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It took three men two hours to shoot a 63 second overhead instructional video of Laura Rege, a recipe developer, making a cake for Bon Appetit what people in the food video industry call a "hands and pans." At the Kitchen Studio, Conde Nast's new 7,000 square foot space in Industry City in Brooklyn, four to six of these "hands and pans" videos are shot daily. It is the type of video on which Tasty, BuzzFeed's famous recipe offshoot, has built a very large audience. Conde Nast's food brands, Bon Appetit and Epicurious, have heartily embraced the format too. Now, the company wants to double its current video business. To do so, it will have to move beyond what's worked in the age of Facebook video, and make something new. Until now, most of Conde Nast's food videos were made in its test kitchen in the company's headquarters at One World Trade Center or in Airbnb rentals. But business has been growing. Over the last two years, Bon Appetit's YouTube subscriber base increased from 34,000 to more than 1 million. In the same period, the number of monthly unique viewers for the videos on its website grew by nearly 2.5 million, according to comScore. Over all, video now makes up a quarter of revenue for The Lifestyle Collection that's Bon Appetit, Architectural Digest, Epicurious, Conde Nast Traveler and the now digital only publication Self. All told, these brands produce about 40 to 50 videos per week, and that doesn't include those made for advertisers. At the same time, the company expected significant overall revenue decline from 2016 to 2017. It closed the print edition of Teen Vogue; reduced the print frequency of GQ, Architectural Digest and Glamour; and cut employees across the company. After that crusade of downsizing and the turnover of big spending old guard editors in chief like Vanity Fair's former editor Graydon Carter there are now rumors of the impending departure of Anna Wintour, the company's artistic director and the editor of Vogue. "We emphatically deny these rumors," a spokesman told Page Six this week. She has unexpectedly become the avatar of a right sized, moderately thrifty Conde Nast. And, rightly or not, Conde Nast is finally looking to digital. In recent years, it has launched additional online verticals; introduced a platform for gay, lesbian and transgender issues called "them"; and embraced digitally focused leaders like Samantha Barry, the new editor in chief of Glamour, and Phillip Picardi, the chief content officer of Teen Vogue. Perhaps not surprisingly, a significant portion of the company's advertising solicitation is now devoted to video. The idea that video will be a financial savior in the media business is contentious, and often mocked. It is expensive to create, and audiences aren't equivalent yet to print or even web in their ability to be monetized. (In human terms: One person watching a video is not financially equivalent to what one person paying for a magazine has been worth.) But Vogue the magazine has just over a million paid subscriptions, and Vogue the YouTube channel has more than 2.2 million subscribers. "In the next 24 months, I hope that video is half our business," said Craig Kostelic, the chief business officer of The Lifestyle Collection. "It's critical. It's the macro trend of content consumption." People Like to Watch People, Not Fingers Conde Nast is not betting everything on "hands and pans" videos. In fact, it is increasingly looking beyond them as viewers gravitate toward something that is a cross between short social videos and the food programs of yore (you might remember it as cable television). Much of the space is for videos featuring hosts like Claire Saffitz, who is known for videos in which she breaks down complex recipes for foods as varied as Twinkies and soup dumplings, or Brad Leone, the quirky host of "It's Alive," a series about fermentation, pickling and more. "For so long we were doing those hands and pans videos, and it's one of those things you had to do based on internet demand and traffic," said Adam Rapoport, the editor in chief of Bon Appetit. "They're kind of boring, they're not stimulating and they're predictable. It was not creatively rewarding. As an industry, we've gone beyond that and it's gone more to the personality videos, to more narrative." Bon Appetit has attracted hundreds of thousands of viewers with human first series like one in which children react to various foods, for example breakfast items from the last hundred years ("the beginning is horrible, so is the middle, so I'll give it a four," said one sophisticated taster about a 1920s breakfast of codfish cakes, hominy and stewed prunes), or another where the magazine's deputy editor swaps out his office for 24 hours of hands on labor at fast paced casual restaurants like Katz's deli in New York (he is critiqued by one of his temporary co workers for being "a little too nice"). Epicurious, while much smaller (it has about 146,000 YouTube subscribers) has similarly attracted audiences with video series like the 50 Person Prep Challenge, in which people attempt basic culinary tasks like slicing a pepper or dicing an onion. To optimize the new test kitchens for filming, they have been outfitted with overhead lights, blackout curtains and acoustic paneling to muffle outside sound. All the stovetops are gas. "People want to see the flame," said Eric Gillin, the digital general manager of The Lifestyle Collection. Sponsored product is everywhere. The countertops? Caesarstone. The small appliances? Braun. Furniture? Crate Barrel. The smart fridges? Samsung. And so on. And though the test kitchen at Conde Nast's headquarters has served well as a shooting location, it will now go back to being primarily a work space for editors who are trying out recipes. "Video can be kind of intrusive," said Mr. Rapoport. "You have camera people, lights, you have to section off a portion of the kitchen, you don't want people to be too noisy. Shooting interrupts the basic workflow." "On YouTube, over half of our audience is under 34 years old. These people are young, they're really engaged, they're watching for an average of over five minutes. It's not this 8 second watch time like on Facebook," said Matt Duckor, the executive producer for the Lifestyle Collection. "YouTube is a sneaky, over the top kind of channel unto itself," Mr. Gillin said. Videos that are somewhere between the length of a social media post and a 60 minute special thrive on YouTube, Mr. Duckor said. A significant chunk of viewers are consuming them not on a cellphone or computer but on a television. "Twenty percent of people watched that cheesesteak video on a television, whether on a smart TV, a game console, Roku or Apple TV," Mr. Duckor said, referring to a video in which a Bon Appetit editor ate 16 Philly cheesesteaks in 12 hours. "Coming across something in your Facebook feed and stopping on it for three seconds can count as a view, but when we talk to advertisers, they want people who are actually connecting with what they're doing, not just happening upon it." The Conde Nast teams have embraced the flexibility of the mid length format. "When you're post cable, it's not a half hour TV show, you're not programming for these ad blocks, you're telling the story for as long as there's a story to be told," Mr. Gillin said. "This industry is moving so fast," Mr. Duckor said. "The videos we're creating now compared to two years ago are really different, but you're always going to need kitchens, you're always going to need the ability to have production space to have people work and sit." For now, the revenue coming in from videos is split between advertising and sponsorships. "About half to two thirds of it is more about traditional ads, like pre roll," Mr. Kostelic said, referring to the brief advertisements that play before a video. But increasingly Conde Nast makes videos for its clients that it does not promote on its own platforms. "Historically, you would have a digital media plan with a set amount of view or impressions," Mr. Kostelic said. "More people are coming to us for our content and creative services plans, with distribution being a separate conversation." The greater goal is for the lessons the Lifestyle Collection team will learn with the Kitchen Studio space to trickle out to the rest of the company. "The issue that Conde Nast used to have is that it was really siloed out by brand, and the brands didn't speak to each other, they didn't share learnings," Mr. Duckor said. "We're at a place now where we can take learnings from Bon Appetit and the success we've had on YouTube and apply them to Architectural Digest, where they haven't quite had the investment in that platform that we have. That's the real opportunity."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Orlando Suero took a series of photographs of Jacqueline and John F. Kennedy in 1954. He called this one of Mrs. Kennedy his Iwo Jima photo his career defining shot. He photographed Shirley MacLaine dancing with Rudolf Nureyev at a party in Malibu. He shot the actor Dennis Hopper and the singer Michelle Phillips during their eight day marriage, including a joint smoking moment in the bathtub (both were fully clothed). And he caught Princess Margaret all but swooning over Paul Newman as Alfred Hitchcock stared straight ahead. The photographer Orlando Suero chronicled the lives of stars from 1962 to the mid 1980s, as the golden age of Hollywood dipped into its twilight. He took particular delight in capturing celebrities with each other, in their element or not. But he was perhaps best known for his portraits. Among his more stunning photographs was one of an elegant Jacqueline Kennedy in a gown lighting candles at a formal dinner table in Georgetown in 1954. Mr. Suero called it his Iwo Jima photo his career defining shot. Mr. Suero, a native New Yorker, started taking pictures at 14 with a used Kodak Jiffy camera given to him by his father. He was soon working at camera shops and photo labs, including a stint at Compo Photo Color in Times Square. There he printed images for "The Family of Man," Edward Steichen's monumental 1955 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. He printed those large images for the exhibition more than a year in advance. By the time it opened, he was already moving up in the photography world. While at Compo, Mr. Suero had received a side assignment to photograph a children's event sponsored by Hanover Bank. Max Lowenherz, who owned the Three Lions Picture Agency, saw Mr. Suero's photos in the bank window, asked who the photographer was and hired him. It was Mr. Suero's first professional job as a photographer, his son said, and he was eager to make his mark. So he proposed taking a series of pictures of the young Senator John F. Kennedy and his new wife, Jacqueline. Mr. Lowenherz was not interested because so many others were writing about the couple. But he said that if Mr. Suero could find a publication willing to run his pictures, he would agree. Mr. Suero pitched the idea to McCall's magazine, which loved it. The young photographer ended up spending five days with the newlywed Kennedys at their modest red brick home in Georgetown, on the carefree cusp of an extraordinary period in American history. His photos showed Jackie kneeling in the living room, sorting her record albums; Jackie weeding the garden while Jack, in a T shirt, read the newspaper ; and, of course , several images of Jackie lighting the candles at her dinner table, one of them a frame so perfectly composed and luminous that it looks more like a painting than a photograph. Mrs. Kennedy herself was impressed and sent Mr. Suero a note. "If I'd realized what a wonderful photographer you were, I never would have been the jittery subject I was," she wrote. "They are the only pictures I've ever seen of me where I don't look like something out of a horror movie." Mr. Suero later gravitated to Hollywood, where he went on to make a name for himself photographing the beautiful people. His favorite subjects included Natalie Wood, Michael Caine, Sharon Tate, Claudia Cardinale and Brigitte Bardot, whom he photographed lounging on a bed by the ocean and, later, dressed as Charlie Chaplin. His lens also caught Jack Nicholson, Julie Andrews, Faye Dunaway, Robert Redford, Diana Ross and many more. He served as a still photographer on movie sets, including those of "Torn Curtain" (1966), "Hell in the Pacific" (1968), "Play It Again, Sam" (1972), "Lady Sings the Blues" (1972), "Chinatown" (1974) and "The Towering Inferno" (1974). Mr. Suero struck up a particular friendship with Lee Marvin, who, like Mr. Suero, had joined the Marines during World War II. When they became acquainted in Hollywood, they realized they had met before: at a military hospital in New Caledonia, during the war in the South Pacific. Jim Suero said Mr. Marvin was his father's "one true friend from Hollywood." In the midst of all the glamour, Mr. Suero suffered from post traumatic stress disorder. He found comfort and joy in taking pictures, but when he wasn't working he could sink into depression. "When you come back, the war doesn't end for you," he wrote in "Orlando: Photography" ( 2018 ), a collection of his photographs. "It stays with you for life for the most part," he added. "Photography was my solace." Orlando Vincent Suero was born in Manhattan on May 30, 1925. His father, Vicente Andres Suero y Seoane, originally from Cuba, was a nightclub manager in Manhattan and Miami, and his mother, Ofelia (Dominguez Ayala) Suero, originally from Mexico, was a homemaker. Orlando grew up in Washington Heights and attended P.S. 132. His first job was as a copy boy at The New York Times, where one day in 1943, at the age of 17, he got a surprising break. He had been despairing at how clueless the older writers sounded in describing the red hot trumpeter Harry James and his band, so the editors asked him to write his own story about a James concert at the Paramount. "Jive, as a Hep Cat Hears It," read the headline, with the subheading, "17 Year Old Beats Out a Panegyric to Its Glory," conveying Mr. Suero's frenetic style and liberal use of a vocabulary so baffling to the editors that they asked him to append a glossary of terms ("slush pump" trombone; "coffins" pianos; "coo for moo" worked for his money ). Mr. Suero joined the Marines that year and headed to the South Pacific with the Sixth Marine Division. He was shot in the arm, received a Purple Heart and was discharged in 1945. He returned to New York and attended the New York Institute of Photography, now an online school. Mr. Suero at his home in Thousand Oaks, Calif., last year with a copy of his book "Orlando: Photography." "He is very shocked that his photos have come back to life," his son said, "because he never considered himself to be a great photographer." He met his future wife, Margaret Ann Greenslade, after the war. They married in 1951. In addition to their son Jim, she survives him, as do their daughter, Wendy Breuklander ; another son, Chris; four grandchildren; and three great grandchildren. Despite the success of his Kennedy photos, Mr. Suero found that work in New York was spotty, so he signed on with the John Deere Company in Moline, Ill., where he took industrial photographs for advertising from 1961 62. "It was horribly depressing, and, coupled with my dad's PTSD , it was a real rough time," Jim Suero said. He stayed in Moline for about a year before the move to Hollywood, where celebrities found him unassuming and easy to work with. Many of his photos were never published. His son Jim and a friend, the producer Rod Hamilton, discovered them in boxes a few years ago and compiled them into "Orlando: Photography," which reviews said finally gave Mr. Suero his proper due at 93. "My father is very humble about his work," his son wrote in the book. "He is very shocked that his photos have come back to life because he never considered himself to be a great photographer. Frankly, he never thought of himself as worthy of a book. But he is embracing it, that's for sure."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Arthur L. Singer Jr., who became an unheralded father of public television in the late 1960s after commercial networks were famously accused of broadcasting a "vast wasteland" of programs, died on Wednesday at his home in Westport, Conn. He was 90. His death was confirmed by his son Charles. In the formative years of government and subscriber funded public television and radio, Mr. Singer was said to have been instrumental in galvanizing federal officials, philanthropies and academics to seed the public airwaves with quality programming and to finance future development. His efforts came in the wake of a speech in 1961 by Newton N. Minow, the newly named Federal Communications Commission chairman, to a roomful of 2,000 television executives in Washington, in which he dismissed their product as a "vast wasteland." In a typical day of broadcasting, Mr. Minow said, "You will see a procession of game shows, violence, audience participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, Western bad men, Western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence and cartoons. And endlessly, commercials many screaming, cajoling and offending. And most of all, boredom." According to Steven Schindler, writing in "Casebook for the Foundation: A Great American Secret" (2007), it was Mr. Singer, as executive assistant at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, who persuaded its president, John W. Gardner, in 1965 to create a commission that, with the endorsement of the White House, would study the future of educational television. As Mr. Singer recounted it, David Ives, a friend who was working at WGBH TV in Boston, called him in 1964 to ask his advice about whether a commission on the financing of public television should be named by the White House. "I suggested a private commission with the president's blessing," Mr. Singer recalled in a brief memoir. "and that the scope be broadened to include the nature of educational television, not just its financing. At that moment, stimulated by Ives's call, the Carnegie Commission was born." The 15 member Carnegie Commission on Educational Television would produce a report, "Public Television: A Program for Action," that laid the groundwork for the Public Broadcasting Act, which President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law in 1967, setting up the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which would seed the formation of PBS and NPR and an infusion of high quality programming. The columnist James Reston of The New York Times wrote that the Carnegie report was "one of those quiet events that, in the perspective of a generation or more, may be recognized as one of the transforming occasions in American life." As Carnegie's liaison to the commission, Mr. Singer recruited the staff, including his former colleague Stephen White as its director (and later principal author of the report), and concurred in the appointment of James R. Killian Jr., the chairman of the corporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as the commission's chairman. "In addition to establishing the infrastructure for public broadcasting," Mr. Schindler wrote in the analysis for Duke University's Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society, "the commission laid the groundwork for connecting the American public to informative, entertaining and enlightening television and radio programming." In an interview with the Columbia Center for Oral History in 1971, Mr. Singer said of the commission, "If there was any one thing at the foundation that I enjoyed most and took the greatest pride in its outcome, that's it." Mr. Singer left the Carnegie Corporation in 1969 to become a vice president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, where he helped initiate two popular public television programs, "Nova" and "The American Experience." The foundation also financed popular science books, among them "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" (1986), a Pulitzer Prize winning narrative by Richard Rhodes. "He pointed out that since we gave people money for a living, we were mostly bearers of good news and we should feel good and make others feel good about the work we did together," Doron Weber, vice president for programs at the Sloan Foundation, said by email. "Having a good time was one indicator that we were doing our job." Arthur Louis Singer Jr. was born on Feb. 14, 1929, in Scranton, Pa., as his parents were on their way to their new home in New Jersey. His father was in the textile business. His mother, Isabel (Corcoran) Singer, was a homemaker.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Megan Thee Stallion Says Tory Lanez Shot Her. He Responded With an Album. Update: Tory Lanez has been charged with assault in the shooting of Megan Thee Stallion. More than a month after the rapper Megan Thee Stallion accused a fellow musician, Tory Lanez, of shooting her in the feet in Los Angeles over the summer, Mr. Lanez on Friday delivered his first public statement denying responsibility in the form of an entire album. The release, with tracks including "A Woman," "Friends Become Strangers" and "Things I Should of Said," came only hours after "Saturday Night Live" announced that Megan Thee Stallion would be the musical guest on its season premiere in October. The album is called "Daystar," which is Mr. Lanez's real first name. In late July, after weeks of declining to say who was responsible for her injuries, Megan Thee Stallion said on Instagram that she was struck in both feet and that "fake stories" about her continued to spread online. In a series of live videos on Instagram the night of Aug. 20, she addressed Mr. Lanez, who was arrested and charged with gun possession in the incident, and said, "You shot me." At the time, representatives for Mr. Lanez declined to comment. But on Friday, he denied the specifics of the accusations in his lyrics across multiple songs. "There is a time to stay silent," Mr. Lanez wrote on social media. "And a time to speak. I said all I could say on this." On the first track, after a collage of news clips addressing the events and their aftermath, Mr. Lanez raps, "We both know what happened that night and what I did/But it ain't what they sayin'." Until the Aug. 20 videos, Megan Thee Stallion and the authorities had said little about what took place early on July 12 on Nichols Canyon Road in Hollywood. The Los Angeles police have not named a suspect or explained her injuries in detail. The police would not even confirm whether the injuries were gunshot wounds. Megan Thee Stallion said she had decided to identify Mr. Lanez because she was fed up with misinformation spreading online. Since details first emerged about the case, speculation has run rampant among hip hop commentators and her legions of fans. Many have simply wondered what happened. It has been a strange turn in the story of a 25 year old rapper who has vaulted to national fame in recent years with hits like "Hot Girl Summer" and collaborations with stars including Cardi B, Beyonce and Nicki Minaj. Born Megan Pete, Megan Thee Stallion spent years rapping in her hometown, Houston, where she learned from her mother, who performed under the name Holly Wood. Her 2017 song "Stalli Freestyle" is often credited as the one that brought her worldwide attention. Then came an EP, "Tina Snow," then critical and popular success with her debut album, "Fever," and then "Hot Girl Summer," a song that became a cultural phenomenon last year. In March, she released another album, "Suga," and her collaboration with Beyonce on a remix of the song "Savage" became her first No. 1 Billboard hit in May. In mid August, she returned to No. 1 on Billboard as a featured guest on "WAP" by Cardi B, which debuted atop the chart with the most streams ever for a song in its first week of release. Mr. Lanez also appeared high on the singles chart, on the song "What's Poppin" by Jack Harlow, which reached No. 4. She has emphasized her ambitions beyond music. (She is a health administration student at Texas Southern University.) "All my life, I've been a person who's had my hands in a lot of things," she said in March. "I was a bill collector at one point. I was a bartender. When I started rapping and making money, I was like, 'I'm going to use this to do the things I really want to do: finish school and start my business.'" What has she said about getting shot? She first described being shot in an Instagram post on July 15, saying that she had "suffered gunshot wounds, as a result of a crime that was committed against me and done with the intention to physically harm me." She said that the police took her to the hospital and that she had surgery to remove bullets. She wrote on Instagram, "It was important for me to clarify the details about this traumatic night." Almost two weeks after that post, Megan Thee Stallion posted a video to reassure fans that she was well, to thank her supporters and to counter reports that she said were invented or based on fake sources. "I was shot in both of my feet," she said in the video, breaking into tears. Surgery, she said, "was super scary, it was, like, just the worst experience of my life." She added that the bullets did not hit any bones or break any tendons, but were "in there" and had to be removed. In neither post did she say where the shooting happened. In the video, she criticized people who she said were spreading rumors about the shooting and those making jokes on social media. "It's not funny," she said. "There's nothing to joke about. It was nothing for y'all to start going and making up fake stories about." She said that she did not put her hands on anyone before the shooting, adding, "I didn't deserve to get shot." And she explained her lack of comment beyond Instagram, saying: "It's not that I was protecting anybody. I just wasn't ready to speak." In the August videos, Megan Thee Stallion said that she was in a car with Mr. Lanez, "his security" and a friend when they began arguing. She said she got out of the car to end the argument. "I get out. I'm walking away," she said. Mr. Lanez, she said, started "shooting me" from out of the back of the car. She said that she did not accuse Mr. Lanez the night of the shooting because she was worried about what the police might do if they learned there was a gun in the car. "Even though he shot me, I tried to spare him," she said. "I didn't tell the laws what happened as soon as it happened and I should have." In October, Megan Thee Stallion published an Op Ed, writing, "it's ridiculous that some people think the simple phrase 'Protect Black women' is controversial." What have the police said? The Los Angeles Police Department on July 15 issued a news release detailing information they had on the incident and the status of the investigation. On July 12, at 4:30 a.m., the police responded to calls reporting gunfire in the Hollywood Hills, the release said. After witnesses provided a description of a vehicle and the people involved, the police said, officers detained "multiple people" at a traffic stop. One person, Mr. Lanez, a singer and rapper whose legal name is Daystar Peterson, was arrested and charged with concealing a firearm in the vehicle, the police said. The release said one person was taken to a hospital to receive medical treatment for a foot injury, but it did not name the victim. Records from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department show that Mr. Lanez was released hours after the arrest after posting a 35,000 bond. He has an Oct. 13 court date. Over the years, he built a loyal fan base and eventually caught the attention of the pop star Justin Bieber, who became a friend and collaborator. After putting out several mixtapes, Mr. Lanez in 2015 signed a deal with Interscope Records and the next year released his debut album, "I Told You," which featured the Grammy nominated song "Luv." Mr. Lanez has since released two more albums, and in April he released the mixtape, "The New Toronto 3," his final project with Interscope. He is also the host of Quarantine Radio, a variety show with interviews and comedy that raised his profile during the pandemic. Following more than two months with no comment about the incident, Mr. Lanez returned to social media on Sept. 24 to tease a response, writing, "To my fans ... I'm sorry for my silence .... but respectfully .. I got time today." What followed was a surprise album released on all streaming platforms, which many listeners on social media saw as crass exploitation of violence against a Black woman. Across 17 tracks on "Daystar," the rapper refers to what he described as a romantic relationship with Megan Thee Stallion, comparing them to Jay Z and Beyonce, but does not detail his version of events from July 12. Instead, he repeatedly questions hers and paints himself as a victim, targeted by his peers in the music industry, with lyrics like, "Since the event, you never called me, but you can't deny me/if you got shot from behind, how can you identify me?" "Daystar" was released independently by Mr. Lanez's own One Umbrella Records.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
BLOOD TREASURE 9 p.m. on CBS. Hints of James Bond and Indiana Jones are sprinkled throughout this fast paced espionage series. The action begins when a terrorist, Karim Farouk (Oded Fehr), kidnaps an antiquities expert and blows up the tomb of Antony and Cleopatra. That sets off an international chase led by Danny McNamara (Matt Barr), a former F.B.I. agent who seeks out the help of an art thief, Lexi Vaziri (Sofia Pernas), who also happens to be his ex lover. (While the show relies on the trope of a Middle Eastern terrorist, the creators try to balance that by having Lexi be Egyptian .) She's quick to whip out her lethal gadgets; Danny's the patient, mindful one. And the occasional sexual tension lends a bit of spice to an otherwise hackneyed plot. The show debuts with a two hour episode, and will air at 10 starting May 28. THE VOICE 9 p.m. on NBC. The final four contestants of this vocal competition Gyth Rigdon, Maelyn Jarmon, Dexter Roberts and Andrew Sevener had one last chance to showcase their talents yesterday, putting on three performances each. One of them goes home a winner after this two hour season finale.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
The Buyers Susan and Larry Landau are newly popular with all their old friends. Growing up mostly in Manhattan, Larry Landau spent his summers first on Fire Island and later in Southampton, where his mother bought a small ranch house. That's the house that introduced his wife, Susan, who's from New Jersey, to the Hamptons. "I fell in love with the Hamptons immediately," she said. Both found they preferred Long Island to the Jersey Shore. "There's a feeling of permanence to the New York beaches, where the Jersey shores have more of a transient feel," Mr. Landau said. In 1999, the Landaus, who reside in a two story colonial in suburban Morris County, N.J., bought the house from the estate of Mr. Landau's mother. Southampton A modern design with soaring ceilings made this house attractive, but the price would have busted the budget. Gordon M. Grant for The New York Times Their two daughters, then in elementary school, became increasingly busy with camp and friends. More visitors would have been nice, said Mrs. Landau, a real estate appraiser. But at that stage of life, few of their friends were able to visit them in Southampton. "It was always something their kids needed back at home." So after a few years they sold the house, telling themselves, "someday we will return." Someday approached. A few years ago, the Landaus about to be empty nesters began the hunt for a new Southampton house. Their ideal location was in Southampton Village south of Montauk Highway. For a relatively modest 550,000 to 650,000, they wanted three bedrooms, two bathrooms and, preferably, a pool. "The question was: 'How do you get to Southampton Village if you are not a hedge fund manager?' " said Mr. Landau, who works in the financial services field. In their price range, they encountered primarily teardowns and fixer uppers. "We came up with a concept called the rainy day test," Mr. Landau said. "Could you see yourself here during a rainy or off season day?" That's one reason they wanted a fireplace for rainy or chilly weather. Southampton A place in a townhouse development that opened last year was "spectacular," but was also well out of budget. Gordon M. Grant for The New York Times "In the summer, when it's raining and you're confined," Mrs. Landau said, "there isn't a whole lot else you are doing except going to T.J. Maxx in Bridgehampton." A lovely four bedroom house on Meadowgrass Lane, circa 1996, came with a pool and a fireplace. Mrs. Landau loved its soaring, vaulted ceiling and modern style, so unlike their New Jersey house. "It helped me decide what I liked," she said. But at 899,000, it was simply too pricey. It later sold for 800,000. The couple checked out Bishops Pond, a 69 unit planned townhouse community that opened last year. Mr. Landau declared it "spectacular and out of the budget." With the smallest three bedrooms starting in the mid 800,000s they are currently selling for around 1.1 million they had to pass it by. They strayed north of the highway and saw a three bedroom house, listed at 540,000, on Helens Lane in North Sea, situated on a creek. They could kayak right up to the yard. North Sea One house had its communal living spaces on the second floor to enhance views, but it needed work. Gordon M. Grant for The New York Times To take advantage of the views, the house had its bedrooms on the ground floor and the living area on top. Both yard and interior needed plenty of work. "It was too kooky for me," Mrs. Landau said. It later sold for 530,000. At an older townhouse community built in 1976, Southampton Meadows, the Landaus found another place within their budget. An end unit, with two bedrooms, two bathrooms and a fireplace, had been vacant for two years; the development included a saltwater pool and tennis courts. The listing price was 689,000, with a monthly fee of around 700. The townhouse didn't seem like it needed that much work, though no interior improvements had been made since it was built. When they next saw a two bedroom ranch house in the low 600,000s and in such bad shape it needed to be razed they knew they would find nothing more suitable than the townhouse. They bought it for 589,000, closed in late winter and went to work. "When we bought it, we saw the flaws," Mrs. Landau said. So many other places were in obvious need of work, but theirs was not. "We were caught off guard," she said, surprised to find their home "needed every inch redone." Their 15,000 renovation budget ballooned to 50,000. But they tackled the project like troopers, doing what they could themselves and joining Angie's List to find skilled workers. "I've got projects for forever," Mr. Landau said. Few of those are outdoors. They find it a relief not to worry about landscaping or pool maintenance. What's more, "I like the social aspects" of a community pool, he said. "There's nothing social about your own pool if you don't have guests out that weekend." Some similar units have been renovated, with space beneath the vaulted ceiling becoming a third bedroom. But the Landaus want to keep theirs as is, airy and bright. If their kids (now in their early 20s) have friends stay over, "they don't care if they sleep on chairs at their age," Mrs. Landau said. This time around, their friends are more eager to visit. "My friends don't have all these obligations to their children," Mrs. Landau said, "and now that my daughters look at the Hamptons as the place to go, everybody wants to come over. Everybody is, like, when's my weekend?" As for the last rainy day, Mr. Landau worked on projects around the house. Mrs. Landau went to T.J. Maxx.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
What feels different to you about our current moment that wasn't true just a few years ago? We're actively talking about diversity a lot more in terms of leads and writers and directors. The other thing is that it seems harder for midsize and smaller movies to do well at the movie theater. I read a stat somewhere that the average person goes to the movie theater around four times a year, and what happens is that these huge movies come out and kind of suck up all the air. You look at comedy especially, and it's been pretty tough going for comedies at the box office for the last couple years. I think it's because there's this sense that only certain movies are worthy of watching at the movie theater. Does that create an opportunity for streamers? It does seem that they're taking a lot more chances on those midsized movies that we have not been seeing at major studios. A Netflix movie doesn't have the same pressure on it as a movie in theaters, and that's good and bad. Obviously, these movies are being made by Netflix at a pretty decent budget, and a subscription is undeniably a lot cheaper than a movie ticket. But the bad part is that if you go to the "new on Netflix" section, there are so many movies that you never hear about. Some of them might be great, but for whatever reason, they don't enter the mainstream consciousness. If there's a movie coming out in a theater, you're going to at least hear about it. You made "The Big Sick" outside the studio system, so you'd have creative control over its casting and story. Since then, you've been working a lot within the studio system. Is your sense that things are changing at that level? There's still a very long way to go, but I think it is changing. For instance, Emily V. Gordon and I wrote a movie and a really huge studio told us, "Hey, a woman of color should be the lead of this movie." I don't think we would have heard that five years ago from a major studio. Now, I don't know if we're in an era right now where people are just talking about this a lot because Hollywood is under a microscope, or if it's going to continue. But right now, you have someone like Constance Wu who can be the lead of a movie she's a bankable star because of "Crazy Rich Asians." So even if it's just this little window, the changes that happen will affect Hollywood going forward. When you talk to people younger than you about the way they watch movies and consume pop culture, what do you find striking? I've talked to multiple young people who have said that they don't like movies! I was at a bar with a friend of mine who directs big movies, and while we were in line for the bathroom, he was saying that movie theaters were going to go away. He was like, "Kids don't watch movies, they watch YouTube." Which I thought was crazy. So he goes, "Watch this." There was a girl in front of us in line, and he said, "Hey, excuse me, what's your favorite movie?" And she said, "I don't watch movies." Just randomly, he picked someone from the audience and she was like 25, she wasn't a child or anything. We were like, "Well, do any of your friends watch movies?" And she said, "Not really." I don't want to sound like an old idiot, because I do watch those videos just to see what people are watching, and it's so different from traditional movies and TV shows. I grew up watching "Ghostbusters" and "Gremlins" and "Indiana Jones," and if I had grown up watching YouTube, I don't know if I would like movies. I talk to younger people sometimes who can binge watch an entire TV season in one sitting, but they're resistant to watching a two hour movie. If you look at those people bingeing Netflix shows, they're doing other things at the same time, or they're on their phone. So it's not that people think watching a movie is difficult, it's that they think just watching that movie is difficult. I can't tell you how much it would piss me off when people would live tweet "The Big Sick." And it happened all the time! It's just how younger people engage with entertainment now. In what other ways is social media going to shape the way movies are made? Well, look at what happened with the "Sonic" movie. Because the internet didn't like it, they're redoing the Sonic design! People have always had an opinion on what they want, but they didn't feel entitled to change that thing. It used to be, "This sucks," and people would move on, and now it's, "This sucks, change it." I think it's a weird, dangerous precedent. What else do you think is changing? When I watch Netflix movies, I find that they're continually recapping things that have happened in previous scenes, and I think they very smartly understand that people will be doing a hundred other things and may have missed something. So the way movies are being made is changing. Oh, and this is very cynical, but I think the standard of quality for people who watch stuff at home is not the same. If you go see "Avengers" in the movie theater, it better be great, but if you're just watching stuff at home, it doesn't matter so much if it's great or not. I don't want to diss Netflix too much, because I do think they make amazing stuff and they're giving shots to people who would not have been given shots 10 years ago, but I also think that Netflix would rather have five things that people kind of like than one thing people really love.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
As such ensembles go, the Chiara String Quartet was a bright but relatively brief candle. It gave a farewell concert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Saturday afternoon, after 18 years of existence and soon after its star turn as quartet in residence at the museum in 2015 16. In contrast, the Juilliard String Quartet is over 70 years old (with repeated turnover), and the Guarneri Quartet retired in 2009, after 45 years, including its own 43 year residency at the Met. Still, there is much to be said for going out at the top of your game, and the Chiara players the violinists Rebecca Fischer and Hyeyung Yoon, the violist Jonah Sirota and the cellist Gregory Beaver seemed to be doing just that, each with a new career path in prospect, though leaving open the possibility of future ad hoc collaborations. The group, which took up residence also at the University of Nebraska Lincoln in 2004, always had a taste for adventure, promoting new music and exploring concert formats in shows it called Chamber Music in Any Chamber. During its Met residency, it gave New York premieres of works by Jefferson Friedman and Pierre Jalbert and extended its practice of performing from memory, rare among string quartets, with "Brahms by Heart." On Saturday, Chiara opened with a work it introduced in 2011, Nico Muhly's "Diacritical Marks," a pleasant series of eight brief interconnected movements. It followed with the New York premiere of Philip Glass's Piano Quintet ("Annunciation"), with the pianist Paul Barnes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
During Robbie Chater's most recent stay in rehab, he was pretty sure the Avalanches the beloved, sample heavy Australian group he'd helped found in the late '90s had broken up. After checking into a detox facility in January 2017, the multi instrumentalist didn't have any access to the outside world. As far as he knew, his latest bout of drinking had caused the Avalanches to cancel a tour promoting their long gestating second album "Wildflower." He felt awful about that, but if it meant the band was over that was also OK, because after two decades of struggling with addiction, he'd finally arrived at a place of acceptance. "I'd been trying so hard to quit drinking on my own but I could not do it," Chater said on a video call from his Melbourne home in early November. His space was sparse and minimalist; a while back he'd sold all but about 200 of his records in an attempt to break from his past. "You get so unwell that you eventually crack open and listen to a new idea or a new way of looking at life." In November 2000, the Avalanches released their magnificent debut album "Since I Left You," a painstakingly detailed tapestry of thousands of obscure, interwoven samples culled, mostly, Chater said, from "junk store records." Somehow as breezy as it is busy, "Since I Left You" sounds a bit like a 1960s beach party painted by Hieronymus Bosch. It was a critical darling and even an out of left field commercial success, with the oddball single "Frontier Psychiatrist" receiving airplay on MTV and American alternative rock radio. Its reputation has only grown over time, and it's now mentioned alongside records like the Beastie Boys' "Paul's Boutique" and DJ Shadow's "Entroducing" as a landmark achievement of analog sampling. But it was also a tough act to follow. The 16 years between "Since I Left You" and "Wildflower" were a dense maze of left turns, overthinking and abandoned songs. Another of the group's founders, Darren Seltmann, left in 2006, making the Avalanches essentially a duo of Chater and his longtime friend and collaborator Tony Di Blasi. Progress was often stalled by Chater's drinking. "There were about five times where I legit thought, this is it, it's over," Di Blasi said in a separate video call, his cat, Jude, occasionally sauntering across the screen's foreground. He saw the arrival of "Wildflower" as "a great achievement, regardless of how it was received or anything like that, just actually getting it done was the victory." Chater has now been sober for almost four years. And when he checked out of rehab, he had a few surprises waiting for him. No, the band hadn't broken up. In fact against the advice of their manager the Avalanches had even played those tour dates, with a full backing band and Di Blasi as the only official member. ("Which was kind of weird," Di Blasi recalled, "but in the end it was like, who cares?") Would he be up for playing Coachella in the spring? Both he and Di Blasi describe those months that followed as the happiest in the Avalanches' sometimes torturous two decade existence. "We were touring and seeing the world, and we felt so full of light and positivity and joy for living," Chater said. Di Blasi said they were charmed by the sense of routine. "We were just like, isn't it great to be in a normal band?" he said. "We'd been sitting at home by ourselves for 16 years in a room." After a comparatively brief four year break, they're doing it again, releasing their star studded third album, "We Will Always Love You." Making the new LP, due Dec. 11, was a more streamlined process because it began with a unifying, if characteristically grand, concept: light, the cosmos and the Golden Records, the two 12 inch phonograph disks that were launched into space aboard Voyager in 1977. The albums contained Bach and Beethoven, Aborigine songs and a Navajo chant, the sounds of trains and horses, and a host of greetings in different languages. Chater was particularly moved by the fact that Carl Sagan, who contributed to the project, included a recording of his wife Ann Druyan's brain waves as she thought about what it was like to fall in love. The core of the new songs are still unearthed samples, but now they intermingle with a motley squad of live voices: Johnny Marr, Rivers Cuomo, MGMT, Karen O, Kurt Vile, Perry Farrell, Leon Bridges and even two of Chater and Di Blasi's early heroes, the trip hop legend Tricky and Mick Jones of the Clash and the pop sampling pioneers Big Audio Dynamite. (Jamie xx also co produced a track on his idols' latest record: "I still can't quite believe it," he said.) "Being a kid growing up in a country town in Australia and hearing that Big Audio Dynamite record, which was a pop hit here I was like, 'How did they make that?!'" Chater said. He'd been similarly drawn to David Byrne and Brian Eno's patchwork "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts," the collagelike production of early De La Soul and Public Enemy albums and even EMF's ubiquitous 1990 smash "Unbelievable." Beguiled by the dark art of sampling, a teenage Chater began experimenting with tape loops at home. Chater grew up mostly in the seclusion of the Australian countryside, "loving music," in his words, "but playing drums badly and piano badly." He felt alienated by the machismo and virtuosity of Australian rock 'n' roll culture: "I'm like, well I'm never in a million years going to be able to play a guitar as well as Angus Young, or whoever. I need to find my own little way of expressing myself that's unique to me." Di Blasi moved to town at the end of high school, and he and Chater instantly bonded over music, jamming in Chater's back shed with friends. But Chater was already a heavy drinker throughout his teens and by 20 he'd become sick enough to land in a detox facility. Sobriety allowed him to focus more intently on music than ever before. Di Blasi brought Chater one of his samplers to occupy his time in rehab. "I remember visiting him one day and he was like, 'Oh, look at this,' and he played me 'Radio' just on samples," he said, referring to one of the layered songs that would end up on "Since I Left You." "He was doing that in rehab! And he came out of it completely invigorated, from almost dying to just being life, absolute life." Chater agreed that a sense of rebirth animated that early work: "That's why that record's full of so much joy and light," he said. "I was so happy to be alive and that record just came pouring out." A sense of interconnectedness flows through "We Will Always Love You," and Chater said the process of working with live singers isn't that different from selecting found sounds. "It's almost like sampling," he said, "in trying to find the right vocalist, to match the music with someone who seems like they've got a certain spirit." Sampling is still a big part of the Avalanches' creative process, and the stirring warmth of their work has always fought the misconception that music made with electronics can't be as personal or emotional as someone crooning into a microphone or strumming an acoustic guitar. "Someone may have sung on this song back in the 1940s," Chater said, "and that record's laid in someone's house for 30 years and they've listened to it and added to the crackles on it, you know? It comes to me and I find it. Where do I fit into this whole flow of energy? "It's really humbling in a way," he added. "Because then we're putting this stuff out, and it floats back out there again."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Nearly 30 years ago, when north of the border Mexican food was more Tex than Mex, Rick Bayless opened Frontera Grill in Chicago, introducing many diners to Oaxacan mole and Yucatecan pork. At his latest Chicago restaurant, Lena Brava, the chef aims to showcase a relatively unsung region of Mexico the state of Baja California in the northern Baja Peninsula, where the food roots are shallower but innovation is exploding. "I'm always trying to take people on to the next step, and this is an emerging cuisine," Mr. Bayless said, extolling the region's unique Mediterranean climate, which nurtures wineries and olive orchards. Baja food, he added, also reflects waves of Chinese, Russian and Italian immigrants and benefits from a high quality supply of seafood from Ensenada. The region's culture might be unfamiliar, but the menu at Lena Brava (which means "ferocious wood") mirrors a clutch of contemporary food trends some of them actually not uncommon in traditional Mexican culinary tradition like raw fish, live fire cooking and smoky mezcal cocktails.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Mr. Deresiewicz is the author of "Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life" PORTLAND, Ore. High school seniors and their families face a difficult choice. Will colleges be open this fall? Will classes be held online? Many families are reluctant to pay or borrow tens of thousands of dollars for what may turn out to be a virtual experience. Without the mainstays of campus life dorms, dining halls, sports, parties many young people are changing their plans, deciding to remain at home and spend the coming academic year at a local community college or public university. Others are deferring college altogether, taking a gap year. As students arrive on campus with stronger academic skills but weaker social and emotional ones, already burned out after years on the academic treadmill, gap year programs offer an invaluable corrective. Participants acquire confidence and independence, begin to develop a sense of purpose, and find out that there's life outside of school. Kids turn into young adults. But there is one big problem with the gap year option now, at least as it has traditionally been conceived. A large majority of gap year programs involve overseas travel. Going abroad this fall is not desirable. Some overseas programs have already suspended operations for 2020 21. This is an excellent time to broaden our idea of what a gap year ought to involve. The assumption that the best thing you can do with your time between high school and college is to go to a developing country, learn about the people there and use your privilege to help improve their lives is, now, starting to crack. To be sure, an overseas gap year can be a very fine thing, and benefiting others is always a worthy goal. But you do not need to go abroad to make the world a better place. By exposing existing inequalities, the current crisis has made blindingly obvious what should have already been perfectly clear. There is plenty of work to be done right here in the United States. If anything, such work is even more challenging than anything that you can do abroad because the problems you address are ones in which you are directly implicated. It's a lot easier, morally and psychologically, to go to Peru or South Africa and deal with inequities "over there" than to go to St. Louis or Houston. When you stay here, you are forced to deal with the consequences of your own comfort and privilege. You also don't get to "go home" at the end. You are already home, and this is what it looks like. This issue, I should say, isn't merely theoretical for me. For the past six years, I have been involved with one of the few domestic gap year programs that engage in the kind of work I'm talking about. Tivnu: Building Justice is a social justice oriented Jewish gap year program that takes place in Portland, Ore. I recently had occasion to speak with several of our alumni. One of them, Ami Furgang, now a senior at Middlebury, wanted to do a gap year but was skeptical of going overseas. "There was something about taking that time in the U.S., knowing that I have benefited from systems that oppress people in the U.S., that felt like more of a responsibility," Mx. Furgang said. "Why would I leave Newton, Mass., to go to a quote unquote Third World country, when there are people literally in Boston, let alone Portland, who I could be supporting?" Mx. Furgang came to Portland because Tivnu is the only domestic Jewish gap year program. But there are other options, most obviously the programs gathered under the umbrella of AmeriCorps: City Year, Volunteers in Service to America and the National Civilian Community Corps. I grieve for the college bound seniors who find their plans derailed by the coronavirus. But I believe that this can also be an opportunity for them: to step off the conveyor belt, to grow up a little bit, to learn about parts of American society they would never otherwise experience and to help their fellow Americans at this moment of unprecedented need. William Deresiewicz ( wderesiewicz) is the author of "The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech," and a member of the board of Tivnu: Building Justice. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Amanda Hess, a critic at large who writes about the internet, discussed the tech she's using. What tech tools are most important for doing your job? Is logging off a tool? Signing out is important. I cover the internet for my job, but I'm also very easily seduced by it, and that can be a dangerous combination. Procrastination can always be plausibly reframed as work. So I have technology that I use to mitigate other technology. Wearing an Apple Watch means that I don't have to pick up my phone every time I get a Medicare scam call, which inevitably sucks me into scrolling mindlessly through every app on my phone. I have strapped an unsightly Apple product to my body in an attempt to keep another Apple product away from me. You write about internet culture, which is a broad topic. How do you decide what to write about? My beat is even wider than that: I'm a critic at large, which means I end up writing about television, music, movies, theater and books, too. My job is to identify themes across the culture, and I find myself investigating ideas more than platforms. I always have a few baby story ideas hanging around in my brain, and they steer my internet activity into one direction or another.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
LONDON There are few emerging fashion designers who can say they have dressed both Sean Combs and Pippa Middleton. But Alice Archer's intricate digital embroidery and prints that meld technology and biology to captivating effect attract a broad range of clients. Why will be clear this London Fashion Week, as Ms. Archer, 32, prepares to show her latest collection in a presentation on Sept. 16. According to Marina Larroude, the fashion director at Barneys New York, "she is definitely a young designer to watch." Ms. Larroude selected Ms. Archer to participate in a Barneys window display in January highlighting the best new British talent. Ms. Archer, who grew up in the Surrey countryside at a Christian conference center run by her father, embroidered artwork for the artist Tracey Emin for eight years while completing her studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, and the Royal College of Art. She then assisted the designer Dries Van Noten, before introducing her label in 2014 with support from Simon Burstein, son of the Browns boutique founder Joan Burstein. The small basement studio where Ms. Archer and one full time assistant create samples is beneath Mr. Burstein's boutique, The Place London, on a well heeled street in the Paddington neighborhood. Ms. Archer calls him "my fairy godfather." In the studio she uses a computer program to map each individual stitch for a piece; as much as a week of computer programming can be required for a single digitized design. The intense work has meant that many of Ms. Archer's garments have fallen into the evening wear category with its accompanying high prices. Ms. Middleton, for example, wore an emerald green silk cocktail dress with an oversized embroidered flower on the skirt, which retails for around 1,500, to a glamorous wedding in Ireland in July; the magenta kimono style jacket that Mr. Combs wore on a red carpet last year costs 2,572. This season Ms. Archer's fourth on the London fashion calendar heralds the designer's attempt to use a variety of techniques and materials to create prints that mimic her intricate embroidery, but make her work more affordable. Prices will start at 700 (but still will rise to as much as 4,600). Ms. Archer began the collection, inspired by summer fruit, with three pieces of embroidered fabric, each measuring about 10 square feet. The embroidery, completed in white, was printed over with photographs of fruits, infusing the fabrics with vivid colors. The pieces were sent to a photography studio to be shot in high detail, the images then transformed into prints that could be applied to a variety of silks. Standout styles include a checked lavender sleeveless A line dress, with a cascade of three dimensional blackberries and strawberries dangling like fringe from a matching bag; a gingham gown with cherries spilling down the front and a three bows on the back; and a royal blue kimono jacket decorated with hand painted lemons. "I have so much ambition for this brand," Ms. Archer said. "More than anything now, I just want it to grow and people to get to know the work I do." Out of the basement, and onto the front lines.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
EDINBURGH The Edinburgh International Festival comes in many tongues this year, among them Dutch and the Aboriginal dialect Dharug. But no matter the language, one abiding impression after a whirlwind weekend of playgoing at the festival and its complementary Fringe event is of a world coming apart at the seams. It's all but impossible, for instance, to leave the director Neil Armfield's stirring Sydney Theater Company production of "The Secret River" without a sense of lamentation . Premiered in Sydney in 2013, Andrew Bovell's adaptation of a 2005 novel by Kate Grenville tells of an English convict named William Thornhill (Nathaniel Dean) who arrives with his wife and sons in New South Wales early in the 19th century. Will finds land by the Hawkesbury River that he can claim as his own, well away from the slums of London's East End. But his newfound sense of self brings Will into contact, and eventual conflict, with the Aboriginal community that calls the same river home. A decent man enmeshed in a clash of cultures destined to end badly, Will prompts a re evaluation of just who, exactly, are the "savages" referred to early in a story of colonial misrule that ripples well beyond the specific time and place. (Mr. Armfield shows several individuals cruelly bound together with ropes, calling to mind recent news reports in the United States of a black man, Donald Neely, being treated the same way.) The production suffered a setback during its Edinburgh run when one of the leading performers, Ningali Lawford Wolf, withdrew because of illness , and the cast had to be rejiggered. (Sadly, Ms. Lawford Wolf died in Edinburgh a few days later.) But by the time I caught the play, the company was in full command of a nearly three hour narrative that falters only when it is too literal minded. "The world here was about to change," we are informed, though Mr. Armfield's stagecraft has already made that clear. Mr. Dean deserves credit for chronicling the fraught byways of Will's moral reckoning, and he is ably supported by a large company that includes Major "Moogy" Sumner as a Dharug patriarch and Jeremy Sims as a disruptive English expat tellingly named Smasher. Stephen Curtis's design, fringed with eucalyptus and given a painterly glow by Mark Howett's lighting, suggests a pastoral setting just waiting to ignite. "The Secret River" will travel to London's National Theater next, playing there beginning Aug. 22. Wherever it goes, it should be seen. The English theater troupe 1927 is no stranger to touring, either. Its latest show, the whimsical 75 minute "Roots," had its world premiere in May at the Spoleto Festival in South Carolina and is running in Edinburgh through Aug. 25 at the Church Hill Theater. It's been a busy year for 1927: The company's coproduction with the Komische Oper Berlin of "The Magic Flute" was seen at the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York last month, and its groundbreaking fusion of live action, animation and music, "The Animals and Children Took to the Streets," was revived in London this year. A sequence of folk tale vignettes, most of them little known, "Roots" ranges from giddiness through to bewilderment and distress. The end result doesn't push this enterprising company forward , but it does at least remind us of where they've been. Not to be outdone by the festival proper is the capacious, unruly and uncurated Fringe, which bills itself as the world's largest arts festival and features a hefty program guide that runs to more than 450 pages and 3,000 plus shows. Fiercely competitive in their quest for audiences, Fringe shows live in hope of a mention in The Scotsman's weekly Fringe First Awards, which are a useful way of finding the theatrical musts. Some shows didn't make that cut, among them the hourlong "Like Animals," a sweet if slight piece in which a real life couple, Kim Donohoe and Pete Lannon, appear as themselves, as parrots and as dolphins: Yes, you read that right. Ellie Dubois's production makes quirky demands of its performers, who get to unleash their inner aquatic mammals, but it's difficult to know what the play itself is saying. Relationships are tricky, it would seem, and depend on circumstance, no matter where you are within the animal kingdom. Other Fringe shows rival the best of what's on offer anywhere in town. The Belgian company Ontroerend Goed's invaluable "Are We Not Drawn Onward to New ErA" is an admonitory piece about climate change that has a palindromic title and structure to match . And it speaks an initially indecipherable language that makes complete sense by the time the show has come to its bleak but beautiful end. After seeing this, you may never want to hold a plastic bag again. "Crocodile Fever," a pitch black comedy at the Traverse Theater, extends the best Fringe tradition of showcasing the new. In it, Meghan Tyler, a writer from Northern Ireland, finds gallows humor in the troubled region's conflict. The show's director, Gareth Nicholls, was responsible for "Ulster American," one of the more raucous successes of last year's Fringe. "Crocodile Fever" is even better: This portrait of a family that will stop at nothing, even the occasional severed limb, to settle long festering scores comes soaked in blood and bile. Running concurrently at the Traverse theater, "Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran" finds its Anglo Iranian creator, Javaad Alipoor, in the unusual position of encouraging audience members to turn their phones on, so they can follow the hourlong show's social and historical weave on Instagram. (If you can't do that, trust me, the portrait of brazen societal excess still lands.) As it is, the piece seems almost too compact: There are a multitude of themes, glancingly conveyed at present, that could be further teased out. And taking a late night slot at the same address, Stef Smith's unexpectedly poetic "Enough" peeks behind the sunny, welcoming smiles of two flight attendants (Louise Ludgate and Amanda Wright, both terrific) to reveal sexual abuse, familial distress and enveloping loneliness . Skilfully calibrated by the director Bryony Shanahan, the piece unfolds against repeated references to a calamitous news event ("Isn't it awful?" "Just awful") that is never made clear, an omission that feels absolutely right. The grimness of the world is apparent everywhere, or so I was often reminded across seven shows in three days: Why limit the grievous specifics to just one?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
