of less affluent cities like Lynwood, South Gate and Paramount. And when we first moved there, it was, frankly, boring, and hard to stay out of trouble. There were fights, drug abuse, police and gun violence. And at times, it appeared each one of us five kids would squander the opportunities our parents were working hard to shape for us. But my family evolved, and South Downey has evolved with it. This summer, Downey had what one 60 year resident described as the "largest display of civil disobedience in a generation." It was some 300, mostly young people of color led by a 19 year old college freshman named Donald Arrington, marching for Black Lives Matter. Property value here has also boomed as real estate prices have ballooned to the million dollar range, according to Sergio Orzynski, a realtor with Keller Williams. A house on the very end of my block just sold for about 700,000 and a few blocks over, there were multiple million dollar listings. That's the paradoxical part about Downey: It shows that Latinos can live a life of relative wealth and influence in the United States without having to give up ties to their respective and diverse Latin American cultures. But it also exemplifies a distinctly American idea: the possibility of upward mobility across generations. The phrases "Mexican Beverly Hills" and "Latino Beverly Hills" aren't great for many reasons, especially because they center the success of people of color through a white lens (Beverly Hills being one of many elite American suburbs that was originally planned as an all white community). But the truth is, this is the name Southeast L.A.'s Latin American community created, and it signifies an important ideal. It doesn't hurt that Downey is glittering with mansions, lush gardens and a Portos, the lauded Cuban bakery that always has a massive line out the door and regularly features catty verbal altercations when someone tries to cut. Elon Musk even considered opening his factory here before Toyota wooed him to Silicon Valley. The long flirtation with South Downey ended with Mr. Musk penning a public letter titled "Downey is Great." (It's true that there are Tesla charging stations all around town.) My parents don't own a Tesla or mansion. But they do live in a large compound that houses three generations of Galindos. So there are resources and we band them together, a multigenerational approach to long term stability that has helped us survive the worst of the coronavirus recession. The whole neighborhood is like that now. Generations of families, working together to put down roots. Erick Galindo writes about life in Los Angeles for LAist and other publications. June Canedo is a photographer based in Los Angeles, Calif.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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Twitter said the tweets, which implied that protesters in Minneapolis could be shot, glorified violence the first time it had applied such warnings to any public figure's posts. The decision to add the new warning labels was approved by Jack Dorsey, Twitter's chief executive, after a late night debate among company officials, said a person with knowledge of the deliberations. Twitter further tightened restrictions on the messages from Mr. Trump and the White House by blocking users from liking or replying to them, though people could still retweet the messages if they added a comment of their own. But Twitter did not go as far as taking the posts down, saying it was in the public's interest that the messages remain accessible. The tussle began after Mr. Trump tweeted a hurtful and unsubstantiated conspiracy theory this month to attack the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, which caused critics to call on Twitter to remove the messages. While Twitter did not take those posts down, it added fact checking labels for the first time to two of the president's election related posts on Tuesday. The labels stood out because Twitter for years did little to moderate Mr. Trump's often inaccurate and threatening posts. That immediately ignited Mr. Trump's ire. He accused Twitter of stifling free speech and said he would not allow the social media companies to operate unfettered. And in an apparent act of retaliation, he signed the executive order on Thursday taking aim at Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides the liability shield to the tech companies. Twitter and Mr. Trump are now in a standoff. The company has said it will continue putting warning labels and restrictions on tweets that incite violence or spread false information about elections and the coronavirus. And Mr. Trump, who once tweeted up to 108 times a day this month, shows no signs of stopping his usage of the service, lashing out on Friday on Twitter about Twitter itself. "Twitter is doing nothing about all of the lies propaganda being put out by China or the Radical Left Democrat Party," he wrote. "They have targeted Republicans, Conservatives the President of the United States. Section 230 should be revoked by Congress. Until then, it will be regulated!" He posted several other tweets citing similar views by his favorite Fox News hosts. And as if daring Twitter, he posted another message about looting leading to shooting on Friday afternoon. In its separate Twitter account, the White House jabbed directly at Mr. Dorsey: "The President did not glorify violence. He clearly condemned it. Jack and Twitter's biased, bad faith 'fact checkers' have made it clear: Twitter is a publisher, not a platform." And Dan Scavino, the president's deputy chief of staff, said Twitter should be targeting the protesters in Minneapolis. "Twitter is targeting the President of the United States 24/7, while turning their heads to protest organizers who are planning, plotting, and communicating their next moves daily on this very platform," he wrote. He added that Twitter was full of it and "more and more people are beginning to get it." Twitter said it had decided to restrict Mr. Trump's tweet about the protests in Minnesota "based on the historical context of the last line, its connection to violence, and the risk it could inspire similar actions today." It had applied a warning label on a tweet from the Brazilian minister of citizenship, Osmar Terra, last month, but the label was not for glorifying violence. Mr. Dorsey also tweeted on Friday morning that social networks' fact checking process should use open source technology software that is created and shared for general use and be verifiable by everyone. He did not respond to a request for comment. The conflict has thrown Twitter into chaos, with employees racing to take action on Mr. Trump's tweets while also scrambling to protect themselves from harassment. After Mr. Trump and his allies lashed out at one Twitter employee who had publicly criticized Mr. Trump and other Republican leaders, other employees removed their company affiliation from their social media profiles or locked their accounts from public view. First Amendment scholars said Friday that Mr. Trump and his allies had it backward and that he was the one trying to stifle speech that clashed with his own views. "Fundamentally this dispute is about whether Twitter has the right to disagree with, criticize, and respond to the president," said Jameel Jaffer, executive director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. "Obviously, it does. It is remarkable and truly chilling that the president and his advisers seem to believe otherwise." Revoking Section 230 protections would expose Twitter and other online platforms to expansive potential legal vulnerability that could undermine the fundamentals of their businesses. But it would also remove the very legal standard that has allowed Mr. Trump to use Twitter so effectively to communicate with his more than 80 million followers no matter how incendiary, false and even defamatory his messages may be. Without a liability shield, Twitter and online companies would be forced to police accounts like Mr. Trump's even more closely to guard themselves against legal action. Twitter has for years faced criticism over Mr. Trump's posts on the platform. The company has said repeatedly that the president did not violate its terms of service, however much he appeared to skirt the line. It has also said that blocking world leaders from the service or removing their tweets would hinder public debate. Twitter did announce last year, however, that it would in certain cases place warning labels on posts from political figures that broke its rules, the feature it used with Mr. Trump's tweet about Minneapolis. Mr. Trump's message implying that the Minneapolis protesters could be shot was also posted on his official Facebook page, where it appears without any warning labels. Mark Zuckerberg, the company's chief executive, told Fox News this week that he was uncomfortable with Facebook's being "the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online." Protests have raged in Minneapolis this week over the death on Monday of George Floyd, a black man who had been pinned down by a white police officer who pressed his knee on Mr. Floyd's neck. Frederike Kaltheuner, a tech policy fellow at the Mozilla Foundation, said Twitter's confrontation with Mr. Trump raised questions about how the platform would treat other world leaders. In March, the company deleted posts by the presidents of Brazil and Venezuela that contained unproven information about Covid 19 treatments.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet was the envy of many in New York's dance world: It had a wealthy patron who loved dance, provided good pay and benefits to its dancers, built the troupe a chic Chelsea home and almost single handedly bore the brunt of the company's costs. But the perils of relying on a single donor became clear this month when Cedar Lake's founder and benefactor Nancy Laurie, a Walmart heiress had a change of heart and announced that she would close the company after performances in June at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. News of the impending demise of Cedar Lake, which had become known in recent years for introducing European choreographers to America and seemed to have plentiful resources, stunned its fans. Many weighed in on the company's Facebook page with anguished comments like "This is so sad! I would never have guessed!" and "What happened? I have so many questions..." Ms. Laurie, whose net worth was estimated at 4.5 billion by Forbes, declined an interview request. A spokeswoman for Ms. Laurie, Melissa Nathan, said in a statement: "Over the past decade we have dedicated substantial resources to Cedar Lake. Unfortunately, prevailing circumstances make running Cedar Lake no longer viable in this community." A review of the dance company's tax filings showed that for the year ending in July 2013, Ms. Laurie and a foundation she ran provided more than three quarters of Cedar Lake's 5.9 million in revenue. Tickets and touring brought in only around 7.6 percent of the company's revenues about half of what it made by renting out its West 26th Street home for special events. There were indications that the company had considered trying to broaden its donor base. As recently as October, Cedar Lake had advertised for a manager for external affairs whose duties were to have included developing "multiplatform sponsorship proposals for corporate partners, foundations, government, and individuals." The position was never filled. Katharine DeShaw, the president of Philanthropology, a philanthropic consulting firm, said that while some nonprofit organizations are created by single donors willing to endow their budgets in perpetuity, many of the strongest are created by single donors who then get like minded supporters to join in the effort. "I guess the big message here is that whoever that founding donor is, unless they're willing to put enormous endowments behind their vision, their organizations won't survive if they don't invite other people in, and I would argue early in the game," Ms. DeShaw said. When Ms. Laurie decided to start the company more than a decade ago, she offered dancers an almost unheard of 52 week contract (even many top ballet companies do not pay their dancers year round), along with benefits and vacation pay. But the company also raised eyebrows with a system of fining dancers for lateness, changing choreography or missing entrances. Even the company's debut was unusual. In 2004, Cedar Lake filed a lawsuit against another contemporary ballet company, Complexions, charging that Ms. Laurie had donated 82,500 to Complexions with the understanding that Cedar Lake could make its dance debut at a Complexions performance only to have Cedar Lake dropped from the program. It is unclear how the lawsuit was resolved; Ms. Laurie's spokeswoman declined to comment on it, and officials at Complexions did not respond to an email and a phone message seeking comment. The company was initially viewed suspiciously as a rich woman's whim and got decidedly mixed reviews. But it developed a following in New York and beyond, as it toured extensively, and its studio and dancers were featured in the 2011 film "The Adjustment Bureau," starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt. In 2012, Roslyn Sulcas wrote in The New York Times that it had "become a New York success story, possibly the country's most innovative contemporary ballet troupe with an A list repertoire, and an accent on creation that few companies worldwide can match." But there was internal upheaval in recent years as well. The artistic director who helped establish the company, Benoit Swan Pouffer, a French born former member of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, resigned in 2013. The company's executive director died, and a successor left after a brief tenure. Several company dancers and officials, still employed as they prepare for their final performances in Boston in May and Brooklyn in June, declined to comment on the closing of Cedar Lake. The story of Cedar Lake reminded Ms. DeShaw, the consultant, of another New York dance company: the Harkness Ballet. The Harkness Ballet was created in 1964 by Rebekah West Harkness, a philanthropist who gave millions to dance and to medicine, and who also built a theater for dance on 62nd Street and Broadway. It dissolved after a somewhat rocky decade when Ms. Harkness said she had sustained stock market losses and could no longer support it alone. The Harkness Theater was demolished. Ms. Nathan, the spokeswoman for Ms. Laurie, said that Cedar Lake's home on West 26th Street, which is owned by the Laurie family, would continue to be rented out for private events.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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WHEN the 64th Frankfurt Motor Show opens on Tuesday for two days of press previews, some 50 automakers and specialty builders will begin unwrapping upwards of 100 new models for journalists. The numbers are not only impressive they are significant. Why? Well, if the sheer volume of vehicles introduced at various auto shows around the world in recent years is a telling indicator, it would seem that the axis of the industry has shifted. Until about 2008, when the worldwide economy started to sour, the North American International Auto Show in Detroit was asserting its role as the must see of all industry salons. But the retreat in domestic car sales changed the stature of Detroit's show and the enthusiasm of the automakers that support it financially. "I don't know that the momentum or power has shifted from Detroit to Europe as much as it's just shifted all over the world," said Rebecca Lindland, director for automotive research at IHS Global Insight. She noted that when the schedules of the New York and Shanghai shows conflicted earlier this year, many senior executives skipped the American event and headed to China instead. The Detroit show's stature was unavoidably damaged by the bankruptcies of Chrysler and General Motors, of course. Ford and G.M. had already scaled back operations, shedding their international brands Aston Martin, Jaguar, Land Rover, Saab and Volvo and domestic nameplates like Hummer, Mercury, Pontiac and Saturn also disappeared. As the number of new models introduced in Detroit dwindled to a few dozen, 80 to 100 debutantes seemed to become the norm at shows in Geneva, Paris and Frankfurt. The China auto show, which alternates between Beijing and Shanghai, is also increasing in size and significance. The Americans, with the possible exception of Ford, would appear to have less to show the motoring world. While Ford has an important design study, the Evos, to introduce, Chrysler has only a high horsepower Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT8 to promote in Frankfurt. G.M. will show a European version of the Chevrolet Malibu, and its German subsidiary, Opel, will offer an electric design study. That is in stark contrast to European automakers, particularly the Germans, who have so much to show this year that they outgrew the sprawling Messe Frankfurt convention center and its 3.6 million square feet of exhibition space. Audi felt compelled to build a new exhibition area complete with its own oblong test track in an open area outside the existing halls. The company, which is on a sales record streak, is introducing seven new models at Frankfurt, including electrics like the A2 hatchback and city runabouts called the "urban concept" and "urban concept spyder." Audi is but one of the Volkswagen Group brands including Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, SEAT and Skoda that will be introducing new models or showing concepts at Frankfurt. VW itself is hoping to reclaim the magic of the original Beetle by introducing a new family of small cars called Up. VW will also suggest new directions in personal mobility with the NILS concept, a single seat, outboard wheel city E.V. BMW is giving an coming out party for an entire new i line of premium electric mobility solutions. These include the i3 compact and i8 sports cars, both previewed at press functions in July. Mercedes Benz, which has done well with its high powered AMG models, is planning to introduce more of them in Frankfurt: a roadster version of the hot selling SLS and an SLK55. Also promised is a fuel cell concept and a new B Class compact. If it seems as though German manufacturers are on the leading edge of new, gas free urban transportation solutions, it is due in no small part to the European Union's strict pollution controls. "Today, all the innovation in the auto industry is coming from the German manufacturers," said Vianney Rabhi, head of strategy for MCE 5, a French engine development company. "A little from Japan. None from the U.S." A look at what the automakers of other countries are presenting or not presenting in Frankfurt is instructive. Japanese automakers seem to be in a bit of a retreat in Europe, and to some degree, they may be holding back vehicles for the Tokyo auto show in December. Nissan, Mitsubishi and Suzuki are not officially introducing vehicles here, though a souped up Suzuki Swift Sport will be on display. Toyota is presenting new Prius variations, Lexus a new GS hybrid and F Sport model, and Mazda its new CX 5 compact crossover. The Koreans, on the other hand, are ascendant. Kia is showing a four door coupe concept, expected to be named the Veredus; Hyundai will take the wraps off the new i30, roughly equivalent to the Elantra, and two other models. China is represented only by Chang an, which hopes to spark European interest in a small sedan called the C201. Europe has proved to be an especially resistant market for the Chinese. Volvo, the Swedish automaker that is now Chinese owned, is bringing a luxury sedan, the Concept Universe, that was take note here first shown in China last April. Sweden's other carmaker, Saab, withdrew from the Frankfurt show in recent weeks and seems to be headed for bankruptcy. Italy is well represented by the Fiat Group, which is introducing new models from several of its brands. Among French automakers, Citroen will display the Tubik design for a vanlike creation, Renault has the Frendzy futuristic family mover and Peugeot will have its HX1 concept.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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Katrina Scott Wasn't Supposed to Reach the U.S. Open. She's in the Second Round. As more and more players withdrew from the United States Open because of travel and safety concerns during the coronavirus pandemic, a spot finally opened for a player who picked up the sport accidentally and hasn't let go since. Katrina Scott, 16, was given a wild card 18 days after the initial list of wild cards was announced, and her next match is Thursday against a fellow American teenager, the 22nd seeded Amanda Anisimova, 19. Scott showed a readiness to compete in her first round match on Tuesday that belied the hasty summoning. Ranked 637th in women's singles, Scott beat the 131st ranked Natalia Vikhlyantseva of Russia, 7 6 (3), 6 2. Katrina's mother, Lena Scott, had grown up as a ballet dancer in Iran before emigrating to the United States at age 17 with her mother, who was seeking breast cancer treatment. Lena Scott had initially started her daughter in ballet lessons at just 18 months old. When Katrina didn't take to ballet, she instead put her into figure skating, which she figured was close enough to ballet, at age 3. Katrina took to figure skating quickly, training up to three hours a day toward the goal of one day competing professionally. But when Lena couldn't pick her up from practice one day, Katrina's alternate ride took her life in a new direction: the friend whom she car pooled with first had to go to a tennis lesson. When Scott got on the court, her ambitions suddenly changed. "Once I want something I work as hard as I can to get it, and do anything possible to get it," Scott said in an interview. "Anything in life, I'm super competitive in all aspects of life. Even off the court, I always want to win." Her father, David Scott, said that the family began to take Katrina's tennis more seriously when she started doing well in 14 and under competitions. "She's having a good time with it, she's having fun, and it became more serious as it became part of her identity, that she's really good at this and it can really take her some place," David Scott said. "And it worked out. She kept going, she stayed motivated, and she became more serious about it and more conscious of her time on the court and how she used it." Katrina Scott's goals were validated last summer in San Jose, Calif., when she played a competitive first round qualifying match against Timea Babos, who is currently ranked 101st, and was quickly embraced by the crowd. "All the fans were cheering as loud as they could and I had them behind my back," she said. "It was this feeling, this adrenaline rush. I was like: this is really for me." Months later, her road took an unexpected geographic detour. Scott's parents had met as students at Santa Monica College and then Cal State Northridge in Los Angeles, where they would later raise their daughter, who is bilingual in English and Farsi. But she relocated to Columbus, Ohio, to train with coach David Kass at the Kass Tennis Academy. Kass encouraged the family to pull her out of competitions for six months to redevelop her game, a plan that stretched into nine months because of the pandemic. Kass and Scott used the time to rebuild her mind set on the court and her forehand. "She'd been more of a defensive player throughout juniors, and in our opinion that needed to change in order to have a lot of success on the pro tour," Kass said. "That's a major change, in terms of attacking the ball and your court positioning." "Her forehand started over with a totally different swing," he added. "Learning a new swing is not the hardest thing to do over time, but unlearning a swing you've been doing for years is extremely hard." More than those tactical and technical changes, Kass was most impressed by Scott's mentality in her first round win, triumphing despite having "plenty of anxiety" in the match. "I'm really proud of her for fighting through it," Kass said. "She definitely played with a good amount of nerves, which is understandable, but she was able to find a way, not playing her best tennis or even close to it. But she's a great competitor." The win solidified Scott's place in a highly regarded cohort of American girls born in 2004, including Coco Gauff and Robin Montgomery. "When one of your peers from junior breaks through, I think it's been shown that others start pushing and believing, too," Kass said. "You start seeing them in bunches." Like Gauff and several other young players, Scott has used this summer to highlight civil rights causes near to her, wearing a Black Lives Matter T shirt onto the court for her match and into her news conference. Scott, whose paternal grandmother is African American, was proud of other players, including Naomi Osaka, for also choosing to use their platforms to highlight social issues. "I think it's great that we're really putting this out there and making it known and letting people know that we're not too young," Scott said. "We are young, but we're going to do the best for our cause and support it 100 percent, and do what we can to make a difference."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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Kevin Greene, a relentless linebacker who attacked quarterbacks like prey on his way to recording the third most sacks in National Football League history, died on Monday at his home in Destin, Fla. He was 58. The Pro Football Hall of Fame announced his death but did not provide a cause. Over 15 seasons with the Los Angeles Rams, Pittsburgh Steelers, Carolina Panthers and San Francisco 49ers, Greene used his speed and strength, mostly from the outside linebacker position, to hunt quarterbacks. His 160 regular season sacks rank third behind the totals of the defensive ends Bruce Smith (200) and Reggie White (198). "I believed in my heart that I was unblockable," Greene said in 2016 during his Pro Football Hall of Fame enshrinement in Canton, Ohio. Greene was a brash and charismatic performer on the field, possessed of long blond hair that flowed from beneath his helmet and seemingly inexhaustible energy. "He was an awesome force on the field and as a person," Bill Cowher, the former Steelers coach, said in an interview. "When you coached him, he gave you everything he had. He was a man of tremendous energy, passion and respect." Greene registered 16.5 sacks in both 1988 and 1989, then 13 more in 1990, while playing for the Rams. But he did not lead the league until he had 14 in 1994, with the Steelers, and 14.5 in 1996, with the Panthers. In 1998, his penultimate season, he had 15 sacks Greene said that sacking a quarterback brought him relief. "My teammates depended on me to do that," he said in an undated interview on Steelers.com. "I contributed. I didn't want to let my teammates down. I did something to stop that drive. Either I hit the quarterback at the right time and caused a fumble we recovered, or we got an interception." He added: "A sack was different than making a tackle for a loss, or a tackle at the line of scrimmage. It was just me making a contribution and not letting my brothers down." When he lived on the Army base in Mannheim, West Germany, where his father was stationed, "football began to burn inside of me," he said in his Hall of Fame speech. He played against other military youngsters "the best that the athletic youth association had to offer." His family returned to the United States in time for him to attend high school in Granite City, Ill., where he played football and basketball and was a high jumper on the track team. He entered Auburn University in 1980, but failed to make the football team as a punter. He played intramural football before joining the varsity in 1984 as a walk on, playing defensive end. "He had the physical tools and ability, and he came with a vengeance," the longtime Auburn coach Pat Dye said in a 2016 NFL Films documentary about Greene. "But the thing that set him apart is what he had inside of him. He played the game with every molecule in his body." Greene was drafted by the Rams in the fifth round of the 1985 N.F.L. draft. He played defensive end at first before moving to outside linebacker, where he thrived in the 3 4 defensive scheme three linemen and four linebackers which suited him best. But he left for Pittsburgh as a free agent in 1993 after the Rams shifted to a 4 3 defense. "If you were going to play against Kevin, it was going to be a full day's work," Dom Capers, who coached Greene in a 3 4 formation as the defensive coordinator of the Steelers and the head coach of the Panthers, said in an interview. "He'd get sacks late in a down by outworking the other guy. He had that extra something, that 'it,' you were looking for."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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GREAT PERFORMANCES 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). There's not much in the way of symphonic instrumentation on Nas's era shifting 1994 album "Illmatic." Producers including DJ Premier and Pete Rock laid down subdued keyboard samples and crisp drums and let Nas fill in the rest with his dense wordplay and vivid storytelling about daily life in Queensbridge. But in this concert at the Kennedy Center, the M.C. is backed by the National Symphony Orchestra for a full performance of the album. The indelible, spiky piano riff on "N.Y. State of Mind" is played by an acoustic bass and padded by lurking brass; creeping vibraphone on "One Love" gets a lift from flighty woodwinds. And the once even keeled, resigned "Life's a Bitch" builds to a euphoric, mesmerizing climax. STRIKE BACK 10 p.m. on Cinemax. This action series was a hit for Cinemax over four American seasons it followed British and U.S. operatives on high risk, first person shooter missions in gorgeous locales around the world. "It incorporates the look and spirit of video games and violent comic books into a television series as well as any show around," Mike Hale wrote in his Times review in 2015. That year's season was billed as the show's last, but the franchise is reloading with an entirely new cast that includes Daniel MacPherson and Roxanne McKee. The premise an elite, international, gun toting force chases terrorists to their hidey holes remains the same. METOO, NOW WHAT? 8:30 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). After leading to the downfall of Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey and others and landing on the cover of Time's Person of the Year issue, the MeToo movement has waded into more ambiguous waters, with debates raging over the behavior of public figures like Chuck Close or Aziz Ansari. This special, hosted by Zainab Salbi, founder of Women for Women International, explores the cultural moment through original reporting and extensive discussions, and ponders the next steps of fighting harassment and gender inequality.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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Sloane Stephens, 17 months old, enjoys the online Songs for Seeds program, but her mother worries that she isn't getting enough face time with peers to be prepared for preschool. This article is part of our latest Learning special report, which focuses on ways that remote learning will shape the future. With all the talk of remote learning for secondary schools and colleges, one important population is missing from the nationwide conversation about learning during the pandemic: babies and toddlers. Many parents are keeping their little ones away from playgrounds, playgroups and preschool preparatory programs. As a result, the social and learning opportunities for the youngest children have been curtailed, just like everyone else's. Those who study and work with the youngest children are concerned about the effects on learning and school readiness. "There is going to be a bit of a collective lag in academic skills and in those executive function skills that allow a child to navigate a classroom more easily," the developmental psychologist Aliza W. Pressman predicted. Without group settings, "we are missing a lot of observations, so there is going to be a whole raft of problems," said Patricia K. Kuhl, who co directs the Institute for Brain and Learning Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. That's partly because group settings like day care, classrooms and even playgrounds are often where adults notice, sometimes by comparing children with their peers, that little ones have sensory, motor, cognitive and learning problems that can benefit from early interventions. Dr. Kuhl leads the kind of brain studies that place a 2.5 million magnetoencephalography machine that looks like a "hair dryer from Mars," as she put it, on the heads of young children to map neural activity, even as the babies are awake and fidgeting. The work of both women has taken on greater urgency during the pandemic. These last few months, Dr. Pressman has seen, and helped, families innovate to provide the youngest with more interaction, education and opportunities to learn through play. For many families, that innovation has taken the form of reconsidering screen time and digital spaces, previously a pretty big no no for babies and toddlers. Programs from places like Apple Seeds, a New York City based series of indoor playgrounds and early childhood programs, have been huge for parents. The company had to close its locations this spring. It quickly pivoted the most popular in person program, an interactive music program called Songs for Seeds, into a digital offering with live 45 minute Zoom sessions offered several times a week for a monthly fee of 25. Babies and toddlers can see not only the musician teachers, but also, critically, one another. On a Wednesday morning this fall, Lizzy and Kit Benz took a makeshift stage in front of a kitchen concealing curtain at their home in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens with a keyboard and guitar in hand. "Can we all clap our hands to the beat? Let's clap our hands and stomp our feet!" they sang to kick off the program of original songs and call and response stage patter, in which the duo encouraged audience members (often by name) to name colors, shout out shapes, count and make animal sounds and movements. "Manipulating objects like musical instruments builds motor skills," said Alison Qualter Berna, a co founder of Apple Seeds. She added that making animal sounds and movements at the same time uses two parts of the brain simultaneously and encourages neural network connections; recognizing shapes is a precursor to recognizing and writing the alphabet; naming colors helps toddlers learn to describe their world in words; and understanding numbers is the basis of mathematical thinking. For the youngest children, like Sloane Stephens, who is 17 months, the most basic lesson is to follow along. Clad in a baby Rolling Stones T shirt, Sloane sucked a pacifier and clapped throughout with obvious glee. "There are other programs like ABC Mouse, Khan Academy for Kids and Homer, but the problem is that those start at age 2," Sloane's mother, Maya Sharan Stephens, said. "So the children who are at this weird in between space, between 1 and 2, who haven't necessarily developed the motor skills, shape and color recognition, it's hard for them." Since the spring, Sloane's family has relied on Songs for Seeds, as well as on their public library in Greenwich, Conn., which like many libraries around the world is offering story time, puppet shows and singalongs for kids online. Still, she worries that her daughter isn't getting enough face time with peers to be prepared for preschool when the time comes. "I see the difference when she is able to interact with other children," she said. Heather Superchi feared that her son, Luke, 4, was forgetting the advances he'd made socially and in speech. (Luke, an only child, has been more isolated than many other children; his premature birth has led to lingering health problems that make him at high risk for Covid 19.) "There has definitely been a little of that regression," she said. But with Songs for Seeds and a My Gym franchise near their home outside Denver, she said, "It's preparing him in the way he has to pay attention and wait his turn, which I think are going to be very important when he goes to school." Sarah Burke, the mother of Gus Tracy, 2, said that when the pandemic first hit, "We leaned into screen time like a lot of parents did." Through Songs for Seeds, they noticed that Gus came alive during activities relating to the alphabet. Now, they try to recreate what Gus enjoys onscreen in their neighborhood in Brooklyn. "So, when we go out for walks, we search for ABCs in the environment, in streets signs, license plates and other people's T shirts," Ms. Burke said. In terms of language acquisition, "I just really see things clicking for him." Gus's alphabet city is an example of "the good news," as Dr. Pressman said, that "we can practice many of these skills in everyday life," including "executive function based skills such as self regulation, emotion regulation, autonomy, perspective taking, communicating, critical thinking and self direction." "You can turn almost any home based activity or interaction into an opportunity," Dr. Pressman said, ticking off examples. To encourage the sense of discovery and the "problem solving, turn taking and perspective taking" that comes from situations like "navigating that playground moment of when you are going up a slide, and another kid wants to come down the slide," she advises letting children play in an undirected manner. In some homes, that may mean allowing children "to use garages, backyards, basements or attics to find opportunities for exploring," Dr. Pressman said. If children encounter obstacles, allow them to work things out. That includes conflicts with siblings, though "if you do need to jump in, help them communicate with each other," she said. But bath time, feeding, diaper changes and getting dressed present the best opportunities for both babies and toddlers. "It is in those caregiving moments that some of the biggest brain boosting interactions occur," Dr. Pressman said. To support that, she works with the nonprofit Vroom and with Healthynest, a company that makes baby products, to provide parents with free tools and ideas to maximize such moments. And the youngest of the young are likely to benefit from extra time at home with parents during the pandemic. That's because secure attachment is the most important foundation for brain and language development. "In fact, we may find that their language is boosted because of time spent at home with their primary caregivers," Dr. Pressman said. "In some ways, babies are living their best lives."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Education
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MADRID Old Masters have always outnumbered Old Mistresses, especially at the Prado. The museum is chock a block with paintings we know from Art History 101, in which female artists seem almost nonexistent. We come to the Prado to admire El Greco's bony saints and Goya's strolling majas, to marvel at Velazquez's "Las Meninas," that brilliant painting puzzle in which the artist depicts himself with assorted members of the Spanish court, working on an enormous canvas that we cannot see, leaving us to wonder for eternity what it shows. This year the Prado is celebrating its 200th anniversary, and the good news is that the female presence in its galleries has been winningly expanded with "A Tale of Two Women Painters: Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana." The historically revelatory show, which remains on view until Feb. 2, brings together about 60 works by two 16th century Italian artists who were celebrated in their lifetimes but rudely forgotten after their deaths. Over the centuries, many of their paintings were lost, destroyed or reattributed to their male colleagues, and it wasn't until the 19th century that the process of rehabilitation began. Sofonisba, the more compelling and modern of the two, was a sensitive portraitist whose work is easy to recognize. (Both artists are known by their first names, as is true of Renaissance biggies including Leonardo and Michelangelo). She is sometimes described as the first major female painter of the Renaissance, and the faces gazing out from her work have a startling immediacy. The show opens with a series of self portraits that emphasize the roundedness of things. She depicts herself as a wide eyed, moon faced young woman eager to declare her ambition as an artist. Her hair is pulled back indifferently, and her clothing is nothing special. She generally wears the same black jacket, and the same white blouse that ties at the neck. She has no use for makeup or jewelry, and there's no grand Mona Lisa like landscape unfurling in the distance behind her. Instead, she appears against flat, brownish, near empty backgrounds that heighten the austere mood. Some of her most affecting portraits are small in size. "Self Portrait" (1558), on loan from the Colonna Gallery in Rome, is just 10 by 8 inches and quietly riveting. Sofonisba is dressed in her usual white blouse, with three thin strings dangling delicately from her collar to the bottom edge of the canvas. Rendered with Flemish like precision, the strings are like an exquisite necklace made from nothing but cotton and air. Born around 1535, in a well off family in Cremona, Sofonisba was the oldest of seven children. She began painting at an early age, using herself and her siblings as models. When she was around 11, her parents sent her and one of her sisters to train in the workshop of a local painter named Bernardino Campi. Some scholars believe it was the first time in the Renaissance that any girls were given such an opportunity. Michael W. Cole, a professor at Columbia and contributor to the Prado catalog, is about to publish "Sofonisba's Lesson," a substantial monograph that opens at the poignant moment when Sofonisba "left her father's home" to study art. Professor Cole lavishes praise on both her father and teacher for their open mindedness. Still, one wouldn't want to overplay the role of the men in Sofonisba's life, and deny her the force of her own decisions and creativity. It seems to me that it was precisely the constrictions that society imposed on her that led her to go off in an original direction. Unable to study anatomy and paint big biblical or mythological scenes, she achieved something new by enlarging the area in art reserved for personal experience. She has no rivals as a painter of children and adolescents, whom other painters of her era tended to depict like adults, except a few feet shorter. Just look at the faces in her best known painting, "The Chess Game" (1555), which shows three of her sisters in a garden, absorbed in a competitive chess match. The girls are dressed sumptuously, in shiny, gold embroidered fabrics that cover their torsos like so much metal armor. Bands of pearls festoon their hair, in contrast to the gray haired demeanor of their governess, a gentle figure peeking in from the right side. All in all, the painting feels remarkably psychological and prescient in its understanding of sibling rivalry. Lucia, the older of the girls, seems almost regal as she reaches across the board to claim a pawn from Minerva, the middle sister, who appears in sharp profile, pale and insecure, raising her hand as if asking for permission to speak. Europa, the youngest, a girl of perhaps 7, turns toward the losing sister and flashes a nearly ecstatic grin perhaps the first expression of schadenfreude in art? The Prado show, which was curated by Leticia Ruiz Gomez, takes the form of a double feature, pairing two artists who flourished in the same era, in the same area of northern Italy, but who probably never met. Their works are made to mingle in the galleries in a pas de deux. But is this approach appropriate? It is hard to imagine that male artists would have to share the galleries quite this way, and you wonder if the curators at the Prado think that women need to team up to better confront the patriarchy. The double billing seems especially odd because one artist overwhelms the other. A show that was perhaps intended as an expression of sisterly solidarity ends up celebrating Sofonisba's intimate portraits at the expense of Lavinia's work. Like most women artists of her era, Lavinia was the daughter of an established painter. Her father, Prospero Fontana, trained her in his workshop in Bologna, in a Mannerist style. In those days, having a father who painted allowed a young woman to gain studio experience without risking her reputation by being sent away from home and put in the custody of a possible cad. Even later artists, like the much celebrated Artemisia Gentileschi in the 17th century and Angelica Kauffman in the 18th century, were also trained in their father's workshops. Lavinia was certainly accomplished on paper, and her days were no doubt packed. She bore 11 children, only three of whom outlived her. Thankfully, her husband, a fellow painter named Gian Paolo Zappi, was ahead of his time in his willingness to be a house husband. He gave up his career to help raise the children and assist in the studio. Lavinia claimed, a little patronizingly, that she refused to let her husband help with her paintings, except to fill in the drapes. Although Lavinia was born in 1552, just two decades after Sofonisba, she seems to belong to a different era. She is more of a Mannerist than a Renaissance style naturalist, less interested in capturing individuals than in cataloging their expensive clothes or the lack thereof, as in "Mars and Venus," a winking interpretation of Greek myth dominated by a helmeted Mars and a female turned to display her pale backside. More typically of her work, Lavinia's "A Lady of the Ruini Family" (1593) shows an auburn haired noblewoman smiling blandly as she strokes her lap dog. She's not the only one in jewels. The little dog, too, who appears in profile, its hind legs resting on a tabletop, is actually wearing an earring a hoop with three dangling stones. The material excess is so wacky you begin to feel you are looking at a page from the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog. Even so, the rehabilitation of forgotten women painters is an admirable and essential pursuit, and the Prado is to be congratulated for untangling so much 16th century history in this exhibition. Naturally, we want to see the work of female artists who flourished (or didn't) through the centuries, even if some of the recent discoveries have offered more in the way of social history than aesthetic excitement. Not every artist can be a Sofonisba, a figure of robust, even dazzling, originality. Most artists are more like Lavinia, capable but not transformative, more relevant to their era than to ours. Still, we want to know about all of them. Art history has preserved the efforts and stories of countless second rate men; women deserve the same courtesy. Either way, can we please do a better job of preserving their work and life stories than the tastemakers of the 16th century did?
