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LOS ANGELES In what they hope will be an aggressive attack on the web based theft of intellectual property, some of Hollywood's top foreign sales executives are banding together to fight digital movie pirates. Five small film companies Millennium, Voltage Pictures, Bloom, Sierra/Affinity and FilmNation Entertainment said they were forming a new antipiracy coalition with the aim of mobilizing small businesses in the television, music, game and software industries against online theft. The alliance is calling itself the Internet Security Task Force. Millennium's president, Mark Gill, described it as a last ditch effort by relatively fragile companies with fewer than 50 employees to avoid what they say is the near destruction of their prospective blockbusters, as happened to Millennium and its partners with "The Expendables 3" last year. "Maybe larger businesses can afford to take a hit," Mr. Gill said in a phone interview last week. "But we don't have that luxury, we can't survive." Precisely what the new task force can do that antipiracy efforts by organizations like the Motion Picture Association of America and CreativeFuture are not doing remains uncertain. But Mr. Gill said the group was considering a wide range of options, including a media campaign to be organized by the Mercury public affairs firm, a lobbying effort by Heather Podesta Partners, which is based in Washington, and increased pressure on companies that advertise on pirate sites. There are currently no plans to file any lawsuits, unless member companies pursue litigation on their own. Nicolas Chartier, the chief executive of Voltage Pictures, touched off an Internet uproar in 2010 when he filed suit against 5,000 unnamed web users via their IP addresses, seeking damages for illegal downloads of "The Hurt Locker." Elizabeth Holmes Hones Her Defense in Day 2 of Testimony Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Though wary of mass litigation, which invites the inevitable backlash and procedural quagmire, Mr. Gill said the group was closely watching Canada, where a legal process called "notice and notice" is now in place. Since January, Canada has required Internet service providers to immediately forward a notice of alleged copyright infringement to suspected thieves, rather than waiting for repeat violations, as in the United States. Canadian service providers, Mr. Gill said, now deliver seven times as many notices as their counterparts in the United States to those suspected of illegal downloading, a rate that they hope will discourage potential violators once they are told that they are being tracked. Jeremy Malcolm, a senior global policy analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a web freedom advocacy group, said his group though often wary of Hollywood actually favors a Canadian style system, which makes notification easier but does not force more immediate action on service providers. "But we do feel it needs some fine tuning," Mr. Malcolm added. He said some American companies were using the notices to deliver demands for damages much larger than those permitted under Canadian law. Millennium, whose chairman, Avi Lerner, is an impetus behind the task force, was particularly damaged last year by the online theft of "The Expendables 3," which leaked to the web on July 25, three weeks before its theatrical release. This month, police officers in London arrested a suspect in connection with the leak. But, Mr. Gill said, more than 60 million illegal viewings had already taken a heavy toll. In all, according to Boxofficemojo.com, "The Expendables 3" took in only about 206 million at the worldwide box office, down sharply from 305 million in sales for its predecessor. The box office in some countries, Mr. Gill said, fell by as much as 89 percent. Mr. Gill said the new task force would be more closely focused on piracy than the Motion Picture Association of America, which conducts a worldwide effort (and assisted in the recent arrest in the "Expendables" case), but must attend to the sometimes diverging needs of its six member companies, all big studios. And, Mr. Gill said, the group expects to press its aims with advertising or legislative initiatives that may be sharper than similar efforts by CreativeFuture, a Hollywood antipiracy group whose 350 members include the major studios, agencies and guilds along with Millennium and other companies. "This is an aggressive game that's only been played aggressively by the other side," Mr. Gill said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
When your mother handed you a copy of "Our Bodies, Ourselves," it meant one of two things: You were about to have a pained conversation with a parent wielding a hand mirror, or you were meant to take the book, read it and never mention it again. Either way, you were prepared. For generations of girls, "Our Bodies, Ourselves" was the starter pack to adulthood: It let you know whether your vulva was weird looking (it wasn't), what kind of birth control you might want to use and whether you were the only one who had a special relationship with your pillow. (You weren't, Page 162 assured.) But after nearly 50 years, Our Bodies Ourselves, the Boston nonprofit home of the book, will stop publishing the pubescent tome amid a period of "transition." The book, last updated in 2011, will no longer have new editions. The nonprofit organization housing their programmatic work they reported 279,460 in revenue for its 2016 fiscal year will now be led by volunteers. "This is a really sad moment for our readers," said Julie Childers, the executive director of Our Bodies Ourselves. "But we still have a strong, scrappy board of directors and 300 experts in the field to continue being a voice in the public sphere." That the foundational feminist text will cease to publish at this particular time seems strange. Trump's inauguration was dwarfed by millions of women wearing "pussy hats"; abusive men across every industry are being outed by MeToo; women in film, television and music are embracing the feminist label with gusto. This week, Janelle Monae released a music video that is rife with imagery celebrating the vulva. But feminist nonprofits, especially those founded during the movement's second wave heyday, aren't thriving in a way that reflects the moment. Stalwarts like the National Organization for Women and Ms. magazine still exist. But their profiles dwindle in the shadow of newer endeavors like Times Up, or Teen Vogue's recent political makeover. Longstanding feminist organizations have tried to keep up with their younger counterparts by expanding efforts online. Before Our Bodies Ourselves made the decision to stop publishing, for example, Ms. Childers said the organization tried to raise money for a large scale digital project that would allow users to create their own books. "It was very hard to create a digital future for 'Our Bodies, Ourselves' that people would agree to fund," she said. In an ironic cultural shift, many of the most successful new feminist projects have a distinctly retro feel and are deliberately offline. Consciousness raising groups and zines are back; Rookie magazine's series of books are designed to look like well worn yearbooks. And the women only social club the Wing in part inspired by the women's club movement of the early 1900s just raised 32 million dollars to open locations across the country. (Its revenue comes from corporate sponsorship and memberships.) "There's this embarrassment of riches in the digital space and it can feel exhausting," said Emma Holland, who started a zine with two friends called "repro rights" after the presidential election. Ms. Holland's zine, which has published three issues, is available on what she calls a "janky website." Girls from Oklahoma to South Africa have read it, and she's heard from high school students who have handed copies out in their cafeteria or held "folding parties." (The zine is printed on a single sheet and then folded into a booklet.) Most of what "repro rights" covers is available in the pages of "Our Bodies, Ourselves," but the rite of passage of a mother handing over a women's health bible to her daughter has become less common. Children are increasingly able to find sexual health answers online. And Ms. Holland, who also works at the Wing, said she thinks there's a particular aesthetic appeal in things like zines that speaks to younger women: "It's the same reason we like Polaroids or record players." As a feminist who got her start blogging a phrase that now makes me sound absolutely ancient I worry for a new generation of feminists whose cultural and political successes won't necessarily translate into financial sustainability. "There's a perception that there's this stream of funding that just doesn't exist," said Jamia Wilson, the executive director of the Feminist Press. "If people want our organizations to survive, they need to invest in them." She points out that when you look at who has the best access to philanthropic funding and connections to major donors like environmental groups you'll inevitably see executive directors that are white men. "Our Bodies, Ourselves" has "always been a labor of love," Ms. Childers said, but perhaps that's part of the problem. Even as women's work and activism has completely changed lives and shifted the direction of the country, we still have largely been expected to do it for little to no money, with women's nonprofits relying on pure passion and urgent need. As feminism becomes more and more culturally powerful, guiding voices with experience will be more important ever. The more mainstreamed feminism becomes, the easier it is to water down the values of the movement. "Merriam Webster made 'feminism' the word of the year," Ms. Wilson said. "But we've been here for years, unafraid to take on books that were considered too radical or risky by other presses." And Ms. Childers said that, while there's an abundance of information on the internet, "it's hard to sort out what's accurate, what's trustworthy and what's from a feminist point of view." She's right. It's hard to imagine a future in which a mother lovingly directs her daughter to a URL to read about vulvas and pillows. I know when the time comes, I'd prefer to hand my daughter a book with dogeared pages and underlined passages rather than texting her a link. But Ms. Childers doesn't rule out the possibility of a miraculous return. Feminists, especially those who have been around for a while, have a habit of doing impressive things with limited resources. "I'm a feminist in my 40s," she said, "and it's been an incredible honor to work with the founders and this generation of second wave activists. I won't be surprised at anything this group is able to accomplish." Jessica Valenti is a feminist columnist and the author of "Sex Object: A Memoir."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
I'M sorry that my column hasn't appeared for several weeks (I was on book leave). I'm sorry if you missed reading it. And I'm sorry if you didn't notice. Maybe I'm going overboard here, but I've been reading about apologies lately, and it has made me realize how hard it can be to make one right. So I'm covering all my bases. There has been a fair amount in the news lately about apologies, particularly whether the chief executives of financial institutions have been contrite enough about the role they played in bringing about this recession. But whether it be an apology from a public figure to an anonymous mass of people or a private one between you and your spouse, a good apology has the same essentials. These include an acknowledgment of the fault or offense, regret for it and responsibility for it and, if possible, a way to fix the problem, said Holly Weeks, a communications consultant and author of "Failure to Communicate: How Conversations Go Wrong and What You Can Do to Right Them" (Harvard Business Press, 2008). We're taught when we're very young to say, "I'm sorry," when we steal someone's pail in the sandbox or lock our sister in a closet (hypothetically speaking). But somehow, as we grow up, our apologies often become more abstract, more defensive and less an acceptance of responsibility than a demand that the wronged person forgive us. Examples of bad apologies abound. " 'I want to apologize' is not an apology," Ms. Weeks said. "It's no more an apology than 'I want to lose weight' is a loss of weight." How about "I'm sorry if you were offended," or "I'm sorry I hurt your feelings"? These imply that the injured party is just too sensitive. "I've been agonizing about this. I've been losing sleep. I feel so bad." These suggest that the wronged party should take care of the apologizer. And then there's, going on attack "Are you going to hold this against me forever?" if the apology isn't immediately accepted. The act of contrition sometimes comes wrapped in self congratulation. For example, Ms. Weeks said that she analyzed the speech by former Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York when he publicly admitted wrongdoing and resigned. Only 17 percent of that speech was apology. The rest "was about how great he was," she said. In my opinion, the apology sent by e mail or text message is also a cowardly way out, except for the most minor of incidents. Do it in person, or at least over the phone. An apology should not be thought of in terms of an expression of regret or getting something off your chest, which is more like a monologue, Ms. Weeks said. Rather, it has to be thought of as a communication between people. "Take the focus off yourself and keep it on your counterpart," she said. Apologizing has been complicated over the years by the threat of liability. This has led to apologies that have been carefully parsed to remove any real regret or accountability. "So many apologies are constructed by legal or P.R. people" as a defensive mechanism, not as a sincere expression of remorse, Ms. Weeks said. This can be true for politicians, doctors and business executives, but also for you or me if we're, say, involved in a traffic accident. Should we say we're sorry? Is that admitting fault? In fact, it was a traffic accident in the 1970s that led politicians to try to resolve some of these problems. According to Jonathan R. Cohen, a law professor at the University of Florida, a Massachusetts state senator's daughter was killed while riding her bicycle, and the driver who hit her never apologized. The father couldn't believe that the driver had never expressed contrition, Professor Cohen said, and was told that the driver had dared not risk even saying "I'm sorry," because it could have been seen as an admission in the litigation surrounding the girl's death. When the state senator retired, he worked with his successor to introduce and win passage of legislation that allowed a "safe harbor" for people to offer "benevolent gestures expressing sympathy or a general sense of benevolence," said Professor Cohen, who has written extensively on the intersection of law and apologies. Now, a majority of states have enacted "I'm sorry" laws some that address just medical malpractice, while others apply to all civil cases. This aversion to apologies is not universal. "When faced with a charge that they have seriously wronged another person, Americans typically deny or challenge the claim or may try to explain and justify their actions," according to Arthur Rosett, an emeritus professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles. Professor Rosett co wrote an article on the different approaches to apologies by Americans and the Japanese. In Japan, unlike the United States, civil or criminal defendants must express a personal apology to those they have wronged, or to a society whose rules they have violated. An offer to pay damages or accept punishment without offering an apology would be considered insincere in Japan, Professor Rosett wrote. And I know I'm stepping into a minefield here, but I think we're all familiar with two other groups who handle apologies differently: men and women. Of course, there are many exceptions, but each gender tends to have a different style of apology, says Deborah Tannen, a linguist who has written many books about the different conversational styles of men and women. Women are inclined to say, "I'm sorry," more frequently than men, who often see apologizing as being put in a weakened position. Also, Ms. Tannen said, too often people men in particular feel they should have to apologize only for bad behavior, not for its outcome. She uses the example of a father who thought he was doing his grown daughter a favor; she wanted the contact information for an old high school boyfriend but didn't know how to get it. The father took it upon himself to call the boyfriend and passed on the information to his daughter. She was furious that her father had let her interest be known to her former beau. The father, bewildered, refused to apologize. In his eyes, he had done nothing wrong. But even if he didn't want to apologize for his behavior, Ms. Tannen said, he could apologize for the outcome for embarrassing his daughter, even inadvertently. But on the flip side, women are sometimes too quick to apologize, wanting to paper over real problems to make uncomfortable situations go away, Ms. Weeks said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Each spring, American Ballet Theater moves into the Metropolitan Opera House for eight weeks like a juggernaut. How do you fill that vast, nearly 4,000 seat theater for eight performances a week? Every year, the answer changes as the season progresses. Momentum seems to build throughout each season, this year in particular. Throngs have been flooding in for the final production, Alexei Ratmansky's "Whipped Cream," which closes on Saturday night. Such crowds were seldom seen in the opening week's performances of "Giselle" in May or the following month, when the house was too often underpopulated. That run of "Giselle" had other problems: Lighting was dim, and few dancers seemed interested in projecting to the Met's further reaches. Projection was also an issue last week, when I watched three performances of "Don Quixote" from the Family Circle, the theater's uppermost level of seats. It was instructive to see how several of the company's stars were, successfully, addressing a larger audience. Even so, few seemed to perform as if they knew the Family Circle existed. Beneath the shoulders, they relished the expanse of the Met's large stage. Their faces, however, kept focusing ahead as if on the classroom mirror, with no lift of the eyes and cheekbones. Ballet is a thrillingly multidimensional art: Too few dancers remember this. In the past decade, Ballet Theater has changed considerably: It's not long since the company catered to balletomanes who needed Russian names (Irina Dvorovenko, Natalia Osipova, Diana Vishneva and others); this season, Ms. Osipova's sole Giselle was the only remaining token of that. Instead, the presence today of such principals as Stella Abrera, Misty Copeland (now the company's main draw) and Hee Seo are helping it become an American exemplum of racial diversity. And these dancers have come up through the ranks.