This essay includes spoilers from the current season of "The Boys." The most recent episode of Amazon's superhero spoof "The Boys" opens with a gun toting white man killing a South Asian storekeeper while hateful rhetoric about dangerous illegal immigrants runs through his head. Later at a public rally, two heroes decry "godless, inhuman supervillains" who are "pouring across our borders" while standing in front of a giant American flag. And to think that when I watched the episode screener recently, I had turned to it for a break from news stories about senseless murders of people of color and the poisonous, racist discourse that's become the norm in my supposedly great country. But this season of the series delivers more of the same: I was asked to watch more Black men die. The show's fictional renderings of Black deaths pale in comparison to the real tragedies they mirror. But I found their effect to be similarly distressing, and the presentations of both raise ethical questions about how we convey the horrors of America. When is this documenting of wrongs, as art or as journalism, a worthwhile public service intended to awaken people to what's happening in their country? And when is it simply exploiting tragedy for the sake of spectacle? Adapted from Garth Ennis's notoriously graphic comic book of the same name, "The Boys" has never been light viewing. But it has a dark sense of humor, and the explicit violence has a point, as part of a larger critique of capitalism, consumerism, jingoism and the American obsession with celebrity. In the show's alternative version of the world, superheroes are everywhere, and the best an adored group called the Seven are backed by an evil corporation, Vought International. The second season narrows its gaze to focus on a timely topic: the power of hateful, fear mongering political rhetoric. To that end, the show introduces a brand new member of the Seven: Stormfront, an ageless wonder, played by Aya Cash, who we discover fought previously under the nom de guerre Liberty and was a member of the Nazi elite during World War II. The Stormfront of the comic is a savage Nazi man in a cape, a fierce, powerful hero who openly terrorizes people of color. The series switches the gender and makes the unveiling of her villainy more subtle: She is a white feminist who challenges sexist double standards but then mobilizes her fans, first via social media and then at raucous rallies, manipulating people's fears to her advantage. Her bigotry is revealed gradually, but as we see in flashbacks from when she was Liberty, it runs deep. In one triggering scene set in the '70s, Liberty stops a Black man and his younger sister as they're driving along at night. The superhero cites a car robbery, though the man insists the car is his. Nevertheless, Liberty kills the man as his sister watches. In the present day, as Stormfront, she chases a superpowered character into an apartment complex full of Black families, thoughtlessly killing bystanders along the way. She flings a Black man against his own refrigerator and he dies in his home, and it's implied that the rest of his family does, too. She tosses another out of a window as if he were a piece of trash. When she reaches her target, an Asian man, she kills him slowly, cruelly, spitting out a racial epithet as she does. Later, at a rally, we see her proclaiming the need to "Keep America safe again," in an explicit callback to our president's favorite catchphrase. Then there's that opening scene of the episode released on Friday, when a random white Stormfront fan, infected by her rabble rousing racism, shoots the man at his own convenience store, afraid that he is one of the immigrant superterrorists he has been warned about. This scene and others like it this season are more vicious and urgent in their satire than what we've generally seen from "The Boys," which primarily parodied celebrity culture and comic book cliches in Season 1. These calls are coming from inside the house. At least they feel that way to me, as a Black viewer. From its first episode, "The Boys" has proved that it won't shrink away from garish displays of blood and dismembering and otherwise gratuitous content, from its depictions of sexual assault to its alternative version of 9/11. In terms of pure violence, the scenes leading up to the revelation that Stormfront is the racist Liberty are generally in line with the show's more wanton action. But they build to something worthwhile, illuminating how hate can disguise itself, how it can be weaponized, how it can be inextricably woven into the fabric of a nation. In that way, it's not much different from the videos we see constantly on news sites and telecasts and social media. Of Jacob Blake, shot and left paralyzed in Kenosha, Wis., in late August. Of George Floyd, who died with his head pressed to the ground, pinned beneath the knee of a police officer, in late May. Of all the Black people we've seen before and since. That night I watched "The Boys," I also watched an NBC News collection from 2016 that packaged multiple police brutality videos together. One ran into another into another as I squinted at the screen, trying to make out what was happening in the muffled exchanges between blurry bodies. I felt a low, constant sense of suspense not the electric feeling of anticipating the drop of a roller coaster but the more everyday anxiety of, say, watching a pot on the stove, hoping your roiling, bubbling sauce won't spill over. The almost banal sense of fear that comes with being Black in America. Watching "The Boys" put me on edge, but to some extent I could shake off the anxiety. The acting, the camerawork, the artistic sheen of the series rendered these Black deaths visually indelible, but those elements also signaled the artifice of those scenes. I can still conjure them clearly in my mind, in part because of the cinematic choreography that went into creating a more stylized version of reality. My reaction to the videos of Black deaths, however, was the inverse; I don't remember the specifics of the scenes, but the sinking feeling remains. There was the subtle kick of adrenaline that quickened the tempo of my heart and set the engine of my imagination going, churning out scenarios in which I was stopped in the street or shot in my home. I considered my overwhelmingly white Brooklyn neighborhood and tried to recall how many Black people I had seen that day, wondering if they at any point felt targeted, if they were also sitting fearful and panicked in their homes. And yet we're so quick to share these videos and to comment. The media is quick to replay the murders in the interest of documenting the news. They appear on TV and they autoplay in news articles and social media feeds, accompanied by an obligatory trigger warning, as though that excused what is sometimes a mere commodification of horror. In pursuing a salient truth about our nation, there is danger of reducing these videos into spectacles: performances, strung together, divorced from the concrete reality of the situation. There is by now so much footage of Black deaths, so many videos, that the details have become blurry to me. Who reached for something? Who had hands in their pockets? Who gestured? Who slowly stepped forward? Who raised their arms into the air? The particulars are inconsequential or dangerous to the extent that they're used to explain away brutality, as though the victims were somehow at fault in their own executions. And yet they remind us that these were specific people killed within specific circumstances, not just names on a list or symbols of a movement. We call out, "Say their names," but doing so can become more reflexive than reflective. Having watched deaths both fictional and real that night, I was exhausted, no longer sure which were exposing a continuing national tragedy and which were exploiting it. That line is hazy and shifts from person to person, and perhaps from night to night. But I'll keep watching. Occasionally we need to pay the price of our contentment, with fiction that expands our understanding of racial injustice in America and with the firsthand videos that bear witness to it. Both may miss the mark at times, when they fail to consider the dignity of the victims as carefully as they do their own narratives or ratings. But we can't afford to look away.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Margaret Hoover, a conservative, and John Avlon, an independent, are television pundits who are married to each other. Quite happily, if a recent visit to their Gramercy Park apartment is any measure. Their telegenic union may be a lesson in overcoming the orthodoxies that divide us. Ms. Hoover, a former Fox News contributor who once scuffled with Bill O'Reilly when he got her name wrong ("I'm sorry, there's a lot of blondes in this operation, I can't keep you straight," he told her), is a great granddaughter of Herbert Hoover, the man who until recently was one of only two presidents who had never held previous public office to be ranked by some political scientists among the worst 10. (President Trump now shares that twofer.) She is also the new face of "Firing Line," the PBS talk show and playground of William F. Buckley Jr., the mischievous and polysyllabic conservative warrior who died in 2008. The show ran from 1966 to 1999. To compare the drawling, sprawling Mr. Buckley, whose performance style Norman Mailer once described as a combination of "commodore of the yacht club, Joseph Goebbels, Robert Mitchum, Maverick, Savonarola, the nice prep school kid next door, and the snows of yesteryear," with the diminutive, polite and well prepared Ms. Hoover, 40, is impossible, so let us move on. Their duplex apartment, part of a house once owned by Robert Winthrop Chanler, an Astor, artist and early 20th century bon vivant, is traditionally decorated and includes much Hoover abilia, like a sign that reads, "This Home is for Hoover because Hoover is for this Home." Visiting with the couple is a bit like hanging out with the members of a very good looking high school debate team warming up for a match. "He thinks the center right and the center left are so far aligned there should be some sort of centrist coalition," Ms. Hoover said. "I don't think that's an effective mechanism. But I'd be more than delighted for him to go do that. My focus continues to be on the two party system " Mr. Avlon broke in. "The party of James Madison," he said. "Hold on, you are mansplaining," his wife said. The pair met cute during Rudolph W. Giuliani's 2008 presidential bid. Mr. Avlon had been Mr. Giuliani's speechwriter when he was mayor, and came aboard to work on the campaign. Ms. Hoover, who had worked on George W. Bush's second campaign and in his White House, flew up from Washington to interview for the team. Before her arrival, Annie Dickerson, a Republican strategist, declared that Ms. Hoover was the woman Mr. Avlon would marry. When she walked into the offices, Mr. Avlon remembered, he was "struck by the totality of her." It was early summer, and fate threw in some thunderbolts an epic rainstorm that shut down New York City's airports. While a staffer tried to find Ms. Hoover lodging on the campaign team's meager budget, she and Mr. Avlon went out to dinner and argued over the institution of marriage, among other things. Ms. Hoover: "Marriage is terrible, it's for suckers." (She was in an unhappy relationship at the time.) Mr. Avlon: "Not if you find the right person." (He was single.) When no hotel rooms could be found, Mr. Avlon offered her his sofa. Really? "Really," she said. "I slept in my suit, though I needed a T shirt and a pillow." "Apparently I was being unchivalrous," Mr. Avlon said. "I just thought if I headed in that direction. ..." They stayed up late, still arguing, having moved on to his first book, "Independent Nation ." She thought its premise was "idiotic," she said. "You pick a party and you use the party mechanisms to get things done." Ms. Hoover took the book home with her, however, and vigorously marked up the margins. "Her notes were so good, it was literally, like, WRONG, underlined, everywhere," Mr. Avlon said. (Sadly that document from their courtship has gone missing.) On the subject of mixed marriages like theirs, James Carville, one half of another famously bipartisan couple, liked to say that such unions are feasible, but perhaps not advisable. Mr. Avlon reached for his wife's hand. "Love is a verb, it's not the flu," he said. "Margaret comes by her partisanship very honestly" meaning, she inherited it "and there is certainly tension because Republicanism is the family religion and she married outside the faith." Her husband broke in. "Democracy depends on the assumption of good will among its participants," he said. "Can I put in a little texture?" his wife said. "Most people aren't Republicans four generations down from a president. There's something really specific about being a Hoover and the pejorative term that was multigenerationally tethered to economic hard times, misery and antipathy for the struggles of ordinary people. Which is completely antithetical to the real story, which is that Herbert Hoover was an orphan who came from nothing and achieved international prominence by keeping a third of Europe alive." Ms. Hoover was referring to the 31st president's food relief efforts in Belgium after World War I, when he was still a private citizen. She is an energetic booster for her relative. Years ago, she wrote "American Individualism: How a New Generation of Conservatives Can Save the Republicans," a handbook for renovating the Republican Party (and his legacy). It pairs the tenets of Hooverism with a focus on millennials. Partisanship as a shield was also baked into her upbringing in Denver. "My dad always said we were Western conservatives," said Ms. Hoover, meaning a blend of Western individualism and a libertarian's approach to social issues. She came to Washington after Bryn Mawr (and a job at a law firm in Taiwan), hoping to find like minded Republicans. But she was put off by the social conservative policies championed by the younger Mr. Bush's circle. (Ms. Hoover is a founder of the American Unity Fund, which promotes gay rights as a tenet of conservatism.) Mr. Avlon, who grew up in New York City, is a grandchild of Greek immigrants. Their experiences have made him, he said, a proud patriot. He avoided Washington after Yale, and went to work for Mr. Giuliani because he believed that he could be more effective in city politics. Mr. Avlon is fond of quoting Fiorello LaGuardia: "There's no Democratic or Republican way of cleaning the streets." The Obama years strained the marriage, philosophically: Health care, the remedies for climate change and the Iran deal were particular sticking points. But President Trump has brought them together. It would appear that Ms. Hoover and Mr. Avlon, in their new roles, have pledged to turn the volume down, at least on television. "I'm not sure that's my role," Mr. Avlon said. "Well, hold on, you always say you want to shed light not heat," Ms. Hoover said. "You're right, sorry," he said. "The silver lining in this civic stress test," Mr. Avlon continued, meaning life under the Trump presidency, "is that we're going to roll up our sleeves and not treat our democracy as a spectator sport. This is not a drill." Ms. Hoover said, "I have more faith that our system can withstand a bad apple. You approach it like the house is on fire, but the house is not on fire. We have a fireball in the Oval Office, but the house is not burning." There was a lot more in this vein, but then Toula Lou, the couple's daughter, who is 2 and a half, woke up from her nap ready for a snack. (Their son Jack, 4 and a half, was at day camp nearby.) There are a few theories about why bipartisan marriages are often composed of a Democratic male and a Republican female. One is that Democratic men are more attractive.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
The choreographer Jack Cole has flown under the radar of American dance history. A pioneer of theatrical jazz onstage and on the screen and a performance coach to Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe he influenced the likes of Jerome Robbins, Alvin Ailey and Bob Fosse, yet we don't hear about him much. Beginning on Wednesday, Jan. 20, the Museum of Modern Art is bringing Cole's work to light with "All That Jack (Cole)," a two week film and lecture series organized with the dance critic Debra Levine, a Cole scholar. The lineup features 18 films to which Cole contributed, including "On the Riviera" (1951), "Down to Earth" (1947) and "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" (1953). Many of these will be introduced by Broadway and Hollywood guests, but for full context, attend Ms. Levine's talk, "All That Jack," on Saturday, Jan. 23 (with the dancer Carmen de Lavallade), or Jan. 25 (with the choreographer Grover Dale). She's an animated speaker who drives home the relevance of Cole's work, then and now. (moma.org.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Moroccan, Navajo or Tibetan? Flat weave or shag? These are a few of our favorite rug options at various prices. The actress Julianne Moore, the designer Jenna Lyons and the artists Brice and Helen Marden are among the stylish New Yorkers who have helped make these shaggy, generally diamond patterned carpets from North Africa one of the design world's biggest trends. Secret Berbere has its central location in North Central Morocco, with outposts in Madrid and Paris. The company ships some of the world's best Berber carpets worldwide for less than 4,000. That's a slightly better deal than you're likely to get from through Nazmiyal Antique Rugs in New York or Woven in Los Angeles. But those stores also have lush Beni Ourains in the 5,000 to 7,500 range. (Kat Maouche, in Portland, Ore., is another shop worth checking out.) Shoppers are sometimes frustrated by these carpets' sizes; because they are woven by nomadic tribespeople who sleep in long narrow tents, they seldom run wider than seven feet. That's why Ms. Lyons now has two side by side and Ms. Moore has two woven together for her West Village townhouse. Doris Leslie Blau, the Upper East Side emporium frequented by many top decorators, produces "contemporary Moroccans" in wider sizes (and at much higher prices). A few years ago, I strolled in one day and encountered a saleswoman whose first question was if I was "working with an interior designer." A few months later, a number of these carpets were wholesaled through an auction house that specializes in modern design. For two decades, Fort Street Studio and Joseph Carini Carpets (formerly Carini Lang) have sold carpets to practically every celebrity in the 100 million club. Both firms produce hand knotted rugs with handsome geometric prints, both work largely in silk and wool silk blends, and both offer living room rugs for upward of 20,000, customizing their signature designs to a customer's preferences. Madonna and Brad Pitt, each of whom have multiple homes, own carpets from both. Dolma, a Tibetan rug showroom on Lafayette Street in New York, has a similar aesthetic to Fort Street Studio and Carini, but is far less expensive. Its offerings don't have the same tapestry like effect as the higher end places, but the silver plush rugs (around 5,000) still look beautiful underneath sofas and chairs from every era. They are also slightly less likely to make your apartment look as if it's been "done" by an interior designer. Still looking for a rug like the ones made in 17th century Iran? Want to flash your wealth like Paul Manafort or Adnan Khashoggi? For decades, these intricately woven Middle Eastern carpets were standard operating procedure among masters of the Western universe. Then things got more informal, and the market became flooded with high quality fakes. Today, Persian masterworks can still be found through Peter Pap Oriental Rugs, based out of Dublin, N.H., as well as Nazmiyal Antique Rugs, Beauvais Carpets (both in Manhattan) and Mansour (Los Angeles). Prices generally start around 20,000, said Jason Nazmiyal, an owner of Nazmiyal Antique Rugs and go up, and up. Prices there tend to be far lower than at retail. And thanks to sites like Live Auctioneers and Invaluable, which aggregate the listings of auction houses in a format similar to eBay, the process of acquiring great, collectible design has been democratized, making middleman sites like 1stdibs less necessary. The downside to buying at auction is that you can't return. Either way, a Swedish carpet by the prominent designers Barbro Nilsson, Marta Maas Fjetterstrom and Marianne Richter will cost a lot. "All of them are signed," Jason Nazmiyal said. "These are so trendy. The prices are going up so much. It's ridiculous." A black and white banded kilim from Mazandaran (an Iranian province by the Caspian Sea) is a folkloric carpet whose slightly uneven lines will juxtapose nicely with sleek Hans Wegner chairs and B B Italia sofas. So will a Tuareg, a straw and leather mat that's gone from the mosques of Mauritania (where worshipers use them as prayer mats) to Manhattan hot spots like the Ace Hotel. Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber had one in their dining room. Christian Louboutin has one at his vacation home near Aswan, Egypt. These carpets give a room a masculine edge, even if walking barefoot on them is barely more fun than traipsing around cobblestone in five inch heels. Some of the best ones can be had for as little as 1,500.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
The N.F.L. on Thursday canceled its annual Hall of Fame Game, an exhibition scheduled for Aug. 6, so players and coaches grappling with restrictions related to the coronavirus pandemic could have more time to prepare for the regular season, which, for now, is still set to begin Sept. 10. The decision, by team owners in an ad hoc teleconference, gave the league flexibility to push back, if needed, the start of training camps. Starting in late July, teams are expected to begin welcoming players to their facilities. The league and the players' union are also discussing other measures, including further trimming the preseason schedule, which consists of four games per team. Still, Roger Goodell, the league commissioner, said the N.F.L. was committed to starting the regular season on time and, if allowed by state and local officials, having fans in the seats at games. The most immediate hurdle, though, is preparing for training camps. While the league has established safety protocols that have allowed front office members and coaches to return to their offices, the N.F.L. and the N.F.L. Players Association have not agreed on a set of guidelines, including testing and quarantines, to govern the return of players. "Obviously, there's a lot more to do," Goodell said. None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. Allen Sills, the league's chief medical officer, said in a conference call with reporters after the meeting that the N.F.L. was in "very active discussions" with the players' union on screening, travel and a "very ambitious" testing program, though "testing alone is not going to be sufficient to keep everyone healthy." "This is all about risk reduction," he added. "We know we can't eliminate risk." Unlike other professional leagues whose seasons were interrupted by the pandemic in March, the N.F.L. has been able to conduct most of its normal off season activities, including free agency, the draft and off season workouts, remotely rather than in person. The league did, however, cancel its annual meeting in late March and has said its slate of regular season games overseas will be moved back to the United States. Training camps will be particularly critical this year because coaches were not able to work directly with new draft picks, players acquired via trades, free agents invited to work out and other new players in April and June. The new collective bargaining agreement that was signed in mid March allows teams to add two players, increasing the roster size to 55 from 53. The union and the league are discussing the possibility of increasing the size of rosters even more to make it easier to find substitutes for players who are infected with the coronavirus and must go into quarantine. Teams must report to training camp 47 days before their first regular season game. For the Kansas City Chiefs and the Houston Texans, who open the season on Sept. 10, that means reporting on July 25. Other teams would be required to start training camp by July 28. The league has said that to maintain competitive balance, all teams must open training camp at the same time. Doing so may mean pushing back the start of training camp because the number of infections has been rising in several states, including Arizona, Florida and Texas, that host N.F.L. teams. The number of players who have been infected is also growing. Ezekiel Elliott, the Cowboys' star running back, confirmed that he tested positive for the coronavirus this month. Other members of the Cowboys, as well as staff members and players from the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Houston Texans, the Los Angeles Rams and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, have also reportedly tested positive. Von Miller, the star linebacker on the Denver Broncos, said in April that he had tested positive, while New Orleans Saints Coach Sean Payton also tested positive. Some players, including Tampa Bay quarterback Tom Brady, have been flouting the union's social distancing recommendations by practicing in groups without wearing personal protective equipment, or P.P.E. On Thursday, Brady posted a photo of a workout to his Instagram account with a paraphrased quotation from Franklin D. Roosevelt that read, "Only thing we have to fear, is fear itself." Alarmed by rising infection rates and informal practices, the players' union's medical director, Thom Mayer, sent a message to players last week urging them not to participate in group workouts during the off season. While other leagues, like the N.B.A. and M.L.S., plan for players, coaches and staff to live and work in an enclosed community, the N.F.L. has announced no such plans. Anthony S. Fauci, the country's highest ranking specialist in infectious diseases, cast doubt on the N.F.L.'s approach.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
LIKE many inventors, Bob Nepper, 82, is a compulsive improver. Mr. Nepper, an electrical engineer who lives in North St. Paul, Minn., has pet projects that have included a self guided lawn mower and an outside faucet that can run hot and cold. His basement is stocked with tools like a lathe and a milling machine to craft his ideas. But Mr. Nepper, who retired from the 3M Company decades ago, is most obsessed with building a low cost way to purify water in the world's poorest countries. "I've had sympathy for having a lack of clean water," said Mr. Nepper, who grew up on a farm. "There is such a need for it." With that memory for inspiration, Mr. Nepper gets together with Bill Stevenson, a fellow humanitarian inventor and retired 3M engineer, a few times a week to find new ways to purify water. One includes a solar powered pasteurizer that missionary groups took to Haiti. Another is a device that indicates water is hot enough to be pasteurized, and it can be used with a solar oven. Whether as volunteers or for profit, older inventors like Mr. Nepper are riding a rising tide of American innovation. They are teaming up, joining inventors clubs and getting their products into the marketplace. And older inventors bring valuable skills to their work, many experts say, like worldly wisdom and problem solving abilities that can give them an advantage over younger inventors. "There's a boom in inventions by people over 50," said John Calvert, executive director of the United Inventors Association. Over 60 percent of the association's members are older, he added, so they also have more time for inventing. Besides clubs, more innovation friendly spaces are also popping up to help. Maker spaces, where people build things or even brainstorm for ideas, welcome older inventors. And start ups like Quirky, which helps inventors commercialize their work, has developed over 400 products, including ones by older inventors. "Today's 50 plus crowd is more educated, active and mobile," said Louis J. Foreman, chief executive of Edison Nation, which helps independent inventors get their ideas licensed and into the marketplace. "They're coming up with solutions" to problems "that face people every day." One example, he said, is a doctor who came up with a knee brace for overuse injuries, which was later licensed. An innovation hungry marketplace is driving the need for more inventors especially as baby boomers hunt for products that can help them as they age. Josh Scharf, 62, creates smart living products for baby boomers. Mr. Scharf, an industrial designer, now has his own company after being a consultant for many years. One of Mr. Scharf's patented products is called PathLights, an automatic light system for stairs and hallways that helps people see better at night. "Good ideas are ageless," said Mr. Scharf, who lives in Short Hills, N.J. "But I also know manufacturing, and how to get things done." Expansive knowledge of the invention process is not a necessity. A bubbling imagination is all you need, said Warren Tuttle, president of the board of the United Inventors Association. "Some inventors drop out of high school," he said, "and some are Ph.Ds." Women, he added, are incredibly creative because they see the benefit of a product and then work backward to make it. Older inventors can better focus on a project, though, Mr. Tuttle said. "When some people meet rejection," he adds, "they give up. So you need lots of stick to itiveness." Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' Dr. Gary Small, professor of psychiatry and director of the UCLA Longevity Center, agreed that aging had its advantages. "Everyone thinks that aging is a negative process," he said. "But that's not necessarily the case. An aging brain can see patterns better." Mr. Nepper has a basement workshop filled with devices and tools he uses to design and build his inventions. Angela Jimenez for The New York Times The mental stimulation that goes with inventing also strengthens the brain, Dr. Small said. Short term memory does decline, he said, but people become more empathetic as they get older. "And this is an essential ingredient in creating products for others," he added, "so you can see what an audience needs." Lifelong learning also lowers the risk for dementia, Dr. Small said. To stimulate creative juices that can lead to inventions, he advises scheduling creative time or trying new things. "People who are great inventors observe the world and take it in," he said. For example, James E. West, 84, obtained 11 patents when he was over 60 and is an inventor of the electret microphone, a microphone that uses a permanently charged material to eliminate the need for a power supply. "Anyone can be equally inventive at 75 as at 40," said Mr. West, who is in the National Inventors Hall of Fame. "It's having the time to bring ideas to fruition." Inventing, Mr. West added, is a natural function of the mind that anyone can do. "And it improves the quality of life for people," he said. "Bringing something new into the world is exciting and extremely rewarding." But inventing does not guarantee a golden payday. Only 2 to 3 percent of all inventors make any money from their inventions, experts said. One big reason, they said, is that there are many real world issues to solve first. Creating a prototype can cost thousands of dollars and take several months. And the patent approval process can take years, said Thomas W. Galvani, a patent lawyer in Phoenix. It can cost 5,000 to 15,000 and even then a patent may be denied. Mr. Nepper, for example, has no patents in his name because it's too expensive. And he acknowledges that getting a product to market is difficult. "Yet filing a patent on your own can be a fatal mistake," said Mr. Galvani, "since there are a number of technical requirements." Spending lots of time on product development can send people over the bankruptcy cliff, said Mr. Tuttle of the inventors association. "They may spend too much time on prototypes," he said. "Or they may make thousands of products that can't be sold." Mr. Tuttle himself lost nearly 100,000 and two years of his life creating an automatic pot stirring device called StirChef that did not sell well. "I put my family at risk and nearly lost everything." Mr. Tuttle's advice: Start small and take the inventing process one step at a time. Some inventors, awash with inventions with no home, turn to intermediaries like Edison Nation instead. Their profits may be much slimmer, though. Edison Nation inventors who get their products licensed reap 50 percent of the licensing fees. However, there are many steps in the process. The product is reviewed by a team and then presented to Edison Nation's large stable of partners. If one says yes, Edison Nation acquires, licenses and usually obtains the patents for the product. Submitting ideas is relatively inexpensive. Edison Nation charges 25 to evaluate a product, and Quirky takes free submissions. Franklin Ramsey, who lives in Charlotte, N.C., invented a trash can several years ago that holds bags in place, after helping his wife with her janitorial business. For Mr. Ramsey, 76, hiring a patent lawyer and producing and marketing a product meant spending lots of money. So, Mr. Ramsey took his newfangled trash can to "shady companies to get it commercialized," he said. He ended up paying one company 13,000. "But they didn't get a patent or even market my product," he said. "I got no value." Then Mr. Ramsey, who was a corporate pilot before he retired, turned to Edison Nation, which serves as a conduit between inventors and retailers. His trash can was licensed to Simplehuman and other companies, patented and branded as Pressix. More than 6.7 million trash cans with Pressix technology have been sold. Mr. Ramsey still receives royalty payments. Mr. Ramsey is a born inventor. "If I buy something and it doesn't work, I take notice," he said. "I always keep my mind open."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Roughly 5,300 years ago, a group of ancient sheep herders in East Africa began an extraordinary effort to care for their dead. It was a time of great upheaval in their homeland. Global climate changes had weakened the African monsoon system, causing a significant drop in rainfall. Pastoralism spread south from the Sahara . What is now known as Lake Turkana in northern Kenya shrank by half over the succeeding centuries. These early herders dug through about 1,000 square feet of beach sands down to bedrock and gouged out burial pits. They interred their dead there: the bodies of men, women and children of all ages, many with personal items and ornamentation. When the crevices they had dug into the bedrock filled up, the herders piled bodies on top of the pits, carefully placing large rocks over the heads and torso of each corpse. They did this for about 700 years, burying at least 580 people and perhaps 1,000 in all, according to a study published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Then, for reasons scientists don't understand, at about the same time that Lake Turkana stopped shrinking, the people decided to stop burying their dead this way. The pit wasn't yet full. But the herders covered it over with pebbles and then, to mark the spot, somehow managed to drag a dozen giant basalt pillars to the site from a kilometer or more away. "Once the landscape was stabilized, perhaps these social anchors became less important," said Elisabeth Hildebrand, the paper's lead author and an associate professor of anthropology at Stony Brook University in New York . The place, now called the Lothagam North Pillar Site, was never used as a burial site again, and lay virtually undisturbed until an international team of researchers, led by Dr. Hildebrand and Katherine Grillo, an assistant professor at the University of Florida, Gainesville, began to examine it. There are five other sites around the lake with similar pillar markings, and previous research by another group suggests that at least one of them was also used as a monumental cemetery. The new paper covers the results of digging deep into and at the fringes of the site during the summers of 2012, 2013 and 2014. The researchers also used ground penetrating radar surveys to examine its dimensions. This idea turns on its head the longstanding notion that it was only after people urbanized that they became organized enough to build complex structures, like cemeteries , sa id Susan McIntosh, a professor of anthropology at Rice University in Houston, who was not involved in the research. "In archaeology, we used to think we understood that monumental constructions were associated with sedentism and food and or labor surpluses commandeered by elites," Dr. McIntosh said. "This was part of mainstream narratives about the 'rise of civilization.'" But excavations of sites like Lothagam North, Gobekli Tepe in Turkey and Poverty Point in Louisiana show that ancient mobile populations could also build monumental works, Dr. McIntosh said. The burial site also indicated the lack of an apparent hierarchy. "This truly was a place that accommodated all ages and life stages," Dr. Hildebrand said. "It wasn't reserved for a chosen few or people of special high status. Everybody was accommodated there." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Most were buried with ornamentation, including an infant who wore an ostrich eggshell bracelet. One man was buried with a headdress decorated with what researchers figured out were 400 carefully arranged gerbil teeth. He probably wore the headdress during life. Digging up these remains wasn't easy. Lake Turkana is very remote today, as it likely was in ancient times, Dr. Grillo said. It's also extremely sunny and windy, making excavations of fragile bones quite tricky, said Susan Pfeiffer, an emeritus professor at the University of Toronto, who served as the team's senior bioarchaeologist. The bones disintegrated when exposed to bright sunlight, and the windy conditions made it tricky to keep the dig area shaded, she said. The team has stopped digging at the site to avoid disturbing any more remains, although they hope to dig at several of the other pillar sites around the lake, Dr. Grillo said. Herders who live in the area today are not descended from these ancient cemetery builders and do not view them as their ancestors, she said. But Dr. Hildebrand is now concerned about the future of the pillar sites. She and others on the team have been working with local residents, as well as the Kenyan national museum, to preserve Lothagam North. "Before, the site was naturally protected from human threats by its own distance," she said. "Now, many more people have motorbikes."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
The actress Anna Chlumsky held up a bottle of Jo Malone's Peony Blush Suede cologne in one hand and a bottle of Wood Sage Sea Salt cologne in the other. "Which one smells more like the first female president?" she said. Ms. Chlumsky, 37, was spending a bright December afternoon shopping for Christmas presents in the West Village. She had already chosen Swedish moccasins "for the main people who will be in my house around the tree," she said, and had put aside clothes, books and ornaments for her two young daughters, dodging some tricky Santa questions from the 4 year old. But other relatives and friends still needed gifts. And since Ms. Chlumsky was about to go into rehearsals for "Cardinal," an Off Broadway play at Second Stage's Tony Kiser Theater, this was the day to buy them. Well, she would know. She plays Amy Brookheimer, the female president's hassled chief of staff, on the HBO comedy "Veep." Ms. Chlumsky has racked up five supporting actress Emmy nominations during the shows' six seasons. ("Veep" is on hiatus while its star, Julia Louis Dreyfus, undergoes treatment for breast cancer.) Amy, a business casual vortex of frayed nerves and tensed neck muscles, is not especially good at self care. In one episode, she flees a spa after seven agonizing minutes. Her preferred chill out: screaming in a parking garage. Just about every role Ms. Chlumsky takes on, from Vada in the 1991 weepie "My Girl" to Lydia, the tightly wound urban visionary in "Cardinal," is similarly intense. Ms. Chlumsky has some of that same maelstrom energy even on her downtime. So it was at least a little disconcerting to hear her ooh and aah over emollient bath oils. She began the afternoon at Diptyque on Bleecker Street. She had just come from a Metropolitan Opera Guild luncheon honoring the soprano Renee Fleming, her co star in the Broadway comedy "Living on Love," and was still wearing a red and blue Cynthia Rowley dress with crochet details. Underneath a chandelier made of upcycled votives, she poked at some scent diffusers, quizzed a saleswoman on how to remove wax from glass and read the label of a foaming body wash in a snooty French accent. Ms. Chlumsky does a very good snooty French accent. Mostly she followed her nose. Scents are important to her. She used to change her perfume every time she had "an identity crisis," she said, and now wears the One by Dolce Gabbana. "What's crazy is I even had an identity crisis having my second baby and it still works," she said. At Diptyque, a pine and mint candle tempted her. So did a fiery citrus scent. "Oh my gosh, that's stunning," she said. At home she tends to burn earthier scents, like sandalwood or vetiver, to help her relax. Relaxation is a new thing for her, "something I've embraced in the last post partum therapy I went through," she said. She selected a box of five small votives for a couple on her list, and for a childhood friend, a hunk of solid rose perfume. "Look how gorgeous," she said. That smoky citrus candle made its way into her bag, too, alongside a complimentary tuberose votive. No one seemed to recognize Ms. Chlumsky (her credit cards are under a different name), but she has a big, busy smile and a ready laugh and everyone wanted to give her stuff. She walked a block or two, trading the pocket Versailles of Diptyque for the mini Swinging London of Jo Malone, pausing on the way to collect a sample of face cream from a man standing in the door of Orogold Cosmetics and a smear of body butter from a table outside Radiance.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Sign up for the weekly Science Times email. We've never been closer to the moon. Even though humans have not been there for decades, our understanding of our lunar neighbor has never been better. But our ability to really know our moon was not always this easy. The beginning of the moon race in 1959 offered our first real glimpses of the surface, with Soviet probes sending the first close up pictures back to Earth. We inched closer with the Apollo 8 flyby in 1968. No humans had ever been so near. For the first time, our view was swapped it was the pockmarked lunar surface in the foreground, and our blue speckled Earth in the distance. Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. For millenniums the moon was a thing of legend. People believed that it controlled our moods, our behaviors and even our destinies. This divine assignment found its way into myths, literature and, of course, art. "Both before and after the invention of the telescope, artists and amateur astronomers were looking at the moon, interpreting what they saw, and trying to reconcile this with religious and philosophical beliefs at the time," says David Bardeen, an art historian at the University of California, Los Angeles. "Art helped negotiate all of the questions that were being raised." One of the oldest portrayals of the moon was made at the height of the Bronze Age. The two dimensional sculpture, forged from metal and gold, is called the Nebra Sky Disk because of where it was discovered in Germany. It dates to 1600 B.C. and is one of the oldest known depictions of the cosmos. Art historians believe it was probably an astronomical tool, hinting at how some Bronze Age cultures kept watch on the sky. To the East and many centuries later, the crescent moon appeared in a sculpture called the Stele of Nabonidus. In ancient Babylon, King Nabonidus worshiped the moon god, called Sin, represented as the crescent moon. The king even gestures upward as a mark of his devotion. This piece dates to the sixth century B.C., during the last neo Babylonian era, when religious worship of the moon was common. Many older pieces, like this stele, connect the moon to a deity. But as technology developed, our relationship to the moon began to change. In fall 1609, Galileo Galilei used his new telescope to look at the moon from the hills of Tuscany. The object he had before seen only with his eyes suddenly became more complex. Originally trained as an artist, he grabbed watercolors and his notebook and painted the surface of the moon over a few months, documenting how the shadows changed and the light collected in craters of different sizes. Soon after, he published these drawings in a journal called "Sidereus Nuncius" with support of the Medici family in Florence. This astronomical treatise was then widely distributed, making visual access to the moon's surface available to some for the first time in history. Suddenly, in Galileo's watercolors, the austere lunar facade was filled with valleys and craters, making Earth and the moon more similar than previously imagined. Although Galileo revealed that the moon was not merely a smooth, featureless orb, artists continued finding symbolic meanings in our lunar neighbor. "Artists use the moon symbolically, but the ways in which they paint it often bear little relationship to scientific discoveries," Caroline Campbell, director of research at the National Gallery in London, said. "The moon is a very powerful way of showing the 'other.' Something alien and different." Nearly three centuries after Galileo, a Japanese woodblock artist, Taiso Yoshitoshi, created a series of prints called "One Hundred Aspects of the Moon." At a time when Western influence was high, Yoshitoshi made a concerted effort to bring Japanese and Chinese lunar myths back into popular art. One of his most famous pieces, "Cassia Tree Moon (Tsuki no Katsura)," depicts Wu Gang of the Han dynasty, who abused his power after becoming fluent in Taoist magic. As punishment he is sentenced for eternity to chop down the cassia trees that grow on the moon. Once removed with his giant ax, they would immediately grow back. The full transition of the moon in the Western imagination from light source, to a symbol, into simply an object of nature to be documented may have been completed in the 19th century with what is perhaps the most famous depiction of the night sky. In 1889, Vincent van Gogh admired the moon through his bedroom window at the asylum at St. Remy de Provence. "Starry Night" is almost an overwhelming dance of brush strokes, like starlight that has been smeared and animated. But as if it were the only static object in the night sky, the crescent moon rests in the upper right of the painting. While wholly unrealistic, van Gogh's impression of the natural world manages to not only invoke a real sense of what the night sky looked like, but also how it felt to see it. This is one of the first major works of art that provides us with a sense of the night without relying on myth or religious symbols. Earlier in the same century, the moon started to be an object for the imagination to explore.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Update: An 18 year old Texas man was arrested on Wednesday in the fatal shooting of Eddie Hassell. Eddie Hassell, an actor best known for a recurring role on the NBC show "Surface" and the movie "The Kids Are All Right," died Sunday after being shot in Texas, according to his representative. He was 30. Mr. Hassell was shot outside his girlfriend's apartment in Grand Prairie, a Dallas suburb, around 1 a.m., according to the representative, Alan Mills. He was shot in the abdomen and taken to a nearby hospital, where he died, Mr. Mills said. Police officers responded to the scene of the shooting around 1:50 a.m. local time and found Mr. Hassell wounded by gunfire, Mark Beseda, a spokesman for the Grand Prairie Police Department, said in an email. Officers administered first aid and Mr. Hassell was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead, Mr. Beseda said. The police were investigating possible motives for the shooting, Mr. Beseda said. A car that was taken from the scene was later recovered, he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
OAKLAND, Calif. Facebook said on Thursday that it would allow many employees to work from home permanently. But there's a catch: They may not be able to keep their big Silicon Valley salaries in more affordable parts of the country. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, told workers during a staff meeting that was livestreamed on his Facebook page that within a decade as many as half of the company's more than 48,000 employees would work from home. "It's clear that Covid has changed a lot about our lives, and that certainly includes the way that most of us work," Mr. Zuckerberg said. "Coming out of this period, I expect that remote work is going to be a growing trend as well." Facebook's decision, the first among tech's biggest companies, is a stark change for a business culture built around getting workers into giant offices and keeping them there. Using free shuttle buses, free cafeterias and personal services like dry cleaning, tech companies have done as much as possible over the years to give employees little reason to go home, let alone avoid the office. If other giant companies follow suit, tech employment could start to shift away from expensive hubs like Silicon Valley, Seattle and New York. The option to work from home could also provide more reason for tech workers who complain that their enviable salaries still aren't enough to buy a home in San Francisco or San Jose to consider settling in other parts of the country. Mr. Zuckerberg's announcement followed similar decisions at Twitter and the payments company Square, both led by Jack Dorsey. Mr. Dorsey said last week that employees at his companies would be allowed to work from home indefinitely. At Google, employees have been told they can work from home through the end of the year, but the company has not made any indications about permanent plans. There are signs that remote work is popular among technologists. After Mr. Dorsey's announcement, Google searches for "Twitter jobs" spiked, according to Google Trends. Aaron Levie, the chief executive of the business technology company Box, wrote on Twitter that "the push happening around remote work is as game changing for the future of tech as the launch of the iPhone" more than a decade ago. Still, the biggest tech companies were trying to expand beyond their main offices before the pandemic, as an older generation of companies like Intel had done. Amazon, for example, intends to open a second headquarters in Virginia. The coronavirus pandemic could accelerate those plans. "Before the virus happened, a lot of the discussion about the tech sector was about how to bring people to work sites and create affordable housing," said Robert Silverman, a professor of urban and regional planning at the State University of New York at Buffalo. "This is kind of a natural progression." An employee exodus from the biggest urban tech hubs, combined with layoffs, could have dramatic local impacts. Housing costs in the Bay Area, for example, have fallen since the pandemic began, according to the rental firm Zumper. Rents in San Francisco fell 7 percent in April, and were down 15 percent in Menlo Park, Facebook's home. Mr. Zuckerberg long worried that employees who worked remotely would lose productivity. Facebook once provided cash bonuses to employees who lived within 10 miles of its headquarters. In 2018, Facebook expanded its main campus with elaborate new offices designed by the star architect Frank Gehry, including a 3.6 acre roof garden with more than 200 trees. Just last year, Facebook started moving into a 43 story office tower that it had leased in San Francisco, and the company is still reportedly in talks for a significant office expansion in New York, as well. In March, the coronavirus lockdown forced companies to send employees home. Many tech companies, including Facebook, emptied their offices before local shelter in place orders. Now, more than two months later, executives are discovering that their remote workers performed better than expected. Mr. Zuckerberg said employees remained focused even though they were working from home. The Landscape of the Post Pandemic Return to Office None Delta variant delays. A wave of the contagious Delta variant is causing companies to reconsider when they will require employees to return, and what health requirements should be in place when they do. A generation gap. While workers of all ages have become accustomed to dialing in and skipping the wearying commute, younger ones have grown especially attached to the new way of doing business. This is causing some difficult conversations between managers and newer hires. How to keep offices safe. Handwashing is a simple way to reduce the spread of disease, but employers should be thinking about improved ventilation systems, creative scheduling and making sure their building is ready after months of low use. Return to work anxiety. Remote work brought many challenges, particularly for women of color. But going back will also mean a return to microaggressions, pressure to conform to white standards of professionalism, and high rates of stress and burnout. Facebook will begin by allowing new hires who are senior engineers to work remotely, and then allow current employees to apply for permission to work from home if they have positive performance reviews. Starting in January, Facebook's employee compensation will be adjusted based on the cost of living in the locations where workers choose to live. Facebook will make sure employees are honest about their location by checking where they log in to internal systems from, he said. Mr. Zuckerberg said the shift could offer more benefits than inconveniences for the company. Allowing remote work will allow Facebook to broaden its recruitment, retain valuable employees, reduce the climate impact caused by commutes and expand the diversity of its work force, Mr. Zuckerberg said. So far, Facebook, Square and Twitter are being far more aggressive than their counterparts in the industry. Their work is mostly done in software code, which can be handled remotely. At Apple, on the other hand, many employees are hardware engineers who need to be in the company's lab, particularly because of the company's secrecy around its products. Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive, said in April that the company's main office in Silicon Valley would be closed until at least June and has not updated that timeline. Start ups could also find it difficult to manage a remote work force. Allowing workers to live in the Midwest could keep costs down, but Silicon Valley has a giant talent pool from which start ups draw their workers. Also, many venture capitalists, mostly based in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, expect the companies they invest in to be based nearby.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
The FX show "The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story" has explored issues of race, celebrity and the 24 hour news cycle. On Tuesday night, in the sixth episode, "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia," the series examines gender discrimination, and the withering scrutiny that the prosecutor Marcia Clark faced during the trial. Earlier this year, I spoke to Sarah Paulson about her surprisingly sympathetic performance of Ms. Clark, and about Tuesday night's episode specifically. Here are the highlights, which have been edited and condensed for clarity. How She Viewed Marcia Clark During the 1990s I have this strange feeling of guilt. I was only 19 at the time, but my 41 year old self feels guilt that I, as a woman, and more women during the time of the trial, did not rally around her more. The idea that a woman who was very strong, who wore maybe shorter skirts than people thought was appropriate, had a bad haircut, didn't wear a lot of makeup, looked a little tired because she was raising a 3 and 5 year old and was going through a divorce and was trying the trial of the century, should be taken to task for her lack of concealer and her bad haircut? As a woman, to think that she would be scrutinized and persecuted like that, it was like a witch trial. The big thing for me was how wrong I was about her. It's not even thoughts I formulated on my own. I allowed myself to believe what was told to me. I thought, "I don't like her hair, she does seem awfully tough, why doesn't she smile more?" I had a 19 year old's brain, so I'll cut myself a little bit of slack. But anyone who was 30 or 40 or 50, I don't understand why they weren't protecting her more as one of their own and to say: Let's not talk about what she's wearing. On the Public's Criticisms of Ms. Clark People weren't talking about her skill in the courtroom. That was ancillary to the bigger conversation about her: her looks. I don't think women saw her as one of them. She's the kind of woman nobody wants to be: hard, strident, aggressive, ambitious. All those negative words. Why does ambition have to be a negative word? It's never a negative word when associated with a man. I think all she was doing was her job. Marcia didn't want to change her clothes. She was instructed to. She was told to. At a certain point you go, "I guess if this is going to help a guilty man be sentenced appropriately, I guess I'll do it." About That New Hairstyle... I remember when we shot that, I remember walking in, not having a plan what I was going to do. I walked in thinking I looked pretty good. And then Judge Ito says, "Welcome, Ms. Clark, I think," and there was this tittering of laughter behind me and from the defense table. All of these men. And I burst into tears. I could feel the temperature in my neck rising, I could feel the color change in my face. I remember thinking,"I don't know how she did this." It was one of those rare things that happens where sometimes you've gone enough in that person that you would have had the same reaction that they had. I couldn't have planned that as an actress in a conscious or cognitive way that's like: "Now you should cry here." It's just what I felt. It was a combination of what I felt as Marcia playing it, and as a woman, I felt incredibly exposed. It was like standing in a room full of strangers with no clothes on. It was very upsetting. We had shot a lot of that episode already. That episode was full of one pummel after another that she had to endure. I emailed her. I told her,"I can't even tell you how much I respect how you handled yourself during all this. You were being pushed and pulled by so many people to be so many people. Anybody but you. What a horrible idea that for the first time in your life you are thrust onto a national stage, and you're told: 'This? The way you look, the way you are, the way you present, we don't like it.' " All you're trying to do was to put a man who you believe viciously murdered two people one of them he was beating for years and years with no repercussions and put your feet on the ground every day while raising a 3 and a 5 year old? And going through a divorce. It made my head spin. The fact she was able to do that was unbelievable. I think I might have cried a little. She was perfectly punctual. Her voice was a few octave voices higher than the footage I watched because she finally quit smoking. It's a very surreal thing to immerse yourself in this world where there is so much archival footage to draw upon. I could watch her facial expression, her reactions to things and I could imagine what she must have been thinking. I could see when she took a breath, I could see when she moved her hand. It was so odd to do so much research, and then I was sitting with her and I could actually talk to her. We had dinner for four hours.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
