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PHILADELPHIA The idea lingers that art can be separated from politics. But it can't. All art high, low; illustrative, abstract is embedded in specific political histories, and direct links, however obscured, are always there. Such links are the unswerving focus of "World War I and American Art" at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, a panoramic show that has the narrative flow of a documentary, and the suspenseful, off kilter emotional texture of live drama. World War I lasted roughly four years, from 1914 to 1918, with the United States joining the fray in 1917. The brevity of that engagement has led Americans to play down the war, but we shouldn't. Although politicians at the time spun the conflict which the public increasingly understood to be a murderous mistake as the war that would end all wars, it did the opposite. It set the model for World War II, Vietnam, Iraq. And it departed from previous models of war only in ramping up their barbarities with modern technology. With World War I, invisibility became a deadly weapon. Submarines turned oceans into minefields. Airplanes, used in regular combat for the first time, killed through stealth and distance. Silent death emerged: poisonous gases enveloped victims, blinding them, eating their flesh, leaving them to drown in their own fluids. Add to these grisly innovations the high power guns that, dronelike, pulverize bodies outside the range of vision, and you can see how warfare became depersonalized. It felt like a scientific experiment, not a human engagement. Some artists were avid hawks. Childe Hassam was. He wanted America in on the Allied side, and fast. He painted repeated pictures, in an Impressionist style, of Manhattan avenues festooned for victory parades: a world composed entirely of confetti and flags. Other artists resisted American intervention. John Sloan, a socialist, viewed the war as an imperialist profit machine fueled by the lives of the poor. He turned out a stream of drawings that said as much. In one, a porcine businessman holds out a medal to a legless soldier dragging himself across a floor. And certain artists had a personal investment in the conflict. Marsden Hartley was living in Berlin when war broke out, and some cubistic paintings he did there, like "Berlin Ante War," were visual responses to the flash and clamor that followed the call to arms. Others had an added subtext. Hartley was in love with an officer in the Prussian Army named Karl von Freyburg, who was killed in the war's opening months. The later Berlin paintings became memorials to him. They celebrated martial valor but also mourned its consequences. A soldier with a mutilated face wearing a prosthetic mask made by the sculptor Anna Coleman Ladd. Hartley's sense of ambivalence, of confused loyalties, finds echoes elsewhere in the show, which travels to the New York Historical Society in May, even after patriotic loyalty became the law of the land. When the United States officially entered the war in 1917, domestic censorship came down hard. The Espionage and Sedition Acts criminalized antiwar expression. Immigrants were treated with overt suspicion. Neighbors spied on neighbors. A military draft went into effect. Pro war visual propaganda, underwritten by the advertising industry, proliferated, with printed posters like James Montgomery Flagg's finger jabbing "I want YOU" Uncle Sam covering the walls of classrooms, factories and restaurants. Joseph Pennell's vision of a firebombed Lower Manhattan is from this time, as is Harry Ryle Hopps's image of the German kaiser as a maiden ravishing ape. Ethnic slurs showed up in painting, too. George Bellows, suspicious, like Sloan, of American motives in the war, suddenly turned out melodramatic scenes of German soldiers raping and torturing civilians. He had read about them in a lurid piece of agitprop published by the British Committee on Alleged German War Outrages, and was passing on the semifake news. These Bellows pictures aren't exhibited much. They need a historical context to make sense, and the show gives them one. More interesting is the way the curators Robert Cozzolino, Anne Knutson and David Lubin have uncovered political content in places you might not expect. A Georgia O'Keeffe watercolor, "The Flag," is one example. In the fall of 1917, O'Keeffe visited her younger brother, Alexis, in a Texas military camp before he was shipped abroad. She had highly conflicted, basically hostile feelings about the war itself, and was worried about her brother in particular. (She had reason to be. He was felled by a mustard gas attack in France and eventually died from its effects.) The flag she painted after the visit a streak of red bleeding into bruise colored clouds catches her mood: anxious, angry, appalled. Charles E. Burchfield, who spent the war at his family's home in Ohio, lived with a daily dread of being drafted. The fear caused nightmares, which in turn inspired paintings and drawings of grotesque landscapes and faces. When he finally went into the Army, he translated some of those forms into camouflage designs. The sculptor Anna Coleman Ladd similarly turned art to wartime use. In 1917, when she was almost 40, she opened a Paris studio devoted to creating prosthetic masks for soldiers whose faces had been disfigured. Before and after photographs of her clients are some of the most moving antiwar statements in the show. Ladd's name is largely forgotten. As is that of Claggett Wilson, an artist and a victim of chemical warfare who suffered from post traumatic stress, but pulled himself out of it by painting the battlefield horrors he'd lived through. His watercolors of exploding shells and mad eyed soldiers are standouts in an exhibition rich in intensely original work. So are paintings by the great Horace Pippin, who survived the double trauma of combat injury (the war left one arm permanently disabled) and of being African American in a racist United States Army. He began drawing as a form of therapy, and by the early 1930s was producing labor intensive paintings like "The End of War Starting Home." It's an extraordinary thing. Its title is joyous; its image of war still very much underway is not. Maybe the idea was that being at home is a battle, too. The tableau is often compared to ancient Classical friezes. And like such images, based on themes of history and myth, it elevates and softens tragedy through formal beauty. That beauty is the big weakness of Sargent's magisterially painted image. It glamorizes profound human damage. It glosses over the criminal meanness and fraudulence of a media fed war that was "trivial, for all its vastness," as Bertrand Russell, who lived through it, wrote. Pippin understood that reality. So did Wilson, and O'Keeffe. And so did the American painter John Steuart Curry, who goes straight for it in a painting that hangs near the end of the show. Curry was an American regionalist best known for scenes set in his native rural Kansas. But "Parade to War, Allegory" is different from those. It shows troops marching in tight formation down a city street. Excited schoolboys run along beside them. A young woman, a sister or sweetheart, embraces a soldier as she keeps pace with him. In the foreground, a spectator cheers, but a policeman seems to be holding back another one, a distressed older woman. Maybe she sees what no one else does: All the soldiers have skulls for faces. The painting dates from 1938, and a second world war was looming. There's no indication of where Curry's soldiers are coming from, or where they're going. It doesn't matter. That they're dead history come alive, a warning of where not to go, what not to do, and that schoolboys and lovers and citizen onlookers don't see this, is all that counts. Artists, recorders of history whether they want to be or not, see it. They can't change it, but they can describe it. And that description is always there.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Takuo Aoyagi, a Japanese engineer whose pioneering work in the 1970s led to the modern pulse oximeter, a lifesaving device that clips on a finger and shows the level of oxygen in the blood and that has become a critical tool in the fight against the novel coronavirus, died on April 18 in Tokyo. He was 84. His death, in a hospital, was announced by his employer, Nihon Khoden, a Tokyo based company that makes medical equipment. A niece, Kyoko Aoyagi, confirmed the death but said she did not know the cause. The pulse oximeter has become "an indispensable addition to medicine," said V. Courtney Broaddus, a professor emeritus of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Historically, patients were measured by four vital signs: temperature, blood pressure, pulse and respiratory rate. "It has become the fifth vital sign," she said of oxygen level. While many coronavirus patients do feel chest pain, fever and other symptoms, Dr. Broaddus said, the pulse oximeter "has become especially important because humans do not sense a low oxygen saturation alone."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
In tiny Sellersburg, Ind., just across the border from Kentucky, Manitowoc Foodservice is in the final stages of closing a factory that makes beverage dispensers and ice machines and is laying off 84 workers. The company is moving production to Mexico. Just 100 miles away, President elect Donald J. Trump will appear on Thursday with workers at Carrier's Indianapolis plant to boast of his success in saving at least 1,000 jobs from moving to Mexico. The truth across the Rust Belt is that there are more Manitowoc Foodservices than Carriers. The layoffs and closing in Sellersburg follow similar shutdowns by Manitowoc in Ohio and Wisconsin. "I'll give Trump his due, but I hope he and the American people and Congress don't forget about all these other jobs going to Mexico," said Chuck Jones, the president of Local 1999 of the United Steelworkers in Indianapolis, which represents Carrier. "Down the pike, a lot more are going to be moving out." Indeed, Rexnord, the ball bearing factory in Indianapolis where Mr. Jones went to work straight out of high school nearly 40 years ago, said in October it would be moving to Mexico. It is just a mile from the Carrier plant. The mayor of Indianapolis, Joe Hogsett, and Senator Joe Donnelly, both Democrats, tried to exert Trumplike pressure to force Rexnord to rethink its plans, but so far the company has not shown any sign it will change course. "On a personal level at Carrier, it is huge," said Jerry N. Conover, director of the Indiana Business Research Center at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. "But by itself, the disappearance or retention of 1,000 jobs is a small slice of the total economy in Indiana." "I think there will be continued downward pressure on employment in factories because of trends toward automation especially and moving to lower cost areas for production," he added. Carrier, in its official statement on the deal on Wednesday, said that it thought the agreement it negotiated with Mr. Trump and Vice President elect Mike Pence "benefits our workers, the state of Indiana and our company." But it said that incentives provided by Indiana, where Mr. Pence is governor, "were an important consideration." It added that "the forces of globalization will continue to require solutions for the long term competitiveness of the U.S. and American workers." Those 1,000 Carrier jobs saved represent just 0.2 percent of total manufacturing employment in the state. And despite a rebound since the aftermath of the Great Recession, at just over half a million positions, factory employment in Indiana this year is still down by more than 20 percent since 2000. The good news is that Indiana has been doing well economically, with an unemployment rate below the national average and steady gains in employment like food service, retail and logistics. But those service jobs pay well below the 20 to 25 an hour that veteran Carrier employees with only a high school diploma can earn building furnaces and fan coils in Indianapolis. The typical manufacturing worker in the state earns 59,000 a year, about 20,000 a year more than the typical service job. What happened on Day 2 of Elizabeth Holmes's testimony. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. And for less credentialed workers, that margin is the difference between having a shot at a middle class life, including owning a home and sending children to college, and having to struggle to make ends meet. "These are truly irreplaceable jobs," said Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, an advocacy group, and a native of Rensselaer, Ind. "A manufacturing job is one of the only ladders to fulfilling the American dream for a worker without a college degree." "A manufacturing worker who loses their job at Carrier will be resigned to facing a lower standard of living and leaner retirement years," Mr. Paul added. "Carrier is special because it happened at the right time and the right place and it gained a high profile. But obviously, Donald Trump and Mike Pence can't intervene every time a plant closes." The economic fortunes for this group have been shrinking for years, which is a major reason the story of Mr. Trump and Carrier has resonated so deeply. In Indiana, in particular, as in other so called Rust Belt states, there are a lot of people who are less educated: Just 16.5 percent of the state's residents ages 25 to 64 have a bachelor's degree, half the rate for the country over all. And while about 30 percent have an associate degree or some college, the bulk of Indiana residents, 44 percent, have only a high school diploma or less. Nor has manufacturing remained the sole domain of whites. It provides a crucial source of higher paying jobs for minorities. In the popular imagination, the Indianapolis factory where 1,400 Carrier workers build furnaces and fan coils looks like a scene out of "The Deer Hunter" or "Norma Rae." Blue collar guys walking through the plant gate, lunch pail in hand, or white women barely getting by after years on the line. But the reality at the Carrier plant that Mr. Trump will visit on Thursday is very different. About half the workers are African American, making it a much more diverse workplace than many white collar settings. Women account for a substantial portion of the work force as well, but the wages are anything but subsistence: over 20 an hour plus benefits for workers with just a high school diploma. That is an almost unheard of level of pay for Indiana workers with that level of education in other sectors like food service and retail or even many health care jobs.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Christina Vella, the author of several colorful works of narrative history, notably "Intimate Enemies: The Two Worlds of the Baroness de Pontalba," a tale of wealth and scandal in 19th century France and New Orleans, died on March 22 in New Orleans. She was 75. The cause was cancer, her daughter Robin Vella Riehl said. Ms. Vella, a historian by training, found one of her richest subjects close to hand, in her native city. "Intimate Enemies," published in 1997, told the story of Micaela Leonarda Antonia Almonester y Rojas, daughter of the richest man in New Orleans. Her marriage at the age of 15 to the son of a French baron set in motion a family scandal whose intricacies enthralled the novelist Stendhal. The Baron de Pontalba, enraged when he learned that his daughter in law's dowry was to be paid in installments and foiled in his 20 year attempt to seize her property, burst into her bedroom at the family's country estate in France in 1834, took out a pistol and shot her three times in the chest. Wounded but still alive, Micael, as she was known, led him in a chase around the house that ended when the baron, admitting defeat, turned his gun on himself. The newly minted baroness turned her hand to property development. She built the mansion on the Rue du Faubourg St. Honore that is now the American Embassy. On returning to New Orleans in the 1840s, she oversaw the design and construction of the Pontalba Buildings, two red brick rowhouse complexes flanking the Place d'Armes, which was renamed Jackson Square after Andrew Jackson at her instigation. One of the chief features of the French Quarter, the rowhouses established the fashion for iron railings throughout the old city.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
THE W South Beach here draws a see and be seen crowd, with a vibe created by the airy lobby, the thumping house beat music, and a sprawling outdoor pool where an empty chaise is a rare find. Since it opened in July 2009, the W has counted among its guests Denzel Washington, Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn. But the W is not just a hotel. It's a condo hotel, meaning that people wanting to buy into a piece of the action can do so. Three years after opening, the W is still one of the hottest hotels on the beach, its popularity spurring other potential high end competitors to swirl around Miami Beach hoping to break into the market. And lately, in Miami's burgeoning waterfront condo market, it seems to be getting buzz not only as a hotel, but also as a potentially lucrative option for condo buyers. So I recently went to Miami to see how the condo hotel concept works in a city that still has so many condo units to absorb after the housing crash. Are buyers as interested in the W as hotel guests seem to be? Just how does the W South Beach stack up as an investment? First a little background. Condo hotels have been around for about 15 years. Donald J. Trump was among the first to pioneer the concept with the Trump International Hotel and Tower at 1 Central Park West. There are different takes on the concept. In the case of the W South Beach and the Trump SoHo in New York, buyers can acquire a condo in the same building as the hotel and then either use it or allow the hotel to rent it out, for which they receive a cut of the revenue. The hotel typically offers discounts to condo owners on food and beverages and spa services. The rooms are sold with the same furnishings as other hotel rooms, meaning there's really no chance for custom finishes. At the W South Beach, owners can buy their unit and choose to live in it year round, although that almost never happens. If they choose to let Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, the owners of the W chain, rent it by the night, they have two options. In the more restrictive option, owners are allowed to use the unit for 60 days a year and get a net 49 percent cut of the revenues. In the less restrictive option, they can use it for an unlimited number of days and get a 30 percent net cut of revenues. Starwood requires W South Beach owners to sign two year agreements when they enter a rental program. And if you want to use your condo, you have to give Starwood 30 to 90 days' notice, depending on the season, to ensure availability. New Year's is a blackout period (and the whole hotel is already sold out Dec. 29 31 this year). Buyers in Miami and New York should understand that what they are getting is not really a piece of the chain that is managing the hotels. At the W they are getting a condo unit in the building developed by David Edelstein, a New York developer. At the Trump SoHo, it is the Bayrock/Sapir Organization that is selling the condos, not the Trump Organization, which manages the hotel. The hotel operators sign management contracts, but they don't lock themselves in forever. One day the W South Beach could be a W and the next it could be a Sheraton. The fine print has created work for lawyers. In June a group of pro football players sued the W South Beach's developer, 2201 Collins Fee (led by Mr. Edelstein), alleging that the developer had used a "sophisticated scheme to lure buyers to the project by using the W name as bait only to sell them a unit that was not in fact a W unit." The players are looking to get back their deposits. "A condo hotel is a very difficult investment strategy," said Aaron Resnick, a Miami lawyer representing the football players in the suits. "It's not such an easy, simple purchase where you are going to buy and get a rent check every month. It is a lot more complicated than that." Mr. Edelstein dismisses that suit and others as being the product of "speculators" looking for a way out of their deposits. Earlier this year nearly a dozen plaintiffs sued the Four Seasons in Miami claiming the hotel and its partner, Millennium Partners, "duped" investors into paying inflated prices for the condos by promising 5,000 per month in returns. Instead of advertising the units as promised, the owners contend, the hotel hid them from renters in order to prioritize its own rooms. Both the hotel and the developer are fighting the lawsuit in court. In March the owners of the Setai in Miami fired the hotel's operator, Singapore based General Hotel Management, for poor performance. Two months later G.H.M. sued the owners, a subsidiary of Lehman Brothers Holdings, for breaking its 15 year management contract. Could the same sort of thing happen to the W South Beach? Yes, but it's not likely. David Milus, a senior vice president for operations, said Starwood had a "long term" deal with Mr. Edelstein. (Just how long is proprietary, he said.) The W South Beach is among the more successful revenue generators of the chain's 43 properties, he added. "We don't have any intention of pulling out and anticipate being there for a long time," Mr. Milus said. It's the W name that persuaded Ronald Kimel, a Canadian who owns a real estate management company, to pay 7.25 million in 2009 for a three bedroom penthouse with a private pool and sprawling outdoor space overlooking the Atlantic. "I definitely bought it because of the W brand name, thinking that would protect the value of the unit," he said. He has stayed in his penthouse for only two nights. He prefers the tranquillity of his 4,500 square foot apartment at the Apogee, which is also in South Beach. But his children and business associates frequently use the residence at the W. Mr. Kimel wants to sell the penthouse for 10 million to streamline his real estate holdings in Miami. But his brokers, Oren Alexander of Prudential Douglas Elliman and Jill Eber of Coldwell Banker, are having trouble showing it. Mr. Kimel's rental contract with the W gives him access to the penthouse only when it's not rented. "It's always rented by the hotel," Mr. Alexander said. "It may be that I can't sell it until after the contract is over and I have control and can do what I need," Mr. Kimel said. If he were to buy the penthouse again, he said, he would ask to see a copy of the management agreement with the hotel, just to understand more clearly what his risks and obligations were. Mr. Kimel has also had some concerns about the vaunted W service. Family members and business associates have complained that the suite hasn't always been clean at 4 p.m. check in. "It is what it is," said Mr. Kimel, 68. "Their success in the hotel is that it is full a lot." In the two days I stayed at the W, I had a mixed experience. I enjoyed the lime infused water waiting for guests just inside the private entrance to the beach. Friendly beach attendants expertly set up my umbrella and offered fresh towels. But the room service was disappointing. There were three miscues in just one day, a Sunday. First a room service attendant brought the wrong salad for lunch. A different attendant forgot to deliver my salmon at dinner; she delivered it 30 minutes later and said the hotel would not charge me. Then, at 3:20 a.m., I was awakened by incessant banging on a door. Five minutes later it hadn't stopped. I went to the peep hole and saw the same room service attendant who had forgotten the salmon holding a tray in one hand and banging on the door of my neighbor's penthouse suite with the other. She kept banging until I finally opened my door. The next day, I noticed while checking out that the hotel had in fact charged me for the salmon (it was taken off the bill after I pointed out the error). Maybe this shouldn't be as much of a concern to the owners of the condos if they stay at the W as infrequently as Mr. Kimel does. They are certainly selling. The developer has sold 200 of 408 units since beginning sales in 2006. Condos have sold for as much as 9.4 million, and "prices continue to go up," Mr. Edelstein said. "The single most satisfying and inspirational part of the job is that people have bought multiple units," as many as six or seven additional condos, he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
"Starry Night," an 1888 painting by Vincent van Gogh in Tate Britain's new exhibition. The work depicts the Rhone in France, but scholars believe it was influenced by a view of the Thames in London. LONDON We like to think of Vincent van Gogh as a creature of the elements: buffeted by the wind and rain, or going mad in the sunflower fields under the wilting Provencal sun. But here's another, just as valid, idea of van Gogh: comfortable, middle class Vincent in a top hat and coat, commuting to work in Victorian London, and spending his weekends rowing on the Thames, or strolling in Kensington Gardens. That was, indeed, van Gogh in his early 20s, when he moved to London from his native Netherlands to work for the international art dealing firm Goupil Cie. as an assistant in their branch in the Covent Garden district. Van Gogh didn't make a single painting in London, but as "Van Gogh and Britain," a new exhibition at Tate Britain makes clear, his time in the British capital had an enduring impact on his work. "Looking at his work through his relationship with Britain brings into the foreground his amazing intellectual curiosity," said Carol Jacobi, the lead curator of the show. Recent research into lesser known chapters of van Gogh's life, such as his time in Britain, have provided us with a more well rounded image of the artist, slowly replacing the old vision of a wild man whose art came directly from the soul though it will take a long time to shift that idea, said Sjraar van Heugten, an independent van Gogh art historian and curator based in Belgium. "It's entirely clear that van Gogh was not the completely spontaneous painter who worked very fast, almost without thinking," said Mr. van Heugten in an interview. "He read very widely: literature as well as popular science. If you carefully study his work, the image arises of a man who carefully thinks about his works and prepares." Van Gogh got his job in London at the Goupil gallery through family connections in the Netherlands. Both Vincent and his brother Theo worked first in the firm's branch in The Hague, and about the same time that Theo moved to the Brussels branch, Vincent was sent to London. They both ended up working in the Paris headquarters, but although Theo rose through the gallery's ranks, Vincent was fired a couple of years later. "It's really interesting to think of van Gogh as having this commercial chapter to his life," said Ms. Jacobi. "He started to work at Goupil when he was 16, and he was sent to the London branch when he was only 20, all alone in this massive city. His letters home were very enthusiastic about the art he was seeing." Mr. van Heugten said that at the gallery, van Gogh "got to know about the artists of his time. He saw the prints and paintings at Goupil, he got to discuss art with the art dealers, and because of Goupil, he got to live in cities with museums." Van Gogh lived in London from May 1873 to December 1876, first at a boardinghouse in what he described as, "a quiet, convivial, nice looking neighborhood" (which is still unknown), before moving to 87 Hackford Road, in Brixton, then a middle class suburb on the city's outskirts, where he lived with a widow and her teenage daughter. Later, he moved to another lodging house, on nearby Kennington Road. When he wasn't working in the gallery, much of his free time in London was spent frequenting art museums such as the British Museum and the National Gallery, where he had his first exposure to English painters, such as John Constable and John Everett Millais. "English art didn't appeal to me much at first, one has to get used to it," Vincent wrote to Theo in July 1873. "There are some good painters here, though, including Millais," whom he mentioned 17 times in his letters. By January 1874, he wrote a list of some 40 artists whose work he'd admired in London. Tate Britain has assembled some of the particular works he mentioned, such as Millais's "Chill October" 1870, a bleak image of wild brush and windswept trees under a temperamental sky, which van Gogh may have used as the inspiration for his work, "Autumn Landscape at Dusk," from 1885, also in the show. We also see how the flickering lamps along the foggy Thames in James Abbott Whistler's "Nocturne: Grey and Gold, Westminster Bridge" may have influenced van Gogh's glimmering gaslights and their aqueous reflections in the 1888 painting "Starry Night," on loan from the Musee d'Orsay, depicting a view of the Rhone in Arles. "Most of the juxtapositions in the exhibition between van Gogh and the work that he admired are kind of more like conversations," said Ms. Jacobi. "You can see that he's taking ideas and running with them." Van Gogh eventually became "disillusioned with the commercial world" said Ms. Jacobi: His lack of enthusiasm for the London post was noticed, and he was fired from Goupil in 1876. He stayed in Britain for several more months, taking a few teaching jobs, before returning home to the Netherlands for Christmas, where he decided he wanted to pursue a career as a preacher. Van Gogh probably had no idea during his time in London that he would start painting, at last, in early 1881. It wasn't until late in his life that the wilder van Gogh began to emerge in the south of France, where he struggled with mental illness and painted almost a canvas a day. So, did van Gogh turn from one sort of man to another? "For me there's not really a contradiction," said Nienke Bakker, the curator of van Gogh paintings at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, "because he came from a background where there was art and literature all around him, he was raised in an art gallery in a way. This was his upbringing, and he took all that with him when he became an artist and moved away from what we like to call the 'civilized world.'" Van Gogh's later works were made with "all this knowledge and these images in his head," she said. Given what came later in van Gogh's life the tragedy of his illness and premature death at age 37, after just 10 years as a painter it's comforting to walk through "Van Gogh and Britain" and consider this peaceful, youthful period of the artist's life, when he was busy absorbing the culture and sights of London. "Things are going well for me here," he wrote to Theo from London in January 1874. "I have a wonderful home and it's a great pleasure for me to observe London and the English way of life and the English themselves, and I also have nature and art and poetry, and if that isn't enough, what is?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
The soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, in the title role of Puccini's "Tosca," charges into the Metropolitan Opera's production and never lets go. The Metropolitan Opera's "Tosca" was plagued by drama when it was new last season. The lead singers canceled; the conductor, Met music director James Levine, was suspended amid accusations of sexual misconduct (and later fired by the company). The director, David McVicar, said he considered quitting. This season's revival has been quieter. But this doesn't mean things are dully business as usual. The drama is, thankfully, now onstage. At the performance on Monday, the soprano Sondra Radvanovsky charged into Mr. McVicar's production and never let go, following a grand entrance with an evening of strong singing and fervent dramatic purpose. Detractors sometimes cite a brittleness in Ms. Radvanovsky's sound as off putting. I tend to view this occasional harshness as something she is conscious of and uses dramatically. And her intonation on Monday seemed more consistently secure than in some past appearances at the Met. Her Tosca thrills and coheres. In the first act, when the character must prove an able seductress while also showing traces of jealousy, Ms. Radvanovsky came up with ingenious ways to make these facets flow together. With discerning placements of breath, she seemed, early on, to laugh at her own insecurities and propensity for distrust, at least in front of her lover, the painter Cavaradossi (here played ably, if not particularly deeply, by the honey tone tenor Joseph Calleja). When Cavaradossi's back was turned, however, this Tosca dropped that lovable, self conscious mask in brief storms of fury. These quick transitions make this Tosca seem a little jumpy but Ms. Radvanovsky's performance is thoughtful, never busy for its own sake. And her approach planted the seeds for a brutally effective second act showdown with the villain Scarpia. When this chief of police accuses Tosca of acting a role when she pleads for Cavaradossi's life, we know he's wrong: We've seen what it looks like when this diva is in machination mode. The stakes are appropriately high for Tosca's "Vissi d'arte," and Ms. Radvanovsky delivered a subtle and affecting rendition of the aria, using her practiced soft into loud vocal tricks only sparingly. Making his Met debut as Scarpia, the baritone Claudio Sgura muddled through some lower passages, turning the character into something of a functionary, instead of an evil force of nature. This Scarpia's sadism is more courtly than glowering; some more supple singing from Mr. Sgura in the second act gave intriguing glimpses of smugness. Still, this was always Ms. Radvanovsky's show. It was more difficult to say which character ruled the Met's revival of Bizet's "Carmen" on Tuesday. By the third act, it was clear that top singing honors belonged to the soprano Guanqun Yu, as Micaela. Her showcase aria, "Je dis que rien," had true glamour thanks to a tone of lean, quick witted elegance, as well the occasional, well placed touch of luster. Much of the rest of the show felt rote, or wobbly. Though she appeared in this production last season, the mezzo soprano Clementine Margaine seemed to struggle with some of the blocking during the Habanera. While she focused on hitting her marks, some descending flourishes strayed off pitch. As Don Jose, the tenor Yonghoon Lee had enough volume for the Met. But the ringing quality of his voice was too often pushed to strident ends that blotted out the potential for varieties of color. This Carmen and this Don Jose collaborated effectively in more tender exchanges. But the garishness elsewhere and the boisterous pulse of the conductor Omer Meir Wellber, making his house debut did not enliven Richard Eyre's staid staging.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. Over the last decade, NBC Universal's cable chief, Bonnie Hammer, has occasionally visited the Golden Globes under less than glamorous conditions: sitting in a production truck for the E! network, dressed in jeans and sneakers, with her hair pulled back. By time the network wrapped up its red carpet show and the show actually began, a limo would be summoned, a pizza ordered and Ms. Hammer's night would be all but over. It was a very different scene Sunday night when the USA cable network's first year hit "Mr. Robot" took home the Golden Globe for best television drama, a first for the network, and Ms. Hammer found herself at the center of a triumphant NBC after party. "This is the lady that makes it happen," said Rami Malek, the show's fresh faced star, his arm draped around Ms. Hammer. "This is the one brave enough to make this choice," added his co star Christian Slater, holding his award for best supporting actor in a TV drama. "She certainly has moved the network in a very unique direction, and I'm grateful she was willing to take this risk." This was a share the wealth year for TV at the Golden Globes; no networks won more than the two awards grabbed by Amazon and USA, a cable unit of NBC Universal. It was a particularly striking achievement for USA, a network that has been known for big ratings, but not for avant garde or critically acclaimed programming in an era that is rife with them. Awards nights have not been USA nights. But these are different times in the TV industry. There is more programming than ever, ratings are in free fall and award winners can come from producers of any conceivable stripe. That included relatively obscure shows like Amazon's "Mozart in the Jungle," which won the best TV comedy award, the second consecutive year the streaming service took that category. "If you're going to get into the zone of being in the top five shows out of 400? Well, if you talk with everybody you know and everybody thinks your show is a fantastic idea, you're probably a little behind the curve and should get a different idea," Roy Price, the head of Amazon Studios, said. That is essentially what USA executives did. "Mr. Robot," a drama that embraces of the moment themes like hacking and the isolating effects of digital life, is darker than the so called blue skies programming that helped propel USA to the most viewed cable channel in the last decade. "The show is a weird, subversive, tiny little show," said Sam Esmail, the creator, holding his Golden Globe. "The best I could think of for its potential was a cult hit. That was the thing I was dreaming about." 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Instead it became more than that. The nearly three million viewers who tune in about half of them in the 18 to 49 year old demographic important to advertisers made it one of the top new drama cable series of the year. The first step toward the success of "Mr. Robot" was taken a couple of years ago, when Ms. Hammer and the USA Network's president, Chris McCumber, noticed that the programming that was once so successful for USA was starting to show signs of wear and tear. "We had a filter where it had to be flawed but likable characters, drama with a dollop of humor," Ms. Hammer said, referring to a longtime strategy that helped fuel shows like "Burn Notice" and "Psych." "And then we realized that many of those who watched USA for years basically aged out of the demo. The 40 somethings were now 50 somethings. We had to say, 'O.K., we get it. We have to look at the 30 somethings and the millennials. What are they going to watch?' " Ms. Hammer and Mr. McCumber realized what that group wanted was not what USA had on the air. "The world isn't blue skies, it's very complicated," Ms. Hammer said. "The generation that is growing up right now is willing to accept that life is complicated, that decisions aren't easy. They don't tune in because it's fun. Anything that hits an honest authentic nerve, they'll basically embrace it." "The show in a really uncanny way, sometimes tragically, mirrored what was going on in the world right now," Mr. McCumber said. Mr. Esmail said working with a network that was suddenly open to a new creative approach presented a golden opportunity. "If I went with another network that had a certain style and voice to their network they're going to want to impose this on the show, there might have been more compromise," Mr. Esmail said. "Here was an opportunity to define what that could be." The awards for "Mr. Robot" were welcome news for USA, especially because, like many cable channels, its viewership dropped sizably this year. Ratings were down about 15 percent in total viewers and 20 percent in the 18 to 49 demographic. Ms. Hammer said that scrutinizing the ratings was a backward way of thinking now, and that was one of the reasons USA had changed its game plan. "For a long time we wanted to do great business in linear television and we did it," she said. "We accepted we weren't going to get a ton of awards. Now we're in a different business. Now it's no longer just competing in the linear business, it's competing for great content." And if the ratings continue to fall, will advertisers still be around to spend money on that so called great content? "I sure as hell hope so or I'm going to be fired," she said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
The New 'Cats' Trailer Is Here, Now With More Idris Elba With longer looks at co stars and a bigger emphasis on plot, the clip leaves out mention of behind the scenes personnel like Andrew Lloyd Webber. None "Tonight is a magical night," says Old Deuteronomy (Judi Dench) in the new trailer for "Cats," "where I choose the cat that deserves a new life." Whether one of the longest running musicals in Broadway history finds a new life on the big screen remains to be seen. After the initial trailer was released to online derision and countless memes in July, the follow up clip which runs nearly 45 seconds shorter focuses more on the plot, positioning a feline reincarnation ball as an "American Idol" like contest. "Many will compete," reads one of the taglines. "Only one can win." Jennifer Hudson's version of "Memory," which dominated the earlier trailer, is nowhere to be heard, and there's no mention of T.S. Eliot, author of the source material for the stage musical, "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats." Likewise, the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, and the choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler ("Hamilton"), who both got shout outs last time, are left out. Taylor Swift can be seen shimmying in one bit of new footage, and the physical comedy of James Corden and Rebel Wilson is put in the spotlight. There are also longer looks at co stars like Idris Elba and Dench. But only Twitter will tell if this clip will appease the skeptics . Maybe we've all gotten used to the " digital fur technology" by now?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
REPAIRS: The 2009 Cadillac Escalade is among the G.M. vehicles that may be getting an extended warranty on the throttle position sensor. AUDI hybrids that won't go into electric mode and O rings found lying in Mini oil pans are among the mechanical maladies covered in the latest technical service bulletins. The bulletins, compiled by alldatapro.com, offer automakers' insights into some recurring problems with various models. The bulletins, known as T.S.B.'s, are not recalls; they are information provided by manufacturers to dealers' service departments and mechanics. Unless otherwise noted, the carmakers do not offer payment assistance for these repairs beyond normal warranty coverage. Alldata.com sells a more comprehensive version of the bulletins to consumers. Here are some recent examples: ACURA A cold start rattle may shake some TSX owners awake. In T.S.B. 10 024 issued on Oct. 6, Acura's parent company, Honda, said the noise in 2009 and some 2010 models with the 4 cylinder engine might be caused by a faulty actuator for the variable valve timing. The owner's mechanic will become intimately familiar with the TSX engine during a 50 step process of taking most of it apart and putting it back together to replace the part. AUDI Some Q5 Hybrids may not be taking advantage of their hybrid systems. In T.S.B. 241246 issued on Oct. 10, Audi said some 2013 models might not switch into electric mode at all, even when the high voltage battery was fully charged. Dealers can reprogram the control computer to get the silent mode back in operation. DODGE Some 2011 Challengers may have a problem with the smart glass switches. In T.S.B. M24 issued on Oct. 19, the parent company, Chrysler, said the switches, which control the automatic up down function of the door windows, may operate when not intended, resulting in a battery drain. Chrysler will replace the switches without charge. GENERAL MOTORS Some hybrid models may have an incorrect transmission O ring seal. In T.S.B. 12222A issued on Sept. 28, the company said the problem in the 2012 13 Buick Regal and 2013 Buick LaCrosse and Chevrolet Malibu eAssist models might result in sluggish shifting or requiring high engine speeds to engage Drive or Reverse. Replacing the transmission fluid pump O ring should smooth things out. Also several S.U.V.'s with V 8 engines may be getting an extended warranty on the throttle position sensor. In T.S.B. 11273 issued on Sept. 20, the company said the problem might cause the check engine light to illuminate and the vehicle to run rough. The part will be warranted for 10 years or 120,000 miles, up from the standard coverage of five years or 100,000 miles. The trouble may appear in some 2008 9 Chevrolet TrailBlazers, GMC Envoys and Hummer H2s; 2008 10 Cadillac Escalades, Chevrolet Avalanches, Expresses, Silverados, Suburbans and Tahoes; GMC Savanas, Sierras, Yukons and Yukon XLs; Hummer H3s; and 2009 10 Chevrolet Colorados, GMC Canyons and Hummer H3Ts. INFINITI Some 2013 JX35 owners may be puzzled by interior lights that turn themselves on and off. In T.S.B. 12 065 issued on Oct. 3, Infiniti said the flickering or illuminating of dome lights when the doors were not open was probably caused by an incorrectly routed wiring harness. Rerouting the harness should keep the lights from shining on their own. JAGUAR Some 2012 XKs may have a rear right side fog light that doesn't light. In T.S.B. K128 issued on Sept. 25, Jaguar said the problem could be fixed by replacing the fog light assembly. MINI Oil changes in Minis may become a bit more complicated. In T.S.B. M110612 issued on Oct. 1, Mini's parent company, BMW, said that technicians might find an O ring in the oil filter housing when changing the oil. The O ring is from the oil filter nonreturn valve inside the engine, and it dislodges because it is too small. BMW said that no further engine damage was caused by the O ring, and that replacing the oil filter housing should clear up the issue. The problem can occur in 2006 12 Hardtops, 2009 12 Convertibles and all years through 2012 of the Coupe, Roadster and Countryman. Also, some 2010 11 models may have oil leaking from the timing chain tensioner. In T.S.B. M110512 issued on Sept. 1, BMW said the problem in the Hardtop, Convertible, Clubman and Countryman models resulted from a timing chain tensioner seal ring that is too soft. Replacing the seal ring should do the trick. NISSAN Some 2013 Nissan Altima owners may notice a drumming from the right strut tower when making a turn at 15 m.p.h. In T.S.B. 12 090 issued on Oct. 8, Nissan said the noise was caused by a problem with the right front strut coil spring. Replacing the spring should limit percussion to the infotainment center. VOLVO Some models may leak oil from an unused bolt hole in the engine. In T.S.B. TJ26765 issued on Oct. 2, Volvo said the trouble in 2012 13 S60 models was caused by an unused bolt hole. Sealing the hole with a proper bolt should stop the drip.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater. 'A SOLDIER'S PLAY' at the American Airlines Theater (previews start on Dec. 27; opens on Jan. 21). Charles Fuller's 1981 play, about a murder at a Louisiana army base, makes its Broadway debut. Kenny Leon's production stars David Alan Grier, Blair Underwood and Jerry O'Connell. "What Mr. Fuller has written," Frank Rich wrote in a review of the original production, "is a relentless investigation into the complex, sometimes cryptic pathology of hate." 212 719 1300, roundabouttheatre.org Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. 'DERREN BROWN: SECRET' at the Cort Theater (closes on Jan. 4). New Yorkers' secrets will be a bit safer now that this evening by Derren Brown, the English magician and mentalist, ends its Broadway run. "Every time I visit the dapper Mr. Brown," Ben Brantley wrote, "I leave in a lighter, less polluted mood brainwashed in the most positive sense of the term." 212 239 6200, derrenbrownsecret.com 'A CHRISTMAS CAROL' at the Lyceum Theater (closes on Jan. 5). Jack Thorne's often delicious adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic, directed by Matthew Warchus, will be packing up its chocolate chip cookies and oranges. "While retaining the jolliness and sentimentality associated with some 170 years' worth of stage versions," Ben Brantley wrote, "Thorne and Warchus have polished the story's social conscience to a restored brightness." 212 239 6200, achristmascarolbroadway.com	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Amid Bruce Springsteen's huge songwriting catalog, "Western Stars" is a side trip in place and time: a homage to a bygone pop era and a return to one of his recurring fascinations the present day American West as envisioned and, in the early 1990s, inhabited by a native New Jerseyan. It's not an album courting new young fans or claiming any 2019 zeitgeist. It's more like a speculative alternate history: What if Springsteen's music had taken a very different direction at the start? "Western Stars" arrives following the explicit autobiography and starkly staged sincerity of "Springsteen on Broadway," even though it was in the works before those performances. Instead of trying to extend that revealing tour de force, the new album veers elsewhere; it's an experiment in genre and narratives. Most (and perhaps all) of the songs are other people's stories, not Springsteen's own. In them, the West California along with Arizona and Montana can be a promise of open spaces and second chances. But more often, the western horizon is the end of the line, where Springsteen's characters find themselves alone with their regrets. The music itself is a kind of character study. It harks back to an early 1970s pop style that Springsteen now 69, whose debut album appeared in 1973 had nothing to do with at the time. "Western Stars" revisits a sound that found a place in Los Angeles studios particularly in Laurel Canyon in the late 1960s and early 1970s and in Nashville as a means to get country singers onto pop radio by making country music "countrypolitan." The era's elaborate productions the sound of performers like Glen Campbell, Harry Nilsson, Charlie Rich and the Mamas and the Papas enfolded pristinely recorded acoustic guitars and keyboards, understated drums and mere whispers of country style pedal steel guitar into lofty orchestral arrangements. At the time, it could turn corny and overwrought. In 2019, however, the style is a direct repudiation of current pop: smooth and liquid rather than rhythmic and sparse, and relying largely on acoustic, physical instruments (though on Springsteen's album, a few synthesizers slip in). Those early 1970s productions were unapologetically decorous, premeditated, luxurious and grown up. Yet often, in songs like Skeeter Davis's "The End of the World" or Campbell's "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," the plush orchestral pop hits of the 1960s and 1970s cushioned sorrow and solitude. They were worlds away from the turbocharged bar band that would become Springsteen's E Street Band, and they were clearly aiming for the middle of the road, not the fast lane. The craftsmanship in those studio efforts was as self effacing as it was substantial; the hired musicians were intended to serve the song, not to be noticed. As a lifelong student of American popular music, Springsteen clearly noticed. On "Western Stars," a few songs "Tucson Train," "Sundown," "Stones" sound like the E Street Band could be swapped in for the orchestra. But Springsteen strives to meet his chosen idiom more than halfway. He wrote songs that thrive on the swells and undulations of orchestral drama, and he sings with long breathed phrases that aren't exactly crooning he's not built for that but that set out to sustain more than they exhort. One of the centerpieces of "Western Stars" is "Chasin' Wild Horses." Its narrator did something awful in his youth, then left home to lose himself as a cowboy, chasing wild horses in Montana for the Bureau of Land Management, sometimes shouting a lost love's name to an empty echo. Its guitar picking intro bears an odd, doubtless coincidental, resemblance to the Lady Gaga Bradley Cooper hit "Shallow," but its gathering impact comes from its expansive arrangement, which opens and deepens around his voice like an endless prairie. Amid Springsteen's songwriting catalog, "Western Stars" is a side trip in place and time. The arc of the album Springsteen still treats an album as a whole moves from hope to desperation to elegy. The album begins with "Hitch Hikin'," whose footloose narrator easily gets ride after ride (including one from a "gear head in a souped up '72," to pin down the era). Next is "Wayfarer," proclaiming chronic wanderlust as strings, horns, glockenspiel, women's voices and even castanets arrive to cheer him onward. But as usual for Springsteen, "Western Stars" doesn't aim for comfort. Like his California centered album from 1995, "The Ghost of Tom Joad," its songs depict people who usually go unnoticed and who have little left to lose. The title song, "Western Stars," is told by an aging actor once a star of westerns who is still working, picking up women and occasionally getting recognized: "Once I was shot by John Wayne," he sings. "That one scene's bought me a thousand drinks." Many of the album's characters are men trying to lose themselves in physical labor, to sweat out memories of a love that they failed to hold onto. "Hard work'll clear your mind and body/The hard sun will burn out the pain," Springsteen sings in "Tucson Train," and that's one of the few songs on the album that anticipates a happy ending. In "Drive Fast (The Stuntman)," amid keening strings that recall "Wichita Lineman," the singer is a stuntman itemizing his broken bones and scars, reminiscing about a romance on a B movie set. And in "There Goes My Miracle," there's only the barest hint of a back story behind the loss: just an orchestral crescendo and a leaping melody, stately and bereft. By the end of the album, the possibilities of escape and renewal have long since faded away. "Hello Sunshine" is both the album's first single and its summation. The sound is cozy: major chords, a light beat like a cruising train. But Springsteen sings about how empty the endless road ahead had become: "Miles to go is miles away," he warns, and his refrain is actually a plea: "Hello sunshine, won't you stay?" The rhythm guitar is a pleasant rustle, the pedal steel guitar lends a golden glow and the strings are a warm bath. Yet as soothing as they are, they're nowhere near enough to make things right.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
"The Old Guard" could just as well have been called "The New Blood," since that's what it tries to pump into the weary superhero genre, with a reasonable degree of success and quite a lot of, well, blood. With the familiar movie studio franchises in lockdown, Netflix has the opportunity to introduce a new squad of specially empowered warriors, drawn from the pages of Greg Rucka's graphic novel series, brought to life by the director Gina Prince Bythewood and set loose against an evil tech bro big pharma C.E.O. and his heavily armed minions. The fighters led by the fearless, furious Andy (Charlize Theron) don't have fancy costumes or alter egos, and they all share the same superpower, which is not dying. Or not staying dead. When those minions hit them with automatic rifle barrages, Andy and her colleagues fall down and bleed, but then they jump up again, wounds quickly fading, to finish off their surprised attackers. Andy is the boss because she's been doing this the longest since antiquity, when she went by Andromache. The others include Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli), lovers who met cute on opposite sides of the Crusades, and Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), who joined up during the Napoleonic Wars. Much of "The Old Guard," which gently clears a path for possible sequels, has to do with the initiation of the newest member of the team, a young United States Marine named Nile Freeman (KiKi Layne). There have been a few others over the centuries. One thing Nile learns, as she struggles to understand her immortality, is that it comes with some fine print. Not a stake through the heart vampire escape clause, but something more subtle and philosophical. Time comes for everyone, sooner or later, and Andy's crew lives in the shadow of both perpetual loss they are doomed to outlive anyone they might care about and constant uncertainty. They are powerful, but also vulnerable. Which is a good look nowadays. Nobody needs arrogant, swaggering heroes, and the tone of hard boiled melancholy that Theron in particular sets is welcome. Like a gunslinger in a certain kind of western, Andy is having doubts about her vocation, wondering how much fight she has left in her and whether her efforts have been in vain. The world, she bitterly notes, hasn't gotten much better, and it's not always possible to tell the good guys and the bad guys apart. She and the others see themselves as a kind of nongovernmental humanitarian intervention force, though what they mostly do is kill people. This contradiction bothers Nile, and represents an ethical circle that "The Old Guard" doesn't quite square. It's nice to hear about the helpful things these immortals have done, but what we really want to see them do is throw punches, swing axes, break bones and blow stuff up. Prince Bythewood obliges, keeping the action fast and fierce and avoiding C.G.I. heavy, overdone set pieces. She is a filmmaker who never condescends to her material, but whatever the genre romantic comedy ("Love Basketball"), coming of age story ("The Secret Life of Bees") or show business melodrama ("Beyond the Lights") her movies are anchored in humane, shrewd curiosity about the people they depict. In this case, the emotional axis is the uneasy mentor protege bond between Andy and Nile. Andy is wise, but also weary, in danger of losing the sense of purpose that has sustained her for who knows how many years. Nile, for her part, has been drafted into a cause she didn't choose and doesn't understand, and she wavers between self confidence and panic. Layne, a standout in Barry Jenkins's "If Beale Street Could Talk," is a quiet, intense presence, with a knack for the kind of small gesture an eye roll here, a shrug or a grimace there that Prince Bythewood has a knack for noticing. The story Rucka wrote the script doesn't feel wildly original, but it's good enough to activate a lively interest in the characters. An ex C.I.A. guy, Copley (Chiwetel Ejiofor), recruits the team for a mission that turns out to be a trap. That pharma boss, Merrick (Harry Melling), whose hooded sport coats are perfect signifiers of 21st century rich guy awfulness, wants to harvest immortal DNA for new medicines. The do gooder veneer he puts on his megalomania fools nobody, except maybe Copley. You do hope that the anonymous gunmen Merrick employs have decent health insurance. And also that future installments will build on the promise of this beginning, which suggests all kinds of possible developments. There's a lot of back story to cover, and also various future conflicts within the old guard and between them and the rest of the world. I'm not usually someone to hope for sequels, but I guess if you live long enough ... The Old Guard Rated R. Plenty of killing. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. Watch on Netflix.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