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Our guide to art shows that will be closing soon. 2017 WHITNEY BIENNIAL at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through June 11). This is arguably the best Biennial in years, and perhaps the best ever in its combination of demographics, aesthetics and political urgency. Nearly half of the featured artists are female, and half nonwhite. Their works reach from figure painting to virtual reality. Such realities as income inequality, racism, misogyny, immigration and violence are confronted in ways that set a high standard for social engagement sustained by formal ambition. (Roberta Smith) 212 570 3600, whitney.org 'FAST FORWARD: PAINTING FROM THE 1980s' at the Whitney Museum of American Art (closes on May 14). This exhibition takes a first shot at the long overlooked history of '80s American painting and mostly misses its mark. The heady, poly style energy of the moment is intermittently present, often in works previously long in storage by Julian Schnabel, Kathe Burkhart, Moira Dryer and several others. But the show, which is limited to the museum's collection and its smallest floor of galleries, is confused and timid. Still, don't miss it. So far, it's all we have. (Smith) 212 570 3600, whitney.org 'MARISA MERZ: THE SKY IS A GREAT SPACE' at the Met Breuer (closes on May 7). This survey of tenacious, innovative, often beautiful work belatedly reveals its maker, now in her 90s, as the queen of Arte Povera, the postwar Italian movement known for using humble materials. It runs from her early cut aluminum "Living Sculpture" pieces to drawings, paintings and small sculptures of mostly female heads. Constant experimentation with materials, a disdain for traditional finish and some revenge on the male gaze emerge. (Smith) 212 731 1675, metmuseum.org
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The history of art is littered with significant painters and sculptors who never reached the same level of renown as some their peers. Sometimes these omissions are justified by a disparity in skill, but in certain cases bad luck, prejudice or misunderstanding prevented artists from getting recognition. From Feb. 21, 2019, to June 2, 2019, the Frick Collection's exhibition "Moroni: The Riches of Renaissance Portraiture" will allow New Yorkers to decide whether Giovanni Battista Moroni deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as the more famous figures of his era. This will be the first major exhibition of Moroni's work in the United States. (The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, put on a small exhibition of Moroni's portraits in 2000.) "It's not every day you can introduce to the public an Italian Renaissance artist that they don't know whose work is spectacular," Aimee Ng, the curator of the exhibition, said in an interview.
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WASHINGTON Even before Ronald Reagan became the oldest elected president, his mental state was a political issue. His adversaries often suggested his penchant for contradictory statements, forgetting names and seeming absent mindedness could be linked to dementia. In 1980, Mr. Reagan told me that he would resign the presidency if White House doctors found him mentally unfit. Years later, those doctors and key aides told me they had not detected any changes in his mental abilities while in office. Now a clever new analysis has found that during his two terms in office, subtle changes in Mr. Reagan's speaking patterns linked to the onset of dementia were apparent years before doctors diagnosed his Alzheimer's disease in 1994. The findings, published in The Journal of Alzheimer's Disease by researchers at Arizona State University, do not prove that Mr. Reagan exhibited signs of dementia that would have adversely affected his judgment and ability to make decisions in office. But the research does suggest that alterations in speech one day might be used to predict development of Alzheimer's and other neurological conditions years before symptoms are clinically perceptible. Detection of dementia at the earliest stages has become a high priority. Many experts now believe that yet to be developed treatments are likely to be effective at preventing or slowing progression of dementia only if it is found before it significantly damages the brain. The "highly innovative" methods used by the researchers may eventually help "to further clarify the extent to which spoken word changes are associated with normal aging or predictive of subsequent progression to the clinical stages of Alzheimer's disease," said Dr. Eric Reiman, the director of the Banner Alzheimer's Institute in Phoenix, who was not involved in the new study. Visar Berisha and Julie Liss, professors of speech and hearing science at the university, compared transcripts of all 46 news conferences that Mr. Reagan held to the 101 sessions President George H. W. Bush held in his term. The researchers assessed changes in the presidents' speech patterns with a new algorithm based on a technique used by others to analyze changes in writing by novelists. In an interview, Dr. Berisha said he did not set out to study Mr. Reagan, but found he was the only individual with progressive dementia for whom long term transcript information is publicly available. He chose Mr. Bush because he was most comparable in age to Mr. Reagan at the start of their presidencies, and both men served during roughly the same decade. Age and era are important issues for comparison because they can influence language measures. Mr. Reagan was 69 when he became president, and Mr. Bush was 64. Mr. Reagan died at 93 in 2004. The researchers found no changes in the speaking patterns of Mr. Bush, who is not known to have developed Alzheimer's. But in Mr. Reagan's speech, two measures use of repetitive words, and substituting nonspecific terms like "thing" for specific nouns increased toward the end of Mr. Reagan's presidency, compared with its start. A third measure, his use of unique words, declined. The researchers' methodology was not designed to determine whether the changes were present in Mr. Reagan's rare early news conferences, Dr. Berisha said. Other factors like a deliberate decision to reduce the complexity of his speaking style, or the injury, surgery and anesthesia from the assassination attempt made on him in 1981 could account for the language changes they found, Dr. Berisha said. In 1984, Mr. Reagan's poor performance in his first presidential debate with Vice President Walter Mondale renewed questions about his mental capacity. A study published in 1988 suggested that Mr. Reagan had some cognitive impairment during his debates with President Jimmy Carter and Mr. Mondale, but the authors said that their findings were insufficient to conclude that the changes affected Mr. Reagan's policy judgments and ability to make decisions. The new research is part of a larger effort to develop objective tests that would serve as bellwethers for Alzheimer's and other neurological diseases, Dr. Berisha said. While the new study is "very clever," said Dr. Richard Caselli, an Alzheimer's expert at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz., further research involving larger numbers of individuals is necessary to prove the methods actually predict dementia. Imperceptible cognitive decline often predates by many years the precipitous downturn that occurs once compensatory strategies, like relying on well rehearsed phrases and simple words, fail and an individual can no longer mask his cognitive deficit. Dr. Berisha wanted to determine whether natural language processing and algorithms could be used to detect any such changes in news conferences, because spontaneous responses to questions require greater cognitive effort than a rehearsed speech does. Sharing thoughts and ideas through spoken communication is a fragile process. Even the simplest verbal response requires a complex sequence of events. The brain must recall the words to best convey a message, put them in proper sequence, and then signal the muscles required to produce speech. The slightest damage to brain areas that orchestrate these events can produce speech difficulties. Earlier studies have shown that certain linguistic biomarkers change with disease progression. Spoken vocabulary size declines, for instance, and use of indefinite nouns increases. Studies of a small group of American nuns have shown a strong relationship between the complexity of the language the women used in handwritten autobiographical essays when they were young and their cognitive health many decades later. Canadian researchers have reported that analyses of syntax in novels by Iris Murdoch and Agatha Christie indicated early signs of dementia (Ms. Murdoch died of Alzheimer's; Ms. Christie is suspected to have had it.) The same analysis applied to the healthy P. D. James, who died at 94 last year, did not find signs of dementia.
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A photograph by Paolo Pellegrin showing the moment after an Israeli airstrike destroyed several buildings in Beirut in August 2006. A retrospective of Mr. Pellegrin's work has opened at Italy's national museum of contemporary art. ROME When Paolo Pellegrin's gripping photographs of the 2016 battle for the Iraqi city of Mosul were hung along the entrance wall of Gallery 5 of the Maxxi, Italy's national museum for contemporary art and architecture, handouts labeled the work a "contemporary 'Guernica,' " referring to the masterpiece by Picasso. Like "Guernica," Mr. Pellegrin's patchwork of images, challenges the viewer with an unflinching frontal assault depicting the totality of warfare, spanning the battlefield, civilian populations in flight and the strained post fight confrontations between victors and vanquished. In one of the oversize images, smoke from the burning oil fields of Qayyara, southeast of Mosul, is the protagonist: an abstract, terrible beauty. The collection serves as an introduction to Mr. Pellegrin's world of brutal conflict and human suffering, a recurrent theme in a retrospective of his work that runs at the museum through March 10. It's a notion that has always interested Mr. Pellegrin "to make the specific coincide with the universal," as he put it. That, he explained during an interview this month, was "when the photograph becomes archetypal." The images from Mosul were taken as military forces were trying to recapture the city from Islamic State militants, but within that particularity, "There is the echo of something larger, the idea of conflict," he said. The photographs in Gallery 5 were originally published in The New York Times Magazine in November 2016. The show in Rome is not the first time that Mr. Pellegrin's pictures have graduated from the pages of magazines and newspapers to gallery walls. But this exhibition is the largest retrospective of his work, and the first to be held in the Italian capital, where he was born in 1964. (He now splits his time between London and Geneva.) Mr. Pellegrin spent two years mining his archive to select more than 150 images from two decades of his peripatetic life, which has taken him to countries in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and beyond. He has documented war, civil unrest, seedy American neighborhoods, environmental disasters, the Romany people, mass migration, celebrities and ordinary people. In the process, he has picked up many prizes and endorsements, including 10 World Press Photo Awards. The importance of photographs is in "what they are trying to say," Mr. Pellegrin said. In this process, the photographer's "paternity" of the image is limited, he added, describing the moment a picture is taken as a crossroads where the photographer, the subject and history intertwine to give life to an image. After that, an image is on its own, he said: How it is perceived depends on the viewer. In 2017, Mr. Pellegrin traveled to the Antarctic, where he joined Operation IceBridge, a NASA expedition to document the impact of climate change "the central theme of our existence, ours and that of our children," he said. Commissioned by Time magazine, he acknowledged that the assignment had posed a particular challenge: Photography "is not equipped to deal with the slow time of climate change," he explained. Instead, he said, he chose to capture "the fragility of beauty of an extraordinary landscape that is extraordinarily in danger." Mr. Pellegrin said that the sparseness of the Antarctic had encouraged a visual approach that he had been developing in his work of late. "After years of grappling with the absence of a third dimension, building depth through the use of form and layers, I find myself doing the opposite, trying to eliminate," he said. He compared this new slant to a sculpture emerging from a block of stone, "removing, removing, until you arrive at the center, at the essence," he said. The choice to photograph mostly in black and white served a similar purpose, he said. "I think that subtracting an element of the real allows the photograph to express itself in more symbolic terms," Mr. Pellegrin said. "Color is tied to our way of seeing, of perceiving the world," he explained, while the abstraction of black and white "offers an additional expressive possibility." A self portrait by Mr. Pellegrin in 2016. "Photography is an active language that gives voice to the photographer," he said. Mr. Pellegrin said that he saw himself as part of a "tradition and lineage of photographers who expressed themselves in black and white," including fellow practitioners whom he admired, like Robert Frank, William Klein and Gilles Peress. Mr. Peress worked with Magnum Photos, the international photographers' collective that Mr. Pellegrin joined as a full member in 2005. Despite that veneration of black and white, Mr. Pellegrin shot some images of the central Italian city of L'Aquila, devastated in a 2009 earthquake, in color. The photographs were taken for a recent commission from Maxxi that would form part of a proposed contemporary art museum in the city. Mr. Pellegrin and five other artists were asked to create site specific pieces for the Palazzo Ardinghelli, an 18th century palace that would house Maxxi L'Aquila. His project has two parts: a grid of 140 separate black and white images of the city's architectural wounds and subsequent reconstruction, now on show on the ground floor of the Maxxi in Rome, and a series of color panels of the countryside around L'Aquila that Mr. Pellegrin shot during one moonlit night. "Paolo always has this approach, on the threshold, looking at the world as it moves," Ms. Melandri said. Mr. Pellegrin said that he was honored to have been chosen for the venture. "What's important is that Maxxi opens in L'Aquila, that there's an awareness of the need for an artistic contribution," he said. "The museum is a strong signal."
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The New York Times is reviewing the work history of Ali Watkins, a Washington based reporter at the newspaper whose email and phone records were seized by prosecutors in a leak investigation case that has prompted an outcry among press advocates. The private communications of Ms. Watkins, 26, who joined The Times in December, were obtained by the Justice Department as part of an investigation into a former Senate Intelligence Committee aide, James A. Wolfe, who was charged last week with making false statements to the F.B.I. Ms. Watkins and Mr. Wolfe, 57, had an extended personal relationship that ended last year. Prosecutors suspected that Mr. Wolfe had leaked classified intelligence to reporters, a claim that he denies. The Times said on Tuesday that it was conducting a review of Ms. Watkins's involvement in the case, including the nature of her relationship with Mr. Wolfe, and what she disclosed about it to her prior employers. Ms. Watkins informed The Times about the prior relationship after she was hired by the paper, and before she began work in December. She has said that Mr. Wolfe did not provide her with information during the course of their relationship. Mr. Wolfe was one of the highest ranking aides on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which Ms. Watkins covered extensively at Politico, BuzzFeed News, The Huffington Post and the McClatchy Company, where she started as an intern in 2013. Her reporting for McClatchy on the Senate Intelligence Committee led to an investigative series that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. At The Times, Ms. Watkins has covered federal law enforcement. The seizure of Ms. Watkins's records has raised concerns about overreach by the Justice Department, particularly among news organizations and press freedom groups. On Dec. 14, days before she began working at The Times, Ms. Watkins was approached by F.B.I. agents, who asked about her contact with Mr. Wolfe; she said she did not answer their questions at the time. She was also approached last June, shortly after she was hired at Politico, by a man who identified himself as a government agent and brought up Mr. Wolfe, according to several people familiar with her description of the interaction, who requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. The man contacted Ms. Watkins and offered to meet as a potential source for her reporting, these people said. During a meeting in Washington, he told Ms. Watkins that he was aware of her personal relationship with Mr. Wolfe and asked if she would assist him in ferreting out government leakers and the journalists they worked with. On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that the man who had approached Ms. Watkins was Jeffrey A. Rambo, whom the paper identified as a Customs and Border Protection agent. In a statement, the agency said that its Office of Professional Responsibility would review the matter. 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. "CBP takes all allegations of employee misconduct seriously," the statement read. "The allegation has been immediately referred to CBP's Office of Professional Responsibility." Unsettled by the interaction, Ms. Watkins informed her managers at Politico. It was the first time that she had disclosed to her editors that she and Mr. Wolfe had been personally involved, according to three people familiar with the conversation. Ms. Watkins's byline continued to appear on numerous Politico stories focused on the Senate Intelligence Committee until she left for The Times last December. Ms. Watkins declined to comment on Tuesday. Her lawyer, Mark J. MacDougall, also declined to comment. "Ms. Watkins did not disclose the personal nature of her relationship early on in her tenure at Politico, but she was managed accordingly once that disclosure was made," a spokesman for Politico, Brad Dayspring, said in a statement. The move by prosecutors at the Justice Department to seize Ms. Watkins's email and phone records was the first known instance of the Trump administration pursuing a journalist's private communications. The Committee to Protect Journalists called the move "a fundamental threat to press freedom," and First Amendment lawyers expressed concern about a government crackdown on journalists.
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Unlike its subject, the documentary "What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael" merely feints toward criticism. A numbing torrent of largely unidentified film clips and poorly labeled commentary, Rob Garver's overstuffed tribute to the life and work of America's best known and most written about film critic is at times barely coherent. Forced to compete with a near constant barrage of movie fragments some with only the most tenuous connection to the text Kael's distinctively passionate voice (smoothly narrated from her letters and essays by Sarah Jessica Parker) is disastrously muffled. As are those of her admirers and detractors, the colleagues and filmmakers whose revelations and insights, however sharp or spicy, are so smushed together that I was constantly hitting "Rewind." Theater audiences won't have that luxury. Through the smog of distractions, a portrait emerges of a uniquely gifted, complicated, arrogant and combative writer, one whose abhorrence of sentimentality caused her to savage "The Sound of Music" and the "inhumanly happy" performance of its star, Julie Andrews. Her tenure at The New Yorker, from 1968 91 (with a brief break to dabble, unsuccessfully, in film production with Warren Beatty), happily coincided with a seismic eruption in American independent filmmaking, when young directors like Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman and Brian De Palma were developing their personal styles. So was she: an anti academic, chattily entertaining prose that read as both hard bitten and strangely needy. She desperately wanted movies to make her feel things, and was ruthless when they didn't. Hers was a profoundly sensual approach (which she cheekily flaunted in book titles like "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang") that caused her to celebrate pictures that many viewed as pulp. She responded viscerally to the erotic energy of Bernardo Bertolucci's "Last Tango in Paris" and the violent pathos of Arthur Penn's "Bonnie and Clyde," a movie she single handedly rescued from a critical mauling. The flip side was a disdain for the cool anomie of foreign art house darlings like "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and "La Notte," works that committed the unforgivable sin of boring her. Her infamous 1985 pan of the nine hour Holocaust documentary, "Shoah," which she found "exhausting," continues to reverberate.
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Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos and anything else that strikes them as intriguing. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once a week blast of our pop music coverage. "A Perfect Miracle," from a Spiritualized album due Sept. 7, unfolds as a lush self contradiction. It's a waltz that builds from modest ukulele strumming and glimmering electronics to full cinematic orchestration. In a kindly voice, Jason Pierce/J. Spaceman professes exalted love in the verses "I'd catch the wind and have it blow all my kisses to you" only to take it all back in the choruses: "Lately I've found I don't need you around." And since verse and chorus have the same chords, he can conclude by singing both sentiments at the same time. J.P. The soft rock phase of Nicki Minaj's career continues apace. "Bed" is a temperate collaboration with Ariana Grande, a breathy come on with extra mild dancehall underpinnings, and while Ms. Minaj is an excellent rapper, she tends toward lower gears on songs like these. That said, she does open with a an elaborate scenario about having sex to the rhythm of Lil Wayne's "A Milli," which seems needlessly theatrical. But sometimes, the more absurd the concept, the more animated Ms. Minaj becomes. On "Rich Sex," a collaboration with Lil Wayne, she has some of her familiar ferocity, rapping on behalf of women who know their worth, and against men who are not worth the time you give them. JON CARAMANICA Troye Sivan, not yet the full spectrum pop star he should be, delivers a mellow, ethereal bop with Ariana Grande, who is, strangely, also not yet the full spectrum pop star she should be. This strong collaboration has the ease of streaming era pop peppered with some of the casual confidence of the soulful house of the 1990s. J.C. Maxwell, 'We Never Saw It Coming' A lone song suddenly released by Maxwell, as yet unconnected to an album, arrives like a threnody for liberal democracy. "Blindsided by them," Maxwell sings, on the verge of tears, over gently tolling piano and eerily sustained orchestral instruments. "What can I do? It's so uncontrollable." There's no solace at the end, only the desolate drone that began the song. The song's Tidal only video clip, titled "The Glass House," starts with a couple's argument and ends in mass devastation. J.P. If you thought doing an album of old ballads would lead JD Allen to change his tune, gussy up, splash on a new cologne and pin a bouquet to his lapel, think again. The best romantic improvising in jazz has always been about understatement, and while this 45 year old tenor saxophonist has stories of his own to tell, he lives by an old timer's hardy ethic. Mr. Allen opens "Love Stone," his ballads record, with "Stranger in Paradise" his quartet floating in a taut rubato from tentative major to melancholy minor. Mr. Allen's notes have a certain mossy elegance to them, a vigor, but he packs plenty of conflict into each one: What you hear most clearly here is need. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO Punch Brothers, 'It's All Part of the Plan' A few years ago, the bassist William Parker published "Sessionography," a book documenting almost every performance and recording session he'd been on since 1972. Almost 500 pages long, it shows him to be a lifelong connector of artists from across the avant garde, from the esteemed to the unknown. "Voices Fall From the Sky," out Friday, represents one slice of that creative life: The three disc collection features original works Mr. Parker has recorded with vocalists over the past few decades. On "For Fannie Lou Hamer" with Mr. Parker playing the marimba, glockenspiel and reeds, and leading a full band Leena Conquest roams from spoken decree to wide, darkened vibrato. She delivers the story of Ms. Hamer, the famed voting rights activist: "This small woman did not know the word 'enemy'/She was carrying the people, carrying them on her back." G.R. Low has been making what has long been described as "slowcore" indie rock since 1993; it embraced electronic sounds on its 2016 album, "Ones and Sixes." That palette grows exponentially more menacing and overwhelming in three segued songs from "Double Negative," the album Low will release in September. Gusts of white noise and inexorable bass thuds all but submerge "Quorum"; the 4/4 bass drum of "Dancing and Blood" wobbles on each impact as if the dance floor is buckling. "Fly" sustains impossibly long breathed vocal drones over a flickering heartbeat as Mimi Parker sings, "Leave my weary bones and fly" and the video suggests a mother's death. It's rough going, but worth it. J.P.
