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"You look really cute," the coffee shop barista said to me, handing over a pastry. "You just look so cute," my co worker said when I came in, late, to our daily meeting. "Can I hug you? I have to hug you. You're just so. ..." My friend's voice trailed off, smothered by the weight of our embrace. But she didn't have to finish the sentence. We both knew. I looked cute. Had I gone on a makeover show? Got a fabulous hairstyle? Splurged on some amazing new designer? No. It was late November, I was six months pregnant and wearing 15 overalls. It is not an overstatement that I found myself on the receiving end of more positive attention for my looks during that first week in overalls than at any point in my life not on my wedding day, not at prom, not when I wore my first choker necklace in the eighth grade or got an extremely cool eyebrow piercing during a college term abroad. When you're living with a growing, changing and visibly pregnant body, body image gets weird. For me, gaining weight was more emotionally arduous than I would have thought. Pulling on pants that were straining in the thighs as well as stomach, for instance, was irrationally troubling. Maybe the wave of positive attention felt extra profound because I was struggling with my new topography more than I wanted to admit. The topics parents are talking about. Evidence based guidance. Personal stories that matter. Sign up now to get NYT Parenting in your inbox every week. But after months of near daily clothing experimentation (eventually the black overalls were joined by a pair of blue corduroy overalls), I can say with some certainty that maternity overalls guarantee a remarkable emotional response from their beholders. They are adorable in the same way that puppies and kittens are adorable in a primal way. This is not news to those who sell them. Work wear, in general, has invaded mainstream women's fashion, but overalls occupy a special place for the pregnant. The Cut has made a special guide to buying them; the online retailer ASOS introduced maternity overalls in 2015 and sales have risen every season since. When Ariane Goldman began Hatch, her upscale maternity company, in 2012, she had a onesie in the original collection of 12 items. "It was a street stopper," she said in a phone interview. The shop added variations on the onesie theme to seasonal collections, but it wasn't until 2016, in a collaboration with Current/Elliott denim, that Hatch began selling overalls. Immediately, the pieces sold out, a fact that Ms. Goldman said was, frankly, a bit surprising, given the price tag of 178. For spring, Hatch offers no fewer than five new styles of jumpers alone, in a multitude of colors and fabrics. Maternity overalls offer many tangible benefits. They are comfortable, with a lack of waistband and adjustable straps. They can be quite economical for a piece that serves as both top and bottom (starting at 48 on ASOS, for instance, which has some 11 versions for sale). Some people, like my friend Jessie Cohen in Los Angeles, just adapted nonmaternity overalls for even more savings. ("I cannot tell you how many compliments I got.") Others, like the lifestyle blogger Caroline Harper Knapp, see a future filled with overalls even after birth. "My only disappointment with these maternity overalls," she said at the end of 2015, "is that I didn't order them earlier in my pregnancy. I am obsessed." But beyond utility, maternity overalls have a deeper appeal. When I wear them, not only do people want to remark upon them, but they also want to touch me. (People often want to touch you when you're pregnant and don't always feel the need to ask.) This didn't come as a total shock because, a few years ago, I had a good friend who often wore maternity overalls, and every time I saw her, something deep within me stirred. She's a petite person, and the sight of her, belly protruding, turned me into some kind of handsy version of the creature from "Pan's Labyrinth," gawking at the outfit, commenting on it, awkwardly throwing my arm around her shoulders, hugging hello and goodbye and hello and goodbye. At the time, I thought it was just that she was so damn squeezable in them, but now I think it's not really about any one person looking great (or cute). There's something of Freud's "uncanny" in clothing like overalls or a onesie that puts a pregnant woman in a toddler's outfit. There's no cleavage in overalls; there are barely legs. The fact of a pregnant stomach is not hidden, at all, by the shape of the clothing, but unless the overalls are somehow fitted, the exact contours of one's body remain fuzzy. It's a profoundly mixed signal: the ultimate sign of physical female maturity coupled with clothing that de emphasizes female sexuality. As Ms. Goldman put it, "Overalls allow these two moments to meet." Over time, of course, my overalls' magic ego giving power has dimmed. My friends and co workers stopped paying attention to them, likely through the sheer repetition of their rotation in my wardrobe. (No shame, it seems, in rocking the same piece of clothing to work three or more days in a row, or wearing the same overalls and T shirt to your baby shower, wedding rehearsal dinner and public speaking engagement.)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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New York City is a gateway for fresh art talent but it's also an archive of art careers past. Some are visible, in the "active" file. Most are buried deep. A few surface only after artists have departed, as is the case with the American photographer Alvin Baltrop, who was unknown to the mainstream art world when he died in 2004 at 55, and who now has a bright, tough monument of a retrospective at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. The show, "The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop," is also a monument to New York itself during the 1970s and '80s, when Mr. Baltrop did his major work. During those decades, the city was physically falling apart. At the same time, it radiated creative energy. Among other things, in the wake of the 1969 Stonewall uprising, it was home base for a new gay consciousness. Disintegration and rebellion dovetailed in a line of derelict shipping piers that stretched the Hudson River between Chelsea and Greenwich Village. Isolated from the rest of the city after the collapse of the southernmost section of the elevated West Side Highway, the piers became a preserve for gay sex and communion, and the primary subject of Mr. Baltrop's surviving photographs. These include architectural studies of the piers, but also shots of their semi residential population of homeless people, teenage runaways, sexual adventurers, criminals and artists, a company that Mr. Baltrop, in effect, joined. Some shots are of the ship itself as a functioning war machine, which, although it never actually went to Southeast Asia during Mr. Baltrop's time, kept its crew busy with on deck drills. Far more interesting and experimental are images of domestic life at sea: sailors sunbathing; napping on deck, and rubbing shoulders in tight living quarters. And most daring, are dramatically posed and lighted studies of nude male bodies: torsos, buttocks, genitals. In these images, the mood is erotic without being furtive. These are clearly collaborations with willing models. After discharge from the service, Mr. Baltrop returned to New York City, where he lived on the Lower East Side with a woman named Alice and made a living as a taxi driver. By this point, just a few years after Stonewall, the piers had become the main stage for an openly expressed gay sexuality, and they drew Mr. Baltrop in. Initially he used his flexible hours as a cabby to visit and photograph them. Then, to gain more time, he quit driving, bought a van and, supporting himself as a freelance mover, camped there for days and nights on end. There's no question that he considered his photographs particularly of Pier 52, then located at the end of Gansevoort Street, just beyond where the Whitney Museum of American Art now stands a long term project, a mix of historical documentation, insider anthropology, and autobiography. Life on the piers, with its definable demographic and culture of confinement, was not so different from that on board a ship, and Mr. Baltrop viewed it both from afar and up close. The more than 200 pictures in the Bronx show are very much about pulling back for the broad view, then zeroing in. He was careful to give the piers a context. He shot the waterfront neighborhood with its bars (The Ramrod, Badlands, the Stud), its transient hotels, and its commercial truck parking lots (which also served as nocturnal trysting places). And he photographed, at varying distances, the abandoned shipping depots and warehouse sheds on the piers themselves. As a group, these images are invaluable contributions to American urban visual history, but also to art history. A lot of new art was happening on the piers. In 1975, the New York artist Gordon Matta Clark sliced a huge crescent shaped, light flooded hole in a west facing wall on Pier 52 and titled it "Day's End"; a painter named Tava (Gustav von Will) was doing murals, as were younger contemporaries like Mike Bidlo and David Wojnarowicz. Mr. Baltrop recorded some of this work, though it seemed incidental to his true interest. What really gripped him was the grandeur and danger of structural ruin, and the people who occupied it. Look closely at his panoramic views of pier exteriors and you'll see, in many, the presence of tiny figures, clothed or nude, leaning from windows, lounging around, having sex. And the majority of his shots were of populated interiors. In Pier 52, he used a homemade version of a window cleaner's harness to suspend himself from the ceiling and survey activities below. At the same time, because he became a regular, unthreatening presence, he was able to photograph on the ground action, much of it sexual, from an intimate vantage. The piers were not benign places, and Mr. Baltrop knew it. Muggings were common. Murders happened. He took chilling pictures of the police fishing bodies from the Hudson. (One locally famous waterfront habitue, the drag queen and activist Marsha P. Johnson, of whom Mr. Baltrop made a wonderful portrait, was found dead in the river in 1992.) He spoke, later in his life, of "the frightening, mad, unbelievable, violent, beautiful things that were going on" at the piers. He was aware that his own attraction to them had a pathological element. "It became an addiction," he said. "It was like a drug. It was a drug." Yet you find little sense of menace in the photographs, most of which are black and white, with a few in color. Raw, cavernous interiors have a church like luminosity. And, despite repeated images of bare flesh the work can feel erotic but chaste, the way Thomas Eakins's paintings of adolescent boys at a swimming hole do. Much has been made of the "classical" poise of explicitly sexual images by Baltrop's celebrated contemporaries Peter Hujar and Robert Mapplethorpe. But Mr. Baltrop's a classicist too, just a less self conscious one. So why has he been all but ignored until fairly recently? Again, his outsider status as a queer working class African American is a big part of the answer. (He had two small shows, one in a bar where he moonlighted as a bouncer, but one gallery owner who saw the pictures referred to him as "a real sewer rat type"; another accused him of stealing work by a white photographer.) Fortunately, toward the end of his life, he met the painter Randal Wilcox, who immediately saw the value of his photography and, after Mr. Baltrop's death from cancer in 2004, rescued it from what could easily have been obliteration. In addition to a cache of personal items identity cards, medical records, cameras that are in the Bronx show, Mr. Baltrop left behind a handful of beat up photographic prints and thousands of rolls of film that he couldn't afford to have processed. In 2008, an Artforum essay by the writer and curator Douglas Crimp (reprinted in the exhibition catalog) put Mr. Baltrop's name into circulation, and his reputation continues to grow. This fall his work will be included in the rehang of the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection. He's also in the Whitney's collection. (On the site of Pier 52, which served for more than a decade as his studio and sometime home, a public art project by the artist David Hammons, organized by the Whitney and the Hudson River Park Trust, began construction this week.) Mr. Baltrop himself might well be hard pressed today to recognize the part of the city he once recorded. Among the show's latest images is one of a pier engulfed in flames and smoke. The picture may well date from around 1986, when the "sex piers" began to be demolished by the city, to be replaced by the luxury condos, entertainment centers and the transplanted uptown museum there today. It's gratifying to think of Mr. Baltrop, brilliant, persistent, and fully resurrected in the Bronx show, as the true phoenix arising from the ashes. The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop Through Feb. 9 at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1040 Grand Concourse; 718 681 6000, bronxmuseum.org.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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There are some 3,800 ghost towns in the United States, most abandoned in the 19th and early 20th centuries in favor of bigger cities, or casualties of changing industry. Some languish as ruins, others are designated as national parks. And a rare handful are in the midst of being developed into luxury vacation spots. The old silver mining town of Cerro Gordo, Calif., nestled in the high desert mountains near Death Valley, is one of those. It was purchased in 2018 by two entrepreneurs, who planned to convert it into a "destination for dreamers" an Instagrammably rustic resort, open to overnight accommodations as soon as this spring. In March, one of the entrepreneurs, Brent Underwood, left for a trip to the lonely location that was only meant to last a week or two. Instead, a pandemic and then an unseasonable snowstorm hit, making it close to impossible for him to leave. (The next closest town is three hours away by car, and an eight and a half mile drive down a steep washboard road separates the camp from the main highway.) To pass the time, and with limited cell and internet service, Mr. Underwood developed more rustic hobbies. He took up animal tracking, monitoring the activity of a bobcat who appeared to visit his porch nightly, leaving paw prints in fresh powder. He melted snow for potable water. He explored the silver mine tunnels for which the town is famous and found graffiti scrawled into the wall from 1938. He has also continued to work on repairs. At its most populated, over 4,500 residents lived in Cerro Gordo, but only 22 original structures remain. Two historic homes known as the Mortimer Belshaw and Louis D. Gordon "mansions," named after the oil barons who bought out Mexican prospectors in the 1870s had been converted to modest bed and breakfasts by the former owners. Mr. Underwood toggles between both properties, both as resident and renovator. Out of fear and respect (and social distancing), the few places Mr. Underwood has avoided are the cemetery and the bunk house, which he reports is haunted. ("The longer I'm here the more things happen to me that I can't explain," Mr. Underwood said in May. "I was a firm nonbeliever prior to purchasing the property.") During the gold and silver rushes of the late 19th century, living in isolation was par for the course, an inevitable cost of the frontier dream. Though this existence was brutal and often boring not to mention violent, racist and dangerous the hardship itself has been romanticized within the public's whitewashed imagination of the Wild West. (It continues to be of endless fascination today: A Reddit forum where Mr. Underwood described the idiosyncrasies of his stay went viral in April, perhaps fueled by many people's collective boredom or weariness with stay at home directives.) Living in the middle of nowhere is just another day's work for the park rangers at Bodie State Historic Park, California's biggest and most celebrated ghost town. Open to the public whenever the road is accessible, Bodie is known for its "arrested decay" condition, in which the structures built in the 1800s are maintained but only to the extent that they don't deteriorate. At 8,379 feet elevation in the Sierra Nevada, Bodie is so remote it boasts its own microclimate. A handful of park rangers including Taylor Jackson, who has worked at Bodie for three years, live an isolated existence there most of the year. "I mean, the nearest grocery store is two hours away," said Mr. Jackson. "If you forget to buy the milk, you're not going to have milk that week." This makes it impossible for Mr. Jackson, 38, not to imagine what it may have been like for an early settler during Bodie's heyday from 1887 to 1892. Once, during a particularly nasty snowstorm, a roof was almost ripped off a building. Mr. Jackson and three other rangers struggled with rope in gale force winds to tie down the aging metal sheeting. It was a task he knew could have befallen early pioneers some hundred years ago. "I'm still shocked on a daily basis as to how these people were able to make it through the winters the way they did," he said. "Their walls had holes in them. I mean, the snow was coming in through their house." For Brad Sturdivant, a former superintendent park ranger and former executive director of the Bodie Foundation, snow and isolation provide a relief. Mr. Sturdivant had spent 24 winters working at Bodie since 1975 before helping to establish the foundation in 2008. "For some of us it was the best time of year because it gave you the opportunity to sit back," he said of the lonely winters. "Well, not sit back, it gave you a chance to prepare for the next year." When open, over 150,000 tourists visit Bodie annually, recalling the bustling town at the turn of the 20th century. (The park has recently reopened for the season, after closing under stay at home orders at the height of the pandemic.) But when it is snowed in, it's rather empty. "Bodie at one time was the third largest population center in the state of California, and it went away," said Mr. Sturdivant. "The biggest lesson to take from Bodie's history? This too shall pass." According to the executive director, Edoardo Rossi, 40, staying in a ghost town, even one that's been renovated, is akin to time travel. Actual cowboys often cruise by with their cattle in warmer seasons and Butch Cassidy himself supposedly carved his name into the original bar top in the saloon. Plus, no more than 50 people visit or live at Dunton at any one time. At 9,000 feet elevation, 22 miles from the main road, the 20 acres of the old compound are surrounded by wilderness. Twenty staff members were sheltered in place during stay at home orders. "I've had some real reflection moments of what it must've been like to live at Dunton before the world traveled," said Seth O'Donovan, 40, who lives and works at Dunton year round as director of operations. "We're way out here but we felt like a fluid part of the world because our guests travel in and out, all of a sudden that just stopped and overnight. It was just us." The focus of Ms. O'Donovan's job shifted from actively managing clients and staff to ensuring the immediate safety and wellness of the community. The resort has reopened for business, with many of the communal aspects of the luxurious stay modified. (Meals are no longer shared family style, for one thing.) Travelers have not flooded back but "in the long term, I think places like ours will become more popular as people seek to be outside again," said Mr. Rossi. The developers of Cerro Gordo have a similar vision. "I certainly think that people will prefer more space to spread out over dense urban core areas," said Mr. Underwood. "We have 400 acres here and never plan to have more than 20 or 30 people here at a time, so we definitely have enough room for people to not feel on top of each other." As quarantines lift but social distancing continues, a vacation in an isolated historic site may also seem like a much safer option. A true ghost town is different: it's quiet and empty by virtue of being deserted. Time moved on and the world changed around it. No one sings from balconies or has food delivered. No one waits for life to start again, because it never went away. "There were some moments where I felt such a heavy heart for friends of mine in hospitality who are in cities right now," said Ms. O'Donovan. "I live up here because I can leave work and go foraging for local and wild plants, I can go on my trail run and be with our deer friends. That connection to nature here has honestly sustained me. It is the connection to the wild, to me, that is in some ways that I don't even know how to express or argue right now the entire point of this whole moment." For Mr. Underwood, the extreme isolation in Cerro Gordo was similarly clarifying. After six weeks alone he found a briefcase in the back of the old general store where miners once bought their sundries. The blue tattered luggage was filled with the ephemera of another man's life a miner who lived in the town, some hundred years earlier at the height of its second boom in zinc production during the early 20th century. "Bank statements from the 1910s, mining claims he'd taken out, lawsuits with other miners, divorce papers citing 'extreme cruelty,' uncashed checks, love letters, hate letters, everything," said Mr. Underwood. "It was this perfectly preserved time capsule of a miner's life." The fate of the miner is lost to time, but the discovery, Mr. Underwood said, "left me with an image of memento mori." "This man who had hopes and dreams, highs and lows, at the end, all he was reduced to was this briefcase of papers," he said. "What do I want to leave in my briefcase of papers?" He changed his routine, started taking a daily hike at sunset and learning how to photograph the stars. He learned to sand and stain floors and build decks. "All things I definitely wouldn't have learned had I stayed in my apartment in Austin," Mr. Underwood said. And because of the former caretaker's careful planning, he had enough stocked canned tuna and toilet paper for himself and all attendant spirits. "I'm already making plans for what I'm going to do next winter," Mr. Underwood said. "I don't plan on going anywhere before then so I need to be prepared."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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CHICAGO When it comes to hot jobs in today's economy, software app developer is almost certainly near the top of the list. Robotics and automotive engineers, too. But pastry chef? In recent years, as fine food has evolved from highbrow preoccupation to a form of mass entertainment, demand for people skilled in the delicate art of dessert making has soared. "Many students are getting hired before they even graduate," said Jacquy Pfeiffer, dean of the French Pastry School here in Chicago, which graduates about 160 full time students each year. "Restaurants are being built much faster than I can produce professionals." It's not just restaurants that are hiring, but a profusion of pie shops, cupcakeries and cronut mongers as well. Even grocery stores are snatching up bona fide pastry chefs. Yet, according to Mr. Pfeiffer and 10 other chefs and restaurateurs, the salaries of pastry makers in the Chicago area do not appear to have budged much, if at all. The key to this puzzle tells us a lot about why the American economy isn't necessarily behaving the way workers have traditionally assumed. Employers, according to those in the industry, have increasingly turned to less experienced workers to ensure the flow of sweets. In effect, they are creating their own pastry chefs like so many tart shells rather than paying a premium to hire them fully formed. The strategy isn't unique to the culinary world. In many booming sectors, employers have an underappreciated capacity to slow the upward march of wages by hiring less credentialed candidates. A company looking for a web developer an occupation whose numbers have increased by about one quarter during the three most recent years for which there are government data could pay well into the six figures for top talent, or it could pay in the mid five figures. "It depends on the needs of the website," said Boris Epstein, co founder of the tech recruiting firm Binc. "Coding academies and boot camps" short courses lasting a few weeks to several months "graduate people who are perfectly fine." As a result, wages for web developers nationally increased only modestly during the same period, though the rate of increase was most likely higher at more tech heavy companies, which also frequently offer stock options. Along the way, said Sam Toia of the Illinois Restaurant Association, there has been a significant increase in chef driven restaurants, the sort of establishments whose chefs would sooner cut out their tongues than outsource their dessert offerings. "I don't think any self respecting place does that," said John Shields, the executive chef and, with his wife, proprietor of Smyth and The Loyalist, a pair of restaurants they opened this summer. And yet Mr. Shields's case illustrates how restaurants have managed to keep salaries in check. Instead of hiring a pastry chef who spent years honing her skills, he chose to hire a pair of sous chefs in their mid 20s for each restaurant. He pays them about 35,000 a year. Mr. Shields, a longtime savory chef who did a tour at the famed Chicago restaurant Alinea, and his wife and business partner, Karen Urie Shields, a former executive pastry chef at another noted Chicago eatery, Charlie Trotter's, conceptualize the desserts. The two younger chefs execute them. Mr. Shields and other restaurateurs say there is a strong economic imperative at work. In a low margin service business like food, it is difficult to pay high salaries to a worker who is involved in only a limited aspect of the restaurant's menu. "Paying someone 55,000 per year is a big venture," he said. (For the Shieldses, the rationale is even more creative than it is economic: Their pastry vision could clash with that of a more experienced chef.) Although both of Mr. Shields's young pastry chefs have committed to staying for two years, the pay means that the Shieldses may not be able to keep them for much longer. "Everyone is looking for somebody," he said. "Someone might say, 'Why do I want to make 35,000 at this place when I could go make 75,000 working for Whole Foods?' " (A Whole Foods spokeswoman said the company generally paid salaries in that range only for those who oversaw desserts across multiple stores.) Many restaurateurs have adopted some variation of the Shieldses' strategy, meeting their pastry needs by throwing younger and less experienced people at the job. In an extreme case, they simply pull a cook off the savory line and rechristen him the pastry chef. The upside for young pastry chefs is that rigorous training at a top flight restaurant like Mr. Shields's can lead to a position earning considerably more, like overseeing desserts for a large restaurant group or hotel, where they can typically make 70,000 or 80,000 a year. And major opportunities for talented chefs can come relatively early in their careers. This spring, less than two and a half years after she began seriously studying the craft, Emily Spurlin was hired to be the executive pastry chef at Bad Hunter, a vegetable focused restaurant in Chicago's West Loop, one of the city's foodie havens. When the restaurant opens this month, Ms. Spurlin will oversee three cooks and supply the baked goods for a Latin American inspired cafe and bar owned by the same restaurant group. On a Wednesday in late September, Ms. Spurlin, 28, was busy preparing a vegan curry squash tart whose richness came from a mix of coconut milk and creamed cashews, for a tasting with some of the restaurant's staff members. The chocolate chip cookies she had been refining for the better part of a month were finally coming along the breakthrough was caramelizing the butter but she said she was having trouble finding a spot in the restaurant where her sourdough starter would rise, given its sensitivity to temperature. At this, she pulled out a plastic bin full of starter labeled "Clint Yeastwood." "Most bakers name their starters," she confided. Pastry traditionalists fret over the willingness of restaurateurs to rely on the young and inexperienced. Mr. Galzin, the Nashville restaurateur, complained that young pastry chefs too often concocted elaborate creations before they had mastered the basics. "People feel like they can skip some of the fundamentals of pastry," he said. "Like rosemary caramel you want to add rosemary but your caramel sucks in the first place." Even Grant Achatz, the celebrated chef behind Alinea, who famously did not replace a highly regarded pastry chef after he decamped for another restaurant in 2006, said he was ambivalent about the approach. On one hand, he and his fellow practitioners of progressive gastronomy, who blur the lines between sweet and savory dishes, often find the idea of a separate pastry chef restrictive and even contrived. On the other? "I really love the idea of someone that's dedicated to their craft, dedicated to the practice of pastry," he said. "I feel like it's something that's going to come back into the fold really soon."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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When last we left off, the older prince was married and settled. But the younger prince was searching for true love. Spoiler alert! He met a woman. A commoner (gasp!). An American (get the smelling salts!). And they are getting married Saturday. Here's some reading to catch you up, if you've been hidden away in a castle guarded by a dragon for the past year. If you honestly know NOTHING (yeah, right), our F.A.Q. is for you! It covers the basics: who, what, where, when. And everything else. And no, you cannot go. I know I've seen Meghan Markle before ... Yep. If you've watched the USA show "Suits," she played Rachel Zane. Harry's in it for love. In the 1930s, Edward VIII was forbidden to marry his divorced American girlfriend and also be king, so he gave up the throne. But that was another century, another world and many divorces ago.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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Nearly a century after the film "Reefer Madness" alarmed the nation, some policymakers and doctors are again becoming concerned about the dangers of marijuana, although the reefers are long gone. Experts now distinguish between the "new cannabis" legal, highly potent, available in tabs, edibles and vapes and the old version, a far milder weed passed around in joints. Levels of T.H.C., the chemical that produces marijuana's high, have been rising for at least three decades, and it's now possible in some states to buy vape cartridges containing little but the active ingredient. The concern is focused largely on the link between heavy usage and psychosis in young people. Doctors first suspected a link some 70 years ago, and the evidence has only accumulated since then. In a forthcoming book, "Tell Your Children," Alex Berenson, a former Times reporter, argues that legalization is putting a generation at higher risk of schizophrenia and other psychotic syndromes. Critics, including leading researchers, have called the argument overblown, and unfaithful to the science. Can cannabis use cause psychosis? Yes, but so can overuse of caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, stimulants and hallucinogens. Psychosis is a symptom: a temporary disorientation that resembles a waking dream, with odd, imagined sights and sounds, often accompanied by paranoia or an ominous sensation. The vast majority of people who have this kind of psychotic experience do not go on to develop a persistent condition such as schizophrenia, which is characterized by episodes of psychosis that recur for years, as well as cognitive problems and social withdrawal. Can heavy use cause schizophrenia or other syndromes? That is the big question, and so far the evidence is not strong enough to answer one way or the other. Even top scientists who specialize in marijuana research are divided, drawing opposite conclusions from the same data. "I've been doing this research for 25 years, and it's polarizing even among academics," said Margaret Haney, a professor of neurobiology at Columbia University Medical Center. "This is what the marijuana field is like." The debate centers on the distinction between correlation and causation. People with psychotic problems often use cannabis regularly; this is a solid correlation, backed by numerous studies. But it is unclear which came first, the cannabis habit or the psychoses. Children who later develop schizophrenia often seem to retreat into their own world, stalked periodically by bizarre fears and fantasies well outside the range of usual childhood imagination, and well before they are exposed to cannabis. Those who go on to become regular marijuana users often use other substances as well, including alcohol and cigarettes, making it more difficult for researchers to untangle causation. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Consider cigarettes, the least mind altering of these substances. In a 2015 study, a team led by Dr. Kenneth S. Kendler of Virginia Commonwealth University analyzed medical data on nearly two million people in Sweden. The data followed the individuals over time, from young adulthood, when most schizophrenia diagnoses occur, to middle age. Smoking was a predictor for later development of the disorder, and in what doctors call a dose response relationship: the more a person smoked, the higher the risk. Yet nicotine attracts nowhere near the concern that cannabis does, in part because the two drugs are so different in their everyday effects: mildly stimulated versus stoned. Indeed, some scientists have studied nicotine as a partial treatment for schizophrenia, to blunt the disorders effects on thinking and memory. Is it biologically plausible that cannabis could cause a psychotic disorder? Yes. Brain scientists know very little about the underlying biology of psychotic conditions, other than that hundreds of common gene variants are likely involved. Schizophrenia, for instance, is not a uniform disorder but an umbrella term for an array of unexplained problems involving recurrent psychosis, and other common symptoms. Even so, there is circumstantial evidence for a biological mechanism. Psychotic disorders tend to emerge in late adolescence or early adulthood, during or after a period of rapid brain development. In the teenage years, the brain strips away unneeded or redundant connections between brain cells, in a process called synaptic pruning. This editing is concentrated in the prefrontal cortex, the region behind the forehead where thinking and planning occur and the region that is perturbed in psychotic conditions. The region is rich with so called CB1 receptors, which are involved in the pruning, and are engaged by cannabis use. And alterations to the pruning process may well increase schizophrenia risk, according to recent research at the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard. In a 2016 analysis, scientists there found that people with the disorder often have a gene variant that appears to accelerate the pruning process. What does this mean for me? Experts may debate whether cannabis use can lead to psychotic disorders, but they mostly agree on how to minimize one's risk. Psychotic conditions tend to run in families, which suggests there is an inherited genetic vulnerability. Indeed, according to some studies, people prone to or at heightened risk of psychosis seem to experience the effects of cannabis differently than peers without such a history. The users experience a more vivid high, but they also are more likely to experience psychosis like effects such as paranoia. The evidence so far indicates that one's familial risk for psychotic disorders outweighs any added effect of cannabis use. In a 2014 study, a team led by Ashley C. Proal and Dr. Lynn E. DeLisi of Harvard Medical School recruited cannabis users with and without a family history of schizophrenia, as well as non users with and without such a history. The researchers made sure the cannabis users did not use other drugs in addition, a factor that muddied earlier studies. The result: there was a heightened schizophrenia risk among people with a family history, regardless of cannabis use. "My study clearly shows that cannabis does not cause schizophrenia by itself," said Dr. DeLisi. "Rather, a genetic predisposition is necessary. It is highly likely, based on the results of this study and others, that cannabis use during adolescence through to age 25, when the brain is maturing and at its peak of growth in a genetically vulnerable individual, can initiate the onset of schizophrenia." Because marijuana has been illegal for so long, research that could settle the question has been sorely lacking, although that has begun to change. The National Institutes of Health have launched a 300 million project that will track thousands of children from the age of 9 or 10 through adolescence, and might help clarify causation. For the near future, expert opinions likely will be mixed. "Usually it is the research types who are doing 'the sky is falling' bit, but here it is switched," said Dr. Jay Geidd, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego. "The researchers are wary of overselling the dangers, as was clearly done in the past. However, clinicians overwhelmingly endorse seeing many more adolescents with 'paranoia'" of some kind. In short: Regularly using the new, high potency cannabis may indeed be a risk for young people who are related to someone with a psychotic condition. On that warning, at least, most experts seem to agree.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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For four years, Beth Howard rented the famous cottage in the Grant Wood painting "American Gothic" in Eldon, Iowa. It is owned by the State Historical Society. Grant Wood's "American Gothic" painting (and all of its parodies) may be legendary, but most people don't realize that the little white farmhouse in the background is real that it's located in Eldon, Iowa (pop. 900), that it's owned by the State Historical Society, and that, until recently, it was a private residence. There are only a handful of people who can say they've lived "inside" his masterpiece painting. I am one of them. And it was a wild ride. In 1930, Grant Wood traveled to Eldon, not far from the Missouri border, with his artist friend, John Sharp, who was from the tiny rural burg a busy railroad hub at that time. They drove past a small farmhouse on the edge of town. It was a humble cottage in the Carpenter Gothic style, typical for that era with one exception: beneath the steeply pitched roof was a pointed arch window normally found adorning churches. Wood was amused by what he deemed a pretentious detail and asked his friend to stop so he could sketch. It was this house more precisely, this window that inspired what has become one of the most famous works of art in the world. Wood drew his sketch on an envelope and returned to his art studio in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where he imagined what the occupants of the house might look like. Using his sister, Nan, and his dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby, as the models, he created a pair of Midwestern characters some would say caricatures with stern, bordering on sour, expressions. He painted the man, the woman and the house individually, on separate occasions, and titled his work "American Gothic." Its fame did not guarantee the home's protection. Built in 1881, ten years before Grant Wood was born, it changed hands several times over the years, falling into disrepair after a long stretch of vacancy. Even after it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, in 1974, a visitor during that decade was likely to remark with disappointment, "This is what Grant Wood got excited about?" In 1991, its last owner, Carl Smith, donated the place to the historical society, which spent nearly 100,000 to restore it. The state continued to rent it out as a residence, to two different Eldon postmasters, a schoolteacher, and from 2010 to 2014 me. I laughed when I saw it. It was exactly as Grant Wood had depicted it, his brush strokes capturing every last intricate detail of "the world's second most famous White House" the front porch and its carved posts, the screen door, the vertical lines of its board and batten siding, the roof shingles, and, of course, the churchy window. In real life it was so much cuter than I expected. At 700 square feet, it was the ultimate Tiny House, like a beach cottage with a view of a cornfield instead of an ocean. A visitor center with a museum and gift shop had been built next door in 2007, with construction funds raised in true rural Iowa fashion: by holding bake sales. I went inside and learned that the house was for rent. Upon hearing the rent was the same price I was paying for my storage unit in Portland, Ore., 250 a month I decided I wanted to live in this house, in the country, and I followed through on my fantasy. As meticulously as Grant Wood portrayed the outside of the American Gothic House, I can, with great intimacy, describe every quirk of the inside. And the quirks are many. Take the upstairs Gothic window, for starters, reaching nearly six feet from floor to ceiling. It is bolted shut, unlike the identical Gothic window on the back side of the house, which is hinged to allow the top half to fold down and then swing open in order to move furniture in and out. Even at 5 foot 5, I had to duck when climbing the stairs. I eventually got used to being woken by laughter and high beam headlights shining toward it in the middle of the night when travelers wanted a photo. Sometimes I would turn on the light and give them a scare who would expect anyone to be living there? By day, a steady stream of tourists came, posing for pictures (and peeking in the windows) dressed in the free costumes provided by the visitor center calico smocks with cameos, overalls and black jackets, even the spectacles and wielding pitchforks of all sizes. They brought their own props, which included a prized Harley Davidson, a fleet of Stanley steam cars, and a herd of llamas. It was the centerpiece of a Klingon calendar shoot, a bare chested rock band's album cover, a marriage proposal, a family reunion a gamut of creativity daily. Of the 15,000 visitors the house sees each year, a handful were bold enough to walk inside if I left the door unlocked. The hassles were the reason the rent was so low, and also the reason the lease had a special clause reminding its tenant to "always treat the public in a friendly manner." I was friendly, most of the time, especially during the summers when I ran the Pitchfork Pie Stand out of the living room. I also taught pie classes, which included a tour of the house. I pointed out the odd half length bathtub in the sliver of a bathroom, an improvement from the original outhouse. I warned guests to watch out for the square nails poking up from the floorboards, the reason I kept a hammer at the ready.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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As Dr. Edwards noted, Mississippi's James Vardaman, arguably one of the most violent racist politicians in American history, and that's quite a feat, said in 1903, "a vote for Vardaman is a vote for white supremacy, a vote for the quelling of the arrogant spirit that has been aroused in the blacks by Roosevelt and his henchmen, ... a vote for the safety of the home and the protection of our women and children." Vardaman, who once famously said, "If it is necessary, every Negro in the state will be lynched," won election and became governor of Mississippi. Indeed, untold numbers of lynchings were executed because white women had claimed that a black man raped, assaulted, talked to or glanced at them. But it goes even further than that. The Tulsa Race massacre, the destruction of Black Wall Street, was spurred by an incident between a white female elevator operator and a black man. As the Oklahoma Historical Society points out, the most common explanation is that he stepped on her toe. As many as 300 people were killed because of it. In 1944, 14 year old George Stinney Jr. was electrocuted for the killing of two little white girls. He was the youngest person executed in the United States in the 20th century. His trial lasted only a couple hours. There was little or no cross examination of prosecution witnesses or calling of defense witnesses. The all white, all male jury deliberated for only 10 minutes before finding Stinney guilty, and he was sentenced to death. He was just 5 feet 1 inch tall. As Laura Bradley wrote in Slate, "He weighed 95 pounds when he was arrested, and was so small he had to sit on a phone book in the electric chair when he was executed within three months of the murders." Some say the book was in fact a Bible. The torture and murder of 14 year old Emmett Till in 1955, a lynching actually, occurred because a white woman said that he "grabbed her and was menacing and sexually crude toward her." His torturers beat him, shot him in the head and tossed his body into the Tallahatchie River tied to a cotton gin fan with barbed wire. A few years ago, the woman admitted to an author that she had lied. Till's lynching would serve as the big bang of the Civil Rights Movement. Indeed, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on that bus, she said that she was thinking of Till.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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SAN FRANCISCO Pavel Cherkashin, a Russian investor based in this city, thought he had the perfect name for a Catholic church that he is spending 11.5 million converting into a tech palace. It would be called Hack Temple. But that was before the nearly daily deluge of news about Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election by hacking computers and using Facebook and Twitter to spread inflammatory messages and sow division. "We had so many concerns from our investors saying this would be inappropriate and we should change it," said Mr. Cherkashin, 44, who planned to officially open Hack Temple this fall. "A bunch of Russian guys opening a hacker temple in the middle of San Francisco at a time when Russian hackers are considered the most evil in the world. They say you can't." With news of the hacking and influence campaigns escalating all year, the Russian immigrant community of Silicon Valley, which numbers in the tens of thousands, is in a strange new position. Some Russian venture capitalists said start ups were more wary about taking their funding, while several Russian born engineers said they were being treated differently socially and in their companies. Lawyers also said some tech firms were installing tighter security measures restricting what data foreign born coders can see. At the same time, many said that as Russia gained a reputation for its hackers, interest in hiring its tech talent was increasing. The tension is new. Russian immigrants helped build the last generation of Silicon Valley behemoths: The Google co founder Sergey Brin and the early Facebook investor Yuri Milner are both Russian born. Now when Mr. Cherkashin, a partner at GVA Capital, which is investing 120 million in start ups, pitches companies on why they should take investments from him, he gets skeptical questions as soon as they hear his accent, he said. "It feels like if you're a politician and you fell into a sex scandal, and everybody knows you for this, and every time someone recognizes you they have this smile on their face, 'So how's your personal life doing?' " said Mr. Cherkashin, whose firm was incorporated in the United States. Prospective partners and start ups invariably ask the same question, Mr. Cherkashin said: Is his money clean? "This question comes up two or three times a day," he said. "I don't think people would ask this question to a manager from another region." Julian Zegelman, an entrepreneur and a lawyer who represents and invests in Russian speaking founders, said potential local tech partners worried they would accidentally get into business with the Russian government. "They don't want to be invested or dealing with companies whose technical talent is captive in Russia," he said. Mr. Zegelman said he had noticed that some cybersecurity firms, big tech companies, government customers and large venture capital firms were the most wary about working with new Russian immigrants. Yet some start ups and small investment firms are more interested in Russian talent now. "If you would have asked 10 years ago what Russia was known for, it would be Putin, the oligarchs and oil," he said, referring to Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin. "Now when you ask folks, 'What do you think about Russia?' you get things back like: 'Oh, great cryptography.' 'Oh, it's a lot of talented engineers.'" Leonard Grayver, a lawyer specializing in start ups who is on the board of the American Business Association of Russian Speaking Professionals, said the hacking had put Russian tech talent at "the forefront." His firm brokers technology deals between Russia and Silicon Valley, handling tech licensing and talent acquisitions, and he said the average size of a deal had risen to 4 million this year, from 1 million to 2 million last year. And as companies staff up with Russian talent, he is getting a new question that he finds bizarre: "Are we letting the wolf in the henhouse? " Some companies have asked him to help arrange for heightened internal security, he added. "A lot of clients are trying to find ways to hire those Russian hackers and at the same time instituting heightened security protocols internally," he said. "They're isolating source code so you don't have access to the main tree." When young Russian technologists first arrive in San Francisco, the person they often text is the investor Nicholas Davidov. Mr. Davidov, 30, said he was part of what he called the New Wave, which is a group of Russian founders and engineers who came over to Silicon Valley in the last few years. They gather at a Russian immigrant owned bar in San Francisco, Rum Sugar, and every Wednesday at a smoke shop in Redwood City, Calif., where they share stories. Most of the comments that Mr. Davidov and his friends now get are couched as jokes, he said. "Somebody announced me on one of the conferences where I was speaking and said, 'I invited Nick because I wanted to collude with Russians,' " he said. "Just a lot of jokes." Ivan Novikov, 29, a co founder and the chief executive of Wallarm, was less enthusiastic about how news of Russian interference in the election has affected his life. "Technically, any Russian who works in I.T. is a hacker, so we're all 'Russian hackers,' and a lot of people like to mention it, but it's not so funny when it's 10 times per day or 10 times per party," he said. "We definitely don't like this hype about it." Some Russian born entrepreneurs said they had noticed no change in how they were treated. Stanislav Shalunov, a co founder of Open Garden, which develops peer to peer mesh networking software, said he hadn't experienced anything different. "With all this hacking news, I don't think anyone alleges anyone from the Russian tech community in the U.S. is engaged in it," he said. "And it's pretty obvious that lots of people from Russia are getting hired." Back at what may only briefly be known as the Hack Temple (investors want a new name before it officially opens), two young Russian entrepreneurs made breakfast sandwiches in the rectory kitchen one morning last week. The building has eight bedrooms, some with bunks to fit up to four; a living room full of Midcentury Modern sofas; and a patio covered in artificial turf and often used for beer pong. Before Mr. Cherkashin bought the building in January 2016, it was Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe Church. In the cavernous nave, the stained glass saints were covered in gauzy panels to soften the religious feel. Volunteers have fixed the broken organ so it plays again, now for parties. "If there would be a city in the world where you can go to church and a hackers' house," Mr. Cherkashin said, "it would only be this one." On the wall along one of the aisles, Evgeniy Lapchenko, the Ukrainian artist, has remade Hieronymus Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights." Among the twisted human figures are tech luminaries: the Apple co founder Steve Jobs taking a selfie, revelers at Burning Man and Mr. Brin of Google in a self driving car. As for rebranding Hack Temple, Mr. Cherkashin hasn't found a new name he likes. "It can be called the Start Up Temple," he said. "But it's just too boring."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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Called Wyandanch Village, the 40 acre, 500 million development project calls for adding a mix of stores, offices and apartments in the middle of low slung strip malls and auto repair shops. Ground was broken on the 12 acre first phase last year. WYANDANCH, N.Y. For years, this Long Island hamlet has been caught in the grip of poverty, blight and crime while the nearby Hamptons and other New York City suburbs in Suffolk County prospered. Even a McDonald's restaurant failed and was torn down. But community leaders are betting they can help cure entrenched social problems by creating a vibrant city style, high density downtown where none existed before. "This is going to be a major improvement in our quality of life," said Kimberly Jean Pierre, the director of the Wyandanch Community Resource Center, a job placement agency. Called Wyandanch Village, the 40 acre, 500 million development project, which is being paid for with public and private funds, calls for adding a mix of stores, offices and apartments in the middle of low slung strip malls and auto repair shops. Ground was broken on the 12 acre first phase last year. As opposed to Long Island development plans from the last century, which created driveway and garage suburbs like Levittown, the project is not trumpeting its car friendliness. In fact, in a regional trend, it is by a train station, with the expectation that residents including those for whom cars are too expensive will prefer to commute by rail. New businesses will provide jobs, advocates say, and with huge investments in sidewalks and streetlights, as well as a park with an ice skating rink, Wyandanch Village will provide the hamlet with a needed new and improved look. "All these pieces will go hand in hand to help revitalize the place," said Russell C. Albanese, chairman of the Albanese Organization, a Long Island based firm that is the project's developer. Conceived more than a decade ago, the project in Wyandanch (pronounced WHY an danch) has been slow to coalesce, frustrating some residents. It took years to buy up or use eminent domain to take the nearly 70 properties in the project's path, and upgrade and install infrastructure like sewers. Next, the hamlet, which is part of the town of Babylon and about 40 miles from Midtown Manhattan, will gain a new, larger train station. A parking garage for commuters, to replace acres of surface parking lots, is also going up. In addition, the Long Island Rail Road is at work on a continuing project to bolster train service to the area, which will result in a second track in Wyandanch. In all, 93 million in public funds, from federal, state and local sources, has been spent on those stage setting improvements or set aside for future ones. The privately funded portion of the project, though, is likely to be the most visible part. It is focused on a pair of five story mixed use buildings, with apartments in the upper stories and retail space below, that will tower over the landscape. The development cost of these two buildings, currently under construction on leased land, is 76 million, paid for in part with federal tax credits. The first will be completed in January; the second will open in a year. If the spirit of Wyandanch Village echoes urban renewal efforts, the results will hardly resemble the monolithic brick complexes from such projects in the 1950s and '60s. Ground was broken last year for the first phase of Wyandanch Village on Long Island. Yana Paskova for The New York Times The facades on the two initial buildings will be varied, using materials like stucco and clapboard, and roofs will be designed in Italianate and mansard styles. Together, they will contain 177 apartments, from studios to three bedrooms. As a condition of receiving public money, 123 are reserved for lower income levels; 1,000 applications for them were received this summer. The cheapest one bedrooms will cost less than 1,000 a month, Mr. Albanese said. The market rate units, which will start at around 1,500 for a unit of the same size, will be leased this fall. The ground floor commercial spaces will be no larger than 5,000 square feet each to discourage big box stores, which, town officials say, put Long Island's mom and pop retailers out of business. As of this week, four out of 15 of them were close to being leased, at about 30 a square foot, to a bank, Asian restaurant, shoe store and men's salon, Mr. Albanese said. The town is offering retailers 15 year tax abatements to ensure those stores are filled, officials say, since darkened windows would undermine the project's goal of creating a lively streetscape. Building codes, revamped because of the project, are also strict about signs, with neon banned, for instance. Wyandanch Village will include a public park between the two residential buildings. Ground will be broken in a few weeks for that one acre space, which will host concerts in the summer and an ice rink in winter. Next year, the downtown from scratch is set to gain a three story, 90,000 square foot office building, projected to cost about 40 million, whose 25,000 square foot ground level berth is being eyed for a grocery store, officials say. Later phases for the rest of the 40 acre site, today a checkerboard of weedy lots and boarded up buildings, call for additional stores and multifamily housing, and a youth center, though the overall project is unlikely to be completed for a decade. Whether Wyandanch Village will fulfill its social mission is unclear. Its low cost apartments are not reserved for those living in the hamlet, where 11 percent of people ages 18 to 64 live below the poverty line, versus 6 percent in Suffolk County as a whole, according to census records from Queens College, part of the City University of New York. In fact, an ancillary goal of the project is to provide rental housing to the broader population, in an area underserved by apartments in general. Only 20 percent of Long Islanders live in rental housing, according to the census, compared with more than 35 percent in suburban New Jersey. But Wyandanch Village could bring needed jobs for the community. Already this year, about 10 percent of the 100 member construction crew has been made up of local residents, town officials said, adding that it is hoped that the new stores will hire residents as well. Improved train service is expected to open up job markets, they add. Encouraging residents to walk to stations for their commutes is a reversal from the period after World War II, when subdivisions in Wyandanch advertised "wide paved streets" and proximity to the Southern State Parkway to lure those who went to work by car, according to documents provided by Mary Cascone, Babylon's town historian. Those ads were aimed at African American families, often barred from segregated subdivisions like Levittown. Places like Carver Park in Wyandanch, named for George Washington Carver, attracted black residents then, and today about 70 percent of Wyandanch's population is black, according to census data. The Wyandanch project comes at a time when other Long Island communities are trying to revive their downtowns with dense, transit oriented developments. They include Patchogue, which has added hundreds of apartments in multistory buildings, many of them providing affordable housing, over objections about their drawing undesirable welfare recipients. The village, which has a train station, has also welcomed many restaurants in recent years, creating a bustling night life. With master planned communities of this type, "there's a bit of a contradiction in that they're big developments based on the concept that small is good," said Grant R. Saff, a geography professor at Hofstra University. If residents do need to get in their cars for errands, as has happened recently in downtown New Brunswick, N.J., after the closing of a major supermarket, he said, revitalization plans can suffer. But to resuscitate these areas, Mr. Saff said, "one of the best ways to do it is to take advantage of the fact that they are transportation hubs." In an area as hard hit as Wyandanch, any investment seems beneficial, said Ms. Jean Pierre, whose office is on a lot that contained that defunct McDonald's. "People were skeptical at first that this would ever happen," she said. "But every day something different and beautiful is happening there."