James stared down "the prospect of persistent existential disillusionment," though the warm tone of his work belies this description, and often framed experience in a Buddhist like perspective: "If one looks carefully," as Kaag puts it, "suffering is not the exception but the rule." Can we actively reduce this suffering? James thought so, or that at least it would truly benefit us to act as if we could. "My first act of free will," he wrote, "shall be to believe in free will." Perhaps the reason James remains beloved by so many readers more than a century after his death is that his pragmatism often shaded into self help. He believed in the power of positive thinking, in bucking up; he counseled action, and not just philosophizing, in the face of uncertainty; he may have even, from time to time, turned his frown upside down. But he expressed all of his (and our) struggles and their potential solutions in the smartest possible ways, and never pretended that a revised mood was a settled state of affairs. He knew that living is a continual process, and that perhaps the best we can hope for is just enough therapy to make it to the next crisis. "Philosophically speaking, James attempted something very hard, maybe impossible, at least for one person," Kaag writes, in one of his characteristically elegant explanations. "He wanted to craft a philosophy that was absolutely honest to the twisted, often contradictory, facts of life, but also to the desire that many of us have to transcend them. In his words, he wanted to provide a way of thinking between the 'tough minded' scientist and the 'tender minded' idealist, preserving what is valuable about both sides." James conducted this project with a quality that Kaag calls "epistemic humility," a concept that readers steeped in the rhetoric of 2020 might need defined. It means that you don't know it all. And that whatever you do know might be more provisional than you think. One of Kaag's previous books, "American Philosophy," was a charming, brainy and equally personal account of time he spent reveling in a philosopher's remarkable and nearly abandoned private library in New England. The first part of that book spent considerable time on James, and a small number of its sentences reappear verbatim here. But if Kaag has borrowed some of his own planks, "Sick Souls, Healthy Minds" is a new house, a more modest and specific structure than his earlier works.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Leading the restaurant pack is the retro chic and market driven Jacinto, headed by Lucia Soria, an alumna of the famed Argentine chef Francis Mallmann. On a recent afternoon in Montevideo, a young couple approached the counter at Futuro Refuerzos, a snug sandwich shop that features artisanal breads, house made spreads and locally sourced meats. The woman was wearing a wide brimmed felt halt and carried a vintage leather handbag; the man sported tousled curls, forearm tattoos and skinny jeans. There was nothing remarkable about this scene stylish 20 somethings ordering gourmet sandwiches in a self consciously rustic space except that it unfolded in a destination that has seemed immune to hipsterdom. Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, is almost invariably described as old fashioned, nostalgia tinged and slow paced. But in the past few years, an energetic cadre of entrepreneurs with social media proficiency and a keen awareness of global trends has begun to breathe fresh life into this traditionally sleepy South American city. Most are design and trend savvy millennials who are opening up restaurants and boutiques, organizing street festivals and supper clubs, and daring to stand out in a society that has typically rewarded modesty. "Thanks in part to social media, young Uruguayans have a global mind set and are very motivated," said Monica Zanocchi, the founder of a popular fashion and lifestyle blog called Couture. "There are a lot of creative professionals entering the work force, and since established companies can't absorb all of this new talent, they end up becoming entrepreneurs." Futuro Refuerzos is led by Fermin Solana, a food writer and rock musician who grew frustrated with the lack of options in Montevideo. "There was nowhere to eat a decent sandwich beyond the old places that make chivitos," he said, referring to the traditional steak sandwiches that are offered in neighborhood joints or local fast food chains. "I looked at Santiago and Lima, where the sandwiches are incredible, and decided to take a risk." Soon after opening in late 2015, Futuro Refuerzos had garnered a following thanks to creations like "gol," handmade pita filled with spiced meatballs, sweet blood sausage and red cabbage. Mr. Solana is part of a group of young restaurateurs and chefs fueling the city's small but growing foodie circuit, which right now includes over a dozen restaurants, cafes and specialty stores (until recently, Montevidean epicures spoke of living in a culinary wasteland, so this is a noticeable improvement). There is Estrecho, a tiny restaurant in the historic district with simple decor belying a sophisticated lunchtime menu prepared by Cali Diemarch, a chef trained in the United States who invents his daily dishes on the fly, such as a deconstructed chivito made with filet mignon, poached egg, caramelized pancetta and fried onions. La Pasionaria, a concept store and restaurant on a quiet nearby street, recently welcomed a new young chef, Luciana Fia, who makes pasta, ice cream and other food by hand, using fresh, local ingredients. At Sucre Sale Bistro, a casual spot near downtown, on the back patio of the Alliance Francaise de Montevideo, Florencia Ibarra often sneaks refined dishes like rabbit in mustard sauce with boulangere potatoes into her unfussy Gallic influenced menu. Leading the pack is the retro chic and market driven Jacinto, headed by Lucia Soria, an alumna of the famed Argentine chef Francis Mallmann. Ms. Soria frequently appears on television, participates in food festivals like Degusto and headlines as the top guest chef in supper clubs like Mesabrava. "Finally, we have good places to eat, good live music and a generation of people who are breaking away from the old molds," Mr. Solana said. "I think the city's lighting up." Montevideo's new vibe is closely linked to fashion and interior design, as seen in a surge of shops selling locally made clothes, accessories and home accents. Last year, one of the most dynamic new labels, Rotunda, unveiled a sleek multistory boutique in the Punta Carretas neighborhood, complete with its own photography studio, where the owners, Kevin Jakter and Sofia Dominguez, showcase their expanding line of minimalist women's clothing, eyewear, shoes, and jewelry.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Regardless, we can probably assume that the Mt. Hood ex machina wasn't intended to be entirely random. Perhaps it's a manifestation of all the anger on display earlier in the episode. Malcolm punches Ramon for throwing Hailey out of the treehouse. Duc finally unloads on Greg about the "moral crime" of sleeping with an Asian prostitute when he knows Duc's mother was also an Asian prostitute. Greg calls out Duc for sleeping around in Vancouver when he professes to be celibate. (Did you find it likely that Greg would have heard gossip about his son picking up random Canadian women in bars? I did not.) When Navid tries to downgrade his relationship with Kristen back to a friendship, she blows up at him. On the air at a local morning show, Audrey dresses down Steve for using the Empathy Initiative to cover for his company's ties to child labor. Ashley is upset that her prospective employer sees her as a "diversity hire" and exasperated when Malcolm tries to convince her to take the job anyway. In the episode's most maudlin story line, the cause of Farid's repressed trauma finally comes into focus. Made to flog himself in a public square, as a child, for defacing a poster of the Ayatollah and then beaten to a pulp by his mentally ill mother, a pious Muslim who believed Farid's irreverent act had gotten his father killed he was rescued and taken to America by his uncle, Amir. Decades later, deep in the throes of his own mental illness, he tearfully flogs himself out of guilt over his father's death and his mother's decades old unanswered telephone calls. He won't listen when his wife and son assure him that he's not responsible for what happened to his parents. Afraid for herself and their child, Layla takes Navid and leaves. Farid finds himself at Imam Chuck's door, the back of his white jacket stained with blood in the shape of angel wings. There's nothing subtle about the symbolism on "Here and Now," and that's not necessarily a bad thing. But not even an actor as talented as Peter Macdissi, who plays Farid and is an executive producer of the show, can pull off material this overwrought. If Farid's bloody search for meaning in Islam is a figurative ascent to heaven, then there's something hellish about Ramon's pursuit of the man on fire. Because he's at the top of a nearby hill when the eruption happens, he has to descend to the foot of Mt. Hood (in a mask so flimsy he's surely inhaling all types of harmful gases) for his climactic encounter with the flaming figure. When they lock eyes, dozens of wispy humanoid shadows begin to float upward on the ashy ground behind Ramon. Then, the burning man walks away and Ramon strides toward the volcano. It's a cryptic final shot, made even more ambiguous by the deceptively upbeat but actually quite dark Brian Eno track "Baby's on Fire," which plays over the closing credits. Still, there's a cathartic mood to this conclusion that mirrors many characters' journeys from anger to relative peacefulness late in the episode. Duc turns to Carmen, whose intuitive powers begin to heal his nervous stomach, as they embark on a union that could become his first healthy sexual relationship. Kristen and Navid reconcile before he leaves town. Greg seems strangely comforted by his visit with Ike. The imam literally helps to heal Farid's wounds.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
When Mr. Fernandez, who was sworn in as president in December, meets the pope at the Vatican on Friday, they are expected to discuss a recurrent problem: how to save Argentina from another debt default. The president hopes to kick off his relationship with the pope with the right foot, even despite his pledge to push for the legalization of abortion. In his first six weeks in office, Mr. Fernandez has used the term "solidarity" to define his government's incipient economic program. This concept, one of the pillars of the Roman Catholic Church's Social Doctrine, is highlighted by the pope in pastoral speeches and Vatican documents, including those that talk about economics. For Mr. Fernandez, so far, solidarity has meant asking wealthy Argentines to pay more taxes, in part to finance an emergency food program to alleviate extreme poverty. The pope, meanwhile, is increasingly placing the global economy at the top of his agenda. In March he will host young economists and activists in Assisi, Italy, at an event called "The Economy of Francesco," named for the 12th century St. Francis but also, indirectly, for himself. Francis says that the event will seek to promote "a different kind of economy: one that brings life not death, one that is inclusive and not exclusive." The Assisi event coincides with the March 31 deadline Mr. Fernandez has imposed on himself to complete the country's thorny negotiations with its creditors. What he wants from Argentina's debt holders is simple: more time for repayments, to give the economy space to recover after almost two years of recession. In other words, solidarity, a concept mostly unheard of in financial market circles. In their quest, the pope and Mr. Fernandez share a link in academia: Joseph Stiglitz, the Columbia economist and Nobel laureate who has for years theorized about how to improve sovereign debt negotiation. Last May, Mr. Stiglitz and the pope discussed ways to "create new economic thinking" for a "social economy." A young research assistant for Mr. Stiglitz, an Argentine named Martin Guzman, also attended that meeting. In 2016, Mr. Stiglitz and Mr. Guzman were among the authors of a book called "Too Little, Too Late," which proposed a new framework for sovereign debt restructuring. Mr. Guzman is now Mr. Fernandez's economy minister and has the difficult task of selling solidarity to the country's bondholders and the I.M.F. It is improbable that the pope can perform the miracle of turning creditors' cash gluttony into altruism overnight, but Argentina's debt recidivism can nonetheless use the moral patina of Francis' progressive economic language, especially as Mr. Fernandez tries to garner support for the country's case at the I.M.F. board. While God may not play dice, the pope excels at playing his cards. Less than a week after his meeting with Mr. Fernandez, the Vatican is holding a seminar on "New Forms of Solidarity Toward Fraternal Inclusion, Integration and Innovation" that lists Mr. Stiglitz, Mr. Guzman and, notably, the I.M.F. managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, among its speakers. Argentine pundits have taken the meeting as evidence that a new "Hand of God," only this time lawful, might again act in the country's benefit. 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
During the coronavirus pandemic, location information has shown where people are following social distancing rules, and where they have traveled enabling analysis of potential hot spots. The Times has used this data to show that people from low income areas were less likely to be able to shelter at home than people from high income locations and to demonstrate how the virus may have spiraled out of control in the United States. How would I know if my data is collected? It can be difficult for people to keep track of whether and how their data is being gathered. Android based devices and iPhones both require apps to ask users to enable location services before collecting the information, but the explanations people see when prompted to give permission are often incomplete or misleading. An app may tell users that granting access to their location will help them get weather alerts, but not mention that the data will be sold. That disclosure is often buried in a densely worded privacy policy. In a recent test of five apps that provide information for Cuebiq's data set, the disclosures indicated that the data would be shared for advertising and analysis, and users were directed to information on limiting that sharing. But some apps made it easier than others to stop the data collection. And in a test last year by New York Times opinion journalists of an app that sent data to Cuebiq, the initial prompt for the user to allow access to location information did not mention all the ways it would be used. That app later changed its messaging. Even with such disclosures, it may not be clear to users how frequently someone's information is collected and what it can show. In Europe and California, users can request their data. Elsewhere, policies vary by company. You can request your data from Cuebiq or ask the company to delete your data regardless of where you live. Cuebiq ties your data to your phone's so called advertising ID, which is used by marketers and others to differentiate phones from each other, and will send you the information associated with that ID. To prevent people from getting data on others' IDs, the company requires you to download an app that verifies the number and then makes the request. You can then delete the app without affecting your request. The app is available for both Android and iOS. How can I opt out? If you want to prevent Cuebiq from collecting your data, the easiest way is to disable the advertising ID on your phone. If you disable it, Cuebiq will no longer keep track of your device. These instructions provide a good overview for disabling the ID on different Android phones. Apple provides a guide for iPhones here.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Wellness isn't a concept that seems synonymous with the ever growing hassles of flying, but that could finally be changing. Some airlines are embracing the idea of healthier flying, offering calorie conscious menus and new exercise videos. According to Beth McGroarty, research director for The Global Wellness Institute, a nonprofit organization for the wellness industry, even as seats shrink and flights get more crowded, many carriers want air travel to be more bearable (and even enjoyable). They believe wellness is the way to do that. "It's part of the larger wellness movement happening in the travel industry," she said. And, unlike the usual trend of amping up onboard amenities for only their first and business class customers and stripping them away for passengers in economy, Ms. McGroarty said that no passengers are left out in this recent wellness push. "Wellness in the air, in many instances, is more democratic," she said. All United Airlines and JetBlue customers have access to the popular digital meditation service Headspace as part of their in flight entertainment. JetBlue's Headspace content includes videos that address travel topics, such as fear of flying and difficulty sleeping upright. Among international carriers, Swiss Air offers Headspace onboard long haul flights, and British Airways has a Well Being channel on its in flight entertainment systems that includes meditation and stretching exercises. Also, the Hong Kong based carrier Cathay Pacific recently launched six in flight videos, called "Travel Well With Yoga," in a partnership with Pure Yoga, the popular yoga studio chain. Each video is between five and 20 minutes, and feature yoga and meditation exercises such as hip and back stretches and deep breathing. American Airlines started prioritizing wellness after conducting customer surveys and running focus groups with fliers about what they want. "We learned that our passengers care a lot about their well being," said Nick Richards, the company's director of customer experience. According to American's research, travelers wanted to sleep more soundly in the skies, and to that end, the airline recently tapped the mattress and bedding brand Casper to design pillows, blankets and other products which are supposed to help with a more comfortable sleep. Premium economy passengers receive a lumbar pillow and a soft cotton blanket while the Casper amenities for international first and business class fliers include mattress pads, pillows, blankets and pajamas. Mental well being and sleep aside, airlines are also incorporating wellness onboard by offering healthier food and drink options. Turkish Airlines, for instance, has a new Fly Good Feel Good campaign that includes a menu of herbal teas such as one with rooibos, sage and lavender to help relieve stress and promote sleep. Another is an energizing blend with mate, mint and ginger. Children are offered a traditional Turkish drink with milk, carob powder and date syrup that's meant to strengthen the bones. In January, TAP Air Portugal tapped five Michelin starred Portuguese chefs to create low calorie Portuguese influenced entrees for its business class passengers. Those entrees will also be offered to economy passengers starting this summer, said Joel Fragata, head of the airline's in flight products. Jose Avillez, of the two Michelin starred Lisbon restaurant Belcanto, crafted a stone bass in tomato and onion stew, along with coriander and basil potatoes for TAP's fliers while Henrique Sa Pessoa, of the Michelin starred Alma, also in Lisbon, came up with a lemongrass and ginger chicken curry. "We want to showcase our delicious cuisine but do it with health in mind because people today are more and more health conscious," Mr. Fragata said. A handful of domestic carriers, too, are encouraging mindful eating. Dr. Charles Platkin, a nutrition and public health advocate, and the director of the Hunter College NYC Food Policy Center, conducts an annual airline food study where he analyzes the economy food of every domestic carrier. In his latest study, released last December, he declared that Delta Air Lines is a leader "by a long shot" in its commitment to improve "its food in terms of health and consciousness." Dr. Platkin's analysis found that Delta's meals, snack boxes and individual snacks have an average of 480 calories, a decrease from the year before, at 527 calories. Delta also frequently updates its food choices including its free snacks. Almonds, a pretzel snack mix and a KIND Dark Chocolate Chunk Bar are among the recent offerings, and all are less than 200 calories and gluten free. To purchase, fliers can choose from a menu that includes wraps from Luvo, a company whose mission is to create nutrition focused meals. In commending other carries in their commitment to wellness, Dr. Platkin also called out JetBlue's newly available AmuUp box, packed with gluten free crackers, hummus, olives, almonds and a fruit energy bar. Tamara Young, a spokeswoman for the airline, said that adding the box to its onboard menu lineup is one of the ways the airline is weaving wellness into "its customer experience."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
LOS ANGELES What will happen to Sony Pictures? That has been a question in Hollywood since Kenichiro Yoshida took over as Sony Corporation's chief executive in April. Unlike his two predecessors, Mr. Yoshida, a number cruncher based in Japan and known for jettisoning underperforming businesses, seemed to have little affinity for the company's also ran movie and television division, which is best known as the home of Spider Man and "Seinfeld." Surely this would be the moment for Sony to get rid of the midsize studio especially since Rupert Murdoch had just decided to sell his bigger 20th Century Fox to Disney, having concluded it did not have the scale needed to compete with moviedom insurgents like Netflix, Apple and Amazon. Surprise. When Mr. Yoshida takes the stage on Monday at the CES trade show in Las Vegas, he plans to use the high profile platform to showcase Sony movies, television shows and music. He plans to telegraph that not only will his Sony not exit any of these businesses, it will make them a priority as his predecessors have not. In particular, Mr. Yoshida wants to make better use of the company's online PlayStation Network as a way to bring Sony movies, shows and music directly to consumers. PlayStation Network, introduced in 2006, now has more than 80 million monthly active users. "I want to convey the message that Sony is a creative entertainment company," Mr. Yoshida said by phone from Tokyo before leaving for Nevada. That description amounts to a significant shift. Sony has long been seen as a consumer electronics superpower first and a Hollywood entity second. Even so, Sony is in no way leaning away from its portfolio of technology and consumer products. At CES, as the Las Vegas trade show is known, Sony is expected to showcase image sensors for cars, new audio products, ultra ultra high definition televisions and robotics. Thomas E. Rothman, Sony's movie chief, will take the stage after Mr. Yoshida to talk up the company's turnaround in film, bringing along Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, producers of the studio's recent "Spider Man: Into the Spider Verse." But Mr. Rothman's remarks will be peppered with references to how Sony cameras have helped the studio its tech breakthroughs bolstering its creative endeavors. Sony's entertainment empire has its share of challenges, of course. After buying out partners, Sony has outright control of the world's largest catalog of music publishing assets. But the recording unit had a soft 2018 in the hit department. Apple has been poaching Sony television and film executives to work on its coming streaming service. And major Sony made television shows like "Better Call Saul" and "The Blacklist" are aging. Efforts to find replacements have mostly fizzled, in part because the highest paying TV networks are ordering more shows from in house suppliers. As a whole, however, Sony's entertainment businesses are stronger than they have been in memory in particular the film division, which suffered a devastating cyberattack in 2014. Mr. Rothman and Mr. Vinciquerra have turned movies into an unexpected engine by cutting costs and focusing more intently on all audience "tent pole" fantasies like "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle," which took in 962 million worldwide in 2017. To dropped jaws in Hollywood, "Venom" generated 856 million in ticket sales late last year. Sony has a parade of big budget sequels on the way "Men in Black: International" arrives in June and the studio is aggressively mining the rights it holds to Marvel characters in the Spider Man comics family. To that end, movies based on Morbius, Black Cat and Silver Sable are in the works; the Sinister Six could be Sony's answer to "The Avengers." Sony is also considering making animated television shows based on characters introduced in "Spider Man: Into the Spider Verse," which has collected 276 million at the box office. Now that Fox has been sold, only Disney and Sony have rights to make Marvel related film and television content. And Marvel characters are popular with the PlayStation Network crowd. One reason that Mr. Yoshida is pushing for more collaboration: Marvel's Spider Man, a 60 game, set a record for Sony in September by selling 3.3 million copies in its first three days of release.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Tom Brady's Patriots easily dispatched the Los Angeles Chargers, but after the game he wanted to focus on his team's status as underdogs. The divisional round of the N.F.L. playoffs has come and gone, confirming some things we knew the Patriots are devastatingly good at home, the Chiefs play football like it's a video game, etc. while revealing some new wrinkles for both the four losing teams and the victors headed to the conference championship games. As we look ahead to next weekend, we can look back at what we learned from this week's games. None Taysom Hill is more than a decoy. The Saints' backup quarterback was called on primarily for short runs this season. On three plays in his team's win over Philadelphia, the former Brigham Young star showed he is capable of far more than that. His 4 yard run on a fake punt set up the Saints' first touchdown, and later in the game he very nearly caught a 46 yard touchdown pass from Drew Brees. And his arcing, 46 yard touchdown pass to Alvin Kamara in the third quarter may have been overturned because of a holding penalty, but the ease with which Hill hit Kamara in stride on the deep throw is something defensive coordinators surely will not forget. None Tom Brady can still summon that underdog spirit. After demolishing the Los Angeles Chargers, 41 28, the Patriots quarterback, who is about to appear in his eighth consecutive A.F.C. championship game, told reporters that no one believes in his team. "I know everyone thinks we suck and can't win any games," he said. Julian Edelman, who passed Reggie Wayne for the second most career postseason catches by a receiver, concurred, saying, "We're the underdog this week. I'm going to jump on that train and roll with it." None C.J. Anderson was a terrific pickup for the Rams. The six year veteran was cut by the Carolina Panthers on Nov. 13, then tried and failed get a spot on the lowly Oakland Raiders, and eventually landed in Los Angeles in Week 16 as an insurance policy behind Todd Gurley. In three games for the Rams, including their 30 22 win over the Dallas Cowboys on Saturday, the 27 year old Anderson has rushed for a combined 422 yards and four touchdowns. That Anderson had 123 yards against the Cowboys even though Gurley was back on the field spoke volumes about the Rams' faith in their backup. None The Chiefs are more than just Patrick Mahomes. The second year quarterback is the justified focus of any defensive effort against Kansas City after his 50 touchdown regular season, but the Chiefs demolished the Indianapolis Colts, 31 13 without Mahomes throwing a touchdown pass. He did rush for a score, and the Chiefs got three other rushing touchdowns from three different players, including one in which Damien Williams juked a pair of Colts defenders nearly out of their shoes. None There is a limit to Nick Foles's magic. The Eagles' backup quarterback came into the game with a 4 0 record in the playoffs over the last two seasons, and even had people debating how Philadelphia would handle things between Foles and Carson Wentz if Foles went on another extended playoff run. He started almost flawlessly on Sunday, but when he got the ball back with his team down by just 6 points in the fourth quarter, a pass of his sailed through Alshon Jeffery's hands and into the waiting arms of the Saints' Marshon Lattimore, ending the Eagles's hopes. As so much of the Foles's story line relies on things inexplicably working out for the quarterback, that's the type of play that will end the debates quickly. None Philip Rivers still hates facing Tom Brady. The Chargers' quarterback has had a fine career that could likely land him in the Hall of Fame, but he has never beaten Brady. That point was again driven home emphatically on Sunday, as New England's defenders had Rivers flailing right away, while Brady calmly picked apart the Los Angeles defense. None The Cowboys live and die by Ezekiel Elliott. The superstar running back had an uncharacteristically poor game against the Los Angeles Rams on Saturday, carrying the ball 20 times for just 47 yards. In 28 career regular season games in which Elliott has carried the ball at least 20 times, the Cowboys have gone 22 6, but to find playoff success, Dallas may need to find some more offensive balance. As it stands, they are 1 2 in the playoffs since drafting Elliott. None Darius Leonard is a monster. Indianapolis was eliminated by Kansas City, but Leonard, the Colts' rookie linebacker, got to show off how much ground he can cover, generating 14 tackles and recovering a fumble in the losing effort. If the Colts' offense gets fully healthy, and the defense can put more pieces around Leonard, Indianapolis could be a dominant team in the near future. None Expect some offense: The four surviving teams ranked first through fourth in points scored this season.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Lithoredo abatanica is an organism with an unusual appetite: This creature eats stone. And when it excretes, what comes out is sand, the leftovers of a still mysterious digestion process. The mollusk, unearthed from the bottom of a river in the Philippines, was introduced this week by an international group of scientists in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. It is a shipworm, a group of burrowing animals related to clams, but so different from known examples that it is both a new species and genus. Shipworms are usually known for their habit of eating wood. It's right there in the name: They use their shells, attached to one end of their bodies, as chewing devices to burrow into and consume ship bottoms, docks and any other submerged wood . The behavior has made them the plague of mariners past and present, and in recent times, they have even sampled the delights of at least one New York City pier. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Wood eating shipworms fascinate scientists because they digest pulverized wood with the help of symbiotic bacteria that live in their gills. The bacteria manufacture an array of enzymes and other substances, and studying them and finding new shipworms may prove helpful in the search for new antibiotics, a subject of interest to the scientists behind the new paper.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Last summer, there was no escaping "Welcome to the Party," Pop Smoke's breakout single. It was a terrific kind of claustrophobia. The beat is tense and ornery, and Pop Smoke, with a voice as soothing as industrial machinery, was a lordly narrator of impending mayhem. Rattling car windows, the song was a reminder of how New York hip hop once sounded, and dominated. Booming out of nightclub speakers, it was an incitement to dance floor insurrection. "Welcome to the Party" was the anchor of Pop Smoke's debut album, "Meet the Woo," but the real emotional core was "PTSD." On an album full of tossed off threats and rowdy bluster, a soundtrack for rumbles in dark basements, here was a song about the cost of all that conflict. "My PTSD starting to kick in so I gotta get high," he rapped, before detailing all the things he needed to escape from. On other songs, he sounded ready for war; on this one, he sounded like he'd just come home from one: "I spent 20 on my wrist and 20 on a chain/I be spoiling myself so I can ease the pain." And yet there is no ease to be found. Pop Smoke, who was killed at the age of 20 early Wednesday morning at a home in Los Angeles, was at that ascendant place in his career just after local renown bubbles up into something bigger and more promising. The place where new opportunities compete for space with old tensions. He'd just released his second album, "Meet the Woo, Vol. 2," which debuted at No. 7 on the Billboard album chart, and he was evolving from the most charismatic figure in the Brooklyn drill scene one of the most vibrant in hip hop right now into a genuine breakout star, not bound by place or style. It's been some time since Brooklyn has had a genuine hip hop prospect, certainly one who channeled the bruising energy of the 1990s. Melodists have run the genre for a decade now; Pop Smoke with a voice that recalled Lloyd Banks and DMX punched through that sweetness like a sneering heavyweight. In the wake of his success, other aspirants from the scene Smoove L, Fivio Foreign, Sheff G were beginning to draw wider notice. And Pop Smoke found himself spending more time outside of Brooklyn, a beloved new character getting a taste of how life looked from the Hollywood Hills. Part of the cruel logic of sudden fame is that it presents unanticipated hazards. Pop Smoke was killed in an apparent home invasion robbery; in the hours following his death, internet sleuths made plain how easy it was to track where he was staying in Los Angeles based on social media posts. Those posts were intended to be totems of triumph, emblems of the new life that his music was affording him. They also may have been a road map. "Where we come from, it ain't sweet," Pop Smoke told me, when I interviewed him last summer, about growing up in Canarsie, where gang life was omnipresent. He detailed a youth shaped by ambient dread about what may lay just around the corner. "I had a gun in school. I had guns in church," he said. "People was trying to kill me." His motivation, he said, came from the opportunity to provide some semblance of hope to children who "got to carry their guns to school because it ain't safe, but they still got to make sure they get they diploma 'cause they mom could be happy. I do it for them. That's me." When I spent time with him and his friends last summer, just as Pop Smoke was beginning to gain real attention outside of his neighborhood, there was still an air of wariness that hung over them. When they were approached in SoHo by an aggressive fan, everyone stiffened up just a bit while sizing up the potential threat. While driving out to Canarsie from Manhattan, he and his team drove quickly and defensively, speeding past other cars on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. But Pop Smoke also was basking in the attention. When clerks in a clothing store put on his music, he grinned wildly and talked to them like friends. When some teens in an Uber spotted him and began waving frantically, he rolled down the window and gave them a nod. And back in Canarsie, he sauntered around a crowded basketball tournament like a returning prince, swaddled by love. His ascent was not without hiccups, particularly in regards to law enforcement. In October, he was scheduled to perform at Rolling Loud in Queens the first local iteration of the important hip hop festival series. But the New York Police Department prevented him and a handful of other local acts from taking the stage, saying they "have been affiliated with recent acts of violence citywide." D.J.s at the festival that weekend spun Pop Smoke's music heavily in symbolic protest, to rapturous crowd response. Last weekend, he was advertised on the bill for a concert in Brooklyn that was celebrating the drill scene. But while other acts performed, Pop Smoke did not. That disruption at home seemingly only fueled his ascent everywhere else. Last month, he attended Paris Fashion Week, sitting front row at Off White, and was photographed alongside the designer Virgil Abloh. He recently completed his first movie role, as a charismatic basketball playing hooligan, in Eddie Huang's forthcoming film "Boogie." Even as he began to expand his musical approach on "Meet the Woo, Vol. 2," Pop Smoke was indisputably himself, his sandpaper voice and stop start flow immediately identifiable. He became an avatar of hip hop's turn from the polished back to the rugged. In recent months, he had collaborated with Nicki Minaj, Travis Scott, H.E.R., Quavo and more, exporting the particularities of Brooklyn's sound and importing others into it. Often, charisma is the Trojan horse that carries new sounds, styles or ideas into the mainstream. Pop Smoke, with a quick smile matched with cool menace, was a perfect ambassador. But he was hungry for what success had in store for him, the places it might take him. "I like learning new things and experiencing new things," he said. "You can't stay the same."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
LOS ANGELES Warner Bros. became part of the gun safety debate again on Tuesday when relatives and friends of those killed during the 2012 movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colo., sent a letter to the studio expressing disquiet over its coming R rated film "Joker." The 2012 shooting occurred during a midnight showing of the Warner superhero movie "The Dark Knight Rises." "Joker," which will arrive in theaters on Oct. 4, is a gritty character study of the title comic book villain directed by Todd Phillips and starring Joaquin Phoenix. The film has been celebrated by some critics, with Mr. Phoenix's performance as a violent, mentally ill loner singled out as Oscar worthy, and attacked as irresponsible by others because it drapes the character in heroic imagery. "When we learned that Warner Bros. was releasing a movie called 'Joker' that presents the character as a protagonist with a sympathetic origin story, it gave us pause," the letter said. "We want to be clear that we support your right to free speech and free expression," it continued. "But as anyone who has ever seen a comic book movie can tell you: With great power comes great responsibility. That's why we're calling on you to use your massive platform and influence to join us in our fight to build safer communities with fewer guns." In a statement, Warner noted that it had donated to victims of violence in the past, including those in Aurora, and that its parent company, AT T, had joined other companies in calling for bipartisan legislation to address gun violence. "At the same time, Warner Bros. believes that one of the functions of storytelling is to provoke difficult conversations around complex issues," the statement said. "Make no mistake: Neither the fictional character Joker nor the film is an endorsement of real world violence of any kind. It is not the intention of the film, the filmmakers or the studio to hold this character up as a hero." Box office analysts expect "Joker" to be a blockbuster, generating at least 80 million in opening weekend ticket sales in the United States and Canada. The Aurora killings are associated with the Joker character in the public consciousness, though he does not appear in "The Dark Knight Rises." It was initially widely reported and later debunked that the gunman, whose hair was dyed reddish orange, had told the police that he was the Joker. Historically, movie theater violence has been rare, given the vast number of attendees: 1.3 billion tickets were sold in the United States last year, according to the database Box Office Mojo. The debate about a link between movie violence and real events is a perennial one, however, with independent studies repeatedly finding no firm connection between the two. The letter, signed by five people and addressed to Ann Sarnoff, who took over as Warner's chief executive last month, concluded by pressing the studio to join companies like CVS and Walmart in more fully embracing gun safety. The letter asked Warner to end political contributions to candidates who take money from the National Rifle Association, to lobby for gun reform, and to give money to survivor funds and gun violence intervention programs. 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 are calling on you to be a part of the growing chorus of corporate leaders who understand that they have a social responsibility to keep us all safe," the letter said. Sandy Phillips, whose daughter was among the 12 killed in Aurora in 2012, signed the letter and spoke more pointedly in an interview. "If it's one person that is excited or encouraged to become violent from seeing something like that, then that's one too many," she said. "Who are we to say that somebody in that audience isn't a wannabe mass shooter and isn't encouraged by what he's seen onscreen?" Warner has been consistently daring in its handling of screen violence, going back to the 1930s with sharp edged gangster movies like "Little Caesar" and "The Public Enemy." The most contentious Warner entries include Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" (1971), which the director had pulled from theaters in Britain after it seemed to prompt copycat incidents; "Natural Born Killers" (1994), which generated headlines and a lawsuit for supposedly inspiring crimes similar to those committed by the film's protagonists; and "The Matrix" (1999), which became linked in the news media to the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado. Igor Volsky, executive director of the advocacy group Guns Down America, helped write the letter that was sent to Warner on Tuesday. He said in a telephone interview that he had not seen "Joker." He said the trailer and online reactions to festival screenings had prompted the letter. He added that he agreed with the studies that had shown no direct link between violence in movies and violence in the real world. "Everyone else in our peer countries see the same movies and play the same video games, yet we are the ones with the high rates of violence," he said. "The reason for that is that guns in America are way too easy to get. That is the source of the problem, and that's what we are asking companies to do: Help build safer communities with fewer guns."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
For several decades, Sumner M. Redstone ran his media empire with forceful, fiery and sometimes fear inducing resolve. Whether he was heatedly pursuing an acquisition or churning through chief executives, there was never much doubt about what he wanted. Now, however, Mr. Redstone, 93 and frail, is sequestered in his Beverly Hills mansion. He has not been seen publicly in more than a year. In conference calls with his companies, he remains silent for long periods, and a recent court case showed that his speech was erratic and his words sometimes incomprehensible. As a result, Mr. Redstone's wishes, currently at the center of a bitter legal dispute, are being conveyed to his corporate executives, and to the public, through a new team of representatives acting on his behalf as he reorganizes his 40 billion media empire. These new lieutenants are unknown to many of Mr. Redstone's longtime confidants at Viacom, the big entertainment company he controls. Their sudden appearance has become an issue in the challenge Viacom directors have mounted because of the recent changes at the top of his companies; some have questioned whether a new lawyer and a new spokesman acting on Mr. Redstone's behalf have even met with him, suggesting that they are actually acting at the behest of his daughter, Shari Redstone. In court filings, the directors asserted that the lawyer, Michael C. Tu, was "purporting to act" on Mr. Redstone's behalf. An opening hearing is scheduled on Tuesday in Massachusetts for a lawsuit challenging Mr. Redstone's competency and asserting that he has been manipulated by Ms. Redstone. Two crucial questions set the backdrop for the legal battle: Who is speaking for Mr. Redstone, and is he capable of conveying his wishes through them? The dispute centers on the abrupt and unexpected May 20 dismissals of Philippe P. Dauman, the chief executive of Viacom, and George S. Abrams, a Viacom director, from the trust that will control Mr. Redstone's companies after he dies or is declared incompetent. Mr. Dauman and Mr. Abrams were also dismissed from the board of National Amusements, the private theater chain through which Mr. Redstone controls Viacom and CBS. The moves were widely viewed as the first in a path that would lead to the firing of Mr. Dauman, who joined Mr. Abrams in filing a suit seeking to immediately block the actions. In new court filings on Monday, lawyers for Mr. Dauman and Mr. Abrams countered that the ratification was legally irrelevant because it is not permitted by the provisions of the trust. The trust allows only Mr. Redstone to remove trustees while he lives and has capacity, and does not allow for anyone else to remove trustees when he lacks capacity. "There is reason for this carefully crafted removal power: Mr. Redstone wanted to make sure that neither his estranged daughter nor any family member would be able to remove independent trustees and thereby dominate the trust," the court document states. Even before the court determines whether Mr. Redstone had the mental capacity to oust the two executives, it must first assess what actions Mr. Redstone took to hire his legal team and instruct them to act on his behalf, said John C. Coffee Jr., director of the Center on Corporate Governance at Columbia Law School. "It can't be assumed that because someone shows up in court with a document that states, 'I hereby remove X and Y from the trust,' that they were authorized by Sumner Redstone to say that," Mr. Coffee said. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. "Did he have capacity to take that action?" he added. Representatives for Mr. Redstone argue that although he suffers physical ailments, he remains mentally astute. A geriatric psychiatrist hired by Mr. Redstone stated in a report released last week that he retained "legal mental capacity" to make the business decisions he did, and that they "reflect his own authentic wishes and preferences," based on two exams in the last two weeks. Still, there is no question that Mr. Redstone's health has declined significantly. Mr. Redstone had a series of minor strokes in the last two years that left him with a severe speech impediment. A judge in a recent civil suit said that a videotaped testimony of the media mogul showed that it was "not in dispute that Redstone suffers from either mild or moderate dementia." Lawyers for Mr. Dauman and Mr. Abrams called the geriatric psychiatrist's report a "one sided, uncross examined and distorted view of Mr. Redstone's mental condition," in the court filings on Monday. The combination of public disclosures related to Mr. Redstone's health with his silence during board meetings led Viacom directors to eliminate his pay as a director and chairman emeritus of the company last month. Then on May 16, three Viacom directors received an email from Mr. Tu, the new lawyer, notifying them that his law firm, Orrick, Herrington Sutcliffe, had been hired to represent Mr. Redstone and his interests in Viacom. Mr. Tu, a partner in Orrick's security litigation practice in Los Angeles, was unknown to Mr. Dauman, Mr. Abrams and Frederic V. Salerno, Viacom's lead independent director, who had all worked with Mr. Redstone for decades. From left, Sumner M. Redstone, his daughter Shari Redstone and Philippe P. Dauman, chief executive of Viacom. A lawyer for Mr. Salerno called Mr. Tu to try to confirm that he was authorized to represent Mr. Redstone and receive confidential corporate information on Mr. Redstone's behalf. Mr. Tu refused to answer a question about whether he had met Mr. Redstone, according to court filings by Mr. Dauman and Mr. Abrams. Mr. Tu did not answer Mr. Salerno's query because of attorney client privilege, said Mike Lawrence, a spokesman for Mr. Redstone, adding that Mr. Tu had "of course'' met with his client. Mr. Lawrence also said it was false to imply that Ms. Redstone had played a role in choosing her father's new lawyer. Mr. Redstone met Mr. Tu through Robert N. Klieger, who is also connected to Ms. Redstone. Mr. Klieger joined Mr. Redstone's legal team in March in the midst of the salacious lawsuit challenging his mental competency that was filed by Manuela Herzer, his former companion. Ms. Redstone was aligned with her father in that suit. Mr. Klieger, a partner of the law firm Hueston Hennigan, is also representing Ms. Redstone in a new 100 million suit against her filed by Ms. Herzer. . Mr. Klieger said in a statement that he had represented Mr. Redstone's companies for more than 15 years and that his previous firm had represented Mr. Redstone in legal matters. He added that he had "never met or spoken" with Ms. Redstone or her representatives until several weeks after he was hired by Mr. Redstone in the Herzer case. "She had nothing whatsoever to do with my hiring," Mr. Klieger said. "Who is Mr. Redstone's old legal team?" In recent weeks, Mr. Redstone also retained a new spokesman, Mr. Lawrence, who holds the title of chief reputation officer at Cone Communications, which is based in Boston. Mr. Lawrence has released a series of statements in Mr. Redstone's name but has never met him. Mr. Lawrence was brought on by Mr. Redstone's lawyers to help with media inquiries during the flurry of breaking news on May 21, the day after it was revealed that Mr. Dauman and Mr. Abrams had been ousted. Mr. Lawrence issues statements on behalf of Mr. Redstone based on communication with Mr. Redstone's lawyers, who work directly with the media mogul.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
A. SAVAGE at the Sultan Room (Feb. 17, 8 p.m.). When the band Parquet Courts first broke onto New York's indie rock scene, their ambling, cryptic lyrics amplified their slouchy brand of Brooklyn cool. But over time, the group's approach grew more direct a shift that is reflected in the solo work of their frontman, Andrew Savage. Released in 2017, his debut album under the name A. Savage is a collection of pensive and earnest songs about love and political strife. Complete with pedal steel embellishments and paeans to "Ladies From Houston," the music bears the influence of Savage's native Texas as much as the New York scene with which he is associated. thesultanroom.com THE BK DRIP at Kings Theater (Feb. 16, 8 p.m.). This opulent theater in Flatbush, Brooklyn, will offer a suitable setting for a decadent lineup that brings together some of rap's strongest emerging voices. Among them are Polo G, an ambassador of Chicago's hard edge drill scene who has recently embraced a more melodic approach, and Sheff G, who is credited with bringing the distinctive subgenre from the Midwest to Brooklyn. Both he and fellow Brooklynite Pop Smoke will perform in their home borough for the first time since they were removed from Rolling Loud's bill at Citi Field in October at the request of the New York City Police Department. Melii, the bilingual Harlem based rapper, will do her part to balance out the testosterone fueled bill. 718 856 5464, kingstheatre.com EARTHGANG at Gramercy Theater (Feb. 14, 9 p.m.). Viral hit making and overnight celebrity are common narratives for today's rap stars; the pace of this Atlanta based pair's rise seems glacial by comparison. The duo of Johnny Venus and Doctur Dot met as high school students in 2008, and in the intervening years, they've developed a distinctive and eclectic style that splices together soul, psychedelia and classic Southern hip hop. The past decade served as a long runway to Earthgang's major label debut, "Mirrorland," released on J. Cole's Dreamville imprint in September. Currently on tour behind the record, Earthgang will be at Warsaw in Brooklyn on Thursday and Gramercy in Manhattan on Friday. Both shows are sold out, but resale tickets are available. 212 614 6932, thegramercytheatre.com PUSS N BOOTS at Rough Trade NYC (Feb. 14, 8:30 p.m.) and Bowery Ballroom (Feb. 15, 8 p.m.). Across her nearly two decades as a mainstay of the adult contemporary sector, Norah Jones has shown herself to be a willing collaborator, appearing on songs with everyone from Dolly Parton to Outkast. One of Jones's most enduring musical partnerships, though, is with the musicians Sasha Dobson and Catherine Popper, with whom she performs in the alt country group Puss n Boots. In 2014, the trio released "No Fools, No Fun," a debut flavored by folksy, fingerpicked guitar, close harmonies and, of course, Jones's signature silky coo. After a few years of relative inactivity, Puss n Boots will release their sophomore album on Friday and perform in Brooklyn on the same evening. The following night, they will appear in Manhattan. roughtradenyc.com mercuryeastpresents.com/boweryballroom JILL SCOTT at Radio City Music Hall (Feb. 20, 8 p.m.). Long before "empowerment core" had a name, or Lizzo as its de facto spokeswoman, this Philadelphia born singer was operating in a similarly enlightened space though her hits were noticeably lower octane. "Who Is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds Vol. 1," her debut album from 2000, offered leisurely R B meditations on romance and self love for the everywoman, including "One Is the Magic ," a bright, trumpet laced jam on which Scott basks in solitude. "Who Is Jill Scott?" will turn 20 this summer; in honor of the occasion, Scott kicked off an anniversary tour earlier this month. Her stop at Radio City is sold out, but for fans eager to hear her play the album front to back, verified resale tickets are still available. 212 465 6000, radiocity.com Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. SHRINES at National Sawdust (Feb. 19, 8 p.m.). This chameleonic performer's efforts over the past decade have been intriguing if somewhat scattershot. After establishing herself in Berlin under the moniker Erving (her full name is Carrie Erving), then moving to Brooklyn and starting the indie band Ponyhof, she is now producing spectral electro pop as Shrines. Erving's musical sources are similarly diffuse, her sound reflecting the influence of German techno, chamber pop and Sean nos, a traditional style of singing that she studied while earning her master's degree in Ireland. On "Release," Shrines's debut EP from November, her languid vocals, laid atop crisp programmed drums and lush strings, are spellbinding. 646 779 8455, nationalsawdust.org OLIVIA HORN JOANNE BRACKEEN AND UGONNA OKEGWO at Mezzrow (Feb. 14 15, 7:30 and 9 p.m.). A leading composer and pianist in jazz since the 1970s, Brackeen has a piano style based in neatly angled patterns and harmonies, and darting melodicism. She keeps your ear chasing her notes in many directions, even while the center of gravity remains firm and rhythmically grounded. A National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, Brackeen appears here with Okegwo, a stalwart upright bassist who has accompanied some of jazz's finest bandleaders. mezzrow.com VINICIUS CANTUARIA AND JESSE HARRIS DUO at the Iridium (Feb. 18, 8 p.m.). With his hushed strum on the guitar and his low croon both insular and inviting Cantuaria is an excellent match for the songbook of Antonio Carlos Jobim, whose music he covered on his most recent album, "Vinicius Canta Antonio Carlos Jobim." These qualities also make him a logical partner for Jesse Harris, the guitarist and vocalist best known for his collaborations with Norah Jones (he wrote her breakout hit, "Don't Know Why"). 212 582 2121, theiridium.com JOHN ELLIS AND ANDY BRAGEN at the Jazz Gallery (Feb. 14 15, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). It has been over 10 years since Ellis, a saxophonist and clarinetist, and Bragen, a playwright, debuted "The Ice Siren," a "jazz opera" that in fact owes as much to modern Western classical as it does to jazz. Next month the opera one of three long form collaborations that Ellis and Bragen have produced will finally be released as an album. This concert celebrates that fact, as well as the 25th anniversary of the Jazz Gallery, which commissioned "The Ice Siren." Ellis will perform the work with an 11 piece group featuring the vocalists Gretchen Parlato and Miles Griffith, and conducted by the trombonist J. C. Sanford. 646 494 3625, jazzgallery.nyc BILL FRISELL at the Blue Note (Feb. 18 23, 8 and 10:30 p.m.). Each of the ensembles Frisell has in store for this six day run promises something rewarding. The challenge is deciding which to pick. For the first two nights, this folk inflected experimental guitar hero will play in a trio with two of his frequent collaborators, the bassist Thomas Morgan and the drummer Kenny Wollesen. On Feb. 20 21, he will be in duet with the expert trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, and from Feb. 22 to 23 he will present a quintet featuring Akinmusire, Wollesen, the saxophonist Greg Tardy and the bassist Tony Scherr. 212 475 8592, bluenote.net MWENSO THE SHAKES at National Sawdust (Feb. 20, 8 p.m.). Hailing from Sierra Leone by way of England, the vocalist Michael Mwenso is undaunted by the tall task ahead of anyone running what's nearly a full on performance revue of the sort that dominated American stages 100 years ago. You're dealing in music, dance, inspirational storytelling, comedy; in terms of the entertainment and the message to be delivered, that's basically promising it all. Mwenso is up to the challenge; he sings and banters like a carnival barker at a swingers' club, and he has a plucky young crew to support him. The Shakes include the dulcet tongued South African vocalist Vuyo Sotashe, the tap dancer and vocalist Michela Marino Lerman, the tenor saxophonists Julian Lee and Ruben Fox, the keyboardist Mathis Picard, the bassist Russell Hall and the drummer Kyle Poole. 646 779 8455, nationalsawdust.org ELIO VILLAFRANCA AND THE JASS SYNCOPATORS at Dizzy's Club (Feb. 18 20, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). A Cuban born pianist of immense talent and understated touch, Villafranca will present in the coming week material from two new projects: "Life Stories," a book of songs he wrote inspired by his journeys through Cuba, Haiti, Spain and New Orleans, and "Don't Change My Name," a tribute to Florentina Zulueta, a woman from the African kingdom of Dahomey who was enslaved and brought to Cuba in the 17th century. Villafranca's band will include the trumpeters Jeremy Pelt (on Tuesday and Wednesday only) and Alex Norris (on Thursday), the saxophonist and clarinetist Roxy Coss, the trombonist Robin Eubanks, the bassist Peter Slavov, the drummer Dion Parson, and the percussionists and vocalists Mauricio Herrera and Lisette Santiago. 212 258 9595, jazz.org/dizzys GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