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Enrollment in nearly half of the nation's largest school districts has dropped steadily over the last five years, triggering school closings that have destabilized neighborhoods, caused layoffs of essential staff and concerns in many cities that the students who remain are some of the neediest and most difficult to educate. While the losses have been especially steep in long battered cities like Cleveland and Detroit, enrollment has also fallen significantly in places suffering through the recent economic downturn, like Broward County, Fla., San Bernardino, Calif., and Tucson, according to the latest available data from the Department of Education, analyzed for The New York Times. Urban districts like Philadelphia and Columbus, Ohio, are facing an exodus even as the school age population has increased. Enrollment in the New York City schools, the largest district in the country, was flat from 2005 to 2010, but both Chicago and Los Angeles lost students, with declining birthrates and competition from charter schools cited as among the reasons. Because school financing is often allocated on a per pupil basis, plummeting enrollment can mean fewer teachers will be needed. But it can also affect the depth of a district's curriculum, jeopardizing programs in foreign languages, music or art. While large districts lost students in the 1970s as middle class families left big cities for the suburbs, districts are losing students now for a variety of reasons. The economy and home foreclosure crisis drove some families from one school system into another. Hundreds of children from immigrant families have left districts in Arizona and California as their parents have lost jobs. Legal crackdowns have also prompted many families to return to their home countries. In some cases, the collapse of housing prices has led homeowners to stay put, making it difficult for new families and new prospective students to move in and take their place. But some say the schools are partly to blame. "We have record low confidence in our public schools," said Kevin Johnson, the mayor of Sacramento and head of education policy for the United States Conference of Mayors. (He is married to Michelle Rhee, the lightning rod former chancellor of the Washington public schools and now an advocate for data driven reform). "If we have high quality choices in all neighborhoods, you don't have that exodus taking place," he said. The rise of charter schools has accelerated some enrollment declines. The number of students fell about 5 percent in traditional public school districts between 2005 and 2010; by comparison, the number of students in all charter districts soared by close to 60 percent, according to the Department of Education data. Thousands of students have moved into charter schools in districts with both traditional public and charter schools. A year ago, Tanya Moton withdrew her daughter, Dy'Mon Starks, 12, from a public school and signed her up for Graham Expeditionary Middle School, a nearby charter school. "The classes were too big, the kids were unruly and didn't pay attention to the teachers," Ms. Moton said of the former school. She said she sought help for her daughter's dyslexia at her former school, but officials "claimed that she didn't need it." After transferring to Graham, Ms. Moton said, "one of the teachers stayed after school every Friday to help her." During the recession and weak recovery, pinched state financing and dwindling property taxes forced many public schools to shed teachers and cut programs. "The fewer students we have, the fewer dollars we're getting" from the state and federal government, said Matthew E. Stanski, chief financial officer of Prince George's County Public Schools in Maryland, where enrollment has fallen by almost 5 percent in five years, despite sharp gains in nearby counties. Officials have laid off about 100 teachers and district employees, cut prekindergarten to half days and canceled some athletic programs, Mr. Stanski said. In Los Angeles, the district has dismissed more than 8,500 teachers and other education workers in the last four years as enrollment fell by about 56,000 students. The Mesa Unified District, which lost 7,155 students between 2005 and 2010, has closed four middle schools in the last three years, delayed new textbook purchases, and laid off librarians. The students left behind in some of these large districts are increasingly children with disabilities, in poverty or learning English as a second language. Jeff Warner, a spokesman for the Columbus City Schools, said that enrollment appears to be stabilizing, but it can be difficult to compete against suburban and charter schools because of the district's higher proportion of students requiring special education services. In Cleveland, where enrollment fell by nearly a fifth between 2005 and 2010, the number of students requiring special education services has risen from 17 percent of the student body to 23 percent, up from just under 14 percent a decade ago, according to the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. Such trends alarm those who worry about the increasing inequity in schools. "I see greater stratification and greater segregation," said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. Educators are concerned that a vicious cycle will set in. Some of the largest public school systems in the country are in danger of becoming "the schools that nobody wants," said Jeffrey Mirel, an education historian at the University of Michigan. Jeanmarie Hedges, a mother of two teenage sons, moved her family out of Prince George's County two years ago because the proportion of students passing standardized tests was much lower than in neighboring Charles County, Md. Ms. Hedges said she was also driven by fear of violence in the school. "Some of our friends went there and they were beaten up a lot," she said. A. Duane Arbogast, acting deputy superintendent for academics in Prince George's County, said he recognized the challenge of persuading families to send their children to public schools. "We simply have to get better and provide an education that people of all social classes would be proud of," said Mr. Arbogast, who cited a new health sciences academy and a planned performing arts high school in his district. But declining enrollment can force tough trade offs. "If you want to offer Spanish but you only have 80 kids taking Spanish, then your cost per pupil" is larger than if you have 500 in Spanish classes, said Jonathan Travers, director at Education Resource Strategies, a nonprofit consulting group that helps school systems adjust to changes in enrollment. Before the Mesa district closed Brimhall Junior High School this year, the school lost teachers in art, music and technology in part because of a declining student head count. That made it harder for the school, which faces competition from many charter schools, to attract students. "Education has gotten to be almost a sales job," said Susan Chard, who taught seventh grade math at Brimhall for 18 years. "You want to provide reasons for parents to bring their children to your school."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Education
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Valley Cottage, a small rectangle of green set amid the three Nyacks and Congers about 30 miles from New York in Rockland County, is a quiet suburb with a woodsy setting and an unexpected connection with Czarist era Russia: Leo Tolstoy's youngest daughter and secretary, Alexandra, who arrived in the area in the late 1930s, spent four decades establishing and nurturing a community for political exiles a flourishing organization called the Tolstoy Foundation, through which the author's legacy lives on in the hamlet today. Lacking the name recognition of neighboring towns, these days Valley Cottage has buyers to thank for having raised its profile. Some of them, priced out of those neighboring communities in recent years, discovered it had affordable real estate, as well as a convenient location not far away from the area's many amenities. Residents are a short drive from Nyack, whose downtown is abuzz with shopping, restaurant and arts offerings. They are just over the West Nyack border from the huge Palisades Center mall, with its dozens of major retailers. And they can access the city via the New York State Thruway and the Tappan Zee Bridge, each minutes away. Valley Cottage, however, is serene. Off the main north south artery, State Route 303, the roads wind through hills and woods, and developments of suburban homes have street names like Joy and Mirth. "It's got that Norman Rockwell feel," said Chris Cefola, a lifelong resident, and the owner of Cefola's Clarkstown Auto Lube on State Route 303. He is also the president of the Valley Cottage Civic Association. Within its niche Upper Nyack, Nyack, West Nyack and Congers Valley Cottage has just over 9,000 residents on about four and a half square miles, according to 2010 census data. Prospective buyers are often completely unfamiliar with the hamlet, said Gail Posnack, an associate broker with Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage in New City. "They forget there's a place in the middle called Valley Cottage." But once shown properties there, they can't help but appreciate their affordability, Ms. Posnack said. They may not get Nyack's river views, but they do get more space and land for their money. A dry cleaner, a bakery, a pizza place and a few other businesses along Kings Highway constitute about all that Valley Cottage has in the way of a downtown. But a certain distinction is imparted by the presence of the onion domed church, the nursing and rehabilitation center, and other elements of the Tolstoy Foundation, which got its start in this peaceful wooded enclave through the efforts of Alexandra Tolstoy. She died here in 1979. Founded with the goal of providing services and temporary housing for political refugees from 40 nations including the Soviet Union, the group also promotes Russian heritage, running a Saturday school, currently for a group of 75 children, with classes in Russian language and culture. It owns a collection of cottages, too; they are used predominantly as assisted living quarters for the elderly, said Victoria Wohlsen, the executive director.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Dolly Parton, dressed in a sequined lilac pantsuit with black piping and matching butterfly wings, stood on an outdoor stage on a recent Friday morning. Behind her was a 52 foot sculpture of a "Wildwood Tree," with 620 acrylic butterflies. She was commemorating Wildwood Grove, a new six acre addition to Dollywood, her theme park in Pigeon Forge, Tenn. Based on Ms. Parton's childhood "daydreams and imaginations," the 137 million expansion is intended for families, especially those with younger children. (Teenagers are welcomed, Ms. Parton said, "as long as you behave." ) Ms. Parton spoke with The Times about the park's expansion, why she prefers to travel by bus and how her hometown pride influenced her decision to open the park. What are some changes you've noticed from the time you started traveling until now? Gas prices. Diesel prices. I started in show business when I was very young. We traveled by bus and I remember loving, in the early days, stopping at all the truck stops along the way because of all the great restaurants, all the great food, all the little out of the way places. I used to take my family on trips and vacations. We would go all over the world. We'd stop in and have food, but we'd take a lot of our own food. You'd take your own good pillows and your little things, which I still do to this day. Even when I travel overseas, I take my pillows, I take a few snack foods and other things that you might not be able to get. What are your favorite snacks to take? Potted meat. Or weird things like Vienna sausage. That and a bottle of Tabasco: If I can't eat whatever they're cooking, I can always have that. But I think everybody takes little special things whether it's special chips or special little treats like things in my freezer, cooked at home. Just thaw it out on the bus. I know how to live on the road . I know how to travel. When you're on the road, are you reading? Listening to music? I do love to read and I write a lot. I really get a chance to rest, too, because I'm always so busy. But once I'm on that bus I can sleep. I sleep better on my bus than anywhere else. I'm a Gypsy at heart. I just love the rocking of those wheels and smell of diesel. I fly when I have to. I don't like to fly. But when I tour we make it part of the deal. I don't like to spend tons of money, just flying here and there to say I'm flying private jets, because I'd much prefer my bus. Do you have any good travel skin care tips? I clean my face in the mornings. You never know if you're going to wreck the bus, you never know if you're going to be somewhere in a hotel and there's going to be a fire. So I leave my makeup on at night and clean my face in the morning. What do you think is the highlight of Wildwood Grove? The whole area, but the tree is the centerpiece. When parents get tired of running around with their kids you kind of take them in this area where they have all kinds of games to play. You cool off, sit against the wall, rest your feet. But everything is tailor made for kids and parents to bring families together. Have you been on any of the rides? I don't ride the rides. I never have. I have a tendency to get motion sickness. Also, I'm a little bit chicken. With all my hair I got so much to lose, like my wig or my shoes. I don't like to get messed up. I'm gonna have some handsome man mess it up, I don't want some ride doing it. No matter where in the world you go, you always come home and contribute here. Can you talk to me about that? I think you should be able to be proud of where you're from. I didn't leave here to get away from my people. I wanted to do other things, I wanted to go see the world, but I was always proud to be a country girl. I knew this would be a wonderful business venture, but I also knew it would really bring a lot of joy and happiness and a lot of jobs, too. That was important to me. Growing up poor, I know how important it is to make a living. And take pride in it. Will people hear your music at Wildwood Grove? Oh yes, they'll play my music in a lot of the stores. It's a little theme. Hopefully it's not enough to make you gag. This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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SOME of the best selling cars in Latin America and the Caribbean provide extremely poor crash protection, new safety tests show. The testing by the Latin American New Car Assessment Program, known as Latin NCAP, represents the first comprehensive crash test program for Latin America, safety experts say. Latin NCAP is an initiative of safety organizations including the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile and the FIA Foundation and is similar to NCAP programs that promote highway safety in Australia, China, Japan, South Korea, the United States and Europe. The test results indicate that occupant safety in the region's best selling cars is "20 years behind the five star standards now common in North America and Europe," Latin NCAP said. "Unfortunately, in Latin America one star cars still dominate the market." In a telephone interview, David Ward, director general of the FIA Foundation, said the poor crash protection was "a problem that will likely increase." Companies are producing unsafe cars because they can, he added, because of lax government regulations and a lack of consumer awareness. The World Health Organization says that the Latin Caribbean region has the world's highest per capita death rate from motor vehicle crashes and that the rate is expected to rise sharply as more people acquire vehicles. Latin NCAP tested models from some of the largest automakers in the United States and Europe. The Chinese made Geely CK1 received the worst rating in front impact testing: no stars on a five star scale. The Geely lacked air bags, as did the single star cars, which are manufactured and sold in the region by Fiat, Ford, General Motors, Peugeot and Volkswagen. The three best performers in the front crash test received four stars. They were the Ford Focus Style, Chevrolet Cruze and Nissan Tilda Hatchback. All had two air bags. None of the lowest rated cars meet the safety requirements of Europe or the United States and are not sold in those regions. Aside from not having air bags, which have generally not been required by governments in the region but may be offered on more expensive models, some of the least expensive and most popular cars "show weaknesses" in their body structures, Latin NCAP said. The group said it was "disappointing that the Latin NCAP tests reveal a number of models with body shells that fail to remain stable." The Latin tests, like other NCAP programs around the world, are based on standards set by the United Nations in 1998. The Latin NCAP's frontal test, in which a car strikes an offset barrier at 40 miles per hour, is identical to one used in the United States by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. In contrast, the NCAP tests by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the United States crashes cars into a full frontal barrier, not one that is offset to the driver's side, at 35 m.p.h. That agency also gives star ratings based on the occupants' chance of injury, but its ratings are not equivalent to those in the Latin American tests. Latin NCAP wants Latin American governments to enact U.N. safety standards into law, and it has has asked automakers selling cars in the region to comply voluntarily with the standards. "It is not a question if they will they must," Mr. Ward said. In the past, in North America and Europe, automakers have had to be pushed to adapt safety standards, but once faced with results like those from the test they "tend to respond very quickly," he said. Four out of five cars sold in Latin America are made in Brazil, said Mr. Ward of the FIA Foundation, and it is now the sixth largest auto producing nation. Last year, Brazil overtook Germany as the world's fourth largest car market, and within five years it is expected to overtake Japan for third place, he said. "Frankly, they won't cut it internationally if they remain at low level standards," Mr. Ward said. "If countries like this don't establish a regulatory floor, ever cheaper cars will be sold. In a race like that, China and India are likely to win." Bella Dinh Zarr, the North American director of a global initiative called Make Roads Safe, as well as director of road safety for the FIA Foundation, said: "We understand all the economic issues and the worry that cars will not be affordable. But that's just not the case." She said it would cost little more to produce cars with life saving technologies like air bags and crumple zones, which absorb the energy of a collision. Further, she added, manufacturers in the region are building cars on old platforms even though newer, safer vehicle designs exist. "The factory platforms already exist to make safer cars, and I believe that car manufacturers just need strong encouragement to move forward with using these platforms worldwide," she said. "Most models that are similar to the models in the U.S. did better. This is because they had the essential safety features that we expect, like air bags and crumple zones." American consumers won't tolerate unsafe cars, Dr. Dinh Zarr said, "and there is no reason that our Latin American and Caribbean neighbors should have to either." Until recently in the region, only the affluent could afford cars, and most were imported. But as in many other developing regions, there has been a large increase in car buyers from the middle class, and as a result, production has exploded in the last five years. The report also included a separate star rating for crash test protection of child restraints, which found that the restraints recommended by some automakers did not fit well in their vehicles and therefore performed poorly. To achieve a high score, both the car and the child restraint had to perform well. The report's findings also raise safety questions for travelers. A survey of the Web sites of major car rental companies operating in the region indicated that some cars listed in the report were in the rental fleets, said Rochelle Sobel, founder of the Association for Safe International Road Travel, a nonprofit advocacy group. "Let the renter beware," Ms. Sobel said. "Very often car buyers have safety in mind, but it's often not on the radar screen when renting." People often assume that safety standards abroad are similar to those in the United States, and are not aware that many countries have poor roads, weak laws that are erratically enforced, inadequate signs and lighting and inexperienced drivers. When those factors are combined with cars that lack basic safety features, "it's really a recipe for disaster," Ms. Sobel said. Worldwide, motor vehicle crashes are the No. 1 killer of healthy Americans abroad, the State Department says, exceeding deaths by terrorism, crime, infectious disease or plane travel. Ms. Sobel, whose organization developed Road Travel Reports that detail road safety issues for about 140 countries, recommends checking rental car fleets and reserving a car long before traveling to ensure that the desired model is available, and upon arrival to insist on it or one with similar safety features. In addition, before leaving the lot it is advisable to inspect the vehicle for safety features, as well as the condition of the tires and whether the windshield wipers are working.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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What would happen if "Back to the Future" starred black people? That's what the filmmaker Stefon Bristol imagines in "See You Yesterday" (there's even a winking cameo by Michael J. Fox), now on Netflix, which centers on C. J. (Eden Duncan Smith), a high school science prodigy who builds a time traveling backpack. But instead of going back to the past to save her parents' marriage, as Marty McFly did, she rewinds the previous 24 hours in hopes of preventing the murder of her brother by the police. As in "Back to the Future," C.J. must be careful not to change a single aspect of the past lest she provoke a different but equally fateful event. For C.J., though, doom seems unavoidable either way, turning what could have been a fun time travel tale into an ominous, sorrowful story that underscores the expendability of black lives.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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One of the country's most influential researchers in cancer screening has resigned from his post at Dartmouth College, after a two year internal investigation concluded he had plagiarized a graph included in a paper published in a prominent journal. The researcher, , has published widely on the risks of aggressive screening and over diagnosis, including Op Ed articles in The Times and several popular books. He disputed the university's findings against him. "I am saddened to say that I am resigning from Dartmouth," Dr. Welch wrote in an email to colleagues. "I feel that I can no longer participate in the research misconduct process against me as I fear my participation only serves to validate it." In a prepared statement, Dartmouth said the university had "reviewed this matter in accordance with its research misconduct policy and procedures, which defines plagiarism as 'the appropriation of another person's ideas, processes, results or words without giving them appropriate credit,'" and found Dr. Welch guilty.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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The writer and director Claire Oakley demonstrates an admirable control of tone for her first feature film, giving her coming of age story the feel of a horror film. The sound design plays a huge part in maintaining the ominous overtones, with an ambient score that surges as Ruth's anxiety mounts. Cool grays and blues blanch the palette, the performances are subdued and the camera watches the characters from afar, at a remove from Ruth's overheated imagination. The distance that Oakley maintains keeps the danger present. There is always a sense that there is room in the frame for a threat to materialize. It's an intriguing interpretation of adolescent discovery, one that uses horror to suggest the dread that comes with finding a sense of self. Make Up Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters and virtual cinemas. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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Nathan Bajar for The New York Times Nathan Bajar for The New York Times Credit... Nathan Bajar for The New York Times What Do Twitter Employees in New York Wear to Work? Twitter may be besieged with controversies over fake news, hate speech and harassment, but its Manhattan offices on West 17th Street are a study in sunny civility. On a recent Thursday, the 400 so called tweeps who work there were dining on Indian food in the bright cafeteria, with its Big Buck Hunter arcade game and Ping Pong table. Others were pecking away on their sticker covered laptops. And with the average age hovering around 30, there seems to be less and less separating street clothes from office wear. You don't look so much Miami. I have the black V neck below the sweatshirt. Also I'd say my Air Force 1's are Miami. Though they're also a bit New York. Black. Like the jeans. What about the sweatshirt? The sweatshirt is comfort. It's a hoodie from Outdoor Voices. I could wear it after work, at work. Honestly, I have a watch my father gave me, a Breitling, which I love. But I've been using my Apple Watch for the fitness aspect. I'm able to track my family and see how they're doing. We get competitive. Those sleeves! Are you about to fly away? Literally. I'm a huge fan of an all black look. There's so much you can do with it. And this has a lot of personality and is sheer and very witchy. What draws you to witchy things? Alexander McQueen loved to design for very powerful women, who can be seen as bold or dangerous. And that defines a lot of the things that attract me. But I'm not a witch. Tell me about your black jeans. I'm not actually a huge jean fan. I don't own that many. But you need a pair of black jeans. It can be the foundation of a great outfit. Like the way you need a little black dress. What's the attraction to an all black outfit? Monochrome you can either do very well or it can be very boring. To be able to communicate your identity through a black palette is pretty incredible. Tell me about your hair color. I like the idea that if you're going to have to be a grown up, making grown up decisions, you can also have some fun with things like bright pink hair. Vintage. I have a mild obsession with ouroboros the snake is eating itself but also birthing itself. The idea of self criticism and self improvement. I wear a lot of black. Always. I used to wear a lot of color. As the hair got brighter, the clothes got darker. Has your style changed since you began dressing maternity? I've been trying really hard to make sure it hasn't. I'm lucky that many of my clothes have the benefit of Lycra. I'm graying, I have a very gray beard, and my wife wears gray and we dress our son in gray. I don't know why. You sound like the world's most depressing family. It's just happened. We've just adopted gray as our color. How do you decide what to wear each morning? I have two pairs of jeans: black and gray. And then always a button down, where you can actually button down the collar. Uniqlo. It's a little bit baggier than I prefer, but it's comfortable. You mentioned that your doctor made you wear those shoes. I had a stress fracture. The doctor literally just wrote down the name of a shoe: Hoka One One Bondi 6. He said, "Wear this for six weeks and you'll get better." They looked like Yeezys or something.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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Robert Herr blames himself for what was his worst real estate investment. As a mortgage broker and real estate agent, he said, he should have known better than to buy a quarter share in a beachfront condo. But like many others before him, he could not resist the siren call of sea air and an ocean view, all without the costs and aggravation of owning an entire piece of property himself. Instead, Mr. Herr could buy 13 weeks, drive the 90 miles from his home in British Columbia to use the weeks he wanted and put the rest of the time into the rental pool to cover his costs. Or so he thought. Most years, Mr. Herr and his wife cleared a couple of hundred dollars more than they paid in dues and maintenance. But they started to think the underlying investment, those 13 weeks, was losing value. When Mr. Herr sold his share in May, for 75 percent less than he had paid for it, his suspicion was confirmed, and he was furious for buying it in the first place. "It's titled real estate, and it's waterfront. Why couldn't you resell it?" Mr. Herr, 72, said. "That's the theory. But in practice, that's not what happens." The value of fractional real estate has long been debated. Critics see it as a hustle, while supporters argue that it is a smarter way to use vacation real estate, because most second homes are used for only a few weeks a year. The contemporary version of fractional ownership started with time sharing in the 1960s, when the first properties opened across Europe and later in Hawaii. The idea that people could buy designated weeks that they could use at a resort or trade for other destinations spread to vacation spots around the United States, Mexico and Europe. By the 1990s, large hotel operators like Marriott and Hilton had gotten into the business. The industry is now organized into three subsectors: fractional ownership, private residence clubs and destination clubs. According to Ragatz Associates, which tracks the industry, the first two are basically the same, but private residence clubs are a more upscale version of fractional ownership. Destination clubs are more like country club memberships, in which people pay an initiation fee for access to rent and stay in luxury homes. Mr. Herr bought his share in 2008 in the Beach Club Resort in the town of Parksville on Vancouver Island. He and his wife had selected Victoria, another town on the island, to retire. "There was a train from Victoria to Parksville, and we thought, 'Wouldn't it be cool to take a train two and a half hours away?'" he said. "It was something new." But within a few years, the train had lost so much money that it closed, and Mr. Herr's feeling about his investment soured. Having bought his share as the real estate bubble was bursting, he held on as most of the value went out of the fractional market. The fractional industry in North America peaked in 2007, with 2.3 billion in sales, but it has been in decline ever since. Last year, sales were 471 million, with 61 percent coming from destination clubs. In its annual report, Ragatz Associates said several factors had aligned against fractional ownership. Among them were a decrease in home equity, which buyers had previously been able to tap to buy fractional shares that were tough to finance; a glut of vacation homes for sale and the lowering of prices to sell them; and competition from home sharing sites, like Vrbo and Airbnb. Some of the first fractionalized dwellings were castles in 13th century France, said William N. Goetzmann, the Edwin J. Beinecke professor of finance and management studies and director of the International Center for Finance at the Yale School of Management. Eschewing the law of primogeniture, in which the firstborn child inherited everything, the French opted for equal inheritance. But if the only asset to divide was the family castle, the siblings owned it together. "When you divide it up, what do you do with it?" Professor Goetzmann said. There were three options in medieval times, which were pretty much the same as they are today. The heirs could divide up the castle and live there together, which Professor Goetzmann said marked the first use of the word "condominium." They could also create time sharing out of the castle or operate the castle lands as a business and split the revenue, often from rents paid on the land. The French, he said, developed rules to allow people to sell their shares in the castle. But disputes ensued, the same kind that have persisted into modern times. Part of the difficulty in selling fractional or vacation homes is that people value them incorrectly, said Christopher J. Mayer, a professor of finance and real estate and a co director of the Paul Milstein Center for Real Estate at Columbia Business School. "Most of the return comes in using them," Professor Mayer said. But fractional shares, along with vacation condos and houses, are not great investments. There are a lot of beachfront locations in the United States and the Caribbean where you could own a property, he said, and they're not all that different unless you're looking at exclusive locations like Miami Beach. The same goes for ski resorts, because there is plenty of land on and around a mountain to build more condos. "You should not buy any vacation real estate assuming the value will go up, because if it does go up, the guys sponsoring these properties will build more," Professor Mayer said. "It's not about appreciation for the existing buyers. They're going to build more and sell them." Before selling his share, Mr. Herr said, he tried to rally his fellow owners more than 300 of them to convert the Beach Club Resort into condominiums. It was an effort, he said, to recoup what they had lost in the value of their shares. He got only 23 proxies, and his motion failed. His lawyer, Michelle Karby, legal counsel at Oreck Karby in Vancouver, said such resistance with properties owned fractionally was common. Many owners buy their shares for emotional reasons and are content to use their weeks, she said. "People don't understand just how much it's costing them," Ms. Karby said. "They pay their management fees and they haven't looked into selling their share, so they don't know they'd have to sell it at a loss." Yet one real estate owner's loss could be another's good fortune. Rick Brunette, general manager at Palm Island Properties, on a barrier island on the west coast of Florida, said sales of existing fractional shares had picked up this year. The community, which began in the 1980s and consists mostly of condos, duplexes and houses, has 12 units divided into 48 quarter shares. None sold last year, but four have already sold in 2019, Mr. Brunette said. Of the six currently listed, sales are pending on two, he said. "This has been a good year," he said. "They have good years, and all of a sudden, it's quiet." The prices are nothing like they were in 2005 and 2006, when quarter shares on Palm Island sold for more than 100,000, Mr. Brunette said. But prices have stabilized in the past five years around 25,000. As in any effort to move a piece of property quickly, though, price matters. A second floor quarter share had been listed for 30,000, but the price has been reduced to 23,500. "You never make money in real estate when you sell it," Mr. Brunette said. "You only make it when you buy it, if you buy it at the right price."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Your Money