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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With "everything on hold," Steve Chadwick and his wife, Kate Smith, decided to decamp from Bernardsville, N.J., to this house in the Outer Banks in North Carolina for a month, starting on Memorial Day. Within 24 hours of President Trump's European travel ban in March, Laura Jones had three inquiries to rent her house in the Catskills for a month. "We had never been able to rent it for more than four days before, and most were for just a weekend," Ms. Jones said. The house has already had two groups for one month each, and a three month renter will soon take the place. Like a newly reopened barbershop, vacation properties are seeing a surge of bookings, especially now that states are reopening and loosening health and safety restrictions. A typical summer vacation may take the family for a week or two to the beach or mountains. This year, as many employees have been shooed from the office and summer camps have been canceled, some of those travelers still in an economic position to do so are relocating for a bit longer. Twiddy and Company, which manages 1,100 vacation homes on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, said it was seeing an "unprecedented" number of long term bookings. Calls began coming in mid March and increased significantly in May, according to the company. Steve Chadwick and his wife, Kate Smith, decided to decamp from Bernardsville, N.J. to the Outer Banks for a month, starting on Memorial Day. They chose the area in part because it was an "easy drive" and less expensive than the Jersey shore. The couple thought, "We really won't get an opportunity like this again to go away for a month and still be able to work 'normally,'" Mr. Chadwick said. Their three teenage children, whose summer sports practices, camps and jobs have been canceled, brought along their schoolwork. The family is already thinking about extending their stay. In Maine, a "steady unraveling" of reservations at the beginning of the pandemic left every rental home in Scott Dobos's portfolio unoccupied through the end of May. Mr. Dobos, director of rental operations for Legacy Properties Sotheby's International Realty, manages about 50 vacation properties, with each typically renting for one to two weeks. When the governor, Janet Mills, declared a 14 day quarantine period in early April for anyone coming to Maine, Mr. Dobos thought the result would be "catastrophic." People in quarantine cannot leave their accommodations, "even to go to the beach if it's right outside," he said. Alex Lucey and seven friends booked the six room Waldo Emerson Inn in Kennebunk, Maine, for the month of June. The worry over virus transmission has many people renting out entire properties. Instead, there was a "swift and noticeable" shift to inquiries for one to six month rentals he said, and in the last three weeks, nine homes have been rented for a month or longer to people driving in from out of state. This summer, most Americans are expected to stay fairly close to home. A recent survey conducted by MMGY Travel Intelligence and the U.S. Travel Association showed that most travelers felt safer in their own cars than on an airplane. Only about 20 percent of the respondents said they were willing to drive 500 miles or more one way to reach their vacation destination. Families with school age children are facing the fact that most summer camps have been canceled. Angela Rice, a co founder of Boutique Travel Advisors in the Scottsdale, Ariz., area, said that some clients are looking at rustic long term rentals near lakes, trails and waterfalls as an alternative. She has received inquiries from clients with children who are looking to take road trips to a "lodge, ranch, ski resort town," or anywhere with stand alone lodgings and outdoor activities. "Once they drive all the way out there," Ms. Rice said, "they want to stay awhile." Many travelers are ready to depart immediately, perhaps because they have cabin fever, feel more comfortable as officials relax restrictions or are unsure about booking too far into a future with hazy conditions. Evolve Vacation Rental, which manages 14,000 vacation homes across the country, said trips booked within seven days of departure are up 300 percent compared with last year. Earlier this month, Alex Lucey, 30, and seven friends booked the entire six room Waldo Emerson Inn in Kennebunk, Maine, for the month of June. While the group, who are in their late 20s to early 30s, "spends money judiciously" and wouldn't normally rent a house for so long, "we saw the distancing measures were going to continue for a few more months at least," he said. They all wanted to get out of New York City. Mr. Lucey, an investment banker, said he will keep his work schedule during the day, but looks forward to hanging out in the evening with his friends, eating dinner outside and going for hikes and bike rides on the weekends. "It will be a meaningfully different experience than my apartment in Brooklyn," he said. The worry over virus transmission has other groups and families choosing smaller properties they can rent out entirely, so they won't cross paths with other guests in the hallways or dining rooms. Amy Lansky of Princeton, N.J., rented an oceanfront house in Maine for 10 weeks starting in mid June. For her family of five, including school age children, "summer is usually a social time at home," with friends and camps and going to the local pool, she said. But with the pandemic, she was looking forward to "isolation" in Maine, going to the beach and for walks and bike rides without seeing many people. Ms. Lansky's parents live about an hour from the rental. After a two week quarantine, "which we respect and appreciate," Ms. Lansky said, the children will be able to go visit their grandparents and go boating. Cate Caruso, owner of True Places Travels in Vancouver, Wash., got a request this year from clients a set of families that take an annual summer trip together about renting an entire lodge. In some states, lodgings are required to operate at reduced capacity, so families booking a few rooms may end up getting the whole property at a fraction of what it would normally cost, she said. The setup is better for owners, too. Renting to a single group rather than to multiple parties makes social distancing, food service and cleaning easier. "People are peeking out from under their rock and seeing what their options are," Ms. Caruso said. "We're trying to figure out if this is a trend or the new normal." WE CAN DREAM ABOUT TRAVEL Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter: Each week you'll receive tips on traveling smarter, stories on hot destinations and access to 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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The first few times that Phil Tipper drove the BMW i3, he loved the car's acceleration but was put off by its strong regenerative braking, which quickly slows the electric car when the driver backs off the accelerator. But then Mr. Tipper, a self identified environmentalist, took part in BMW's i3 Extended Test Drive Program, which replaces quick spins with a loan of up to three days, and he changed his mind. "It was an opportunity to familiarize myself with the car," said Mr. Tipper, a retired medical laboratory director in Irvine, Calif. "After a day or less, the regen effect became second nature." He had also experienced a bit of vertigo from the sporty handling car during his earlier drives, but that, too, went away. "I got used to it." Kenn Sparks, a BMW spokesman, said that not all of the company's United States dealers are participating in the extended test drives. "We offered the program to any dealer authorized to sell the i3," he said in an interview. So far, he said, 138 have signed on, which is almost half of those offering the i3. Cars used in the program will most likely be offered for sale as "pre owned" cars, Mr. Sparks said. "While technically a pilot, the response from customers and dealers has been so positive I imagine that we'll keep it going," he added.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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Not a lot of 90 year olds are making paintings of this scale or verve. This is the most productive time in my whole life, right now. You try to do about five things at once, one of which is dare the other guys to try, raise the bar. The painting "Golden Image," I never did anything like it. It was a sunset in Maine. I usually paint the sensation of what I'm seeing. Here, I'm actually painting the analysis of it, all memory. I made four or five little sketches in different colors. I lost any discernability of which one was better. I said to Ada, "Which one do you like?" She said the yellow one. I heightened the colors. There's very little tonal difference between the trees and the sky . It sort of merges. I took it right up to 12 feet. It came out like dynamite. This portrait of a disembodied face against the vivid yellow background feels new to me. I was painting this woman Susanne Orton, in the portrait behind Mr. Katz, top, on the left and all of a sudden I said, "I'm sick and tired of white." I just arbitrarily put the lemon yellow against the flesh, like an Asian Indian combination. Then I kept cropping it and made it a less conventional, more aggressive image. You can get the whole feeling with parts missing. Do you consider yourself a collector? I'm not a collector type, actually. I throw everything out. But when I started making money, I thought I should buy some stuff for the education. Since I've been around for so long, it adds up.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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Credit...Ross Mantle for The New York Times BULGER, Pa. About 150 Jersey cows in the rolling terrain at Rivendale Farms in Bulger, some 25 miles west of Pittsburgh, wear Fitbit like collars that monitor their movement, eating and rumination patterns. They are milked not by humans but by robotic machines. A nearby greenhouse, about a quarter acre in size and filled with salad bowl crops like kale, arugula and baby carrots, is automated. The temperature, humidity and sunlight are controlled by sensors and retractable metallic screens. And soon, small robots may roam the farm's eight acres of vegetable crops outdoors to spot disease and pluck weeds. Farming in America is increasingly a high tech endeavor. Combines guided by GPS, drones, satellite imagery, soil sensors and supercomputers all help the nation's food production. Yet that technology is mainly tailored for big industrial farms, where fields stretch as far as the eye can see. Rivendale Farms, which has just completed its first year of full operations, offers a glimpse of technology coming available for smaller farms. Technology for giant farms is all about increasing yields and cutting costs. For smaller farms, too, efficiency is paramount. But technology can also eliminate a lot of tedious, routine labor a lifestyle payoff that can help persuade a younger generation to stay put on family farms rather than sell out. Smaller farms typically raise specialty crops on limited acreage. Specialty farming requires a scaled down approach, like the small robots being developed for Rivendale by scientists at nearby Carnegie Mellon University and the expanding array of equipment from the "slow tools" movement, a group of farmers and engineers designing affordable tools for small farms. The goal at Rivendale, said Thomas Tull, the farm's owner, is to create a "boutique, cutting edge farm, enabled by technology, that produces great food." Rivendale can afford its combination of cutting edge commercial technology and science experiments because Mr. Tull is a billionaire serial entrepreneur, investor in tech related ventures and former film producer. He is also on the board of Carnegie Mellon. He has spent several million dollars on Rivendale so far. But the plan, Mr. Tull said, is for the farm to become self sustaining by 2020. "We're seeing greater use of modern technology and tools in smaller, soil based farming, and that vision is being wholeheartedly embraced at Rivendale," said Jack Algiere, farm director at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, a nonprofit farm in Pocantico Hills, N.Y., that has been a leading advocate for sustainable agriculture on small farms. Mr. Tull bought the land in 2015, and construction started the next year. It is now a diversified operation with milking cows, breeding cows, vegetable crops, corn for feed, chickens, even honeybees. Rivendale, including pasture land, cover crops and woods, spans 175 acres. Farming in America has been consolidating for decades, with the average size of a farm being 444 acres in 2017, according to government statistics. And more than half of the value produced by the nation's agricultural sector is generated by a small fraction of very large farms, 2,660 acres on average. Rivendale's milk, eggs and produce are sold to selected local restaurants and hotels. It also supplies food to the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Pittsburgh Steelers, in which Mr. Tull is a part owner. Walk into the dairy barn at Rivendale and there are no people only cows, an automated feed system and three robotic milking machines. The Rivendale cows are milked four times a day on average, when they feel ready, compared with the traditional twice a day regimen when humans manage the milking. And its Jersey cows produce 15 percent more milk than the average for the breed, with a higher protein and butterfat content, said Christine Grady, general manager of Rivendale. "They eat when they want, lie down when they want and feed when they want," Ms. Grady said. "And a happier cow produces more milk and better milk." It takes a week or two for the cows to get accustomed to the robotic milkers and the built in incentives, said Rodney Rankin, who leads the dairy operations. The milking stations have vanilla flavored feed pellets, but a cow cannot just come back repeatedly for the treats. Sensors and a scale a cow's weight can vary by up to 75 pounds in a day prevent cows without reasonably full udders from getting in. Robotic milkers have been available for years. But the technology has steadily improved, requiring far less human assistance than a few years ago. The machines cost about 200,000 each. Without them, and an automated feeding system, the milking barn at Rivendale would require five workers instead of being mainly overseen by one, Ms. Grady said. The Rivendale robotic milking machines are made by Lely, a Dutch company and a leader in the industry. In some European countries, up to 30 percent of the cows are milked by machine, while in the United States the share is about 2 percent, estimates Mathew Haan, a dairy technology expert at Pennsylvania State University's agriculture extension program. The gap, Mr. Haan said, is largely explained by more generous programs that support milk prices as well as higher labor costs than in America. These two factors have encouraged investment in automation in Europe. In the United States, even large herd producers with thousands of cows in California, which have been labor intensive operations, are beginning to try robotic milking machines. That is driven partly by changing immigration policies that may create a shortage of farm workers. But to date, the main market has been smaller operations with 120 to 240 milking cows, said Steve Fried, Lely's North American sales manager. George Kantor, a senior systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon's robotics institute, is leading the effort at Rivendale to develop "scouting robots" to identify disease and weeds in the vegetable field, and then send smartphone alerts if there is a problem. His team did field work and collected data in the fall, then shifted to a university lab for the winter. Computer vision and machine learning, Mr. Kantor said, will be deployed to distinguish healthy plants from diseased ones and weeds. Scott Flory is one of them. After earning his degree in dairy science from Virginia Tech, Mr. Flory returned to his family farm in Dublin, Va., in 2009, with ideas for modernizing its operations. Since then, the farm has installed four of the Lely robotic milkers, equipped the cows with activity trackers and doubled the number of its milking cows to 240, without adding workers. The farm remains almost entirely a family affair, run by him, his wife, Laura, and his parents, Dale and Janet. "I wouldn't be in the dairy business today without this stuff," said Mr. Flory, who is 30. At Rivendale, Mr. Tull, the owner, has no doubt that advancing technology will transform smaller farms someday. But after closely observing the operations at Rivendale this past year, he said, "You come away with a tremendous respect for farmers, and that the work is hard and complex. The key is getting the right mix of art and science."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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Eugene R. Declercq, a health researcher at the Boston University School of Public Health, said there had been a push among doctors to stop inducing births or scheduling C sections before 39 weeks of gestation unless there was a strong medical reason to do so. The practice of scheduling C sections early and inducing labor early was believed to have been a potential contributor to infant mortality. "There's been a conscious effort to change practices," he said. "It has been one of the success stories." In a separate C.D.C. report released earlier this year, preterm births declined slightly, to 9.57 percent of births from 9.62 percent in 2013. And deliveries by cesarean section fell by 2 percent to 32.2 percent of deliveries, the lowest since 2007. Researchers debate whether C sections are a risk factor for infant mortality. It was not clear if the recent dip would improve the infant mortality ranking of the United States compared to other rich countries. Infant mortality in the United States was more than double the rates in Finland and Sweden in 2010, according to the C.D.C. Dr. Steven Woolf, director of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, who has studied international comparisons of life expectancy, said he did not think the improvement in 2014 would change much for the international picture. "Its good news that the infant mortality rate dropped last year, but it's still much higher than the average of all the countries in the O.E.C.D.," he said, referring to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of developed countries that serves as a close international comparison. In 2013, the rate in the United States was about 50 percent higher than the average rate for those countries, he said. The progress comes as the Obama administration provides money for programs in which nurses and other professionals visit poor mothers most at risk of delivering a baby preterm, or of having an infant die. But it was not clear whether the improvement was related to such programs, which help a modest share of the population.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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Szilard, ever resourceful, acquired hundreds of pounds of black, greasy uranium oxide powder from a Canadian mining corporation. Fermi and his students packed the powder into pipe like tin cans and arranged them equally spaced in a circle within a large tank of water mixed with powdered manganese. At the center of the arrangement they placed a neutron source. Neutrons from the source, slowed down by the water, would penetrate the uranium atoms in the cans and induce fissions. If the fissioning atoms released more neutrons, those "secondary" neutrons would irradiate the manganese. Measuring the radioactivity induced in the manganese would tell Fermi if the fissions were multiplying. If so, then a chain reaction might be possible, one bombarding neutron splitting a uranium atom and releasing two neutrons, those two splitting two other uranium atoms and releasing four, the four releasing eight, and so on in a geometric progression that could potentially produce vast amounts of energy for power or for an atomic bomb. The experiment worked. In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized a program to build atomic bombs, hoping to defeat a Germany that was potentially a year or more ahead in the deadly race. Fermi, working now at the University of Chicago, undertook the building of a full scale reactor to demonstrate that a chain reaction could be achieved and controlled. By then it was known as well that a nuclear reactor would breed a newly discovered element, plutonium, an alternative nuclear explosive. Fermi's reactor would also demonstrate the breeding of plutonium. Instead of water, which absorbed too many neutrons, the demonstration reactor would use graphite, the form of carbon found in pencil lead, to slow the neutrons. Graphite blocks the size of planter boxes, drilled with blind holes to house slugs of uranium metal, would be stacked layer by layer to form a spherical matrix. Fermi, who loved American idioms, called his creation a "pile." Across the month of November 1942, Fermi supervised the building of Chicago Pile No. 1 on a doubles squash court under the west stands of the university football stadium. It was ready on the frigid morning of Dec. 2, 1942. Through the morning and early afternoon, wielding his slide rule, Fermi slowly took the pile critical, with a characteristically Fermian break for lunch. It worked, which meant a bomb would almost certainly work as well. Historically, no other development in Fermi's life ranks as high as the nuclear reactor, mighty versions of which produce more than 11 percent of the world's electricity today. Fermi continued to contribute original scientific work throughout the war and postwar at the University of Chicago. He advised the United States government on atomic energy and worked on weapons problems during summer stints at Los Alamos. He opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb more vehemently than J. Robert Oppenheimer but escaped the ruination visited upon Oppenheimer by the vindictive chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis L. Strauss. He went on to help build the first hydrogen bomb. I kept wishing this biography were livelier, lit with more surprises, but Schwartz, working with limited sources, tells the story well. A few infelicities are distracting. "Disinterested" doesn't mean "uninterested." "Fulsome" still means "offensively flattering," not "generous," though the meaning is changing. Brig. Gen. Leslie R. Groves of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, not Oppenheimer, held "authority over the entire Manhattan Project." Oppenheimer was the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, one part of the project, where the first bombs were designed and built. Still, these are minor mistakes. All in all, Schwartz's biography adds importantly to the literature of the utterly remarkable men and women who opened up nuclear physics to the world.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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Lucas Hunt grew up on a pig farm in Iowa. He headed east to study at Southampton College in Southhampton, N.Y., and rented in the Hamptons for 14 years, writing poetry and working as a literary agent. Mr. Hunt started auctioneering on the side, having been summoned as an emergency substitute for a Southampton Hospital benefit. He had experience from his hometown, where auctions were common. He continued running benefit auctions and his business, Hunt Auctioneers, grew. "Year round life in the Hamptons can go only so far," Mr. Hunt said. He had friends living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, so three years ago he moved to a rental in nearby Greenpoint, across from the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. Mr. Hunt, now 40, paid 1,500 of the 2,000 rent, sharing the two bedroom with a friend who stayed there part time. Maintenance problems abounded. Mr. Hunt used a pan to collect the rainwater dripping through the ceiling, graduated to a bucket and, when that proved insufficient, a trash can. Last winter, some of his favorite shirts were soaked by rainwater. "It was imperative for my sanity to move," he said. He envisioned his new place as airy and clean, but also warm and inviting. "Telling a real estate agent your vision is not as clear as making a list," he said. So he made one, including light, views and a rent of around 2,000 a month for a studio or one bedroom. Using five apps StreetEasy, Trulia, PadMapper, Naked Apartments and Zumper he went to work. "I felt frantic about it," he said. He contacted every agent who seemed to have a suitable listing. "The idea was zero fidelity." He planned to remain in Greenpoint. But the few available apartments were renovated units in small, older walk up buildings, and seemed expensive for what they were. The various maps showed vacancies across Newtown Creek in Long Island City, Queens, which Mr. Hunt knew nothing about. So he took the G train to Court Square. "There was this hum of new construction, kind of like a whir, with lights and generators," he said. "It felt like a whole city was being built. I was blown away. It was desolate and futuristic. Its history has yet to be written." Mr. Hunt checked out the residential high rises on Center Boulevard, lining the waterfront. "They all seemed aged and dated," he said. He was drawn to the energy farther inland. On Crescent Street, he visited a studio at Packard Square North. Like most he saw, it was nice enough, though he disliked the floor, a busy pattern with a shine. The Long Island City buildings he visited had all been constructed within a decade, but "I was looking for new new," he said. Agents were often late for appointments, he found. "We always met at Dunkin' Donuts," he said. To one of those agents, he pointed at a rising building, 1 QPS Tower, and was informed it wouldn't be ready for a few months. But another agent, Fernando Serrano, a salesman at Home Residential, had more up to date information: 1 QPS Tower, he said, would soon be open for rentals. The two men agreed to meet at Mr. Serrano's preferred coffee place, Panini Tozt Cafe. They headed to 1 QPS Tower, where Mr. Hunt saw model one bedrooms and studios. "It was the thing I dreamed of in my mind," he said. He cared not a whit about amenities, or so he thought. Then he saw the gym and the rooftop pool. "I love to swim," he said. "That's why I lived in the Hamptons for 14 years. This was luck city." The building was offering two free months of rent on a 14 month lease, and was picking up the broker fee. For 2,500 a month (net effective rent: 2,143), Mr. Hunt chose a studio halfway up the 44 story building, with a mesmerizing view of Manhattan in the distance and Long Island City below, with traffic thrumming and the 7 train coming and going. Mr. Hunt arrived last winter. His furnishings are spartan little more than a bed and a table for a "command post," where he writes. His poetry is published by Thane Prose Press. "Now, I have a fully functional environment," he said. "Long Island City was the surprise best move of my life. Everything I craved in Brooklyn and could not find, I found in Queens."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Thirteen year old JoJo Siwa rolled up to school in a souped up vintage car with a giant pink bow plastered on the grill. Inside the car, with her blond hair tightly pulled into a side ponytail and wrapped in a pastel yellow bow, she sang to her mother, "I don't really care about what they say," while a group of mean girls wearing not so pastel clothes snickered from a bench. (We know they're mean girls because the words "mean girls" are displayed on the screen next to them.) "Don't let the haters get their way," JoJo's mother, also clad in yellow pastel, told her. No worries. The new young teenage heroine of suburban America showed no fear. After winning a rowdy dance battle in her video "Boomerang," which has gotten over 200 million views on YouTube, JoJo places a purple bow on the lead mean girl. Everyone becomes best friends. Since June, JoJo's Bows made by H.E.R. Accessories, a licensee of JoJo's have been among the top sellers at Claire's, the store popular among the middle school set, according to Hind Palmer, Claire's global brand marketing and public relations director. "I can't believe it's a hair bow that's doing this," said Jennifer Roth Saad, the creative director of H.E.R. "I've never seen something like this." JoJo said in a phone interview that she had worn a side ponytail with a bow since she was 4, and she has worn it through most of her career, which includes stints on "Abby's Ultimate Dance Competition" and "Dance Moms." But recently, she has become well known to her 2.7 million YouTube subscribers for wearing a bow and being goofy by showing videos of her sick in bed, getting ready in the morning and playing pranks on another YouTube star. "I'm 13, and I like being 13," said JoJo, who divides her time between Omaha and Los Angeles. "A lot of people my age try to act 16. But just be your age. There's always time to grow older. You can never grow younger." In Britain, where JoJo's bows are even more successful than they are in the United States, the head teacher of a school in Bury banned the bows because they were distracting, while another school, in Long Eaton, permitted the bows so long as they conformed to dress code colors. Many popular videos made by girls in the pre and early teenage years live on nine connected YouTube channels. Seven Super Girls, the most successful of these channels, has over six million subscribers and its videos have been viewed a combined 6.9 billion times. Each channel others are called Seven Cool Tweens, Seven Awesome Kids and Seven Twinkling Tweens is run with more efficiency than some professional media sites: Each girl is responsible for making a video on a specific day of the week. (Annie was on Seven Awesome Kids from 2010 to 2011.) They follow a set of guidelines that include weekly themes, and precludes them from giving their surnames and location. The SAKs channels, as they are known, were started in 2008 by seven families in Britain who, in the early days of YouTube, wanted to make sure their children were making family appropriate content. The only remaining parent of that original partnership is Ian Rylett, who is currently in charge of the SAKs operation. Mr. Rylett, who lives in Leeds, said producing the channels was essentially his full time job. He and a team of six others take care of copyright issues, create sponsorship deals, come up with weekly themes, monitor the channels and arrange meet and greets. The tickets for a 1,000 seat event that is coming up in Orlando, Fla., are selling for 30 each. Mr. Rylett receives an income from the channels, as do some of the girls. The girls own their own content, he said, but they have not signed contracts. Alexis, a 12 year old from Southern California whose parents wanted her surname withheld for privacy reasons, has made close to 200 videos for Seven Cool Tweens and Seven Awesome Kids over the past three years. Alexis wears her reddish brown hair in a braid, no makeup and braces. Her bedroom isn't catalog perfect. Her most popular videos revolve around silly antics like pranking family members (which received 23.2 million views), making a mess of herself and her outfit before the school dance and getting grounded for life. The appeal? "Kids want to watch kids," Alexis said in a phone interview. She would like to see girls being recognized for more thoughtful content, she said, such as that of Marley Dias, 12, who started the 1000BlackGirlBooks campaign last year after recognizing a scarcity of black girl protagonists. "If I had a 13 year old," Ms. Long said, "I would push her toward someone like Marley Dias instead of JoJo. But Marley Dias doesn't sell giant hair bows. Marley Dias sells social justice and social causes and writing and nerd culture. And there's plenty to market there."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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With a pandemic putting beloved Mother's Day traditions on hold this year, movies about conventional moms the kinds with cute kids, kindly husbands and gorgeously sun soaked kitchens can provide much needed comfort and solace. "Cheaper by the Dozen" will do nicely. But in this atypical time, it's atypical moms who deserve screen time. These matriarchs are nobody's idea of ordinary. They're the tough oddballs and troublesome misfits and anything goes women who are fiercely protective of their kids, and who strive, despite many obstacles, to help their families flourish and make bad situations better. These moms are strange, but you know what? Moms' new normal is strange, too. No matter what kind of parent you're celebrating this holiday, here are some terrific movies about out of the ordinary moms to help make this anything but normal Mother's Day feel just a little sweeter. (Except Ma. Keep an eye on her.) Who says you have to be human to be a mom? In this dystopian sci fi thriller, a maternal robot named Mother (warmly voiced by Rose Byrne) raises a flesh and blood girl named Daughter (Clara Rugaard) alone inside a fortified bunker as part of a plan to repopulate a devastated postapocalyptic Earth. (There are eerie similarities between our grim present and the film's quarantine like setting and its characters' aversion to and skepticism of outside contagion.) But when Daughter lets in a wounded human woman (Hilary Swank) who's skeptical of Mother's intentions, Daughter's allegiance crumbles, and she begins to wonder: Does Mother know best? Tightly directed by Grant Sputore, "I Am Mother" keenly raises thought provoking questions about modern medical ethics and artificial intelligence as the frenzied action snowballs. But tenderly threaded into the suspense and dread is a contemplative and heartfelt story perfect for moms who love a good debate about the many meanings and motivations of motherhood. Decades before there was Elektra the mother of the fictional House of Abundance on "Pose" there was the real life Crystal LaBeija. With eyelashes to here, LaBeija was the mother, or drag overseer, of the House of LaBeija, the created queer family founded in the early 1970s in the opening days of the modern New York drag and ballroom scene. In Frank Simon's fabulous documentary "The Queen," LaBeija is among the drag contestants vying in the Miss All American Camp Beauty Pageant, hosted by the drag icon Flawless Sabrina (a.k.a. Jack Doroshow, who died in 2017). When the top prize goes to the delicate Miss Harlow of Philadelphia, Miss LaBeija loses it. Feeling slighted by the judges, and competing amid the racism of pre Stonewall New York City, she delivers a furious rant that's a must see snapshot of what happens when you mess with a drag mother. (For more on the House of LaBeija, watch the vital, influential documentary "Paris Is Burning.") "What kind of mother parties with high schoolers?" screams an enraged mom to this film's title character, setting up the diabolical premise in Tate Taylor's deranged horror thriller. Octavia Spencer stars as Sue Ann, a kindly veterinarian's assistant in small town Ohio who buys bored teenagers alcohol and invites them to get wasted in her basement, where "Safety Dance" is on the playlist as if the '80s never ended. But the fun downstairs belies numerous terrors upstairs, which has been declared off limits. That's because Ma as she wants the kids to call her lives with a trauma from her past, and as a result has nefarious plans for her new young friends, some of whom are the offspring of Ma's former, not so nice high school classmates. Ricocheting from sweetness to fury, Spencer gives a sharply calibrated, snowball cold performance as a damaged Gen X parent with a bloodthirsty appetite for vengeance. "It's overworked and underappreciated moms who finally allow themselves to be a little bit selfish." That's how Mila Kunis has described the characters she, Kathryn Hahn and Kristen Bell play in this raunchy comedy, written and directed by two dads: Jon Lucas and Scott Moore (the screenwriters of "The Hangover"). Silly and stuffed with sass, "Bad Moms" is an escapist fantasy about stressed out suburban mothers who are so fed up with the pressure to be perfect neo Donna Reeds that they stop playing nice and go for broke in wildly buffoonish, boozy and hilariously irresponsible ways. (Christina Applegate leads the gang of do gooders who clash with the momsters.) For women who never dreamed a pandemic would be the reason they became stay at home parents, "Bad Moms" is a devil may care antidote to quarantine fatigue. Writing in The New York Times, Manohla Dargis called the film "a funny, giddy, sentimental laugh in." This one's for moms who need a break and a laugh. Available on FX Now, Amazon, YouTube and iTunes. Wonderful and weepy are movies about well intentioned mothers in conflict with their self involved daughters: Barbara Stanwyck in "Stella Dallas"; Joan Crawford in "Mildred Pierce"; Lana Turner and Juanita Moore in "Imitation of Life." (What a Mother's Day triple feature!) Add to that list Laurie Metcalf as Marion McPherson, the loving but ever discontented parent of an individualistic teen daughter (a delightfully awkward Saoirse Ronan) in Greta Gerwig's Oscar nominated "Lady Bird." Metcalf knows her way around flawed, multifaceted mothers, having brilliantly portrayed them on TV ("Roseanne") and Broadway ("A Doll's House, Part 2"). In "Lady Bird," Metcalf herself nominated for an Oscar is all the things we're fascinated and frustrated by in a complex matriarch: she's wry but sensitive, demanding but practical, tough but supportive. Her perceptive performance as an all too human mother of a driven, oddball daughter makes "Lady Bird" an entertaining and lovely bounty for a Mother's Day movie: it's insightful, bittersweet and above all, remarkably moving. Available on Amazon Prime, Kanopy, YouTube and iTunes.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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Tony Woods has never broken into the mainstream the way his protege did, but a recent set shows why he has been so influential. WASHINGTON On Sunday, when Dave Chappelle accepted the Mark Twain Prize, the most prestigious honor in comedy, the first person in the star packed audience (Jon Stewart, Tiffany Haddish, Sarah Silverman) he singled out in his speech was Tony Woods, a stand up whom few outside comedy circles had heard of. Comparing his influence to that of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie on Miles Davis, Chappelle spoke directly to Woods: "I was trying to play like you," he said. "You were the first person I ever saw do it absolutely right." Tony Woods, the dean of Washington comedy, one of the finest, most underrated incubators of stand up talent in the country, has never starred in a movie or headlined his own sitcom or talk show. He hasn't even released an hourlong special. But few comics today are more naturally funny or have been as influential. Two days before Chappelle paid tribute to him at the Kennedy Center, Woods, who is in his 50s, ambled onstage across town at the basement space of the DC Improv, took his fedora off and placed it delicately on the microphone stand. In the middle of one of his many digressions, Woods asked a question from the side of his mouth. "Do you know I can't go to Jamaica?" He paused to let imaginations wander, then he leaned back, as if he had changed his mind about letting us know the answer. But he smiled and explained how he got into trouble with the tourism board there for a joke about how much pot people smoke. Woods said: "The guy said: 'You want to smoke?' And I said, 'Land the plane first.'" Then he hit the microphone with his hand, his version of a rim shot. Listen closely to Tony Woods and you can hear echoes of Dave Chappelle. There's the low key style, the conspiratorial glances, the shift from meditative mosey into explosive punch line, the peculiar and emphatic pronunciation of the word "man." But the most obvious link might be the way they punctuate a punch line by hitting the microphone. Chappelle drops it on his leg and runs away, while Woods taps it, but the effect is the same. The similarities imbue Woods with a certain mystique in comedy; he's the Rosetta stone for one of the most significant stand up careers of the past couple decades. In August, the standup Hampton Yount joked on Twitter: "Dave Chappelle always does a fake run off the stage after a joke, not because it's good but because he sees the ghost of Tony Woods career every time." But there's a difference between the sincerest form of flattery and the anxiety of influence. Over the years, Chappelle has become a far more political and philosophical comic than Woods, a defiant violator of norms and wager of cultural wars. When he started doing standup at 14, the most influential comic in America was Eddie Murphy, whose fast talking profane swagger was widely imitated and amplified when "Def Comedy Jam" (originally hosted by Martin Lawrence, another D.C. product) brought black club comedy to a national audience on HBO. In interviews, Chappelle worried that the expectations set by this show pigeonholed black comedians. "It's limiting everyone," he told The Washington Post in 1993. In the old divide between comics who say funny things and those who say things funny, Woods has always belonged firmly in the second camp. He toys with language, favoring malaprops and mispronounced words (he has a ball with "ferret"). He also spins yarns about sex or Mister Rogers (even mixing the two a bit), and specializes in benign lies, introducing white comics as N.A.A.C.P. award winners and describing himself as a 92 year old sharecropper born during the Depression. His comedy has a silliness that veers close to pure nonsense. "So, we're down here," he said, soon after taking the stage at the Improv, eyes at half mast, downshifting into a sigh, before sputtering into nonsense: "Yeah, for real, you know?" Then he pointed out that the door by the stage was not really a door and the D.J. in the back was actually just a guy pressing buttons. Folding his arms, he glanced left and right and leveled with us: "We're in the pantry." Woods was hosting the show, introducing a handful of local comics, but taking the most stage time. One local comic, Rahmein Mostafavi, ribbed him from the stage: "Tony did a tight 45." Woods said he knew he was supposed to hype up the crowd and goose them into applause, but he waved his arms in a parody of enthusiasm. When he asked where audience members were from and someone yelled, "Chicago!" Woods responded, "O.K., calm down." There's one version of the career of Tony Woods that sees him as essentially tragic. On an episode of Marc Maron's podcast, Wanda Sykes, who is also from D.C., seemed exasperated that he hadn't broken through to the mainstream. "You have all the pieces to the puzzle," she said. "Just put it together." But watching Woods perform in his hometown made me wonder about our definitions of success. As the night wore on, his oddball delivery became quirkier, as he added whistles and guffaws and mimed a kangaroo. "When God came to Australia, he started playing jokes," he said. "He gave them pockets but arms that couldn't reach them." As his show stretched past 12:30 a.m., the comic Rod Man, who was headlining upstairs, made a surprise drop in, looked at the crowd and described it as a "hostage situation." No one else seemed to feel that way. Woods certainly looked comfortable just lingering, the most relaxed man in the room. When a comic walks offstage, the show is over. In live stand up, you have to be there. But this is even truer with Woods, since his act doesn't really translate fully outside the room, and you can't find a slick version of him on HBO or Netflix. And yet, if Tony Woods proves one thing, it's that you don't need to be captured on tape to stand the test of time. A joke told in a club may be an ephemeral thing, but it can stick with people for a long time and even inspire some to tell more.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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Naomi Luppescu, the costume designer, and Baille Younkman, credited with assistant costume design, create a rich palette as the dancers hair down and wearing lipstick, they are unabashedly feminine weave across the stage in gold and lavender velvet, with a peach top here and crimson pants there. It's as if on a warm night, they casually floated into a party in Los Angeles, where Ms. Djordjevich, a former New Yorker, now lives, and decided to get away from it all by sneaking down to the basement to perform a square dance. ("Anthem" is a co commission of Los Angeles Performance Practice and the Chocolate Factory.) The movement itself is hypnotic, but their half smiles and eye contact throw the rigidity of the choreography off balance. In between claps, they pat their buttocks or breasts in time with the beat. What's enlightening is how in control they are and, by extension, Ms. Djordjevich is too. The colorful lighting, by Madeline Best, shifts into something starker and more austere as the dancers pair off and fall backward in slow motion. There are pelvic thrusts as they balance on one another and slow rolls across the floor. But then the music's pulse quickens again and their latched arms and high energy kicks transform them into something like the four cygnets from "Swan Lake" only more louche, and instead of an chilly pond, the setting is a beach house just before dawn. There is a dramatic break when the women collapse onto the floor in panting states of disarray. When they rise back up and reclaim their dance, they are messier and sweatier; a stickiness pervades their once pristine clothes as they take turns running behind the spectators, removing their shoes and tossing them onto the stage.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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PALACES FOR THE PEOPLE How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life By Eric Klinenberg 277 pp. Crown. 28. This time of year, my wooden desktop in the Office of the Mayor looks very similar to my computer desktop: covered in spreadsheets. It's budget season in South Bend, Ind. the annual reckoning. Priorities jostle against one another, and sometimes it feels as if we must choose between investing in places (fire stations, streetscapes) and investing in people (after school programs, job training). We do some of both, of course, but the process forces us to balance two concepts of what a city is: a place and a population. In "Palaces for the People," Eric Klinenberg offers a new perspective on what people and places have to do with each other, by looking at the social side of our physical spaces. He is not the first to use the term "social infrastructure," but he gives it a new and useful definition as "the physical conditions that determine whether social capital develops," whether, that is, human connection and relationships are fostered. Then he presents examples intended to prove that social infrastructure represents the key to safety and prosperity in 21st century urban America. Klinenberg is an N.Y.U. sociologist best known recently as Aziz Ansari's co author for "Modern Romance," in which he helped the comedian apply social science tools to better understand dating. Here, he begins with questions he first addressed in an earlier book on a lethal heat wave that struck Chicago in 1995. He asked how two adjacent poor neighborhoods on the South Side, demographically similar and presumably equally vulnerable, could fare so differently in the disaster. Why did elderly victims in the Englewood neighborhood lose their lives at 10 times the rate of those in Auburn Gresham? The explanation had to do with social capital, the amount of interpersonal contact that exists in a community. In the neighborhood with fewer fatalities, people checked on one another and knew where to go for help; in the other, social isolation was the norm, with residents more often left to fend for themselves, even to perish in sweltering housing units. Crucially, these were not cultural or economic differences, but rather had to do with things like the density of shops and the vacancy rate along streets, which either helped or hurt people get to know one another in their communities. 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. The new book's exploration of this reality begins in the basement of a library in a low income Brooklyn neighborhood, where an Xbox based bowling competition pits local seniors against rival teams from a dozen library branches across the borough. The example of a virtual bowling league has particular poetic resonance two decades after Robert Putnam, the Harvard political scientist, raised fears of societal collapse in his study "Bowling Alone." Where Putnam charted the decline of American communal participation through shrinking bowling league membership, Klinenberg's basement of virtual bowlers illustrates how technology might actually enhance our social fabric provided there are supportive spaces. Given what we have learned about the health impacts of social isolation among the elderly, lives may depend on creating more such opportunities. Klinenberg finds in libraries "the textbook example of social infrastructure in action," a shared space where everyone from schoolchildren doing homework to the video gaming elderly can get to know one another better. For him, the presence of destitute or mentally ill visitors is a feature, not a bug, of libraries, because it requires people to confront radical differences in a shared space. Klinenberg extends the idea of social infrastructure to grade schools, college campuses, public housing, private apartment buildings, coffee shops, sidewalks, pocket parks, churches, murals, even flood management projects in Singapore and public pools in Iceland. Pretty much any space that can affect the social fabric is within the author's scope. Here, social infrastructure is not a subset of what we call "infrastructure" but something broader, which makes his project ambitious but also perhaps too vague: After all, if it could include virtually all public and many private or even virtual spaces, is the category even useful? It is, especially when Klinenberg discusses social infrastructure in terms of quality, not just quantity. While some of his examples simply reinforce the inarguable fact that we need more of these resources (more libraries! more gyms! more gardens!), his most illuminating cases gauge what happens in spaces whose designs are either socially helpful or harmful. Social infrastructure becomes less a thing to maximize than a lens that communities and policymakers should apply to every routine decision about physical investment: Do the features of this proposed school, park or sewer system tend to help human beings to form connections? In case after case, we learn how socially minded design matters. A vaunted housing project built in 1950s St. Louis quickly became a nightmare of crime and vandalism; a smaller, adjacent complex remained relatively free of trouble because its design promoted "informal surveillance" and care of common spaces by neighbors. The reconfiguration of large urban schools into smaller, more manageable ones now shows promise in boosting graduation rates in New York partly because this allows parents, students and teachers to form a community in which problems are addressed informally before they can disrupt learning. Meanwhile, much of our built environment contains negative or "exclusive social infrastructure," including gated communities in the United States and South Africa, and college fraternities, which Klinenberg condemns categorically based on their association with substance abuse and sexual assault. (The construction of a massive wall, unsurprisingly, is an example of public investment that is not conducive to social infrastructure.) Much of the book's most interesting content has to do with climate security. From the informal network of Houston churches that kicked into gear after Hurricane Harvey, to the unlikely rise of the Rockaway Beach Surf Club in New York as a vital hub of recovery after Hurricane Sandy, we see how the right kind of social infrastructure can aid struggling communities and even save lives by connecting people during and after disasters. As Klinenberg observes, "when hard infrastructure fails ... it's the softer, social infrastructure that determines our fate." Klinenberg's approach even lets him apply appealing nuance to precincts of our social life that have become objects of simplistic head shaking and finger wagging. When it comes to social media, for example, he takes a look at online communities, especially for young people, and pointedly suggests that teenagers turn to the digital realm largely because they have little alternative. Modern parenting norms make it less likely they will be allowed to physically move around their neighborhoods and communities. When unable to use traditional spaces like streets or parks, young people have no choice but to rely on the internet as their primary social infrastructure. It's a point that should invite introspection among parents who require their children to remain within sight, then scold them for spending too much time looking at screens. "Palaces for the People" reads more like a succession of case studies than a comprehensive account of what social infrastructure is, so those looking for a theoretical framework may be disappointed. But anyone interested in cities will find this book an engaging survey that trains you to view any shared physical system as, among other things, a kind of social network. After finishing it, I started asking how ordinary features of my city, from streetlights to flowerpots, might affect the greater well being of residents. Physically robust infrastructure is not enough if it fails to foster a healthy community; ultimately, all infrastructure is social.