The Bahama parrot's numbers are not what they should be, ornithologists say, but they probably fared better in Hurricane Dorian than, say, the Bahama nuthatch. In a catastrophic hurricane like Dorian, the loss of lives and homes can be overwhelming. But even in the midst of devastating sadness and disbelief, a far less urgent but perennial question can tug at the back of the mind. What is the impact of these storms on wild creatures, like birds? It is too soon to know the extent of Dorian's impact, and really too soon to ask. Ecological post mortems are nowhere near the first order of business. But interviews with scientists and the findings in a paper published Monday by Ecology Letters suggest that many birds are resilient, and that when a hurricane does push a species over the brink, it is almost always a species that we have put there in the first place. If what we're worried about is extinction, "we're the driving force," said David Steadman, curator of ornithology at the Florida Museum of Science, who has done a vast amount of research on Caribbean birds. By destroying the environments where birds live, introducing alien predators and damaging the environment in other ways, humans gradually put birds, and of course other species, at risk. A hurricane or another disaster may deliver a final punch, but it is not the underlying cause of extinction. Christopher Elphick, an ornithologist at the University of Connecticut and one of the authors of the new paper, said development and sea level rise, both caused by humans, are the slow and sure killers. He compared it to heart disease: "Eating just a little too much fat in your diet is what causes the heart attack. But shoveling snow is what pushes you over the edge." Birds do die in hurricanes, of course, and suffer other indignities. Dorian blew some to Nova Scotia. And some were spotted hiding out in the hurricane's eye. Who knows where they ended up. Fortunately, Hurricane Humberto, which had people in the Bahamas worried about a second hit, took another path over the weekend. Scientists concentrate on species and subspecies. In terms of the Bahamas, only speculation is possible at the moment. One species on the extreme edge, the Bahama nuthatch, only one or two of which were known to be living before Dorian, may well have been pushed to extinction. Others that are in trouble, like the Bahama parrot, may have suffered little impact. Diana Bell of the University of East Anglia said that researchers from her lab found a Bahama nuthatch last year. That's one single bird. She said another team reported finding two. Dr. Steadman, who has been researching birds in the Caribbean and elsewhere for many years, said that in contrast the Bahama Parrot which is in trouble, but not as severely may have done just fine. Much of the parrot population dwells on the south of the island, which was hit but not devastated. And the parrots nest in cavities in the island's limestone, and no doubt would have hunkered down during the storm. "I would doubt if there's so much negative impact on that parrot population at all," he said. Other birds that are struggling there are the Bahama swallow and the Bahama oriole. Past hurricanes have hit certain bird populations very hard, but selectively. Hurricane Hugo in 1989 brought Category 5 winds to the Francis Marion National Forest in South Carolina that knocked down the old growth nesting trees of the red cockaded woodpecker. The bird nests in tree cavities in old growth forests, and the storm snapped old trees in two. Eighty seven percent of the forest's 1,765 cavities were destroyed. Joseph M. Wunderle Jr. of the United States Forest Service, who is based in Puerto Rico, said the managers of the forest responded with artificial cavities to help save the woodpeckers that remained. Dr. Wunderle has studied and written about Caribbean birds and hurricanes for decades. Hurricane Maria, he said may have knocked out a group of Puerto Rican parrots that live at a high elevation. "The official count now is two birds in the Luquillo Mountains," he said. The power of the hurricane played a role. Colleagues of his told him that when Maria came in at night as a strong Category 4 hurricane in September 2017, it killed 17 of 20 parrots wearing tracking devices. "They found them dead under fallen trees and tree branches," he said. The St. Kitts bullfinch also fell victim to hurricanes in the late 19th century , Dr. Wunderle said. The bird survived for a while and disappeared, he said. It had lived in a mountain forest on St. Kitts, feeding on fruits and seeds, and the plants took a long time to recover. Why didn't it move to the lowlands? At lower elevations wild areas had been replaced with fields of sugar cane. By humans. Insect eaters do a lot better, Dr. Wunderle said. Even if adult insects are lost in a hurricane, there are eggs, pupae, larvae. And there is a lot of dead wood, which many insects love. The Cozumel thrasher is another example. The island was hit by Hurricane Gilbert in 1988 and Hurricane Roxanne in 1995. The introduction of alien predators to the island may have contributed to its disappearance. When bird populations are reasonably widespread, they can, however, be quite resilient in the long term. Dr. Elphick, his colleague Chris Field and other researchers from the University of Connecticut were inspired to look at the effects of catastrophic storms on marsh birds because they were in the midst of surveying bird populations in Eastern coastal marshes when Hurricane Sandy struck in 2012. They were surprised to see that the effect on bird populations was not that great. Individual birds certainly suffered, and that often prompts an immediate reaction from both the public and scientists. "People see dead birds and say, oh my God," Dr. Elphick said. But individual deaths don't necessarily mean trouble for the species. Their team wanted to understand the long term prospects for bird species over 20 years after a disaster. They created a computer model and after putting in data on the size of a population, its pattern of reproduction and other factors, they ran simulations to see how bad a species would have to be hit by a disaster for it to have an effect on its long term prospects. They looked at four birds: the clapper rail, willet, saltmarsh sparrow and seaside sparrow. For saltmarsh sparrows and clapper rails, almost all adults had to be killed for there to be a change in the long term prospects of the population. The seaside sparrows and willets weren't quite as robust, but they still needed to experience reproductive failures of more than 75 percent for their long term survival to be threatened. In general the team found that the coastal birds they studied are highly resilient to individual storms. They believe their simplified model which concentrates on deaths and reproductive failures, not the strength of storms could be useful for projecting what is likely to happen to other species facing disasters. Of course, Dr. Elphick said, "there are two big caveats to our general result." The species they studied are very small, or very localized. And that, of course, is exactly the situation for island birds, particularly where humans have changed the environment. Climate change may bring an increase in frequency and strength of hurricanes that could change their calculations somewhat, Dr. Elphick said. But the biggest threats to the birds he studied are the gradual erosion of habitats by human development and, for marsh birds, development of the marshes where they live, and rising sea levels, which make average tides and storms more dangerous during nesting periods. Development and rising sea levels are, of course, caused by us. As Dr. Bell put it: "Birds evolved to withstand hurricanes. They didn't evolve to withstand destruction by humans."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
MANY of those who end up moving to Verona started house hunting in surrounding communities: Montclair and Glen Ridge to the east, Cedar Grove and the Caldwells to the north, Roseland to the west. Verona, like West Orange, is relatively affordable, with a wide variety of condominiums, three bedroom houses, Victorians and newer, bigger colonials. "The great thing about Verona is that it has a price point for everyone," said Katie Severance, an agent for Re/Max Village Square in Upper Montclair. One couple who found the right price point, Claudine and Al Pascale, paid 384,000 for a three bedroom one and a half bath Dutch colonial in Verona two years ago. The Pascales, who were married last month and plan to start a family, see their house as a wise purchase for various reasons not least because they work nearby, he as a software manager in Parsippany, she as a librarian in Cliffside Park. There is also their love of Verona Park, a sweeping and picturesque 54 acre site with a lake. They see children regularly playing in the neighbors' yards in the Forest Avenue section in this era of sitting inside playing video games, Mrs. Pascale said with a laugh. And not too long ago came a block party, another old fashioned surprise. "I'd never been invited to a block party before," she said. The Pascales, who moved to this corner of Essex from Bergen County, have company in their fondness for it. Mary Myers Koelhofer and her husband, David, moved here from the Detroit suburbs with their two children six years ago, paying 575,000 for a four bedroom two bath colonial dating to the 1920s. "It's so cute," Mrs. Koelhofer said. "The kids all walk to school. They know who the crossing guard is. It's a very Norman Rockwell setting. The one thing we really like is that it has a real small town feel." That quality is apparent in the strength of local volunteerism, said Frank Sapienza, Verona's part time mayor. During the economic downturn, he said, no services were cut. Taxes are considered reasonable, especially when compared with those of neighboring communities. "There's a great community spirit," Mr. Sapienza said. "When someone's in need, this community comes together like no other." After an October snowstorm left 80 percent of Verona residents without power, the township needed to get rid of thousands of leafy tree branches snapped off by the heavy snow. At the site of the town pool, a kind of unofficial community meeting space, debris was gathered and machines were used to mulch it. The mulch was then trucked to the Hilltop Conservancy, the former site of the Essex County Sanatorium, where a three acre meadow is being created by conservancy volunteers. "Saved us tens of thousands of dollars," Mr. Sapienza said. "We didn't have to get rid of all that wood." Lisa and Sean Remler moved to town in August with their daughters, Caitlin, 10, and Sara, 7. The school the girls attend, Forest Avenue, one of four primary schools in the Verona district, has about 250 students enrolled through Grade 4. As Mrs. Remler put it, "I feel like the teachers really know my kids." Caitlin and Sara will probably soon be spending time at the town pool, which has two water slides and which, even before its recent renovation, was "one of our jewels," Mr. Sapienza said. A family membership is 440 a year. Anticipating the first full summer in town, Mrs. Remler said: "Everybody says they go to that pool. People say, 'We have neighbors who have kids who are grown now, and the kids have told us, we grew up at that pool.' " Verona sits almost smack dab in the middle of a triangle formed by Interstates 80 and 280 and the Garden State Parkway though it is not as if any of the three highways were right down the street. Ms. Severance (an author of "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Selling Your Home") said, "You've got access to highways, but the highways aren't running through Verona." It is not on the New Jersey Transit Midtown Direct line for which the closest station is in Montclair but the township has easy highway access to New York City, about 20 miles to the east. And although Verona is hardly as trendy as Montclair, its neighbor to the east, Mrs. Koelhofer said, "we're as close to Montclair as some of the people who live in Montclair." Busy Bloomfield Avenue traverses the township from Montclair to Caldwell, and residents like the accessibility to both towns, but they also like Verona's homespun shopping district, up the street from Verona Park. On weekends, customers visit DiPaolo Bakery on Bloomfield Avenue in a steady stream. Verona is also a good place to slow down. When asked what he liked to do on weekends, Mr. Sapienza said, "I just like to sit in the backyard and relax." The housing stock is varied enough to attract empty nesters. Steven Schwartz, 67, and his wife, Judy, 65, paid 690,000 two years ago for a pair of two bedroom condominiums on the penthouse floor of one of the Claridge House high rises. They had lived nearby in Short Hills for 26 years, raising two sons, and when they moved away, they wanted to live in more maintenance free surroundings. It took them a year to renovate, raising the ceilings along the way, Mr. Schwartz said, but they now have a three bedroom apartment and a one bedroom apartment. Their sons live in Florida and Colorado, and the Schwartzes have four grandchildren, whom they get to see often. And when they get back to Verona, a spectacular view always welcomes them home. "We get to see from the Verrazano Bridge all the way up to the George Washington Bridge," he said. "At our ages, it's perfect." Residences on the Garden State Multiple Listing Service ranged from a one bedroom 1964 condo, for 143,000, to a three bedroom condo in a high rise built in 1965 for 1.5 million. A six bedroom four bath Victorian overlooking the park and lake was listed at 1.199 million. The annual tax bill was 16,113. In the middle, at 375,000, was a three bedroom one and a half bath colonial built in 1945 in the Forest Avenue section, with an annual tax bill of 9,950. George F. Librizzi, Verona Township's tax assessor, said 149 houses sold in 2011; the average sale price for a condominium was 203,900; for a single family house, 458,500. According to Trulia, the median sale price in Verona from December to February was 385,000, or 0.5 percent higher than the median a year earlier. The median fell by 7.8 percent over the last five years, but it was still 6.9 percent higher from December to February than it had been in the previous quarter. "It's been getting better and better," said Barbara J. Amato, the broker/owner of the Claridge Realty Group, which markets condos in the two Claridge House luxury high rises. "I have seen it pick up since the first of January." Five DeCamp express buses run to the Port Authority on weekday mornings from Lakeside Avenue in Verona. The trip takes about 45 minutes; a 40 trip ticket is 261. Residents can also park at Montclair State University and take New Jersey Transit to Penn Station. Daily parking is 3, a monthly ticket 208. There are six direct trains to New York from 5 to 9 a.m., and four returning from 4 to 8 p.m.; the trip takes 50 minutes to an hour. Verona Park, bordered by Lakeside and Bloomfield Avenues just east of downtown, surrounds a 13 acre lake created in 1814 to fuel a grist mill. The lake became hugely popular for boating, fishing, skating and swimming, and Essex County has made improvements, recently developing an exercise course. The park has a playground, a boathouse, and tennis and bocce courts, but its pathways also draw a lot of walkers and joggers. Not far away, on Bloomfield Avenue, is an old fashioned ice cream parlor called the Towne Scoop that the Remlers have discovered. In addition to Forest Avenue, the primary schools are Brookdale Avenue, F. N. Brown and Laning Avenue. Enrollment is about 300 at Laning Avenue, the largest of the four. Average class size is 18.3; the state average is 18.2. Joan Gardner, a Verona resident since 1984 who is an agent for Coldwell Banker in Caldwell, laughed when she said: "It's like a joke. Everybody says their elementary school is the best."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Travis Reginal and Justin Porter were friends back in Jackson, Miss. They attended William B. Murrah High School, which is 97 percent African American and 67 percent low income. Murrah is no Ivy feeder. Low income students rarely apply to the nation's best colleges. But Mr. Reginal just completed a first year at Yale, Mr. Porter at Harvard. Below, Mr. Reginal writes about his journey. Click here to read Mr. Porter's essay. CONAN O'BRIEN might have been previewing my freshman year at Yale when he said: "There are few things more liberating in this life than having your worst fear realized." It was early May, the day before the end of the year. Finals week hysteria was over. Yet an unshakable anxiety pressed on my chest. I told a friend about my struggle and she said, with the wisdom women seem to always possess, that it must be about going home. I didn't understand at first. I was excited about summer break after a hard year of schoolwork. Then I got it. I felt I had done the one thing I feared most: let people down. My grade point average was not the worst, but I was not proud of it. As the first generation in my family to attend college, the margin of error is small. My family is "low income," and I am supposed to go to college and excel to provide a better life for everyone back home. And the community back home is desperate for healing. My mother was 15 when I was born. My parents were naive, reckless and, in my father's case, overwhelmed. So I was raised in a single parent home. No one is surprised to hear that, unfortunately. That's the norm in many African American communities; in Jackson, more than half the households with children under 18 are single parent. Thanks to my mother, who highly values education, I found a productive substitute, burying myself in studying and reading. In 10th grade, I joined a new speech and debate club at Murrah High School, started by a classmate named Justin Porter (now at Harvard). In him, I found what I had long hoped for a black male who could push me intellectually. The work we did gave me a depth of analytical skills, perhaps my greatest preparation for college. I also found release in writing poems. In my admissions essay, I gave the reader a glance over my shoulder at "the process of emptying my soul" as I composed one. Postsecondary administrators and pundits wonder why smart students from low income families are not applying to top institutions. For one, said students may not know what is required to apply to an Ivy League school. Had I not done my own research, I would not have known I had to take SAT subject tests. Also, it was important that the schools let me know I had a chance of getting in. I knew I had a great shot at an Ivy League school after being selected by Dartmouth for a free visit to campus the summer before senior year. Yale, too, reached out based on my "outstanding achievements" and sent a letter saying they thought I could thrive at their school and should apply. And so I did. I applied early action but was deferred. When I finally viewed the e mail congratulating me on my acceptance, it was a glorious moment, but it was bittersweet. The number of black students in the Ivy League is nothing remarkable, and we continue to be outnumbered by other minority groups. Most Murrah students were going to local state schools, and there were those who did not continue their education at all. For low income African American youth, the issue is rooted in low expectations. There appear to be two extremes: just getting by or being the rare gifted student. Most don't know what success looks like. Being at Yale has raised my awareness of the soft bigotry of elementary and high school teachers and administrators who expect no progress in their students. At Yale, the quality of your work must increase over the course of the term or your grade will decrease. It propelled me to work harder. More than one of every eight Yale students will be the first in their families to graduate from a four year college, according to the Yale admissions Web site. At Bulldog Days, a weekend for admitted students that Yale paid for me to attend, people talked about resources for first generation students. But during the school year I had no clue where those resources were. I was lost navigating courses, and took classes I thought I could cope with but were not the best for the skills I wanted. As a black student I felt I had something to prove, and stubbornly didn't seek help. It was foolish: I finished quantitative reasoning in the middle of the class instead of the top. I also opted for courses that had the least expensive books, because I had to cover them myself. At Yale, I saw the wealth inequality face to face. Though I was on a full scholarship, a surprise bill arrived from the financial aid office stating I owed almost 1,000 for the university health plan. I was under the impression it was free no one had discussed prices at the numerous meetings for freshmen. Very few times in my life have I panicked more: 1,000 is nothing to many students, but it would place a tremendous burden on my mother. Fortunately, I was able to cancel the plan before the deadline. Whew! I have had awkward conversations at Yale, including one with writing tutors who assumed I didn't know what a subordinate clause was. Some students were amazed I made it to Yale given my circumstances. Adults would ask how I was adjusting to a culture so different from what I was "used to." But I think students of other races have more of an adjustment in interacting with me. Considering the negative images painted of black men, I am constantly thinking of my race and how others view me. I am spending the summer in Louisville, Ky., in the Portland community, which outsiders consider the ghetto. I am working with Neighborhood House, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to break the cycle of poverty and prepare students to be college ready. My job as a youth leader is to unbury and showcase to them the talents they possess. The anxiety has not gone away. I do not feel like the accomplished person everyone thinks I am. But I hope to inspire African American youth to pave a path to success, regardless of the college they go to or the trade skills they acquire. I know from my personal story that many young people living in at risk neighborhoods have large imaginations, passionate hearts and deep desires to transcend their community.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
More Professors Give Out Hand Held Devices to Monitor Students and Engage Them EVANSTON, Ill. If any of the 70 undergraduates in Prof. Bill White's "Organizational Behavior" course here at Northwestern University are late for class, or not paying attention, he will know without having to scan the lecture hall. Their "clickers" will tell him. Every student in Mr. White's class has been assigned a palm size, wireless device that looks like a TV remote but has a far less entertaining purpose. With their clickers in hand, the students in Mr. White's class automatically clock in as "present" as they walk into class. They then use the numbered buttons on the devices to answer multiple choice quizzes that count for nearly 20 percent of their grade, and that always begin precisely one minute into class. Later, with a click, they can signal to their teacher without raising a hand that they are confused by the day's lesson. But the greatest impact of such devices which more than a half million students are using this fall on several thousand college campuses may be cultural: they have altered, perhaps irrevocably, the nap schedules of anyone who might have hoped to catch a few winks in the back row, and made it harder for them to respond to text messages, e mail and other distractions. In Professor White's 90 minute class, as in similar classes at Harvard, the University of Arizona and Vanderbilt, barely 15 minutes pass without his asking students to "grab your clickers" to provide feedback Though some Northwestern students say they resent the potential Big Brother aspect of all this, Jasmine Morris, a senior majoring in industrial engineering, is not one of them. "I actually kind of like it," Ms. Morris said after a class last week. "It does make you read. It makes you pay attention. It reinforces what you're supposed to be doing as a student." Inevitably, some students have been tempted to see clickers as "cat and mouse" game pieces. Noshir Contractor, who teaches a class on social networking to Northwestern undergraduates, said he began using clickers in spring 2008 and, not long after, watched a student array perhaps five of the devices in front of him. The owners had skipped class, but their clickers had made it. Professor Contractor said he tipped his cap to the students' creativity this was, after all, a class on social networking but then reminded them that there "are other ways to count attendance," and that, by the way, they were all signatories to the school's honor principle. The practice stopped, he said. Though the technology is relatively new, preliminary studies at Harvard and Ohio State, among other institutions, suggest that engaging students in class through a device as familiar to them as a cellphone there are even applications that convert iPads and BlackBerrys into class ready clickers increases their understanding of material that may otherwise be conveyed in traditional lectures. The clickers are also gaining wide use in middle and high schools, as well as at corporate gatherings. Whatever the setting, audience responses are received on a computer at the front of the room and instantly translated into colorful bar graphs displayed on a giant monitor. The remotes used at Northwestern were made by Turning Technologies, a company in Youngstown, Ohio, and are compatible with PowerPoint. Depending on the model, the hand helds can sell for 30 to 70 each. Some colleges require students to buy them; others lend them to students. Tina Rooks, the chief instructional officer for Turning Technologies, said the company expected to ship over one million clickers this year, with roughly half destined for about 2,500 university campuses, including community colleges and for profit institutions. The company said its higher education sales had grown 60 percent since 2008, and 95 percent since 2006. At Northwestern, more than three dozen professors now use clickers in their classrooms. Professor White, who teaches industrial engineering, was among the first here to adopt them about six years ago. He smiled knowingly when asked about some students' professed dislike of the clickers. "They should walk in with them in their hands, on time, ready to go," he said. Professor White acknowledged, though, that the clickers were hardly a silver bullet for engaging students, and that they were just one of many tools he employed, including video clips, guest speakers and calling on individual students to share their thoughts. "Everyone learns differently," he said. "Some learn watching stuff. Some learn by listening. Some learn by reading. I try to mix it all into every class." Many of Professor White's students said the highlight of his class was often the display of results of a survey via clicker, when they could see whether their classmates shared their opinions. They also said that they appreciated the anonymity, and that while the professor might know how they responded, their peers would not. Last week, for example, he flashed a photo of the university president, Morton Schapiro, onto the screen, along with a question, "Source of power?" followed by these possible answers: P"4. Expert power" (more typically applied to someone like an electrician or a mechanic). P 5. Referent power" (usually tied to how the leader is viewed personally). To Professor White's seeming relief, a clear majority, 71 percent, chose No. 3, a sign that they considered his ultimate boss to be "legitimate." And then, to his delight, the students emerged from their electronic veils to register their opinions the old fashioned way. "They can be very reluctant to speak when they think they're in the minority," he said. "Once they see they're not the only ones, they speak up more."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
The newest luxury material to hit high fashion rails has nothing to do with centuries of artisanal tradition or rare and exotic animals, and everything to do with ... garbage. And it is coming soon to a Stella McCartney store near you. On Tuesday, with World Oceans Day around the corner, the label announced that it was entering into a long term partnership with Parley for the Oceans, an organization that works to end the destruction of marine life. One of the group's biggest initiatives is the creation of a yarn fiber (imagine the soft upper of an Adidas knit shoe and you'll get the idea) that is made from plastic objects such as fishing nets, debris and bottles that are collected from oceans. Ms. McCartney plans to use it. "To take something that is destructive and turn it into something that's sexy and cool, how can that not be luxury?" Ms. McCartney said. In the past, scientists have calculated that 4.8 to 12.7 million metric tons of plastic waste enter the oceans annually. Since 2015, Parley has worked with the government of the Maldives, as well as the nation's resorts, fisheries, schools and fishing vessels to collect 80 to 120 tons of plastic from the oceans per month. After gathering the plastic, Parley cleans and sorts it, then condenses it into smaller pieces that are shipped to recycling plants, where they are turned into filament and then into yarn or fabric. Parley is collaborating with the United Nations to extend its programs to 38 small island developing states. As part of the collaboration with Stella McCartney, whose length has not been determined, the label will use the ocean plastic in lieu of woven or recycled polyester in products like shoes, bags and outerwear. Ms. McCartney has already worked with Parley on a sneaker design for Adidas, a company that Parley has teamed up with on several projects. She would not say how much of each product will be made from the material, in part because the process of using it in items beyond sneakers began only recently. "You're not dealing with a machine," Ms. McCartney said. "You can't just say, 'Hey, this is a great idea, let's roll it out with X million pieces.'" Will consumers be convinced that garments made in part from recycled materials are worth hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars? "When I was younger, leather equaled luxury, and people could not get their head around the fact that I was not using leather," said Ms. McCartney, who has made animal rights a focus for her vegan brand since its founding in 2001. "Leather is cheaper than some of the nonleather alternatives, it's less interesting, it's less modern. Every element of it, to me, is not particularly luxurious or fashionable." She continued, "Is a recycled plastic ever going to be something people think is a luxury? If they don't notice it and if they feel that living on this planet longer is a luxury, then yes, to me that's my idea of luxury." Her company has teamed up with sustainability focused organizations over the years, including the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Wildlife Friendly Enterprise Network, and has used fabrics that have a low impact on the environment, like cashmere that is made from post factory waste and viscose that does not originate in endangered forests. She acknowledged that working with alternative materials can mean higher production costs, but said that her company tries not to pass on those expenses to the consumer. "We are always getting hit with extra costs, and that's something we absorb happily," she said. "Even with bringing nonleather goods into the U.S., we get hit with an extra tax. It's something we just swallow. I can't deliver a product that's more expensive and that prices me out of the marketplace." Ms. McCartney said to expect to see Parley material in pieces that will go on sale in July, though you probably won't be able to recognize them without reading the tag. "We're in a framework where we can deliver something to people," she said. "It's not one piece that's overpriced or 50 pieces that look like they have been woven in your living room." The ultimate hope, for both Parley and Ms. McCartney, is that a new material will be invented to replace plastic, and for there to be no plastic discarded into the oceans for them to reclaim. In the meantime, Mr. Gutsch said he wants Ms. McCartney's participation to serve as an example for the fashion industry. "We know if Stella starts something, she goes all the way," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Into this quagmire bravely wade Ari Folman and David Polonsky, the creators of "Anne Frank's Diary: The Graphic Adaptation," a stunning, haunting work of art that is unfortunately marred by some questionable interpretive choices. As Folman acknowledges in an adapter's note, the text, preserved in its entirety, would have resulted in a graphic novel of 3,500 pages. At times he reproduces whole entries verbatim, but more often he diverges freely from the original, collapsing multiple entries onto a single page and replacing Anne's droll commentary with more accessible (and often more dramatic) language. Polonsky's illustrations, richly detailed and sensitively rendered, work marvelously to fill in the gaps, allowing an image or a facial expression to stand in for the missing text and also providing context about Anne's historical circumstances that is, for obvious reasons, absent from the original. The tightly packed panels that result, in which a line or two adapted from the "Diary" might be juxtaposed with a bit of invented dialogue between the Annex inhabitants or a dream vision of Anne's, do wonders at fitting complex emotions and ideas into a tiny space a metaphor for the Secret Annex itself. The comedy of the "Diary" one of the book's most charming and often overlooked aspects shines in this form. The tension between the Franks and the van Daans, the family with whom they go into hiding (a dentist, Alfred Dussel, joins later), is a rich vein of material for Anne, who sees Mrs. van Daan as obnoxious and vain; she cares only about her own family's survival and is harshly critical of Anne's manners and attitude. Here, she is often depicted wearing her trademark fur coat; when her husband threatens to sell it, Polonsky draws its collar with live rabbits, one of which speaks up in her defense. Anne also aims her satire at the limited food options in the Annex, offering sardonic menus and diet tips. In the graphic novel, one spread depicts the families at dinner, each character represented by an animal. Anne's sister Margot, whose saintly composure she often envied, is drawn as a bird, gazing at an empty plate: "I feel full just by looking at the others," the thought bubble above her head reads. Meanwhile, Mr. van Daan is an enormous bear, shoveling cabbage into his mouth with both paws even as he demands more. Meyer Levin on Anne Frank's "The Diary of a Young Girl," a book too tenderly intimate to be frozen with the label "classic" There are so many wonderful juxtapositions of text and imagery that it feels cruel to focus on only a few, but another consistent standout is the way the graphic novel conveys Anne's fantasies and emotions so crucial to the "Diary." In a line taken almost verbatim from the book, Folman's Anne wonders, "How can we, whose every possession, from my panties to Father's shaving brush, is so old and worn, ever hope to regain the position we had before the war?" Polonsky's accompanying illustration depicts the Franks as beggars huddled on the side of an elegant street lined with cafes and restaurants, while passers by in fancy clothes including the van Daans ignore them. In a page illustrating Anne's most tumultuous inner thoughts, Polonsky draws her as the figure in Munch's "The Scream"; for a calmer moment, she's Adele Bloch Bauer in Klimt's "Portrait." When 16 year old Peter van Daan and Anne first begin to fall in love, Polonsky depicts their faces reflected in each other's pupils, as if to indicate the depth of their feelings. This graphic adaptation is so engaging and effective that it's easy to imagine it replacing the "Diary" in classrooms and among younger readers. For that reason especially, it seems a mistake not to have included more in the way of critical apparatus to explain the ways the creators diverged from the historical record, especially when they touch most directly on the Holocaust. There is, for example, a naive, stylized rendering of a concentration camp scene, which makes sense as a representation of Anne's fantasies she didn't know the barbaric specifics of what was going on around her but risks confusing students, who might not know that Auschwitz wasn't in fact a big green square surrounded by pleasant looking buildings with huge canisters reading "GAS" plugged into them.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
American Media Inc., the country's largest tabloid publisher whose chairman is a close ally of President Trump, controls almost the entire supermarket checkout rack after new acquisitions announced on Friday. A.M.I. said it had bought In Touch, Life Style, Closer and 10 other titles from Bauer Media, expanding a celebrity news portfolio that already included The National Enquirer, Us Weekly, Globe, OK!, Star and Radar Online. The move gives the company, led by David J. Pecker, almost full ownership of the print gossip market, leaving People magazine, owned by the Meredith Corporation, as one of the only major glossy gossip titles not under Mr. Pecker's umbrella. (TMZ, the dominant gossip player online, has come under the ownership of AT T with its purchase of Time Warner.) Mr. Pecker is a Bronx native and a longtime Trump friend. A former top executive of Mr. Trump's casino business sits on A.M.I.'s four member board of directors. During the 2016 campaign, its flagship National Enquirer devoted glowing covers to Mr. Trump's triumphs, aggressively attacked his rivals and made its first ever presidential endorsement. A.M.I.'s move to buy 13 titles from Bauer Media, including several teen magazines, is particularly bold given that the company is under the most intense public and legal scrutiny it has faced in its history. Federal Election Commission officials are looking into whether it violated campaign finance laws when it effectively bought the silence during the 2016 campaign of a former Playboy model, Karen McDougal, who said she had an affair with Mr. Trump years earlier. A.M.I. has denied any wrongdoing. Separately, federal investigators with the Southern District of New York are looking into its arrangement with Ms. McDougal as part of its broad investigation into the president's lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, and have asked for Mr. Cohen's communications with Mr. Pecker and his lieutenant, Dylan Howard. 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. Long known for having the power to make and break stars, A.M.I.'s magazines have impacted politicians and their campaigns as well. It reached its journalistic high point in 2007 when The National Enquirer broke the story that former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina had fathered a child with a woman who had worked for his campaign, and then concocted an elaborate ruse in which his top political aide publicly claimed to be the baby's father. But it has also gone out of its way to protect business partners and those known as "Friends of Pecker," even when their behavior was textbook fodder for scandal sheet cover stories. After the actresses Ashley Judd and Rose McGowan made veiled references to misconduct by Mr. Weinstein in 2015 and 2016 which were followed by investigations into him by journalists at New York magazine, The New York Times and The New Yorker Mr. Howard came to the aid of Mr. Weinstein, with whom A.M.I. had business ties. His help included dispatching reporters to find information that could undercut Mr. Weinstein's accusers, The Times reported in December. A.M.I.'s purchase of the rights to Ms. McDougal's story about Mr. Trump part of a 150,000 deal that also included rights to fitness related commentaries that would run under her name was what is known as a "catch and kill" deal, known for the tabloid world practice of buying stories that are damaging to allies only to bury them. A.M.I., which also owns lifestyle brands including Men's Journal, Muscle Fitness, Hers and Flex, has repeatedly restructured in the past decade. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2010, and reported up to 1 billion in debts at the time. It was acquired four years ago by two private equity funds.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Robinson Cano ruined his Hall of Fame chances more than two years ago, when he was first suspended for using a banned substance. His second suspension, a 162 game ban announced by Major League Baseball on Wednesday, turns his career into a farce. That is a shame, because Cano has some of the best statistics in major league history for a player at his position. Only eight second basemen have compiled more hits than Cano, who has 2,624. All have plaques in Cooperstown, and only two Roberto Alomar and Craig Biggio have been active in Cano's lifetime. But Cano, who turned 38 in October, will soon disappear into baseball's memory hole, becoming more of a historical footnote than a headliner. He will be one of those guys you will think of, years from now, and shrug: He could really hit. I guess. For the Mets, this development is probably just as well, excising another symbol of the last two discouraging seasons. Upon taking control of the team this month, the new owner Steven A. Cohen fired Brodie Van Wagenen, the general manager who engineered the bold but disastrous trade for Cano in December 2018, about six months after Cano had flunked a drug test with the Seattle Mariners and been suspended for 80 games. That time, Cano was caught using furosemide, a diuretic better known as Lasix, which is frequently used as a masking agent for performance enhancing drugs. Cano said the substance had been given to him by a doctor in the Dominican Republic for a medical ailment and, without specifying the ailment, insisted that he "would never do anything to cheat the rules of the game that I love." Van Wagenen, who was Cano's agent before working for the Mets, soon echoed his point. None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. "I don't want to get into semantics, but I do think it's important remembering Robbie was not suspended for a P.E.D.," Van Wagenen said after making the trade. "He was suspended for a diuretic." Cano then had his worst season in more than a decade. He improved in 2020, but Wednesday's news offered a possible reason: He tested positive for Stanozolol, an unsophisticated and easily detectable steroid developed in the 1960s that has led to suspensions for the All Stars Rafael Palmeiro, Jorge Polanco and Ervin Santana, the former Mets reliever Jenrry Mejia and the 2008 No. 1 overall draft pick, Tim Beckham. Cano's current agent, Kyle Thousand, did not respond to a request for comment. Cano's positive test essentially invalidates his 2020 stats: a .316 average with an .896 on base plus slugging percentage, his best mark since 2013, when he was with the Yankees. Cano became a free agent after that season, and the Yankees offered him seven years and 175 million to stay. If Cano had accepted, the deal would have just expired. Instead, he wisely took advantage of a bad team's desperation to be relevant. The Mariners splurged on Cano for 10 years and 240 million, and could hardly believe their luck when the Mets took the second half of the deal off their budget and gave up the franchise's best prospect, outfielder Jarred Kelenic, for the privilege. The deal was bigger and even worse than that, of course the Mets got a closer, Edwin Diaz, whose struggles in 2019 may have cost them a chance at the playoffs, and also gave up a pitching prospect, starter Justin Dunn, who had a solid debut season for Seattle last year. To help offset the cost of Cano, Seattle took the highly paid veterans Jay Bruce and Anthony Swarzak. As for 2021, Cano took the contract off Cohen's payroll all by himself, an unexpected gift to the owner and his new team president, Sandy Alderson, who preceded Van Wagenen as general manager. In a statement, Alderson said the team was "extremely disappointed" in Cano. "The violation is very unfortunate for him, the organization, our fans and the sport," he added. Unfortunate for Cano? Absolutely, although he is still signed through 2023. But the sport has been through this with him before, and the organization and fans should be happy. Cohen is the majors' richest owner, so the savings from lopping Cano off the payroll are all relative. But it cannot hurt to have even more financial freedom and an open spot at second base with D.J. LeMahieu available in free agency. LeMahieu just led the majors in hitting, at .364, and has been the Yankees' best player in each of the last two seasons. Even without LeMahieu, the loss of Cano can help the Mets, who could shift Jeff McNeil to second base and clear left field for Dominic Smith. Then again, the Mets can think even bigger under Cohen. They could engage not only LeMahieu, but also the other jewels of the free agent market: starter Trevor Bauer, closer Brad Hand, catcher J.T. Realmuto, outfielders Marcell Ozuna and George Springer. Nothing is off limits, it seems, except Cano's access to major league ballparks in 2021.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Facebook is turning to a former television news journalist to help smooth over its strained ties to the news media, which views it as both a vital partner and a potentially devastating opponent. It has hired Campbell Brown, a former NBC News correspondent and CNN prime time host, to lead its news partnerships team, starting immediately. The position is a new one for Facebook. In the role, Ms. Brown will "help news organizations and journalists work more closely and more effectively with Facebook," she wrote on her Facebook page on Friday afternoon. The addition of Ms. Brown comes as Facebook is struggling with its position as a content provider that does not produce its own content that is, as a platform, not a media company. Facebook's ambivalence in applying editorial judgment to the information coursing through its site has repeatedly drawn the company into trouble. In the past few months, Facebook has faced criticism for giving too much prominence to fake news; for censoring as offensive an iconic Vietnam War photograph of a naked girl fleeing a bombing attack; and for allegations that members of its "trending topics" team, which is now disbanded, penalized news of interest to conservatives. In recent months, Facebook has taken several steps to try to limit the exposure of fake news on its site, including working with a group of news organizations. Facebook executives emphasized that Ms. Brown's role was not to act as the sort of editor in chief that some commentators, including Margaret Sullivan, the Washington Post media columnist, have said it needs. They said she would not be involved in content decisions. Rather, they said, she will work as a liaison with news organizations so that Facebook can better meet their journalistic and business imperatives and lessen some of their suspicion about the social media giant. In recent years, Ms. Brown has emerged as a major player in the pitched political battles over charter schools, prominently clashing with teachers' unions while coming out against teachers' tenure. She is married to Dan Senor, a Republican foreign policy adviser and former White House adviser, who is making his own media foray with a bid to buy the Israeli financial newspaper Globes. And during the campaign Ms. Brown was critical of Donald J. Trump. But Facebook executives said they were hiring Ms. Brown for her understanding of the news industry as a onetime White House correspondent, co anchor of "Weekend Today" and primary substitute anchor of "Nightly News" at NBC News, and prime time anchor on CNN, which she left in 2010. 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. Some commentators noted Ms. Brown's ties to the Republican donor Betsy DeVos, Mr. Trump's nominee to lead the Department of Education. Ms. DeVos's family foundation funds The 74, an education focused journalism site co founded and led by Ms. Brown. In a post to the site on Friday, Ms. Brown said she was stepping away from her daily editorial role at The 74, but will remain on the company's board of directors. Facebook declined to comment beyond Ms. Brown's original post on Facebook. The social media site's relationship with the news media is, at best, in frenemy territory. The company relies on major news organizations including The New York Times for reliable news content. News organizations, in turn, rely on Facebook for distribution to its 1.8 billion users, who are increasingly turning to its news feed for information instead of to news organizations' own home pages. That shift has allowed Facebook to eat up a huge share of the online advertising market, contributing to devastating consequences for the ad supported news organizations. So, Facebook has gotten double blame in recent months for enabling the circulation of false news items while contributing to the financial pressures that are causing the continuing, national wave of newsroom buyouts and layoffs. Facebook executives said Ms. Brown would help find better accommodations between Facebook and its journalistic partners so that both find the partnerships equally worthwhile whether through Facebook Live, its Instant Articles feature or its news feed. The company does have some seasoned journalists in its ranks. But it does not have any in a senior position working on its newsroom partnerships, contributing to a disconnect between the company and news organizations when discussing how to collaborate on projects.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
July began as it has for each of the last 10 years, with the Mets cutting Bobby Bonilla a check for 1.19 million. The former slugger hasn't played professional baseball since 2001, but the payments will come every July 1 until 2035, when Bonilla will be 72. On Monday, less than a week after Bobby Bonilla Day, the Kansas City Chiefs made considerably bigger headlines by locking up their franchise quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, to a contract extension through 2031 that was worth 503 million. Pro sports had its first deal worth a half billion dollars. These two contracts connected, amusingly enough, by Bonilla having been teammates with Mahomes's father, Pat, in the former's final season with the Mets provide a perfect jumping off point for comparing how contracts are structured in the N.F.L. versus in other pro leagues. Bonilla's deal has spawned endless jokes on social media. But it also was simply a reflection of the ironclad guarantees that are baked into Major League Baseball contracts. At the time the deal was made, the Mets were on the hook to pay him 5.9 million and the only way for the team to free that money up for other deals was to get Bonilla to agree to deferred payment, resulting in a contract in which he would be paid 29.8 million over the course of 25 years. Mahomes, meanwhile, is fresh off a Super Bowl win and his deal was celebrated not just for its dollar figure, but because it seemed to guarantee that he would be spending his entire career with a team that had, for so long, seemed incapable of developing its own quarterback. ESPN took things a step farther by quickly putting together a graphic declaring Mahomes had surpassed Mike Trout of the Los Angeles Angels for the most lucrative contract in professional sports history. The problem with that assertion, of course, is that Mahomes plays in the N.F.L., not M.L.B. or the N.B.A., so the purported windfall required a great deal more scrutiny. Right off the bat, that 503 million was cut down after reporting accounted for nonguaranteed performance incentives in the contract which, if not met, reduce its value to 477 million. Even that total is attached to a mostly unfamiliar term, "guarantee mechanisms," which immediately raised the hackles of people familiar with the league's ability to inflate the value of its deals. Details continued to leak throughout Monday night, with the NFL Network and other media outlets reporting Mahomes's signing bonus as 10 million, with a very salary cap friendly 2020 base salary of 825,000. While more than 140 million of the deal is fully guaranteed against injuries, there is at least 300 million in the contract that could not reasonably be considered guaranteed in any way similar to the contracts in other major sports. The Chiefs will have several opportunities along the way to stop paying Mahomes if they so choose, and if they do, he can become a free agent. There will also be room for him to force renegotiation along the way. These concepts should not shock anyone, as Tom Brady and the New England Patriots recently tore up the two remaining years of a contract extension he'd signed just a year before, allowing the six time Super Bowl winner to depart for Tampa Bay. To compare Mahomes's deal to those in other sports in the simplest terms possible, think of it this way: If Mahomes sustains a career ending injury this season, his team would be obligated to pay him a little more than 140 million. If Trout were to sustain a similar injury, the Angels (or their insurance company) would still owe him the full 426.5 million. It is an important difference, because in the N.F.L., where careers are shorter and injuries more severe, the guaranteed amount is generally seen as the only part of a contract that matters. The league's stars often have huge dollar figures celebrated when their new contracts are signed, mostly for salary cap, ego, and market leverage reasons, but the most an N.F.L. player has actually taken home is the 252.3 million earned by Eli Manning over his 16 seasons with the Giants. M.L.B. has thus far had seven players exceed Manning's career total, according to Baseball Reference, and has six other players whose current contracts have more than that in guaranteed money. Similarly, the N.B.A. has had five players earn more in their careers than Manning, according to Sportrac, and will soon have that list expand a great deal, with players like James Harden and Stephen Curry guaranteed more than 200 million just on their current deals, on top of what they've made in the past. Mahomes is a brilliant player worth every penny he makes, and there is every reason to believe that he will finish his career as the highest paid N.F.L. player in history. But it is something of a coup for his league that this deal is being reported by some as the largest in pro sports when he is guaranteed less total money than the 161 million the Baltimore Orioles are obligated to pay Chris Davis, who is perhaps the worst everyday player in baseball.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
On the soggy floor of one of the only remaining intact forests on the island nation of Singapore, the egg sized heads of carnivorous creatures emerge from decaying leaves. They appear to be belching, or singing, or screaming out the catch phrase of their cousin in Hollywood "Feed me Seymour." This is Nepenthes ampullaria, an unusual pitcher plant found on the islands of Southeast Asia and the Malay Peninsula. And its "Seymour" is the worm larva of Xenoplatyura beaveri, a species of fungus gnat that develops inside the plant's mouth. When grown, it looks like a mosquito with big biceps. They've got a strange relationship, these two. The plant gives the gnat baby a safe place to eat and develop. In exchange, the baby builds a web across the plant's lips, captures and eats other insects and then defecates into its maw, or pitcher. The plant eats the ammonium rich droppings. And all is well in this miniature world of weird. It's not romantic. It's not sweet. But researchers call this relationship "mutualistic" in a study published Wednesday in Biology Letters. Their findings, based on laboratory experiments that simulated this insect plant interaction in the wild, suggest that cohabitation may have its benefits for these two obscure organisms. How tiny pitcher plant communities like this one and others the group is studying function may reveal secrets of plant and insect life, said Weng Ngai Lam, a graduate student in botany at the National University of Singapore, who led the research.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
NASA's Cassini spacecraft will plunge into Saturn on September 15, incinerating itself after 20 years in space. On September 15, 2017, the Cassini spacecraft will dive into Saturn, ending a 13 year tour of the ringed planet and its strange moons. Cassini arrived at Saturn in 2004, after a seven year journey through the solar system. Its first port of call was Titan, Saturn's largest moon. A frigid world of nitrogen smog and dark hydrocarbon lakes. Cassini released the Huygens probe to land on Titan. Parachuting through the moon's smoggy atmosphere, Huygens sent back images of alien river beds carved out of methane and water ice. Our first touchdown on an alien moon. Cassini returned to Titan over a hundred times, using the moon's gravity as a slingshot to shift its orbit and weave a three dimensional pattern through space. Over hundreds of flybys, Cassini's cameras dissolved Saturn's majestic rings into grooves and gaps, bands and braids. For 13 years, Cassini joined the dance of Saturn's 62 moons. Scuffed marbles chasing each other around a golden ring. The flattened moonlet Pan clears a narrow track through the rings. Potato shaped Prometheus carves ripples in Saturn's thin F ring. Sponge like Hyperion tumbles chaotically through the void. And pale Iapetus sweeps its orbit clean. A ball of ice dusted with black and ridged with mountains. But the most surprising moon of all was Enceladus, glistening with fresh snow. Its crinkled shell hides an ocean of water that might be hospitable to life. Geysers of salt water shoot from stretch marks near its south pole. Cassini flew through these plumes several times. It's sensors detected promising molecules but they were not designed to look for life. Are alien microbes hitching a ride in the briny spray? It will take a future spacecraft to find that answer. Cassini arrived at Saturn in the depths of northern winter, with the north pole in darkness. As the planet tipped downward, Saturn's seasons slowly changed. Perfect lighting to study the north polar hurricane. A six sided storm that could swallow four Earths. Some of Cassini's orbits took it behind Saturn. An alien sunset before hours of darkness. Looking back past Saturn's rings, Cassini even saw the distant Earth, a pinprick of blue light. In April, the spacecraft swung close by Titan for the last time, letting the moon's gravity pull it inward. For the first of 22 dives inside Saturn's rings. The "Grand Finale," 22 chances to peer at Saturn's cloud tops, study the pole and look out at the rings from the inside. But Cassini's fuel is almost gone. Its watch is ending after 20 years in space. To keep the lakes of Titan and the snows of Enceladus untouched by any earthly microbes, the spacecraft must be destroyed. On September 15, Cassini will make its final dive, piercing Saturn's clouds at over 70,000 miles an hour. Straining to remain upright as it sends its final data back to Earth. Saturn's butterscotch clouds will burn and scatter it into a wisp of alien atoms, leaving nary a ruffle nor a burp to show for it. Just a brief meteor flash. A streak of light that no eyes that we know of may ever see. The Cassini spacecraft that has orbited Saturn for the last 13 years would weigh 4,685 pounds on Earth and, at 22 feet high, is somewhat longer and wider than a small moving van tipped on its rear. Bristling with cameras, antennas and other sensors, it is one of the most complex and sophisticated spy robots ever set loose in interplanetary space. On Friday morning, the whole world will hear it die. At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, the scientists of the Cassini mission will figuratively ride their creation down into oblivion in the clouds of Saturn. They will be collecting data on the makeup of the planet's butterscotch clouds until the last bitter moment, when the spacecraft succumbs to the heat and pressure of atmospheric entry and becomes a meteor. So will end a decades long journey of discovery and wonder. The Cassini Huygens mission, as it is officially known, was hatched in the 1980s partly to strengthen ties between NASA and the European Space Agency and partly because, well, where else in the solar system would you want to go? With mysterious, mesmerizing rings and a panoply of strange moons (62 and counting), Saturn was the last outpost of the known planets before the discoveries of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Giovanni Domenico Cassini was a sharp eyed 17th century astronomer who first discerned a dark gap in Saturn's enigmatic rings and then discovered four moons. Christiaan Huygens discovered Titan and recognized Saturn's rings for what they are. The orbiter and lander arrived in July 2004 like wide eyed tourists at Saturn, the realm of mystery and rings. Shortly thereafter, in December 2004, Huygens departed the mother ship and made the first landing on an alien moon, touching down in the hydrocarbon slushes of Titan three weeks later. Cassini was just settling in for a long stay, circling Saturn like a pesky interplanetary paparazzo. A list of its greatest hits would include movies of the six sided storm that hugs the planet's north pole; detailed views of Saturn's spidery golden rings, woven into warps, braids and knots by the gravity of tiny moonlets; the discovery of plumes that look like snow making machines shooting from the surface of the moon Enceladus. Not to mention postcards of lakes and seas on Titan. NASA, not shy about sharing its accomplishments, recently released a blizzard of numbers summarizing the mission: 4.9 billion miles traveled, 294 orbits of Saturn completed, 2.5 million commands executed, 635 gigabytes of science data collected, 453,048 images taken, 3,948 science papers published, 27 nations participating and two oceans discovered. To which must be added: 2.5 billion to build and launch Cassini and Huygens, split between NASA, E.S.A. and the Italian Space Agency, and another 1.4 billion to run them for 20 years in flight. Like great scientific endeavors, Cassini raised as many questions as it answered. What, for example, is going on in those oceans on Titan and Enceladus? Titan, the only moon in the solar system to have a thick atmosphere even thicker than the Earth's is now the only other body in the universe known to have liquid on its surface. That liquid is not water, but methane and ethane hydrocarbons. The air on Titan is almost pure nitrogen. In addition, there may be an ocean of water or some other liquid substance deep under the surface. If you think that Life As We Don't Quite Know It could be based on some liquid other than water a possibility suggested by Steven Benner, a biochemist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Florida Titan has the potential to be Exhibit Number One. In recent years, proposals have been floated to send balloons, boats and even a submarine to Titan to check out whatever chemistry might be going on in its frigid wastes. Other astronomers have seized on Enceladus as the most likely place to find extraterrestrial critters. The plumes erupting from its southern region suggest that there is a warm salty ocean beneath the ice. Where there is water, so the mantra goes, there may be life. Microbes might be hitching a ride to space on those plumes, free for the taking by a spacecraft designed to detect them. Which Cassini was not. Nevertheless, Cassini flew right through one of the plumes in October 2015 and found evidence that chemical and thermal reactions deep in the ocean were producing energy in the form of hydrogen gas. Similar environments on Earth, like deep sea vents, are hotbeds of microbial activity. Thanks to Cassini, then, the far worlds of Saturn have leapt to the top of the lists of alien life hunters. Recently NASA circulated a call for proposals for future missions out there. But nothing lasts forever. The scientists could have left Cassini for dead when its time came, a derelict in space. But that would have risked contamination on Saturn's pristine and now very interesting moons, should the spacecraft hit them. So it had to go, and anyway there was still more to be learned by crashing it into Saturn. Cassini's fate was sealed last April. Using Titan's gravitational pull, Cassini changed course oh so slightly onto a trajectory that would take it on the first of 22 passes inside Saturn's rings, where no spacecraft has ever gone. On September 11, Cassini will get one more "goodbye kiss" from Titan, a last fatal gravitational nudge directing the spacecraft into Saturn itself. The cameras will turn off on the 14th, after one final look around the environs Cassini has called home for the last 13 years. But most of the spacecraft's instruments will keep working, gathering and analyzing samples of the planet's atmosphere as the spacecraft blazes into the clouds, which should tell us something about how the giant planet formed and evolved. Have the rings always been there, or are they a more (cosmically) recent addition?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Patients will swab their own nose using a testing kit sent by the company, and will mail it in an insulated package back to the company. The Pixel by LabCorp COVID 19 test will be available to consumers in most states, with a doctor's order, the agency said. LabCorp said that it would first make the tests available to health care workers and emergency workers who may have been exposed to the virus or have symptoms, and that it would be making the self collection kits available to consumers "in the coming weeks." The company also noted that because the tests are done by consumers in their own home, it would cut down on the demand for masks and other protective equipment that is usually needed to collect testing specimens. The company said the test will cost 119. Consumers will have to pay out of pocket for the test, a company spokesman said, and ask their insurer for reimbursement. The Trump administration has repeatedly said that diagnostic tests for the coronavirus will be covered so that consumers don't have to foot the bill. At a moment when governors across the country say their states are facing a shortage of tests, and companies like CVS and Walmart are setting up drive through testing centers in parking lots, the arrival of kits that let people collect their own nasal specimens at home has the potential to open up testing to a wider audience. Medical experts said the home swabbing tests could increase convenience for consumers and reduce the need for people to go to medical offices where they might inadvertently expose health providers and other patients to the infection.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