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MIAMI Illegal surveillance of journalists, judges, human rights activists and politicians from the opposition has re emerged in Colombia. And Colombians are not the only ones affected. Using United States taxpayer money earmarked to fight drug trafficking and guerrillas, the Colombian Army has carried out illegal espionage operations against Americans in Colombia. A few days ago, the magazine Semana disclosed copies of the files found in a search operation by army intelligence officers who had been illegally collecting information on the whereabouts and news sources of reporters from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and NPR, and on a prominent photographer who was in Colombia on assignment for National Geographic. A forensic report by Colombia's Office of the Inspector General found photographs and reports on contacts, places of residence, social media activity and the movements of American journalists and dozens of Colombian reporters, including myself, on an intelligence sergeant's desk. The files also contain information on human rights defenders, politicians from the opposition and the military. The intelligence units involved have received aid from the U.S. government in the form of technology and cash, intended to reduce cocaine trafficking from Colombia, the world's leading supplier of the drug. However, a significant portion of those resources was diverted to illegally collect intelligence on journalists, human rights activists and politicians. Intelligence activities are, by their very nature, opaque. In Colombia, civil controls are practically inexistent. Discretion, while sometimes necessary, was used to foment human rights violations, excesses of power and the misuse of public resources. An operation ordered by the Supreme Court uncovered the most recent scandal: a military facility was raided to establish whether illegal intelligence monitoring was being carried out from there, and in particular whether the recipient of that information was Senator Alvaro Uribe Velez, who is head of the Democratic Center party, or C.D., and a former president of Colombia. Mr. Uribe is the political boss of President Ivan Duque, who has publicly called Mr. Uribe the "eternal president." The investigation found that the military had been collecting information on 130 people, some of whom were critical of the government and some of whom were politicians from the opposition. But there was also a surprise: Among those "profiled" was Jorge Mario Eastman. Mr. Eastman, Colombia's ambassador to the Vatican, was Mr. Duque's chief of staff during his administration's first nine months. Mr. Eastman had also been the presidential adviser for communications and deputy minister of defense during the Uribe government. Another person targeted was Lynsey Addario, a Pulitzer Prize winner who visited the jungles of Colombia to do a photo essay on the National Liberation Army, or E.L.N., guerrillas for National Geographic. Using social media analytics software and information from Ms. Addario's social networks, the intelligence officers identified her possible contacts in Colombia. Several Colombian reporters were also followed, among them the prestigious investigative journalist Ricardo Calderon, who was the one who ended up revealing the intelligence officials' illegal activities. Another target was Nicholas Casey, who covered Colombia as Andes bureau chief for The New York Times. Last May, Mr. Casey revealed the existence of written instructions from the army to double the number of criminals and militants killed or captured. For many, the order signaled the return of the so called false positives the murder of young civilians by soldiers who were rewarded with cash bonuses, promotions and paid time off as part of a 2005 ministerial directive that stimulated the "body count" policy. The victims were then presented as guerrillas killed in confrontations with the army. Immediately after Mr. Casey's report was published, members of the governing party accused him of supporting the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Senator Maria Fernanda Cabal, one of the party's most radical legislators, suggested, without evidence, that Mr. Casey was paid by the FARC to write false news articles. When the Foundation for Press Freedom denounced, or FLIP, the accusations against Mr. Casey, former President Alvaro Uribe replied on Twitter that FLIP was clouded by "defending bias on the part of 'journalists' who end up protecting narcoterrorism and defaming the FFAA," which stands for the Colombian Armed Forces. Illegal surveilling of journalists and government critics has been commonplace in Colombia for at least 15 years. In 2009, during Alvaro Uribe's second term, the Administrative Department of Security, a civilian intelligence agency that reported directly to the president, illegally spied on Supreme Court magistrates who were investigating ties between political leaders and paramilitary groups; hidden microphones were even planted in closed court sessions. As a consequence of these activities, several high officials were sentenced. Among them were the chief of staff under the Uribe presidency, Bernardo Moreno, and the head of the security department, Maria del Pilar Hurtado. The department was dissolved in 2011 and replaced with the National Intelligence Directorate. But that reform was the exception. Usually, whenever a scandal breaks out, the sitting president and his defense minister act surprised and some junior officers are called out as "rotten apples" and fired. It also happened during the presidency of Juan Manuel Santos: The so called Operation Andromeda was uncovered, wherein military intelligence members tried to hack the communications of the negotiators with the FARC guerrillas during peace talks held in Havana. It is also fair to say that Colombian intelligence, both military and police, has dealt blows to drug trafficking and decimated the power of the guerrillas, leading to negotiations with the FARC, which had become the largest and longest lasting guerrilla group in the world. It has also significantly reduced the damage capacity of the still active E.L.N. Intelligence will continue to be essential for the security of Colombians. However, for it to survive and be respected, major surgery is necessary. The governments of Colombia and the United States, which has used at least 10 billion in taxpayer money since 2000 to finance cooperative security and defense programs, must guarantee that military intelligence is effectively subordinated to civilian oversight and that it complies with the laws. Intelligence law needs teeth for the government to effectively direct the actions of intelligence agencies and their budgets. Until now the role of civilians has been decorative, and the minimal oversight is exercised only within the military hierarchy. The government must assume political responsibility for what the military does or does not do. In addition, legislative intelligence and counterintelligence commissions, a purely ornamental entity, must open up to a meaningful and decisive presence of the opposition parties. This is the only way for there to be controls against corruption and some politicians' use of force to persecute adversaries, reduce public scrutiny and restrict the work of the national and international press.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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Retailers kicked off 2011 with better than expected sales in January, with some relying on discounts to clear merchandise left over from the holiday season. But while the results exceeded forecasts, analysts said there were challenges ahead as rising costs pare profits. Sales at stores open at least a year, a crucial indicator known as same store sales, rose 4.2 percent in January compared with a 3.3 percent increase in the month a year ago and forecasts of 2.7 percent, according to a monthly tally of 28 retailers by Thomson Reuters. It said 68 percent of the retailers exceeded analysts' forecasts. The month followed a holiday shopping season that was the strongest since 2006. But some analysts said that January in general was not considered a good bellwether month for the rest of the year. David Bassuk, head of the Global Retail Practice at AlixPartners, said the month, during which teenage apparel retailers struggled, gave more of an indication of how deeply retailers could discount, rather than how robust consumer spending had become. As such, a more accurate picture of retailers' health will emerge when they report quarterly profit, Mr. Bassuk said. And in the coming months, retailers will face rising costs globally for cotton, fuel and labor. "It is nice to see some positive numbers on the board," Mr. Bassuk said. But, he added: "As they report their earnings we are going to see dramatically reduced profit margins." "Get prepared for lots more challenges ahead," he said. Ken Perkins, president of the research firm Retail Metrics, said that "retailers have to be very pleased with how sales panned out" in January. "The fact that it was not a downer is encouraging," Mr. Perkins said. "But it does not mean it could be a gangbuster year by any means." He said that it was not possible to extrapolate that performance to what retailers might experience during the rest of the year because of rising apparel, transportation and labor costs that vendors are starting to pass on. The monthly reporting of same store sales is one of several closely watched indicators that are showing that the pace of the economic recovery has started to pick up. The statistics shed some light on the health of the consumer and related insights into the impact of the job market on the economy. The Thomson survey showed that apparel retailers as a group recorded a 5.6 percent rise in same store sales last month compared with January 2010, although those marketing specifically to teenagers recorded a 2 percent decline. Department stores are starting to show better performance by attracting younger consumers through social media promotions and by stocking better brands, Mr. Bassuk said. Department stores' sales rose 2 percent, according to the survey. Discount stores also did well, rising 5.2 percent. Costco, for example, had a 9 percent gain in same store sales; analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters expected 7 percent. And the discount retailer Target reported a 1.7 percent increase, which fell below expectations. The drugstore sector was up 4.5 percent. Sales at Limited Brands, which owns Victoria's Secret and Bath and Body Works, rose 24 percent in January, far exceeding forecasts of a 6.7 percent rise. Limited reported Thursday that net sales were 772.6 million for the four weeks ended Jan. 29, compared with 622.6 million in 2010, and that it expected to report adjusted fourth quarter earnings of 1.23 to 1.25 a share, compared with previous guidance of 1.02 to 1.17. In a recorded call, the company said its results were helped by a shift of the first day of the Victoria Secret semiannual sale to January from the last quarter. Those stores sales were up 35 percent, it said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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Though waterfront usually sells at a premium, sometimes real estate prices in the Hamptons ebb and flow with the shifting sands. In Sagaponack, for instance, the price on Billy Joel's four bedroom six bath shingle style home with 145 feet of sandy beach was raised to 23.5 million recently, from 16.75 million in 2012. With new dune shrubbery, a swimming pool in the works, air conditioning being installed on the second level and parts of the 5,500 square foot living space getting a redo, the house is on the market for more than the 22.5 million Mr. Joel sought in 2009 after his split from his wife, the cookbook author Katie Lee, said Biana Stepanian, the listing agent and an associate broker with the Corcoran Group. Also factoring into the higher price is a 26 million beach nourishment project underway in Sagaponack, Water Mill and the Town of Southampton to help buffer homes from future storms. "It's not just one mitigating factor when you put a price together," Ms. Stepanian said. "It's everything involved."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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It's never an easy transition, the CBS broadcaster Jim Nantz said last Sunday, shifting from discussing a grotesque season ending injury to talking about football plays, but since that is what he and analyst Tony Romo were tasked with, that is what they did. It's what millions of TV viewers did, too, after Dallas quarterback Dak Prescott was yanked down by Giants defensive back Logan Ryan at such an angle, and with such force, that his right ankle buckled. Prescott, his eyes welling, was ferried off the field at AT T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, in a medical cart. The game, as always, went on. A new quarterback, Andy Dalton, came in for Dallas. The Cowboys beat the Giants. Prescott spent the evening in surgery. "They do unbelievable things they run through a wall sometimes and get back and pop up and run back to the huddle and it's easy to forget that they are human beings," said Griese, now an analyst for ESPN's "Monday Night Football," in a telephone interview. He added, "It's not natural or normal for somebody that we watch every week, and we root for, that in one moment they're going to be the hero, and in the blink of an eye, their season's over and they're done, and there's ramifications for their career. And we take five minutes and move on. That's not normal. And I hope it never feels normal." In the cold calculus of the N.F.L., players are devalued and commodified, packaged for consumption on Sundays, Mondays and Thursdays. The most seductive narratives are player comebacks, and the worse the injury, the better the more inspiring the return. The connection is inescapable: A life altering injury is followed by months of physical and mental anguish, and then, hopefully, a career begins anew. It was a stroke of atrocious luck for someone who had started all 69 games for Dallas since entering the league in 2016; who, betting on himself after declining a long term contract extension, was on pace to shatter the league's single season passing record; and who had been willing to share his vulnerabilities, admitting to depression in the wake of his brother's suicide in April. It was an honest play, a football play, one without malice or intent. Other moments around the league might have looked worse in real time Malik Jackson's throttling of Cincinnati quarterback Joe Burrow in Week 3, A.J. Johnson's sack of Jets quarterback Sam Darnold in Week 4 but the recipients of those hits ultimately returned, having escaped serious harm. The league's most valuable players are its quarterbacks, but the measures it has taken to protect them enforcing helmet to helmet hits, calling roughing the passer penalties, fining defenders for how they land on quarterbacks after sacking them are by no means infallible. Prescott's entire life changed because of a fluke play, much as Alex Smith's did 23 months ago. After enduring 17 surgeries and a compound fracture to his right leg so grisly that the traumatic aftermath threatened life and limb, Smith has emerged as the N.F.L.'s avatar for perseverance, a model for Prescott as he begins his recovery. A few hours before Prescott's ankle folded on Sunday, Smith ran onto the grass at FedEx Field to quarterback the Washington Football Team, his first game action in 693 days. Replacing the injured Kyle Allen sidelined by a helmet to helmet hit from Los Angeles Rams cornerback Jalen Ramsey Smith told reporters after the game that it was "almost a blessing" that he entered with little notice. He didn't have much time to think, for instance, when All Pro tackle Aaron Donald clung to Smith like a backpack while sacking him. Watching, you might have gasped. Was his leg going to collapse again? No? OK, good. Fourth down. "As fans, we're able to push these things aside to move on in order for the larger goal, which again mirrors an American value: We want to win," said Dr. Eric M. Carter, an associate professor of sociology and justice studies at Campbellsville University in Kentucky and the author of "Boys Gone Wild: Fame, Fortune and Deviance Among Professional Football Players." "And I think the violence of the N.F.L. has just become so embedded that we don't think about it anymore. As bad as the whole C.T.E. issue is, how often do most fans think about that on a Sunday? We don't. That level of violence and hypocrisy of the N.F.L. has just become so normative that I don't think we pay any attention to it." The very mechanism of football encourages fans to distance themselves from the humanity of the game. The league's insistence on playing through the coronavirus pandemic has created an unnerving backdrop to this most abnormal of seasons. When a Covid 19 outbreak strikes the Tennessee Titans, or positive tests crash other teams, the impulse might be to fret about the impact on the N.F.L. schedule or to assign blame on somebody, anybody instead of focus on the short and long term ramifications of an insidious virus. Or when an offensive player lay writhing on the field, one's thoughts likely turn toward fantasy football implications before his well being, if at all. Players have immense pain thresholds, but they also minimize injuries, if they bother disclosing them, out of fear, as well fear of losing their jobs, their livelihoods, their sense of self. Smith couldn't conceal the injury he sustained on Nov. 18, 2018, but he encountered those same emotions during a grueling recovery chronicled for entertainment purposes by ESPN in the documentary "Project 11," wondering whether he would ever walk again, let alone run again, let alone play again. Smith, remarkably, has accomplished all three. The prognosis for Prescott is favorable, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said in a radio interview Tuesday, and he should be ready for team activities in the spring. In the meantime, Jones added, he had complete confidence in Dalton. The N.F.L. trucks onward.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. PHILHARMONIA BAROQUE at Alice Tully Hall (March 12, 7:30 p.m.). This esteemed San Francisco period instrument ensemble, led by Nicholas McGegan, is joined by the singers Anne Sofie von Otter and Anthony Roth Costanzo for Handel arias, a suite from Purcell's "The Fairy Queen," music by Arvo Part and even a world premiere from Caroline Shaw. 212 721 6500, lincolncenter.org/great performers PHILHARMONIA ORCHESTRA at David Geffen Hall (March 10, 3 p.m.; March 11, 8 p.m.). As part of his takeover of the San Francisco Symphony, Esa Pekka Salonen will give up his post as the principal conductor of this London ensemble but what a productive partnership it has been. On Sunday they perform Bruckner's Symphony No. 7. On Monday the main event is Salonen's own Cello Concerto, with Truls Mork as the soloist, in between Sibelius's "The Oceanides" and Stravinsky's "The Firebird." 212 721 6500, lincolncenter.org/great performers BEATRICE RANA at Zankel Hall (March 12, 7:30 p.m.). If you're surprised that this immensely talented young pianist has waited this long to have her New York recital debut, then that makes it all the more anticipated. Chopin's Op. 25 Etudes are on the bill, as well as Ravel's "Miroirs" and Agosti's transcriptions from Stravinsky's "The Firebird." 212 247 7800, carnegiehall.org 'DAS RHEINGOLD' at the Metropolitan Opera (March 9, 1 p.m.; March 14, 8 p.m.). The Met has worked hard to improve Robert Lepage's production since it was last seen in the house, in the hope that technical improvements might ameliorate its other woes. See for yourself in these two performances of the first drama of Wagner's "Ring." There are potential high points among the cast: Norbert Ernst and Gerhard Siegel will likely be ideal as Loge and Mime; Gunther Groissbock excels in everything he sings, including Fasolt; and there's the prospect of Jamie Barton's Fricka, too. Greer Grimsley is Wotan; Tomasz Konieczny is Alberich. Philippe Jordan, an experienced Wagnerian, conducts. 212 362 6000, metopera.org
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. President Trump made an unannounced visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Saturday, later tweeting he underwent "phase one" of a physical he plans to complete next year. "Yes, Trump's first part of his physical is going to be such a hit that next year, they're coming out with a sequel: 'Colonoscopy 2: 2 Blocked 2 Scope.'" STEPHEN COLBERT "I just had one. My doctor never said, 'O.K., uh, drop your pants, uh, bend over, try to relax I'll be back in six months.'" STEPHEN COLBERT "Phase 1 was this weekend, Phase 2 is next was this a physical or a kitchen remodel?" JIMMY KIMMEL "Phase 1 of a physical? That sounded strange so we did some digging and discovered that his annual physical has five phases, so let's take a look now at the five phases of Donald Trump's annual physical. Phase 1: Measure his official height and negotiate his official weight. Phase 2: A complete strip, spackle, priming and repainting. Phase 3: His annual battery of paternity tests. Phase 4: Surgically remove his hand from a Nutella jar. And finally, Phase 5: Ask about getting breast implants not the procedure, he just wants to play around with them." SETH MEYERS
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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Driving through Millstone, one will stop for a crossing deer or maybe even a horse before having to worry about a traffic light. That's because this town of 37 square miles doesn't have any, or much in the way of streetlights, either. When Cerrita Telmany's relatives visit from New York, "no one leaves my house in the nighttime," she said, explaining that, to them, "it's really spooky." But for Ms. Telmany, 33, who long lived right on top of neighbors in Staten Island, the off the grid atmosphere of this Monmouth County township that she and her family moved to four years ago feels just right. "Nobody has fences up," she said. "The kids can run around and play and you can be as loud as you want and no one is going to complain." Once strictly a farming community, the township of over 10,500 residents has more than doubled in population the last two decades. But its growth has been controlled in a way that has eluded neighboring towns: large tracts of farmland remain intact, and in addition to a strict zoning code, there is a notable lack of industrial or commercial development.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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As the co founder, chairman and chief executive of the 30 billion investment firm Tiger Management L.L.C., Julian Robertson, 82, has achieved a high profile in the world of finance. His role as a luxury hotel proprietor, however, has been more under the radar. Mr. Robertson, based in New York City, owns three upscale properties in New Zealand: Kauri Cliffs Lodge on the North Island; the Farm at Cape Kidnappers; and Matakauri Lodge near the city of Queenstown on the South Island. His love for the country began just before he started Tiger in 1980 when he spent six months in Auckland with his wife, Josephine, and their two children (a third son was born later) to write a novel. The book was never published, but his attraction to the region stayed with him when he was back in the United States. He made his imprint there permanent more than a decade ago when he bought the farmland where he built Kauri Cliffs. While Mr. Robertson still works full time running his investment company, he also has a hand in overseeing his venture in travel. His son Jay, 37, divides his time among the lodges managing the day to day operations, and the older Mr. Robertson gives his input during his annual stay from December to March. Following are edited excerpts from a conversation with Mr. Robertson. Q. What compelled you to go to New Zealand to write your novel? A. I was always very interested in geography, and since the country has some of the most diverse geography in the world including mountains, sea and farmland, I was drawn to it.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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From Matthew Wong's show at Karma, "Starry Night," 2019, one of many works that take inspiration from natural forms. On Oct. 2, the artist Matthew Wong took his life in Edmonton, Canada, where he lived. He was 35, had Tourette's syndrome and depression, and was one of the most talented painters of his generation. That talent shines forth in "Blue," Mr. Wong's posthumous solo exhibition and only his second in New York at Karma, a gallery in the East Village. His gifts are even more convincing than in his unforgettable debut there in 2018. Clearly, the artist's visionary fusion of form and feeling never stopped developing. True to its title, the paintings of nocturnal landscapes and interiors on view explore the infinite tones, moods and luminosities of the color blue, as do a series of gouaches displayed in Karma's project space a few doors away from the main gallery. Mr. Wong made some of the most irresistible paintings I've ever encountered. I fell for the patchworks of color and stippled patterns of his landscapes at the Frieze New York art fair of 2017, in Karma's booth. It was a visceral experience, like falling for an unforgettable song on first listen. It was deeply nourishing: my life had been improved and I know other people who have had the same reaction. Such relatively unalloyed pleasure is almost as essential as food. These paintings are extremely open and vulnerable. But once they lure you in, they leave you alone to explore their chromatic, spatial and psychological complexities. This mysterious journey is often signaled by a smooth pathway leading inward from a painting's bottom edge which is sometimes being traveled by a shadowy solitary walker. Such a presence takes a deep purple path in "Solitude," amid dark trees, with lighted buildings looming above. In "Path to the Sea," the road leads through dense banks of trees to a view of gray surf that reads at first like a tear in a painted backdrop, or a porthole. Mr. Wong was born in 1984 in Toronto, Canada, the only child of parents involved in textiles and fashion who moved between Hong Kong and Toronto every few years; he was fluent in English and Mandarin. He earned a B.A. in cultural anthropology from the University of Michigan in 2007. After relocating to Hong Kong as an adult, he added an M.F.A. in photography in 2013, when he also started experimenting with ink and paper before taking up oils. Mr. Wong is sometimes called a self taught painter, but he custom built an exceptional classroom, studying the medium in books and museums and above all by posting images of his work on Facebook, engaging with people who responded and sometimes forming extended online friendships. These included the painters Brian Calvin and Peter Shear, as well as the art dealer John Cheim, who advised him on which brand of oil paint to use. The paintings in "Blue" show Mr. Wong working bigger and more expansively than before, with a sense of real if unearthly light. There is less busyness and more areas of solid color, especially in the paintings of interiors. Pointillist textures have become airier or ceded to scaled up expanses of short, boxy daubs of color, widely used to warp near and far. In "The Old World," they blanket the foreground, suggesting flowers but also indicate trees on a distant mountain. In "Blue Rain," they add the bark to birch trees near a little cabin, seen through a veil of long, slanting strokes that approximate precipitation. And in "Starry Night," these strokes in yellow, blue and black define the surface of a dark lake, and, in light turquoise, the adjacent shore, where the daubs resemble radiant cobblestones. The night sky is defined by overlapping turquoise arcs Yayoi Kusama's best known technique but each now has its own bright yellow dot, or star, too. Mr. Wong's paintings also synthesize from Chinese landscape painting, Van Gogh, Vuillard, Milton Avery, Alex Katz and Lois Dodd. But his brush strokes convey their own sense of urgency and speed, which downplays mastery for the sake of direct communication. And Mr. Wong took equal inspiration from natural forms leaves, trees, their branches, grass, stones, bushes translated them into a his own vocabulary of semiabstract strokes and shapes. These motifs are profuse in "Unknown Pleasures," where a field of blue plant life is bisected by a smooth rising path leading toward a white topped Fuji like peak. Above, a sky of wide horizontal bands of blues and dark yellow suggests a tribute to the Color Field painter Kenneth Noland. Although other paintings in this haunting show are darker, this one greets us at the show's start, like a burst of song. Over the summer and into September, Mr. Wong and Brendan Dugan, Karma's founder, worked out every detail of "Blue" the sequencing of works throughout the gallery. Mr. Wong insisted that his name not appear on the catalog's cover or anywhere except the final page. Mr. Dugan remembered him saying, "I want to remove myself from the work." After Mr. Wong's death, Mr. Dugan and Monita Wong, the artist's mother, decided that Mr. Wong's unsparing attention to the show's preparations made it a final statement. It opened as planned on Nov. 8, with no works for sale. Reopens Thursday through Jan. 5 at Karma, 188 East Second Street and 172 East Second Street, Manhattan; 212 390 9279, karmakarma.org.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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At American Ballet Theater, where international stars zip on and off the stage like point shoes on a conveyor belt, there is gratification in knowing your corps de ballet. Along with the soloists, these dancers constitute the heart of the company, which opens its spring season Monday at the Metropolitan Opera House. It may sound simplistic, but what sets these six apart in a corps of 61 besides their promise and rigor is the sheer breadth of their dancing. They think about transition steps. They don't pause before a turn. They move without waiting for applause. Here's to the new blood. After training in jazz and tap, Eric Tamm fell in love with ballet while watching Ballet Theater performances at the Met and, as he put it, "not being able to sleep at night." An incisive, musical dancer, Mr. Tamm has just started studying the piano, all the more appropriate given his coming performances in Balanchine's poetic "Duo Concertant" this season with Misty Copeland. Mr. Tamm said he believes in being well rounded; he's just produced a dance film, "On a Grass Field." At Ballet Theater, where the line for leading parts is long and often monopolized by international stars, he finds that having options helps. "The hardest part about getting older is realizing that there is the business side to companies," he said. "As a dancer, you have to go back to being 5 years old and dancing in your living room. I still have that." Dream roles usually define a dancer, but Skylar Brandt wants none of that: As much as she hopes to dance Juliet one day, she also has her eye on the sassy, flamboyant Kitri in "Don Quixote." Ms. Brandt, who surprised herself by progressing far in the casting calls for the forthcoming Starz show "Flesh and Bone," is a sparkling actress as well as a dancer; her performances in Alexei Ratmansky's "Piano Concerto 1" are imbued with as much mystery as daring, boundless joy. This season, she hopes to perform the Spring Fairy in "Cinderella," as well as the lead Can Can Girl in "Gaite Parisienne." For Ms. Brandt, who began studying at the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School at Ballet Theater when she was 12, the troupe is the only home she's ever known. "I've never thought about another company, which could be taken as really foolish and narrow minded," she said. "But I like to think of it more as determination." At 6 foot 1, Calvin Royal III may be a majestic presence at Ballet Theater, but he didn't start out on a dance track. In eighth grade, he dropped his ambition to become a classical pianist to try, as Mr. Royal explained, "something completely out of my comfort zone." The girls in his ballet class nicknamed him Grasshopper, because he was so lanky and out of control. "I would come home every day just in pain, sore, popping Advil," he said. But after two years of training, he was awarded a scholarship at the Onassis School. Since joining Ballet Theater, he has owned leading parts in Mr. Ratmansky's "Piano Concerto 1" and Twyla Tharp's "Bach Partita," which, he admitted, was a challenge. "Twyla was like, 'You need to take some time for yourself and figure out how to make this work for your body and your dancing, because ultimately it's you out there,' " Mr. Royal said. "Just raw. I feel like I've been told that before, but, for some reason, the way she said it was like, O.K., I can do this. I felt like I had her there with me." And onstage? "It was like a caged bird being set free." The luminous Australian dancer Stephanie Williams relishes movement, as she deftly proved in Mark Morris's "Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes." As she said: "I'm not a static person at all. I feel like I really use dance as a form of escapism. I can't just do steps. Even in class, they're like, 'Calm down, Stephanie, calm down.' " Ms. Williams came to Ballet Theater with experience, having danced previously with the Australian Ballet, Christopher Wheeldon's Morphoses and Het Nationale Ballet in Amsterdam. Her stint with Morphoses, where she said she encountered "real people, real artists," changed her path. "It really opened my eyes as to how every individual is worthy, myself included," she said. "I wanted to experience more of that. It's made me live more in the moment." She sent a letter of intent to Ballet Theater and eventually got the job. This season, Ms. Williams hopes to perform the Summer Fairy in "Cinderella" and Zulme in "Giselle," but her desire, down the line, is to conquer the dramatic parts: Giselle, Tatiana in "Onegin" and Juliet. "That's a real woman suffering," she said. "We all have gone through pain and heartache. And I love dancing with a man. It's just the best." It's no surprise that Joseph Gorak grew up training with Fernando Bujones, the Ballet Theater star revered for his purity of form. With his finely pointed feet and scrupulous classical line, Mr. Gorak is a future prince who opts for elegance over flash. While there are others like him in today's virtuosic landscape, it takes some resolve to stay that way. "We have so many male dancers who can do so many extraordinary things; they might not be ballet, but they can do them," he said, laughing. "I never want to get to a point where I compromise correct style or technique for an extra pirouette or going overboard with a jump." This season, Mr. Gorak makes his debut as the mischievous Franz opposite Yuriko Kajiya in "Coppelia." Lately, he's been focusing on his partnering with Keith Roberts, a newly appointed ballet master. "I get so tense," Mr. Gorak said. "When I'm partnering a girl, I can claw." He gripped his hands around an imaginary waist. "But Keith has taught me how to breathe and to work with my hands more." Last season's transformative turn as Lensky in "Onegin" pushed him in the right direction, too. "I was always so scared onstage," he said. "I still have stage fright, but I've learned that this is an art form, and if I'm going to go out there being scared, then what's the point of doing it? I'm definitely going with the flow more these days." When it came to knowing the difference between male and female variations in ballet, Devon Teuscher was clueless. Her Russian teacher, Alexander Nagiba, recognized how strong she was and just taught her everything. It wasn't until she arrived at Ballet Theater that she realized she had been dancing male parts, too. "I was like: Wait a second. I did that," she said, laughing. "It taught me to be able to do whatever I'm thrown and not think twice." Despite her prodigious strength, Ms. Teuscher is all upper body eloquence. This season, she reprises Myrta, the imperious Queen of the Wilis in "Giselle." It's taxing. "You're doing essentially a full class in not even 10 minutes," she said. "But it's a rush." In the past couple of seasons, Ms. Teuscher has flourished; by her own admission, it took her a long time to build confidence. "I was so afraid to get in anyone's way or do anything wrong that it took me the longest time until last year to even stand in front in class," she said. "It was very difficult for me to break out of my shell and recognize that I'm getting these opportunities for a reason, and so I need to embrace that."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Moments from shows in which the producer Al Burton had a hand. Clockwise from top left: "The Jeffersons," with (from left) Isabel Sanford, Sherman Hemsley and Norma Donaldson; "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman," with Louise Lasser and Howard Hesseman; "The Facts of Life," with (from left) Nancy McKeon, Charlotte Rae and Lisa Whelchel; and "Win Ben Stein's Money." Al Burton, a television producer who began his long career in 1949 with a show about teenagers in Los Angeles and later helped develop programs as diverse as "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" and "Win Ben Stein's Money," died on Oct. 22 at his home in San Mateo, Calif. He was 91 . Over nearly 60 years , the upbeat Mr. Burton started the Miss Teenage America pageant; worked on sitcoms like "The Jeffersons" and "Diff'rent Strokes" for the producer Norman Lear; and was the executive producer of "Charles in Charge," a comedy series starring Scott Baio. He began working with Mr. Lear in the late 1960s, booking dancers and musical acts for a variety special that he produced. A few years later, Mr. Burton pitched an idea for a half hour comedy that Mr. Lear rejected. But, Mr. Burton recalled, Mr. Lear asked him to explore an idea that became "Mary Hartman," the soap opera satire that was briefly a five nights a week sensation, starring Louise Lasser as a neurotic housewife. "He said, 'I want people who like soap operas to get addicted to it,'" Mr. Burton was quoted as saying in "The Producers: Profiles in Frustration" (2004), by Luke Ford. Mr. Burton explained that Mr. Lear had wanted people "to call their friends after they see it and say, 'There's something here you've got to see.'" Mr. Burton said he and Gail Parent wrote a 27 page synopsis of the series. But after it was spurned by CBS, NBC and ABC and before it was successfully syndicated nationally Mr. Burton asked Ben Stein, the stone faced economist and former Republican speechwriter, to watch a videotape of the show. (The two had met at the Aspen Institute.) Mr. Stein raved about it in The Wall Street Journal in 1975, almost five months before the series went on the air, sealing his friendship with Mr. Burton . "Al was my Jay Gatsby, showing me the lushness of life in Hollywood just what I wanted to see," Mr. Stein wrote in The American Spectator shortly after Mr. Burton's death. Mr. Stein, who became known in Hollywood for his memorable bit part as the droning teacher in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" (1986), discovered in Mr. Burton a lunch partner (lunch was often kosher hot dogs) and adviser. In the mid 1990s, Mr. Burton conceived "Win Ben Stein's Money," a quiz show in which Mr. Stein competed against three contestants; if he got an answer wrong, money was deducted from his pay. The series, which ran from 1997 to 2003 on Comedy Central, featured Jimmy Kimmel as Mr. Stein's original co host. While in high school, Alan traveled to Los Angeles to attend a six week summer course in radio and television at U.C.L.A. that proved inspirational. Shortly after starting his studies in communications at Northwestern University in Illinois, he was a candidate for a scholarship that was endowed by the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, an alumnus. Following an interview with Mr. Bergen, he got the scholarship. Mr. Burton left for Los Angeles shortly after graduating in the late 1940s, intent on meeting with Mr. Bergen. But Mr. Bergen was on tour, so instead Mr. Burton headed to a local station, KLAC TV, hoping to be hired as a page. When he was told that he looked too young for the job, he tracked down the station manager to tell him that his programming was ignoring a local minority: teenagers. The manager hired him without any salary at first to host, write and produce "Tele Teen Reporter," a news show about teenagers in Los Angeles . It lasted several years Mr. Burton was eventually paid and given a budget and inspired him to produce other youth oriented programs on stations in Los Angeles. He parlayed his interest in youth culture in the 1960s into annual Teen Age Fairs, which featured performances by musical acts, including the Beach Boys; booths with products for the teenage market; fashion, surf, beauty and car exhibitions; and what became the Miss Teen USA pageant . "We've done extensive research throughout the country to determine what teenagers want to do and see, and their interests are more varied than that of their parents," Mr. Burton told Valley Times Today, a Los Angeles area newspaper, in 1963, during the first of several fairs he staged in Los Angeles and other cities. In 1964, he developed "Hollywood a Go Go," a weekly music variety series that for two years featured artists like the Rolling Stones, Nancy Sinatra, James Brown, Freddy Cannon , Nancy Sinatra and Dee Dee Sharp . Almost a decade later, when Mr. Burton went to work full time developing shows for Mr. Lear and Bud Yorkin at Tandem Productions, he was known for his strong eye for talent. Glenn Padnick, the former president of Embassy Television (as Tandem was renamed), recalled how Mr. Burton engineered "The Facts of Life," about four teenagers at a girls' boarding school, as a spinoff from "Diff'rent Strokes," which followed the story of two African American youngsters adopted by a rich white man. The new show had the character Edna Garrett, played by Charlotte Rae, moving from being a housekeeper in "Diff'rent Strokes" to the housemother in "The Facts of Life." "NBC was so hard up at that moment that they wanted to spin Charlotte Rae off 'Diff'rent Strokes' after one season," Mr. Padnick said by phone. "It was a totally fraudulent idea, but Al turned it into a wonderful series that went on for nine years ." He added that "Fernwood 2 Night," the fictional talk show starring Martin Mull and Fred Willard that was spun off from "Mary Hartman" in 1977, was "entirely Al's baby ." Mr. Burton's love of music led him to collaborate on the theme songs to "Diff'rent Strokes" and "The Facts of Life" with Alan Thicke and Gloria Loring .