The boathouse on Lake Halla at Stedsans in the Woods. Going to the Swedish Woods to Live an Instagram Fairy Tale The story of Stedsans in the Woods, as told on Instagram, reads like a modern day fairy tale: a rural retreat deep in the forest of southern Sweden where the sun is always setting over a lake, campfire gatherings glow nightly, and every meal is a nourishing Nordic feast of food foraged and farm raised. The wholesome appeal of this remote utopia among pines and old growth oaks beckons through even the smallest of digital screens. But is social media enough to convince anyone to drive hours for a night in the woods? Before opening in the summer of 2017, Stedsans in the Woods was a pie in the sky project dreamed up by Mette Helbak and Flemming Hansen. In 2016, the Danish couple closed their Copenhagen restaurant, Stedsans OsterGRO, and uprooted their family from the Danish capital to plant new roots in Sweden. The destination: 17 wooded acres next to Lake Halla, about three hours north of Copenhagen. The nearest town of even modest size is more than 25 miles away. "Stedsans has always been a communication project , " said Ms. Helbak, a cook, stylist and cookbook author, who explained that the name, in Danish, which means "a sense of location, a sense of where you are," conveys the importance of place in the couple's philosophy. "When it was craziest, we actually had people from every single continent except for Antarctica working here at the same time," said Mr. Hansen. "People from Venezuela, Chile, the U.S., Canada, Mali, Iran, different places in Europe, Taiwan, New Zealand and Australia." Today the property has evolved into a rambling nature retreat with Bedouin tents and minimalist wooden cabins, as well as a restaurant powered solely by fire and supplied mainly by what's found in the woods and grown in the gardens. "In the forest, it's amazing to see how you have food around without having to do anything at all," Ms. Helbak said. The staff is a multinational coterie of volunteers, interns and young idealists who farm, forage, cook, serve and construct most of the resort each season, and the atmosphere hovers somewhere between summer camp and commune. Many of the workers view shoes as an unnecessary encumbrance, and guests are encouraged to follow suit; signs posted outside the cabins read, "Walking barefoot reduces stress and boosts immunity" (an unverified claim). And what's lacking at Stedsans namely electricity and running water is considered part of the appeal. This is a place to disconnect from the larger world and reconnect with nature. (When she calls, there are outdoor compost toilets.) Both Ms. Helbak and Mr. Hansen are quick to admit that life in the woods is never as tidy as social media suggests. There was the first summer when, Ms. Helbak said, "we were up to our knees in mud," and warned guests to bring rubber boots. And last summer, Ms. Helbak moved off the property to a nearby village, a difficult decision precipitated in part by the imminent arrival of the couple's third daughter. Like many guests, the first interaction that I had with Stedsans was on Instagram. I had admired the wooden A frame sauna floating on the lake. I had scrolled past colorful flower dusted salads served in the rustic restaurant. I had clicked on images of the cozy, carefully styled cabins. What Instagram didn't show me were the bugs. Fat flies swarming over the breakfast table, clouds of gnats at dusk, creeping spiders, buzzing mosquitoes and ferocious little black biting flies that Swedes call knott. But let me assure you, they're there. On two separate occasions last summer, I journeyed from my apartment in Stockholm to Stedsans in the Woods via Copenhagen admittedly, not the most direct route driving hours through southern Sweden to the forest retreat. On my second visit, a Saturday in late June, my husband steered our rental car down a long, gravel road lined with birch trees. At the end of the road, a hand painted sign indicated that we'd reached our destination. It was the beginning of a heat wave that would scorch Sweden all summer, but the surrounding fields and forests were still mostly green. The trail was an immediate immersion into the forest, winding through dense underbrush and across wooden planks a perilous obstacle course for any guest who over packs. After about 10 minutes crunching twigs and dodging branches, we caught sight of the lake peeking through the trees. Another sign in loopy script pointed the way to the cabins, sauna, outdoor showers and restaurant. Cabin No. 2 was similar to the others: a simple, fir wood hut with a steep sloping roof, sheepskins on the floor, a comfortable bed piled with blankets, and floor to ceiling windows facing the forest. There were candles, basic side tables, two organic cotton towels and little else in the snug space. But what more does one need? After dropping our backpacks and applying bug spray (it was not my first visit), we strolled to the blackened timber boathouse by the lake where the other guests had begun to gather. Bottles of sparkling cider were uncorked on a bench a self service cocktail hour accompanied by bites from the garden: curls of parsnip, crisp cucumber and crumbles of salty cheese from a small dairy in the nearby town of Falkenberg. While others took fishing rods out in a canoe and fired up the floating sauna, my husband and I pushed out a rowboat for a lazy loop on the lake. Soon it was time for dinner. As daylight began to fade, dinner was served in the forest restaurant, a large glass walled tent that seated 30 odd guests around three long communal tables. The six course meal was determined by what grows on the property, which operates on the farming philosophy known as permaculture. As guests began to congregate in a clearing beneath old sails strung from the treetops, Mr. Hansen poured aperitifs and introduced himself to the crowd, which that evening was all couples, a mix of younger and middle aged pairs, almost all from Denmark. A few cooks scampered among the open air kitchen, fire pits and a crackling grill suspended from a tree. And when the final stragglers had glasses in hand, our host launched into an impassioned welcome speech cum manifesto. At a time when every new restaurant is expected to have a concept, Stedsans instead has a cause. More than simply a restaurant, or a nature resort, this place in the wilderness is "a political project," said Mr. Hansen, an attempt to change the world by example in some small way. The meal we would eat that night would produce no waste. Leftover food would be fed to the chickens, and since no chemicals are used, the water for washing would be reused in the gardens. The implicit goal is to prove the Stedsans hypothesis: that all natural food grown nearby is not only nourishing, it also tastes better. The final two courses cheese from the nearby dairy and a dessert of rhubarb, cream and elderflower blossoms were served outside around a campfire ringed with rough hewed benches and wood stump stools. Many of the Danes had become fast friends, laughing together in the twilight, balancing dessert plates on their knees and eagerly raising their glasses for refills of sweet orange wine. Soon Mr. Hansen slipped away, the staff retreated to a far corner of the forest, and my husband and I stumbled through the darkness aided only by an iPhone flashlight to find the way back to our cabin. The following morning, the forest was serene with only the sound of twittering birds and rustling leaves. There was a slight chill in the air as we walked to breakfast at the barn where we'd checked in the afternoon before. Inside, a buffet was arranged on a long wooden table: loaves of Danish rye studded with raisins and apricots, an array of cheeses and yogurt, homemade granola and a warm pot of sprouted porridge. Over a small campfire outside, a worker fried eggs on cast iron skillets, a slow task as flames lagged in the morning breeze. While we waited, I scrolled through the few photos I'd taken the previous day, none of which compared to the magazine ready images in the Stedsans feed. But I did find one shot that I eventually shared on Instagram. How could I not? The following week, friends kept mentioning that picture, asking about that gorgeous place with the floating sauna in the lake. Every time, without fail, I said that it was Stedsans in the Woods, and that it was magical. I always forgot to mention the bugs.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Bradbury feared memory loss. Today we have designated Google and our social media accounts as the guardians of our memories, emotions, dreams and facts. As tech companies consolidate power, imagine how easy it could be to rewrite Benjamin Franklin's Wiki entry to match what the firemen in Bradbury's novel learn about the history of the fire department: "Established, 1790, to burn English influenced books in the Colonies. First Fireman: Benjamin Franklin." In his way, Bradbury predicted the rise of "alternative facts" and an era of "post truth." As the virtual world becomes more dominant, owning books becomes an act of rebellion. When a printed book is in your possession, no one can track, alter or hack it. The characters in my film have never seen a book. When they first encounter a library, the books are like water in a vast digital desert. Seeing, touching and smelling a book is as alien to the firemen as milking a cow by hand would be for most of us. The firemen are transfixed by the books but they still have to burn them. Burning books in the film posed a legal challenge. The cover art of most books is protected by copyright, and in most cases we were unable to obtain permission to display it let alone burn it on camera. So the art directors for my film designed countless original book covers that we could burn. The question was: Which books? There were always more I wanted to burn than we had time to film. I knew I wanted to include some of my favorites, like "Crime and Punishment," "Song of Solomon" and the works of Franz Kafka. But we had to burn more than just fiction. Herodotus' "Histories" history itself was incinerated. Pages of Emily Dickinson, Tagore and Ferdowsi's poetry crumbled into black ash. Hegel, Plato and Grace Lee Boggs's philosophy were set on fire. The firemen discriminate against no one: Texts in Chinese, Hindi, Persian and Spanish all burned. A Mozart score, an Edvard Munch painting, magazines, newspapers, photographs of Sitting Bull, Frederick Douglass and the 1969 moon landing went up in smoke. Even the most fanatic firemen would have a hard time burning all the copies of a best seller like "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People." After J. K. Rowling spoke out against Donald Trump on Twitter, people tweeted that they were planning to burn their Harry Potter books. So we followed suit. Famously banned books had to go: "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," "Lolita," "Leaves of Grass" and "The Communist Manifesto." While we were shooting the film, "To Kill a Mockingbird," a frequent target of censorship, was once again banned in some schools, so into the flames it went. For some authors, having a book burned in the film was a badge of honor. Werner Herzog and Hamid Dabashi generously donated their work to be burned alongside the best and the worst of literature. If we save "Wise Blood" then we must preserve "Mein Kampf" as well. Watching the books burn was an otherworldly experience. The hiss of incinerating pages sounded like the final gasps of hundreds of dying souls. The more we burned, the more hypnotic it became a mesmerizing spectacle of pages curling and embers dancing into the void. Bradbury believed that we wanted the world to become this way. That we asked for the firemen to burn books. That we wanted entertainment to replace reading and thinking. That we voted for political and economic systems to keep us happy rather than thoughtfully informed. He would say that we chose to give up our privacy and freedom to tech companies. That we decided to entrust our cultural heritage and knowledge to digital archives. The greatest army of firemen will be irrelevant in the digital world. They will be as powerless as spitting babies next to whoever controls a consolidated internet. How could they stop one person, hiding in his parents' basement with a laptop, from hacking into thousands of years of humanity's collective history, literature and culture, and then rewriting all of it ... or just hitting delete? And who would notice?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
This century old home in southeast Stockholm was designed in 1918 by Charles Lindholm, a Swedish architect, as his personal residence in Saltsjobaden, a suburb on the Baltic coast originally developed as a resort area for the wealthy. Restored by the current owner, the seven bedroom, five bathroom (three full bathrooms, two half) home retains its cultural roots, particularly in the 19th century hand painted ceilings by the decorator Filip Mansson, whose designs adorn many local churches and public buildings. With its steep ceramic tile roof, brick facade and asymmetrical windows, the 4,337 square foot waterfront house evokes Sweden's medieval castles; its resemblance to one such castle, Glimmingehus, a landmark 16th century structure on the southern coast, earned it the local nickname Little Glimmingehus, according to Ingrid Niclason, an agent with Skeppsholmen Sotheby's International Realty, which has the listing. The half acre property is entered through ornate cast iron gates. The main entry hall leads to three large formal rooms with arched doorways, oak parquet floors, slatted wood ceilings and mullioned windows. The living room, anchored on one end by a stone and brick fireplace, has astrological signs painted on the ceiling. Three windows are arrayed in an oriel, or bay window, forming an alcove with a vaulted ceiling that faces the rear of the property. To one side of the living room is a salon that opens onto a south facing terrace; to the other is a dining room with colorful nature themes painted on the ceiling. The kitchen, off the dining room, has oak countertops, wide plank floors and a Husqvarna cast iron oven. The owner added a second full kitchen on the lower level as a food preparation space for entertaining. The lower level also has a bedroom, drawing room, full bath with limestone tile, guest bath and laundry room. On the upper level, the master bedroom has a balcony with views of the backyard gardens and the inlet behind the property. There are three additional bedrooms, all with painted wood ceilings, and a drawing room. The bedrooms share two full limestone baths. The attic level, which also has oak floors, has a bedroom with a fireplace, and a large office. A third room, with exposed ceiling beams, could serve as a studio or bedroom. The grounds also include a swimming pool, a pool house and a two car garage. The backyard slopes down to a patio with a wood burning pizza oven, a winterized guest cottage, and a flat lawn area that has been used as a landing pad for helicopters, Ms. Niclason said. A jetty provides access to the inlet, which winds its way to the Baltic Sea. The property is within walking distance of a marina, the Saltsjobaden Golf Club and the well known Grand Hotel Saltsjobaden, opened in the late 19th century by K.A. Wallenberg, a prominent banker and politician. A rail station with service to downtown Stockholm is a block away. Depending on traffic, the city center is about a 30 minute drive from the house, and Stockholm Arlanda Airport is about an hour away. After several years of steadily rising prices, the Stockholm housing market softened two years ago, said Per Arne Sandegren, the analysis manager at Swedish Brokerage Statistics, an independent housing data firm. Prices began to fall during the latter half of 2017, and are now about 8 percent lower than they were at this time last year, for both apartments and villas, he said. Among the reasons for the decline, he added, are tighter government restrictions on mortgages and a spike in construction of new apartments. The price range for a two bedroom apartment in the center of Stockholm is now about 6 million to 9 million Swedish kronas (or about 650,000 to 980,000), Mr. Sandegren said, with the apartments most in demand dating to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and fully restored. The average time a home spends on the market, according to Hemnet, a Swedish listings site, is about a month twice as long as it was before the market slump, said Niklas Berntzon, a broker and founding partner of Eklund Stockholm New York. He attributed the slowdown to sellers' resistance to lowering prices, but said that those attitudes were starting to change. Buyers also are concerned about the direction of the market, particularly when it comes to new construction, Mr. Berntzon said: "Buyers are fearful about buying on floor plan now because they don't know whether they will be able to sell their existing apartment for enough when the new one is ready." The luxury market is flat, he said, although buyers will pay for a product they really want. Last year, a penthouse apartment in a new development atop a hotel fetched a record breaking 104 million Swedish kronas (or 11.3 million), Mr. Berntzon said, noting that the development, called the Continental, is unusual for Stockholm in that residents have access to 24 hour room service and hotel amenities. Foreign buyers make up a very small share of the market in Stockholm, agents said, and those who do buy are typically moving there to work. Mr. Berntzon said he recently sold an apartment in the suburbs to a New Yorker who works for Spotify, the music streaming service headquartered in Stockholm. "There are not many people buying just for investment in Stockholm," said Mr. Berntzon, noting that foreign buyers make up just 1 or 2 percent of the total market. At the high end, he said, it is as much as 7 or 8 percent, with buyers coming from America, Britain, France and Germany. Ms. Niclason said that many luxury buyers are Swedes returning home after working outside the country. "You can earn a lot more living outside of Sweden because of the taxes here," she said. "When they come back, they can buy expensive properties." Mr. Sandegren said foreign buyers are more common in the countryside, where Germans, Danes and Norwegians are known to buy holiday homes. He also said that Swedish tech companies looking to hire skilled foreigners have attracted buyers from the U.S., India and elsewhere in Europe. Buyers pay a stamp duty of 1.5 percent of the sale price of a house, said Ms. Niclason said. The tax does not apply to the purchase of apartments. The seller's real estate agent commonly handles the transaction for both parties. The agent's commission, paid by the seller, is typically 1.5 to 3 percent, Mr. Berntzon said, although agents sometimes receive an additional "kick," he added, if they sell a property for more than the asking price. The annual tax on this property is 7,412 Swedish krona, or about 800, Ms. Niclason said. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
LOS ANGELES The home that Natasha Gregson Wagner shares with her husband, his sons and their daughter in Venice, a seaside neighborhood here, smells clean in a non antiseptic way and, on a recent visit, faintly of the lilacs that rested in a vase on the kitchen countertop. Scent matters to Ms. Gregson Wagner, 45. It's an emotional trigger and conjurer of memory. In every home that she has lived in as an adult, she says she has planted a gardenia bush, because the smell of gardenias reminds her of her mother. "The smell is what I remember, the comfort of the smell," she said as she sat on a banquette in her kitchen, wearing jeans and a flowered, billowy blouse. "I knew when she was home because I would smell her perfume. She would waft through the house." Her mother was Natalie Wood, who appeared in "Miracle on 34th Street" as a little girl, "Rebel Without a Cause" as a teenager and "Splendor in the Grass" and "West Side Story" as a young woman. Beginning at the age of 4, and over the next four decades, Ms. Wood starred or appeared in more than five dozen films and television shows and was an emblem of Hollywood glamour and beauty, wholesome but sensual a good girl growing up in front of American moviegoers during the squeaky clean 1950s and the sexual revolution and era of women's liberation that followed. At the time, Ms. Gregson Wagner was 11 and her sister Courtney Wagner was 7. Ms. Gregson Wagner was on a sleepover at the Hollywood Hills home of her best friend, who had a new clock radio. The girls went to sleep with the radio on. The news was broadcast as they slept. "I woke up and I was like: 'Is this real? Is this really what's happening?'" Ms. Gregson Wagner recalled. "They said, 'Natalie Wood drowned off the coast of Catalina.'" Then she got home. "It was all real," she said. "I remember all these adults, my dad was just in bed, he was in bed not able to function at all. Daddy Gregson was there the next day and my stepmom, Julia. My mom's three best friends: Mart Crowley, who is a playwright; and Howard Jeffrey, who passed away and was assistant choreographer on 'West Side Story'; and then Delphine Mann, who is still alive. They were really taking care of us, and of course our nanny. It was kind of like a Fellini movie with people coming in and out. It was very extreme. Very bizarre." As any daughter would be, she was devastated and scared. "Her bed and her sheets smelled like her," said Ms. Gregson Wagner, who is petite at 5 foot 2 and with almond shaped brown eyes, bears more than a passing resemblance to her mother. "I slept there for a lot of nights. Especially with one of her pillows, it just smelled like her in the days after." More than 30 years later, the memory of that death and the decades long controversy that surrounded it remains a powerful one for Ms. Gregson Wagner, one that she has rarely spoken about publicly. An actress who has appeared in films such as "High Fidelity" and "Two Girls and a Guy," Ms. Gregson Wagner has chosen, over the years, to reserve most of her remembrances and reflections about her mother's life and death for conversations with close friends and loved ones. Working with her mother's estate, she has decided to embark on a commercial project. She has created (and is planning a major rollout for) a perfume to honor her mother, called Natalie. It is a gardenia based fragrance in a square glass bottle adorned by Ms. Wood's signature. Next fall, there will be a coffee table book she is contributing to, to be published by Turner Classic Movies and Running Press, with essays as well as vintage film studio and family photographs. The occasion has led Ms. Gregson Wagner to speak about her mother's death and, of greater importance to her daughter her life. Here are more fascinating tales you can't help but read all the way to the end. None Getting Personal With Iman. The supermodel talks about life after David Bowie, their Catskills refuge and the perfume inspired by their love. A Resilient Team for a Broken Nation. With the Taliban in control, what, and whom, is Afghanistan's national soccer team playing for? The Fight of This Old Boxer's Life Was With His Own Family. A battle among Marvin Stein's family over his fortune broke out, and he suddenly found himself powerless to fight for himself. She has spent years talking to therapists while trying to extricate the mother who died from the celebrity whose legend lived on. The process, at times, was confusing and isolating, she said, and left her feeling insecure: the overshadowed daughter of a movie star who died young, rather than Natasha, daughter of Natalie. But raising her daughter, Clover, 3, with her husband, Barry Watson, has shifted her perceptions. "When you grow up with a mom who is so enigmatic and gorgeous and full of charisma and power," she began, "well, because I was 11 when she died, I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how I am different from her and how I am similar, to help me have my own individuality." Ms. Wood remarried Mr. Wagner (whom Ms. Wood called R J) when Natasha was 2, and then appended her new husband's name to her daughter's. "She added his name without talking about it to my real dad, which she shouldn't have done; but that was my mom's style," Ms. Gregson Wagner said. "She didn't think she needed to ask permission to do anything." After her mother's death, Ms. Gregson Wagner was raised by her stepfather ("Daddy Wagner") in the Pacific Palisades, spending summers with her real father ("Daddy Gregson") in Wales. (Courtney, Natasha's younger sister, is the child of Ms. Wood and Mr. Wagner. Katie, Natasha's older sister, is the daughter of Mr. Wagner and Marion Donen, whom he wed between his two marriages to Ms. Wood; Katie lived with her father and sisters.) "There were no lawyers," she said. "My dads just sat down and my Daddy Gregson said, 'I feel like Natasha should come live with me because she's my daughter,' and my Daddy Wagner said, 'I know, that would make sense, but she's grown up with me,' and then they said, 'What's the best thing for Natasha?'" She added: "And they were right. The best thing for me was to live with my stepdad and see my Daddy Gregson over the summer." Ms. Wood's death was declared a drowning, but some of the details around it remain unknown. The tragedy has long been a favorite focus of conspiracy theorists, and caused something of a family rift. Recently, Lana Wood, Natalie's younger sister and Natasha's aunt, approached Mr. Wagner in a hotel lobby in view of a videographer, asking him to answer questions about the night Natalie died. The video ended up on RadarOnline.com and kicked up a little dust on the web. "And even when I hear that stuff that my aunt creates and people call me and say, 'Oh my God, I am so sorry,' I say, 'Don't be sorry for me.' It's literally like saying my dad has two heads or three heads. It's so preposterous that I can't even relate to it. It doesn't even touch me." In his 2008 memoir, "Pieces of My Heart: A Life," Mr. Wagner wrote: "If I had been there, I could have done something. But I wasn't there. I didn't see her. The door was closed; I thought she was belowdecks. I didn't hear anything. But ultimately, a man is responsible for his loved one, and she was my loved one." Ms. Gregson Wagner has been working on processing this all for 35 years. "I was in therapy from, like, the minute she died until I was 30, practically," she said. In the past, it has affected her relationships with men. (In 2003, she married D. V. DeVincentis, the screenwriter of "High Fidelity," who is a writer for the FX series "The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story." They divorced in 2008.) She and Mr. Watson, married a year and a half but together for nearly six, have an easy way about them. As she talked about her mother's life and death, he would check in on her, give her a kiss, say, "I love you, babe," before ducking out of the room to go watch the University of Michigan basketball team play on television or heading out to pick up their daughter from preschool. What Ms. Gregson Wagner wants is to tell people more about her mother a woman they may have shed tears over, a woman they didn't even know. "She was hilarious," Ms. Gregson Wagner said. "She was always so funny. She would walk into our house and everything would be better. If she walked into a room and it was sepia, it suddenly became bright colors. My mom and my dad were always laughing at each other's jokes. Her laugh was this deep 'HAHAHA!' She would always say to my dad: 'Oh R J, just stop it! I can't! Just stop it!'" Ms. Wood wore nightgowns by Porthault, favored the chopped salad at La Scala in Beverly Hills, was overprotective and fearful of her children being kidnapped, wrote love letters in loopy script to her daughters that quoted from "The Little Prince," knew how to burn the end of a wine bottle cork to create makeshift eye shadow, sometimes yelled, was always bossy, never cooked (or at least not well), begrudgingly took her daughters to see the film "The Blue Lagoon," called home every day while traveling (even from the Soviet Union), worked hard, forbade her children from trying to capitalize on their parents' fame and loved animals. At the family home on North Canon Drive in Beverly Hills, there were cats, dogs, chickens and ducks. "One of the ducks got loose," Ms. Gregson Wagner said, "and was flying around and I remember my mom was like: 'R J! One of the neighbors called and the duck is in their pool four houses down!'" She loved gardenias, with which Mr. Wagner would fill the house to celebrate his wife's July birthday. There is even a gardenia etched on Ms. Wood's gravestone, her daughter said. This is why Ms. Gregson Wagner has decided to create a fragrance in her mother's name. "Natalie" is being sold online and there will be a big retail push over Mother's Day and then Christmas. It is Ms. Gregson Wagner's more modern take on her mother's favorite perfume, Jungle Gardenia, which was very popular, said to have been worn not just by Ms. Wood but also by Elizabeth Taylor and others as well. Ms. Wood began to wear the scent after she worked on the 1946 film "The Bride Wore Boots," starring Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Cummings. Ms. Wood, then a young girl of about 8, said her daughter, complimented Ms. Stanwyck on her perfume and so Ms. Stanwyck gave her a bottle. "After that, whenever anyone complimented my mom on it, she would gift it to them. My mom wore it all her life and I remember her putting it on in her bathroom," she said. "I'd sit there and watch her put her makeup on and then she'd go into her bathroom where all of her Jungle Gardenias were and she'd dab it." Her creating the perfume has already resulted in certain serendipity, she said. When Clover's babysitter told Ms. Gregson Wagner that the grandparents of another child she was babysitting for lived in the house in Beverly Hills that Natasha had grown up in with Mr. Wagner and Ms. Wood, Ms. Gregson Wagner sent the grandmother a bottle of the Natalie perfume with a note that read, as she remembers it, "It seems so appropriate that this fragrance would sit in your bathroom, whether you wear it or not." The woman replied by sending Ms. Gregson Wagner three pairs of high heeled shoes that belonged to her mother that she had happened upon in the house. Among them are a pair of cream peep toe heels with a big pink flower affixed to them. "They fit!" Ms. Gregson Wagner said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
If these were normal times, Ger Tysk, a sailor, would be getting her tall ship ready for an expedition along the coast of New England. Instead, Ms. Tysk, 38, is hunkered down in her apartment in New Bedford, Mass., and taking people on a different sort of voyage. She used her digital camera to film herself reading a chapter from "Moby Dick," the 1851 classic by Herman Melville, as part of an online Story Hour Series for the New Bedford Whaling Museum. "Moby Dick" is her favorite book. "Reading it not just as a novel but as a history text was what fascinated me," she said. Ms. Tysk is one of 46 volunteers who were chosen to read for the series, a virtual version of the museum's annual "Moby Dick" Marathon, in which speakers take turns reading the novel aloud in front of an audience. It takes about 25 hours. "We get so many reader inquiries each year for the in person marathon that we thought that this would be a nice way to include some of those people who haven't been able to read in the past," said Tina Malott, a spokeswoman for the museum. Ms. Tysk has participated in the marathon before. In 2015, she took a graveyard shift 3:30 a.m. on a Sunday and presented her reading to a sleepy crowd beneath a pod of whale skeletons suspended from the ceiling of the museum. This time, she read her piece Chapter 121, in which two shipmates joke about the danger of their mission from an armchair in her living room, with a stuffed whale at her elbow and a framed print of a tall ship behind her. The series began streaming online April 16, with one hour of readings every evening at 5 p.m., and it will end on May 11. So far, it has been a replay of footage from last year's marathon. But beginning on May 2, the people who were randomly selected to read from home will have their debut on the museum's YouTube channel, a platform that might have been hard to imagine in Melville's time. In the 19th century, the whaling industry made New Bedford one of the richest cities on earth. It was a draw for migrants: Many came from Portugal, the West Indies and Cape Verde, an African archipelago then governed by Portugal. 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. Still today, depictions of whales and tall ships are everywhere in the city. It's not uncommon to see harpoons as decor in restaurants. The athletic teams at New Bedford High School are known as the Whalers. New Bedford is the setting for the opening scenes of "Moby Dick," but the fictional journey of the tall ship Pequod begins in Nantucket. It ends in the sea. The novel follows a narrator "Call me Ishmael," he begins across oceans with an eclectic crew led by the dictatorial Captain Ahab, who is on an obsessive quest to kill a white whale named Moby Dick. To some, "Moby Dick" is kind of a slog. During his lifetime, Melville was unable to sell out his first print edition, a clunker at more than 600 pages. But it has become an American classic, and last month, the New Bedford Whaling Museum's call for volunteers attracted contributors from across the United States. Tom Loftus, 65, a reader who is isolating with his family in Westport, Conn., worried about his delivery and practiced his reading several times. "I was beyond nervous," he said. "I was a wreck!" At one point, he stood up to take a breather and stepped on his glasses, breaking them. "It's been a comedy," he said. "Finally I just said, 'You know what? I'm going to read this thing like I'm reading the bedtime stories I used to read to the kids,'" he said. It worked. He used an iPad to film his rendition of Chapter 102 (Ishmael reveals how he knows so much about whale skeletons). Another volunteer, Candice Kelsey, 49, a teacher in Los Angeles, has spent years introducing "Moby Dick" to high school students. "I just absolutely love the story," she said. "It's hilarious and also so meaningful." She used her smartphone to film her performance of Chapter 110 (a harpooner named Queequeg falls ill and comes so close to death that a coffin is made for him then he decides to survive).	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
For about an hour on Wednesday night, six performers undressed and confessed in the Underground Theater at Abrons Arts Center. They talked about their relationships to their bodies, revealing everything from circumcisions and mastectomies to sexual fantasies and ruminations on gender. By the end, we knew all about them, their genitals and their lives, in selective but intimate detail. The occasion was "Disclosures," a new work by the Croatian choreographer Bruno Isakovic. The only world premiere in this year's Queer New York International Arts Festival, it's not Mr. Isakovic's first foray into nakedness. His "Denuded," presented by the festival last year, also explores exposure. But while that piece, which has grown from a solo to a duet to a work for 11 dancers, deals with breath and bodily tension, "Disclosures" is driven more by text than by movement, at times to its detriment. It does, however, begin with dancing. New Yorkers who frequent Union Square may know Qween Amor, the roving performer who cavorts for commuters in devil horns and a thong. S/he (to use his/her preferred gender pronoun) is the most bacchanalian cast member, strutting and swirling in circles to euphoric techno, flaunting a sparkly scarf. The others Chris DeVita, Diana Y. Greiner, Elena Rose Light, Ryan M. McKelvey and Alexander Paris form a still (and clothed) tableau in the center, surveying the audience, except for Mr. DeVita, who lies face down with his pants half off. Each performer delivers a monologue while disrobing. The husky Mr. McKelvey, having reflected on his body hair, wonders aloud: Do his platform stilettos make him more or less of a man? Mr. DeVita, who has developed "a softness," he says, since leaving his job in ballet, offers a nude tutorial on ballet technique. Mr. Paris, we learn, would sit on an egg as a child, hoping it would hatch.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
The relationship between Russia and the United States has been mired in crisis for much of the past decade. Communication once considered routine has been cut off, deepening mistrust and making it more difficult to reduce tensions and avoid miscalculation. The current state of affairs does not serve the strategic interests of either country, and it puts global security at risk because Russia and the United States are the only countries that possess enough nuclear weapons to destroy each other and all of humanity. Rebuilding mutual confidence and putting United States Russian relations on a safer track will be a challenging long term endeavor, given the political climates in Washington and Moscow. But the two countries have a chance to head off even more instability by extending the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which expires in one year, on Feb. 5. While 12 months may seem like a lot of time, in diplomatic terms and in the present environment, the clock is ticking fast. The United States and Russia can avoid a senseless and dangerous return to nuclear brinksmanship if they act soon. There is no reason to wait, and extending the treaty, known as New START, is the place to begin. With the unfortunate dissolution of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty last year, New START is the only agreement still in place that limits the size of American and Russian nuclear forces. It also provides vital verification and transparency measures, including on site inspections, that have helped foster strategic stability. The treaty allows for a five year extension if the leaders of both countries agree. President Vladimir Putin and President Trump should seize this opportunity. Our countries survived the nuclear dangers of the Cold War through a combination of skilled diplomacy, political leadership and good fortune. The fall of the Berlin Wall did not eliminate those dangers, but the years that followed saw continued progress on arms control, a sharp drop in nuclear peril and a reduced reliance on military means for addressing potential conflicts. Today, in contrast, geopolitical tensions are rising and the major powers are placing a renewed emphasis on the role of nuclear weapons in their military strategies. Experts are suddenly talking less about the means for deterring nuclear conflict than about developing weapons that could be used for offensive purposes. Some have even embraced the folly that a nuclear war can be won. Late last year, we met in Vienna with other former foreign ministers from more than a dozen countries, as part of the Aspen Ministers Forum, to review the global security landscape and examine these trends in depth. We emerged from these consultations deeply troubled by the possible worldwide consequences of an accelerating global arms race, the increased risk of military incidents and the degradation of arms reduction and nonproliferation agreements. We believe that the world needs to move in a new, less hazardous direction. As a result of that meeting, we and 24 other former foreign ministers are now issuing a statement calling upon leaders of all countries to counter the uncertainties posed by nuclear weapons more urgently. The means to address these dangers are at our disposal, but they can be carried out only through wise leadership. During the Cold War, the world proved that well constructed, balanced and faithfully implemented treaties, political commitments and norms of behavior can effectively reduce tensions and the likelihood of conflict. This spring, 190 nations will gather in New York on the 50th anniversary of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to review current nuclear risks and proliferation challenges. Extending New START would send a signal to the rest of the world as other countries consider their responsibilities to help halt the spread of nuclear weapons. It could also lay the foundation for increased international cooperation in the next decade. The recent escalation of attacks between the United States and Iran demonstrated how quickly the lack of guardrails can move us to the brink of war. Amid the erosion of multilateral agreements and diplomatic channels, we came close to calamity. The dangers of miscalculation are too grave for leaders to resort to ambiguous communication, threats and military action. In the years ahead, the security landscape will be made only more challenging by emerging technologies and their interplay with conventional and nuclear capabilities. So it will be crucial to create a revitalized spirit of diplomacy based on a shared understanding of the dangers, and ways to mitigate potential sources of harm. As former foreign ministers, we pledge to continue speaking out on this issue and do our part in this effort. Right now, the most important thing to do is extend New START. Russia has indicated, at the highest levels, its willingness to do so. All that President Trump needs to do is agree. Legislative approval is not required. Time is critical. Doing nothing while waiting for a "better" agreement is a recipe for disaster: We could lose New START and fail to replace it. The treaty's agreed limits on nuclear arsenals are too important to be put at risk in a game of nuclear chicken. Moreover, we have an opportunity to improve security and rebuild trust between the world's two great nuclear powers. It must not be thrown away. Madeleine Albright was the United States secretary of state from 1997 to 2001. Igor Ivanov was the Russian foreign minister from 1998 to 2004. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
In June, months after it announced its current season, the Met said that technical difficulties would prevent it from moving forward with its plans to stage Robert Lepage's complex production of Berlioz's "La Damnation de Faust." It decided to perform the opera in concert instead, and to cancel three performances, leaving a hole in the calendar. Enter "Porgy," which audiences can't seem to get enough of. It has become a runaway hit at a time when the Met has struggled with declining attendance. Starring Eric Owens and Angel Blue in the title roles, one performance this fall broke a Met record, officials said: Because the company increases prices as demand rises, the performance took in 113 percent of its anticipated box office revenue. The Met said that most of the original cast would be able to perform the extra dates, including Mr. Owens and Ms. Blue. The conductor, David Robertson, will lead the final two new dates; the Feb. 4 performance will be conducted by J. David Jackson. Tickets will go on sale Dec. 9. "Porgy and Bess" is shaping up to be a cinema hit, too. The Met said that it had already sold 67,000 tickets to the upcoming Live in HD simulcast of the production to cinemas around the world, on Feb. 1, and that it plans to add encore screenings in more theaters than usual.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
YOU NEVER FORGET YOUR FIRST A Biography of George Washington By Alexis Coe Read by Brittany Pressley Given that we are now a nation of armchair epidemiologists, it felt eerily relevant to learn that George Washington survived the following diseases, among others: smallpox, malaria (six times), diphtheria, tuberculosis (twice), dysentery and tuberculosis at the same time (four times), and pneumonia. We generally take it for granted that Washington was an impressive man, but to triumph over this many illnesses at a time when cures ranged from draining your blood to draining your blood again seems near superhuman. Even more so when the ailments are presented in list form with symptoms (including words like "excruciating," "bloody," "pustules") and treatments (sometimes just "prayer"), as they are in "You Never Forget Your First," Alexis Coe's new biography of the man and president we only thought we knew. As this historian illustrates, most of what we do know is either untrue no child would chop down a cherry tree in order to make mischief; wood would be an exceptionally bad material for dentures or less interesting than what the existing history books have overlooked. The table of diseases (hard to follow in the narrator Brittany Pressley's audiobook version, in which the jolting transitions between narrative and sidebar detract from the experience) isn't there just for fun; it is a stealth fighter in Coe's battle against the existing canon of Washington biographies. The physical obstacles the man has overcome, she argues, are better evidence of his strength and resilience than the details that other popular biographers have focused on: namely, his thighs. She nicknames these historians, Ron Chernow first among them, the "Thigh Men of Dad History," i.e. men (and they are all men) who write history about men for men. To her, their reflexive focus on Washington's stereotypical masculinity means that they neglect other things that are more important: his shortcomings and contradictions, the textures of 18th century life. The nickname makes me cringe, but it's effective.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
When the International Center of Photography reopened last year in its new home on the Bowery, it seemed to be swerving into a new lane or, perhaps, careering off the road altogether. New York's leading photography institution, it opened uptown in 1974, with a mandate from its founder, Cornell Capa, to showcase photojournalism, documentary images and other kinds of "concerned photography." But since then, the medium of photography has fractured; lens based imagery has moved from the darkroom to the social media screen; and the center has changed, too. The new location includes no space for its permanent collection those 200,000 prints are out in Jersey City and its first show was a digital hodgepodge that drew as many snipes as cheers. So "Magnum Manifesto," the museum's rewarding summer exhibition, is something of a TBT, to use that most nostalgic of Instagram hashtags. This 70 year showcase of Magnum Photos, the granddaddy of photojournalism agencies whose founders included Capa's brother Robert, who shot the much debated image of a dying Republican soldier in the Spanish Civil War turns back to printed images and published books, made by professionals shooting with high end kits. The 75 photographers include such veterans as Henri Cartier Bresson, Elliott Erwitt and Susan Meiselas; more recent stars like Martin Parr and Alec Soth; and promising younger members like the South African photographer Mikhael Subotzky. It adds up to a fine history lesson, but also offers a model for how this museum can pursue the necessary work of thinking about other, newer kinds of images. Magnum was founded in 1947 as a collective of independent photojournalists, ready to document the world with new, lightweight cameras, notably rough and tough Leicas loaded with high speed 35 millimeter film. "Magnum Manifesto" thus opens with a wall of small black and white photographs attesting to a new postwar order: a war crimes trial in Dachau, the United Nations General Assembly in session, flag waving rebels in Algiers, Peronists demonstrating en masse in Buenos Aires. In those first decades, the Magnum aesthetic was one of humanistic universalism, and photography offered a lingua franca to imagine a new world. Magnum's images would appear in such magazines as Look, in the United States, or Point de Vue, in France. True to the agency's name a magnum is an oversize bottle of champagne, but also a cartridge of bullets Magnum in its early days was a collective of brash individuals whose images sought to distill the chaos of life into precise, unforgettable instants. Cartier Bresson, who had escaped from a German prison camp during the war, was a master at that; in a washed out shot here from 1951, a lone woman crossing the street in London manages to convey the whole of the Blitz and postwar privation. Constantine Manos, a South Carolina photographer who deserves far more renown, shot a moving series of the daily life of an African American child in 1952, when Mr. Manos was just a teenager himself. The hunger for what Cartier Bresson called "the decisive moment" endured in the next generation of Magnum photographers, including Danny Lyon, whose pictures of inmates in a Texas jail still shock, and Raymond Depardon, who portrayed patients in an Italian psychiatric hospital. Yet the late '60s also saw a more restless, troubled vernacular arise among Magnum's members, especially the Americans. Paul Fusco, shooting in color, traveled in 1968 on the funeral train bearing Robert F. Kennedy's coffin to Washington; the expectant mourners are a blurry, betrayed collective, with none of the specificity you'll find in Cartier Bresson or Robert Capa. Charles Harbutt, a photographer and former president of Magnum, rigged up a slot machine to three slide projectors for a 1969 exhibition in New York. Visitors pulled the arm and saw photographs from "America in Crisis" flicker past: If you hit three Nixons, you won a prize. (The reproduction at the center works quite nicely, though I never hit the jackpot.) Still, you've got to make a living. Magnum is a commercial agency, not an artistic collective, and one of the surprises of this exhibition is a wall of glossy corporate annual reports, for such companies as the Bank of New York and Goldman Sachs. The Seagram report of 1979, shot in luscious color by Burt Glinn, features a smiling couple enjoying cocktails in front of their Frank Stella painting, and three gents downing scotch and martinis outside the Toronto City Hall. Those projects helped pay the bills for other, more personal endeavors, including photobooks of the Iranian Revolution and other current affairs evoked here through half a dozen short films, with hand models turning pages. Is there any function for reportage photography today, now that everyone carries a cameraphone, and every triumph or disaster is instantly captured and broadcast? A new generation of Magnum photographers is trying, and its members embrace a more artistic and individual language than that of their predecessors. Mr. Subotzky's outstanding, voluminous project "Ponte City," done in collaboration with the artist Patrick Waterhouse, explores the tallest residential tower in Johannesburg, which was built for white residents during apartheid and later became a high rise slum and drug den. In addition to photographs of the tower's residents and architecture, the project also includes more idiosyncratic images of flickering TVs and stained posters, assembled into more than a dozen pamphlets. Other members have taken similarly subjective stances. Paolo Pellegrin documents the continuing refugee crisis in the Mediterranean by picturing not bodies, but waves. Alessandra Sanguinetti has shot the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, France, after the terrorist attack of last summer, as a nearly abstract blackout. "Magnum Manifesto" has been organized by three French scholars: Clement Cheroux, who recently left the Pompidou Center in Paris to become the senior curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the historian and Magnum specialist Clara Bouveresse; and Pauline Vermare, an associate curator at the center. Its principal accomplishment, beyond the archival discoveries, is that it presents photography as neither independent art nor mere documentation, but as something in between, plugged into the world while still obeying its own rules. The game now for the center is to bring the same rigor displayed in this show to its presentations of other kinds of images: ISIS videos and Snapchat filters, drone sights and selfies.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
What if I told you that one of the best ways to fix your smartphone addicted brain was to buy another gadget? You didn't read that wrong. Just bear with me: I'm talking about a much dumber gadget, one that is dedicated to being great at just one thing. It's an e book reader. Think about it. Now that phones are so fast and capable and social media has become inescapable, all we talk about is wanting to unplug from our tech. An e reader can be a low tech substitute to your high tech addiction, similar to how smokers use e cigarettes to cut down on nicotine. The best part? While an e reader is still tech, you get to consume books that provide a respite from the hateful comments on social media and the stress inducing news articles we consume on the web. To make my case for this column, I tested Amazon's newly released Kindle Oasis for about a week. This is the Cadillac of e readers. It has a seven inch screen and an aluminum body, and its special feature is an adjustable light to shift the screen's color tone from cooler in the daytime to warmer at night. It is also waterproof. For a starting price of 250, the Oasis is overkill. Its cheaper sibling, the 130 Kindle Paperwhite, which has a six inch screen with an integrated light for reading in the dark, is perfectly adequate for most people; the only downside is that its color tones are not adjustable. So treat the Oasis as an aspirational example for why you may want an e book reader. Here's more on the product and how owning an e reader helped curtail my own phone addiction. The Oasis is a simple and elegant product, but with some downsides. For one, the device is bulkier than other Kindles. The aluminum back has a wedge shaped grip, which Amazon said was intended to shift the center of gravity to your palm. It feels reminiscent of gripping the spine of a book. That diminishes one of the main benefits of an e reader, which is that it's thinner and lighter than a physical novel. On the front of the device, there are two physical buttons for page turning. The top button turns pages forward; the bottom one turns pages backward. They work well but feel superfluous: It's just as easy to reach your thumb over to swipe the screen to flip a page. The Oasis is, over all, comfortable to hold. But over several hours of reading, the wedge got tiresome to grip, and I found myself switching between hands. Amazon's cheaper Kindle Paperwhite, with a curved back that lacks the thick grip, is more pleasant to hold over long durations. Now onto the upsides. The Oasis's signature feature, the adjustable light, is a delight. The device has 25 LED lights 12 white and 13 amber to let you tweak the color tone from cool to warm manually or automatically on a timed schedule. I set the device to adjust its light automatically, and at night, the warmer color tone felt easier on my eyes. One quick aside: There's a debate over whether the color tones of screens affect sleep. Some studies have shown that blue light emitted from screens, including smartphones and some e book readers, can act as a stimulant, disrupting your circadian rhythms and making it harder to sleep. It's unclear whether screens with warmer color tones help you get better sleep. As for other benefits, the Oasis works for both lefties and righties. If you're holding the device in your right hand and rotate it 180 degrees to hold the grip with your left hand, the screen automatically reorients itself so that the book is right side up. Books look fantastic on the Oasis. Like other e readers, it uses e ink technology, which has matured over the last decade to make text look crisper and clearer. As with other e readers, the battery for the Oasis lasts weeks. (I haven't had to recharge my test unit since receiving it more than a week ago.) All things considered, I recommend the cheaper Kindle Paperwhite (which I own) over the Oasis. For roughly half the price, it has most of the same benefits: weekslong battery life and an excellent screen. The lack of color adjustment isn't a deal breaker. Rather than degrade the reading experience, the Paperwhite's smaller screen is a benefit. It's less cumbersome to hold and fits into most coat pockets, whereas the Oasis does not. About 10 years ago, Steve Jobs told The New York Times that he felt e readers would lose against multifunction products like the iPhone. He predicted that people wouldn't pay to have a device with such limited features. "I think the general purpose devices will win the day," he said. "Because I think people just probably aren't willing to pay for a dedicated device." Mr. Jobs's prediction was correct. But one thing he didn't foresee was that a decade later, public discourse around tech would center on smartphone addiction. One 2016 study found that 50 percent of teenagers felt addicted to smartphones, and a separate study last year showed that 60 percent of adults ages 18 to 34 had acknowledged smartphone overuse. Count me among those admitting they have a problem. Over the last week, I picked up my phone about 114 times a day, according to my iPhone's Screen Time statistics. That's pretty bad but before I owned a Kindle, my average was about 156. I still have lots of work to do, but this is progress. I also got to test the social benefits of the Kindle Oasis in an unexpected way. This week, I came down with the flu, and when I was bedridden and alone at home, I got stuck in a feverish loop of incessantly checking Twitter and email on my phone instead of sleeping. When I realized this, I picked up the e reader and downloaded a book about dogs. Minutes later, I was out like a light. When my partner returned home, she asked, "What did you do today?" I replied that I had started reading a book about dog psychology. "Did you know dogs don't like raincoats?" I asked.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
The history of art is full of surprises. The latest is "Flora Crockett: Works From the 1940s and 1950s" at Meredith Ward Fine Art on the Upper East Side. In 2015 I reviewed this forgotten painter's first solo show in New York since 1946 (also at Meredith Ward), and wondered how many more female artists awaited rediscovery. I should have wondered what further revelations Ms. Crockett's work held. One is certainly Meredith Ward's second Crockett exhibition; it is even better than the first, which focused on works from the '60s and '70s. As seen here, Ms. Crockett's earlier works are even more confident and witty than what she produced later. They pull together several strands Surrealism, biomorphism, a prescient Pop Art buoyancy in ways that almost always seem just right, supported by an unerring color sense and broad knowledge of the various ways oil paint can be applied to canvas. This all seems remarkably up to date: Several paintings could easily be from our new century. Smoke and clouds are a thing. In one painting, smoke rings of white and celadon float above a dark purple femurlike form against a beautiful red on cream crosshatch pattern startlingly similar to that which Jasper Johns employed in the 1970s. In another, a current of smoke wafts across the painting like a lazy jet stream, through a levitating circle seemingly made of shiny red ribbon, while the background pattern is green on green, a camouflagelike brocade. Sometimes Ms. Crockett, who died in 1979, seems to respond to her contemporaries. There are signs of Hans Hofmann's push pull forms and rectilinear compositions reminiscent of Myron Stout and Burgoyne Diller. But these allusions don't detract; in fact, they indicate a compelling, unthreatened awareness. This show is a must see, not least for budding art historians seeking a thesis subject. Juliana Huxtable is a transgender model, D.J., writer and artist whose most prominent art world exposure to date has been as the nude subject of an iridescent 3 D sculpture by Frank Benson at the 2015 New Museum Triennial, where her photographs were also on display. Ms. Huxtable's current show, "A Split During Laughter at the Rally," at Reena Spaulings on the Lower East Side, reverses that dynamic: Rather than her body, Ms. Huxtable's voice funny, acerbic, malicious even is on display. The show's centerpiece is a video she narrated, represented by a close up of her lips painted a shimmering baby blue. The video follows a group of jaded L.G.B.T. activists marching around New York chanting "No K.K.K., no fascist U.S.A., no Trump." ("Girl, I am over this," complains one protester to another.) In the process, the group discovers a crunk beat lurking within the call and response and a possible "rhythm conspiracy," in which white protest movements have borrowed from black culture without acknowledging the debt. A nearby text and photography installation goes further, arguing that white skinhead culture is also derived from black culture, particularly rude boy Jamaican street culture. The installation includes images of white celebrities with shaved heads, labeling them "low key skinheads," and white L.G.B.T. people accompanied by text that reads "Queer hairlessness and punk machismo flippancy as radical antagonism skinhead." Essentially trolling other activists and alternative cultures, Ms. Huxtable's work is strident and provocative, though her message isn't new: Everyone from Elvis Presley to Dick Hebdige has acknowledged white culture's debt to black culture. Achieving parity is harder, as Ms. Huxtable, who once worked for the American Civil Liberties Union, must know. Now that Emmanuel Macron has taken office as president of France, make some time to see "Elysee," a stylish exploration not very scholastic, but irresistible of French political authority by the artist Laurent Grasso. He's among a generation of practitioners, at ease with slick production in multiple media, who have put Paris back on the map of the international art world after long years of obscurity. Mr. Grasso was given special access to the French presidential palace to film "Elysee," which was first seen last year in an exhibition at the National Archives in Paris. The 16 minute film consists largely of tracking shots through the Salon Dore, a blinged out cousin of the Oval Office, with its chandeliers, clocks, candelabras, tapestries and gilded everything. The film's smooth editing and sexy electronica score, by Nicolas Godin (half of the group Air), at first put me in mind of an Air France commercial, but Mr. Grasso's film grows more forceful when he disrupts the endless gold with everyday objects in the sanctum sanctorum of European power: pens and erasers, a speech on terrorism ringed with handwritten annotations, a telephone with the prime minister's office on speed dial, a weathered copy of Le Monde with Mr. Macron's name in a headline. What makes Mr. Grasso's lush film more than a promotional reel is its absent protagonist: Francois Hollande, who won the 2012 French election with promises to be "normal" and to abjure the monarchical airs of previous French presidents. "Elysee" hinges on the gap between grand, enduring architecture and fallible, human occupants, though the film may take on a new cast now that an insurgent 39 year old I can still hardly believe he pulled it off sits behind the gilded desk. Pope.L's "Well (elh version)," a series of small ledges bearing water glasses that must be topped up with eyedroppers every day by gallery employees. If you stare across the room at Ms. Vaughn's inspired display of discarded Chicago Transit Authority train seats, they look interchangeable, but on closer inspection, each seat reveals a distinct pattern of wear. Every two and a half minutes exactly, Pope.L's "Pedestal," an upside down water fountain bolted to the ceiling, releases a thin jet of water into a hole in the floor. It's a disquieting meditation on the nature of time endlessly replenished but endlessly fleeting made more ominous by "Well (elh version)," a series of small ledges bearing water glasses that must be topped up with eyedroppers every day by gallery staff. An untitled work, displaying an upended brown couch draped with a silver prom dress, by Kayode Ojo. Courtesy of the artist and Martos Gallery Each of Ms. Dyson's three white on gray paintings is 6 feet wide by 8 feet tall and dominated by a subtle circular pattern applied with plastery strokes of a palette knife. But sharp pencil lines and brighter white wedges cut through this engulfing fog like spirit through flesh. Mr. Ojo's upended brown couch, meanwhile, on which he's draped a silvery sequined prom dress, evokes a fascinating combination of potential and regret. All together it makes for a starkly minimal aesthetic, but one that elevates, instead of eliding, the human body.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Cancer centers are re evaluating their relationships with health care companies, including when, if ever, doctors and researchers should serve on corporate boards. Here are some hospital executives and cancer researchers who sit on the boards of publicly traded companies, in dual roles that may raise questions about conflicts of interest. President and chief executive of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Boston Company: Dr. Glimcher sits on the boards of the British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline and Waters Corp., a laboratory equipment and software company. Outside Compensation: Dr. Glimcher joined the board of GlaxoSmithKline in September of 2017; she received 101,000 in total compensation from the company that year, plus compensation of 285,440 from Waters that year.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