FRANKFURT For all the talk about Germany's financial exposure to Greece, it turns out that some German banks have a problem of more titanic proportions their vulnerability to the global shipping trade. Germany's 10 largest banks have 98 billion euros, or 128 billion, in outstanding credit or other risks related to the global shipping industry, according to Moody's Investors Service. That is more than double the value of their holdings of government debt from Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain. And it is more than any other country's financial exposure to the shipping industry, which is in the fifth year of a recession. Moreover, German banks bear a generous share of the blame for spawning that recession. By helping to finance and market funds used to build and buy ships, a popular tax shelter, the banks helped create a glut in large container ships that has led to a collapse in cargo hauling prices worldwide. Germans grumble chronically about having to pay for Greece's bad debts, and German policy makers style themselves as guardians of fiscal prudence. But the shipping related crisis, and the threat it poses to the German economy from billions of euros in bad loans and losses at shipping related companies, is a reminder that German banks and political leaders also have plenty to answer for. The recession in shipping has been overshadowed by the euro zone debt crisis, but it has many of the same causes. They include complex financial products that turned sour, market distorting government incentives and a gigantic underestimation of risk. "The container ship market is completely overbuilt," said Thomas Mattheis, a partner at TPW Todt, an accounting firm in Hamburg that advises clients in the industry. He attributed the situation to banks that granted easy credit, cargo companies that ordered too many vessels and investors eager for the tax free profits that were part of the allure, thanks to German law. "When you look back you can say they all had a share," Mr. Mattheis said. HSH Nordbank in Hamburg, the world's largest provider of maritime finance, is expected to raise its estimate of potential losses from shipping on Wednesday when it reports quarterly earnings. The bank, owned by local governments and savings banks, has already warned that in coming years it will need to avail itself of 1.3 billion euros in guarantees offered by Hamburg and the state of Schleswig Holstein, putting a further strain on taxpayers. "I have to admit that grave mistakes were made in the years before 2009," Constantin von Oesterreich, chief executive of HSH, said in an interview published on Saturday by The Hamburger Abendblatt. In October, Mr. von Oesterreich became the bank's third chief executive since 2008. Other German banks that were particularly active in ship finance, including Commerzbank in Frankfurt and NordLB in Hanover, which both rank in the top five globally in that market, have said they have made adequate provisions for losses and will not need any government aid. Commerzbank, which is partly owned by the German government after a bailout, shut down a unit specializing in ship financing this year and is winding down its holdings. The bank warned in its most recent quarterly report that it would be at least another year before it could sell units that were set up to finance construction of cargo ships with names including Marseille and Palermo. While larger, relatively new cargo ships sell for tens of millions of dollars, older, smaller ships often fetch only a few million not much more than the value of the scrap metal. 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. Exposure to shipping is one reason Moody's affirmed its negative outlook for German banks last month. In a report, the ratings agency warned that the global shipping industry "faces weakened demand amid sluggish global economic growth and evolving structural overcapacity." It said money that the 10 largest German banks had lent to the shipping industry equaled 60 percent of their capital, the funds held in reserve for potential losses. The shipping crisis has already caused a string of bankruptcies worldwide. Last month, the Overseas Shipholding Group, based in New York, sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The company, which specializes in transporting oil and petroleum products, continues to operate while it seeks to restructure. Last year, Beluga Reederei, a shipping company in Bremen, collapsed with the loss of about 550 jobs, according to The Weser Kurier newspaper. Beluga's majority owner was Oaktree Capital Management, an investment firm based in Los Angeles. From a financial point of view, Germany has been hit especially hard by the shipping crisis because of the popularity of funds used to finance ship construction, as well as a tradition of ship finance by German banks. Ship funds, usually organized by specialized firms but often marketed and financed by banks, benefited from a law that taxes ships according to size, rather than revenue. Any profits that ships generated were almost tax free. But many investors did not realize that they would still be liable for paying the underlying tax on the ships, even if there were no profits. In some cases, they were even expected to repay past dividends to cover loan payments on money losing ships. These days, few are profitable. According to industry estimates, some 300 big container ships are idle in ports around the world for lack of customers.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
In 1973, I served as an assistant special prosecutor for the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, which investigated the connection between the White House and the break in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, the subsequent cover up and other crimes connected with the White House under Richard Nixon. And nothing that I saw then even during the so called Saturday Night Massacre, when Nixon ordered his attorney general to fire the special prosecutor rises to what we are witnessing now with President Trump. The commutation last week of Roger Stone's sentence is the latest of multiple, brazen efforts to make the fulfillment of the investigation by the special counsel Robert Mueller all but impossible. The efforts by President Trump have amounted to a cover up and they were often made possible by his ability to control the Justice Department and by the lack of independence of the Mueller investigation. It demands a renewed look at how we empower independent counsels regrettably, history has shown us that, under extraordinary circumstances, they are needed to conduct proper oversight of abuse by the executive branch. That is a big difference from my experience in the Watergate prosecution: Established by the Justice Department, our investigation was functionally independent from it and the executive branch. We did not answer to the attorney general. We were not restricted from investigating or prosecuting Nixon, nor were we governed by any internal Justice Department rule that prohibited prosecuting a sitting president. And as the efforts by the attorney general, Bill Barr, and Mr. Trump's commuting of the Stone sentence make clear, that lack of independence has made a big difference. From the start, Mr. Mueller was restrained by Justice Department regulations. He was barred, for example, from looking into the broader relationship between Mr. Trump and Russia through a review of Mr. Trump's financial records and tax returns. Furthermore, according to the Mueller report, Mr. Trump made multiple attempts to fire the special counsel, and it is difficult, if not almost impossible, to conduct an investigation under those circumstances. Ultimately, the Mueller investigation did complete its limited investigation into whether any member of the Trump campaign conspired with the Russian government (it did not "establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities"); it also detailed the evidence, without reaching conclusions, relating to Mr. Trump's obstruction of justice. But as a result of those limitations, Mr. Trump, with the assistance of Mr. Barr, spun the narrative to affect the impact on the American public of the Mueller report and, as we have seen with Mr. Stone and Michael Flynn, undermined the criminal convictions obtained by Mr. Mueller's team. In the Watergate investigation, the special prosecutor decided not to indict Nixon because Congress was actively considering impeachment. After convicting the major figures in the scandal, including two attorneys general, almost no one (except Nixon) was pardoned and no one had their sentences commuted. Upon completion of our investigation, we issued a report without anyone in the executive branch spinning its results. Mr. Mueller's team convicted Mr. Stone for covering up for Mr. Trump. By granting clemency to Mr. Stone, the president expands the cover up. Mr. Trump's purpose has been clear: to prevent Mr. Stone and others (like Paul Manafort and Mr. Flynn) from recounting the full truth about the actions of the Trump campaign in 2016 concerning Russian interference. It is no coincidence that the only former Trump confidant in federal prison is the one who truthfully testified against Mr. Trump, his former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen. Information released in the past year primarily from Mr. Stone's trial, as well as unredacted parts of the Mueller report has offered more evidence about the areas of collusion and obstruction. For instance, according to this material, in summer 2016 Mr. Stone and Mr. Trump discussed future releases by WikiLeaks of damaging information against Hillary Clinton. The Mueller report noted that it was "possible" that the president "no longer had clear recollection" of such discussions with Mr. Stone. But it's possible that the denials, according to the report, "could also be viewed as reflecting his awareness that Stone could provide evidence that would run counter to the President's denials and would link the President to Stone's efforts to reach out to WikiLeaks." More recently, other former administration officials have expressed alarm at Mr. Trump's abuses for instance, John Bolton, in his recent book, describes the president's interference with Justice Department investigations as "obstruction of justice as a way of life." Mr. Trump's grant of clemency to Mr. Stone was an unconstitutional use of the presidential clemency power. The Constitution obligates the president to "take care that the laws shall be faithfully executed." It does not permit a president to grant clemency or to pardon a co conspirator, an obvious conflict of interest. Even Bill Barr has said as much. When asked at his confirmation hearing if a president can "lawfully issue a pardon in exchange for the recipient's promise to not incriminate him," he answered: "No. That would be a crime." No court has ever confronted this issue, and no court is likely to be asked to confront this issue regarding Mr. Stone because there is no independent prosecutor to challenge Mr. Trump's commutation of the Stone sentence. If Mr. Mueller's prosecution team had been truly independent and was still intact, they would have the ability to contest the constitutionality of the president's grant of clemency to Mr. Stone. In the final report issued by the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, we opposed institutionalizing a special prosecutor by law. We believed it would be abused, that it would not abide by Justice Department standards and would become bureaucratic. Nevertheless, an independent counsel law was passed and for the reasons we anticipated, it expired in 1999: Both Democrats and Republicans believed it was overused and abused. Looking ahead, there needs to be a better mechanism in extraordinary circumstances like Watergate and Russian interference in the 2016 election that allows for the appointment of a truly independent special prosecutor. We were lucky to get the Mueller report, but Mr. Mueller was acting under restraints. Unfortunately history tells us that we will need special counsels in the years ahead, under extraordinary circumstances, and as we did with Watergate, that office should have true independence to protect our country and Constitution. Nick Akerman ( nickakerman), a partner at Dorsey Whitney, was an assistant special prosecutor on the Watergate Special Prosecution Force.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Back in November, Mitchell Robinson showed the world what he's capable of. Robinson, the rookie Knicks center, absorbed contact under the basket from Orlando's Melvin Frazier and flopped to the court, hoping for a foul that was never called. Instead, the Magic passed the ball around a few times, finding a wide open Jerian Grant in the corner, 22 feet from a supine Robinson. In three seconds that defied reasonable expectation, Robinson got to his feet, raced toward the corner and leapt into the air. He fully extended his lanky 7 foot 1 frame and swatted the 3 point attempt out of midair so matter of factly that Grant pulled his hands toward his body, looking almost sorry that he had attempted the shot. The block was Robinson's eighth of the game, setting a Knicks rookie record (which he stretched to nine blocks by the end of the night). But beyond the block's impact in the moment, the play illustrated the 20 year old's approach to this season. The perception may be that the Knicks are tanking in hopes of drafting Duke's Zion Williamson, but for Robinson, any shot an opponent takes is a chance for him to get a block and he is not going to be cheated out of any of them, even if the shooter is beyond the 3 point line. As a result, a mostly irrelevant team has become must watch television. The Knicks had not forgotten that November block when the Magic came back to Madison Square Garden on Tuesday. The team posted a video of the play on Twitter, wondering if history would repeat. The post proved prophetic, as Robinson led the way in a 108 103 victory for the Knicks with 17 points, 14 rebounds, 6 blocks and 3 steals in 33 minutes off the bench. Four of the blocks came in just 40 seconds in the second quarter. The Knicks' two game winning streak ended on Thursday with a disappointing 125 118 loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers. But even in defeat, Robinson managed to add to his highlight reel, this time with a shot an opponent didn't take. It was early in the second quarter, and Cavaliers guard Matthew Dellavedova got the ball with a clean look at the basket from 3 point range. As he prepared to shoot, he noticed Robinson a few feet in front of him, with the rookie lowering his shoulder slightly as he prepared to leap. Dellavedova immediately thought better of trying his luck and passed the ball instead. A few seconds later on the same possession, Robinson got his block anyway, swatting away a layup attempt from Marquese Chriss. A rare prep to pro N.B.A. player as a result of his complicated withdrawal from Western Kentucky University, Robinson has been limited to 18.6 minutes a game as he works to refine his game, but he is still third in the N.B.A. at 2.3 blocks a game. When rated by block percentage, which estimates the percentage of an opponents' shots a player blocks in his time on the floor, Robinson is nothing short of stunning, at 10.4 percent. Basketball Reference has tracked block percentage back to the 1973 74 season, and the top four seasons among players with 100 or more blocks belong to Manute Bol, the 7 foot 7 shot blocking savant. No. 5 on the list belongs to Robinson. Sample size obviously needs to be considered, but Robinson stands a chance of being the only qualified player beyond Bol and Alonzo Mourning to finish a season with a block percentage higher than 10. Rim protection luminaries such as Serge Ibaka (9.8), Mark Eaton (9.2) and Dikembe Mutombo (8.8) all fell short of that mark in their best seasons. Robinson, who has quickly become a fan favorite, believes he is just getting started. He was asked recently how many shots he could block a game if the team let him play 30 minutes a night. "Probably around six," he said. "I feel like I can get like six." The N.B.A. season record for blocks per game is 5.6, set by Eaton in 1984 85, yet Robinson's boast does not seem all that far fetched, largely because of his unusual ability to block shots along the perimeter as well as under the basket. "His potential is crazy," Emmanuel Mudiay, the Knicks guard, told reporters before Thursday's game. "He's probably the best shot blocker I ever played with in my life. In my opinion, he's the best shot blocker in the league." Fizdale has said that Robinson's confidence and execution have improved since the team acquired DeAndre Jordan to serve as his mentor. The numbers back that up, as Robinson has averaged 11 points, 8.7 rebounds and 3.2 blocks a game since Jordan's arrival on Jan. 31, while still averaging only 23.1 minutes a night. He has also continued to pester outside shooters, with eight of his 35 blocks in February coming on 3 point attempts. Fizdale was asked recently if Robinson compared to any other players he had coached. The coach, who has worked with excellent rim protectors like Marc Gasol, Jermaine O'Neal and Chris Andersen, spoke about his rookie like a proud father. "No," he said. "He's a different guy, and he's got so much more room to grow. I'm going to keep my foot way up his butt to make sure he does." That could be terrible news for anyone looking to get a shot off against the Knicks in the coming years. They might find there is no place to hide.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
The international trailer for Pixar's new sequel is shorter and punchier than the two and a half minute clip that was released in the United States last week, with more Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) and a lot less Bo Peep (Annie Potts). While new characters voiced by Christina Hendricks and Keanu Reeves are given short shrift, it's good to hear Wallace Shawn (as Rex) and Don Rickles (as Mr. Potato Head). The tone favors slapstick over sentimentality, yet the road trip story line feels derivative of "Toy Story 3." After a series of Super Bowl commercials that were too brief to have much of an effect, the first theatrical teaser for this adaptation of the best selling young adult horror novels proves more effective. It also makes clear that while Oscar winner Guillermo del Toro co wrote and produced it, the film was directed by Andre Ovredal ("Trollhunter"). Among the disturbing images, one might be most unsettling to teens: a deadly pimple. If you don't know who Noah Centineo is, just ask any nearby adolescent. The heartthrob from "To All the Boys I've Loved Before" and "Sierra Burgess Is a Loser" returns in yet another youthful Netflix rom com. In this one, he's a high school hunk who creates an app that matches him with girls in need of someone to pose as their boyfriend. It's like a gender switch update of Patrick Dempsey's '80s relic "Can't Buy Me Love," with Camila Mendes Veronica Lodge on "Riverdale" as an added attraction. 'Dora and the Lost City of Gold' (Aug. 2) The 7 year old from Nickelodeon's long running cartoon "Dora the Explorer" has transformed into a high schooler (Isabela Moner) for her first big screen live action adventure, but the initial trailer doesn't clarify the intended audience. A joke about raves will no doubt fly over the heads of tots, while teenagers are unlikely to be impressed by Dora's computer animated monkey sidekick, Boots. Even with a cast that includes Michael Pena and Eva Longoria as Dora's parents and Eugenio Derbez ("Instructions Not Included") as a jungle guide, this looks like it could be a lost cause. Wait, Angry Birds is still a thing? Apparently so, as the follow up to the original 2016 cartoon brings back avian hero Red (voiced by Jason Sudeikis) and his rival, green pig Leonard (Bill Hader). This time, they join forces against a new enemy, a purple feathered creature that lives on a frozen island. That explains but doesn't excuse the use of Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
People take dozens of uncalculated risks each day. Every time they swallow a pill, bite into a burger or get behind the wheel, they are trusting the systems that delivered those products to market. But there are instances when the risks become too hard to ignore, like the giant recall of vehicles with potentially explosive airbags made by Takata. The airbags can spew metal fragments, causing life altering injuries or death. More than 19 million vehicles from 12 automakers have already been recalled in the United States, and now two manufacturers have extended recalls for certain 2015 and 2016 models. Other incidents are still under investigation. "Consumers may ask, 'Should I be worried about the airbags in my vehicle, even if they are not now under recall?'" Mark Rosekind, the administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said at a recent meeting. It's a legitimate question. Unless Takata can prove that the airbag inflaters in question are safe, millions of additional vehicles could eventually be recalled. As safety advocates point out, the probability of injury is low, but the associated risks are high, leaving consumers in an uncomfortable position. For some car owners, the solution is as easy as taking their recalled vehicle to a dealership for a repair. But what should you do if you have to wait for parts? And what about drivers who may be wondering about the safety of Takata airbags that have not been recalled, particularly if they're in the market for a new vehicle and want to avoid the mess entirely? These aren't easy situations to navigate. "You want to be able to rely on a safety feature to function properly each time," said Sean Kane, president of Safety Research and Strategies, a research and consulting firm. "And it is unclear just how frequently they are not going to perform properly." The root cause of the explosions has yet to be determined, though automakers initially blamed isolated manufacturing problems. More recently, however, regulators have pointed to ammonium nitrate, the chemical propellant used by Takata to inflate the airbags. It can destabilize over time and violently rupture the metal casing, or inflater, sending metal shards flying inside the vehicle. Eight deaths and more than 100 injuries have been linked to the defective airbags. And though a 2012 study raised questions about ammonium nitrate, Takata waited more than two years to share the information with regulators. Given everything it knows thus far, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recently laid out which vehicle repairs were most urgent and should take priority, since there aren't enough parts available to immediately fix every recalled vehicle. The sheer size and complexity of the recall means that it will take several years for the problem to be fully addressed. Takata is making only 30 percent of the replacement parts, so other manufacturers will have to retrofit their inflaters to fit the various recalled models. Which airbags are at the highest risk? Those with older inflaters, specifically those more than five to seven years old, appear to be more likely to rupture than newer ones. And those that have spent a continuous stretch of time in areas of high heat and humidity, like the Gulf Coast, are also at higher risk because the moisture affects the structure of the ammonium nitrate. Driver side inflaters are more likely than passenger side ones to cause fatal injuries, though it is unclear whether that is because a driver is always present, increasing the odds. Cars with problematic inflaters on both the driver and passenger side also pose greater dangers. With that in mind, regulators organized the recalls into three groups. Top priority is being given to cars that are generally from model years 2008 or older, and that were originally sold or (ever) registered in areas of "high absolute humidity," including Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Puerto Rico. Vehicles in that group must have parts available by the end of March, but regulators said manufacturers had until the end of 2017 to swap out most of the defective inflaters. Muddling matters further, some car owners will have to get their airbag inflaters replaced twice: Since non Takata inflaters are not being produced quickly enough, some vehicles are simply receiving an identical Takata ammonium nitrate inflater as a temporary fix. Since those airbags are new, their installation essentially resets the clock. (Final repairs must be done no later than the end of 2019). Drivers who find themselves waiting for a replacement part should ask dealers for a loaner car, though regulators said they didn't have the authority to require automakers to provide them. "Why should you ride in a car with a ticking time bomb?" said Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, a consumer advocacy group. "Even among the highest risk inflaters, ruptures are not common," Mr. Rosekind said at the recent meeting. "But as we've said, even these low odds of rupture are unacceptably high. And some consumers may prefer not to drive their vehicle until it is fixed." Dr. David Lilienfeld, a physician from Foster City, Calif., found himself in this predicament. He said he and his wife had owned about half a dozen Hondas over the years and rarely gave competing brands a second look. But after waiting nearly five months for the airbag in his 2004 Honda Civic to be fixed, his loyalty began to waver. Dr. Lilienfeld, 58, called two dealerships in July, which took down his contact information and told him he could be waiting awhile. Months passed. "This is absurd to have to wait five months for something that is potentially deadly to be repaired," he said. That finally changed last week, when he escalated his complaint by calling Jeffrey Conrad, senior vice president and general manager of Honda. The next day, his car was picked up and towed into the Honda service bay. "At least my faith in the company has been restored, though I don't think it should have required my talking with a V.P. to do it," he added. By contrast, Libbie Nofzinger, a 25 year old student from Toledo, Ohio, had a more seamless experience. When she took her 2004 Honda Accord to the dealer for an oil change last month, workers noticed that it had been recalled and provided her with a rental car while it was repaired. "It was pretty easy," she said. "I got my car back the next morning." Millions of additional vehicles with Takata's ammonium nitrate inflaters are still on the road and will be recalled at the end of 2018 unless new information surfaces establishing that they are safe. Another category of Takata inflaters now uses a desiccant, a chemical that helps combat the effects of moisture, in an attempt to make ruptures less likely. But regulators said even those would be recalled unless Takata can demonstrate their long term safety by the end of 2019. Regulators have banned Takata from using ammonium nitrate for new orders, though it can still fulfill existing orders using the propellant. It must fully phase out its use of ammonium nitrate by the end of 2018, though several of Takata's customers including Honda, Nissan and Toyota have already dropped the company as their supplier for airbag inflaters in new models. Consumers who are in the market for a new or used car, or who are wondering what type of inflater is buried within their steering wheel, have their work cut out for them. I called Honda customer service in an attempt to figure out what kind of airbag was in my family's Honda, even though it hasn't been recalled. Two different representatives told me I'd have to ask the dealer, but when I called two dealers, they said I'd have to ask the manufacturer. When I called Honda again, I was assigned a case number and a manager called me back the next day. She said it was possible that the inflater was made by Autoliv, another manufacturer, but to be certain I'd have to pay for a mechanic at a dealer to physically check. Five manufacturers BMW, Fiat Chrysler, Ford, Honda and Mazda account for about 14 million of the 19 million recalled vehicles, which can be found on safercar.gov. But most of the deaths and injuries occurred in vehicles from Honda, which recalled 6.28 million Hondas and Acuras. The company has confirmed six deaths in the United States and more than 60 injuries. Generally speaking, the Takata recalls have not hurt the book value of affected vehicles, according to Kelley Blue Book and Edmunds, two services that track the market. Ultimately, however, even some shiny new cars being driven off lots now will probably be recalled. Joan Claybrook, a former administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and a longtime consumer safety advocate, suggested that before purchasing a new vehicle, buyers should find out what kind of airbag it has. An even bigger concern of hers, she said, is the safety agency's ability to stay ahead of future problems. "It is really important to understand that Congress is starving this agency to death, and that undercuts its ability to handle these safety issues," said Ms. Claybrook, who called the agency's budget minuscule. "And I'd say this is an emergency issue."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Travelers from the United States seem to have an increasing interest in visiting Australia: Sales of Australia trips from the United States on Expedia.com have grown almost 35 percent in the last two years. From January through September, the tour operator Intrepid Travel has hosted 310 American travelers in Australia, up from 182 for the same period last year. Despite the long flight, said Ignacio Maza, the executive vice president of Signature Travel Network, a consortium of travel consultants, American travelers should consider it. "There are vibrant cities like Sydney, beautiful beaches, natural wonders found nowhere else and world class wine and food," he said. Best of all, an Australian getaway can be had at an attractive price. Throughout 2017 and 2018, Intrepid Travel is offering a 14 day Australia's East Coast Encompassed, Sydney to Cairns group tour. The itinerary includes stays in Sydney, Byron Bay and the Great Barrier Reef; a boat trip around the Whitsundays Islands; and a day trip to Fraser Island. Prices start at 3,890 a person, inclusive of upscale accommodations, transfers, all tours and 19 meals. Book by calling 800 970 7299. Travelers with less time to spend should consider the eight night Contrasts of Australia group tour from Trafalgar, also offered from now through 2018; stays and tours in Melbourne, the Great Barrier Reef, Sydney and Cairns are part of the itinerary. Prices start at 2,655 a person, inclusive of accommodations, transfers, most tours and 14 meals. Book by calling 866 513 1995.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Tourism is thriving on the Galapagos Islands, and conservationists worry about the effects on the animals and environment. Above, tourists on Espanola Island. Going to the Galapagos Is Easier and Cheaper Than Ever. That Might Not Be a Good Thing. "The archipelago is a little world within itself," a young Charles Darwin mused in his London study in 1839. Four years earlier, the aspiring naturalist had spent five weeks on the Galapagos Islands, some 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador. So taken by the "extreme tameness" of the species he encountered, he wasn't an ideal visitor by today's standards: He hopped on the backs of giant tortoises and "pushed a hawk off the branch of a tree" with the muzzle of a gun. These days, that "little world" is brand name nature, drawing an increasing number of visitors from around the world to see, among other creatures, blue footed boobies, marine iguanas that swim alongside equatorial penguins, and the giant tortoises for which the islands are named. In 2017, 241,800 people visited the islands, according to the Observatorio de Turismo de Galapagos, up from 173,419 a decade earlier. Much of the growth more than 90 percent from 2007 to 2016 is from land based tourism: visitors who fly into airports on the islands of Baltra and San Cristobal, check into hotels and take a la carte tours that are considerably cheaper than the expensive cruises that traditionally are how most visitors have seen the islands. With round trip flights from Quito costing as little as 400 or so, and hostel accommodations starting at 20 a night, the Galapagos Islands are no longer just for upscale travelers. "The problem is that the islands lack basic infrastructure like waste, energy, water," Mr. Hardter said over an iguana branded I.P.A. As we talked, the misty rain called garua started, and one of Darwin's finches scavenged from my unfinished plate. Mr. Hardter, who is originally from Germany, came to the islands in 2006 to build a solid waste recycling center with the World Wildlife Fund. Today that center processes all of Santa Cruz's plastic and organic waste. With the influx of so many people, more environmentally responsible ways of dealing with everything from long term waste disposal to drinking water are needed, Mr. Hardter said. Later, I strolled past a fish market where a 16 foot marlin dangled from a hook, and sea lions, pelicans and frigate birds nudged iPhone wielding tourists. A relative lack of predators and a curious public have made these animals fearless and bold. More than once I saw someone get too close to a sea lion, which barked in displeasure even, in one case, chasing a couple of tourists away. (In the national park itself, visitors are told to stay six feet away from the animals. Those rules, I was told, are routinely ignored, and my own observations bore this out.) Not far from the market, Avenida Baltra is lined with mom and pop stalls serving ceviche and marinero soup, and kiosks where tour operators hawk day trips geared to cost conscious visitors. Most of these advertised eco friendly specials; just how eco friendly is difficult to verify. Sometimes, these options are, by their very nature, the least impactful. You can visit highland jungle trails, coffee plantations or the twin volcano craters called Los Gemelos, all just outside town. Prices range from a few dollars for a cab ride to a couple of hundred for a day on the ocean in an outboard motor boat or small yacht. Or you can rent a bike for about 15 and explore a paved road that cuts through a semiarid landscape to forest. A few miles away in the sleepy town of Bellavista, off a dirt road on a private farm, there are lava tunnels sculpted by years of magma flow. White pickups double as taxis and charge a dollar to take you anywhere in town, even for D.I.Y. jaunts. I went on one of those jaunts, getting dropped off at the edge of town where Avenida Baltra heads uphill and into the highlands. I was in search of tortoises, but instead I saw yapping dogs and fences protecting corn and cattle, all of which disrupt migratory routes of the tortoises. Hours later, tired and wet, I boarded a bus for 50 cents. Staring out the window, I finally saw giant tortoises on the side of the road I lost count after a dozen many being fed by tourists (another thing that is discouraged, but nearly impossible to enforce). Where you spend the night is another indicator of change and the stratified options offered to visitors. Though the Observatorio de Turismo de Galapagos claims there are currently limitations on the number and size of new hotels, accommodations have increased dramatically over the last decade from 65 to more than 300 with prices running from backpacker rates to over 900 a night. I stayed in a standard room at the Ikala, an affordable lodging just a few steps from Puerto Ayora's marina. Many hotels have eco friendly features, or at least claim to. At the Ikala, solar panels heat the showers and light the garden. Across the bay, one of the island's oldest hotels (and most costly a suite recently ran about 800 a night) is Finch Bay, which feels like a slice of Malibu and takes its eco friendly services seriously. An on site treatment plant desalinates brackish seawater, a greenhouse supplies the kitchen and all fish is bought from locals. In 1989, Finch Bay's parent company helped establish the recycling center project Mr. Hardter worked on years later. Renato Vasconez, the quality manager at Finch Bay, said that all the hotel's wastewater is treated before it is released. A new filtration system will boost production when completed later this year (the hotel already provides potable water to neighboring properties that the municipality cannot reach). A boat is needed to get to nearby islands, so even land tourists may end up spending time on an expedition vessel operated by Lindblad or Quasar Expeditions. They aren't cheap a week can run several thousand dollars but the advantage is that you get the expertise of top naturalists employed by the cruise lines. Providers like Quasar are also plastic free and support the national park and organizations like the Charles Darwin Foundation and the Galapagos Scouts, organizations whose researchers work to preserve the species that attract foreigners. Lindblad sponsors similar work, something smaller operators can't afford. Lindblad, Quasar and other expedition cruises, are typically all inclusive. Last minute deals run as much as 30 percent off. The alternative is taking a day trip on smaller vessels from Puerto Ayora that cost as little as 100. The trade off is that you're generally on the water only a few hours, and the price might just cover gas (food and snorkeling or diving are often negotiated individually). Expedition ships also have permits to visit islands that many of the day cruises do not. "You get what you pay for: the quality of the guide, level of English, food, boat," said Dominic Hamilton, a deputy tourism minister turned magazine editor. "The animals and islands are the same; the options aren't." I decided to splurge on a Quasar cruise, which departed from Baltra and took me and about 30 passengers to several islands over the course of a week. Alex Cox, a veteran Galapagos born guide with nearly three decades of experience and an encyclopedic love for nature, pointed out volcanoes and blue footed boobies, and expounded on the complexity of the Galapagos every morning over a mug of hot water with lemon. On a blustery morning, Mr. Cox and I were snorkeling off the islet of Genovesa. Something darted through my legs and I surfaced with an uncontrollable laugh: It was a sea lion. Bobbing at the surface, I noticed three fishing boats with gear I later learned was illegal. Although it is legal for these fisherman to catch tuna and other fish in much of the Galapagos Marine Reserve, Mr. Cox told me that the type of lines the fishermen were using could accidentally snag and harm or kill sea lions, sharks and turtles. Later, Sofia Darquea, president of the Galapagos Naturalist Guides Association, told me about the dangers of illegal fishing practices. If the marine life goes, she said, so go the birds and reptiles, and so, too, the tourists. "The national park doesn't have enough working boats to monitor what's going on here," she said. The fact that only a fraction of the marine reserve the waters surrounding the national park are off limits to fishing, had to be the most confusing thing I heard during my visit. I knew that the government faced pressure from local fishermen, and that there had been incidents of violence in the past. But shouldn't all of this land and the surrounding sea be off limits? Wouldn't that protect this place for years to come? "These marine populations are being depleted," Enric Sala, a National Geographic explorer in residence, said. "If Ecuador wants the Galapagos to continue to be a unique place that attracts visitors from all around the world, and brings in hundreds of millions of dollars every year and supports tens of thousands of people, then they have to make a decision. Otherwise, the Galapagos risks going from being a unique place to being a very common place like so many others that have been destroyed through short term interests." On my last night in Puerto Ayora, I walked along the marina and stared across the water. Baby white tipped sharks swam in schools at the water's edge. A squawk turned my head it wasn't wildlife, but rather a young woman in a North Face jacket and Birkenstocks who was having what seemed like an argument with an uncooperative sea lion. Instead of posing for a snapshot, the sea lion kept advancing on the interloper, perhaps expecting to be fed instead of filmed. I watched as an opportunistic Galapageno approached. "Don't worry," he said. "If you want to get real close for a good picture, we can go to North Seymour island for the day. Just 200." The woman looked at her companion, a young man in a tie dye shirt who shook his head. " 100," the Galapageno bargained. "On my boat, we'll spend the whole day on the island." The sea lion waddled off the pier and splashed off into the water. The woman's eyes trailed after the departing mammal.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
The dancer Joseph Gorak still has what Jacques in "As You Like It" calls the "shining morning face" of the schoolboy, even though on Aug. 1 he will become a soloist for American Ballet Theater. And his face shone on Saturday afternoon, when he made his debut as Franz, the engaging double timing scamp at the center of the three act ballet "Coppelia." His account promised much for the future: just what was needed amid three performances of "Coppelia" otherwise chiefly notable for farewells. First, Mr. Gorak. Actually, other roles show he is both child and man. This layering recently made him wonderfully vulnerable as the adult Prince in "Cinderella": A dash of pathos underlay his regal dignity. And in "Coppelia," in which he embodied carefree adolescence, he added one twist in Act III. Taking the stage for the wedding pas de deux, he did so with the touching, suddenly self conscious responsibility of someone handling his first grown up duties in public. It was also Act III that first showed the full stretch of his legs and feet. He was trained in part by Fernando Bujones (1955 2005), an American Ballet Theater virtuoso in the 1970s and 1980s; and Mr. Bujones's arched feet are strongly echoed by Mr. Gorak's. They're just the most eye catching part of his elegant line. Step for step, when this young man's legs and feet sweep through the air in jumps and turns, he exemplifies the Bujones lineage. But Mr. Gorak's sweetness of manner is all his own; and so is the calm of his ultralong phrasing. You think his dancing is going to be all youthful enthusiasm, but it turns out to have qualities of quiet command you didn't anticipate.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
American Dance Platform (Tuesday through Jan. 17) American companies hailing from sea to shining sea are presented here by the Joyce Theater and White Bird, an influential Portland, Ore., dance organization, as part of the tsunami of dance showcases hitting New York for the annual gathering of arts presenters. The four split bill programs will pair established troupes, like the Martha Graham Dance Company, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and Alonzo King's Lines Ballet, with young collectives that are generating buzz, like TU Dance out of St. Paul and Ate9 from Los Angeles. Tuesday, Wednesday and Jan. 17 at 7:30 p.m., Thursday through Jan. 16 at 8 p.m., with 2 p.m. matinees on Jan. 16 and 17, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 242 0800, joyce.org. (Brian Schaefer) American Realness (through Jan. 17) Since its debut in 2010, the American Realness festival has been a popular purveyor of audacious work by contemporary performance artists. Artistic categories here are fluid (like identity, as many of these artists would argue), but the more dance inspired offerings include Jaamil Olawale Kosoko's " negrophobia," an exploration of the black male experience in America (Friday through Monday), Jillian Pena's "Panopticon" (Saturday through Jan. 17, in partnership with the COIL festival), "Sara (the smuggler)," a solo performed by veteran performance artist Sara Shelton Mann (Monday through Jan. 13), and Antonio Ramos and the Gang Busters with "Mira El!," a dissection of gender (Tuesday through Jan. 15). At various times, Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand Street, at Pitt Street, Lower East Side, 866 811 4111, americanrealness.com. (Schaefer) Big Dance Theater(through Jan. 16) Founded in 1991 by Annie B Parson and Paul Lazar, this singular company begins the new year with a 25th anniversary jubilee. "Short Form," as the program is called, includes five new and revised works highlighting Ms. Parson's choreographic voice, imaginatively interwoven and festively interrupted by an intermission disguised as a birthday bash. Wednesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., the Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 255 5793, thekitchen.org. (Siobhan Burke) Alison Chase (Thursday through Jan. 17) Reflecting the current global refugee crisis, Alison Chase, a co founder of Pilobolus, depicts a harrowing one way journey in her new work, "In the Forest of the Night." Also part of her second New York season is "Tracings," which uses bodies to invoke the Maine coastline where she lives. These join two repertory works, one that explores the cracks in a relationship and one that reimagines a Buddhist legend, all told with Ms. Chase's physical inventiveness and storytelling sensibilities. Thursday and next Friday at 8 p.m., Jan. 16 at 2 and 8 p.m., Jan. 17 at 2 p.m., Five Angels Theater, 789 10th Avenue, near 52nd Street, Clinton, alisonchase.org/nyc2016. (Schaefer) Chen Dance Center (Thursday through Jan. 16) In "Newsteps," a semiannual showcase of emerging choreographers selected by a panel of veterans, Takeshi Ohashi looks at dynamics in relationships; Gina Montalto wonders when to stay silent and when to scream; Hannah Garner puts a positive spin on failure; Ayaka Kamei brings her experience as a volunteer in the aftermath of the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami to the stage; and Laura Henry takes inspiration from "Lord of the Flies." At 7:30 p.m., 70 Mulberry Street, Chinatown, chendancecenter.org. (Schaefer) Coil Festival (through Jan. 17) The annual performance jubilee from Performance Space 122 has always been a boundary buster, but at this year's festival, an explicit theme is borders, as in questioning, crossing and erasing them. Among the dance artists taking that mission to heart are Jillian Pena, who uses mirrors to play with perspective in "Panopticon" (Saturday through Jan. 17); David Neumann, with a narrative driven dive in personal turmoil called "I understand everything better" (Sunday through Jan. 15); the Norwegian artists Findlay//Sandsmark Pettersen, presenting a meditation on dying (Tuesday through Jan. 17); and the Australian duo of Helen Herbertson and Ben Cobham with "Morphia Series," inspired by the Greek god of dreams, and tailored to an intimate audience of a dozen (Wednesday through Jan. 16). At various times and locations; a full schedule and details are at ps122.org/coil 2016. (Schaefer) Company XIV (through Jan. 17) If the traditional "Nutcracker" evokes the transition from childhood to adolescence, then Company XIV's "Nutcracker Rouge" might be the subsequent crossover into adulthood and the accompanying sexual awakening. The choreographer Austin McCormick combines a strong dose of burlesque, baroque and ballet with glittered pasties and G strings for a charmingly sensual and playful holiday romp. Tchaikovsky never sounded so scandalous. Tuesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 5 p.m., Minetta Lane Theater, 18 Minetta Lane, Greenwich Village, 800 745 3000, companyxiv.com. (Schaefer) Danspace Project Commission Reprisals (Friday through Jan. 16) In the past 20 years, Danspace Project has commissioned nearly 500 works, and it's starting 2016 by remounting four recent ones. Netta Yerushalmy's "Helga and the Three Sailors" features a solo performed by Ms. Yerushalmy in front of video clips of her as a child in her native Israel (Friday). In "White," Michelle Boule applies theories of quantum mechanics and BioGeometry to spatial relations in dance (Saturday). Keely Garfield embraces sincerity in "Wow" and three dancers interpret a work by the avant garde artist Joseph Cornell in Laurie Berg's "The Mineralogy of Objects" (Thursday through Jan. 16). At various times, St. Mark's Church, 131 East 10th Street, East Village, 866 811 4111, danspaceproject.org. (Schaefer) Excognito Dance Festival (Friday through Jan. 18) This Brooklyn based festival alternates between mixed bill programs featuring the three participating companies, and programs where each gets the stage all to itself. Belinda McGuire performs solos created for her by Doug Varone, Idan Sharabi and Sharon Moore (and one of her own); the choreographer Joshua Beamish introduces two new works in his quirky, fluid style; and in its single company show, LoudHoundMovement presents "In the Plague of Dreams," based on a story about an oppressed town. At various times, the Actors Fund Arts Center, 160 Schermerhorn Street, Boerum Hill, 800 838 3006, excognitodance.com. (Schaefer) Guangdong Song and Dance Ensemble (through Sunday) This company from China makes its American debut with "Dragon Boat Racing," a glossy production that recounts the origins of a popular Cantonese musical composition. That tale is also a dramatic love story, expressed in part through large scale, unison dance numbers that draw from ballet and traditional Chinese forms. Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 1 p.m., David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, 212 496 0600, davidhkochtheater.com. (Burke) 'Intensio' (through Sunday) Daniil Simkin, one of American Ballet Theater's most pyrotechnic stars, has been staying busy in the off season. For this high profile side project, he commissioned four contemporary works by Gregory Dolbashian, Alexander Ekman, Jorma Elo and Annabelle Lopez Ochoa. At the program's Jacob's Pillow premiere last summer, the best part was the cast, which includes seven of Mr. Simkin's Ballet Theater peers and Celine Cassone of Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal. Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m., Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 242 0800, joyce.org. (Burke) Noche Flamenca (through Jan. 23) Traditional Spanish dance and ancient Greek theater are an unlikely but well suited pair in Noche Flamenca's sharp production "Antigona," based on Sophocles's famous tragedy. The dance lights a fire under the play while discovering in itself a knack for narrative drama. In the title role, the powerhouse Soledad Barrio is both fierce and fragile. The century old church where the performance takes place is filled with striking sets, darkly amorous music played by a live band and a ferocious Greek chorus of dancers. Mondays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., West Park Presbyterian Church, 165 West 86th Street, Manhattan, 866 811 4111, nocheflamenca.com. (Schaefer) Donna Uchizono (Friday, Saturday and Wednesday through Jan. 16) Ms. Uchizono's new work, "Sticky Majesty," both welcomes and parses an array of conflicting sociopolitical views, in ways more covert than readily apparent, folded into structure and form. A nontraditional seating arrangement ensures that there's no reigning outlook on the world inhabited by her excellent cast, which includes the dancers Hadar Ahuvia, Sarah Iguchi, Molly Lieber, Heather Olson and Meg Weeks. At 8 p.m., Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, 280 Broadway, near Chambers Street, Lower Manhattan, 646 837 6809, gibneydance.org. (Burke) Works Process: Justin Peck (Sunday and Monday) Mr. Peck, the young resident choreographer at New York City Ballet, has thrilled the ballet world in recent years with one inventive dance after another. So far, they've all been abstract. His first narrative work, based on the Hans Christian Andersen story "The Most Incredible Thing," arrives in February. At this preview event, Mr. Peck, the composer Bryce Dessner and the designers Marcel Dzama and Brandon Stirling Baker will chat about their collaboration while a handful of City Ballet dancers perform excerpts. At 7:30 p.m., Peter B. Lewis Theater, Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street, 212 423 3575, worksandprocess.org. (Schaefer)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Edie Windsor, the veteran L.G.B.T. activist who emerged as arguably the most famous figure in the marriage equality movement, has gotten married again. On Monday, she and her new partner, Judith Kasen, a vice president at Wells Fargo Advisors, were wed at City Hall in New York. The city clerk was Michael McSweeney; the officiant was Angel Lopez. It was an understated ceremony. The brides arrived in a black Uber car with just one witness, Danielle Reda, Ms. Kasen's best friend. Ms. Windsor and Ms. Kasen wore black suits and wound up at the clerk's office a little later than usual because Ms. Reda forgot to bring identification and had to run back to the Upper East Side, where Ms. Kasen has an apartment, to retrieve it.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Fanny Waterman, the British pianist and teacher who co founded the prestigious Leeds International Piano Competition and oversaw it as chairwoman and artistic director for more than five decades, died on Dec. 20 at a care home in Ilkley, Yorkshire. She was 100. Her death was announced by the Leeds competition. The idea of presenting an international music competition in 1960s Leeds, a gritty industrial city in northern England, seemed risky. But Ms. Waterman, a Leeds native who learned perseverance from her poor Russian immigrant father, believed in the vitality of her hometown and was certain that she could draw support for the venture. "I dreamt it up one night, and I was so excited that I woke up my husband," she said in an interview with The Jewish Chronicle in 2010. "He was born in London," Ms. Waterman added, "and he said: 'It won't work in Leeds. It has to be in a capital city.'" But Ms. Waterman talked up the idea and raised funds from patrons, banks, businesses, the Leeds City Council and the University of Leeds. Her husband, Geoffrey de Keyser, a doctor, became a founder of the competition, along with her good friend Marion Harewood, a pianist who was then the Countess of Harewood (and was later married to the Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe). The two friends also wrote "Me and My Piano," a series of piano lesson books that remain top sellers in Britain. From the start, Ms. Waterman conceived of the Leeds competition, which is held every three years, as a means to foster musical values that she had cultivated as a performer and teacher, placing musicianship, artistry and sensitivity over technical bravura. Music is a "wonderful discipline," she said in the 2010 interview. "You can't play a note without thinking, How loud, how soft, how soon, how late? It makes you think carefully, and it gives you judgment." Over the years the competition joined the ranks of the world's elite contests, including the Van Cliburn, Tchaikovsky and Chopin. Such competitions are major springboards for careers in music, often an obligatory stop on a young performer's progress (though they have also been criticized as quashing creativity and individuality). As with all competitions, the administrators of the one in Leeds point not just to the list of their outstanding winners among them Michel Dalberto, Jon Kimura Parker, Ian Hobson and Alessio Bax as proof of success in identifying young talent, but also to finalists who became major artists. That group of luminaries includes Mitsuko Uchida, Andras Schiff, Lars Vogt and Louis Lortie. The first Leeds competition took place in 1963, with the composer and conductor Arthur Bliss as chairman of an eminent jury. It was an immediate success, with 94 entrants from 23 countries, though with one potentially embarrassing result: The winner was one of Ms. Waterman's students, Michael Roll, raising the perception of favoritism. Ms. Waterman later said that he had deserved to win, and that the judges had strongly supported him. For the third competition, in 1969, Ms. Waterman asserted herself after the Romanian pianist Radu Lupu placed fourth in the second round, which meant he would not advance to the finals. Deeply impressed by Mr. Lupu's playing, Ms. Waterman insisted that the number of finalists be increased from three to five, and vowed not to organize another competition unless he made the cut. She got her way, and Mr. Lupu wound up winning and going on to a distinguished career. The competition garnered wide attention in 1972 when the American pianist Murray Perahia, then 25, won first prize. In the last round, with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, the other two finalists, Craig Sheppard and Eugene Indjic, also Americans, played Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto, a work that many young pianists have used to prove their virtuosic mettle. Mr. Perahia, already an audience favorite from performances of works by Schumann, Mozart, Mendelssohn and others, instead chose to play Chopin's intimate, elegantly brilliant Piano Concerto No. 1 in the finals. He prevailed despite suffering terrible anxiety under the pressure, earning a cash prize of 1,850 and numerous recital and concerto engagements. Ms. Waterman was born on March 22, 1920, in Leeds, the second child of Mary (Behrman) Waterman and Meyer Waterman (the family name was originally Wasserman). Her mother was an English born daughter of Russian immigrant Jews. Her father, born in Ukraine, was a skilled jeweler. Though the family struggled financially, her parents came up with enough money to provide Fanny with piano lessons once her talent became clear. She practiced on an old upright piano and studied with a local teacher while her brother, Harry, took violin lessons. At 18, she became a scholarship student at the Royal College of Music in London, studying with Cyril Smith. She performed Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 with the Leeds Symphony Orchestra in 1941, the same year she met Dr. de Keyser, then a young medical student, whom she married in 1944. With the birth of their first child, Robert, in 1950, Ms. Waterman decided to devote herself to teaching. Robert de Keyser survives her, as do another son, Paul, a violin teacher, and six granddaughters. Her husband died in 2001. Once the Leeds Competition got going, Dr. de Keyser became intimately involved, both in recommending lists of repertory and in writing up rules. "He was a doctor, but his knowledge of music was second to nobody," Ms. Waterman said in 2010. In 1966, she and her husband bought Woodgarth, a magnificent eight bedroom Victorian house in Oakwood, a suburb of Leeds. She kept two fine pianos in its spacious drawing room, where she taught, made plans for the competition and presided over lively musical soirees that included guests like the composer Benjamin Britten and the tenor Peter Pears, as well as Prime Minister Edward Heath. Ms. Waterman sold the house this year.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