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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Adrian Danchig Waring, who made his debut as Apollo on Wednesday at the David H. Koch Theater, didn't need to be told he had big slippers to fill. The two Apollos of recent seasons at New York City Ballet have been superlative: In Robert Fairchild, there is a raw, athletic exuberance and in Chase Finlay, a cool, unassailable polish. With both unavailable Mr. Fairchild is performing on Broadway in "An American in Paris," and Mr. Finlay is recovering from an injury two new dancers are getting a shot at the lead in George Balanchine's "Apollo," the oldest work in the company's repertory. (On Tuesday, Zachary Catazaro takes over.) When the curtain rose, Mr. Danchig Waring stood in profile windmilling an arm, slowly, sensually and then with more fervor to Stravinsky's score. From the start, he seemed less of a boy becoming a god than a jittery animal, alert to his senses and ready to strike, which he did with a flourish in urgent jumps that traveled across the stage. While he didn't sustain that early intensity as the ballet drew on, he stiffened into shapes instead of growing into them he managed to make the most of his body, in which an erect back and muscular thighs can give him the look of a superhero. Though his Apollo never attained real elegance of form, he was absorbingly sinuous.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Athletes and coaches study game tapes of their opponents, looking for weaknesses and other clues on how to get the upper hand. That's how gardeners should look at weeds, learning as much as they can about the plants and all their moves. The process starts with learning the names, because without knowing who's who, we can get distracted: Dame's rocket is beautiful, masquerading as lavender and white roadside drifts of tall phlox in late spring. But Hesperis matronalis is not native Phlox paniculata in fact, it has displaced many native plants on its romp across much of the country since its introduction from Europe several centuries ago. Another trickster is mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris, from Europe and Asia), which can look like some chrysanthemum you once planted although it isn't. Start by identifying what you're dealing with, using the help of printed and online field guides (see the suggested resources below). Next, look up the weed's life cycle. If it's an annual (like Galinsoga ciliata, or even crab grass), you don't want it to flower and set seed, so pull it or mow before that happens. Mulch any bare spots left behind, if they're not ready to be replanted, to help keep the next generation from sprouting. (Weed seeds love a void.) Is your target a biennial, like garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata), or a perennial, like mugwort? Here's where it pays to study what makes a weed successful. To understand why garlic mustard is so hard to control, consider its multiple tactics of weedy prowess. A large plant can disperse 7,900 seeds that have an extended dormancy and can lurk in soil for as long as 10 years. But there's worse news: Garlic mustard is allelopathic, meaning it contaminates the surrounding soil, rendering it inhospitable to the germination of seedlings even as seemingly sturdy as native red maples. Nothing grows where it has marked its turf. Knowing that makes me more determined and also helps me forgive myself for not being able to quickly seize the upper hand. Look to the Roots What is the plant's root system like? Does it have surface runners, called stolons (like the lawn loving creeping Charlie or ground ivy, Glechoma hederacea)? The most loathed perennial weeds are often those that multiply by rhizomes underground stem tissue laden with buds ready to sprout anew should any be left behind. No amount of pulling or digging seems to get to the bottom of perennial field bindweed (wild morning glory, Convolvulus arvensis), which is said to have roots that go down 20 feet. Its sound alike, hedge bindweed (Calystegia sepium), is a bigger plant, but oddly doesn't send its roots down so deep instead, they go sideways as far as 10 feet. It's important to know that you can't just pull on rhizomatous weeds like these, which leaves their power hidden underground. When the soil is moist, loosen it with a fork or spade and patiently follow the trail. Let the area re sprout, then do it again and again or cover the spot with plastic sheeting to solarize some of the remains after the first try. That's the secret, really. The most expert organic gardeners those of us who eschew the use of chemicals have no tricks to make weeds disappear. Vigilance is key, starting with the ability to recognize the earliest signs of infestation, including what the weed looks like as a seedling, and then acting quickly and repeatedly. Yes, we use mulch, perhaps with a layer of newsprint or cardboard beneath that might slow some opponents. But most of all, we weed. That works with many weeds, but not the worst. Once I know I am fighting a tough one, I research one final point online: What the Cooperative Extension office nearest to where I garden recommends as the timing and method of treatment, which can differ by region. And I try to think of weeding making an observant, slow pass through each bed in the garden, every week, all season as a meditation, a practice that is part of my life as a gardener. Bending, pulling; bending, pulling. Sometimes, though, I admit I can't help thinking of it as all out war. On those days, I madly stuff garbage bags with seed laden weeds I have exhumed or ones with rhizomes that could sprout, tying them closed and setting them in the sun next to my compost heap, to cook them to death for weeks before I add the remains (by then harmless) to the heap. Name That Weed: A Crash Course The simplest way to identify a weed is probably crowdsourcing. Register for a free account at iNaturalist (using the app or website) and upload a photo with the date and location. Or do some homework: The Weed Science Society of America's master list of weed databases is mostly geared toward agricultural and lawn pests. The tools on the site are not prescriptive, but rather for identification purposes, and they have a regional orientation according to which state university created them, but many weeds are widespread. The tools on that list that work best for gardeners offer a series of prompts to narrow the search: Is the plant grass or broad leaved, upright or creeping? Three favorites are the University of Minnesota's Is This Plant a Weed? tool, the encyclopedic weed identification site at the University of California Davis and the University of Missouri Weed ID Guide (also available as an app). Sometimes I take a shortcut and browse the Rutgers New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station's weed gallery of 130 plus thumbnail photos, because the most likely culprits are all there a real rogues' gallery. An old style, region specific weed field guide is another trusted tool: "Weeds of the Northeast" by Richard H. Uva, Joseph C. Neal and Joseph M. DiTomaso is the classic for my region. (In field guides, northeast means south to Virginia, north to Maine and southern Canada, and west to Wisconsin, or thereabouts.) I also use Richard Dickinson and France Royer's "Weeds of North America," which makes identification easier with detailed plant portraits and photos of weeds at every life stage.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Thomas Gallagher, 72, is a multimillionaire, but he is still nervous about money. "I have more money than I had ever imagined, but I still worry do I have enough, if I live longer than I thought?" When Thomas Gallagher was 17, he worked as a clerk on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and put 10 a week into an account at Irving Bank. "That was my discipline, my savings," Mr. Gallagher said. "Back then, the goal was to have enough money to buy Christmas presents." Mr. Gallagher, who is retired from his position as vice chairman of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce World Markets, is a member of Tiger 21, a network of over 570 members who collectively manage more than 50 billion worth of personal investable assets. At age 72, he is a multimillionaire. Even so, "I still feel, to some extent, that I don't have enough money," he said. "Emotionally, I don't come from money; I got very lucky on Wall Street. I've been dealing with a myriad of psychological issues since I retired. I have more money than I had ever imagined, but I still worry do I have enough, if I live longer than I thought?" The psychology of wealth is knotty. On the surface, being wealthy can make people believe they have more control over their lives, but it can also control them emotionally, said Olivia Mellan, a psychotherapist in Washington who specializes in money issues and is the author of "Money Harmony: A Road Map for Individuals and Couples." "If someone doesn't have that money growing up, it's like being shot through with too much energy," she said. "There's this undercurrent that money equals love, power, security, control, self worth, self love, freedom, self esteem all those loaded things that money supposedly can do, but doesn't." Wealth frequently comes with a bundle of expectations anxiety and pressure to make smart money decisions, for example, about how it is managed, spent, passed on to future generations, or used to create a legacy. There is a degree of fear. "People are afraid of the money, how it might corrupt them, or make them insensitive to other people's plights," Ms. Mellan said. "They worry about their kids having so much money thrown at them that they will not be motivated to work for money and have a meaningful life." Eric D. Bailey, founder and chief executive of Bailey Wealth Advisors in Silver Spring, Md., said possessing wealth was an uneasy feeling for many of his clients, a combination of business owners and mid and upper level executives whose average net worth is 3 million to 15 million. "They don't take it for granted," he said. "They never do feel they have enough. It takes some coaxing to get them to spend money." He said he helped them understand that under any combination of scenarios, the odds were very low that they would outlive their money. What many people who become wealthy are not prepared for is the emotional difficulty of dealing with money, said James Grubman, a psychologist and founder of FamilyWealth Consulting. "For more people than you would think, the adjustment to having money is quite stressful," Mr. Grubman said. "No one gets a lot of empathy talking about these things." This is easy to understand if you think about the stereotypes that society generally has about the rich, he added. "If you grow up hearing money messages like rich people only care about themselves or other negative beliefs about the wealthy and then you become wealthy yourself, how are you going to reconcile what you believed about those people with the fact that now you are one of them?" Another worry is that if you are rich, you have a target on your back, and people are always going to hit you up for loans and gifts. There is the security and the stability and the success that wealth represents, but people just do not want the identity and the downside of what they associate with being rich, he said. One way to combat the apprehension about wealth is financial education. "The anxiety that comes with having acquired wealth is alleviated by having the confidence you can learn what you need to learn," said Charlotte Beyer, author of "Wealth Management Unwrapped Revised and Expanded: Unwrap What You Need to Know and Enjoy the Present" and founder of the Institute for Private Investors, a provider of educational and networking resources for ultrahigh net worth investors and the nonprofit Principle Quest Foundation, which supports education and mentoring for girls and women. "You need to decide what do I want this money to do?" Ms. Beyer said. "How you spend your money is the ultimate representation of your values, and you should do it with joy and fun and love." Inherited wealth comes with some different worries. Susan Remmer Ryzewic, 66, came into a fortune after her father died and his engineering business was sold for 100 million. "The biggest anxieties were working out the differences with my siblings on how the family wanted the money invested and what they felt the money should represent," she said. "If you don't manage the emotional and family aspects, the money doesn't matter." When the family's fortune landed, it was overwhelming. "We found we couldn't move forward initially because we were all so concerned about our own agenda that we were not really listening to each other," Ms. Remmer Ryzewic said. "It took awhile for us to be speaking the same language." Ms. Remmer Ryzewic, her brother and two sisters spent a lot of time in the first few years getting educated. She took a number of courses on fixed income investments and aspects of portfolio management so she could be a reasonably informed consumer. And there is that nagging feeling of being taken advantage of. "In the beginning you are thinking all these people are so wonderful and nice and then you realize everybody wants a piece of something," Ms. Remmer Ryzewic said. "You get sort of cynical. And I started feeling I was being defined by it. Now I just feel so fortunate that it provides me with choices. Initially, it was way more responsibility; now I am comfortable with the responsibility." One highlight of their good fortune: Ms. Remmer Ryzewic, her sisters and mother, who is now deceased, set up The Remmer Family Foundation, a private charitable foundation, with some of the proceeds. One of the foundation's goals is to reduce poverty for women and youth by helping disadvantaged adolescent and preadolescent girls take ownership of their lives. The foundation also encourages environmental stewardship by improving the sustainability of the world's fisheries. Acquiring wealth from the sale of an entrepreneurial venture has its own set of mental gymnastics. "First generation wealth creators who sell their business and now are investing their wealth and dealing with their wealth are different than second generation, or someone who got it by the lottery," said Michael Sonnenfeldt, founder and chairman of Tiger 21, and author of "Think Bigger: And 39 Other Winning Strategies From Successful Entrepreneurs." They have finally made it from modest beginnings and are now in a brave new world, he added. "They're in their sweet spot, and then they sell their business and they're adrift," Mr. Sonnenfeldt said. It is like jumping through the looking glass, he said. You are going back to square one." Then too, for many entrepreneurs, they spent a lifetime reaching just beyond their grasp, always reaching for the next goal, he said. "It's a really lucky person who can say I have enough. I am comfortable with what I have."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Your Money
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Nuclear arms control is at a crossroads not because we are approaching the deadline on an extension of the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, but because China's nuclear expansion threatens to upend decades of relative nuclear stability between the United States and Russia. The United States and Russia have been reducing their strategic nuclear arsenals since the end of the Cold War. The 1991 Start Treaty allowed each side 6,000 deployable strategic nuclear warheads; the 2010 treaty, known as New Start, lowered that limit to 1,550 operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads. But stability at these lower force levels will be challenged by China's nuclear ambitions. China is clearly moving away from the small, limited nuclear force of its past. It is fielding modern land and sea based strategic systems and plans to introduce an air launched ballistic missile delivered by heavy bombers in the near future, achieving its own strategic nuclear triad. The Defense Intelligence Agency estimates that China will at least double the size of its nuclear arsenal over the next decade and is building the production capacity to expand it further. Given China's secrecy about its nuclear forces, and its manifestly aggressive strategic intentions, this nuclear expansion may go even further, well beyond Beijing's old "minimum deterrence" doctrine. Still, it is in China's interest to reverse its dangerous nuclear buildup, lest it set off a nuclear arms race involving the United States and Russia, and perhaps encourage other nuclear powers to increase their forces to keep pace. Meanwhile, the United States is replacing its aging nuclear weapons systems. Our intention is to remain within the New Start limits of 700 strategic missiles and bombers and 1,550 deployed strategic warheads. But as Chinese nuclear forces grow in size and sophistication, the United States will have no choice but to reassess and adjust its own nuclear force requirements. In the past, the United States classified China's small nuclear arsenal as a subset of U.S. nuclear force requirements, which have been largely driven by the Soviet and then Russian threat. But this will not remain the case if U.S. nuclear forces remain at historically low levels and China's continue to expand with no discernible constraint. And the less we know about what China is doing and why, the more the United States must rely on worst case scenarios to size its nuclear forces accordingly. China's nuclear expansion and its refusal to engage in meaningful dialogue will affect stability on multiple levels. Increased U.S. nuclear force requirements to ensure credible deterrence against China would affect the United States Russia strategic nuclear balance and threaten to undermine the prospects for further negotiated reductions. We should assume that Russia will also assess the implications of China's expansion. The American special envoy for arms control, Marshall Billingslea, made these points to his Russian counterpart during a meeting in June in Vienna. Russia should clearly see its own self interest in helping to bring China into discussions on arms control. These talks need not focus on making China part of an extended New Start agreement. But renewing the treaty for the United States and Russia without conditions for bringing China into a broader arms control process carries risks for future security, even if today it seems the easiest course to take. All the great powers must be invested in such a process. We ask China to recognize its obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to negotiate in good faith on limiting and reducing nuclear arms and, more generally, to take steps toward greater transparency. Transparency is important to foster greater trust and lessen the chance of miscalculation during a crisis. That first step is joining the United States and Russia at the table in Vienna. Those of us charged with ensuring the defense of the United States call on Congress and our allies to help make the case to Russia and China that it is in the interests of all nations to broaden the current arms control framework to verifiably limit the nuclear weapons of all three major powers to secure a more stable and prosperous future.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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Due in part to the blockbuster exhibition on Michelangelo's drawings, and despite a new mandatory admission fee for non New Yorkers effective in March, the Metropolitan Museum of Art set yet another attendance record for the fiscal year that ended on June 30, attracting more than 7.35 million visitors to its three locations at Fifth Avenue, the Cloisters and the Met Breuer compared to 7 million last year. In announcing the attendance numbers on Thursday, the museum also said it had raised more than 250 million from donations, membership and government support, up about 7 percent over last year. That includes about 80 million from Florence Irving, a trustee, and her late husband, Herbert Irving. "We don't chase visitor numbers, but they are one sign among many of whether we are doing a good job in serving our mission and the needs of the public," said Daniel H. Weiss, the Met's president and chief executive, in a telephone interview. Max Hollein, the Met's new director, starts in August. Mr. Weiss also said he was pleased to see that the new admissions policy had not affected the museum's position as New York City's most visited tourist attraction for domestic and international audiences. "There is no evidence of any diminution in visitor numbers," he said. "Revenues are hitting the targets that we set I think people understand it."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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Julia Miles in an undated photo. She founded Women's Project in 1978 because, she said, she was shocked "that the thing I cared most about theater was really lacking in female voices." Julia Miles, who dedicated her career to ensuring that women playwrights and directors had a stage of their own, died on March 18 at a care facility in Ridgefield, Conn. She was 90. Ms. Miles was working as an assistant director of the nonprofit American Place Theater in the mid 1970s when she noticed that few of the plays the company produced were written by women. "I looked at our roster, and of about 72 plays that we had done, only about eight were written by women," Ms. Miles told The New York Times in 1998. "I was shocked at this, that the thing I cared most about theater was really lacking in female voices." Resolving to do something about the gender disparity, she began Women's Project, now known as WP Theater, in 1978 with a grant from the Ford Foundation, at first staging productions in the American Place Theater's basement. That basement and WP's later homes became incubators for young talent and welcoming places for artists trying to bring new perspectives to the theater. A different perspective was apparent from WP's first production, "Choices," a one woman show in which Lily Lodge read selections by Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Parker, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Plath and other writers. Since then WP has produced more than 600 plays. Standouts during Ms. Miles's tenure included "Still Life" (1981), about the Vietnam War, written and directed by Emily Mann and starring Mary McDonnell, Timothy Near and John Spencer, which earned four Obie Awards; and "A ... My Name Is Alice," a musical revue conceived and directed by Joan Micklin Silver and Julianne Boyd. Frank Rich, reviewing "Alice" in The Times in 1984, noted that it was performed in an airless basement and had "few production values, odd curtain times" and only a piano for accompaniment, but added, "It's amazing how little any of that matters, however, when there's fresh talent on display almost everywhere you look." WP has also produced the work of playwrights like Maria Irene Fornes, Eve Ensler and Lynn Nottage and featured actors like Billie Allen, America Ferrera and Sarah Jessica Parker. Ms. Miles did all she could to keep WP humming, from securing a million dollar donation from the playwright Sallie Bingham to helping playwrights arrange for child care so that they could attend rehearsals. Mary McDonnell, who after appearing in "Still Life" went on to earn Academy Award nominations for her roles in "Dances With Wolves" (1990) and "Passion Fish" (1992), said in a phone interview that Ms. Miles "made you relax with the process of developing your own voice, and it didn't matter if you were a writer, a director, an actor." Once, Ms. McDonnell recalled, Ms. Miles invited her to lunch after one of Ms. McDonnell's performances had received a scathing review and helped her put the critic's reaction in context. Ms. Miles, she said, "talked to me about how to develop the kind of internal muscle, emotional muscle" that female artists needed "to make choices that didn't fit into the old paradigm." Experiences like Ms. McDonnell's were common among the many women Ms. Miles mentored. The actress Kathleen Chalfant, who helped Ms. Miles found WP, said in a phone interview that she was hard pressed to think of a significant female playwright or director active in the American theater who "hadn't been touched by the Women's Project or encouraged by Julia." Ms. Chalfant added that one of Ms. Miles's enduring legacies was likely to be a professional community that could outlast WP. "It created this kind of old girls' network that is so necessary to move forward in any profession," she said. Julia Eugenia Hinson was born on Jan. 24, 1930, in Pelham, Ga., to John and Saro Hinson. Her father was a tobacco and cotton farmer, her mother a homemaker. She graduated from a boarding school in Georgia, then earned a bachelor's degree in theater at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., where she met William Miles. They married and moved to New York City to pursue acting careers, and Ms. Miles studied at the Actors Studio. But aspects of acting in the city soon grew tiresome. "I did auditions and hated it," she told The Times in 2001. "I hated the herds. I felt there had to be a better way." In the late 1950s Ms. Miles began producing plays with Theater Current, a company she founded with friends. She joined the American Place Theater in 1964. Her marriage to Mr. Miles ended in divorce, as did her second marriage, to Sam Cohn, a prominent talent agent. In addition to her daughter Marya, from her marriage to Mr. Cohn, she is survived by two daughters from her marriage to Mr. Miles, Stacey Slane and Lisa Miles; a stepson, Peter Cohn; a sister, Priscilla Arwood; and seven grandchildren. Ms. Miles stepped down as Women's Project's artistic director in 2003. From the beginning she had said that she hoped to disband the organization once women had achieved equality in theater.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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Joe Laurinaitis, half of a tag team known as the Road Warriors who brought a brash, muscular showmanship to professional wrestling in the 1980s and were among the sport's biggest stars in that era, died on Sept. 22 in Missouri. He was 60. World Wrestling Entertainment announced his death. No cause was given. TMZ Sports reported that he died while vacationing at a resort in Osage Beach. Mr. Laurinaitis was known as Road Warrior Animal, and with his partner, Michael Hegstrand a.k a. Road Warrior Hawk made a splashy entry into the sport. Tag team wrestling had faded from prominence in the 1970s as individual wrestlers took the spotlight, but the Road Warriors, with chiseled physiques, garish face paint and costumes, and a name drawn from a 1981 Mel Gibson movie, helped the two man version come roaring back. "Perhaps the most successful tag team gimmick in history, Hawk and Animal came into being in 1983 as post apocalyptic biker toughs," Greg Oliver and Steven Johnson wrote in "The Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame: The Tag Teams" (2005). "They rewrote the book on power and size, thrashing all comers." The book ranked them second only to the Fabulous Kangaroos, an act that worked an Australian theme, among the greatest tag teams in wrestling history. The Road Warriors got a crowd's attention before they even made it to the ring, thanks to their signature entrance music, Black Sabbath's "Iron Man," a song that opens with thudding percussion that is soon joined by a screaming guitar. "When you heard that drum beat," Mr. Laurinaitis told the podcast "Chair Shots to the Cranium" in 2018, "and you heard that guitar riff, you'd know that someone was going to get their head kicked in." Another signature was a bit they called the Doomsday Device. "The Doomsday Device was our finishing move," Mr. Laurinaitis explained in his memoir, "The Road Warriors: Danger, Death and the Rush of Wrestling" (2011, with Andrew William Wright). "I'd duck down behind an opponent and pick him up on my shoulders. As soon as he was balanced in an upright position, Hawk would come off the top rope with a big clothesline and knock the guy for a back flip." The pair's appearance, distinctive for the time, included complementary mohawks, an idea that came from Mr. Hegstrand, according to Mr. Laurinaitis. He suggested that Animal go with a single strip of hair in the center of his head, while Hawk had smaller strips on the left and right of his head. "'That way it'll look like we could plug our heads into each other,'" he recalled Hawk saying. "As crazy as it sounded to me," Mr. Laurinaitis wrote, "it really didn't sound that crazy at all. So we did it." The two, who were also known as the Legion of Doom, won an assortment of titles in the 1980s and '90s. Mr. Hegstrand died in 2003 at 45. Mr. Laurinaitis continued to wrestle well into this century. In announcing his death, WWE called him "one of the most intense superstars to ever step into the squared circle." Joseph Michael Laurinaitis was born on Sept. 12, 1960, in Philadelphia to Joseph and Lorna Laurinaitis. When he was 13 the family moved to Florida, where he took up weight lifting. Two years later another change in his father's employment took them to Minnesota. At Irondale High School in New Brighton, he played baseball and football. He also played football during his two years at Golden Valley Lutheran College in Minnesota. But he left college when his girlfriend became pregnant. (The resulting marriage was brief.) By 22 he was drawing attention as a power lifter aided, he later admitted, by anabolic steroids. He and Mr. Hegstrand became acquainted when both were bouncers at local clubs. They started working out together and, as Mr. Laurinaitis wrote, "decided to see what a regular steroid regimen could do for us." When they teamed up and joined the wrestling circuit, their musclebound physiques were a decidedly different look. "We basically changed tag team wrestling forever," Mr. Laurinaitis told The South Florida Sun Sentinel in 2001. "The era of the beer bellied drinking guy who said, 'Give me 50 and I'll be happy,' ended."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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A two year legal battle between Apple and its chip supplier, Qualcomm, reached a new level of contention on Monday when Qualcomm said a Chinese court had ordered Apple to stop selling older iPhone models in China. The court ruling is the latest turn in the two companies' fight over Apple's use of Qualcomm technology in iPhones. But Apple and Qualcomm disagreed on the impact the decision will have on iPhone sales in China. Qualcomm said a Chinese court ruled on Nov. 30 that Apple had infringed on two Qualcomm patents and issued a preliminary injunction that bars Apple from selling the iPhone 6S, the iPhone 6S Plus, the iPhone 7, the iPhone 7 Plus, the iPhone 8, the iPhone 8 Plus and the iPhone X in China. The ruling did not apply to Apple's three newest iPhones: the XS, the XS Max and the XR. Apple said in a statement, however, that it continued to sell all iPhone models in China. "Qualcomm's effort to ban our products is another desperate move by a company whose illegal practices are under investigation by regulators around the world," an Apple spokesman, Josh Rosenstock, said. He added that in the Chinese court case, Qualcomm had challenged Apple on three patents it had never raised before, including one that had already been invalidated. Late Monday in China, Apple continued to sell four of the seven iPhone models affected by the ruling the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus and the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus on its Chinese website, as well as its newer models. Apple's stock price was up less than 1 percent on Monday. Qualcomm's stock rose 2.2 percent. A slowdown in iPhone sales has contributed to a roughly 25 percent slide in Apple's share price since the company last released quarterly results on Nov. 1. The ruling also adds to developments that have worsened trade tensions between the United States and China, including the recent arrest of the chief financial officer of the Chinese electronics giant Huawei. "The hits keep coming," said Tom Forte, an Apple analyst at D. A. Davidson, referring to the string of negative headlines for the company. He added that the Chinese ruling was not as worrisome as other recent news because it affected only older smartphones and could still be resolved. It is possible that Apple would be able to sell older iPhones if they were running on newer software. But Don Rosenberg, Qualcomm's executive vice president and general counsel, said in a statement that the court ruling wasn't specific to the phones' software. He said Qualcomm would ask the Chinese courts to enforce the order. "Apple continues to benefit from our intellectual property while refusing to compensate us," he said. Qualcomm, which has long sold key communications chips to Apple but has been excluded from its latest models, has filed a series of patent suits against the smartphone giant in multiple countries. Those lawsuits came after Apple filed suit in early 2017 challenging Qualcomm's practices in licensing its patents. The ruling in China involved two Qualcomm patents. One lets consumers adjust and reformat the size and appearance of photographs. The other manages applications using a touch screen when viewing, navigating and dismissing applications, Qualcomm said. A Qualcomm spokeswoman said Apple could ask the Fuzhou Intermediate People's Court to reconsider its orders within 10 days of being served with them. There is no other appeal process. Apple cannot post a bond or pay a fine and continue infringing the two patents, she said. Apple said it had filed a request for "reconsideration" with the court on Monday, the first step in appealing the preliminary injunction. Steve Mollenkopf, Qualcomm's chief executive, has said he expects that victories in its patent cases would help persuade Apple to agree to settle the legal disputes. Qualcomm is the largest supplier of modem chips that allow smartphones to communicate over cellular networks. More than half of its profits have historically come from patent license fees it charges to phone makers, which have in turn complained to regulatory authorities and sued Qualcomm. Apple sued Qualcomm in January 2017, accusing it of monopolistic practices that harm Apple and the industry. The Federal Trade Commission raised similar charges in a case filed against Qualcomm the same month. Qualcomm has insisted its practices are legal.