PARIS Paris Fashion Week had barely begun before the wind was knocked out of it. The culprit was Marine Serre: a surprisingly elfin radical, 5 feet and change tall, soft spoken in the extreme. At a rehearsal space, on loan from the choreographer Blanca Li, in the 19th Arrondissement, Ms. Serre, 26, staged her first formal show, an assured, spiny debut from a designer who previously had only a few moon printed jerseys and some historically minded moire skirts to her name. "At the beginning," Ms. Serre protested, at the mention of that. Yes, I agreed: six months ago. Ms. Serre has come far, fast, and the guests at the show Tuesday morning took notice. Three collections in, she already has the benediction of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton; she won the 2017 LVMH Prize for young fashion designers, an award worth 300,000 euros, or about 369,000, which is decided by a jury including the designers Nicolas Ghesquiere, Karl Lagerfeld and Marc Jacobs. Her new collection had less of the overt historical references she once leaned on; it was easier to believe, as her notes put it, that she "always keeps the future in sight." There were still yards of her signature crescent moon prints, but joining them were pieces with a kind of tough glamour: denim jackets cinched and molded after the model of corsets; utility jackets with bottle holders, lipstick caddies and phone pockets to "replace the classic handbag" an admirably heresy in an industry carried on the back of accessory sales. Ms. Serre has worked in the studios of Balenciaga, Dior and Margiela, and her work has reflections of that experience, particularly in her willingness to push what fashion people euphemize as a "strong" look. But she doesn't sound like a cog of the industry; she sounds more like a revolutionary.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
A diorama of one of Maurice Sendak's set designs for a Houston Grand Opera production of "The Magic Flute." It's among the nearly 150 objects on display at "Drawing the Curtain: Maurice Sendak's Designs for Opera and Ballet," which closes at the Morgan Library Museum on Sunday. 'ARTISTIC LICENSE: SIX TAKES ON THE GUGGENHEIM COLLECTION' at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (through Jan. 12). Displays that artists select from a museum's collection are almost inevitably interesting, revealing and valuable. After all, artists can be especially discerning regarding work not their own. Here, six artists Cai Guo Qiang, Paul Chan, Richard Prince, Julie Mehretu, Carrie Mae Weems and Jenny Holzer guided by specific themes, have chosen, which multiplies the impact accordingly. With one per ramp, each selection turns the museum inside out. The combination sustains multiple visits; the concept should be applied regularly. (Roberta Smith) 212 423 3840, guggenheim.org 'AUSCHWITZ. NOT LONG AGO. NOT FAR AWAY' at the Museum of Jewish Heritage (through Jan. 3). Killing as a communal business, made widely lucrative by the Third Reich, permeates this traveling exhibition about the largest German death camp, Auschwitz, whose yawning gatehouse, with its converging rail tracks, has become emblematic of the Holocaust. Well timed, during a worldwide surge of anti Semitism, the harrowing installation strives, successfully, for fresh relevance. The exhibition illuminates the topography of evil, the deliberate designing of a hell on earth by fanatical racists and compliant architects and provisioners, while also highlighting the strenuous struggle for survival in a place where, as Primo Levi learned, "there is no why." (Ralph Blumenthal) 646 437 4202, mjhnyc.org 'PIERRE CARDIN: FUTURE FASHION' at the Brooklyn Museum (through Jan. 5). He was never a great artist like Dior, Balenciaga or Saint Laurent, but Pierre Cardin still at work at 97 pioneered today's approach to the business of fashion: take a loss on haute couture, then make the real money through ready to wear and worldwide licensing deals. He excelled at bold, futuristic day wear: belted unisex jumpsuits, vinyl miniskirts, dresses accessorized with astronaut chic Plexiglas helmets. Other ensembles, especially the tacky evening gowns souped up with metal armature, are best ignored. All told, Cardin comes across as a relentless optimist about humanity's future, which has a certain retro charm. Remember the future? (Jason Farago) 718 638 5000, brooklynmuseum.org 'ELECTIVE INFINITIES: EDMUND DE WAAL' at the Frick Collection (through Nov. 17). How does a contemporary artist enter a scene as formidable as Henry Frick's Gilded Age mansion? For de Waal, the English ceramist and author of the acclaimed family memoir "The Hare With Amber Eyes," the answer is with modesty. Only as you follow de Waal's site specific installations in nine of the museum's galleries does his own restrained music begin to ring out. Below Ingres's dangerously seductive "Comtesse d'Haussonville," he installs little strips of solid gold leaning against two huddles of white porcelain; in the richly appointed West Gallery, two pairs of overlapping flat screen shaped glass boxes ("From Darkness to Darkness" and "Noontime and Dawntime") distill the experience of being overwhelmed by painted imagery into a lucid kind of serenity. (Will Heinrich) 212 288 0700, frick.org 'THE JIM HENSON EXHIBITION' at the Museum of the Moving Image (ongoing). The rainbow connection has been established in Astoria, Queens, where this museum has opened a new permanent wing devoted to the career of America's great puppeteer, who was born in Mississippi in 1936 and died, too young, in 1990. Henson began presenting the short TV program "Sam and Friends" before he was out of his teens; one of its characters, the soft faced Kermit, was fashioned from his mother's old coat and would not mature into a frog for more than a decade. The influence of early variety television, with its succession of skits and songs, runs through "Sesame Street" and "The Muppet Show," though Henson also spent the late 1960s crafting peace and love documentaries and prototyping a psychedelic nightclub. Young visitors will delight in seeing Big Bird, Elmo, Miss Piggy and the Swedish Chef; adults can dig deep into sketches and storyboards and rediscover some old friends. (Farago) 718 784 0077, movingimage.us 'ALICJA KWADE: PARAPIVOT' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Oct. 27). This shrewd and scientifically inclined artist, born in Poland and based in Berlin, has delivered the best edition in five years of the Met's hit or miss rooftop sculpture commission. Two tall armatures of interlocking steel rectangles, the taller of them rising more than 18 feet, support heavy orbs of different colored marble; some of the balls perch precariously on the steel frames, while others, head scratchingly, are squinched between them. Walk around these astral abstractions and the frames seem to become quotation marks for the transformed skyline of Midtown; the marbles might be planets, each just as precarious as the one from which they've been quarried. (Farago) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'SIMONE LEIGH: LOOPHOLE OF RETREAT' at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (through Oct. 27). Leigh's sensuous, majestic sculptures of black female figures fuse the language of African village architecture and African American folk art, and sometimes racial stereotypes, like the "mammy" figurines produced and collected in earlier eras in America. Sculpture is only one part of the practice that earned Leigh the Hugo Boss Prize 2018, but it is the one that inspired this show of three large objects in a gallery off the rotunda. The title comes from the writings of Harriet Jacobs, an enslaved woman who spent seven years hiding in a crawl space to escape her master's advances. In the exhibition, the "loophole" becomes a kind of artistic conceit, too, in which Leigh moves deftly between mediums, styles and messages, addressing multiple audiences but always, as she has stated, black women. For Leigh, loopholes might include representations of women that link back to ancestors or empower women by drawing on the freedom available through art. In that sense, these sculptures are sentinels, and placeholders. (Martha Schwendener) 212 423 3840, guggenheim.org 'THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ALVIN BALTROP' at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (through Feb. 20). New York City is a gateway for new talent. It's also an archive of art careers past. Some come to light only after artists have departed, as is the case with Baltrop, an American photographer who was unknown to the mainstream art world when he died in 2004 at 55, and who now has a bright monument of a retrospective at this Bronx museum. That he was black, gay and working class accounts in part for his invisibility, but so does the subject matter he chose: a string of derelict Hudson River shipping piers that, in the 1970s and '80s, became a preserve for gay sex and communion. In assiduously recording both the architecture of the piers and the amorous action they housed, Baltrop created a monument to the city itself at the time when it was both falling apart and radiating liberationist energy. (Holland Cotter) 718 681 6000, bronxmuseum.org Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. 'NATURE: COOPER HEWITT MUSEUM DESIGN TRIENNIAL' at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (through Jan. 20). Plastics transformed the material world after World War II. Today, they pollute our oceans. A better future will be made with ... algae. Or bacteria. That's the dominant theme of this sweeping exhibition. On display here at the Smithsonian's temple to the culture of design are objects you might once have expected only at a science museum: Proteins found in silkworms are repurposed as surgical screws and optical lenses. Electronically active bacteria power a light fixture. The triennial displays some 60 projects and products from around the world that define a reconciliation of biosphere and technosphere, as Koert van Mensvoort, a Dutch artist and philosopher, puts it in the show's excellent catalog. "Nature" provides us with a post consumption future, in which the urgency of restoring ecological function trumps the allure of the latest gadget. (James S. Russell) 212 849 2950, cooperhewitt.org 'NOBODY PROMISED YOU TOMORROW: 50 YEARS AFTER STONEWALL' at the Brooklyn Museum (through Dec. 8). In this large group show, 28 young queer and transgender artists, most born after 1980, carry the buzz of Stonewall resistance into the present. Historical heroes, including Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, are honored (in a film by Sasha Wortzel and Tourmaline). Friends in life, Johnson and Rivera are tutelary spirits of an exhibition in which a trans presence, long marginalized by mainstream gay politics, is pronounced in the work of Juliana Huxtable, Hugo Gyrl, Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski and Elle Perez (whose work also appeared in this year's Whitney Biennial). (Cotter) 718 638 5000, brooklynmuseum.org 'OCEAN WONDERS: SHARKS!' at the New York Aquarium (ongoing). For years, the aquarium's 14 acre campus hunkered behind a wall, turning its back to the beach. When aquarium officials last year finally got around to completing the long promised building that houses this shark exhibition, maybe the biggest move, architecturally speaking, was breaking through that wall. The overall effect makes the aquarium more of a visible, welcoming presence along the boardwalk. Inside, "Ocean Wonders" features 115 species sharing 784,000 gallons of water. It stresses timely eco consciousness, introducing visitors to shark habitats, explaining how critical sharks are to the ocean's food chains and ecologies, debunking myths about the danger sharks pose to people while documenting the threats people pose to sharks via overfishing and pollution. The narrow, snaking layout suggests an underwater landscape carved by water. Past the exit, an outdoor ramp inclines visitors toward the roof of the building, where the Atlantic Ocean suddenly spreads out below. You can see Luna Park in one direction, Brighton Beach in the other. The architectural point becomes clear: Sharks aren't just movie stars and aquarium attractions. They're also our neighbors as much a part of Coney Island as the roller coasters and summer dreams. (Michael Kimmelman) 718 265 3474, nyaquarium.com 'PUNK LUST: RAW PROVOCATION 1971 1985' at the Museum of Sex (through Nov. 30). This show begins with imagery from the Velvet Underground: The 1963 paperback of that title, an exploration of what was then called deviant sexual behavior and gave the band its name, is one of the first objects on display. Working through photos, album art and fliers by artists like Iggy Pop, the New York Dolls, Patti Smith and, yes, the Sex Pistols, the exhibition demonstrates how punk offered a space for sexual expression outside the mainstream. In the story told by "Punk Lust," much of it laid out in placards by the writer and musician Vivien Goldman, one of the show's curators, graphic sexual imagery is a tool for shock that frightens away the straight world and offers comfort to those who remain inside. While some of the power dynamic is typical underage groupies cavorting with rock stars images from female, queer and nonbinary artists like Jayne County and the Slits make a strong case for sex as an essential source of punk liberation. (Mark Richardson) 212 689 6337, museumofsex.com 'STONEWALL 50 AT THE NEW YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY' (through Dec. 1). For its commemoration of the anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion, the society continues with two micro shows: "By the Force of Our Presence: Highlights From the Lesbian Herstory Archives" documents the founding in 1974 by Joan Nestle, Deborah Edel, Sahli Cavallero, Pamela Olin and Julia Stanley of a compendious and still growing register of lesbian culture. And "Say It Loud, Out and Proud: Fifty Years of Pride" turns a solo spotlight on charismatic individuals: Storme DeLarverie (1920 2014), Mother Flawless Sabrina/Jack Doroshow (1939 2017), Keith Haring (1958 90) and Rollerena Fairy Godmother. (Cotter) 212 873 3400, nyhistory.org 'T. REX: THE ULTIMATE PREDATOR' at the American Museum of Natural History (through Aug. 9). Everyone's favorite 18,000 pound prehistoric killer gets the star treatment in this eye opening exhibition, which presents the latest scientific research on T. rex and also introduces many other tyrannosaurs, some discovered only this century in China and Mongolia. T. rex evolved mainly during the Cretaceous period to have keen eyes, spindly arms and massive conical teeth, which packed a punch that has never been matched by any other creature; the dinosaur could even swallow whole bones, as affirmed here by a kid friendly display of fossilized excrement. The show mixes 66 million year old teeth with the latest 3 D prints of dino bones, and also presents new models of T. rex as a baby, a juvenile and a full grown annihilator. Turns out this most savage beast was covered with believe it! a soft coat of beige or white feathers. (Farago) 212 769 5100, amnh.org 'VIOLET HOLDINGS: LGBTQ HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE N.Y.U. SPECIAL COLLECTIONS' at Bobst Library (through Dec. 31). With the Stonewall Inn now a National Historic Landmark (and a bar again; it was a bagel shop in the 1980s), nearby New York University has produced a homegrown archival exhibition at Bobst Library, across the park from Grey Art Gallery. Organized by Hugh Ryan, it takes the local history of queer identity back to the 19th century with documents on Elizabeth Robins (1862 1952), an American actor, suffragist and friend of Virginia Woolf, and forward with ephemera related to the musician and drag king Johnny Science (1955 2007) and the African American D.J. Larry Levan (1954 92), who, in the 1980s, presided, godlike, at a gay disco called the Paradise Garage, which was a short walk from the campus. (Cotter) 212 998 2500, library.nyu.edu 'CYCLING IN THE CITY: A 200 YEAR HISTORY' at the Museum of the City of New York (through Oct. 6). The complex past, present and future roles of the bicycle as a vehicle for both social progress and strife are explored in this exhibition. With more than 150 objects including 14 bicycles and vintage cycling apparel it traces the transformation of cycling's significance from a form of democratized transportation, which gave women and immigrants a sense of freedom, to a political football that continues to pit the city's more than 800,000 cyclists against their detractors today. (Julianne McShane) 212 534 1672, mcny.org 'LEONARDO DA VINCI'S "SAINT JEROME"' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Oct. 6). The 500th anniversary of Leonardo's death in 1519 will bring big doings to Paris this fall with a one stop only career survey at the Louvre. New York gets a shot of buzz in advance with the appearance at the Met of a single great painting: "Saint Jerome Praying in the Wilderness." On loan from the Vatican Museums, it's one of the most rawly expressive images in Leonardo's canon. And it's a mystery. We don't know exactly when it was painted, or for whom, or why. Like much of this artist's work, it's unfinished. Incompleteness is part of its power. And powerful this picture is, a spiritual meltdown unfolding right before your eyes. You won't want to miss it. (Cotter) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'DRAWING THE CURTAIN: MAURICE SENDAK'S DESIGNS FOR OPERA AND BALLET' at the Morgan Library Museum (through Oct. 6). Drawn from Sendak's bequest to the Morgan of his theatrical drawings, this succinct yet bountiful exhibition offers an overview of a dense, underappreciated period in this artist's career, undertaken with his most celebrated books well in the past and his life in uneasy transition. "Fifty," Sendak said, "is a good time to either change careers or have a nervous breakdown." The new midlife career he took on in the late 1970s was that of a designer for music theater. His rare ability to convey the light in darkness and the darkness in light brought him to opera. It's the focus of this show, which is aimed at adults but likely delightful for children, too. Five of his productions emerge before our eyes from rough sketches to storyboards, polished designs and a bit of video footage in those unmistakably Sendakian colors, watery and vivid at once. (Zachary Woolfe) 212 685 0008, themorgan.org 'ILLUSTRATING BATMAN: EIGHTY YEARS OF COMICS AND POP CULTURE' at the Society of Illustrators (through Oct. 12). Batman turned 80 in April, and now the character is being celebrated with this visual feast of covers and interior pages, teeming with vintage and modern original comic art that shows the hero's evolution. The exhibition includes "Bat Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan," a display devoted to a Batman story originally printed in Japan, and "Batman Collected: Chip Kidd's Batman Obsession," featuring memorabilia belonging to the graphic designer Chip Kidd. (George Gene Gustines) 212 838 2560, societyillustrators.org 'LIFE: SIX WOMEN PHOTOGRAPHERS' at the New York Historical Society (through Oct. 6). In the three decade plus golden age of Life magazine, only six of its full time photographers were women. On the face of it, this exhibition at the historical society is half an excuse to air some gorgeous, previously unpublished silver prints, half a broad hint about how much talent we've lost to discrimination over the years. But cheery photo essays by professional women about other women hesitating to join the work force make a subtler point: that the actual mechanics of discrimination tend to be more complicated than they appear from a distance. (Heinrich) 212 873 3400, nyhistory.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Schoolchildren who regularly attend the St. Peter's Evangelical Church service sing hymns in English as way to preserve the legacy of the church's African American founders. SAMANA, Dominican Republic Martha Leticia Wilmore , a retired schoolteacher who lives in the port town with a population of roughly 100,000 people off the northeastern edge of the island of Hispaniola, has had the same Sunday morning routine for nearly all 90 years of her life: She eats a piece of sweet bread, drinks a cup of ginger tea and gets dressed in a freshly pressed blouse to attend the service at the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) church, one of two places for worship for the community as it branched off years ago from St. Peter's, locally known as "La Churcha ." Ms. Wilmore is a descendant of a group of more than 300 African Americans who chartered a boat to Samana in 1824 from Philadelphia. For her and 10 other older community members, ranging in age from 80 to 104, attending the weekly church service is a way to preserve the history of the early African American settlers, passed down through songs and the English language. It is a history that many fear will be forgotten. Inside St. Peter's Evangelical Church, the oldest church in town that was founded by the settlers, a group of children sang "Amazing Grace" in front of a crowd filled with congregants who sang along while wearing an assortment of white outfits. "It's a beautiful story and if they don't know it, it will get lost," said the Rev. Jerlin Feliz Diaz, 45, pastor at St. Peter's Church. The relocation to the Dominican Republic came during a back to Africa movement for black people in the United States, Professor Mann Hamilton said. Some estimates claim that as many as 6,000 African Americans migrated throughout the island and as many as 13,000 went to West African countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone. "There was a large issue dealing with what to do with freed black people during this time period," Professor Mann Hamilton said. All passengers on that original ship to Samana obtained their freedom by escaping the slave owning South or by purchasing their own freedom papers. They hailed from A.M.E. churches in the South and throughout the Eastern Seaboard and had surnames like Sheppard, Hamilton, Wilmore and King, which continue to be common throughout the port town. Establishing a viable church became the focus of the group in 1824. African American cultural practices have been preserved through the weekly church activities, which continue today. English was spoken in homes and in schools established by the churches, and other culinary and cultural traditions were passed along, like gingerbread and "johnny cakes," a cornmeal flatbread. "His people banned us from speaking the language we had grown up speaking," said Franklin Wilmore, 75, a local music instructor and weekly A.M.E. church attendee. Many people in the community who only spoke English and had to learn Spanish, developed a hybrid "Spanglish" language in the meantime. In 1979, things changed when cruise ships starting arriving in Samana. Ricardo Barrett Green, 64, who grew up speaking English before the ban, was one of the first descendants to get hired by Carnival Cruises to translate for English speaking tourists. He remembers his first day on the job at age 18, "I was alone with 50 white people who were staring at me and I didn't know what to do, so I began to sing a church song that I knew in English: 'I'm up on the mountain and I will not come down! I'm up on the mountain and I will not come down,'" he said, laughing while recalling the experience. "They loved my performance and everyone clapped. I came back the next day and sang more songs and eventually learned how to be a good tour guide." Connecting to the music and songs of their black American ancestors has been important to the community. Lincoln Phipps, 86, a retired music instructor and member of St. Peter's, grew up playing the trumpet in the church and continued as an adult. He doesn't play in church anymore, but he plays his trumpet and sings gospel songs like "God Will Take Care of You" at home for his wife. Mr. Wilmore now teaches music composition as well as African American spiritual hymns he learned as a child to school age children. Ms. Wilmore and many of the descendants of the 1824 wave of African Americans, have a complicated definition of their Dominican identity. While they were born in Samana, and in many ways feel Dominican, they acknowledge their roots in African American history and have yearned to connect with distant relatives in the United States. Others, however, have not been able to travel to the United States. When the African American settlers arrived in Samana in 1824, the government gave many of them medals to distinguish themselves as Americans. The medals were intended to both celebrate their arrival and were initially told that it would allow them to return to the United States. But many cannot return because their medals were lost and many of their documents have been destroyed over time. When Barack Obama was elected as the United States' first African American president in 2008, Wilfred Benjamin, 45, a local tour guide and cultural preservationist, pursued a longtime hope: He drafted a letter to the U.S. government asking for Samana residents to be recognized as the descendants of African Americans . There was no response. "There's no way to identify our history," Mr. Benjamin said. "There's no statue or official order or cultural center."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
LONDON David Beckham strode into the Kent Curwen showroom here, just one block from the men's wear mecca of Jermyn Street. He smiled amiably at the small gathering of fashion reporters; posed for a picture with Suzy Menkes, the Vogue International editor, who would soon post on Instagram, and briefly rubbed his close cropped beard before announcing that he wanted to make one thing perfectly clear. "I am definitely not the designer," he said, looking in the direction of Daniel Kearns, who stood to the side, basking slightly sheepishly in the soccer superstar's glow. "I wish that I had the time that Daniel has, and that my wife has, even though she tells me every day that she doesn't have much time. But I don't." With that, Mr. Kearns, an Irish designer who had previously worked at Alexander McQueen, Yves Saint Laurent, Louis Vuitton and Faconnable before being hired a year ago by Mr. Beckham and his new business partners to revitalize the venerable British fashion house, talked about how he planned to update the many staples like the cricket sweater, rugby shirt and hunting jacket that went back to the company's founding in 1926.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
But the surfeit of fringe at shows this week owes a debt to an entirely different cast of characters. There were the artist Sterling Ruby, whose soft sculptures, dripping threads, were echoed in the clothes and handbags at Calvin Klein; Nicki Minaj, wearing fringed boots and not much else in a selfie that went viral this summer; a renegade assortment of bikers and neo hippies, resurrected in spirit at Alexander Wang and Anna Sui; and, not least, the romanticized saloon gals and cowpunchers of the great American West, who have moseyed their way into the collective fashion consciousness.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
From my elders, I learned that justice is sometimes seven generations away or more and inevitable. TULSA, Okla. It was an ordinary July morning in the Arts District of the Muscogee Creek Nation territory here. Already hot and set to get hotter. I was inside my house fooling with some lyrics when my husband burst in. "We won!" he announced. The cellphone in his hand carried the breaking news. "We won the McGirt v. Oklahoma decision!" I froze, caught on an inhale, in disbelief and shock. How could any Native tribal nation win any decision with this conservative Supreme Court? And at a time in American history like this when justice seemed so imperiled? My husband and I teared up. We were part of a collective cry that went up in what we call Indian Country when the decision landed. We spent much of the rest of the day checking in with friends and family confirming the news was real. Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch, nominated for the court by President Trump, ruled that because of an 1866 treaty that the Creek Nation signed with the United States much of Oklahoma is still sovereign tribal land, and so Indigenous people who allegedly commit crimes on that land must face justice in tribal or federal courts, not state ones. "Today we are asked whether the land these treaties promised remains an Indian reservation for purposes of federal criminal law," Justice Gorsuch wrote. "Because Congress has not said otherwise, we hold the government to its word." But the ruling was about so much more. It was about validity, personhood, humanity the assertion of our human rights as Indigenous peoples and our right to exist. Justice Gorsuch continued: "On the far end of the Trail of Tears was a promise. Forced to leave their ancestral lands in Georgia and Alabama, the Creek Nation received assurances that their new lands in the West would be secure forever. In exchange for ceding 'all their land, east of the Mississippi River,' the U.S. government agreed by treaty that 'the Creek country west of the Mississippi shall be solemnly guaranteed to the Creek Indians.'" All day, I kept thinking how this decision was girded by centuries of history; how the news would be received by the parents, grandparents and great grandparents who have left this world. The elders, the Old Ones, always believed that in the end, there would be justice for those who cared for and who had not forgotten the original teachings, rooted in a relationship with the land. I could still hear their voices as we sat out on the porch later that evening when it cooled down. Justice is sometimes seven generations away, or even more. And it is inevitable. The Old Ones have always reminded us that we will be here long after colonization has worn itself out. An elder explained to me once, pressing her fingers together, "See this?" I could see no light between her fingers. "This is the time since European settlement." Then, she spread her arms from horizon to horizon: "This is the whole of time." The Supreme Court decision last week affirmed what those of us who live close to our history here know already. Still, we weren't sure what was going to happen because we do not usually fare well in courts. We have always been dogged by legal fictions and false narratives. In the Declaration of Independence we are referred to as "the merciless Indian savages" on "our frontiers." That a conservative nominee to the Supreme Court stood with four other justices and followed the rule of law, instead of bowing to political arguments, is striking: a decision of integrity. It provides hope that the rule of law upon which this country is based can be applied equally. The Old Ones understood the truth that "we are all related," and now, as a nation reckoning with racism, maybe more of us are beginning to understand it, too. We tribal nation citizens will continue to go about our lives here as ordinary U.S. and Oklahoma citizens: going to public schools, working jobs, paying taxes, holding positions of public trust and raising our families. And still, we will have our lives apart from the mainstream. You will find us in our Creek churches, ceremonial grounds and community centers, situated in our rural communities, at the edge of the towns and cities, out there in the trees, the land.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Google is removing the 130 entry fee for its Stadia cloud gaming service indefinitely, the company said on Wednesday, making free high end video games available to just about anyone with a computer during the coronavirus pandemic. The move gives millions of people in 14 countries access to big budget video games without spending hundreds of dollars on a gaming console or a powerful PC. With much of the world urged to stay at home during the virus outbreak, interest in playing video games has surged. The World Health Organization has been supporting a game industry initiative called PlayApartTogether to encourage social distancing and gaming. By making Stadia free now, Google is not only seizing a market opportunity but also trying to extend its lead in cloud gaming over rivals like Amazon, Microsoft and Nvidia, which are building their own platforms. "Keeping social distance is vital, but staying home for long periods can be difficult and feel isolating," Phil Harrison, Google's vice president for Stadia, said in a blog post announcing the change. "Video games can be a valuable way to socialize with friends and family when you're stuck at home."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
With so much time spent at home, many of us are paying more attention to our surroundings and discovering that we don't like what we see. Now might not be the time for a gut renovation, given the social distancing measures still in place and shifting rules regarding construction in different areas and apartment buildings. But it's a good time to think about smaller home improvement projects. With weekends largely devoid of social plans, what else have you got to do? If you're willing to tackle the work yourself, there are changes you can make that won't cost much but will have a big effect on the appearance and comfort of your home. A few designers recently shared some of their favorite budget friendly D.I.Y. projects. For more immediate gratification, take a targeted approach to introducing a new paint color. "Paint a small space say, a bathroom a brighter or bolder color that makes you happy," suggested Rebecca Atwood, a Brooklyn based textile designer and the author of "Living With Color" and "Living With Pattern." Or apply a favorite color to all the trim in one room, or all the interior doors, to change them from background elements to decorative features. "We all think about the color of our walls," she said. "But we don't think enough about the doors." Robert McKinley, a New York interior designer, offered another suggestion: Choose paint with an uncommon finish. In his beach house in Montauk, N.Y., most of the walls are white, but the den is painted with a cloudy, deep red lime wash from Domingue Architectural Finishes. "The lime wash basically gives the look and feel of a plastered wall, but anybody can do it," he said. "I mean, talk about changing the room it made this simple, white room into the most special room in our house." Home improvement TV personalities like Chip and Joanna Gaines have been highlighting the appeal of shiplap and other kinds of wall paneling for years. Paneling is relatively easy to install, said Joanne Palmisano, an interior designer in Shelburne, Vt., and an author of "Rock Your Rental" and other books on designing with salvaged materials. And a little paneling, she noted, can go a long way. "A lot of times we use it as a headboard paneling wall," she said, rather than paneling an entire room. "It gives it this dramatic feel and look." When she renovated Main and Mountain, a motel in Ludlow, Vt., she used a handful of green painted vertical boards in guest room niches to create eye catching storage areas. Ms. Palmisano has even used reclaimed Shaker style cabinet doors to create a paneled headboard wall. The best installation method "depends on the look you're going for and what's behind the wall," she said. In most cases, it involves identifying where the studs are, cutting the boards to size and securing them with a nail gun. If you need help, she added, "There are so many YouTube tutorials." As well as replacing flush mount fixtures with more flattering pendants or chandeliers, Ms. Mangini said, she also tells people to add fixtures closer to eye level: "Add some lamps and sconces, which is also a really great way to bring in character." If you use plug in sconces, installation is easy. Just mount them on the wall near outlets. Sconces are particularly useful beside beds or sofas and above counters or desks. Compared to a single, bright ceiling light, having multiple lower wattage fixtures "creates a mood," Ms. Mangini said. Wallpapering is another job that might sound easy but can quickly become problematic when the paste spills and the paper bubbles and sags. One option for a simpler installation is peel and stick wallpaper, which is effectively a giant sticker for your wall. "I'm embarrassed about how often I use it," Ms. Palmisano said. "But it's a really easy way to make a dramatic change in a room." Another advantage: Removal is almost as easy as installation. "If it's put on right, it can last a long time," she said. "But if you change your mind, or you're renting, you can take it off before you move, usually without damage." And if you want to cover ugly flooring in a bathroom, mudroom or kitchen, there are peel and stick vinyl floor tiles an old product that companies have improved with new patterns and colors. The bed is usually the focal point of the master bedroom, and the headboard is typically its most distinctive element. If you have an upholstered headboard that you don't love, reupholstering it is an easy D.I.Y. project. "You just need a staple gun," Ms. Atwood said. "You're stretching the fabric taut and staple gunning it to the back. It's just like stretching a canvas." Unlike reupholstering a sofa, re covering a headboard requires a minimal amount of fabric, she said, and you could even dye or print your own. (Ms. Atwood's book "Living With Pattern" includes instructions for a D.I.Y. shibori dyed headboard.) If you don't have a headboard, you can make your own, said Ms. Palmisano, who has made them out of plywood covered with carpet padding and faux leather. It doesn't even need to attach to the bed frame. "You just make a wall cleat," she said, or buy one, to mount the headboard directly to the wall behind the bed. If new paint, light fixtures and wallpaper aren't enough to make you happy with your interior, Mr. McKinley suggested adding a bar. In his Montauk house, he and his wife, Kate Nauta, removed a door from a small closet to convert it into a space for mixing drinks. "We did it ourselves," he said, by installing a couple of low Ikea wall cabinets topped by a counter finished in back painted acrylic. Above, they added sconces, a mirror and a vintage wall shelf to hold bottles. This sort of improvement has multiple advantages during lockdown. "It looks so cool," Mr. McKinley said. And it's well equipped to ease anxiety. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
MILAN Almost five years to the week since the lightning strike that was Alessandro Michele's debut at Gucci an event that business schools will study for a long time to come the designer found himself reflecting on his own inevitable obsolescence. "Maybe one day I will not be relevant,'' Mr. Michele said on a bright Saturday afternoon at the Gucci Hub, located in a former aeronautics factory. "Maybe one day I will not be in fashion.'' If the idea and the vague rumors that inevitably attach to it distressed the designer, it failed to show on his face. Dressed in faded jeans and Gucci sneakers, an 18th century jeweled necklace tossed over his vintage cabled Aran sweater, he seemed bemused by all that had transpired since he, a one time accessories designer for the brand, was elevated after news broke in 2014 that Frida Giannini, Gucci's creative director, was being ousted. Few could have predicted from that first show of femme male models dressed in pussy bows and fur lined slip ons that Mr. Michele would so successfully capture the zeitgeist that a creative vision he is the first to characterize as eccentric would drive a sluggish label to cultural centrality and its parent global brand (Gucci is owned by the multinational Kering) to high double digit growth. Mr. Michele has continued to operate on that principle, the designer said before his return to the Milan men's wear schedule after several seasons of the mixed sex presentations he was among the first to innovate. "I still think that in one month I will be fired,'' he added. From the perspective of this observer, that seems like a stretch. Sure, Gucci sales are not at the stratospheric levels that made it the highest selling Italian fashion brand. And the anti sexist, anti racist, gender various, anti ageist plurality platform, which Mr. Michele was among the first in fashion to embrace, has become an industry bandwagon (well, maybe not the anti ageist part.) Yet, not only because Mr. Michele now employs Mickey Mouse motifs on Gucci products, does he resemble Walt Disney in his gift for fusing high culture to the vulgar delirium of pop. Gucci was founded in 1921 by Guccio Gucci, a Florentine, to make leather goods for the carriage trade. Few such customers now exist. There is a minute number of very rich people, yes, and there are the legions who imagine that a double G buckle slipped through their belt loops means they have arrived. What was the destination, again? "I started in this business 25 years ago and I'm lucky because I'm still working by my stomach,'' Mr. Michele said, meaning he is driven less by marketing than by instinct. "At a certain point in the business, it was 'Sell the bag, sell the bag, sell the bag'.'' That, he said, was the point at which he found himself bored and depressed and looking for the exit. Then, as it happened, he sold the bag. "I don't know what is next,'' Mr. Michele said. "I'm not a bitch, but the relationship is open.'' More of the same? Is it an action meeting for PETA, as the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is better known? Or a Redstockings consciousness raising group, a revolutionary cell speaking bitterness? No, it is Milan Fashion Week. Was it only a decade ago that runway shows here were orgies of luxury glut? More was not only more, it was not enough. Concerns with the dire state of the earth were a joke to some. The fall men's wear shows often featured not only immense amounts of clothes that few people could afford but things made from the hides of crocodile, alligator, pony, mink, coyote and just about anything that moved on four legs two, if you count the ostrich. One Vogue editor used to joke that, if there were a species of endangered creature yet unexploited by Italian designers, it was probably an oversight. Likewise, at Giorgio Armani's Emporio Armani show, the message was recycling in the form of a slick new R EA MIX (recycled Emporio Armani) capsule collection of navy streetwear made of renewed or recycled fabrics. Still, a larger and nagging issue presents itself. This was noted by a forlorn group outside of the Ferragamo show on Sunday morning. "There is no fashion on a dead planet,'' read a placard carried by one of a handful of protesters whose reason for targeting the Ferragamo show was unclear. The collection itself was precise, thoughtful, economical just the sort of thing you expect from Paul Andrew, a designer who, it is always noted, is the son of an upholsterer to Queen Elizabeth II. It also happened to be environmentally friendly in an old fashioned way: You would want to keep the stuff in your closet forever. Fashion, Italy's second largest industry, generated almost 100 billion last year, according to Raffaello Napoleone, chief executive of Pitti Immagine, a company that promotes Italian fashion. Roughly 67,000 businesses here employ 620,000 people to crank out almost incalculable quantities of goods, he added. The scale of consumption at that level is daunting and so is that of disposal and waste. Think Topshop and Zara. Think DSquared2, whose maximalist designers, the Canadian twins Dean and Dan Caten, celebrated a quarter century in the business with a greatest hits collection of their well worn motifs (ponchos, biker gear, north country fleeces, denims) layered in a way they have made a brand signature. You could have easily reduced the whole show to a fraction of its size with no net loss to viewers or consumers or, for that matter, creativity. Outfitting some dancer friends in hospital gowns not all that unlike some of Mr. Risso's designs, Mr. Tillett instructed them, as he later wrote in a direct message, to "surrender to gravity, surrender consciousness,'' while a child's music box played a tinny version of Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg's "If I Only Had a Brain.'' What they looked like were junkies nodding out. The piece, Mr. Tillett wrote, was "dedicated" to the Sackler family and was one artist's response to a further catastrophe facing humanity: the global OxyContin epidemic. If Mr. Risso and the industry he serves stopped treating profound problems with superficial fixes, they might make truly beneficial use of their powerful platform. There is no fashion on a dead planet. Bear it in mind.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
FRANKFURT In a bricks and mortar declaration that the euro is here to stay and that the European Central Bank is its headquarters, the bank marked a milestone Thursday with a ceremony for its imposing new office towers. In effect, the new building sets in concrete and lots of steel and glass the declaration this month by Mario Draghi, the bank's president, that "the euro is irreversible." But in an embarrassing disclosure for an institution that has preached austerity to countries like Greece and Spain, the central bank said it had encountered a little spending problem. Increases in the cost of materials and unexpected construction problems will add as much as 350 million euros ( 450 million) to the original estimated price tag of 850 million euros. That would make it a 1.2 billion euro building. "There have been a number of unforeseen challenges that needed to be dealt with," Jorg Asmussen, a member of the central bank's executive board, said at a reception to observe the completion of the structural frame. Disclosure of the cost overrun tarnished a topping out ceremony held in the unfinished 45 story headquarters on a riverside site once occupied by a fruit and vegetable warehouse that served a grim role as a Jewish deportation depot during the Nazi era. The building will replace the provisional quarters the central has occupied since the introduction of the euro currency in 1999. The new central bank headquarters, two sculptural towers looming over the Main River, symbolizes the growing power the central bank has acquired over the course of the euro zone debt crisis. It also gives Frankfurt, with its 700,000 people, a new status symbol in its efforts to establish itself as the Continent's premier financial center. The city is also home to Deutsche Bank, the German stock market and the German central bank, the Bundesbank. Besides its original core task of setting benchmark interest rates for the 17 countries in the euro zone, the central bank has become the main source of financing for hundreds of banks that cannot borrow through the regular markets. Mr. Draghi has declared the central bank's intention to rein in borrowing costs for countries like Spain by buying their bonds on open markets, effectively becoming lender of last resort. Like the common currency itself, though, the central bank as an institution has been a work in progress. Its current headquarters, a plain office tower in downtown Frankfurt, hardly seems worthy of the bank's expanding importance. That building is not large enough to hold all 1,600 employees, many of whom work in rented space elsewhere. The existing quarters are also modest compared with the nearby seat of the Bundesbank, which dominated European monetary policy before the euro and still exerts tremendous influence. 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. The Bundesbank and other national central banks continue to do much of the day to day operational work that a currency union requires. With more than six times as many employees throughout Germany as the European Central Bank, the Bundesbank occupies a parklike campus complex, a fortress of glass boxes in a different neighborhood of Frankfurt. Built in the 1970s, it was a symbol of Germany's postwar economic miracle. It is notably greener and more spacious than the current European Central Bank offices. The new central bank headquarters, scheduled for occupancy in 2014, could be read as something of a declaration of independence from the Bundesbank's anti inflation dogma. Defending price stability, as the Bundesbank did implacably for decades, was a founding principle of the central bank and is still its chief mandate. But with his recent promise to buy government bonds in unlimited amounts to help contain the borrowing costs of troubled euro countries, Mr. Draghi has defied Bundesbank gospel and earned sharp criticism from its president, Jens Weidmann. While the central bank has taken a leading role in forcing austerity on Greece, Italy and other stricken countries, the new headquarters is far from spartan. The curving profile of the two towers, which are connected by an atrium, means that no two floors have the same dimensions. That added to the cost. Mr. Asmussen said increases in the cost of building materials and in construction work would add 200 million euros to the cost as estimated in 2005. The historic warehouse on the site, Grossmarkthalle, will be restored and incorporated into the new complex for conferences and other functions; that could cost 150 million euros more than earlier estimates. The warehouse, built in 1928, served as a produce exchange for the city until 2004. A memorial is being constructed for the 10,000 Jews who were herded aboard trains at a nearby siding from 1941 to 1945, the overwhelming majority never to return. The new central bank headquarters was designed by Coop Himmelb(l)au, an architectural firm in Vienna. The central bank's governing council, which consists of the members of the executive board and heads of the 17 national central banks in the euro zone, will meet at a large, doughnut shaped conference table beneath a huge skylight.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
It was the splashy Southeastern Conference debut that Mississippi State wanted from Coach Mike Leach: His Bulldogs swept into Louisiana State's Tiger Stadium, passed for 623 yards and conquered the reigning national champion. The game also included a widely broadcast shortcoming in college football's promises to adhere to coronavirus precautions: For much of his time on the sideline last Saturday, Leach's conference mandated face covering hung around his neck. "I tried to remember the best I could," Leach said this week. "Then I found myself talking all the time." Play calling, he added, had contributed to "a constant state of talking, so between me taking it down to talk, me lifting it up and it falling down on its own and me remembering to put it back up, I think there were a number of challenges there." Perhaps more than any other major American sport, football is grappling with a scourge of overt, if not always deliberate, mask violations during competition at the collegiate and professional levels. The N.F.L. has angrily watched some of its biggest names defy its rules. Most of the coaches in the SEC, the sport's most prominent collegiate conference, repeatedly breached the league's policy during its opening weekend, and college conferences that are playing football this fall, or planning to, have begun weighing how to police their stated protocols more forcefully. The question is not easily solved in a sport that has long been politicized, that prizes its image as a haven for the macho and that, at the top ranks of the college game, lacks centralized governance. One league's straightforward crackdown could be another's public relations nightmare. The N.F.L., which this week postponed the Steelers Titans game because of an outbreak among Tennessee players and staff, has so far opted for a hard line, handing down at least 1.7 million in fines to coaches and franchises and scrutinizing the Las Vegas Raiders after players skipped masks at an indoor charity dinner. Troy Vincent Sr., a top league executive, warned coaches in a memo this week that penalties for game day violations could escalate to suspensions or a loss of draft picks. There has been far less urgency in the college ranks. No coach or player with limited exceptions, masks are recommended or required for players when they are not on the field competing has been publicly disciplined for not wearing a face covering on the sidelines. The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert R. Redfield, has called cloth face coverings "one of the most powerful weapons we have to slow and stop the spread of the virus, particularly when used universally within a community setting." The C.D.C. has urged people to don masks when they are near people with whom they do not live, especially when it is difficult to socially distance. Although critics of football's masking rules have correctly noted that most games are outdoors and that players and coaches are regularly tested for the virus, medical experts and sports executives believe that face coverings on the sidelines still help curb the pathogen's spread. Regular testing has detected outbreaks, but not left teams immune from them. None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. This week, Notre Dame said 18 football players had tested positive for the virus, and the coach there, Brian Kelly, told ESPN that the outbreak was believed to be linked to a pregame meal. Beyond guarding teams against the virus, leaders in sports and pandemic response also believe the sight of players and coaches wearing masks can powerfully amplify a public health recommendation that has been bitterly debated in some parts of the United States. "Our coaches recognize they're role models, not just for the student athletes on the team but in their communities," said Larry Scott, the commissioner of the Pac 12, which plans to begin its football season in November. The SEC, the Alabama based conference whose footprint includes some Republican controlled states where masking rules and recommendations have been widely resisted, is already facing scrutiny after its leaders spent months pledging that the league would comply with experts' advice. It was not long ago, after all, that all of the SEC's coaches appeared in a public service announcement, complete with a marching band's cadence, that said, "Wear your mask. We're wearing them. Are you?" "I fully recognize the passion associated with coaching and competing," Sankey added. "Yet we will all be watched closely and must be certain to comply with masking, distancing and hygiene protocols to minimize the potential spread of Covid 19." Without elaboration, he said that conference officials would "take additional action, if necessary, to ensure adherence" to health protocols. In the meantime, the conspicuous violations of the mask policies the Atlantic Coast Conference had some notable breaches when it began playing last month have alarmed some experts and revived questions about how stringently athletic programs nationwide are following health rules away from television cameras. A survey of more than 1,200 college athletic trainers that was released last month found that about 47 percent of coaches and staff members across sports were "fully compliant" with safety protocols related to the virus. The survey, conducted by the National Athletic Trainers' Association, also found that roughly 7 percent of coaches and staff members did not follow the rules at all. Despite the high profile shortcomings, some coaches, including a handful in the SEC, have openly embraced masks beyond the public service announcement. Sam Pittman, the Arkansas coach who scrupulously wore a mask during last weekend's loss to Georgia, said in an interview that he had spent part of the off season testing face coverings to see which would best let him speak into his headset. He said he had used a mask during practices to become more accustomed to it. "I couldn't live with myself if I thought I had transferred the virus to somebody, and I know we get tests and all of those things, but I don't want to get it and I don't want to give it to somebody," Pittman said. "But it really has become habit."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Caroline Chou, 19, pins a green screen to the goldenrod walls of her childhood bedroom in San Jose, Calif. She's already changed into her uniform: a white button down shirt, pleated skirt and green striped tie. A wand and heavy tome lie on the bed, in case she needs props. Chou, who would normally be on campus at the University of California, Los Angeles, has adjusted to a new normal during the coronavirus pandemic. She spends her weeks clicking between online college courses and two remote, part time jobs. And on the weekends, she slips away to Hogwarts. These edits frequently give creators a chance to romance their favorite characters, a la Wattpad fan fiction. With strategic cuts or more advanced editing, users can star as "Harry Potter" protagonists, whose love interests include everyone from the Weasley twins to Luna Lovegood to overwhelmingly Draco Malfoy. Self insert videos also offer young fans, many of whom grew up with Harry Potter, comfort and escapism during the pandemic. After online classes, they can go to a potions lesson. Separated from their usual social lives, they can befriend other Potterheads on TikTok. And queer people and people of color, who have been notably marginalized in the Harry Potter universe, can finally become protagonists in the stories they've long adored. Setup and costuming are just two steps in Chou's production. As she builds her universe over a Zoom interview, the Slytherin scours YouTube for clips from the "Harry Potter" movies, choreographs her scenes and films herself. Later, she'll use Adobe Premiere Pro to bring herself out of her green screened bedroom and onto the Hogwarts campus through keying, masking and color correction. The end result is a 12 second montage of her admiring five of the "Harry Potter" boys. The whole process takes about two hours, but some of her videos which can be as long as 60 seconds have taken up to 10. For Chou and Law, Harry Potter edits double as wish fulfillment and professional practice. Chou, a film student who wants to be a director, got into TikTok after one of her professors encouraged her to stay creative during quarantine. Law studies digital media at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, and hopes to work in visual effects. Like most Harry Potter fans, they both grew up wishing they could attend Hogwarts. "Now that I'm older, with the magic of technology, I can see myself there," Law said. Creators like Chou, who is Taiwanese American, and Law, who is Chinese American, also add more racial diversity to the movies. "It's a great opportunity for any person of color," said Belle Miranda, a 19 year old TikToker and one of Law's nearly 80,000 followers. "I can write my own spinoff: What if a Latina Ravenclaw was inserted in the series?" Emelee Chanthabury, 22, received multiple comments comparing her to Cho Chang, the only notable Asian character in the "Harry Potter" series, when she first started editing herself into the movies. Chanthabury, like Cho Chang, is a Ravenclaw who fancies Cedric Diggory. But the two look nothing alike: Chang is of Chinese descent, whereas Chanthabury is Laotian and white. "It was weird, because I never saw myself as different; I never saw myself as a side character," Chanthabury explained. "I'm seeing myself as a main character in the story." The experience has introduced Chanthabury to a community of fans like her. "When I go through my followers and my comments, it's all Asian women, and it brings me so much joy," she said. This is one of Harry Potter TikTok's other major draws: Like the message boards and chat rooms of yore, fans are using the app to meet and befriend fellow Potterheads. They communicate in group chats on Instagram, Snapchat and by text messages. Sometimes, they even collaborate on videos together. Law uses Zoom with her Harry Potter friends the self christened "Hogwarts Cheeto Girls" regularly, and just met one in person for the first time. Chou recently edited herself and Melina Spahn, a 20 year old Hufflepuff from Germany, into a scene from "Order of the Phoenix." "The fact that you live across the ocean and here we are fighting Death Eaters together," Spahn commented on the post. "I love this." Erin McDonald, 19, has relied heavily on these friendships in the last few months. Her parents moved from her home state of Virginia to San Luis Obispo, Calif., during her first semester of college. So when quarantine forced McDonald to move back home, she found herself across the country from her childhood friends. McDonald found solace in TikTok, quickly gaining more than 120,000 followers for her videos romancing the Quidditch captain Oliver Wood. She and Chanthabury have an ongoing video series with their friend, Mia Oberholzer, 19, a Slytherin from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Another of McDonald's TikTok friend groups, the "Harry Potheads," is comprised mostly of younger teenagers. They call her Papa Ernie, and the group meets on Zoom every night. Ever the Hufflepuff, McDonald said her favorite thing about Harry Potter TikTok was its overwhelming positivity. When she found herself unwittingly at the center of some fandom drama in October, the issue was resolved with no hard feelings. On another account, she posts "Harry Potter" scene edits in which various characters encourage her eating disorder recovery. As a bisexual woman, McDonald said she also wanted to create more space for fans like her, especially given what some see as the "Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling's feeble attempts at gay representation. Rowling's recent comments about transgender people have likewise spurred legions of fans to make "Harry Potter" their own. While other fans thirsted over Draco Malfoy, McDonald was one of the first users to edit herself into a relationship with Hermione Granger. Multiple creators followed suit, including Beth McAlpine, a 16 year old Hufflepuff from London. "It's like fixing a part of your childhood that was missing," McAlpine said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