We take the weekend to highlight some of the recent books coverage in The Times: Helen Oyeyemi's sixth novel, "Gingerbread," has the fairy tale aura typical of her work. Our reviewer calls the book "jarring, funny, surprising, unsettling, disorienting and rewarding." With his new book, "I.M.," the fashion designer, television star and singer Isaac Mizrahi adds memoirist to his list of achievements. Mizrahi also visits our podcast this week, to discuss the book and his formative years. Roz Chast and Patricia Marx, both of The New Yorker, talk about their new book, their ukulele band and, of course, their mothers. Mark Synnott's "The Impossible Climb" gives context for Alex Honnold's historic unroped ascent of El Capitan, Yosemite's 3,000 foot slab of "glacier polished granite." Honnold's climb was recently documented in the Oscar winning film "Free Solo." Our review of Synnott's book is by the intrepid author and dog sledder Blair Braverman.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Sometimes cultural shifts rumble at a glacial pace. Sometimes they gather momentum so quickly that our language can only surge ahead in an effort to catch up. Think selfie, or vape, or normcore. Next up may be Mx. (pronounced mix), a gender neutral alternative to Ms. and Mr. Online discussion of Mx. grew clamorous in the last month after an array of media outlets reported with more excitement than hard facts that editors of the prestigious Oxford English Dictionary had announced its consideration to add the Mx. title. Like so many pebbles of cultural news that ripple across the Internet, that one was only sort of accurate. The actual story is a bit less dramatic: A representative of the Oxford University Press, which publishes a range of periodicals, including the OED, was contacted by someone asking whether Mx. might be added to the mix. The answer was yes, it is being considered by one of the publisher's online lexicons, OxfordDictionaries.com. But the fervor with which the cultural discussion grew underscored perhaps a greater truth: Swaths of Americans are comfortable with new considerations of gender and of the importance (or lack thereof) of identifying a specific gender, and they would welcome new words to help communicate in a new world. The language issue was amplified in the past week by the appearance of Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair and the attendant confusion surrounding which name and pronoun should be used. The chatter about Mx. and its indication of mainstream acceptance is a welcome, if overdue, development for some. Justin Vivian Bond, a singer, songwriter and performance artist, began to use Mx. in self reference in 2011. "It sounded like an obvious description of what I was: a mix of genders," the artist said. The honorific has already made headway in Britain. About a year ago, the Royal Bank of Scotland, for instance, began to instruct its employees to offer customers the option of selecting Mx. when filling out paperwork at local branch offices. The move was made, said Marjorie Strachan, the head of inclusion for the bank, to respond to requests made by bank employees and customers. The L.G.B.T. community applauded the policy, she said, as did those who simply do not want to be addressed by a title that indicates gender. "It's not just about making the option available to people," Ms. Strachan said. "It's about educating our work force to make no assumptions about why one would use it. It's no different than if someone wanted to use Ms. rather than Mrs." The adoption of the term in Britain has been easier because the idea of more than two genders is more accepted there than in the United States, so Mx. has more support there, said Kate Bornstein, the author of "Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us." "The U.K. is ahead of the U.S. in terms of radical sexuality and gender, they're far ahead," the author said. An article this week in The New York Times referred to a speaker using the honorific Mx. However, Philip B. Corbett, a Times editor who oversees the newspaper's style manual and usage rules, called that appearance of Mx. in The Times an exception. "I don't think we're likely to adopt Mx. in the near future," he said. "It remains too unfamiliar to most people, and it's not clear when or if it will emerge as a widely adopted term." Linguistic experts say it is harder to change usage habits of words uttered frequently in speech, such as "she" and "he." But a realignment in honorifics may be more quickly achieved because courtesy titles are less often spoken than written, like in the completion and mailing of government, health care and financial documents, as well as in newspapers and other media publications. Katherine C. Martin, the head of United States dictionaries for the Oxford University Press, said that she and her colleagues were surprised by the huge, mostly positive reaction to online reports regarding the incorporation of the title. She said Mx. was on the "new words watch list" for OxfordDictionaries.com. The first citation of Mx. found by Ms. Martin's team dates to 1977, in a publication called The Single Parent. In the midst of the Ms. era, an article in it wondered whether a courtesy title that masks gender might help ameliorate any bias against single parents. "On second thought, maybe both sexes should be called Mx.," the article said. "That would solve the gender problem entirely." Mx.'s next notable appearance, Ms. Martin said, came in the early 1980s, when some people engaged in nascent forms of digital communication and did not know one another's gender. In the last decade, she added, it popped up regarding people who chose not to identify with either gender or were in transition.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Sam and Cailli Beckerman go through every waking moment as if they have just won the big prize on the fun wheel. They radiate optimism to an almost absurd degree. They dress bravely and outrageously. "They're two of the most authentically joyful human beings I've ever experienced in my life," said Karen Robinovitz, the creative director and co founder of Digital Brand Architects, an agency that represents them. "I describe them as human glitter." The Beckermans, 36 year old identical twins from Canada, are bloggers and social media influencers hired by fashion and lifestyle brands. They're part of an economy in which the number of social media followers you have is currency and your job is to post, 24 7, to Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat. For the Beckermans, New York Fashion Week is a chance to see friends from the global fashion tribe and to reconnect with companies that pay them. Hanging out with them, however, you see that it's hard to determine where the marketing ends and real life begins, which, for the brands, is the point. As Sam put it, about a recent project: "We're Disney girls. We're obsessed." They are also Chanel girls, H M girls, Moschino girls, Coach girls, Refinery29 girls, Aldo girls and Kenzo girls. Does that leave anybody out? What sets the Beckermans apart from other fashion bloggers, and what brands and designers love about them, is their over the top personal style. They often wear clashing, cartoonish, multilayered outfits that few others could pull off say, Haruno Shibuya Army pants with blue faux fur on the knees paired with Fenty x Puma sneakers and a Coach black leather vest. And there are two of them. "I try to be like the Beckermans," Ms. Rocha said. "I put on everything in the morning. And then I take it off. I'm scared to be fun." The Beckermans were once New York based designers themselves. They lived in the city for 10 years. They graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology and had a short lived clothing line, Beckerman, that showed in 2007 during fashion week. Creating and marketing a collection was stressful, they said. They much prefer attending other designers' shows, which combines all their favorite things: taking photographs, meeting people, seeing fresh fashion and dressing up. They arrived on Sept. 7 from Toronto, where they live together, schlepping five bags of checked luggage between them. "Not the hard shell kind, they don't expand enough," Sam said. "The stretchies." On Thursday, after lunch with a friend and before a party hosted by the Gap and Refinery29, they rested briefly at the bar of the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown, where they were staying (they are not, for the record, Roosevelt girls). In person, you're reduced to remembering that Cailli's face is ever so slightly rounder, and that Sam, by infinitesimal degrees, takes charge in social interactions. Knowing the awkwardness this induces in others, the women are fine with, and even encourage, treating them as one interchangeable unit. At the bar, Cailli wore Alexander Wang short shorts and thick soled Chanel sandals that lit up, while Sam paired H M leather shorts with her Chanel light ups. Both wore on brand Gap hashtag DoYou T shirts. They were excited for the whirlwind week ahead, but, then, every day is a whirlwind. In the last few months, working with various brands, they had traveled to the south of France ("We stayed in a villa"), to a big mall in King of Prussia, Pa. ("We're mallrats"), to Los Angeles ("We got to see our younger sister, Chloe"), to Cuba and Vancouver, British Columbia, to Las Vegas for an electronic music festival ("We love dancing!") and to New York. Now they were back in the city before going to Toronto briefly and then Paris for more shows. "I have to look through our Instagram to know what we did," Sam said jokingly, cracking herself and Cailli up. Soon their car and driver pulled up outside provided for them, along with an accompanying hashtag to use, by Lexus. Crawling through traffic, they turned the S.U.V. into a mobile studio, snapping photos of their outfits and editing on their phones. "This is where we take the best selfies," Cailli said. Sam explained: "The lighting is great. You just have to make sure the seatbelt isn't showing too much." The party was at a Gap pop up shop in a raw storefront in TriBeCa. The Beckermans weren't required to do much more than show up, pick out some clothes from the racks and photograph themselves having fun wearing them. Twenty minutes in, they were approached by a breathless Ryan Massel, a Canadian TV host and fashion blogger. "I saw their Chanel shoes and I was, like, please," Mr. Massel said. "I've been waiting to meet you guys for four years." Indeed, Mr. Massel appeared to be overheating in the Beckermans' presence. "I'm so sweaty," he said, whipping out his phone for a group selfie. "I'm so excited. I need to get a towel." At the Jeremy Scott show, held at Moynihan Station, the Beckermans caused the photographers outside to swarm as they approached. Inside, they chatted with Ms. Rocha and found themselves seated beside another pair of selfie loving sisters, Paris Hilton and Nicky Hilton Rothschild. "They're great girls," said Sam, who, like Cailli, is full of praise for nearly everyone and everything. Backstage after the show, the Beckermans gave Mr. Scott a congratulatory hug. The designer was asked what he loves about them. "What don't I love?" he said. "I don't love that they live so far away." Turning serious, Mr. Scott added: "I love that they're optimistic, uplifting, positive. And it's not a put on. I've been with them outside of fashion events. It's who they are." In a way, with their everyday outrageousness and unconditional love for clothes, the Beckermans resemble the fashion characters of a less commercial era. You got the sense that, even without the iPhones welded to fingers constantly typing out corporate approved hashtags, Sam and Cailli would be doing the exact same thing they are doing now.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Even in a room dotted with Hollywood luminaries, the arrival of Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper at a table at the National Board of Review awards gala Tuesday night caused a special kind of commotion. Chairs were pushed aside. A group of onlookers formed seemingly out of nowhere, many raising their phones over each other trying to snap a picture. When a server balancing a platter of food approached the fray, a waitress offered her colleague two words: "Good luck." Generally speaking, the mood at the gala, held at Cipriani 42nd Street, was more casual than other awards season events, due in part to the fact that, as is always the case, the night's winners had already been announced. ("Green Book" won best picture and actor; "A Star Is Born" took best director and actress.) Also, the event isn't televised so acceptance speeches, unencumbered by broadcast time limits, were much looser and longer (and at times more rambling) than the Golden Globes on Sunday. Walkoff music played only when speeches were actually finished. The night's winners took advantage of that freedom to comment on the diversity in the teams behind this year's movies. Constance Wu, who starred in "Crazy Rich Asians," which won for best ensemble, seemed to channel the 2002 Oscar acceptance speech by Halle Berry when she said, "This award isn't just for us but it's for all underrepresented people to finally be seen." Michelle Yeoh, another "Crazy Rich Asians" star, was applauded when she spoke of the film as a "landmark, historical moment for our culture." She added, "You don't have to treat us special. Just give us equal opportunities, that's all we ask." There were also cheers in the audience when the "Orange Is the New Black" star Uzo Aduba presented best supporting actress to Regina King for her turn as the matriarch in the James Baldwin adaptation "If Beale Street Could Talk." Aduba pointed out that "we rarely see such a multidimensional African American woman on screen let alone over 40." "In a time when we must unite as a single nation," she added, "when we must remember there are still the same issues facing us as Mr. Baldwin wrote about in 'If Beale Street Could Talk' over 40 years ago, these stories have to be told." As the ceremony was unfolding, President Trump was addressing the nation about his long promised border wall, and his presence was heavily felt in the room. Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie, who won for breakthrough performance in "Leave No Trace," said she wanted to acknowledge the goodness in people. "Through the goodness in people, we can make a start toward a better world, a world that won't come about if we build walls to keep each other out." The comment was met with applause. Soon after, Barry Jenkins, winner of best adapted screenplay for "If Beale Street Could Talk" and perhaps inspired by a profanity laden speech Robert De Niro gave at last year's gala, delivered the night's most direct and harshly worded rebuke of the president. "There is a film here called 'Minding the Gap' that is being celebrated by Bing Liu," Jenkins said, referring to one of the board of review's top five documentaries. "His family, they immigrated here and the president does not want them here. Chloe Zhao, who directed 'The Rider,' which is a masterpiece the president does not want her here. There was a film this year called 'Roma' made by a man named Alfonso Cuaron. The people in that film, the president does not want here." And then, using a decidedly stronger word than "forget" and eliciting some of the loudest applause of the night, Jenkins said: "Forget him." A big cheer came when the directors Betsy West and Julie Cohen began their acceptance speech for best documentary for "RBG" with a "medical update" on the film's subject, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. "We are told by her family that Justice Ginsburg's recovery from recent surgery is going very well," West said. Lady Gaga, walking onstage to accept the award for best actress for "A Star is Born," asked, "Is Judge Kavanaugh still in office?" She went on to comment on how her own work helped her understand the challenges her character would face as a young woman in the music business, saying, "in my career, I have over and over again tried to subvert the influence of powerful men." "Every time they told me to go left," she went on, "I would take a sharp, sharp right." She also expressed gratitude toward her collaborators, especially Bradley Cooper, whom she called a "modern directorial Houdini." Later, after being presented with the award for best director by Steven Spielberg, Cooper said that the recognition for his directorial debut gave him the "courage to disregard fear and to continue to pursue truth with love."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
When I started to watch American ballet companies in London and New York in the late 1970s, one of the four ballerina roles in George Balanchine's "Symphony in C" at New York City Ballet was filled by the African American dancer Debra Austin. Suzanne Farrell, most celebrated of Balanchine ballerinas, danced the second movement, Ms. Austin the third, and in the finale the two were centerstage, leading the company's arrayed ranks. Meanwhile Dance Theater of Harlem had London seasons almost every year; it was widely said, with reason, that its account of Balanchine's "Agon" surpassed that of City Ballet. That's American ballet, I thought, with black dancers flourishing in the same soil beside white ones, and looked forward to seeing more progress along those lines. But what has happened since then? Well, the supply of male African American ballet dancers has remained steady; but that of their female counterparts has not. I recommend this strong and detailed "My Body My Image" piece by the African American writer and former dancer Theresa Ruth Howard; it places the current fuss about Misty Copeland in the context of her black ballerina antecedents. Wednesday at American Ballet Theater brings Ms. Copeland's first New York Odette Odile in "Swan Lake." (She danced the role with Washington Ballet this April.) I wish for everyone's sake that it seemed less momentous for the future of African American women in ballet. We should have gotten further than this long ago. The Royal Ballet in New York In the years from 1949 76, New York was the Royal Ballet's second home. This week's season at the David H. Koch Theater is its first in the city for 11 years; it's now led by a generation of international dancers largely unknown in New York (from America, Argentina, Australia, Cuba, France, Japan and Russia as well as Britain).	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
MOSCOW The Russian government on Thursday approved across the board budget cuts over the next two years in the clearest sign yet that officials do not expect its economy, the world's eighth largest, to revive soon, and that the Kremlin is ready to try a new policy to spur growth. Making the move more unusual, the cuts come midway through a previously approved spending plan, and they reflect a shift in strategy away from reliance on consumer spending. In Russia, budgets are approved for three years in advance rather than year by year. The Finance Ministry now projects that revenue will be 3.5 percent lower in 2014 and 7 percent lower in 2015 than it predicted a year ago, when the government of President Vladimir V. Putin approved the three year spending plan. Under the revised budget, military salaries will be frozen next year and the government will put less money into a pension fund for future retirees. It will use the money to meet current pension obligations instead. "The budget turned out really tough," Dmitri A. Medvedev, the prime minister and a former president, said in comments carried by Russian news agencies on Thursday when he presented the new plan. "We had to work off the real situation in the economy in our country, and in the world." The problems for Russia's economy run deeper than its overwhelming dependence on oil and gas revenue, which account for more than half the federal budget. Wages that for years rose faster than labor productivity under economic policies that made Mr. Putin widely popular have now priced Russians out of the market for many goods and services globally. Russia's economy is now growing more slowly than that of the United States. In the second quarter, the gross domestic product rose 1.2 percent in Russia, compared with 2.5 percent in the United States. Officials spent the summer debating how to reverse the slowing of economic growth here. In a speech in June, Mr. Putin suggested the Kremlin would try to prime the economy with government spending by dipping into about 171 billion in reserves in sovereign wealth funds to finance infrastructure projects like modernizing the trans Siberian railway. Those spending plans were never carried out. Since then, the economic policy team has changed direction, economists say, and the new approach became clear with the release of the plan for cutting the three year budget rather than running higher deficits. Open or closed on Thanksgiving? Here are stores' plans for Thursday and Friday. "They want to change the model of growth in Russia's economy" away from dependence on consumer spending, Vladimir I. Tikhomirov, chief economist at the Otkritie brokerage house, said of the new policy. "The government and central bank have decided their top priority is to bring inflation down." This shift, Mr. Tikhomirov said, reflects a deep seated aversion by Mr. Putin to foreign borrowing of the type that made the Soviet Union beholden to Western banks in its later years. In light of the worsening slowdown here, further stimulus would require foreign borrowing. "It goes against normal economic policy" to cut spending in the face of an economic slowdown, Mr. Tikhomirov said. The new Russian policy instead retraces a growth strategy followed successfully in the late 1990s by Eastern European nations like Poland, which focused intensely on controlling inflation and borrowing costs for businesses. Though this brought a temporary slowdown, and even recession in some countries, business activity picked up as rates came down. The Russian government predicted several years of slow growth of about 3 percent, down from the 4.5 percent previously forecast.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Mark Burnett, the reality show impresario, has faced mounting demands in recent days to release old video from his series "The Apprentice," on speculation that Donald J. Trump was captured on camera making vulgar remarks during his 11 years as the show's host. On Monday, Mr. Burnett broke his silence and issued a statement with a basic message: Don't look at me. "Despite reports to the contrary, Mark Burnett does not have the ability nor the right to release footage or other material from 'The Apprentice,'" read a statement issued by Mr. Burnett's public relations team and attributed to Mr. Burnett and Metro Goldwyn Mayer, the entertainment conglomerate that acquired a majority of his production company in 2014. The statement did not elaborate on the reasons Mr. Burnett could not distribute the video, beyond a general description of "various contractual and legal requirements" that "restrict M.G.M.'s ability to release such material."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
When Meera Parat decided to leave her one bedroom apartment in Seattle and return to her childhood home in Palo Alto, Calif., she figured she would be staying for a few weeks. Three months later, Ms. Parat, 25, a data scientist, was still taking video calls from her childhood bedroom, which is decorated with elementary school participation trophies and notes with inside jokes. "It's probably exactly the same from when I left it in high school," she said. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that roughly 20 percent of U.S. adults moved, or know someone who relocated permanently or temporarily, because of the pandemic. The study found that higher income and education played a role in who was able to move. Chinazor Offor, 25, who works in e commerce at Bustle Digital Group, was hesitant at first, but when the pandemic hit and her hours were cut in half, she realized she couldn't sustain living in New York. She decided to move home to Senoia, Ga., at the end of April to ride out the rest of quarantine with her parents. After being away from New York for nearly two months, Ms. Offor said she found herself being less distracted by the hustle and bustle of the city. She started practicing guitar regularly, after playing in high school. "I don't know if I could go back after feeling like I can actually pay off debt," Ms. Offor said. "I can actually save for the first time." "Being back here is like a time capsule," said Sonia Sakhrani, a health care professional who relocated from the Upper East Side of Manhattan to her parents' home in the Forest Hills section of Queens. Ms. Sakhrani, 31, said that while she no longer has a curfew, the restrictions of not having the freedom to go out because of quarantine "evokes the same feeling that you had as a teenager." 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. Kendall Ciesemier, who drove 13 hours from Brooklyn to her parents' home outside of Chicago, said that in some ways, being thrust back into her childhood environment meant reverting to dynamics she had with her parents growing up. "Navigating the world from my childhood bedroom is like some weird dissonance between like feeling," said Ms. Ciesemier, 27, a producer at a nonprofit. "I finally hit the point where I'm very comfortable. I finally made it out of the hole of entry level jobs and the early parts of post grad life." Sometimes, being in her childhood home makes Ms. Ciesemier feel as if "maybe I haven't really grown up." "The weird thing was having to be like, this is my room and if the door is closed, you knock," she said. "I've been on a FaceTime date and my mom barged in because I told her I was talking to my best friend from college," Ms. Ciesemier said, laughing. "I was just humiliated. It was horrifying but really funny." Ms. Ciesemier, who is immunocompromised, initially made the decision based on her health. She is now back in her apartment. Other emotions and old teenage angst have resurfaced as people have been using their time back home (sometimes voluntary; sometimes not) to go through the closets, boxes and drawers containing treasures from the past. "Being back definitely brings up a lot of insecurity you had as a kid and as a young adult at this house in particular," said Delaney Huesgen, 21, who graduated from Kent State University in December, moved to New York City in January and moved back home to Seattle a month later when the fashion public relations firm office where she had been interning closed. "We moved here when I was just starting high school so there's lots of those weird, kind of awkward feelings." For Ms. Huesgen, the decision was not initially financial but then became so as time passed. "I realized that being home and saving money on rent, although I was still paying for my apartment in New York until June, was going to be really beneficial in the long run," she said. "It is kind of nice now, though, because I know that any money I make is simply being saved for when I get back on my feet in the city." Ms. Offor is back in Brooklyn but plans to go back to Georgia once her lease ends at the end of August. Though she is uncertain how long she plans to stay in her home state, she said the past few months have only illuminated the immense income inequality so many Americans like herself experience. "I'm really into the idea of Black financial empowerment, and I genuinely think that in order to take a step forward, sometimes you have to take a step back," she said. "One of the biggest things is that money is power. Financial wellness is power, and it allows people to create generational wealth." While some people have embraced the experience of being in the rooms that shaped their formative years, others have been more reluctant. Lisa Caravelli described her childhood bedroom as not only unchanged but "worse." "My parents took my old room decorations from when I was a toddler, like everything Minnie Mouse and bubble gum pink and did the room as if l was 4 years old again," said Ms. Caravelli, 26, who works in advertising software sales in Chicago. The Minnie Mouse revival was for her two younger nieces, who occasionally sleep over. "I'm thankful for Zoom backgrounds because otherwise it's a big bow headboard and polka dots." But more than Disney decor, for many, certain memories from the past have emerged as unexpected opportunities for self reflection in terms of how they've changed throughout the years, and the ways in which they've stayed the same. When going through her old diaries and notes passed during classes, Ms. Caravelli was surprised to find how the concerns she once had about her romantic life are similar to the ones she has today. "These conversations are not that different from ones that I just had last week with some of my friends that are also single," Ms. Caravelli said. "The way that it's like, 'I don't know if I like him, does he like me?' 'Should I wait to text back?' made me realize how far I've come as a person and have really changed through different moments in my life. But oh man, in so many ways I'm still that same middle school girl wondering if her crush likes her back." Jacob Brian Wilson, 34, a publicist from Manhattan, has also been reconnecting with his younger self as he quarantines at his parents' farm in San Miguel, New Mexico. He said that through certain items, like forgotten poetry he had written at age 17 or photos of him as a young swim coach, he sees someone he's "lost touch with." "Looking at these photos reminded me who I've always been, and highlighted how I have tried hard in some instances to push that truth away," he said. "How I've neglected what I've always liked doing, like writing little expressive poems." Ms. Rose recalls her stepfather, who was the mayor of Austin during the 1990s, frequently traveling with her mother to cities around the world. Because she was in school and couldn't join, her parents would bring her back postcards from places like Russia, Germany and South Korea. "It gave me a little project to write friends with these old postcards," Ms. Rose said. "I found one that I had written to my dad and had never sent when I was like 7, so I mailed it to him. I think he got a kick out of that." Though some are itching to get back to pre pandemic life, others, like Mr. Wilson and Ms. Rose, have decided they aren't in any rush. "I'm fortunate to have a job where I can work remotely, and instead of sirens I now wake up to the soft sounds of birds and my mom's rooster crowing," Mr. Wilson said. "Do I miss my friends and old way of life? Absolutely. But I'm using this time to make space for thinking about what it is that I want to create more of in my life, and want to make an effort to see less of as well, moving forward in this new chapter of life we are all entering and the new normal." For Ms. Rose, being back in Austin has led to rediscovery. She has been accepted to graduate school in public policy in her hometown, a city she had not previously considered. And while Ms. Rose said she feels lucky to have the means to move home, she feels that "luck" isn't quite the right word.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Two musicals with enormous brand names, "Mean Girls" and "SpongeBob SquarePants," led the pack of Tony nominated shows Tuesday morning, garnering 12 nods each. The nominators also showered affection on five critically acclaimed productions: revivals of "Angels in America" and "Carousel," as well as the new musical "The Band's Visit," got 11 nominations apiece, while the new play "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" and a revival of "My Fair Lady" each got 10. The best new musical race will now pit "The Band's Visit," a critical darling, against three shows with bigger fan bases but weaker reviews: "Mean Girls," "SpongeBob SquarePants" and "Frozen." Among the boldface names who scored nominations: Denzel Washington, Andrew Garfield, Tina Fey, Amy Schumer, Tony Shalhoub, Michael Cera, Renee Fleming and Diana Rigg. Critics on the nominations Who is nominated? Nominee reactions And now, the races begin. "The Band's Visit," a delicate musical that has been doing strong but not sell out business at the box office, will face strengthened challenges from "Mean Girls" and "SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical," two titles that arrived with built in fan bases, in the highest stakes race in this year's Tony Awards. In something of a surprise, "Mean Girls," Tina Fey's musical adaptation of her 2004 film about high school social dynamics, and the eye popping "SpongeBob," based on the animated television series about underwater sea creatures, led the nominations on Tuesday, each earning 12 nods. Both are spearheaded by cultural powerhouses: Ms. Fey is one of the nation's most well liked comedic writers and performers, and "SpongeBob," with a huge cult following, is the first Broadway venture led by Nickelodeon, the children's cable network. "The Band's Visit," by contrast, is adapted from a fictional 2007 Israeli film about what happens when an Egyptian police band gets stranded for a night in an Israeli desert town. It is a bit of an oddity on Broadway more subtle than showy, long on loneliness and short on spectacle with aching performances and unusually artful lyrics. But after a successful start at the Atlantic Theater Company Off Broadway, it moved to Broadway and earned superlative reviews. The fourth contender for best musical is Disney's "Frozen," based on the enormously popular animated film, which was not embraced by critics. The show didn't get nominations for its performers or much of its creative team, although it did score nods for its book and score. Even seasoned entertainers said the nominations were a thrill. "I cannot lie I cried a little bit in the middle of Equinox this morning, and not because my workout was too hard," Ms. Fey said in an interview. "It's such a childhood dream. You go back to when you were a kid and going to see shows getting a Playbill, dreaming of being in a Playbill some day." A panel of 43 theater experts who saw all 30 eligible shows over the last year voted on the nominations. The voters are not allowed to have any financial relationship with any of the eligible shows. "SpongeBob," "Mean Girls" and "Frozen" are among numerous big brands that have dominated a season whose new shows have also included "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child," "Escape to Margaritaville" and "Summer: The Donna Summer Musical." There were also solo shows by Bruce Springsteen, Michael Moore, John Lithgow and John Leguizamo, and star turns by Amy Schumer, Denzel Washington, Chris Evans, Uma Thurman, Andrew Garfield and Clive Owen. "I'm enormously happy, and very moved," Mr. Kushner said on Tuesday. "Being on Broadway is always exciting there's a feeling of an immediate and a lively connection to American theater history, and to the extent the Tonys are a celebration of theater in the United States, it's great to know that the play still has a place and that people are still excited about it." "Angels" is now the leading contender for best play revival, but the category is extraordinarily strong, and includes new productions of "Three Tall Women," by Edward Albee; "The Iceman Cometh," by Eugene O'Neill; "Lobby Hero," by Kenneth Lonergan; and "Travesties," by Tom Stoppard. At nearly four hours long, "Iceman" (like "Angels" and "Cursed Child") is not for those with short attention spans, though it is swifter than earlier productions of the play. "Three Tall Women" and "Lobby Hero" share a different distinction they are on Broadway for the first time, but are considered revivals because they have been widely staged since their Off Broadway debuts decades ago. Among new plays, "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" is the overwhelming favorite. A sequel to the seven novels, it depicts a time when Harry and his friends are parents of Hogwarts students, and grappling simultaneously with ominous signs in the wizarding world and the ordinary challenges of raising adolescents. "Cursed Child" is the only one of the nominated new plays still running. The others are "The Children," by Lucy Kirkwood; "Farinelli and the King," by Claire van Kampen; "Junk," by Ayad Akhtar; and "Latin History for Morons," by John Leguizamo. Ms. Jackson, a two time Oscar winner who last appeared on Broadway in 1988, portrays a formidable matriarch in "Three Tall Women." Another veteran getting notice: Diana Rigg, a beloved British actress who won a Tony in 1994 for "Medea," now back on Broadway at 79 with a fierce, funny and feminist take on Mrs. Higgins in a heralded revival of "My Fair Lady." Ten other performers were nominated for their Broadway debuts, dazzling audiences with unexpected gifts. Among them: The 19 year old Hailey Kilgore, for her breakout performance as Ti Moune, the self sacrificing girl at the heart of "Once on This Island"; Ari'el Stachel, who had to audition seven times before landing the role as Haled, an amorous Egyptian trumpeter, in "The Band's Visit"; Lauren Ridloff, a onetime Miss Deaf America who unexpectedly landed the starring role of Sarah Norman in a revival of "Children of a Lesser God"; and Ethan Slater, who used lessons learned as a high school wrestler to develop a physical language for SpongeBob SquarePants. Another nominated debut is for an actress with a high profile already: the comedian Amy Schumer. The writer Steve Martin approached Ms. Schumer at a starry party and asked her to read the script of a play he was working on. She agreed, and that led to the production of "Meteor Shower" on Broadway. J.K. Rowling and Sonia Friedman were nominated as two of the three lead producers of "Cursed Child" (the third is Colin Callender). Ms. Rowling is the author of the "Harry Potter" books, and Ms. Friedman is one of the most successful producers in London. Two female directors were nominated and are now strong contenders for awards: Marianne Elliott, who directed the "Angels in America" revival, and Tina Landau, who directed "SpongeBob SquarePants." And despite some concern that their gender politics were dated, the lush musical revivals of "My Fair Lady" and "Carousel" scored well in the nominations, and are selling well at the box office. Several female writers were also singled out. The leading contender for best book of a musical is Ms. Fey, and Ms. Kirkwood and Ms. van Kampen were nominated their plays. (Ms. Rowling is not credited as the writer of "Cursed Child," although she collaborated with the dramatist, Jack Thorne, and the director, John Tiffany, on creating the story.) Racial and ethnic diversity is always a big issue on Broadway. Of the 39 performers nominated for Tonys, 13 are black, Hispanic, Asian American or Arab American. What happens next? Now it's up to the voters. There are 841 Tony voters investors and producers, as well as actors, directors, designers, journalists and others who are eligible to cast ballots for most categories. (This year, for the first time, a few categories sound design and orchestration will be decided by a subset of about half of the voters.) The voters now have about five weeks to finish seeing all the nominated shows, or to revisit shows they saw in the fall and want to see again, and then they have until noon on June 8 to submit ballots. This is the first year that the Tonys, presented by the Broadway League and the American Theater Wing, are using all electronic voting each voter is to be tracking his or her show attendance on a website, and then is to submit votes using that site. In the coming weeks, the voters will get barraged with goodies from the nominated shows cast recordings, souvenir books, trinkets and the nominees will pop up at a ceaseless stream of nonprofit benefits, hoping to build good will and remain visible to industry insiders while voting is underway. A few noncompetitive honors have already been announced. The composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and the performer Chita Rivera will receive lifetime achievement awards at the ceremony, while Nick Scandalios, executive vice president of the Nederlander Organization, will get a volunteerism award for his work as an advocate for gay parents and their children. The annual prize for regional theater will go to La MaMa Etc., the New York based experimental theater company. At a reception on June 4, Tony Honors for Excellence in the Theater will be presented to Sara Krulwich, the longtime theater photographer for The New York Times; Bessie Nelson, a longtime costume beader; and Ernest Winzer Cleaners, a 110 year old business with a specialty in costume work.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
WASHINGTON Despite the recent run of disappointing economic data, a broad range of experts and forecasters expect the economy to improve slightly in coming months, thanks to lower oil prices and new signs of life from sectors like automobiles and housing. Call it a firming up, if not quite a comeback. Economists at many of the most watched forecasting organizations, both public and private, expect growth to pick up through the summer and into the fall, although only to a pace broadly considered sluggish, if not dismal. This week, Macroeconomic Advisers, an economic consultancy often cited by policy makers, estimated the annual rate of growth in the second quarter at just 1.2 percent well below the pace needed to reduce the unemployment rate. But the firm also projected growth to accelerate to around 2.4 percent in the third quarter. "The pace of economic growth is picking up, but not to a rate that is very robust," said Joel Prakken, the chairman of Macroeconomic Advisers. "It certainly is no great shakes." Forecasters, including those at the Federal Reserve, have been overly optimistic at several points during the slump of the last few years, of course. But the recent fall in oil prices and the stabilization of the housing market do give some gravitas to the current predictions. On Thursday, the Labor Department reported that new claims for jobless benefits dropped to their lowest level in four years, at 350,000 a week. Analysts said they were unsure how much of the decline stemmed from an actual improvement, as opposed to temporary factors in the auto industry. The pace of economic growth will have huge implications for a country still trying to emerge from the worst downturn in 70 years amid a presidential campaign that will most likely turn on the economy. United States growth began to surge in late 2011 and early 2012, before slowing significantly in the spring. Some of the recent headwinds like a re escalation of the euro zone crisis, households that are paying down their debt, and a falloff in growth in big emerging markets, like China and Brazil remain. With tax increases and across the board government budget cuts looming at the end of the year unless Congress acts to change the law some economic experts are wary. "The soft patch could easily extend through year end or almost a full year," Steven Ricchiuto, the chief economist at Mizuho Securities USA, wrote in a note to clients on Thursday. "Companies are unlikely to hire, invest in new plants and equipment or build inventory. This pullback could very well last through year end as the chances of any movement on the fiscal front are unlikely until after the election." The weaker than expected spring data has raised speculation that the Federal Reserve might announce a new round of bond buying this summer to spur growth. Some Fed officials want further action because they are not confident the economy will pick up soon. But other headwinds have started to slack, leading some economists to believe that jobs and growth numbers will track up modestly. Perhaps most significant is the falling price of oil. Gas prices rose steadily from January through March on concerns over a confrontation with Iran as the United States and its allies cut the producer out of the petroleum market. But tensions have faded and gas prices have fallen to 3.38 a gallon today from above 3.90 a gallon in April, which has left more money in American consumers' wallets and businesses' ledgers. Every penny that the price of gas falls leaves about a billion dollars in American pockets over the course of a year, economists estimate. The lower gas prices "will take a few months to show up" in consumer spending and confidence numbers, said Mr. Prakken of Macroeconomic Advisers. But it should lead to higher sales for businesses and greater optimism among households. Understand Rising Gas Prices in the U.S. A steady rise. American consumers have seen the cost of gasoline, along with many other goods and services, surge sharply in recent weeks. Last month, gas prices hit their highest level since 2014, and the national average for a gallon of gas is now 3.41, according to AAA. The role of crude oil production. Gas prices have gone up in part because of fluctuations in supply and demand. Demand for oil fell early in the pandemic, so oil producing nations cut production. But over the past year, demand for oil recovered far faster than production was restored, driving prices up. Additional factors at play. The price of crude oil is only one element driving up gas prices. Compliance with renewable fuel standards can contribute to the cost, the price of ethanol has increased, and labor shortages in the trucking industry have made it more expensive to deliver gas. A global energy crunch. Other types of fuels, including natural gas and coal, are also growing more expensive. Natural gas prices have shot up more than 150 percent in recent months, threatening to raise prices of food, chemicals, plastic goods and heat this winter. The U.S. response. To combat soaring prices and their effects on inflation, President Biden ordered the release of oil from the nation's emergency stockpile. He also asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate possible "illegal conduct" by oil and gas companies. James Bullard, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, said that he saw "modestly improving economic growth during the second half of 2012, along with a slow and intermittent decline in unemployment," when he spoke in London this week. Economists pointed to surging new car sales as a good economic indicator: a sign that households are confident enough to make a major purchase and that they are accessing the credit markets. It is also a boon for auto businesses the auto industry reported a 22 percent jump in sales in June, with some carmakers reporting that revenue increased as much as 60 percent year on year. "The surge in car sales is disproportionately important," said Ian Shepherdson, an economist and forecaster at High Frequency Economics. "It means that you're willing and able to take out a loan and that's quite a good sign." Moreover, there are accumulating signs that housing has turned around, perhaps auguring a rise in residential investment, an upturn in construction jobs and growing sales. "I do think that the economy is stronger than the recent data would suggest," said Mark M. Zandi, the chief economist of Moody's Analytics. "We've had the numbers say underlying job growth is at 80,000 jobs a month, where we could see 150,000 jobs a month. Or G.D.P. at 2 percent, where it's really at 2.5 percent. That will become evident later in the year." Some economists pointed to private forecasts showing a stronger June than the one depicted in government reports. A Bureau of Labor Statistics survey showed that employers added just 80,000 new positions that month not enough to bring the unemployment rate down from its elevated rate of 8.2 percent. But a closely watched monthly survey showed that private sector employers added a strong 176,000 jobs in June. "Everybody has argued that A.D.P. got it wrong," said Mr. Shepherdson, of the survey. "But it's a big survey, and a good survey. Maybe the Bureau of Labor Statistics got it wrong." Mr. Prakken said the initial unemployment claims "suggest that the labor market has not fallen out of bed." He added, "There's been a pause in hiring, a momentary pause in hiring."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Hot on the heels of "Girls Trip" and "Rough Night" comes "Someone Great," Netflix's contribution to the "girls' night out" genre. Written and directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, the film kicks into action when the college sweethearts Jenny (Gina Rodriguez) and Nate (Lakeith Stanfield) call it quits after nine years. Jenny's new job requires a move across the country, and Nate decides to break it off rather than deal with dating long distance. As a goodbye and a way of taking her mind off her heartbreak, Jenny's best friends, Blair (Brittany Snow) and Erin (DeWanda Wise), take her out for one last night on the town.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
LONDON Take a couple, any married couple will do, as long as they've been together for a good while. Consider the deeply intimate ways in which they've come to know each other during their relationship. Now think of how they could use that knowledge to wound each other, with a precision afforded nobody else in the world. Such speculation is fueling some of the most successful plays in the West End this season, suggesting that the theatergoing audience's appetite for marriage as a blood sport remains alarmingly healthy. The dramas that blur the lines between the marital and martial include two new works for which tickets are as elusive as happy endings. There's Nina Raine's elegantly brutal "Consent," an Ingmar Bergman like anatomy of love and friendship with a chilling legal twist, which is totally sold out at the National Theater. And despite lacerating reviews, Ivo van Hove's ice cold "Obsession" is packin' 'em in at the Barbican Center, partly because it features Jude Law emoting manfully (and shirtlessly) as the fulcrum of a fatal triangle. In the meantime, being performed within a wedding china plate's throw of each other, are revivals of early and late career works from that American titan of the bad marriage play, Edward Albee: an uneven production of "The Goat" (2002), starring Damian Lewis and Sophie Okonedo, at the Haymarket Theater, and a nigh perfect interpretation of Mr. Albee's masterwork, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," at the Harold Pinter Theater. "Woolf" is one play I thought I'd seen enough of for now. But this version, directed by James Macdonald and starring a ravishingly well matched Imelda Staunton and Conleth Hill, harrowed and moved me as if I were encountering the show for the first time. It also made me appreciate anew the impeccable construction this 1962 portrait of marriage in academia and the rich opportunities it allows its cast of four to build characters that tower in the memory. Mr. Macdonald, an undersung British director of fierce emotional insight, has an equal appreciation for the form and feeling of this play, and how they infuse each other. Ms. Staunton, who conquered London two years ago as the American musical's stage mother from hell in "Gypsy," is just as persuasive as Martha, the scorched earth mother and hostess from hell. At first, I thought her performance was overly self conscious. Then I realized those defensive mannerisms belonged to Martha, not Ms. Staunton, and much of this production's power comes from watching her be stripped of them. Mr. Hill dares to portray George, her husband, as the gray nonentity she says he is. But his anger at being a human swamp (Martha's word) allows him to assume, by degrees, a fearsome shape; never underestimate the power of hate in love. As George and Martha's victims, the young marrieds Nick and Honey Luke Treadaway (who won the Olivier Award for "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time") and Imogen Poots are full of their own sly surprises. The entire production keeps surprising you, not least by making such a seemingly classic reading of it feel so revelatory. If this "Virginia Woolf" brings out the play's inherent strengths, Ian Rickson's production of "The Goat," the story of a man whose marriage comes apart when he falls in love with a farm animal, underscores its susceptibility to misinterpretation. "The Goat" has always walked a shaky tightrope between farce and tragedy, and this version often leans dangerously toward the cartoonish. Part of that is a matter of Mr. Lewis's nasal nerdishness as Martin, an architect with his head in the clouds and his loins in the mud. Ms. Okonedo (last on Broadway in "The Crucible") endows the role of his blindsided wife with a visceral rage that Mr. Lewis finally matches, though not without stripping gears. Which, it must be said, the play itself seems to do in this imbalanced production. There's no tonal instability in Roger Michell's taut staging of "Consent," a highly intelligent analysis of intelligent people behaving with self destructive stupidity. Not that they can really help themselves. Ms. Raine (whose wonderful "Tribes" was an Off Broadway hit in 2012) depicts an interlocking set of couples driven by primal instincts, who abuse the so called privileges of marriage in ways that include spousal rape. Or is what occurs truly rape? Like Lucas Hnath's excellent "A Doll's House, Part 2," which recently opened on Broadway, "Consent" carefully weighs different points of view on the battle of the sexes without ever negating the genuine pain that underlies them. And by making three of her seven characters lawyers, two of whom are friends taking opposing sides in a rape case, Ms. Raine makes her own subtle case for the inadequacies of the contemporary legal system in addressing sex crimes. This being a play set in Britain, the class system and particularly its built in unfairness for working class women is also anatomized ruthlessly. Real passion is in short supply in "Obsession," the latest offering from Mr. van Hove, whose brilliant deconstructions of Arthur Miller's "A View From the Bridge" and "The Crucible" shook up staid Broadway the season before last. "Obsession" is based on Luchino Visconti's steamy "Ossessione" (1943), a prototype of Italian Neorealism, adapted from James M. Cain's noir novel "The Postman Always Rings Twice." If you've seen either of the American film versions of "Postman" (of 1946 and 1981), you'll know the plot, and its potential for burning down the house sexuality. A drifter wanders into an isolated diner and falls instantly for the owner's wife; their lust drives them first to kill her boorish husband and then more or less annihilate each other. The adulterous lovers are here embodied by Mr. Law and the Dutch actress Halina Reijn hotly in his case and coolly in hers. Despite the use of swelling old style movie music (by Eric Sleichim) and a melodrama steeped English language version by the immensely talented but erratic Simon Stephens, "Obsession" exudes a yawning detachment from the feverish proceedings onstage. Designed by Mr. van Hove's right hand aesthetician, Jan Versweyveld, the typically abstract set includes a suspended accordion, which plays itself, and the carcass of a car, which (this being a van Hove production) rains icky oil on everybody. That feels appropriate to a production that often registers as mechanically autoerotic. Being part of a couple is a lonely business, Mr. van Hove seems to be suggesting. In that regard, at least, Mr. Albee and Ms. Raine would surely have agreed with him.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Wearing a red print sundress and glamorous makeup, right down to her false eyelashes, Christine Shevchenko entered the media room at the Metropolitan Opera House looking as if she were en route to a garden party. Had she really just danced her first lead in a full length ballet the arduous, three act "Don Quixote" at American Ballet Theater's Wednesday matinee? "I can't believe that it happened," said Ms. Shevchenko, a soloist in the company. "I made it through." As the passionate Kitri, a demanding classical role, Ms. Shevchenko, a highly technical dancer, did more than make it through. She sparkled, dancing with aplomb. She credits her confidence onstage to her time as a young competitive dancer. Born in Odessa, Ukraine, she started out as a gymnast before moving to Philadelphia with her family when she was 7. At 8, she enrolled at the Rock School for Dance Education. "They took me to different competitions I did the Moscow International Ballet Competition and I won the gold. I also danced 'Don Q' there." As stressful as those competition experiences were "You have one chance to do it clean and perfect," Ms. Shevchenko, 28, said she's reaping the benefits now. "Even if you don't feel confident, they taught me to present myself like I am." But it should be noted that Ms. Shevchenko isn't a dancer especially prone to agitation. "I'm a very calm person," she said with a laugh. "Everybody will say that." Following are edited excerpts from a conversation with Ms. Shevchenko just after her Kitri debut. You certainly kept your calm when you dropped your fan in the third act. What went through your mind? As soon as I did that, I was like, shoot I should have put the wrist strap on and I forgot! I was like, how can I pick this up really quickly? So I just did it. That was bizarre. Oh well. It was a human moment. But that was the only mishap. What was your happiest moment onstage? My Act I variation. Laughs. I just felt on top of my game and so in control that I actually enjoyed myself. Another very happy moment was that one handed lift, because I used to struggle with that lift. It worked. That's always a stressful moment for me, too, sitting in the audience. It's a crazy lift. But I have the most amazing partner Alban Lendorf and everything is so easy with him. In your fouette turns, you performed double pirouettes while raising your arm and opening and closing your fan. Was that something you wanted to tackle for this? Yes. I've never done that before, but I love how it looks. The only difficult part is coordinating opening the fan because you have to open it quickly enough before you do the double pirouette. It can throw you off your leg. What would you have wanted to change about today? There were just some areas when I felt tired that I would have liked to have been stronger. The ballet master Irina Kolpakova said those things will get better the more I do it. She said: "You have the base there already. You have everything there." What does she push you on? More presentation. Especially for this role, she wanted me to be more fiery and to use my head more. She came to me during the intermissions and told me things I had to do for the next section to make sure I remembered. You have a big season coming up. Along with Myrta in "Giselle," you'll dance "Mozartiana" with David Hallberg. But what's next? I still have my debut as Mercedes and the Queen of the Dryads on Saturday night in "Don Quixote" . We'll see how that goes. Laughs. I haven't had any rehearsals for it. So for the next few days, I'm crash coursing. Are you more attracted to classical ballets than to contemporary ones? I am. Since I was little, I've known every single part in every ballet. I watched ballet videos all the time. I was a super bunhead for sure. But it's great to also do contemporary ballets and to move your body in other ways. You were so impressive when you filled in for Gillian Murphy in Alexei Ratmansky's "Piano Concerto No. 1" a few years ago. How did that go down? That was a shocker. I was supposed to have the whole day off. I was going to go get my nails done. They came to me an hour before the show started one hour and they were like, "You have to do this part because we have no one else to do it." I had no choice. I was in a studio the whole time before I had to go onstage, learning the choreography.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