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, site of a lab where researchers are working with Ebola and other viruses. GALVESTON, Tex. Almost a decade ago, scientists from Canada and the United States reported that they had created a vaccine that was 100 percent effective in protecting monkeys against the Ebola virus. The results were published in a respected journal, and health officials called them exciting. The researchers said tests in people might start within two years, and a product could potentially be ready for licensing by 2010 or 2011. It never happened. The vaccine sat on a shelf. Only now is it undergoing the most basic safety tests in humans with nearly 5,000 people dead from Ebola and an epidemic raging out of control in West Africa. Its development stalled in part because Ebola is rare, and until now, outbreaks had infected only a few hundred people at a time. But experts also acknowledge that the absence of follow up on such a promising candidate reflects a broader failure to produce medicines and vaccines for diseases that afflict poor countries. Most drug companies have resisted spending the enormous sums needed to develop products useful mostly to countries with little ability to pay. Now, as the growing epidemic devastates West Africa and is seen as a potential threat to other regions as well, governments and aid groups have begun to open their wallets. A flurry of research to test drugs and vaccines is underway, with studies starting for several candidates, including the vaccine produced nearly a decade ago. With no vaccines or proven drugs available, the stepped up efforts are a desperate measure to stop a disease that has defied traditional means of containing it. "There's never been a big market for Ebola vaccines," said Thomas W. Geisbert, an Ebola expert here at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, and one of the developers of the vaccine that worked so well in monkeys. "So big pharma, who are they going to sell it to?" Dr. Geisbert added: "It takes a crisis sometimes to get people talking. 'O.K. We've got to do something here.' " Dr. James E. Crowe Jr., the director of a vaccine research center at Vanderbilt University, said that academic researchers who developed a prototype drug or vaccine that worked in animals often encountered a "biotech valley of death" in which no drug company would help them cross the finish line. To that point, the research may have cost a few million dollars, but tests in humans and scaling up production can cost hundreds of millions, and bringing a new vaccine all the way to market typically costs 1 billion to 1.5 billion, Dr. Crowe said. "Who's going to pay for that?" he asked. "People invest in order to get money back." The Ebola vaccine on which Dr. Geisbert collaborated is made from another virus, V.S.V., for vesicular stomatitis virus, which causes a mouth disease in cattle but rarely infects people. It had been used successfully in making other vaccines. The researchers altered V.S.V. by removing one of its genes rendering the virus harmless and inserting a gene from Ebola. The transplanted gene forces V.S.V. to sprout Ebola proteins on its surface. The proteins cannot cause illness, but they provoke an immune response that in monkeys, considered a good surrogate for humans, fought off the disease. The vaccine was actually produced in Winnipeg, Manitoba, by the Public Health Agency of Canada. The Canadian government patented it, and 800 to 1,000 vials of the vaccine were produced. In 2010, it licensed the vaccine, known as VSV EBOV, to NewLink Genetics in Ames, Iowa. The Canadian government donated the existing vials to the World Health Organization, and safety tests of the vaccine in healthy volunteers have begun. NewLink's product is one of two leading vaccines being tested. The other, which uses a cold virus that infects chimpanzees, was developed by researchers at the National Institutes of Health and GlaxoSmithKline. The first tests of an earlier version of it, employing a different cold virus, began in 2003. Several other vaccine candidates, not as far along, are also in the pipeline and may be ready for safety testing next year. Once any drugs or treatments pass the safety tests, they will be available for use in larger numbers of people, and health officials are grappling with whether they should be tested for efficacy in the traditional way, in which some people at risk are given placebos instead of the active drug. Governments and the military became interested in making vaccines against Ebola and a related virus, Marburg, during the 1990s after a Soviet defector said the Russians had found a way to weaponize Marburg and load it into warheads. Concerns intensified in 2001 after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and anthrax mailings. "The National Institutes of Health came up with a program called Partnerships in Biodefense that partnered researchers like me with companies, usually small companies," Dr. Geisbert said. The government money led to major advances in the laboratory, Dr. Geisbert said, but was insufficient to cover the huge costs of human trials. Nor could the small companies that were involved in the early studies in animals afford to pay for human trials. No finished product came to market. Dr. Geisbert moved on, working on treatments for Ebola and another version of the V.S.V. vaccine. For the vaccine work, his main collaborator has been Dr. Heinz Feldmann, the chief of virology at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Mont., part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The newer version of the vaccine uses a slightly different form of V.S.V., one that Dr. Geisbert said he thought might be less likely to cause side effects, and more likely to gain quick approval because it has been used as the basis for an H.I.V. vaccine and is known to the Food and Drug Administration. But the new version, VesiculoVax, made by Profectus Biosciences in Baltimore, has not yet been tested in humans. The V.S.V. products are live vaccines, with replicating viruses that may cause a reaction. It is not clear what level of side effects will be considered acceptable. Chills and nausea are possible, Dr. Geisbert said, but he added, "Who cares, if you survive Ebola?" Most vaccines are given to prevent disease before people are exposed to it, and the plan is to use Ebola vaccines that way. But the V.S.V. vaccines have also been shown to protect monkeys even after the animals have been exposed to a heavy dose of Ebola if given soon after exposure. Researchers hope that they will work that way for people, too. If they do, health workers and family members who have been in contact with a patient might be protected, instead of having to spend 21 days of dread, waiting to see if they get sick. Dr. Geisbert spends much of his time working with Ebola and other deadly viruses in a Biosafety Level 4 laboratory at the Galveston National Laboratory, where the researchers wear spacesuits that each come with an independent air supply, and visiting journalists are required not to report which floor the labs are on. This month, one of his tasks is to test the Profectus vaccine and an experimental treatment against the Ebola strain that is causing the current epidemic. The virus is from a species called Ebola Zaire, against which the products have already been shown to work. But different strains within a species can vary genetically by 2 percent to 7 percent, Dr. Geisbert said. Most of the time, those small variations do not matter, and a drug or treatment that works against one strain will work against all. But once in a while, the difference matters. "We don't know for 100 percent certainty until we prove it in animals," Dr. Geisbert said. "The companies I work with are smart. They want that answer sooner rather than later, before they go investing millions of dollars to put this into humans."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Shriver's intellect and talent, her political convictions and her impressive confidence are all on display in "Property: Stories Between Two Novellas," her assertive, frequently funny and altogether satisfying first collection of shorter fiction. The book's epigraph from E. M. Forster poses an overarching question: "What is the effect of property upon the character?" Shriver sinks her teeth into this query in the novellas that anchor both ends of the book and the 10 stories that shore up the middle. A woman buys a repossessed house from the bank only to have her life upended by ghosts from the evicted owner's past. A man's relationship with his father is forever altered by a squabble over PS160 and the price of an airmail stamp. A mother's desire for an empty nest leads her to bounce her unmotivated 32 year old son onto the street, making him a spokesman for the disenfranchised. A tube of ChapStick resolves a man's indecisiveness about seeing his difficult, dying father for the last time. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. In "The Standing Chandelier," the emotionally sophisticated, irony laced novella that opens the collection, a decades long, mostly platonic friendship between a woman named Jillian and a man named Weston ends when he gets engaged and agrees to his fiancee's demand that he stop seeing Jillian. The friendship, he realizes, is more important to him than he has cared to admit: "The more sizable a sacrifice his fiancee appeared to be demanding, the more amply it was demonstrated that she was right to demand it." The friends part amiably enough, but any lingering good feelings are reduced to rubble by an argument over an eccentric piece of art that both households consider their own. "The ties between the two parties had been severed. All that remained was stuff." Thus Jillian concludes that "she had nothing to lose by savaging his good opinion of her, and one thing to gain: her chandelier." Suspense here and elsewhere in the collection depends not on who gets the guy (or girl) but who gets the "stuff." Shriver's settings range from Brooklyn to Belfast to London, from Lexington, Va., to Somerville, Mass. She is equally adept at inhabiting male and female characters, and equally convincing with natives of the United States and Britain. (Not surprising, since she divides her time between Brooklyn and London.) While employment a subject usually touched on lightly in short stories plays a significant role throughout, Shriver favors characters who live on the fringes of traditional careers: an artist who eschews galleries and survives on pieced together odd jobs, who approaches "earning her keep like quilting"; an expat American freelance journalist who writes a chatty, low paying column called "Yankee Doodles"; an international couch surfer who secures hospitality through the diligent deployment of "brightness and enthusiasm." The most ambitious character is a corporate embezzler driven to despair by the luxuries he can suddenly afford with his ill gotten wealth. Despite this variety, "Property" feels more unified than many story collections, and reading it has many of the satisfactions of reading a novel. This is largely due to Shriver's commitment to exploring her theme. From one story to the next, the acquisition of things land, money, empty nests rarely leads to happiness and often stimulates character traits that might better be kept in check. As the disillusioned narrator of "Vermin" observes after she and her husband have come to regret buying a house they'd loved renting, "There may be such a thing as becoming too responsible." Readers who prefer stories in the minimalist mode with tersely evoked characters and murky endings should probably look elsewhere. Shriver favors a dense patina of detail. Her descriptions of rooms, wardrobes and appearances are full bodied. Her use of the Irish Good Friday Agreement of 1998 as a plot point had me rushing to Wikipedia. Shriver doesn't leave readers guessing about her characters' foibles. "The Subletter," the terrific, politically charged novella that closes the collection, begins with two pages of exposition on the protagonist's weakness: "The trouble wasn't that she was incapable of generosity, but that if she was generous then she remembered being generous ... and remembered generosity didn't seem truly generous, quite." "The Standing Chandelier" opens with five pages (delightful, sometimes hilarious pages, it should be noted) of the protagonist's feelings about being disliked: "On top of someone hating you, you cared that someone hated you and apparently you shouldn't. Caring made you even more hateable." Several stories conclude with a summary of what the future holds for the characters, in some cases death. If few of the people in these stories are best friend material ("Jillian had the kind of charm that wore off"), Shriver's humor and epigrammatic wit render most of them interesting: "A widow of 57 had both too much story left, and not enough. It was narratively awkward: an ellipsis of perhaps 30 years during which nothing big would happen." "Emer was a taker. Everywhere she went she would siphon off a little more than she gave back. The Emers of this world were levied on the whole species, like a tax." There are a few stories in this ample collection that seem inessential, and Shriver's fondness for abundance leaves a couple feeling a bit overstuffed. But her confident grasp of the material and her natural gifts as a storyteller will keep you in her spell and leave you, at the end, slightly altered. "I don't know if the moral of this story is that you should never buy a house," one narrator says. I don't know if that's quite the moral of "Property" either, but such is Shriver's power that I finished this persuasive and richly entertaining book wondering if I might not be better off selling mine.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Today, Louis Vuitton is a luxury fashion label, a status symbol that usually hangs from a shoulder or elegantly dangles from a wrist by way of a leather logoed handbag. But rewind to 1835, and the name belonged to a man who left his home at the age of 14 and began walking 280 miles from eastern France to Paris. Upon arriving two years later, he worked as a box maker and packer before starting his own company in 1854, designing ergonomic trunks or "specialty packing for fashion" as it was advertised for the wandering elite. Vuitton's "Trunk of 1906," with beechwood, brass corners, patent lock and monogram canvas exterior not only embodies the brand's history and sensibility, but is also the prototype for modern luggage, making it the most appropriate piece to welcome visitors into the new "Volez, Voguez, Voyagez" exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris that runs through Feb. 21. (The exhibition is expected to be shown in other cities in 2016, with Tokyo being a potential destination.) The extensive, nine room retrospective covers 160 years, four modes of transport and hundreds of signature pieces by a handful of Vuitton descendants and designers, all of which portray the brand's inventiveness and elegance. "We wanted to talk about the story of Louis Vuitton and to show how even contemporary pieces conform to past pieces," said Olivier Saillard, the director of the Palais Galliera Musee de la Mode in Paris and the show's curator. This explains why "Volez, Voguez, Voyagez" Fly, Sail, Journey is by no means chronological. While the exhibition still manages to unfold seamlessly from room to room, each of which is marked by themes like "Expeditions" and "Sophisticated Dandies" with elaborate set design from the stage director Robert Carsen; the most delightful displays are those that show a clear progression from "then" to "now." The transformative time lapse is realized in the placement of an aluminum gilded trunk from 1892 next to a chrome plated bronze sculpture of the Keepall bag from 2001 by the artist Sylvie Fleury. Be it air, train, boat or automobile, there was a sack to suit one's flight of fancy both in form and function. Whether it was the invention of a tumbler lock that allowed one unique key to unlock several pieces, or the durable woodwork of the stackable flat trunks, there wasn't a piece of clothing, shoe, hat, hairbrush or typewriter that didn't get its own carefully curated carryall. "Every life is a body of work," Mr. Saillard writes in the exhibition's extensive hardcover catalog from Rizzoli, available for 140 euros or about 151 at 1.07 to the euro, in the gift shop and online. "Louis Vuitton's life can be seen mirrored under the light of his work. The generations that succeeded him maintained that reflection because the radiance of a mission we call the art of living still shines." Some highlights (with pictures) from the exhibition: Designed in 1936 by Louis Vuitton's grandson, Gaston Louis, a publisher and journalist who eventually took over the business from his father, Georges, this 35 pound portable desk piece features space for a typewriter, books and other office items that all stayed in place once folded. According to the brand's extensive customer files, similar models were ordered by the American embassy and Ernest Hemingway. "I wanted to create a special atmosphere to show the art of writer, which is as important as fashion," Mr. Saillard said of the "Heures D'Absence" room where the piece is displayed. Originally designed to hold dirty laundry on long sailing trips, during which passengers often changed five times a day, this soft canvas bag from 1901 was the predecessor of the modern gym bag. "It's the grandfather of every bag you see in the world," Mr. Saillard said. This particular piece once belonged to Gaston Louis and therefore bears his tricolor V monogram, which became a house signature and is still in the line today. First appearing in the 1930s, this duffel like tote became the prototype for all weekend bags. "The Keepall is a kind of sport bag, which influenced many bags for fashion, but also for daily life," Mr. Saillard said. Originally constructed in cotton canvas, through the years this iconic, tube shaped sack also came in cowhide and has been reinterpreted by various artists and designers like Takashi Murakami and Yayoi Kusama. The exhibit includes 10 different models in four different rooms in the exhibition. The final room is dedicated to music, and features one of the few contemporary pieces this record box designed by Helmut Lang in 1996 to celebrate the centennial of the monogrammed canvas. "It was important for me to end the exhibition with music in order to indicate how there's some special commode for everything you want even the most vulnerable things you have to pack, like an instrument," Mr. Saillard said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Google Chromecast Review: A Streaming Device That Gets Better the More It Knows None The new Chromecast's selling point is helping you find shows and movies you might like. Once upon a time, watching TV involved picking up a remote control, pressing the power button and flipping through channels. Boy, have things changed. When you watch TV with the new 50 Chromecast streaming stick from Google, the search giant tries to find content that you may want to watch based on what it knows about you. Before you get started, it wants you to take these steps: 1. After plugging the streaming stick into the back of your TV, you press and hold two buttons on the white remote control. 2. On your smartphone, you download and open the Google Home app, log in with your Google account and enter the home address where you are using the Chromecast. 3. You give the app access to your smartphone's location data to help find the nearby Chromecast. (Wait, didn't you just share your home address?) 4. You give the Google Home app access to your phone camera to scan a bar code shown on the TV screen to link the app with the Chromecast hardware. (Wait, didn't you just give access to your location to help the phone find the Chromecast?) 5. You agree to accept a Google privacy policy and to waive any rights to sue Google, via an arbitration agreement. 6. You specify where the Chromecast is your living room, kitchen, bedroom or basement, for example. 7. You select your Wi Fi network to connect Chromecast to the internet. 8. You are presented with the option to share more information with Google to help improve the product and services. 