NAYPYIDAW, Myanmar Foreign executives who flew into this dirt poor country over the past year to tap into what is described as Asia's last major frontier market often came away skeptical, befuddled or outright disappointed. "Look, listen, learn and leave" was the catch phrase that described trips here by executives who saw first hand the lack of electricity, terrible roads, eager but very undereducated work force and overwhelmed government officials. Now, two years after Myanmar's civilian government came to power, the country appears to be moving into another stretch of its journey from military dictatorship to democratic market economy. Flirtations by foreign investors are turning into commitments, vague promises into dollars. Some of the world's most prominent multinational companies Coca Cola, Unilever, General Electric, Philips, Visa have started doing business in the country. "We're prepared to be very patient," said John G. Rice, a vice chairman of General Electric, who attended a World Economic Forum conference of foreign executives in Naypyidaw that concluded Friday. G.E. has leased aircraft and sold medical machinery and turbines in Myanmar in recent months and announced it would donate 7 million worth of training to engineers and health care workers. The overall scale of the company's investment remains small. G.E. opened an office earlier this year with considerable fanfare but it has only two employees in the country. "The world is getting used to the fact that Myanmar is no Shangri La," said Peter Maher, the head of Southeast Asian operations for Visa. "This is frontier stuff," he said. "We take it on faith that there will be a market here." Since December, when automatic teller machines were reintroduced into the country, the number of A.T.M.'s accepting international credit cards has gone from zero to 160 and spending by foreign cardholders in the country has totaled about 7 million. But as a measure of the still tiny size of the market here, in neighboring Thailand, which has a similar population but a much more developed economy, foreign cardholders spent 400 times as much during the same time period about 3 billion, Mr. Maher said. One of the biggest tests of the country's ability to attract investors is the auction for mobile phone licenses scheduled to be completed later this month. Fewer than 10 percent of the people in Myanmar have mobile phones, compared with 80 percent in neighboring Bangladesh. The high cost of gas is forcing families to cut back on activities and essentials. Clearview AI does well in another round of facial recognition accuracy tests. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. Jaspal Bindra, the group executive director of Standard Chartered Bank, said the winners of the mobile phone licenses would need to invest billions of dollars. "That's where you will see investment dollars quicker than later," he said. Companies selling food and other consumer goods are also moving quickly. For decades, packaged food and drinks have been imported and smuggled into the country from Thailand and China; companies are now seeking to move production here. Daniel Sjogren, managing director of Carlsberg Myanmar, is presiding over the construction of a brewery in Bago, a city an hour and a half outside the country's commercial capital, Yangon. With annual consumption of beer in Myanmar about five liters, or little more than one gallon, per person, compared with 20 liters per person in a more developed territory like Hong Kong, the brewer anticipates years of growth. But Carlsberg's investment plans also underline some of the challenges foreign companies face in setting up operations. Yangon, where Mr. Sjogren is moving with his family, is strained by the influx of foreigners. He had difficulty getting his two young children enrolled in an international school and the house he has rented in Yangon is only marginally less expensive than the apartment he is leaving in Hong Kong, one of the world's most expensive cities.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Because "True Detective" has no narrative continuity from season to season, it is united instead by a set of distinguishing elements "auteur stamps" to put it kindly, "cliches" to put it less so. Broadly speaking, every season is about hard boiled detectives working the case that will define their careers and alter their lives, leading to a confrontation with unfathomable evil in the outside world and personal demons from within. There is also a refreshing of rotating elements, like whatever brooding song T Bone Burnett unearths for the opening credits, and the big name actors in the lead roles. The one constant is the voice of Nic Pizzolatto, whose robust interpretation of the noir procedural is unmistakable, for better or worse. In this week's episode, a few more specific elements asserted themselves, starting with the detective's broken relationship with his children. Detective Hays doesn't have kids yet in the 1980 timeline because he is only just meeting Amelia, their future mother. But his relationship to the Purcell children is already coloring his approach to fatherhood. The Purcell kids, we learn, have been hiding something from their parents and from everyone else, for that matter. When they were alive, they claimed to be playing with a schoolmate named Boyle a few times a week, but when Hays and West interrogate the kid, he claims to have spent little time with Will Purcell. And when asked about Boyle, Will's father, Tom, is struck by the fact that Boyle was supposed to be a close buddy but he never remembers that boy ever spending time in their home. Even though the Purcell children are the victims here, no matter the circumstances, the fact that they were lying to their parents and perhaps had a "secret friend" who may be responsible for their abduction plays on Hays's mind. The lesson for him is that children are never safe outside his watch, for one, but also that they're as capable of deception as grown ups. That feeling of powerlessness over a child's fate was a dominant and at times, laughable element of "True Detective" last season, when Colin Farrell's absentee dad made several heavy handed attempts to have a relationship to his son but often erupted into anger and violence. When the boy got bullied in school, his answer was to drive over to the kid's house and beat his father to a pulp on the front lawn. One of the most crucial sequences this week's episode, which is devoted mostly to picking up bread crumbs, catches Hays at a Wal Mart in the 1990 timeline with his two children, Henry and Becca (Isaiah C. Morgan and Kennedi Butler), who are still of elementary school age. He demands they stay by his side, despite their antsy desire to visit the toy aisle, and when Becca wanders off as he's picking out toilet paper, he quickly loses his cool. He dashes through aisles with his son, has customer service call for her over the public address system and even demands that they lock down the entire store to keep anyone from getting out. When she turns up, his reaction is maybe 20 percent relief and 80 percent fury, and he terrorizes her just as Farrell terrorized his already put upon son last season. Back home, he barks at his wife for acting too giddy over a piece of good information she picked up from the police about Julie Purcell's reappearance at the drugstore robbery. He barks at her again to check on the kids, and gets reminded that she spends far more time looking after them than he does. The difference between Hays and Farrell's character, however, is that the big case is about children, so his unhinged rants around and about them cannot be chalked up to garden variety cop on the edge behavior. We don't know everything that has happened in the decade between the Purcell case breaking and the scene at Wall Mart, but we know enough that his fear over what can happen to kids and his knowledge that they can lie has poisoned his thinking. And although we also don't know why the grown up Becca is estranged from him in the 2015 timeline, his temperament suggests the answer. Still, it's disappointing to see Hays slurping from a bottle of Jack Daniels and carping at his wife, because it brings him right in line with the detectives on previous seasons. It shouldn't be too much to expect Pizzolatto to make some tweaks and perhaps define Hays a little differently, especially since we've seen how calmly and methodically Hays can work a crime scene or question suspects and witnesses. Although the mystery has unfolded compellingly on this season of "True Detective," with the three timelines relating to each other elegantly, it's a shame to think of Hays as a carbon copy of detectives past, particularly given his racial differences and his seemingly more sober process. "True Detective" wouldn't be "True Detective" without a case ruining its hero's life, but it's fair to hope that Pizzolatto will ruin Hays's life in less expected ways. One of the fascinating side effects of multiple timelines is that they stand in for lapses in memory. We don't know what happened between 1980 and 1990, or 1990 and 2015, but our minds fill in the blanks anyway, depending on whatever narrative or behavioral cues Pizzolatto supplies. It is particularly interesting to imagine what happened to Tom in the years after his son was murdered and his daughter went missing how he found God and got sober, what bottom looked like for him before he quit drinking and how he secured a warm relationship with West. Extremely relatable that Hays would lose track of his daughter when considering what kind of toilet paper to pick up. Charmin currently has Ultra Soft and Ultra Strong rolls sitting side by side at the grocery store. Surely there's a difference, but who can know right away which to choose? Hays finding multi sided Dungeons Dragons die in the wood recalls the little remembered 1982 made for TV movie "Mazes and Monsters," starring Tom Hanks in his first lead role. What notoriety the film does have, beyond being a footnote in Hanks's career, lies in its fear mongering over role playing games like D D and their effects on the psychologically susceptible. Having Will's hands positioned as they were in his First Communion photo is right on that edge between creepy and exploitative. It suggests a line is about to be crossed.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
What are magic tricks if not a warping of reality? Skilled illusionists look like they are bending the laws of physics. What they actually do, of course, is make their audience believe in a world where people can be sawed apart and put back together, where objects fall upward and mind reading is possible. Kristen, the narrator and sole character of Crystal Skillman's new play "Open," at the Tank, executes magic tricks because she is the one who needs to believe. The miracle this lovely show pulls out is that by the end, she does and so do we. Decked out in a floral pattern blazer and a top hat, a cummerbund over her T shirt, Kristen (the wondrous Megan Hill) is a pretty funky magician. When she shuffles an invisible deck of cards, she simply mimes the action and a sound effect helps the audience fill in the blanks. When she juggles invisible balls, the slapping noise they make as they hit her palms is enough to convince us that Ms. Hill is a master of eye hand coordination. "Open," unobtrusively directed by Jessi D. Hill, is not a postmodern deconstruction of David Copperfield, however, but a fragile love story that harbors tragedy under its seemingly goofy exterior.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Is Audrey Hepburn making a return to the house of Givenchy? On Thursday, the French brand named Clare Waight Keller as its artistic director, responsible for women's and men's wear, accessories and couture. She will be the first woman to run the creative side of the house founded by Hubert de Givenchy in 1952. The announcement marks a new stage in this year's game of fashion musical chairs, and it is a potentially significant change, both for Givenchy and its incoming designer. The news came less than two months after Ms. Waight Keller, a British designer, officially resigned from Chloe which is owned by Compagnie Financiere Richemont, and which announced last week that its new creative director was Natacha Ramsey Levi. Ms. Ramsey Levi had been creative director of women's ready to wear at Louis Vuitton, a brand that, like Givenchy, is owned by LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton. "I am very happy to have Clare Waight Keller join the LVMH group," said Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH, in announcing the news, which was released simultaneously on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, WeChat and Weibo. "I believe her widespread expertise and vision will allow Givenchy to enter the next phase of its unique path." What that next phase is remains to be seen, but the choice of Ms. Waight Keller, rumored during the recent Paris Fashion Week, suggests the answer is not more of the same. Givenchy's previous artistic director, Riccardo Tisci, left the brand in February after 12 years. He was responsible for transforming it from the house defined largely by the relationship between Mr. de Givenchy and Ms. Hepburn, his greatest muse, to a house the Kardashians loved, with all the Gothic hard edge pop culture buzz that suggests. Mr. Tisci also made it a social media force. By contrast, there is nothing hard edge about Ms. Waight Keller, 46, a low key personality often pictured peeking out from under her long brown hair, hands tucked into trouser pockets. As a designer, she has seemed content to let her brands be the stars, and her work, both at Chloe and in her former position as designer of Pringle of Scotland, was marked by a soft focus, accessible elegance with a tailored line. Think of it as slouchy chic. Indeed, the statement by Philippe Fortunato, chief executive of Givenchy, seemed to suggest a return to the brand's roots. "I am very excited to see Clare bring her singular sense of elegance and modernity to Givenchy," he said. "By exploring our maison's 65 year heritage and the outstanding savoir faire of its ateliers, I am convinced Clare will help Givenchy reach its full potential." Though Ms. Waight Keller, who began her career working at Calvin Klein in New York and with Tom Ford at Gucci, was also in charge of men's wear at Pringle, she has never worked with an haute couture atelier before. Givenchy suspended its formal couture shows in 2012, first holding static presentations of the collection instead, and more recently incorporating some couture looks into its men's wear shows in January and June. But the fact that Ms. Waight Keller has been specifically given responsibility for the highest form of fashion's art suggests that a return to a more formal couture offering may be in the future. It also suggests that the idea was false that Ms. Waight Keller, who has three children and has recently moved her family to London from Paris, was taking time off after Chloe because of the pressures of today's fashion cycle. Her responsibilities at Givenchy, after all, will be significantly greater than her responsibilities at Chloe: She will be overseeing at least eight collections a year, as opposed to four. LVMH does not break down the performance of individual brands in its financial results, but the Givenchy annual sales revenue is believed to be to around 500 million euros, or more than 530 million,) and there are 72 free standing stores worldwide. In January, LVMH reported revenue of EUR37.6 billion in 2016, an increase of 5 percent, beating expectations because of strong sales in the United States and Europe, and a pickup in demand in Asia. Along with the move of Raf Simons to Calvin Klein from Christian Dior, the switch by Ms. Waight Keller should put to rest the recent theory that designers are rebelling against the relentless demands of the system by stepping off the hamster wheel. Perhaps most significantly of all, though, her appointment at the helm of one of LVMH's signature brands is further indication that the largest luxury group in the world is increasingly focused on the talents of women designers, and changing a historical pattern that has seen most large brands with significant women's wear profiles run by male creatives. (In June, Christian Dior, the structural owner of LVMH, named Maria Grazia Chiuri as artistic director.) In her new role like Phoebe Philo, the creative director of Celine, another LVMH brand (who, when she was creative director of Chloe, became the first designer to ever take a formal maternity leave) Ms. Waight Keller will move between London and Paris, where the Givenchy atelier is based.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
, 70, is the founder and president of the Property Group Partners, which develops and manages office buildings. The company is developing an office building at 860 Washington Street in Manhattan's meatpacking district in partnership with Romanoff Equities. Q. How did you decide on a new name after your separation in 2011 from Louis Dreyfus? A. The Louis Dreyfus family changed ownership and didn't want to be associated with real estate anymore in the U.S., and so it was very amicable. Property Group was what we had been known as when we were Louis Dreyfus. It's a little generic. The only other alternative was to put a name on it, but I think we're all in this together on this team. Q. You founded the Louis Dreyfus Property Group more than 40 years ago. Any plans to retire soon? Q. How is business these days? A. We have never been busier. We have more projects under way than we've ever had at any one time. We have three new projects. One is in Washington, D.C., which is called Capitol Crossing, and it's about 2.2 million square feet of office space. The second is here in New York in a venture with the Romanoff family, at 860 Washington Street. And we have a building at 52 Lyme Street in London, which is right next to Lloyd's of London. Q. Is 860 Washington your sole holding in New York? A. Yes. In 1985 we finished 527 Madison Avenue at 54th and Madison. And 148 Lafayette Street we sold just over a year ago, which was a complete renovation and rehab of the building, an office building. One Forty Eight Lafayette Street was owned in a fund, and the fund had a finite life, so that's why we disposed of that. A. We're on the east side of the High Line and the new Whitney Museum is on the left side. It's a 10 story building. We are breaking ground on and about Oct. 1. There's a dinner theater on the site right now, and they leave on the 28th of September. All of our plans have been submitted to the building department, and we're moving forward. It's going to be a green building hopefully we're going for gold. Q. Sustainable development has been your focus. A. It's wise to do things as environmentally acceptable as you can. We also found that the biggest economic driver were users. Law firms in Washington want it. There's an emphasis on long term sustainability. We're looking at doing a cogeneration plant for the buildings on our site in Washington. It's a higher first cost, but you're able to control your long term power costs. Q. Any early interest from potential tenants for 860 Washington? This may be an opportunity for a single user for the entire building who may be interested in it not as just a location but as a branding opportunity. We are abutting the High Line. Our first floor is 25 feet high the retail space which brings us to pedestrian level of the High Line. And our second floor is 17 feet high. Q. What kind of company could you see leasing there? A. There are a couple of industries. One would be fashion and the other would be tech; we're in talks with people in those industries. A. I think we're a little early to say, but certainly the office space will have spectacular views. The windows on the east have views of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. The windows on the west have great views of the Hudson, and south we have all of Lower Manhattan.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
The 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Ecuador in April that killed at least 410 people and injured more than 2,000 emotionally devastated the country and caused enormous damage. A disaster that severe can often lead to a downturn in tourism, but that may not be the case in Ecuador. Travel specialists say that the earthquake likely won't affect tourism because the epicenter of the quake was on the country's northwest coast, a region dotted with beachfront resorts that are popular getaways for locals but not with international tourists. Although about half of these hotels were destroyed, according to Gabriela Sommerfeld, the general manager of Quito Tourism, Ecuador travel representatives say that their clients are still interested in visiting the country. Ginny Caragol, an Ecuador expert at the New York City based travel consulting firm Valerie Wilson Travel, said that none of her clients with coming trips to the country had canceled or postponed their plans. "The earthquake was devastating, but it happened in a pocket of the country where not many international travelers go," she said. Beth Jenkins, an Ecuador expert at McCabe World Travel in Washington, D.C., said that her clients are inquiring about the earthquake but aren't concerned about visiting Ecuador. "My itineraries to Ecuador never included the north coast where the earthquake happened, and also, none of the country's top attractions were damaged because of it," she said. Although a natural disaster can often cripple a country's tourism industry, it doesn't always have to, said Henry H. Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst at the San Francisco based Atmosphere Research Group. "It really depends on where the disaster happened and how quickly the community can recover." Hurricane Odile in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, in 2014 and the 2004 tsunami in Asia "were devastating to tourism in those areas because they were badly damaged," he said. "In the case with Ecuador, the damaged area isn't where international visitors really went." Although the Galapagos Islands, in the Pacific Ocean off the country's western coast and known for their spectacular wildlife, are Ecuador's biggest tourist draw, Quito, the country's capital, is increasingly becoming a destination, and tourism to Ecuador over all is growing and is significant to the local economy. According to statistics from Quito Tourism, the tourism industry is the fourth highest source of income in the country and brought in more than 1 billion last year. Also, 1.5 million people visited last year compared with 650,000 in 2007; that same year, less than a half million tourists came to Quito, but in 2015, the city had more than 706,000 tourists. A big reason for the jump in visitors is Ecuador's improved infrastructure. A new airport, Mariscal Sucre International Airport, opened in 2013 outside of Quito with more runways and facilities for passengers. High end hotels have opened throughout the country such as Casa Gangotena, a 31 room upscale property with a fine dining restaurant in the heart of Quito's old city, and Mashpi Lodge, located three hours from Quito in the Equatorial Choco Bio Region, known for its rich biodiversity. "Tourists would fly through Quito to get to the Galapagos, but now that there is better infrastructure on the mainland, they are spending time there and appreciating the many sights," Ms. Jenkins said. The Galapagos aside, top attractions in Ecuador include Quito's well preserved historic center, a Unesco World Heritage site that is full of plazas, churches and convents; a trip to the Equator where visitors can walk on ground that is said to be precisely at Earth's midpoint 0 degrees latitude, 0 minutes, 0 seconds; and an excursion to the Andean alpine grasslands an hour from Quito, where visitors can soak in hot springs and go hiking and mountain biking. Still, while the major tourist draws were spared by the April earthquake, there is a part of the country that was badly damaged, and Ms. Sommerfield said that travelers could contribute to a recovery by visiting Ecuador. "The best way to help Ecuador after the earthquake is to visit Ecuador," she said. Mr. Harteveltd agreed. "Tourism is a big help in recovering from a natural disaster because it brings in money to the economy," he said. "And, if you want to be more proactive, you can join the efforts of a nonprofit that's hands on in helping with the recovery and make your trip a volunteering vacation."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Anne Barnard, The Times's bureau chief in Beirut, Lebanon, who covers Syria and the Middle East, discussed the tech she's using. You've spent much of your time covering the Syrian war. What have been your most important tech tools for doing your job? Covering Syria has transformed the way I use technology at work. Not that I use especially high tech tools I don't. But the particular journalistic and logistical challenges of covering this conflict have prodded everyone to use basic technology in new and different ways. That means not just me and my colleagues, but also the Syrians whose experiences we are covering. The most important of those tools is the ubiquity of smartphone video and the ease of sharing it. Also critical are social media networks, which have helped connect journalists to a wide variety of sources. There are too many apps and devices to mention, but they include the familiar list: Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Twitter and Skype. Methods that Syrians helped pioneer and develop, using these simple tools, have been adopted all over the world by people struggling against authority, including in the United States with witnesses recording police brutality or Black Lives Matter activists sharing those videos. The Syrian government has long kept tight control on international journalists' access to Syria and their movements inside. So when the protest movement began in 2011, Syrian activists knew they had to film their own actions and the government's crackdown if they wanted the outside world to know. This began with individual witnesses and activists narrating the date and location as they used phones to film protests, then security forces attacking protesters, then opposition fighters taking over neighborhoods, then government helicopters and, later, fighter planes bombing those neighborhoods. As the war dragged on, opposition areas became just as difficult to reach as government ones; they were blocked by sieges, or journalists there were threatened by extremist kidnappers, by airstrikes or by both. So these tools became important for covering all sides and areas, although we've never stopped traveling to any areas we can get to. Seven years later, the use of such digital media tools has become far more systematic. The rescue group the White Helmets, working in opposition held areas, routinely takes video from cameras mounted on volunteers' helmets as they try to pull survivors from rubble. The conflict has become partly an information war, and all sides record videos they hope will go viral to spread their point of view. But we journalists also use the same tools to steer the conversation and verify information, not just passively receive what people want to send us. From the start, we've combined online and in person contact, meeting people online and seeing them in person later, or using social media to quietly keep in touch after meeting inside the country. Using Skype or WhatsApp videos or photos, we can witness what a person is going through in real time. We can also ask them to show us their surroundings or send images of shrapnel or documents or locations, to bolster or debunk claims. We use reverse image search to make sure that photos and videos being shared online are not recycling old incidents. And with the help of colleagues, we can use geolocation to verify the time and location of photos and videos. What are some of the biggest challenges of using these tech tools? The number one challenge is the security of witnesses and sources. Whether in the United States or in Syria, electronic communications cut two ways: They provide an avenue for a government's surveillance to identify and/or locate the people struggling against it. In Syria, the government chose not to block Facebook and other platforms; it used those networks to track activists and the relationships among them. People have been arrested and tortured for their social media posts, or even a "like" on someone else's comment, and private messages are often hacked and tapped. So we are constantly looking for safer means of communication. How do you use technology differently in Beirut than you did in the United States? Technology is more of a lifeline here as I communicate with family, friends, colleagues and sources around the world, with video and audio apps a cheaper and clearer alternative to subpar cellphone connections. And Facebook and WhatsApp groups are an easy way to share photos and feel more in touch. But it's also frustrating, limited by slow internet speeds. I work with colleagues on amazing visual multimedia projects that I and many residents in the region are unable to view fully because we literally don't have the bandwidth to load and run them efficiently. I also have become a devotee of podcasts during my time here, since they're the best way to get the radio broadcasts I like to listen to back home. It's also invaluable to catch up on the global and Mideast news in the morning without looking at a screen while walking, or working out. What is Beirut's tech scene like? What are some of the most popular homegrown apps there? There are some tech start up incubators in Beirut. Lebanon has terrible communications infrastructure, except for a small area in downtown Beirut that has better internet speeds. But it has lots of creative human capital with an incentive to work on tech ideas that bypass the corruption that is prohibitive for many brick and mortar businesses. My favorite Beirut tech idea is MakerBrane, which comes from Ayssar Arida, an urban designer, and Sabine de Maussion, a curator, a married couple we met when they had the cubicle next to my husband's in a shared office space a few years ago. It's still in development. The idea is a reinvention of building sets like Lego and going to a more creative and sustainable mind set. It's a combination of physical and online tools that allow kids and adults to connect pieces of existing modular building sets they already own to one another. (You could combine Lego and other toys, for instance.) The online part lets people share and collaborate on designs as in Minecraft. The idea is to let people design toys locally and for the company to make money not by selling plastic but by letting people share their designs. So kids can design their own toys and sell the designs to others. Or they can pay small fees for designs they can then build themselves with stuff they have kind of like paying for a recipe plus the "branes," which are small and sent for free. Outside your job, what tech product are you currently obsessed with? Books! Enjoying reading offscreen is increasingly important for everyone in an over digitalized world where email and other digital communications encroach on the boundaries between night and day, home and work. My kids, 10 and 7, spend hours reading books every day; we don't have cable or satellite TV except in our home office for me and my husband, who is also a journalist and a researcher, to very occasionally watch breaking news on Arabic regional channels. Kid screen time is restricted to a few hours on the weekend. The biggest challenge in trying to fit our stuff back into the smaller apartment we'll be moving home to in New York soon is not clothes or even beautiful Middle Eastern textiles and woodwork. It's our shelves and shelves of books. One of the biggest consolations we've offered the kids for leaving Lebanon, where they've grown up, is a promise that a few blocks from our apartment, there will be a public library.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
As the sale of TikTok enters its final stages, Beijing is saying it wants the last word. In a bureaucratic two step, China on Friday updated its export control rules to cover a variety of technologies it deemed sensitive, including technology that sounded much like TikTok's personalized recommendation engine. Then on Saturday, the country's official Xinhua news agency published commentary by a professor who said the new rule would mean that the video app's parent, the Chinese internet giant ByteDance, might need a license to sell its technology to an American suitor. Beijing's last minute assertion of authority is an unexpected wrinkle for a deal as two groups race to buy TikTok's U.S. operations before the Trump administration bans the app. Taken together, the rule change and the commentary in official media signaled China's intention to dictate terms over a potential deal, though experts said it remained unclear whether the Chinese government would go as far as to sink it. The moves from Beijing ensnare TikTok and potential American buyers including Microsoft and Oracle, wedging them in the middle of a tussle between the United States and China over the future of global technology. Beijing's displeasure alone could scare off TikTok's suitors, many of whom have operations in China. TikTok is the most globally successful app ever produced by a Chinese company, and the conflict over its fate could further fracture the internet and plunge the world's two largest economies into a deeper standoff. "At a minimum they're flexing their muscles and saying, 'We get a say in this and we're not going to be bystanders,'" said Scott Kennedy, a senior adviser at the Washington based Center for Strategic and International Studies who studies Chinese economic policy. "It could be an effort to outright block the sale, or just raise the price, or attach conditions to it to give China leverage down the road," he said. He added that it showed a rare bit of consensus between China and the United States that both agreed ByteDance was a national security priority. If Beijing blocks the sale of TikTok, it would effectively be calling the Trump administration's bluff, forcing the U.S. government to actually go through with restricting the app and potentially incurring the wrath of its legions of influencers and fans. Ordering companies like Apple and Google to take down TikTok in app stores globally could also prompt further anger against the Trump administration and even lawsuits. ByteDance and Oracle declined to comment on the rule changes and the Xinhua article. Microsoft did not have immediate comment. The U.S. Department of Commerce did not respond to requests for comment. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But Beijing's move could risk empowering the more hawkish members of Mr. Trump's team and igniting an even more forceful response from the administration, which has said that it could take more measures to block tech companies like Alibaba and Baidu from doing business in the United States. China's changes to its export rules came just as ByteDance had signaled that it was close to reaching a resolution on the future of TikTok's business in the United States. President Trump this month issued an executive order restricting Americans' dealings with TikTok beginning in mid September. He and other White House officials have said the app could be a Trojan Horse for data gathering by the Chinese Communist Party, an accusation that ByteDance has denied. That set off the deal negotiations. Chinese officials have denounced the Trump administration's treatment of TikTok, characterizing it as "bullying." In Friday's update to the export control rules, China's Commerce Ministry and its Science and Technology Ministry restricted the export of "technology based on data analysis for personalized information recommendation services." TikTok plays up its ability to use technology to understand users' interests and fill their feeds with more of what they will enjoy watching. In the Saturday article published by Xinhua, a professor of international trade at China's University of International Business and Economics, Cui Fan, said that ByteDance's technologies would most likely be covered by the new export controls. "If ByteDance plans to export relevant technologies, it should go through the licensing procedures," the article cited Mr. Cui as saying. Any sale of TikTok would most likely require the transfer overseas of code and technical services, the article said. "It is recommended that ByteDance seriously study the adjusted catalog, and carefully consider whether it is necessary to suspend the substantive negotiation of related transactions, perform the legal declaration procedures and then take further actions as appropriate," Mr. Cui was quoted as saying. Mr. Kennedy said that it was exceedingly rare for a professor to make comments about a specific, in progress deal, and that it signaled that ByteDance would now have to consult the Chinese authorities about the controls. China has previously used bureaucratic procedure to block commercial deals without appearing to do so outright. In 2018, Qualcomm called off a 44 billion deal to buy the Dutch chip maker NXP Semiconductors after Chinese regulators simply failed to either approve or reject the transaction. Beijing's prolonged antitrust review was seen as a form of leverage over trade talks with the Trump administration, though China's Ministry of Commerce denied that the two matters were related. In other industries, too, foreign companies including Microsoft, Volkswagen and Chrysler have been investigated for what China says are anticompetitive practices. Beijing has rejected the charge, made by American business groups, that it uses laws like antimonopoly rules to advance industrial policy.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
In London on Saturday night, the venerable British dance company Rambert performed "Draw From Within," a new work by the Belgian choreographer Wim Vandekeybus. I watched it from my home in Brooklyn. Such viewing from afar, once rare in concert dance, has become ordinary. But where most such performances these days are free and prerecorded, this one was ticketed and livestreamed. If you missed the show, you couldn't catch it later, so it had immediacy. But, unlike most livestreams, this was not a static recording or a glitchy presentation over Zoom. Watching it felt more like watching a movie, immersive and absorbing, yet easily the most technically sophisticated live dance production I've seen since theaters closed. Filmed entirely within Rambert's studios, the work seemed to roam, via moving cameras and moving sets, through different spaces, scenes, dreams. We were in a dark place, in the middle of dancers who drew figures in the air with smoke from extinguished torches. And then suddenly, smoothly we were in the dojo of some martial arts cult, or witnessing the birth of a miracle child who turned out to be a murderer, or, most topically, trapped in a sinister hospital ward. If that sounds like a series of nightmares, you're getting the idea. Occasionally, the mood lightened, as when "You and Me" by Penny the Quarters came on the soundtrack, and Salome Pressac one of the most striking of the telegenic Rambert dancers swayed and shimmied with delicious nonchalance, unimpressed by a suitor. Yet even then, the undertone was menacing, and the next moment, Ms. Pressac found herself ensnared by wires. Those wires, wielded by leaning dancers and slicing up space, are a good example of the production's ingenuity and also of how that ingenuity was continually applied in the service of intensity. Over time, though, that relentless intensity grew to feel monotonous and manufactured. Apart from a little bit of soul, the soundtrack tended toward Eastern European wedding music and a lot of electric guitar. The hyped up choreography, in fact, often resembled simultaneous guitar solos: the dancers noodling, flinging themselves around, always jumping and spinning at once. Or, to borrow a metaphor from the work itself, the dancing was like that smoke: sinuous and short lived, however many times the torch was relighted. The supple, vigorous dancers were equal to the physical challenges. They could handle the acting. But the dramatic scenarios, intended to be surreal, were instead generic, built out of familiar ideas from horror films, skillfully recycled and reproduced but not allusive in any illuminating way. If "Draw From Within" was like a movie, it was like a movie you've seen before. The state of emergency it presented was ersatz, conventional, a trademark of Mr. Vandekeybus. I might have been more receptive to it if we were not in a real one. Everyone on the long list of rolling credits deserves praise for pulling off this show, but the stakes of relevance are much higher now than before the pandemic, when the production was first planned. Near the end of the production, one dancer, playing a clueless host or fatuous TV news reporter, asked, "What is this? What are they doing?" In another time, the question might have registered rhetorically, as satire or as a commentary on criticism. On Saturday, I wanted to know the answer. "Draw From Within" was presented live online from Sept. 24 to 27. Tickets were available through the Brooklyn Academy of Music.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Lionel Messi of Argentina and Luis Suarez of Uruguay are among the European based players who have been called up for next month's World Cup qualifiers in South America. After weeks of indecision and discussion, FIFA is planning to order soccer clubs to release players who have been called up for World Cup qualification games next week, a move that is likely to lead to a furious backlash from teams, leagues and player unions fearful of the risks of international travel during the coronavirus pandemic. The FIFA demand will come after weeks of unsuccessful talks to find a compromise that addresses concerns about committing players to intercontinental travel amid a global rise in virus cases, and will apply most notably to South American national teams eager to recall their overseas based players for the first round of qualifying matches for the 2022 World Cup. In a meeting last week, an alliance of leagues, Europe's top club association and the global players union FIFPro pressed FIFA to relax its rules on player release for next month's games, which will take place on Oct. 8 through Oct. 13. FIFA, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, plans to accede to demands that players not be compelled to play in exhibition or friendly matches, but it will enforce release requirements for the first round of South America's World Cup qualification games and for matches in Europe's Nations League. The decision will require clubs to release dozens of European and North American based athletes as soon as this weekend for what their teams and unions argue are risky trips that could force them because of quarantine rules to miss club games once they return. Major League Soccer and some of its teams on Friday became the first group to write to federations in South America to say they would not release players for the games, saying quarantine requirements in the United States and concerns about testing procedures elsewhere meant they were within their rights to block requests for players to join their national teams. "While we understand that players and staff will undergo testing and screening, we do not believe it is medically possible to determine the COVID 19 status of the player's teammates, coaches and technical staff given the timing of the travel, training and match dates," read one of the letters from M.L.S. reviewed by The Times. In it, the league said it "was not prepared to release" the player, Paraguay's Alejandro Romero, who is known as Kaku. Conmebol, the regional body for South American soccer, wrote to FIFA that same day, urging it to enforce its rules. Its letter, signed by Conmebol's president, Alejandro Dominguez, insisted that any failure to do so would impact on the sporting integrity of its qualification campaign. In the letter, Dominguez demanded that FIFA issue sanctions for any breach. Under its laws, FIFA can bar a player from playing club soccer for five days after the end of the international release window if a legitimate request is ignored. It also can open disciplinary procedures against the player's club, which would typically result in a fine. The head of the global players union said FIFA's decision would push players into an untenable position next week, forcing them either to set aside their personal health concerns or risk punishment. "The reality is we are in the middle of a pandemic, and the prospect that a player could be sanctioned for taking a decision based on his consideration of what is safe for them is completely wrong," said Jonas Baer Hoffmann, the general secretary of FIFPro, a global players union. FIFPro, along with groups like the World Leagues Forum and the European Club Association, a lobby group for top teams in Europe, had been in talks with FIFA about the October window. In the past, players and clubs have skirted the release rules by claiming minor injuries just before an international window. Many now expect a rash of such diagnoses over the next week. A study by FIFPro showed the biggest impact of the FIFA rule would be borne by teams in North America and Europe. In all but one case that of Bolivia the majority of players on South American national team rosters are based overseas. Once FIFA issues its ruling, the first players will be required to travel starting Sunday, though there are no uniform protocols in place to safeguard their health. Current proposals being considered by FIFA for the October games will require a minimum test turnaround of 72 hours. That is looser than the 48 hour requirement it had for games played in Europe in September, and could expose players to greater risks of contracting the virus while they wait for results. And while FIFA is moving to enforce its rules for the World Cup qualifiers, it will simultaneously ease the obligation for exhibition games. That decision, while welcomed, has led to confusion about the "health first" mantra FIFA has repeated throughout the pandemic; critics of the strict adherence to the rule for qualifiers noted that the risks of contracting the virus remain unchanged regardless of the stakes of the match.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Last week, we faced the horrors of climate change and the incipient apocalypse. This week, we're at war. I will attempt to be as objective as possible as I report the shoots and scoots of the latest episode from my embed. In the beginning, the house mother Asia O'Hara announced her crisis of faith in the face of her shared sartorial services and subsequent standing suffering in the previous week's maxi challenge. She expressed shock and awe that her fellow members of a familialist flock, whose professed values include compassion, charity and sisterly love, could "evolve" into merciless resource hoarders who are only out for themselves and do not support their fellow woman. (I envy Ms. O'Hara, who apparently has not read a think piece in the last 18 months.) Incensed that she did not reap what she sewed, a changed Asia vowed to take her focus off the family. We were forced to bear witness to an outtake from last week's "Untucked" in which The Vixen and Eureka engaged in a heated domestic conflict. (I abstain from "Untucked" for the same reason I abstain from Twitter I simply cannot bear to watch like minded freedom fighters defuse their collective power via relentless infighting.) In a confessional, The Vixen sent incendiary missives to her followers: "Do you know there's 100,000 on the line? Girl, I got enough sisters." Yes, in the workroom, as well as in our cowardly new world, money, and the race within which smooth individuals compete for it, trumps fellowship. Fittingly, following last week's RuPocalypse, this queens' army was summarily deployed to combat. The gentleman officer Ru rallied the troops and commanded them to construct military inspired looks from the contents of large camouflage print duffel bags, shouldered by two especially strapping Pit Crew members. (Do these guys get hotter every season, or are my eyes being progressively opened as I more fully inhabit my sexual prime? Nec refert, I suppose.) Fortunately, we went to this war with the army we want, and our semper fine girls lined up in fetching formation. Monique Heart detonated the runway in grenade earrings and camo chaps, and a newly focused Asia was the bomb as a purple fatigued Mad Maxine. But The Vixen, in an Ann Taylor for Army Surplus capsule confection, was named the victor. Our Ru tenant then announced that the battle was moving to lower ground the daytime talk show, that hallowed American theater of war in which the ladies' improvisation skills would be tested in front of a live audience. The Vixen was ordered to split the troops into assignments silly segments for the talk show, to be hosted by the delightfully off brand "Bossy Rossy" Mathews. She intentionally paired her two mortal enemies, Eureka and Aquaria, openly admitting that she "didn't try to expletive nobody over except those two. They're both two big babies, so I hope they suffer." Eureka and Aquaria were "two big babies," all right they both latched on to their segment, "Look At Me, I'm A Sexy Baby!," and milked the bit dry. Convicted scene burglar Eureka once again pocketed the challenge, realizing her weight was gold and emerging naked but for a diaper and bib, parroting my Tinder mantra "I'm shaped like a fat baby already, so why not give them, like, legit fat sexy baby?" For a "look queen," Aquaria was surprisingly funny, shaking her rattle dazzled nipples and cooing in a baby voice (an accent that was, sadly, as liminal as Nicole Kidman's in "Big Little Lies," though it didn't affect the accolade winning chances of either). Upon finding out that her husband had left her for a baby (funny, this is why I joined Tinder), Eureka's character decided to become one, and upon finding out that Aquaria was the baby he left her for, she threw a ground pounding tantrum that brought the house down, the house down. The rest of the squadron's improvised devices were not terribly explosive. Blair was zero dark twenty one as a cactus's cuckold, hitting the panic button early on in her scene with the wig snatching Monique by screaming their agreed upon "safe word", which was, of course, "Vanjie!" (Has any first eliminated queen ever made such a memorable impression? If she is not brought back, I will girlcott this show.) Surprisingly, Monet, a brilliant improviser in her live shows, misfired with a confusing setup that attempted to conflate angel food cake with the hip pads her character was "addicted to" eating, and her bit collapsed. Sweet Mayhem soured as a pickle phobe, while her partner Miz Cracker tickled as "Dr. Dill," a pickle who was also a psychotherapist who was also Jewish, and then was not. The Vixen and Asia's "Single Black Female" bit really threw the dog out of the window their attempt to mock Cracker and Aquaria's copycat feud did not progress beyond their similar yellow dresses and, after swinging and missing at all of Ross's jokey pitches, The Vixen simply walked. I mean, I only made it through level two at the Upright Citizens' Brigade, but even I know that the cardinal rule of improv is "Yes, and," not "No, bye!" On elimination day, Mayhem attempted to broker peace between Eureka and The Vixen. After a painful "Untucked" clip in which Eureka was legit bitchy and The Vixen threw water boiled with fission, the latter froze to ice as Mayhem amiably advocated for an armistice. Eureka ceded the battleground to The Vixen, gently offering her space and conceding that, although she was sure she'd said "y'all" and not "you" (this was important in a context that I have neither space nor energy to describe), if "you" was what she'd actually said (it was), she was sorry. Eureka shared that, after a lifetime of antagonism and abuse, drag helped her "find her voice," and admitted that, now that her mouth has been opened, she can get "a little out of hand." This elicited the glimpse of The Vixen's inner workings that we have been longing to catch, as she confessed in turn that for most of her drag career, she would silently "show up, get my money and leave," but that the "current climate" radicalized and uncorked her. "I go from 0 100, because it is still new for me," she said. "And I don't know how to get to 50." Eureka extended an olive branch, a bowl of picholines, a dish for the pits and a cheese plate, and offered to shake Vixen's hand, but was rebuffed. The generous Eureka warmly said, "Just know that my friendship's here. Whatever direction that goes in." The Vixen smiled, but only to apply her blush. Then she growled, "I'm tired of this mushy expletive ." For the many experiences that have led her to this moment, and the many systems that have undoubtedly failed her, I am truly sorry. But, Vixen, it's been 18 months. I'm afraid of getting to 50 in this climate too, but we must, and this is how we do it. The same softness which once made you a target now compels people to trust you with their stories. Take their hands. Waving a white flag of a gown, Ru announced the fashion challenge, "Denim and Diamonds." The girls answered the call of booty, as cutout backsides ruled the runway. The Vixen got her range of motion down to 50 in a killer denim mermaid dress; Asia destroyed in a distressed Tina Turner homage; and Miz Cracker delighted in a Pippi esque long stocking with a hilarious buckteeth reveal. When will she win a challenge? She is qualified and without obvious flaw. Did her husband cheat or something? Kameron surprised in a "young Dolly Parton" look, and in a lovely moment, Ru gave her the floor to express her lifelong adoration for the guest judge Shania Twain, who has gotten to 50 quite nicely. (Well, she is Canadian. Single payer and poutine do a body good.) Eureka, in a funny sexy Elvis style jumpsuit, won the maxi challenge, as well as two tickets to Cirque du Soleil in Vegas, for which she now has the perfect outfit. Aspiring "chocolate Judd" Mayhem looked more like "strawberry LaToya Jackson," and Monet's cutout jumpsuit created the wrong kind of gap in the crotch. The two were sent to their stations for a lip sync battle to Ms. Twain's "Man, I Feel Like A Woman." Mayhem made a strong standard issue showing, but Monet, a lip sync beast, twisted it out Vanjie style, butching it up in a cropped wig and pantomiming smoking a joint whilst riding a motorcycle. In a coup de main, she sealed her style and her safety by pulling out not one, but two cans of Aqua Net, and spraying away the competition. (Is it cruel to hope that she's in the final two every week? Her lip syncs have been the highlight of the last two episodes.) She shante stayed, and our dream diplomat Mayhem was dispensed, to bring her message of peace to a world that urgently needs it. Readers, I implore you: We're all terrified of World War III, so let's not start it with our sisters. Although this life is competitive, reach out to your fellow struggling women and offer them your hand. We can only get to 50 together, and these days, we're all just improvising. Let's go, girls. See you next week. Over and out.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
The mirror universe has offered some of the most ambitious story lines across multiple "Star Trek" generations, allowing both the writers and the actors to reimagine established characters, or even briefly turn them upside down. So it's no surprise that this week's installment of "Discovery" was a strong one, especially because it was directed by someone who knows Trek intimately: William T. Riker himself, Jonathan Frakes. Titled "Despite Yourself," the episode took viewers to a typically unexplored world (a core Trek tenet) while maintaining the herky jerky pacing and unpredictability that has set "Discovery" apart from its predecessors. (Hey look! Another unexpected death for an underdeveloped main character!) The episode had plenty of callbacks to serve as Trek fan service the "agonizer" device, the Terran Empire salute and even the introduction of a story line involving the U.S.S. Defiant. But the mirror universe seemed to be a distraction from the main story: The writers are leaving not mere bread crumbs, but rather entire loaves to telegraph that Tyler is, indeed, our missing Klingon friend, Voq. But he doesn't seem to remember that. (Or does he? Is that why he killed Dr. Culber?) I'm still skeptical that this is where the show is heading; it would be too easy. The "Discovery" writing staff has delighted in zigging when other shows would zag, starting with Burnham's mutiny and the death of Georgiou early in its run. That this mirror universe episode went so far out of its way to tell the audience that Tyler had been surgically altered tells me there are more twists on the way. And is Culber really dead? I don't know, and I'm not sure we got to know him well enough to care. If Tyler really is a spy, murdering Culber would make sense, as would how he went about it. Wilson Cruz did a nice job portraying Culber in limited screen time, particularly when paired with Anthony Rapp as Stamets. Tilly's transformation into an angry captain in the mirror universe was impressive. She has primarily existed as a foil to Burnham's dreariness throughout the season, and outside of that, we've really seen her be only meek, nerdy and nervous. The mirror universe arc should allow Mary Wiseman to display more of her acting range. The last time Jonathan Frakes sat in the director's chair for something connected to Trek was two decades ago: the 1998 film "Star Trek: Insurrection," which was, uh, not good. But that came two years after the brilliant "Star Trek: First Contact," which Frakes also directed. He also directed several episodes of "Voyager," "Deep Space Nine" and of course, "The Next Generation." He did great work in this episode, particularly in the opening scene, during which he effectively ratcheted up the tension as the Discovery crew quickly realized that things were amiss, even beyond the normal scope of time and space. His use of the cameras, which constantly circled the conversations, helped move the story along. In fact, the cameras were rarely stationary, which made the episode even more visually interesting. For some baffling reason, Lorca insists that Culber cannot care for Stamets because Culber's "medical objectivity" is compromised. "Oh, suddenly you care about protocol?" Culber replies, speaking for all of us. I want to like Lorca. I really do. Jason Isaacs is giving a very compelling performance. But the writers seem to be turning him into a fundamentally different person from who he was earlier in the season. Some might call this character development. Others might say there are more shoes to drop. I don't know. But I shared Culber's incredulity after he reminded Lorca of all the times he'd broken protocol at Lorca's insistence. Lorca's response suggests that he doesn't want to make those mistakes again. But is there another, more qualified doctor on the ship whom we don't know about? Lorca seems to have caught on to the romance between Burnham and Tyler. He walks over to Burnham's station and tells her she can breathe easy because Tyler is safe after a mission. "I need to know that I can rely on my crew to act professionally at all times, particularly now," Lorca says. "We're in dangerous waters." This made me snort. It comes a few episodes after Lorca slept with a superior officer, who repeatedly assailed him for not being professional. Also, perhaps a captain who demands professionalism wouldn't insist on a mutineer's becoming a crew member on his ship or on having a phaser within arms reach when he sleeps at night.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