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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The last interview was over. The set, a room inside a New York hotel, had gone dark. The subject, Robert A. Durst, headed for the bathroom, apparently unaware his microphone was still on. "There it is. You're caught," he is heard saying. "What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course." It made for a chilling conclusion to an absorbing six or so hours of television. But once HBO's "The Jinx" released you from its grip, questions emerged. Why had the filmmakers, Andrew Jarecki and Marc Smerling, withheld this seemingly vital utterance until the very last scene of the very last episode? For that matter, why had they not gone back to Mr. Durst to ask him about this possible confession? When had they alerted the police? These questions led, inexorably, to other, larger ones: Was this film a form of journalism or entertainment? And, more broadly, what should an audience's expectations of documentary films be? Such questions are now being asked by the viewing public after "The Jinx." But they have preoccupied documentarians for years, as nonfiction film has transcended its roots as a relatively straightforward, niche medium to gain mass appeal. This evolution has created a tension between the need to stick to a fair, accurate presentation of facts and the imperative to tell a dramatic story. "As the stakes go up, filmmakers are really starting to grapple with the issue of how the craft of filmmaking gels with the act of reporting," said David Wilson, who co founded the True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Mo. Not so long ago, documentaries were the cinematic equivalent of castor oil. In 1988, Miramax took pains to avoid referring to Errol Morris's "The Thin Blue Line," the story of a man wrongfully imprisoned for murder, as a "documentary film," promoting it instead as "a new kind of murder mystery." But documentaries are now well rid of their take your medicine stigma. Today, news and entertainment companies as diverse as HBO, Netflix, Hulu, CNN, ESPN, Amazon and Al Jazeera America are trumpeting their documentary offerings. Some airlines even offer a "documentary" option on their in flight entertainment consoles. The film "Blackfish," about animals at marine parks, had a material effect on SeaWorld's profits. The changes roiling the news business are partly responsible for this boom; documentarians have stepped in to fill the void left by shrinking budgets at traditional news outlets. Dan Cogan, executive director of Impact Partners, which matches financiers with socially conscious films, cites "The Hunting Ground," a new documentary about campus rape, as a case in point. "Twenty years ago, that would have been an investigative series in a newspaper," Mr. Cogan said. "Today, it's a documentary film." For a lot of philanthropists seeking to bring about social change, the documentary film has become the investment vehicle of choice. A few years ago, the Ford Foundation announced that it would put 50 million into independent documentaries. (Among those it helped fund was the 2014 film about Edward J. Snowden, "Citizenfour.") Documentaries are a predominantly liberal business, but not exclusively so: Joe Ricketts, a major donor to right wing causes, invested in Dinesh D'Souza's first documentary, "2016: Obama's America," which was released in 2012 and has earned 33.4 million, according to Box Office Mojo. Documentaries have demonstrated the form's ability to produce results. The 2012 film "The Invisible War," about rape in the United States military, helped push the secretary of defense, Leon E. Panetta, toward a major policy change. "The Central Park Five," also released in 2012, helped move New York City's mayor, Bill de Blasio, to settle a 40 million lawsuit brought against the city by five men falsely convicted of beating and raping a jogger in Central Park in 1989. The 2013 documentary "Blackfish," which addressed the mistreatment of animals at marine life amusement parks, had a material effect on SeaWorld's profits. But there's a flip side to the documentary boom. The proliferation of films has made it harder for a documentary to break out. And the results that a growing number of films have achieved have increased the pressure on documentarians not only to keep their audiences entertained, but also to produce a film whose impact can be measured. In other words, the bar is high and it keeps getting higher. It's one thing for a film to raise doubts about the guilt of a convicted killer, as Mr. Morris did in "The Thin Blue Line." But "The Jinx" accomplished something with a greater degree of difficulty: It put someone in handcuffs. (Mr. Durst, a New York real estate scion, was arrested on a murder charge a day before the show's finale.) Ask 10 different documentarians to characterize what they do and you will get 10 different answers. Some consider themselves journalists first. Others say they are primarily storytellers. Still others see themselves foremost as advocates. These impulses don't always coexist peacefully. "The tenets of journalism and storytelling are sometimes at odds with each other," said the documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger. "And sometimes advocacy is at odds with journalism." The makers of "Citizenfour" used information from its subject, Edward J. Snowden, in news articles while making the film. Even the courts seem unsure how to view documentaries, as Mr. Berlinger knows from firsthand experience. Several years ago, Chevron subpoenaed hundreds of hours of film that he had shot for "Crude," a documentary about a class action lawsuit brought against the oil company in Ecuador. Mr. Berlinger argued that as a documentary filmmaker, he was entitled to the same protections as a journalist. He ultimately lost. Subsequently, however, Ken Burns successfully fought back New York's attempts to get their hands on transcripts and other materials from "The Central Park Five." "One of the weird things is that there aren't any rules in documentary film," said Mr. Wilson of the True/False Festival. "Every filmmaker approaches their subjects and films differently." This is one reason documentaries can be so compelling: Every filmmaker effectively reinvents the genre to best tell his or her story. But having no rules can be problematic. Can we still trust what we are watching? " 'Documentary' is a very elastic word," said Thomas Powers, the documentary curator at the Toronto International Film Festival. "I understand why that makes people in certain quarters of journalism a little uneasy." Without rules of engagement, we are left with only the filmmaker's cues, and sometimes they send us mixed signals. During "The Jinx," for instance, verite footage seamlessly blends into impressionistic recreations. Laura Poitras, who made "Citizenfour," has described herself as a "visual journalist." She didn't hold back any blockbuster revelations while making her film. Instead, she contributed to articles about secret United States intelligence activities in both The Washington Post and The Guardian before "Citizenfour" was released. She won a Pulitzer for her newspaper reporting, and an Academy Award for her film.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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LOWELL, Mass. After her first ever class at Middlesex Community College last fall, Socheata Mam sank into a couch with her backpack in the main building's lobby. The 19 year old Cambodian immigrant was overwhelmed, realizing she had committed to a full load of five classes and her 30 hour a week job as a grocery cashier. Her parents, with limited English language skills, could not guide her. They had never had a chance to go to college because the Khmer Rouge not only committed genocide of more than 1.7 million Cambodians from 1975 79, they also cut off educational opportunities for many of those who survived. Ms. Mam, who immigrated to the United States at age 9, said she believed she had to rely on herself for everything at her college in Lowell, Mass., home to the nation's second largest Cambodian population. At the center, Ms. Mam could use the computers, eat lunch, use some of the sriracha hot sauce stocked in the minifridge and hang out with other Asian students. She could get tutoring, academic advising and financial aid tips and maybe eventually shed that feeling that she was on the outside looking in, the same experience Mr. Uy had a few decades ago as a freshman at Boston College. During the spring semester, Ms. Mam went to the connections center every day after classes. Mr. Uy, whose desk faces the entrance, was usually the first person she saw, and just behind him covering most of the back wall was a 10 foot wide by 5 foot high painting of Angkor Wat, a 12th century Cambodian temple complex. Ms. Mam's family has a smaller version of a similar painting in their living room. "The center feels like another home. I go in there, do my homework, talk to them about my days," Ms. Mam said. "It gives me a sense of comfort in a way, just because there are a lot of familiar faces here." Southeast Asians, researchers say, are the fastest growing ethnic or racial group in community colleges and enter college with a number of issues including poverty, limited English skills, and post traumatic stress from fleeing the aftermath of wars in Vietnam and Laos and the genocide in Cambodia. These students have as high a risk of dropping out of college as low income Hispanic or African American students, researchers say. Yet colleges and policymakers often don't realize it because Southeast Asian students' statistics are lumped in as part of overall Asian student performance. Their problems are hidden partly because of the model minority myth that all Asians are academic superstars and flourish in high school and college. "That's often what we hear about Asian Americans. 'They're not our problematic students,'" said Robert Teranishi, co director of the Institute for Immigration, Globalization and Education at U.C.L.A. "When we talk about students of color and programs to support students of color, a lot of times Asian Americans haven't historically been included." Middlesex, which has campuses in the Boston suburbs of Bedford and Lowell, received a 1.7 million, five year grant awarded to 14 colleges in 2016 to improve the academic performance of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. The college has focused its efforts on its campus in Lowell, about 20 miles northwest of Boston, because of its large Southeast Asian presence. Middlesex has roughly 8,200 students, including 13.1 percent who are Asian, 17 percent Hispanic, 8 percent black, and 56 percent white. Asian students' transfer rates 39 percent were consistently lower than the 42.3 percent average for all other groups at Middlesex, according to United States Education Department data. But Middlesex officials were largely unaware that Asian students were struggling so much. Asian American students, interviewed in focus groups, told educators at the college how isolated and stressed they felt. Some ventured into a multicultural center at the school before the Asian student center opened, but rarely stayed because of the lack of Asians. They said they did not believe professors understood their culture and history, a problem Middlesex is hoping to resolve with faculty training. "How do we talk about the killing fields and how are we aware of students in our classroom who might have some PTSD? It's having a larger awareness of this population," said Pamela Flaherty, Middlesex's chief student affairs officer and dean of students. Several students said it helped to hear Mr. Uy's story. He, like Ms. Mam and many of the center's other regulars, had to learn English as a second language. His first language is Khmer, which Cambodians pronounce ka mai to distinguish the word from the French pronounced Khmer (ke mare) as in the Khmer Rouge. Middlesex also created an intensive English language institute, hoping to work with Cambodians of all ages struggling to learn English. Mr. Uy, 44, said he immigrated to the United States around age 9 from a refugee camp in Thailand. He was only 3 or 4 when he and his family fled their home with only the clothes on their backs and went to work in labor camps. At Middlesex, he brought students, their families, community members and faculty together in February to watch a screening of Angelina Jolie's film, "First They Killed My Father," the story of a young Cambodian girl's experience during the genocide. He participated in a panel discussion, opening a dialogue that few students had ever had with their family members. Karonika Brown, 34, who had graduated with an associate degree from Middlesex in 2016 then remained on campus working and taking classes, went to the film. "I was bawling it was awful because I could relate to so much of it," said Ms. Brown, who first started taking classes at Middlesex in 2005 when she was 22 and the single mother of a toddler. She was born in Cambodia in 1983 after the genocide, but both of her parents had been in internment camps. Her mother lost two babies to starvation. Her father died in a refugee camp in Thailand when Ms. Brown was 2. Her mother never recovered emotionally, and Ms. Brown, who is married now, takes care of her mother as well as her three children, ages 7, 11 and 13. Virak Uy is the director of the Program for Asian American Student Advancement at Middlesex Community College and helped establish the Asian American Connections Center at the school in Lowell, Mass. M. Scott Brauer for The New York Times She has dropped in and out of college because of finances and stress. She was recently accepted to Simmons College but decided it was too costly. She plans to transfer to the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, in the fall of 2019, get a bachelor's degree in education and become a teacher. Ms. Mam said she never knew what her parents and grandparents endured in Cambodia until I interviewed her, her mother and stepfather at their home in Chelmsford, which borders Lowell. Ms. Mam's two grandmothers and two of her three older stepsiblings also live there. Ms. Mam's mother, Prumsour Sinn, said she was 3 or 4 when the Khmer Rouge came. She and her family stayed in the capital city of Phnom Penh, and what she remembers most is the fear. She was not allowed to go outside. Mrs. Sinn, who never went beyond high school, divorced Ms. Mam's father when her daughter was 1, and in 2008 married Kosal Sinn, who already lived in America. Mr. Sinn was still in high school when the Khmer Rouge came. "We walked in a line of people, barefoot. Sometime, people sit down, not eating, die," he said, searching for the words he wanted to say in English to describe his family's forced march to a labor camp. Ms. Mam said it was helpful for her to learn about her parents' past a past that might indirectly add to the pressure she felt to thrive in college. Her parents want her to finish community college, transfer to a four year school and get a good job. But they both work full time in factory jobs to support the family, and they cannot help with college bills. Ms. Mam applied for financial aid in the fall but did not receive it, and she paid the 3,000 in tuition and fees herself. At Mr. Uy's suggestion, she took four classes in the spring semester and worked fewer hours. She took out a 600 loan to help with college she works full shifts Fridays through Sundays. "Sometimes when I go to work, I go to school, I think it's overwhelming," said Ms. Mam, who wants to pursue a career in criminal justice. "I get so stressed out when I think about how am I going to make it to the next step." But if she runs into trouble, she knows she will make the center, and Mr. Uy, her first stop. "He's always there," she said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Education
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WASHINGTON The Federal Reserve is widely expected to announce on Wednesday that it will continue buying Treasury securities to stimulate growth in the new year. The Fed's public declaration in September that it would buy bonds until the outlook for the labor market "improved substantially" has cleared away much of the uncertainty and controversy that usually precedes such announcements. The economic recovery remains lackluster and millions are looking for work. But while some analysts question the central bank's ability to improve the situation, few doubt that the Fed, under its chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, is determined to keep trying. Indeed, while Fed officials continue to warn that a failure to avert scheduled tax increases and spending cuts next year would overwhelm their efforts and plunge the economy back into recession, they have also said that even if Congress and the White House negotiate a compromise, the Fed's efforts would continue. "I am not prepared to say we are remotely close to substantial improvement on the employment front," Dennis P. Lockhart, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, said in a recent speech. "I expect that continued aggressive use of balance sheet monetary tools will be appropriate and justified by economic conditions for some time, even if fiscal cliff issues are properly addressed." The remarks were particularly significant because Mr. Lockhart is among the moderate members of the Federal Open Market Committee whose support Mr. Bernanke invested months in winning before starting the new policy. With the direction of policy clearly set, debate has turned to the details. The Fed, whose policy making committee is meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday, still must determine what to buy and how much to spend, and officials continue to debate the best way to describe when the agency is likely to stop buying. In making those decisions, the Fed must balance its conviction that buying bonds reduces borrowing costs for businesses and consumers against concerns the purchases might disrupt financial markets or inhibit its control of inflation. Analysts say the immediate answer is likely to be more of the same. The Fed currently buys 40 billion of mortgage backed securities and 45 billion of Treasury securities a month. Officials highlighted that 85 billion figure in September, and have indicated since that it remained their rough target. "It would be odd for them to disappoint the expectations that they have created themselves," Kris Dawsey of Goldman Sachs wrote in a note to clients predicting that the Fed would maintain both the dollar amount and the division. Other analysts have suggested the Fed might slightly decrease the total amount of purchases, to 80 billion, or increase the share of mortgage securities. The Fed is unlikely to announce a new timetable this week, analysts said. The committee has said that it does not plan to raise interest rates before the middle of 2015, and that it will stop buying bonds before it starts raising rates. Many officials on the 12 member committee perhaps even the majority would prefer to substitute economic objectives for guidance set by the calendar. The Fed's ability to reduce borrowing costs derives in part from persuading investors that interest rates will remain low. Telling investors how the economic situation must change in order to warrant a change in policy could be more convincing, and therefore more potent, than simply publishing an estimated endpoint, these officials say. But an account of the committee's previous meeting, in late October, showed that officials remained divided about which economic objectives to use. The most vocal proponent of focusing on economic goals, Charles L. Evans, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, said last month that the Fed should declare its intent to keep short term interest rates near zero until the unemployment rate fell below 6.5 percent, provided that the rate of inflation did not exceed 2.5 percent. "I believe we have the ability to go even further in reassuring financial markets and the general public that policy will stay appropriately accommodative," Mr. Evans said in advocating the change during a speech in Toronto. Other officials have misgivings about placing such emphasis on any single economic indicator, or on the unemployment rate in particular. The discussions are moving slowly, in part because it is not clear the changes being contemplated would have significant benefits. The targets the Fed is considering closely resemble its own past practice, meaning the new thresholds would tend to reinforce rather than shift expectations. Lou Crandall, chief economist at the research firm Wrightson ICAP, noted in a recent analysis that the unemployment rate exceeded 7 percent in the mid 1980s and again in the early 1990s, and in both cases the Fed waited until the rate fell well into the 6 percent range before it began to raise interest rates. The relative complacency of Fed officials also reflects their judgment that the mortgage bond purchases announced in September are working. Average interest rates on 30 year mortgages are at the lowest levels on record, averaging 3.35 percent in November, according to Freddie Mac's regular survey. "This is solid evidence that our policy has been and continues to be effective though it is certainly not all powerful in current circumstances," William C. Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said last week. To continue the companion purchases of Treasury securities, the Fed will need to change its approach. It is now buying long term securities with proceeds from the sale of short term securities, but it is running out of inventory to sell. The most likely alternative is to create money by crediting the accounts of banks that sell bonds to the Fed, the same method now being used to buy mortgage bonds and also to finance earlier rounds of the Fed's so called quantitative easing. The Fed has repeatedly overestimated the health of the economy and the impact of its efforts. This time, officials have promised to maintain their efforts even as the economy shows signs of improvement. But they are once again sounding notes of cautious optimism about the coming year if Washington does not interfere. A budget deal reducing deficits in the long term, Mr. Bernanke said in November, "could help make the new year a very good one for the American economy."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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TROLLHATTAN, Sweden On a gloomy, rainy afternoon, Rafael Hernandez strained through his exercise routine, preparing for the day that he would return to work at the local Saab auto plant. "We'll be back at work soon, and I want to be ready," said Mr. Hernandez. He is a door adjuster in the body shop, and now works out six days a week. The Saab factory here has not produced any cars since April, when creditors stopped providing operating cash and left Mr. Hernandez and more than 3,000 of his co workers with little to do but wait. Most of them remain defiantly devoted to the company despite the long odds against its survival. "I love Saab. I drive a Saab 9 3," said Mr. Hernandez, a 10 year employee and a native of Cuba, insisting that a reporter follow him outside to see his car. "I'm confident that it will work out." The Saab facility in this city of 40,000 people is silent, save for workers who drop by once a week to perform light maintenance or cleaning to stay busy. Just 62 miles to the south, in Gothenburg, Sweden's second largest city, the contrast is stark. There, Volvo is operating two shifts, churning out 54 cars an hour from early morning until midnight. Stefan Jacoby, Volvo's new chief executive, talks confidently of plans to raise output to 800,000 cars a year by 2020, more than double last year's total. That the outlook for the Swedish carmakers could be so different is partly testimony to diverging histories under former American owners General Motors for Saab, Ford Motor for Volvo. It also reflects their ensuing fortunes: Volvo found a deep pocketed rescuer and Saab did not. The Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, the largest private carmaker in China, paid Ford 1.8 billion last year for Volvo. Saab ended up in the hands of an underfinanced Dutch entrepreneur, Victor R. Muller, the owner of a tiny maker of sports cars called Spyker. For Mr. Muller, 52, who had never managed a large company before, it was a daring move. G.M., eager to wash its hands of Saab as it prepared for bankruptcy, accepted 74 million in cash and 326 million in preferred shares for the company in January 2010. G.M., which continues to make cars under the Saab name in Mexico, has since written off the value of those shares. If Mr. Muller was going to turn Saab around, he needed to win over loyal customers, who loved the company's aerospace heritage and technological leadership, and a style they regularly describe as quirky and different. G.M., over the two decades that it ran the company, had made cars based on Opel, Subaru and even giant sport utility vehicle platforms. Martin Skold, who studies the auto industry at the Stockholm School of Economics, said G.M. never figured out how to integrate Saab, ultimately investing little in the brand while raiding it for technology like turbo engines and front wheel drive. Per Erik Mohlin, a former president of Volvo, puts it more bluntly. "G.M. had no idea what to do with Saab," he said. "I don't think they had a clue what to do with a premium brand." James R. Cain, a spokesman for G.M., said the company "has always viewed Saab as a unique and iconic brand, and we hope they are able to work their way through their difficulties." Jeff Platt, a blogger in New York at a site called SaabsUnited, said that Mr. Muller was going to restore at Saab "what G.M. had distilled out of them." But Saab was too small to succeed as a mass market company in an industry dominated by giants, and it lacked the niche products that allow a company like Porsche to prosper. Its lineup consisted of two aging models, and there was no cash to roll out new vehicles. In March, suppliers began cutting off credit. The Trollhattan factory sputtered for a bit, closing completely in June. Today, even the cars in the Saab Museum are pledged to creditors. "It's essential that we don't put our heads in the sand," she said, "that we keep going to work, going out, going to parties." Initial jobless claims drop to their lowest point since 1969. The U.S. effort to cut energy costs may not have the intended effect. Catch up: Elizabeth Holmes points fingers at others and says she was a believer. Many outsiders see little reason for hope. "The likelihood that Saab will survive in anything resembling its current form is very, very small," said Anders Trapp, an auto industry analyst at Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken in Stockholm. "It's more likely that it will disappear entirely and someone will buy the name from the bankrupt estate." Mr. Skold, at the Stockholm School of Economics, said Mr. Muller "has prolonged the life of Saab by being the superentrepreneur that he is. But his management approach might be more appropriate for a start up than for a 60 year old company." Mr. Muller declined to comment for this article, but in an interview last week he expressed confidence that Saab would be saved. In the spring, he turned to China in search of investors, eventually lining up Pang Da Automobile Trade and Zhejiang Youngman Lotus Automobile. They agreed to jointly invest 245 million euros ( 341 million) for a 53.9 percent stake. If financing could be arranged to meet the bills until the Chinese infusion arrived, he argued, Saab could return to work. In September, their salaries unpaid, employee unions began proceedings that threatened Saab with liquidation. Mr. Muller won court protection from creditors to buy time; the state which has made clear that there will be no bailout agreed to guarantee the salaries until he presented a reorganization plan. Now, he appears to be running out of time. On the same day last week that Mr. Muller announced he had raised 70 million from a Connecticut investor, North Street Capital, Saab's court appointed administrator called for a halt to the reorganization, saying Saab lacked the money to continue. The Chinese companies have now offered to buy Saab outright. Mr. Muller responded Sunday by terminating the partnership. Negotiations continue. Without a breakthrough, Saab's fate could be sealed as early as Friday, when the court overseeing the reorganization decides whether it can continue. History has been kinder to Volvo. When Ford bought it from the truck maker Volvo for nearly 6.5 billion in 1999, it was building a luxury unit in which Volvo would play a clear role alongside Land Rover, Jaguar and Aston Martin. Volvo may not have prospered, but it did not wither. The crunch came when Alan R. Mulally became Ford's chief executive in 2006 and decided to shed the luxury unit as part of an effort to simplify the global business under his "One Ford" strategy. "It seemed like a natural fit for the Ford brand at the time," John Gardiner, a Ford Europe spokesman, said of the Volvo purchase. When Ford decided to sell, "it wasn't a question of what went wrong," he added; rather, a strategic decision was made. In any case, the timing meant it was up for sale as the crisis hit. Volvo laid off thousands of employees in Gothenburg in 2008. But the company, which exports 90 percent of its cars, mainly to the United States, China and Britain, was relatively strong, with a worldwide reputation for safety and durability. An ambitious Chinese executive, Li Shufu, the Geely chairman, saw in it the ideal vehicle for expanding abroad. So far, Mr. Li has moved cautiously, appointing Mr. Jacoby a hands on German with a long career inside the upper ranks at Volkswagen but leaving most of the management intact. And though Geely, based in Hangzhou, China, owns a large Chinese automaker, there is little cooperation between Volvo and Geely's Chinese car unit, aside from talk of joint sourcing in China and on electric vehicles. The Geely deal "is to a certain extent an experiment," Mr. Jacoby said in an interview in his Gothenburg headquarters, "one that could maybe be a model for the future of a deal by a major Chinese investment into a Western enterprise." "Now for the first time we are a stand alone company," said Mr. Jacoby, who predicts Volvo will post an operating profit this year. "People are being given real responsibility to a greater degree than under Ford, but they are also having to be more accountable." Volvo will expand aggressively in China, he said, aiming for 200,000 cars there in 2015, up from 50,000 expected this year. In leafy central Trollhattan, Filip Eskel, 17, sat outdoors at a cafe on a chilly recent afternoon with Andreas Hultgren and Angelica Eliasson, both 18. Mr. Eskel, who is studying auto mechanics in his last year of high school, hoped to work for Saab, but "that doesn't seem possible anymore." He said he would probably stay in Trollhattan, and get work in a garage. Mr. Hultgren will try to enroll at a small university in Trollhattan if his grades are good enough. Otherwise, he said, it will be Gothenburg, for work. Ms. Eliasson said she would probably move to southern Sweden after graduating. "It's going to be a ghost town around here, I think," she said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Global Business
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The Westin is only the second hotel to open on Jekyll Island in the last 40 years and is part of a new "beach village," with a frozen yogurt shop, convenience store, pub and shops. The hotel itself is parked on the beach overlooking the Atlantic and surrounded by dunes and tall sea oats. A convention center, golf course and turtle rehabilitation center are a 20 minute walk away. Savannah is a 90 minute drive; Jacksonville, an hour away. The island was recently evacuated during Hurricane Matthew, but hotel officials said the property suffered only minor damage, because of the island's natural dune barrier, and reopened three days after the storm passed. I booked a Grand Deluxe room, a notch above a basic unit. Even though the hotel occupancy was low the December night I stayed, I was given a cramped room with no ocean view. There was no bathtub and only one queen bed instead of two, which I'd booked. The room, at least, was tasteful with dark wood trim, beveled mirrors and a beige carpet. The "Heavenly Bed," which Westin promotes, was dressed in quality white sheets and a duvet, but was no more comfortable than most beds of this hotel category. The room came with a Mr. Coffee maker and plenty of plugs with USB outlets. After calling reception twice to ask if I was in the right room, they asked me if I wanted a free upgrade to an oceanfront room, which was slightly bigger. I did. Several fees were levied during my one night stay including an annoying resort fee of 15, an 11 percent tax, an additional 5 city tax and a 6 entrance fee to the island. A catalog selling everything from the sheets to showerheads felt more crude than savvy.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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It's a stressful thing to sue your former employer for age discrimination. For nearly four years, as they pursued a federal lawsuit against administrators at Ohio State University and awaited action by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Julianne Taaffe and Kathryn Moon worried about their finances, their health and their futures. The two women had worked in the English as a second language program at Ohio State since 1983, teaching students from 40 countries. "We helped build the program from the ground up," said Ms. Taaffe. So in 2009, when a new program director began disparaging them and other veteran E.S.L. staffers while promoting younger and less experienced people, they wondered despite their consistently first rate performance reviews if they'd screwed up somehow. Though age discrimination seemed a likely explanation Ms. Taaffe is now 62 and Ms. Moon, 67 "I couldn't bring myself to believe Ohio State would do anything like that," Ms. Moon said. Then came an email in 2010 from their new boss to an acquaintance at another university. He wrote that he was dealing with "an extraordinarily change averse population of people, almost all of whom are over 50, contemplating retirement (or not) and it's like herding hippos." Then he inadvertently copied one of his own staff. For years thereafter, experienced E.S.L. teachers faced actions they believed were intended to force them from their jobs. Junior colleagues not only got promotions, but choice assignments. Older instructors lost their offices and, reassigned to a cramped open space, shared an insufficient number of computers even as younger colleagues kept their offices and desktops. The director's successor continued his policies, and staffers heard him deride veteran teachers as "millstones" and "dead wood." "It was part of a strategy to make us uncomfortable and make us retire," said Ms. Moon. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Eventually, more than 20 E.S.L. staffers were squeezed out, their positions threatened with elimination or reclassification at lower salaries. When Ms. Taaffe lodged a formal complaint, a university investigation brought no action. She lost 23 pounds and developed the beginnings of an ulcer. Ms. Moon, who said the conflict "felt like a giant knot in the pit of my stomach for months and months," suffered insomnia and back spasms. In 2014, both women retired years before they'd intended, because they expected to lose their positions and faced prohibitively expensive health insurance costs if they delayed. Neither could find a comparable position elsewhere. Recent events have brought some vindication, however. In November, the E.E.O.C. found "reasonable cause to believe" that the women and their older colleagues had been discriminated against, a violation of the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act, which protects workers 40 and older. Then, very quietly, on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, Ohio State announced a settlement. "The Ohio State University is committed to hiring and retaining a diverse and inclusive work force," the university said in a statement to The Times. The university denied that it had acted unlawfully and took no action against any employee. But the university has rehired both women and agreed to back pay and retroactive benefits totaling about 203,000 for Ms. Taaffe and 237,000 for Ms. Moon. It also paid 325,000 in attorneys' fees to the Gittes Law Group, the firm representing the women, and the AARP Foundation lawyers who joined their suit. More important, the plaintiffs won "prospective injunctive relief," actions to avert illegal policies in the future. Ohio State has agreed to train human resources staff to recognize, investigate and prevent age discrimination. And it will establish a "second look process," an independent review of age discrimination investigations. "That's one of the major victories in the case," said Dara Smith, an AARP Foundation attorney. The two plaintiffs "would not accept the settlement until we reassured them that the university would have to change its policies." The settlement could prove important for the more than 5 million Americans who work for state governments and entities. "State and local government employers are still learning that there's an age law and that it's applied to them since 1974," said Cathy Ventrell Monsees, senior attorney adviser at the E.E.O.C. But since a Supreme Court decision in 2000, plaintiffs who bring age discrimination suits against state employers cannot collect damages, making attorneys reluctant to take such cases. (Plaintiffs can seek damages from private employers or the federal government, however, and in some cases from local governments.) "It takes a long time to try these cases, and then there's no payoff even if you win," Ms. Smith said. The E.E.O.C. can sue for damages on behalf of complainants, though Ms. Smith said she thought it unlikely in this case. The Ohio State settlement, however, demonstrates that "it can be worthwhile to bring these claims" against states, she said. "It's a public reminder that they need to take age discrimination as seriously as they take other forms of discrimination." Although the federal age discrimination law took effect 50 years ago, a milestone the E.E.O.C. has marked with a new report, "age usually gets left out when companies think about diversity," Ms. Ventrell Monsees said. "If the same supervisors made those comments about race or sex, they'd know trouble was coming." When older workers get dismissed or pushed out, however, they contend with longer periods of unemployment before being rehired, assuming they are rehired. Their new jobs, Ms. Ventrell Monsees pointed out, often pay less than those they lost. They may have to retire long before they'd expected. But Julie Taaffe and Kathryn Moon are back on campus, hoping their protracted effort will help other older state employees. Ms. Taaffe met with E.S.L. students last month for the first time since 2014 and was relieved to find her teaching skills intact. "I'm planning to stick around for a while," she said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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FAST FURIOUS PRESENTS: HOBBS SHAW (2019) 8 p.m. on HBO; stream on HBO platforms. We have come a long way since Vin Diesel and Paul Walker played Californian street racers in 2001's "The Fast and the Furious." The franchise has ballooned since then, and its latest offering is this spinoff. In "Hobbs Shaw," which takes place between "Fate of the Furious" (2017) and the upcoming "F9," Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham reprise their roles from earlier "Furious" movies, reluctantly teaming up to keep a genetically enhanced supervillain (Idris Elba) from getting his hands on a deadly virus. Their mission ties in Shaw's formidable sister (Vanessa Kirby), a rogue MI6 agent, and takes them to Chernobyl and then Samoa. The plot is hardly the point the main attraction is the scathing banter between the leading men and the over the top, gravity defying stunts. It may not be the strongest film in the saga, but it's a fun escape. SEASONAL WONDERLANDS 9 p.m. on BBC America. BBC America is introducing yet another nature series, focusing this time around on the transitions between seasons and how wildlife adapts to them. The actor Domhnall Gleeson ("Run") narrates all three episodes. The first puts the lens on New England's striking colors and the diverse inhabitants of its trees; the remaining two episodes highlight Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago, and Okavango, a river delta in Botswana.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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Three women stand, limbs entwined. Gently unraveling, they sit, only to entangle again. In this manner, they continue, from configuration to configuration, except that one of them sometimes pulls apart, positioning and regarding the others. She is the choreographer. She is Jodi Melnick, and this is her "Moment Marigold," which had its debut at BAM Fisher on Wednesday as part of the Next Wave Festival. It is hard to describe Ms. Melnick's acclaimed dancing without resorting to the same stock of adjectives: subtle, nuanced, delicate, gossamer. Her choreography explores those qualities, as if to test or remember how they feel from the inside. And in Maggie Thom and EmmaGrace Skove Epes, she has chosen stage companions to whom the same words can apply. When not knotted, the three women spend much of the 50 minute work moving independently. They share loops of material a drift of loose swinging arms and twisting torsos textured by stumbles, elbow jabs and fluttering hands but not in a form as clearly defined as a canon. The synchronicity between two dancers comes and goes like a mirage. Often Ms. Melnick collaborates closely with one of her colleagues while the other one cuts through or poses at a distance. Sections of unison, whether static or bouncy, have a contrastive drama.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Millions of people gave their email addresses to Quibi, JetBlue, Wish and other companies and those email addresses got away. They ended up in the hands of advertising and analytics companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter, leaving the people with those email addresses more easily targeted by advertisers and able to be tracked by companies that study shopping behavior, according to a report published on Wednesday. The customers unwittingly exposed their email addresses when signing up for apps or clicking on links in marketing emails, said the researcher Zach Edwards, who runs the digital strategy firm Victory Medium. In the report, he described the giveaway of personal data as part of a "sloppy and dangerous growth hack." The practice of making customers vulnerable to tracking by allowing their personal data to be passively collected by third parties is nothing new, Mr. Edwards said in an interview, but it has gained traction despite efforts to improve online privacy protections. "This hack used to be something that only very niche and sophisticated developers understood," he said. "But now the entire ad tech industry understands it." Privacy experts have raised concerns about leaks of personal information for more than a decade, said Arvind Narayanan, a computer science professor at Princeton University who has studied data mining. Careless web programming practices lead to some accidental giveaways of large hunks of personal information, he said, but other leaks are intentional. "There's an industry of ad targeting that tries to connect people's online and offline activities," Mr. Narayanan said. "People may not want all of their interests and activities and purchases to be tied together in one uber profile that connects every dot, but that's exactly what's happening. These leaks are one clue to the puzzle of how companies are able to create that all encompassing profile." Mr. Edwards, a contributor to a recent study that examined potential privacy violations by dating services like Grindr and OkCupid, wrote in the new report that one of the "most egregious" leaks involved Quibi, a short form video platform based in Los Angeles that is run by the veteran executives Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman. Quibi went live on April 6, long after new data privacy regulations went into effect in Europe and California. "In 2020, no new technology organizations should be launching that leaks all new user confirmed emails to advertising and analytics companies," Mr. Edwards wrote. "Yet that's what Quibi apparently decided to do." 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. People who downloaded the Quibi app were asked to submit their email addresses. Then they received a confirmation link. Clicking on the link made their email addresses available to Google, Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat, according to the report. Quibi said in a statement on Wednesday that data security "is of the highest priority" and that "the moment the issue on our webpage was revealed to our security and engineering team, we fixed it immediately." Mr. Edwards said customers were probably unaware of leaks at Wish, an e commerce platform where hundreds of millions of email addresses were most likely exposed starting in 2018. When users clicked on links in marketing emails from the company, their email addresses were shared with Google, Facebook, Pinterest, PayPal and others, he wrote. Wish strengthened its data protection measures after hearing from Mr. Edwards this year, the company said in a statement. But it criticized his report as "off the mark," noting that the email addresses were encoded and went to service providers that Wish uses for advertising and sales support. A spokesman for Wish added that Google and other advertising and analytics companies "had no reason" to crack the encoded email addresses. "In any event," the spokesman said, "it certainly is not a 'breach' to provide a service provider with such encoded information." Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment. According to Mr. Edwards's report, customer data also leaked out of JetBlue, which said in a statement that it was taking Mr. Edwards's concerns seriously and would review his findings.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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"Ballet (New York)," a new work by the Conceptualist French choreographer Jerome Bel, has moved. Having made its debut this month at the Marian Goodman Gallery in Midtown Manhattan, it migrated over the weekend to a much more hallowed space for New York dance: the studio, currently occupied by the Martha Graham Dance Company, that was long the workshop of Merce Cunningham. Mr. Bel's work, a commission for Performa 15, gathers together a motley crew of 13 New Yorkers whose training in dance runs from seemingly zero to good enough for New York City Ballet (Megan LeCrone, a soloist with that company, is in the cast). Their responses to simple instructions from Mr. Bel, whose direction is laissez faire, are supposed to illuminate something about dance and the people doing it. According to the program note, the work is also supposed to be about how different environments "frame and shape the way we see and 'feel' dance." Hence the move. On Thursday "Ballet (New York)" will shift locations again for a final performance, this time at El Museo del Barrio. Compared with the Goodman Gallery, the Martha Graham Studio Theater offers slightly more comfortable seating. Gorgeous afternoon light streamed in through the space's famous windows. But "Ballet (New York)" was no more resonant in this place than it had been at the Goodman.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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LOS ANGELES Fissures revealed by the hacking at Sony Pictures Entertainment have raised the prospect of profound change at one of Hollywood's oldest institutions: the Motion Picture Association of America. In a behind the scenes drama, the Sony Pictures chairman, Michael Lynton, last month told industry colleagues of a plan to withdraw from the movie trade organization, according to people who have been briefed on the discussions. He cited the organization's slow response and lack of public support in the aftermath of the attack on Sony and its film "The Interview," as well as longstanding concerns about the cost and efficacy of the group. Reversing course in mid January, as the Oscar nominations were being announced, Mr. Lynton stayed in. But he and other studio executives are now discussing proposals that could alter the structure, mandate and governance of a 93 year old organization that has been the policy front for Hollywood's major film studios. If adopted, their still emerging propositions might jolt the group into line with the new realities of a changing entertainment business. They might, for instance, open the association to new members and expand its interests to include television programs or digital content. They might also reduce the heavy annual contribution of more than 20 million that is required of each of the six member companies: Walt Disney, Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Universal and Sony. One suggestion would even involve selling or perhaps redeveloping the organization's Washington quarters, which is on prime real estate near the White House. Under tightened government ethics rules, the building's screening room, though still active, is no longer the scene of lavish movie and dinner nights that were once popular with lawmakers. Asked about the discussion of a serious reworking of the M.P.A.A.'s mission and structure, Christopher J. Dodd, chief executive of the association, said: "I'm for that, completely." Speaking by telephone on Wednesday, Mr. Dodd, a former senator from Connecticut, said he was on his way to a Los Angeles dinner with top studio executives, where he expected to engage in a broad conversation about goals and possible changes. Though he declined to discuss Sony's near exit, Mr. Dodd said of Mr. Lynton: "He's there. I'm glad he's there. I think he's handled this well." As for other members' position on revamping the organization, Mr. Dodd noted that "some feel more strongly about it than others." Strains within the film association were thrown into sharp relief in early December at the height of the hacking crisis engulfing Sony. That is when Sony's sister studios still unsure about the source of the attack, and most with an eye on their own interests did not line up behind an effort by Mr. Dodd and the actor George Clooney to show support for Sony and "The Interview," a comedic sendup of the Korean leader Kim Jong un. Warner Bros. had been willing to sign on to a public expression of support, according to people briefed on the exchanges. But other studios were largely wary, and Mr. Dodd was hampered by a rule that requires alignment of all member companies behind any significant step. The need for full agreement has kept the association from influencing some major policy debates, as member companies and their parent corporations wrestle with diverging interests. The M.P.A.A. has taken no bold stand, for instance, on proposals to regulate the web through the Federal Communications Commission. Presumably, Comcast which owns Universal and has a vast broadband operation might view any such move differently from Sony or Disney, which own no such pipelines. On another front, state and local film commissioners in New York and elsewhere have sometimes carried the brunt of legislative fights for production subsidies. Under Mr. Dodd, however, the organization has considerably stepped up its fight for incentives and support for commissioners. Mr. Lynton declined through a spokesman to discuss tensions between Sony and its peers or deliberations about the future of the M.P.A.A. Similarly, representatives of the other M.P.A.A. member companies declined to comment. 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. But over a dozen people with knowledge of company actions and positions, most speaking on condition of anonymity to protect relationships, described over the last several weeks an industry debate that was likely to result in at least some changes. Kevin Tsujihara, the chief executive of Warner Bros., said he, like Mr. Dodd, welcomed an examination of the organization that would mirror a similar review of cost and mission at his company. "Now is as good a time as any" to look at fundamental questions, Mr. Tsujihara said in an interview. He added: "We haven't, as an industry, evolved fast enough." Sony, Warner and Paramount are clearly interested in proposals for change. Where the other companies fall in the debate remains to be seen. "The bigger issue is that it's the motion picture association," said Katherine L. Oliver, who was New York's commissioner of media and entertainment under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and now consults with cities through the Bloomberg Associates nonprofit. "Who represents the growing television industry and the growing content creation industry?" Ms. Oliver asked, voicing a question that is now being examined by the M.P.A.A.'s member companies. In private conversations over the last week, people associated with various member companies with some exceptions expressed satisfaction with Mr. Dodd, who succeeded Dan Glickman as the M.P.A.A. chief in 2011. Mr. Dodd's current employment contract extends to the spring of next year. Mr. Lynton, who contributed to Mr. Dodd's presidential campaign in 2007, was among those who strongly backed his appointment to the M.P.A.A. post. And those people largely acknowledged that the film studios depend heavily on the association for core cross company functions. Those notably include the supervision of a film ratings system, and the operation of a separate unit that protects movie titles from use by others under a voluntary industrywide arrangement. But those briefed on the position of several companies said virtually all the studios have chafed lately at the high cost of maintaining the M.P.A.A., along with its worldwide antipiracy and market access operations, particularly as Sony, Warner and others are cutting staff and costs. As recently as 2012, public tax filings by the film association, a nonprofit, showed one year expenditures of about 69 million, supported by dues of about 10 million from each studio, plus income from the ratings system and other sources, to support a staff that then numbered about 200. But the current contributions are approaching 25 million a year, according to several executives. (Others say the number is slightly lower, depending on how the spending on dues and other support is counted.) That reflects some growth in operating expense under Mr. Dodd, who was paid about 3 million in 2012, according to the tax filing. Mr. Lynton and others have posited that including television companies and units in an expanded trade organization would better reflect the current realities of entertainment, while spreading the cost of global efforts among a larger number of participants. Television shows are generating more money and viewers than film, often for the same companies that make movies. Any such expansion would probably end the rule of unanimity, theoretically making the M.P.A.A. or a successor more nimble. But it would also bump quickly into existing policy organizations for instance, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association or CreativeFuture, Hollywood's antipiracy alliance with overlapping membership and mission. On Wednesday, Mr. Dodd said he had "talked with a lot of people" about expanded membership over the last several years. As for selling that Washington building, which is also near a number of embassies, he sounded a note of caution. "It's an important spot," he said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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On March 13, as New York City schools let out for what turned out to be their last official day and offices were telling their employees to work from home, I came down with an ominous fever and chills, and my business partner and I closed our two Brooklyn bar restaurants. By the next week I would be diagnosed with Covid 19, and the week after that I would develop pneumonia. I spent four weeks bedridden, isolated from my family, at times immobilized with terror that I wouldn't survive the night. When the virus released its grip and I could finally sit up in bed, my first impulse was to email my staff: We're back in business! I have worked in the restaurant industry for 41 years, as a server, a bartender and, for the past 22 years, an owner. We have weathered upheavals, 9/11, the downturn of 2008 and Hurricane Sandy. But the food and beverage service industry has been hit harder than almost any other in this pandemic, accounting for 60 percent of the jobs lost in March. Those are unprecedented numbers, and none of us has ever seen anything like the troubles looming on the horizon for our industry, particularly for smaller, independent owners like me. All of the many small bar and restaurant owners I know are desperately interrogating one another in daily calls and texts, trying to catch every seemingly germane webinar, to follow the dizzying array of acronyms of activist and support groups that have popped up, plaintively asking who's doing what, who's opening and who's closing? Oh, so and so is doing takeout/delivery? And she's selling a little curated selection of groceries and household goods out the side window? Is that working? After closing, we committed to paying our staff for three weeks, which sapped our bank account. We went through a volley of calls and Zoom meetings with accountants, bankers and restaurant industry lawyers to try to determine what our liability would be if we took the Paycheck Protection Program loans and couldn't then open and rehire our entire staff by our loan's ending date of June 10. We took the loans despite the risk of being saddled with debilitating debt. Others on our staff came down with symptoms of Covid 19, while one of our former cooks died from the disease in mid April, leaving behind a wife and two young daughters. It became a question of what we owed our employees, not just legally, but morally. While pols from Chuck Schumer to Marco Rubio congratulate themselves for the bipartisan CARES Act, we in the trenches realize the P.P.P. loans and their kin are mere bandages on a gunshot wound, and for us the real struggle is going to begin when things open up. Those loans' regulations as they're currently written require them to be spent almost fully to reimburse employees for lost income and used entirely within eight weeks of their being granted. So that's great for a short fix for our staff, but does pretty much nothing for the future viability of our business. In the two months in which we've been forced to be closed to the public by law, we've been paying full rent, utilities, whopping liability insurance and workers' comp insurance, state and local sales taxes, payroll taxes and our share of the buildings' real estate taxes, all while bringing in zero dollars. While most states have adjusted their liquor sales laws to allow for takeout or delivery of alcohol during this time, that's merely planting an optimistic flag for most of us, a quivering promise, for those clearing 800 on nights they're used to grossing 10,000, that they'll be back, in some capacity ... maybe? In my home state of Wisconsin, following an ill advised court ordered opening on May 13, social media featured bars perilously packed with revelers. Here in New York, the epicenter of the country's cases, every indication is that the scrutiny on bars and restaurants is going to be intense. Protocols already being readied in most states will limit indoor business to 50 percent of prior capacity even down to 25 percent in some states and restrict seating to safe distances of six feet. That would give me four lonely seats across the entire run of each of my bars, with guests dotted here and there slipping their masks down to sip at a drink, and perhaps three of our five booths permitted to be occupied. And all of this in a time of depressed economic activity, when most customers will already be leery of re emerging and congregating, and have far less leisure income to spend. That is quite effectively a death sentence. It would result in revenues of 25 percent or less of our normal operation, which in this business, even given a popular spot doing quite well, yielded razor thin margins to begin with. There is, quite simply, no possible way for anyone to make those numbers work. Danny Meyer, the impresario whose Union Square Hospitality Group has shepherded many of New York's most lauded dining spots into existence and whose empire once employed thousands here, has stated openly that with the limiting protocols the state is looking to put in place, he deems it pointless to open any of his fine dining restaurants until such time as there is a vaccine. I can't fault him. Maybe we could in good faith struggle for the next couple of years in the red, my business partner and I chipping in out of pocket, slogging along in hopes of coming to the surface eventually. That is, if there's not another order to shut down. To avoid an enormous die off of our smaller independent restaurants and bars, and the subsequent financial crippling of the millions of workers they employ, four tectonic changes, in some combination, would have to be effectuated by federal and state governments. Rent is obviously one of our biggest expenses, especially in larger cities. Rent easements are not voluntarily coming from landlords afraid that they will not be able to pay their taxes and other expenses. For commercial rent forgiveness to become a given, it would have to be mandated by state government, and for that to work the landlords would in turn have to be granted easements of property taxes. That might mean drawing a straight percentage line, cutting rents by law to 50 percent, say, or pegging easements to monthly gains against former revenue as shown by tax records. The onerous payroll, sales and other taxes still being drawn out of our accounts, despite the bars being now over two months closed, would also have to be eased. When we pay out 16,000 of payroll to the staff, I'm adding another 8,500 in payroll taxes. Combined with state and local sales taxes among the highest in the country, and our typical share of building taxes, this surpasses the rent we pay. As one might expect from the parasitic insurance industry, the business liability insurance we are obligated to carry, at a cost of hundreds of thousands over the course of the years we've been in operation, now denies us any remuneration for business interruption in this crisis even as it issues us another 14,500 quarterly bill. The current federal administration seems unwilling to take any action to address insurance companies' refusal to compensate their captive clients for business interruption, a position the insurance industry's lobbyists are working frantically to cement in the wake of the havoc unleashed by the coronavirus. Imagine if you found your car demolished in a parking lot, but your longstanding insurance company simply told you it's not obligated to cover the damage. Now imagine that writ larger, as your entire living. This tells us what we already knew; this larcenous "cost of doing business" also needs to be at least temporarily abated by the government, to help owners free up money they need to pay their employees and struggle to their feet. And going forward, political pressure must be brought to bear on insurance companies that reap enormous profits while denying their obligations to contract holders. What seems certain is that outdoor space on sidewalks and streets needs to be opened up by municipalities for bars and restaurants to expand their tables and seating, so that they are able to recoup some of their working footprint while keeping guests at safer distances from one another. Many cities globally are already testing out versions of this; Cleveland has delineated 25 blocks as emergency open zones to facilitate their restaurant industry. Is New York City likely to block off Atlantic Avenue, a major Brooklyn thoroughfare one of our bars happens to be situated on? Certainly not, but the sidewalks are wide there, and so to each business in need there could be concessions of space that wouldn't hinder traffic, cyclists or pedestrians. If the city allowed us to place tables on the sidewalk, at least during the summer and autumn months, this one measure alone could prove a lifeline for us, as for so many smaller shops that will struggle to keep their doors open. Without it, we're envisioning being forced to close both of our bars. Contemplating what the landscape of my city could look like without help evokes a melancholic dread of what will be lost. What could replace my favorite reggae themed Japanese izakaya, or the venerated Italian slice spot with the octogenarian pizzaiolo, the Malaysian cafe with superb French toast, or the lauded cocktail bar hidden behind the telephone booth door? These are not just whimsical indulgences for idle spending; independent restaurants and bars are a defining element of a city's very identity. To envision New York as a moonscape of nothing but the few major franchises that can fund a long loss, a monotony of McDonald's, Chipotles, Domino's and Sweetgreens, is to shudder at an unrecognizably reduced city. Bereft of the smaller, idiosyncratic places that safeguard its lifesaving charm against the tussle and insult of big city life, would New York still be a place tourists would bother to flock to? Would it continue to be a city any of us would want to live in? Toby Cecchini ( tobycecchini) is a co owner of The Long Island Bar and The Rockwell Place in Brooklyn, and author of the book "Cosmopolitan, a Bartender's Life." 