9. Google asks you to record some voice samples so that its virtual assistant can recognize your voice. 10. You pick your streaming apps, like Netflix, YouTube TV and Disney . Rest assured, Google says you are providing this data so that it can speed up the setup process and show you personalized information, like the local weather and recommendations for TV shows and movies that you may enjoy. Sure beats flipping through a bunch of random TV channels, right? Well, here's how that went for me. Google's goal: to help the content find you. The new Chromecast and remote. First, a primer on what's new about this Chromecast, which was unveiled last week. The streaming stick includes a remote control and a software operating system for choosing content to watch, similar to Roku's streaming products and the Apple TV set top box. 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. With past versions of Google's streaming stick you would open a video on your phone and press a button to "cast" the content to the Chromecast, meaning the phone was essentially your remote. I downloaded my favorite streaming apps to the Chromecast: Netflix, YouTube, YouTube TV, Disney , Amazon Prime Video and HBO Max. The Chromecast then took information that Google knew about me to come up with a list of recommended programs on a page labeled "For you." The "For you" page is the main screen of the new Chromecast. Google gathered information about activities on my Google account, like my online searches and the YouTube videos I watched, to find content I may enjoy. All told, I was disappointed. Given how much Google knows about me, I was hoping it would do a better job at predicting what I would like to see. In the top row, labeled "Top picks for you," Google recommended that I watch "The Wendy Williams Show," a celebrity talk show, as well as "SportsCenter." (For the record, both my wife and I don't watch talk shows, and we're not sports fans.) It also recommended I check out "Wonder Park" and "Bigfoot Junior," both children's animated movies. (We don't have children.) A few of Google's recommendations were spot on. "Snowpiercer," a movie from my favorite Korean director, was a top pick. One row of recommendations was devoted to home improvement shows, which makes sense because I've been watching dozens of do it yourself repair videos to work on my house amid pandemic induced boredom. Another row presented cooking videos from YouTubers I frequently watch for inspiration in the kitchen. On the other hand, another row listed "Comedies about love," including several Adam Sandler movies like "Big Daddy" and "Mr. Deeds." (To put it lightly, I am no fan of Adam Sandler comedies.) Over all, the "For you" page felt like a grab bag of hits and misses. The Chromecast also has an "Apps" page that shows a simple grid of my streaming apps for me to open and find content by myself. That's generally how Roku and Apple TV work, and to me, that's still a better way to watch TV. So what was that all for? I described my experience to Google and pressed the company on why it needed so much information just to set up the Chromecast. The company said the setup process with the Google Home app was an optional shortcut to skip manually entering my Google account information and password with the remote control. Granting access to the location and camera sensors was a security requirement for the setup process. Sharing my home address, it turns out, was also optional, to help Google give updates on local information like the weather. As for the inconsistent recommendations, Google said that it made suggestions from a wide variety of signals of activity on Google's products, including entertainment related searches and programs added to my watch list, and that the picks would get better over time. So whom is the Chromecast for? I must confess that my struggle with the streaming era is never knowing what to watch. It's the paradox of choice: If we can pick from thousands of TV shows and movies, it's tough to be satisfied with whatever we choose. The Chromecast, if it had worked well for me, would have helped solve that problem. Yet I'm probably not the target audience: Over the years, I've taken steps to minimize the data I share with tech companies, including Google and Facebook, and that may be largely why the Chromecast's recommendations were off the mark. So the Chromecast may work for those who don't think twice about sharing information with Google. Come to think of it, that's plenty of people.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
"You can bring mindful awareness to all contexts, including being online." Bill Duane, a Google executive and meditation teacher who oversees the company's well being and performance learning programs. Take a moment before you log on to your phone or computer. Before posting anything on social media, ask yourself three questions: Is it necessary? Post only if the answer to all three is yes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
Upon learning that Presley's Stutz had been farmed out for promotional duty at a Nascar track, some Elvis fans were less than pleased. "It's sad that Elvis Presley Enterprises took the car out of the Graceland exhibit for this event," Robin Rosaaen, president and founder of the All The King's Things fan club in Las Vegas, said in a email. "I remember in the early years at Graceland when this car was out back under the carport area for the fans to enjoy up close and even sit in the drivers seat." Disappointment over how the car was used was not limited to veteran fans. "The car is a piece of history and should of been left alone," Will O'Rourke, 16, founder of an Elvis Presley fan club on Facebook, said in an email. "You can't take the Declaration of Independence and sign your name at the bottom of it, because it destroys the history behind it. I really don't like how the car left Graceland to be driven as some kind of promotion." Gary Hahn, vice president of marketing and media for Elvis Presley Enterprises, said in an email that it was his belief that, other than a member of the restoration team who took the car on a brief test drive after this year's preservation work was completed, no one had driven the car since Presley's last drive. He said the car was not restored, but "preserved" to bring it back to operating condition while keeping its Elvis era patina intact.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Sometimes at night, Pio (Pio Amato), a 14 year old Roma boy living on the rough edge of the southern Italian town of Gioia Tauro, sees the specter of his grandfather's horse wandering the streets. It goes without saying that Gioia Tauro, a beaten down zone of poverty and petty crime, is no place for such a noble animal. "When we were on the road, we were free," says Pio's grandfather glimpsed as a young man in a brief opening scene who watches his descendants struggle to hold onto the old ways of their wandering, proudly ungovernable kind. "A Ciambra," the second feature directed by Jonas Carpignano (the first was "Mediterranea," also set in Gioia Tauro), follows Pio's lurching movement toward manhood and observes his environment with a sympathetic, probing eye. The film, named for the battered apartment complex where Pio lives, provides fresh evidence of the continued vitality of the neorealist impulse as it tries to embed a fictional narrative in the actual world. It has the shape of a fable and the texture of a documentary. The actors are nonprofessionals playing versions of themselves. During the end credits, the frame is filled with more than a few dozen Amatos, Pio's onscreen (and Mr. Amato's real world) family. Kinship is the defining and also the confining fact of Pio's life. Home is a hive of siblings and cousins, presided over by Pio's mother, daughter of the semi mythic grandpa. Pio trails after his older brother, Cosimo (Damiano Amato), playing the familiar role of sidekick, mascot and occasional annoyance. The younger boy is a natural watcher, a close student of the ways of his elders, eager to emulate them even when he doesn't quite understand what's going on. After Cosimo is arrested, Pio tries to fill his shoes and apply the lessons he has absorbed. He steals luggage, ransoms stolen cars to their owners and contemplates bigger scores. He is cunning, though not always smart, and like many adolescents he vacillates between wild overconfidence and childlike naivete. He knows how to drive a car, but not how to read. He goes wherever he pleases, but is afraid of elevators and trains. He is rarely without a cigarette, a habit that apparently begins among boys in his family shortly after they're out of diapers. Mr. Amato's brooding man child features and skinny frame give physical expression to Pio's in between, half formed state.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Clutching a gray plastic suitcase filled with most of his belongings a blanket, a toothbrush, a pair of white sneakers and a comb Wang Sheng goes from factory to factory in southern China begging for a job. The answer is always no. Mr. Wang, 49, used to be able to find work in Shenzhen, a sprawling industrial megacity. But factories are turning him away because he is from Hubei Province, the center of China's coronavirus epidemic, even though he hasn't lived there in years. "There's nothing I can do," said Mr. Wang, who has only a few dollars left in savings, lives off plain noodles and rents a small room for about 60 a month. "I'm just by myself, isolated and helpless." China's roughly 300 million rural migrants have long lived on the margins of society, taking on grueling work for meager wages and limited access to public health care and education. But now they are among the hardest hit as China's leader, Xi Jinping, calls for a "people's war" to contain the virus and the authorities impose controls across broad swaths of the country. As outsiders, rural migrants, no matter where they are from, are an easy target. Many factories are afraid to restart operations in case their workers are carrying the virus, raising concerns that the government's controls could smother the economy. Local officials have barred many migrants from crossing city lines. Landlords have kicked them out of their apartments. Some are crammed into hotels or sleeping under bridges or on sidewalks. "We have struggled so much already," Liu Wen, 42, a factory worker in Zhengzhou, a city in central China, who was evicted from her apartment because she had returned from her husband's hometown in the southern province of Guangdong and her landlord worried she might be carrying the virus. She now is living with her husband and two children in a hotel. "Now we've lost hope." On Sunday, Mr. Xi acknowledged that the situation in China remained "grim and complex," but urged party officials to not only continue their efforts to contain the virus but also to focus on restarting production. "We must turn pressure into motivation, be good at turning crisis into opportunity, orderly restore production and living order," he said. Mr. Xi, already under scrutiny for the Chinese government's slow and erratic response to the coronavirus outbreak, now faces pressure to quell anger among low income families and dispel broader fears of an economic downturn. The party has long staked its legitimacy on the idea that it can deliver prosperity and protect the working class. "The Chinese Communist Party leadership does not like to be criticized for neglecting or abandoning workers," said Jane Duckett, the director of the Scottish Center for China Research at the University of Glasgow. "Their ideological underpinnings Marxism Leninism, socialism lie in being a party of the 'workers and peasants.'" Ms. Duckett said the party was probably wary of discontent among workers. Mr. Xi has said that the government should watch employment closely and that companies should avoid large scale layoffs. The virus, which has killed at least 2,400 people and sickened nearly 77,000 in China alone, has brought parts of the Chinese economy, the world's second largest, to a near standstill. While some factories have started up again in recent days, many are still closed or operating well below capacity, with parts in short supply and workers stranded hundreds of miles away. 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. Businesses across a variety of sectors manufacturing, construction and transportation have ordered their employees to stay home, usually without pay. That has created strains for many migrants, who earn barely enough to keep up with the rising cost of living in Chinese cities and often hold little in savings. While wages are low, migrants can still earn more in the cities than they would in the countryside, where jobs are scarce. They are willing to go to cities for a shot at a better life, even if they must live in crowded workers' dormitories or run down apartments. Yang Chengjun, 58, who lives in northeast China and sometimes works as a carpenter, says he and his son are living off the land now, relying on rice and vegetables they grow and struggling "just to stay alive." Mr. Yang worries the family will run out of money within a month. "The pressure on migrant workers was always great," Mr. Yang said. "The epidemic adds insult to injury." Their struggles have been made worse by local officials who have helped fuel a perception that rural migrants pose a threat to public health and should be treated as potential carriers of the virus. In some cities, migrants have been forced into quarantine in facilities run by the government, according to reports on social media. In others, like Wuxi in the east, workers from afar have been barred from entering and warned that they would be "seriously dealt with" if they resisted. China's strict population controls have worsened the plight of many migrant families. The Mao era household registration system, known as hukou, makes it difficult for people from the countryside to change their legal residence to cities. As a result, they are considered outsiders even if they have lived in cities for decades and have limited access to health care, schools, pensions and other social benefits. As the coronavirus has spread, some workers who have come down with pneumonia and other symptoms say they have been unable to find affordable care in major cities. While the government now provides free care to those found to have the coronavirus, many hospitals are overwhelmed and lack the resources to officially diagnose the virus. As a result, some migrant workers living in cities say they have been forced to pay thousands of dollars in medical expenses to treat sick relatives. In Hubei, where the outbreak began in December, many workers worry that the economic pain will continue for months or longer. The province, which is home to more than 10 million migrant workers, remains shut off from the rest of China, and business has ground to a halt. Huang Chuanyuan, a 46 year old construction worker in Hubei, has stopped buying meat to save money. His employer, a Chinese construction company, told him that he had no choice but to wait at home.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Either way it's a mess and not the way any Democrat wanted the party's voting to begin in an election year with stratospheric stakes. To excite the most Americans possible and have its best chance of toppling President Trump, the Democratic Party needs a sorting of candidates that's coherent, a system that inspires faith, a process that makes participants feel respected and heard. Iowa provided none of that on Monday night. Instead it staged a baffling spectacle resistant to any timely, definitive verdict. More than 18 hours after the actual, physical caucusing at hundreds of locations across the state had finished, there were still no official results, just resentments, recriminations and reports that a newly intricate manner of counting had proven laborious, a newly developed app for it hadn't worked as planned, a backup phone line had jammed and the campaigns had been asked to join a pair of emergency conference calls with state Democratic officials. The candidates were stunned. Their aides were livid. And Democrats nationwide, so hungry for the first signs of resolution in a primary with so many competitive candidates, waited and waited late into the night on Monday and surely, in most cases, gave up and went to bed. Not me. I was too aghast, agitated and curious to see how soon Trump and his enablers would exploit this turn of events. The inevitable answer: right away. Brad Parscale, the president's campaign manager, sent a tweet out before midnight Eastern time on Monday. "Democrat party meltdown," he wrote. "They can't even run a caucus and they want to run the government. No thank you." Lovely and not the last of it. Trump quickly amplified the gloating and taunting, which, after golf, are his favorite sports. On Tuesday morning he tweeted: "The Democrat Caucus is an unmitigated disaster. Nothing works, just like they ran the Country." Donald Trump Jr. used his own Twitter account to spread a conspiracy theory about a fraudulent outcome and sniped that "there's no question anymore that the greatest threat to US Elections is in fact Democrat incompetence." The Trumps, Parscale and the rest of their wretched gang will fold what happened in Iowa into their persistent narrative: Democrats are hapless, and the traditions and institutions that Americans are asked to trust don't deserve that deference. Iowa is a prompt for cynicism. Cynicism is President Trump's lifeblood. As predictable as Parscale's tweet were formal complaints about the credibility of the vote count from Democrats worried about their showing in the caucuses. One came from Joe Biden's campaign, which argued that "considerable flaws" should be examined and addressed before any results were accepted. And so the victor in Iowa may be denied his or her full measure of credit and exultation, the losers may be spared some of the usual damage and one or more of the candidates and his or her supporters may question the fairness and legitimacy of how the entire Democratic primary plays out. It's 2016 all over again. Wasn't the party supposed to learn from its mistakes? There's no excuse for this, not given how long the Iowa Democratic Party had to prepare, not given the privilege of the state's first in the nation status, not given how deeply invested tens of millions of distraught Americans are in the effort to get rid of an unfit, amoral president. That effort can't start like this. The debacle was a specific betrayal of Iowa's voters. I spent most of the past week in Iowa, where I was wowed and moved by how much thought Iowans were putting into which candidate they'd caucus for. They made clear that they saw Trump as an existential threat. So they weren't merely deciding on a favorite candidate. They were anointing a savior and anxiously unsure about who represented the surest and best hope. I'd never seen voters so twisted into knots. I'd never seen pundits so perplexed by the tea leaves in front of them and so hesitant to play fortuneteller. I'd never been so stymied for insight, so barren of instinct. This wasn't a political contest; it was a kidney stone. And by late Tuesday afternoon, it still hadn't passed. The candidates, too, were betrayed, cruelly and destructively so. They tried to work around the crazy ambiguity, delivering remarks to their supporters that neither declared victory nor conceded defeat, because no one was yet victorious and no one yet defeated not officially. "Somehow, some way, I'm going to get on a plane tonight to New Hampshire," Amy Klobuchar told the crowd at her election night party, and that "somehow, some way" was a nod to the surreal limbo in which the candidates languished. "We're going to walk out of here with our share of delegates," Biden told the crowd at his election night party. It was a safe statement, because it was an utterly and necessarily vacuous one. Bernie Sanders matched it: "I have a strong feeling that at some point, the results will be announced." As the hours ticked by, the Iowa Democratic Party released a statement saying that the delay was attributable to their diligence in resolving inconsistencies and that there was "not a hack or an intrusion" that should stoke doubts about the eventual vote tally. But doubts had already been stoked. They'll probably never go fully away. And in an era when "rigged" and "hoax" are the actual mantras of the American president, they're devastating. They're unaffordable. Pete Buttigieg spoke later than other candidates and seemed to have information that convinced him that he'd finished at or near the top. "An improbable hope became an undeniable reality," he said, referring to the long odds against a 38 year old, openly gay man rising this high in the Democratic primary. He gave a shout out to "the love of my life," his husband, Chasten. That moment was historic. But would it be remembered instead as premature and overconfident? Thanks, Iowa, for the clarity on that. Way to get the ball rolling. 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. I invite you to sign up for my free weekly email newsletter. You can follow me on Twitter ( FrankBruni).	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