SAN FRANCISCO Slack, the workplace messaging start up, disclosed the details of its business in an offering prospectus on Friday as it joined the parade of tech companies that plan to publicly list their shares this year. Sharing its financial results widely for the first time, Slack said it had collected 400.6 million in revenue in its latest fiscal year, which ended Jan. 31. That was nearly double what it had generated in the previous fiscal year. It lost 140.7 million in the latest fiscal year, narrowing its losses from 180.9 million the year before. The company had 88,000 paying customers at the end of the most recent fiscal year, up almost 50 percent from the previous year. Of those customers, 575 paid more than 100,000 for their subscriptions, contributing about 40 percent of the company's revenue. Friday's filing shed more light on Slack, which has grown out of a video game company into an increasingly common way for workers to communicate. Its software is meant to be a replacement for email but it also lets colleagues chat and share files, among other tasks. Slack's filing followed the initial public offerings of two other high profile start ups, Lyft and Pinterest. The biggest tech public offering of recent years that of the ride hailing giant Uber is also on deck, with Uber pricing its shares on Friday in a stock sale that is expected to value it at as much as 91 billion. The I.P.O. boom has had mixed results. Lyft's shares sank below their I.P.O. price after an initial spike last month. Pinterest's stock has stayed above its offering price since its debut on the market this month. But less prominent start ups that sell software to other businesses have performed better. Shares of Zoom, a video conferencing company, rose 80 percent on its first day of trading as a public company this month, and PagerDuty, which sells software to help companies respond to complaints and other incidents, experienced a first day pop of 60 percent. Investors typically like the predictable revenue of tech companies that sell software to businesses and are betting that companies will continue to increase their spending on these wares. Slack, which is pitching itself as doing "nearly anything that people do together at work," will seek to benefit from that trend. Get the Bits newsletter for the latest from Silicon Valley and the technology industry. Yet unlike most other Silicon Valley darlings going public this year, Slack is not holding an initial public offering, where it sells shares to the public. Instead it will carry out a "direct listing," where it simply lets its shares start trading on a stock market. It plans to do so on the New York Stock Exchange, under the ticker symbol "SK." The price of its stock would then be set solely by demand from public market investors. The process has none of the safeguards of a traditional I.P.O., since the company will not sell shares that could help guarantee trading liquidity. That poses the risk of Slack's market capitalization falling below the 7.2 billion that it was valued at by private investors last year. The last major company to take this route was Spotify, which listed its shares last year. Like that music streaming giant, Slack can do this kind of transaction because it does not need the money. The messaging service has taken advantage of the plentiful capital in private markets, amassing 1.2 billion in venture funding, half of it in the last two years. Slack disclosed on Friday that it has 841 million in cash on its balance sheet, according to its prospectus. Slack's chief executive, Stewart Butterfield, has reveled in the easy money available to his company. "It might be the best time for any kind of business in any industry to raise money for all of history, like since the time of the ancient Egyptians," he told The New York Times in 2015. The company's biggest shareholders include the investment firms Accel, Andreessen Horowitz and Social Capital and the Japanese technology titan SoftBank.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
WHAT IS IT? Four door convertible S.U.V. HOW MUCH? 30,695 base, 35,015 as tested with options including automatic transmission ( 825), heated leather seats ( 900) and body color three piece hard top ( 980). WHAT'S UNDER THE HOOD? 3.8 liter V 6 (202 horsepower, 237 pound feet of torque) with 4 speed automatic transmission. IS IT THIRSTY? Surprisingly so: the E.P.A. rating is just 15 m.p.g. city, 19 m.p.g. highway. BEFORE I'd driven a mile in the 2011 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited, I declared, "This thing must have more sound deadening than the 2010 model." Which turns out to be true. This observation wouldn't be notable if I'd driven the two vehicles back to back, but it had been nine months since I'd driven last year's model. And I'm not claiming that I'm superperceptive the improvement is simply that obvious. I predict that otologists will soon be bombarded by serial Wrangler owners who want to know what's wrong with their ears. "My new car, doc I can't hear the wind noise." Besides the extra layers of sound deadening, the 2011 Wrangler gets a redesigned interior that no longer looks like an official entry in the Worst Plastics in the World competition. The dash is redesigned in higher quality materials, and exposed hex head screws add a dose of industrial flair. You can order leather seats (an option since last year) with heaters. Heated leather seats in a Wrangler? What next, a hardtop that's the same color as the rest of the body? Yes. That's now an option, too. Lest you think the venerable Jeep has gone all Hollywood high society, let me assure you that it hasn't forgotten the muddy trenches whence it came. The 2011 model is refined, for a Wrangler, but that's like saying that Muammar el Qaddafi gives concise speeches. Consider the Wrangler's increasingly preposterous motor, a 3.8 liter V 6 that chokes out a mere 202 horsepower. I once owned a 1987 Jeep Cherokee that was powered by a 177 horsepower 4 liter inline 6 cylinder. Twenty four years later, the Wrangler V 6 betters my '87 Cherokee by only 25 horsepower. If electronics evolved at the pace of Jeep 6 cylinders, an iPod would be the size of a walk in freezer and Bluetooth would be a pirate who eats too many blueberries. Jeep has a new 3.6 liter V 6 that I hope will eventually end up in the Wrangler, but for now the weary 3.8 endures. This may be one vehicle, though, where a lack of power is a prudent design feature. The Wrangler's legitimate off road talents are enabled by solid axles front and rear; slow recirculating ball steering and high ground clearance all of which are a liability on the highway, where the Wrangler wanders and lurches like a somnambulating hobo. There are certainly other vehicles that handle better, like forklifts, shopping carts and those strange motorized waiting rooms that take you between terminals at Dulles airport. Archaic technical details duly noted, the Wrangler has plenty going for it. Jeep's legendary 4x4 represents a rare confluence of history, practicality and fun. It's the strangest car that we all take for granted. In what other mainstream vehicle can you fold down the windshield and remove the doors? It's a convertible in the summer and a four wheel drive snowmobile in the winter. Wranglers imply nothing about status I know an affluent older lady in the city who drives one, as well as young guys who install lift kits and go off roading in the boonies. The Wrangler's honest charisma has widespread appeal, as evidenced by the 94,310 examples sold last year. The upgraded interior is only going to broaden that audience. My brother in law, for instance, is in the market for a new convertible to replace his BMW 330Ci. He climbed into the Wrangler, took a look around and said, "Why don't I get one of these?" And it appears that he will. In which case, he'll be trading his Ultimate Driving Machine for a slow, crude truck. And on a sunny day, with the top open and the stereo turned up, that will seem like the best decision in the world.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
WASHINGTON Trey Mourning had one foot out the door at Georgetown when Uncle Patrick became Coach Ewing. He turned around and went to a team meeting. Ewing Mourning roots run deep at Georgetown. But they also intersect at a crucial moment in the N.B.A.'s evolution on the court and are thicker, even, than the figurative blood that was spilled in one of the most ferocious rivalries in league history. That warfare involved the Knicks and the Miami Heat. Every N.B.A. playoffs from 1997 to 2000 featured among other ultimate fighting showdowns occasionally resembling basketball a main event involving two throwback centers: Patrick Ewing and Trey's father, Alonzo, both of Georgetown pedigree. A decade and a half later, after a dominant career at Ransom Everglades, a prep school in Miami's Coconut Grove neighborhood, Trey Mourning enrolled at Georgetown in 2014, months before his father was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame. He did so essentially for three reasons: the university's academic reputation, his family legacy and extended family relationships. Over the next three seasons, he proceeded to mostly ride Thompson's bench, registering no more than the 5.9 minutes he logged per game as a sophomore. With his senior year approaching, he was loath to conclude his college career without much time on the court, without opportunity. It is, however, a complex web that Georgetown weaves. Thompson was relieved after the 2016 17 season and replaced by Patrick Ewing, a hire inspired by Thompson's father, known around campus as Big John, who coached Patrick Ewing and Alonzo Mourning at Georgetown and remains a mentor to both. Suddenly, Trey Mourning, a 6 foot 9 forward, had a more difficult decision to make regarding a potential transfer. Though Patrick Jr.'s assistant coaching position would be eliminated because of an anti nepotism policy, the young Mourning could not dismiss the chance to play under the senior Ewing, who is actually listed in Trey's smartphone as Uncle Patrick. They had a private sit down, during which Ewing told him, "Put in the work, you'll play." No problem, Trey thought. If there was one thing ingrained in him by his father, it was an ethic that across 15 N.B.A. seasons of low post warfare was best exemplified by Alonzo Mourning's refusal to pack it in after a kidney transplant in 2003. Trey wound up sitting out his senior year at Georgetown with a hip injury, but he had been starting as a graduate student this season. He averaged 23.5 minutes, 7.7 points and 5.4 rebounds a game in the team's first 11 games, but was idled recently by a concussion his status is "day to day." (Georgetown is 11 3 over all as it enters an early but important Big East matchup with St. John's, which is 13 1 over all, on Saturday afternoon in Washington.) In a game against Campbell on Nov. 24, Mourning had career highs of 27 points and 12 rebounds. Watching was his father, who works in Miami for the Heat and sat in the stands at Washington's Capital One Arena for the only time this season, along with Trey's brother, Alijah. Trey Mourning's game is less bullish than his father's, reflecting the sport's dramatic shift since those Heat Knicks conflagrations, which often ended with neither team within squinting view of 90 points, much less 100. Compelling as the games were, unequaled at the time in raw intensity, they contributed mightily to N.B.A. rule changes in 2004 and the contemporary mix of unimpeded driving and long distance shooting. He and his buddy Alonzo can reminisce all they want about the punishment Michael Jordan absorbed against the Knicks' and the Heat's brutish defenses. It would be different now. "Imagine what Michael would do in today's N.B.A.,'' Mourning said in a telephone interview. "He'd probably average 50." And what can Ewing 56 and hoping for head coaching longevity do but go with the flow? Trey Mourning, in fact, recalled working on low post defense in high school with his father while a visiting Ewing watched from the sideline. "Patrick would be sitting there and, knowing the rule book, being a coach in the N.B.A., he'd say, 'Oh, no, we can't teach him that way, that's illegal,'" Trey said. But in the 1990s, little seemed out of line, or beyond the realm of anarchic possibility, when Pat Riley's Heat and Jeff Van Gundy's Knicks staged an N.B.A. production of the Hatfields and McCoys although the rivalry was also a knockoff of "All in the Family." Besides the Ewing Mourning connection, Riley coached the Knicks from 1991 to 1995 before moving to Miami, and Van Gundy, his assistant in New York, held the job until 2001. In Miami, Riley hired another Van Gundy Jeff's brother, Stan. There was a night in May 1999 when the Heat pulled away in the fourth quarter to force a decisive fifth game of a first round playoff series, and the Knicks' Latrell Sprewell, out of frustration and just for the fun of it, slammed the Heat's Terry Porter to the floor on a fast break. A furious Stan Van Gundy bolted upright from his seat next to Riley and stormed down the Heat's inflamed bench, yelling: "Remember all that. Remember what they do." "They," of course, being the team coached by his kid brother. "What Riley taught his players was to compete with an intent to dominate and annihilate your competition, mentally and physically," Alonzo Mourning said. "When he coached the Knicks, he planted that seed. Then he coached the Heat and he planted that same seed. He literally built two monsters." Yet somehow, against all odds of tribal conflict, the Ewing Mourning friendship was never shaken, much less severed. Not even when Ewing was suspended for a crucial playoff game between the two teams in 1997 after wandering harmlessly off the bench during a brawl under the basket, costing the Knicks a chance to play in the Eastern Conference finals. And not after a slugfest broke out between Mourning and Larry Johnson, a former teammate in Charlotte, in the waning seconds of Game 4 of a first round series between the Knicks and the Heat in 1998. That resulted in a Mourning suspension, his absence from a Knicks' Game 5 rout in Miami and a hilarious photo of Jeff Van Gundy almost levitating while clasping Mourning's leg. Count Van Gundy among those who miss such pugnacity. "It's not an us versus them mentality as much," he told ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski recently. "You're hard pressed to find a true rivalry anymore where there's a little bit of edginess or bad blood." Paradoxically, Ewing and Mourning, following the lead of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, set a precedent for contemporary stars with their repudiation of Riley's no frenemies policy. "Pat used to get mad when he was the Knicks' coach and I'd go out with Alonzo and Dikembe," Ewing said, tossing in Mutombo, another Georgetown veteran. "He'd tell me, 'You got to stay away from those guys.' But whenever we played, starting with the summer workouts at Georgetown, we'd try to kill each other." Alonzo Mourning said, "And at the end of the day, it was family," Trey Mourning, a toddler back then, has one notable memory of the Heat Knicks rivalry, the aftermath of the Porter Sprewell episode in 1999, otherwise known as the Allan Houston game. Houston's climactic runner in the lane bounced on the rim before going through the net, breaking Miami's heart and propelling the Knicks from the threshold of first round defeat all the way to the N.B.A. finals. "We had a TV in the kitchen my Nana was there, my two cousins," Trey said. "I couldn't comprehend what it all meant yet, but I do remember they showed my dad walking off the court like this." He put both hands on his head and feigned a look of disbelief. "That game hurt him," he said. "He still talks about it sometimes." As Georgetown does not retire jersey numbers, Trey wears his father's and Ewing's No. 33. He sat down for a recent interview in a National Kidney Foundation T shirt, reflecting his father's work to combat the rare disease focal glomerulosclerosis that threatened his life and required the transplant at age 32. "I told him I would try to make it happen, and then he went out and learned to speak Portuguese," Alonzo said. "What 15 year old does that?" They never made it to Brazil, summer enrollment at Georgetown intervening, but that was the beginning of Trey Mourning's love affair with language. He has since learned Italian, Spanish, some Greek and French, and hopes to make use of his lingual skills while playing professionally in Europe. "Trey's been a vocal leader for us," said Ewing, whose Hoyas start two freshman guards. "He didn't play much before this season, so he doesn't have a lot of experience. But he's grown up with the game; he always wants to learn." When he finished answering questions in the interview, Trey had a few of his own for a reporter he knew had covered the careers of his father, his coach and that Jordan fellow who always got the better of the Georgetown alumni. "What made Michael so good, in your opinion?" he said, turning on his smartphone recorder. The answer was simple. In addition to his otherworldly skills, Jordan had the same will and work ethic that defined Riley's teams in Miami and New York. Effort, Trey Mourning was told, can never be legislated out of the game. He nodded. It was nothing he hadn't heard from his father and his "uncle" turned coach, the root of everything they embrace, including each other.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. HISTORIES OF FILM: THE CIRCULATING FILM AND VIDEO LIBRARY AT THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART (through Dec. 4). Before Kanopy, before video, there was, well, MoMA, which started a circulating film library in 1935 and has supplied movies to festivals, campuses and enthusiasts ever since. As part of its reopening season, the museum is highlighting just a small sampling of what it makes available. The first of two programs (on Friday and Tuesday) described as "essential tools for film students" covers almost a century of filmmaking, from the pioneering director Edwin S. Porter ("Life of an American Fireman," shot in 1902) to "Precious Images," a seven minute history of cinema assembled by the Oscar telecast montage wizard Chuck Workman, who won an Oscar of his own for this 1986 short. 212 708 9400, moma.org PROGRAMMERS' NOTEBOOK: IN CASE YOU MISSED IT at BAM Rose Cinemas (Nov. 22 27). Screening in this series on Saturday, "Birds of Passage" is a decades spanning film that deals with the drug trade and an indigenous people in Colombia. A. O. Scott wrote that viewers would likely emerge from it with their perceptions of the world "permanently altered." For those who missed that experience, BAM is bringing back "Birds of Passage" and other films from the past year that are at risk of being overlooked. The program opens on Friday with the Australian western "The Nightingale" (from Jennifer Kent, the director of "The Babadook") and continues on Sunday with Khalik Allah's "Black Mother," which Glenn Kenny called "an evocation, invocation and chronicle of birth and life," and on Monday with the British photographer Richard Billingham's first theatrical feature, "Ray Liz." 718 636 4100, bam.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
The nation's hospitals have been merging at a rapid pace for a decade, forming powerful organizations that influence nearly every health care decision consumers make. The hospitals have argued that consolidation benefits consumers with cheaper prices from coordinated services and other savings. But an analysis conducted for The New York Times shows the opposite to be true in many cases. The mergers have essentially banished competition and raised prices for hospital admissions in most cases, according to an examination of 25 metropolitan areas with the highest rate of consolidation from 2010 through 2013, a peak period for mergers. The analysis showed that the price of an average hospital stay soared, with prices in most areas going up between 11 percent and 54 percent in the years afterward, according to researchers from the Nicholas C. Petris Center at the University of California, Berkeley. The new research confirms growing skepticism among consumer health groups and lawmakers about the enormous clout of the hospital groups. While most political attention has focused on increased drug prices and the Affordable Care Act, state and federal officials are beginning to look more closely at how hospital mergers are affecting spiraling health care costs. During the Obama years, the mergers received nearly universal approval from antitrust agencies, with the Federal Trade Commission moving to block only a small fraction of deals. State officials generally looked the other way. President Trump issued an executive order last year calling for more competition, saying his administration would focus on "limiting excessive consolidation throughout the health care system." In September, Congress asked the Medicare advisory board to study the trend. But not only have big consolidations continued, the behemoths have further cemented their reach in some regions of the country by gobbling up major doctors' and surgeons' practices. Ted Doolittle, who heads Connecticut's Office of the Healthcare Advocate, has fielded angry complaints from residents, but he sees few options available to officials. "A lot of this is too little and too late," he said. The latest giant hospital consolidations continue to stir concerns. Dignity Health and Catholic Health Initiatives, two large chains, are expected to become one of the nation's largest groups with 139 hospitals in 28 states by the end of the year. And two of Texas' biggest systems, Baylor Scott White Health and Memorial Hermann Health System, recently announced plans to combine. The New Haven area has witnessed the most significant decline in competition. Yale New Haven Health, one of the largest hospital groups in Connecticut, took over the only competing hospital in the city and has also aggressively expanded along the state's coast. The group recently added another hospital to its collection, merging Milford with its Bridgeport location. Although the price of a hospital admission in the New Haven Milford area was already three times higher than in other parts of the state, prices surged by 25 percent from 2012 to 2014, compared with 7 percent elsewhere in the state, according to the Petris Center. In the national analysis, a third of the metropolitan areas experienced increases in the cost of hospital stays of at least 25 percent from 2012 to 2014, from roughly 12,000 to at least 15,000. Prices rise even more steeply when these large hospital systems buy doctors' groups, according to Richard Scheffler, director of the Petris Center. Its six hospitals are clustered around the state capital and are the only resort for residents in broad swaths of the eastern part of the state. This month, it announced plans to add a seventh hospital to its network. "These systems are empire building, there's no question," said Jill Zorn, a senior policy officer for the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut, which seeks to improve access for residents. "But to whose benefit?" Numerous studies by economists and others have underscored how hospital consolidation is driving up the cost of medical care. "Within the academic community, there is near unanimity," said Zack Cooper, a health economist at Yale University who is among a group of researchers that has looked at how dominant hospitals affect prices. The emergence of a one hospital town is inevitable in many places, and the Parkersburg, W.Va., area is no exception. St. Joseph's merged with neighboring Camden Clark Memorial in 2011, and then they were consumed by what is now the state's largest health system. "We've got it down to a single campus," said Albert L. Wright Jr., the chief executive of West Virginia University Health System. "Parkersburg is not big enough to support two hospitals." Residents can get most care locally but they go to Morgantown, where the academic medical center is situated, for complex conditions. "We've elevated the level of care," Mr. Wright said. But private insurers are paying more. In the Parkersburg Vienna area, the overall price of a hospital stay increased 54 percent from 2012 to 2014, after the mergers. That is compared with 10 percent elsewhere in the state, according to the Petris Center. Large systems "get paid better by some of the insurers," Mr. Wright said. Flailing hospitals often have little choice but to be acquired or go out of business, and a larger system can offer badly needed capital and management skills. "They can fix a hospital and benefit the community," said Torrey McClary, a lawyer who specializes in mergers at King Spalding. When Yale New Haven Health took over the Hospital of Saint Raphael, a Catholic hospital six blocks away from its New Haven location, Saint Raphael was in danger of going under. Over the last six years, the system has invested more than 200 million in capital improvements at Saint Raphael, said its president Richard D'Aquila, including modernizing "everything behind the walls." "Our focus is not on getting bigger," Mr. D'Aquila said. He said Saint Raphael, which was half empty when it was taken over, is now seeing record numbers of patients. Systems also say they are trying to improve the care for smaller communities. "We're actively trying to move care toward places that are accessible," Hartford's chief executive, Elliot Joseph, said. But patients rarely reap the rewards of lower insurance premiums or out of pocket expenses when mergers occur. Hartford executives talk about reducing the total cost of care in the same breath that they discuss the need to charge insurers more. "The math for us is how we move the care out of the hospitals while maintaining our financial stability," Mr. Joseph said. To defend higher rates, many hospitals cite low reimbursements from government sources, particularly Medicaid, and highlight their role as a safety net. "We're left with no choice," Mr. D'Aquila said. Others, like Hartford, negotiate prices as a single entity, forcing health insurers to include all of their hospitals in a network or risk losing access in areas where there are no alternatives. Hartford "has taken over so many hospitals and practices that, with the Anthem dispute, we felt we had no choices at all," Sharry Goldman, a Storrs, Conn., resident, told state lawmakers. Although Hartford and Anthem Blue Cross, the insurer, eventually reached an agreement, Connecticut passed a law this year requiring hospitals and insurers to extend previous contracts for two months to protect consumers when the parties are at an impasse. The regulators argue that CHI wanted to wield its newfound clout by shifting some operations and imaging from less expensive outpatient settings to hospitals where they could charge more. "I am all for taking advantage of hospital based pricing, if we think it is doable in the market and the market can support it," a CHI executive is quoted as saying in the lawsuit. "It would be great to drop a couple of million more to our bottom line." CHI Franciscan said the attorney general's allegations were "misguided and unfounded." In California, Mr. Becerra, the state attorney general, brought a lawsuit against Sutter in March, claiming that its actions led to significantly higher prices in Northern California. Sutter says it adopted methods encouraged by the federal health care law, by combining hospital services with care delivered outside the hospital to better meet patients' needs. But Mr. de Brantes, the health care executive in Connecticut, and others wonder why many mergers were allowed in the first place. "The puzzling part for many of us in the state is why anyone would allow these oligopolies to form," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
The Sugerman family's trip to Southern Utah this past May involved a treacherous drive. There were hairpin turns; the three adult children needed to move boulders to clear a path for the car. "We were on these roads which were barely roads, climbing up canyon walls," said Andy Sugerman, of Ann Arbor, Mich. "It was night. The sky was beautiful. Everybody was fully engaged." The value of shared adversity and overcoming these obstacles together allowed for bonding unlike any other kind of experience, he said. Many parents sending kids off to college weep over their empty nests, thinking their time as a family is over. And a generation ago, young adults often wanted to get as far away from their parents as possible once they entered adulthood. But that isn't always the case these days. An increasing number of young adults move back home for summers or after college. And even for those who launch quickly, family vacations present an opportunity for parents to remain close to their adult children. The trip to Utah was the latest annual family vacation for Mr. Sugerman, his wife, Gayle Rosen, and their three sons, Eli, 25; Alex, 23; and Sam, 19. The family's first outdoor adventure a road trip across the West in 2008 was motivated by the recognition that "as the kids were getting older, the opportunities for time together would be more limited," Mr. Sugerman said. Since then, the family has explored 28 national parks together. Ms. Rosen presumed that as the boys grew into young adulthood, they'd lose interest in being with their immediate family and that the trips would stop. But that has not happened. "The opportunity to go on a cool outdoor trip with my family continued to present itself, and I've continued to take it," said Eli, who lives about four hours away from his parents, in Chicago. "I see no reason why an end would be in sight." Ms. Rosen feels fortunate that her children still want to go. "I love being outdoors with them. We all unplug and I get to see the amazing human beings they've become," she said. A variety of factors are keeping young adults connected to their parents both geographically and emotionally. Research by Karen Fingerman, a professor of human development and family sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, found that, compared to the mid 20th century, young adults today tend to be less financially stable and are more likely to marry later keeping them closer to their families while many more of them live with their parents. She also discovered that technology and accessibility of transportation make it easier to stay close. "The culture is shifting toward increased contact and increased interdependency" between parents and their young adult children, Dr. Fingerman said. Her work indicates that 30 years ago, only half of parents reported weekly contact with a grown child, while currently nearly all parents had contact with a grown child in the past week, and over half of parents had contact with a grown child every day. She found affection and intimacy between young adults and their parents rising as well. Dr. Fingerman said this is generally a positive development that benefits both generations. As young adults turn more to their parents than their peers for guidance, "they're getting better advice from people who care about them," she said. Although you can foster close relationships without spending money, taking a family vacation with young adults is a growing trend, said Rainer Jenss, president and founder of the Family Travel Association, a company that encourages family travel. He points to Backroads, a Berkeley, Calif. based company focused on upscale active travel for families as an example. Next year, Backroads will introduce a "20s Beyond" segment dedicated to parents traveling with their children in their 20s and 30s. Tom Hale, the company's founder and chief executive, said that last year, 6,500 parents and their adult children went on the company's trips, even though the trips weren't specifically aimed at this older age group. Diane Sanford, a relationship psychologist based in St. Louis and author of "Stress Less, Live Better: 5 Simple Steps to Ease Anxiety, Worry, and Self Criticism," suggests these trips go better if parents manage their expectations, don't overschedule and allow everyone to have time to themselves. Laura Sutherland, who lives in Santa Cruz, Calif., and her husband, Lance Linares, have taken their son, now 30, and daughter, now 32, on 10 trips since they graduated from college. The trips now include their spouses. Ms. Sutherland recommends booking accommodations with private rooms if possible. She assigns everyone responsibility for preparing or treating for a meal and pitching in with cleanup. "We have clear communication in the beginning that parents shouldn't be servants," she said. If budgets or timing don't allow for travel, hiking close to home or going out for lunch and a visit to a local museum can work, too. As young adults strike out on their own, there's a delicate balance that parents need to achieve. It starts with respecting kids' growing independence in adolescence, said Dr. Ken Ginsburg, co director of the Center for Parent and Teen Communication at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. They should feel comfortable coming to you for advice. By the time they are young adults, it's no longer a one way street. "When you honor the fact that they can guide and support you, you're developing a relationship that can last for decades," Dr. Ginsburg said. Dr. Sanford says if a dispute arises, instead of reacting or getting angry, "pause, take a breath and ask yourself whether it's more important to get your way or have the opportunity for a good relationship." Carl Pickhardt, a counseling psychologist based in Austin, Tex., and author of the blog "Surviving Your Child's Adolescence" and the book "Who Stole My Child? Parenting Through the Four Stages of Adolescence," encourages parents of adult children to repeat a few mantras to themselves: I will respect the choices you make and how you face the consequences; I will not criticize or censor your behavior in any way; and I will cheer you on as you engage in life. He said to never provide unsolicited advice, but to request permission, saying something like, "I have some advice I would like to give that would be helpful, but only if that's something you would like me to do." Dr. Ginsburg suggests determining if your child wants you to listen or to provide advice, using language like: "I'm so glad that you always feel you can come and talk to me about these things. How can I be the most supportive?" Dr. Ginsburg emphasized that there are some situations that call for a parent to become involved if the adult child's safety is at risk, including dangerous depression, significant and substantial drug use or domestic abuse.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
The Greek Parliament voted late Tuesday in Athens to back a hugely unpopular property tax, one of a series of new austerity measures. The vote could clear the way for a crucial injection of international financing meant to at least temporarily stave off a default on government debt. The property tax, the first of its type in Greece, would raise 2 billion euros, or 2.7 billion, this year alone, according to government calculations. The question is whether enough Greek people can or will pay the tax to meet those forecasts. "I know that a lot is being asked of the Greek people," the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said on Tuesday in Berlin during a joint news conference with the Greek prime minister, George A. Papandreou. Mr. Papandreou was in Berlin for talks with Mrs. Merkel, who sought to sway public opinion ahead of a vote Thursday in the German Parliament on a bill that would bolster the main European bailout fund, known as the European Financial Stability Facility. Meanwhile, lawmakers in Slovenia voted Tuesday to approve their share of the rescue fund's guarantees. Finland's Parliament is expected to reluctantly approve the fund measure in a vote on Wednesday, despite formidable domestic opposition. All 17 members of the euro zone must ratify the expanded fund, a process that has delayed its adoption. The Greek vote on the property tax was widely seen as a crash test for Mr. Papandreou's embattled Socialist Party, which must in coming weeks pass bills for similarly controversial measures, like a plan to place 30,000 public workers on reserve status with reduced wages for the next 12 months. Greek opposition parties say the reserve status plan is a prelude to layoffs. The vote indicated that Mr. Papandreou had managed to rally Socialist lawmakers despite enduring party rifts over the government's austerity drive. But public opposition to the new tax was clear Tuesday as a small but vehement group of demonstrators clashed with police outside Parliament as lawmakers voted. In addition, thousands of public transport workers walked off the job in the latest in a series of 24 hour strikes protesting salary cuts and feared layoffs as state bodies are merged and abolished. The tax, which will apply to 5.5 million homeowners or about 80 percent of Greek households will cost the average family 800 to 1,500 euros (about 1,045 to 2,041) a year, depending on the location and size of their property. With unemployment at 16 percent, and average income only about 26,000 euros, it is unclear how many households will be willing or able to pay. Greek leaders, though, moved to assure their foreign creditors that they would keep promises to address the economic and political shortcomings that are the underlying reason the country cannot pay its debts without help. The Greek finance minister, Evangelos Venizelos, said that auditors from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund were due to return to Athens this week. Earlier this month, they left the country in what was viewed as a display of dissatisfaction with Greece's progress on cutting the size of government and removing barriers to economic growth. Mr. Venizelos confirmed that the I.M.F.'s managing director, Christine Lagarde, whom he met with in Washington last weekend, had requested written guarantees from the government on the timetable for the new measures and projected revenue. The measures include additional wage and pension cuts. Speaking to the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Tuesday, Jean Claude Juncker, president of the group of euro zone finance ministers, said talks had broken off this month because of difficulties "in finding common ground between what the Greek government was expected to do and what it was able to do." Since then, the situation had improved, Mr. Juncker added, though he said it was too soon to determine whether Greece had met the conditions for its next round of emergency financing. Mrs. Merkel, meanwhile, said she was confident Greece would fulfill conditions set by international lenders, and promised that Germany would be supportive. But she tempered her remarks by insisting that Germany was "not available" for further steps like jointly issued bonds guaranteed by all euro zone members an idea that Germany has staunchly resisted. And the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schauble, ruled out an increase in the size of the euro zone bailout fund, though not necessarily an increase in its ability to borrow. The fund will have the power to buy European government bonds and recapitalize struggling banks. But some analysts have said the fund needs to be two or three times bigger to remove any doubts about its impregnability. Mr. Schauble also said Tuesday that it was likely that the rescue mechanism would be further "enhanced," though he would not give details. He said that any improvements to the fund would have to be done in an "efficient way" that did not overburden Germany and the six other countries with top credit ratings that are essential to giving the rescue fund a credit rating of AAA. Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, a member of the executive board of the European Central Bank, also seemed to offer cautious support for increasing the fund's ability to borrow on open markets.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
The coronavirus pandemic is laying bare structural deficiencies in America's social programs. The relief package passed by Congress last week provides emergency fixes for some of these issues, but it also leaves critical problems untouched. To avoid a Great Depression, Congress must quickly design a more forceful response to the crisis. Start with the labor market. In just one week, from March 15 to March 21, 3.3 million workers filed for unemployment insurance. According to some projections, the unemployment rate might rise as high as 30 percent in the second quarter of 2020. This dramatic spike in jobless claims is an American peculiarity. In almost no other country are jobs being destroyed so fast. Why? Because throughout the world, governments are protecting employment. Workers keep their jobs, even in industries that are shut down. The government covers most of their wage through direct payments to employers. Wages are, in effect, socialized for the duration of the crisis. Instead of safeguarding employment, America is relying on beefed up unemployment benefits to shield laid off workers from economic hardship. To give just one example, in both the United States and Britain, the government is asking restaurant workers to stay home. But in Britain, workers are receiving 80 percent of their pay (up to PS2,500 a month, or 3,125) and are guaranteed to get their job back once the shutdown is over. In America, the workers are laid off; they must then file for unemployment insurance and wait for the economy to start up again before they can apply for a new job, and if all goes well, sign a new contract and resume working. Even if unemployment is generously compensated as it is in the 2.2 trillion bill Congress passed there is nothing efficient in letting the unemployment rate rise to double digits. Losing one's job is anxiety inducing. Applying for unemployment benefits is burdensome. The unemployment system risks being swamped soon by tens of millions of claims. Although some businesses may rehire their workers once the shutdown is over, others will have disappeared. When social distancing ends, millions of employer employee relationships will have been destroyed, slowing down the recovery. In Europe, people will be able to return to work, as if they had been on a long, government paid leave. The battle for the speediest recovery starts today. The next congressional bill needs measures to protect employment for the duration of the shutdown. This does not raise insuperable technical difficulties. The bill passed last week provides support for wages in one industry, airlines. Congress could easily extend this program to other sectors. Some countries like Germany, with its Kurzarbeit system, a policy aimed at job retention in times of crisis already had the government infrastructure in place to send workers home while the state replaced most of their lost earnings. But several nations with no experience in that area like Britain, Ireland and Denmark were able to introduce brand new employment guarantee programs on the fly during the epidemic. This situation for laid off workers would be bad enough if it were not aggravated by a second American peculiarity. As they are losing their jobs, many workers are also losing their employer provided health insurance and now find themselves faced with the Kafkaesque task of obtaining coverage on their own. One option involves continuing to be covered by one's former employer, a program known as COBRA. It is prohibitively expensive: Participants have to bear the full cost of insurance, 20,500 per year on average. Another option is to go shopping for a plan on the Affordable Care Act insurance exchange, where one is faced with a bewildering choice between plans like Blue Shield's Bronze 60 PPO (with a deductible of up to 12,600 per year) and Aetna's Silver Copay HNOnly (with a 7,000 deductible and up to 14,000 in annual out of pocket expenses). The last option is to join the ranks of the uninsured, a catastrophic solution during a pandemic. There are reports that people have already died of Covid 19 because they refused to go to the hospital, worried about bills, or because they were denied treatment for lack of insurance. The bill passed last week does nothing to reduce co pays, deductibles or premiums on the insurance exchanges; nor does it reduce the price of COBRA. The next bill should introduce a Covidcare for All program. This federal program would guarantee access to Covid 19 care at no cost to all U.S. residents no matter their employment status, age or immigration status. Fighting the pandemic starts with eradicating the spread of the virus, which means that everybody must be covered. Covidcare for All would also cover the cost of Covid 19 treatments for people who are insured. Insurance companies would be barred in return from hiking premiums, which might otherwise spike as much as 40 percent next year. The United States also needs to ramp up its support to businesses. Since containing the epidemic requires government mandated economic shutdowns, it is legitimate to expect the government, in return, to shelter businesses from the economic disruptions. To keep businesses alive through this crisis, the government should act as a payer of last resort. In other words, the government should pay not only wages of idled workers, but also essential business maintenance costs, like rents, utilities, interest on debt, health insurance premiums, and other costs that are vital for the survival of businesses in locked down sectors. This allows businesses to hibernate without bleeding cash and risking bankruptcy. Denmark was the first nation to announce such a program; it is being emulated by a growing number of countries, including Italy. In the United States, calls to support businesses have been met with excessive skepticism so far. To be sure, the congressional relief package includes 350 billion in help for small businesses, but the program is complex, limited in scope and only a fraction of eligible businesses are likely to use it. A liquidationist ideology seems to have infected minds on both the left and the right. On the right, opposition to government grants to businesses is grounded in the view that markets should be left to sort out the consequences of the pandemic. Let airlines go bankrupt; shareholders and bondholders will lose but the airlines will restructure and re emerge. The best way government can help is by slashing taxes, according to this view. The relief package includes more than 200 billion in tax cuts for business profits. This view is misguided. There is nothing efficient in the destruction of businesses that were viable before the virus outbreak. The crisis cannot be blamed on poorly managed corporations. Government support, in the case of a pandemic, does not create perverse incentives. Bankruptcies redistribute income, but in a chaotic and opaque way. And while bankruptcy might be a way to deal with the economic fallout of the pandemic for large corporations, it is not well adapted to small businesses. Without strong enough government support, many small businesses will have to liquidate. The death of a business has long term costs: The links between entrepreneurs, workers and customers are destroyed and often need to be rebuilt from scratch. On the left, a popular view contends that the government should help people, not corporations. It holds that big corporations acted badly before the crisis buying back their shares, paying C.E.O.s exorbitant salaries and should not be bailed out. If they are, in this view, they should be subject to strict conditions, like swearing off share buybacks, reducing C.E.O. pay, and a 15 minimum wage for their employees. The concerns underlying this view are understandable. Inequality has surged since the beginning of the 1980s. This crisis, however, is unlike the financial crisis of 2008 9. The firms seeking aid today bear no direct responsibility for the disaster that threatens their survival. If the government mandates a shutdown for public health reasons, why should it attach any conditions to temporary financial support for directly affected industries? No doubt some companies will exploit loopholes in government relief plans. Some businesses, more broadly, will disproportionately benefit from the pandemic. While tens of thousands of brick and mortar stores are closed, Amazon sales rise. The Seattle based company is one of the few S P 500 firms whose stock price is higher today than at the beginning of the year. Cloud computing is exploding. Facebook traffic is booming. But these windfall profits have a fair, comprehensive and transparent solution: The government should impose excess profits taxes, as it has done several times in the past during periods of crisis. In 1918, all profits made by corporations above and beyond an 8 percent rate of return on their capital were deemed abnormal, and abnormal profits were taxed at progressive rates of up to 80 percent. Similar taxes on excessive profits were applied during World War II and the Korean War. These taxes all had one goal making sure that no one could benefit outrageously from a situation in which the masses suffered. To help make this happen, the next bill needs an excess profits tax. If Congress fails to act, the pandemic could well reinforce two of the defining trends of the pre coronavirus American economy: the rise of business concentration and the upsurge of inequality. Some will say that the solutions we've outlined show excessive faith in government. They will correctly point out that some of these policies are undesirable in normal times. But these are not normal times. The big battles be they wars or pandemics are fought and won collectively. In this period of national crisis, hatred of the government is the surest path to self destruction. Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman ( gabriel zucman) are economists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the authors of "The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
's stunning novel "Pachinko" her second, after "Free Food for Millionaires" (2007) announces its ambitions right from the opening sentence: "History has failed us, but no matter." "Pachinko" chronicles four generations of an ethnic Korean family, first in Japanese occupied Korea in the early 20th century, then in Japan itself from the years before World War II to the late 1980s. The novel opens with an arranged marriage in Yeongdo, a fishing village at the southern tip of Korea. That union produces a daughter, Sunja, who falls in love at 16 with a prominent (and married) mobster. After Sunja becomes pregnant, a local pastor offers her a chance to escape by marrying him and immigrating together to his brother's house in an ethnic Korean neighborhood in Osaka. Together, they embark into the fraught unknown. Pachinko, the slot machine like game ubiquitous throughout Japan, unifies the central concerns of identity, homeland and belonging. For the ethnic Korean population in Japan, discriminated against and shut out of traditional occupations, pachinko parlors are the primary mode of finding work and accumulating wealth. Called Zainichi, or foreign residents, ethnic Koreans are required to reapply for alien registration cards every three years even if they were born in Japan, and are rarely granted passports, making overseas travel nearly impossible. From a young age, Sunja's oldest son sees being Korean as "a dark, heavy rock"; his greatest, secret desire is to be Japanese. His younger brother, Mozasu, even after he accumulates great wealth through his pachinko parlors, confides to his closest Japanese friend: "In Seoul, people like me get called Japanese bastards, and in Japan, I'm just another dirty Korean no matter how much money I make or how nice I am." Mozasu's son, Solomon, learns this too quickly after graduating from an American university. He returns to Tokyo on an expat package with the Japanese branch of a British investment bank, then is fired once his ethnic Korean connections are no longer needed for a business deal. Still, Solomon is of a new, less wounded generation. He believes there are still good Japanese people and sees himself as Japanese, too, "even if the Japanese didn't think so."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
MILAN It was 9:30 p.m. on a chilly Sunday in an industrial area on the outskirts of Milan, and rain had been pounding down for 48 hours. The Missoni show had just ended, and Angela Missoni, the brand's creative director, was welcoming around 120 guests for supper. "We are a family business, and we have been built upon decades of family dinners," she said as the restaurant space in a converted warehouse near the Fondazione Prada swelled with guests, all kissing one another and erupting in loud, happy chatter. "So I wouldn't have this celebration any other way." Mountains of melt in the mouth antipasti lined a wall of each room, with slightly heavier dishes pasta bowls, roast lamb and artichoke souffle passed around by smiling young waiters. Gallons of prosecco and crisp white Italian wines sat in giant ice buckets kept discreetly in corners. "You should have seen this place hours earlier," Ms. Missoni said, laughing. "The rain was dripping down onto the buffet tables and onto my catwalk over at the show venue. At one point, I was trying to convince myself that colorful reflections from all the big puddles of water would be a nice addition to the night." She continued: "But I am a problem solver, always have been. That's my job in this family, I think. We each have our own role. But we are all unanimous about what tonight has to be about enjoyment and informality. This is just what we do." Until last year, the Missoni dinner had been held in the family apartment in the heart of Milan, but security required a change in venue as the party numbers swelled, one guest said. Still, the company had done its best to recreate the original, welcoming ambience. Each of the large, spacious rooms was bathed in warm light from candles in the shape of large balls of yarn, with dozens of statement sofas dotted around and surrounded by expansive bouquets of flowers in signature Missoni hues magenta pinks and burned oranges not to mention a small army of actual Missonis, all wearing the brand's signature knits. Ms. Missoni's daughter, Margherita, who recently introduced a children's wear line, was holding court in one corner, while her son Francesco was chatting in another, his English bulldog, Johnny, waddling among the guests as he had during the show. Ottavio Missoni Jr., the brand's sales director for North American operations the son of Vittorio, Ms. Missoni's brother, who had been the brand's marketing director until his death in a 2013 plane crash held a glass of red wine in one hand and a bowl of ravioli in the other. Rosita Missoni, 84, who founded the company with her husband (also named Ottavio) in 1953, questioned a barman at length about the contents of her fresh ginger cocktail. "My grandmother is so Italian; she always insists that the food has to be as good as the food we eat in her kitchen, near the factory, and she makes sure of it, too," Mr. Missoni said. "Nothing will stop her. Sharing meals all together with her at our center is still the beating heart of this family."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Installation view of "Women Take the Floor," at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The show is an effort to dedicate more space to women's artworks. Only 4 percent of the art acquired by the museum between 2008 to 2018 was by women 3,788 of 90,215 works. Over the past decade, there has been a sense in the art world that gender equity was on the horizon: Emerging female artists were landing high profile solo shows, museums were staging women themed exhibitions, grants were being awarded to boost female artists, and long neglected artists were being given overdue recognition. This assumption of progress is being sharply challenged by new data showing that between 2008 and 2018, only 11 percent of art acquired by the country's top museums for their permanent collections was by women. And contrary to any hope that acquisitions of artworks by women are inching upward, the percentage remained relatively stagnant, according to the data, released on Thursday. The new analysis was by Artnet, an art market information company, and "In Other Words," a weekly podcast and newsletter produced by Art Agency, Partners, an art advisory firm that was acquired by Sotheby's. "The perception of change was more than the reality," said Julia Halperin, the executive editor of Artnet News and one of two lead authors on the report. "The shows for women were getting more attention, but the numbers actually weren't changing." Over the past decade, just 29,247 works by female artists were acquired by 26 top museums in the United States, out of 260,470 total works. The barometer of achievement for female artists, experts agree, is not the number of solo and group exhibitions they are given, which are often less expensive and easier to mount, but direct purchases by the museum for their permanent collections, as well as donations. The report, which included more than 40 interviews with curators, artists, collectors and dealers, suggests several reasons for the gender imbalance, including museum committees tasked with acquiring work that were often preoccupied with name recognition and wary of spending money on a female artist who didn't have a recorded reputation for selling at auctions. The bias of the collectors who donate works to museums is also at issue, as well as a longstanding bias toward male dominance in art history books. "It's the idea of women artists being more of a risk, which seems to speak to a sort of institutional timidity," said Charlotte Burns, the executive editor of "In Other Words." Of the roughly 5,800 female artists whose works were acquired, 190 women or just 3 percent were African American. According to the researchers' data set, the number of acquisitions of artwork by women peaked in 2009 at 3,462. "We assume that, given the commonly held belief that women artists are amazing, that there had been much more growth," said Naima J. Keith, the vice president of education and public programs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and a curator. "This should be the wake up call. Maybe we haven't done enough." The researchers also asked museums to report the gender parity in their exhibitions. From 2008 to 2018, according to their data, 14 percent of all exhibitions were either solo shows featuring female artists or group exhibitions in which the majority of artists were female. The number of exhibitions featuring female artists gradually climbed over the decade, more than doubling from 49 exhibitions in 2008 to 104 exhibitions in 2018. The research does not differentiate between large and small exhibitions, leaving open the possibility that the climbing number is not necessarily an indicator of significant change. There is general agreement that women artists are in a far better position today than in 1971, when Linda Nochlin wrote her landmark essay, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" in ARTnews magazine. Ms. Burns said that in recent years, with greater awareness of gender inequity in all fields, there had been a rush of press about art museums' efforts to increase the representation of female artists. But when Ms. Burns and Ms. Halperin reached out to museums for their institution's data on gender parity, they found that few if any of the institutions had kept track. Museums are much more likely to highlight exhibitions and acquisitions that look good in a news release, Ms. Halperin added. "No museum is going to say, 'Our fall program is majority male artists,'" she said. "But they would say, 'Our program is majority female artists.'" According to the data that the researchers gathered through Artnet's Price Database, acquisitions of women made art stagnated even as the auction market for work by women more than doubled between 2008 and 2018. The global market grew from 230 million to 595 million over that 10 year period, according to the data. However, the sale of women's artwork in the global auction market comprises only 2 percent of the total market share, according to the researchers. And of that share, five female artists dominate the market, comprising nearly 41 percent of the total. Those top earning female artists include Yayoi Kusama, Joan Mitchell, Louise Bourgeois, Georgia O'Keeffe and Agnes Martin. (Only Ms. Kusama is living.) In doing this research, Ms. Burns and Ms. Halperin reasoned that some critics might argue that women are simply outnumbered by men in the fine art world. According to a Yale University study from 2017, however, the Yale School of Art reached gender parity in 1983, indicating that a gender divide in the field of art in general was not the likely source of current inequities. Reaching gender parity in acquired work is likely to be more difficult at encyclopedic museums, which aim to represent art across history and geography. Those museums, which include the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, have a mandate to collect across eras not necessarily from certain demographics. At the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, only 4 percent of the art acquired between 2008 to 2018 was by women, or 3,788 out of 90,215 works acquired by the museum. "Why, as a woman who has been working in this field for 20 years, is this shocking me so much?" said Nonie Gadsden, a senior curator at the museum. Ms. Gadsden said that part of the problem is that only a fraction of their acquisitions are purchased by the museum; much is donated by collectors, and so relies on their personal purchases. Ms. Gadsden said the museum is making a concerted effort to focus on art by women. This month, the museum cleared out the entire third floor of its Art of the Americas Wing and filled it with works by female artists dated between 1920 and 2020. The exhibition, called "Women Take the Floor," features about 100 female artists. (Most of the art was already part of their permanent collection.) At one point in her career, Ms. Gadsden said she was skeptical about women themed exhibitions because she feared that they tokenized female artists. Later she said she came to understand that these types of exhibitions could highlight overlooked artists whose important work was boxed out by dominant men. That is particularly true of female action painters like Helen Frankenthaler and Elaine de Kooning, who have a gallery in the new exhibition. "By putting the women out there, we can bring attention to them without the known names sucking the air out of the room," she said. "If they were in a room with Jackson Pollock, everyone in the room would go to the Jackson Pollocks." Among the museums that took part in the survey, smaller institutions tended to have made better progress toward gender parity, the researchers said. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, for example, collected 21 works by women in 2008. In 2018, they collected 288 works by women. That museum, Ms. Burns pointed out, made an explicit commitment to increasing representation of female artists.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