BAYREUTH, Germany Articles about 19th century operas typically don't require spoiler alerts. This one does. That's because Wagner's "Lohengrin" as staged at the Bayreuth Festival here by the visionary Yuval Sharon, the first American director in the festival's 142 year history has a new ending. In the ambiguous final scene of Mr. Sharon's production, with sets and costumes by the artist couple Neo Rauch and Rosa Loy, the two lead female characters appear not only to survive, but thrive: liberated from patriarchy, and for the first time given complete agency. Lohengrin, a failed hero, leaves in shame. And the gullible people of Brabant, depicted as vaguely mothlike, are killed en masse by a single zap. When the curtain came down at the premiere on Wednesday night, there "were barely any boos," David Allen wrote in his review for The New York Times. But there were more than a few scratched heads as people struggled to make sense of what they had seen. On social media, people joked that Gottfried, a shining green presence that seemed more symbol like than human, looked a little like Germany's signature Ampelmannchen on traffic lights. "All of these various ideas resonate with each other, or clash with each other, or sometimes don't get told all the way to the end," he said over lunch the day after the premiere. "I love things that aren't closed, because then the audience has such power and freedom to discover things for themselves." He then invoked the Roland Barthes adage that "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author." Mr. Sharon, 39, a MacArthur "genius" grant recipient and one of the most innovate directors working in opera today, tends to do things like that. His program notes for "Lohengrin" even use a Brecht poem, "In Praise of Doubt," as an epigraph. That poem in many ways holds the key to understanding this "Lohengrin," which makes a feminist of Wagner by reading into the motives of its most oppressed characters: the women. In one stanza, Brecht writes: The most beautiful of all doubts Is when the downtrodden and despondent raise their heads and Stop believing in the strength Of their oppressors. A traditional reading of "Lohengrin" would be that the villainous Ortrud plants the seed of doubt that makes Elsa ask the forbidden question of Lohengrin's name and origin. In other words, curiosity kills the cat. But Mr. Sharon said he sees Ortrud as a sort of freedom fighter who liberates Elsa, while the moth people of Brabant blindly follow the light of Lohengrin's charisma to their deaths. This is just the latest dramaturgical feat by the Los Angeles based Mr. Sharon whose own opera company, the Industry, has in the past staged a single opera around the city, with limousines driving audience members from scene to scene, and put on a "War of the Worlds" both inside and outside Walt Disney Concert Hall. (He has yet to direct at a major American company like the Metropolitan Opera in New York.) His "Lohengrin" is tame by comparison; after all, it was made for a traditional proscenium space designed by Wagner. Mr. Sharon has been relishing his time at the theater, whose acoustics are famously balanced and clear like "you're inside a cello," he said. And he didn't even know he was Bayreuth's first American director until a reporter from The Times told him so last year. In an emailed statement, Katharina Wagner, the composer's great granddaughter and one of the festival's directors, said that Mr. Sharon has a convincing vision and "a deep understanding of Wagner's works." "His feeling for nuances and fine gradations in the drawing of the characters on stage is very pronounced," she wrote. "In addition, he is a passionate director and a distinctive team worker, the 'sunshine' of the whole team, as Christian Thielemann called him." (Mr. Thielemann is the conductor.) Not once did she and Mr. Sharon talk about his nationality. "It was just never even a topic, somehow," Mr. Sharon said. Now, though, "it feels like such a nice counterprogram to what is happening politically to our country." I asked what he meant. "When we see how our president reacts to Germany even in the last week, treating Germany like an enemy, instead of a close ally it to me feels very meaningful to come to Bayreuth," he said, "and offer the opposite program and say: Look, through music, through art, through this collaboration we can show how different cultures can find ways to talk to each other and work together and create something." How would you describe the state of opera in America? What's interesting in America now is that there's such a thirst for new work, definitely more than when I first started working. That's amazing, and I hope that continues, but I wish that American companies took a little more stock of what's happening in Europe. We also have a really difficult financial and social problem with opera that every company in America is struggling with. Some people think, then, that we have to do "Elixir of Love" in street clothes. I want to say: Well, why are you even doing "Elixir of Love"? It doesn't speak to me at all. I guess some people like the music, but if you like the music, you can do it in concert. If you're going to stage it, really give us a burning reason. So you think there should always be a reason, no exception. Oh, yeah. I don't think you should ever treat it as a given, like, "Of course, we're going to do 'Carmen.'" Right. But I think that's an idea from a different time. I think in America, at least, there should always be a burning need. If it's just to fill the seats, that seems to me like it's not leading in the right direction. I don't know; there are plenty of people on the business side ... This is your idealism coming out. I still have that idealism. That's why I started my own company. I'd like to offer an opposite approach to all of that, and with new work. Because of that, how do you see yourself as part of a broader American landscape? When I started the Industry, it was really about trying to enrich the operatic landscape with composers I thought companies wouldn't give a chance to. We're still a scrappy company, but I think we've found resonance on a larger scale. What that means for the opera field, I can't say. I can have my wish for what it means. It's not that everyone does operas in cars that's not the point but maybe opera companies think beyond the proscenium. You can do exciting things in a proscenium theater, but the approach needs to be a little different. You just can't do the same old thing. What other Wagner operas are you eager to direct? All the Wagner operas to me are real abysses: You can work on them forever. They sound a lot more modern than a lot of contemporary pieces. It feels like their time is still coming, somehow, not like history. I would do any of them, but I have an idea for "Meistersinger" that I would love to do, but I can't tell you on the record. I'd love to do a "Ring" cycle one day. That's like Mount Everest for a director, but I don't think I'm doing it any time soon. To me it feels like an artistic goal. I'm almost 40 now. So, a "Ring" cycle in my 50s would be cool.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Hachette Book Group on Friday dropped its plans to publish Woody Allen's autobiography and said it would return all rights to the author, a day after its employees protested its deal with the filmmaker. "The decision to cancel Mr. Allen's book was a difficult one," a spokeswoman for the publisher said in a statement. "We take our relationships with authors very seriously, and do not cancel books lightly. We have published and will continue to publish many challenging books. As publishers, we make sure every day in our work that different voices and conflicting points of views can be heard." But she added that Hachette executives had discussed the matter with employees and, "after listening, we came to the conclusion that moving forward with publication would not be feasible for HBG." Letty Aronson, Mr. Allen's sister and producer, declined to comment on Friday. Hachette announced the book deal on Monday, saying its Grand Central Publishing imprint would release Mr. Allen's autobiography, "Apropos of Nothing," on April 7. It described the book as "a comprehensive account of his life, both personal and professional," and said it would include Mr. Allen's writing on "his relationships with family, friends, and the loves of his life." The journalist Ronan Farrow, whose book "Catch and Kill" was published by another Hachette imprint, criticized Hachette in an email exchange earlier this week, calling its decision to publish Mr. Allen's book a betrayal. "Your policy of editorial independence among your imprints does not relieve you of your moral and professional obligations as the publisher of 'Catch and Kill,' and as the leader of a company being asked to assist in efforts by abusive men to whitewash their crimes," Mr. Farrow wrote to Michael Pietsch, the chief executive of Hachette. Mr. Farrow, whose reporting on accusations of sexual assault against Harvey Weinstein and other powerful men helped touch off the MeToo movement, is Mr. Allen's son with the actress Mia Farrow. Mr. Farrow and his adopted sister, Dylan Farrow, have long accused Mr. Allen of molesting her when she was a child, allegations he has denied. Mr. Allen was not charged after two investigations. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. Mr. Pietsch, in an interview on Tuesday, defended the decision to publish Mr. Allen's book and said the company's imprints don't interfere editorially with one another. "Grand Central Publishing believes strongly that there's a large audience that wants to hear the story of Woody Allen's life as told by Woody Allen himself," he said. "That's what they've chosen to publish." On Thursday, Hachette employees staged a walkout to protest their company's plans. Hachette subsequently said it would have "a fuller discussion" with its staff members. Mr. Farrow didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday. Mr. Allen, an Academy Award winning filmmaker, has seen his legacy tarnished by the allegations about his daughter. An agent representing him had approached several publishers since late 2018 but was "met with indifference or hard passes," The New York Times reported last year. In November, Mr. Allen and Amazon settled a breach of contract lawsuit after the company backed out of a multi movie deal with Mr. Allen after MeToo allegations from the 1990s resurfaced against him. Mr. Allen filed the suit against Amazon earlier last year. Following the announcement of the book's cancellation on Friday, Suzanne Nossel, the chief executive of the free speech nonprofit PEN America, called the situation "something of a perfect storm." This incident, she said in a statement, "involved not just a controversial book, but a publisher that was working with individuals on both sides of a longstanding and traumatic familial rupture. This presented unique circumstances that clearly colored the positions staked out and decisions taken. If the end result here is that this book, regardless of its merits, disappears without a trace, readers will be denied the opportunity to read it and render their own judgments." The French arm of Hachette, Editions Stock, has said it plans to proceed with publishing Mr. Allen's book. The imprint's director, Manuel Carcassonne, expressed his support for the project in an interview with the magazine Le Point published on Monday. "The American situation is not ours," Mr. Carcassonne said. "Woody Allen is a great artist, director and writer, and his New York Jewish humor is evident in each line of this memoir, in its self mockery, its modesty, its ability to dress up tragedy as comedy. Including at his expense. It's unfortunate that this decision was made unfortunate for freedom of expression but perfectly understandable in the American context." Because Hachette reverted all rights when it canceled the book, including translation rights, any of its international branches would have to re approach Mr. Allen and his agent about possible publication.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
WITH his divorce completed, Vishal Kapoor, a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills, Calif., bought a 6,500 square foot house and began outfitting it for his new life as a single man. One thing he wanted was a gym. So he built one and filled it with the latest equipment. He estimated that the 250 square foot gym cost about 200,000 and he spent another 60,000 on equipment. "We had the option of putting it in one of the rooms," Dr. Kapoor said. "But it was dark and there's no natural light. The way it is now, there's a lot of natural light. It just makes it nicer." The summer months are a particularly popular time for updating houses, with new bathrooms, new kitchens or even a new roof. But whether the renovations add to a home's value, that's a different matter. Even when they do increase the price a seller may get, they rarely increase it in line with how much the renovation costs. "People confuse helping the home keep up with the market with an upgrade or a renovation," said Jonathan J. Miller, president and chief executive of Miller Samuel, a real estate appraisal firm that covers the New York metropolitan area. "The simplest example may be refinishing your floors or repainting the inside of your house. Those are things that need to happen every so often so the house doesn't fall behind the market." With renovations, he said the relationship between cost and value are always changing. At times, a 100,000 renovation may add only 50,000 to the value of a home. In other instances, spending 50,000 may increase the value by 100,000, he said. And there are the times when the renovation may decrease the home's value. Mr. Miller said he remembered a one bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village that he appraised almost three decades ago. The apartment had a 30,000 built in entertainment system that was purple formica. "The owner thinks the value is the apartment plus 30,000," Mr. Miller said. "The buyer is thinking it's the value of the apartment minus 3,000 to remove it and repair the wall. Here lies the problem." What is going to add value depends as much on the type of renovation as the particular housing market. And Mr. Miller said he tells clients that "personal taste and market taste" can be different. New roofs and insulation have great financial returns, said Jessica Lautz, managing director of survey research at the National Association of Realtors, which teamed up last year with the National Association of the Remodeling Industry to determine the value of renovations. Ms. Lautz said people who would like to recoup more of their investment would do better by aiming for boring. Putting in new insulation and garage doors or replacing a roof, siding or windows adds value and saves energy. But new kitchens and bathrooms make owners happy, and their value is more difficult to discern. According to the Realtors report, the average price of a kitchen renovation is 60,000 and carries a "joy score" of 9.8 out of 10. Yet, the report found, only 67 percent of the price is recovered when the owner sells the house. A bathroom renovation typically cost 26,000 and has a joy score of 9.3, but only 58 percent of that will be recovered. Stan Humphries, chief economist for Zillow Group, said he found in his research that high end bath and kitchen renovations were among the worst investments (though not as bad as finishing a basement). On the other hand, he said, a "midrange bathroom remodel" could reap a big increase in value. These are renovations where a fairly bland bathroom is made into something "you'd bring your guests into," he said. The return is 1.71 for every 1 spent. "When you get way up into the finishes for a bath or kitchen, you start to really apply a strong aesthetic to that renovation," he said. "When you make choices about backsplashes and finishes, the buyer may not like it. But they're going to appreciate a usable bathroom, regardless." Whatever the renovation, its ability to increase the value of a home can be short lived. "A renovation beyond three years unless it's something major like a new story of your house isn't going to matter that much," he said. "The new car smell of that renovation has gone away, and your neighbors have done the same thing." Still, Ms. Lautz said, big, expensive renovations may be necessary just for sellers to attract interest on photo heavy real estate websites. "You look at homes online and see the new kitchens and bathrooms that really sparkle," she said. This benefit varies, depending on demand in a particular housing market. "If you're in a housing market with very tight supply, all of a sudden the value spread between a home that needs a lot of work and the home that doesn't need any narrows," Mr. Miller said. "In a market where there is an oversupply, it's just the opposite. There's more of a premium for a home that has already been done." New Canaan, Conn., an affluent town an hour from New York City, is experiencing one of those gluts. Amanda Briggs, the brokerage manager at Houlihan Lawrence there, said the town had a lot of listings for large, four story homes that are 10 to 15 years old. "They're perfectly maintained," she said. "But these houses look more dated than they are. The cabinets look outdated. Buyers want to redo them, and they're factoring in the costs to the price." Ms. Briggs said her agency has published a guide for its brokers on the science of pricing. While she demurred on what that science was, she offered statistics showing the downside of getting the price wrong. In New Canaan, the houses that are properly priced are on the market for an average of 76 days and sell for 97 percent of the asking price. But the time on the market for homes that need at least one price reduction goes up to 226 days and the eventual selling prices is only 87 percent of the list price. One factor at work is the difference between what Ms. Briggs called buyer's math and seller's math. "Sellers think acquisition cost plus what I put into it is what it's worth," she said. "Buyers are looking at price per square foot and Zillow's analytics." As for personal touches, how they contribute to value depends on whether they make a home more or less attractive relative to the homes around it. Lilly Lenavitt, an agent with Compass, a real estate agency in Los Angeles, said the basic upgrades apply in that market, with a premium placed on pools. The value of a gym, though, could go either way.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
The tastemaker Louis Comfort Tiffany favored bright opalescent palettes during his later years, and the colors have become something of an obsession for Gordon H. Hancock, a glass collector in Patchogue, N.Y. Mr. Hancock, 75, a retired owner of a car repair shop, owns about 400 pieces of pastel tinted glass tableware that Tiffany workers made in the 1920s, as Mr. Tiffany's five decade career wound down. The objects are neatly organized in display cases throughout Mr. Hancock's low slung 1950s home. He has clustered vases, candleholders, saucers and dinner plates; drinking vessels for water, wine and champagne; and serving pieces for salt, sugar, cream, cakes, fruit and cigarettes. The palette on the shelves includes rosy pinks, celadon greens, caramel, violet, sapphire and aquamarine. Iridescent gold is dusted along the ruffled or pointy rims and the twisted or fluted stems. Subtle crosshatching and motifs of foliage, flowers and butterflies come to light when sunbeams pour in at just the right angles. At the bottom of each piece, he applies a neat handwritten label, with a system of letters and numbers that he also uses in his computer database. "I'm not going to tell you what my code is," because it would reveal what he has paid, he said teasingly. He has sometimes spent more than 1,000 at auction for a rarity, such as a leaf pattern pink compote with a milky pedestal that belonged to the now shuttered Louis C. Tiffany Garden Museum in Matsue, Japan. Mr. Hancock cannot afford Tiffany's better known stained glass lamps and windows, which can sell for millions of dollars each, he said. (He estimates that his holdings are worth 300,000.) He sometimes checks eBay multiple times a day, when something irresistible in pastel has come up for sale. Among scholars in the Tiffany field, he is famed for his "encyclopedic zeal," said Ria Murray, the manager at the Lillian Nassau gallery in Manhattan. Philip Chasen, an antiques dealer in East Norwich, N.Y., said that few other enthusiasts specialized as intently as Mr. Hancock, although Mr. Chasen did have one customer who sought only Tiffany desk sets enlaced in grapevine filigree. Virtually everything in the Hancock collection was made in the 1920s, when Mr. Tiffany was heading into retirement. The factory, in Corona, N.Y., had supplied roomfuls of custom works for homes, churches, synagogues and institutions, and it produced popular knickknacks like pincushions and thermometer holders. Mr. Tiffany eventually handed the company to some longtime colleagues, two generations of glassworkers in the Nash family. Incarnations of the business limped along for a few years, and it was bankrupt by the time Mr. Tiffany died in 1933. Mr. Hancock has pored through every scholarly study that mentions the Tiffany twilight era, and he has decoded the factory's cryptic number and letter markings. He can explain how the staff rolled and molded the molten glass and developed innovative hues, iridescent layering and enameled metal rims. On one pinkish gold plate in his collection, an inscription reads, "Sample approved by A.J. Nash." In copies of the Nashes' notebooks, he has found original design drawings for vessels he owns. As the Tiffany workshops faltered, a notebook page was inscribed with the words "the end" above a strand of teardrops. Mr. Hancock has focused on this rather poignant collecting area since the 1970s, when he first saw Tiffany vases and stained glass at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "That's what sparked my interest," he said. "I just thought it was absolutely beautiful." The first pastel piece to enter his home was an aquamarine wine glass. It took decades, he said, to assemble a matching set of everything else in aquamarine that might have graced the table of the goblet's original owner, to serve meals from soup to nuts. Mr. Hancock, a Brooklyn native, became a methodical collector while still a teenager in East Meadow, N.Y. He was always drawn to narrow niches: United States airmail stamps, for instance, and half dollars that depict windblown Liberty in midstride. In the jargon of the collecting world, he is deemed a "completist," seeking to own at least one of everything ever made in his area of pursuit. Books about Mr. Tiffany's range of creations typically devote only a page or two to pastel tableware; it is sometimes dismissed as merely commercial fare, produced in multiples. Mr. Hancock, however, can point out subtle differences between seemingly identical handmade pieces. Organizations including the Art Glass Forum New York, the Westchester Glass Club and the Corning Museum of Glass have brought him in to lecture. He has lent objects to institutions, including the Dayton Art Institute in Ohio, and he is in frequent contact with experts at organizations laden with Tiffany works including the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, Fla., and the Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass in Long Island City, N.Y. A few major collections of Tiffany pastel have broken up in recent years. The Garden Museum in Japan, which closed a decade ago (Michaan's Auctions in Alameda, Calif., dispersed its contents), was set up by Takeo Horiuchi, a real estate investor who had custom crates made to protect his acquisitions from earthquake damage. Mr. Hancock's compote arrived in a black box lined in sumptuous blue velvet. It is so sturdy, he said, "you could put the piece in there and throw it off a train and it wouldn't break." Mr. Hancock is working on a book about his collection, and for a decade he has handed out free copies of his annual calendar depicting his favorite pastel pieces. He has a day job, publishing a monthly trade magazine for the Long Island Auto Body Repairmen's Association. Few of his colleagues in the car repair world understand his all consuming glass hobby. He said, half jokingly, "They think I'm nuts." He has not decided whether to sell the collection eventually or give it to his family, and he does not consider it finished. "It's ongoing," he said, and then he described some red and violet vessels that he is pursuing, in forms that were new to him.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
WASHINGTON Should every new government building in the nation's capital be created in the same style as the White House? A draft of an executive order called "Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again" would establish a classical style, inspired by Greek and Roman architecture, as the default for federal buildings in Washington and many throughout the country, discouraging modern design. The order, spearheaded by the National Civic Art Society, a nonprofit group that believes contemporary architecture has "created a built environment that is degraded and dehumanizing," would rewrite the current rules that govern the design of office buildings, headquarters, and courthouses, or any federal building project contracted through the General Services Administration that costs over 50 million. "For too long architectural elites and bureaucrats have derided the idea of beauty, blatantly ignored public opinions on style, and have quietly spent taxpayer money constructing ugly, expensive, and inefficient buildings," Marion Smith, the group's chairman, wrote in a text message. "This executive order gives voice to the 99 percent the ordinary American people who do not like what our government has been building." But the proposed executive order has already drawn fierce opposition from architects who say it would have a dampening effect on architectural thought and give President Trump broad power to make aesthetic appraisals, something critics say he knows nothing about. "At the most fundamental level it's a complete constraint on freedom of expression," said Roger K. Lewis, an architect and a professor emeritus of architecture at the University of Maryland who has written extensively about design and planning in Washington. "This notion that the White House has expertise or knowledge or understanding of architecture and design sufficient to allow them to mandate that all federal buildings be classically styled is absurd." The hope among the order's authors could be to put it in front of President Trump sometime within the next month, according to one person familiar with its development. It would explicitly discourage some modern forms of architecture including the Brutalist influenced Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue whose appearance Mr. Trump has criticized in favor of classical design. He held up the National Gallery of Art as a model of the "conversation" between modernist and classic structures. The West building, designed by the architect John Russell Pope and finished in 1940, was modeled after the Roman Pantheon. The East building, designed by the Chinese American architect I.M. Pei and completed in 1978, is a triangular design influenced by modernist thought. Though the order would only apply design rules to federal public buildings and some memorials whose designs are developed through the General Services Administration, not Smithsonian funded museums, Mr. Forgey described the museum as a civic and architectural medley that would be less common if the order is successful. "It's an example of why we need contemporary thought in architecture," Mr. Forgey said. "It's what makes contemplating and experiencing cities enjoyable." The order also accuses the G.S.A.'s Design Excellence Program, which directs the federal government's multibillion dollar building program, of encouraging the proliferation of modern styles, arguing that "the federal government has largely stopped building beautiful buildings the American people want to look at or work in." In an email, Amale Andraos, the dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, said the G.S.A. program had encouraged a proliferation of different architectural styles and ideas. The effort to rewrite the Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture is considered among the most egregious features of the order. The principles, part of 1962 document by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the New York senator, who as a Kennedy administration official was heavily involved in design issues in the capital, have endured for over half a century, in part because they discouraged promoting an official style: "The design must flow from the architectural profession to the government. And not vice versa." The administration's draft order, which was obtained by The New York Times, suggests an abrupt reversal of that ethos: "Classical and traditional architectural styles have proven their ability to inspire such respect for our system of self government. Their use should be encouraged." The proposed mandate has triggered protests from architects and critics of the administration who say the president should not have the ability to issue a top down mandate on how government buildings should look. News of the draft first appeared in the Architectural Record. Asked about the possibility of an executive order, Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, declined to comment. Architects have regarded Mr. Trump, a former real estate developer who keeps close watch over his family's portfolio of luxury properties, with a certain degree of wariness since he took office. His design style at his personal properties favors gilded furniture, marble flooring, and Louis XIV style flourishes. But two of his higher profile business projects, including the Trump Towers at Columbus Circle in New York City and The Trump Tower in Chicago, were built with modernist influences. As the order works its way closer to the president's desk, the prevailing thought among architects is that Mr. Trump's approval of one school of architectural thought over another would create a dangerous and even cynical precedent for architects contemplating the aesthetic future of the capitol. "We are a society that is linked to openness of thought, to looking forward with optimism and confidence at a world that is always in the process of becoming," Thom Mayne, a California architect and Pritzker Prize winner whose Santa Monica firm has designed a number of buildings for the G.S.A., said in an email. "Architecture's obligation is to maintain this forward thinking stance."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Before the debate, this attack on democracy itself was not fully clear to me, not even after a decade researching the earlier white power movement and several years watching its resurgence after the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. This movement declared war on the state, and especially the federal government, in 1983. It then embarked upon a series of violent acts, most notoriously the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. But there is something new today: The president and his administration are at war on the democratic process, as we see in his weakening of the Post Office and the credibility of mail in ballots, in calls for "poll watchers" that are clear invitations for intimidation, and in statements by Mr. Trump that cast doubt on his willingness to accept the results of the election. Not only does "Stand back and stand by" fail to denounce and disavow white supremacist violence, it seems to be a call to arms and preparedness. It suggests that these groups, who are eager to do violence in any case, have the implicit approval of the state. The day after the debate, Mr. Trump claimed not to know who the Proud Boys were, and told them to "stand down." But even the most generous interpretation of his comments does not release Mr. Trump from accountability. The Proud Boys some of whom were involved in the Charlottesville rally should be well known to the president. And no matter what he says now, he can't unring the bell. The groups Mr. Trump declined to disavow will interpret attempts to clarify to be merely strategic denials. He did not, in his initial statement, specify a moment for which the Proud Boys ought to "stand by." But if Mr. Trump loses, they will surely move from "stand by" to "engage," prepared to take violent action. If Mr. Trump wins, they will likely believe that they are an unofficial apparatus of state violence. Because of my research on the white power movement's history, I regularly hear from people sounding the alarm. They are advocates who try to deradicalize those attempting to leave white power groups. They are watchdogs that monitor white power internet activism. They are people at tech companies charged with flagging hate speech, and who are exhausted by the sheer magnitude of the task and the hatefulness they encounter. They are teachers and librarians and parents worried about what to do when they meet young people headed down the road to violence. And they are even people who have worked in the Trump administration, people in his own Department of Homeland Security and F.B.I., who have repeatedly identified white power as the most prominent source of domestic terrorism. Whistle blowers like Elizabeth Neumann and Brian Murphy at the Department of Homeland Security have been warning of insufficient resources and will to confront this problem at the highest levels of the Trump administration.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
SAN FRANCISCO Five years ago, Marc Benioff negotiated to sell Salesforce, the software company he co founded in 1999 and has run ever since, to Microsoft. If the deal had gone through, he would have been richly rewarded but, in the end, just another employee of the tech colossus. With Tuesday's news that Salesforce was buying Slack for 27.7 billion, Mr. Benioff did something much more difficult. He is now set to directly compete against Microsoft, one of the world's most valuable companies, in its own favored territory. Microsoft has been slugging it out with Slack in the pandemic fueled rush to enable remote collaboration through communications tools. The faster the nature of work transforms, the more valuable victory will become, and the fiercer the competition. Mr. Benioff, 56, does not appear to be fazed. Or maybe he is in denial. In a 30 minute interview after announcing the Slack deal and Salesforce's earnings, he rejected all opportunities to talk about his history with Microsoft or even acknowledge its existence. "What's that company?" he said. "How do you spell it?" Microsoft is sitting on a 137 billion cash hoard and has a well honed competitive instinct. It gets 115 million users every day for its would be Slack killer, the Teams chat platform, thanks to the ubiquity of Microsoft Office. Salesforce, which specializes in sales management software, had 9 billion in cash this summer. Slack, for all its brand name familiarity, had only about 12 million users before the pandemic. It has declined to update its numbers. Salesforce and Slack might be the underdogs here, if you can consider a 220 billion company an underdog. But they have a not so secret weapon in Mr. Benioff. He learned some lessons in showmanship from his mentor, the Apple co founder Steve Jobs, including how to turn news conferences into events and how to become the human embodiment of a company. "You've got to give Benioff credit. He's built one of the biggest software companies in the world," said Mark Moerdler, a senior research analyst at Bernstein. "But this is not going to be easy." Mr. Benioff, who has deep roots in the city, likewise dominated local discourse, challenging the other tech chiefs to step up. He and his wife, Lynne Benioff, contributed 100 million to a new children's hospital. In 2018, the couple bought Time magazine for 190 million. Forbes pegs Mr. Benioff's net worth at 9.4 billion. The mogul might be getting weary of the attention. "Can't you find a more interesting and better looking protagonist?" he asked. In the interview, Mr. Benioff could not be dissuaded or turned aside from his talking points: "Business is the greatest platform for change ... The future of our industry is a work from anywhere environment ... I like to innovate, I like to create, I like to see things and make them happen ... I love that we take care of all stakeholders, not just shareholders." The question of whether Mr. Benioff can pull off his challenge to Microsoft is likely to become a long term subject of fascination in Silicon Valley. Over the past two decades, Salesforce has acquired dozens of companies to extend its core products. The biggest acquisition before Slack was Tableau, a data visualization company, which Salesforce bought for 15.3 billion last year. Mr. Benioff once even had the notion of buying Twitter, back in 2016. But it proved a step too far, although it would have been a wild ride. He is an avid tweeter, much looser than most chief executives. On Monday, he tweeted a picture of former President Barack Obama, who had a copy of Mr. Benioff's book "Trailblazer" on the shelf. "Marc has come full circle. From considering a sale to Microsoft, he is now becoming the next Microsoft," said Venky Ganesan, a managing director at the venture capital firm Menlo Ventures who specializes in software. Mr. Ganesan, who said he knew Mr. Benioff only as a business acquaintance, saluted his ability "to visualize a certain future and then make it happen." Daniel Newman, principal analyst at Futurum Research, has been critical of Salesforce in the past but said the Slack deal had a reasonable chance of success. "You have a product in Slack that people love but which hasn't been marketed well," Mr. Newman said. "Salesforce and Benioff can give it faster growth and extract untapped potential. Excuse the buzzword, but maybe this is really one of those synergy moments." Except for the question of Microsoft. Mr. Benioff came of age in Silicon Valley when Microsoft was decidedly the bad guy. His early employer, Oracle, was run by Larry Ellison, who had a long running and often bitter feud with the Microsoft co founder Bill Gates. As Salesforce grew, it had its own scrapes with Microsoft over employees and patents. After Satya Nadella became Microsoft's chief executive in 2014, he and Mr. Benioff met and tried to work together. Mr. Benioff offered unsuccessfully to buy Microsoft's Dynamics software line, which Salesforce competed with. When that idea foundered, he offered to sell Salesforce to Microsoft for 70 billion, about 22 billion over its market value. A second attempt at a deal a few months later did not work out, either. The companies became that Silicon Valley perennial: "frenemies" that competed but also did deals. In 2016, both wanted to acquire the social networking site LinkedIn, whose millions of employment histories offered a rich data trove. They bid against each other. Microsoft, with its deep pockets, won with an offer of 26.2 billion. Mr. Benioff tweeted that it was "anticompetitive."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Q. When did you notice that trend? A. I would say around 2008 we started to really see a change. Until the mid 1980s, the whole market was pocket watches. Wristwatches weren't something people generally considered a collectible, though there were some trailblazers, like Andy Warhol. But in the last 20 years, pocket watches became increasingly out of fashion as wristwatches became more and more in vogue. Then around 2007 or 2008, all of a sudden, you had the Chinese, who became heavily involved in the market for pocket watches. A. If you're looking for Chinese market pocket watches, you're actually looking for something that was made specifically for the Asian market, either in England during the 18th century, and then in Switzerland throughout the entire 19th century. The watches that were made for the Chinese market were called "Chinese caliber," meaning that the mechanism of the watch consists of plates and bridges fashioned in a manner that would appeal to Chinese collectors and tastes, namely decorative with engravings such as foliate designs. For example, you're looking at watches that had extremely beautiful enamel scenes, like a burst of summer flowers, or small enamel portraits. Q. How have prices been affected by the buyers from Asia? A. The whole landscape has changed. For a while, your typical Chinese market watch in a gilt metal case would sell for only 5,000, whereas today, it can sell for 40,000. Then you have an enameled gold watch with more features, like miniaturized figures that do something. The complicated designs might feature a whole carpenter shop, for example, with six or seven different figures, hammering, sawing or winding a mill. Those can easily sell for 200,000. If you add a singing bird to that mix, you can go from the half million dollar to the million dollar category. Q. What kind or prices did they fetch when they were first made? A. Hard to say, but they would have been expensive even then. For example, we had a rare open faced watch made for the Chinese market from about 1860 by Louis Audemars, Brassus Geneva, with specialized hunting scenes depicting an elephant, lion, horse and hunters. We sold it for 81,250. Q. Where have these watches been since the 19th century? A. They stayed in families, mostly. For China, during the late 19th century there were things that came out because of the opium wars and the Boxer Rebellion that were imported to the West. But because people couldn't go there for such a long time during Maoist times there were lots of things that just never came out.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Foreground from left, the Republican senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mike Braun of Indiana and Rand Paul of Kentucky in the chamber, with Dr. Anthony S. Fauci onscreen. The proceedings were carried on cable news. But the aesthetic was low budget "Westworld." The Senate Health Committee's questioning of four administration health officials Tuesday morning, on the government's response to the Covid 19 pandemic, was the highest profile congressional testimony in weeks. As many states move toward reopening even as the death tolls rise, the subject was if, when and how things might safely get back to normal ish. But everything in the Senate's surreal and desolate visual presentation only underlined that we are light years away from normal. Typically, a high profile Senate appearance is the theater of congestion. The testifiers appear, flanked by advisers, and face a forest of cameras and microphones as they stare down a crowded bank of legislators. Tuesday's proceedings looked instead like a tribunal in some depopulated cyber western dystopia. A remote operated camera robo swiveled on the open chamber floor, as a couple of human photographers darted about. The image of Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee the committee chair, self quarantining after an aide tested positive for the coronavirus hovered on a screen above an empty chair. The guests all appeared virtually, three of them also in some form of precautionary isolation. This did not look like the America that President Trump painted Monday, when he declared that the country had "prevailed" against its recent challenge. It was a ghost town with everything but the tumbleweeds. The guests included Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Adm. Brett P. Giroir, the assistant secretary for health; and Dr. Stephen M. Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. But top billing belonged to Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert and the administration's point person on pandemic response, whose boss in the White House prefers wishful triumphalism, tweets and ramblings to following doctor's orders. An advance report said that Dr. Fauci planned to warn of "needless suffering and death" if states rushed to reopen before meeting guideposts of progress, suggesting that, out of Mr. Trump's eye line, he might offer harsher medicine. Instead, he slipped the scalpel in gently. (The ranking committee Democrat, Patty Murray of Washington, ended up pre empting his "suffering and death" line in her opening questions.) He warned that "the consequences could be really serious" if states moved too fast, and countering a Trumpist insinuation that the Covid 19 death count, now over 80,000, has been inflated agreed that the actual toll is likely higher than the official figures. But he also offered a spoonful of optimism, venturing that it was "more likely than not" that a vaccine would be available in a year or two, while maintaining his genial family practitioner from Brooklyn tone. Away from the presidential briefings that played like "The Apprentice," he likened the process of approving potential treatments to "Shark Tank." (The references change, but the reality TV ness of this administration never goes away.) The sharpest conflict came when Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, assailed "doom and gloom" predictions about the virus and told Dr. Fauci, "I don't think you're the end all" with regard to reopening policy. Replied the immunologist to the ophthalmologist: "I give advice according to the best scientific evidence." It's possible that the logistics lent themselves less to theatrics and confrontation. Amid the usual lags and audio glitches Mr. Redfield's connection was especially shaky it's hard to have a good fight over videoconference. The most pointed political battle of the morning was less about what came out of the mouths of senators than what covered them, or didn't. The Democrats in the committee room mostly wore masks. The Republicans largely didn't, or removed them before the proceedings started. Face masks worn mainly to keep the wearer from inadvertently infecting others have become a metonym for the now partisan argument over how worrisome the pandemic is, how much people should change their routines because of it and the extent to which people are morally and socially obligated to inconvenience themselves for the good of others. What should be a matter of objective public health practice has become one more polarizing cultural signal, splashed across your kisser. Fittingly, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, one of the more moderate Republicans and facing a tough re election campaign, began the hearing with no mask, then put one on, as if trying to keep one lung in each camp. Dr. Fauci was alone and maskless on video. But late in the hearing, he spoke approvingly of how, outdoors in Washington, D.C., "you can see many people out there with masks on, which gives me some degree of comfort that people are taking this very seriously." If it was a comment on what we witnessed in the hearing room, he kept it oblique. That's the beauty of videoconferencing: No one knows exactly what you're seeing on your own screen.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Ricky Gervais will return to host the 2020 Golden Globes on Sunday, and once again no one will be safe. Not the nominees. Not the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the group that sponsors the awards. And not even NBC, which broadcasts them. The British comedian has hosted four times in the past, from 2010 to 2012, and then again in 2016. Each year, he seized the opportunity to roast as many stars as possible. Past targets include Cher, Tom Cruise, Hugh Hefner, Bruce Willis, Jodie Foster, Justin Bieber, Jeffrey Tambor and Ben Affleck. In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Gervais said he had aimed to entertain a global audience rather than please the celebrities in the room. "I try and play the outsider," he said. "I've got to be the bloke sitting at home who shouldn't have been invited." Gervais has said this will be his last time as Globes M.C. But then again, he has made such claims before. While onstage in 2010, he said: "One thing that can't be bought is a Golden Globe. Officially." After a brief pause, he shrugged and added, "I'm not going to do this again anyway." Mel Gibson has been Gervais's recurring victim. In 2010, before introducing the actor, Gervais stood behind the podium with a glass of beer in his hand and said, "Honestly, I like a drink as much as the next man. Unless the next man is Mel Gibson." When Gervais introduced Gibson again in 2016, he said he wasn't judging the actor back in 2010. "Listen, I still feel a bit bad for it," he told the crowd. "Mel's forgotten all about it, apparently. That's what drinking does." In 2011, Gervais introduced Tom Hanks and Tim Allen with a biting jab at Allen. What can I say about our next two presenters? The first is an actor, producer, writer and director, whose movies have grossed over 3.5 billion at the box office. He's won two Academy Awards and three Golden Globes for his powerful and varied performances, starring in such films as "Philadelphia," "Forrest Gump," "Castaway," "Apollo 13" and "Saving Private Ryan." The other ... is Tim Allen. The actors hit back. "Like many of you," Hanks said, "we recall back when Ricky Gervais was a slightly chubby but very kind comedian." "Neither of which is he now," Allen added. Gervais recently said he regretted making the joke and that he hoped Allen didn't take it personally: "I didn't want Tim Allen to think, 'Oh, that was written for me. Why me?' Well, because you were standing next to Tom Hanks." Target: Everyone in the Room During his opening monologue in 2010, Gervais started off by blasting everyone. "Just looking at all the faces here reminds me of some of the great work that's been done this year ... by cosmetic surgeons," he said. "You all look great." The camera abruptly turned away from Meryl Streep and cut to a wide shot of a different table. Yikes. In 2011, Gervais poked fun at Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie, who starred in the romantic thriller "The Tourist." The film received negative reviews but managed to earn three Golden Globe nominations. "It seems like everything this year was three dimensional," Gervais said. "Except the characters in 'The Tourist.'" He went on say the movie wasn't nominated solely so that members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association "could hang out with" Depp and Jolie it was also because the actors were bribed. For the most part, Gervais was a tad tamer during the 2016 ceremony. The one exception was a joke aimed at Caitlyn Jenner, who had been involved in a fatal car crash in 2015. "What a year she's had," Gervais said. "She became a role model for trans people everywhere, showing great bravery in breaking down barriers and destroying stereotypes. She didn't do a lot for women drivers, but you can't have everything, can you?" Gervais does not just go after stars he goes after show business as a whole. In 2010, he addressed the overwhelming emphasis Hollywood places on actors. "We all know writers get way too much credit in Hollywood," he said, "and that's due to the generosity of actors sometimes mentioning them." He continued: "I don't want to keep going on about actors but they're the most important ones, O.K.? It's not the words you say. It's how good you look when you're saying them." In 2016, he made an all too true observation about the gender pay gap in the entertainment industry. "All female remakes are the big thing. There's a female remake of 'Ghostbusters.' There's going to be a female remake of 'Ocean's Eleven.'" "And this is brilliant for the studios," he said, "because they get guaranteed box office results and they don't have to spend too much money on the cast." When introducing Robert Downey Jr. in 2011, Gervais delivered a one two punch. First, he wondered whether some of the actor's films, including "Iron Man" and "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," were actually pornography. Then he went even further: "He has done all those films," Gervais said, "but many of you in this room probably know him best from such facilities as the Betty Ford clinic and Los Angeles County Jail." Target: The Cast of 'Sex and the City 2' During his opening monologue in 2011, Gervais went after stars who were not nominated for any awards, like the cast of "Sex and the City 2." "I was sure the Golden Globe for special effects would go to the team that airbrushed that poster," Gervais said. "Girls! We know how old you are. I saw one of you in an episode of 'Bonanza!'"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
I LOVE the cardio rush I get from spinning, but I find the workout rather torturous: the music blaring as a shrill instructor screams on a headset to "climb up a mountain" that doesn't exist, as I frantically adjust the knob so the bike speed is "seven tenths" of my total strength. Underwater cycling, now popular in Europe, seems to have all the benefits of its landlocked compatriot but lacks some of the downsides. There are no speed adjustments to make to the waterproof bike, so you don't have to worry about keeping pace. And at Aqua, the first New York studio to offer the class (for women only, at this point), the lighting is dim, the candlelit mood more therapeutic than punishing. Best of all, the whole 45 minute class takes place in a swimming pool. "I didn't feel right after spinning," said Isabel Dupre, 48, a French fashion photographer in a blue bikini, who has lived in New York for 20 years. "I stopped because I thought it was just too hard." She started aqua cycling, she said, because she was "obsessed" with swimming. According to Aqua's Web site, the sport burns up to 800 calories an hour. I climbed onto one of the 15 bikes in the four foot deep pool, where the 84 degree water came up to my chest. I tucked my closed toe jellies into the pedal straps, and as I started pedaling my legs felt like jelly. The water lapped at my moving limbs but did not deter them from spinning.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Five Places to Visit in Greenville, S.C. One of the U pcountry city's most intriguing areas is West Greenville, an enclave that has been transformed into an artistic and entrepreneurial district. None Kelly Blackmon for The New York Times Greenville, S.C., near the Blue Ridge Mountains, has emerged as a buzzy destination for the culinary and creative arts after years of economic growth and urban revitalization. One of the U pcountry city's most intriguing areas is West Greenville, the former hub of the city's textile production. In recent years, the enclave known as "The Village" of West Greenville has been transformed into an artistic and entrepreneurial district with an eclectic mix of small businesses. There's a James Beard semifinalist restaurant, a host of independent galleries, as well as the Greenville Center for Creative Arts, which houses an art school and regularly holds public events and workshops. The Greenville Center for Creative Arts is largely responsible for putting the Upcountry city on the national visual arts map. Kelly Blackmon for The New York Times West Greenville's biggest cultural draw, the four year old Center for Creative Arts, is housed in the city's historic cotton factory and is largely responsible for putting Greenville on the national visual arts map. The center includes an expansive gallery featuring work from on site studio artists and fellows, as well as another gallery dedicated to local and regional talents. It also runs permanent and temporary exhibits and events (like Greenville's most popular monthly open house, First Friday, which is free and geared toward engaging the community). The Anchorage was a semifinalist for best new restaurant in the 2018 James Beard Awards. Kelly Blackmon for The New York Times The marquee restaurant i n the city's burgeoning dining scene is an ode to local ingredients. A semifinalist for best new restaurant in the 2018 James Beard Awards, the spot has a rotating menu of small plates that might include homemade pasta with Johnston County ham, arugula and garlic, and a salad of Brussels leaf, daikon kimchi, and rainbow carrots topped with albacore tuna, all served on dishware designed by the local potter Darin R. Gehrke . The chef Greg McPhee, an alum of Husk in Charleston and Restaurant 17 in nearby Traveler's Rest, set up shop in the village's former mill infirmary in 2017, making The Anchorage the space's first tenant in 40 years. You can't miss it: The revitalized corner building has a facade kitted out with a vibrant mural depicting a vegetable garden. The Village Grind, which opened four years ago, serves specialty coffee and pastries. Kelly Blackmon for The New York Times This four year old cafe has an intimate, rustic aesthetic and specialty coffee expertise. With beans sourced from local roasters like Methodical and Due South Coffee, the shop serves pastries, from morning buns to chocolate croissants and doughnuts (Sundays only), made each morning by neighborhood bakers, including Bake Room and Golden Brown Delicious. The Flatiron Building houses the studios and galleries of local artists and craftspeople, including Joseph Bradley, above, whose paintings are nature inspired. Kelly Blackmon for The New York Times The triangular, two story brick building on the corner of Pendleton Street houses the studios and galleries of the city's most promising artists and craftspeople . The nature inspired paintings of Joseph Bradley are perhaps the most well known outside of Greenville, having appeared in shows and galleries from New Orleans to Boston, and have a permanent home in Charleston's Atrium Art Gallery. Indigo Flow Art is a hybrid yoga studio and art gallery that opened in 2018. Kelly Blackmon for The New York Times Opened in 2018, the hybrid yoga studio and art gallery with a philanthropic bent is run by Katie Hughes, a certified yoga instructor, and her artist mother, Julie Hughes. The art focused section of the space features permanent collections by Ms. Hughes, who describes her signature style as "abstracted realism," and selected works by local and regional artists. The minimalist yoga and meditation studio is in the back of the shop, where Katie Hughes offers Vinyasa and Chakra yoga, mat Pilates, and meditation, as well as beginner classes for kids. The mother daughter duo allocates 10 percent of monthly profits toward their Indigo Outreach yoga and mindfulness program, created for at risk youth in the community. 52 PLACES AND MUCH, MUCH MORE Follow our 52 Places traveler, Sebastian Modak, on Instagram as he travels the world, and discover more Travel coverage by following us on 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.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
ATLANTA For years, Beverly L. Hall, the former school superintendent here, ruled by fear. Principals were told that if state test scores did not go up enough, they would be fired and 90 percent of them were removed in the decade of Dr. Hall's reign. Underlings were humiliated during rallies at the Georgia Dome. Dr. Hall permitted principals with the highest test scores to sit up front near her, while sticking those with the lowest scores off to the side, in the bleachers. She was chauffeured around the city, often with an entourage of aides and security guards. When she spoke publicly, questions had to be submitted beforehand for screening. "She was known as the queen in her ivory tower," said Verdaillia Turner, president of the Atlanta teachers' union. But Dr. Hall got results. Test scores soared. Two national groups named her superintendent of the year. The secretary of education, Arne Duncan, hosted her at the White House. Then, last summer, the Atlanta miracle collapsed. A state investigation found that 178 principals and teachers at nearly half the district's schools desperate to raise test scores had cheated. Students from this poor, mostly African American school district who could barely read were rated proficient on state tests, and they didn't receive the remedial help they needed. For months, the Fulton County district attorney has been investigating former school officials. Felony indictments are expected, for altering state documents, lying to investigators and theft of government funds. By last spring, Gov. Nathan Deal and Mayor Kasim Reed of Atlanta knew they had to find someone to clean up the mess. They asked Erroll B. Davis Jr. to become the new superintendent when Dr. Hall left at the end of June. Mr. Davis, who is 67, did not need the job. His wife of 43 years hoped he would not take it. He had nothing to prove. An engineer by training, he had been the chief executive of a Wisconsin based utility company, and then, starting in 2006, the chancellor of the University System of Georgia. In October 2010, he announced he would retire from the chancellorship the following summer. People tried to warn him off the Atlanta job. Michael Bowers, a former attorney general who was co director of the state investigation, understood how pervasive the corruption was and how daunting it would be to change the culture. "I know Erroll. I told him, 'You're crazy as a bedbug to take that job at your age,' " Mr. Bowers recalled. "You know why he did it? He is a genuine public servant." For his part, Mr. Davis said, "When I look back at my life, I don't want my contribution to have been shaving a few eighths off a bond deal to make a million dollars." On July 1, the day he was supposed to retire, Mr. Davis was sitting at Dr. Hall's old desk, reading the 800 page investigative report and trying to figure out which, if any, of the people in the offices surrounding him could be trusted. Since then, he has been unbending about rooting out corruption, to the point that Richard L. Hyde, who had been the lead investigator on the commission that issued the state report, said, "He's brought order to chaos, it's very impressive." Mr. Davis has removed more than the 178 teachers and principals named in the report, and he dismissed several top administrators. He has also made himself accessible, visiting 8 to 10 schools each month unannounced. And he has been kind. During a stop at Slater Elementary last week, he walked into every classroom. "I want to thank you for what you do," he told each teacher. "I couldn't do your job." As he travels the district, often driving himself to meet with small groups of principals, Mr. Davis repeatedly tells them, "Education is the only industry in this country where failure is blamed on the workers, not the leadership." Beyond his talents, Mr. Davis offered something to both sides. He had been chosen for the university chancellorship by Mr. Perdue. And he is African American, a must for a school district where most of the work force and students are black. Mr. Davis says he is not political, describing himself as "slightly left of center on social issues and slightly right of center on fiscal matters." His salary as superintendent is 240,000, less than half of what he made as the university system chancellor. He is an engineer to the core, bringing office work to football games to read during breaks. "A football game takes three and a half hours," he said, "but if you add up the actual playing time, it's much less, so there's a lot I can get done." He hangs his suits on two racks, taking the first in line, wearing it for a day, putting it at the end, and repeating. Dr. Hall and her top aides had six secretaries and receptionists; Mr. Davis and his have three. People are still shellshocked from the Hall years. Ms. Turner, the union president, said she was surprised when Mr. Davis's secretary called to set up a lunch. "I said, 'Why does he want to do that?' " Ms. Turner recalled. "She said, 'He wants to get to know you.' The man is a breath of fresh air." Dr. Hall was viewed as inaccessible, sequestered in her office. Recently he received a complaint that a teacher had given her students the answers to a test. After investigating, he immediately removed her from the classroom. "My policy is zero tolerance," he said. "I do not want people who cheat teaching children. Can I do that? We'll find out. If I lose, so be it, sue me."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
Attorney General Letitia James of New York said on Thursday that she had filed a lawsuit against a for profit stem cell clinic, Park Avenue Stem Cell, claiming it performed unproven, rogue procedures on patients with a wide range of medical conditions, from erectile dysfunction to heart disease. "Misleading vulnerable consumers who are desperate to find a treatment for serious and painful medical conditions is unacceptable, unlawful, and immoral," Ms. James said in a statement. "We will continue to investigate these types of clinics that shamelessly add to the suffering of these consumers by charging them thousands of dollars for treatments that they know are ineffective." The lawsuit is part of the attorney general's broader look at dubious medical claims being made by stem cell clinics in New York. It comes on the heels of repeated attempts to crack down on the stem cell industry by the Food and Drug Administration, which warned nearly two dozen clinics earlier this week to stop selling treatments that could harm patients. The clinics have proliferated around the country, despite a lack of evidence that would support claims that stem cell injections can repair aging joints or regenerate tissue. Situated in Midtown Manhattan, Park Avenue Stem Cell is operated by Dr. Joel B. Singer, a plastic surgeon who has previously run afoul of state regulators, according to the state attorney general's office. Phone calls and emails to Dr. Singer and his lawyer were not returned. According to state regulators, Park Avenue Stem Cell also had ties to a California business, Cell Surgical Network, with roughly 100 affiliates around the country, that was sued by the F.D.A. last year. The federal agency is seeking a permanent injunction against Cell Surgical Network, according to state officials, who say the clinic followed the network's procedures until its affiliation ended last December. Stem cells, derived from cells found in blood, fat or birth tissue, offer promise as a potential treatment to repair damage from injury to disease. But regulators have become increasingly concerned that many of the claims made by the companies and clinics offering stem cell treatments have far outpaced the available medical evidence. Like the New York clinic, many of these clinics offer people treatments that cost thousands of dollars, which patients typically pay out of pocket because health insurers refuse to cover the therapies. Some products have proved dangerous to patients, blinding some and causing severe infections in at least a dozen people. In the case of Park Avenue Stem Cell, patients were treated with stem cells taken from their own adipose tissue, or fat. "Defendants claim that they can treat a variety of serious medical conditions, including but not limited to, urologic diseases and erectile dysfunction, neurology diseases, cardiac/pulmonary disease, autoimmune diseases, and orthopedic conditions, even through there is currently no adequate scientific substantiation that these treatments will be effective; in fact, they could be harmful," according to the lawsuit. On its website, the clinic promotes what it describes as "personal cell therapy" to use your own cells to start or enhance "your own healing process." The site goes on to promise "you will lead a life that is more meaningful and pain free with services that will change your life and lifestyle." It lists what it claims is scientific literature suggesting "these cells may represent a medical breakthrough in the treatment of many chronic medical conditions." Patients would pay 3,995 or more for a stem cell procedure, according to the lawsuit. Many people thought they were part of a patient funded research study, and regulators accused the clinic of giving patients the false impression that the treatments were part of a study approved by the F.D.A. The clinic emphasized its research, including a long list of "reference articles and studies," according to the lawsuit. "Such claims overstate the scientific legitimacy" of the clinic's treatments, the regulators said. Regulators also say Dr. Singer is operating a GoFundMe fund raising campaign to perform stem cell treatments for free. "Not only chronic pain, but other ailments such as post traumatic brain syndrome, autoimmune diseases, orthopedic injuries and other ailments can be helped by this amazing procedure," the campaign promises. So far, Dr. Singer appears not to have raised any money. Since being contacted by state regulators, the clinic has revised its website and added numerous disclaimers, but state officials say consumers had a "net impression" that stem cells were an effective treatment for these various conditions. The website also appears to have been further changed to solely emphasize orthopedic conditions like arthritis or joint disease.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