The aftermath of an Aug. 4 robbery at the Eyewitness War Museum in Beek, the Netherlands. Thieves stole 1.5 million worth of World War II memorabilia, the museum's director said, including rare Nazi uniforms. It was 2 a.m. on a Tuesday when the raid began at the Eyewitness War Museum in the town of Beek, the Netherlands. First, a group of thieves teased open the museum's front gate. "You can see it on our cameras," Wim Seelen, the museum's director, said in a telephone interview. But then, they disappeared. An hour later, the burglars returned in several estate cars. In a scene reminiscent of a heist movie, they spread out tires across the highway that runs past the museum to create a roadblock, and parked a fake police car beside it, so it looked official. Over the next five minutes, the group maybe 12 people in total, Mr. Seelen said battered down the museum's front door, broke display cabinets and took what they'd come for: nine mannequins wearing rare Nazi uniforms. The outfits included one worn by Hitler's personal chef, and another by a high ranking member of the S.S. The robbers took other items of World War II memorabilia, Mr. Seelen said, with the haul worth about 1.5 million in total. "It was done with military precision," he added. The museum's alarms went off, but the police held up by the roadblock arrived too late to catch anyone. "Of course, I'm terrified it will happen again," Mr. Seelen said. The Aug. 4 raid in Beek was only the most dramatic in a string of recent robberies from World War II museums in Europe, and the burglaries are spreading panic among similar institutions. Since March, four museums in the Netherlands and Denmark have been broken into, and memorabilia, including Nazi uniforms, has been stolen. The most recent raid took place on Nov. 3, when robbers broke through a window at the German Museum North Schleswig, in southern Denmark, and made off with three mannequins in Nazi outfits. Administrators from all four of the burglarized institutions said in telephone interviews that they believed the thieves were acting on the orders of collectors looking to get their hands on rare Nazi memorabilia. But they were uncertain whether the robberies were carried out by the same group, or were simply part of a worrying trend. Officers of the Dutch and Danish police said in telephone interviews that they had no suspects in any of the robberies, but were looking for patterns. Richard Bronswijk of the Dutch police's art crime unit, said his team had two theories: that wealthy collectors in Russia or Eastern Europe had ordered the robberies, or that they were undertaken by supporters of the far right. The second theory was less likely, he added, "as those guys don't have much money, and like to buy replicas." The raid at the Eyewitness War Museum was incredibly professional, he said. "They were really like 'Ocean's Twelve,'" he added, referring to the Hollywood heist movie. The Netherlands and Denmark, which were both occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II, have numerous small, private and state funded museums devoted to the history of that conflict. Many have glass display cases filled with memorabilia including weapons, and dioramas depicting scenes from the war, with mannequins in original uniforms. There are around 100 in the Netherlands alone, Mr. Seelen estimated. Concern is growing in Denmark, too. "I'm sure every museum's taking precautions," Henrik Skov Kristensen, the director of the Froslev Camp Museum, said in a telephone interview. "But if someone's determined to do something like this, they will." Mr. Kristensen's museum, set in a former prison camp in Denmark, was robbed in March. The burglars also took S.S. uniforms. After finding no leads, the Danish police closed the investigation in April, he said. Giel van Wassenhove, a Belgian dealer in military memorabilia, said in a telephone interview that the value of Nazi items had been rising for years. "The stuff that's being stolen is all very desirable, and the prices are going crazy," he said. "Everyone knows if it's got a Nazi emblem on it, its price is high." An S.S. uniform could fetch anywhere from 3,500 to 35,000, he said. In the two Dutch robberies, thieves stole a special rifle, the "F.G. 42," which was used by Nazi paratroopers, Mr. van Wassenhove said. A decade ago, he said, that gun was worth about 60,000; today, it is worth more than 175,000. But Mr. van Wassenhove played down suggestions that a boom in far right collectors was driving the soaring prices. Most buyers were investors simply chasing a profit, he said. Many museums might not realize the value of objects in their collections, Mr. van Wassenhove added. Those that do are not taking any chances: Ms. Moens of the Arnhem War Museum said that, in addition to installing anti tank barriers, the museum had taken all its Nazi uniforms off display. In October, the War Museum Overloon returned two rare books it had borrowed from an Amsterdam institute, including a "Book of the Dead" listing 1,500 victims of the Holocaust at Auschwitz. Janneke Kennis, a spokeswoman for the museum, said the museum feared the books could be targeted by thieves. Mr. Seelen said the raid at the Eyewitness Museum had been so devastating that, for weeks afterward, he considered closing down. He said he knew he would never see the items again. But World War II museums are not just homes for memorabilia, he said: they play an important educational role. "The Second World War was a period of so much suffering that we have to tell the story of it, to make sure it never ever happens again," he said. "I'm not going to quit telling that story."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
In the present day, Al and Earn have come to a crossroads. Al's ready to level up in his career and Earn is little more than dead weight. "FUBU" offers the first substantial glimpse into their past, revealing that Al has a decades old history of carrying his cousin. This week, we're flashing back to the late '90s, where a teenage Earn is stuck shopping with his mother. As any bored kid would do, he wanders off to explore something more interesting than down market home decor (though he's a little long in the tooth for playfully plowing through the racks the way he does). He can't believe his luck when he stumbles upon a neon yellow FUBU jersey, a rare hip hop fashion find amid the store's non designer dreck. The next morning, Earn's so eager to show off his newly purchased status symbol that he's wide eyed and alert before his alarm clock even sounds. He grins all the way to the school bus stop, no doubt triggering instant onset nostalgia for anyone who ever cherished that adolescent fashion "first" be it a piece of real jewelry, a pair of de rigueur sneakers or a designer purse. He arrives at school to a chorus of exactly the kind of external validation he'd been craving. More than just impressing his peers, he manages to get a smile and a compliment from his crush, an epic feat for a teen who hasn't yet infiltrated the in crowd. His swelling ego gets punctured by the entrance of classmate Devon, who's wearing the same shirt. But not exactly the same, and after the class clown notices and crows that one of the boys must be sporting a knockoff, the question of "Who has the fake FUBU?" becomes a source of schoolwide intrigue. While Earn's stewing in his anxiety because he knows his is the likely counterfeit his cousin is in the principal's office, keeping calm in the face of weighty allegations. "Do you know why you're here today, Alfred?" the principal asks. A fellow student has accused him of stealing, but the charge is small stuff that Al refuses to sweat. He knows exactly which loophole to exploit in order to avoid punishment and gets off the hook with ease. From this we learn three things: Even in his youth, Al was plain spoken and blunt; he's a veteran at hustling contraband; and he's long since figured out the system and his role in it. Earn possesses none of this prowess and that's why his day continues to be a stomach churner. Even as he's flexing his brain power in biology class ("You're pretty smart," his cute female lab partner tells him), he shows he's clueless when it comes to maneuvering the school's social minefields. "If it's fake, everybody's gonna roast me ... forever," he says to a friend, dreading the cruel nicknames he'll have to endure. Being white and, thus, not beholden to the same code of cultural conduct, the friend simply shrugs and says, "It doesn't seem like a big deal to me. I've worn this shirt twice this week." Everyone else seems fixated on Earn's designer drama, from the object of his affection to upperclassmen to cafeteria workers. FUBU got its start by promoting a sense of black unity it's an acronym for "For Us, By Us" but that message fell on deaf ears here. Earn's peers were determined to delineate between the haves and have nots and in order to protect himself from being outed as the latter, he needed that name brand as armor. And when a single loose thread threatened to unravel everything, he turned to Alfred for counsel. "I'm not cool like you," Earn says, scanning the hallway for oncoming tormentors. (He tells Al the shirt came from the sale rack at Marshalls, though it looked more like a secondhand store than a discount retailer.) "What should I do? I'm freakin' out!" We've seen this dynamic before in "Money Bag Shawty," when Earn couldn't even buy respect. He repeatedly turns to Al to help him obtain the street cred that's clearly been eluding him his whole life. Wise beyond his years, young Al recommends denying the shirt is phony, regardless of what any bullies claim. "Confidence is key," he tells him. As ever, Earn hears Al, but doesn't listen to him. When the resident style aficionado, Johnny, fingers him as the fake Devon earned authenticity points for his shirt's "Made in China" tag Earn braces himself for a barrage of ridicule. Which is when Al comes to his rescue, flipping the script on Johnny's ruling with some of that aforementioned confidence (as well as a little racism). "Of course this fool's gonna say 'Made in China.' He's Chinese," Al says. It's sound enough reasoning for the easily swayed crowd and they set off hazing Devon relentlessly. ("I'm not Chinese, I'm Filipino," Johnny clarifies, but no one cares.) There's no heartwarming family bonding moment afterward. In fact, the cousins barely even share a glance after this entire exchange. Earn simply slinks off to the school bus, gray hoodie zipped all the way to the top, and watches silently as Devon takes a heaping helping of undeserved humiliation. The next day, it's revealed that Devon committed suicide. In addition to the hazing, he'd been coping with his parents' divorce; the combination proved too much for him to bear. The class clown stifles a giggle, the biology teacher holds back tears and Earn just sits there wordlessly blinking, a habit he's kept up over the years. He arrives home to a concerned mother and aunt, who've heard about the death. As they clip coupons, they rattle off life advice to him and Al, who's watching TV in the next room. "People will bully you your whole life, if you let 'em," Al's mother says. "You gotta stand up for yourself." "You and your cousin gotta look out for each other," Earn's mother adds. As it turns out, they've been bound to this advice for too long and, lately, it's been to Al's detriment. Earn has spent years faking it, but has yet to make it. And now, seeing how long Al has had his back, it's clear why he was reluctant to work with Earn in the first place and is eager to finally shake him off. The period setting meant Throwback Thursday was in full effect musically, with tracks by Tracy Chapman, The Pharcyde, the recently departed Craig Mack, Nas (with Lauryn Hill) and even a late '80s hit by Al B. Sure! flooding this episode. Though there is a broad mishmash of '90s apparel and music, it seems safe to carbon date the year of this flashback as 1998, judging by the Outkast "Aquemini" poster hanging near Earn's bed. That's also the year that Daymond John's streetwear label hit its peak. It's surprising to learn that Al was enrolled in JROTC. He doesn't seem the type to go in for all the program's rules and rigorousness. There must have been some Bibby ish shenanigans going on behind the scenes because the class clown's haircut went from "Fresh Prince" fade during one scene to angular Bobby Brown asymmetry in the next.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Putin and Xi Herald the Virtues of Globalism, Critiquing the U.S. on Trade ST. PETERSBURG, Russia In back to back speeches at an investment conference Friday, the leaders of Russia and China cast themselves as the champions of free markets and global trade, an overt show of opposition to what they portrayed as the United States' retreat into protectionism with sanctions and tariffs. President Xi Jinping of China spoke expansively about his country's firm support for globalization and open borders, saying that "we all must work to bring about a harmonious world." In his speech, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia took a much darker turn, hinting that trade wars could turn into real wars. He argued that the United States, after decades of "pretending" to promote free markets, had been turning its back on them because powerful economic competitors had emerged, threatening America's dominance. Together, the two leaders' remarks highlighted the strengthening ties between Russia and China as their relations with the United States sour. Western countries, led by the United States, have imposed sanctions on Russia in the wake of election interference, a military incursion in Ukraine and a series of human rights abuses. Since early 2018, the Trump administration has placed tariffs on more than 250 billion worth of Chinese imports and has threatened a further round on roughly 300 billion worth of goods, saying it has engaged in unfair trade practices. On Friday, Mr. Xi argued that nations must preserve and improve trade rules rather than throw them out over what he suggested were minor irritants. "If you are unhappy with fleas in your fur coat, you should not throw the fur coat in the oven," he said, according to an official translation. "The current multilateral trade system has to be protected." 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. Certainly, not everyone benefits from a level playing field, Mr. Xi added wryly, arguing in defense of the world's existing trade rules that allow for low tariffs, once propped up by the United States. The United States' trade policy left an opening for two leaders who have previously found themselves on the receiving end of such criticism. China has been roundly accused of stealing intellectual property, and one of its largest technology companies, Huawei, has been facing restrictions around the world. Russia has nationalized energy companies as oil made up an increasingly larger portion of its exports. The Kremlin heavily promotes the annual investment conference held this week, the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, as a way to foster foreign investment. The American ambassador, Jon M. Huntsman Jr., boycotted this year's conference after the arrest of an American banker in February, which sent a chill through Western investor circles. At the same time, relations between Russia and China have been warming. Mr. Putin has pushed to increase cooperation with Asia over the last five years in the wake of sanctions and other efforts to isolate Russia after its annexation of Crimea and attempt to destabilize Ukraine. Russia recently released data that showed that trade between Russia and China grew 108 billion last year, almost a 25 percent increase from the year before a figure buoyed by rising oil prices. Friday was the final day of Mr. Xi's three day visit to Russia. On Wednesday, he said that "President Putin is for me a best friend." The next day, Mr. Putin took Mr. Xi on a boat tour around the canals of St. Petersburg. "We hated to leave, as there are so many issues to discuss," Mr. Putin said of that meeting. But when he was asked at the conference on Friday if he would take sides in the trade war between the United States and China, Mr. Putin said he was citing a Chinese proverb that "when tigers fight in the valley, the smart monkey sits aside and waits to see who wins."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