The first game of the first set of the so called Battle of the Sexes the 100,000 winner take all tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs in 1973 is marvelously reproduced in a new play called "Balls." The action proceeds in real time, shot by shot, perfectly synchronized to a soundtrack of racket tapping, score keeping, sneaker squeaking and thwacks. Unfortunately, there are 27 games to go. One thing I have to say for "Balls," which opened on Wednesday at 59E59 Theater, is that it has ... a lot of nerve. Plays about sports are not often very good, plays about tennis even less so, and this particular contest recently the subject of the film "Battle of the Sexes" would seem to be overmined. Even if stage directors can invoke the audience's imagination to fill in the blanks, filling in so many gets tiring fast. This hasn't deterred the playwrights Kevin Armento and Bryony Lavery he the author of the well received "Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally" and she of the harrowing and decidedly non Disney "Frozen." They insist on depicting the entire three set match, albeit in mime: straightforwardly on three occasions (as in that first game) but mostly in various theatrical transformations thereafter. Sometimes Ms. King (Ellen Tamaki) is upstage; sometimes Mr. Riggs (Donald Corren) is. Sometimes only one of them is seen, sometimes neither. The net may be parallel or perpendicular or diagonal to the audience, or it may move; occasionally there is no net at all. In one lovely black light scene, only the ball is visible. Though this action is cleverly devised by the directors Ianthe Demos and Nick Flint, and executed perfectly under the movement direction of Natalie Lomonte, it is neither tennis nor theater but a kind of hysteria. The whole play seems to be constructed backward, starting with a concept requiring a full 85 minutes of athletic representation and ending with the maddening question of how to fill all that time. Narratives so constructed often leave you thinking, "Why?" but, in "Balls," the authors' solutions, trite and tiresome, have you frequently blurting, "What?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
"Where the Crawdads Sing," by the September pick of Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine book club enters the fiction list this week at No. 9. This is Owens's first novel; readers may remember the memoirs she wrote with her then husband, Mark, about their years in Africa studying endangered species: "Cry of the Kalahari," "The Eye of the Elephant" and "Secrets of the Savanna." It was in Africa that Owens became "fascinated with the social groups of mammals which are almost always made up of females," such as brown hyenas. "The males come and go for mating or meals, but the females stay in their birth groups and maintain strong bonds with their pride or pack mates for life," she writes on her website. These animals reminded her of her own tight knit friendships and made her realize "how strong the genetic propensity for female groups must be in our own species." So perhaps it's no surprise that "Where the Crawdads Sing" about a young girl surviving on her own in a North Carolina coastal marsh asks, as she says, "how isolation influences the behavior of a young woman, who, like all of us, has the genetic propensity to belong to a group." "Depth of Winter," the latest volume in Craig Johnson's contemporary series starring the Wyoming sheriff Walt Longmire, is at No. 5 on the list this week. Johnson, who lives on a ranch outside tiny Ucross, Wyo. population 25 and often sports a cowboy hat, just like his main character, has admitted that fans often confuse him with Longmire. "I always correct them, for fear that they might want me to arrest someone," he once told Publishers Weekly.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Matthew Rosenberg, who covers political disinformation and is based in Washington, discussed the tech he's using. You're covering disinformation in politics ahead of the 2020 election. That's a busy beat, aided by the prevalence of social media. Where to begin? That we live in a world that seems to be awash in disinformation? That no one seems to have a good answer for countering it? That Americans are being bombarded with warnings that foreigners the Russians! the Chinese! the Iranians! are coming to confuse us with all sorts of misleading nonsense? On top of disinformation, the beat includes hacking and election security and political digital malfeasance in general yes, campaigns know a lot more about you than you think. It's enough to make anyone feel paranoid. So I find it's helpful to take a deep breath and break it down. Let's start with disinformation, which implies intent: Someone is trying to mislead when spreading it. Misinformation is simply information that's wrong, though the person spreading it may not realize that. Neither is a new phenomenon. For as long as humans have been, well, human, we've been misleading one another, and politicians have typically been among the worst offenders. But now, of course, falsehoods spread at the speed of social media, and the internet makes it easy to take deception to the next level. Russian trolls can pose as Black Lives Matter activists. Democrats can help elect one of their own by pretending to be conservatives. A Republican political operative can anonymously troll Democrats with fake campaign websites that seek to pit liberals against one another. And any event, no matter how small or insignificant, seems liable to produce its own community of truthers. Covering it all is tricky. Writing about every little conspiracy theory and fake news story circulating in the dark corners of the web risks amplifying the nonsense. Better to focus on the people behind the disinformation. Technology can help find them. But once you know who they are, it is about old fashioned reporting drawing them out and getting them to explain why they are in the disinformation game, their motivation, whom they are working with and who is paying the bills. What tech tools do you use to discern or trace disinformation? In all honesty, I rely on the expertise of others. There's a big community of researchers who have serious engineering chops and are building all kinds of helpful tools. They're finding bot networks, tracking online political advertising and flagging nearly identical social media posts by people who seem to have no apparent connection to one another. Me? I once learned enough code to try building a Twitter bot. It didn't work. Even the best, custom built tools can get you only so far. The technology can help spot a particularly nasty conspiracy theory that is making its way from 4chan to Twitter, or uncover how the Trump campaign has posted more than 2,000 ads on Facebook about immigration that include the word "invasion." But once you find the disinformation, you need to dig into it. The tools for that work are simple: You need a phone, and you need something to write with. How do you protect the confidentiality of your sources and the security of your communications with them? Before I got into the disinformation game, I covered national security in Washington and spent 15 years as a foreign correspondent in places where the government is really good at listening to your communications, like Pakistan. On those beats, a lack of security can get a source thrown in prison or killed. Let Us Help You Protect Your Digital Life None With Apple's latest mobile software update, we can decide whether apps monitor and share our activities with others. Here's what to know. A little maintenance on your devices and accounts can go a long way in maintaining your security against outside parties' unwanted attempts to access your data. Here's a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online. Ever considered a password manager? You should. There are also many ways to brush away the tracks you leave on the internet. Discretion is crucial. The first rule of source protection is Do Not Talk About Your Sources. It is also the second rule. Meeting sources in person is always best. But since it is often not feasible, there are tools to mitigate the risks. Apps for encrypted calls and messaging are essential. I rely on Signal, as do most of my sources. For encrypted emails, Protonmail is popular. Strong passwords are a must, too, and I use a password manager to store all those long strings of letters, numbers and symbols. It also helps to turn off location tracking on your phone, and to not use ride hailing services like Uber when going to meet sources. Then there are burner phones. They're useful, and you get to sneak around like a secret agent when you're buying one. To make sure it cannot be traced, you need to pay in cash, never register it with your own name or real email and never connect it to your home or work Wi Fi network. I have two at the moment. One is a cheap smartphone, and the other is a flip phone. What other tech do you find useful for your job? CrowdTangle is incredibly useful for tracking how information spreads on social media. SimilarWeb is great for web analytics. DomainTools is essential for online forensics. LexisNexis is crucial for finding phone numbers and home addresses. If I had to pick one account to keep, it would be my professional account on LinkedIn. The network is invaluable when you are looking to track down people inside a specific organization or industry. And it is amazing how people will sometimes use their LinkedIn pages to describe in detail specific projects they worked on, including highly classified government programs. There's no single better place online to ferret out sources. You broke the Cambridge Analytica story last year. Have you modified your own social media use since? I've definitely had my paranoid moments. After the Cambridge story broke, when Facebook's stock price was in free fall, I got to thinking about how Facebook had 11 years' worth of my private messages, photos and posts. I panicked and started deleting things. It took about an hour for me to chill out and realize that if I wasn't going to delete my whole profile, a couple of half measures were not going to make a difference. I've since found that keeping the profile was more useful than not. I still have old friends messaging me there, and I need it for reporting. Facebook is simply too good at connecting people. It's why it makes so much money off our data. I have cut back on social media, though not because of the Cambridge story or other reporting on big tech companies. Some of my reasons were not particularly unique: I found it less and less satisfying, and I began to worry about the immense amount of time I was wasting. If you think Instagram is a time suck, wait until you're the oldest person on TikTok.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Art Lerner on the practice greens at his community's golf course at Frenchman's Creek in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. He said he feels no guilt about enjoying his time. Before Art Lerner retired, he could not imagine how he would fill the days. He had few hobbies come to think of it, only one: fishing. But at his firm's urging, Mr. Lerner, a money manager, had already stayed on the job for three more years than he intended, and "I'd had enough," he said. Now, 14 years into retirement, Mr. Lerner, 75, looks back in amusement at his fretting. He plays golf four mornings a week and goes fishing once or twice a month. In between, he watches television and putters around his house in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., his full time residence since he sold his Manhattan apartment and his weekend home in New Jersey. "I've got a good puttering sense," the twice divorced Mr. Lerner said. "I've learned how to kill an afternoon without feeling bad that I've not done anything constructive." For many baby boomers, retirement is neither a chance nor an excuse to take it easy. Rather, it's an opportunity to take a class (or six). Then there's mastering a language or an instrument, writing a novel, climbing a mountain, maybe starting a business. But some are choosing to retire more in the manner of their parents than in the style of their striving peers. They have earned the right to do what they please, they say, and what pleases them is playing golf, playing cards, playing with the grandchildren and playing with the remote control. Heni Weisfogel, a mother of four who went to law school at age 40 and then became a high school teacher and administrator, reluctantly retired last year and moved from Highland Park, N.J., to Boca Raton, Fla. "I wasn't ready, but I had an hour commute to work each way, and I hated the winters," Ms. Weisfogel, 72, said. Once she did retire, snow started looking pretty good. That was before she discovered canasta. "I've become an avid card player," Ms. Weisfogel said. "I've even taken up mah jongg, which I thought was for old people. I swim and I walk and spend time with my family. My days are filled." Most of her friends, she said, achieved all they wanted in the business world and do not feel a need to achieve more now that they have left it. "They like the idea of playing golf every day and not having a timeline," Ms. Weisfogel said. Attitudes about retirement have changed markedly since the introduction of Social Security in 1935, said Ken Dychtwald, the founder and chief executive of Age Wave, a consultancy focused on issues related to the aging population. "In retirement 1.0, you reached a place where you weren't perceived to be quite as valuable as you used to be, and it was time to make way for younger people," he said. "It wasn't assumed you'd live much longer after you retired. "Around 1970, you had retirement 2.0," he continued. "A lot of people were retiring. Many of them had time on their hands, they had money, and they were discovered as a market. Cruise lines and golf communities went after them." Suddenly, leisure retirement was glamorous, even aspirational. "The earlier you did it," Mr. Dychtwald said, "the more successful you were perceived to be." Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' Not much was expected of retirees for a generation, and, perhaps more to the point, retirees did not expect much of themselves. Now, in what could be called retirement 3.0, "a highly educated, active group is looking at what might well be 25 years of leisure, and a lot of people are saying, 'Sounds boring to me,'" Mr. Dychtwald said. "The upside is that many of them are finding fulfillment in trying new things. They're looking to achieve more of their potential. Maybe they're hoping they will be late bloomers. "The downside," he added, "is that it creates a lot of pressure on everybody. People are going start to fear that if they're not making the most of themselves or being sufficiently productive in their later days, they're going to be looked down on." David Demko, a semiretired clinical gerontologist in Orange Park, Fla., agreed. "People will judge each other for their choices," he said. "It's similar to the feminist movement, when stay at home mothers felt they were being looked down on by working mothers, and working mothers felt their priorities were being questioned by stay at home mothers. "The first thing anyone down here asks me is, 'How's your golf game?'" Dr. Demko added. "I think golf's a waste of time, but I'm sure a lot of people think I'm crazy for not wanting to play." A waste of time? Golf? Those are fighting words in some precincts. Some may choose to give a wide berth to personal enrichment and self improvement in retirement because they had their share of both at work. David Daubert, a former marketing manager at Procter Gamble, went to several Dale Carnegie seminars during his career and took part in many skill development and leadership seminars offered by P. G. When he retired 17 years ago, he wanted to play golf, travel with his wife, garden and play more golf. That's exactly what he is doing. "We have professors who lead book clubs," said Mr. Daubert, 70, who lives at Solivita by AV Homes, a retirement community in Kissimmee, Fla. "Book clubs are not for me. I do water aerobics." Terry Walzman thought maybe he should learn Spanish when he retired six years ago and he and his wife began splitting their time between Edison, N.J., and Boynton Beach, Fla. So far, he has done nothing about it. That's fine with him. "I'm not interested in going back to school," said Mr. Walzman, 74, who has four degrees and had several careers, including a business installing telephone systems. "In my youth, I was very ambitious," he added. "I had to get 100 on every test. I had to do this, and I had to do that." Now, he plays golf, plays poker, swims twice a day and spends some time monitoring his investments. "To be totally honest, I'm at peace," he said. "I'm happy. What can I tell you?" Mr. Lerner, the former money manager, speculated that if he had a wife, she might tell him to get out of the house and "take old age classes," he said, referring to the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Florida Atlantic University. "My friends who take courses told me to look in the catalog, but there wasn't one subject that interested me. "I don't know. Maybe it's my personality, but I don't have to justify my behavior," Mr. Lerner said. "I'm enjoying my retirement just as it is. And if it's O.K. with me, I'm not going to change even if someone else says I'm wasting my time."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
I'm not sure whether to call this the good news or the bad news, but Covid 19 is not the only thing that parents need to think about right now. Of course, this year is very different, and when I talked to pediatric emergency room specialists around the country, they reinforced summer safety advice, while noting some of the special twists and dangers of this dangerous and twisty time. "Everyone has cabin fever, and they want to get out and have a good time," said Dr. Mark Zonfrillo, an associate professor of emergency medicine and pediatrics at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. And even as many parents may feel that it's all they can do to enforce social distancing and mask wearing, it's important to remember the safety measures from the before times as well. Dr. Maya Haasz, an attending physician in the pediatric emergency room at Children's Hospital Colorado and an assistant professor at University of Colorado School of Medicine, said they are seeing injuries that reflect a summer of individual activity rather than team sports. Kids are out riding their bikes and their scooters, she said, but not always wearing helmets. "We're seeing more significant head injuries," she said. Sign up for the Well Family newsletter And because some parents are still scared to go to hospitals, injured children are sometimes not coming in immediately. The delay can be painful for the child and problematic for the doctors, for example if a laceration is more than a day old, and can't be safely sewn up. "We're doing a tremendous amount to keep the hospital safe," Dr. Haasz said. "You are not at risk of getting Covid in the hospital." But to help keep kids out of the emergency room, remember the sunscreen and the bike helmets and the adult supervision for kids in the water. Drowning is the leading cause of death for children from 1 to 4 and it can happen silently and swiftly, leaving behind devastated families and regrets that never go away. Dr. Maneesha Agarwal, a pediatric emergency physician and assistant professor at Emory in Atlanta, said that in 2018, 443 children from 1 to 4 died from drowning, and that it kills about 1,000 children of all ages every year. There are two peaks in age, she said, first the toddlers and young children who accidentally gain access to a body of water, and then the adolescents, the risk takers, "who might be horsing around, sneaking into pools." With the pandemic, children may not be going to community pools, where there would be lifeguards, and the home pool market has been booming. "A lot of people are getting new pools and first time pools, so with that comes a responsibility for not only proper barriers and pool gates, but also proper supervision in an era of distraction," Dr. Zonfrillo said. Parents need to think about layers of safety, Dr. Agarwal said, such as having a four foot tall fence around the entire pool, but also alarms. Parental supervision is key. "We recommend for younger children and not experienced swimmers that they should always be within arm's reach," Dr. Agarwal said. Parents should not assume they can rely on a lifeguard, who will have many swimmers to watch. Even kiddie pools and shallow bodies of water can be dangerous, Dr. Zonfrillo said: "A toddler can drown in just a few inches of water." If you have a trampoline, supervise children carefully, follow all safety instructions, and make sure there is only one child on the trampoline at a time. Trampoline sales have gone up in the pandemic, and doctors have been very concerned about trampoline related fractures and trips to the emergency room. "A bunch of kids on a trampoline can really cause a lot of injury," Dr. Agarwal said. Be mindful of bike safety, be vigilant about helmets. And remember that kids can get badly injured on scooters and on all terrain vehicles, or ATVs. ATVs are very common, especially in rural communities, Dr. Agarwal said, and nationally, about four children are seen in an emergency department every hour with ATV injuries. She recently treated a child who had taken "every single precaution," she said. "He was on a designated ATV recreational area, he had a helmet, he was supervised, he had no passengers and yet he still managed to roll over his ATV on himself." Bottom line: Although she understands their appeal, Dr. Agarwal said, "Don't put your kid on an ATV." Take the summer sun seriously: Keep children in the shade as much as possible, use hats and protective clothing in addition to sunscreen. Apply lots of sunscreen, reapply it every couple of hours, and after children go in the water. Make sure children stay hydrated, especially if they're exercising. Children who are engaged in athletics should start hydrating before they go out to practice, Dr. Agarwal said, and if they haven't been practicing during the shutdown, they should ease back in, and be particularly careful about hydration and heat exposure when they go back to practicing. Heat stroke is always a worry, especially vehicular heat stroke, which happens when small children are left in cars. Many doctors were worried that the pandemic might put children at additional risk, if parents who are reluctant to take them into stores leave them in vehicles. "In hot temperatures, the temperature in the car can rise within minutes," Dr. Zonfrillo said. Ideally, parents should leave children at home while they do errands. This year, Dr. Agarwal said, the numbers are actually looking a little better. For the past two years, over 50 children a year have died from heat stroke; there have been 11 deaths so far this year. Be aware of the danger posed by firearms that are not properly secured and stored. Firearms are not specifically a summer risk, but this is a summer of children not going to camp, and home injuries loom large. Firearm sales have increased in the pandemic, and Dr. Agarwal says that pediatric emergency doctors are worrying over these new owners especially, and whether they are storing the guns safely they should be stored unloaded, locked up in a gun safe or with a trigger lock, and with the ammunition locked up in a separate location. "I want to encourage all parents to ask about the presence of unsecured firearms in any home where children go to visit," Dr. Agarwal said. Other at home injuries to avoid in an at home summer include poisonings and falls, especially falls from windows. A window screen alone is not a sufficient protection. Be aware that even the substances you're using to protect your children can be toxic; the pandemic has meant increased poisoning incidents involving hand sanitizers. Dr. Zonfrillo emphasized the importance of what he called "re child proofing the home, based on the child's developmental age." Social isolation may be taking a toll, especially on children who suffer from anxiety or depression, and on those who may not have been able to get help and therapy virtually. On the other hand, as children begin to interact more, whether in person or virtually, and even start school again, doctors worry about bullying. Dr. Haasz said this is a time for "really keeping an eye out for friends and family who have mental health concerns." To help keep vulnerable children safe, it's again important to be sure the home is injury proofed, she said: "Lock up anything they could use to hurt themselves, even seemingly benign medications like Tylenol and Benadryl." And if you're worried about your child's mental health, she said, bring it up. "You are not going to harm your child by asking them questions," she said. "If you are concerned about them, talk to them. If you're concerned they're going to hurt themselves, bring them into the hospital." Dr. Perri Klass is the author of the forthcoming book "A Good Time to Be Born: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future," on how our world has been transformed by the radical decline of infant and child mortality.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
Logevall painstakingly reconstructs Kennedy's several youthful trips abroad, where he sowed some wild oats, to be sure (there is plenty of that in these pages, more than enough fornicating and philandering to sate even the most prurient reader's taste), but more consequentially, made use of his father's abundant connections to interview statesmen and political leaders in Europe and beyond. Toward the end of a seven month junket that ranged from Moscow to Jerusalem, the 22 year old Kennedy, Zelig like, was in Berlin in August 1939, accurately predicting the imminent outbreak of war, and shortly thereafter sitting in the visitors' gallery at Westminster to witness Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain proclaim Britain's belligerency. Everywhere he took notes and everywhere he grew in wisdom and conviction. "It was the kind of exposure and training," Logevall writes, "that no future president since John Quincy Adams had enjoyed at so young an age." A fastidiously diligent researcher, Logevall pays scrupulous attention to Jack's prep school and college essays, including a close reading of the Harvard senior paper that became Kennedy's first book, "Why England Slept," which analyzed the timidity of Britain's political class in the face of indifferent or hostile public opinion. Logevall pronounces it a "thoughtful and cogent ... original contribution to knowledge." He later describes Kennedy's best selling "Profiles in Courage" (whose actual authorship has long been contested) as an "ode to the art of politics" that, he valuably reminds us, "extols both compromise and courage." From all the carefully marshaled evidence a picture emerges of an uncommonly curious, sometimes frivolous but increasingly earnest young man on his way to shaping an informed, cleareyed, unsentimental sense of the world and his nation's place in it. And its place in history. Kennedy's generation came of age in the mid 20th century's agonizingly long season of Great Depression and world war. The former touched the Kennedys lightly if at all. But the latter blighted the father's diplomatic career, claimed the life of the eldest son and made a hero out of the commander of PT 109. It also catalyzed Jack Kennedy's comprehension of what was at stake in the modern contest of nations, and deepened his skepticism about the utility of war itself, especially after the advent of nuclear weapons. It instructed him about the distinctive characteristics of his allotted historical moment, and left him convinced that the time had urgently arrived when America had to cast off its isolationist legacy and don the mantle of global leadership. In this he decidedly detached himself from the views to which his father so unremittingly clung. This is the heart of this richly detailed and instructive book. And it is where Logevall's expertise as a Pulitzer Prize winning scholar of international relations comes advantageously into play and where his book's subtitle, "Coming of Age in the American Century," is brought tellingly into focus. To the biographer's insights he adds the historian's perspectives about the several episodes in which the young Kennedy's worldview took shape: his father's tortured tenure as ambassador in London while the Munich crisis unfolded and the debate over "appeasement" took on ugly intensity; the American commitment to sweeping international restructuring at war's end; the vexing role of domestic politics notably the red baiting antics of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the nascent Cold War; and the postwar struggles over decolonization, not least in Indochina, where Congressman Kennedy in 1951 saw at first hand the futility of France's effort to crush Vietnam's determination to be independent. Logevall artfully melds the biographical and historical approaches. Though crafted as a kind of bildungsroman, "JFK" delivers something more than the traditional story of the callow wastrel's maturation into the admirable adult. Here phylogeny closely replicates ontogeny. John F. Kennedy's individual journey of separation from his father's isolationism tracked the progression of the United States in midcentury from peripheral international player to hegemon. The global stage where a president could bend the arc of world history remained Kennedy's preferred arena and the presidency his obsession. The domestic issues that lay in a state governor's province he once dismissed as "little more than 'deciding on sewer contracts.'" This was the mind set he brought to the White House, and in some ways this entire book can be read as an elaborate prolegomenon to Kennedy's most important foreign policy address, at American University in June 1963, where he urged a realistic reappraisal of the Cold War and laid the foundations for the hotly contested policy that became known as detente.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Even as "Glass" is expected to surpass "Aquaman" at the top of the box office next week, another superhero themed movie looms: "Captain Marvel." But the third preview for Marvel's adventure packs a bit less power than its predecessors or some of this week's other new teasers. Marvel billed this 90 second ad, which premiered during the College Football Playoff championship game, as a "special look," but much of the footage has already been seen in the film's first two trailers. The new scenes feature banter about wardrobe between Brie Larson's titular superheroine and "Avengers" series staple Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson). "Grunge is a good look for you," he tells her the film is set in 1995 and she questions the wisdom of putting the S.H.I.E.L.D. logo on a hat: "Does announcing your identity on clothing help with the covert part of your job?" It's a good thing nobody goes to these movies for the dialogue. "Something truly goddamn strange is going on!" art gallery owner Jake Gyllenhaal declares in the mesmerizing trailer for this surreal satire. He's not kidding: A dead artist's works take on supernatural powers, devouring their greedy owners. The director Dan Gilroy previously teamed with his real life wife, Rene Russo, and Gyllenhaal on another dark media tale, "Nightcrawler" (2014), and "Velvet Buzzsaw" might be even creepier. The title could cause confusion with another coming Mads Mikkelsen movie the outdoor survival drama "Arctic" but the tone could hardly be more different. In this graphic novel adaptation, the Danish actor plays an aging assassin who's forced out of retirement (aren't they all?) by a squad of younger contract killers hired by his former employer. The stylish visuals and Mikkelsen's eye patch make "Polar" look pretty cool. Dev Patel is a long way from "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel" in this dramatization of the 2008 terrorist attacks on the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai. The trailer can't seem to decide if it's selling a harrowing docudrama or a "Die Hard" style action thriller, and it's unclear if the film focuses on Patel as a hotel employee or Armie Hammer as a guest. In any event, this clip doesn't make "Hotel Mumbai" seem worth checking out. It's the opposite of "Big." Get it? Regina Hall ("Girls Trip") stars as a tech exec who wakes up in the body of her gawky 13 year old self (played by Marsai Martin of "black ish"). The presence of Issa Rae the creator of HBO's acclaimed "Insecure" heightens expectations, but they're cut down by the trailer's painfully strained gags.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Retail sales fell unexpectedly in December, the government said Thursday, despite earlier scattered signs that the 2009 holiday shopping season was stronger than expected. From supermarkets to department stores, sales fell 0.3 percent from November, a decline that economists attributed to a bleak jobs market and a reluctance by consumers to spend freely. Analysts, encouraged by signs that consumers were regaining confidence, had expected sales to rise 0.5 percent. The tone of the report on Thursday from the Commerce Department was at odds with a stream of data showing that sales in December were up markedly compared with the dreary results of the year before. At department stores, for instance, the latest government data showed that sales fell 1.2 percent compared with December 2008. Early this month, however, Thomson Reuters reported a 2.9 percent increase for retailers in December compared with the previous year.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Shailene Woodley, who has a full plate of projects, including the "Big Little Lies" Season 2 premiere on June 9 and two movies in the works, is as thoughtful with her beauty choices as she is with her career. Born in California, Ms. Woodley, 27, prefers her beauty products natural, meditates every single day and practices wellness rituals even in her hotel room. Find out what she's into now. I travel so much that I don't have a routine that I follow every single day. What I absolutely do every day, though, is shower more than anyone should. When I wake up, I shower. This is even before I run or work out or anything. I shower again after. When it comes to washing my face, I'm not a very fancy person. I keep the Juice Beauty facial wash in the shower. I bought it at a health food store years ago, and my skin seems to love it. But it doesn't do a great job taking off makeup. For that, I use body wash on my face first, which I'm sure is not dermatologist recommended, and follow up with the Juice Beauty. On my body, I might use the Pure Fiji sugar scrub. I like the pineapple flavor because it reminds me of a man in my life, a delicious man. The scent is delicious, and he's delicious. Right out of the shower, I use this body lotion called Nucifera. It feels good and smells nice. Then I brush my teeth I'm a creature of habit and use the Jason Powersmile toothpaste and put on deodorant. I switch between Agent Nateur and Meow Meow Tweet, which is all natural. It's very hard to find natural deodorants that work well. But I find that if I rotate between these two, I smell less than with other natural deos. I'm into natural products. I try to be mindful of what I put on my body but also how it impacts the environment. But I have other products. I think it's like saying you're into fruit because you eat a lot a fruit, but you enjoy cake, too. If I have time, I have this African mud mask by Nyakio. It can take off a full face of makeup. I was staying at the Bowery Hotel years ago, and I sat down next to this woman at the bar, and we hit it off. We had drinks and everything. This is her line, and she sent me some of her products. I've been using them for years. I switch between a few of my products depending on what time of the month it is. Let me tell you, during ovulation and on my cycle, my skin does very different things. Most days I use Skinceuticals C E Ferulic serum. It blasts your skin with antioxidants. And then I put on the Nyakio chamomile sleep mask day and night, actually. I have a Chanel palette that I absolutely love. That's what I take with me in my purse when I'm out. It has a highlighter, a blush and a concealer. I'm usually pretty chill when it comes to eye makeup. If I want a little definition, I use a black or brown eye pencil. At the moment I'm using this brand called W3ll People. I really dig the eyeliner because you can blend it easily. I do a chunky line and smudge it all around with my finger. I use mascara by Tarte it's the one in the bamboo casing in black or brown. If I want to use eye shadow, I have a mix. I love the Dior palettes, the ones with five different colors, and Urban Decay. Efficiency is really important to me, so I like that the Dior and Chanel palettes are slim and easy to pack but also have a lot of colors. Right now, I wear Lake Skye 11 11. I use the roll on instead of the spray. I also use Santal by Le Labo. I like their candles a lot, and I feel like my clothing takes on the scent. My hair has been bleached, dyed black, bleached and dyed black, probably five times in the last year and a half. Luckily, I found this salon in Paris, David Mallett. He has this amazing treatment it's called the Tokyo treatment that is next level incredible. Look, I've done a lot of treatments, and I have never done anything that actually restored my hair to where it was before I dyed it. Otherwise, I use Kevin.Murphy Hydrate Me line for my shampoo and conditioner. They leave my hair feeling soft. If I want to style it, I tend not to use any heat. I use Bumble and Bumble Hairdresser's Invisible Oil Balm to Oil Pre Shampoo Masque. I put it on my hair when it's dry, and it makes it look wet and oily in a good way. I have very thick hair. When I wear it in a ponytail, it's the size of a horse's tail. The masque tames it but also makes it easy to style. I meditate every single day without fail. Sometimes it's three minutes, sometimes it's an hour and a half. I can be in the center of the storm and watch everything in the tornado go around me. Another thing I started doing recently has been helpful for my psyche, and that's cold plunges. If I have bathtub wherever I am, I get a bag of ice and fill it. I sit in the ice bath for two to three minutes or, really, as long as I can stand. I do that three times back and forth between a hot shower. It's more effective than vitamin C or echinacea for kicking a cold. I studied herbalism for a long time, which led me to studying nutrition. I care deeply about and am intellectually invested in what I consume. It's not just to protect my own longevity, it's recognizing that my daily diet decisions have an impact on future generations. I very much eat everything, though. I'm not gluten free or meat free. But I'm very conscious of what I choose. For example, I don't eat meat every day. If I eat fish, which is rarely, I make sure it's wild caught. I'm also very routine oriented. My breakfast is porridge, and lunch and dinner is a combination of veggies, carbs and protein. But I try not to take things too seriously. It's very easy to feel guilty about your choices, and if it brings stress, then bye bye. I'm really into low impact fitness. It just feels better for my body. I'm also a big class person because it's motivating. I'm a Scorpio, so I've got a lot of competition in my blood. But for me it's about feeling good. That and making sure I laugh a lot.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
A New York art fair is coming to your smartphone. For the first time, Frieze New York an eight year old fair that will be held at Randalls Island Park from Thursday through Sunday will include a virtual reality component. For fairgoers, this will come in the form of a booth with works visible via high tech headsets. But it will also be available to curious viewers worldwide, via the free to download Acute Art app. All you need is a basic virtual reality headset like Google Cardboard, and you can immerse yourself. The VR section of the fair is called Electric, and Daniel Birnbaum, the former director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, served as its curator. Mr. Birnbaum, who is the director of Acute Art and a leader in the field of artistic production using VR, selected seven works six in virtual reality and one in augmented reality for Frieze's first foray into the medium. The AR work is an exploration of a physical drawing . Two VR works are historically focused pieces done in collaboration with contemporary artists; these use the technology to explore works by Marcel Duchamp and Hilma Af Klint. This might be the first time many people see VR art in person, Mr. Birnbaum said. Of the in app element, he said, it's a chance for a "mainstream audience who wouldn't normally go to fairs " to have the experience. Loring Randolph, Frieze's artistic director for the Americas, said, "I think the work in Electric is going to blow people away and I'm very excited about the new dimension that it is going to bring to the fair."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
On Monday, the fashion label Public School joined the club and announced it was uniting its men's and women's wear shows, just like Gucci, Tom Ford and Burberry, and moving them to December and June from the traditional women's dates of February and September, just like, well, nobody else. It is also renaming them Collection 1 and Collection 2, just like no other brand. And while it will not sell clothes right after they are shown, the label will deliver to stores a month earlier than usual. Unlike anyone else. Yes, fashion weeks are getting even messier and more confusing! Especially because the brand's reasons for making the move are not like anyone else's. Although the current upheaval in the fashion system (I like to call it the Great Show Shake Up, or G.S.S., as I feel there will be more such changes, so an acronym may come in handy) is largely attributed to "consumer fatigue" with seeing clothes six months before they hit stores (or that's what the Council of Fashion Designers of America said when it started this now out of control ball rolling), Public School has a different take on the matter. For the label, this is about "creative logic," according to Dao Yi Chow, who founded and designs the brand with Maxwell Osborne. Mr. Osborne and Mr. Chow also became the creative directors of DKNY a year ago, solely responsible for the legacy of Donna Karan after she retired and the brand's owner, LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, suspended her Donna Karan line. After two seasons of double duty on their brand and DKNY, holding shows three days apart, the design duo discovered that all that stuff about it being hard to serve two masters is true. "It's really intense and emotionally draining to have them so close together," Mr. Chow said. Indeed, the two have struggled to create a new, and distinctive, identity for DKNY. "Lukewarm" would be a nice way to put the critical reception. So they decided to combine their pre collections and main collections, and to move the latter to the former show time, thus separating the DKNY and Public School shows. The change has the added benefit of streamlining the label's production and delivery process, Anthony Landereau, Public School's president, pointed out, and of allowing it to ship to stores a month earlier. From a design standpoint, it "allows us to have two big ideas for the year, to tell one story with men's and women's, and make it more substantial," Mr. Osborne said. As for the whole see now and sell to consumers immediately thing, however, Mr. Chow noted: "I have yet to figure out how to get fabric in 30 days and sew a garment in 15 days. If anyone knows how to do that, they can let me know." The label does plan to hold some sort of consumer outreach during the traditional women's wear fashion weeks that will focus on the collection in store at the time. It is dropping out entirely of New York Fashion Week: Men's. (Women's wear makes up 60 percent of Public School's sales.) DKNY, however, will remain on the New York Fashion Week schedule. While it is probably this decision will ultimately be lumped in with the G.S.S., and labeled another example of the system's problems, the shortcomings it reflects are not really about the shows; they are about the difficulties designers have balancing the demands of two brands. This structure fell out of favor after the implosion of John Galliano, who was designing both Christian Dior and his own line, but it has been making a comeback, with Jonathan Anderson juggling collections for J. W. Anderson and Loewe, and Tomas Maier doing so for the line that carries his name, as well as for Bottega Veneta. Public School's move suggests it may once again be time for a rethink. Still, the risk is that Public School will now be showing at a time when there are few, if any, members of the international news media and buyers in New York. Though 75 percent of the brand's business comes from the United States, it is focused on growing internationally (this fall, Harrods and Liberty London will start carrying the brand), and this action could stymie that goal. Mr. Chow, however, said the company thought it was worth taking the chance. "The old chestnut that you have to be physically present at a collection is becoming outdated," he said. We will find out if he is right in June, when the first joint show and test of the new process and it will be a show, not a presentation takes place.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
There had been other raunchy sex comedies "Porky's," with its memorable, ouch inducing locker room scene, and "Animal House," which showed the extremes of frat life. But "American Pie" set a new standard for the genre when the world watched an apple pie become a vehicle to manhood. Centered on a group of high school friends Jim (Jason Biggs), Kevin Myers (Thomas Ian Nicholas), Chris "Oz" Ostreicher (Chris Klein) and Paul Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) "American Pie" followed the four on their winding and sometimes humiliating quest to losing their virginity. But the scene that would go down in movie history is when Jim, whose friend had described the feeling of third base as "warm apple pie," sees one such pastry sitting on his kitchen counter and decides to experiment with it. That would be awkward enough and then Jim's father (Eugene Levy) walks in. Made for 11 million, "American Pie" was released on July 9, 1999, and gave Biggs his big break. Since its release, there have been three additional feature films and four direct to video movies in the "American Pie" franchise. And, 20 years later, the original movie still gives new meaning to pie. The stars Jason Biggs and Eugene Levy, the writer Adam Herz, the directors Chris and Paul Weitz and the producer Chris Moore recently looked back on filming the notorious pie scene, and talked about the lasting impact of the film. These are edited excerpts from several conversations. Originally there was no pie in the script or in the title. ADAM HERZ The pie scene wasn't in my original draft. There was this line somewhere early in the first act where the kids are talking about rounding the bases of sex. I wanted this line to show Jim's naivete but also show, do the other guys know what they're talking about either? I wrote this line "What does third base feel like?" And Chris Klein was like, "Warm apple pie, dude," and he does this gesture. That line always stuck with me. CHRIS MOORE It was my first big studio movie, and there was this whole conversation about, "What would a pie look like if somebody had done that?" Everyone had different opinions: "Well, would it be crushed? Would it be mangled? Would it actually have fallen out of the pan? Should we do a scene where you see some of it on 'him'?" JASON BIGGS I remember reading the "American Pie" script, though it wasn't called "American Pie" at the time. I would've been happy if I had gotten any part. It was like nothing I had read. It was brutal because the feedback I had gotten was that I was the director's first choice, but the studio was still potentially holding out for a "name" in the role. The name that was I hearing the most at the time was Jonathan Taylor Thomas, who was at the height of "Home Improvement" fame. There was at least a month where I was just waiting around. EUGENE LEVY When I first read the script, I had a problem with the way the character was written. Paul and Chris were so amenable to the changes I wanted to make that we had a session a week before we started shooting where they were like, "What do you want to change about the character?" I said, "Everything. I want the character to be a dad: a square dad. I don't want him to be the guy who wants to be best friends with his son." CHRIS WEITZ I think the movie would not have worked the way it did without Eugene's humane take on the character. BIGGS He only worked like five days in that first movie. For me, though, those five days working with Eugene was like a comedy intensive. The pie scene may have been ridiculous on screen but shooting it required intricate mechanics and a lot of deep breaths. LEVY For me it was more anti climactic than one might think. I walked into the kitchen and I was only looking at a piece of tape marked on a light stand where my son would have been humping the pie. So, I had to react to a piece of tape. MOORE At one point we tried to see if we could get McDonald's apple pie, and as a producer that was one of the funniest phone calls I've ever been on, listening to the representative from McDonald's say, "Wait. You want a character to put on the apple pie as if he was trying it out on his manhood." BIGGS I wasn't aroused, obviously, so it was kind of more like my penis was against it. It wasn't in it, if you will. Also, it was a fake pie. It was a real tin pie case, but then it was Styrofoam on the inside. Then we put real apple pie pieces all around it, and all around my region. I was sort of flush against the pie as opposed to being inserted into the pie, if you know what I mean. Biggs had to shoot multiple options and angles with the pie. Those outtakes came in handy when, after the success of the film in theaters, the studio decided to release an unrated DVD version of the film. BIGGS We did it once where I straddled the counter and the pie on that island in the kitchen. Then we did it a second way where I was doing it standing up. I believe the latter was the version that was in the theaters, and then the former was where I was on top of the counter, I believe that was in the DVD or the unrated version. PAUL WEITZ For the scene , our first assistant director J.B. Rogers called out "Start humpin'" instead of "action." BIGGS Each time it was very tricky. I'll never forget J.B. would be coming in and would be adjusting my pants ever so slightly. Like, "O.K., you're showing too much crack. Oh, you're showing not enough crack. We can see a little bit of your penis here." It was probably like six hours of doing it from all different angles and all different versions of it. MOORE There was one Biggs did sitting down that didn't really work at all because the pie just all dumped on top of him. Then there was a whole conversation about thrusting. I think most people, if they looked at it, wouldn't say he got all the way to the point of release with the pie. CHRIS WEITZ In theaters, it was received with considerable glee. The internet was not at full throttle yet, so neither the outrage machine nor the meme economy came into play. I recall Spike Lee saying something rather unkind about it; apparently the pie scene disqualified the movie from being a movie. Twenty years later, that's what still stings! BIGGS For a long time after, and still occasionally, I'll get sent an apple pie at the restaurant. It's definitely not as intense as it was when the movie first came out. That I think is just always going to happen. I've resigned myself to that. I got a lot of pies sent to me. HERZ It was super surreal. I remember one night Jay Leno was doing pie jokes you just knew it was entering the zeitgeist. BIGGS I do remember there was a story after the movie had come out about a kid in Idaho that attempted to do this and got third degree burns on his penis, because he didn't wait for the pie to cool down after it got out of the oven, which is, of course, just a super amateur mistake. Dude, you got to let it sit for an hour after it gets out of the oven. Come on. MOORE Jason deserves a lot of credit, and Eugene, for creating those characters in a way that they weren't your stock dad and dumb kid. And I think that's why it went on to make four theatrical and three straight to DVD movies: because people really liked the characters and the comedy stayed in the realm of reality if there is such a thing where a guy's going to see what it feels like to use an apple pie as a sex toy. PAUL WEITZ The things I like most in the movie are conversations between Natasha Lyonne and Tara Reid about whether her character has had an orgasm and Natasha's character's advice that she has as much of a right to enjoy sex as the male character she's with and that's something that should be considered.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Netflix has fired the actor Danny Masterson from the show "The Ranch" amid allegations by multiple women that he raped them years ago. "As a result of ongoing discussions, Netflix and the producers have written Danny Masterson out of 'The Ranch,'" the streaming service said in a statement on Tuesday. "Yesterday was his last day on the show, and production will resume in early 2018 without him." Mr. Masterson will continue to appear in the already filmed fourth part of the comedy series, scheduled for release on Dec. 15, and in some episodes to premiere next year. The news comes as Mr. Masterson continues to face allegations from four women, stemming from the early 2000s. A lengthy Los Angeles Police Department investigation into their accusations appears to have stalled, according to HuffPost, and the authorities have not yet filed charges. One woman said that Mr. Masterson anally raped her, while another said he began raping her while she was passed out; when she awoke, she said, he choked her until she passed out again. The allegations were contained in police reports that were published in March by Tony Ortega, a former editor of The Village Voice. In a statement, Mr. Masterson denied the accusations, which he described as "outrageous." "Law enforcement investigated these claims more than 15 years ago and determined them to be without merit," he said. "I have never been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of one. In this country, you are presumed innocent until proven guilty. However, in the current climate, it seems as if you are presumed guilty the moment you are accused." At least three of the women claimed they were pressured to keep quiet by the Church of Scientology, to which they and Mr. Masterson belonged, according to Mr. Ortega, who wrote a book on Scientology. The Church of Scientology "adamantly denied" that it had pressured victims. "What is being stated is utterly untrue," it said in a statement. "This has nothing to do with religion. This story is being manipulated to push a bigoted agenda." "The Ranch" is a comedy about a failed professional athlete, played by Ashton Kutcher, who returns home to help his father and his brother, played by Mr. Masterson, on their family ranch. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. In his statement, Mr. Masterson said he was "very disappointed" by Netflix's decision. He thanked the cast, crew and fans of the show and said he wished it success. Before the Tuesday announcement, a Netflix executive had reportedly unwittingly told one of Mr. Masterson's alleged victims that the company did not believe the accusations. The exchange occurred at a children's soccer game on Sunday when the victim approached the executive, Andy Yeatman, the director of global kids content for Netflix, HuffPost reported. After Mr. Yeatman acknowledged to the woman that he worked at Netflix, she asked why the company had done nothing about Mr. Masterson, according to the report. Mr. Yeatman reportedly said that the company generally takes such allegations seriously, but did not believe Mr. Masterson's accusers. "I'm one of them," the woman, whom HuffPost did not name, told him. Netflix said in a statement that Mr. Yeatman's comments "were careless, uninformed and do not represent the views of the company." The news of Mr. Masterson's firing comes one day after Netflix announced that the sixth and final season of "House of Cards" would star Robin Wright, who had shared the spotlight with Kevin Spacey until he was fired this fall following a slew of reports of sexual misconduct.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Apart from Frederick Wiseman's "Ex Libris: The New York Public Library," few movies have celebrated book lending institutions as havens of fair mindedness and pluralism, so it's tempting to give a pass to "The Public" as a rousing, lovingly made civics lesson, even if its screenplay does not seem fated for shelves. Emilio Estevez wrote, directed and served as a producer on the film; he is also its star. Inspired by an essay that appeared in The Los Angeles Times in 2007, the movie isn't the actor filmmaker's first brush with earnest Americana. (His ensemble piece "Bobby" (2006) tried to capture the optimism at the Ambassador Hotel in 1968 as admirers of Robert F. Kennedy awaited his arrival.) But it may be his most substantive. At what other physical institution can you learn about virtually any topic? Where else are the homeless welcomed as equals, at least until they are not? (A subplot deals with the fallout from a patron's eviction for body odor.) And if libraries are microcosms of democracy, what does it mean that they are sometimes closed? The bulk of the movie takes place inside a public library in Cincinnati as the city braces for a cold snap. Estevez plays Stuart Goodson, a librarian on easy conversational terms with the homeless who camp out there every day. Then one night, during the potentially fatal arctic chill, Jackson (Michael K. Williams) informs Stuart that the city's shelters are full. He and a large group of other men simply won't leave.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Brush up on your fashion and music history. On Thursday, Coach will celebrate its 75th anniversary by putting 48 vintage bags up for auction, including a duffel (the brand's most iconic style, introduced in 1971) that has been reworked with metallic patches and pins. The first 50,000 in sales will benefit the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Celebrate the 20th anniversary of Jay Z's "Reasonable Doubt" at a pop up built to look like the iconic D D Studios, where the album was created. It will have limited edition merchandise like LSTN ebony wood headphones and an ISHU scarf that features anti flash technology designed to block paparazzi shots ( 469) created in collaboration with fancy.com. At 347 West Broadway. Tickets are 50 in advance and can be used toward purchases. And from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., Peruvian Connection will celebrate its 40th anniversary with a cocktail party at which you'll get a 20 percent discount on limited edition reissues of best sellers like a blanket striped coat ( 263, originally 329) and a portrait cowl neck sweater hand loomed from pure alpaca in the Andes ( 174, originally 218). At 341 Columbus Avenue. The same day, the women's contemporary label Joie will open a boutique at Brookfield Place where you'll find Parisian chic meets Cali cool bits like an embroidered blouson dress ( 438) and a buttery leather moto ( 898). At 230 Vesey Street.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