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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From 1840 to 1841, less than a decade after a cholera epidemic ravaged New York City, two daughters in law of John James Audubon, the wildlife painter, died of tuberculosis, the second while living with Audubon in Lower Manhattan. Like the many New Yorkers who have fled the city during this year's Covid 19 pandemic, Audubon promptly left town, relocating three generations of his family to the country to escape what he called the "hot bricks and pestilential vapors" of urban life. For 4,938, he bought 14 acres of picturesque woodland along the Hudson River in the area now known as Washington Heights, a parcel that stretched northward from 155th Street, an unpaved cart path at the time. Here, on a steep hillside by the water, the creator of the lushly painted "Birds of America" built a two and a half story clapboard frame house over an English basement, with green shutters and verandas front and back. The story of the area's evolution from hinterland to suburb to city is comprehensively told in Matthew Spady's fluidly written new history, "The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot: Audubon Park and the Families Who Shaped It" (Empire State Editions, Fordham University Press). Matthew Spady, a citizen historian whose 23 year obsession with his neighborhood led to his comprehensive new book, "The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot: Audubon Park and the Families Who Shaped It." Katherine Marks for The New York Times Mr. Spady, a market research project manager and a former opera singer, became curious about his neighborhood's long forgotten history in 1997, when he and his partner, Scott Robinson, decided to move into the Grinnell, a Renaissance Revival style apartment house built in 1911 at 157th Street and Riverside Drive. "Who or what is Grinnell?" asked Mr. Robinson, a question that led the pair to the New York Historical Society, where a librarian showed them an encyclopedia entry on the environmentalist George Bird Grinnell. Grinnell grew up on Audubon's estate after the painter's death, and Grinnell's 1938 obituary in The New York Times noted that he was often called "the Father of American conservation." The encyclopedia reported that Grinnell "had been in the classroom of Lucy Audubon," the painter's widow, Mr. Spady recalled in an interview, "and that really stirred my imagination." Over the next 23 years, Mr. Spady became an obsessive citizen historian, poring over thousands of deeds, wills, church records and newspaper articles. His research uncovered the counterintuitive story of how two of the most noted naturalists of their eras actively contributed to the urbanization of the Arcadian landscape both men loved and called home. The Audubons moved into their rambling clapboard homestead in 1842. The house was nine miles from the city's edge, and was full to bursting with both creativity and people. Audubon's painting room was on the first floor, and he and his wife slept in a second floor bedroom overlooking the river and the New Jersey Palisades, with two grandchildren in a trundle that pulled out from under their bed. The Audubons' sons, Victor and John Woodhouse, remarried, and the two couples and their children slept in several of the other four second floor bedrooms. For a time, Samuel F.B. Morse rented the basement laundry room for telegraph experiments. The homestead sat just 20 feet from the Hudson at the bottom of a steep slope. The family called the property "Minnie's Land" for Mrs. Audubon, whom the boys affectionately called Minnie, the Scottish word for mother. For sustenance, John Woodhouse raised pigs, cows and chickens and planted nearly 200 fruit trees. In enclosures, the family kept bears, wolves, foxes and other four legged models that Audubon and John Woodhouse painted for a monumental new compendium called "The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America." Victor painted the scenes' backgrounds. In 1851, after several years of deteriorating health and finances, Audubon died in his painting room, his final nesting place. The Hudson River Railroad had arrived two years earlier, and although its tracks severed Minnie's Land from the water, its trains brought financial opportunity. With Upper Manhattan suddenly within commuting distance of downtown, and the Audubons strapped for cash, they sold off the eastern portion of their holdings and developed the rest into the city's first railroad suburb. Extending from 155th to 158th Streets west of 11th Avenue (now Broadway), Audubon Park was a gated community of 12 Italianate villas, most of them occupying hillside promontories. According to Mr. Spady, the Audubons exerted as much control over who moved into their bourgeois Shangri La as any modern co op board, ensuring that all the initial residents were Episcopalians of the merchant class. Victor and John Woodhouse built new houses along the river, and their mother lived six months a year with each of them. But by 1862, pneumonia had taken John's life, and Victor, an alcoholic, had died after a drunken fall and an ensuing illness. In 1864, Mrs. Audubon sold the homestead to Jesse Benedict, a lawyer, who dressed up the simple frame house with showy plumage typical of the post Civil War period: a mansard roof and bay windows on two sides. With the passing of the Audubons, the park that bore their name gradually came under the sway of the Grinnell family. Like Audubon before him, George Blake Grinnell, a cotton merchant, had anxieties about disease and city life that led him to rent a house in the park in 1857. Seven years later, he bought the Hemlocks, an Italianate villa on the site of a former chicken yard, which he later topped with the inevitable mansard roof. Enriched by a second career as a stockbroker, he kept on buying property, ultimately amassing about two thirds of Audubon Park. George Bird Grinnell, his eldest son, was born in 1849 and enjoyed a "Huck Finn" childhood, said John Taliaferro, the author of the 2019 biography, "Grinnell: America's Environmental Pioneer and His Restless Drive to Save the West." George Bird "would go off into the countryside and go hunting, often missing" his quarry, Mr. Taliaferro said. "But it wasn't mischievous, because Madame Audubon was his tutor, and he'd bring her birds and she'd describe what they were, so he learned at the feet not of John James Audubon but of his widow." When the boy brought her a captive red crossbill, she set it free. Though George Bird was expected to go into the family business, the natural world offered an alternative path. "The ghost of Audubon was really still quite present there," Mr. Taliaferro said of Audubon Park. "There was that choice: Do you become your father or is there another mentor that steers you in a different direction in your life, and I think that's what Audubon was to Grinnell." As the editor of Forest and Stream magazine, the founder of the first Audubon Society and a champion of national parks, George Bird played a leading role in bringing environmentalism into the tent of conscientious progressivism. A glacier in Glacier National Park in Montana bears his name. But he left a different kind of imprint on the landscape of Audubon Park. As plans were being drawn up to extend Riverside Drive uptown from Grant's Tomb, Grinnell and his family used their political connections to wangle a serpentine inland detour of the drive from 155th to 161st streets, a route that ran right past the front door of the Hemlocks and boosted the Grinnells' property values. This maneuver cut the Audubon houses off from the rest of the park, leaving the wildlife painter's old home hunkering gloomily in the shadow of a 40 foot retaining wall, with the new Riverside Drive looming above it. To meet the demands for cash from his siblings, Grinnell began selling off the family's holdings in 1904, capitalizing on a new 157th Street subway station on the site of their former vegetable garden. In short order, apartment houses began rising on the eastern side of Riverside, including the 13 story Renaissance Revival style Riviera, which a developer started building in 1909 on the spot where the Hemlocks had stood. When the city acceded to local requests to designate an Audubon Park Historic District in 2009, it excluded 12 brick and limestone rowhouses built in the 1890s on West 158th Street near Riverside. Efforts by Mr. Spady and the Riverside Oval Association to have the row added to the district have been unfruitful, and the new owner of Nos. 636 640 has obtained demolition permits for all three. As it happens, the first owner of No. 638 was Reginald P. Bolton, a dogged preservationist who had tried as early as 1905 to rescue the Audubon homestead from the wrecking ball. To this day, a weathered wooden sign bearing his surname hangs above the doorway under the stairs. But it seems unlikely that the nameplate, or indeed the entire house, will long survive the ongoing development that Audubon unwittingly set in motion when he began taming the land there in the 1840s. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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A Quarantine Hospital So Unwelcome that New Yorkers Burned it Down President Trump tweeted in late April that because of the coronavirus pandemic, he sought to halt immigration "in light of the attack from the Invisible Enemy." This followed earlier assertions that concerns over the virus's spread legitimized a crackdown at the southwestern border. While this particular coronavirus may be novel, there is nothing new about the use of a pathogen to justify hostility to foreigners, as disease and anti immigrant sentiment have periodically been fevered bedfellows in America. "It's been this way in the history of public health in the United States since the beginning," said Dr. Kathryn E. Stephenson, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who leads a clinical trial team that is working to develop treatments and a vaccine to battle Covid 19. "The original anti immigration laws were based on a fear of disease, particularly of cholera." The New York Marine Hospital, often called the Quarantine, was built in 1799 on the island's northeastern shore, near where the Staten Island Ferry docks today. The picturesque 30 acre complex, situated on land seized by the state through eminent domain, extended up the hill from the waterfront past the current site of Borough Hall to around the area now occupied by the St. George Theater and St. Marks Place. Expanding over the years, the Quarantine ultimately included some 11 hospital buildings, including a six ward Smallpox Hospital and a two story brick Women's Hospital facing the bay. The complex's handsome centerpiece was St. Nicholas Hospital, a three story brick structure roughly 300 feet by 50 feet, which was crowned by an observatory on which a statue of a sailor kept watch over New York Harbor. All told, the complex could accommodate 1,000 patients at a time, and by the 1840s it cared for upward of 8,000 people a year. Though remote from the teeming immigrant masses of Manhattan's Lower East Side, the Quarantine was all too close to the residents of Castleton, the town that surrounded the facility, who considered it, in the words of one of them, "a pest and a nuisance of the most odious character." The mosquitoes that carried yellow fever were untroubled by the six foot wall that bounded the hospital campus, and one of the town's most popular businesses, a hotel and pub called Nautilus Hall, was just across the road, according to a report by Dr. Stephenson, who grew up nearby in the 1980s. Hospital staff mingled freely there with the outside population. Many of the inmates of the Quarantine, which was overseen by both the state and the city, were new immigrants who arrived by sea suffering from cholera, smallpox, yellow fever or typhus, infectious diseases that spread rapidly among travelers packed together below decks in steerage. The statue of the sailor atop St. Nicholas Hospital watched throughout the decades as a parade of ships docked at the Quarantine's piers, having been sent there from the docks of Manhattan or Brooklyn if even a single person onboard was deemed by a health inspector to have an infectious disease. Quarantine staff managed to rescue most of the patients. "The sick men and women, in their night clothes, just arisen, weakened with illness and dreadfully excited, were thronging around Dr. Bissell on the open grounds adjoining the building, crying aloud," The New York Times reported. "'Will they burn us, will they burn us?' they would repeat, clinging to him." Dr. Stephenson, the infectious diseases physician scientist who has studied the Quarantine, said that local residents' sense of political voicelessness had helped lead to the arson attack but that xenophobia was also a major factor. "If you whip up people enough into thinking that it's not the virus or the disease that's the problem that it's these people who are bringing this disease then I think it's going to whip people into this type of violence," she said. "Currently, when the president says 'Wuhan virus,' or when he specifically tries to make this a Chinese kind of thing or associate it with foreigners and immigrants, that's terrifying because that's been a tried and true method over centuries in the United States, and it leads down this terrible path." Patients who died during the Quarantine's early years were buried in trenches in a cemetery south of the complex in an area that is now part of the Silver Lake Golf Course. In recent years, erosion has brought to the earth's surface some gravestones and plot markers that had been laid flat and buried in the intervening centuries. "They never had any recognition when they died," said Lynn Rogers, the cemetery group's director, who believes her own Irish forebears were buried among what she estimated to be 8,000 to 10,000 dead interred in the two Quarantine graveyards. She added that a post to a genealogy message board had yielded 2,000 letters from people all over the world who suspected that their ancestors had perished in the Marine Hospital. "It was the same story we heard over and over again," Ms. Rogers said. "They're on a ship's list, they're not in the 1850 census, and there's no death certificates they just vanished." Still, not all Marine Hospital stories ended in misery. While the facility was in operation, ragged shantytowns cropped up on the island's north shore, cobbled together by new immigrants waiting for their relatives to be released from quarantine. Many of these Irish and German immigrants ultimately decided to put down roots, Ms. Rogers said, and today some of their descendants are sixth and seventh generation Staten Islanders.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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While her Orlando Storm teammates were about to take a routine coronavirus test on Monday at The Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, Danielle Collins was not even in the same state. She was about a two hour drive away in Charlottesville, Va., where Collins said she had traveled to shop for supplements to help with her rheumatoid arthritis. The next day Collins, a leading American player, was dismissed from the Storm and the remainder of the World Team Tennis season for breaching the league's health and safety protocols by leaving the Greenbrier during the competition. "I don't think Danielle was trying to do anything bad, but it put us in a situation where you've got to uphold what you are trying to do here so we can keep the other 150 people here safe," said Carlos Silva, the chief executive of World Team Tennis, in a telephone interview on Wednesday. Collins, who reached the semifinals of the 2019 Australian Open and is ranked 51st in singles on the WTA Tour, was sharply critical of men's No. 1 Novak Djokovic last month for complaining about the United States Open's plans to operate with strict health guidelines that might force players to limit the size of their teams. "For those of us (most tennis players) who don't travel with an entourage, we actually need to start working again," Collins had said. "It would be nice to have the best player in the world supporting this opportunity and not spoiling it for the players and the fans!" But she insisted on Wednesday that her stance was not at odds with her behavior during World Team Tennis, saying that she had simply not realized that she was not allowed to leave the resort and had seen no written notice forbidding it. "I don't feel I intentionally broke a rule so I don't feel it affects what I said about the U.S. Open," she said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. "There was a waiver that I signed that was specific to the safety protocols and practices that were to take place during World Team Tennis, and it didn't have any mention of not leaving the hotel." But Silva said the requirement to remain at the resort had been explained to the players and the event staff at an "all hands meeting in the stadium" on July 11, and then explained again to the teams' coaches and general managers at another meeting on July 15. Collins said she had no recollection of hearing it mentioned at the general meeting. "I wanted to absolutely make sure it was clear," Silva said. World Team Tennis, a mixed gender league founded in 1974, was among the first sports leagues in North America to return during the pandemic and was the largest tennis event so far to do so. With normal home and away play ruled out in 2020, the league managed to salvage its season by bringing all nine teams to The Greenbrier to stage the entire competition there over three weeks. The experiment is being closely watched by others in the tennis world. The U.S. Open, the Grand Slam event scheduled to run from Aug. 31 to Sept. 13 in New York, is also planning to limit interactions to test and protect players and staff during the event, which is to be held without spectators. "It's important for sports in general that this goes well," Silva said of his league's season. "This isn't just us. I'm cheering for M.L.S. I'm cheering for the N.B.A. I'm cheering for a tennis exhibition going on in Europe. I am cheering for the U.S. Open, and we are happy to share any of the knowledge we acquire here. It's definitely not easy, I will tell you." The biggest challenge, he said, is maintaining vigilance. "You can do things right 100 times, but if you do things wrong once, the 100 times gets flushed down the toilet in a second," he said. "You cannot let your guard down." World Team Tennis play began on July 12 and is set to continue until Aug. 2. Players and league staff are being tested regularly, though not daily, for the coronavirus and are required to wear masks and socially distance when in public areas. But players and league officials are not the only visitors at the resort. The hotel and its vast grounds are open to other guests, and a maximum of 500 spectators are also allowed in the tennis stadium, although Silva said that so far there had been no more than "a couple hundred a day." So far, 740 tests have been conducted on the league's players and staff, with none producing positive results. "It's not a perfect bubble, but it's close and players are comfortable with things in my opinion," said Tennys Sandgren, an American men's player who was one of Collins's teammates on the Storm. Collins said the presence of so many outsiders contributed to her confusion. "I don't really know how that works if I wasn't able to leave and there's hundreds of guests staying at the hotel who weren't with the group," she said. She said she had informed a World Team Tennis official about her intention of traveling to Charlottesville, where she was a star at the University of Virginia, winning N.C.A.A. singles titles in 2014 and 2016. She said the league official, whom she declined to name, had not informed her such a trip was forbidden. She also said she had left the Greenbrier earlier in the season to seek care for her dog. "W.T.T. staff were aware of that and didn't say I couldn't do that," she said. Collins said she had been going through a difficult time, with her arthritis flaring up and her mother hospitalized for "a pre existing medical condition." Silva said inquiries had not turned up any confirmation of a league official condoning Collins' trip to Charlottesville. He also said he had found no evidence of players leaving the resort for outside meals, despite some concern. He said Collins was not being held to a different standard. "I would never do that," Silva said. "It wouldn't be bright, wouldn't be fair. I think also a surprise trip two hours away to a different state definitely raises your level of attention for sure. If she had made a mistake and gone down the street to a pizza shop and she really didn't know, I would have talked to her about it. But a surprise trip that was a two hour drive?"
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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Mr. Roosevelt is a great grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and the chairman of the Theodore Roosevelt Institute at Long Island University. On Monday, Capt. Brett Crozier, the commander of the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, sent a letter to the Navy pleading for permission to unload his crew, including scores of sailors sickened with Covid 19, in Guam, where it was docked. The Pentagon had been dragging its feet, and the situation on the ship was growing dire. "We are not at war," he wrote. "Sailors do not need to die. If we do not act now, we are failing to properly take care of our most trusted asset our sailors." After the letter was leaked to The San Francisco Chronicle, the Navy relented. But on Thursday, it relieved Captain Crozier of his command. Captain Crozier joins a growing list of heroic men and women who have risked their careers over the last few weeks to speak out about life threatening failures to treat the victims of this terrible pandemic. Many of them are doctors and nurses, and many of them, like Captain Crozier, have been punished. All of them deserve our deepest gratitude. In removing Captain Crozier, the Navy said that his letter was a gross error that could incite panic among his crew. But it's hard to know what else he could have done the situation on the Theodore Roosevelt was dire. Ships at sea, whether Navy carriers or cruise ships, are hotbeds for this disease. Social distancing is nearly impossible: The sailors are practically on top of one another all day, in crowded messes, in cramped sleeping quarters and on group watches. It is thought that a sailor caught the virus while on shore leave in Vietnam. Once on board, the virus took its now predictable course: First a sailor or two, then dozens, and all of a sudden more than 100 were sick. Captain Crozier received orders to take the ship to Guam, but he was not given permission to offload most of the sailors. The virus was threatening to overwhelm the small medical crew aboard. There was not much time before sailors might start dying. The captain felt he had to act immediately if he was to save his sailors. He chose to write a strong letter, which he distributed to a number of people within the Navy, demanding immediate removal from the ship of as many sailors as possible. Perhaps this was not the best approach for his career, but it got results. The letter, once leaked to The Chronicle, quickly reappeared in papers nationwide. The immediate public pressure forced the Navy to relent, and it started arranging to get as many of the crew members as possible off the ship and into hotels in Guam. Captain Crozier, however, paid a big price. The acting secretary of the Navy, Thomas Modly, summarily fired the captain, not for leaking the letter (for which he said he had no proof), but for showing "extremely poor judgment." Many disagree, believing that Captain Crozier showed excellent judgment. He left the ship Thursday night to a rousing hero's sendoff. I suppose it is too much to hope that the Navy, if only for its own benefit, will see its way to reverse this unfortunate decision. But it is probably too late to save Captain Crozier's career. As a descendant of the namesake of Captain Crozier's former command, I often wonder, in situations like this, what Theodore Roosevelt would have done. In this case, though, I know exactly what he would have done. In 1898, he found himself in almost the exact same position. Before his rise to national politics, Roosevelt commanded the Rough Riders, a volunteer cavalry regiment, in the invasion of Cuba during the Spanish American War. The Battle of San Juan Hill had been fought and won, and the war was basically over. However, the soldiers, still deployed in Cuba, faced a far worse enemy: yellow fever and malaria. As was usual in the days before modern medicine, far more soldiers died of disease than of enemy action. The battlefield commanders, including Roosevelt, wanted to bring the soldiers home. But the leadership in Washington in particular Russell Alger, the secretary of war refused, fearing a political backlash. A standoff ensued. The career Army officers, who did not want to risk their jobs by being too outspoken, were stymied. Roosevelt, as a short term volunteer, had less to lose. So, with the tacit approval of his fellow commanders, he wrote a fiery open letter and released it to the press. The letter, known as the "round robin," was printed in virtually every newspaper in the country, creating an uproar demanding that the soldiers be brought home immediately. Alger relented, and the troops were sent to quarantine on the end of Long Island, at Montauk Point. Though hundreds of men died of disease in Cuba, Roosevelt's actions probably saved countless more. He did, however, pay a price. Alger was furious with him. When Roosevelt's nomination came up for a Medal of Honor, the secretary shot it down (Roosevelt eventually received the medal, posthumously, in 2001). Of course, Roosevelt came out the winner. Who today remembers Russell Alger? In this era when so many seem to place expediency over honor, it is heartening that so many others are showing great courage, some even risking their lives. Theodore Roosevelt, in his time, chose the honorable course. Captain Crozier has done the same.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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For Disabled Actors, Memorizing the Part Is Only the Beginning It's not as rare as it used to be for disabled actors to play disabled characters, but they rarely are at center stage as much as in "Cost of Living," Martyna Majok's play at Manhattan Theater Club. Katy Sullivan, a bilateral above the knee amputee since birth, portrays the loudmouthed Ani, who loses her legs in a car accident. Gregg Mozgala has cerebral palsy, a condition he shares with his character, John, a testy Princeton graduate student. Manhattan Theater Club needed only minor accommodations to mount the play, according to Stephen M. Kaus, the associate artistic producer. (There were "zero budgetary implications," he added.) The theater installed two ramps backstage at City Center Stage 1 to help performers get from the house to backstage and from the green room to the stage level. By installing the ramps, the theater also anticipated understudies who might have different disabilities, and helped guests with disabilities who wanted to greet the cast. That's not to say that performing the play has been easy. (The production closes on Sunday.) A recent peek backstage before the curtain went up found the actors prepping for the physical particulars of their roles. Among other things, neither of them uses a wheelchair in real life, yet had to learn to negotiate with one on a stage that revolves. Here's a look at how the performers navigate in ways their nondisabled peers never need to consider. "I spend a lot of time stretching," she explained. "If you're asking unstretched, unrelaxed muscles to hold still, you're immediately going to start shaking and they are going to tense." The challenge is psychological, as well. "With my prosthetics on I feel powerful and self confident," she said. "The moment I roll out onstage, it is not a comfortable place for me to be. It feels very naked." Mr. Mozgala's cerebral palsy is less physically penetrating than his character's, meaning he has to both contort his body and act rigid onstage for the role. He has regular physical therapy to help relax his muscles. Both actors walk out to take their bows Ms. Sullivan on prosthetics to the surprise of some in the audience. The small backstage area had to be accessible to the electric wheelchairs that Ms. Sullivan and Mr. Mozgala use onstage. A movement consultant, Thomas Schall, helped to ensure their safety as they maneuvered their characters' "little cars," as Ms. Sullivan put it, on and off. Mr. Kaus said that the crew helped actors become acclimated by slowly increasing the speed of the revolve. "We wanted to figure out when did it feel unsafe, and when did it become extreme, to find out where our limit is," he said. "There was a real buildup of both confidence and repetition in terms of how the movement on and off the turntable was put together." During a performance, small lights cue the actors to get moving. "Once you're on it, you're moving, and it's just going," said Ms. Sullivan. "I definitely ran really hard into a wall during tech one day." In the show's most affecting scene, Ani, left alone by her ex husband for a moment, loses her grip as she holds herself up in a bathtub, and her body slips completely into the water. It's a shocking moment for the audience, Ms. Sullivan said, "because people don't know if it's an accident." Ms. Sullivan said that at a recent performance, an audience member stood up as if to attend to her.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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Essay: The Experiments Are Fascinating. But Nobody Can Repeat Them. None At this point, it is hardly a surprise to learn that even top scientific journals publish a lot of low quality work not just solid experiments that happen, by bad luck, to have yielded conclusions that don't stand up to replication, but poorly designed studies that had no real chance of succeeding before they were ever conducted. Studies that were dead on arrival. We've seen lots of examples. In 1996, a psychology study claimed that unobtrusive priming the insertion of certain innocuous words in a quiz could produce consistent behavioral change. That paper got cited by other scientists a few thousand times before failed replications many years later made it clear that this finding, and much of the subsequent literature, was little more than researchers chasing patterns in noise. As a political scientist, my personal favorite was the survey finding in 2012 that women were 20 points more likely to support Barack Obama for president during certain days of their monthly cycle. In retrospect, this claim made no sense and was not supported by data. Even prospectively, the experiment had no chance of working: the way the study was conducted, the noise in estimating any effect in this case, any average difference in political attitudes during different parts of the cycle was much larger than any realistically possible signal (real result). Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. We see it all the time. Remember the claims that subliminal smiley faces on a computer screen can cause big changes in attitudes toward immigration? That elections are decided by college football games and shark attacks? These studies were published in serious journals or promoted in serious news outlets. Scientists know this is a problem. In a recent paper in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, a team of respected economists and psychologists released the results of 21 replications of high profile experiments. Replication is important to scientists, because it means the finding might just be real. In this study, many findings failed to replicate. On average, results were only about half the size of the originally published claims. Here's where it gets really weird. The lack of replication was predicted ahead of time by a panel of experts using a "prediction market," in which experts were allowed to bet on which experiments were more or less likely to well, be real. 11 Things We'd Really Like to Know And a few we'd rather not discuss Similar prediction markets have been used for many years for elections, mimicking the movement of the betting line in sports. Basically, the results in this instance indicated that informed scientists were clear from the get go that what they were reading would not hold up. So yes, that's a problem. There has been resistance to fixing it, some of which has come from prominent researchers at leading universities. But many, if not most, scientists are aware of the seriousness of the replication crisis and fear its corrosive effects on public trust in science. The challenge is what to do next. One potential solution is preregistration, in which researchers beginning a study publish their analysis plan before collecting their data. Preregistration can be seen as a sort of time reversed replication, a firewall against "data dredging," the inclination to go looking for results when your first idea doesn't pan out. But it won't fix the problem on its own. The replication crisis in science is often presented as an issue of scientific procedure or integrity. But all the careful procedure and all the honesty in the world won't help if your signal (the pattern you're looking for) is small, and the variation (all the confounders, the other things that might explain this pattern) is high. From this perspective, the crisis in science is more fundamental, and it involves moving beyond the existing model of routine discovery. Say you wish to study the effect of a drug or an educational innovation on a small number of people. Unless the treatment is very clearly targeted to an outcome of interest (for example, a math curriculum focused on a particular standardized test), then your study is likely to be too noisy there will too many variables to pinpoint real effects. If something at random does turn up and achieve statistical significance, it is likely to be a massive overestimate of any true effect. In an attempt at replication, we're likely to see something much closer to zero. The failed replications have been no surprise to many scientists, including myself, who have lots of experience of false starts and blind alleys in our own research. The big problem in science is not cheaters or opportunists, but sincere researchers who have unfortunately been trained to think that every statistically "significant" result is notable. When you read about research in the news media (and, as a taxpayer, you are indirectly a funder of research, too), you should ask what exactly is being measured, and why. Andrew Gelman is a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Credit...Jemal Countess/WireImage, via Getty Images The leader of a global campaign to prevent tuberculosis has been accused of bullying and harassing employees, and creating a poisonous work environment especially for people of color, according to interviews with current and former staff members and internal documents obtained by The New York Times. Since 2011, at least seven employees have filed formal complaints against Dr. Lucica Ditiu, executive director of Stop TB, a global partnership of 1,700 groups focused on preventing tuberculosis, The Times has found. The documents describe a leader who insulted and screamed obscenities at employees; made racially and sexually inappropriate jokes and comments; and threatened punitive action against anyone who complained about her behavior. Stop TB is focused on preventing more than a million deaths from tuberculosis each year, primarily in Africa and Asia. With an annual operating budget of 100 million, provided by donors like the United States Agency for International Development and the World Bank, the partnership is the leading organization in the fight against tuberculosis, still the world's largest infectious disease killer. The accusations of misconduct against Dr. Ditiu threaten to paralyze the partnership and upend the worldwide campaign to control TB at a perilous moment. Many experts fear that progress against the disease has stalled as lockdowns to stop the coronavirus have interrupted care and deliveries of medicines for tuberculosis patients in Africa and Asia. Dr. Ditiu, a public health expert from Romania, has led Stop TB's staff of roughly 80 people since 2011. The partnership is hosted by the United Nations Office for Project Services, an arm of the U.N. But Stop TB answers primarily to its board. Under her leadership, the workplace environment deteriorated to a remarkable extent, documents and interviews show. Stop TB set out to promote an event in Mexico with an image of Speedy Gonzales, the main character of a cartoon series long criticized for offensive stereotypes of Mexicans, according to internal emails obtained by The Times. A manager circulated an email with a picture of his son in blackface, "picking cotton and being a slave." The documents allege that at a recent staff birthday gathering, Dr. Ditiu boasted that she had slipped a racial and sexual slur into her speech at a global health conference, on a dare from other public health officials. In May, on a video call, Dr. Ditiu suggested that the staff take "sex classes" during the lockdown, according to a complaint by one participant. Dr. Ditiu did not respond to requests for comment. UNOPS and the World Health Organization, also an agency of the United Nations and which oversaw Stop TB until 2014 have investigated multiple complaints against Dr. Ditiu, but she does not seem to have been disciplined beyond having to enroll in classes and work with a behavioral coach. The partnership departed the W.H.O. six years ago, and officials declined to comment on relations with Stop TB during its tenure. UNOPS's own investigation "did not identify wrongdoing or misconduct to the level requiring termination," according to a spokesman. But in June the organization was "informed of further details of historic incidents within the StopTB partnership which do not demonstrate the values of integrity, inclusion, respect and tolerance that are non negotiable at UNOPS." "Events in this case fell short of our commitment to a respectful, inclusive working environment," UNOPS said in a statement to The Times. Stop TB's own board launched a new investigation in July after additional allegations of misconduct, according to Joanne Carter, the board's vice chair. "Any racism or toxicity in the workplace is unacceptable, and we are absolutely committed to ensuring a safe and equitable work environment," Dr. Carter said. USAID, Stop TB's biggest donor, did not comment on the allegations, but said in a statement that it expects all of its partners to "ensure a safe and ethical work environment in which each person is respected and valued." Some global health experts were dismayed to hear of the complaints against Dr. Ditiu. "If she's done these things, it's hard to see how she can remain in a leadership position," said Helen Jenkins, a TB expert at Boston University. But some researchers said losing Dr. Ditiu would be a blow to the global effort against TB because she was instrumental in modernizing the approach to prevention and treatment, and in persuading governments to fund programs. Dr. Raviglione stayed on the Stop TB board after the split, but stepped down in November 2017. UNOPS has hosted Stop TB since 2015, but cannot terminate Dr. Ditiu without the agreement of the board. But board members are too close to Dr. Ditiu to discipline her, Dr. Raviglione and others told The Times. The W.H.O.'s report on Dr. Ditiu's conduct, for example, was shared with the board, but "it disappeared, as far as I know," Dr. Raviglione said. "This board did not have a mechanism at all for evaluation of the executive director." Current and former employees and consultants who spoke to The Times or provided information asked to remain anonymous, saying they were afraid of repercussions for their careers. People consulting with U.N. linked organizations often have contracts that can be canceled with a month's notice, so they remain silent even when mistreated, said one former employee of Stop TB. Colleen Daniels joined Stop TB in early 2015 as a human rights adviser. In August of that year, her supervisor, Jacob Creswell, sent an email to the staff with photographs of his son in blackface, along with adults with faces painted red and dressed in Native American garb. One photograph includes a Confederate flag at full mast and a noose. The boy was "in blackface picking cotton and being a slave at the local spectac at his farm camp. He was very excited," Dr. Creswell wrote in the email, which was obtained by The Times. When Ms. Daniels, a Black woman from South Africa, complained that the photographs were racist, Dr. Creswell replied, "Yes that is why I was shocked to see my kids in that would never happen in the US," according to an email he shared with The Times. Dr. Creswell, who told The Times that his wife is a woman of color, said he apologized in person for sending the photographs. Ms. Daniels said he did not and that his response amounted to hasty backtracking. Shortly after the incident, according to Ms. Daniels, Dr. Ditiu and Dr. Creswell began excluding her from important meetings and trips. "Eventually, it just got so bad," said Ms. Daniels, who added that "white people on the team stopped talking to me." In September 2017, Stop TB publicized an event in Mexico by featuring the cartoon character Speedy Gonzales. Dr. Ditiu dismissed Ms. Daniels's protests that the image was offensive, internal emails show. Dr. Ditiu agreed to change the image only after Erika Arthun, a deputy director at the Gates Foundation and a member of Stop TB's executive committee, warned in an email that "the Mexican stereotype of Speedy Gonzalez for a conference in Mexico wasn't well received." Ms. Arthun did not respond to a request for comment. "Stop TB is supposed to speak on behalf of the most vulnerable and marginalized in the world, and the majority of them are Black and brown people," Ms. Daniels said. "How can Stop TB ensure that brown and Black people are getting their voices heard if they're marginalized in the organization?" In February 2017, two Stop TB employees a white man and a woman of color complained to UNOPS that Dr. Ditiu had bullied them and created "an atmosphere of fear and anxiety" in the office. Dr. Ditiu screamed expletives on the phone during the staff Christmas party, "and then scolded me because I had been unreachable by phone for 15 minutes whilst my phone was charging," the man wrote in a complaint to UNOPS obtained by the Times. Dr. Ditiu also told them that mistakes would result in "throats being slit," and later said she had been joking, according to the complaint. Both complainants declined requests for interviews. But in emails to UNOPS obtained by The Times, they also described episodes of retaliation, alleging that Dr. Ditiu held back their promotions and hinted to them and other employees that they would never be hired by any public health organization if they spoke out against her. The emails indicate that Dr. Ditiu's deputy, Dr. Suvanand Sahu, approached employees and offered them promotions in exchange for keeping quiet about the allegations. These accounts were confirmed to The Times by several current and former employees, and supported by internal emails and text messages between employees. Dr. Sahu did not respond to requests for comment. UNOPS launched an eight month investigation into the allegations against Dr. Ditiu. In an email from April 2017 obtained by The Times, a UNOPS representative told the employees there was "a prima facie case" that their complaint had led to retaliation from Dr. Ditiu, particularly the withdrawal of promotions that had previously been promised to them. In August 2017, Dr. Ditiu said in a meeting attended by 40 people that UNOPS was making her take classes to learn appropriate workplace language. According to people present at this meeting, she also said employees would find out soon whether they would be able to keep their jobs the next year statements that some interpreted as a threat of retaliation. Two months later, Dr. Ditiu was placed on probation for a period of 12 months and asked to meet with a behavioral coach once a month. She read aloud a scripted apology to the staff, and said she would step away from managerial duties. But the board's executive committee received an anonymous letter in November 2017 describing Dr. Ditiu's continuing "abusive behavior" and saying that despite the probation, she was "bolder than ever." (Some people suspected Ms. Daniels was the sender, but she denied it.) In an email from January 2018 obtained by The Times, a UNOPS official told the employees who had complained about Dr. Ditiu that she had "admitted misconduct, and is in the process of improving the situation" so they should "start afresh" and "put some positive energy" into their relationships. Ms. Daniels left StopTB in December 2017. In a letter to the board in June, she said she could no longer remain silent about the racism and bullying she had experienced. "I hope that your silence when you found about the bullying in 2017, won't continue in 2020," she wrote. Findings from the board's independent investigation are expected by the end of September. The investigation comes at a delicate time for Stop TB. UNOPS has said that it does not share in the partnership's "direction" and will no longer serve as its host, effective June 2021.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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WASHINGTON President Trump took his pitch for a coronavirus related economic stimulus package to Capitol Hill on Tuesday, joining Senate Republicans over lunch to discuss cutting payroll taxes, offering targeted relief to tourism and hospitality industries, and other possible steps to lift economic growth. After the meeting, a Senate aide said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California would take the lead on negotiating a bipartisan package. Mr. Trump emerged from his lunch with no new details to share on the package, which remained in flux throughout the day on Tuesday, amid internal struggles at the White House and a cool reception among congressional Republicans to the temporary payroll tax cuts that the president has floated. Mr. Trump said the payroll tax cut and other ideas were discussed, adding that "there's great unity within the Republican Party." He acknowledged there was not yet a consensus on how to proceed but expressed confidence that the economy would endure. "Be calm," he said from Capitol Hill, after speaking with lawmakers. "The consumer has never been in a better position than they are now." Mr. Trump and his advisers are also considering using the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a vehicle to deliver funds to stimulate the economy, a move that could allow the administration to begin bolstering growth without waiting for Congress. The president could approve major disaster declarations in a growing number of states that have seen coronavirus outbreaks, according to officials in the administration and in Congress. Such approvals would allow FEMA to begin distributing aid to affected individuals, such as emergency food stamps, and to states and local governments for efforts including "emergency protective measures." The idea is one of many options being proposed to help alleviate economic strain from a virus that is quarantining workers and consumers, scuttling vacations, closing factories and causing other disruptions. Lobbyists in Washington suggested that several possible plans were under consideration on Tuesday, including tax credits for companies that retain employees who are unable to work because of quarantines and the possibility of allowing firms to delay paying a portion of their estimated quarterly corporate tax bills until the spread of the virus and its economic effects subside. Other possibilities included temporarily suspending some excise taxes, such as the 7.5 percent tax airlines pay to the Federal Aviation Administration; increasing community development block grants; and fixing an error in the 2017 Republican tax overhaul that makes it more expensive for restaurant owners to do renovations. 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. Mr. Trump previewed several ideas at a news conference on Monday evening, but discussions remain in flux and many of the proposals would require congressional approval at a time of deep partisan ire and with the 2020 election looming. The idea of a payroll tax cut in particular has divided Mr. Trump's advisers, with Mr. Mnuchin and Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council, expressing concerns about the cost, whether it would address the problems caused by the virus and what Democrats would demand if they reopen the tax code. However, Peter Navarro, Mr. Trump's trade adviser, has been a proponent of the idea, and Mr. Trump has been pushing for it to be included in a package of options. Mr. Navarro has often been at odds with Mr. Trump's other economic advisers over trade policy. His appearance with the coronavirus task force at Mr. Trump's White House briefing on Monday raised eyebrows among some officials who wondered if he had inserted himself into the fiscal stimulus discussion. Mr. Navarro said in an interview that he was there at the president's request. "The president specifically asked during the Oval meeting that I, by name, and other members of his economic and trade team stand with him on the podium, and I left when the president left," Mr. Navarro said. Leaders in the Democratic controlled House have also reacted with skepticism to the payroll tax plan. They have pushed for the administration instead to ramp up spending on the public health response to the virus. One area of agreement among Republicans and Democrats is the need for any package to include government provided sick pay to workers who are unable to perform their jobs as a result of quarantines or caring for children whose schools are canceled over virus fears. It is unclear how such a program would work and how it would ramp up fast enough to prevent affected workers from missing payments on rent, credit cards or other bills. Markets rallied on Tuesday morning on news of the stimulus request, after suffering steep losses Monday. But several congressional aides cautioned it will most likely take weeks, at minimum, to complete and approve any stimulus bill. The White House is also considering other plans that would not require congressional action, such as allowing tax payments to be deferred. Mr. Trump said on Monday that the White House would hold another news conference at some point on Tuesday laying out stimulus measures in more detail. While his advisers worked on the package, Mr. Trump on Tuesday called the Federal Reserve "pathetic" for keeping interest rates too high, renewing a regular gripe as coronavirus spreads both globally and domestically, roiling markets and threatening the economic outlook. "Our pathetic, slow moving Federal Reserve, headed by Jay Powell, who raised rates too fast and lowered too late, should get our Fed Rate down to the levels of our competitor nations," he tweeted. "The Federal Reserve must be a leader, not a very late follower, which it has been!"