A College Athlete Calls His Coach to Opt Out. And Ends Up on the Outs. College athletes have begun challenging a longstanding pillar, that the college sports industrial complex must hum along as if straight from the pages of "Das Kapital" on the fuel of exploited labor. Their labor. Yet, to better understand how the modern day dynamic works and why players are more stridently calling for a voice in matters like social justice, how their images are used, straight up pay and playing during the pandemic all that's necessary is to listen to a five minute, nine second recording of a phone call between Nick Rolovich, the new football coach at Washington State, and Kassidy Woods, a redshirt sophomore receiver. It lays clear not with an iron fist, but a velvet hammer just who is in charge. "Kass, how are you doing? What's up?" Woods, who was competing for a starting position, had called to tell Rolovich that he was opting out of the season. Woods explained that he had been diagnosed with the sickle cell trait when he enrolled at Washington State and with so much uncertainty about the coronavirus's lingering effects, he did not feel comfortable playing. "I've got nothing wrong with that," Rolovich replied. Then he asked Woods a question: was he joining the Pac 12 Conference unity group? Rolovich was referring to the Pac 12 football players who announced Sunday they were threatening to sit out the season unless their demands, including more concrete health and safety protocols and measures that would amount to a redistribution of much of the wealth that players generate for their schools, were met. Well, the coach said, that would be a problem. Woods's scholarship would be honored for this year, as is required for anyone who opts out for health reasons, but if he was part of this organized effort, it was going to be handled differently, the coach said. Woods could not work out with the team because it would send a mixed message and his locker should be emptied by Monday. Rolovich then urged Woods to tell others they would face the same consequences. (Dallas Hobbs, a redshirt junior defensive end, soon found out he needed to empty his locker, too, he said.) And then the conversation concluded as if it they had discussed dessert options in the dining hall. "All right. Appreciate you, coach," Woods said. When I spoke with Woods on Monday he had sent me a recording of the phone call on Sunday night he said he was devastated, but resolute. He had hoped to become a starter this season and work toward a career in the N.F.L., and had no complaints about his place on the team. Indeed, Woods was emerging as a leader. He (along with Hobbs) represented the football team on the Student Athlete Advisory Committee, served as the social chair of the recently formed Black Student Athlete Association, and represented Washington State at the Black Student Athlete Summit in January at the University of Texas. And Woods also served as the team's unofficial barber, commandeering a chair in the Cougars' athletic complex and putting to use the skills his mother, a hairdresser, taught him. He'd been introduced to Washington State President Kirk Schultz through a Black Student Athlete Association video conference call and had built up a relationship with the athletic director, Pat Chun. But by Monday, Woods said he felt abandoned. He'd called Chun hoping he could still be part of the team, but Woods said the athletic director backed the coach. What also upset him, he said, is that several teammates were cowed into not opting out because he said they felt threatened. "A lot of them have reached out 'Man, I'm sorry,'" Woods said. "If you're here for me, just opt out. If we all did, what is he going to do cut everybody from the team? You say you love me, say I'm your brother, but me and Dallas are pretty much ostracized from the team." He added: "It's all about the movement. Me and Dallas have been nothing but a service to Washington State. Our coaches don't have anything bad to say about me. I don't have anything bad to say about them except for dismissing me for being part of this movement." Woods said his disquiet goes back to late June, when a teammate he was living with texted several days before Woods headed back to campus to say he had tested positive for the coronavirus. Woods said nobody from the school notified him or of any other cases. He also expressed discomfort with signing a liability waiver when he reported for voluntary workouts on July 1. And when Washington State announced on July 23 that virtually all learning would be remote, Woods said he and his teammates wondered why they were on campus preparing for football. "I knew I was standing up for something," Woods said. "You don't really know how it's going to go." Woods's feelings of abandonment, though, are not complete. He said he has received support from players around the country. And his parents and his six siblings have firmly encouraged him. In fact, his mother, Jerline, made public her son's circumstance as a rebuttal to a reporter who tweeted that no players had been cut. "You're putting all this on your back a target maybe teams don't touch you," said his father John Woods Jr., a basketball captain at Missouri in the late 1990s, who encouraged his son to make the recording public. But he said that times are different. "He's just standing up for his First Amendment rights that need to be addressed," his father said. "He didn't do anything wrong and he stands by that. Twenty five years ago, we wanted to do that, but now they've got this platform where it's OK." He continued: "We can't just dribble, be quiet, run, you've got your scholarship you should be happy. You can't get away with that and intimidate players into not saying those things and make them feel like, 'oh, it's me.' Those days are over."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Re "For Jackie Robinson's Centennial, a Display of Rarely Seen Photographs," Jan. 31: In my 80s now. The special section about Jackie Robinson is a forever treasure. In my boyhood in Logansport, Ind., a childhood friend of my father's was Johnny (Red) Corriden, who made the big leagues and was a Brooklyn Dodgers coach in the 1940s. At the end of the season, he would stop by our home in Logansport, and each visit Red would say, "Here Johnny" and present me with a brand new official major league baseball. This writer, only 7 when this started and 1,000 miles from Brooklyn, became a lifelong Dodgers fan. Along came 1946, and Robinson was at Montreal. Everything possible was read about him, and then came 1947. (Corriden by then was a Yankees coach.) My local drugstore for some wild reason had a Jackie Robinson comic book for sale. With 10 cents from my allowance, I got the comic book and was reading it on the front porch when my father, a white man born in 1891, saw me with it and said, "Son, it's all right that you root for that colored and all right that you read that comic book, but do not let anyone know about this." For a 10 year old who believed that his parents were always right, there was stunning mystification. In the early spring of 1947, we rode the train to Chicago to see the Dodgers play the Cubs. We had good seats near the visitors' dugout (somehow Corriden arranged this, even though he was with the Yankees). As not everyone knows, Robinson played first base his rookie year. When he stepped out of the dugout, in the Dodgers' traveling grays, and made his pigeon toed trot to first base, all at once two things were known by me: My all time sports hero was right before my eyes, and my father had feet of clay. This watershed moment has affected my views about civility forever. On the 40th anniversary of Robinson's rookie year, I sent a short note to Rachel Robinson, Jackie's widow, simply stating that his heroism had reached and forever touched a 10 year old a thousand miles away. My fanatical loyalty to the distant Brooklyn Dodgers led to many fights and much peer mockery (as the Dodgers lost too many World Series) when I was 6 in a 1950 Larchmont, N.Y., neighborhood of Yankees fans. Jackie Robinson, my hero, ran faster, hit more cannily, executed double plays and taunted opposition pitchers and infielders with greater skill, guts and swagger than anyone else in the game (to the best of my unstatistical knowledge). Stealing home, to my later Little Leaguer's mind, was nearly impossible, but Robinson succeeded 20 times and attempted even more. At first, I did not know his race. I did not understand such categories. He was just the greatest ballplayer. A little older, I knew better and learned that getting to first base was only one of the difficulties that faced my American hero (in every sense of that word). So when "next year" became "this year" (some readers will understand that phrase), tears came to my eyes. When the Dodgers moved to L.A., it happened again. When Jackie Robinson died young, I wept. When I read The Times's special section, once more I cried. As deserving as Jackie Robinson is of all the attention he has received, it is a shame that Larry Doby is all but ignored. Doby broke the color barrier in the American League two months after Robinson broke in with the Dodgers. He faced all the same difficulties as Robinson, overcame all the same hurdles and persevered to have a great career, helping Cleveland win the 1948 World Series. Yet we see no biopics or retrospectives of Doby. No. 42 has been retired from baseball, but No. 14 goes unhonored. Perhaps playing in New York is the reason for the difference. But whatever the reason, there is no doubt that Doby is in fact deserving of recognition to the same degree as Robinson.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Credit...Daniel Dorsa for The New York Times No one playing Bob Fosse could feel like a good dancer. Not even Sam Rockwell, who can shimmy so well that many of his movie characters cannot make it to the end of a film without busting a move. He improvised slinky malefactor slides for his villains in "Charlie's Angels" and "Iron Man 2." The way he grooved through a diner in a Flight Facilities music video was reminiscent of Christopher Walken's cool dance number for Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice." Mr. Rockwell danced his "Saturday Night Live" monologue with top hat and cane and did a split in a fitted suit on "The Tonight Show." And at the Vanity Fair Oscar party in February, he and his girlfriend, the actress Leslie Bibb, kicked off a dance circle that led to Glenn Close tearing up the floor in a glittering jumpsuit. "Leslie's a pretty good hoofer," Mr. Rockwell said about his tall, lithe girlfriend, who played Will Ferrell's wife in "Talladega Nights" and has a coming series on Netflix as a superhero mom. "She's got that kind of Ann Reinking frame, and she can actually krump a little." The actor, 50, looked beat when I met him one recent Saturday afternoon at the Bowery Hotel to talk about his latest project, "Fosse/Verdon," an eight part series on FX. It also stars Michelle Williams, as Gwen Verdon, and was conjured by Lin Manuel Miranda and Thomas Kail, who directed "Hamilton" and "In the Heights," and the producer Steven Levenson. Nicole Fosse, the daughter of the two dancers who embodied Broadway razzle dazzle, is also a producer. It is based on Sam Wasson's biography "Fosse." Like Fosse and Verdon, Mr. Rockwell was exposed to show business early. Both parents were aspiring actors. He picked up some moves in middle school in San Francisco. He wanted to get away from "a white supremacist group," and started hanging out with "a crowd that wanted to dance. We went to high school dances and it was when 'Footloose' and Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' album was out. And break dancing. It was a way to meet girls, and I just kind of got into it, got into James Brown." When they began making the series, Mr. Rockwell recalled, "I was cocky and I said, 'I can dance,' so I went into this room and I tried to keep up, and it became apparent pretty fast that I am not a real dancer. And even though I have rhythm and I can move, picking up choreography like that is a different thing. Doing ballet, jazz, tap since you were 6 is different than what I do." He went for intensive lessons in fundamental tap dancing and Fosse 101. "Tap is hard," he said. And he had to shave his head to accommodate the hairpiece of Fosse's stringy comb over. Fosse changed movies and Broadway forever, inventing an original American dance idiom: syncopated, tiny, isolated movements with shades of burlesque and showbiz with a capital S. "He added a dark sparkle, which is a hard thing to do in dance, to add negative feelings to something exuberant and vital," Mr. Wasson told me. Just as Fosse was influenced by Charlie Chaplin (the bowler hat and "Sweet Charity" moves), Groucho Marx (the walk in "Steam Heat" in "Pajama Game") and Fred Astaire ("Dancin' Man"), he influenced many others; homages easy to discern in videos by Beyonce, Usher, Justin Timberlake, Madonna, Lady Gaga and Michael Jackson, who tried to get Fosse to direct the "Thriller" video. (See Fosse play the Snake in "The Little Prince" to see what Jackson adapted.) He said that his acting coach referenced "Dead Ringers," the movie in which Jeremy Irons plays creepy twins, as a good model for Fosse and Verdon. "It's a complex romance," Mr. Rockwell said. "It's almost like they're twins. There's a symbiotic thing with them that transcends, not just a romantic relationship, it's almost like they're joined at the hip." Just as Verdon left her baby son with her parents to return to dancing, Mr. Rockwell's mother moved back to New York to pursue her performing career after her divorce, leaving 5 year old Sam to be raised by his father, except in summer, when Sam joined her in New York. He would go along when she did singing telegrams. (Once, she sang to Jack Lemmon.) Mr. Kail noted the irony that the great success of Verdon and Fosse in "Damn Yankees" provided the template for the couple's Faustian bargain. Fosse helped create Verdon as a leading lady when he choreographed her "Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets" dance as the devil's temptress seducing an older baseball player in Washington to sell his soul to regain his youth. That's when the dancers fell in love and he left his second wife, Joan McCracken, also a musical comedy star on Broadway. He hurt Verdon with his other women, but she kept working with him and she was with him when he died in D.C. at 60 from a heart attack just before the opening night of a "Sweet Charity" revival. Mr. Rockwell, who has now transcended his reputation as the quirky sidekick, is drawn toward gray. He was surprised by the backlash at the idea that his racist cop in "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" seemed to be redeemed at the end of the movie (the role won him a Golden Globe and an Oscar for best supporting actor), but "I can't worry about that." He padded himself up again for "Best of Enemies," out in theaters next week, playing another porky racist who tangles with a strong woman and comes out a better person. There is unlikely to be the same blowback because Mr. Rockwell is playing a real person, an exalted grand cyclops of a Ku Klux Klan group in Durham, N.C., who becomes a convert to civil rights activism thanks to an African American woman played by Taraji P. Henson. "Taraji is supercool," he said. "We graduated high school the same year. We know the same songs." They bonded over a shared appreciation of music, especially Doug E. Fresh's 'La Di Da Di.'" He said they were moved by the scalding spectacle of Charlottesville, Va., to make the movie. "Obviously, racism is still very much alive, you know?" he said. "And you have to continue to tell these stories. I know that 'Do the Right Thing' and 'Mississippi Burning' had a big effect on me when I grew up. So if I can contribute in that manner, then that's a good thing." As Mr. Rockwell likes to say, you don't have to be an ass to play an ass. Maybe because he played a 10 year old Rick once in an East Village improv comedy skit to his mother's Ilsa, the actor is a great proselytizer for therapy. He even asks his shrink for advice on how to think of his characters. His partner in crime in "Charlie's Angels," Kelly Lynch, said Mr. Rockwell is "a doll" whose strength is his combination of "super chill" and vulnerable. "He can slide into dark characters because he doesn't judge them," she said. "A lot of actors would say, 'Ick, I don't like this guy.'" Mr. Rockwell said he doesn't believe that his character in "Three Billboards" is truly redeemed. "I think he's on his way to something. But it's like the end of 'Good Will Hunting,' when Matt Damon cries in Robin Williams's arms, and then he drives off to find Minnie Driver. It's like he's done working on himself. Like, 'Oh, no more therapy.' You know? You don't just cry and then not go to therapy anymore. So it's the same thing with Dixon. He's on his way to trying to be a better person. But he's not done working on himself, and certainly Frances's character has a lot of work to do on herself. They're both screwed up." RELATED: Sam Rockwell shares a bit more about himself. I asked him what he thinks happened to the characters played by him and Frances McDormand on that road trip to track down a rapist. "My theory is, maybe they went to a bar to get a little liquid courage to kill the guy, then they ended up getting drunk and making out," he said. "I don't think they killed the guy." I asked Martin McDonagh, the director and writer of the movie, what he thinks about that coda. Mr. McDonagh recoiled. "I don't want to picture them fooling around," he said. "That would be a dangerous little romance." Mr. Rockwell has said he would let himself be eaten alive by rats to work with Mr. McDonagh. The Irishman said that he admires Mr. Rockwell because, while he is "the loveliest, nicest guy I've worked with, so smart and generous and a joy to be around," he brings a "frisson of danger" to his performances. George Clooney seconded this sentiment. He gave Mr. Rockwell his breakthrough role, in "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," in which Chuck Barris, the creator of "The Gong Show," claimed to be a C.I.A. assassin. "Sam is easily one of the best actors I've ever seen," Mr. Clooney told me. "His ability to make you root for characters that ordinarily would be despised is uncanny." Mr. Clooney concluded: "He makes it all seem so effortless. Come to think of it, I hate him." Thomas Kail compared Mr. Rockwell to a jazz musician, who only makes surprising riffs after "he takes every scene and examines it and scrutinizes it and marinates in it." That explains his pitch perfect portrayal of George W. Bush in "Vice," for which he was also nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar. "I began to find him really charming," Mr. Rockwell said, adding that the key to impersonating W. was adding "a little Elvis, a thing in the lip. It actually gave me a little bit of a muscle twitch in my chin." Ms. Bibb joked on the red carpet for the Golden Globes about how disturbing she found it, when he was playing that role, to be sexually attracted to Bush. Mr. Rockwell said that the thing he loves about Ms. Bibb, who sold her place in Los Angeles to move into his East Village apartment, is that she makes him laugh. When he first saw her act in a short film, he said, it seemed as though "Jessica Lange and a young Mary Tyler Moore and Carol Burnett all had a baby." He added: "She's a pistol. She definitely gives me a run for my money, challenges me. It's never boring." When they met more than a decade ago, in the lobby of Chateau Marmont, they flirted and he left his number with the maitre d' to give to her. He said that with two actors, it's tricky. "You have to take turns being Elvis and Cher. You know what I mean. Like today, I'm on doggy duty." I asked if he still doesn't want kids. "Yeah, me and Leslie, we're not doing the kid thing," he said. "It's not my jam. It's not my thing. I'm more of an uncle type." I wondered if it has to do with his childhood, when his parents broke up and he stayed with his father in San Francisco, while his bohemian mother moved to New York to pursue her acting career. (New York magazine once wrote that Mr. Rockwell had the air of having been raised by wolves "but very considerate wolves who write thank you notes after they've eaten all your sheep.") "It could be, but these days everybody comes from a broken home," he replied. "My mom, she really is a good mother and she did the best she could. I think I'm too selfish to be a father. I think I know what it takes. You know? I just don't want to put a kid through my lifestyle is a little crazy, and I think Leslie feels a similar way and frankly I'm too selfish. I want to have my life and wake up when I want to wake up. I'd rather take care of the dog and take care of Leslie and take care of myself." What if he was with someone who wanted kids? I wondered. "It probably wouldn't have worked out," he said with a shrug. I noted that not much seems to have changed since his Oscar. He's still in the same East Village pad.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