An analysis of drinking water sampled from three homes in Bradford County, Pa., revealed traces of a compound commonly found in Marcellus Shale drilling fluids, according to a study published on Monday. The paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, addresses a longstanding question about potential risks to underground drinking water from the drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The authors suggested a chain of events by which the drilling chemical ended up in a homeowner's water supply. "This is the first case published with a complete story showing organic compounds attributed to shale gas development found in a homeowner's well," said Susan Brantley, one of the study's authors and a geoscientist from Pennsylvania State University. The industry has long maintained that because fracking occurs thousands of feet below drinking water aquifers, the drilling chemicals that are injected to break up rocks and release the gas trapped there pose no risk. In this study, the researchers note that the contamination may have stemmed from a lack of integrity in the drill wells and not from the actual fracking process far below. The industry criticized the new study, saying that it provided no proof that the chemical came from a nearby well. In 2012, a team of environmental scientists collected drinking water samples from the households' outdoor spigots. An analysis showed that the water in one household contained 2 Butoxyethanol or 2BE, a common drilling chemical. The chemical, which is also commonly used in paint and cosmetics, is known to have caused tumors in rodents, though scientists have not determined if those carcinogenic properties translate to humans. The authors said the amount found, which was measured in parts per trillion, was within safety regulations and did not pose a health risk. Dr. Brantley said her team believed that the well contaminants came from either a documented surface tank leak in 2009 or, more likely, as a result of poor drilling well integrity. The nearby gas wells, which were established in 2009, were constructed with a protective intermediate casing of steel and cement from the surface down to almost 1,000 feet. But the wells below that depth lacked the protective casing, and were potentially at greater risk of leaking their contents into the surrounding rock layers, according to Dr. Brantley. In April 2011 the three homeowners in Bradford County sued the drilling company, Chesapeake Energy Corporation, over reports of finding natural gas and sediment in their drinking well water. In May of that year, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection cited the oil and gas company for violating the Pennsylvania Oil and Gas Act and Clean Streams Law by letting natural gas enter the drinking wells, though the company admitted no fault. In 2012, the homeowners settled the lawsuit and the company bought the three households. As a result of that suit, the state environmental protection agency recommended that the drilling company require that their wells extend what are known as intermediate casings beyond 1,000 feet. Dr. Brantley described the geology in northern Pennsylvania as being similar to a layer cake with numerous layers that extend down thousands of feet to the Marcellus Shale. The vertical fractures are like knife cuts through the layers. They can extend deep underground, and can act like superhighways for escaped gas and liquids from drill wells to travel along, for distances greater than a mile away, she said. Katie Brown, an energy consultant with Energy in Depth, an advocacy group for the Independent Petroleum Association of America, said the authors had no evidence that the small traces they found of 2BE, which is also used in many household items, came from a drilling site. "The entire case is based around the detection of an exceedingly small amount of a compound that's commonly used in hundreds of household products," Ms. Brown wrote in an email. "The researchers suggest the compound is also found in a specific drilling fluid, but then tell us they have no evidence that this fluid was used at the well site." Garth T. Llewellyn, a hydrogeologist with Appalachia Hydrogeologic and Environmental Consulting and the lead author of the report, said that when his team sampled water wells that were farther away from the drilling sites, they did not find any of the compounds found in the three households. "When you include all of the lines of evidence, it concludes that that's the most probable source," he said. Mr. Llewellyn had previously provided the families with environmental consulting during their civil case with Chesapeake Energy. Victor Heilweil, a hydrogeologist from the University of Utah who was not involved with the study but reviewed its details, said it was noteworthy for showing "the detailed geologic fabric explaining how these contaminants can move relatively long distances from the depth to the drinking well." An environmental scientist from Stanford University, Rob Jackson, who also reviewed the paper, said it "clearly shows an impact of oil and gas drilling on water quality." But he emphasized that this instance was an exception. The dates of the incident were not surprising to Scott Anderson, a senior policy analyst with the environmental advocacy group Environmental Defense Fund, who said that well integrity was generally poor around 2008 and 2009. He said that using casings of steel and cement at depths below 1,000 feet was a good idea in this region. But he also noted that the industry has strengthened its practices since then, including increased use of intermediate casings. "Industry knows how to construct wells properly, but the fact is that they don't always do so," Mr. Anderson said. "My hope would be that papers like this will encourage industry and its regulators to do a better job of doing what they already know they are supposed to do."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
It took a remarkable effort to sound so casual. That's one lesson of the hugely expanded 50th anniversary reissue of "The Beatles," the double album that has been known as the White Album since its release in November 1968. On the surface, the White Album marked a shift from the orchestral formality and sonic experimentation of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." Its core approach returned to the four Beatles strumming and picking guitar and bass, pounding a piano and socking the drums. There are giggles and hoots and wisecracks scattered through the album, as if making the music was a lark. But as Beatlephiles have long known and the reissue documents, the White Album was by no means back to basics. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr worked painstakingly, using start to finish live studio performances as a foundation but then building around them. In the studio, the Beatles ran through songs again and again, often in all night sessions that ended up wearing down their producers and engineers. The new White Album package peers deeply into their labors; it includes, for instance, Take 102 of George Harrison's "Not Guilty," a song that never reached the finished album. Never miss a pop music story: Sign up for our weekly newsletter, Louder. The anniversary edition holds six CDs (two with remixes of the original LPs, four with mostly unreleased recordings) and a Blu ray disc with high definition mixes, packed in a hard bound tome of exhaustive annotations and images of handwritten lyrics. One CD collects what are called the Esher demos: four track recordings, mostly just acoustic guitars and vocals. They're workmanlike, sometimes jokey sketches, clearly awaiting further development. The other three discs draw from the protracted studio sessions. While Beatles lore has depicted the making of the White Album as the beginning of the group's breakup, the hours of previously unreleased tapes reveal a band patiently and often jovially working together.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
BERLIN Germany is no longer playing nice with Russia. In the past few weeks, Germany has helped to rescue Russia's main opposition leader, Aleksei Navalny, and accused Moscow of poisoning him; rolled out the red carpet for Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the Belarusian opposition leader who tried to topple one of Russia's satellite regimes; and accused the country of state orchestrated murder on German territory. And if that wasn't enough, it's pushing for sanctions on Russian officials. It all seems to add up to something close to a confrontation and a decisive move away from Germany's decades old approach, which sought to gently coax Russia into a more productive relationship. Is Germany turning against Russia? Or should the antagonism of the past weeks not be taken too seriously? That longtime approach, known as "Wandel durch Annaherung" ("change through rapprochement") and developed in the 1960s to ease Cold War tensions, was straightforward. If Germany helped to improve the economy and civil society in Russia, it would modernize and become more democratic and cooperative. Close economic ties would lessen the risk of armed conflict and give Germany political leverage. The strategy held for decades. As recently as 2008, the foreign minister Frank Walter Steinmeier, today the president of Germany heralded a "Modernization Partnership" promoting the "great goal" of a "European peace order stretching from the Atlantic to Vladivostok." It would be, he said, "for the common benefit of the people in Russia, Germany and the whole of Europe." But as President Vladimir Putin turned to revisionist nationalism and tightened his authoritarian grip on his country, the policy began to look a lot less effective. Russia's invasion of Crimea in 2014 and its cyberattack on Germany's Parliament a year later deeply damaged relations. Russia has since sown disinformation across Europe, intervened in Syria and fueled the conflict in Libya. With each rogue act, the mantra of "change through rapprochement" sounded increasingly hollow: To many, proponents look naive or ideological (or worse). And among Germany's politicians, disillusionment and anger are growing not least for Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose visit to Mr. Navalny's hospital bed was an uncharacteristically bold demonstration of her feelings. So Germany's newly confrontational style should not come as a complete surprise. "Mr. Navalny's poisoning has certainly been a catalyst," Liana Fix, the program director for international affairs at the Korber Stiftung Foundation, told me. Far from marking a new departure in Germany's approach to Russia, Ms. Fix said, the reaction to the poisoning of Mr. Navalny simply laid bare how corroded the relationship has become. But longstanding foreign policy traditions do not end just like that. Change through rapprochement is still sacred in some parts of the Social Democratic Party and in many states in eastern Germany. Many German businesses, not least those who cater to Eastern European and Central Asian markets, are also strongly in favor of maintaining good relations with Russia as are the more business focused sections of the Christian Democratic Union. In truth, Germany is split over how to approach Russia. In the past weeks, more hawkish voices took the lead. But the country is not upending its relationship with Russia at least not yet. Nowhere is that clearer than in the debate over the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. A nearly completed 11 billion project stretching from the Russian coast near St. Petersburg to Germany, the project is a monument to the special relationship between the two countries. Yet internationally, the project is roundly opposed. For the United States and most European countries, it's another egregious effort to expand Russian influence. For Ukraine and Germany's eastern European neighbors, it hands Russia dangerous means to exert control over the region's energy supply. In Germany itself, skepticism about the project had been building for some time. When Mr. Navalny was poisoned, it came rushing to the surface. Heiko Maas, the foreign minister, appeared to call the project into question, saying he "hoped that Russia doesn't force us to change our stance toward Nord Stream 2." It was the first time a cabinet member had spoken out against it. Far from issuing a rebuke, Chancellor Angela Merkel supported the comment. But that's as far as it went. The government looks to have backed down, and the project is proceeding. Though Nord Stream 2 could be stopped, the risks would be substantial. First, there'd likely be a retaliatory, and costly, lawsuit. Then there's the inevitable political fallout. But perhaps most important, stopping Nord Stream 2 would be a clear, unequivocal signal that Germany had turned against Russia. Instead, for now, Germany is seeking the support of its European partners. On Monday, the European Union's foreign ministers approved the proposal, put forth by Germany and France, to impose sanctions on Russian officials suspected of poisoning Mr. Navalny. Turning the conflict into a European issue is a smart move. It is Mr. Putin's aim to split the European Union; this is a chance for Europe to respond with one voice. But Germany won't be able to backpedal all the way. The confrontation may have progressed too far already: Mr. Putin is unlikely to forget, or forgive, the actions of the past weeks. And as Russia confronts the coronavirus at home and conflicts among its neighbors, there's no guessing what might come next. Germany ought to be prepared and know how it will respond.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
BLONDE REDHEAD FEATURING ACME at Le Poisson Rouge (Jan. 8, 5 and 9 p.m.). Last year, the art rock trio Blonde Redhead teamed up with the American Contemporary Music Ensemble for performances of Blonde Redhead's well received 2004 album, "Misery Is a Butterfly." Now, the group, which typically fashions shoegaze from a fusion of gritty guitars, clattering drums and the singer Kazu Makino's heavenly soprano, will be joined by ACME once more for these two shows; they are debuting a previously unheard collaboration, but expect a song or two from "Misery Is a Butterfly," too. 212 505 3474, lpr.com CELEBRATING DAVID BOWIE at Terminal 5 (Jan. 10, 8 p.m.). One year after he died unexpectedly at 69, some of David Bowie's friends and collaborators are coming together to play "Bowie music Bowie style." Those artists, including the keyboardist Mike Garson and the guitarists Adrian Belew and Earl Slick, will support performers such as the Harlem Gospel Choir, Angelo Moore of Fishbone and Kate Pierson of the B 52s. But the evening's highlight promises to come from the astronaut Chris Hadfield, who memorably performed Mr. Bowie's "Space Oddity" from the International Space Station in 2013. 212 528 6600, terminal5nyc.com JUSTIN TOWNES EARLE at City Winery (Jan. 10 11, 8 p.m.). The musician Justin Townes Earle is the son of the Grammy winning singer songwriter Steve Earle, so it's not surprising that he has inherited his father's gift for spinning a yarn. On a pair of recent albums, "Single Mothers" and "Absent Fathers," Mr. Earle explores issues of family life with charming country, rousing rockabilly and gritty, world weary vocals that suggest he is far wiser than his 35 years. With Carsie Blanton. 212 608 0555, citywinery.com YUKA C. HONDA at National Sawdust (Jan. 6, 10 p.m.). The Japanese artist Yuka C. Honda is best known for her work with the indie pop outfit Cibo Matto, whose food obsessed songs like "Know Your Chicken" had regular airplay on MTV in the 1990s. That group broke up in 2002, only to return with the concept album "Hotel Valentine" in 2014. But on the side, Ms. Honda has veered into more avant garde terrain, releasing solo albums on the respected experimental label Tzadik and collaborating with visionaries like Laurie Anderson, Yoko Ono and others. For this show, Ms. Honda will unveil a new multimedia work inspired by the writings of the Japanese author Ryu Murakami, which she will present with help from the guitarist Nels Cline, the drummer Alex Cline, the harpist Zeena Parkins and the bassist Devin Hoff. 646 779 8455, nationalsawdust.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
A scene from Spontini's "Fernand Cortez" at the Teatro del Maggio Musicale in Florence, part of a burst of new interest in the early 19th century composer. The composer Gaspare Spontini wasn't known for his modesty. In 1844, at 70, he traveled to Dresden, Germany, to conduct his opera "La Vestale" at the invitation of the young Richard Wagner. The older composer discouraged Wagner from a career as a dramatic artist, saying that he, Spontini, had brought the art of opera to such heights that any attempt to follow him could only have "ruinous consequences." But Wagner later wrote that, despite Spontini's vanity, the meeting only raised his "high esteem for the master." Berlioz, too, was a passionate admirer who devoted two chapters to Spontini in "Evenings with the Orchestra." In those days, Spontini was at the apogee of the opera world. Yet his reputation faded, along with those of other grand opera stars. Spontini attended conservatory in Naples but, according to Berlioz, taught himself by studying Gluck's scores. Unlike other Italian opera composers who came to Paris, he was little known on his arrival, in 1803, but soon he acquired the backing of Empress Josephine, who was instrumental in bringing "La Vestale" to the stage. "We have an excellent idea of who Napoleon was from an artistic perspective because of painters such as David," said Jean Luc Tingaud, who conducted "Fernand Cortez." "Spontini offers an opportunity for a similar understanding of Napoleon through music." When the victorious Roman general Licinius, in "La Vestale," returns home to popular acclaim, a stirring chorus honors him while simultaneously reminding audiences of Napoleon's military triumphs. "With Spontini, the chorus is no longer decorative or secondary," said Patrick Barbier, a scholar of the composer, "but an essential protagonist." "La Vestale" has an aura of Gluckian Neo Classicism, but, Mr. Muti said, is also "charged by flashes of Romanticism." While the recitatives look back to the 18th century, other passages anticipate Berlioz and the grand opera of Meyerbeer. And Mr. Muti believes that Spontini's mastery of large musical structures directly influenced Wagner. Berlioz documented Spontini's skills as an orchestrator. "His writing for winds and percussion is especially striking," said Mr. Tingaud. Mr. Muti mentioned a celebrated passage from "Agnes" in which Spontini evokes the sound of an organ by cleverly scoring music for stage band. Napoleon dictated the subject of Spontini's next opera after "La Vestale." Thinking that a music drama could bolster support for his Iberian campaign, he directed that a libretto about Hernan Cortes's Mexican conquest be prepared and that Spontini write the music. The idea was that audiences would recognize in Cortes a liberator in the Napoleonic mold. But the propagandistic content of "Fernand Cortez" seriously misfired. The Iberian campaign bogged down, and audiences identified Cortes with the courage of Napoleon's opponents. The opera was ordered withdrawn, although it triumphed in a revised form in 1817, after Napoleon was sent into exile. The Florence production revealed "Fernand Cortez" to be uneven Act I is overweighted with ballet but possessed of enough strong scenes to more than justify its revival. A heroic aura is never far away, but Italianate lyricism enriches the personal drama of Cortes and his Mexican lover, Amazily , while choral writing colorfully differentiates Spaniards and Mexicans. More than once, I was reminded of Berlioz's "Les Troyens." The straightforward production, by Cecilia Ligorio, dealt astutely with the question of how to characterize Cortes, a figure now deplored as a brutal colonialist but revered as a hero when the opera was written. Ms. Ligorio essentially preserved the opera's favorable portrayal of Cortes, but enlisted Cortes's confidant, Moralez, as a silent conduit for dissent. At the beginning of acts and during the final ballet, texts drawn from or inspired by contemporaneous writers attacking Cortes's fanaticism were projected as if they were Moralez's thoughts, offsetting the laudatory libretto.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
With most outdoor venues shut this summer, The New York Times last month asked performers and directors to recall their experiences working among the elements. Our critic got nostalgic, too. Now it's readers' turn; an edited selection of their responses follows. Tom Hanks was playing Falstaff in "Henry IV" outdoors in Los Angeles. In the opening moments, a drunk and reclining Falstaff had a bird land on his bloated stomach. During much laughter, Hanks didn't have a clue what was happening as he couldn't see the top of his belly. After the bird left and Hanks arose, a fellow cast member whispered to Falstaff what had occurred, and without missing a beat, Hanks improvised a couple of lines referring to the incident. Great fun! JIM LOPES, Los Angeles Memory of a close call: I was onstage alone, playing Juliet in Columbus, Ohio, when a huge windstorm whipped up. The set included six to eight metal arches, 13 feet high, which were placed in rows on either side of me. When the wind took the first one, they all toppled like dominoes. Luckily, I was not killed. The director, who was inside a nearby building, avoiding the wind, was the only one with the authority to "call" the show for inclement weather. So after the audience stopped screaming, I continued, while hoisting the arches so that Juliet's parents could make their entrances. The joys of outdoor theater in the Midwest! SUZANNE T. LAIRD, Westerville, Ohio In August 2019, I visited Oahu, Hawaii for the first time. At a museum I saw a poster for a local amateur Shakespeare performance of "As You Like It," outdoors that evening on the museum grounds. There were seats for only about 100 people, and a makeshift raised platform with some tropical trees on either side. The backdrop was a parking garage and some office buildings across the street. When I looked at the program, I noticed there were two names for each of the characters. One was for the "voice actor." As the play began I realized that all the voice actors were out of sight behind me reading their lines, while "movement actors" were onstage in the roles. They used all kinds of body gestures, facial expressions, and even some dance moves to act out the words we were hearing. It may sound very strange, but after a while I really got into it. Perhaps there were actors who had great voices, but not the physical look or physical abilities for a part, or vice versa. The cast was ethnically diverse, the onstage actors bursting with energy, and the voices soared into the night air. I have seen innumerable theater productions around the world, from Kabuki in Tokyo to Broadway, and in my hometown. But I rank this production, from the Hawaii Shakespeare Festival, as one of the truly unique, creative interpretations I have ever seen. I will never forget it. BRAD IGOU, Lancaster, Pa. I will never forget a production of "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" performed in an outdoor theater by Florida State University students at their summer location on Jekyll Island, Ga. This would have been the early to mid 70s. The entire audience, arrayed around the grass on our blankets and beach chairs, was eaten alive by mosquitoes, but no one left because it was impossible to tear yourself away. Whoever that Pseudolus was, the role has never been performed more brilliantly. I've often wondered where those students are today. They gave my family and so many others an extraordinary gift on a hot summer evening so long ago. REBECCA TILLET, Newtown Pa. I have been a wardrobe supervisor, technician, stitcher and dresser on/Off Broadway, as well as for film and television, for 45 years. My very first professional job in N.Y.C. was as a dresser for the New York Shakespeare Festival at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. I had seen a show there the summer before and decided it would be the perfect job between my junior and senior year of college. I bugged the wardrobe supervisor, Elonzo Dann, for the second half of 1975 until late spring of 1976. I mailed letters and resumes weekly, called the costume shop and left messages until he hired me, just to stop the barrage. I sublet a studio apartment on West 16th Street for 150 a month, learned the subway system and was paid 100 per week so I could actually live big city life. That summer, there were oodles of young men with bowl haircuts all over New York and they were all in "Henry V. " DEBRA KATZ WEBER, Teaneck, N.J. I was playing the Welsh Captain Fluellen (and Queen Isabel) in a production of "Henry V" starring Liev Schreiber and directed by Mark Wing Davey. This was July of 2003. We were performing for a full house. The show had been up for several weeks, so we were in command, as it were. King Harry had made his comradely mingling with his men, moving from fire to fire, rousing their spirits before the battle at Agincourt, when all of a sudden the skies opened up with a downpour. The cast raced offstage we had to, if for no other reason than to protect the expensive mics we all were wearing. To our amazement we saw that most of the audience was still there. They had jackets pulled over their heads, and programs. The consensus was: Let's get back out there! We had to get rid of the microphones and then we trooped out, to great cheers. I'm not sure exactly where we started from but I know that we were out there for the St. Crispin's Day soliloquy. The glory was that for the last, dramatic quarter of "Henry V," we were playing those scenes speaking those words with the rain POURING on us. In a career now over 60 years, in all media, this is a moment in time I will never forget. PETER GERETY "Tecumseh!" is an outdoor drama performed in a huge amphitheater in Chillicothe, Ohio. It has been running summers for as long as I can remember. My special memory includes the sound of the Shawnee horses' hooves thundering on the ground, the voices in the night, and the wonderful costumed actors who brought it to life. All those years ago, it was magical. And a little sad, too. Might be time to see it again when we all creep back to these wonderful outdoor venues. D.L. PREECE, Zionsville, Ind. It was the summer of '78, and we'd waited in line for several hours to grab the free tickets for the Shakespeare in the Park production of "The Taming of the Shrew," with Raul Julia and Meryl Streep. What made this evening especially exciting was, after the show, we'd waited by the stage door to meet Raul Julia (19 year old theater majors do such things). When he came out, he was more than magnanimous talking to us about the play, his "food for the world" project and more. We were ready to let him go, when he said, "Which way are you walking? I'm heading this way." Of course, we said we're going that way too, to which he replied "Great! Walk with me and we'll talk some more." Just then, Meryl Streep came out, and Raul said, "Meryl, come walk with me and my friends." And with that, on that hot sticky summer night, my three friends and I ... and Raul Julia ... and Meryl Streep ... walked through Central Park, talking about theater, Shakespeare, the injustice of world hunger and anything and everything else that came up. TIM DIERING, Amesbury, Mass.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
"I am a killing machine but a happy one I get all my resentments out in my books," told The Times earlier this year. Her latest novel, "Kingdom of the Blind," once again stars Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surete du Quebec, Canada's provincial police force. Gamache lives in the postcard pretty outpost of Three Pines, which Penny has always made clear is based on the village in Canada's Eastern Townships where she lives. A guide to the Eastern Townships includes a map highlighting real life locations in Penny's novels, so people can visit the bookshop from "How the Light Gets In" or the boulangerie in "The Cruelest Month." And they can find places that inspired Penny, too, like the house that unnerves Gamache in "Dead Cold": "Buildings, he told himself, were just everyday materials. There's nothing special about this place. But still the house seemed to moan and shiver." Penny fans, of course, aren't the only ones who like to visit places featured in their favorite novels. The town of New Bern, N.C., recently drew up a walking tour for visitors who wanted to visit sites parks, movie theaters, cemeteries featured in Nicholas Sparks's novels. And so many people came to Louisiana's New Iberia Parish looking for places from James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux books that the parish created a guide to the detective's favorite real life haunts, like the Bon Creole lunch counter, Victor's Cafeteria, even the local streets. "I drove down East Main under the arched live oaks that spanned the street, toward the Shadows, a red brick and white columned antebellum home built in 1831 on Bayou Teche," Robicheaux says in "Cadillac Jukebox." There are also dozens of maps for novels set in Salem, Mass., including the 2006 cult favorite "The Lace Reader," by Brunonia Barry.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
On a recent late summer evening, a gleaming black Mercedes Maybach pulled up on West 15th Street outside of Kola House, a newly opened restaurant, and lingered quietly by the curb. In the backseat of the car, amid neon purple light strips, sat Kasseem Dean, a.k.a. Swizz Beatz, the hip hop artist and producer who has worked with the likes of Jay Z, Beyonce and DMX. Kanye West has called him "the best rap producer of all time." Mr. Dean, 38, is also an avid art collector (and curator for Kola House), who made his first major purchase, an Ansel Adams photograph, when he was 18. He has since devoted considerable energy to building what he calls the Dean Collection, an assortment of art that he intends to pass on to his five children. It is kept in storage, at home and in his personal studio in Chelsea, which is where the Maybach was headed that evening. "Sometimes you're leaving the studio at four, five or six in the morning, you can just lay back and have a little baby moment," he said, referring to the pillow in his lap from the Brooklyn Museum, whose board Mr. Dean joined in 2015. "My brain doesn't unlock until midnight," Mr. Dean said. "There's too much going on in the daytime. I like to make music when the world sleeps. I'm not thinking too much, I'm not checking my phone, the kids are asleep." After most studio sessions, Mr. Dean heads home to New Jersey to take his children to school and doesn't fall into bed until 11 a.m. Then, it's a three or four hour nap and back to business. Mr. Dean began working as a disc jockey when he was a teenager, in clubs he wasn't even old enough to legally enter. He was getting paid, but he didn't trust checks or the concept of fast cash. "I was getting all these checks, and I was putting them in shoeboxes," Mr. Dean said. Once he realized he actually had several hundred thousand dollars in the bank, Mr. Dean bought a house, looked around and realized he didn't want to decorate with posters. It was time to hit the galleries. "They wouldn't take me really seriously," he said. "I was 18. And the style was different back then: baggy clothes, everything 10 times bigger. I just didn't look like the type of person who was coming in to buy fine art." He eventually met the collector David Rogath, who became his guide to the art world. Mr. Dean's collection now includes works by famed artists like KAWS and Kehinde Wiley. "None of these vibes can hang in my house," he said, referring to the skull, which appears three dimensional from certain angles. "Imagine going to the kitchen and that's in the hallway. Nah, I'm cool." In the corner of another room, on the floor next to a set of shelves that displayed photos of Mr. Dean and the singer Alicia Keys, his wife of six years, were two large plaques. "My wife and friends had these made for my accomplishments throughout the years," said Mr. Dean, who only has a 2010 BET Producer of the Year statuette on display in the studio. "They know I don't celebrate this type of stuff." The support between the pair goes both ways. When Ms. Keys was criticized this summer for her decision to go makeup free, Mr. Dean took to his Instagram to defend her choice. "Somebody's sitting home mad because somebody didn't wear makeup on their face not your face, but they didn't put makeup on their face," Mr. Dean said with incredulity in the post, emphasizing that Ms. Keys's decision was a personal one. After putting the plaques down, Mr. Dean walked into the next room, a small recording space. The walls were covered in a brown wash; enlarged newspaper clippings; portraits of rap greats; and sayings like "Get Better." Mr. Dean appears to share his wife's interest in authenticity and the natural way of doing things. "I wanted this room to be where you can have a nostalgic feeling," Mr. Dean said. He pointed at an air conditioning unit, disappointment on his face. "I wanted to leave it out. I wanted it to be hot, so you have to wear tank tops," he said. "That's the way it used to be in studios: tank tops, shorts, slippers, making the best music. But it got too hot."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
FELLOW adventurers, refugees from winter and armchair archaeologists, we are here on this shiny green tour bus to embark on a safari of sorts. We'll be exploring the local habitat, as upended and reconfigured by an epochal real estate fiasco. Our guide, Marc Joseph, stalks wildlife of the white elephant variety. A real estate agent, he specializes in houses that proved financially disastrous for someone the banker, the homeowner, the American taxpayer, often all three. Mr. Joseph's bus is emblazoned with red letters spelling the name of this thrill ride: ForeclosureToursRUs.com. As we navigate this speculator's paradise turned financial wasteland, Mr. Joseph stands at the front of the bus in a green polo shirt, highlighting specimens like this one: a white stucco house fronted by palm trees and topped by a Spanish tile roof on a canal emptying into the Gulf of Mexico. It last sold in 2005 for 850,000. Yours today for 273,000. "How much cheaper does it have to go before you say, 'Well, that's just craziness,' " Mr. Joseph beseeches as our tour group mostly retirees from up North, basking in Bermuda shorts on another December day stolen from winter examines the swimming pool and the Jacuzzi. "I'm telling you now, your opportunity is banging at your door." Yes, it has come to this in Cape Coral, a reluctant symbol for the excesses of the great American real estate bubble: foreclosed homes served up as tourist attraction. The struggles and pain that produced this ecosystem are neatly masked by the newly installed granite countertops, pristine carpets and fresh coats of paint that now ornament many properties on the tour. I am on the bus because, two years earlier, I spent a week here looking at the myriad ways in which plunging home prices were undermining the American dream. Cape Coral and the Fort Myers metropolitan area were confronting an especially potent cauldron of troubles. Unemployment was soaring, and tax revenue was plunging, forcing cuts in government services and intensifying anxiety. Now I am back to see what has happened. The dominant pursuit of the moment here is cleaning up The Mess left behind by the era of easy money. The Mess is found in the glut of vacant commercial spaces; in the local unemployment rate, now pushing 14 percent; and in the discarded furniture at curbside and the overgrown front lawns left by some of those relinquishing their homes to foreclosure. "We've been at the epicenter of this," says Frank Cassidy, a retired Los Angeles police officer who heads Cape Coral's code enforcement division, which carts away much of the detritus. "We're the front line on blight." He lays out a satellite map showing the city of Cape Coral, a thumb shape expanse jutting into the gulf. It shows 64,571 single family homes. Each one touched by foreclosure over the last three years is marked red, as if the city were stricken with a rash: 18,575 red dots pockmark the map. Kristy Clifton at 30, the youngest member of the code enforcement team patrols northwestern Cape Coral in her white Ford Taurus, summoning colleagues to help with the latest clean out. This is not work for the squeamish. Some people depart in a rage, leaving graffiti on living room walls (profane suggestions about how bankers might rearrange their anatomy), mounds of trash, dirty diapers, even piles of human excrement. As she gathers the artifacts of lives gone wrong and deposits them into Dumpsters, she wonders what happened. "People can just up and leave, and it seems like they leave their whole lives behind," she says. "Army medals. Photo albums. Framed photos of children. Cribs. Toys. I don't know if they don't have anywhere to go or anywhere to put this stuff. But you'd think that pictures of your kids you'd take." THE MESS is the product of The Story, the fable that waterfront living beyond winter's reach exerts such a powerful pull that it justifies almost any price for housing. The Story propelled the orgy of borrowing, investing and flipping that dominated life here and in other places where January doesn't include a snow blower. The Story lost its magic amid the realization that speculators had simply been selling to other speculators, making the real estate market look like a Ponzi scheme. The ensuing crash was breathtaking. By the winter of 2007, median housing prices in Cape Coral and the rest of Lee County had fallen to about 215,000, down from a high of 278,000 in 2005. By October 2009, they had fallen to near 92,000. Somewhere on that long, steep downhill path, what was once portrayed here as a momentary if wrenching setback seeped into the community's bones, embedding lowered expectations and fear. The first time I visited in 2007, James W. Browder, the Lee County schools superintendent, had recently scrapped plans to construct seven new schools. When I visited last month, he detailed how one fourth of his elementary schools were now sending home weekly backpacks of food with students. "One elementary school principal noticed parents going into schools with kids in the morning and sitting down in the cafeteria with them," Mr. Browder said. "Then they noticed parents eating breakfast off kids' plates. And then they noticed parents taking scraps home." In Texas, the all consuming gauge of prosperity is the price of a barrel of oil. Here, it was once the value of a developable parcel of land. Today, it is the volume of foreclosures. In the Cape Coral, Fla., area, Marc Joseph, left, a real estate agent, leads a tour of foreclosed homes. More than a quarter of single family homes in the city have been touched by foreclosure in the bust. At the end of 2007, the pace was already grim here, with foreclosures running at 1,100 a month, a more than fivefold increase from early that year, according to RealtyTrac, a real estate research firm. By late 2008, the pace had quickened again, to about 2,000 a month. By the fall of 2009, foreclosures had fallen to about 1,400 a month, prompting hopes that the worst was over. But real estate agents and mortgage brokers wary of optimism are focusing on a new term that has entered the housing lexicon: ghost inventory. Banks appear to be sitting on thousands of homes caught in limbo, neither foreclosing nor receiving any payments. "We're not in a recession," says Bobby Mahan, an amiable broker here, describing conditions in the area. "We're in a depression." Two years ago, Mr. Mahan's office, Selling Paradise, displayed a sign that seemed unusual at the time. It invited customers to come in for a free list of available foreclosed properties. Now, nearly every surviving real estate agent seeks business with such signs. Out in Lehigh Acres, a sprawling empire of cookie cutter ranch houses, agents once worked in a strip of model properties, waiting in pristinely carpeted living rooms with plates of cookies for prospective buyers. Today, many of the models have themselves succumbed to foreclosure. Those still going are draped in banners offering foreclosure expertise. Prices are now so low that inventory is moving. From the beginning of last year through October, the Fort Myers metropolitan area had already had 14,000 sales of single family homes more than in all of 2007 and 2008 combined. Roughly three fourths of the deals were foreclosed homes and short sales, in which property sells for less than the bank is owed. Yet about three fourths of the buyers have been paying cash, an apparent indication that most are investors, not ordinary homeowners. "That doesn't give me a lot of confidence," says Cape Coral's newly elected mayor, John Sullivan. "Where are they going to sell these properties? The party's over." For a select few, however, the party rages on. Allen Olofson Ring, a clean cut, sandy haired, Harvard educated real estate agent from Boston, is enjoying his best year since entering the local real estate business seven years ago. He has parlayed longstanding relationships with mortgage companies Chase, in particular into the acquisition of exclusive rights to selling their foreclosed properties. Back in 2006, the end of the bubble, Mr. Olofson Ring sold about 27 properties for a total value of roughly 14 million. By December, he was on pace to complete 800 deals valued at 41 million. "These are the greatest times," he says. When he gets new listings, he visits the properties to see whether they are occupied. To get inside, he uses the tools that fill the trunk of his Nissan Altima: a power drill, specialty keys, flathead screwdrivers. "It can get wild," he says. "We're about to break in the house no, rephrase that gain entry, and some guy comes out half naked and says, 'What you doing in my house, boy?' " When he encounters residents, he offers them cash to vacate, from 500 to 3,000, while threatening eviction if they stay. Then, he puts the houses on the market, priced to sell. "I get numb to it, I guess, because I've done so many," he says. "It's a little surreal. You feel bad. It gnaws at you. At the same time, what are you going to do? Life goes on." What are you going to do? This question has insinuated itself seemingly everywhere here, like a soundtrack stuck on an infinite loop. Dave Robison has lived in northwest Cape Coral since 2002, when he moved down from Cincinnati, paying 160,000 for his house. He figured that he would stay until his house fetched enough to allow him to retire full time in Mexico. Now, he bitterly regrets that he didn't cash in back in 2005, when the house was worth perhaps 400,000. He walks his two greyhounds past a tan stucco house on the corner, where the grass on the lawn reaches three feet high, possibly sheltering possums and snakes. An official abatement notice is tacked to the front door, ordering the owner someone in Reseda, Calif. to cut the grass. A house across the street is similarly forlorn. "You think you've got something and you don't," says Mr. Robison. "There's nothing you can do but just ride it out." The pool at the former home of the Pellegrino family looks like many others where nature has taken over in Florida. Farther down the block, another house sits cloaked in overgrown shrubbery with yet another abatement notice tacked to the door. Two years ago at this very house, I met the two women who were then living there Elaine and Charlene Pellegrino a mother and daughter. They were sifting through the belongings of Elaine's husband, Charlene's father, who had recently died, leaving them with two troubled businesses to run and debts they couldn't manage. Elaine Pellegrino, then 53, was disabled, living on Social Security. Her daughter was jobless. They had resigned themselves to losing their home and had stopped making the mortgage payments. Yet they were cognizant that they could stay for many months as their case worked its way through a local court system already overwhelmed by foreclosures. Now their days there have ended. Tax documents sit in a rain matted stack in front of the garage. A "for sale" sign lies warped and discarded in the weeds. Inside the house, bills are scattered across the floor with playing cards, a March 2008 TV Guide and the innards of a VCR. A plastic trash bag brimmed with foreclosure documents. Behind the house, green slime chokes the swimming pool the same green slime that now colonizes countless pools left to the elements in South Florida. The Pellegrinos moved out in July 2008, Charlene explains. A bathroom pipe had burst, and mold had grown on the walls. She and her mother couldn't afford repairs. The strangest thing was how the bank implored them to stay, she says. Even after it became clear that they were not going to pay their mortgage, the bank figured that it would be better having them there to deter scavengers who would strip out the cabinets, the wiring, the toilets. "They wanted us to stay on indefinitely," Charlene says. "It was weird." When the Pellegrinos left, they found an upside to the bust: the seemingly limitless array of affordable rentals. After walking away from their house and its 1,500 monthly mortgage payments, they rented a nearby four bedroom home for 950 a month. Now Charlene, earning 2,400 a month as a home health worker, has designs on moving to a better place still, for 700 a month. KEVIN JARRETT is also on the move, adding his own house to the growing stock of local ghost inventory. Circumstances were already dire for Mr. Jarrett, a real estate agent, when I met him two years ago. He and his wife had arrived from Illinois in the mid 1990s, aggressively borrowing as they snared four properties. The peak came in the summer of 2007, when they paid 730,000 for a waterfront home in Cape Coral. By the end of that year, Mr. Jarrett hadn't closed a deal in months. He was falling behind on the mortgages for all four of his properties and had dropped his health insurance. "Here we are, two years later, and there's no end to this," he says, leaning into a booth at the University Grill, a steak and lobster place he used to enjoy regularly during the boom years. "I make a mean Hamburger Helper now." Deals have shrunk to almost nothing. Three of his four homes have been lost to foreclosure. He remains in the place on the water in Cape Coral, though he has not made a payment in roughly two years. "Sometimes I think they just lost my file," he says. The house is mostly empty, owing to impromptu yard sales he conducts to keep food on the table. The piano, the sofa, the coffee table, the dining room table and chairs: all gone. His living and dining rooms are devoid, save for one piece of art he cannot bear to surrender: a statuette of Don Quixote. "You know, dream the impossible dream," he says. "It's just one of those little remnants to keep dreaming, because if you don't dream, you don't get anything." His wife left in July 2008, he says, taking their daughter back to Illinois. ("Not having the finances to sustain the lifestyle you had is very trying on a relationship," he says.) Last winter, a repo man came for Mr. Jarrett's boat, a 22 foot Hurricane power cruiser. In the spring, he sold his beloved yellow 2001 Corvette convertible for 13,500, paying 5,300 for a used 2000 Cadillac. Still boyish looking at 50 despite his graying hair, Mr. Jarrett is starting over, moving down the coast to Marco Island, where houses sell for much more than they do here. A friend is offering a place to stay. His employer, Keller Williams, promises a desk in its local office. On his foreclosure tour, Marc Joseph tells customers, "You cannot purchase the bricks and mortar, and build a house for what they're selling for." He is full of gratitude, yet deeply unsettled by the reality that he is walking away from his dream home. Getting rich is a feat best accomplished here today by tapping into the inventory spawned by the unfortunate end to other people's richness. This is the sort of opportunistic thinking that prompted Mr. Joseph our tour guide on today's foreclosure safari to buy a bus on Craigslist. After he bought the vehicle, which had previously been used to ferry parishioners to a Baptist church, he had it painted green, then added his new tour company logo in red. (Another employer of the "'R' Us" designation, Toys 'R' Us, threatened legal action to force him to find another name, Mr. Joseph tells riders on his bus. He says he has agreed to change the name in the next few months.) Tanned and sinewy with sunglasses nesting in his hair, Mr. Joseph looks and sounds like the comedian Ray Romano, minus the agita. He deals primarily in houses owned by Fannie Mae, the government backed mortgage financier. He cleans and sometimes renovates them before putting them on the market, clearing away The Mess in the service of selling an updated version of The Story. On a recent tour, eight potential buyers occupied the upholstered bench seats of his bus. Norm Tardie, a semiretiree down from Vermont, is hunting for bargain investments. A retired heating and air conditioning contractor from Massachusetts in a yellow Hawaiian shirt is looking for a possible vacation place. Mr. Joseph indulges the classic shtick of the Florida sales pitch. "Where we from?" he asks one couple, who conveniently hail from Illinois. "How cold is it in Illinois today?" he asks. "So we appreciate where we're at today," he says. "That's the way we want you to feel when you walk into a house." These prices cannot last! This is Mr. Joseph's essential message, one he expresses in a multitude of ways. "You cannot purchase the bricks and mortar, and build a house for what they're selling for." He lavishes particular attention on Paulette O'Rourke, a tan, reddish blond retiree from Cincinnati, whose pink nails and enthusiasm make her seem game. She just bought one house here, and she likes the thought of owning another, as an investment. Not unimportantly, she has cash, roughly 100,000 in retirement funds from her old hospital job. "You call up your financial guy," Mr. Joseph is saying, adopting the tones of the liberation theologian. "You say, 'I want to sell all my stocks and mutual funds,' and you're done. You call him up and say: 'I'm taking control. I want to buy a house in Florida.' " This idea is germinating as Ms. O'Rourke admires the swimming pool and the white ceramic tile at a house that sold for 350,000 three years ago and is now on the market for 164,500. "It is that opportunity," Mr. Joseph is saying. "It is that time."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Nancy Drew , the girl detective who could pick a lock, play the bagpipes, tap Morse Code in high heels and drive her blue roadster like a Daytona champ, turns 90 next year. Introduced as "a pretty girl of 16" on the first page of "The Secret of the Old Clock" in 1930, Nancy has inspired generations of readers (Sonia Sotomayor, Oprah Winfrey and Hillary Clinton among them) with her style and pluck. No matter how many bowling balls and candelabras bludgeon her, she keeps sleuthing. Fictional characters like V.I. Warshawski, Veronica Mars and Betty Cooper of "Riverdale" owe her a tip of the cloche hat. "She's a force for good, unafraid to speak up, unafraid to challenge authority," said Melanie Rehak, the author of "Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her." Over the years, Nancy has aged up and down; her hair has morphed from blond to red to strawberry; she has acquired best friends, Bess Marvin and George Fayne, and a loyal boyfriend, Ned Nickerson. Briefly, her roadster was maroon. Never out of print, she has appeared in more than 250 books and counting, in movies, on television shows, in CD ROM games. She has been reinvented, in ways that fans have not always embraced, for seemingly every era. Each new adaptation has to reckon, Rehak explained, with the Nancy readers think they know. "It's very hard to disconnect her from the decades and decades of cultural presence that she has had," she said. On Oct. 9, she returns again, in "Nancy Drew," an hourlong drama on CW with a contemporary spin and a supernatural kick. Brittle, adrift, this Nancy is grieving her mother, sparring with her father and having casual sex with Ned Nickerson. He goes by Nick now, and he has a record. Call it "The Mystery of the Hot Mess." "At the core is the idea of a young woman who believes in righting wrongs and finding the truth," said Stephanie Savage, a creator of the series. How and why has Nancy evolved from her tweed suited origins to her new role as a thoroughly modern snoop? Grab your magnifying glass. Edward Stratemeyer , the head of a children's literature syndicate, first imagined Nancy Drew in 1929. Having already created "The Hardy Boys," Stratemeyer wanted a detective who could capture the hearts and pocket money of girls. He described this new heroine, in a memo to his publishers, as "an up to date American girl at her best, bright, clever, resourceful and full of energy." Her name, he suggested, might be Stella Strong. Or Diana Dare. Or Nan Drew. Benson , who wrote Nancy Drew books off and on for two decades, fleshed out Stratemeyer's breakneck plot while imbuing Nancy with spunk, valor and an unflagging sense of her own moral rightness although that rightness occasionally lent itself to burglary. In the 1950s, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, Stratemeyer's younger daughter and heir to the Stratemeyer Syndicate, took over the series, instilling Nancy with some of her own Wellesley educated refinement and drive. The Nancy Drew books, which have sold more than 80 million copies, offer a model of femininity that is self reliant, snappily dressed, capable of catching the baddie in time to make the college dance . An apotheosis of American girlhood, Nancy isn't quite an everywoman we can't all crack a safe or pilot a speedboat but she is an archetype, just generic enough for readers to imagine themselves in her sensible heels. "She's sort of an analog hero," Melinda Hsu Taylor, the showrunner for the CW's "Nancy Drew," said. "She's not able to fly or turn herself invisible, but she gets it done in the way that somebody who's reading the books maybe could get it done, too." The 1932 book "Nancy's Mysterious Letter " made that explicit. "I have solved some mysteries, I'll admit, and I enjoy it," Nancy says. "But I'm sure there are many other girls who could do the same." 'Meet the Toughest Sleuth Who Ever Captured ... Your Heart!' Popular culture likes to reimagine its superheroes every decade or so. Nancy is no exception. In the 1930s, the Stratemeyer Syndicate sold the film rights to Warner Bros. Nancy first appeared onscreen, played by a curly haired Bonita Granville, in "Nancy Drew ... Detective," a 1938 film advertised with tag lines like "Her homework may not be so hot ... but her police work is 100 percent!" and "Meet the toughest sleuth who ever captured ... your heart." Three sequels quickly followed, none of them major successes . In the late 1950s, even as new books were being written, the early ones were revised, with an eye to making them even more plot driven and less prone to ethnic and racial stereotypes. (Adams's remedy: Make all of the characters white.) On the new canary yellow covers, Nancy kept up with contemporary fashions, although Adams proudly kept the books free of pernicious influences like hippies and drugs. The '80s, '90s and 2000s saw several attempts to make over Nancy , in books and onscreen. A Nancy in jeans and moussed hair graced the covers of "The Nancy Drew Files," books aimed at a teenage audience. A younger Nancy Drew appeared in "Nancy Drew Notebooks." When the original series , "The Nancy Drew Mystery Stories," concluded, "Nancy Drew: Girl Detective" took over, with Nancy narrating her adventures in the first person. In 1989, a series for USA Networks, starring Margot Kidder , never finished its pilot, and in 1995, WB briefly aired, then canceled, a half hour series with Scott Speedman as Ned. In the '00s, ABC aired a Nancy Drew pilot, passing on a series, and Emma Roberts appeared in a Nancy Drew movie. CBS and NBC both developed projects centered on a middle aged Nancy Drew, but declined to order series. This year, a movie starring Sophia Lillis , had a limited release and like all Nancy Drew adaptations before it, earned middling reviews. Why has Nancy Drew proved so difficult to adapt? "It's a bit of a puzzle," said Rehak, the "Girl Sleuth" author. "Part of her appeal has always been that people relate to her in various ways. Actually seeing her onscreen embodied in a real person kind of ruined it for them."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Jones was relieved in Sunday's game by Colt McCoy, a likely replacement under center. But Judge said he's considering several options from bringing in a free agent to preparing another player on the roster to take over as an emergency quarterback all of which are harder now that the team has to conduct virtual meetings Monday and Tuesday to comply with more stringent N.F.L. guidelines amid the coronavirus pandemic. The potential quarterback change comes just as the Giants seemed to have pieced an offense together by emphasizing ball safety. The Giants had lost running back Saquon Barkley to a season ending injury in their second game of the season, but Wayne Gallman has rushed for a touchdown in five consecutive games, becoming a reliable red zone option for a team that has struggled to identify reliable targets. The Giants have rushed for more than 100 yards in each of their past six games. Jones, too, had seemed to learn from his past turnover woes, going without an interception in the Giants' three wins and not fumbling in their last two. The Giants accumulated 386 yards of total offense against the Bengals, their highest total of the year and a positive sign for a team that had ranked 30th in the N.F.L. in yardage per game entering Sunday. It was also a mark of progress for an offensive line that has struggled since Eli Manning was still the franchise's starter and that is now under new tutelage, since Judge fired Marc Colombo on Nov. 18 amid a reported practice dispute. Dave DeGuglielmo, the new offensive line coach, held the same position with New England Patriots in 2014 and 2015, when Judge was also an assistant there and had been brought to the Giants as a consultant. "Anybody who's watched us play has seen the progression with those guys up front blocking much better in the running game, the protection has improved as the year has gone on, and we've played better as an offense as a result," Jason Garrett, the offensive coordinator, said on Friday. The successful pivot also points to Judge's hold on the Giants' helm. In his first year as an N.F.L. head coach, he has made a name for himself as enthusiastic, quirky and quick witted; someone who is not afraid to pull a viral stunt to keep his team engaged, as he drew clicks for when he was videotaped sliding in the mud for a fumble recovery drill. He also drew laughs by making members of his coaching staff run laps in training camp. That Joe Judge juice seems to go a long way for the Giants, who have not had a postseason appearance since 2016. In the face of a slow start, narrow wins and losses and coronavirus cases, he has kept Giants players positive by never giving a negative quote to the press, cracking jokes and making sure all players keep their cameras on during the team's videoconference calls.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports

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