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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Christopher Munch has a near unique filmmaking voice, possessed of an understatement that can register either as droll or profound, and sometimes as both. He doesn't get to exercise that voice too frequently, alas. The writer director debuted in 1991 with "The Hours and Times," an equally bold and sensitive piece of cinematic speculative fiction about the relationship of John Lennon and the Beatles' gay manager, Brian Epstein, and the pair's shared sense of being outsiders. Other pictures in his subsequent, too sparse filmography show the wide range of his interests; "Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day" was about a post World War II Chinese American fighting to preserve a railroad his grandfather helped to build, while 2011's "Letters From the Big Man" dared to take the idea of Sasquatch relatively seriously. In his first feature since "Letters," Munch considers another American myth, legend, or buried historical fact, depending on how you look at it. "The 11th Green" begins with a beguiling text stating that while much of what you are about to see is "necessarily speculative," the narrative that follows represents "a likely factual scenario." The visuals are eye opening; a young woman sits by a tall cactus in the desert at dusk, and as the strains of Wagner's Overture to "Parsifal" play on the soundtrack, she happily watches the stars come out, smiling with particular satisfaction when a U.F.O. briefly reveals itself. Flying saucers can't wink as such, but this one practically does.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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Dr. Lillian Macrae Guenther and Brian Jeffrey Meyers are to be married on Sept. 2 in Richmond, Va. Rabbi Rachel A. Silverman is to officiate at Maymont Estate, an events space. Dr. Guenther, 35, is a pediatric oncologist in Boston on the staff at both Boston Children's Hospital and Dana Farber Cancer Institute, where she also is a researcher, studying novel therapeutics for pediatric bone tumors. She is also a clinical pediatrics instructor for residents and fellows at Harvard Medical School in Boston. She graduated from Brown and received a medical degree from SUNY Downstate College of Medicine. She is a daughter of Katherine F. Doyle in Larchmont, N.Y., and Hector I. Guenther of Osterville, Mass. The bride's father retired from the New York office of the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, where he served as the executive director for consumer, retail and business services banking. Her mother is a freelance grant writer and fund raiser. Mr. Meyers, 33, leads the product management team for pricing algorithms at Wayfair, a furniture and decor catalog and online retailer in Boston. He graduated and received an M.B.A. from Dartmouth.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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They Recovered From the Coronavirus. Were They Infected Again? None A patient recovered from coronavirus was discharged from Leishenshan Hospital in Wuhan, China, earlier this month. Can people who recover from a bout with the new coronavirus become infected again and again? The Japanese government reported this week that a woman in Osaka had tested positive for the coronavirus for a second time, weeks after recovering from the infection and being discharged from a hospital. Combined with reports from China of similar cases, the case in Japan has raised some uncomfortable questions. Reinfections are common among people who have recovered from coronaviruses that cause the common cold. But those pathogens are very different from the new coronavirus, and experts said it's unlikely that these are cases of people getting infected a second time. "I'm not saying that reinfection can't occur, will never occur, but in that short time it's unlikely," said Florian Krammer, a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. Even the mildest of infections should leave at least short term immunity against the virus in the recovering patient, he said. More likely, the "reinfected" patients still harbored low levels of the virus when they were discharged from the hospital, and testing failed to pick it up. Even if there were occasional cases of reinfection, they do not seem to be occurring in numbers large enough to be a priority at this point in the outbreak. A report published Thursday in JAMA supports the idea that people may test positive for the virus long after they seem to have recovered. In four medical professionals exposed to the virus in Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the epidemic, a test that detects the viral genetic material remained positive five to 13 days after they were asymptomatic. This does not necessarily mean that they were still able to infect others, however. The PCR diagnostic test is highly sensitive and can amplify genetic material from even a single viral molecule. As such, the test could merely be picking up fragments of the virus. PCR tests may detect remnants of the measles virus months after people who had the disease stop shedding infectious virus, Dr. Krammer said. The other possibility is that the negative test was done poorly, or the samples were stored at a temperature at which the virus deteriorates. The throat swab may also simply miss the virus that is hiding elsewhere in the body. "A virus test is positive if the virus was there on the swab in sufficient quantities at the time you swabbed the person," said Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. "A negative test is not a definitive that there is no more virus in that person." Dr. Lipsitch offered an analogy: a jam jar with mold on top. Scraping off the surface might give the impression that the jam is now mold free, but in fact the jar may still contain mold that continues to grow. At a hospital in Zouping, Shangdong province, on Friday, a coronavirus patient who had recovered was donating plasma. The Japanese woman initially had mild symptoms of coronavirus infection and tested positive in late January. She was released from the hospital on Feb. 1. She tested positive again on Wednesday after coming in for a sore throat and chest pain. "That certainly sounds like it could be an actual resurgence of the virus in infectious form," Dr. Lipsitch said. But, he added, "Single anecdotes are really hard to interpret." One worrisome possibility is that the coronavirus follows what is known as a biphasic infection: the virus persists and causes a different set of symptoms than observed in the initial bout. In patients infected with Ebola, the virus may persist for months in the testes or eyes even after recovery and can infect others and keep the epidemic going. The recovered person, too, can develop other symptoms, including insomnia and neurological problems, said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University. "We don't know if that's the case with this coronavirus," Dr. Rasmussen said. "We don't know anything about this virus." Coronaviruses are on the whole poorly understood, she said. Before the SARS epidemic, coronaviruses were not known to cause serious illnesses. Some scientists have said that people infected with the new coronavirus produce antibodies that will protect them in the future. And a single patient report suggests that the immunity may last at least seven days. But this finding is neither surprising nor reassuring, said Dr. Stanley Perlman, a coronavirus expert at the University of Iowa. "The issue is whether you'll see it in seven months or in a year," he said. "That's what you care about." The new coronavirus closely resembles the ones that cause SARS and, to a lesser extent, MERS. There are no reports of reinfections with the SARS virus, Dr. Perlman said, and only one that he has heard of in a patient recovering from MERS. Dr. Perlman's research with MERS has shown that the strength of the immune response depends on the severity of the infection, but that even in those with severe disease which should produce the strongest immune responses the immunity seemed to wane within a year. How long immunity lasts will also be a key question to resolve when designing a vaccine for the new coronavirus, particularly if the virus becomes a seasonal threat like influenza. "What is the nature of immunity to this virus after infection?" Dr. Lipsitch said. "That's a research question that's urgent."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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Sam Hodgson for The New York Times
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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BOCHUM, GERMANY Udo Mode steered his Opel compact car slowly over the cracked pavement of the half empty parking lot at the company's plant in Bochum, Germany, on a recent workday. "This used to be full," said Mr. Mode, 59, who worked 40 years at the plant before taking early retirement several years ago. "You had to get here early to get a spot." The only people visible on this day were a couple of truck drivers standing idly next to rigs with Czech license plates. The two story brick factory is a visible manifestation of the problems facing automakers in Europe and the communities that depend on them for jobs. Built atop a former coal mine, the Bochum plant has already suffered waves of layoffs. From more than 20,000 in its heyday, a little over 3,000 people work there now 5,000, counting subcontractors. Now, after losing 747 million on its European operations last year its 12th straight year of losses General Motors, Opel's owner, is under intense pressure to make further cuts. Worker representatives at Opel say they have been told the company must reduce the company's production capacity by 30 percent. Bochum, as one of the oldest Opel plants, with some of the most highly paid workers, is considered the most endangered. Opel is an acute example of a problem that also afflicts competitors like Fiat, Renault and PSA Peugeot Citroen. All makers of midprice cars have more factories than they need, while the West European auto market is entering what appears to be a severe slump. New registrations of passenger cars fell nearly 10 percent in February compared with a year earlier, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association. The burden of reducing that costly production surplus is likely to fall disproportionately on communities like Bochum, which depend on the automobile industry for jobs. Despite waves of job cuts, Opel remains the biggest private employer in Bochum. The regional chamber of commerce estimates that 40,000 jobs depend on Opel Bochum, at businesses ranging from parts suppliers to local restaurants. G.M. has promised to honor an agreement with workers not to close any Opel plants until after 2014. That was part of an earlier cost cutting program that included closure of a plant in Antwerp, Belgium. But Bochum workers worry that Opel would stop investing in operations there in preparation for a shutdown once the agreement expires. The Opel supervisory board met Wednesday in Russelsheim, Germany, the center of European operations, but did not announce any decisions. While saying it has not decided to close any plants, G.M. has made it clear that major cost cuts will be necessary in Europe. "All participants are in agreement that Opel must operate profitably and that measures must be taken to increase sales, raise margins and reduce costs," G.M. and worker representatives said in a joint statement Wednesday. Workers vowed Saturday to do everything they could to prevent G.M. from leaving. Several thousand gathered at an indoor arena in Bochum for an informational meeting organized by the Opel workers council in response to the speculation. Employee representatives handed out T shirts in bright yellow, the Opel color, that said, "We're staying in Bochum." "Bochum won't budge, we made that clear," Carsten Adametz, a toolmaker at Opel, said outside the event. Workers have some leverage. German labor laws give them a voice in cost cutting plans. In addition, Bochum is the only factory producing a new generation of the Opel Zafira minivan. A strike could deprive Opel dealers of a key model. Worker representatives insist that shutting down Bochum would cost more than it would save, because of the need to clean up the site, with its legacy as a former coal mine, to make severance payments to employees and to move production to another factory. In addition, the shutdown would further damage Opel's image in Germany, workers say. 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. "If Bochum closes, it will be one of the most expensive shutdowns in history," said Rainer Einenkel, chairman of the Bochum workers council. Opel's plant in Ellesmere Port, Britain, is also seen as endangered because of its age and wage costs. Britain and Germany are the company's biggest markets, with sales of about 268,000 vehicles each last year. "Trust in American company managers is not very big," said Jorg A. Linden, spokesman for the regional chamber of commerce. At the same time, he said, "Bochum needs Opel and Opel needs Bochum." Many workers, who call themselves Opelaners, blame G.M. for what they say were years of mismanagement. They say G.M. prevented Opel from developing export markets and, more recently, has promoted Chevrolet brand cars in Europe at the expense of Opel. The Chevrolets are made in South Korea or other countries outside Europe. Karl Friedrich Stracke, the chief executive of Opel, denied last month that G.M. had prevented the unit from selling outside Europe. Still, except for Russia and Turkey, Opel's sales outside the European Union are negligible. Opel's history of losses and labor turmoil which includes noisy disputes with workers and a planned sale of the unit in 2009 that G.M. backed out of at the last minute has unsettled workers and ensured a steady flow of negative headlines. It may also have contributed to a slide in market share to 6.4 percent in February from 7.1 percent a year earlier. "We need calm," said Mr. Einenkel, head of the workers council at the Bochum factory. Some Bochum residents are pessimistic about the plant's chances after 2014, when the agreement with G.M. expires. Employees in Bochum say they earn less than the union rate, but that is still six times that of their counterparts in Gliwice, Poland, site of a newer factory. Another problem may be the Bochum factory's age. The building has two stories, in contrast to most modern factories, which are typically arrayed on one level to allow more efficient movement of materials. An Opel spokesman, Alexander Bazio, said that the company had arranged the production process so that the two stories are not a disadvantage. "Everyone who isn't stupid already left Opel," said Mr. Wollmann, who still lives in an apartment building originally built for Opel workers. Many restaurants and shops in the neighborhood have closed, he said. "The town is now a shadow of what it once was." The Bochum factory produces mostly the Zafira, a minivan similar to the Chevrolet Orlando, and according to Mr. Bazio is working at capacity to meet demand for a new generation of the model. But workers worry what will happen when the model ages and demand inevitably falls. Mr. Bazio said no decisions had been made about assembly of future models in Bochum. "Without a second model and more investment, it looks grim," said Lothar Marquardt, who worked at Opel as an electrician before becoming a worker representative who sat on the company's supervisory board. He is now retired. Bochum also produces a version of the Opel Astra, a compact sedan. But it is an older generation of the car that is sold only in Eastern Europe. Mr. Marquardt and others are dismayed that Opel is building its new Mokka compact S.U.V. in South Korea. That was seen as a bad omen for Bochum. "The Mokka would fit perfectly in the system," Mr. Marquardt said as he sat at a restaurant with Mr. Mode and Ulrich Langer, another former Opel worker. They reminisced about models like the Opel Kadett that they helped build back when Opel was a more formidable competitor to Volkswagen and BMW. Ferdinand Dudenhoffer, a professor at the Universitat Duisburg Essen who studies the auto industry and happens to live a few hundred meters from the Bochum factory, thinks that the company, despite its official silence, is telegraphing its plans. "In my opinion, G.M. plans to close plants," he said. "Otherwise, they would not have made a decision to build Mokkas in Korea." Maria Munoz Munoz, 45, said that she has been living apart from her husband, a welder, since last year, when he took a job in Russelsheim, a city about 250 kilometers south of Bochum that is the center of Opel's operations. She tried living in Russelsheim, she said, but felt isolated and lonely away from the community where she grew up. Her husband's job there seemed more secure, Ms. Munoz Munoz said. "It was voluntary, but he was afraid." She said that she wanted the Bochum factory to stay open on the slim chance that her husband could work there again. Her eyes watering, she said, "I hope for a miracle and my husband comes back."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Global Business
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On the surface James appears a manipulator of genius, but for all his machinations he is constantly flopping in the arenas of power, money and sex. The movie makes a point of showing him striking out with a beautiful young woman (the music and dance artist FKA twigs, whose casting indicates the hipness quotient to which the movie aspires); young Otis then picks up Dad's slack and starts an intimate friendship with her. Harsh! One could watch "Honey Boy" musing that it must be nice to have someone finance a movie of your 12 step qualification. That assessment is actually too generous. To share one's "experience, strength and hope," as Alcoholics Anonymous puts it, is meant, ostensibly, to help others. This is not the aim here. "Honey Boy" is a flex: an assertion of the clout LaBeouf claims, in interviews, to no longer have. When adult Otis sasses his counselor (Martin Starr) at a recovery facility, so high end it has a grand piano in its reception area, Hedges and Ha'rel don't present the character as a damaged person having a difficult time accepting help. Rather, they concoct a rough and tough, rehab resistant maverick who can't be tamed because his wounds are just too complicated. Near the film's end, Otis splits from rehab and finds James back at the motel. Sitting by the pool, they share a joint. "I'm gonna make a movie about you, Dad," Otis says. And there you have it.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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K Beauty got us hooked on Korean BB Creams and jelly cleansers. J Beauty convinced us of the benefits of Japanese essences and sake ingredients. Probably we were bound to grab our beauty passports and move on to another country. And so we did: Now there's G Beauty. In the last few years, German beauty brands have begun to inhabit nearly every beauty aisle, including Whole Foods and high end beauty retailers like Bluemercury. But unlike, say, K Beauty, which started as a concerted effort by the Korean government to market Korean brands abroad, G Beauty is less about pushing novel routines than it is about making clean beauty a confusing space with many conflicting definitions more approachable. "Our customers like that Germany beauty follows the European standards for clean, which automatically means they don't include many toxins," said Jessica Richards, the founder of the influential Brooklyn boutique Shen Beauty. German brands also tend to have fairly minimalist, straightforward packaging, which is a good thing in today's noisy beauty aisles. Cassandra Grey, the founder of Violet Grey, a luxury beauty retailer in Los Angeles, is even more emphatic. "Customers now look for the Made in Germany stamp on skin care products the same way we look for the organic sticker on our tomatoes," she said. The three top selling skin care lines at her shop are from Germany. In German beauty, clean, efficacious skin care can mean taking a farm based, organic approach, as is the case with Weleda, a natural skin care pioneer with Swiss German roots that was founded in 1921; and Dr. Hauschka, a natural skin care and cosmetics line that has been around since 1967. Both have had decades to build out their biodynamic farms, labs and manufacturing processes. "We have a lot of control over our ingredients, which is key for a natural beauty brand," said Rob Keen, the chief executive of Weleda North America. "You don't know where some of these companies are getting their naturals from." Weleda is experiencing a resurgence in the United States and gaining a cultish following for its classic Skin Food moisturizer ( 18.99), a staple for many top makeup artists and, InStyle reports, for Rihanna, Julia Roberts, Victoria Beckham and more. Last year, sales in the United States were up 19 percent, Mr. Keen said. (According to the market researchers Spins and Nielsen, German natural personal care brands are up 13 percent in the United States compared with 11 percent for all natural personal care brands.) And while the German government is not helping its companies market abroad, "the country truly does support biodynamic farming and this idea of sustainability," said Martina Joseph, the chief executive of Dr. Hauschka Skin Care. "If you look across many different categories and businesses in Germany, it's about quality and ingredient integrity." For the most demanding clientele, though, the exciting brands are the ones that offer not only clean formulations, but also new science. That includes such German skin care darlings as Augustinus Bader, Dr. Barbara Sturm and Royal Fern. Timm Golueke, the dermatologist in Munich who is behind Royal Fern, thinks of his line, which includes an ingredient patented from fern extract, as "marrying wellness with German engineering." He points out that German brands are particularly transparent. The packaging is clear, the ingredients are laid out simply, and claims are backed up with science (in his case, his patent and decades seeing patients as a dermatologist). "The patients I see in London and in Germany, they want the same thing," Dr. Golueke said. "They want skin care that works, but they also want things to be nontoxic. That's what German brands are building trust in." As a retailer, Marla Beck, the co founder and chief executive of Bluemercury, has bought in. "German beauty is known for science backed, clean formulas that deliver highly effective results," she said, noting her particular admiration for the Dr. Barbara Sturm Brightening Serum, which features cress sprouts extract as well as shimmer particles that give a glow. (Bluemercury is the largest retailer of the Dr. Barbara Sturm line in the United States.) Ms. Beck also mentioned the high quality of the ingredients, especially important when customers are shelling out 310 for said brightening serum. Barbara Sturm, an aesthetic medical doctor in Dusseldorf, became the talk of social media for creating custom blended creams with blood drawn from the patient. She created her highly regarded line based on the philosophy of eliminating all damaging ingredients. "Clean beauty, which I take to mean nontoxic, nonirritating and noninflammatory, is at the center of my approach to healing the skin," Dr. Sturm said. Then there is the professor and scientist Augustinus Bader, who founded his namesake skin care line two years ago. According to the company, it closed out last year with 6 million in revenue with just two products (moisturizers called the Cream and the Rich Cream). In February the company appointed a new chief executive, Maureen Case, a veteran of Estee Lauder, and has plans to introduce a new product this summer. Dr. Bader, who has serious science credentials in stem cell research, took years to develop the two products. He approached his formulas from an epigenetics point of view that is, using ingredients to stimulate repair signals inside the body. "The stem cells, they work, but they work too slowly," Dr. Bader said. "I thought, 'How can we use the body's own repair mechanisms?' We have some inner clock as our skin ages that shuts down the repair mechanisms. My idea here is you can jump start skin healing with the right triggers." "It's a different form of treatment," he said. A last thought from Dr. Sturm, who, for all of her momentum, cautioned that G Beauty is a marketing concept and that nationality doesn't tell you if a product is "clean." "Skin care is not the Olympics," she said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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Show sites are smaller, we hear, but even if you didn't make the guest list this season, there are plenty of ways to take part in the festivities surrounding New York Fashion Week. On Thursday, Rebecca Taylor will collaborate with Tilt Brush by Google, a cool VR tool that allows users to "paint" in a 3 D space, on an immersive installation that will take over her entire meatpacking district store. Customers will be able to experience Ms. Taylor's fall 2018 collection through augmented reality and order pieces like a velveteen leopard print jacket ( 550) and high waist pants ( 395). At 34 Gansevoort Street. On Friday, Makoto Azuma, a flower artist best known in the fashion world for the ice encased floral structures he created for Dries Van Noten, will unveil an installation at Opening Ceremony filled with unusual specimens like five needle pines ( 1,800) and Japanese royal ferns ( 720). At 35 Howard Street. Also on Friday, the Danish label Ganni, beloved by street style influencers, will open a pop up souvenir shop with its signature print dresses and hand knit sweaters ( 520), alongside tourist staples like posters and key rings with images of Copenhagen shot by Ana Kras ( 4). At 230 Elizabeth Street.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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While individuals may pay less out of pocket, it is unclear whether the clinics save money for the health care system over all, according to a recent report from the Center for Studying Health System Change, which studied urgent care centers in six cities. To the extent the clinics divert inappropriate emergency room visits, they most likely save money, but they may also direct patients away from less costly primary care offices, which could add to costs. "It's too soon to know," said Alwyn Cassil, a spokeswoman for the center. Robert L. Wergin, a family doctor in rural Nebraska and president elect of the American Academy of Family Physicians, advises patients to check first with their own doctor when they need care; most family doctors offer same day visits when patients are ill, he said. A report in the journal Health Affairs found that about 40 percent of primary care offices offered extended hours. Visiting a provider who knows your history allows them to better assess your condition, he said. Recently, Dr. Wergin said, he saw a patient who had visited an urgent care clinic for a minor ailment, but then scheduled a visit with him when she did not feel better. He ordered additional tests that suggested she might have a more serious condition. He emphasized that his patient was treated appropriately at the urgent care clinic, but said that following up with your regular doctor if your symptoms do not improve is important. Here are some questions to consider about urgent care clinics: Most urgent care visits are covered by insurance, said Mr. Ayers of Concentra, and many clinics accept both private insurance and Medicare, the federal health program for the elderly. As with any medical provider, however, coverage varies, so ask if the center takes your specific plan. The Center for Studying Health System Change found that few of the centers accepted Medicaid, the federal state health program for the poor, but that some offered discounts for patients who paid their bill in full at the time of service. When should I consider an urgent care clinic? Severe injuries or symptoms, like a compound fracture or chest pain, are best treated at an emergency room. While insurers may encourage use of urgent care clinics, they shouldn't be used for true emergencies. "If you are in fear of life or limb, you should call 911 or go to the emergency room," said Ms. Cassil. How should I choose an urgent care clinic? You might ask your own doctor what location he or she suggests if you need care outside of regular office hours. Marc Salzberg, an emergency physician and founder of the StatHealth group of urgent care clinics, suggests calling ahead and asking what services the clinic offers and what its fees are, so you will be prepared if you need to use it.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Your Money
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A cigarette display in Australia, where the tobacco industry lost a case last year. Philip Morris International has filed suit under an investment treaty. Tobacco companies are pushing back against a worldwide rise in antismoking laws, using a little noticed legal strategy to delay or block regulation. The industry is warning countries that their tobacco laws violate an expanding web of trade and investment treaties, raising the prospect of costly, prolonged legal battles, health advocates and officials said. The strategy has gained momentum in recent years as smoking rates in rich countries have fallen and tobacco companies have sought to maintain access to fast growing markets in developing countries. Industry officials say that there are only a few cases of active litigation, and that giving a legal opinion to governments is routine for major players whose interests will be affected. But tobacco opponents say the strategy is intimidating low and middle income countries from tackling one of the gravest health threats facing them: smoking. They also say the legal tactics are undermining the world's largest global public health treaty, the W.H.O. Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which aims to reduce smoking by encouraging limits on advertising, packaging and sale of tobacco products. More than 170 countries have signed it since it took effect in 2005. More than five million people die annually of smoking related causes, more than from AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined, according to the World Health Organization. Alarmed about rising smoking rates among young women, Namibia, in southern Africa, passed a tobacco control law in 2010 but quickly found itself bombarded with stern warnings from the tobacco industry that the new statute violated the country's obligations under trade treaties. "We have bundles and bundles of letters from them," said Namibia's health minister, Dr. Richard Kamwi. Three years later, the government, fearful of a punishingly expensive legal battle, has yet to carry out a single major provision of the law, like limiting advertising or placing large health warnings on cigarette packaging. The issue is particularly urgent now as the United States completes talks on a major new trade treaty with 11 Pacific Rim countries that aims to be a model for the rules of international commerce. Administration officials say they want the new treaty to raise standards for public health. They single out tobacco as a health concern, wording that upset the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, which said that the inclusion would leave the door open for other products, like soda or sugar, to be heavily regulated in other countries. "Our goal in this agreement is to protect the legitimate health regulations that treaty countries want to pursue from efforts by tobacco companies to undermine them," said Michael Froman, the United States trade representative, in a telephone interview. The language is not yet final, he said. But public health advocates say the current wording would not stop countries from being sued when they adopt strong tobacco control measures, though some trade experts said it might make the companies less likely to win. This fall, more than 50 members of the House and about a dozen members of the Senate sent letters to the administration expressing concern. Tobacco consumption more than doubled in the developing world from 1970 to 2000, according to the United Nations. Much of the increase was in China, but there has also been substantial growth in Africa, where smoking rates have traditionally been low. More than three quarters of the world's smokers now live in the developing world. Dr. Margaret Chan, director general of the W.H.O., said in a speech last year that legal actions against Uruguay, Norway and Australia were "deliberately designed to instill fear" in countries trying to reduce smoking. "The wolf is no longer in sheep's clothing, and its teeth are bared," she said. Tobacco companies are objecting to laws in both developed and developing nations. Industry officials say they respect countries' efforts to protect public health, but face difficulties promoting their brands as more countries ban cigarette ads. Often, the only space left is the packaging, and even that is shrinking, with some countries requiring that packages be plastered with shocking pictures of people with cancer; in Australia, brand names are reduced to uniform block letters on drab olive backgrounds. "Removing our trademarks removes our assurance to customers of the origin and quality of our lawfully available products, meaning they and their characteristics become indistinguishable from those of our competitors," said Gareth Cooper, group head of regulation at British American Tobacco. In the early 1990s, the American government used to pressure countries to open their markets to American tobacco companies. As smoking rates in some of these countries rose, outrage grew, and President Bill Clinton issued an executive order in 2001 that banned the United States government from lobbying on the industry's behalf. But other types of trade agreements have emerged that give companies rights. Such treaties are intended to promote prosperity by reducing trade barriers and protecting investors from expropriation by foreign governments. They allow companies to sue directly, instead of having to persuade a state to take up their case. They have proliferated since the 1990s, and number around 3,000, up from a few hundred in the late 1980s, according to Robert Stumberg, a law professor at the Harrison Institute for Public Law at Georgetown University, whose clients include antismoking groups. In Africa, at least four countries Namibia, Gabon, Togo and Uganda have received warnings from the tobacco industry that their laws run afoul of international treaties, said Patricia Lambert, director of the international legal consortium at the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids. "They're trying to intimidate everybody," said Jonathan Liberman, director of the McCabe Center for Law and Cancer in Australia, which gives legal support to countries that have been challenged by tobacco companies. In Namibia, the tobacco industry has said that requiring large warning labels on cigarette packages violates its intellectual property rights and could fuel counterfeiting. Mr. Cooper, of British American Tobacco, whose local affiliate sent the government a legal opinion, said in an email that countries should "consider the broader context of implementing regulations that can impact trade." Thomas Bollyky, a trade lawyer and a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said many developing countries are at a disadvantage in investment cases because they do not have the specialized legal expertise or resources to fight. Uruguay has acknowledged that it would have had to drop its tobacco control law and settle with Philip Morris International if the foundation of the departing mayor of New York, Michael R. Bloomberg, had not paid to defend the law. (The company's net revenue last year was 77 billion, substantially more than Uruguay's gross domestic product.) Even developed countries like Canada and New Zealand have backed away from planned tobacco laws in the face of investment treaty claims, Mr. Bollyky said. The most closely watched legal battle is playing out in Australia, where the tobacco industry lost a case in domestic courts last year. Philip Morris International has filed suit under an investment treaty between Australia and Hong Kong, where the firm has a branch. The proceedings, which are not public, will be held in Singapore and decided by outside arbitrators, not judges.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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The editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is known for its conservative tone, but an editorial the newspaper published online Tuesday night would stand out even in the pages of its left leaning peers. The editorial was an extraordinarily harsh rebuke of President Trump, calling him "his own worst political enemy" and asserting that he was damaging his presidency "with his seemingly endless stream of exaggerations, evidence free accusations, implausible denials and other falsehoods." In particular, the editorial board pointed to Mr. Trump's unsubstantiated claims that former President Barack Obama had tapped his phones. "The President clings to his assertion like a drunk to an empty gin bottle," the editorial said, even though senior intelligence officials, as well as Republicans and Democrats, have said they have seen no evidence to support Mr. Trump's accusations. The paper's editorial and opinion writers have been critical of Mr. Trump in the past, although the language of this editorial, which ran in Wednesday's paper, seemed intended to remind the president to focus on his stated goals rather than distractions. And the timing of the editorial during a week in which Mr. Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Judge Neil M. Gorsuch, is testifying at confirmation hearings and the House of Representatives is expected to vote on the Republican health care bill is almost certainly not a coincidence.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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Experimental brain scans of more than two dozen former N.F.L. players found that the men had abnormal levels of the protein linked to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease associated with repeated hits to the head. Using positron emission tomography, or PET, scans, the researchers found "elevated amounts of abnormal tau protein" in the parts of the brain associated with the disease, known as C.T.E., compared to men of similar age who had not played football. The authors of the study and outside experts stressed that such tau imaging is far from a diagnostic test for C.T.E., which is likely years away and could include other markers, from blood and spinal fluid. The results of the study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday, are considered preliminary, but constitute a first step toward developing a clinical test to determine the presence of C.T.E. in living players, as well as early signs and potential risk. Thus far, pathologists have been able to confirm the diagnosis only posthumously, by identifying the tau signature in donated brains. Previous studies had reported elevated levels of the tau signature in single cases. The new study is the first to compare the brains of a group of former players to a control group, using an imaging approach that specifically picks up tau and not other proteins in the brain. "What makes this exciting is that it's a great first step for imaging C.T.E. in the living, not just looking at single instances, but comparing averages and looking for patterns by comparing groups," said Kevin Bieniek, director of the Biggs Institute Brain Bank Core at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio. None Week 11 Takeaways: Here is what we learned this week. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Jets Lose Again: Falling to the Miami Dolphins, the Jets' receiver Elijah Moore offered consolation. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. Dr. Bieniek was not involved in the study. Over the past decade, the competition for research dollars to investigate C.T.E. has become fierce and political, with charges of exaggerated claims and interference by the N.F.L., which has produced scientific reports to rebut any link between the disease and repeated head trauma. The group that develops the first useful clinical test stands to attract a surge of funding, not to mention potential commercial partnerships. At least one group, in California, has already formed a company to promote its own test. The new study was led by Dr. Robert Stern of Boston University, which thus far has the largest collection of donated brains from former pro football players. He led a coalition of investigators at multiple centers who took brain images from 26 former pro players, aged 40 to 69, who had a variety of memory, mood and mental problems associated with C.T.E. Those images showed marked elevation of tau proteins in the areas of the brain that display the tau signature when diagnosed post mortem. The players' tau signal in those areas was higher, on average, than the tau signal from a control group of men who had not played. "We found, as well, that the amount of abnormal tau detected in these PET scans was associated with the number of years playing football," Dr. Stern said. His collaborators included brain scientists from the Mayo Clinic Arizona, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Avid Radiopharmaceuticals. Avid makes a molecule, called a ligand, that binds to proteins, in this case in the brain. Avid's ligand is the most studied of the so called tau detectors, and the company helped finance the study. Experts said the findings were encouraging, because any reliable marker for abnormal tau accumulation would allow doctors not only to identify people with C.T.E., but also to monitor progress from potential drug treatments. But, these experts said, much more work is required to develop a reliable test for a disorder that is still not well understood. As in tests for people suffering from Alzheimer's and other diseases that affect the brain, researchers have spent years trying to precisely refine the ligands that are ingested by patients before they receive PET scans and other imaging tests. There are also many open questions about the tau protein that is a signature of C.T.E. Researchers are trying to determine whether the protein, which occurs naturally in the brain, accumulates faster in people who have received repeated head trauma, and how those accumulating levels are related to behaviors associated with C.T.E., which include not only memory deficits but also impulse control issues and symptoms of depression. The new study found no correlation between the strength of the abnormal tau signature and the severity of cognitive and mood problems in the former players, though the sample was small. The search for a test for C.T.E. in living patients has received intense scrutiny since the disease was first discovered in deceased professional football players 15 years ago. The universe of professional players is relatively small only about 2,000 active players and 20,000 retirees and the Boston group's work has been based on a sample of some of the worst cases. Many, perhaps most, pro football players do not develop disabling cognitive problems, and there are likely many other brain traumas that could potentially result in the C.T.E. tau signature. Yet football is by far the country's most popular sport, with more than a million high school students playing the tackle version of the game. The detection of C.T.E. in former pro players turned what was viewed as an occupational hazard into a public health debate. For years now, parents, coaches, school administrators, doctors and others have engaged in a dispute over whether children should be allowed to play collision sports. Part of that dispute is trying to prove (or disprove) whether there is a direct link between exposure to repeated hits to the head absorbed in games like tackle football and the development of cognitive and neurological problems later in life. Here, the science is emerging. Studies by Dr. Stern and other researchers, including in the paper just released, suggest that there is a dose response the more hits to the head, the more likely you are to develop problems later. But researchers have questioned studies that have shown a high percentage of deceased former football players found with C.T.E. They claimed that the research subjects were self selected because the families of players who suspected they had brain disease were more likely to donate their brains to science.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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Note: Series' availability on streaming platforms is subject to change, and varies by country. If you're looking for more streaming recommendations, subscribe to the Times's Watching newsletter. It's not all good tidings in Bedford Falls, the setting of this Frank Capra classic from 1946. Poor George Bailey (James Stewart) is contemplating suicide after a terrible business deal threatens his family's well being just before Christmas. Lucky for him, a benevolent angel (Henry Travers) is there to show him what's truly important. Although George experiences some dark moments in his journey, this Christmas movie contains one of the most life affirming endings of all time. There's nothing like a classic Christmas tune to warm up a party. Named after the yearning Christmas carol by Irving Berlin, "White Christmas" follows a song and dance duo (Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye) as they team up with two equally talented sisters (Rosemary Clooney and Vera Ellen) to save a failing hotel. With all of this singing power in the cast, this 1954 musical brings Berlin's songs into the story and romances. And if you're in the mood for more classic Christmas cheer, seek out the earlier version of this story, "Holiday Inn," from 1942, starring Crosby and Fred Astaire. Follow the topsy turvy childhood of a now grown Ralphie (Peter Billingsley) as he reflects upon the best Christmas present he ever got (a Red Ryder carbine action, 200 shot, range model air rifle!), the trouble he went to get it and several misadventures along the way. The movie's catchphrase comes from the answer Ralphie gets for his gift request: "You'll shoot your eye out." The appeal of the movie's most famous prop the leg lamp is less easy to explain. This 1947 film has been remade a few times, but accept no substitutes. It's the story of a cute girl who comes to believe that Santa (Edmund Gwenn) exists and works at a famous department store. A skeptical Macy's employee (Maureen O'Hara) isn't so sure, so when the man claiming to be Santa is taken to court, an upstart lawyer (John Payne) tries to prove he's right. The little girl in the movie is played by a young and precocious Natalie Wood. Break open the MGM vault for this heartfelt 1944 film, in which Judy Garland plays a loving older sister in a family that is told they will be leaving St. Louis for the East Coast. The movie's tone can be bright and cheerful, as it is during the catchy "Trolley" number, in which Garland sings to her fellow passengers about love. And it can also be melancholic, like when she looks longingly out a window and sings one of the best renditions of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." This endearing story follows a human raised by elves (Will Ferrell) who ventures from the North Pole to the streets of New York City in search of his real dad (a delightfully grumpy James Caan). In the course of his misadventures, he comes across a disgruntled department store employee (Zooey Deschanel), a children's book author (Peter Dinklage) and of course, Santa (Ed Asner). As is the case with many Will Ferrell movies, it's very quotable. And if you say otherwise, then you sit on a throne of lies. By yourself for the holidays? Take some home security tips from Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin), the smart kid in this 1990 John Hughes film, who devises elaborate booby traps to fend off robbers after his parents accidentally leave him behind during their rush to the airport. Take Kevin's dietary and personal hygiene tips only under advisement. Everything that can go wrong went wrong in "National Lampoon's Vacation," which followed the Griswold clan on its disastrous trip to a theme park. Ditto on their trip to Europe. This third installation in the "Vacation" series offers no break for Clark the Patriarch (Chevy Chase) and his beleaguered family. Of course the Christmas tree will be ruined, the turkey will be overcooked, and the in laws will be most displeased. Best not to speak of what happens to the cat.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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And yet, there's evidence of quarantine fatigue even among those with the means to ride out the crisis. Tom Brady was seen exercising in a closed public park, and celebrities like the actor Josh Brolin have offered public mea culpas for violating lockdown guidelines. Recreational golfers are sneaking onto closed courses. One simple explanation for this behavior is what economists call "diminishing marginal utility." Think of it this way: During the first few days in lockdown, you probably had the opportunity to do things in the house that you were fairly enthusiastic about. Maybe you binge watched "Game of Thrones" or "Tiger King." Or perhaps you finally got around to building that cardboard box fort with your son. But that was several weeks ago. Now your son is driving you nuts, and you're into the dregs of Netflix shows, and you just want it to stop. In other words, you've used up all the "high utility" (i.e., high happiness) activities and are now scraping the bottom of the barrel. Cue quarantine fatigue, and the creeping desire to get out. Behavioral research also suggests that people don't actually like to sit around and do nothing. In one study, researchers found that when subjects were told to sit in a room and do nothing, they chose to give themselves electric shocks rather than pass the time in silence. In another study in Kenya, two colleagues and I found that people got greater psychological satisfaction from working for payment than from being idle and receiving the same payment. This "idleness aversion" might drive our desire to get out of the house and do something, whether it's a visit with friends or a trip to Target that's more a craving than a necessity. Even those who are working from home are probably longing for the outlet that the office used to provide. In a survey of working women in Texas in 2006, Daniel Kahneman and Alan Krueger found they got more satisfaction from socializing both at work and after work than from many activities in the home, like watching TV, cooking, housework or child care the things that make up a large majority of many people's experience under quarantine. So what can we do to fight off quarantine fatigue at this crucial time? First, remind yourself that while fatigue may be setting in, the biological nature of the virus is not changing. It remains highly contagious and, while perhaps not as lethal as we once feared, brutal in its impact on many who contract it. Remember that your fatigue induced sojourns into public spaces might inadvertently spread infection. Remind yourself that you don't want to be responsible for the deaths and suffering of those in your community. This might be a good time to learn a language, teach yourself a new home based skill like crafting or art, or to take one of the many online classes available in a host of disciplines. Not all of these activities have to be done alone. So ask your friends, what are you all doing to stay sane inside, and can I (remotely) join you?
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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WASHINGTON As lawmakers prepare for another round of fiscal stimulus to address economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested the next package include a retroactive rollback of a tax change that hurt high earners in states like New York and California. A full rollback of the limit on the state and local tax deduction, or SALT, would provide a quick cash infusion in the form of increased tax rebates to an estimated 13 million American households nearly all of which earn at least 100,000 a year. In an interview with The New York Times, Ms. Pelosi said the next phase of an economic rescue package should include additional measures to get more money directly to individuals like the 1,200 direct payments for low and middle income taxpayers that were authorized in the 2 trillion bill that President Trump signed on Friday. That could be achieved, she said, by having Congress "retroactively undo SALT," a reference to a cap on the state and local tax deduction that Republicans included in their 2017 tax overhaul. That limit prevents households from deducting more than 10,000 a year in state and local tax expenses from their federal tax bills. Henry Connelly, a spokesman for Ms. Pelosi, said on Monday evening that she was proposing something narrower than a full SALT rollback, and that any change would be "tailored to focus on middle class earners and include limitations on the higher end." "We could reverse that for 2018 and 2019 so that people could refile their taxes" and receive more money back from the government, Ms. Pelosi said in the interview. "They'd have more disposable income, which is the lifeblood of our economy, a consumer economy that we are." In the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats wielded the SALT limits in House campaigns against Republicans in wealthy blue state suburbs of cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Democrats voted last year to repeal the cap, but the effort died in the Republican controlled Senate. Republicans called the effort hypocritical, saying that it would primarily benefit wealthy households in high tax states. Democrats had roundly denounced the 2017 law, which included rate cuts for businesses and individuals, as a handout to the rich. But the SALT deduction overwhelmingly benefits high earners. "The ink is hardly dry on a 2 trillion plus emergency package," said Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania. "It's far too soon to know whether and of what nature additional legislation is needed. If we determine that another measure is necessary, it should not be the vehicle for Speaker Pelosi's partisan, parochial wish list." The congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimated last year that a full repeal of the SALT limit for 2019 alone would reduce federal revenues by about 77 billion. Americans earning 1 million a year or more would collectively reap 40 billion of those benefits. Most of the rest would go to households earning 200,000 or more. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. That is a contrast with the bill Mr. Trump signed on Friday, which began to phase out direct payments for households earning 150,000 or more. Ms. Pelosi's proposal represents "the way to get money into the hands of people who don't benefit from the 1,200 checks because they make too much money," said Kyle Pomerleau, a resident fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "It certainly gets money into hands. But I'm not sure it's the correct hands." Many liberal economic policy analysts also oppose lifting the SALT cap, calling it regressive tax policy. Seth Hanlon, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, said the same logic was also a reason not to lift the limit in the next economic rescue bill. That is particularly true because consumption data show that low and middle income Americans are more likely than higher earners to spend benefits from the government immediately and stimulate economic activity. To continue with direct assistance, Mr. Hanlon said, "there are ways you could target it to truly middle class people. The problem is, relatively few middle class people claim SALT." The Tax Policy Center estimates that only 3 percent of households in the middle quintile of American taxpayers would receive any benefit at all from the SALT cap repeal. "In and of itself," Mr. Hanlon said, "it doesn't strike me as the most effective way of targeting economic stimulus."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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Photographs of boxers make up a wall of fame at the Fat City Boxing Club in Stockton.Credit...Jason Henry for The New York Times Most people will have you believe that a city starts at its outskirts. You get there by landing at an airport or exiting a freeway ramp, following directional signs in plain highway green and white. A city's boundaries are clearly drawn; cross a line, and you're there. You'll probably have to fight your way through a ring of big box architecture and layers of residential sprawl, but eventually you'll find the heart of it: an old downtown full of ornate, once magnificent buildings. But I came to Stockton, Calif., a different way. For me, it will always be a place that I first entered through the pages of a book. "He lived in the Hotel Coma," states the first line of "Fat City," Leonard Gardner's 1969 novel. A dissipated boxer named Billy Tully surveys the view: "From his window he looked out on the stunted skyline of Stockton a city of eighty thousand surrounded by the sloughs, rivers and fertile fields of the San Joaquin River delta a view of business buildings, church spires, chimneys, water towers, gas tanks and the low roofs of residences rising among leafless trees between absolutely flat streets." The real Stockton is near the center of California's Central Valley, about 90 minutes east of San Francisco; its population in recent decades has ballooned to over 300,000. These days it's infamous for being the second largest American city after Detroit to go bankrupt following the economic meltdown of 2007. The city filed for Chapter 9 municipal protection in 2012 with over 700 million in debt, and emerged in 2015 after cost cutting and reorganization. The indie rock band Pavement came from here, as did the alt country crooner Chris Isaak. It's home to the University of the Pacific, whose music department produced the jazz musician Dave Brubeck. A revamped section downtown has a gleaming sports arena (completed in 2005) and a mall. The real Stockton is nice enough. But the Stockton of "Fat City" is lurid and legendary. It's where guys with flasks in their pockets line up on street corners at 4 a.m. to ride rattletrap buses into agricultural fields to pick tomatoes or top onions. Downtown is rife with greasy diners, fleabag hotels and steamy dive bars. Drunks take cover from the rain in incinerator silos. Boxers bust each other's noses in basement gyms. Dissolute men pine for wives who have ditched them, and dissolute women carp at no good boyfriends. It's not pretty, yet somehow, through the honesty of its grime and the earnest way its inhabitants try to scrape and spar their way out of it, it becomes beautiful. "Fat City" is an Edward Hopper painting, a Robert Frank photograph, a midnight choir Tom Waits operetta plunked on an out of tune piano. Mr. Gardner has an old fashioned grandeur. He wears a corduroy jacket; V neck sweater; cuffed, rumpled trousers; and dress shoes. His light brown hair has a sheen of silver. When he adds a fedora to the ensemble, he's positively Sinatra esque. His spoken syntax is flawless. It's rare that he starts a sentence with one idea and abandons it midway through for another. He's unerringly polite but not falsely modest. When I ask him about the N.Y.R.B. edition and how it feels to talk about a book he wrote almost 50 years ago, he says, "It's a little like magical thinking came true, to have it still respected the way it is." He warns me that most of the Stockton that inspired "Fat City" is long gone. "Everybody in town called it Skid Row," he says. "There would be editorials in the newspaper: 'We've got to clean up Skid Row.'" When Huston and his crew arrived to shoot the film, a tear down was in effect. "One hotel that we used in the opening of the movie was torn down the day after it was shot," Mr. Gardner says. "The film company must have made a deal, like, 'Don't knock it down until we shoot there.'" Leonard Gardner was born and raised in Stockton. His father, originally from Texas, was a postal inspector with an office in a stately, muraled federal building downtown. His mother, an Englishwoman, was a homemaker who was proper, religious and artistic. When Mr. Gardner was 7 or 8, he and his older sister caught rheumatic fever, and he missed two years of school. To help him recover, his father, a boxing enthusiast and former amateur, bought him a pair of gloves and hung a speed bag in the garage. "I got so that every day I'd be out there, 10 rounds on the bag," Mr. Gardner says. "He wanted me to build myself up. And it did make me strong and healthy." The father's passion became the son's. "He talked a lot about boxing," Mr. Gardner says. "I'd spar with him when I was 12 or 14 and he was in his 50s. He was slick and clever and hard to hit." Soon the young man could outbox his neighborhood buddies. "I made myself go to the Lido Gym, which was full of professionals and amateurs," Mr. Gardner says. "Rough, tough guys. Some of them could really rattle your brain." He only lasted at the Lido for a couple of months. "I got my nose broken in my first bout," he says. "The doctor told me, 'Don't put gloves on for a couple of months.' It didn't mean anything to my manager. He was phoning me: 'Forget about that, come on down, work out.' But I didn't." By that time he had developed another interest, writing. He got a job as an attendant in a Skid Row gas station. "Almost everyone I knew in Stockton would never set foot in Skid Row," he says. "But I think I was just inclined to be a writer. I got acquainted with the local winos, and some of them were nice guys. I wrote a piece for my high school English class, 'The Life of a Wino.' The teacher read it in class, and people told me it was better than the essays or stories in our textbook." He left Stockton at 19, lived for a time in Mexico City and wound up in San Francisco. The passion for boxing stayed with him. "I wanted to write a novel about a guy struggling in Skid Row with a poverty stricken life," he says. "And I also knew I wanted to write about boxers. And somewhere along the line I got the idea to put the two together." Stockton stayed with him, too. "It never occurred to me to write a boxing novel set anywhere else," he says. "After a steak dinner with Ruben and a stroll along El Dorado Street, Billy Tully went back to the Oxford Hotel, where he had been sleeping, sober and alone, for the past week." Mr. Gardner wrote "Fat City" over four years in San Francisco, but occasionally took a bus back to Stockton for research. "I was living on peanuts," he says. "Sometimes I came down and stayed in a crummy cheap hotel. That sign on a wall in the book, 'If you smoke in bed, let us know where to send your ashes,' that was on the wall in a room I rented in this hotel." Back in the car, Mr. Gardner threads his way toward the old business district. We pass aged barrooms with out of work neon beer steins and the original branch of the Bank of Stockton, a seven story Beaux Arts building, once Stockton's tallest. He stops in front of Xochimilco, a Mexican cafe. Dusk is falling. In the novel, a climactic bout takes place between Billy Tully, an aging contender making another stab at the big time, and a Mexican fighter named Lucero. Overweight and also over the hill, Lucero arrives in Stockton by bus, checks into a hotel and proceeds to a Mexican restaurant downtown called El Tecolote. The next day Mr. Gardner takes me to the Fat City Boxing Club, run by his old friend Yaqui Lopez, a former light heavyweight title contender and member of the World Boxing Hall of Fame. They met around the time of the Huston film Mr. Lopez played Jeff Bridges's sparring partner and stayed friends. The gym, inside a former car dealership, is deafening. The sound of pounding speed bags mixes with Mexican music blaring over a sound system. Two young boxers in face guards and body padding spar in an elevated ring. Mr. Lopez, 65, tall and incredibly fit, has fists the size of my head. The walls are covered with framed posters from his bouts in places like Atlantic City, Copenhagen and Rome. Mr. Lopez started the gym a few years ago to give underprivileged Stockton youth a place to channel their energy. We watch the two fighters in the ring. "They're punching each other around pretty well," Mr. Gardner says. "I can hear the punches," I say. "It's all part of training," he says. "The idea is, you get used to punches coming at you, and if they hit you, you don't flinch. You're not even supposed to blink, because you might get hit with another one that you wouldn't see coming. You're supposed to take a punch with your eyes open. And maybe look for your opening to counter with a punch of your own. If you didn't box very much, you might be punch shy and flinch." Behind the banners we can see the old scoreboard and balcony seats. Mr. Gardner swivels his neck. "They'd have the ring right here in the center," he says. "And a whole lot of, I guess, folding chairs. "I went to a lot of fights here in the old days," Mr. Gardner says. "I saw Yaqui Lopez fight here." He continues to search in the recesses of the ceiling beyond the drapes. "I'm looking for the tassel," he says. "When Billy Tully gets knocked down, he's looking at a big tassel hanging down from the center of the building." "He looked up at the lights and the brown and blue gathered drapery way up at the apex of the ceiling where a giant gold tassel hung, the whole scene shattered by a zigzag diagonal line, like a crack in a window. He did not remember rising, or how he got through the round." All we could see was a thick, bare cable. "They got rid of the tassel," Mr. Gardner says. After the "Fat City" film came out, Mr. Gardner adapted one of his short stories, "Christ Has Returned to Earth and Preaches Here Nightly," into a screenplay called "Valentino Returns." The film was briefly released in 1989. He wrote and worked as a producer for the TV show "NYPD Blue." "Sweeter Than Sugar," a piece of boxing journalism about the first matchup between Roberto Duran and Sugar Ray Leonard in 1980, is in the 2011 Modern Library anthology "At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing." And even later, he grouses about people always asking him why he never wrote another novel. But revisiting Stockton seemed to be having a subterranean effect. "I do have a dream," he says. "I don't want to go on at length talking about my next novel because it's a long way off and who knows if I'll ever do it. But a lot of it would be set here. So I need to stay in touch with the old town." We decide to take another crack at the Lido Gym. Those Moorish columns along the front are intact, if weathered and chipped. Up a flight of steps we stop at a front desk behind thick plexiglass. A group of men, sitting around talking, stop and stare. After intense negotiations and promises not to sue, a manager agrees to take us to the basement. "In a ring under a ceiling of exposed joists, wiring, water and sewage pipes, a Negro was shadowboxing in the light of fluorescent tubes. Three men in street clothes, one bald, one with deeply furrowed cheeks, the third wearing a houndstooth check hat with a narrow upturned brim, all turned their faces toward the door." The ceiling is low, a maze of beams, pipes and wires. The concrete floor is stained with water. The walls are bare, except for some graffiti. A carbon monoxide detector beeps. Just as we had been forewarned, there's nothing here. Nothing whatsoever. We walk around and our footsteps echo, tracking the water across dry spots. "The ring was in the center," Mr. Gardner says. "The speed bags were against the wall. I think the shower room was there under the sidewalk. To get to the lockers, you went through the shower room, and the drain was always faulty and so you were sort of wading through an inch or two of water, walking on our heels with the front part of our shoes out of the water." His voice is subdued, maybe a little pained. "I would have thought there would at least be an old punching bag in the corner, or something," he says. As barren and empty as the room is, I can see it all. The men, the lights, the damp and the thump of glove on skin. Or is it just the powerful imprint of the novel? As I stand here, it occurs to me that this is the essence of fiction: the liminal space between the tangible world outside and the inner layout of the mind, the antechambers of reality that usher us into the imagination. This is "Fat City." I've made it. I turn to say something to Mr. Gardner, but he is preoccupied. He stands with his head bent, leaning slightly on one foot and his fedora cocked forward on his head. He is holding a pocket notebook that I didn't even know he was carrying, and he is writing.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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The genetic data posted online seemed perfectly anonymous strings of billions of DNA letters from more than 1,000 people. But all it took was some clever sleuthing on the Web for a genetics researcher to identify five people he randomly selected from the study group. Not only that, he found their entire families, even though the relatives had no part in the study identifying nearly 50 people. The researcher did not reveal the names of the people he found, but the exercise, published Thursday in the journal Science, illustrates the difficulty of protecting the privacy of volunteers involved in medical research when the genetic information they provide needs to be public so scientists can use it. Other reports have identified people whose genetic data was online, but none had done so using such limited information: the long strings of DNA letters, an age and, because the study focused on only American subjects, a state. "I've been worried about this for a long time," said Barbara Koenig, a researcher at the University of California in San Francisco who studies issues involving genetic data. "We always should be operating on the assumption that this is possible." The data are from an international study, the 1000 Genomes Project, that is collecting genetic information from people around the world and posting it online so researchers can use it freely. It also includes the ages of participants and the regions where they live. That information, a genealogy Web site and Google searches were sufficient to find complete family trees. While the methods for extracting relevant genetic data from the raw genetic sequence files were specialized enough to be beyond the scope of most laypeople, no one expected it to be so easy to zoom in on individuals. "We are in what I call an awareness moment," said Eric D. Green, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health. There is no easy answer about what to do to protect the privacy of study subjects. Subjects might be made more aware that they could be identified by their DNA sequences. More data could be locked behind security walls, or severe penalties could be instituted for those who invade the privacy of subjects. "We don't have any claim to have the answer," Dr. Green said. And opinions about just what should be done vary greatly among experts. But after seeing how easy it was to find the individuals and their extended families, the N.I.H. removed people's ages from the public database, making it more difficult to identify them. But Dr. Jeffrey R. Botkin, associate vice president for research integrity at the University of Utah, which collected the genetic information of some research participants whose identities were breached, cautioned about overreacting. Genetic data from hundreds of thousands of people have been freely available online, he said, yet there has not been a single report of someone being illicitly identified. He added that "it is hard to imagine what would motivate anyone to undertake this sort of privacy attack in the real world." But he said he had serious concerns about publishing a formula to breach subjects' privacy. By publishing, he said, the investigators "exacerbate the very risks they are concerned about." The project was the inspiration of Yaniv Erlich, a human genetics researcher at the Whitehead Institute, which is affiliated with M.I.T. He stresses that he is a strong advocate of data sharing and that he would hate to see genomic data locked up. But when his lab developed a new technique, he realized he had the tools to probe a DNA database. And he could not resist trying. The tool allowed him to quickly find a type of DNA pattern that looks like stutters among billions of chemical letters in human DNA. Those little stutters short tandem repeats are inherited. Genealogy Web sites use repeats on the Y chromosome, the one unique to men, to identify men by their surnames, an indicator of ancestry. Any man can submit the short tandem repeats on his Y chromosome and find the surname of men with the same DNA pattern. The sites enable men to find their ancestors and relatives. So, Dr. Erlich asked, could he take a man's entire DNA sequence, pick out the short tandem repeats on his Y chromosome, search a genealogy site, discover the man's surname and then fully identify the man? He tested it with the genome of Craig Venter, a DNA sequencing pioneer who posted his own DNA sequence on the Web. He knew Dr. Venter's age and the state where he lives. Bingo: two men popped up in the database. One was Craig Venter. "Out of 300 million people in the United States, we got it down to two people," Dr. Erlich said. He and his colleagues calculated they would be able to identify, from just their DNA sequences, the last names of approximately 12 percent of middle class and wealthier white men the population that tends to submit DNA data to recreational sites like the genealogical ones. Then by combining the men's last names with their ages and the states where they lived, the researchers should be able to narrow their search to just a few likely individuals. Now for the big test. On the Web and publicly available are DNA sequences from subjects in the 1000 Genomes Project. People's ages were included and all the Americans lived in Utah, so the researchers knew their state. Dr. Erlich began with one man from the database. He got the Y chromosome's short tandem repeats and then went to genealogy databases and searched for men with those same repeats. He got surnames of the paternal and maternal grandfather. Then he did a Google search for those people and found an obituary. That gave him the family tree. "Now I knew the whole family," Dr. Erlich said. And it was so simple, so fast. "I said, 'Come on, that can't be true.'" So he probed and searched and checked again and again. "Oh my God, we really did this," Dr. Erlich said. "I had to digest it. We had so much information." He and his colleagues went on to get detailed family trees for other subjects and then visited Dr. Green and his colleagues at the N.I.H. to tell them what they had done. They were referred to Amy L. McGuire, a lawyer and ethicist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. She, like others, called for more public discussion of the situation. "To have the illusion you can fully protect privacy or make data anonymous is no longer a sustainable position," Dr. McGuire said. When the subjects in the 1000 Genomes Project agreed to participate and provide DNA, they signed a form saying that the researchers could not guarantee their privacy. But, at the time, it seemed like so much boilerplate. The risk, Dr. Green said, seemed "remote." "I don't know that anyone anticipated that someone would go and actually figure out who some of those people were," Dr. McGuire said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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David Bowie was a New Yorker for over 20 years. In Bowie years, that is practically an eternity considering the multitude of lives he lived musically, geographically and otherwise since he set out to become a star in the late 1960s. "I can't imagine living anywhere else," said Mr. Bowie, who was born in Brixton in South London and had stints in Berlin; Lausanne, Switzerland; and several other cities, "I've lived in New York longer than I've lived anywhere else. It's amazing. I am a New Yorker," he said in a 2003 interview. Soon after news spread of Mr. Bowie's death on Jan. 10, two days after his 69th birthday and the release of his album "Blackstar," fans started a makeshift memorial outside the SoHo apartment where he had lived with his wife, Iman, since 1999, joined the following year by their daughter, Lexi. Mr. Bowie and Iman purchased their first city home in 1992, a ninth floor apartment at the Essex House Hotel on Central Park South, which they sold in 2002. "Just as each and every one of us found something unique in David's music, we welcome everyone's celebration of his life as they see fit," Mr. Bowie's family wrote in a statement. Should you be looking for a way to honor the musician in the city he called home, there is no shortage of activities to partake in, many of which Mr. Bowie enjoyed doing himself. He wrote of the park in a 2003 essay for New York magazine: "It's the emotional history of New York in a quick walk." Robert Wright for The New York Times Walking in general (the earlier in the day the better) was a preferred way for Mr. Bowie to experience city life. "The signature of the city changes shape and is fleshed out as more and more people commit to the street," Mr. Bowie wrote. "A magical transfer of power from the architectural to the human." The park is about a 10 minute walk from the apartment on Lafayette, where fans left notes, photos and flowers outside the building after hearing of his death, and where the musician Glen Hansard paid tribute recently with an acoustic performance of the Bowie classic "Ashes to Ashes." Mr. Bowie enjoyed shopping for rare vinyl at Bleecker Bob's before it closed in 2013 after 45 years, only to be turned into a frozen yogurt shop. But there are plenty of fine vinyl purveyors still operating in and around Greenwich Village, including Bleecker Street Records (188 West Fourth Street). If you're stopping there for vinyl on your Bowie crawl, do not expect much by the man himself, at least not for a while. Nino Perez of Bleecker Street Records said the store quickly sold out of most titles in the days after his death and it did not expect to have more copies of "Blackstar" until the end of February, because of the high demand. David Bowie's last album, "Blackstar," was released on Jan. 8. It's a similar story at Generation Records (210 Thompson Street). "I sold out of his new album right away," Jason Primavera said, referring to the vinyl edition, though he added that customers were asking for it even before he died, as its positive reviews piled up. Before stocks are replenished, consider taking home one of Mr. Bowie's contemporaries, like Iggy Pop or Lou Reed, both of whom he met and befriended during a 1971 visit to Manhattan. Mr. Reed and the Velvet Underground's debut album was one of Mr. Bowie's first exposures to New York music, in the form of a gift from his manager, Ken Pitt, in 1966. "Everything I both felt and didn't know about rock music was opened to me," Mr. Bowie wrote in 2003. "I was hearing a degree of cool that I had no idea was humanly sustainable." The theater had long been part of Mr. Bowie's creative world, dating back to his prestardom days working with Lindsay Kemp at the London Dance Center. In 1980 he earned positive reviews for his performance in "The Elephant Man" at the Booth Theater (222 West 45th Street). "Yes, more young people in designer jeans and leather now show up at the Booth Theater than before, and yes, they probably show up because Mr. Bowie is a celebrated rock star," John Corry wrote in The Times in 1980. "Fortunately, he is a good deal more than that, and as John Merrick, the Elephant Man, he is splendid." Though "Lazarus" has closed, you can still see the prequel, Nicolas Roeg's "The Man Who Fell to Earth" (1976), in which Mr. Bowie "gives an extraordinary performance," according to Richard Eder's review in The Times. It is currently available on Vudu and Amazon Video. Other Bowie related titles available to stream include "The Hunger" (1983), "The Last Temptation of Christ" (1988) and "The Prestige" (2006). The documentary "David Bowie: Five Years" (2013) can also be viewed on Hulu and Amazon Video via a Showtime add on subscription.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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Anthony Bourdain's death by suicide on Friday prompted an outpouring of grief, with fellow celebrities, friends, foodies and fans paying tribute to a man who charmed many with his unvarnished, compassionate commentary on food and life. The appreciations of Mr. Bourdain's writing and television shows came from all corners, including from former President Barack Obama, who shared a meal with Mr. Bourdain in Vietnam in 2016, and at least one retired astronaut who recalled enjoying Mr. Bourdain's work from the farthest perch. "I watched his show when I was in space," Scott Kelly, the NASA astronaut, wrote on Twitter. "It made me feel more connected to the planet, its people and cultures and made my time there more palatable. He inspired me to see the world up close." In a statement posted to Twitter, the actress Asia Argento, Mr. Bourdain's girlfriend, said she was "beyond devastated" by his death. "His brilliant, fearless spirit touched and inspired so many, and his generosity knew no bounds. He was my love, my rock, my protector," she wrote. Here's what Mr. Bourdain's friends and fans had to say about his death and legacy. 'You shaped the way we see food' Chefs and food writers remembered Mr. Bourdain fondly for his friendship and the role he played in shaping how his readers and viewers understood food and culture. "Anthony was a dear friend," Eric Ripert, the French celebrity chef and restaurateur, said in a statement provided to The New York Times, which he later tweeted a version of. "He was an exceptional human being, so inspiring and generous. One of the great storytellers of our time who connected with so many. I wish him peace. My love and prayers are with his family, friends and loved ones." Andrew Zimmern, the American celebrity chef, said that Mr. Bourdain had been in good spirits in recent months. "The irony, the sad cruel irony is that the last year he'd never been happier," Mr. Zimmern wrote on Twitter. "The rest of my heart aches for the three amazing women he left behind. Tony was a symphony." "One of the nicest people I've ever met and so genuinely a celebrant of communities and their foods which had, for Anthony, a spiritual value," Joyce Carol Oates, the author, wrote on Twitter. Another author, Gary Shteyngart, remembered taking Mr. Bourdain to Brighton Beach in Brooklyn for an episode of the show "No Reservations." "He was gracious, brilliant and charmed every surly Russian in sight," Mr. Shteyngart wrote. 'Thank you for shining your light on the dark places' Mr. Bourdain was also remembered for the compassion and humanity he showed, in ways big and small, outside the world of food. The chef Jose Andres, who was recently in Europe with Mr. Bourdain, said in a tweet: "You still had so many places to show us, whispering to our souls the great possibilities beyond what we could see with our own eyes...you only saw beauty in all people." Jordana Rothman, restaurant editor of Food Wine magazine, remembered him for a small generosity. "At a time in my career when people still looked through me at parties to see if someone more important was on the other side, Bourdain shook my hand and asked me what I care about," she wrote on Twitter. "I've paid the gift forward in a thousand handshakes since." Others celebrated his honest embrace of the MeToo movement, not only through his support of Ms. Argento, his girlfriend and one of many women who accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault, but also through his own introspection as a man.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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With a libretto by the poet Bao Long Chu, "Bound" opens with the humiliated Diane (the intensely expressive soprano Fang Tao Jiang) enduring her sleepless night in jail. She plaintively calls to her absent mother, trying to understand how a good student struggling to support her younger brothers could have come to this moment. In Ashley Tata's effectively simple production, Stephan Moravski's set suggests the dry cleaning store where Diane works, with an array of shirts on hangers dangling from above and a long blue table for conducting business. We see Diane at the store, berated by her gruff boss (the baritone Andrew Wannigman) and forced to choose between opening the store and a chemistry test. (Other girls, she observes, struggle with whether or not to kiss a boy, or what dress to wear for junior prom.) The story shifts back to her cell, where her mother (the formidable mezzo soprano Guang Yang) seems to appear and sings a fitful monologue about ghosts that haunt: the parents and siblings she left in Vietnam, horrific memories of war, the ancient ancestors she feels she's betrayed. In the final scene, a by the book judge (the stentorian bass baritone Daniel Klein) decides to teach Diane a lesson and send her to jail. The score is the strong point of "Bound." Though many composers meld Asian and Western elements in their music, Mr. Huang does so with such confidence and elegance that you hardly notice the mingling. His is a distinctive voice, spiked by cluster like harmonies, at once piercing and ethereal, and squiggly rhythmic riffs. Played here in an arrangement for 10 instruments, including Chinese pipa (conducted surely by Alex Wen), the instrumental sounds suggest the heaving, pummeling emotional subtext of the story, as the characters sing Mr. Huang's urgent vocal lines, shifting from dramatic exhortation to moments of poignant lyrical reflection. The creators of "Bound" seem to have wanted to keep the work a little vague and open to interpretation, and for Diane to seem emblematic of many young people from struggling immigrant families. But I wanted to know more. And as presented here, the mother's lament seemed self indulgent. If she's so guilt ridden about leaving her family in Vietnam, why is she not dedicating herself more deeply to her daughter? Diane mourns her mother's absence. But is this absence emotional or actual?