ACCRINGTON, England Andy Holt is standing at the door to the bar, watching the celebrations unfold. On the field, Accrington Stanley's players are in the middle of an impromptu lap of honor, pumping their fists and beaming broad smiles. John Coleman, their manager, is conducting the crowd's chanting, soaking in their adulation. Holt, the club's owner, does not seek to join them, to bask in their reflected glory. But still, as fans start to leave, a steady stream heads toward him, hands outstretched, wanting to offer their congratulations, or share their glee. He greets each one like an old friend. "You should come in here, it's only a pound a pint," he tells one. Another is reassured that the prize money for the victory will be reinvested in the team. "That's PS135,000, that is," he says. "It'll go straight into the squad." On one level, that is what the F.A. Cup means to a club like Accrington Stanley, and to a chairman like Holt. Though Coleman's team is now thriving in League One English soccer's third tier it is doing so on a fourth tier budget. By beating Ipswich Town, which competes a division higher, in the third round of the world's oldest cup competition, Accrington has earned around a tenth of its annual revenue in a single day. For Holt, the bigger thrill, though, is what may be to come. Should Accrington be drawn to face one of the Premier League's giants in the next round Holt had hoped for Manchester United or Arsenal, though Monday night's draw would later pair those two titans together and should the game be selected for television, the rewards could approach PS1 million: life changing, season defining, horizon expanding money. "There are not many chances for a club like us to get access to football's fortunes," Holt said. "The F.A. Cup is one of them. You could do a lot with a million pounds, around Accrington." Accrington was not the only club imagining those possibilities over the last four days. That has always been the charm of the F.A. Cup's third round weekend, traditionally the most romantic in England's soccer calendar. This is the point when the teams from the country's top two divisions, the Premier League and the second tier Championship, enter the competition, alongside those from the lower tiers and any nonleague clubs that have survived an arduous campaign through the early rounds. That sense of opportunity has long made it fertile ground for surprises. It is in the F.A. Cup's third round that the lesser lights have the chance to bloody the noses of the great and the good, when the coddled elite come unstuck in airless, ramshackle stadiums and on haphazard, mud ridden fields. This year as ever a handful of teams maintained the tradition: Oldham, Newport County and Gillingham beat Premier League opposition. Barnet, of the fifth tier Conference, overcame Sheffield United, a team in contention for promotion to the Premier League next season. By those standards, Accrington's win barely counted as a shock: Ipswich Town is currently last in the Championship, enduring a miserable season. "It will be F.A. Cup magic if we manage to win," said Mark Pinkney, an Ipswich fan who had made the journey to Accrington with his father, Harold, and son, James. The three generations had come to the low hills of Lancashire from England's southeast coast because they hoped the Cup might provide a little "break" from the league. That, to many, is precisely the problem. For all that third round weekend means in the hearts of many English soccer fans, for all the memories it conjures, it is now taken as a truism that it has lost some of its mystique, some of its appeal. Some fans, like Nick Mills, 43, a Grimsby Town supporter on his way to his team's meeting with Crystal Palace of the Premier League, blame those teams who prioritize survival in the top flight over a shot at glory. "Teams like Palace and Newcastle: they're the ones that have killed it, the teams where it is about Premier League survival," he said. "Knocking Palace out would be an upset, but you're expecting a reserve team." Though the upsets still come, Mills is correct: those Premier League teams eliminated this year, as is now generally the case, were lacking most if not all of their first choice players, many of them rested for what the club decided were more important games. Palace made it through, narrowly, in front of 6,000 traveling Grimsby fans, but it did so having made nine changes from its last Premier League game. Others cast the blame on the Football Association itself: for kick starting the competition's demise by allowing Manchester United to opt out in 2000, in favor of playing in that year's Club World Cup in Brazil; for toying with various ideas like abolishing replays of tied matches to bow to the wishes of those Premier League clubs that see the Cup as an unwelcome distraction. This year, the F.A. was fiercely criticized for scheduling games at seemingly random times across the weekend to meet the demands of an international television deal, and using other matches as test runs for a video assistant referee system. "It's a wonderful thing, the F.A. Cup," Holt said. "It needs protecting." Wherever the fault, the effects are obvious. At Burnley's meeting with Barnsley, the Premier League hosts had tried to encourage more fans to come by reducing ticket prices to PS10 for adults and PS5 for children. Though the visiting team had brought a healthy contingent, Turf Moor, Burnley's raucous stadium, was noticeably quieter than normal. Swaths of seats remained empty. Elsewhere, there were weakened teams named not only by the Premier League's giants and those battling to avoid relegation from the top flight, but by those, like Leicester City, caught in the middle, and with nothing much else to play for. The trend is now mainstream: Championship teams often name weakened sides, too; the prize money on offer even for winning the F.A. Cup pales in comparison to the king's ransom promotion to the Premier League would bring. Looked at from a distance, it is hard to see much magic left: teams of reserves contesting games they do not care about in front of half empty stadiums, for the right to stay in a competition everyone involved sees as an afterthought. The F.A. Cup may not have the prestige it once did; the annual discussion of how much better the Cup used to be may now be as much of a fixture of third round weekend as the shocks and surprises. But it still provides opportunities: to visit new places, to see new teams, to welcome in new fans. It is still a place of possibilities. "It's still a thrill for us," said Holt, back in Accrington. Holt will have a little longer to cherish that feeling. Accrington will face the winner of a replay between the Southampton and Derby County in the fourth round. It is not quite the money spinner he had hoped for, but there is more to the F.A. Cup than economics. There are memories to be made.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
But what did Akeela's end say about my own practice of medicine? The Hippocratic oath, which dates to Greece in the fifth century B.C., states that a physician must not "administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so nor ... suggest such a course." Instances in which physicians have participated in euthanasia have generally been wholly unethical. These include a program started by Nazi physicians in the 1930s to kill mentally ill and chronically infirm persons and over 100 controversial deaths facilitated in the 1990s by Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a pathologist who believed that terminal patients had a right to determine when they died. There is one current exception to the prohibition on physicians expediting death: physician aid in dying. In six states and Washington, D.C., physicians may legally prescribe medications that terminally ill patients may take when they so wish. Numerous protections are written into these laws, such as making sure that the person is really dying and has full capacity to make decisions. I could think of stories similar to that of Akeela among my own patients. There was the blind woman who was bedbound, in pain and partially paralyzed from a stroke; another woman was skeletal from metastatic cancer and required constant sedation and analgesia. There have been many more. Some of these patients had explicitly expressed a wish to die, hoping that we doctors might, humanely, "end it all." My experiences with Akeela led me to reflect on these cases. If suffering was so obvious and not reversible, and there was a way to provide immediate relief, was my reflexive refusal to assist in the dying process always the right thing to do? And if the patient, fully understanding all of his or her options, was asking for death, didn't this make him or her more worthy than a dog, whose suffering could only be assumed? I had little doubt that family members, seeing a loved one suddenly at peace, might have said what our vet said to us: "She was tired." But in my own practice, I can never countenance euthanasia. Hippocrates' sentiments from over 2,000 years ago resonate for me. Doctors are in the business of healing bodies, not harming them even if that "harm" potentially provides relief from the same type of suffering we find unacceptable in our pets. Having said this, I am not opposed to telling my patients about physician aid in dying. Indeed, were they so inclined and prepared to move to a state where it is legal, I might help them make the transition. And if aid in dying became legal in my own state, New York, I would consider making a referral to a physician who might prescribe the necessary drugs. Of course, for most patients, moving to another state near life's end is neither desirable nor practical. And in many cases, the process could never be implemented in time. Fortunately, though, there are now better medications to treat the symptoms of dying and a specialty, known as palliative care, that can provide expert guidance in doing so.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
"Democrats started their convention last week with Eva Longoria, a famous Hollywood actress who played a housewife on TV. Well, I'm actually a real housewife and a mom from Michigan with two wonderful kids in public school who happens to be the only only the second woman in 164 years to run the Republican Party. Four years ago, President Trump started a movement unlike any other. And over the next four days, we will hear from a few of the millions of hardworking everyday Americans who have benefited from his leadership." "Florida " "Georgia " "Guam " "Indiana " "Iowa " "Kansas " "Kentucky " "Tennessee " "Texas!" " are excited to nominate " " Donald J. Trump " " and Vice President Mike Pence " " for four more years." "Thank you for all you've done." "He's taken on the swamp, all of the swamp the Democrats, the press and the Never Trumpers. And when you take on the swamp, the swamp fights back." "This election is a battle for the soul of America. Your choice is clear: Do you support the cancel culture, the cosmopolitan elites of Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden, who blame America first? Do you think America is to blame? Or do you believe in American greatness? Ladies and gentlemen, leaders and fighters for freedom and liberty and the American dream, the best is yet to come!" "I am the proud daughter of Indian immigrants. They came to America and settled in a small Southern town. My father wore a turban. My mother wore a sari. I was a brown girl in a black and white world. We faced discrimination and hardship, but my parents never gave in to grievance and hate. My mom built a successful business. My dad taught 30 years at a historically black college. And the people of South Carolina chose me as their first minority and first female governor. America is a story that's a work in progress. Now is the time to build on that progress and make America even freer, fairer and better for everyone. That's why it's so tragic to see so much of the Democratic Party turning a blind eye towards riots and rage. The American people know we can do better. America isn't perfect, but the principles we hold dear are perfect. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that even on our worst day we are blessed to live in America." "Our founders believed there was nothing more important than protecting our God given right to think for ourselves. Now the left, they're trying to cancel all of those founders. They don't seem to understand this important principle: In order to improve in the future, we must learn from our past, not erase it. So we're not going to tear down monuments and forget the people who built our great nation. Instead, we will learn from our past so we don't repeat any mistakes." "We don't give in to cancel culture or the radical and factually baseless belief that things are worse today than in the 1860s or the 1960s. We have work to do. But I believe in the goodness of America, the promise that all men and all women are created equal. Our side is working on policy while Joe Biden's radical Democrats are trying to permanently transform what it means to be an American. Make no mistake: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris want a cultural revolution, a fundamentally different America. If we let them, they will turn our country into a socialist utopia. And history has taught us that path only leads to pain and misery, especially for hard working people hoping to rise. Instead, we must focus on the promise of the American journey."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
SAN FRANCISCO An Uber executive accused of stealing driverless car technology from his former employers at Google is exercising his Fifth Amendment right to avoid self incrimination, according to his lawyers. The lawyers for Anthony Levandowski, the former head of Google's self driving car project who is now leading a similar effort at Uber, said he was broadly asserting his Fifth Amendment rights because there was "potential for criminal action" in the case, according to court transcripts obtained on Thursday. The legal maneuver adds even more intrigue to the high profile fight between two of the technology industry's largest companies, which are squaring off in the race to put driverless cars on the road. Mr. Levandowski is at the center of a lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, which was spun out from Google to become its own Alphabet subsidiary. Waymo has accused Mr. Levandowski of stealing documents and poaching employees before quitting Google and then colluding with Uber to use that technology to advance driverless car efforts at the ride hailing service. Shortly after leaving Google, Mr. Levandowski started his own self driving truck start up, Otto. Six months after Otto was formed, Uber acquired the company for 680 million. Waymo filed a motion seeking a temporary injunction this month to stop Uber's autonomous vehicle development. As part of the motion seeking the injunction, Waymo said that Mr. Levandowski, while still working at Google, installed software that allowed him to download over 14,000 files, or about 9.7 gigabytes of data, pertaining to the driverless car program. Uber was ordered to hand over those files. In the transcript of a private hearing before Judge William Alsup in United States District Court in San Francisco, Mr. Levandowski's lawyers said he was invoking his Fifth Amendment right to avoid self incrimination in not turning over documents that may pertain to the case. Arturo Gonzalez, one of Uber's lawyers, said they have made clear to Mr. Levandowski that he needs to release any documents relevant to the case as part of discovery. "We obviously have a conflict," he said. Miles Ehrlich, one of the lawyers representing Mr. Levandowski, said the Uber executive was asserting his Fifth Amendment rights to protect against "compelled disclosure that would identify the existence, location or possession of any responsive documents." He also said that Mr. Levandowski's decision to invoke the Fifth Amendment may change as they examine the case. The situation raises questions about the future of Mr. Levandowski at the company. When Uber's lawyer told the court that the company could not force him to testify, Judge Alsup said Uber had the right to order him to cooperate or be fired. Without arguing about whether or not Mr. Levandowski stole documents, Uber's lawyer said the company intended to prove that its driverless car technology was not stolen from Waymo. "The more we get into this, it might look like a public relations disaster for Uber," said Michael Carrier, a law professor at Rutgers University. "The mere fact that you're pleading the Fifth doesn't look good." The acquisition of Otto and the hiring of Mr. Levandowski was critical for Uber. It is betting that autonomous cars are essential to its future, allowing it to run a fleet of cars around the clock without having to pay drivers. Angela Padilla, Uber's associate general counsel, said in a statement that the company plans to publicly lay out its case on April 7. "We are very confident that Waymo's claims against Uber are baseless and that Anthony Levandowski has not used any files from Google in his work with Otto or Uber," she said. A Waymo spokesman declined to comment. Uber's lawyers tried to keep the hearing confidential, arguing that it could harm Mr. Levandowski's reputation. Judge Alsup dismissed that argument. The New York Times obtained a copy of the transcript after Uber sent an email to employees warning of possible negative coverage in the news media over the expected release of a document from the trial.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