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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DOCS AND FRIENDS Aside from a vague sense that time is now divided into "before the pandemic" and "during the pandemic," it's hard to have perspective on the events of the past six months. Brian Stelter's "Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth" is among the first books to explore where we are now and it's certainly the first to examine how the president's preferred news source played a role in the dissemination of misinformation about coronavirus. "Fox's longest tenured medical analyst, Dr. Marc Siegel, told Hannity on March 6, 'at worst, at worst, worst case scenario, it could be the flu,'" writes Stelter, who is CNN's chief media correspondent, in the book's prologue. "This was shockingly irresponsible stuff and Fox executives knew it, because by the beginning of March, they were taking precautions that belied Siegel's just the flu statement. The network canceled a big event for hundreds of advertisers, instituted deep cleanings of the office and began to put a work from home plan in place. Yet Fox's stars kept sending mixed messages to millions of viewers." In a phone interview, Stelter explained how he became interested in the president's relationship with Fox because "it's the only story of the Trump years that's left." He said, "It's not as if Trump is addicted to the best researched, most in depth, meticulously sourced material in the world. If he were, we'd all be better off, right?" The book was late "I had blown through deadlines" so, "come February and March, we realized that the pandemic was an essential part of the story because of Fox's downplaying the disease and President Trump's failures early on." "Hoax," now in its second week on the hardcover nonfiction list, was originally called "Wingmen" because "Trump has wingmen, like Sean Hannity," Stelter said. "My editor gets all the credit for the title. In this war on truth we are all living in, 'hoax' is a potent, malicious, ugly little word and Trump has been using it more every year. So has Fox."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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From the whimsical skylights that protrude like reptilian eyes from its new underground art museum to the undulating walls of a new library, Helsinki's latest attractions are resolutely cutting edge. So it came as something of a relief, on a recent trip to the Finnish capital, to spot a homely pastry in bakery windows throughout the city. Tube shaped and topped with a circle of ruby red jam, this is a Runeberg cake, and it's eaten to commemorate the birthday of Finland's national poet, Johan Runeberg, who was born on Feb. 5, 1804. That a poet would get his own national baked good is reason enough, as far as I'm concerned, to recommend Finnish gastronomy. But happily, there are a growing number of other reasons as well. Helsinki has been slower to the Nordic revolution that has turned Copenhagen and Stockholm into global culinary destinations. But the same surge of creativity that has brought the city the Amos Rex contemporary art museum and the architecturally stunning Oodi library has extended to cuisine as well. "When I first got here about seven years ago, there were a few fine dining restaurants and a lot of fast food, but nothing in between," said Barcelona born Albert Franch Sunyer (he is a co owner of Restaurant Nolla, which is currently closed as it rebuilds in a new location, slated to open this summer). "But I left to travel for a year in 2015, and when I came back, it was like 'wow, what happened?' Suddenly there were all these new kinds of places, and a younger generation of chefs starting their own businesses. Even the customers were different they were more willing to go out." The innovations tend to be of degree they exalt Finland's limited but superlative produce and eschew luxury ingredients like shellfish and beef in favor of wild plants and offcuts of proteins rather than kind. (In the winter, you will see a lot of root vegetables. In the spring and summer, herbs and berries.) In 2010, the mostly self taught chef Sasu Laukkonen opened a tiny neighborhood restaurant called Chef and Sommelier, and quickly turned it into one of Helsinki's most acclaimed restaurants. Seven years later, he reopened in the same space as Ora, with a menu even more fervently devoted to Finnish ingredients, and a kitchen reconstructed to take advantage of every centimeter of available space. Ora is still small enough that guests have to time their trips to the restroom so as not to block the servers. But the intimate dining room makes the perfect stage for Mr. Laukkonen. A one man rebuke to the stereotype of the reticent Finn, he slips back and forth behind a kitchen counter that also serves as a table, plating on the one side and multilingually regaling diners on the other with stories about the Finnish loggers who used to load up on the Arctic turnips he says are like rutabagas, but sweeter; or the seasonal burbot, a chimera like fish with the head of a catfish, the tail of an eel and a liver that tastes like that of a monkfish. Like "former prime minister" and "former porn star," the title "former chef at Noma" is one not easily discarded. Yet Kim Mikkola and Evelyn Kim, who met while they were both working at the famed Copenhagen restaurant, have managed to carve a distinct identity for themselves right out of the gate. The combination of references from his Finnish background with those from her Korean American one makes for dishes that disarm with their idiosyncrasies before winning you over with their daring flavors. This is cooking with a clear point of view. You wouldn't expect it upon entering Inari. Physically, the restaurant could hardly be more nondescript: in chilly months, the ground level windows let in little light, rendering all the plainer the bare walls and unadorned tables. But it hardly matters, because from the first dish, it all turns. Precise wedges of crisp daikon alternate with segments of grapefruit that shimmer in a pool of quince; the sweet, tart and spiciness of the components are melded together by earthy shards of black garlic. Korean tteokbokki rice cakes with the shape and texture of very al dente gnocchi bathe in a briny mussel broth that pops thanks to a healthy dollop of salmon roe. Shiitake and enoki mushrooms, strewn among globules of a lightly gelled aspic made from clean tasting chicken broth, are served cold, invigorated, like many of Inari's dishes, with a pow of chile oil. The surprises continue further along the tasting menu: burbot makes an appearance again, swimming this time in a loose turnip foam that hides leaves of seaweed a decidedly modern take on a classic Finnish stew made with spinach and cream; tender slabs of sweetbreads get a jolt of honeyed tartness from persimmons. For dessert, that most Finnish of fruits, lingonberry, comes to the table as an ice cream dressed in a frill of crisp pastry and red bean paste. The eight headed, silk and bamboo dragon by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei that greets guests is the first clue: the St. George hotel, which opened in May 2018 makes a strong bid to be Helsinki's most cosmopolitan accommodation. More proof comes in the restaurant one floor below, which is overseen by Mehmet Gurs, the chef of Istanbul's Mikla restaurant. With its low lighting, chocolate velvet chairs, and smoky gray walls, Andrea is a sophisticated spot, and at lunchtime its tables fill with fashionably dressed business people. Like Mr. Gurs himself, who is the child of a Turkish father and Swedish Finnish mother, the menu at Andrea is something of a mash up. But rather than fusion cuisine, with all the haphazard blending the word implies, Andrea serves highly polished Turkish dishes made with Finnish ingredients. Or at least mostly. An exception starts the meal in the form of the house baked bread instead of a warm pide, it's a proper sourdough served, in the Nordic way, on a slab of polished tree trunk with freshly churned salted butter on the side. From there, though, the flavors change quickly to the bright, supple tastes of the Mediterranean. The mezze, or small plates meant to be shared, belie their apparent simplicity: from the lush muhammara, a walnut and red pepper paste slicked with fruity olive oil to a chicken salad spiked with kebab spices to a stew of smoky braised eggplant sparked with tomato and tiny, nutty chickpeas. Mains are built largely around the grill that is the star cooking technique of the Anatolian kitchen, whether a simple skewer of lamb, its edges perfectly charred, its interior still rosy; or a thick curl of octopus, the tentacle glazed sweet and smoky with pomegranate molasses. But throughout, there are hints that we are far from the Bosphorus. That lamb skewer, for example, is served with a dollop of cicek, the traditional herb flecked yogurt, but instead of fresh cucumbers it's spiked with very Nordic pickled ones. A starter of perfectly cured salmon, the flesh pink and plush, is beautifully offset by its own pickles in this case tart green apples and an emulsion of the same fruit that is like the best apple sauce you've ever tasted. A final dusting of sumac transforms it into something far more cosmopolitan than its parts. In many ways, Gron is an amalgam of every trend to hit the Nordic restaurant scene in the past few years. Here, for example, is the minuscule open kitchen heavily populated with cooks who periodically put down their tweezers to bring out food; there is the tasting menu punctuated with words like "ramson capers" and "fermented." Natural wines; housemade sourdough; plant based, seasonal and organic? Check, check and check. But Gron distinguishes itself as well. Once again, its room is small and bare, with wall mounted shelves serving as spice storage, and not in a decorative way. But the service, whether from one of two dedicated servers or from a chef, is warm and knowledgeable, and the atmosphere is much more relaxed, friendly bistro than cold, serious temple of dining. And for a Nordic, the chef Toni Kostian takes an unusually maximalist approach to cooking. That sourdough (which is exemplary the restaurant has its own bakery across town) comes to the table not only with butter, but with little pots of spiced pumpkin seeds, and sweet cicely flavored salt as well. A perfect potato rosti, the exterior golden and crunchy, the interior pale and creamy, is topped with buttery oyster mushrooms, dusted in dried reindeer powder, and served with fresh baby sorrel and a sour cream that turns it into the Finnish latke of your dreams. A dense almond cake, piped with spruce scented Swiss meringue and set aflame tableside, is irresistible on its own, and even more so with the puckery preserved blueberry compote that accompanies it. Not everything works a savory tart filled with roasted and raw yellow beets, lovage pesto, Swedish Vasterbotten cheese, celeriac and pickled horseradish flowers suffers from a few too many ingredients, and the gelatinous texture of glazed cod tongues is not enhanced by equally slippery braised cabbage. But an evening at Gron is still filled with convivial discoveries, and by the time a chef sends you off into the snowy night with a warm cannele, the crisp pastry redolent with the scent of woodruff, the sense of well being is pronounced. Even poetic. Follow NY Times Travel on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Get weekly updates from our Travel Dispatch newsletter, with tips on traveling smarter, destination coverage and photos from all over the world.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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What are nations like North Korea and Iran really doing at nuclear reactors that are out of sight? Someday, wispy subatomic particles known as antineutrinos could provide a clear view of what countries with illicit nuclear weapons programs are trying to hide. Antineutrinos are devilishly difficult to detect, but this quality is precisely what makes them potentially ideal for monitoring international nonproliferation agreements aimed at preventing the spread of atomic weapons. A collaboration of American and British scientists announced on Tuesday that they would build a test antineutrino detector called Watchman in a mine on the northeast coast of England. The project is sponsored by the National Nuclear Security Administration, part of the United States Department of Energy. When completed in 2023, the apparatus is to consist of a cylinder about 50 feet in diameter and 50 feet in height, filled with 7.7 million pounds of water and located about 3,600 feet underground in the Boulby Mine, which produces salt and potash, a fertilizer. Sensors lining the inside of the cylinder will observe the occasional flashes generated when an antineutrino resulting from reactions in the Hartlepool nuclear power plant, about 15 miles away, slams into a particle in the detector liquid. The experiment would run for two years.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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BECOMING NANCY It's 1979, and when 12th grader David Starr gets selected to portray Nancy in his high school production of "Oliver!," the unconventional, gender blind casting causes a stir in his small town. This new musical, based on the novel by Terry Ronald, opens the season at Atlanta's Alliance Theater Company. Jerry Mitchell ("Kinky Boots") directs and choreographs. The book is by Elliot Davis, music by George Stiles and lyrics by Anthony Drewe. In previews. Sept. 18 Oct. 6; Alliance Theater, alliancetheatre.org. NOVENAS FOR A LOST HOSPITAL Cusi Cram's latest, perhaps more an experience than a play, celebrates St. Vincent's Hospital, which closed in 2010 after 161 years. The show, workshopped last year at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, stars Kathleen Chalfant as Saint Elizabeth Seton, who guides the audience through stories from across the hospital's history and also leads us from an Episcopal church to a theater to the city's AIDS Memorial Park. Daniella Topol, Rattlestick's artistic director, helped develop the show, and directs. In previews. Sept. 19 Oct. 13; Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, rattlestick.org. FERN HILL Three aging couples, friends for decades, decide to move in together to help each other out as they hit their twilight years, but an affair comes to light and tests the group bond. The play, by Michael Tucker, primarily known for acting roles including years on "L.A. Law," premiered at New Jersey Repertory Company last year. Nadia Tass directs a cast that includes John Glover and Jill Eikenberry, Mr. Tucker's wife and former co star on "L.A. Law." In previews. Sept. 19 Oct. 20; 59 East 59 Theaters, 59e59.org. KINGFISHERS CATCH FIRE This new play by Robin Glendinning is based on the fascinating true story of Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty, a Vatican priest who helped Jews escape the Nazis in Rome, and the powerful Nazi Herbert Kappler, head of the Gestapo there. During World War II, Kappler tried to stop and even kill O'Flaherty, but years later the priest became a frequent visitor to Kappler's prison cell, where they talked about religion and literature. Kent Paul directs. In previews. Sept. 22 Oct. 20; Irish Repertory Theater, irishrep.org. NOTES ON MY MOTHER'S DECLINE Andy Bragen's ("Don't You Say a Word") autobiographical play looks at the relationship between a son and his formerly strong willed mother, now ill and in her decline. Knud Adams directs. Previews begin Oct. 6. Oct. 13 27; Fourth Street Theater, playco.org. ONLY HUMAN Gary Busey hardly seems like the most obvious actor to be cast in the role of God, but of course that's why you're reading about this pop rock musical about an epic battle between Jesus and Lucifer. The book is by Jess Carson, and music and lyrics by Mike Squillante, based on a story by Jesse Murphy and Mr. Squillante. NJ Agwuna directs. Previews begin Oct. 8. Opens Oct. 21 ; Theater at St. Clement's, onlyhumanmusical.com. FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE/WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF The Public Theater presents a revival of the 1976 Ntozake Shange play about a group of women of color telling their stories of endurance in a racist, sexist world. The choreography is by Camille A. Brown and Leah C. Gardiner directs. Previews begin Oct. 8. Oct. 22 Nov. 24. The Public's season will also include the first major New York revival of Tony Kushner's 1985 play "A Bright Room Called Day," about America under the Reagan administration, which posed questions about the rise of authoritarianism that feel very timely once again. Previews begin Oct. 29. Nov. 19 Dec. 8; Public Theater, publictheater.org. RIGHT TO BE FORGOTTEN A 17 year old boy makes a bad decision and leaves a mark on the internet that follows him for years. Can he erase the indiscretion even though the internet never forgets? This new play by Sharyn Rothstein, having its world premiere at Arena Stage in Washington D.C., considers personal privacy in an age when such a concept seems nonexistent. The Arena season also features an August Wilson festival, a new play by Ken Ludwig, and more. Oct. 10 Nov. 10; Arena Stage, arenastage.org. GAMES Henry Naylor's play, based on the life story of Helene Mayer, a German Jewish fencer who was chosen for Germany's Olympic team in 1936 despite her Jewish roots, was a hit at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe last summer and comes to New York courtesy of the SoHo Playhouse. Daren Lee Cole directs. Previews begin Oct. 10. Oct. 20 Nov. 24; SoHo Playhouse, sohoplayhouse.com. The playhouse will also present its annual Fringe Encore Series, featuring productions chosen from Fringe festivals around the world. Nov. 27 Dec. 29; TINA: THE TINA TURNER MUSICAL Adrienne Warren stars as the indomitable queen of rock in this musical, which had a world premiere in London and is still running there. You may already know her life story, but the critics were rapturous about Ms. Warren's performance, so I'm in. The book is by Katori Hall ("The Mountaintop") with Frank Ketelaar and Kees Prins, and Phyllida Lloyd directs. Previews begin Oct. 12. Opens Nov. 7; Lunt Fontanne Theater, tinaonbroadway.com. LAST DAYS OF SUMMER A 13 year old Brooklyn kid forms an unlikely friendship with his baseball idol, a star player for the New York Giants, in this musical set against the backdrop of World War II. The show, with a book and lyrics by Steve Kluger, based on his novel, and music by Jason Howland, had its world premiere at Kansas City Repertory Theater last year. Jeff Calhoun ("Newsies") directed then and will again for the first show in George Street Playhouse's new home. Oct. 15 Nov. 10; New Brunswick Performing Arts Center, georgestreetplayhouse.org. WE WILL ROCK YOU Imagine a post apocalyptic world with no music and no instruments (no fun, basically). A group of outcasts wages a battle to take back the world from the control of a global corporate entity in this musical inspired by, and featuring, the stadium rock music of Queen. "We Are the Champions," "I Want To Break Free," "Bohemian Rhapsody" and, of course, the title song, are incorporated into the story, with a book by Ben Elton. Nov. 14 17; Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden, msg.com. HALFWAY BITCHES GO STRAIGHT TO HEAVEN In his first new play since "Between Riverside and Crazy," Stephen Adly Guirgis takes us inside a women's halfway house in New York City to witness the day to day. John Ortiz directs this coproduction of Atlantic Theater Company and the LAByrinth Theater. Nov. 14 Dec. 22; Atlantic Theater Company, atlantictheater.org. GREATER CLEMENTS Maggie (Judith Ivey) is about to shutter one of the last businesses in Clements, a mining town in decline, when a stranger (James Saito) shows up and inspires hope in this new play by Samuel D. Hunter. Davis McCallum, who directed Mr. Hunter's prior Lincoln Center Theater production, "The Harvest," will direct. Previews begin Nov. 14. Dec. 9 Jan. 19 ; Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, lct.org. FEFU AND HER FRIENDS Lileana Blain Cruz directs a revival of Maria Irene Fornes's 1977 feminist play about a group of women navigating a male dominated world. Nov. 16 Dec. 8; Theater for a New Audience, tfana.org. OTHER THAN WE Described as "a cli fi eco feminist fable," this new play written and directed by Karen Malpede finds four scientists concocting a bold response to the climate crisis. Nov. 21 Dec. 1; Downstairs at La MaMa, lamama.org. SING STREET It's 1980s Dublin and Conor, a nerdy kid in a tough new school, tries to impress a girl by forming a band in the 2016 film written and directed by John Carney ("Once") that heads to the stage this fall. The book for this adaptation is by Enda Walsh, also a "Once" veteran, and music and lyrics are by Mr. Carney and Gary Clark, the singer and songwriter who started the Scottish pop band Danny Wilson in the 1980s. Sonya Tayeh ("Moulin Rouge!") is the choreographer, and Rebecca Taichman ("Indecent") directs. Previews begin Nov. 25. Dec. 16 Jan. 12 ; New York Theater Workshop, MRS. DOUBTFIRE With "Tootsie" grabbing a bunch of Tony nominations and awards, somehow this adaptation of a film about an actor disguising himself as a woman to get what he wants seems... expected? Based on the 1993 Robin Williams movie, the musical will premiere at Seattle's 5th Avenue Theater, which has sent "Hairspray" and "Catch Me If You Can" to Broadway. "Mrs. Doubtfire" comes from the team behind "Something Rotten!" the book is by Karey Kirkpatrick and John O'Farrell, and music and lyrics by Wayne Kirkpatrick and Karey Kirkpatrick. Jerry Zaks directs. Previews begin Nov. 26. Dec. 13 29; 5th Avenue Theater, 5thavenue.org. MOBY DICK Understatement Can't wait to see what the team behind "Natasha, Pierre the Great Comet of 1812," does with Herman Melville's classic tale of a man's obsessive battle against nature. The book, music, lyrics and orchestrations are by Dave Malloy, based on the Melville novel, and the show was developed with and will be directed by Rachel Chavkin. Dec. 3 Jan. 12; American Repertory Theater, americanrepertorytheater.org. KEEP Daniel Kitson ("Mouse: The Persistence of an Unlikely Thought"), the English comedian and storyteller who makes far too infrequent appearances in New York, comes to Brooklyn with his latest monologue. Running through a list of every object in his home, Kitson has created a show he describes as "about how much past the present can usefully contain ... about the importance of regret and the possibility of hope and the delusion of starting again ... and the inevitable sadness of ever holding on to anything." It'll still be funny though. Dec. 4 19; St. Ann's Warehouse, stannswarehouse.org. WEST SIDE STORY Even if you've seen this musical many times, you certainly can't say "been there, done that" when Ivo van Hove is at the helm. The innovative Belgian director will put his spin on the story of star crossed lovers and New York street gangs, based on Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet." Isaac Powell ("Once on This Island") is Tony and Shereen Pimentel will play Maria she's one of 23 cast members making their Broadway debuts. Previews begin Dec. 10. Opens Feb. 6; Broadway Theater, westsidestorybway.com. BECKY NURSE OF SALEM Becky is an ordinary grandmother trying to do the right thing and be a good influence on her troubled granddaughter, and perhaps find love, so she visits a local witch for help. Becky is also the great great great great great granddaughter of Rebecca Nurse, who was executed for witchcraft in Salem in 1692. In her new play, Sarah Ruhl ("In the Next Room, or the vibrator play") ponders just how much has and hasn't changed for women in a tumultuous American. Anne Kauffman directs this world premiere. Dec. 12 Jan. 26; Berkeley Repertory Theater, berkeleyrep.org. THE LEHMAN TRILOGY This epic tale of the monumental rise and epic fall of the financial powerhouse Lehman Brothers, written by Stefano Massini and adapted by Ben Power, will land on Broadway following critically acclaimed productions at the National Theater in London and at the Park Avenue Armory earlier this year. The original cast Simon Russell Beale, Ben Miles and Adam Godley will continue with the production as will the director, Sam Mendes ("The Ferryman"). Previews begin March 7. Opens March 26. Nederlander Theater. FLYING OVER SUNSET Did you know that Cary Grant tripped on LSD at some point? So did Aldous Huxley, who wrote "Brave New World," and Clare Boothe Luce, the playwright who became a congresswoman and an ambassador. This new Lincoln Center Theater musical, set in the 1950s, takes an imaginative leap and puts the three famous folks together on an acid trip for what sounds like a pretty interesting journey. The book is by James Lapine, who also directs, with music by Tom Kitt and lyrics by Michael Korie. The cast features Tony Yazbeck ("On the Town") as Grant, Carmen Cusack ("Bright Star") as Luce and Harry Hadden Paton ("My Fair Lady") as Huxley. Previews begin March 12. Opens April 16; Vivian Beaumont Theater, lct.org. CAROLINE, OR CHANGE The relationship between a black maid and a young Jewish boy in 1960s Louisiana provides the backdrop for this 2003 Tony Kushner/Jeanine Tesori musical. Those of us who regretted missing it at the Public Theater and on Broadway have another shot when this revival, directed by Michael Longhurst, comes to Broadway. Mr. Longhurst's production was critically acclaimed in London last year, and Sharon D. Clarke, who starred there, will play Caroline in New York as well. Previews begin March 13. Opens April 7; Studio 54, roundabouttheatre.org. PLAZA SUITE Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker will perform together on Broadway for the first time since "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" in 1996, a year before they were married. Next year, they'll co star in a revival of Neil Simon's 1968 comedy, directed by John Benjamin Hickey. The show, made up of three one act farces about married couples all staying in the same hotel room at different times, will have a run at the Colonial Theater in Boston Feb. 5 22, before the spring bow on Broadway. Previews begin March 16. Opens April 23; Hudson Theater, plazasuitebroadway.com. HOW I LEARNED TO DRIVE More than 20 years after they originated the roles of Li'l Bit and her uncle Peck in Paula Vogel's Pulitzer Prize winning drama about sexual abuse, Mary Louise Parker ("Proof") and David Morse ("The Iceman Cometh") will revisit the characters on Broadway. Mark Brokaw ("Heisenberg") who directed the 1997 Off Broadway premiere for the Vineyard Theater, will once again direct this revival. Previews begin March 27. Opens April 22; Samuel J. Friedman Theater, manhattantheatreclub.org. BIRTHDAY CANDLES We witness decades of Ernestine's birthdays, as she tries to make her mark on the world, in this Noah Haidle play that pokes at big questions like one's purpose in the universe. The show had its world premiere at Detroit Public Theater last year, directed by Vivienne Benesch, producing artistic director of PlayMakers Repertory Company in Chapel Hill, N.C. The show, and director, now move to Broadway in a Roundabout production starring Debra Messing. Previews begin April 2. April 21 June 21 ; American Airlines Theater, roundabouttheatre.org. TAKE ME OUT Richard Greenberg's 2002 play about a professional baseball player coming out as gay, and the many complications and prejudices that follow, hits Broadway again for the first time since it landed there in 2003 (following an Off Broadway production at The Public Theater). Scott Ellis directs a cast including Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Jesse Williams. Previews begin April 2. April 23 June 14; Hayes Theater, 2st.com.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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SOT: Emily Driscoll "Construction is not my favorite sight, but it beats looking at a brick wall." VO: AS NEW YORK CITY'S LONG AWAITED SUBWAY BURROWS UP SECOND AVENUE... NAT POP footage from Erik Olsen video Hudson Yards construction AND NEW TOWERS RISE ON MANHATTAN'S FAR WEST SIDE, SOME INTREPID HOMEBUYERS ARE PUTTING UP WITH PERPETUAL NOISE AND DUST FOR THE SAKE OF LONGTERM PROFIT. SOT: Emily Driscoll "I have plenty of swiffers on hand, just in case and they get used pretty quickly... VO: DOCUMENTARY FILM MAKER EMILY DRISCOLL BOUGHT HER ONE BEDROOM OVERLOOKING THE FUTURE 2ND AVENUE 72ND STREET SUBWAY STOP IN SEPTEMBER 2013. SOT: Emily Driscoll "At 2am I hear these trucks barreling down and going over all these rips and breaks in the streets...also because of the construction there's lots of traffic jams, so I hear lots of honking all the time, people get very frustrated... SOT: Emily Driscoll When I looked at this apartment, I had already put offers on 3 other apartments and each time, someone with an all cash offer came and bought the apartment even though I was in negotiations, sorry do you want me to...was that too loud?" VO: WHILE CONSTRUCTION ZONES MAY BE MORE ACCESSIBLE, AND SOMETIMES MORE AFFORDABLE, AMENITIES CAN BE HARD TO FIND, IN THE SHORT TERM. THAT'S THE CASE AROUND THE HUDSON YARDS, A LARGE CONSTRUCTION PROJECT ON MANHATTAN'S WEST SIDE. SOT: Christin Lin "I had heard of Hudson Yards before, but I didn't really know the extent to which the area was being developed.//Right now I think it's lacking a lot of great neighborhood establishments, bars maybe, it's missing a lot of local character I guess you would say." VO: BUT REALTORS SAY IN THE LONGTERM THE SERVICES WILL COME. ROBIN AND JEREMY STEIN, BOTH BROKERS WITH THE CORCORAN GROUP PREDICT THAT WHAT'S BEEN HAPPENING IN THEIR TRANSFORMING NEIGHBORHOOD, KNOWN AS HUDSON SQUARE, IS CERTAIN TO HAPPEN AROUND HUDSON YARDS. SOT: Robin Stein One of the first signs is you start to see empty store fronts, fill in with small boutiques, or little cafes or tiny restaurants...clearly the more rental or new construction that's going on, you know that more amenities are coming to the neighborhood. SOT: Jeremy Stein "Certainly when you start walking around a neighborhood, if you see scaffolding, if you see empty lots, if you see people wrecking garages, that's a tip off that something is changing in that neighborhood. You know developers will buy garages, they'll buy parking lots, they'll buy gas stations and they'll level them and they'll clear them...and you know that they're going to look to try and sell them.... VO: WITH THE RECENT COMPLETION OF THE HIGHLINE AND THE COMING EXTENTION OF THE SEVEN TRAIN IT'S NOT SURPRISING FORMER MAYOR BLOOMBERG DUBBED THIS CACOPHONOUS PIT MANHATTAN'S GOLD COAST. SOT: Christin Lin "It was definitely a good thing to know that values in this area would be going up."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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As the author of "Turn Right at Machu Picchu," about a trek to find the lost city of the Incas along a relatively unknown route, and "Meet Me in Atlantis," about amateur explorers' passionate attempts to locate the sunken island metropolis, I'm intimately familiar with travel books that might be categorized as "obsessive quests." My favorites are those written by authors who undertake adventures of their own. Here is a selection. A Norwegian sailor sails from Peru across the Pacific on a balsa raft to prove the truth behind a Polynesian myth. The legitimacy of his findings is debatable, but the high seas adventure he weaves from his journey is timeless. An inexperienced climber quits his job at a London fashion house to drive across Europe and Central Asia to Afghanistan, where he hopes to ascend a Himalayan peak. Arguably the funniest book ever written in which the author is falsely charged with murder. Shortly after World War II, a young Englishman decides to trek across the Empty Quarter of Arabia; his spare prose captures the vanishing nomadic way of life in one of the planet's harshest environments.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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THE LAND OF FLICKERING LIGHTS Restoring America in an Age of Broken Politics By Michael Bennet Michael Bennet is disappointed, and he's running for president. In "The Land of Flickering Lights: Restoring America in an Age of Broken Politics," the Democratic senator from Colorado has not written a typical, triumphal campaign memoir. Instead, the book reads like a sweeping diagnosis of the nation's political ills (which include, in Bennet's view, a desperate aversion to bipartisan discussion and a crippling reliance on short term thinking), stitched together with assurances that room for redemption still exists. "As I look back on a decade in the Senate, I can't help being haunted by a profound sense of lost opportunity," Bennet writes. His prescribed path forward is heavier on suggestions for how we should think more cooperatively about the work of politics than on particular policies. This starts with embracing the "high expectations" and values he ascribes to the country's historical and intellectual founders, and recognizing that real cross party discourse can strengthen and protect American democracy. The heart of "The Land of Flickering Lights" is an insider's retelling of five recent Washington episodes "when uncompromising factionalism in pursuit of ideological goals disabled both political parties and destroyed any bipartisan incentives to govern the American republic." Bennet casts himself not in the protagonist role, but as a hyperinformed, well read analyst ducking in and out of the action. He recounts the battles over replacing Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court and discusses the fallout from the Democrats' move in 2013 to abandon the 60 vote Senate threshold for approving most judicial nominees. Bennet assigns blame for the subsequent dysfunction to both parties, and calls his vote for that maneuver his biggest senatorial regret. He describes how Supreme Court decisions to loosen regulations on political money in 2010 gave rise to Tea Party groups that empowered Republicans' opposition to environmental causes. He further traces the rise of short term thinking about inequality, taxes, government spending and deficits, and outlines recent failures to enact immigration reform. Twice Bennet quotes James Baldwin: "Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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WASHINGTON DJI, the large Chinese drone maker, is facing mounting security concerns within the Trump administration that its flying machines could send sensitive surveillance data back to China. Now, the company is trying to get on American officials' good side by building some products in the United States. The company, which is privately held, said on Monday that it would repurpose a warehouse in Cerritos, Calif., to assemble a new version of a drone that has been popular among federal and local government agencies. The assembly of its flying devices in the United States will represent a small percentage of DJI's overall global production. But it could help the company meet some necessary federal requirements. In addition, the company will build some machines with a newly available set of features, known as Government Edition. The system saves data collected by the machine only on the drone itself, and the information can be taken off the machine only after it lands. Those drones cannot transfer any of the information wirelessly online. The new production facility and the new data features, the company hopes, will be enough to continue to sell the products in the United States. About 70 percent of all drones in the country are supplied by DJI, according to one estimate. The company makes small drones for hobbyists as well as the higher end industrial grade drones used to survey remote areas and forest fires, among other uses.