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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WHEN TIME STOPPED A Memoir of My Father's War and What Remains By Ariana Neumann Growing up as the child of a wealthy Czech born industrialist in Caracas, Ariana Neumann wanted for nothing except mystery. Her parents, luminaries of Venezuelan society, doted on her. She had the run of their house with its modern art collection and lush garden. But she dreamed of being a detective, and when she was 8 formed a spy club with cousins and friends devoted to investigating puzzling occurrences: an incongruously placed cheese rind, say, or a suspiciously misfiled LP. One day, their play led her to a box in her father's study that contained an identity card. On it, a Hitler stamp, a photo of her father as a young man and a name and date of birth that didn't match his. In "When Time Stopped: A Memoir of My Father's War and What Remains," Neumann unravels the mystery of that identity card. The story she uncovers is worthy of fiction with hairpin plot twists, daredevil acts of love and unexpected moments of humor in dark times. Given the slew of colorful characters and dramatic details, Neumann could have turned her painstaking research into a historical novel. Instead she has written a superb family memoir that unfolds its poignant power on multiple levels. Yes, her account of one Jewish Czech family's race to outwit the Nazis makes for thrilling reading. But just as important is her lucid investigation of the nature of memory, identity and remembrance. The discovery of the identity card terrified Neumann as a girl. Her mother, 20 years younger than her father, had never seen it. And she knew better than to ask her father. She had already learned not to bring up the subject of his nightmares, which some nights left him screaming in Czech, or the single photograph he kept of his parents, which showed them seated at a table covered in documents, looking isolated and sad. As a young adult, Neumann unlocked new clues but they only deepened the mystery. On a visit to Prague she saw her father's name, Hans Neumann, on a list of Jewish victims of Nazism. In the spot where the other entries showed the date of death, his had a question mark. He accompanied her on another visit to the Czech Republic where he was taciturn and tense, except for one moment at a fence overlooking a railway, where he broke down in silent sobs. 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. At his death in 2001 he left his daughter the box she had spied as an 8 year old. This time it was crammed with letters and documents. Following their trail led Neumann to discover the story of her paternal family along with an ever widening network of living relatives, many with similar boxes of letters and photographs to contribute. Otto and Ella Neumann were assimilated Jews who owned a paint factory near Prague and had two sons, Hans and Lotar. Hans, the younger, was a dreamer and often late. His knack for getting hurt earned him the nickname "the unfortunate boy." With his gentile friend Zdenek he earned admittance to a club of pranksters by lying down in the midst of a busy road, casually telling concerned passers by that they were "just a little tired." Neumann's book pieces together the story of how this "unfortunate boy" came to escape deportation at the hands of the Nazis three times. With the help of Zdenek he survived the war hiding in plain sight under a false identity in Berlin, where he engaged in industrial espionage by day and rescued German civilians from Allied bombings as a firefighter by night. A photo shows Hans and Zdenek standing in front of a Berlin monument to Otto von Bismarck in 1943 wearing short trousers and broad smirks. Thanks to Hans's written recollections, we learn of the terrible tension and fear he lived through. More than once he popped a carefully guarded capsule of cyanide into his mouth, ready to bite down if a German guard should unmask him. The book also reconstructs in unsparing detail the suffering of Otto and Ella in Terezin. Here and there it was relieved by the heroic efforts of Lotar, hiding in Prague, and his gentile wife, Zdenka. Devoted to her Jewish in laws, she infiltrated the concentration camp to smuggle in news, food and shoe polish. Otto relied on the last item to darken his white hair to look more youthful and delay deportation to Auschwitz. Time is the central theme of Neumann's memoir. It governs Hans's behavior as an adult and father, from his obsessive punctuality to his persistence, in violation of Venezuelan norms, of arriving to cocktail parties at the appointed hour. He told his family he liked to "stretch time" by rising early. He owned 297 pocket watches. His daughter would observe as he took them apart "with absolute precision and fathomless patience." As she puzzles out the story, Neumann discovers the moment when her father was gripped by the power of time. In the spring of 1943, having absconded from his third summons to deportation, Hans hid in a secret compartment inside the family factory. Alone, he cracked open his watch to make sure time had not stopped. He needed to check that the ticking was not in his head, "that it was not just his thumping heart; that there was order somewhere, and that time was real and going by." Likewise, Neumann's book obeys its own exquisite clockwork. Different narrative parts act like interlocking cogs moving at different speeds. As she spins out the tale of Hans's wartime ordeal, another story unspools in the background that traces her relationship with her father until she makes peace with his silences. The largest wheel in the mechanism of remembrance is genealogy itself: the comfort Neumann finds in the tiny signs of kinship between her father and her own children; the connections forged with newly discovered relatives whom she is sometimes able to pick out in a crowd at first meeting. At the end of the book the hands all align. "I realize that without having meant to search for them in particular, I finally have found my family," Neumann writes. Working through her father's wartime trauma helped her find her place in a legacy that was "not so much forgotten as veiled in silence."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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Our weekday morning digest that includes consumer news, deals, tips and anything else that travelers may want to know. United Airlines grounded its flights for two hours this morning but service has resumed. Flight delays, however, persist. This is the second time that technical issues have grounded United flights in just over a month. The high end beauty brand La Mer is opening its first ever worldwide spa Wednesday at the Baccarat Hotel and Residences New York in Midtown Manhattan. Called Spa de La Mer, the 1,900 square foot space is on the hotel's lower level, and, like the rest of the property, was designed by the Paris based Gilles Boissier who wanted it to be reminiscent of a European seaside retreat. The ceilings are vaulted, and the soothing colors throughout include warm champagne and bronze tones. Also, each of the four treatment rooms have a wall with a sea kelp mural that was hand painted by the New York artists Lynda White and Jeff Wood. The face and body treatments available highlight La Mer products, but the signature service is the 90 minute La Mer Baccarat Facial ( 350), which includes an extensive face, neck and shoulder massage, a diamond powder exfoliation and deep breathing using colored Baccarat crystals.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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The first Billboard chart of the new year belongs to Taylor Swift. Ms. Swift's "Reputation" (Big Machine) returns to No. 1 for a fourth time on the latest chart, with the equivalent of 107,000 sales, according to Nielsen. Of that total, 79,000 copies were sold as full albums, and the rest were made up of streams and downloads of individual tracks. The latest chart counts sales made in the seven days through Dec. 28, which means that Ms. Swift probably benefited from last minute holiday shopping, although the total for "Reputation" was down slightly from the week before, when it logged 133,000. Also this week, Huncho Jack, the new duo of the rappers Travis Scott and Quavo (of Migos), started at No. 3 with "Huncho Jack, Jack Huncho" (Quality Control), with cover art by the 81 year old Ralph Steadman ("Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"). The album had the equivalent of 90,000 sales, the vast majority from streams. Ed Sheeran's "/" is No. 2 in its 43rd week on the chart. Eminem's new "Revival," last week's top seller, falls to No. 4 in its second week out. And the soundtrack to "The Greatest Showman," the P.T. Barnum biopic starring Hugh Jackman, is No. 5.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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PARIS They took three years to blossom, but Jeff Koons's tulips are finally in full bloom. A t a ceremony in Paris on Friday, the American artist dedicated a new sculpture to friendship between France and the United States, and to the victims of recent terrorist attacks in the city and across the European country. The ceremony drew a three year saga to a close, in which French cultural figures quarreled about the monument's location and significance, and questioned Mr. Koons's motives in creating it. At the inauguration ceremony, Mr. Koons said, "The sculpture 'Bouquet of Tulips' was created as a symbol of remembrance, optimism and healing." Made of bronze, aluminum and stainless steel, "Bouquet of Tulips" is 41 feet tall. An outstretched hand holds 11 colorful tulips and evokes the hand of the Statue of Liberty holding her torch. Mr . Koons said it also echoed Pablo Picasso's "Bouquet of Peace," a 1958 lithograph. Mr. Koons announced the gift of a sculpture to the people of Paris in November 2016, months after Jane D. Hartley, the United States ambassador to France at the time, had asked him to create a tribute to the victims of the terrorist attacks in France in 2015 and 2016.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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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. Rudolph Giuliani has struggled over the past week to clarify the Trump administration's official narrative in the Stormy Daniels scandal and it's turning him into the latest punching bag for late night TV hosts. On Sunday, Giuliani walked back comments he made last week confirming that President Trump reimbursed his lawyer Michael Cohen for the hush money Cohen had sent to Stephanie Clifford, the pornographic film actress known as Stormy Daniels. Giuliani told George Stephanopolous of ABC that the facts he had outlined might actually be "rumors." Trevor Noah cried foul, saying that the Trump White House can't simply claim that unfavorable truths are rumors. "At this point, Giuliani's defense strategy seems to be, dismantle reality. But really, it fits into the whole idea that Trump and his people have always been playing with: fiction vs. facts. Facts are anything that helps Trump and anything that doesn't help Trump isn't a fact. And as Trump's lawyer, this is going to be Giuliani's challenge, because they haven't figured out yet what version of events won't get Trump into trouble. Once they figure that out, that's when they'll start calling things facts. It's like when a cop pulls you over and asks you how fast you were going, and you try to figure out the speed limit. You're like, 'Officer, I was going 50, 55 miles an hour?' 'That's 10 miles faster than ' 'Before I went 45 miles an hour. You didn't let me finish!' 'But you said you were going 55.' 'No, that was a rumor, this is a fact.'" TREVOR NOAH Stephanopolous suggested that he and Giuliani could at least agree that Trump had met Clifford, showing a photograph of the two of them together. With a laugh, Giuliani said, "It depends what you mean by 'met.'" Stephen Colbert said that comment sounded oddly suggestive. "This is awkward uhh Rudy, when a man and a woman love each other very much, they exchange a special hug, and that makes a baby, and right after the woman has that baby, the man has an adult film actress spank him with a financial magazine. That's what he meant by 'met.' That's what 'met' means. Go ask your father." STEPHEN COLBERT Seth Meyers was amused by Trump's own apparent attempts to disavow Giuliani's statements: The president told reporters on Friday that Giuliani would eventually "get his facts straight." He also called Giuliani a "great guy," saying: "He's learning the subject matter." "He's a former mayor and U.S. attorney who's now the lawyer for the president of the United States, and Trump talks about him like he's a trainee at Chipotle. 'Excuse me, my burrito fell apart.' 'I'm sorry, he just started yesterday. He's a great guy. Rudy, you gotta tuck the tortilla! I'm sorry, he'll learn. He's a great guy.'" SETH MEYERS "Trump's going to be the first client who pleads insanity on behalf of his lawyer." SETH MEYERS "I think we know what's going on here. I think their strategy right now is to put someone out there who's even nuttier than Trump, to make him look normal by comparison. And it's working!" JIMMY KIMMEL "First lady Melania Trump today unveiled her formal childhood education platform, called Be Best. Said children, 'Me try.'" SETH MEYERS "A woman in Colorado was cited for property damage after she used a 7 Eleven microwave to heat up a urine sample, and it exploded. The 7 Eleven owner was like, 'Lady, if you wanted hot urine, you could have just poured yourself a coffee.'" JIMMY FALLON "Over the weekend, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told a group of college graduates to 'embrace the mess' in their lives. By the way, 'Embrace the mess' is also Trump's 2020 campaign slogan." JIMMY FALLON
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Television
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, Who Upset Common Wisdom on Cause of Alzheimer's, Dies at 73 , a maverick researcher whose team of scientists identified two genes that put healthy people over 65 at higher risk for Alzheimer's disease, died on Friday in New York. He was 73. Dr. Roses had a heart attack at Kennedy International Airport on his way to a medical conference in Greece, his daughter Stephanie Roses said. Before his death, he had been testing a drug that researchers hoped would help people stave off dementia. In the early 1990s, Dr. Roses and his collaborators at Duke University rejected prevailing assumptions that the buildup in the brain of a protein plaque called amyloid directly caused memory loss and other mental impairments in Alzheimer's patients. Instead, they maintained that the plaque largely resulted from the disease, and that the deterioration of brain function actually originated from the variation of a single gene. In 2009, after financing his research with a loan of almost 500,000 on his house, Dr. Roses and his team identified a second gene that they said could help predict whether the cognitive ability of an older person, generally between 65 and 83, would decline within about five years of acquiring Alzheimer's. There are currently no treatments to prevent or delay the disease, but if therapies do become available, identifying people at risk will be vital. Delaying the onset of dementia by five years through medicine could cut the cost of patient care nationally by 50 billion annually, according to the Alzheimer's Association. The organization paid tribute to Dr. Roses this week, saying that his research had "significantly advanced our knowledge and understanding" of the disease. In countering the amyloid theory, which had become the conventional wisdom and the basis for most research funding, Dr. Roses maintained that dementia in Alzheimer's patients resulted from a gene variation that inhibits mitochondria, or mini organs within a cell, from metabolizing glucose and oxygen, a process necessary to fuel neurons in the brain. Without the energy generated by that fuel, the neurons cannot communicate with one another. Unable to reproduce, they die and are not replaced, and brain function deteriorates. Dr. Roses, a clinical neurologist, spent most of his career at Duke and was the senior vice president for genetics research and pharmacogenetics at GlaxoSmithKline. In his research, he determined the chromosomal locations for more than a dozen other diseases, including Parkinson's, Lou Gehrig's and muscular dystrophy. Allen David Roses was born on Feb. 21, 1943, in Paterson, N.J., the son of Morris Roses, who owned a stationery store, and the former Ceil Schwartz, both Jewish immigrants from Poland who escaped the Holocaust. His father died when Allen was about 13, forcing him to help support the family by working odd jobs and running numbers for mob connected bookies. After graduating from the University of Pittsburgh and receiving his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania, he was a medical resident at Columbia University and Duke. He served as a doctor in the Air Force in Vietnam and was discharged as a captain. Later, he was a professor of neurology and neurobiology at Duke and chief of neurology at Duke University Medical Center, founding director of the Joseph and Kathleen Bryan Alzheimer's Disease Research Center and director of the Center for Human Genetics. Dr. Roses left Duke to join GlaxoWellcome (now GlaxoSmithKline) in 1997. He returned to the university in 2007 as a professor and director of the Deane Drug Discovery Institute. He owned Zinfandel Pharmaceuticals, which has been collaborating with Takeda Pharmaceuticals, a Japanese company, on clinical trials to determine whether Actos, a drug ordinarily prescribed for diabetes, can delay Alzheimer's. The trials, part of a multiyear study, have involved thousands of participants. The tests have been seeking to determine whether doctors can predict the risk of cognitive loss in people with Alzheimer's and whether a low dose of the drug can help in mild cases. Dr. Roses was also the chairman of the American Dance Festival. In addition to his daughter Stephanie, he is survived by his wife, Ann Saunders, a fellow neuroscience researcher who also teaches at Duke; three other daughters, Maija Roses, Joanna Roses Ryan and Michelle Roses Holleman; his sister, Estelle Irizarry; and four grandchildren. He lived in Durham, N.C. The heart attack that caused his death was his third since 1990, but his pace never faltered. "He treated every day like it was his last one, because he knew it probably was," Stephanie Roses said. "He woke up every morning and would blink three times and say, 'I have another day.'"
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Science
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Any intrepid consumer can't help being intrigued by the promise and nerve of Angie's List. Like Yelp, which had its initial public offering on Friday, it allows you to search for reviews of useful services near you and contribute your own evaluations. But unlike Yelp, you are not anonymous when you praise or eviscerate a provider on the Angie's List Web site, and the company requires paid subscriptions in cities where it has been up and running for a while. That business model makes it particularly rare. There are few companies of its size that are built entirely around user generated content yet ultimately charge its contributors to access just about all of it. Yet despite this chutzpah, Angie's List's subscription renewal rates have grown in the last few years, even as it's tripled the number of cities it covers and built sections of its site that may not have much content yet. Thanks to its own initial public offering in November and the data that it released, we now know that its paying members, more than one million of them today, had an average renewal rate of 75 percent in 2011, up from 62 percent in 2008. Given that the company's strong suit is in high ticket service providers who can fix and remodel your home, plenty of people may want to be Angie's List members only when they're in the middle of a move or remodeling. So what exactly is keeping the members around, often paying more than 60 a year for the privilege? In many ways, the paid subscription model is an accident of history. The company was born in 1995, when Angie Hicks, a newly minted graduate from DePauw University, went to work for Bill Oesterle in Columbus, Ohio. Mr. Oesterle, a venture capitalist at the time, wanted to replicate a newsletter service he knew about in Indianapolis that helped residents find plumbers and roofers. So he put Ms. Hicks to work at a card table in his garage. Because this was 1995, nobody was yet shouting from the rooftops that information wanted to be free. "Some of the choices we made early on were dictated by the world we lived in," Ms. Hicks said. "People paid for content." When the business took off, they rechristened the company "Angie's List" since she had assembled it and callers often asked Ms. Hicks to check "her" list for recommendations. The company bought the service that had originally inspired Mr. Oesterle and moved the headquarters of Angie's List to Indiana in 1999. Over the next decade or so, the company methodically moved into new markets. Then, over the course of a few years, starting in 2008, it took a slug of venture capital money and expanded rapidly, losing money and running advertising campaigns all the while. Today, the company, which is still not profitable, is in 170 markets where members are paying and has more than 850 employees, almost all of whom work in Indianapolis. There, they wander back and forth among a ragtag collection of refurbished houses and industrial buildings (plus a repurposed firehouse) that are many blocks from the nice part of downtown. Still, the company has a gym with a full time trainer in a former Indy car garage that it now owns, plus a small orchard between a couple of parking lots. Another lot has an actual diner that will someday serve as the corporate cafeteria. Many of the employees work the phone from their cubicles, one of which sits atop the bed of an antique fire truck. In the office, they hear from members who call on the first of the month when they don't realize they signed up for automatic membership renewal or because they want to sound off about a service provider to a person rather than submit a Web report. (One classic: The guy who phoned in about a company that wouldn't handle his urine stained Santa suit.) Membership prices range from free (in cities where Angie's List is new and needs to add more reviews) to 62.40 a year in its 34 most mature markets. That price gets people access both to the household services lists and the newer health one that includes doctors and massage therapists. Those who wish to review services providers grade them from A to F in six categories, including "overall experience." So from the start, the company has refused to take anonymous reviews. Angie's List site users don't see contributors' real names, but you need one to register and service providers who want to respond on the site to a complaint or compliment can ask the company for your name. In its securities filing before it went public, Angie's List, in what could have been a direct message to anyone thinking about investing in Yelp, put it this way: "The anonymity of the Internet renders it inherently susceptible to outright manipulation by unscrupulous service providers and unhappy customers, so consumers have limited means for discerning which information they should trust." That's pretty heavy breathing for a Securities and Exchange Commission document, but Roger Lee, a general partner at the venture capital firm Battery Ventures, doesn't think it was over the top given the fakery for sale out there in the world. "There are booming businesses overseas that charge you anywhere from 3 to 5 to write a glowingly positive review," he said. No site can stop all such shenanigans, but forcing people to pay and register with a real name helps. Angie's List also has Evan Hock, who leads a team that uses algorithms and human intervention to sniff out problematic reviews each day. "We trust the data we see, and we're used to being lied to," said Mr. Hock, who aspired to the ministry before becoming the confession seeker in chief for Angie's List. "We're the guerrillas of reliable data warfare." Angie's List now makes the majority of its revenue from advertising plus its cut of Groupon like deals that it introduced last year. Service providers who advertise must also offer some sort of a discount to members. The company can apparently make such demands because of the focused opportunity it offers. "If I'm a plumber, and I can put an ad in the Yellow Pages or I can put it in a place where people are paying money to find plumbers, the choice is pretty obvious," said Mr. Lee, the venture capitalist. Still, Angie's List is not always the best venue for every advertiser and may not serve every consumer best either. Consider Brooklyn, where Angie's List competes with entrenched, hyperlocal service sites like Park Slope Parents and Brownstoner, which is focused on home purchases, maintenance and improvement. Antonio Ceriello Electric advertises on both Angie's List and Brownstoner and gets more leads from Brownstoner, which allows anonymous reader contributions. "People may feel more comfortable going to a forum where everyone can just really put an opinion out there," said Rosalia Ceriello, the office manager at Antonio Ceriello. She was quick to add that the far more expensive ads the company places on Angie's List (more than 3,000 worth annually) pay for themselves quickly too. "Clearly they've done a great job," said Jonathan Butler, Brownstoner's proprietor, of Angie's List. "But I'm more local and accessible than Angie, who is supposedly in thousands of cities. They can actually see me at the flea market, so there is a greater sense of intimacy." This is something that Angie's List has heard before, and the company hopes that argument fades away over time. "Once we start really deepening our penetration, then he's not competing against Angie's List," said Mr. Oesterle, who is now the chief executive. "He's competing against the collection of Angie's List members, and it turns out they're as local as it gets." Until Angie's List reaches that point, I plan to continue availing myself of both the locally owned listing and review sites and Angie's List, where the discounts have already paid for the annual subscription many times over in my household. But that isn't to say that you won't ever get the runaround on the site, even from the A rated service providers. As I raced to make a flight on Thursday afternoon, an Angie's List staff member and I used the local list to find me a ride to the Indianapolis Airport. The clear winner and ratings champion, the A rated Tommy's Taxi, wasn't available because Tommy was at the drugstore with a customer who needed to pick up a prescription. The phone number for the local cab company on Angie's List site was busy. Was it incorrect? There wasn't really time to investigate. Growing impatient, I tried the local branch of Carey (which was also on the list, though it didn't have as many reviews as Tommy) and mentally prepared myself for a sky high fee for a ride in a Lincoln Town Car. The dispatcher offered a shared ride for 16.95 instead, and the driver turned up earlier than promised with a stretch limo, which I ended up sharing with no one. I plan on giving them an A.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Your Money
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BERKELEY, Calif. When the economists Janet L. Yellen and George A. Akerlof hired a baby sitter for their son in the early 1980s, they decided to pay more than the going wage. They reasoned that a happier baby sitter would provide better care. The decision not only attracted a series of excellent sitters, it also inspired the couple, both professors at the University of California at Berkeley, to develop a new theory of the labor market that remains an influential justification for the Federal Reserve's ability to stimulate job growth. Employers, they asserted, often seek to improve morale by paying more than the minimum necessary wage, which has the effect of preventing some people from finding jobs. And during periods of high unemployment, they said, monetary stimulus can increase demand for labor a direct rebuttal to the classical view, which left little role for the Fed in combating unemployment. Thirty years later, Ms. Yellen and the debate about the Fed's abilities have both moved from the theoretical world of academia to the Fed itself. As the central bank's vice chair since 2010, she has pressed for stronger measures to reduce unemployment, battling the doubts of other Fed officials about the value of continuing to expand the Fed's enormous stimulus campaign. Ms. Yellen, 67, now finds herself as President Obama's nominee to succeed the Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, at the end of January, largely because many Democrats view Ms. Yellen as the best person to press that stimulus campaign and to strengthen financial regulation. Senate Democrats prevented the nomination of President Obama's first choice, Lawrence H. Summers. For Ms. Yellen, who was drawn to study economics as a path into public service and aspired as a college student to work at the Fed, the top job at the central bank would be a logical if until only recently unexpected culmination. Her confirmation also would reinforce the Fed's evolution from an institution run by market wise bureaucrats focused on controlling inflation to an institution run by academics committed to a broader mission of steady growth and minimal unemployment. Ms. Yellen's intellectual roots and leadership style both suggest that she would push somewhat more forcefully than Mr. Bernanke to extend the Fed's stimulus campaign, according to a careful review of her career and interviews with more than two dozen colleagues and acquaintances. She has expressed greater concern about the economic consequences of unemployment, a stronger conviction in the Fed's ability to stimulate job growth and a greater willingness to tolerate a little more inflation in order to reduce unemployment more quickly. Until recently, her emphasis on unemployment would likely have disqualified her for the job, and it has already inspired opposition from some Senate Republicans and investors concerned that she would not be sufficiently vigilant in guarding against inflation. Ms. Yellen is also a more assertive leader than Mr. Bernanke and appears less averse to conflict. While both encourage open debate and seek to make decisions by consensus, Ms. Yellen has been a more vocal and persistent advocate for her own views. Mr. Bernanke has allowed Fed officials to air their views freely, while Ms. Yellen has expressed concern that the cacophony undermines the Fed's effectiveness by sowing confusion about the direction of policy. Yet it is easy to overstate the changes Ms. Yellen likely would bring. She would be the first Democrat to lead the Fed in nearly three decades, but a liberal central banker is something different from and more conservative than a liberal politician. She was instrumental in the Fed's decision last year to declare a target of 2 percent annual inflation, and has shown only a very limited willingness to tolerate higher inflation. On regulatory issues, too, Ms. Yellen's views are closer to those of the Obama administration than to those of the left leaning Democrats most fervently seeking her nomination. She believes markets are imperfect and require significant regulation. But she favored the emergence in the 1990s of financial giants like Citigroup and has not supported calls for their breakup. And Ms. Yellen may find her own instincts constrained by the increasingly restive minority of Fed officials who want to start pulling back from the stimulus campaign. Richard W. Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas who will become a voting member of the Fed's policy making committee next year as part of a regular rotation is among those officials. Of Ms. Yellen, he said last week, "She's wrong on policy, but she's a darn good, decent, wonderful person." Ms. Yellen, like many economists of her generation, was drawn to the field by an interest in the Great Depression. Economics allowed her to combine a love for the rigor of mathematics with a desire to work on issues affecting people's lives. Born in Brooklyn in 1946, she was raised in Bay Ridge, a middle class neighborhood across the waterfront from Staten Island. Her mother, a teacher with an interest in finance, stayed home to raise Janet and her brother, John. Her father, a family doctor, saw patients in a home office he closed on Wednesday afternoons so the family could spend time together. Some of Ms. Yellen's classmates at Fort Hamilton High School, from which she graduated in 1963, remember a smart and devoted student who seemed a little removed from their teenage world of music, parties and political ferment. "She was a good friend and a good companion," said Charles Saydah, who was in many of Ms. Yellen's classes and hung out with the same group of friends, which he described as "the kids who were interested in folk songs." But "from where I was sitting," Mr. Saydah added, "it was clear that this was a way station to better things" for her. Each year, the editor of the student newspaper interviewed the class valedictorian. Ms. Yellen was both, so she interviewed herself. She talked about her love of travel, her rock collection "I've been collecting rocks since I was eight and have over 200 different specimens" and her plans for college. "I've decided to major in math or anthropology or economics or ..." she wrote. After enrolling at Brown University, it did not take long to narrow the list. "She took her first economics course and came home and gave me the one hour lecture on why economics was the greatest thing going," Susan Grosart, a childhood friend, said, recalling the Christmas vacation of their freshman year. "It was pretty obvious from then on that that was her passion." "He encouraged his students to do work that was about something," Ms. Yellen told The Yale Daily News after Mr. Tobin's death in 2002. "Work that would not only meet a high intellectual standard, but would improve the well being of mankind." Ms. Yellen and Mr. Akerlof spent much of the 1980s trying to understand unemployment at the office, at the dinner table and on vacation in Hawaii, where they rarely entered the water, preferring to read economics books on the beach. The couple met in 1977 in a cafeteria at the Fed, where both had taken research positions. Ms. Yellen had not secured tenure after six years as a junior professor at Harvard University; Mr. Akerlof had been denied a full professorship at Berkeley. "We liked each other immediately and decided to get married," Mr. Akerlof wrote in a personal history after winning the Nobel Prize in 2001. "Not only did our personalities mesh perfectly, but we have also always been in all but perfect agreement about macroeconomics. Our lone disagreement is that she is a bit more supportive of free trade than I." They were both Keynesians, believers in the view that people act irrationally, markets function imperfectly and the resulting problems are not self correcting; the government must help. "While admirers of capitalism, we also to a certain extent believe it has limitations that require government intervention in markets to make them work," Ms. Yellen said in a 2012 interview with Berkeley's business school magazine. "Firms don't just try to pay as little as possible to get the needed bodies on board; when there is unemployment, they ask themselves how wage cuts would affect the behavior of the employees," Ms. Yellen said in a 1995 interview. "Would they quit or feel dissatisfied and work less hard on the firm's behalf if they feel that wage policies are unfair?" This reluctance to adjust wages, in turn, helps to explain why monetary policy works. When the Fed tries to stimulate the economy by increasing the availability of money, it is clear that spending increases. But economists have long debated whether the result is that people buy more goods and services or simply pay higher prices for the same things. In other words, does monetary stimulus just cause inflation, or can it also produce economic growth? The argument hinged on whether prices adjusted quickly. Defenders of monetary stimulus argued that the price of labor, in particular, was "sticky" wages often did not adjust quickly. People were spending 10 percent more money, companies were earning 10 percent more, but wages remained the same. As a result, companies could afford more workers. Ms. Yellen and Mr. Akerlof saw their theory as an explanation for the stickiness of wages. Perceptions of fairness, they said, might not be immediately affected by changes in the money supply. At least some employers would not adjust wages. And as a result, stimulus could increase growth. Other economists advanced competing explanations for "sticky wages." The economist whose account most closely resembled Ms. Yellen's and Mr. Akerlof's, in their view, was none other than Mr. Summers, Ms. Yellen's rival to succeed Mr. Bernanke. Ms. Yellen also collaborated with Mr. Akerlof, and sometimes other colleagues, on a string of other projects that used economic analysis to grapple with policy issues. They analyzed the profitability of East German companies and proposed policies to ease unemployment during unification; they evaluated crime prevention strategies and found evidence for the importance of encouraging community members to report crimes; they evaluated the causes of out of wedlock births and warned that proposed changes in welfare benefits were unlikely to make a difference. Ms. Yellen also was a devoted teacher. She wrote lecture notes in longhand and Andrew K. Rose, a Berkeley colleague, recalled that she would begin by writing, "Hello. My name is Janet Yellen." In a related debate in 1995, Ms. Yellen argued that reducing high unemployment should sometimes be the Fed's highest priority, even above holding down inflation. The bitter aftertaste of the 1970s, when the Fed let inflation soar as it sought lower unemployment, had rendered such views all but sacrilegious for more than a generation, but Ms. Yellen argued that the Fed had allowed the pendulum to swing too far. "To me, a wise and humane policy is occasionally to let inflation rise even when inflation is running above target," she said. She would make a similar argument last year as she built support for the Fed's December announcement that it would tolerate projected inflation as high as 2.5 percent in the service of reducing unemployment. In the mid 1990s, however, both concerns that inflation would fall too low or that unemployment would rise too high were purely theoretical. Indeed, unemployment had fallen to such a low level that many Fed officials had begun to worry that a rise in inflation was inevitable. But in a 1996 memo that Mr. Greenspan gratefully distributed to the policy making committee, Ms. Yellen carefully articulated the case he had been trying to make: The Fed could afford to keep rates low because the economy was changing. Productivity was increasing even as global competition was suppressing the ability of workers to bargain for wage increases. This record has led some critics to charge that Ms. Yellen is insufficiently committed to price stability. "I think she's just entirely too easy money," Julian Robertson, the noted investor, said Monday on CNBC, arguing that her tolerance of inflation could lead to excesses like the run up in house prices that led to the financial crisis. "I think we've got to remember that we're not very far from the last bubble bursting." Ms. Yellen was less successful in influencing fiscal policy during a two year stint as the head of Mr. Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers. A careful thinker who likes to consider issues from many sides, she was not well matched to the work of an internal think tank expected to offer quick commentary on a wide range of economic issues. She also found herself outside the circle of the president's closest advisers. Peter R. Orszag, then a special assistant to the president for economic policy and later Mr. Obama's budget director, said in a recent interview that Ms. Yellen did well in both jobs. However, he said, "I could see why people believe she's particularly good at situations in which there are important decisions to be made that involve pulling facts and weighing consequences carefully without pulling the trigger right away." Many of Mr. Obama's advisers worked with Ms. Yellen in the Clinton administration, and some argued that Mr. Summers was better suited to managing crises, including problems that might arise during the Fed's retreat from its stimulus campaign. J. Bradford DeLong, a Berkeley economist and former Clinton administration official who gave public voice to these views, wrote in August that in "normal times" he would have favored Ms. Yellen, but given the weakness of the economy, he favored Mr. Summers because "a lot of outside the box thinking will be called for." Ms. Yellen returned to the Fed in 2004 as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, one of the 12 branches that conduct research, supervise local banks and participate in setting monetary policy. The staff economists assigned to give Ms. Yellen her first briefing on labor market conditions were already a bit nervous about their new boss, who was by far the most accomplished economist in the room. But they thought she might listen in silence, as the bank's previous president had done. She waited only one sentence before interrupting. "Well, wait a minute," Ms. Yellen said. "What about this?" And then her hands began to trace a graph in the air. In April 2012, Ms. Yellen told a New York audience that the Fed had not done enough to stimulate the economy in the aftermath of the great recession. Ms. Yellen, like most of Fed officials, had underestimated the depth of the recession and overestimated the strength of the recovery. The speech was part of a campaign of many months, most of it waged behind the scenes, to convince her colleagues that the Fed could and should do more. But some Fed officials were waxing skeptical about the Fed's capacity to provide additional help, or worrying about the potential cost. In the months after the April speech, Ms. Yellen's advocacy would be drawn into increasingly sharp contrast with the views of the newest professor on the Fed's board, the Harvard economist Jeremy C. Stein, who began to fret publicly that the central bank's efforts could destabilize financial markets. Ms. Yellen's views have prevailed so far. She is not personally close with Mr. Bernanke, but they respect each other and have broadly agreed about monetary policy, according to people familiar with the relationship. Together with a number of allies, they forged a consensus in the fall of 2012 for the Fed to expand both of its principal campaigns to spur job creation: more asset purchases, and an extended commitment to low interest rates. Last month, despite mounting internal pressure to scale back the bond purchases, Ms. Yellen and her allies prevailed again. The Fed surprised investors by announcing that it would postpone any retreat as a renewal of Washington's episodic fiscal crisis once again threatened the recovery. The Fed's stance has been a disappointment to some observers who believe stronger action is required to reduce unemployment more quickly, even as it continues to worry those who fear the Fed has exhausted its abilities. The inconsistent, sometimes contradictory pronouncements of Fed officials in recent months also have roused the ire of investors who find the Fed's new transparency more confusing at times than its former obfuscation. Ms. Yellen has largely avoided public comment since June, seeking to avoid any impression that she is campaigning for Mr. Bernanke's job. It seems likely that she will next speak at a confirmation hearing later this year.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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The American economy moved into a higher gear last quarter, expanding at an annual rate of 2.9 percent and riding continued strength among consumers and a better performance in global trade. The Commerce Department's report on the nation's gross domestic product, released Friday, is the next to last snapshot of the overall economy before voters go to the polls on Nov. 8. Americans will also get to gauge the economic fortunes of the nation from the monthly unemployment figures to be released on Nov. 4. While the pace of economic growth in the third quarter fell well short of previous achievements, the latest data represented a significant improvement from the first half of 2016 and the best quarterly advance in two years. Economists also said the gains were probably strong enough to reassure Federal Reserve policy makers that it was safe to raise the benchmark interest rate when they meet in December. "This is a good, solid number," said Gus Faucher, deputy chief economist at PNC Financial Services in Pittsburgh. "The economy is growing at a decent clip. Consumer spending will continue to lead growth, and the fundamentals there remain positive." For all the quarterly blips, the ups and downs on Wall Street and the back and forth between political parties, the American economy remains more or less on the same trajectory since the recovery began more than seven years ago: modest but consistent growth. The bigger picture has remained remarkably steady, with yearly growth in the range of 1.75 percent to 2.75 percent. From 2010 to 2015, the economy grew at an average annual rate of 2.6 percent. Economists like Michael Gapen of Barclays expect gross domestic product to expand 2.5 percent in the current fourth quarter, and then advance about 2 percent in 2017. "The consumer is fine, and there is evidence that the industrial side of the economy is stabilizing and the big drags from inventories and weak investment are abating," Mr. Gapen said. "Manufacturing, trade and energy may no longer be significant headwinds, as they have been over the last year." The 1.1 percent growth rate from January to June this year was the slowest first half since 2011, and it was well below what economists expected when 2016 began. Much of that weakness was a result of an inventory buildup on store shelves and in warehouses that has only slowly been worked off. The lingering effects on business investment from the collapse in the price of oil and other commodities have also dragged down the economy. Many experts initially forecast another subdued performance in the third quarter, but estimates crept higher this week after a report on Wednesday showed better than expected exports and lower imports in September. Unlike some recent periods, which showed uneven gains, the growth in the third quarter was broad based, with most industries advancing. For the second quarter in a row, trade was a net positive, adding nearly a full point to growth on a big jump in exports. Consumer spending slowed from its barnburner pace earlier in the second quarter, but at 2.1 percent, it was healthy enough to suggest that shoppers remained optimistic. Other sources of slack, like a drop in spending on residential construction, were more than made up by businesses as they restocked shelves and began investing again in the energy industry and elsewhere. Mr. Trump's campaign noted that growth during President Obama's time in office has fallen well short of 3 percent on an annual basis, and claimed that Mrs. Clinton's stewardship of the economy would not be any better. "The growth numbers are catastrophic," Stephen Miller, a senior policy adviser to the Trump campaign, said in a statement. "Hillary's tax, spend, borrow and regulate policies will cause an outright depression." In a separate report Friday, the University of Michigan revised its final reading on consumer sentiment in October down slightly to 87.2. Oxford Economics attributed the decline to the fierce rhetoric that has characterized the final days of the presidential race. "Consumers often feel less optimistic in election years, and 2016 is no exception," said Gregory Daco, head of United States macroeconomics at Oxford. "We anticipate that a reasonably solid macroeconomic backdrop will underpin a rebound in sentiment once the election has concluded." The recent rebound in oil prices could also spur more economic activity among drillers and other energy producers in the months ahead, even if slightly higher gas prices won't please consumers. Underscoring just how quirky economic data can be on a quarter to quarter basis, the Commerce Department noted that a big chunk of the export gains came from a surge in soybean exports that was unlikely to repeat itself in future quarters. Friday's release was the first of three estimates of quarterly growth that could be revised upward or downward by government number crunchers; the next batch of data on G.D.P. is expected on Nov. 29. Since joblessness hit a peak of 10 percent in 2009, the unemployment rate has been cut in half. Still, growth in the current recovery has fallen well short of previous rebounds in the 1980s and '90s.