SAN FRANCISCO Jessica Lessin thinks the biggest story of the moment how tech is swallowing the universe is hopelessly under covered by the news media. The issue is "massive," she said not long ago in her spare, cube like office here, and "no one is paying attention." Of course, it can be hard to see the forest for the tweets. From analysis of Trump's utterances to conspiracy peddling publishers amplifying themselves on Facebook and YouTube, tech stories increase exponentially every day. But Ms. Lessin, founder of The Information, an influential Silicon Valley publication, thinks most reporters are still focusing on the wrong topics: glamorous cryptocurrency, for example, rather than the blockchain looming over bank loans and stock trades; or the number of cars sold, rather than the artificial intelligence and driver networks that threaten to make that number obsolete. She has focused her site on the larger picture, pursuing industry scoops and keeping the publication ad free, instead charging 399 a year for complete access. The Information achieved profitability in 2016, Ms. Lessin said, three years after she left The Wall Street Journal to start it. She added that she expected 20 million in sales by the end of 2020, and for her staff of two dozen reporters and editors in the Bay Area, Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, Washington and Hong Kong to grow. "The fact that we have a business that's scaling makes me excited," she said. This sense of hope is discordant with the rest of online media, which seems in grim shape last year, more than 1,000 people were laid off at BuzzFeed, AOL, Yahoo, HuffPost and Vice Media. (BuzzFeed is now back on more solid footing and could be headed for a sale.) As other online organs have bloated and intermittently fasted, The Information's reporters have become known in Silicon Valley for sniffing out the industry's misdeeds and tweaking its powerful. A 2017 story revealed sexual harassment allegations against a venture capitalist that led to the shutdown of his firm. A recent article revealing hidden financial data at Quibi, a new streaming service, prompted its chief executive, Meg Whitman, to compare reporters to sexual predators. (She later apologized.) The Information is sparely, almost clinically designed and frequently refreshed. Subscribers include Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos, and the media investor James Murdoch ("Please write nice things about her," he said of Ms. Lessin), corporate clients like Google and Goldman Sachs, and most of start up royalty. Laurene Powell Jobs, the world's seventh wealthiest woman and an influential philanthropist who also owns The Atlantic, finds the site useful. It covers "an ecosystem and an industry I care about," she said, adding, "I've followed Jessica's byline since The Journal." Ms. Lessin, 36, is the rare editor to have risen from ink stained wretch to a player, much like Peter Bart when he ruled Variety, or Anna Wintour of Vogue. But her success, unlike the editors' of an earlier time, owes as much to the data driven discipline of her business as her editorial tastes. In an era when many pay walls, if they exist at all, are easily scaled, Ms. Lessin is fiercely guarding the fortress. "I've said this from the beginning," she said, "and I continue to say this, but you can't give away what you expect the reader to find valuable." While attending Harvard, she scored the coveted faculty beat at the Crimson newspaper. "It was like covering Congress," Ms. Lessin said. "It's fun because you get the bickering and the politics." Lauren Schuker Blum, a friend who worked with her there and later at The Journal, remembered Ms. Lessin's work habits. "We all had these reporter notebooks and most of us would use like half of it, or lose it, but she had like 30 of them, impeccably detailed," Ms. Schuker Blum said. "She was like a libel lawyer's dream." After graduating in 2005, Ms. Lessin completed an internship at The Journal, then kept coming back into the office to pitch stories. Eventually, she landed a full time job covering personal tech, one of the least popular beats at the time. The year was 2005. BlackBerrys were the gold standard of smartphones and Facebook was just an online phone book for college students. In 2008, Ms. Lessin moved to San Francisco to cover the tech industry and regularly broke stories. "I was like, 'Who the hell is this girl?'" said Paul Steiger, the Journal's managing editor at the time. "I kind of followed her work and asked people, 'Is she as good as this looks?' And they said yes." But it was also around this time that some people began to whisper about Ms. Lessin's possible conflicts of interest. Through Harvard, she had become friends with start up founders or fast rising executives at places like Google and Facebook, ostensibly her key subjects. She was also dating another graduate, Sam Lessin, who had started a company that would later be acquired by Facebook. (The two married in 2012.) A holiday excursion in 2008 resulted in a scolding for Ms. Lessin. As the economy was plummeting, she and Mr. Lessin jetted off to the vacation home of his family on the island of Cyprus with friends of theirs from the start up scene. The group passed the time as many people do on vacation, drinking and lounging around the pool. And before filming such activities and sharing them with strangers would become commonplace on Instagram, they posted footage online, including the women wearing matching black and white checkered swimsuits, lip syncing to Journey's "Don't Stop Believing." The Cyprus travelers were blasted for their stunning lack of self awareness as the nation's economy teetered toward crisis and tech companies were laying off employees. Ms. Lessin was singled out by Valleywag, the now defunct tech site, in a post headlined, "WSJ reporter parties in Cyprus with people she covers." 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. "Oh, that never made sense to me," she said. "These were not people I wrote about. These were friends." (A scan of Journal articles from the period shows she interviewed at least one Cyprus attendee in an article Mike Hudack, the head of Blip.tv, a video start up that has since shut down. Ms. Lessin says they were not friends when she wrote the article.) Still, her vacation drew disapproving scrutiny from higher ups at The Journal, though not an official reprimand. Ms. Lessin, in turn, was beginning to chafe at how newsrooms were covering tech from a cool remove, she thought, never going deep. In contrast were the many bloggers who could delve into the industry's every incremental move, but who had become so close to subjects the stories read like ad copy. Ms. Lessin said she thought: Couldn't you do both? In the know reporting that still held subjects to account? "I knew if I didn't do it, someone else would, and I'd be kicking myself," she said. Valley underminers like to snipe that Ms. Lessin never had to persuade investors to back her plan. She had her own money. Her father is Jerome C. Vascellaro, a partner at the private equity giant TPG, which is a significant investor in tech and media businesses like Uber, Vice and Airbnb. Her husband, a son of the late tech investor Robert H. Lessin, made a fortune from the Facebook stock he received as part of the company's acquisition of his start up years ago. Ms. Lessin said she tapped her own bank account, using "less than 1 million," to start The Information, and continues to own and control it wholly. She pays competitive salaries (albeit without equity) as much as 180,000 or more for some top reporters. She refuses to spend more than she grosses, she said. So far, this strategy seems to be paying off. A 2016 article on Tony Fadell, then the head of Google's Nest division, exposed how the executive's last minute decrees and slow decision making had crippled the company's hardware efforts. The story was so in demand it converted over 600 new subscribers in the first day, recalled the reporter who wrote it, Reed Albergotti, who worked at The Information from 2015 to 2019. "It blew up," he said. "That was proof of the model." But is The Information whose title anticipates an interest in nothing short of everything just a trade publication, like Advertising Age or Publishers Weekly? (One heavily trafficked section features richly detailed organizational charts that executive recruiters mine for leads.) Ms. Lessin, seeming a little annoyed by the question, tilted her head and widened her eyes as she computed her reply. "I think that misses the point," she finally said. "There's so much hunger for what we produce." In December, she introduced a consumer friendly version of the site, an app called The Tech Top 10, priced at 30 a year. Instead of a dense story on Netflix's debt structure, the app might publish a short explainer on Netflix's price increase. "You're matching the reader with the level of expertise they want," Ms. Lessin said. "That's what subscriptions allow you to do." She won't say how many subscribers The Information has, but some back of the envelope math suggests she'll have to hit 40,000 paying readers by this year to reach her sales objective, which could be a significant challenge. According to three people familiar with the business, the publication surpassed 20,000 subscribers only around the middle of last year. "I can confirm we have more than that," she said, declining to be more specific. Her publication's success has attracted suitors. Some time last year, John Ridding, the chief executive of The Financial Times, Britain's pre eminent business publication, met with Ms. Lessin in San Francisco. The salmon colored broadsheet was interested in a possible takeover, three people familiar with the matter said. Mr. Ridding declined to comment, and Ms. Lessin said The Information was not for sale. In June 2017, the site landed one of its biggest scoops: a feature that revealed sexual harassment allegations against one of Silicon Valley's most well connected venture capitalists. Six women had accused Justin Caldbeck, a partner at Binary Capital, of unwanted sexual advances, with three of them speaking to the reporter, Mr. Albergotti, on the record. The story exposed a pervasive culture of misogyny and harassment within tech, immediately raised The Information's profile and was a precursor of the broader MeToo movement. But Mr. Albergotti, who now works at The Washington Post, remembered the staff's anxiety as they got closer to publishing. They were keenly aware of what had happened to Gawker, which was sued for invasion of privacy by Hulk Hogan. The suit, which was financed by the venture capitalist Peter Thiel, drove Gawker into extinction and stoked a fear among publishers that anyone with enough money and willpower could vaporize a news outlet. As the Caldbeck story was about to go to press, Ms. Lessin was in Italy attending a conference. She consulted the company's liability insurance, which she had printed out, in her hotel room before heading to a dinner where she would be seated with Jeff Bezos. "I don't remember if I vomited or not," she said. "But I was very nervous." She gave the green light. Mr. Caldbeck didn't sue. Instead, he resigned. A short while later, his venture firm collapsed. As a female entrepreneur, Ms. Lessin felt The Information's work was "deeply personal," especially as several men in the industry, who had heard the piece was in the works, contacted her to suggest the claims were overblown. These were "men I respect, who I was close to," she said. She wouldn't name them. Ms. Schuker Blum, who worked with her at The Journal, said Ms. Lessin is not a gossip, like many reporters. "She's not the journalist who's always complaining," Ms. Schuker Blum said. "She's not a conspiracy theorist. She sees the best in people." Daniel Ek, the chief executive of Spotify, said he found the occasional, critical story on his company "not unfair." But he added that Ms. Lessin "has to walk a tightrope given the level of access that she has. That's got to be tough." Ms. Lessin's connections continue to raise eyebrows, particularly those to Facebook. She and her husband are friends with their Harvard classmates Mark Zuckerberg, the company's chief executive, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, who runs the couple's philanthropy efforts. They attended each other's weddings and both have young children. (Ms. Lessin's two boys, Lion and Maverick, are both under the age of 3.) Mr. Zuckerberg was at The Information's launch party, where she joked that for the super high subscription rate of 10,000 a story could be killed (but just one). Recently, Ms. Chan was a speaker at an Information event. The Information has published tough stories on Facebook, including a 2016 piece that revealed a weakness in its business. A more recent article exposed tensions between Chinese employees and Facebook's leaders. But so far, it has only taken smaller swipes at the tech giant. So how does The Information write about a company run by a friend of the site's owner, one that is also perceived as having failed democracy, if not the universe? Ms. Lessin was circumspect, her contralto voice echoing slightly off the glass walls of her office. "I'm very careful to draw lines around my personal life," she said. "We have very clearly defined our culture around getting the best, most accurate story possible."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Neuroscientists have developed a way to turn an entire mouse, including its muscles and internal organs, transparent while illuminating the nerve paths that run throughout its body. The process, called uDisco, provides an alternate way for researchers to study an organism's nervous system without having to slice into sections of its organs or tissues. It allows researchers to use a microscope to trace neurons from the rodent's brain and spinal cord all the way to its fingers and toes. "When I saw images on the microscope that my students were obtaining, I was like 'Wow, this is mind blowing,'" said Ali Erturk, a neuroscientist from the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich in Germany and an author of the paper. "We can map the neural connectivity in the whole mouse in 3D." They published their technique Monday in the journal Nature Methods. So far, the technique has been conducted only in mice and rats, but the scientists think it could one day be used to map the human brain. They also said it could be particularly useful for studying the effects of mental disorders like Alzheimer's disease or schizophrenia.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
When does a coherent row of brownstones become a miscellany of masonry? That point is nearing or even past for the rowhouses on the south side of East 69th Street, from Second to First Avenues. Thirty years ago they were a nearly uniform group of charming dwellings. Now the string has broken, and these little pearls are skittering across the floor. Not many blocks east of Third Avenue saw sustained rowhouse development, but for some reason in the late 1870s the developer James E. Ray favored this block with a particularly expansive row of 30 houses. He built the houses closer to Second, Nos. 310 344, three stories tall with a high stoop; for those closer to First, Nos. 346 368, he stopped at two stories and a stoop. Ray worked with several architects, and the variations are modest. But in the 20th century, the sweep of the row, especially the two story models, was striking. Ads for the houses began running in early 1880, when The New York Times offered No. 340 for rent for 65 per month. The 1880 census indicates that perhaps half the original residents were born abroad, with nativity noted as Germany, Austria, Bavaria, Prussia, Bremen and so on. The number of residents in 19th century rowhouses was far higher than we expect today. Henry Stadler, a gas fitter from Hesse, lived in the two story house at 368 East 69th with nine family members and a boarder.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
The Times has grown more egalitarian through the years the sons and daughters of truck drivers, waitresses and maintenance workers have graced our pages. (One of our most recent brides, an art teacher for an after school program, bought her wedding dress for 6.) But that patrician reputation is hard to shake. There have been other parodies and commentaries aplenty: Jena Friedman has created videos poking fun at us, and Zach Miller's "Veiled Conceit," a blog from years ago, was the most elaborate. L.V. Krause wrote a memorable piece about why she keeps reading us, angrily. Here in the weddings section, we don't mind an occasional insult thrown our way. Much. Just spell the names right, as the saying goes. Sometimes we even chuckle in a dignified, Thurston Howell III sort of way. In that spirit, we're sharing three of the better takes on our announcements: 1. Terri Pous of BuzzFeed was so mortified by our prose that she produced a 20 question quiz last summer asking readers whether an excerpt actually came from our pages or from her own fanciful mind. Following is a real one followed by a fake one: "Before she started, she asked her new boss, Christine Riordan, then the provost of the university, if a boyfriend came with the job." "The bridegroom had never eaten a hamburger, a fact he delightedly recounted on their first date in between bites of flash fried seitan and kohlrabi." 2. Last summer, Colin Nissan, writing in The New Yorker, projected a gruesome future for a bride who graduated summa cum laude and a groom who was just magna cum laude: This disparity in achievement will be a recurring source of tension for the couple, first rearing its head during their honeymoon, in Belize, when the groom will take a little too long to calculate a tip and the bride will step in to "summa the situation" a phrase the groom will coin in that moment and continue to employ for years to come, with diminishing amusement....	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
On Global Big Day last month, birders around the world counted all the species they could spot in 24 hours. It was a super birding event in the bonanza that is spring migration which runs from late April to early June , but peaks for songbirds in May when millions of birds make their way from parts south to breed in the Northern latitudes. In Prospect Park, members of the Feminist Bird Club did their bit for this enormous citizen scientist data collection effort. Led by Molly Adams, its founder, the group clocked over 80 species in under 10 hours, including one black billed cuckoo and a cerulean warbler. These were good "gets": The cerulean warbler is at risk of extinction like so many birds, a casualty of habitat loss so noting its whereabouts is particularly important for conservation efforts. The cuckoo is not a rare bird, it's just hard to see and not many of them stop in New York City during their migration; that made its sighting a bit of thrill, Ms. Adams said. "We are seeing lots of males today," she said, "because they are the first to arrive and establish territory. We're not just excluding females here." She showed off her club's iron on patch, an embroidered spotted sandpiper, known for practicing polyandry (yours for a donation of 10 or more; the proceeds go to Black Lives Matter), and promised a female bird only walk sometime in the future. (Ms. Adams's backpack was embellished with an "I Love Vultures" button, among other bird pins, but no patch because she does not own an iron.) "I already had that on my list," said Chelsea Lawrence, 28, a software tester for a television company. Younger urban birders yubbies? like those led by Ms. Adams are the new faces in the birding world. They use social media to track their ornithological marks, with digital assists from apps like Ibird or Merlin and websites like ebird the data collection site run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology which have replaced old fashioned Sibley guides to aid in identification (though Sibley has an app, too). They are drawn in by the visual seductions of Instagram, as well as a desire for community inflected by environmentalism. As Jonathan Franzen, still the literary world's most famous birder, discovered, many soon find that without the structure of birding, "the stimulations of nature," as Mr. Franzen wrote in "My Bird Problem," his coming out as a birder essay in The New Yorker, remain "stubbornly theoretical, like sex on Prozac." Pete Lengyel, a co founder of the Kings County Brewers Collective, a craft beer brewery and tap room in Bushwick, was hooked by "Birders" when he saw it a few years ago. Its filmmaker, Jeffrey Kimball, an urban birding convert, captured four seasons of Central Park's birding community in an engaging portrait of its singular characters. There's Starr Saphir, the flinty matriarchal figure who led birders even as she became significantly ill with cancer, and Chris Cooper, 55, a biomedical editor who birds by ear (using birdsong to identify his quarry) and whose elegiac exposition on what he called the "7 pleasures of birding" pops up the all over the internet. Mr. Lengyel, 44, sent the film to all his friends, and convened his own birding group, the Beerders, which includes two brewers, a baker, a butcher and a fashion designer a nice cross section of Brooklyn professions. "We didn't know how to interact with nature in the city, and now we have a sort of purpose," he said, adding that they don't go out too early, as the practices of his profession keep him from being a dawn riser. Mr. Cooper's "7 pleasures" is a touchstone for his own birding passion. "Number three is the joy of hunting without bloodshed," said Mr. Lengyel, a former marine. "I got a camera early on to capture images, and I feel like I'm carrying a rifle around. The joy of collecting is number four. I'm still looking for a prothonotary warbler." He screened "Birders" and "The Messenger" at the Brewers Collective this past year, in a collaboration with the New York City chapter of the National Audubon Society. "The Messenger," which chronicles songbird decline, left