John Wilson specializes in dryly hilarious anthropological studies of New Yorkers. "New York City is the best character," he said. When John Wilson first began filming his debut series back in 2018, New Yorkers were able to talk to strangers and sit in restaurants without fear of impending death. We could banter with our bodega guys or older neighbors mask free, which meant we could reasonably understand what our fellow citizens were muttering and feeling, or the four lettered words they might be directing at us. If you've forgotten what that version of New York is like, "How To With John Wilson," which premieres Friday on HBO, might be the definitive survey of the now ancient traditions of the city things like splitting the check and making small talk with total strangers. Filmed, narrated and written mostly by Wilson, a lifelong New Yorker, the show might best be described as a darkly funny goof on the explainer videos that have saturated YouTube. But that's only the setup. Part urban travelogue, part first person essay, the show is, at its core, an anthropological exploration of people most often New Yorkers in their native habitats. And as of now, it's also kind of nostalgia inducing, with plenty of footage of crowded grocery stores, busy restaurants and streets flooded with people trekking to the office, as they sidestep over dog droppings, spilled food and each other. "I was afraid New York was going to become boring," he confessed on a brisk afternoon earlier this month. The filmmaker, who turned 34 this month, was in the strange place of looking ahead to the debut of a show that will already be "aggressively dated" when it comes out. While he's somewhat worried that viewers might not have appetites for this kind of time travel, Wilson considers himself a documentarian, first. He's less worried about the past than on capturing the present of New York the lead character that has been a constant in every film he's made. "New York City is the best character it's constantly renewing itself, constantly regenerating itself, losing itself," Wilson said. "It makes me want to film as much of it as I can before it disappears." While "How To" is Wilson's first TV series, it's essentially an expansion of the offbeat "tutorial" videos he has been making on his own since 2010. Like his new show, these early shorts would purport to offer viewers insight into mundane tasks, inspired by the YouTube explainers that fascinated the filmmaker. "I would watch them and want to know why this person became obsessed with air conditioners," Wilson said. "Was it a divorce, or something emotional?" Wilson, who studied documentary filmmaking at Binghamton University, began trekking all over the city with his digital camera and iPhone, gathering hours of footage of random colorful New Yorkers and other objects of interest misspelled signage, trash on the street. (The East Village is one of the most reliable sources of material, he said.) He would then reverse engineer scripts based on the footage and insert personal "incidents" to push the story along. "There is more raw material here than anywhere else in the world," Wilson said. Sitting in the backyard of his apartment in Ridgewood, Queens, wearing a flannel jacket and glasses with thick frames, Wilson has a soft spoken presence. But his apparent passiveness masks a finely attenuated eye for the absurdity of life in the city. When our conversation is interrupted, at one point, by the distant sound of a neighbor's violently phlegmatic cough, Wilson breaks into a mockingly repulsed "eww" and adds a deadpan side eye. It was the day after President Trump announced that he had Covid 19, and Wilson explained that his morning had been spent filming newsstands across the city in search of New York Post headlines announcing the news. Inspired by documentary filmmakers like Les Blank, Wilson practices an approach that he describes as "letting the story come to you." For these early films, which he would upload to Vimeo with little self promotion, this process was intensive. He estimates that each of his 10 minute shorts required a year of gathering footage, in addition to writing and editing, all of this done in his free time while he worked a series of "low rent" jobs, like editing surveillance footage for a private investigator. Though the process has been streamlined significantly by an HBO budget, which allowed for a second shooting crew and additional writers, it took two years to shoot and edit the show's six episodes, which clock in at around 25 minutes each. "A lot of documentaries are about something that already happened, but I think people are kind of afraid to let the story find them," he said. "It's scary because you might not end up with something good." An example of "something good" comes in the show's pilot, "How To Make Small Talk," in which Wilson explores the ins and outs of polite chatter and his own difficulties with it. To reinforce a point about location, he went to a WrestleMania event in New Jersey and conducted interviews (which are unscripted throughout the show) with attendees, the first being with a self styled "child predator hunter" shown chugging a beer while wearing a fur coat. The chance encounter led Wilson to go home with the man and film him as he attempted to entrap a predator, rerouting the direction of the episode. "His process is definitely a Catch 22," said Alice Gregory, one of the show's three writers (as well as a contributing editor for The New York Times's T Magazine). "Our scripts were really provisional documents we would put an ideal scenario on paper but we knew it was going to change quite a lot." Wilson's videos have a distinct style, fine tuned during the process of producing over a dozen of these small films. He narrates each episode from a script that, juxtaposed with the footage, builds toward something like hard earned personal revelations. Imagine David Attenborough having minor epiphanies in the style of Carrie Bradshaw. It's idiosyncratic stuff, with little to compare it to, though it shares a spirit with other droll verite gems like "Nathan for You." It's not surprising then, that Nathan Fielder, that show's mastermind, is an executive producer of "How To." After a mutual acquaintance passed along a link of one of Wilson's early films to Fielder, the pair met for the first time in January 2018 at Forlini's restaurant in Chinatown. That night Fielder agreed to develop a longer version of Wilson's tutorials, having decided they deserved to be seen by a larger audience. "As someone who doesn't live full time in New York, you start to understand the city through what you see on TV and in movies," Fielder said in a phone interview from Los Angeles, where he lives. "His New York is the one no one bothers to show, or is too bland or too upsetting or dirty to show." Fielder, whom Wilson refers to as his "Fairy Godfather," took to describing the show as "'Planet Earth,' but for New York" in pitches with networks, which led to HBO agreeing to financing a pilot episode. Here, the wildlife is substituted for confused people making their way through a complicated time. "What we're seeing in the show is people doing their best to grapple with the world they've been dropped into," Fielder said. He described his own role as "trying to help out with whatever," which included expanding Wilson's premise into longer episodes and working with him in the editing room. Fielder recalled one moment when Wilson filmed a woman as she delicately placed a wild pigeon into a plastic Duane Reade bag before walking off through Times Square. "I think about that all the time," he said. "What is the story with that pigeon, was he injured? Was he being rescued? John's stuff is all moments like these there's so much to think about when I watch the show." In the second episode, titled "How To Put Up Scaffolding," Wilson begins his narration by announcing: "Everyone in New York is going to die, but sometimes the city tries to stop that from happening," before taking viewers on a history of scaffolding, documenting its status as a public nuisance and occasional killer. "I spent an entire summer under scaffolding for that one," Wilson said. Framed as straightforward guides to achieving small goals ("How To Cook the Perfect Risotto," "How To Cover Your Furniture"), the episodes stray into strange and personal places: a chance visit with one of Wilson's ex girlfriends; a Best Western conference room full of paranoiacs suffering from the "Mandela Effect"; a Long Island dinner for New York soccer referees. (Wilson wanted to see how those adjudicates of order handled splitting a check the evening dissolves into a disgruntled revolt.) "You can start with fixing an electrical outlet and end up at the edge of a volcano," he said. Or you can find yourself needing a how to guide on finishing production during the early stages of a pandemic. In early March, as the crew finished filming the final episode, the first coronavirus cases began to pop up in the city, a somber fact that gets worked into the end of the season. "We weren't writing with the virus in mind," Gregory said. "That it happened in the middle of the show is almost unbelievable. Everything that interested us about the city began to disappear. Well, not everything." Wilson, ever the documentarian, viewed the crisis as a mandate. "One of my greatest fears is there not being a record of something important," he said. "So, even though it's been tragic, and it's been relentless bad news, the city is also more interesting now." "We're done shooting for the show," he continued, "but I've been shooting nonstop all summer, trying to find everything, like those tents at restaurants, before it disappears." During the pandemic many people openly questioned whether living in New York was worth the hassle. If you need a rationale for forging ahead in this perpetually strange environment, Wilson's show might be the ultimate explainer: How to appreciate life among quixotic city dwellers and their inexplicable rituals. "People might be wondering, with all the Zoom calls and the fact that you could do this anywhere: 'Why would I live in the most expensive apartments in the most expensive city in America?'" Gregory said. "This show is the reason."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
WASHINGTON Is it better to see the Bolshoi Ballet at home or abroad? For decorative splendor, few opera houses can compare with the rebuilt Bolshoi Theater in Moscow which I visited recently and fewer with the immensity of its stage. Yet too many performances in Moscow and St. Petersburg are ruined by the partisan clamor of balletomanes and claques who overapplaud individual sections (sometimes individual steps) of each work, turning ballet into a competitive sport. This week, the Bolshoi plays the Kennedy Center Opera House for a week of "Giselle." Though Tuesday night's opening performance was warmly applauded, with a notable cast and memorable curtain calls, it was a pleasure to note that at no point did this suspenseful dance drama turn into a circus. It's also better to see Yuri Grigorovich's production of the 19th century "Giselle" (with designs by Simon Virsaladze), which is the one the Bolshoi has brought here, than the company's alternative staging, by Vladimir Vasiliev (designs by Givenchy), which I saw in April at the troupe's second Moscow theater, the New Stage. Although there are real faults in Mr. Grigorovich's staging, it keeps the drama of "Giselle" seriously absorbing as the Vasiliev version does not. The old tale which has its roots in the medieval reports of dance mania in the Rhineland of first love, class distinction, deceit, heartbreak, madness and love beyond the grave was alive. It showed, above all, dance as a vital force. The Bolshoi is fielding three casts this week. Tuesday's was led by the company's foremost classicists, Svetlana Zakharova (Giselle) and David Hallberg (Albrecht), who, as Odette Odile and Prince Siegfried in "Swan Lake," will also open the troupe's New York season in July. Ms. Zakharova, who began her career with the Mariinsky Ballet and who is now prima ballerina at both the Bolshoi and La Scala in Milan, is a beauty; the eye dwells on her perfectly sculpted face; her slender, long neck and limbs; and the talonlike curves of her arched feet. She has often, however, seemed cool and detached: not so on Tuesday. She emerged from her mother's cottage in Act I and immediately showed Giselle's happy drive to dance. The ballet's Romanticism encouraged her to adopt a wilder style. Her arms and legs didn't make perfectly even overall lines, but they were charged with energy. (In one flying entrance into Albrecht's arms in Act II, she changed the text: a grand jete lift instead of a temps leve lift, which spoiled the choreography's coherence, since temps leves of various kinds are thematic material throughout the act.) She's not a natural Giselle when she takes to the air (especially in arching soubresauts), an element of strain enters her deportment but she's a vivid, committed one. Ms. Zakharova will open the Bolshoi's New York season in July. Mr. Hallberg, the American star who joined the Bolshoi in late 2011, matches her in physical proportions, right through to the memorably arched feet. As with every ballerina he partners, he helped her performance by the devoted, affectionate attention he paid her: He was her Albrecht. The speed and perfect control of his double air turns were breathtaking (literally I heard gasps); his dancing remains stellar. And despite years of performing Albrecht with American Ballet Theater and other companies, he's not a guest artist who insists on his own way with a role: He dances the Bolshoi's version of Albrecht's steps. The most notable difference was that here, instead of the phenomenal series of entrechat six on the spot he used to do with Ballet Theater (so exceptionally lucid in the glittering crisscross of his feet in the air that some fans swore they were entrechat dix, a much rarer step), he performed, as do most Russian dancers, two diagonals of brises: a shimmering step in which the dancer seems to hover as he crosses the stage, his feet and legs crossing diagonally in the air ahead of his body. But Mr. Hallberg didn't bring these the frightening power with which Mikhail Baryshnikov and Vyacheslav Gordeyev illumined them. I wish he'd try a single diagonal interspersed with brises voles, as Alexei Fadeyechev did when this production was young. How is Mr. Hallberg's Bolshoi experience enriching his artistry? I'd imagined Moscow coaching would help him discard his facial mannerisms his mouth often hangs open, and he likes to overwiden his eyes but the opposite seemed true on Tuesday. Where the Bolshoi's influence was most apparent was the frenzy that distorted his line in his final series of jumps. While I applaud the intention to convey supreme despair, this was a deterioration of Mr. Hallberg's classical style, which used to convey searing passion and princely control to an astonishing degree. I wish I could see the other two casts: Anna Nikulina and Artem Ovcharenko, Ekaterina Krysanova and Ruslan Skvortsov. I'm especially sorry to miss Mr. Skvortsov, who is not listed as dancing in New York in July; he has distinguished himself in several of the Bolshoi's live HD broadcasts: princely, stylish, handsome and multifaceted. Ms. Nikulina, Mr. Ovcharenko and Ms. Krysanova will appear in New York. In most respects, this "Giselle" bears comparison with any of the others now presented. Mr. Virsaladze's sets attractively suggest the brush strokes of Impressionist painters; the forest and lake of Act II recall, in particular, Cezanne. Yet this production's inner life suffers by comparison to that of the Bolshoi's own legend. Film, photographs and reports show that in Leonid Lavrovsky's production, as seen in the West in the 1950s and '60s, the peasant world of Act I had a detailed naturalism beside which this one seems artificial; and the Act II corps of spectral wilis has no exceptional power. Up to at least the '80s, the Bolshoi's torsos, spines and jumps used to have an exhilarating power lacked by today's company. Because I saw this production when it was young in the '80s, I can't help making comparisons. I see today's Bolshoi is not the old Bolshoi; what isn't clear yet is what distinguishes today's Bolshoi from other troupes. But the company is bringing old productions to America, as if hoping we will think it remains its former self.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once a week blast of our pop music coverage. Billie Eilish and her collaborator and brother, Finneas, figured out exactly what goes into a James Bond movie theme, then made the assignment their own. "No Time to Die" has gusts of orchestral melodrama, hints of John Barry's original soundtracks and a looming sense of fatalism. But it also applies Eilish's breathy tone melodic yet lingering just above a whisper and her adolescent bluntness, as she wonders, "Was I stupid to love you? Was I reckless to help? Was it obvious to everybody else?" JON PARELES The song is an arena country promise of uninhibited back seat passion: a march with a spacious, booming beat, echoing guitars and a growing chorus of Cam's voice, offering all she's got. The video turns it into something much more ominous: one last fling during the apocalypse. PARELES On the one hand, this is predictable bloat the dominant hip hop stars of the last few years all phoning in second tier verses. On the other hand, how striking it is that the bloat of the day can sound this strange, this melodically unhinged, this rhythmically unlikely. Plus, in the video, Young Thug is wearing a bondage harness and getting a manicure from a robot nail technician. One thing is clear: Automation will come for us all. CARAMANICA As a drummer, the young British phenom Moses Boyd plays in cross stitched, Tony Allen influenced patterns, as open and rolling as they are forceful. As a bandleader and producer, he piles together deep synths, bass rattling drum machines and ear seizing samples; drawing on a vast range of influences from England, Africa and the Caribbean, he compiles a rich pastiche of electroacoustic textures, with a special composite power. "2 Far Gone," a foray into future house featuring a cameo from the keyboardist Joe Armon Jones, is one of many highlights each one different from the next on Boyd's first official album, the remarkable "Dark Matter." GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO Few rappers sound like they're having as much fun, lyric to lyric, as Flo Milli. A clever, cheerful lyricist with a voice that recalls "Clueless," she was sharp last year on her breakthrough single, "Beef FloMix." But "My Attitude" might be her best to date, a persistently tough blend of aw shucks sexual candor and eye rolling dismissals. All her raps are taunts. All her raps are teases. CARAMANICA Niia, 'If You Won't Marry Me Right Now' Anger, frustration, detachment, desperation, regret, bitterness, self preservation and cold insight course through "If You Won't Marry Me Right Now" from Niia's new album, "La Bella Vita." The tempo is unbudging; every slow chord change seems to struggle against gravity. She anatomizes a six year relationship that has just "wasted so much time," and with production by Niia and Robin Hannibal (of Rhye), each line moves through its own drama: a somber jazz piano trio, floor warping synthesizers, swarms of fiercely insistent voices and moments when Niia sounds painfully alone, still a long way from catharsis. PARELES Each instrument in Carla Bley's longstanding trio her piano, Steve Swallow's electric bass and Andy Sheppard's whispery tenor saxophone is both spare and versatile. Every player puts a premium on plain stated melody, and gently evocative touch. As they entwine, the component pieces never feel amplified or redoubled by each other; there's a quietness, a loneliness together, that gives this group (which began in the 1990s) its special intimacy. One of the great composers in jazz, Bley wrote three new suites for "Life Goes On," the group's latest offering, including "Beautiful Telephones," with a stalking and circling melody that sounds at once wary and serene. RUSSONELLO The banjo virtuoso Abigail Washburn studied Chinese language and culture before she took up the banjo, and amid many musical travels, including extended trips to China, she has collaborated since the early 2000s with Wu Fei, who plays the guzheng, a Chinese zither with a throaty tone. They have finally made an album together, due April 3. "Water Is Wide/Wusuli Boat Song," a Scottish song intertwined with a traditional song from China's Hezhe people, has their two voices and instruments calling and blending across cultural distances that sound much closer on purely musical terms. PARELES While living in Rome in 2017, the pianist Jason Moran set about writing a piece a day, mostly short and simple things well suited for solo piano. He came to record some of them on the Steinway grand at Sant'Andrea de Scaphis, a deconsecrated chapel from the eighth century that has become an art gallery, though it retains its old high flown ceilings and moldered, exposed brick walls. The brief and enchanting "For Love" is built on a lapping, ebb and flow melody, with a cascading feel that calls to mind his "Gangsterism" series. RUSSONELLO	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
BOJACK HORSEMAN Stream on Netflix. After six seasons swilling whiskey and deadpanning, the sweater wearing title character of this animated Hollywood satire is putting down the reins. The series has followed Bojack, an anthropomorphic horse voiced by Will Arnett, as he navigates a fictional version of Hollywood, where he lives as a has been 1990s sitcom star. Toward the end of the most recent batch of episodes, he accepted a job at Wesleyan University. How he adjusts to collegiate life will be one of the questions that the final installments which hit Netflix on Friday will answer. TED BUNDY: FALLING FOR A KILLER Stream on Amazon. Those interested in learning just how wicked the serial killer Ted Bundy was have no shortage of Bundy related programming to choose from Netflix released both a feature film and a documentary series about him last year but this Amazon documentary series promises a fresh perspective, looking at his behavior against the backdrop of 1970s feminism. It focuses on the misogyny of Bundy's crimes, and includes the voices of some of the women affected by them. Those women include Elizabeth Kendall, who in the early 1980s published a book about her relationship with Bundy.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Shortly after a gunman entered Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida in February and killed 17 people, the conspiracy theory website Infowars claimed it had a photo of the attacker wearing "communist garb." It showed a young man with a clenched fist in a red shirt emblazoned with a hammer and sickle and images of Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx. But that man was not Nikolas Cruz, who was arrested two miles from the Parkland, Fla., school on Feb. 14 and later confessed to the shooting, the police said. The man in the red shirt was Marcel Fontaine, who lives 1,200 miles away in Massachusetts and has never visited Florida. On Monday, Mr. Fontaine filed a defamation lawsuit against Infowars, one of its reporters and its right wing founder, Alex Jones, asserting that their story misidentified him as the gunman and caused his photo to spread across social media, message boards and other websites. In the lawsuit, a lawyer for Mr. Fontaine said it appeared that Infowars published his photo simply because of his shirt. "Mr. Jones and Infowars have long been consumed with paranoia over the prospect of communist infiltration and indoctrination," the lawsuit, filed in Travis County District Court in Austin, Tex., said. "Over the past year alone, Infowars has featured hundreds of sensationalist articles and videos focusing on the threat of communist agitation and conspiracies." Mr. Fontaine declined a request for an interview, but his lawyer, Mark D. Bankston, said it was obvious that Mr. Fontaine's shirt was not to be taken seriously. The shirt, which is called "The Communist Party," shows Marx, the 19th century economist who wrote "The Communist Manifesto," wearing a lampshade on his head and Stalin, Lenin, Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro drinking from red plastic cups. "We believe that Mr. Fontaine was targeted due to the T shirt he was wearing, and that Infowars intentionally disregarded fundamental newsroom ethics due to its desire to politicize the tragedy," Mr. Bankston said. Infowars did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. On Monday, the website appended an editors' note atop the Feb. 14 story that said it had previously "showed a photograph of a young man that we had received and stated incorrectly that it was an alleged photo of the suspected shooter." It continued, "We regret that this error occurred." An archive of the Infowars story by the Wayback Machine shows that Mr. Fontaine's photo was online for at least five hours.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
TOMORROW WILL BE DIFFERENT Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality By 273 pp. Crown Archetype. 26 The most stirring moments in the memoir "Tomorrow Will Be Different" are not those in which is making public history, whether as American University's first transgender student body president or the first openly trans person to speak before a major party convention. They are the private moments: when her mother tells her that she feels as if her son is dying; when she unexpectedly falls in love; when she realizes that this transgender man she plans to spend the rest of her life with will die. It is when McBride having lived her entire adult life in public as a trans advocate and budding political figure is finally able to shed her public persona that her narrative is most resonant. By becoming a nuanced character in her own book, she humanizes the impossibly competent, morally unsullied ideal she seems on the surface. McBride acknowledges the difficulty of letting her guard down when she describes her advocacy of a Delaware trans rights bill before the State Senate in 2013: "A few months before, displaying such vulnerability before that body seemed impossible, but through the last several months I had found my voice." There is a constant tension in the book between McBride's ingrained reliance on logic over emotions, and her efforts to break through these intellectual barriers to fully reveal herself, in her book and in the outside world. The memoir starts off with a moving history of McBride's profound inner conflict as a child: "When the boys and girls would line up separately in kindergarten, I'd find myself longing to be in the other line"; "as I'd play in the Cinderella dress, the proverbial stroke of midnight would arrive. I'd have to take it off and return to playing the part that I'd already learned was more than just expected of me it was 'me' to everyone else in my life." Her account of the day she comes out to her college community, in contrast, is more tentative. If the language feels timeworn ("I couldn't hide anymore"; and, once she posts her letter on Facebook, "it didn't take long for the news to spread like wildfire"), it evokes a narrative insecurity that mirrors the nervous self doubt she experiences while actually living through her gender transition. By the time she finds herself arguing before the Delaware legislature, though, both McBride the character and the book's narrative voice have gained enough confidence to passionately convince their audiences of her lifelong cause. The debate scene comes alive through the specificity of McBride's prose. She recalls how some Republican lawmakers at first cast trans people as restroom predators, before becoming "more muted" and "almost sheepish" in their opposition after her testimony, unable to fully vilify trans people after interacting with one. As McBride sits in tears on the Senate floor, State Senator Karen Peterson is the only one to comfort her for Peterson, who is lesbian, recognizes "the indignity of having to plead for your most basic rights," McBride writes. The scene's pathos underlines the absurdity of having to debate anyone's right to a life free from discrimination. 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 the same time, these extended chapters on trans advocacy, teeming with data and policy details, feel shallower than those that develop the star crossed romance between McBride and the young transgender rights advocate Andrew Cray. From his first appearance in the book, at President Obama's White House L.G.B.T. reception in 2012, the narrative intermingles the excitement of new love with the anticipation of its loss. "I think we'd get along pretty swimmingly," Cray messages McBride on Facebook two months after that encounter, his significance in her life already promising to be as noteworthy as his charming use of an adverb. Cray takes a central role in "Tomorrow Will Be Different" only when a sore on his tongue turns out to be cancer, which later progresses to his lungs. As McBride cares for Cray, his illness seems to dismantle her walls of pragmatism and perfectionism. At one point she breaks down over a malfunctioning suction machine, falling to the floor in tears and shouting, "I can't do this!" At another, she decides to spend Christmas with her parents instead of Cray, as much as she knows it will hurt him. These flaws these moments where she appears least noble are evidence of this exemplary woman's humanity. Cray himself also buoys these scenes with his particular blend of stubbornness and charm. He insists on remaining independent from his family through his illness, only to rely on McBride as his caregiver instead. And yet, as the 27 year old man sits in the tub and asks, "Can you wash my tush?" in a playful acknowledgment of the infantilizing force of his disease, we understand his irreverence, and how McBride fell so deeply in love. This anxiety over death's cruel interruption of true love permeates her narrative of Cray's cancer, their wedding and his passing, which McBride narrates vividly and without the self consciousness that is at times distancing elsewhere in the book. Meanwhile, trans identity in McBride and Cray's love story never becomes abstracted from experience. McBride's identity enables her specific life circumstances, but it cannot be reduced, codified or turned into a statistic like the one that says 41 percent of trans men and women have attempted suicide (a number the book cites more than once). Even if McBride and Cray's were the only trans relationship ever in which one person ended up a widow because of the other's cancer, their immediate connection the authenticity and specificity of their love is what inspires the greatest compassion for the universal trans experience, in all its nuance and diversity. The book's strength lies in its portrayal of McBride and Cray as fully realized individuals beyond their transgender identities. After Cray's death, however, McBride's narrative pivots swiftly back to politics without leaving either her or her readers sufficient space to grieve. This is a young woman who has just lost the love of her life at 24. It doesn't seem quite enough for her to merely add his name, as tribute, to the list of her accomplishments to date, or to merely participate in policies that Cray helped develop. It feels as though the compromises that become routine in McBride's advocacy from her willingness to plead with outright bigots for her basic dignity, to her position at the Human Rights Campaign, a mainstream L.G.B.T. organization that has been criticized by the trans community for prioritizing gay marriage over trans rights equally compromise her ability to give the reader an accurate picture of her own grief, which could have imbued "Tomorrow Will Be Different" with the enduring quality of other memoirs of loss. With a foreword by former Vice President Joe Biden that frames the book as an instructive tome for trans people, parents and the general public, the book is perhaps positioned less as a lasting literary contribution and more as a manual for tolerance that puts its writer in a good position to run for office. The inconsistencies and contradictions in McBride's book reflect the difficulty of trying to explain the transgender experience to a predominantly cisgender public. Some trans readers (myself included) may find themselves growing impatient with the author's frequent quoting of dire statistics, or her Trans 101 style arguments for bathroom equality. Her case is too often predicated on the idea that the value of trans lives is even up for debate. I gravitate to the parts of McBride's memoir in which she relies instead on her sincere and singular identity as a young widow who was raised as a boy surrounded by an environment of relative privilege despite inner turmoil to continue her fight for justice. I want to believe that readers across the gender spectrum will be moved by the improbable commingling of two trans lives, and for the cruelty of having one of these lives taken away. And yet, I confess, I'm not so sure. Perhaps a non trans reader would appreciate McBride's appeals to sympathy, like her concluding anecdotes about trans kids she's encountered (when asked what she wants to be when she grows up, 12 year old Stella declares, "The first trans president!"). But these episodes feel reminiscent of the politician's well worn strategy of using other people's especially children's stories to humanize contentious political and social issues, when McBride's own life is testament enough to the validity and intensity of these obstacles. If "Tomorrow Will Be Different" provides a vision for a future of trans equality, I hope it will be one in which the dignity of transgender individuals is not up to cisgender arbiters for approval. Such a future of true equality would breed not only full respect for the trans community, but also more deeply felt memoirs that are uncompromised by the burden of justification.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Bette Midler will return to Broadway, playing another six weeks in the title role of "Hello, Dolly!" before the revival closes this summer. Scott Rudin, the show's lead producer, said early Friday he would close the show on Aug. 25, about 17 months after performances began. The show opened to strong reviews and won four Tony Awards, including for best musical revival and for Ms. Midler's performance. Ms. Midler, who played the title role until January, will return on July 17. She will succeed Bernadette Peters, who has been playing the role since Ms. Midler departed the cast; Ms. Peters's final performance will be July 15. David Hyde Pierce and Gavin Creel will also rejoin the cast as Horace Vandergelder and Cornelius Hackl. Mr. Creel had also won a Tony Award for his performance.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Imagine, if you will, that an unnamed manufacturer just released an all new sports car. It rockets from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 3.8 seconds, pulls more than one lateral g on the skid pad and has a carbon fiber hood and roof. The interior includes dual high resolution screens, top quality materials and the option of racing seats. The manual transmission, with 7 forward speeds, will execute rev matched downshifts, and it's mounted at the rear of the car for optimal weight distribution. Other serious performance hardware include a dry sump oiling system (which keeps the engine lubricated during neck straining cornering maneuvers), an electronically controlled differential and magnetic ride control suspension. All of this is concealed beneath bodywork that's thoroughly dripping in exotic, low slung menace. If Porsche made such a car, it would cost 125,000. If its fenders wore Ferrari badges, it would cost 200,000. But we're talking about a Chevy with a starting price of 51,995. And this fact blows our minds just a little bit less because the car is a Corvette. Where that particular vehicle is concerned, we've come to expect outrageous returns on our dollar. The Corvette has a long and often glorious history. But that continuity, stretching back to 1953, means that every new generation of the Corvette tends to be viewed through the prism of its predecessor. And it's tempting to think of this seventh generation Corvette Stingray (in 'Vette lingo, the C7) in terms of the sixth generation Vette it's like a C6 with better seats, more power, better behavior at the limit. But then you start itemizing the list of aspects that are different, both quantifiable and subjective, and you realize that the C7 isn't much like a C6 at all. The new car's ambitions are fundamentally loftier, a point underscored by the return of the Stingray name. (Chevrolet is surely hoping to evoke the world beating 1963 Sting Ray rather than the 1976 model a fixture of the "Boogie Nights" era that last wore the badge.) Start with the handling. "Handling" was never something the old 'Vette was overly concerned with, as long as its lap times were low enough. The car's breakaway behavior was a particular problem, as it would let go suddenly and with great drama the C6 Corvette is the only car I've ever spun on a racetrack with the stability control system engaged. If Khrushchev and Kennedy had been that twitchy, we might all still be eating canned peas in our fallout shelters while watching "Leave It to Beaver." The C7, though, is friendly and controllable all the way to the limit. The Z51 performance package includes an electronically controlled differential (called eLSD) that allows fine modulation of the car's rear end behavior, instantly adjusting from locked and stable to open and nimble, depending on the requirements at hand. After spending some quality time sliding around the Black Lake testing area at General Motors' proving ground in Milford, Mich., I concluded that buying a 'Vette without the Z51 package would be like getting a puppy without a leash. If you spend a little bit more for a leash, you're going to have a lot better control of that puppy, right? I would also opt for the magnetic ride control system with performance traction management, which goes for 1,795. And the multimode performance exhaust costs a not insignificant 1,195, but is worth it for the wonderful sounds, if not the five extra horsepower that it uncorks. So equipped, you have a 57,785 car that has everything you need. The Corvette Stingray is not a case where the base price is merely a teaser and the car you really want costs 50 percent more. Of course, there might be a couple more options I'd find tempting. One car that I drove was fitted with the 4,210 2LT package, which gives you heated and ventilated seats, a Bose sound system and a heads up display that projects speed and other performance information. (The 3LT interior package, otherwise known as "cover everything in leather," goes for 8,005 and seems gratuitous, given that the basic materials no longer need to be hidden beneath something nicer.) A bit of a la carte interior jazziness was added by the suedelike microfiber seat inserts ( 395) and the carbon fiber trim package ( 995). And as much as I want more carbon fiber in my life, I might skip that option for my own protection. That's because when you open the driver's side door, an angular piece of dashboard is revealed, protruding at just about shin height. And when that corner of dashboard is trimmed in unforgiving carbon fiber armor, you might inadvertently smash your shin on it hard enough to draw blood. Through jeans. After that, I approached the 'Vette with the chastened caution of a nine fingered alligator farmer. Once you safely slide down into the driver's seat, though, you're in for some fun. First of all, the seat itself is new, with a slim magnesium frame that allows for wider bolsters. And if that seat is not supportive enough, there's an optional track biased model that will really clamp your guts in place. Dead ahead is an eight inch screen flanked by old fashioned analog gauges. The screen can display a wide array of information, from engine r.p.m. to cornering g forces to the temperature of the tires. The optional heads up display floats in the ether out above the hood. Yet another eight inch console screen is angled toward the driver and can power down to reveal a hidden storage compartment that includes a USB port, making it a useful place to charge your phone. A Corvette convertible is coming, but all coupes have a removable carbon fiber roof panel that gives you 75 percent of the top down experience, although it consumes most of the cargo area when it's stored away. Fire up the 6.2 liter V8 and the Corvette settles into its familiar V8 lope, with some added bass provided by the optional exhaust system. The base 'Vette packs 455 horsepower and 460 pound feet of torque; add five to both numbers for cars with the multimode exhaust. The previous Corvette made 436 horsepower, so this one isn't wildly more powerful. But with variable valve timing and direct fuel injection, the C7 feels more flexible, more explosive at any given engine speed. And cylinder deactivation enables an E.P.A. rating of 29 m.p.g. on the highway with the manual transmission. G.M. notes that the 29 figure was achieved without using the car's eco mode. If you engage that, your mileage could actually top 30 m.p.g., quite a nifty number for a car that runs the quarter mile in 12 seconds. I doubt anyone will quarrel with the Corvette's performance, but styling might be another matter. As in so many other areas, the C7's looks are a notable departure. I love it, but I'm someone who considers "looks like a Camaro" a verdict often rendered to the 'Vette's rear end a high compliment. What matters more to me is the very fact that the C7 makes such a stylistic departure. Unlike its longtime foil, the Porsche 911, the Corvette is willing to drift with the winds of design. Which means that its styling is of the moment, then dated, then eventually appreciated anew sometime in the distant future. And I acknowledge that the depths of that awkward fashion limbo, when Corvettes smell of Axe body spray and are driven by Eddie Money impersonators, might sour the mood on the new ones a little bit. Hey, that's the price you pay for excitement. The C7 is not perfect. It has gained 90 pounds, and in a straight line a 2014 'Vette is barely quicker than either its predecessor or a 10 year old Z06 model. But for once the Corvette isn't solely devoted to horsepower and brute numbers. Despite offering as much as 638 horsepower, the sixth generation Corvette never shook free of the phrase, "for the money." It was a great car, for the money. The Corvette Stingray is just a world class sports car, no disclaimer necessary.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Aliens, demons and other shady creatures are invading social media and being co opted by the world of style. Salvjiia is a beautiful fright. The Instagram persona of Lilith Morris, she is posed in a recent post as a mutant, her eyes dark pits, her wheat colored hair cascading to the floor, her torso fused with the fur covered legs of a deer. Salvjiia, 19, is part of a subculture of self created oddities proliferating online and, more recently, leaching into the world of style. The most baldly subversive among them, Instagram personalities with mysterious or sometimes off putting handles like Fecal Matter, Forbidden Knowledge and Genesisfawn, are turning to prosthetics, extreme makeup, props, bodysuits and digital effects to mask or make hash of commonly held notions of what it means to be human. If their otherworldly appearance seems familiar, the likelihood is that you've seen it in a tamer form before. Versions of this spectral look date at least from the 1970s, when David Bowie introduced Starman, his pallid alter ego, and appeared as an alien in "The Man Who Fell to Earth." Today there is Maleficent, Angelina Jolie's archvillain, back just in time for Halloween, her character's steeply angled cheekbones and imposing crown of horns suggesting some demonic alien race. Now comes fashion, intent on mining this eerie aesthetic for impact by releasing onto the runways streams of bloodless looking models who seemed to have beamed down from Neptune or Mars. The look's latest champion, Demna Gvasalia of Balenciaga, introduced a phalanx of these human anomalies in his spring 2020 show, all chalky complexions and vulcanized lips and with prosthetics augmenting their otherwise sunken cheeks. His intention, according to his show notes, was to "play on beauty standards of today, the past and the future." They are a Canadian couple who make liberal use of prosthetics and props to sculpt scythe shaped shoes, Mount Rushmore cheekbones, mini horns and other reptilian protrusions. Tentacle like breathing tubes dangle from their mouths. To what end? Is fashion's appropriation of alien chic a celebration of a forward looking, highly evolved form of humanity? Or is something more self serving at work? In recent seasons, fashion, in the guise of diversity, has made a near fetish of parading black, transgender, old and plus size models in their shows and in the case of Tommy Hilfiger, people with disabilities as well. Have designers and marketers simply run out of ways to jolt spectators from their seats? "I never do anything for shock effect," said Carine Roitfeld, the high profile editor of CR Fashion Book. Maybe so, but there are indications that the fashion establishment may be operating from more adulterated motives. Some were hinted at, if only obliquely, by Rick Owens, who commissioned Ms. Morris (Salvjiia) to create makeup for his fall 2019 runway show and ended by introducing a succession of ghostly Salvjiia look alikes on his catwalk. His intent struck some as boldly progressive. But there was something glib, not to say disingenuous, in his program notes, in which he wrote that for a young generation, body modification is the new tattoo. Such comments appear to make light of Instagram users' intentions. "We always went into this knowing that people see us as a joke or click bait," Mx. Bhaskaran, 26, of Fecal Matter said. "That's why it's so important for us to integrate a message more than just a look." Part of the couple's objective, Ms. Dalton, 24, said, is to confer on social outliers "the trans girl, the plus size girl in high school" a sense of belonging. "We want to offer a more tolerant space for anybody to explore their identity," she said. Robert Reed, a 26 year old designer in Brooklyn, creates second skin costumes wearable art, he calls them with horns, masks, winged shoulders and elevator shoes in reaction to what he views as an over stratified society. He documents his work on Instagram. "I want to be seen as an artist, not someone who's male or female, gay or straight, black or white, fat or thin," said Mr. Reed, who has collaborated with Francois Nars, Opening Ceremony and their influential like. "My persona kills that conversation about gender identity. It kills race, it kills any suggestion of the human form. For me, it's like being an enigma." Such aims are more in line with those of Alessandro Michele, the creative director of Gucci, who anticipated the alien incursion more than a year ago with a spring 2018 collection modeled by anemic looking women, their faces veiled or masked by balaclavas, some toting replicas of their own heads. As an aesthetic, it represents, Mr. Michele suggested, a coming golden age of pan gender, post racial, post sexual identity. "We are in a trans human era for sure," he said at the time of his show. "We have to decide what we want to be." Pop culture's embrace of such sci fi extremes comes and goes. Earlier this year, FKA Twigs and ASAP Rocky collaborated on a video in which they appear as glamorous extraterrestrials flashing talons and neon tone masks. Lately, variations of the look have emerged on TikTok, where a stream of cosplay devotees masquerade as mutants from outer space. Fashion, Ms. Dalton said, trivializes that kind of audacity. "What is so personal for us has now become a global trend." "The fashion community needs a trend, something they can use to sell product, to garner attention, to be different from competitors," she said. "You could say that fashion's just tagging along."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Many of us spend our entire lives coming to terms with what our parents have wrought (see Philip Larkin). In two very different debut memoirs Vicki Laveau Harvie's "The Erratics" and Gretchen Cherington's "Poetic License" the authors, both now grandmothers, also have in common a financially privileged background, and an extremely narcissistic parent. Laveau Harvie, the winner of Australia's prestigious Stella Prize, was raised in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies by a charismatic, floridly psychotic and often violent mother who legally disinherited both her children decades before her death, and manipulated her successful but docile husband to do the same. After being banished for over 15 years, Vicki and her younger sister return to their childhood home upon learning that their elderly mother is in the hospital, having shattered her hip in a fall. They discover that their mother had not only kept herself and their father isolated in their remote prairie home for years, but she has also systematically starved her husband to the point of severe mental and physical decline. The sisters seize the moment of their mother's incapacitation to have her mental health evaluated, entering their own assessment of "M.M.A." into their mother's chart: "mad as a meat ax." While in rehab, their mother instantly wins over her caretakers, convincing them of the two sisters' evil intentions. (She tells some people she has no children, that "those girls are just after the money"; she tells others that she had 18 children, all of whom abandoned her; she tells others still that her older daughter fled to Venezuela and is being sought by Interpol.) Watching her in action, Laveau Harvie muses, "She is a kind of flesh and blood pyramid scheme, a human Ponzi. You buy in and you are hooked." 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. Over a period of months, Vicki and her sister are finally able to obtain confirmation of their mother's legal incompetence, thereby ensuring her permanent hospitalization and saving their elderly father from what would be certain death at his wife's hands. As sinister as this sounds, Laveau Harvie tells the story with laugh out loud humor, and tremendous heart and insight. She has a poet's gift for language, a playwright's sense of drama and a stand up comic's talent for timing. But perhaps most remarkable is the generosity of spirit with which she writes about family trauma. Focusing on the six year period at the end of her parents' lives, Laveau Harvie barely mentions the nightmare of her childhood, comparing her lost memory to the landscape around active volcanos: "If you pause to look beyond your feet and raise your eyes, you see that in the distance, farthest from the volcano, the surface has hardened. It is black and shiny, making inaccessible most of your childhood, but you can distinguish from early on some signs of the long apprenticeship of duplicity that allows you to be standing where you are now, picking your way cautiously through life, not just a puff of smoke and a carbonized crisp of memory in the depths." Unlike her sister, who lives outside Vancouver, Laveau Harvie has managed to "shake free and flee" Canada to Australia, where she feels "reasonably safe because I do not carry a lot of my past. My sister carries it for me, her foot in the bear trap of our childhood, unable to extricate herself no matter how hard she pulls." By contrast, Cherington's "Poetic License" feels arduous and labored, making us conscious of the enormous amount of studied control other authors must exert when writing intimate memoirs. In this one, instead of gliding along the narrative track, the reader feels the painful grinding of gears, the sheer effort required to chronicle her experience. The daughter of the acclaimed American poet Richard Eberhart, Cherington describes growing up surrounded by literary gods. Her parents were both "superb entertainers" and their house was always full of literati, including Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot and Allen Ginsberg. At the center was Eberhart, "a supernova, receiving one accolade after another." His friends gathered around him, "occupying our living room like he was their guru. All our eyes were on him. It was his voice that mattered." Booze flowed, egos bloomed and, in a room full of self involved poets, Eberhart "always was his own favorite subject." Cherington's mother was an ideal partner for him, lively, whip smart and always up for a party. Unfortunately, she suffered from a seizure disorder, and as a child Gretchen "assumed the role of protector, carefully watching out for impending danger, and educating strangers about epilepsy." Like many children of famous parents, Cherington struggled to be seen and valued. Cartwheeling across the yard, she was on the periphery of this enchanted forest of stars, jealous of the attention focused on her famous father. How could she shine in such a brilliant household? "There wasn't much room for a kid, at least with Dad," she tells her childhood friend as they read through her father's old letters. "He liked showing me off and tolerated me for short periods of time, but he kept a tight circle of poets and academics around him who sucked up the air. I think that little girl is still sad." Cherington marches us through the years, from her family's various homes along the East Coast to her year at a boarding school in Lausanne, where she learned not only French but also how to apply makeup, style her hair and date boys. As she grew into a curvaceous teenager, the attention she suddenly attracted from her father was unwelcome and shocking. On one bourbon infused night, he came upstairs from a cocktail party, walked into his sleeping 17 year old daughter's room, sat at her bedside, slipped his hands under her shirt, and fondled her. Speechless, she kicked him away; he chuckled and retreated. Silence ensued, a silence that consumed Cherington for half a century. "Deeply buried secrets only prolonged my suffering," she writes. "Silence is isolation, as bad as the abuse itself." Cherington drops out of the University of Washington, where Eberhart had once taught, and becomes a young wife and mother in New Hampshire, where Eberhart was once poet laureate. She works the land on her husband's farm, and eventually establishes her own consulting business for corporate executives, taking pride in being recognized as a respected professional by powerful men like her father. There is little subtlety here. At the age of 40, Cherington decides to delve into the archives at Dartmouth in search of her father's records. Reading his journals and letters, she gains a new perspective on his own childhood trauma, when he nursed his beloved mother through her final stages of cancer. Cherington finally forgives her father, at his deathbed. Twelve years later she takes the podium at an International Women's Day celebration in Hanover, N.H., and tells her own truth. Both Cherington and Laveau Harvie struggle to come to grips with harmful, even abusive parental behavior. But only Laveau Harvie's book truly stays with the reader, for the quality of her original and powerful narrative voice.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
This article is part of the On Tech newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it weekdays. I'll make an easy prediction about Wednesday's congressional hearing into the power of big tech companies: Members of Congress will say dumb things. But please don't believe that these people are too old or too clueless to exercise effective oversight of tech superpowers. This idea, which is prevalent inside of tech companies, lets the tech giants off the hook for what they do. It shows a smug superiority that is not a good look. And it ignores that tech companies are built around software that is designed not to be understood by outsiders. After Mark Zuckerberg's first turns in the congressional hot seat two years ago, people inside of Facebook thought that their boss had completely dominated those old fogies. I've heard this from Facebook executives. Their conclusions have worried me. Members of Congress were fairly blamed for not understanding Facebook, but Zuckerberg didn't get enough blame for failing to make Facebook understood. He dodged, occasionally misled and essentially tried to say as little as possible about how Facebook works. At points, he didn't seem to know how Facebook worked, either. Executives from Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple at a hearing last year likewise seemed to intentionally deflect or dismiss what were generally excellent questions from lawmakers. (Seriously, I could have stared at C SPAN for many more hours.) No one inside the big tech companies should have felt like they "won." To be fair, that is part of the theatrics of all congressional hearings. Members of Congress grandstand and witnesses generally try to be inoffensive or run out the clock. Yet it's in everyone's interest to complete this set of hearings and effectively address these central questions: Are these big technology companies cheating to get a leg up over competitors? If so, does that hurt all of us and what if anything should the government do about it? If members of Congress are confused about how to ask and answer these questions, that's partly because big tech companies are confusing. Few people on the outside can truly understand how Amazon influences the prices of products we buy on its site or at other retailers; assess fears that Google funnels people to its own websites or that Apple steers people to its own apps; or peer into Facebook's strategy to squash rivals in their cribs. All of this is, by design, shrouded in secrecy and mystery. Even many of the big tech companies now say that there needs to be more federal oversight and rules regarding areas like protecting elections and what constitutes appropriate speech online. That means everyone the tech companies, lawmakers and you and me have a vested interest in getting under the hood of these big companies and seeing how they work. This is a worthy goal just as it was to assess the big banks after the 2008 financial crisis. Those banks also thought Congress was too clueless to question them effectively. Maybe so, but regulation came anyway. What questions do you have about the hearing and the power of big tech? Send them to ontech nytimes.com, and Shira will answer a selection in an upcoming newsletter. Please include your full name and location. Don't fall for these distractions at the hearing Me again, taking another moment to talk about Wednesday's hearing Sorry! Not sorry! to explain what it is NOT about. How big the tech companies are compared with the planet Jupiter: In his prepared testimony for Wednesday's hearing, Amazon's Jeff Bezos cited competition from the grocery delivery service Instacart and mentioned the fast sales growth of Walmart's online shopping operation. Sure, but online sales at those companies are a minuscule fraction of Amazon's. There will be a lot of slicing and dicing of data for misdirection like this. Please ignore. The assessment of tech company power is not solely about their size or that of rivals. It is also about their behavior: Do big tech companies tilt the game to their advantage in a way that creates less competition? Whether these sites show political bias: We'll hear a lot about this today, because some conservatives and Republican politicians argue that big tech companies habitually squash information reflecting conservative perspectives. There's little credible reporting to support this, but a root cause of the concern is what I mentioned above: Outsiders can't see or assess the software that determines what information we see online. Black boxes naturally create suspicion. How tech companies influence what information we're exposed to, and how they fairly police what people say online, are complicated topics worthy of debate. However, I'm not sure that there's a direct connection between those topics and the central question at Wednesday's hearing: Do big tech companies cheat to win? How many American jobs they create: In a letter to Congress, Google's chief executive touted a (delicious sounding) brownie shop in New York that drums up business from buying ads on Google. Bezos talked up Amazon training programs to pay for warehouse workers to move into higher paying careers. This is great! We want American companies to create jobs and contribute to economic growth. But companies that create jobs and support small businesses can still break the law by unfairly exercising their power and influence. If you don't already get this newsletter in your inbox, please sign up here. Before we go ... None How to support alternatives to Big Tech: My colleague Brian X. Chen tells us how we can help tech's little guys if we're concerned about having choices. Brian suggests trying the search engine DuckDuckGo, the social network Mastodon and other alternatives to Big Tech products; advises us to buy used electronics to help repair shops and resellers; and asks us to consider paying for software we like from smaller companies rather than taking freebies from the tech giants. None That coronavirus video was tailored to go wild: My colleagues Sheera Frenkel and Davey Alba walked through the stagecraft of a viral video that promoted an unproven coronavirus treatment as a miracle cure. With ingredients including an official looking setting, people in white medical coats and the ability to clip the video and share it on social media easily, the video had been designed to appeal to those who don't trust public health officials and want quick fixes to get past the pandemic. None Can facial recognition technology be effective, unbiased and do more good than harm? Those are questions raised by this Reuters investigation into the use of the technology at 200 Rite Aid drugstores in the United States. Facial recognition systems that were intended partly to notify store workers about potential shoplifters were more likely to be installed at stores in neighborhoods with a large share of lower income or Black or Latino residents, and shoppers were not generally told that their images were being captured and analyzed. At times the facial recognition software also misidentified people. Rite Aid told Reuters it had suspended use of the cameras. This dancing duet of a woman and cat is just plain weird. (Thanks to the Bloomberg columnist Tae Kim for bringing this TikTok video into my life.) We want to hear from you. Tell us what you think of this newsletter and what else you'd like us to explore. You can reach us at ontech nytimes.com. If you don't already get this newsletter in your inbox, please sign up here.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Take a walk. Who knows what you'll find? One observant and serendipitous walker through the world is the artist Maira Kalman, whose fanciful drawings have graced children's books, covers for The New Yorker and the pages of many other publications, including The New York Times. She and her friend John Heginbotham a former member of the Mark Morris Dance Group who now directs his own troupe, Dance Heginbotham have collaborated on "The Principles of Uncertainty." Titled after one of Ms. Kalman's books, this absurd travelogue will feature dancers contemplating ordinary objects, friends, strangers and philosophical ideas, immersing themselves in situations both amusing and heartbreaking. The project's world premiere, on Wednesday, Aug. 23, at the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, will feature choreography by Mr. Heginbotham and sets, props and projections by Ms. Kalman. And there's new music by Colin Jacobsen, played by his ensemble, the Knights. (Through Aug. 27, Doris Duke Theater, Becket, Mass.; jacobspillow.org.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