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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The practice of crowdfunding real estate is spreading from South America where Prodigy Network recently raised around 239 million from 3,100 Colombians to build a 66 story skyscraper in Bogota to New York, where the developer Urban Muse is hoping to offer a slice of a Brooklyn Bridge Park project to the public. Taking a page from Web sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, real estate upstarts like Fundrise, Property Peers, Realty Mogul and Prodigy Network, which is based in New York, are transforming the way real estate projects are built and who profits from them, by allowing the public to invest in an asset class that has traditionally been the exclusive domain of wealthy investors and private equity firms. "It's a very simple concept," said Daniel Miller, co founder of Fundrise. "You should be able to invest in your neighborhood." Daniel Miller, 25, and his brother Benjamin, 36, are the pioneers behind Fundrise, a Web platform that lets communities invest in local real estate projects. Sons of a prominent developer in the Washington area, the brothers began wondering a few years ago why people in a community, like the transitional H Street NE neighborhood, couldn't have more of a say in what was being built there. They realized that who the investors are and where the money comes from determine what gets built: distant private equity backers who see a deal as simply an investment vehicle tend to put up cookie cutter projects and strip malls anchored by chain stores hardly what the community may want or need. "Who your money is affects what you build, but no one ever thinks about that," said Benjamin Miller, who also co founded a site called Popularise that lets developers solicit input from the community. "We're taking an institutional asset and changing who gets to invest in it." A faded two story brick building on Washington's H Street seems an unlikely site for a revolution. But the unassuming structure at 906 H Street NE on Monday became the latest commercial development project to be open to public investment. Financial stakes in the renovation project were offered to residents of Washington and Virginia on Fundrise.com. By Tuesday morning, investors had snapped up 1,500 shares priced at 100 a share. All told, 3,500 shares were offered to the public or 25 percent of the project cost (the rest was raised from private investors and West Mill Capital, the Millers' development firm). Cameron Cook, a 25 year old project manager and Web developer who lives close to H Street NE, was among the first to invest, paying 1,000 for 10 shares. In addition to the potential financial gain an estimated 7 percent annual dividend from rental revenue plus appreciation in the property he was drawn to the novelty of the idea and the ability to directly take part in the neighborhood's revival. "I think it's cool that the community can be more in control of what's happening around them," Mr. Cook said. That seemingly simple idea is actually a radical departure from conventional practice, and requires some financial and regulatory gymnastics. Under current law, only wealthy "accredited" investors (typically those with a net worth of 1 million or more) are allowed to invest in private firms. But recent changes to securities laws ushered in by the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, signed into law in April 2012, will soon make it much easier for the Millers and other new breed developers to "crowdfund" real estate. Under that law, unaccredited investors may invest up to 2,000 a year, or 5 percent of their income or net worth (whichever is greater), in private firms, like a real estate limited liability company, as long as the investment takes place on a site or broker dealer registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The law, however, has been bogged down at the S.E.C., which missed an end of year deadline to complete rules. Until then, crowdfunding companies must either restrict investments to accredited investors or, as Fundrise has done, register each development project with the S.E.C. a process that can take months and tens of thousands of dollars. For now, says Benjamin Miller, offerings are being subsidized to prove the concept. But the brothers hope that eventually the process of offering shares to the public will become much easier. One of their first projects, 1351 H Street NE, a tear down building in Washington's H Street Northeast neighborhood, will include a Taiwanese ramen restaurant run by a chef with a local following, food stalls and a retail shop an idiosyncratic project that would have been a hard sell for conventional investors. But scores of neighborhood residents were happy to invest an average of 2,000 each. That first deal took three months to close. A subsequent offering for 320,000 worth of shares in 1539 Seventh Street NW, a 3,600 square foot building in the Shaw neighborhood sold out in three hours. And the 906 H Street deal was on track to sell out. The investing public will also benefit from appreciation of the property a new streetcar line that will run down H Street is expected to accelerate a revival already under way and bolster real estate values. Gina Schafer, the owner of several Ace hardware stores in the Washington area, invested in two Fundrise projects. "I thought it was cool the minute I saw it," she said. "We don't own our hardware store spaces, because real estate is so expensive here, but wish we could." The H Street projects are "a way for us to get involved in the crazy D.C. real estate market and support our local community." She said that her first dividend payment was on its way. Lately, the Miller brothers have been to New York, where they talked with local developers about using the Fundrise platform on community scale projects in the 500,000 to 1 million range. They have been in touch with Jason Goodman, the chief executive of Third Ward, the co working space that is building a 30,000 square foot commercial kitchen and incubator in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, and Dan Biederman, the developer behind the Bryant Park revival. In their first New York partnership, they teamed up with Glauco Lolli Ghetti, founder and principal of Urban Muse, to bid for rights to develop the John Street parcel on the northern edge of the Brooklyn Bridge Park development project. The site, a fenced in lot adjacent to the Manhattan Bridge, is zoned for up to 130 residential units as well as ground floor retail. Mr. Lolli Ghetti envisions a 120,000 square foot building designed by Snohetta, which created the Norwegian Opera House and the September 11 Memorial and Museum. Under the joint bid, Urban Muse would allow New Yorkers to invest up to 1 million in the retail component. "Retail is such an amenity, I wanted it to be woven into the community," said Mr. Lolli Ghetti, although he worries that city officials handling the request for proposals may consider public participation "a gimmick." He's not sure crowdfunding is suited to large, complex projects. "In real estate, 10 million to 20 million projects are easy. But if you need 500,000 to buy a (small) property and put a local tenant on the street floor, you can't do it. It's too small for private equity." Mr. Goodman of Third Ward, the co working and educational space in Bushwick, is a long term leaseholder who said owning the building through usual lending would require putting 50 percent down in cash or 7.5 million, an amount out of reach for now.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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The "Sing Street" score is made up of nine songs written for the movie by Carney and Gary Clark (including one that was cut from the film), as well as fragments of '80s pop songs (including "Rio," a Duran Duran song also used in the film). The Off Broadway production has sold well, but got mixed reviews from critics; Ben Brantley, writing in The New York Times, called it "promising but still unfulfilled." Taichman said on Tuesday that the creative team was already at work revising the show. "We're looking at a lot of things among them, how to nail the tone of the piece exactly right, and how to explode the world of New Romantics and synthesizers and 1980s pop music into the room more," she said. "We have listened to the wonderful audiences we've had, and have learned a tremendous amount, and we are now thrilled to have the opportunity to make the show better." The musical is being produced by Barbara Broccoli, Brian Carmody, Patrick Milling Smith, Michael Wilson, Orin Wolf and Frederick Zollo; it is being capitalized for up to 11 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. "Sing Street" is the 10th new musical announced for the current Broadway season.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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There are millions of stories in the naked city, and a lot of them have been filmed in Los Angeles. A city partly made by the movies and defined by them, too, Los Angeles rarely comes off like a lived reality onscreen. It's a hazy dream, a gaudy fantasy, a noirish nightmare, an Instagramble cliche. It's no wonder moviegoers and other virtual tourists can map it in their heads without visiting it, even if the Los Angeles they probably know is little more than an aerial view of the Hollywood sign, a cutaway to a clogged freeway and a slavering look at a bountiful blonde. Every so often, a filmmaker plays with these banalities, which I imagine is why Aaron Katz opens "Gemini," a pleasurably drifty, low wattage mystery set in Los Angeles, with an upside down shot of a palm tree. Perfectly framed and photographed, its feathery fronds spreading in silhouette against a dark indigo night sky, the tree hangs in the shot like a chandelier. Mr. Katz gives "Gemini" the expected smoggy freeways and a blonde on a billboard, as well as the kind of mystery that certain Hollywood dreams are made of, complete with a femme fatale, a detective and a lonely horn on the soundtrack. But as that upside down palm tree suggests, he is coming at Los Angeles from his own angle. Like a lot of intrigues, this one opens at night. Jill (an appealing Lola Kirke), a personal assistant, is sitting behind the wheel of a parked car, her face lighted by a cellphone. It's a decidedly ordinary scene, even if cinephiles might flash on a different woman staring into a glowing box in the explosive 1955 noir "Kiss Me Deadly." As she often is, Jill is waiting for Heather (Zoe Kravitz), a young star going through some kind of undefined rough patch. Heather has a meeting with a filmmaker, Greg (an amusingly acid Nelson Franklin), one of those jaundiced, permanently disappointed industry types who doubtless read Nathanael West's "The Day of the Locust" at too tender an age.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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An updated version of this story is here. NICOSIA, Cyprus With Cyprus facing a Monday deadline to avoid a banking collapse, the government and its international negotiators devised a plan late Saturday to seize a portion of savers' deposits above 100,000 euros at all banks in the country, in a bid to raise money for an urgently needed bailout. A one time levy of 20 percent would be placed on uninsured deposits at one of the nation's biggest banks, the Bank of Cyprus, to help raise 5.8 billion euros demanded by the lenders to secure a 10 billion euro, or 12.9 billion, lifeline. A separate tax of 4 percent would be assessed on uninsured deposits at all other banks, including the 26 foreign banks that operate in Cyprus. An agreement was still far off, though, as Cyprus's lenders left for the night without reaching an accord. The proposal still requires approval by the Cypriot Parliament and by the European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund and European Union leaders. Finance ministers from the 17 euro zone countries have scheduled an emergency meeting at 6 p.m. Sunday in Brussels. Under the plan, savings under 100,000 euros would not be touched a rollback after a controversial plan last week to tax insured deposits was rejected by Cyprus's Parliament, amid outrage among ordinary savers and widespread concern that a precedent had been set for governments anywhere to tap insured bank savings in times of a national emergency. Cypriot officials on Saturday also pulled back on a plan to raise billions of additional euros by nationalizing state owned pension funds, after Germany, whose political and financial clout dominates euro zone policy, had indicated it opposes the move. Cyprus's president, Nicos Anastasiades, was meeting Saturday night with political parties to explain the plan. He was scheduled to fly to Brussels on Sunday. Cyprus's finance minister, Michalis Sarris, said on Saturday that there had been "significant progress toward reaching an agreement" with European officials on raising money for a bailout. All parties were working against a deadline imposed by the European Central Bank, which has said it will cut off crucial short term financing to Cyprus's teetering commercial banks on Monday if a bailout deal is not reached by then. Facing what he has called the worst crisis for Cyprus since the 1974 Turkish invasion, Mr. Anastasiades said on Saturday on his Twitter account: "We are undertaking great efforts. I hope we will have a resolution soon." A noisy crowd, estimated at around 2,000 people, gathered outside the presidential palace in the early evening, far more than the hundreds who had gathered there in recent days. With flanks of riot police standing guard, many demonstrators chanted, "Resign! Resign!" as they inveighed against the imminent consolidation of the Laiki Bank, one of Cyprus's biggest and most troubled lenders. In a move demanded by the I.M.F., which will cost thousands of jobs, the toxic assets of Laiki will be hived off into a so called bad bank, while healthy assets and accounts will be moved to the Bank of Cyprus. There, accounts over 100,000 euros would be subject to the 20 percent tax. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. A cutoff of central bank financing and the absence of a bailout agreement could cause Cypriot banks to collapse. It could also lead to a disorderly default on the government's debt, with unpredictable repercussions for the euro monetary union, despite the country's tiny economy. Asked on Saturday whether Cyprus had a backup plan if a deal is not reached, a government spokesman, Christos Stylianides, said, "We are doomed" if a solution is not found. Olli Rehn, the European Union commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, said in a statement on Saturday evening that it was "essential that an agreement is reached by the Eurogroup on Sunday evening in Brussels." But Mr. Rehn also suggested that opportunities had been squandered to find a less painful way out of the crisis. In a thinly veiled reference to the Cypriot Parliament's rejection of an earlier deal, Mr. Rehn that "the events of recent days have led to a situation where there are no longer any optimal solutions available" and that, "Today, there are only hard choices left." European Union leaders "may conclude that it is best to let Cyprus default, impose capital controls and leave the euro zone," Nicolas Veron, a senior fellow at Bruegel in Brussels and a visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said in a recent assessment. "But such a move would violate the promise of European leaders to ensure the integrity of the euro zone no matter what and potentially set off a chain reaction, including possible bank runs in other euro zone member states, starting with the most fragile ones, such as Slovenia and, of course, Greece." Parliament was still deciding when to vote on the new proposal to tax uninsured bank deposits. The finance ministers and the troika on Saturday were still calculating how much money those deposit tax alternatives would raise for the government.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Global Business
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new video loaded: Building the First American Group Conversations with luxury and fashion CEOs, celebrities and policymakers about global challenges and changing consumer behavior. Conversations with luxury and fashion CEOs, celebrities and policymakers about global challenges and changing consumer behavior. International Luxury Conference Conversations with luxury and fashion CEOs, celebrities and policymakers about global challenges and changing consumer behavior. Interviews at a New York Times conference with C.E.O.s, policymakers, entrepreneurs and celebrities on the challenges that will transform the luxury industry from rapid technological evolution to growing nationalism to new patterns of consumer behavior. Interviews at a New York Times conference with C.E.O.s, policymakers, entrepreneurs and celebrities on the challenges that will transform the luxury industry from rapid technological evolution to growing nationalism to new patterns of consumer behavior.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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The State Department has new advisories at Travel.state.gov that rank every country on a scale of one to four to help travelers make informed decisions about their personal safety. The agency introduced the rankings this month to replace its longstanding system of warnings and alerts, which many travelers found difficult to grasp. "Frankly, I personally was tired of explaining the difference between a travel warning and a travel alert even to some of my colleagues," Michelle Bernier Toth, the Bureau of Consular Affairs acting deputy assistant secretary for overseas citizens services, said during a conference call about the rankings. Many people weren't sure what di fferentiated travel warnings from alerts, and what they were supposed to do when either was issued. Under the new ranking system, the lower the number, the lower the risk, with Level 1 being "exercise normal precautions," Level 2 being "exercise increased caution," Level 3 being " reconsider travel" because of serious risks to safety and security, and Level 4 being "do not travel" because of the greater likelihood of life threatening risks and the United States government's limited ability to provide help. Upon first blush, the rankings may seem like laws. For instance, if you search for a country and it's a Level 4, as Afghanistan is, it has a bright red heading and the words "Do not travel." But the State Department does not bar private citizens from traveling to a particular country even one that it advises they not visit. (In the case of North Korea, however, there is a general travel restriction on the use of a United States passport.) The rankings, even those that are Level 4, are recommendations, not rules. Each level has a corresponding color: blue for Level 1, yellow for Level 2, orange for 3, and red for 4. What the department thinks each country's particular risks are is detailed on its page. If a country has a ranking higher than Level 1, the agency also shows certain letters on the country page to indicate the threat or threats at a glance: C for crime, T for terrorism, U for civil unrest, H for health risks, N for natural disasters, E for a time limited event like an election that may pose a safety risk, and O for other. Ms. Bernier Toth said the State Department hasn't changed how it assesses a level of threat in a country just the way threats are presented and described to travelers. Iran, Libya, Syria and Somalia are among the Level 4 countries with "do not travel" recommendations. Canada, Portugal, Cambodia and Vietnam are some of the Level 1, lowest risk countries. Brazil, which said on its government news site, BrazilGovNews, that it will soon begin allowing American citizens to apply for an e Visa instead of making an appointment at a Brazilian consulate, is a Level 2 country, because of crime. Cuba is an example of a Level 3 country, a ranking that reflects the agency's reduced staffing in Havana and limited ability to help travelers, as well as concerns that Americans may be at risk after the mysterious attacks in 2016 that affected employees of the United States Embassy there. In addition to an overall ranking, there can be different rankings within a country. Mexico, for instance, is a Level 2 country, which simply calls for increased caution that's the same ranking as other favorite vacation destinations like France, Italy and Britain. Yet certain areas within Mexico Colima, Guerrero, Michoacan, Sinaloa and Tamaulipas states that experience violent crime from gangs and criminal organizations were given the highest ranking, Level 4. Those particular states, not all of Mexico, have the same ranking as countries like Afghanistan and Somalia. Read what the State Department says about the states in Mexico and you'll see that the threat is violent crime. In Afghanistan, the agency says the threat is not only crime, but also terrorism, civil unrest and armed conflict. This is why it's important to look not just at the ranking number, which lacks that nuance. In general, the guidelines, including the differentiation between states in Mexico, for example, are a reflection of the restrictions that United States government personnel in the country adhere to. "Where they can go," Ms. Bernier Toth said, "where they're not allowed to go, where they can go with very specific security precautions." Travelers who choose to follow the guidelines are doing what United States government employees themselves are doing. The agency plans to routinely reassess the rankings. Levels 1 and 2 will be reviewed at least once a year, unless a new threat emerges or there's been a change in circumstances that warrants a review. Level 3 and 4 countries will be reviewed every six months, or more if circumstances call for it. Travelers who were already familiar with the department's online country pages will still find entry and exit requirements, local laws and customs, and health conditions. The website is now mobile friendly as well. And while the State Department has also done away with emergency and security messages, it will still issue alerts for things like hurricanes and terrorist incidents, which you can sign up for through its Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP), and read at Travel.state.gov.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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Under an administration proposal, employers could use workers' tips for essentially any purpose, as long as the workers were directly paid at least the federal minimum wage. The Trump administration is moving to give restaurants and other employers more control over workers' tips. But critics have denounced the plan as legalizing wage theft and accuse the administration of suppressing evidence that lends credence to the charge. In December, the administration announced a proposal to undo portions of a 2011 regulation that blocked employers from collecting tips and distributing them to anyone other than the workers who customarily receive them. Under the new proposal, for which the public comment period ends on Monday, employers could use workers' tips for essentially any purpose, as long as the workers were directly paid at least the federal minimum wage of 7.25 an hour. The restaurant industry, which has fought the Barack Obama administration regulation for years, argues that the change would allow employers to share the tips of waiters and waitresses with so called back of the house workers like cooks and dishwashers. "We think it's unfair for a busboy who picks up dirty dishes to be able to get tips but for a dishwasher who cleans the dishes not to be allowed to share the tips," said Angelo Amador, senior vice president and regulatory counsel at the National Restaurant Association. But labor advocacy groups and former Obama administration officials argue that the regulation would legalize a vast income transfer from workers to employers, who would be permitted to pocket the tips. "There is a lot of wage theft, tip stealing in restaurants and other sectors where workers depend on tips," Christine Owens of the National Employment Law Project said. "This would be one more reason for employers to take workers' tips and do whatever they want to do with them." A study by the Economic Policy Institute, a left leaning think tank, estimated that the change would cost current tipped workers 5.8 billion a year in pay. It cast doubt on the idea that employers would use the money to compensate other workers better. Heidi Shierholz, a former chief economist at the Labor Department who oversaw the study, said that under standard economic theory, employers were unlikely to pay workers more than needed to attract and retain them, which they are by definition already doing in most cases. She predicted that if the regulation took effect and employers decided to share tips with these workers, "their base pay would be reduced and there would be no more take home pay." The Labor Department estimated that the rule would affect about one million waiters and waitresses and over 200,000 bartenders. Workers in other industries, like hairstylists and manicurists, would also be affected. Many tipped workers would not be affected, however, because the law would continue to prevent employers from taking the tips of those who earned less than the minimum wage. The law allows workers to be paid below the minimum wage as long as their tips make up the difference. The proposed rule has generated a surprising amount of attention, attracting more than 180,000 comments from the public by Friday. That is roughly two thirds the number of comments that the Obama administration's proposal to increase overtime eligibility which affected millions more workers and nearly every industry generated after it was formally unveiled in 2015. At least one major business group and some restaurant owners wrote that the rule would allow employers to put in place new pay practices that benefited both them and workers. "It used to be that our servers typically made 1.5 to two times more than our kitchen staff, which is a big gap, but now they make two to four times more," wrote Kim Snuggerud, who owns the Hilo Bay Cafe in Hawaii. "This gap can be better managed with this change in the regulations. The wage disparity creates many problems, from morale issues to higher turnover." But many self identified former restaurant owners, along with many workers and customers, wrote in to oppose the rule, saying it was unfair and might even amount to theft. 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. Adding to the controversy is the Labor Department's failure to include a numerical analysis of the costs and benefits of the rule when it formally released the proposal. A longstanding executive order typically requires such an analysis for regulations that would have an economic impact of at least 100 million. "When you put out a proposed rule, you have to put out the analysis you have that shows the impact of it," said Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the committee that has oversight over the department. "I think, frankly, if they do that, people would be outraged." When it released the proposal, the department said that the omission was the result of "a lack of adequate data and the speculative nature of determining how employers, employees and customers would all react." But several former Labor Department officials said that while uncertainties and data limitations complicated any effort to measure costs and benefits, economists had well established practices for addressing them. "There are assumptions one has to make, but you build that into the analysis," said David Weil, the former head of the division that enforces minimum wage and overtime rules, which also produced this proposal. "On its face, it's just a ridiculous assertion." Ms. Shierholz said it had taken her team of four primary researchers less than two weeks to generate their estimate. A Labor Department spokesman said that the department had sought public input about how to estimate costs and benefits when it released its proposal and that it "intends to publish an informed cost benefit analysis as part of any final rule." The spokesman pointed out that the 2011 rule also did not include a detailed cost benefit analysis, though former Labor Department officials say that was because the rule codified existing policy and did not change policy. On Thursday, Bloomberg Law reported that the department had, in fact, produced an economic analysis, but that Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta and his aides had chosen not to release it after it showed that the cost to tipped workers could be substantial. The department declined to comment. But two former Labor Department officials said they had been briefed on the analysis by people currently at the department and echoed this account. Michael Hancock, another former top official in the division that produced the proposal, said he found it unimaginable that the department would not have produced an economic analysis because officials at the Office of Management and Budget, who must typically sign off on new regulations, would refuse to do so without one. "At least during my time, O.M.B. jealously guarded the executive order," said Mr. Hancock, who worked at the department for two decades beginning in 1995. "They always insisted if it's even close to the threshold that you've got to do an economic analysis, no matter how challenging." The restaurant industry contends that the Obama era regulation is illegal because it goes beyond what the underlying law supports. It asked the Supreme Court to review the Obama rule after appellate courts in different parts of the country split on the issue. "I would say the process was not followed in 2011," Mr. Amador said. "If there's any flaw here, it's that an illegal regulation passed in 2011." But Mr. Hancock said the proposed change would be highly vulnerable to a legal challenge if completed because omitting an economic analysis denied the public a chance to comment. "The rule making process is designed to give the public an opportunity to have their voices heard," he said. "If you don't include the economic analysis that underlies all of this, the public never had an opportunity to do that. I think it's going to create legal problems."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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Q. Is there a way to install and use additional TrueType fonts on Apple iOS devices, specifically on the iPad? A. You can add new fonts to an iPhone, an iPad or an iPod Touch, but you have to do it in a roundabout way, and the additional typefaces will not be available to use everywhere on the device. Apple allows you to change the size of the type in the iOS Settings for many of the system's built in apps, like Mail and the Calendar, but unless you jailbreak the software and go hacking around with unsupported methods, you cannot change the fonts used by iOS. However, using third party apps and services, you can install TrueType and OpenType fonts on the device. These added fonts should work with word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and other programs on your device. You can see what utilities are available by going to the iOS App Store and searching for "font installer." Most font apps are inexpensive, but usually require in app purchases to get certain typefaces.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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European authorities raided the London offices of a unit of 21st Century Fox on Tuesday as part of an antitrust investigation into the distribution of sports programming. The search at Fox Networks Group was one of several the European Commission said it had conducted across Europe as part of an investigation into potential violations of rules prohibiting price fixing cartels. The investigation adds to the regulatory challenges that 21st Century Fox, Rupert Murdoch's media giant, is facing in Europe, where officials have held up its bid to take full control of the British satellite broadcaster Sky. In a statement, Fox Networks Group said it was "cooperating fully with the E.C. inspection." The raid was first reported by The Daily Telegraph in London, which said the authorities had seized documents and computer files. The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, declined to comment on what companies were involved in the searches. Sports programming has played a key role in Mr. Murdoch's ability to gain a foothold in the European pay TV market. Through 21st Century Fox, he owns a 39 percent stake in Sky, which has 23 million customers and owns rights to show the English Premier League and other professional soccer leagues.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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AMERICAN BALLET THEATER at the Metropolitan Opera (through July 8). The company continues its spring season with performances of "Giselle," through Wednesday, and Alexei Ratmansky's "The Golden Cockerel," based on Michel Fokine's 1914 original, beginning on Thursday. This weekend brings a flurry of New York debuts in the leading roles of "Giselle," including Misty Copeland and Alban Lendorf (Friday), Sarah Lane and Daniil Simikin (Saturday afternoon), and Gillian Murphy (Saturday evening). Ms. Murphy will dance alongside the consummately princely David Hallberg, in his first season back after a long recovery from injury. 212 362 6000, abt.org IVY BALDWIN at Abrons Arts Center (June 1, 8 p.m.; through June 11). In her new work for the Abrons Playhouse, "Keen No. 2 ," Ms. Baldwin explores rituals of grieving and remembering, giving expression through movement and sound to feelings often buried or avoided. The piece is a companion to "Keen (Part 1)," which she created last year in response to the death of the dancer Lawrence Cassella, with whom she worked closely for over a decade. The cast of 10 women (including the choreographer) will interact with a large paper installation by Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen. 212 352 3101, abronsartscenter.org DANCEAFRICA at BAM Howard Gilman Opera House (May 26, 7:30 p.m.; May 27, 2 and 7 p.m.; May 28 29, 3 p.m.). This annual festival brings a wealth of dance and music from Africa and its diaspora to the Peter Jay Sharp Building and its surrounding streets. There will be notes of mourning in this year's festivities, as participants honor DanceAfrica's founder, Chuck Davis, who died this month. The main program, "The Healing Light of Rhythm: Tradition and Beyond," features Wula Drum and Dance Ensemble, Asase Yaa African American Dance Theater, Forces of Nature Dance Theater, Illystle Peace Productions, and BAM/Restoration Dance Youth Ensemble. A memorial celebration for Mr. Davis will take place on Sunday evening. 718 636 4100, bam.org 'EDGES OF LIGHT' at Irish Arts Center (June 1 3, 8 p.m.). Since bringing his evening length solo "Out of Time" to the Baryshnikov Arts Center in 2011, the imaginative Irish dancer (and former "Riverdance" star) Colin Dunne has made few New York appearances. Fortunately for lovers of Irish music and percussive dance, he's back with a new production, created with the fiddler Tola Custy, the harpist Maeve Gilchrist and the piper David Power. Their "Edges of Light" evokes the sounds and sights of Irish dawn, pairing traditional and contemporary music with Mr. Dunne's singular blend of fluidity and rhythmic precision. 866 811 4111, irishartscenter.org
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Among the many tasks of Nick Newbold, the designer's personal assistant? Shooting a documentary about their lives during all of ... this. RYE, N.Y. "Marc is going to be another 40 minutes," said Nick Newbold, popping his shaggy, baseball capped head into the kitchen of a rental house in this leafy, yuppie haven in Westchester County on a Sunday afternoon in late September. Marc is Marc Jacobs, who was hidden away in one of the home's four bedrooms putting together his look for a portrait series that started back in June shortly after lockdown lifted in New York, when British Vogue commissioned a photo for its September issue. It's now become a ritualistic Monday morning Instagram post celebrating fashion, creativity and positivity. These days, Mr. Jacobs is all about lifting the spirits and being of service, as well as enjoying his own personal fashion expression in which gender norms are completely passe. In one shot, he's standing on a stool on the tennis court in a white shirt no bottoms black tights, pumps and a fedora. In another, he's seated on the grass in a glamour scout get up complete with park ranger hat (by Stephen Jones) and binoculars. "So Troop Beverly Hills!" the fashion writer Alexander Fury commented. Mr. Newbold, a boyish 39, is the photographer on the portrait's ad hoc crew of three, while Julio Espada, Mr. Jacobs's former design associate at Perry Ellis, is the stylist. For a world class designer, the setup is remarkably D.I.Y. "This is a ring light I literally got on Amazon for, like, 35," said Mr. Newbold, whose only other equipment is a Sony camera and a tripod. Yet the attitude on set has the professional conviction required for a high fashion editorial. Mr. Jacobs is not known to do things in half measures. "Just a typical Sunday," he said, emerging from his room in a bobbed wig parted to the side, his eyes aggressively coaled Cleopatra style, with a silver streak at the corners. He was wearing a bespoke shirt, tie and shorts from his own label, a burgundy oversize cardigan by O'Connell's, a cuff, belt and kitten heel sandals by Hermes, a bracelet and brooch by David Webb, earrings by Harry Winston, a pearl necklace by Mikimoto and, over his custom Marc Jacobs leather gloves, a pinkie ring by Solange Azagury Partridge. "Can you see the ring? Are you getting the ring?" Neither a professional photographer nor striving to be, Mr. Newbold is Mr. Jacobs's personal assistant. In the eight years since he's been on the job, his duties have grown. He still walks the dogs, orders food and runs errands, but he also oversees things like his boss's art collection. "I'm buying everything, but sold it all, too, obviously with Sotheby's," Mr. Newbold said, referring to last year's clearing house of Mr. Jacobs's extensive collection, including works by Ed Ruscha, Elizabeth Peyton and John Currin, done with the auction house. Mr. Jacobs offloaded these, and his Greenwich Village townhouse to make way for his new life in the burbs with his new husband, Charly Defrancesco. They married last year and promptly plunked down 9.175 million on a 6,000 square foot Frank Lloyd Wright designed house, which they are restoring with the architect's conservancy. In the meantime, the couple is holed up at a rented funky estate appointed with curious 1970s design relics the mirrored powder room has a brown porcelain toilet. Mr. Newbold wrangled the property through Alice and Thomas Tisch, sellers of the Wright house. "I've done everything from demo old houses to get coffee," he said. Mr. Newbold now also sits in on packaging, production, merchandising and marketing meetings. "I don't even know what his title is," Mr. Jacobs said. "His title is Nick Newbold. He does a lot of stuff and he does all of it well." Mr. Jacobs added, "If you asked Eric Marechalle, the C.E.O. of Marc Jacobs International, how vital Nick is, he would tell you he values Nick probably above everyone. Nick is that whisperer that can understand what corporate needs and what creative needs and he's able to filter the two and make it OK for both." More than a conduit, Mr. Newbold is a confidant and caretaker to Mr. Jacobs. He joins him and Mr. Defrancesco on vacation. On a trip to St. Barths a few years ago, Mr. Newbold filmed Marc, Char and friends in a Moke spoofing the orange mocha Frappuccino scene from "Zoolander," which was the beginning of his unofficial role as Mr. Jacobs's personal photographer. He was ordained and officiated their wedding. "To say he's like a brother to me or he's like a father to me would be a terrible thing because my father's dead and I've no relationship with my brother," Mr. Jacobs said. "He's what I wish for in a family member." "If you look back at my trajectory, I've always sort of said, like, 'Yeah, why not?'" said Mr. Newbold, sitting in the deserted lobby of the Mercer Hotel on a recent Tuesday morning. Dressed in an army jacket, a sweatshirt that read "When We All Vote" (a collaboration between Mr. Jacobs and Dover Street Market), jeans and Vans, he brought his French bulldog Charlie, as well as two extra coffees, just in case someone else wanted one. His path from civilian in New Hope, Pa. with no connection to or intention of a life in fashion, to the nexus of its star power and influence, was almost absurdly aimless. A self professed autodidact and jack of all trades, Mr. Newbold will "watch tutorials on YouTube and waste two days figuring out how to do something." He came to Mr. Jacobs by way of Christy Turlington Burns and her husband, Edward Burns, who hired him as their personal assistant in 2009 on the recommendation of their former nanny, a family friend of Mr. Newbold. He ended up traveling the world with Ms. Turlington Burns, helping with her charity, Every Mother Counts, and accompanying her on marathons and shoots when she modeled. "He's hardly a bodyguard, but he feels like someone who has your back," she said in a phone interview. "Not in a gatekeeper way, in the most gentle, respectful way. He sort of just sets the tone." Before this, Mr. Newbold held a series of odd jobs: some public relations, a babysitting gig, designing a line of neckties, tiling Dunkin' Donuts on a construction gig. He hated high school but said he had perfect attendance. He didn't want to go to college but spent three years at Bates College before transferring to George Washington University for a woman. He never wanted to live in a city, but here he is 15 years in New York. "I'm a super solitary person," he said. "I'm alone all the time. I don't like going out. Never have." "You can have a conversation with him about one thing and then suddenly, he'll just slip in, like, 'Oh, and I used to race dirt bikes,' or 'I can drive professional, huge trucks,'" Ms. Turlington Burns said. There was the time his band played CBGB in high school. The time he took up boxing and discovered the "sweet science" mental agility of it. The time he became a 100 mile a week runner, ending up a quarter mile from the finish line, he said, when the bomb went off at the Boston Marathon in 2013. He fell asleep on his drive home and still showed up at work at 7:30 the next morning. Did he mention that he used to race stand up Jet Skis? Or that his drone footage was used by Lana Wachowski in an episode of "Sense8"? In July, Mr. Newbold went to St. Barths. "Guess who got dengue fever?" he said. Confirming Ms. Turlington Burns's account, Mr. Newbold said he drove a commercial truck delivering gelato from New York to D.C. He had an epiphany one night when he found himself pulled over at a weigh station with no commercial license and a broken taillight. "I was like, wait a minute, 'I'm a truck driver now?'" he said. He enjoys "disarming," and sees his role at Marc Jacobs as "a fixer for everything." It inspired his Instagram handle, 1.800.Newbold. Got a problem? Call Nick. Mr. Newbold has always been attracted to off the beaten path creative people, he said. But "I never allowed myself to be creative." A cynical mind may wonder, is his meander actually a climb? "Nick's one of those people I've never tried to figure out or analyze. I trust him," Mr. Jacobs said. "So I've never delved deep into any facet because I tend to do that when I think somebody has got an angle, and Nick to me, from Day 1, I never felt he was in this for something other than the very honest and immediate reaction that he had." Ms. Turlington Burns said: "He's also not someone who's incredibly ambitious." In Mr. Newbold's own words, "I don't have goals." Rather, he rises to the occasion. When the coronavirus hit New York, Mr. Newbold was ready. "I'm such a steady, even keeled person," he said. "Marc and I really bonded over Sandy" the hurricane "because his house flooded. I was there. I had only known him for a couple months at that point. Literally, the water was at my knees, and I'm still grabbing stuff. Then, I heard the door was about to bust open. That was crazy. In disasters, I'm good." Even without Sandy, Mr. Newbold said he and Mr. Jacobs have "been to hell and back" together, bonding during the end of Mr. Jacobs's 16 year stint as creative director at Louis Vuitton, the ouster of his longtime business partner Robert Duffy from the company, and a carousel of restructuring, reseizing and business ups and downs. And then the pandemic. "I was so prepared when it happened," Mr. Newbold said. "I was ready to bug out. Marc could tell you. It's like, 'Well, Nick's ready to go anywhere.' I was like, 'I have passports, we have cash, I have a car. I know where to go.'" The furthest they got was the Mercer Hotel, where Mr. Jacobs spent 70 days as one of three residents at the hotel. (Mr. Newbold maintains his own apartment downtown.) At the suggestion of Sofia Coppola, one of Mr. Jacobs's close friends and collaborators, Mr. Newbold took out his Sony a7ii hand held camera and began chronicling the surreal experience of one man living in an all but deserted hotel with a staff of four. "I couldn't believe how long Marc was staying at the Mercer and that it was just a few of them there," Ms. Coppola said. "I was like, 'I hope you're filming this.'" A 28 minute film titled "A New York Story" resulted, falling somewhere between documentary and humorously bizarre art house piece, beginning with Mr. Jacobs checking in and ending with him checking out and driving off with his husband when the lockdown is lifted. Mr. Jacobs plays every character in the film: the concierge greeting himself at the front desk, the bouncer at the hotel's club the Submercer, where he goes for a drink (Diet Coke) on Saturday night, the maintenance person he summons to the room to change a light bulb in one of the film's more subtly funny moments. It's one thing to know that Mr. Jacobs is a mere mortal, but it's another to imagine him ordering Seamless, making his bed, operating an espresso machine or changing a light bulb. "That's the one thing Marc won't do," Mr. Newbold said. The narrative is the last man in the city at a vacant hotel, "going in with one mind set and coming out with another," Mr. Newbold said. Mr. Jacobs left his room only to shoot the scenes for the film. There's also a strand of pearls that the designer wears in every scene. Make what you will of it. Ms. Coppola gave editing notes. Bill Sherman, the composer known for his work with Lin Manuel Miranda, as well for being the musical director of Sesame Street, did an original score. The film can be seen on Mr. Newbold's YouTube channel. It doesn't promote the Marc Jacobs brand, at least not directly the designer styled himself in a combination of hotel uniforms and his own clothes. If anything, it underscores Mr. Jacobs's need for creative outlets under any circumstance. "An artist needs to create," Mr. Newbold said. "Otherwise what else is there?" What did Mr. Newbold get out of it? Another task mastered. "The funny part is, I don't really want to share this," he said of the film. "I'm happy we did and that's enough, but Marc and I were chatting the other day. He loves to share. He talks about the importance of sharing experiences and art as part of the process. Even the little videos I do for Instagram. I don't really post them on my Instagram, Marc posts them. He's the vessel."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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LOS ANGELES Knicks center Enes Kanter said on Friday that he would not travel with the team to play the Washington Wizards in London on Jan. 17 because he feared retaliation for his public opposition to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. Kanter, who is Turkish, has been an outspoken critic of the president for years. "Sadly, I'm not going because of that freaking lunatic, the Turkish president," Kanter said after the Knicks' 119 112 victory over the Lakers. "It's pretty sad that all the stuff affects my career and basketball because I want to be out there and help my team win. But just because of the one lunatic guy, one maniac, one dictator, I can't even go out there and do my job. It's pretty sad." Kanter said Turkish operatives could present a danger to him in London. "They have a lot of spies there," he said. "I could get killed there easy." An official at the Turkish Embassy in Washington, speaking Saturday on the condition of anonymity to abide by diplomatic protocol, dismissed Kanter's comments as baseless.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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When Only the West Village Will Do For nearly a decade, Chris Heywood and Nick Tomasetti lived in a one bedroom duplex with two full bathrooms at the Archive, a historic rental building on Greenwich Street in the West Village. Over time, the monthly rent rose from around 3,800 to 4,800. So two years ago, they decided to buy a place. "Our earning power went up in the last couple of years," said Mr. Heywood, 43, senior vice president of global communications for NYC Company, the city's tourism marketing agency. Mr. Tomasetti, 38, is a lawyer at a hedge fund. They began saving aggressively. Two years ago, they contacted a friend, Matthew Slosar, a salesman at Douglas Elliman. For a budget of up to 1.5 million, their aim was a charming co op unit with two bedrooms and two bathrooms, preferably in their beloved West Village. They needed a ground floor unit or one with an elevator for their two short legged dachshunds, Zack, originally Mr. Heywood's dog, and Millie. "We can't ask our dog walker to have a plump wire haired dachshund under each arm walking up the stairs," Mr. Tomasetti said. "It felt like the West Village was the fourth character in our relationship," Mr. Tomasetti said. "It was me and Chris and Zack and the West Village," the place where their history had unfolded. Later, Millie joined as "the lovable fifth member of the pack." A year ago, the couple visited a one bedroom co op, with more than 1,300 square feet, in a former factory building on Barrow Street. The interior was dated. It had just one bathroom, with no way to add a second. The price was 1.395 million, with monthly maintenance of 2,725. But "what it lacked in bathroom, it made up for in other space," Mr. Tomasetti said. Still, they wavered. "I think we would have been fighting in the bathroom," Mr. Heywood said. "My husband is not too patient in the morning." They summoned a contractor and were daunted by the renovations needed. The unit later sold for 1.25 million. And while the loft area had an especially low ceiling, "I was willing to duck," Mr. Tomasetti said. The price was over their budget, at 1.695 million, with maintenance of around 1,750. The couple offered 1.45 million, but the seller was unwilling to negotiate. The apartment was later taken off the market. By now, Mr. Tomasetti was amenable to either two bedrooms and one bathroom, or one bedroom and two bathrooms. Mr. Heywood still felt a two bathroom was essential. Otherwise, they would need a new morning routine, including a dog walking schedule. Then they visited a five story elevator building on quaint Bedford Street. A one bedroom unit there, around 825 square feet, comprised two studios plus some common hallway space. The price was 1.4 million, with maintenance of around 1,500. One bathroom had a tub; the other had a stall shower and a stacked washer dryer. There was also a beautiful wall of bookshelves, a working fireplace and four bright exposures. "I could tell from the excitement in their voices that this was the spot," Mr. Slosar said. "The block looks like a TV set."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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"'Drifts' is my fantasy of a memoir about nothing," the narrator says. "I desire to be drained of the personal. To not give myself away." (I'm still unsure whether she gives herself away when she confesses, "I masturbate throughout the day, so much that I pull a muscle in my writing hand, which makes me feel like Robert Walser.") Away from home, she goes on aimless walks, photographs trees, feeds stray cats and attends yoga in spite of the teacher's vacant epiphanies. Occasionally she commutes through "the paranoiac and vulnerable psychic energy" of Manhattan to perform her masochistic adjunct employment. Mortaring these scenes together are descriptions of Rilke's struggle to write his only novel. Like our narrator, he's unsure how to remain in a mist of dreamy attention and in the fire of productivity. Frustrated with how domestic life impedes his work, "he wishes to withdraw more deeply into himself, into the monastery inside him, replete with great bells. He would like to forget everyone, forget his wife and his child." The narrator and her husband also want a monastic existence, "to be guardians of each other's solitude, like the Rilkes. Yet they, too, were always so worried about money. It didn't work out for them." Few writers could get away with invoking Rilke every 20 pages, but Zambreno does, in part because she holds his life up as both instruction and warning. "Drifts," like much of Zambreno's work, mourns the great writers of the past and yawns at a publishing culture in which "a prominent writer of so called autofiction, with a half million dollar advance on his last book, wins the so called genius grant." The narrator questions whether it's possible for this author or anyone else "to write a self in the time you were the self you wrote about." Is it possible for an artist to converse with contemporary culture without being eroded by its banality? She answers by not answering, by returning to Rilke, or contemplating Peter Hujar, Clarice Lispector, Barbara Loden geniuses long gone. Two thirds into "Drifts" the narrator realizes she is pregnant, and as she beholds her "exquisitely tender and changing body" her diction stoops slightly into the hackneyed. "How time moves this summer, so slowly and quickly," she observes, "how my growing body keeps measure."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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In some sense the Zegna show, which opened fashion week here, came to seem like a bellwether. As more shows rolled out, other designers appeared to be having similar responses to the world outside what people here always term "the fashion system." Below are capsule reviews of some of the major collections shown in Milan over the past week. Versace: A subdued show at Versace, staged on a rough industrial set erected within the gardens of the Versace palazzo, strongly made a point for acknowledging a need for armor against the vagaries of the real world. Suits with aggressive shoulders and full trousers alternated with jackets worn atop dress length sweaters layered over snug woolen leggings. In a way, Donatella Versace seemed to be giving physical expression to a Lao Tzu tenet seemingly central to the survival of this fabled label: There are times to be hard and rigid. And there are times when to be soft is strong. Read more. Calvin Klein: Few people are more outwardly optimistic than Italo Zucchelli or of a sunnier disposition. He is a man, after all, who once built an entire collection around a neon red suit. Yet even Mr. Zucchelli, in a collection featuring jeans in black vinyl; shielding coats of slipcover scale; boots of heavy leather; abstracted leopard and cheetah patterns rendered in black and white, seemed subconsciously to have taken on what he called backstage, "a need for protection" at an unstable time. The designer included an entire passage of snug, high waisted trousers topped with pocketed and fitted bombers that could double as paramilitary uniforms, noting: "He looks ready to fight. Read more. Neil Barrett: Not many designers demonstrate anything like Mr. Barrett's command of materials and technique. Like the painter Robert Ryman, he often contrives to hide the complexity of his methods double faced cashmeres are woven to create weightlessness; hybrid garments fuse, say, a parka to the three quarter length overcoat called a Crombie; deeply cut front vents in a jacket allow pocket access without disrupting its line behind shapes so basic they amount to archetypes. Some seem so simple a jeans jacket, a bomber you might at first glance find it difficult to believe anyone actually designed them. Look again. Read more. Jil Sander: Rodolfo Paglialunga's debut men's wear collection for a label founded by Ms. Sander in 1968 seemed not unduly respectful of that designer's original vision, often mislabeled as minimalist. It made the Stations of the Cross without paying outright homage. Overcoats were belted slightly higher than a man's natural waistline, an old Sander trick to force an alteration in posture. Luxurious materials looked deceptively utilitarian. Suit jackets were cropped short and worn over the voluminous trousers this critic predicts will replace skinny jeans as the universally accepted silhouette within a year. Read more.