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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Two of the most persuasive saleswomen New York has ever seen are peddling their wares with high style and equal determination at the Nederlander Theater, where "War Paint" opened on Thursday night. And no, I don't mean the subjects of this data heavy musical, the beauty industry magnates Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein, though they were certainly no slouches in the art of the deal. I'm talking about the resourceful and resolute women portraying those resourceful and resolute women, Christine Ebersole and Patti LuPone. These are actresses whose performing signatures are as well known to Broadway audiences as the stylized brand names of Arden and Rubinstein were to buyers of cosmetics. Ms. LuPone and Ms. Ebersole (notice how tactfully I'm shifting the order in which they're mentioned) are not coasting on the market value of their star appeal. They're strategically deploying the knowledge and craft of a combined eight decades in musicals to make us believe that the show in which they appear is moving forward, instead of running in place in high heels. After all, the creators of "War Paint" Doug Wright (book), Scott Frankel (music) and Michael Korie (lyrics) have lovingly custom tailored roles for Ms. LuPone and Ms. Ebersole in a show that assures them separate ovation garnering entrances, down a staircase (for Ms. Ebersole) and a gangplank (for Ms. LuPone). Both in their 60s, these enduringly vital actresses have reached an age where the field of juicy starring parts in musicals often feels limited to those of Momma Rose in "Gypsy" (Ms. LuPone has already won a Tony for that) and the title character of "Hello, Dolly!" (co opted this season by Bette Midler). In this sense, "War Paint," directed by Michael Greif, might be seen as the musical equivalent of "Feud," the mini series in which Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon play the aging Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, when they made the shocker "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" together. (Ms. Ebersole's Arden describes her and Rubinstein as "dueling actresses in our umpteenth sequel.") Like "Feud," "War Paint" depicts a bitter rivalry between glamorous women struggling to stay in control in a field that is notorious for seeing women as perishable commodities. And neither show shies entirely from the camp factor that is catnip to gay men and their female soul mates. But in telling its story, "Feud" has one whopping advantage, in that Davis and Crawford actually worked together, side by thorny side. There is no record of Rubinstein and Arden's having met, though they ruled their fast expanding beauty empires from the same Manhattan neighborhood in the same era. (The show is set between 1935 and 1964.) This lack of face to face time has forced the authors of "War Paint" to depict the women's twinned biographies as a series of parallel lives, acted out in counterpoint on separate sides of the stage. Thus we learn that for all their differences, Rubinstein, a Polish Jew, and Arden, a Canadian Episcopalian, were ultimately twin sisters under their pancake covered skin. The shows count the ways that this is true: They're both self inventions; they're both excluded from snooty New York society; they both realize that they wouldn't have half the problems they have if they had been men; and they know oh boy, do they know that it's lonely at the top. It's the loneliness part that creates the most conventionally dynamic scenes. Both Arden and Rubinstein quarrel with, and are betrayed by, men they love, who feel emasculated by their dominating women and wind up changing alliances even before the first act curtain falls. For Arden, that's her husband, Tommy Lewis (John Dossett); for Rubinstein, her gay right hand man, Harry Fleming (Douglas Sills). Lewis and Fleming are thankless parts, which may be appropriate to a show about women who rule, but it doesn't make their whiny company less tedious, despite the talented actors playing them. Their existence does lead to a rather amusing sequence in which, their traitorous men having spilled the beans on their beauty formulas, Rubinstein and Arden are forced to appear before a Senate investigation committee. Otherwise, "War Paint" is a double portrait of unchanging women during changing times. The passage of years is signaled by the deluxe period costumes, designed by Catherine Zuber, and by the foxtrot to frug dance steps of Christopher Gattelli's choreography; the leading ladies' eternal solitude is expressed by David Korins's coffinlike walls of products set. The show has slightly shifted its focus since its Chicago incarnation. It now begins not with its stars at separate vanity tables, contemplating their visages, but with a chorus of smartly dressed women heeding the call of a bodiless voice to beautify themselves. That is of a piece with a work in which the dubious ethics of an industry that preys on female insecurity are considered at length, as are the minutiae of packaging and marketing. (What other musical features songs listing ingredients in face creams?) But the compression of extensive research can make "War Paint" sound like a singing Wikipedia entry. Ms. Ebersole and Ms. LuPone go a great distance in disguising the show's essential sameness. Ms. LuPone, wearing heavy jewels and a Polish accent to match, is as imposing as Rubinstein must have been, and presumably a whole lot funnier. Ms. Ebersole, blithe and brittle, is equally formidable in a lighter vein. And Mr. Frankel and Mr. Korie, who gave Ms. Ebersole the part of a lifetime with their best known collaboration (with Mr. Wright), "Grey Gardens," have written numbers for their stars that cannily play to their separate but equal strengths think trumpet (Ms. LuPone) and flute (Ms. Ebersole) and even make an asset of Ms. LuPone's notoriously garbled diction in song.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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LONDON At the opening of the London Book Fair on Tuesday, a mobile massage company set up a row of stools for anyone in need of a shoulder and neck rub. It's been a feature of the fair for years, but the service has never seemed more timely. The Olympia exhibition center in West Kensington teemed with British publishers and editors, a cohort badly in need of stress relief these days. Britain's looming departure from the European Union has set many people here on edge. "Because the details haven't been worked out yet, it's hard to know what is coming next," said Francis Bickmore, a director at Canongate, a Scottish publisher. "I think we're sort of in denial." Nearby, Nick Barley, who runs the Edinburgh International Book Festival, was more blunt. "Half the time" he said, "people are scared out of their minds." Britain's vote to leave the union produced a brief boomlet here for publishers, which hurried out titles such as "The Brexit Survival Activity Book," "The Brexit Cookbook" and, of course, the latest popular riff on Enid Blyton's classic children's books, "Five Escape Brexit Island." Since then, the national referendum has produced something very different for the business: a whole lot of anxiety. Much of the worry stems from a looming fight with American publishers over sales in Continental Europe. For decades, the British have had this market to themselves, selling English language editions of books in France, Italy and every other country in the European Union. That helped turn Britain into the largest book exporter in the world, with total sales equivalent to 6.8 billion per year, according to the Publishers Association, a British trade group. Just over half of that revenue came from exports, and the biggest export market is Europe. Access to this market, without tariffs or the serious competition that comes with being part of European Union, has been a financial boon. Were British publishers to lose a substantial chunk of sales or face added costs on the Continent, the fallout could be dire. United States publishers have long coveted the European market, and with Britain scheduled to formally part ways with the union by March 2019, some are gearing up for an invasion. A warning flare of sorts was fired last fall at the Frankfurt Book Festival, when Simon Schuster's chief executive, Carolyn Reidy, told an audience that, after Brexit, "the argument the British have used to grab Europe as an exclusive market will then be over." 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. That's about as close to a public declaration of hostilities as you can expect. The battle for Europe's book market is already being fought quietly wherever author contracts are drafted. These contracts always include a list of territories where publishers want exclusive rights of distribution. More and more often, the list now drafted by American publishers includes the European continent. Patrick Walsh, a literary agent based in London, has seen Europe included in early drafts of two deals with United States publishers. In both cases, the publishers argued that by the time the book was in stores, Britain and the European Union will have parted company. In both cases, Mr. Walsh pushed back, suggesting that it was too early to know how Brexit would play out, and the codicil was removed. "It was a relatively friendly opening gambit," he said. "But I'm absolutely certain we're going to see more of this." Much of the talk here about the terms of Britain's divorce from Europe has centered on banks, real estate and blue collar industries like fishing and mining. But the creative sector is also bracing for change and fretting about life after Brexit. Few are as worried as the roughly 30,000 people employed by the British book business. Part of it is a concern that Britain will cease to serve as one of the world's great cultural hubs. London in particular has been a huge attraction for foreign artists in fields like contemporary dance and theater. "Those people are based here because they can come and go," said Andrew Franklin, co founder of Profile Books, a London publishing house. "The same is true of literary culture. It's hugely dependent on new voices coming in from other places, and I worry that as this place puts up walls, the literary culture will become more isolated, with a consequent effect on publishing." Mr. Franklin thinks the biggest threat posed by Brexit is the harm it may cause to the British economy, which could reduce disposable income, hurt book sales and result in the closing of both libraries and book shops. There are smaller and more practical worries, too, like the impact on British writers who lose access to Europe's grants and literary prizes. Plus, the United Kingdom has a robust intellectual property regime that publishers are eager to sustain. The Association of Authors' Agents has had several engagements with politicians to convey these and other concerns. For the past two years, the group has visited Parliament with authors in tow, including Cressida Cowell, the woman behind the "How to Train Your Dragon" series, and Misha Glenny, the reporter whose book "McMafia" led to the hit TV mini series by the same name. Lobbyists for British publishers have conferred with key political players in Europe as well, but the future of the English language book market there is unknown. British domination has been rooted in a combination of informal agreement (American and British publishers long ago divvied up countries, based largely on proximity and history) and trade law (as a European Union member, publishers in the United Kingdom have frictionless access to any country in what is known as the Single Market). Many British publishers and agents believe they will continue to outperform on the Continent simply because they are physically closer to it than their rivals. "Why would a British author want their books supplied from America to Europe, which is Britain's nearest market, Brexit or no Brexit?" said Gordon Wise, former president of the Association of Authors' Agents, in an email. "And why would even a U.S. author want to wait for stock to ship trans Atlantically when it could be swiftly supplied from within the European geographical continent by their British publisher?" In addition to speed and ease of distribution, publishers in Britain have offered a higher royalty rate to authors they sell in Europe. In return for exclusive sales rights, British houses have paid what are known as "home royalty rates" essentially, the amount of money they pay authors distributed within Britain as opposed to "export royalty rates." The difference is huge. Lorella Belli, a literary agent, said that the figures vary from publisher to publisher, but that roughly speaking authors earn one British pound (about 1.40) per hardback, when paid a home royalty. The export rate, by contrast, will yield the equivalent of about 7 cents per book. Executives in United States publishing say they are ready to pay home royalty rates for exclusivity in Europe, too. And they doubt that Britain's proximity argument for ascendancy in Europe has much force these days, given how swiftly products now move around the world. "That big body of water between America and Europe is not an issue, thanks to much improved supply chain logistics," said Carolyn Savarese of Kneerim Williams, a literary agency with offices in Boston and New York. "The world has indeed gotten smaller. Or rather, the markets have gotten more accessible." Still up in the air is whether Britain will ultimately face new hurdles in Europe, like tariffs. The full implications of Brexit will come into focus in the coming months, as the basic terms of the departure are negotiated. But among publishers, the jostling for Europe has already begun. "Everyone wants an advantage," Mr. Walsh said. "If they can grab it, they will."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Jack Ewing, a correspondent based in Frankfurt who covers economics and autos, discussed the tech he's using. What impact is tech having on the auto industry? It's not an exaggeration to say that the automobile industry is undergoing its biggest transformation in a century. Three big trends are converging and feeding off one another: battery powered cars, autonomous driving and connectivity the integration of cars into digital traffic networks. The internal combustion engine will disappear quickly, in my view, once electric cars become as cheap to buy as traditional autos and when they can be recharged in 15 minutes or so. That tipping point is probably about five years away, maybe less. Some say cars have become the biggest mobile computers. Why is that, and do you agree? Cars have been carrying around lots of computing power for a while, but most people weren't aware of it. But there's no question the computing power inside cars is growing exponentially to support autonomous driving and connectivity. Car companies like BMW are hiring more coders than mechanical engineers these days, and Volkswagen is even investing in quantum computing. We should probably already be thinking of cars as computers on wheels. Are we anywhere near having autonomous cars become mainstream consumer vehicles? What has to happen? Fully autonomous cars that can drive themselves from A to B while drivers sleep or watch "Game of Thrones" will probably take a while. But onboard computers will increasingly augment drivers and take over city driving. Cars will be able to communicate with one another and with control centers, resulting in better traffic management and reduced congestion. The transition to autonomous, networked driving is not likely to be smooth, however, as we have seen from the recent fatal accidents involving Uber and Tesla. People are already rebelling against giving up their personal information to Facebook; they may balk at turning over the steering wheel to a computer, particularly one connected to some centralized authority. The people developing autonomous vehicles should probably be thinking as much about how to get people to accept the technology, and how to protect individual freedom, as they are about making the technology work. Inventors have not given up that dream. Just a few months ago, an outfit in Slovakia called AeroMobil unveiled a design for a battery powered flying car that the company says will be able to land and take off vertically as well as drive on roads. It would fly autonomously, meaning the driver theoretically wouldn't need a pilot's license. AeroMobil says the vehicle will be available in five to seven years. AeroMobil has also developed a flying car with an internal combustion engine that requires only a very short runway. It will be available in 2020, AeroMobil says. We'll see! Flying cars would be very expensive and therefore never more than a niche product. Until we invent some kind of "Jetsons" like antigravity technology, flying cars will always be inherently inefficient. When you're in the air you're carrying around equipment you don't need for flying, like large road worthy wheels, and when you're on the ground you're carting around stuff that is useless on the highway, like wings or rotors. For my money a more plausible concept is one being developed by Airbus, the giant European aircraft manufacturer, called Pop Up. It's a passenger pod that can be carried around by a battery powered unit that looks like a large hobby drone. The drone carries the pod across town, then drops it onto a battery powered chassis for driving around the city. It would be a shared, on demand service and therefore more within the reach of regular folks. What are your favorite tech tools for doing your job? An app called AudioNote has been life changing. It records sound while you type notes on your MacBook or iPad. Later, you can click on a word in the text and it will take you to that spot in the recording, so you can easily double check quotes. In the old days, looking for a quote in a long recorded interview was incredibly time consuming. LinkedIn is very useful for finding and contacting sources, and for bypassing all the people corporations employ to keep you from finding out what's really going on. But I also still use snail mail. Everyone is so bombarded with electronic communications these days that often a letter is the best way to get somebody's attention. Beyond your job, what tech product are you currently obsessed with using in your daily life? I'm fascinated by products that seem low tech but are actually very advanced. An example would be the Nomos watch I bought my wife for our 25th anniversary last year. The watch is purely mechanical you have to wind it up. But, as I learned during a visit to the Nomos factory in a village in eastern Germany, it would not be possible to make the watches as exquisitely thin and light as they are without state of the art computer driven machinery. Another example is my Brompton folding bicycle. I usually travel by train in Germany. I bring the Brompton along and use it to get from the train station to my appointments. The Brompton is a 1975 design but has been continually refined, and today the factory is heavily computerized. Customers can configure the bike they want online, and the factory in London has a system that makes sure the right components converge on the assembly line at the right moment. Car companies use the same technology on a much larger scale. My point is that it's a mistake to think that something has to have chips inside it to be high tech.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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Dr. Michael Warren had a complicated relationship with his condominium in the meatpacking district. The penthouse duplex with two outdoor spaces was "sort of a labor of love," he said. A frustrating one, too. Renovations dragged on for nearly two years. During the construction, he moved to an unpleasant tenement in Inwood, not far from Columbia University Medical Center, where he is an obstetrician gynecologist. His work includes "a lot of delivering babies in the middle of the night," he said. Meanwhile, Dr. Warren, now 42, decided that, "whether I was with someone or alone, I wanted a kid." Jonas, born of a surrogate, arrived a year ago. "I thought I would be happy with one child, and I thought I would be there forever, and I worked so hard for it," Dr. Warren said of his meatpacking district apartment. "But I realized I want one more." The meatpacking apartment was expensive to maintain as well. Six years ago, Dr. Warren's purchase price had been 950,000. Monthly charges were almost 1,200. Because the building was mixed use and had a certain percentage of retail space on the ground floor, his mortgage interest rate was higher than usual. "I needed to do three things," Dr. Warren said. "Lower my monthly cost, get some money out so I could put it into the next surrogacy, and get a larger space. I knew I couldn't do it downtown." But he could do it in Harlem. If Dr. Warren moved to a two family house in a less sought after neighborhood in or near Hamilton Heights he could also rent out a floor. He thought a historical house would be great "something that was going to make me excited in a different way," he said. Dr. Warren was willing to renovate, as long as he could live in the house during the renovations. He embarked upon the hunt with Eric Penner, an agent at Keller Williams NYC, whom he met when he inquired about a listing for a townhouse, which, unfortunately, required too much work. A rowhouse on West 152nd Street was nicely configured, with a rental apartment on the ground floor. The second floor unit was reached by the original staircase, and he liked the idea that it would "be a part of my life," he said. "It is an important historical detail." More practically, he didn't want tenants stomping above. But he was not keen on the fact that the basement, where he planned to keep his gym equipment, could be reached only by going outside. The house was listed at 1.5 million, but needed some work, and the most Dr. Warren was willing to pay was 1.35 million. The house was later taken off the market. Dr. Warren considered a pretty four story rowhouse on Hamilton Terrace, though it faced east west rather than north south, which he thought would be sunnier. The asking price was 2 million. The house had lovely woodwork, but it was only 16 feet wide. Its back extension housed an even narrower kitchen and consumed much of the backyard. On West 142nd Street, an 18 foot wide two family brownstone had a beautiful L shaped stoop. But on the parlor floor, which had been rented out, "a lot of the woodworking had been badly abused," he said, and the kitchen and bathrooms were in sad shape. Dr. Warren thought he could occupy the top two floors while renovating the others. He was so interested that he offered 1.85 million on an asking price of 1.8 million. But negotiations went nowhere. The owner later renovated the house and returned it to the market for 2.195 million. When Dr. Warren saw a listing for a two family limestone rowhouse a bit farther north on West 162nd Street in Washington Heights, he wasn't sure he would like it. There were few photographs and the price, 1.9 million, seemed high. But the house, almost 20 feet wide, had lovely woodwork and original details like ceiling medallions and fireplaces. It needed far less work than he had imagined. The house, which was occupied by several nuns, had two apartments; the ground floor unit would make a good rental.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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That cruelty is rendered most intimately in "Testimonies," in which the accounts of named women are arrayed in past tense fragments. Yoon uses line breaks and rhythmic pauses to convey dislocation, gaps that leave room for the intransigence of the material, and this formal control lets her frame such images as Kim Yoon shim's excruciating punishment: "When I ran away the police smashed my hands / weaving a stiff pen between my fingers." Yoon, who was born in Busan, Korea, in 1991, the year the first testimonies were recorded, acknowledges the challenges of this chronological distance when she reflects on her method: "How else / could I write the years / I did not live." In an author's note, she characterizes her poetry as "a space in which I conceive disasters, failures and traumas, lending them my own perspective, dimension and articulation." Articulation itself is key to these poems' power: Yoon reminds us that another capacity special to our species is speech. Humans are unique in having a uvula, "the bell in our throat that rings with laughter." The counterforce to horror in these poems is pronunciation, then translation, often for the benefit of the beloved. Drawing on her experience of "intertwined languages" and the postwar Korean diaspora, Yoon savors homonyms ("apple is apology") and uncovers figurative language buried in idioms. Definition and translation are intimate acts: "You rise now / whispering murollida, murollida. Meaning, literally, to raise water, / but really meaning to bring water to a boil." Inherited trauma thus becomes a sieve in consciousness that catches and holds scraps of speech, story and image. Even as Yoon examines other forms of fetishization and sexual objectification registering racist cliches as a New Yorker, for example ("Geisha Schmeisha") the poems remain tethered to their foundational history. As foreignness and proximity imply each other in the field of language "This is the vanishing line. This country, here, there, here" Yoon's poems transmute suffering into something that can be communicated: "Voice, / a fearful current."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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"This is the first time that we have the opportunity to really improve the way the building and its decorations and its sculpture looks," Mr. Bailey said in a phone interview. "We can try to bring attention on 36th Street to this historic architectural treasure. And we can, at the same time, tell the story of how McKim and Morgan came to build this wonderful building." Check out our Culture Calendar here. Mr. Bailey said the Morgan has spent the last two years carefully reviewing the building with Integrated Conservation Resources, a firm specializing in historic restoration, to document its condition and generate a needs assessment. From there, it raised nearly 75 percent of the needed funds through private gifts from its board of trustees and major foundation supporters, including the Sherman Fairchild Foundation and Morgan Stanley, but, Mr. Bailey says, "We still have quite a way to go." The renovation to the building's exterior will take place this year, wrapping up in December, and the landscaping work is set to be completed and accessible to the public by fall 2020. Mr. Bailey says that while visitors will be able to see the restoration in process outside, none of the interior spaces or the museum's activities will be impinged. In October 2020, visitors to the Morgan will be able to see the how the building came to be, both over its original construction from 1902 to 1906, and through its more recent restoration by way of an exhibition featuring documents, images and models from its history, and a new book.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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After a seemingly endless winter, the first hints of spring have teased us with a day or two of temperatures over 60 degrees. That fleeting glimpse of warmth sent many New Yorkers flying out of doors to enjoy the sunshine. For my part, I sipped my morning coffee at home last week and stared wistfully out the window at a neighbor's balcony. In our concrete jungle, there is a hefty dollar value attached to having your own garden oasis even the smallest of shrubberies carries a price tag. And with so many residents suffering from a vitamin D deficiency these days, brokers are promoting listings that can claim specks of green, even if they're barely large enough to hold a bonsai. Yet there are some listings for which the warmer weather was made. Downtown, the average price of a luxury condominium with a terrace is 8.3 million; that compares with just 6 million for those without terraces, according to Vanderbilt Appraisal. And developers are doing whatever they can to take advantage of that pricing edge. The building at 56 Leonard Street in TriBeCa, for example, is a series of stacked boxes designed to allow nearly every unit an outdoor space. In the West Village, the developer of 150 Charles Street created several setbacks that feature enviable terraces. And at Walker Tower, the Chelsea conversion where prices have broken several downtown records, a unit that has a terrace is selling for a premium of more than 40 percent over comparable apartments without outdoor space, according to Vanderbilt. The demand for outdoor space has grown so strong that in some instances, prices have exceeded the industry rule of thumb, which places outdoor space at 20 percent to 50 percent of the price of the interior square footage. Some terraces are trading for as much per square foot as the interior space, or even more. Rebecca I. Edwardson, an associate broker at Warburg Realty, created a database of several thousand apartment listings with terraces and rooftop gardens precisely because putting a price on outdoor space can be such a tricky endeavor. "There are so many variables, most brokers don't know how to price outdoor space," she said. "They go into an apartment and say it feels like 5 million, but they don't have any data to back that up." According to her research, up until last year, these spaces sold for roughly one quarter to one third the value of the interior space. An apartment priced at 1,000 a square foot, for example, would have a terrace valued at 250 to 330 a square foot. She has found, however, that among the new luxury condominiums going up across Manhattan at a quick clip, the price for outside space can rival the price of the interior space. At the recently completed 200 East 79th Street, for example, Ms. Edwardson estimated the value of a nearly 700 square foot terrace at more than 100 percent of the value of the interior of its high floor apartment. (For co ops, she found that terraces remain priced at one quarter to one third the value of the interior space.) Ms. Edwardson was recently involved in the sale of a terrace property over which there was a fierce bidding war. The eventual winner was a foreign buyer who bid 30 percent more than comparable units were selling for. "I asked him why he bid so high," she recalled, "and he said, the way he was looking at his finances he is worth over 100 million was that Europe was less of a safe place than New York and America, so he was shifting his assets here. And for him, to pay a little bit more in New York was actually a good bet, compared to what he would be paying in London or Hong Kong." But not all outdoor space is equal. Like so much in this city, there is a hierarchy to heed. On the lowest rung of the ladder is the balcony, typically a cantilevered concrete slab that hangs off the side of a building like a jutting lip; it is used more for bike storage than sunbathing. On the highest is the terrace, usually tucked in a building setback so it opens to the sky, and large enough to host a summer barbecue. Among terraces, the most sought after are directly accessible from the living room and have both helicopter views and privacy from the peering eyes of neighbors. Shape is also an issue. Wraparound types that stretch across more than one side of a building and offer multiple exposures are considered prime, followed by the square shapes that perfectly suit a dining table. And finally, there are the rectangular slivers that can barely hold potted peonies. Then there are other kinds of outdoor space: the rooftop garden is loved by some, although it is considered a notch below the terrace because of the inconvenience of having to walk up steps, while maisonettes offer ground floor gardens that can be large but are often too dark, shadowed by the tall buildings that surround them. Although some buyers may have bottomless pockets when it comes to outdoor space, you can't help but wonder, is it really worth it? When I was having that morning coffee last week, staring at the building across from me stacked with balconies, I noticed that several of them looked rather abandoned. In fact, the balcony nearest my window has spent the winter filled to the brim with an enormous pile of garbage bags stuffed with what appear to be clothes, along with a rather sad painting that has been warped by the deluge of snow. Like so many symbols of wealth, it may be more in the having than in the using. At developments like 215 Sullivan Street, a Greenwich Village condominium built on the site of a preschool run by the Children's Aid Society, owners don't even have to care for their outdoor space. "Imagine having your own lushly landscaped backyard and you don't even have to worry about the gardening work!" materials pitching the building read. The developer of 215 Sullivan Street hired Edmund Hollander, a well known landscape designer, to create the outdoor spaces roughly 60 percent of the units come with terraces or gardens and spent "in the millions of dollars" to plant 25 foot adult trees and create lush floral arrangements that will be maintained by the building. "When a buyer comes to look at the unit, and they see that you have spent the time to finish it, it appeals," said Raymond E. Chalme, the chief executive of Broad Street Development, the developer, "and when you are looking for 3,000 a foot, that is important." With many of these new condominiums reaching skyward to unfathomable heights, there is also the question of whether you would really want to sit on a terrace 50 stories above the pavement. Recently while I was touring a penthouse in a 50 plus story tower, I was too frightened even to approach the windows, let alone step onto the spacious terrace. With no point of reference outside except for the clouds, it gave the impression of being suspended in midair. Yet Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire chairman of the News Corporation, recently paid more than 57 million for the top four floors at One Madison, the new sliver of a tower on Madison Square Park. It is unclear whether he will actually ever live in the home and make use of its wraparound terrace, but it is crystal clear that a mere mortal like me is not the target for such properties.