15 Minutes of Fame Is Too Much. Try 6 Seconds. LOS ANGELES Against the backdrop of a green screen in a studio space, Nico Santos, a star of the sitcom "Superstore," was performing an SMH. To translate for those unfamiliar with abbreviations popular on internet platforms, this means the actor was shaking his head, implying a judgment of "I truly cannot believe how stupid people are." He did an SMH while looking at the camera, then again with his eyes closed and his lips pursed in a disappointed sideways smirk. People are stupid in many different ways, and so too must be the reaction shot Mr. Santos was filming for Giphy, the company that is the best known purveyor of GIFs, the seconds long soundless video clips that give people a shorthand to express an emotion or reaction through their phones or computers. Most GIFs are pulled from movies, television shows and other media events. But here at Giphy Studios, the emphasis is on creating original content. Mr. Santos, who will appear in the coming film "Crazy Rich Asians," removed his glasses and delivered the two tiered SMH reaction. Then he delivered a "Girl, no." This was followed by a 'Yasss, queen," and then a "EWWW"/"just threw up in my mouth." Like emojis, GIFs have become an oft used replacement for words in texts and messaging apps. This gives these video snippets a lot of currency as young people increasingly favor private messaging over posting publicly on social media. A 2016 study by BI Intelligence reported that the number of global active users on four top messaging services (WhatsApp, Messenger, WeChat and Viber) was exceeding those on the Big Four social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn). GIFs (pronounced like "gifts" without the T) are now so ubiquitous that even non techies in their 40s recognize them when shown on a phone. ("Oh those!" they will say. "Yes, I've see them on Facebook.") Some 300 million Giphy daily users are sharing 2.5 billion GIFs per day through Twitter, Tinder, text messages, Slack, Gmail and, as of recently, in Instagram stories, said Brad Zeff, the chief content officer of Giphy. Giphy Studios thinks it can help old school companies like H R Block break into private messaging with branded GIF campaigns. For a campaign for HP, a spinoff of Hewlett Packard, Giphy brought in Matt Cutshall, a star on Instagram, and shot him holding an HP device and acting silly. Absolut Vodka, known since the 1980s for its distinctive photography in advertising, has also succumbed, commissioning GIFs of the fruits that flavor its booze, twisting temptingly. In some cases, Giphy Studios asks such companies to help cover production costs; for other brands, it offers the service for free. GIFs featuring actors, musicians and other "talent" are also made for free, with Giphy staff members assessing pop cultural relevance in deciding who should get such star treatment. Giphy, which was founded in 2013 and has raised about 150 million from venture capitalists, is still "pre revenue," to use start up parlance. "We don't want to turn revenue on in earnest prematurely," Mr. Zeff said. Part of its strategy is to make this Los Angeles studio a hub for actors, musicians and social media influencers on promotional tours, where they will film reaction shots based on terms that Giphy users often plug into search boxes. The dissemination, it is hoped, will make them "GIF amous." "I really want it to be a stop on a press tour," said Samantha Scharff, Giphy Studios' C.E.O., offering a tour of the space. "You go to 'Kimmel.' You go to Giphy." There is a miniature golf course that winds through the office and most of the conference and meeting tables double as Ping Pong tables, as is de rigueur at start ups. Pillows on couches are stitched with "LMAO" and "OMG." There are a few different filming rooms, including one with a brick wall that the staff thinks of as its "New York stage." And upstairs is a steep slide that visitors are encouraged to try. You never know where GIFs might happen. "We wanted people to come here and hang out and make content," said Ms. Scharff, whose career path has tracked the decreasing attention span of viewers (from "Saturday Night Live," to "The Colbert Report," to producing YouTube videos, to Giphy). It is a risky strategy; part of the appeal of GIFs is that they are organically referential to collective nostalgia for previous pop culture touchstones not choreographed and overtly promotional. She and Mr. Zeff, however, have high hopes that they can change the form from a repurposed clip of existing content into an entertainment medium in its own right. "We want to be the MTV of the messaging generation," he said. In the summer, Martellus Bennett, then a tight end for the Green Bay Packers, came to check out Giphy Studios and toss ideas around with Mr. Zeff. Giphy then decided to send staff members to Green Bay, Wis., to GIF ify Mr. Bennett and teammates including Aaron Rodgers as they pantomimed popular hashtagged gestures ( thumbsup, letsgo and middle finger). The clips racked up 150 million views in 48 hours, according to Mr. Zeff. This December day at Giphy Studios was an unusually busy one, with Gwen Stefani stopping by at the last minute to film holiday themed GIFs, and three other scheduled shoots: with Mr. Santos, a band called Portugal. The Man, and the actress Amber Stevens West. This was the case with Portugal. The Man, who are originally from Wasilla, Alaska, and who won a 2018 Grammy for best pop duo/group performance for "Feel It Still." They arrived at Giphy Studios toward the end of the day and sat down with the production staff to get organized. The idea was to make GIFs connecting to "internet holidays," which tend to be popular among Giphy users in this case National Doughnut Day, Pizza Day, Beer Day, Video Game Day/Gaming Day and Earth Day. Mr. Bruno asked if anyone would object to these. "We have no reservations or moral compass whatsoever," one of the bandmates said. "We'll do anything." The group laughed. That was before they knew they'd be asked to juggle doughnuts and pose next to slices of pizza. In the studio, each of the four musicians took his turn and was a good sport, hamming it up for the camera as producers shouted hashtags. Zach Carothers, the bassist, went first, and seemed relieved when he was done posing with doughnuts placed over each finger like rings. He sat down in the back of the studio and shrugged. "Our record label is always looking for interesting ways to shovel us into all sorts of crap," he said. "I don't know if you've heard, but these GIF things are pretty popular on the interwebs."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
President Trump will visit a Boeing plant in St. Louis on Wednesday to celebrate the tax cut his party handed to American companies. But lurking in the background is a clash over trade one in which Boeing is the most vulnerable target. The tariffs on steel and aluminum that Mr. Trump announced last week have already turned iconic American businesses Harley Davidson, Levi's, makers of Kentucky bourbon into prey for trading partners bent on retaliation. Boeing, which sends 80 percent of its commercial planes abroad, calls itself the nation's biggest manufacturing exporter. So it is the company with the most at stake in a trade fight especially in China, one of the fastest growing aircraft markets. Singled out by the Trump administration as the nation's primary trade adversary, China has the greatest incentive to respond to the tariffs, economists and other analysts say. "The likelihood of retaliation by their biggest single market, China, elevates this from an irritant to potentially disastrous, if not catastrophic," said Richard Aboulafia, vice president of analysis at Teal Group Corporation, a consulting firm in Fairfax, Va. "A trade war is the simplest way to cut off this fantastic growth they have enjoyed." Boeing has prospered since Mr. Trump's election. Its shares have soared, and last year it posted record earnings and cash flow. Much of that money was made abroad, though, and a counterattack aimed at Boeing could reverberate into the farthest reaches of the nation's industrial economy. The company employs 137,000 people in the United States, nearly as many workers as the entire primary steel and aluminum industries. Many more work at its suppliers, from Kansas to Pennsylvania, and those employees would also be at risk of a gut punch if China and other countries chose to make an example of Boeing. "I'm really worried about what it's going to do to us," said James Springer, a mechanic who installs stow bins and class dividers on 787 Dreamliners at Boeing's plant in North Charleston, S.C. "What will the E.U. and China do, especially China? They are one of our biggest customers now." "If China decides to retaliate, it hurts their airlines and their burgeoning aerospace industry," said Scott Hamilton, the managing director at the Leeham Company, an aviation consulting firm in Bainbridge Island, Wash. "Why would you do that?" But if China wanted to exact revenge on the United States through Boeing, it would be uniquely positioned to do so. The government has a significant stake in its national airlines and can easily direct them to cancel orders. About a quarter of Boeing's jetliners went to China last year, and analysts estimate that Chinese orders could account for up to a fifth of its backlog. Until now, Mr. Trump has been a puzzle that Boeing mostly seemed to have figured out. The president began the relationship even before his inauguration by proclaiming his displeasure at the cost of the next generation Air Force One that Boeing is building. "Costs are out of control, more than 4 billion," he declared on Twitter. "Cancel order!" He later told reporters that Boeing was "doing a little bit of a number," and said, "We want Boeing to make a lot of money, but not that much money." 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. Two weeks later, Dennis A. Muilenburg, Boeing's chief executive, visited Mr. Trump in Florida and promised to keep the plane's cost down. "It was a terrific conversation," Mr. Muilenburg said afterward. "Got a lot of respect for him. He's a good man. And he's doing the right thing." Two months later, the president visited Boeing's South Carolina plant and, standing before a 787 Dreamliner, proclaimed, "God bless Boeing." While campaigning, Mr. Trump had repeatedly criticized the Export Import Bank, which lends so much money to the company's customers that it has been referred to as "Boeing's Bank." But in his first year as president, Mr. Trump decided to keep the bank alive. Mr. Muilenburg has praised the president for the corporate tax cut, calling it "the biggest thing we could do in this country to unleash economic energy." The past year and a half has indeed been good to Boeing. Its share price went up by 90 percent in 2017, making it the best performer in the Dow Jones industrial average. It has performed spectacularly so far this year. At the end of February, the company cheerily announced that it had arrived at an agreement with Mr. Trump for an Air Force One with a new, lower price tag. "President Trump negotiated a good deal on behalf of the American people," the company declared on Twitter. Two days later, Mr. Trump said he would pursue steep tariffs on steel and aluminum. "They found themselves bullied," Mr. Aboulafia said of Boeing. "They very intelligently did the smart thing and befriended the bully, and I think they are starting to find out that being friends with the bully is just as hard as being the victim of the bully." The tariffs alone were never going to cost Boeing very much. It doesn't use a lot of steel, and the aluminum that encloses the body of its planes amounts to pocket change relative to an engine or the electronics system. The aircraft maker also has flexible, long term contracts that often allow it to pass on some unanticipated cost increases to its customers, analysts said. Aluminum prices went up by more than 10 percent last year, and no one along the supply chain appeared to flinch. The real risk is that China will lash out, and it's difficult to say how likely that could be. Boeing and its only real rival on that front, the European company Airbus, have backlogs that stretch into the next decade. A Chinese aerospace company, Comac, flew its first Boeing sized jet in China in 2016, but it is years away from producing them. That may make it more attractive to punish a different American brand that makes something the Chinese can easily find elsewhere. On the other hand, the Chinese government may have more leverage over Airbus than it seems. China is expected to surpass the United States to become the world's biggest aviation market by 2022, according to the International Air Transport Association. That growing dominance could help the government lean on Airbus to ramp up production to fill a potential hole left by Boeing, aerospace consultants said. A more moderate option for the Chinese would be to keep current orders on the books, but stop purchasing new Boeing aircraft. That could make for a less intense, but more drawn out, period of pain for the manufacturer. If it loses significant ground in China, analysts said, Boeing would eventually slow production and fire some of its mechanics. That could cripple the companies that make its airplane wings, noses, nuts and bolts. "There is this rippling effect where Boeing lays off people, and then the suppliers lay off people," said Rajeev Lalwani, a Morgan Stanley analyst. "That protectionism is in a way coming back to hurt the U.S."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
The English singer and songwriter Ellie Goulding, 29, is clearly hitting her stride. Her third album, "Delirium," was hailed as the iTunes top pop album of 2015, while the hit single "Love Me Like You Do" earned a Golden Globe nomination (it was on the "Fifty Shades of Grey" soundtrack) and two Grammy nominations her first. Aside from her music, Ms. Goulding has been collaborating with MAC Cosmetics on a makeup collection, which is in stores now. Below, she shares her beauty regimen for on and off the stage. Lauren Fleishman for The New York Times Lauren Fleishman for The New York Times I usually shower in the morning, and then I use a toner. I tend to get quite glowy skin, and this toner by Pixi, which is vegan and animal friendly and is a brand I love, helps with that. Then I usually use a Rodial serum. I tend to go for a serum more than a moisturizer because I also use a very small amount of sunless tan. I love being tan, and I don't like to use sun beds, so I've become a self tan expert. I like James Read, and the best one is the Express Glow mask. The color develops very quickly so you don't somehow end up darker than you wanted to be in the middle of the day. Lauren Fleishman for The New York Times If I'm doing a shoot or performing, I particularly like a water based makeup remover called Bioderma. When you're on a shoot and going through multiple looks, your eyes can get pretty sore with the makeup changes. This one is really gentle. If I have time I don't do it very often I'm really into the Rodial Dragon's Blood eye masks. I've been obsessed with Rodial for a few years now, and they also have this hangover mask that is quite realistic, I think. People can have a drink or two and then in the morning use this. My makeup fascination comes from watching my mom do it when I was growing up. I tend to keep a pretty natural look, and then I dramatize it for the stage. So with MAC, they wanted to do a very specific collaboration in that the collection is basically the colors I wear. I like the idea of a compact because it fits my lifestyle. You put it on in the morning, then you take it with you. I've been using the Halcyon Days one. I fill in my brows with a Sisley brow pencil the line has really beautiful colors that are long lasting. If I'm not using my MAC lipsticks or glosses, I love Charlotte Tilbury lip color in Bitch Perfect, which is a pink nude and stays on really well. I'm blond and not dark, so I tend to shy from a red lip. I use mascara, and I do love lots and lots of lashes. Before Lucy Wearing, my makeup artist, started coming on tour with me, I'd do my own makeup for stage, and I'm quite good at lashes. Actually, we had a party for New Year's Eve, and I did all my friends' lashes. Lauren Fleishman for The New York Times I wear one by Christian Dior called Gris Montaigne. It's lovely but also unisex. I discovered it while literally walking in a department store. Someone sprayed me as I walked by. At first I was annoyed, but it smelled quite nice. Another one I like is Black Opium by YSL. It's so beautiful. I understand why it's a best seller. That's one I wear in the evening. Lauren Fleishman for The New York Times I'm desperately trying to get my hair to grow. I've always been a long hair kind of girl. When I look at pictures of myself, I always think I really want my long hair back. Also you still need a good length of healthy hair to put extensions in. I'm not afraid of admitting I use extensions and spray tan. That's what I do, and that's what a lot of girls do. I find it fun. Around the time I was promoting my album in New York, my hair was the best it has been. Then recently I had a hair disaster and ended up having to cut it really short. Now it's kind of short because of the disaster, and I've resisted the temptation to dye it. My roots are down to my ears! I've been using this product called FAST, which is supposed to make your hair grow fast, but I've been using it for a few weeks now, and I haven't seen a difference. Otherwise, I usually use Kerastase volumizing shampoo and conditioner. You know when you find a shampoo that works for you? This is it. For styling products, I'm very specific about what I use. I use Repair Rescue Sealed Ends by Schwarzkopf. This is not really a cream and not really an oil, but it works. Then I use Oribe thickening spray. It smells so good, and I love having my hair bigger and more dramatic, especially if I'm going out. If I'm in London, I get my extensions done at Easton Regal, and Louis Byrne cuts my hair. I like to run. I like to box. I like to do Barry's Bootcamp. I like a mix of things. I just went to Norway for a few days, and we were climbing mountains and dog sledding. Dog sledding was so good! At first it was really scary they go so fast and it can be very messy if the sled overturns, but it was so incredible. I'm a vegetarian. I don't eat fish or meat. I also try my best to not have dairy or animal products. Such as, for breakfast I had kale with rye bread and a green juice. But I'd say I'm generally pretty balanced. I do have vices like alcohol and chocolate. I'm not too hard on myself about sugar. I know many people who are into health and fitness are anti sugar and anti gluten. But with my job being the way it is, I can't be too strict about things. If I'm doing a sound check and there's a limited amount of food at the venue, I'll find something to eat.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
"The amount of mozzarella sticks I've eaten in this bar," Mamrie Hart, a YouTube personality with more than 1.1 million subscribers, said wistfully. She was wedged into a tiny booth last month at the Triple Crown Bar with her friend and creative partner, Grace Helbig, a YouTube celebrity in her own right with over three million subscribers. What was the appeal of a bar so close to Penn Station? Its proximity to the Peoples Improv Theater, the troupe where both women cut their chops in the mid aughts. Back then, the struggle was real. Ms. Hart, now 33, was bartending at City Crab Seafood Company, where she wore "a full on crab tie," she said with a laugh. Ms. Helbig, 30, was trying to be a comedy writer "like Tina Fey," waitressing at a chain steakhouse and living in a dingy apartment in Brooklyn with a landlord who hit up her and her roommate for money. "He'd ask for 20 and take it off the rent at the end of the month," she recalled. It was mostly by accident that the women realized YouTube could be a viable alternative to traditional show business. Ms. Helbig started posting silly videos with her roommate as "Grace n' Michelle." Soon she alone was hired by a company to post videos five days a week, building up a large, loyal audience before most people really understood the possibilities of YouTube. Later, she started It'sGrace, her own channel on the site. Now they are starring in a movie, "Dirty 30," which opens Friday in select theaters and will be available in digital HD on iTunes. The loose plot centers on an out of control birthday bash two friends throw for Ms. Hart's loveless character. Another co star is their friend and fellow YouTube personality Hannah Hart (no relation to Mamrie). It's the second feature the three women have made largely outside the Hollywood studio system ("Camp Takota" in 2014 was the first). Ms. Hart and Ms. Helbig are thrilled they don't have to submit to industry gatekeepers. "I used to go to auditions for sexy wife," Ms. Helbig said. Ms. Helbig said: "It was such a meat market feeling. It never got easier or more comfortable. It solidified for me that I really love the internet. I love the freedom to create anything I want at home." Although the women have millions of social media followers between them, they are a new breed of star, still unknown to many in the entertainment industry. They get recognized and approached like any celebrity, they said. But they're just as likely to grab a beer and hang out with their fans. "There was one time we were in Anchorage, Alaska," Ms. Hart recalled. "On a whim, I asked Siri where the nearest Benihana was and she was, like, '0.3 miles.' I don't know if I've ever lost it so hard." The reporter informed them he'd never been to a Benihana. "Oh my God!" Ms. Hart said. "We've got a Benihana virgin." The chain is known for chefs who prepare your meal tableside and perform tricks, they explained in the car. "You hope you get a good one," Ms. Hart said. "But if you get a bad one, you just have to support them." At the restaurant, the women enthusiastically ordered sake bombs and several dishes, instantly getting into the festive spirit. When their chef, Pedro, began rapidly slapping his knives on the grill, they both smiled. He was a good one.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
PARIS Two related scenes are currently playing out in theaters here. In "Les Idoles" ("The Idols"), at the Odeon Theatre de l'Europe, the actress Marina Fois recounts in detail the death of the philosopher Michel Foucault, in 1984, of an AIDS related illness. At the Espace Cardin, Foucault's homosexuality is seen through the eyes of his first biographer, the sociologist Didier Eribon, in "Retour a Reims" ("Returning to Reims"). In both productions, prominent French gay artists reclaim their pasts with striking honesty. "Retour a Reims," staged by the German director Thomas Ostermeier, is based on Mr. Eribon's 2009 memoir cum essay about his working class roots, while the writer and director Christophe Honore looks back at the artistic heroes those "idols" he lost to AIDS in his youth. Mr. Honore may be better known for films including "Love Songs," but his theater work is in some ways more ambitious and original. His recent plays have brought real individuals back to life and imagined, with the benefit of hindsight, how they might have interacted: "Nouveau Roman," in 2012, focused on the 20th century French literary movement of the same name; "Les Idoles" brings together six writers and filmmakers who died between 1989 and 1994. Extensive research clearly went into the play, but Mr. Honore doesn't strive for truthfulness. He isn't preoccupied with physical likeness, for starters, and regularly casts women in male roles onstage. In "Les Idoles," Ms. Fois plays Herve Guibert, whose autobiographical novel "To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life" evoked Foucault's last days, while the part of the filmmaker Jacques Demy is taken with gusto by Marlene Saldana, in a fur coat and heels. Some of the characters in "Les Idoles" enjoy more public recognition than others. Mr. Demy is one of them, and the playwrights Jean Luc Lagarce and Bernard Marie Koltes are both revered names on the French stage. A creation about them might easily have turned into a series of reverential obituaries, but Mr. Honore gives "Les Idoles" a welcome lightness of touch. The men are portrayed as witty, imperfect individuals rather than austere icons to be worshiped. They are as likely to launch into a dance number as they are to debate the attributes of the ideal lover: Ms. Saldana's rendition of "Chanson d'un jour d'ete," from Mr. Demy's musical film "The Young Girls of Rochefort," is an unlikely highlight. The play still brings up unsettling questions about the ways in which the AIDS crisis affected the arts community, in France and beyond. If some of those who died had survived, would their legacy be perceived differently today? Did artists who were sick have a duty to speak up, or was staying in the closet as Mr. Demy did an acceptable choice? Throughout, Mr. Honore contrasts the crusade by Elizabeth Taylor (also played by Ms. Saldana) to raise awareness of the disease and funds for research in the United States with the relative public discretion of artists in France. The cast contributes expertly tragicomic performances in a production that acts as a lucid, intimate "adieu" to a formative era for Mr. Honore. When the filmmaker Cyril Collard is left alone at the end, calling out the names of his dead peers only to be met with silence, the void they left behind is palpable. Mr. Eribon's "Retour a Reims" is even more personal, but it doesn't translate as easily to the stage. Mr. Ostermeier, who leads Berlin's Schaubuhne theater, has acknowledged there is "nothing theatrical" about the book, which intertwines autobiography and social theory. Regardless, the director has tackled it in three languages: He first adapted it in 2017 with the actress Nina Hoss, who performed it in English and in German, and has now brought a French version to Paris. It's a spare, unhurried experience. Irene Jacob, replacing Ms. Hoss, plays a voice over artist working on a documentary inspired by Mr. Eribon's experiences. For 45 minutes or so, she merely reads from the book as the fictional documentary which includes footage of Mr. Eribon and his aging mother unfolds on a screen above her head. Slowly, however, disagreements about the project arise with the filmmaker who hired her, played by Cedric Eeckhout. Mr. Ostermeier originally designed the production to allow Ms. Hoss to touch on her own father's political career in Germany, and the French version feels like a compromise of sorts. In the lead role, Ms. Jacob objects to some of Mr. Eeckhout's cuts in the text and to the use of footage from the recent "yellow vest" protests in France to illustrate a point about the far right, but her character otherwise lacks a strong identity. The film is only intermittently revelatory, too, giving this "Retour a Reims" a disjointed feel. Although the production marks the first appearance of the yellow vests in French theater, they are discussed only in passing. A third character, played by Blade M. C. Alimbaye, is present throughout and performs a couple of songs, yet a key story of his African grandfather, who fought for France in World War II isn't introduced until the last 10 minutes. The new year in Paris has also featured two female directors at odds with each other. While Phia Menard, a Frenchwoman, channeled the feminist anger that crystallized in MeToo in "Saison Seche" ("Dry Season"), the polarizing Spanish director Angelica Liddell rails against the same movement in "The Scarlet Letter," loosely inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 novel. The visceral force of Ms. Liddell's confessional monologues has salvaged many of her productions. Not so here. In attempting to react to the social mood, the director and performer, who describes herself as a "recluse," bites off more than she can chew. "I don't like this world where women have stopped loving men," she says early on. "No woman loves enough anymore." This sets the scene for rants so misogynistic that they would probably land a male performer in artistic exile. In any event, "The Scarlet Letter" proves so over the top that Ms. Liddell's ode to the superiority of men mostly prompted awkward laughs at one recent performance at the Theatre de la Colline. The contrast with "Saison Seche" couldn't be starker. In Ms. Menard's latest work, seven women were trapped under a white ceiling that moved up and down. Their way out was to slowly take on the appearance of men, in the style of drag kings, until the walls around them began to visibly erode and crumble. With no text, this metaphor for the glass ceiling relied entirely on Ms. Menard's taut staging and precise physical direction. Her vision comes across with increasing clarity these days, just as MeToo has brought her staunchly feminist stance closer to the mainstream. This might just be a banner year for her.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
"Maybe it is in your spleen we don't know!" Trevor Noah said on Tuesday. "It could be anywhere." Trevor Noah Says Trump's Racism Might Not Be in His Bones 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. The House voted on Tuesday to condemn recent tweets from President Trump, describing as racist his attacks against four Democratic congresswomen of color (including a suggestion that they "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came"). "Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez yesterday responded to President Trump's racist attacks on her and three other congresswomen, calling Trump's words the, quote, 'hallmark language of white supremacists.' Said Hallmark, 'In retrospect, we never should have added that section.'" SETH MEYERS "I saw that Trump sent another tweet. In all caps, it said, 'If you're not happy here, you can leave.' Then he teared up, because those are also his wedding vows." JIMMY FALLON "Just because you complain about your country, doesn't mean you don't love it. It's like sports: Fans want their teams to be better, that is why they complain, all right? If the Knicks kicked out every fan who yelled at them to play better, Madison Square Garden would be emptier than Mike Pence's spice cabinet." TREVOR NOAH The House resolution was temporarily stalled over its use of the word "racist," which Republicans said violated a congressional rule against personally attacking the president. "As opposed to the presidential rule book, which evidently is just a signed headshot of Kid Rock that says, 'Go hog wild, brother!'" STEPHEN COLBERT Some Republicans defended Trump. Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, said the president was tweeting out of frustration. "Frustration doesn't make you racist, all right? If anything, it just lets your racism slip out. Same thing with being angry, drunk, hungry none of that makes you say racist things. Because if it did, those candy bar commercials would be a lot different." TREVOR NOAH Trump returned to Twitter to defend himself on Tuesday, writing that he didn't "have a Racist bone in my body." "Trump spent all day having his friends tell everyone how not racist he is. You know, like nonracists do." STEPHEN COLBERT "Here's the thing. We're not worried about your bones being racist; we're worried about your brain and your mouth being racist. And if he isn't a racist, when he finds out who's been posting all this racist stuff on his Twitter account, he is going to be pissed." JIMMY KIMMEL "But how do we know racism is in the bones, huh? Maybe it is in your spleen we don't know! It could be anywhere." TREVOR NOAH "Racism is your brand. It's like Colonel Sanders saying, 'I don't have a finger lickin' bone in my body.'" STEPHEN COLBERT	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
The government reported on Friday that employers added just 38,000 workers to their payrolls in May, a sharp slowdown in hiring that is expected to push back a decision by the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates. The latest snapshot suggested that the economic recovery might have stalled this spring, at least temporarily. Despite the anemic job gains, the official unemployment rate, (which is based on a separate survey of households), fell to 4.7 percent, its lowest point in nearly a decade. But the decline was primarily a result of Americans dropping out of the labor force rather than finding new jobs. "Boy, this is ugly," said Diane Swonk, an independent economist in Chicago. "The losses were deeper and more broad based than we expected, and with the downward revision to previous months, it puts the Fed back on pause." "The only good news is that wages held," Ms. Swonk said. Average hourly earnings rose again, 0.2 percent for the month, for a gain of 2.5 percent for the last 12 months, an encouraging sign that many more working Americans are finally beginning to enjoy some benefits from a tighter labor market. In close presidential races, the economy's direction in the months leading to the November election has often played an important role in influencing voters, with credit or blame going to the party that occupies the White House. This is hardly a typical presidential race, though, and Friday's report is only one indicator of the economy. Still, after revving up over the last two years, the nation's job engine appears to have sputtered, with the Labor Department shrinking its initial estimates of March and April's employment totals by 59,000. The average monthly gain for the last three months was 116,000 jobs. The weakness in last month's job totals was somewhat exaggerated because the estimate reflected the Labor Department classification of more than 35,000 striking Verizon workers as unemployed. With those people now back on the job, the missing strikers should be added back in the June report. Even apart from that distortion, the average monthly job gains so far in 2016 have fallen far shy of the nearly 240,000 average of the last two years, a pace that has helped buoy the economy and cut the jobless figure in half since the depths of the recession. Given the uncertainty about the economic outlook, the Federal Reserve is now likely to put off any decision to raise interest rates at its next meeting in mid June and probably avoid lifting rates at its July meeting as well. Lael Brainard, a Fed governor and an ally of the Fed chairwoman, Janet L. Yellen, described the May report as "sobering" in a speech on Friday afternoon. Ms. Brainard said the weak job growth was a reminder that the strength of the recovery should not be taken for granted, and she said she did not see clear evidence the economy had rebounded from a weak winter. "Recent economic developments have been mixed, and important downside risks remain," Ms. Brainard, who has pushed for the Fed to move slowly in raising interest rates, said at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. "In this environment, prudent risk management implies there is a benefit to waiting for additional data." With the summer stretching ahead, the sentiment on Wall Street could perhaps be best summed up by the Tempos' 1959 hit, "See You in September." Unless there are further signs of fresh economic weakness, however, most economists expect at least one rate increase before the end of the year. The unemployment rate, which the Fed regards as an important indicator, has finally dropped to where it was before the recession began in late 2007. And first time claims for unemployment insurance have remained at low levels not seen since the 1970s. On the other side of the ledger, the labor force participation rate declined for the second consecutive month, to 62.6 percent, and the number of people working part time for economic reasons rose sharply. Apart from the jobs figures, there are several encouraging economic signs, including a surge in home construction and hardy consumer spending. Most analysts expect the pace of economic growth to pick up to about 2.5 percent over the next three months from the first quarter's 0.8 percent. "To be clear, there is no evidence the economy is slowing into recession," said Steve Blitz, chief economist of M Science, a research firm. Voters' perceptions of the economy are often a driving force in presidential elections. "It's always good to be the party in power when the economic cycle is turning up in an election," said Mark J. Rozell, a political scientist at George Mason University. "It's never advantageous when there is a downturn close to the election." As for the economy's impact, Mr. Mann said changes in personal income, which are on the rise, tend to sway voters at the margins more than the jobless rate or the pace of job creation. Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee, has closely aligned herself with President Obama's economic policies and record long streak of job gains. Worries about the economy are a more common refrain among supporters of Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, as well as among those who are backing Senator Bernie Sanders's last ditch bid to lead the Democratic ticket. Mr. Trump was quick to react on Twitter, writing "Terrible jobs report just reported. Only 38,000 jobs added. Bombshell!" Thomas Perez, the labor secretary, acknowledged that the jobs report was disappointing. But he said: "The closer you get to the summit of full employment, the more trade offs there will be between somewhat slower job growth and rising wages, and that's what we're beginning to see here in this recovery." He, too, continues to be disturbed by the persistently low labor participation rate. Retiring baby boomers would be expected to bring down the proportion of the population in the labor market. But Patrick O'Keefe, director of economic research at CohnReznick, an accounting, tax and advisory firm, pointed to the significant decline among those in their prime working ages as well. Because so many discouraged job seekers have dropped out of the work force, he said, the relatively low official jobless rate is not capturing the true magnitude of the economy's underlying weakness. "In policy making, the Fed continues to focus on a measure that is maladjusted," Mr. O'Keefe said. A broader measure of unemployment that includes people too discouraged to search for work or who are making do with a part time job because they cannot find a full time one stayed steady at 9.7 percent. The heaviest job losses in May were in the construction, manufacturing and mining industries. Not everyone has seen a softening. Tom Gimbel, chief executive of LaSalle Network, a Chicago recruiter, said: "In a weak economy, what usually gets cut first and usually gets put on hold first are jobs at the manager to director level those earning between 75,000 and 125,000 and I haven't seen that yet. " At the lower end of the pay scale, workers have been hungry for an increase in wages that is finally starting to materialize as employers find it harder to fill jobs. Minimum wage increases that have already taken effect in some places may be partly responsible for the uptick in average hourly earnings. Payroll growth was disappointing, said Jeremy Schwartz, an associate in global strategy and economics at Credit Suisse, but it was also consistent with a tightening labor market. As he advised in an alert: "Don't panic."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
YOU may know that you're supposed to check your credit report for accuracy, and that you're entitled to a free copy each year, available from a central Web site maintained by the three major credit bureaus. But you may not know that there are many other companies that also collect consumer information including your employment history and income. Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, you're entitled to a free annual report from many of them, too. That option may be of particular interest if you are planning to apply for a loan, a credit card or a new job, or for government assistance. Or you may simply be curious to know what personal data might be given to prospective employers or lenders. A major provider of such data is Equifax Workforce Solutions, a subsidiary of the credit bureau Equifax that verifies job and income information for employers, lenders and government agencies through a service called The Work Number. (The federal government has hired the company to verify incomes of those seeking subsidized health insurance or government coverage under the Affordable Care Act. Under the contract, it must develop a plan to indicate the accuracy of data and to reduce the risk of fraud.) Equifax Workforce Solutions, also known as the TALX Corporation, obtains its data directly from its employer clients, which it says number 2,900, including 70 percent of the Fortune 500. It's a separate business from the credit bureau, and data from the two aren't commingled, said Dann Adams, the unit's president, in a telephone interview. The verification service was created to help employers manage requests to confirm salary and employment information, like when their workers applied for mortgages, Mr. Adams said. Employers hire Equifax to save time and monitor compliance with privacy laws. Client companies provide employment, payroll and sometimes benefits data to Equifax, which then makes it available, for a fee, to banks, employers and others that it confirms are authorized to receive it. (That includes collection agencies, although Equifax says it releases only employment information like your job title and date of hire to them not pay details.) You may be wondering: Do I have a say in any of this? Equifax says it provides information only to those with a legitimate reason under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and requires anyone seeking income or salary numbers to obtain your explicit consent before releasing it. "The employee has to give permission," Mr. Adams said. The Federal Trade Commission reached a 350,000 settlement with TALX in 2009 over complaints that it failed to provide necessary disclosures to users of its consumer data and to the companies that provide the information. In an e mail, the company said that it was complying with the credit reporting act "and has reported evidence of compliance annually to the F.T.C. as required by the settlement." Still, it makes sense to check the accuracy of the data Equifax may have on you, since demand for income verification is growing. Mr. Adams said the increase was partly a result of recent legislation requiring credit card companies to verify a consumer's ability to pay before issuing a card. In addition, the major credit bureaus (Experian and TransUnion, along with Equifax) have faced criticism from consumer advocates over the accuracy of their data. A recent study by the trade commission found that roughly 5 percent of consumers had errors in their credit reports that could result in higher interest rates on loans. Agencies providing employment and salary data "haven't had that level of scrutiny, so we don't know what the level of accuracy is," said Chi Chi Wu, a lawyer with the National Consumer Law Center. "I would be surprised if it's better." Kevin Kuhn, compliance director at Equifax Workforce Solutions, said its employment data was accurate because it was provided and owned by the employer; Equifax acts as "steward" of the information but doesn't change it, he said. Unlike with credit reports, there isn't a single site where you can request your free annual employment and salary report; you must apply directly to each specialty company. (Among the others that provide job and income verification services are AccuSource and InVerify. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau maintains a list of companies that collect personal financial data of various kinds, but it is not comprehensive.) If your employer uses The Work Number, you can probably obtain your report at theworknumber.com. Otherwise, the site offers a toll free number (866 604 6570) or a form to send by mail; you'll need to provide your Social Security number as well as proof of identity, like a copy of your driver's license and a utility bill. The report will include all employment records the company has on file for you, and will show what companies have sought verifications in the last 24 months. If you've never worked for a company that uses The Work Number, however, the report probably will be blank. Here are some other questions that may arise as you apply: How long will it take to get a report? According to the form on The Work Number, your request will be processed in 15 days and the results will be mailed to you. What should I do if I find a discrepancy? The Work Number's Web site says you can call the service at 800 367 2884, and it will contact your employer to investigate. What if I feel the company isn't adequately handling my inquiry? You can file a complaint with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
A new report on one of the most dreaded war wounds finds that 1,367 men in the United States military suffered injuries to their genitals or urinary tract in Iraq or Afghanistan from 2001 to 2013, mostly from bomb blasts. More than a third of the injuries were severe. The report, published this week by military researchers in The Journal of Urology, is thought to be the most comprehensive review of so called genitourinary injuries in veterans. The problem was recognized before, but the extent was uncertain. The number of cases is "unprecedented" and the injuries "uniquely devastating" because they can impair a man's ability to have sex, father children or urinate normally, according to the report. Most of the wounded men 94 percent were 35 or younger, in "their peak years of sexual development and reproductive potential," the report said, adding that the psychological toll was especially heavy in such young men. Researchers say these men are at high risk for suicide. More veterans have these injuries now than in the past because more are surviving than during previous wars, as a result of better body armor and battlefield medicine. Another reason for the increase, according to the report, is that the often rough terrain in Afghanistan forced troops to patrol on foot, which left the soldiers' groin areas vulnerable to explosions from bombs planted in the ground. Many pelvic injuries occurred during the troop surge there in 2009 and 2010. The figures in the report come from records in the Department of Defense Trauma Registry. Of the 1,367 genitourinary injuries reported, 73 percent involved the external genitals. More than a third of the men had at least one injury that was considered severe; 129 lost one of their testes, 17 lost both and 86 had severe injuries to the penis. Fewer than five lost the penis. Many had other wounds, as well, including traumatic brain injuries, pelvic fractures, colorectal damage and leg amputations. "Many of these have been my patients," said one of the study's authors, Dr. Steven J. Hudak, a surgeon and a lieutenant colonel at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. "We are trying to tell their story and display the burden of the problem." Doctors at several medical centers hope to offer penis transplants from deceased organ donors to wounded veterans. The operation has been performed only once in the United States, last year at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. The transplant recipient was not a veteran, but a man whose penis had been amputated because of cancer. He is doing well, and two more men are on the waiting list another cancer patient, and a burn victim. Johns Hopkins University in Maryland has not yet performed the surgery, but a young man wounded in Afghanistan is on its waiting list. Dr. Hudak said it was not clear how many veterans would actually need penis transplants or be medically eligible for them. Although there were 86 severe injuries to the penis documented in the report, many were considered repairable. In recent years, the military started providing better gear, essentially Kevlar underpants, to protect the pelvic area. One layer, the pug protective undergarment goes inside. The next layer, the pog protective outer garment is thicker and is worn over the soldier's combat trousers. Male and female veterans with genitourinary injuries are being studied as part of a Defense Department project called TOUGH, for Trauma Outcomes and Urogenital Health. Women, who are less likely to suffer these types of injuries, are being studied separately and will be the subject of a later report, according to Dr. Hudak. A new finding in the report is that blast injuries to the pelvis may have a delayed effect that destroys fertility even if there is no obvious external damage. The authors wrote that they had seen some men who were previously fertile and had blast injuries that appeared to leave the testicles unharmed, but whose testicles later atrophied and stopped making sperm. "For many of these men, paternity is no longer possible without the use of donor sperm, which is not a covered benefit for current or former United States service members," the report said. In the British military, doctors routinely collect and freeze sperm from men with testicular injuries as soon as possible after the injury, in case the testes stop working. The soldier's consent at the time is not needed, so this can be done even while he is unconscious. The United States does not allow doctors to collect sperm from troops without their consent. The Defense Department, after recognizing that some service members were losing their ability to have children, created a pilot program last year to pay for freezing sperm or eggs before deployment.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
In an effort to give back to his hometown community in Florida, Carol City, the hip hop star Rick Ross decided to fulfill a childhood dream: He bought a Checkers fast food franchise. Why a Checkers? One reason seemed to rise above them all. "The No. 1 fries in the game," Mr. Ross says in a documentary style video released in December. The video shows Mr. Ross driving around town in his Ford truck, puffing cigars and relating stories from his childhood in the downtrodden community, which is in the Miami area. At a certain point, Mr. Ross begins talking about the burger joint he frequented as a teenager, across the thoroughfare from the carwash where he worked. There was a McDonald's that was closer, but Checkers, he says, was more affordable. "I made 30 a day from 8 in the morning to 8 at night," Mr. Ross says. "I went to Checkers." Checkers does not typically pursue celebrity endorsements. But when Mr. Ross applied to purchase the Carol City franchise last summer, he seemed so genuine in his affection for the fast food chain that Checkers recognized a marketing opportunity as straightforward as a drive through. Still, it did not want a typical campaign. Scott Wakeman, director of marketing for Checkers Drive In Restaurants Inc., and the company's ad firm, Fitzgerald Company in Atlanta, turned to the six year old digital media upstart Woven Digital. The firm has heavy traction among Mr. Ross's primary audience young men on the entertainment sites that it owns, like Uproxx, Dime and BroBible. Woven has also specialized in documentary style productions that, on the surface, do not feel like ads. To Mr. Wakeman, it seemed like a perfect way to take advantage of Mr. Ross's charisma and authenticity. "It just felt like such a unique opportunity," he said. The video, which is 3 minutes 31 seconds long, was filmed over two days in Carol City in late September, mostly as Mr. Ross drove his truck around. Spliced in is footage of pickup basketball games and bikers popping wheelies. The first mention of Checkers comes about halfway through the video. Checkers invests the bulk of its annual marketing budget, about 20 million, in standard television spots, Mr. Wakeman said. By contrast, the Rick Ross ad has been distributed only on social media channels and Uproxx. But Mr. Wakeman said he believed the unusual authenticity of the video and the compelling way Mr. Ross related his story would resonate with viewers more than anything Checkers had tried in the past. 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. "We don't think of it as an advertisement," Mr. Wakeman said, adding of Mr. Ross, "We wanted to create a piece of content that captured his love for the brand." Last year, Woven teamed up with MillerCoors on a series of short documentary videos that profiled entrepreneurs with expertise in making items like watches and surfboards, or, in one case, doing calligraphy. The five part series, sponsored by Coors Banquet beer and run across Uproxx, was intended to reach an audience that has become adept at avoiding traditional advertising. According to Brad Feinberg, senior director of media and digital marketing for MillerCoors, it was a success, receiving more than 33 million views. "This is content that people want to see; they're intrigued by it, they seek it out," Mr. Feinberg said. "And putting it in long form is something you can do in the digital space that is very cost prohibitive in other places." Long form storytelling might sound incompatible with the 140 character attention spans of millennials, but it can have its advantages. Young men in particular have demonstrated a willingness to sit through longer pieces of content if it aligns with their values and gives them something of value in return, said Leah Swartz, senior content specialist for FutureCast, a part of the Barkley agency of Kansas City, Mo., that focuses on research into millennials. Her team considers this a rewriting of the old ABCs of sales. Rather than the mantra "always be closing," brands must now think about how they can "always be helping." "You have to think about helping your consumer, what you're providing, what benefits you're giving, how you're making their lives more fulfilled," Ms. Swartz said. For Checkers, turning a story about a hit rapper's upbringing into a selling point for hamburgers and chicken wings was a bit of a gamble, Mr. Wakeman said. In the video, there are only a couple of references to Checkers' products, such as Mr. Ross's unequivocal praise of the French fries. But Mr. Wakeman said the documentary format allowed Mr. Ross's true voice to shine through. "Food and value are our two big brand pillars, and I think they come through in the spot, in a cool way," Mr. Wakeman said. "It wasn't a script. It was just Rick talking about what he loves" about the place. The video also captures moments of spontaneity. The producers originally intended just to film Mr. Ross outside the Checkers, but on the way there, he sent out a message on Instagram offering free burgers to any fans who wanted to meet him in Carol City. About 200 people showed up, and the cameras rolled as he shook hands and ripped open bags of food. Benjamin Blank, the chief executive of Woven, said the company was not trying to conceal that the video was an advertisement. But he said he thought the content itself was meaningful and captivating enough that ad avoiding viewers ultimately would not mind being sold to. "There were plenty of things Rick could have gotten involved with from a business standpoint," Mr. Blank said. "But his reason for getting involved with Checkers was a great story."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
The day after Ireland's recent abortion referendum, Brenda Malone woke up early, walked to her car and took a stepladder and some wire cutters out of the trunk. Then she started climbing up lampposts and cutting down any campaign posters she could find. The first one had a picture of a fetus on it, with the words "Don't repeal me." Ms. Malone may have looked like an activist claiming mementos of the referendum or a protester making a final act of defiance after Ireland's vote to rescind the Constitution's ban on abortion. But Ms. Malone had different reasons: She is a curator at the National Museum of Ireland who is working to preserve the posters. Since that day, Ms. Malone has put out a call for flags, banners and signs used in the campaign she received her first item last week, and is in discussions for around 25 more. She also successfully asked for airline boarding passes from women who flew back to Ireland for the vote. She asked friends via Facebook, too but advised them not to climb any lampposts. Other Irish museums have made similar requests. The National Gallery said on Twitter it was interested in collecting "anything with artistic intent and merit" tied to the referendum. Dublin City Council Library tweeted that it was looking for "ephemera." Those calls are just the latest examples of "rapid response collecting," a practice that is increasingly being adopted by museums in Europe and America. "Very early on in the campaign I realized we needed to collect these banners," Ms. Malone said in a telephone interview. "They spoke so strongly they're so creative and witty," she said, adding that a personal favorite read, "Get your rosaries off my ovaries." Current exhibits include a burkini, the swimwear used by some Muslim women, which some in Europe have tried to ban; a campaign leaflet used in Britain's referendum on whether to leave the European Union; and a 3D printed gun, acquired after these weapons stirred a panic in Britain in 2013. Corinna Gardner, a senior curator at the museum, said she received regular requests from other museums to borrow such items. She also said that other institutions had asked her for advice about how to develop their own rapid response programs. Leontine Meijer van Mensch, the deputy director of the Jewish Museum Berlin, said in a telephone interview that she was "intrigued by the rapid response approach of the V A." She said that her museum had followed suit and had begun acquiring objects that had figured prominently in current affairs. In April, Ms. Meijer van Mensch said she had tried to obtain the trophy for album of the year that was given to two rappers at Germany's Echo Music Awards. The accolade prompted an outcry because some of the musicians' lyrics were said to be anti Semitic. But Ms. Meijer van Mensch said efforts to get hold of the trophy had been in vain. Just days after the furor over the German music awards, two men wearing Jewish skullcaps, or kipas, were attacked in an affluent neighborhood of Berlin by a man wielding a belt. One of the men, who is from Israel but is not Jewish, said he had worn the skullcap to prove to a friend that he could wear one in Berlin without being harassed. The incident kicked off a debate about the extent of anti Semitism in Germany, culminating in a demonstration in Berlin by kipa wearing protesters. "I was intrigued by the enormous aftermath of this," Ms. Meijer van Mensch said. "I thought I needed to go to this with a photographer, and I needed to collect objects." She clambered up walls at the protest to obtain posters, and afterwards tracked down one of the men who was attacked to get his kipa for the museum. "It was actually quite fun guerrilla collecting in a way. It's very different to normal," she said. The kipa and other objects went on display in the Jewish Museum on May 31. Ms. Meijer van Mensch said she wanted the display to be the first in a series that brought topical objects quickly to the museum. But she said she wanted to collect works beyond those related to controversies about anti Semitism. For example, she said, she is considering documenting a gay Jewish wedding. Ms. Meijer van Mensch said she realized that many of the objects collected in rapid response programs were associated with left wing causes and could therefore open museums to accusations of political bias. But she said that a museum was "never a neutral, objective space." If institutions supported the causes of particular activists, they should at least be transparent about it, she said. Ms. Malone of the National Museum of Ireland said that she had gone on marches calling for a change in the country's abortion laws for years, but that her views were irrelevant to her work. "The museum is nonpolitical, and my job is to research this moment in history, not how I feel about it," she said. No anti abortion campaigners had yet sent the museum a banner, she said. (She had to climb up lampposts herself to secure those.) Ms. Gardner of the V A agreed that politics could be an issue, but she said that all items in the Victoria and Albert Museum were presented factually, and that visitors were encouraged to make up their own minds about them.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design

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