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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Shot in Cuba and inspired by the Brazilian crime epic "City of God" and Prince's "Purple Rain," "Guava Island" does not ultimately feature much new music from Childish Gambino or any singing from Rihanna. The movie opens with a breezy unreleased number from Glover ("If the world ends/I think I wanna die with you") and has elements of another song with the lyrics, "Maybe the sky will fall down on tomorrow/but one thing's for certain baby/we're running out of time." It also incorporates alternate versions of recent Childish Gambino singles like "Summertime Magic" and "Feels Like Summer," along with "Saturday," which Glover debuted on "Saturday Night Live" last year ("God, this 9 to 5 just keep on killing me," he sings). In one scene set in a factory, another character tells Deni that he hopes to save enough money to make it to America. "It's different there," the man says. "I heard people are their own bosses." Deni responds: "This is America. Guava's no different than any other country," adding, "America is a concept. Anywhere where in order to make yourself rich, you have to make someone else richer is America." He then leads a choreographed dance to the song that mirrors some of the music video. At Coachella on Friday night, Glover who has thrown his own festival, Pharos did not make a show of plugging "Guava Island," though he did incorporate tropical imagery and sounds into his set. For one unreleased song, he cleared a section in the crowd to scream over a cacophonous burst of complex drum rhythms, bathed in almost apocalyptic red lights. He also performed the still unreleased track "Human Sacrifice," which debuted in a Google ad during the Grammy Awards in February. Glover was overcome by emotion onstage while discussing the deaths of his father and the rappers Mac Miller and Nipsey Hussle. "What I'm starting to realize is all we really have is memories at the end of the day," he told the crowd. "All we are really is like, data you pass it on to your kids, you pass it on to your friends, your family."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Most people with the infection are believed to have contracted it through exposure to animals at a market that sells seafood and meat in Wuhan. It is not certain that the virus spreads from person to person. But a few cases have not been linked to animals, and researchers say some human to human transmission may be possible. Related viruses, called SARS and MERS, have led to enormous, deadly outbreaks in recent years. "This is a serious situation," Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said at a news briefing. "We know it is crucial to be proactive and prepared." But while there will probably be cases in the United States at some point, "we believe the current risk from the virus to the general public is low," she added. The C.D.C. is also developing a diagnostic test that will be sent to hospitals and state health departments to determine whether people are infected. About 100 experts from the C.D.C. are being deployed to the three airports. The first flight to be screened will arrive at New York's Kennedy International Airport on Friday night, Dr. Martin Cetron, director of the C.D.C.'s division of global migration and quarantine, said at a news briefing. J.F.K. is the only airport in New York where the screening will take place. Screenings at San Francisco International and Los Angeles International will begin on Saturday. About 60,000 to 65,000 people a year travel to the United States from Wuhan. Over the next few weeks, some 5,000 passengers are likely to be checked for signs of the new infection, Dr. Cetron said. Only New York and San Francisco receive direct flights from Wuhan; passengers arriving in Los Angeles are on connecting flights. Travelers will be asked to fill out questionnaires asking if they have symptoms like a cough or a fever, and whether they have visited meat and seafood markets in Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak. Screeners will also use thermal scanners that can be pointed at the forehead or temple to look for fever. People with signs of illness will be examined further, along with family members or others traveling with them. Those who seem likely to be infected with the virus will be sent to area hospitals for further testing and treatment. Dr. Cetron said hospitals in each city had been designated to handle possible cases, but declined to name them. It may not be easy to identify likely cases at airports, because the flu season is well underway, and winter is the peak period for common colds and other respiratory viruses that can cause coughing, fever and runny noses. The screening could take time, Dr. Cetron said, and some passengers may miss connecting flights. The illness was first reported in late December in Wuhan, in central China. Fears of a more widespread outbreak arose when two cases were found in Thailand and one in Japan, apparently carried to those countries by air travelers from Wuhan. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. The disease is caused by a coronavirus, a member of a family of viruses that can cause respiratory ailments ranging from colds to pneumonia. A different coronavirus caused the SARS outbreak that began in 2003. It originated in China and was spread to other countries by travelers, infecting more than 8,000 people and killing nearly 800. That virus is also believed to have jumped to humans from animals at markets selling meat, poultry and sometimes live animals like civets. SARS turned out to be highly contagious among humans. A coronavirus is also the cause of MERS, another severe respiratory ailment that has been present in Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries since 2012. The MERS virus is carried by camels, and most cases have resulted from contact with the animals, but infected people can spread it to one another. The death rate is high, from 30 percent to 40 percent of patients. The new coronavirus appears to cause a less serious illness than SARS or MERS. But Dr. Cetron and Dr. Messonnier warned that the infection is new, little is known about it and the situation is rapidly evolving. The severity of SARS and MERS puts health officials on high alert when dealing with new coronaviruses, Dr. Messonnier said. If the virus is jumping from animals to humans for the first time which may be the case in the current outbreak people almost certainly have no immunity to it.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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WHAT IS IT? Two door drop top supercar with all wheel drive. HOW MUCH? Base price, 144,750. As tested, 161,085 with Sport Chrono Package ( 3,830), Torque Vectoring ( 1,320), Doppelkupplung transmission ( 4,550) and sport steering wheel with shift paddles ( 490). WHAT MAKES IT RUN? 3.8 liter horizontally opposed 6 (500 horsepower, 480 pound feet of torque); 7 speed dual clutch transmission with manual mode. IS IT THIRSTY? The E.P.A. mileage rating is 16 m.p.g. in the city, 24 on the highway, good enough to avoid the federal gas guzzler tax. PORSCHE likes to tinker. Whatever the model, there's always some update just around the corner. Sometimes, the differences are subtle (Hey, are those new turn signals?) and other times the changes significantly alter the car's personality. The new 911 Turbo falls into the latter category. A new direct fuel injection system adds 20 horsepower, putting the 911 Turbo in the 500 horsepower club. And that's a fine club to join. But the tweaks further down the driveline probably have more effect on how the car feels and performs. GETTING PERSONAL If price is no object, there are plenty of options, including a leather covered mirror. The new 7 speed dual clutch PDK transmission lops a couple tenths of a second off the 0 to 60 time all by itself (but you can still order a conventional 6 speed manual). Active motor mounts filled with magnetic fluid can transform instantly from cushy to solid, depending on the driver's aggressiveness. And the torque vectoring rear end uses the brakes to slow the inside wheel in a corner, thereby sending power to the outside wheel. That software reliant approach may be less elegant than the mechanical systems used by Audi, BMW and others, but, boy, does it work. Power into a 90 degree turn, and the 911 Turbo will pivot on its inside front wheel and rotate to the desired heading, basically within its own length. It's quite exciting, the first time you're turning left across traffic and realize it can do that. So the 911 Turbo can find its way down a slalom course, but its personality is dominated by the motor's capacity to crush your skull against the headrest. Step on the gas and the 3.8 liter flat 6 makes a noise as if someone opened a drain at the bottom of the ocean a great stereophonic gargle of suction as the turbochargers try to inhale oxygen from adjacent time zones. Internal combustion engines are basically air pumps, and this one is particularly good at what it does. A pair of 911 Turbos drag racing in Los Angeles could stall a weather system over Nebraska. The 911's list of options borders on the ridiculous leather covered rearview mirror ( 675), air vent slats painted in the exterior color ( 1,010) but the Sport Chrono package is a must have. Not because of the nifty but mostly useless stopwatch that protrudes from the upper dash, but for the extra power that's unlocked when you push the Sport Plus button that is part of the package. Instead of a producing a quite adequate 480 pound feet of torque, the engine can go into "overboost" mode and belt out 516. Here is a philosophical question worthy of Nigel Tufnel: If the motor can produce that level of torque without blowing up, then why is it called "overboost"? Isn't it just a new level of regular boost? Whatever you want to call it, overboost works, to the point where the 911 Turbo's acceleration times don't have much room for improvement. While Porsche cites times in the low 3 second range with the PDK transmission, tests by independent magazines have dipped into the high 2s. That verges on the blast off performance of a Bugatti Veyron or a Formula One car. Traction, not horsepower, is the limiting factor. Even without using launch control (which gives you a violent high r.p.m. start) the 911 Turbo will casually spin all four tires while rolling along in first gear. On dry pavement. With the top down. Yes, I drove the convertible. Which normally would have warranted earlier mention, since convertibles tend to be slower, heavier and less rigid than their hardtop counterparts. But the 911 Turbo Cabriolet's numbers are right on top of the coupe's, so close that it makes no practical difference the Cab is a tenth of a second slower to 60, but in a drag race it will still be right there next to a Ferrari 458 Italia. This car's main drawbacks, and there are two, are a matter of context rather than content. First, the 911 Turbo causes everyone to hate you. A car like a Rolls Royce or a Lamborghini is so over the top that bystanders get a kick out of it. But a 911 is within the realm of what many people can imagine for themselves. Except, chances are, it's still out of reach. That just causes resentment. You see the evidence every day. Nobody yields. People go out of their way to box you in at parking lots. And I'm pretty sure the landscapers next door to me took extra care to launch a fusillade of lawn clippings in the general direction of my driveway, because I later found the Meteor Grey 911 pasted with flecks of grass and dandelions. That didn't happen the week I was driving a Nissan Versa. The second issue is Cabriolet specific. And that is, its power is so overwhelming that it's nearly unusable. Not from a dynamic standpoint, but a legal one. From a standstill, a 911 Turbo Cabriolet can exceed the speed limit anywhere in the country in a matter of seconds. Yet, because it's a convertible without fixed roll hoops, you can't really drive it on a track. With Porsche's blessing, I took the Turbo Cab to my local drag strip and nearly got kicked out after the first run for speeding, essentially. At this strip, convertibles need a roll bar if they're running quicker than a 14 second quarter mile. Knowing this, I hit the brakes before the end of the run, in an attempt to sandbag my time. But I still ran a 12.8 second quarter at 75 m.p.h. That's crazy. A Dodge Challenger SRT8, with a 425 hp Hemi V8, is a 13 second car. And the Turbo is quicker than that with the brakes on. So the 911 Turbo Cabriolet makes everyone jealous, and it's too fast. All cars should have such problems.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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The chief executive of the streaming service Hulu, Mike Hopkins, is leaving to become chairman of Sony Pictures Television, Hulu said on Tuesday. Randy Freer, a member of the Hulu board, will succeed him. Mr. Hopkins, who has been Hulu's chief executive for the past four years, will be moving into the role at Sony that Steve Mosko vacated more than a year ago. Mr. Freer, the Fox Networks Group's chief operating officer and previously a co president at Fox Sports, will take over the Hulu job on Monday. Hulu got a big boost last month when its "The Handmaid's Tale" became the first show from a streaming service to win the Emmy Award for best drama. The change at the top also comes as Hulu's parent companies including Comcast, Disney, Time Warner and 21st Century Fox are making a more concerted effort to sell Hulu the back libraries of their shows, rather than making similar deals with Netflix.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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JENNY CRAIG, Richard Simmons, Oprah in her doughnut denying prime none can match Lotus Cars in a Biggest Loser contest. The English automaker made its reputation with slenderized sporting cars, from Formula One racers to street machines. Unprompted, car aficionados can recite the engineering ethos of the company's founder, Colin Chapman: "Simplify, then add lightness." Lotus's mantra is one of the industry's burdens. Automakers would love to slash 1,000 pounds from every model to meet fuel mileage rules. But any crash diet is stymied by crash standards that stuff cars with safety features, protecting people but adding pounds. Then, demanding consumers fatten up the cars further by asking for weighty indulgences like seats that heat, cool, massage and play DVDs on rear facing screens. As for performance cars, all else being equal, a lighter car handles better than a heavy one. That's why the Lotus Elise convertible and Exige hardtop which, at less than 2,000 pounds apiece, are among the most feathery automobiles on the road are more fun than a 5,200 pound Bentley Continental GT, even if the Bentley can embarrass them in a stoplight drag race. But the basic 50,000 Elise so good that Lotus let Tesla replace the gas engine with lithium batteries and proclaim that the 110,000 Roadster had revolutionized the automobile is suddenly 15 years old. With its undiluted character, the Elise can be simultaneously loved and hated for its go kart vibe, naked interior and zero tolerance for dessert loving Americans. Realizing that many drivers don't forget passengers have no patience for such uncompromising sports cars, Lotus offered the Evora for the 2010 model year. As for being distinctive, can you name another midengine car with four seats? Compared with its siblings, the Evora is 22 inches longer, 5 wider and 4 taller; it is only 4.7 inches shorter than a Porsche 911. The added size lifts the Evora's weight to 3,047 pounds. Yet that's 250 pounds less than a comparable 911 or Corvette, and 800 less than the burly Nissan GT R. How's that possible? For starters, the Evora's three piece aluminum chassis weighs just 440 pounds, no more than a pair of well fed occupants. If you grabbed the Lotus at both ends and wrung it out, it would take nearly 20,000 pound feet of force to make the chassis twist by one degree. Lotus insists that the car's structure is 50 percent stiffer than the Ferrari F430's. The result is a high character British charmer that starts just under 75,000 (about 85,000 well equipped), but looks and handles like a six figure supercar. The Evora certainly has style and exclusivity. There's a nearly Ferrariesque flair to its undulating profile, narrow cockpit and ridiculously saucy hips. Lotus plans to build just 2,000 Evoras a year, with about 700 bound for the United States. Pull into any valet line as I did for an event at a New York area hotel and the attendants are likely to park the Evora front and center amid the Bentleys and Lamborghinis. Given the wide door sills, entering or exiting still involves stretching, but it's nothing like the contortionist act required with the Elise. Inside the Evora, Lotus has made a real effort to create a luxurious ambience, with a leather wrapped dash and door panels, tremendous Recaro seats and even a tilting and telescoping magnesium steering wheel. The effort isn't fully convincing: round metal control buttons, including one for the glovebox, are cryptically labeled, and their backlit labels wash out in sunlight. The Alpine audio system sounds fine, but it's shoehorned into the dash like a discount special and its tiny buttons and touch screen are awkward. Parked behind that navigation screen, however, is a nifty touch: a hand held GPS unit that pops out for portable use. During my test, a hunk of sound muffling carpet came unglued and wound itself around the clutch pedal. I had to pull the carpet off the firewall to go safely on my way. Later, when a passenger pulled his interior door handle, its trim popped loose. Ah, the Evora truly is a British sports car! The driver's footwell is also too narrow to allow a dead pedal that you could brace your left foot against. But all told, the Evora is well packaged, given its size and midengine layout. As with the Porsche 911, the back seat is for toddler emergencies; more usefully, it provides space for a pair of suitcases or other cargo. The rear trunk adds another six cubic feet of storage, making the Evora a genuine traveling companion. But don't think that Lotus has gone all soft. The Evora is still a purist's delight, as I learned at the Monticello Motor Club, a road course northwest of New York City. Like the Elise, the Evora borrows a Toyota engine, this one a 3.5 liter, 276 horsepower V 6 that has been spared a life sentence in a Camry or Sienna. Lotus adds its own clutch, flywheel and exhaust system, and it tweaks the engine controls for more linear response. The Lotus isn't slow, with a 4.8 second dash from a standstill to 60 miles per hour and a top speed of 162 m.p.h. But the engine, while smooth, remains unremarkable for a car in this class, whether in horsepower, torque (at a peak of 258 pound feet) or stirring sound. When a Nissan 370Z at half the price can mount 56 more horses from its V 6, that's an issue. The modest power and slim physique contribute to an economy rating of 18 miles per gallon in town and 27 on the highway. Cruising at 65 m.p.h. I got a Miatalike 30 m.p.g. The Lotus's other sore thumb is a rubbery, long throw shifter for the 6 speed manual gearbox. Considering Lotus's engineering wizardry, I'd expect at least the precision of a Honda manual. An optional 6 speed paddle shifted automatic will be available next spring. Yet as with the Elise and its 4 cylinder Toyota engine, it's to Lotus's credit that the Evora remains one of the most soul stirring sports cars. Lotus claims the Evora can top 1.2 g's of cornering force. That beats every car in the price class, from the Corvette Z06 and Porsche 911 to the Nissan GT R. And without moving to the Amalfi coast, I couldn't find a public curve where I could sanely challenge the Evora's capabilities. Though the Evora provides power steering unlike the Elise the feel is uncanny, with none of the woolen layers of electronic interference that mar some performance cars. There is a stability control system with a competition mode to sharpen the throttle response and raise the tachometer's red line past 7,000 r.p.m.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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LONDON The most telling cameo at the four day men's wear shows here, the kickoff of the fall 2015 multicity men's fashion circuit, was not from the three piece suited David Gandy, the male model better recognized in his Dolce Gabbana ad skivvies; the visiting designers of the American labels Public School and Coach in town to show their wares; or any of the unplaceable Brit rockers at Burberry. It was by the most unlikely guest star of all: the plastic bag, making arguably its most prominent cultural appearance since "American Beauty." The humble bag's runway appearance wrapped around the heads of models like trash whipped in on the breeze was the work of Christopher Shannon, 34, one of the liveliest designers showing in London. It might have been a missive from beyond the closed confines of fashion week, where roiling winds are blowing. Mr. Shannon offered up a sweater with a bag, too, to underscore the point. It read, "Thanks 4 Nothing." From a lesser designer, it might have come off as a bratty joke. But drollery is one of Mr. Shannon's strong suits. (He has a clever way of dissecting real clothes the ones seen on the streets, rather than on the runways and of twisting them into something rich and strange, like his track suits, split into strips like snap studded fettuccine.) So those bags, and the anger they suggested, lent a darker resonance to the collection, one that resounded throughout many shows this week. Mr. Shannon isn't an outlier or a Cassandra preaching doom in the wilderness. He isn't even, as he may be considered in another city, or at another fashion week, a punk. (On the contrary, he's been knighted by the establishment, last year winning the inaugural British Fashion Council/GQ Designer Menswear Fund.) He's one of many designers here whose collections alluded to unease, unrest and uncertainty albeit with a slight smirk. Outside the fashion bubble, after all, violence (or the threat of it) buzzes. The Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris two days before the official beginning of the London shows cast a pall over the week, even if it went largely unmentioned, save for a brief tribute to the victims and their families by Dylan Jones, the chairman of London Collections: Men. And the English and European economies in which these designers sell their indisputably luxurious goods are struggling. The responses to these outside factors vary. There are those designers who look for an escape hatch, like the father/son team Casely Hayford, who called their collection of monkish layers and robelike alpaca wool hoodies "The Runaways." ("I guess we thought it was time," said Charlie Casely Hayford, the son.) And there are those who batten down the hatches. "We're dressing for the apocalypse that's on its way," said Patrick Grant, the dapper designer of E. Tautz, whose collection of exaggerated, slouchy tailoring came in shades of pavement puddle gray. He was kidding, but only just. Fashion week isn't merely an occasion for doomsdaying, of course. It's a spectacle and an entertainment, just like the movies, and just as at the movies, popcorn is widely available. (At key London Collections: Men sites, it's passed out along with beer, coffee and water as part of a canny sponsorship deal.) It's work but it's play, and relentlessly social, where international editors, buyers and marketers jostle endlessly on a nonstop small talk express. Even those editors who don't cover men's wear cropped up at shows this season, after arriving in town for the debut presentation by John Galliano at Maison Margiela. The men's season begins so early in the year that the just passed Christmas and New Year's holidays are an especially hot topic, and an industry that travels in pack formation, it turns out, vacations in packs, too. "I went to Tulum," reported Ben Cobb, the handsomely bronzed editor of Another Man Magazine, Tulum being a thickly trafficked destination among fashion types at present. "Everyone says 'hi.' " But in a climate like the present, it's hard to fault an escapist bent or those taking their pleasure where they may. The rapper Wiz Khalifa, for instance, one of the few celebrities making the front row rounds, was traveling in what appeared to be a choking cloud of pot fumes. Sarah Burton's collection for Alexander McQueen drew on the poppy motif of the World War I centenary observance in London last year. Gloom didn't dim the shine of Jeremy Scott, who for the second season running brought his Moschino men's wear to London from Milan. He is an undaunted maximalist, who ran riot with faux fur, ski chic and bare chests (an odd trend throughout the week, in fact), inspired by Bruce Weber's photos of manly mountain men in his Abercrombie Fitch mode. Christopher Bailey at Burberry a very different designer from Mr. Scott chose fantasy over grim reality, too. Burberry shows are always big budget light and sound spectaculars; this time, with a performance by the British singer Clare Maguire, backed by classical instrumentalists. But by the time reflective confetti showered down for the finale, the scene resembled a Bollywood fantasia (an impression only abetted by the flashing trousers and totes, embroidered with tiny mirrors). Mr. Bailey called the collection "Classically Bohemian," and his models wore poets' spectacles and fringed blankets and scarves knotted over their donkey jackets. But his rhapsody over the bohemian what he defined backstage as "a bit of freedom of the mind, something that is not necessarily conformist," between kisses with Liu Wen and Jourdan Dunn, supermodels who had dropped in, Burberry clad, to see the show felt flashy and a little forced, and the justification for throwing a fringed, grannyish blanket over a two button suit (worn, naturally, sans shirt) hinted at that same old darkness lurking at the edges of the glitter. "You're not changing your whole self," he said, "but just trying to have some fun and try to see something light." In the finest collections shown in London, the clothes didn't distract from darkness but telegraphed resilience in the face of it. But Ms. Burton leavened the severity of her cuts (and the clone like, stomping toughs who wore them) by piecing in motifs of poppies, the flower of remembrance for World War I. (In honor of the war's centenary last year, the Tower of London moat was filled with hundreds of thousands of ceramic poppies, an image still fresh in many minds here.) Ms. Burton's tailoring chops are well known and long established. But here, she managed to merge the strict and soulful, weaving war and peace into a single garment. The young designer Craig Green's show last season was such a breakout met with wild enthusiasm and followed by tripled sales that after it, he said, "We were terrified." But the designer, 28, rose to the occasion, adapting his priestly, ethereal clothes into something more substantial, ready to bear the brunt of high expectations, and whatever else may come along. His tie trailing jackets in cotton/nylon and neoprene looked more armorlike and protective than ever, inspired by military uniforms and workwear. But their strength was set off by the sweaters with an oddly evocative detail: a kind of porthole dead center, which revealed a pale and vulnerable wafer of the wearer's torso. ("We had to shave a few of them," Mr. Green laughed.) The attenuated elegance of his collection, with its drippy sleeves and floppy, French cuff trousers, objet d'art buttons and smart, cropped jackets had a 1970s tang, but Mr. Anderson insisted he had looked not only at the '70s, but the '50s, '60s, '80s and '90s, too, a melange of references that he didn't try to resolve neatly. He preferred, as it he put it tellingly, to throw "everything that survives the apocalypse" into the mix: "the best parts of all those things, and overhybriding it to the point where it becomes, 'Is it an '80s jacket or is it not? And does it really matter?' " Is the apocalypse nigh? If so, Mr. Anderson is not one to spare himself or his audience. So he is cheerfully bounding into the uncertain future, on a runway of ground up tires that stank to high heaven and looked like the surface of the moon. On the show's soundtrack, a voice intoned a list of all things torturous (including, for the record, an "evil, gossiping fashion bastard"). "I feel like it's very uplifting to sometimes face it," Mr. Anderson said. And face it, it goes without saying, dressed to impress.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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Sam Gilliam/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Daniel Dorsa for The New York Times Sam Gilliam/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Daniel Dorsa for The New York Times Credit... Sam Gilliam/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Daniel Dorsa for The New York Times Nights at the Museum: Good for Cultivating an Art Habit and Romance When Ronald Ollie was an engineering student at the Missouri University of Science and Technology in the early 1970s, he would take dates to the St. Louis Art Museum. "The other engineers would say, 'Why are you taking that woman to the art museum?"' he recalled. He would respond devilishly to his fraternity brothers, "You just don't know!" Today, Mr. Ollie, a retired mechanical engineer, and his wife, Monique, who has a doctorate in biomedical engineering, talked about their collection in their Newark apartment, which has a spectacular view of Manhattan and walls covered with abstract work by black artists. The collecting compulsion was a pre existing condition when Mr. Ollie met his future wife in 2003 at the National Black Fine Art Show. "I have picked out a few pieces, but mine are in the back," Ms. Ollie, who is a project manager at Johnson Johnson, said good naturedly. Mr. Ollie, who was raised in St. Louis, visited the museum as a child with his mother, who also enrolled him in art classes. "I had no talent for drawing figuratively," he said. But, as a sixth grader, he took the advice of a friend in class, who leaned over and suggested he try abstract art. "I thought, 'Wow, this is free!' That's where I gravitated." By the late 1980s, when Mr. Ollie was living in New York, a love of looking at abstract art had evolved into a passion for acquiring it. An auction dealer who sold him a Terry Adkins pastel drawing and a lithograph by Herbert Gentry suggested he visit the Chelsea Hotel, where Mr. Gentry lived, to introduce himself. "Herb became one of my great mentors and friends, and he opened the art world up to me," said Mr. Ollie, who then met and began collecting the work of artists including Ed Clark, Al Loving, Frank Bowling, James Little and Stanley Whitney. "Word got around among black artists that I bought abstract art," Mr. Ollie said. "At that time, there were not a lot of people buying." He would regularly meet with many black abstract artists at the Chelsea Square restaurant. "We used to say this was our Cedar Bar," he said, referring to what became the Cedar Tavern (now defunct) in Greenwich Village, made famous by the Abstract Expressionists in the 1950s. Last year, the Ollies gave 81 of their 225 works to the St. Louis Art Museum in honor of Mr. Ollie's parents. The Thelma and Bert Ollie Memorial Art Collection, including pieces by Norman Lewis, William T. Williams, Sam Gilliam and Jack Whitten, will go on view there next September. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. I imagine when you started, these artists were pretty affordable. RONALD OLLIE Very affordable. I started buying directly from the artists, and I could negotiate with them. Ed Clark would take me to various studios, like Stanley Whitney's or Frank Bowling's. I was going to buy a piece, and Frank said, "I'm going to give you my landlord's address and I want you to pay the rent every month." I didn't have to pay the painting all right off and I was helping him pay his rent in Dumbo. The relationships seem as important to you as the artworks. MR. OLLIE These artists trusted that I could talk to them about the art they did in a critical way. Ed would say: "I'm working on a piece. Go take a look and tell me what you think." It did something to me in terms of my confidence in developing my eye and starting to know that this is something that is real for me.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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The announcement that 160 minor league baseball teams and tens of thousands of workers and players had long been expecting finally arrived Tuesday afternoon: the 2020 minor league baseball season will not happen. It is the first time in the history of Minor League Baseball, which was founded in 1901, that a season has been canceled. "These are unprecedented times for our country and our organization, as this is the first time in our history that we've had a summer without Minor League Baseball played," Pat O'Conner, MiLB's president and chief executive, said in a statement. "While this is a sad day for many, this announcement removes the uncertainty surrounding the 2020 season and allows our teams to begin planning for an exciting 2021 season." Technically, the season's fate was sealed when Major League Baseball informed MiLB that it would not be providing the players needed for the season because of the national emergency brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. The MiLB Board of Trustees met earlier on Tuesday to finalize what had been apparent for months.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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PARIS The R B singer Chris Brown was released without charges on Tuesday after he was questioned by the Paris police over a rape accusation, according to the authorities and his lawyer. Shortly afterward, Mr. Brown said in a message on his Instagram account that the accusations were "false" and that his accuser was "lying." Mr. Brown, 29, had been taken into custody on Monday for questioning about an accusation of aggravated rape and possible drug infractions. Reports in the French news media said that an investigation had been opened after a woman filed a complaint with the Paris police, accusing him of raping her at his hotel last week after they met at a nightclub in the capital. The Paris prosecutor's office said on Tuesday evening that Mr. Brown had been released without charges but that the investigation was continuing. Mr. Brown's lawyer in Paris, Raphael Chiche, confirmed that his client had been released but did not comment further on the allegations against him. On his official Instagram page, Mr. Brown posted a picture on Tuesday evening that said "This b!tch lyin'," an image he had used before in reference to a previous accusation in the United States. In the caption for the picture, Mr. Brown wrote in all caps that he wanted to "make it perfectly clear" that "this is false." "For my daughter and my family this is so disrespectful and is against my character and morals," he wrote. According to the celebrity news magazine Closer, which first reported Mr. Brown's detention, his questioning came after a woman in her 20s filed a complaint against him. The woman, who was not identified, accused Mr. Brown of raping her in a Paris hotel room last week, the magazine said. The woman told the police that she met the singer on Jan. 15 at a nightclub near the Champs Elysees and that later that evening, he invited her and several other women to the upscale Mandarin Oriental hotel, where he was staying, Closer reported. According to the magazine, the woman told the police that she then found herself alone in one of the hotel's rooms, where she said Mr. Brown raped her. She also accused a friend of the singer and his bodyguard of raping her. The Paris prosecutor's office said on Tuesday evening that two other people who had been questioned by police in connection with the case had also been released without charges, but it did not identify them or explain their connection to Mr. Brown, who has been attending shows in the city for Paris Men's Fashion Week. Mr. Brown's record company, RCA, which said this month that it had signed a new deal with Mr. Brown, did not respond to a request for comment. Last week RCA dropped another of its R B stars, R. Kelly, after protests that followed the airing of the television documentary "Surviving R. Kelly." In the documentary, women said that Mr. Kelly had lured them into sexual relationships when they were underage, and had abused them mentally and physically. Mr. Brown has been involved in a string of violent episodes over the past few years. In July, he was arrested in connection with a nightclub dispute from April 2017, when he was accused of punching a photographer in Tampa, Fla. In May, a woman sued him, saying he held her against her will at his Los Angeles house last year while a friend of his raped her. He was arrested in 2016 on a charge of assault with a deadly weapon after a standoff at his home. In 2009, he pleaded guilty to one count of felony assault on his girlfriend at the time, the singer Rihanna. Despite his legal troubles, Mr. Brown has remained popular with an ardent fan base. He has won several industry prizes, including the 2012 Grammy for best R B album for "F.A.M.E.," and he performed at that year's Grammy ceremony. His most recent album, "Heartbreak on a Full Moon," opened at No. 3 on the Billboard album chart in late 2017. In 2010, according to the BBC, Mr. Brown was forced to postpone a British tour after he was denied a visa to enter the country because of the assault conviction involving Rihanna. In 2015, he was forced to cancel the Australian and New Zealand leg of his "One Hell of a Nite" tour for the same reason. Earlier that year, he was barred from leaving the Philippines for three days because of a fraud complaint stemming from a 2014 New Year's Eve concert in that country.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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"I don't think anyone's ever spoken to him like that." Stephanie Clifford was talking, on "60 Minutes," about her alleged sexual encounter with Donald J. Trump in 2006. Specifically, the pornographic film actress and director, who goes by the name Stormy Daniels, was describing the moment when she suggested spanking Mr. Trump with a magazine that had his picture on the cover. (According to her, he acquiesced.) But she could just as well have been describing the way she has told her story (which representatives for President Trump have denied). None of Mr. Trump's many media antagonists have taken him on in quite this way, on his own terms, using some of the same tactics he did as a celebrity, candidate and president. Others have come at Mr. Trump with indignation, righteousness and appeals to decency. Ms. Clifford swatted Mr. Trump with a rolled up network newsmagazine. Speaking to Anderson Cooper, Ms. Daniels was direct and conversational. She had playful one liners. ("You didn't even buy me breakfast," she told Mr. Cooper.) She told a story. (Describing how she said Mr. Trump awaited her on the edge of a hotel bed "perched" she mimed his sitting position and bearing.) But most important most, dare I say it, Trumpian she was unapologetic. There's a familiar script for discrediting women who accuse powerful men. They're attacked as opportunistic and promiscuous, out to make a buck. If they deny any of that, it still ends up making the moral conversation about them. Ms. Clifford owned her story and her life. Yes, she's stripped and had sex on camera for a living, a "legitimate and legal, I'd like to point out career." Yes, she's gotten job offers from her publicity: "Tell me one person who would turn down a job offer making more than they've been making." That should sound familiar. Running for president, Mr. Trump jiu jitsued facts that would have ended other candidacies into selling points. Did he give money to candidates he later attacked? That meant he knew how to work the system, and thus could fix it. Did he avoid paying income taxes? "That makes me smart." His brazenness was the brazenness of reality TV, the argument of a finalist in a "Survivor" tribal council who tells the jury to hate the game, not the player. Just so, Ms. Clifford has used unshamability and quick draw ripostes as a force field. When a critic on Twitter told her that "dumb whores go to hell," she shot back, "Glad I'm a smart one." Ms. Clifford's story had plenty of tidbits, salacious (her statement that Mr. Trump did not use a condom), bizarre (her recounting of watching an entire "Shark Week" documentary with him) and disturbing (her charge that a man threatened her, in front of her infant daughter, if she spoke about Mr. Trump). But running through it was a theme: I know who I am, and that's exactly why you should believe me. Mr. Cooper made the case that the story was worth covering, at double length, on CBS's flagship newsmagazine. He recognized the story was about sex, asking for details up front and pressing Ms. Clifford on her motives whether she might get a book deal, for instance. But he moved on to look, at some length, at the possibility that a 130,000 payment for Ms. Clifford's silence might be an illegal campaign contribution. Even more, as the subject turned to threats, payoffs and nondisclosure agreements, the interview became about power, the ability of wealthy men to pay, pressure or coerce women into silence. (The alleged parking lot encounter aside, Mr. Trump's lawyers have openly threatened Ms. Clifford with financial ruin.) It's about who gets to decide when their stories get told and under what terms. Ms. Clifford made a point of emphasizing that she was "not a victim" in having sex with Mr. Trump, even though she described an encounter she was, at best, unenthusiastic about. "You put yourself in a bad situation and bad things happen, so you deserve this," she said. A few days earlier, Mr. Cooper sat down on CNN with Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who says she had an extended affair with Mr. Trump at around the same time as Ms. Clifford. Ms. McDougal described having been in love with Mr. Trump, then guilty and apologetic for having a relationship with a married man with a newborn child. Ms. Clifford, on the other hand, represented herself as having no illusions about herself or Mr. Trump. Asked if she thought he had offered her a role on "The Apprentice" to keep her romantically interested, she said, "Of course. I'm not blind." To paraphrase one of Mr. Trump's campaign lines, she was saying that she knew he was a snake when he took her in. With this admission, she implicitly told the audience: Look, we're all adults here. We know how these things work. As an argument, that was 100 percent Trump. Mr. Trump did not put Ms. Clifford on his TV show. But she did make it on TV, where she proved an adept apprentice in his media techniques. Maybe even a master.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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GREAT PERFORMANCES: LA PHIL 100 9:30 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Last year, three generations of Los Angeles Philharmonic music directors shared one stage for a concert to celebrate the orchestra's centennial. Zubin Mehta conducted pieces by Wagner and Ravel. Esa Pekka Salonen led a symphony by the Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski. Gustavo Dudamel conducted Stravinsky's "The Firebird." And all three joined together to conduct "From Space I Saw Earth," a piece by Daniel Bjarnason that was commissioned by the Philharmonic. With the orchestra now on hiatus in response to the coronavirus, this video version of the concert serves as both a celebration of the orchestra's history and a reminder of what we're missing. BETTY 11 p.m. on HBO. The filmmaker Crystal Moselle ("The Wolfpack") mixed fact and fiction in "Skate Kitchen," her 2018 drama about a crew of teenage skateboarders coming of age in New York. The movie's cast members were largely from a real skating collective that had inspired the movie's story. Moselle drops back into their scene in "Betty," a series that features several of the same performers and characters.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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Scientists digging in the Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores years ago found a tiny humanlike skull, then a pelvis, jaw and other bones, all between 60,000 and 100,000 years old. The fossils, the scientists concluded, belonged to individuals who stood just three feet tall an unknown species, related to modern humans, that they called Homo floresiensis or, more casually, the hobbits. On Wednesday, researchers reported that they had discovered still older remains on the island, including teeth, a piece of a jaw and 149 stone tools dating back 700,000 years. The finding suggests that the ancestors of the hobbits arrived on Flores about a million years ago, the scientists said, and evolved into their own distinct branch of the hominin tree. But without other parts of a skeleton, such as the skull, hands or feet, they can't be sure whether the newly discovered fossils also belong to Homo floresiensis or instead to some other ancient relative of humans (known generally as hominins). Dr. van den Bergh and his colleagues found the new fossils at Mata Menge, an archaeological site on Flores that had already yielded stone tools dating back 800,000 years a clue that hominins of some sort had once lived there. Starting in 2004, the researchers chiseled fossils out of the cementlike rock. For years, they found only animal fossils, including dwarf elephants. In 2014, Dr. van den Bergh and his colleagues got their first stroke of good luck: six feet below the surface, they found a cracked molar. Very quickly they discovered six other teeth, as well as a piece of a jaw. The fossils come from three hominins. The researchers were intrigued to find a wisdom tooth erupting from the jaw. "That means that it was an adult," said Dr. van den Bergh. Yet this adult must have been very small. The researchers estimate the jawbone was 23 percent smaller than the Homo floresiensis jaw found at Liang Bua. "They were truly little people, smaller even than the Liang Bua hobbits," said Richard Roberts of the University of Wollongong, who was part of the team that originally discovered Homo floresiensis but was not involved in the new study. Critics have argued that the Liang Bua bones might have come from a member of our own species who suffered some kind of growth disorder, such as Down syndrome. Several experts agreed that the Mata Menge fossils put to rest any doubts that Homo floresiensis is its own distinct species. In another study published on Wednesday in the journal PLOS One, Karen L. Baab, a paleoanthropologist at Midwestern University in Glendale, Ariz., and her colleagues compared skeletons of people with Down syndrome with the Liang Bua fossils. The researchers concluded that any resemblance was superficial, and that the fossils belonged to a separate species. "There continues to be no very good evidence that this is a pathological modern human," Dr. Baab said. In their new study, Dr. van den Bergh and his colleagues propose that the hobbits evolved from a tall, relatively large brained hominin called Homo erectus that lived in Indonesia at least 1.5 million years ago. Dr. van den Bergh said it was unlikely that Homo erectus could have built boats that could have taken them to Flores. "Personally, I think it was some freak event like a tsunami," he said. By 700,000 years ago, the Mata Menge fossils suggest, the descendants of these castaways had shrunk to three feet in height. It's possible that their brains shrank as well, as an adaptation to life on a small, harsh island. Dr. Baab said the scenario was plausible, but not airtight. The hobbits have some anatomical similarities to Homo erectus in Indonesia, but they're not just scaled down versions. For example, the fossils from the Liang Bua cave show that they had longer arms and shorter legs than Homo erectus. It's possible that they evolved from a smaller, more primitive Asian population of Homo that scientists haven't yet discovered. A few critics of Homo floresiensis still aren't convinced, saying the debate over whether this really was a species couldn't be settled by the new finding.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Bank, who directs "The Artist," seems to give this shambling, ursine Nicov the benefit of the doubt. The character resembles other Chekhov artists and thinkers Trofimov, Trigorin, Vanya though none of them go as far as Nicov, who calls for "a new religion founded on truth and love." (Genya, run!) And Bank allows lines of Malleson's own invention like "Where's the little girl the kiss of a lover is on my lips" (faster, Genya!), to pass without comment. The piece ends, abruptly, with typical Chekhovian irony. Tolstoy found irony indulgent. He thought that a play should have a purpose, tugging its spectator toward greater moral insight. "And where can I follow your character?" he once griped to Chekhov. "To the couch in the living room and back." Accordingly, "Michael," Malleson's adaptation of "What Men Live By," is a lot more didactic, a riff on "The Elves and the Shoemaker" shot through with Christian mysticism. No one kisses teenage girls. On a winter's night, a bootmaker (J. Paul Nicholas), his wife (Katie Firth) and their elderly yet childlike servant Aniuska (Vinie Burrows), invite a tramp (Malik Reed) into the peasant hut they share, only to discover that he has a talent for cobbling and divination. The play's message, articulated baldly, is this: "It seems to men," the tramp says, "that they live by care of themselves, but in truth it is love alone by which they live." If Nicov calls for a new religion, "Michael" promotes an old one, charismatic Christianity. This one act marks the directorial debut of Jane Shaw, a beloved sound designer, who uses light and sound to situate the spiritual in the real. Chekhov and Tolstoy actually liked each other pretty well. They both laughed at that couch joke. But these stories, adapted for separate occasions and without particular elegance, don't have much to say to one another. Love, the title suggests, is the unifying factor, but eros powers the first play, agape the second. Like mismatched matryoshka dolls, the plays knock together when they ought to nest.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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BOYS TO MEN When Daniel Baker, a.k.a. Desus Nice, got a call from his agent, reps and lawyer out of nowhere in late September, he panicked. "I was like, oh wow, the show must've gotten canceled," he said in a three way phone interview with Joel Martinez, a.k.a. the Kid Mero, his co host on their late night TV series, "Desus Mero." "It scared the hell out of me." But it turned out to be good news: Their debut book, "God Level Knowledge Darts," had hit the New York Times nonfiction best seller list, at No. 13. "You know when you get your Ph.D., you're like, 'Don't call me Mister, call me Doctor'?" Martinez asked. "I'm gonna go to the bodega later and when Papi's like, 'Hey Papi!' I'm gonna be like, 'No no no. New York Times best seller.'" A fitting reference for the Bronx comedy duo behind the "Bodega Boys" podcast, which recently released its 220th episode. This book is the extension of their on air chemistry, the "sucio" humor and stoned, semi "washed" wisdom that have made them famous far beyond the New York City borough where they grew up. To preserve their casual repartee in book form, Baker said, they wrote in a shared, "living" Google Doc, the authors and their editor all "freestyling" and feeding off of one another's energy in real time. Plus, this way, whenever Baker or Martinez wrote something self incriminating, their editor could flag it on the spot. Given how much of the finished book is unprintable in The Times, it's fun to imagine what could possibly have been cut. Many anecdotes mention what "may or may not still be open cases," Baker explained. "That's why we say 'allegedly' at least 1,000 times."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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