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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When the Singaporean curator Boon Hui Tan was named director of the Asia Society museum in 2015, he told an interviewer that "contemporary art can only be understood in global terms." Now Asia Society is placing its biggest bet yet on contemporary art: Its inaugural Triennial of Asia will open next summer and bring to New York some 40 artists, along with intellectuals and historians, from what it calls "Asia and the world." The first edition, titled "We Do Not Dream Alone," is scheduled to open on June 5, 2020, and will be preceded by several months of related programming. The curators will be Mr. Tan and Michelle Yun, Asia Society's senior curator of modern and contemporary art. And it will extend past Asia Society's headquarters on Park Avenue to venues in Manhattan and elsewhere. The Triennial of Asia joins a crowded calendar of exhibitions of contemporary art held here every two or three years. The Whitney Biennial, New York's longest running such show, focuses on American art and opens its new edition in May. Elsewhere, the New Museum has presented four editions now of its contemporary art triennial, and the Queens Museum has hosted eight chapters of its locally centered Queens International. So Mr. Tan, who directed the 2013 Singapore Biennale, is aiming to position Asia Society's triennial as a season long effort across disciplines. It will feature debates on public policy and presentations from scientists, though art remains at the heart of the program.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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Wallace was one of the leading voices in NASCAR arguing for removing the Confederate flag from events and banning it from the stands. When a member of his team discovered a noose in Wallace's stall at Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama, NASCAR launched an investigation, concluding that the noose had been in the stall since October of last year. Some observers, particularly those hostile to the Confederate flag ban, decided that this meant the noose was a hoax. But NASCAR officials rejected this view. "Bubba Wallace and the 43 team had nothing to do with this," Steve Phelps, the president of NASCAR, said. "Bubba Wallace has done nothing but represent this sport with courage, class and dignity." If conditions now were like those in January if unemployment was still low and there wasn't mass unrest and a deadly pandemic wasn't continuing to rage out of control then the president's rhetoric might actually work to mobilize his supporters. Part of the story of the 2016 election was the movement, into the Republican coalition, of cross pressured voters who opposed conservative anti government ideology but were also repelled by immigration, Islam and racial liberalism. Trump appealed to these voters by pledging support for policies like Social Security and Medicare while also demonizing racial and religious minorities. But just as important as his message was the overall condition of the economy. It wasn't perfect, but it was good enough. Unemployment was down, growth was steady and wages were up. The economy wasn't on the back burner, but it also wasn't the most salient issue of the election. This gave a candidate like Trump the political space to bring other issues to the fore. And he took it. It is possible that Trump would have succeeded under worse economic conditions; that a crashing economy would have made those cross pressured voters even more eager to support a racist, demagogic candidate. We have something of a comparison point in the 2008 election, when Sarah Palin brought Trump like energy to the Republican presidential ticket, nearly eclipsing John McCain, the presidential nominee. She drew huge crowds with furious denunciations of Obama that centered on a sense of him as foreign and un American. "I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America," Palin told a nearly all white crowd of supporters a month before the election. And yet the kinds of voters Palin tried to appeal to the kinds of voters who would eventually back Trump stayed, for the most part, within the Democratic fold that year. They may have been uncomfortable with the idea of a Black president, but they were outright opposed to another four years of Republican economic policy. Or consider George Wallace, whose politics of cultural rage and racial resentment resonated with voters at a moment, the late 1960s, of relative security and prosperity, not decline and desperation. It's not that demagogues never triumph in bad economic conditions, but that good times may bring some voters to feel that they can afford to vote their resentments. If this is true if it takes a decent economy to make voters conducive to the campaign Trump wants to run then he is, at this moment, speeding down an electoral dead end. As long as Covid 19 is out of control, as long as there is mass suffering, sickness and economic distress, then nothing short of actually doing his job will help him get ahead. There simply is no substitute for good governance. Trump can spend the next four months raging against protesters, defending Confederate monuments and attacking Black celebrities. He can play the hits for his supporters and whip his most devoted followers into a frenzy of MAGA enthusiasm. He can turn up the racism dial as much as he wants and as far as it will go. But if he's looking for approval, he won't get it. 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.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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To navigate the website for Arcade Fire's coming album, "Everything Now," users need to click through a cluttered cascade of Windows 98 style pop ups. Balenciaga's new website looks as stripped down as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, with plain black boxes and no frills Arial font. And the D.I.Y. looking home page for Solange resembles the desktop of a candy colored iMac, complete with QuickTime windows and rows of blue folders. Web designs have come a long way in 20 years, but some are taking a step back to evoke a sort of hipster nostalgia for the early days of the internet. "They're tipping their hat to the 1990s," said David Lee, the chief creative officer of Squarespace, a web platform company based in New York that has created millions of websites for clients. Mr. Lee said that he has seen a recent uptick in what he calls an "anti design brutalism," with clients opting for more bare bones, retro looking sites. Some websites are purposely cumbersome to navigate, with loud, clip art filled pages. Others employ a simplistic Craigslist style utilitarianism that feels like a throwback to an era when web pages were coded by hand. "There's a lot of animated GIFs and flames, but mixing it with something new," Mr. Lee added. While millennials and members of Generation Z those born in the years from the mid 1990s to the early 2000s may not remember what the web looked like in the era of AltaVista and GeoCities, the retro designs tap into the current cultural revival of all things '90s. (See the return of "Twin Peaks," "Will Grace" and concert T shirts.) For those who are older, these sites recall the improvised internet of their youth, in the days before mobile optimization and beta tested user interfaces brought a sleek uniformity to modern web design. Nostalgic websites meant to mimic the days of dial up modems are cropping up in artsy and tech geek corners of the web. Windows93.net, a web project by the French music and art duo Jankenpopp Zombectro, imagines what the Microsoft operating system would have looked like had it been released. (After a two year development delay, Microsoft instead released Windows 95.) The site has had more than eight million visitors. Neocities, built in 2013 by Kyle Drake, 33, a web entrepreneur based in Palo Alto, Calif., is a homage to GeoCities, the early web hosting platform. (GeoCities, started in 1994, was acquired by Yahoo in 1999 for 3.6 billion and went defunct in the United States in 2009.) "I really hate the modern internet," Mr. Drake said. "My vision is to bring back making websites as a creative thing, not just as a business thing." More than 140,000 websites have been created through his platform, he said. Paul Ford, 42, an instructor of interactive design at the School of Visual Arts in New York, agrees that the web today can feel disappointing to early adopters. "It's almost like if your indie band went on to be not the size of U2, but a 4 trillion industry," he said. "I think there's a sense of, 'How do we get back to that?'" One way is to create a website the old fashioned way: by enlisting a friend who knows basic HTML. That is what Billy Silverman, 40, a restaurateur, did in the harried final days before opening Salazar, his acclaimed Sonoran barbecue restaurant in Los Angeles. He tapped his buddy Zack McTee, who runs a small production company in New York, to slap together something quick. The two decided that, if they didn't have the time or money to make the website good, they would at least make it fun. The result recalls a personal website built by a bored teenager in the days before Facebook and Myspace, with flashing Comic Sans text, dancing MC Hammer GIFs and cheesy keyboard music. A banner declaring "now with working email" scrolls across the top. Mr. Silverman said he regularly gets emails from customers who are confused. A common note: "'I love your restaurant but saw your website and think I can help you out.'"
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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The Ptolemaic Kingdom was a prosperous time in Egypt's ancient history, nearly three centuries from 305 B.C. to 30 B.C. that saw the reign of Queen Cleopatra VII and the construction of the Great Library and the Lighthouse of Alexandria. But during the period there were also several bloody Egyptian revolts against the ruling Greeks. Now, a team of historians and climate scientists say in a study published Tuesday that the unrest and uprisings may have been tied to volcanic eruptions that triggered climatic changes. Eruptions across the globe may have suppressed monsoons, the scientists said, diminishing the annual river floods and leading to food shortages. Because 70 percent of the world's population today similarly relies on monsoon dependent agricultural systems, the findings may warn of what might happen in a volcanically active future. Today, humanity lives during a relatively quiet volcanic period. The largest eruption to affect the climate in recent memory was the 1991 Pinatubo event in the Philippines. But things were much different during the Ptolemaic era. "They were unfortunate. They were living in a period where the Nile had extra variability because of these eruptions." When powerful volcanoes erupt, they spew ash and sulfur high into the stratosphere. There, the sulfur oxidizes into sulfate aerosols that reflect sunlight back to space, reducing evaporation on the planet's surface. As less water is absorbed into the clouds, less rain falls into seas and lakes. And if a volcano erupts in the Northern Hemisphere, especially at high latitudes, the cooling effect may tamper with the summertime heating that controls monsoon winds over Africa. When rainfall is reduced and monsoons are suppressed, the Nile fails to flood as usual, starving the crops that depend on its water. "We guess there was a lot of fear when the Egyptians see the Nile not flooding that year," said Joseph Manning, a historian from Yale and co author on the study. "There was fear about what's going to happen. 'Are we going to starve like last time when there was no flood three years in a row?'" That fear could have fueled riots. But to establish a connection between volcanoes and revolts in ancient Egypt, the team first had to determine the dates for when the volcanoes erupted. They did that by looking at ice core data from Greenland and Antarctica, which contain trapped sulfur from ancient volcanic eruptions. The scientists then turned to papyrus records to figure out when the Nile River failed to flood as usual. But the records from the Ptolemaic period were all qualitative, not quantitative. So the team turned to the Nilometer record, which contains measurements taken by large instruments built during Egypt's early Islamic period to monitor the Nile River's annual flood level. The researchers used the data from the Nilometer record to gain measurements from 622 A.D. to 1902 A.D., and identified 60 eruptions between those years. On average the Nile flood level was nearly nine inches lower during eruption years, the team discovered. This suggested a pattern that may have existed during the Ptolemaic Period, as well. After confirming a link between volcanic eruptions and poor Nile flooding, the team then matched the dates of Ptolemaic eruptions with papyrus records of well known rebellions. They found that eight of ten large uprisings happened within two years of a volcanic eruption. The biggest of these, the 20 year Theban revolt, began in 207 B.C., followed a large tropical eruption two years earlier. A papyrus report from this time indicated that most of the farmers were killed and the land had gone dry. In their paper, the researchers were careful to clarify that volcanoes alone were not the cause of Egyptian revolts. Rather, the natural disasters set off a reaction that mixed other ingredients like heavy taxation, ethnic conflict and disease to incite social unrest. "You have all of these things coalescing at a time, and you can imagine it's a powder keg," said Dr. Ludlow. "All of it puts a strain on the social system and can just ignite into revolt against the Ptolemaic Greek elites." Not every eruption in that period was linked to a revolt. The river failed to flood in the years following massive eruptions in 46 and 44 B.C. during Cleopatra's reign, but her food allocation policies may have helped avert uprisings. Kyle Harper, a professor of classics at the University of Oklahoma who has studied environmental change and the fall of the Roman Empire, said the new paper was compelling and that it showed a strong link between volcanic forces and their effects on the Nile River. He added that he would like to see if the analysis could be extended to Egypt's Roman and early Islamic periods.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Kelly Ripa returned to her morning show on Tuesday and declared, with a smile, that "our long national nightmare is over." Ms. Ripa's return to "Live With Kelly and Michael" ended a weeklong saga after she was said to have felt blindsided by ABC's announcement that her co host, Michael Strahan, would leave the show for "Good Morning America." The fallout from the last week will also hasten Mr. Strahan's departure: An ABC spokeswoman confirmed later on Tuesday that he would leave "Live" in two and a half weeks, about four months ahead of schedule. His final day on the show will be May 13. Mr. Strahan will make appearances on "Good Morning America" throughout the summer and will formally join as co anchor in September, the spokeswoman said. After it was announced that Mr. Strahan would be leaving, Ms. Ripa did not appear on three episodes of the show last week. That touched off speculation in the news media about when she would return and whether her relationship with Mr. Strahan was actually as carefree as it appeared to be every weekday morning on television. Ms. Ripa walked onto the "Live With Kelly and Michael" stage on Tuesday, holding hands with Mr. Strahan, before walking off to a side of the stage by herself, with the camera firmly fixed on her. Mr. Strahan was not shown. After an extended ovation, Ms. Ripa, standing in a red sleeveless jumpsuit, addressed the crowd. "I'm going to be perfectly honest," she said. "I'm fairly certain that there are trained professional snipers with tranquilizer darts in case I drift too far off message." The crowd laughed, and Ms. Ripa talked about what she described as this "bizarre time." "I needed a couple days to gather my thoughts," she said. "After 26 years with this company, I earned the right. Let's be honest, I know half of you called in sick to be here, so we get each other." Last Tuesday, ABC announced what seemed like a perfectly routine personnel move: In September, Mr. Strahan would leave "Live" for its corporate cousin "Good Morning America." Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Behind the scenes, Ms. Ripa was incensed. She was angry that she was given next to no warning about the announcement and she was said to be frustrated that her show was being slighted. Ms. Ripa has been host of the show since 2001 (and was previously an actress on "All My Children," a show produced by ABC). This year, Ms. Ripa celebrated her 15th anniversary as host on the show. After Ms. Ripa skipped episodes of "Live" last Wednesday and Thursday Friday's show was taped on Thursday, and she had a scheduled day off Monday she informed the staff late Friday night that she would return for Tuesday's show. Ms. Ripa said that "apologies have been made" and that the brouhaha started "a much greater conversation about communication and consideration, and most importantly, respect in the workplace." She then put something firmly, and pointedly, on the record: Executives at Disney, the owner of ABC, had told her that "Live" was important to the company. "The best thing to come out of this, you guys, is that our parent company has assured me that 'Live' is a priority," she said, with the muffled sound of Mr. Strahan applauding in the background. "Guys, calm down; they didn't say anything about Christmas bonuses." Ms. Ripa congratulated Mr. Strahan, who was still off camera, and said twice that she was "thrilled" for him. After about five minutes, Ms. Ripa said: "This is entertainment. It's supposed to be entertaining. So let's get back to what we do best and start the show. Oh, wait, incidentally, I just want to say one more thing. My dad was a bus driver for 30 years, and he thinks we're all crazy. I think he's right. I think he's right." Ms. Ripa returned to the desk with Mr. Strahan and they moved on with the show as they have for the last four years. They spoke about Ms. Ripa's 20th wedding anniversary which she celebrated while she was away from the show Snapchat, Tom Brady's suspension, Prince and bedbugs. A series of co hosts will begin appearing on "Live" with Ms. Ripa after Mr. Strahan departs. After Regis Philbin retired from "Live" in 2011, more than a dozen guest co hosts cycled through the show before Mr. Strahan was chosen as his successor about 10 months later.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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Few countries have covered themselves with glory in the battle against Covid 19. Western Europe, currently the center of the pandemic, has had its share of poor preparation, planning, and coordination. It has been hit hard: Italy has more than 120,000 cases and more than 15,000 dead the highest number in the world. Spain is not far behind with more than 12,000 deaths. The difference between the crisis in Europe and elsewhere is that Italy and Spain are parts of the European Union, the world's largest experiment in political integration. And in this pandemic, it doesn't appear to be living up to its ideals: A union that speaks often of solidarity between peoples initially saw little solidarity. A union often reproached for technocracy showed none of it. A union built on the freedom of movement of people and goods has become a chaotic continent of closed borders and export bans. Even though European Union institutions quickly moved to undo member countries' selfish restrictions on movement, much of the damage had been done, and Italians welcomed donations of medical supplies from China before they got them from Germany. Some may say that this proves that the European Union itself is failing its citizens. That idea might be especially attractive in countries like Italy and Spain that have yet to recover from the eurozone crisis and European mandated austerity. So when it comes to public health, how did European Union get it so wrong? And what can be done to make sure a similar disaster is averted in the future? The truth is that when it comes to public health, the Union has done what its member nations wanted it to do: not much. For years, European governments have kept Brussels out of health care and public health whenever possible. They have resisted everything from shared standards of care to electronic health records to allowing patients free access to the health care systems of other countries. Under the bloc's constitutional treaties, action on public health is meant to be optional and driven by member states, and health care is a member state responsibility. A disease in animals can be met with forceful E.U. action, but it can't if it becomes a human health problem. 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. That led Europe to where it is today, unprepared for a crisis that is crossing borders. The coronavirus pandemic has laid bare the importance of Europe wide public health and therefore the importance of an E.U. public health policy that lives up to the challenge. If the Union cannot manage fundamental threats to its citizens' health or help members that cannot on their own then its overall contribution to its citizens' life might be questioned. Here's what it should look like. First, the European Union needs to fund and build the capacity to test for diseases starting, of course, with the coronavirus and share the information across member nations. There is a strong chance that there will be graduated lockdowns of different parts of the world over the next 18 months, with restrictions tighter in places with more infections and loosened elsewhere. That would offer a way out of an unsustainable continentwide lockdown and closed borders, but it would depend on credible information, quickly shared. That kind of crucial information sharing is unlikely under the current set up: Europe's executive branch, the European Commission, is constrained by laws that limit its power and it has no specific budget for health security. The European Center for Disease Control and Prevention has only around 300 employees and is primarily a hub for sharing expertise. More professional staff, financial resources, research technology, and obligations for reporting to the Commission and E.C.D.C. could support members as they build up their public health infrastructure. This would be beneficial in smaller and poorer member states that have limited resources for testing or monitoring of population health. It would also be an asset to larger countries, which might not invest in expertise on all the diverse public health threats that exist. It would also continue to be helpful after Covid 19, when we have to confront other frightening public health issues, like the declining effectiveness of antibiotics. The second prescription is to build on European joint procurement of vaccines and equipment. Much of the struggle right now is getting adequate supplies of equipment like masks to the right places. The pandemic is likely to finally end when there is a vaccine; the risk is that getting adequate supplies of a vaccine will not be easy or harmonious. The European Union has a secret weapon here: its size. With 446 million people, it is the world's largest market for many drugs and medical devices. Since the H1N1 pandemic of 2009, E.U. member states have increasingly worked together to negotiate and purchase vaccines and medicines. That's the good news. But it could be done faster and better. Negotiating a price together is hard enough, since some governments have more sympathy for the pharmaceutical companies than others. But even negotiating a price is not the same as buying enough and allocating it according to need. A transparent and reliable mechanism to purchase medicines and devices together and allocate them by need would be a major E.U. contribution to health. That is sure to be especially critical in the coming months once a coronavirus vaccine is developed. A bidding war over scarce vaccines is one individual European countries might often lose, but the Union as a whole, with its immense market, cannot lose. Finally, the member countries need to use the bloc to get their act together when it comes to disaster responses. RescEU, the European Union's organization for crisis response at home and abroad, is a year old. It is set up to look for win win solutions, like pairing countries with spare firefighting capacity and countries with unexpected wildfires. It is not set up to manage continentwide crises like this pandemic. Nor does it really have its own resources. It relies on member states deciding, case by case, to help out. Only late last month did RescEU start developing stockpiles of key resources like masks, ventilators, vaccines and laboratory equipment for handling a pandemic. The European Union should allocate actual resources to RescEU: above all money that can be quickly released, but also dedicated stockpiles, staff and equipment for key risks. None of this will be easy. Member nations of all political affiliations have resisted E.U. intervention in health care and most public health policy. Driving down prices through joint procurement will be resisted by influential pharmaceutical lobbies, especially in countries like France and Germany. Politicians will resist allocating vital supplies by need rather than nationality. Even within decentralized countries, Spain and Italy as much as the United States, politicians will fight for their own jurisdictions and credit. Big and rich countries will see less value in cooperation than smaller and poorer ones. It is always easy to underfund stockpiles when there is no crisis. But European integration is too far along for it to be avoided. Europe's economies are tightly woven together. They can no more be isolated for a year than their individual citizens can be. The European Union institutions will have to lead the members out of their shared public health crisis. That will require measures enable the member states to take joint action. These changes will help the European Union deal with its problems right now, so that its economies and societies can exit their medically induced coma, and in the future, because threats to health like Covid 19 will not go away. Europe is only as safe as the least safe place in it, and that is why governments and citizens need to ensure the E.U. can make all of Europe safe. Scott L. Greer ( scottlgreer) is a professor of health management and policy, global public health and political science at the University of Michigan. 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.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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People have plenty of opinions as to whether the depiction of teen sex on TV is moral enough or whether it's responsible enough. There's less talk about whether it's bad enough. Too often it's airbrushed and idealized, rather than a fumbling, awkward, slapstick process of trial and eros. There is, as the title advertises, plenty of sex in "Sex Education," the sweet and raunchily funny British teen comedy arriving Friday on Netflix. But the most engaging thing about it is the "education" part. Like its middle school American counterpart, "Big Mouth," "Sex Education" explores sex as a learning experience about who you are, what you want and how you relate to other people. Its unlikely educator is Otis Milburn (Asa Butterfield), an awkward, inexperienced teenager. His mother, Jean (a wonderfully deadpan Gillian Anderson), is a sex therapist, with frank manner and a limited sense of personal boundaries. She explains sex to a very young Otis in a flashback thus: "Intercourse can be wonderful. But it can also cause tremendous pain. And if you're not careful, sex can destroy lives." You've heard the line about the cobbler's children not having shoes? Otis is fixed fine for footwear. But he can't masturbate. His adolescent anxiety about his body (he's not crazy about erections, either) is intensified by the constant T.M.I. factor of living with an oversharing parent in a house with erotic art on the walls and exotic implements in the drawers. But Otis has picked up a lot through osmosis. When he talks a classmate through an uncomfortable sex issue (Viagra is involved), his friend and secret crush, Maeve (Emma Mackey), convinces him to set up a side gig as a "sex and relationship therapist" for his classmates. Those who can't do it, teach. It's a far fetched premise, as even Otis's clients admit, but living with Jean has given him a specific skill set and perceptiveness, and somehow he and the show sell it. ("It's weird," a popular boy tells him. "You're like my age, but wise. You're like my mum in a little man's body.") The series strains at first to establish the procedural format: a little bit "Masters of Sex," a little bit "Doogie Howser, XXX." But it blooms, over eight episodes, into a smart, sensitive look at teens finding their place and figuring out the owner's manuals for their bodies. The creator, Laurie Nunn, has managed to make a teen sex comedy I haven't quite seen before timely but not hamfistedly topical, feminist, with a refreshing lack of angst about its subject. Sex, in this show, isn't an "issue" or a problem or a titillating lure: It's an aspect of health. So yes, there are stories about S.T.D.s and revenge porn, and a remarkable, perceptive abortion subplot in the third episode. But there are also story lines about fantasy and sexual compatibility and the gap between pornified expectations and mundane reality. Like Otis, the series is empathetic and nonjudgmental. It's also generous in scope. Past teen comedies tended to be about the desires of male virgins like Otis and their struggles to get laid. "Sex Education" centers and decenters Otis; he's the protagonist but more comfortable observing and listening, as a supporting player in others' stories. One of the strongest arcs belongs to Eric (Ncuti Gatwa), his gay best friend, with whom Otis has an annual date to dress up in drag and watch "Hedwig and the Angry Inch." Eric, exuberant but naive, isn't just discovering his sexuality but learning what he likes and how to present himself in the world. There's a great small moment where Eric, who is black, admires the "fierce" nail polish on an older black man who cheerfully advises him, "Stick to the jewel tones." Dealing with homophobia is part of Eric's journey, but not the sum of it. He's picked on at school, not for being gay but for being a band geek who once got a public erection, earning him the nickname "Tromboner." (An unfair label; he plays the French horn.) "Sex Education" has a knack for introducing characters as stereotypes, then complicating them: jocks have anxieties; nerds have lusts; mean girls and bullies have sympathetic backgrounds. Maeve, in particular, is exquisitely drawn she's smart, tough and outcast both for being poor and for being a girl who has sex and likes it. "Sex Education," unafraid to have fun and be funny, is less like its stark British predecessor "Skins" than like a well executed American teen dramedy on CW. The big difference, of course, is its streaming TV freedom to be as graphic as it wants to be and it wants to be, from its opening seconds. Like "Big Mouth," "Sex Education" is a birds and bees comedy I'd endorse for both teenagers and parents of teenagers, but fair warning: If your sense of boundaries is as expansive as Jean's, you could enjoy it together. If you're more like Otis, I'd suggest watching separately.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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We're feeling loopy and a little loony tunes under lockdown, and bet you are, too. We want to run around in the great outdoors, chase after a pizza delivery guy and maybe throw a cream pie in someone's face, all of which happens in the madcap comedy "What's Up, Doc?" As light and ticklish as a cockatoo feather, Peter Bogdanovich's ode to 1930s shenanigans is a guy meets gal story with pratfalls, silly jokes and perfectly timed slamming hotel doors. It doesn't have a lot on its mind other than movie love and its own style or does it? The dizzy story almost defies synopsis and involves spies and crooks and scholars and assorted identical red plaid bags, all spinning like precariously balanced plates. At its core, though, there's Ryan O'Neal as Howard Bannister, a sober, bespectacled music professor who arrives in San Francisco with his hilariously no nonsense fiancee, Eunice Burns (a sublime Madeline Kahn in her feature debut). Their future and the film's denouement is sealed the minute Judy Maxwell, an anarchic force played by Barbra Streisand, sets her sights on Howard.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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