some in the audience in tears, he said. This fall, the bar will brew a beer called "Safe Flight," an easy drinking I.P.A. with notes of citrus and pines (its sales will aid Audubon). What to Do in Our Great Green Spaces? Over the last few decades, as David Ringer, 34, chief network officer at Audubon, pointed out, cities have focused on creating more green spaces, making parks safer and making sure that all communities have better access to nature. "You see with these efforts a corresponding rise in birding," he said. Ms. Lawrence, the software tester on Ms. Adams' Feminist Bird Club walk, said that her "spark" bird bird vernacular for the bird that hooks you like a gateway drug was an American coot, spotted two years ago in Prospect Park. "It was so weird looking," she said, "I had to go home and figure out what it was." Now, armed with an old school (bound, paper) Sibley, a trifold raptor guide and an app or two, she can easily separate the coots from the grebes. She might spend half of a Saturday in Prospect Park, but if she spots a warbler at lunchtime in the planter in front of her midtown office, "that's birding, too," she said. "I'm really into citizen science and data collection. It can be as competitive as you want it to be. It's also really meditative. You have to be very present to be a good birder." Audubon's market research has identified 9 million people between the ages of 18 and 35, Mr. Ringer said, "who share that blend of an interest in birds and environmental activism. Twenty five percent are Hispanic, 18 percent are African American and 10 percent are Asian American. It's an amazing representation of the demographics of the country." "I think it's a short path from the joy and wonder of birds to the recognition of what they're telling us about the environment, and what that compels us to do," he said. It was after dusk on Sept. 11 a couple of years ago when Annie Novak, 35, an urban farmer, writer and educator at the New York Botanical Garden once voted the cutest organic farmer in the country became a birder. She was tending to a rooftop garden overlooking the Tribute in Light, the annual memorial in Lower Manhattan, when she noticed thousands of flickering shapes in the beams. "I thought they were bats," she said recently, "but was amazed to learn they were nocturnally migrating songbirds." Since that night, she's been researching a book about night migration and the conservation challenges facing bird populations. She now volunteers for New York City Audubon, including for its annual monitoring program at the Tribute in Light, which pulls thousands of birds off course, putting them at risk for injury and exhaustion. (Volunteers assist with counting birds entrained in the beams. When more than a thousand are counted, the lights are turned off for 20 minutes, allowing the birds to disperse and fly on.) "These species of birds have been flying over Manhattan for thousands of years," she said. "There is more and more evidence that artificial light at night impacts these patterns of movement. It's bittersweet to stand on the observation deck of the Empire State Building at night and watch migratory birds, lured in by city lights, circle the spire. It makes you realize how alive the night sky is above the city that never sleeps, which is why I don't sleep much anymore."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
The nine passenger Horseless eCarriage, Mr. Wenig's interpretation of what could be Central Park's open topped runabout, is on display at the New York auto show. It is absolutely massive. The passenger compartment appears to be roughly the same size as those on the several dozen carriages in the Central Park carriage fleet. But the rest of the vehicle, which is a one off creation, is sized to scale, resulting in a machine that according to Mr. Wenig, weighs 7,500 pounds loaded and is the same length as a Ford Excursion. The eCarriage is charged through a port where an early 20th century car's starting crank would be, just under the "radiator." A large rubber bulb to the driver's left is the car's horn. The seats are upholstered in diamond tufted vinyl, and the dashboard is made of wood. Apart from the floor mounted car stereo, everything including the steering wheel and the dash gauges looks vintage. Mr. Wenig said in an email that the eCarriage's 46 kilowatt hour lithium iron phosphate battery pack could have a 100 mile range from a six hour charge. The eCarriage has a top speed of 30 miles per hour, but a GPS sensor would limit the vehicle's speed to five m.p.h. in the park. The prototype on display at the auto show this week cost about 450,000 to put together, including design and engineering costs, Mr. Wenig said. But he says production models, of which there could eventually be 68 if the eCarriage is selected to replace horse drawn carriages, would cost roughly 150,000 to 175,000 each.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Credit...Minh Uong/The New York Times SAN FRANCISCO We expect a lot from our computers these days. They should talk to us, recognize everything from faces to flowers, and maybe soon do the driving. All this artificial intelligence requires an enormous amount of computing power, stretching the limits of even the most modern machines. Now, some of the world's largest tech companies are taking a cue from biology as they respond to these growing demands. They are rethinking the very nature of computers and are building machines that look more like the human brain, where a central brain stem oversees the nervous system and offloads particular tasks like hearing and seeing to the surrounding cortex. After years of stagnation, the computer is evolving again, and this behind the scenes migration to a new kind of machine will have broad and lasting implications. It will allow work on artificially intelligent systems to accelerate, so the dream of machines that can navigate the physical world by themselves can one day come true. This migration could also diminish the power of Intel, the longtime giant of chip design and manufacturing, and fundamentally remake the 335 billion a year semiconductor industry that sits at the heart of all things tech, from the data centers that drive the internet to your iPhone to the virtual reality headsets and flying drones of tomorrow. "This is an enormous change," said John Hennessy, the former Stanford University president who wrote an authoritative book on computer design in the mid 1990s and is now a member of the board at Alphabet, Google's parent company. "The existing approach is out of steam, and people are trying to re architect the system." The existing approach has had a pretty nice run. For about half a century, computer makers have built systems around a single, do it all chip the central processing unit from a company like Intel, one of the world's biggest semiconductor makers. That's what you'll find in the middle of your own laptop computer or smartphone. Now, computer engineers are fashioning more complex systems. Rather than funneling all tasks through one beefy chip made by Intel, newer machines are dividing work into tiny pieces and spreading them among vast farms of simpler, specialized chips that consume less power. Changes inside Google's giant data centers are a harbinger of what is to come for the rest of the industry. Inside most of Google's servers, there is still a central processor. But enormous banks of custom built chips work alongside them, running the computer algorithms that drive speech recognition and other forms of artificial intelligence. In 2011, Jeff Dean, one of the company's most celebrated engineers, led a research team that explored the idea of neural networks essentially computer algorithms that can learn tasks on their own. They could be useful for a number of things, like recognizing the words spoken into smartphones or the faces in a photograph. In a matter of months, Mr. Dean and his team built a service that could recognize spoken words far more accurately than Google's existing service. But there was a catch: If the world's more than one billion phones that operated on Google's Android software used the new service just three minutes a day, Mr. Dean realized, Google would have to double its data center capacity in order to support it. "We need another Google," Mr. Dean told Urs Holzle, the Swiss born computer scientist who oversaw the company's data center empire, according to someone who attended the meeting. So Mr. Dean proposed an alternative: Google could build its own computer chip just for running this kind of artificial intelligence. But what began inside data centers is starting to shift other parts of the tech landscape. Over the next few years, companies like Google, Apple and Samsung will build phones with specialized A.I. chips. Microsoft is designing such a chip specifically for an augmented reality headset. And everyone from Google to Toyota is building autonomous cars that will need similar chips. This trend toward specialty chips and a new computer architecture could lead to a "Cambrian explosion" of artificial intelligence, said Gill Pratt, who was a program manager at Darpa, a research arm of the United States Department of Defense, and now works on driverless cars at Toyota. As he sees it, machines that spread computations across vast numbers of tiny, low power chips can operate more like the human brain, which efficiently uses the energy at its disposal. "In the brain, energy efficiency is the key," he said during a recent interview at Toyota's new research center in Silicon Valley. There are many kinds of silicon chips. There are chips that store information. There are chips that perform basic tasks in toys and televisions. And there are chips that run various processes for computers, from the supercomputers used to create models for global warming to personal computers, internet servers and smartphones. For years, the central processing units, or C.P.U.s, that ran PCs and similar devices were where the money was. And there had not been much need for change. In accordance with Moore's Law, the oft quoted maxim from Intel co founder Gordon Moore, the number of transistors on a computer chip had doubled every two years or so, and that provided steadily improved performance for decades. As performance improved, chips consumed about the same amount of power, according to another, lesser known law of chip design called Dennard scaling, named for the longtime IBM researcher Robert Dennard. By 2010, however, doubling the number of transistors was taking much longer than Moore's Law predicted. Dennard's scaling maxim had also been upended as chip designers ran into the limits of the physical materials they used to build processors. The result: If a company wanted more computing power, it could not just upgrade its processors. It needed more computers, more space and more electricity. At the time, Microsoft was just beginning to improve Bing using machine learning algorithms (neural networks are a type of machine learning) that could improve search results by analyzing the way people used the service. Though these algorithms were less demanding than the neural networks that would later remake the internet, existing chips had trouble keeping up. Mr. Burger and his team explored several options but eventually settled on something called Field Programmable Gate Arrays, or F.P.G.A.s.: chips that could be reprogrammed for new jobs on the fly. Microsoft builds software, like Windows, that runs on an Intel C.P.U. But such software cannot reprogram the chip, since it is hard wired to perform only certain tasks. With an F.P.G.A., Microsoft could change the way the chip works. It could program the chip to be really good at executing particular machine learning algorithms. Then, it could reprogram the chip to be really good at running logic that sends the millions and millions of data packets across its computer network. It was the same chip but it behaved in a different way. Microsoft started to install the chips en masse in 2015. Now, just about every new server loaded into a Microsoft data center includes one of these programmable chips. They help choose the results when you search Bing, and they help Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing service, shuttle information across its network of underlying machines. In fall 2016, another team of Microsoft researchers mirroring the work done by Jeff Dean at Google built a neural network that could, by one measure at least, recognize spoken words more accurately than the average human could. Xuedong Huang, a speech recognition specialist who was born in China, led the effort, and shortly after the team published a paper describing its work, he had dinner in the hills above Palo Alto, Calif., with his old friend Jen Hsun Huang, (no relation), the chief executive of the chipmaker Nvidia. The men had reason to celebrate, and they toasted with a bottle of champagne. Xuedong Huang and his fellow Microsoft researchers had trained their speech recognition service using large numbers of specialty chips supplied by Nvidia, rather than relying heavily on ordinary Intel chips. Their breakthrough would not have been possible had they not made that change. Because systems that rely on neural networks can learn largely on their own, they can evolve more quickly than traditional services. They are not as reliant on engineers writing endless lines of code that explain how they should behave. But there is a wrinkle: Training neural networks this way requires extensive trial and error. To create one that is able to recognize words as well as a human can, researchers must train it repeatedly, tweaking the algorithms and improving the training data over and over. At any given time, this process unfolds over hundreds of algorithms. That requires enormous computing power, and if companies like Microsoft use standard issue chips to do it, the process takes far too long because the chips cannot handle the load and too much electrical power is consumed. So, the leading internet companies are now training their neural networks with help from another type of chip called a graphics processing unit, or G.P.U. These low power chips usually made by Nvidia were originally designed to render images for games and other software, and they worked hand in hand with the chip usually made by Intel at the center of a computer. G.P.U.s can process the math required by neural networks far more efficiently than C.P.U.s. Nvidia is thriving as a result, and it is now selling large numbers of G.P.U.s to the internet giants of the United States and the biggest online companies around the world, in China most notably. The company's quarterly revenue from data center sales tripled to 409 million over the past year. "This is a little like being right there at the beginning of the internet," Jen Hsun Huang said in a recent interview. In other words, the tech landscape is changing rapidly, and Nvidia is at the heart of that change. G.P.U.s are the primary vehicles that companies use to teach their neural networks a particular task, but that is only part of the process. Once a neural network is trained for a task, it must perform it, and that requires a different kind of computing power. After training a speech recognition algorithm, for example, Microsoft offers it up as an online service, and it actually starts identifying commands that people speak into their smartphones. G.P.U.s are not quite as efficient during this stage of the process. So, many companies are now building chips specifically to do what the other chips have learned. Google built its own specialty chip, a Tensor Processing Unit, or T.P.U. Nvidia is building a similar chip. And Microsoft has reprogrammed specialized chips from Altera, which was acquired by Intel, so that it too can run neural networks more easily. Other companies are following suit. Qualcomm, which specializes in chips for smartphones, and a number of start ups are also working on A.I. chips, hoping to grab their piece of the rapidly expanding market. The tech research firm IDC predicts that revenue from servers equipped with alternative chips will reach 6.8 billion by 2021, about 10 percent of the overall server market. Across Microsoft's global network of machines, Mr. Burger pointed out, alternative chips are still a relatively modest part of the operation. And Bart Sano, the vice president of engineering who leads hardware and software development for Google's network, said much the same about the chips deployed at its data centers. But this new breed of silicon is spreading rapidly, and Intel is increasingly a company in conflict with itself. It is in some ways denying that the market is changing, but nonetheless shifting its business to keep up with the change. Two years ago, Intel spent 16.7 billion to acquire Altera, which builds the programmable chips that Microsoft uses. It was Intel's largest acquisition ever. Last year, the company paid a reported 408 million buying Nervana, a company that was exploring a chip just for executing neural networks. Now, led by the Nervana team, Intel is developing a dedicated chip for training and executing neural networks. "They have the traditional big company problem," said Bill Coughran, a partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia Capital who spent nearly a decade helping to oversee Google's online infrastructure, referring to Intel. "They need to figure out how to move into the new and growing areas without damaging their traditional business." Intel's internal conflict is most apparent when company officials discuss the decline of Moore's Law. During a recent interview with The New York Times, Naveen Rao, the Nervana founder and now an Intel executive, said Intel could squeeze "a few more years" out of Moore's Law. Officially, the company's position is that improvements in traditional chips will continue well into the next decade. Mr. Mayberry of Intel also argued that the use of additional chips was not new. In the past, he said, computer makers used separate chips for tasks like processing audio. But now the scope of the trend is significantly larger. And it is changing the market in new ways. Intel is competing not only with chipmakers like Nvidia and Qualcomm, but also with companies like Google and Microsoft. Google is designing the second generation of its T.P.U. chips. Later this year, the company said, any business or developer that is a customer of its cloud computing service will be able to use the new chips to run its software.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Dover Street Market will reopen on Saturday for its biannual New Beginning. Spot the Calvin Klein acid yellow vinyl covered coat ( 3,995) it was one of the most meme worthy looks of the fall shows in the label's new dedicated space on the fourth floor; shop cool kids like Gosha Rubchinskiy and the surf punk label Noon Goons and an assortment of sneakers in a new 3,000 square foot retail floor in the basement; and find new insect inspired bijoux with kinetic body parts, like a beetle brooch in rose silver and pearls ( 6,600) by Delfina Delettrez, in the jewelry space. At 160 Lexington Avenue. Also on Saturday, the California chic home decor label Serena Lily will host a Mamas Minis event with the maternity label Hatch Collection at its Hamptons outpost from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Shop wardrobe staples like a featherweight tank in Cyprus gauze or white cotton that looks great both during and after pregnancy ( 158) while little ones make sand dough sculptures. At 332 Montauk Highway, Wainscott, N.Y. At the No. 6 Basement Sale, which continues through Saturday, you'll find discounts up to 70 percent on vintage clothing, shearlings, leather clog boots and more. At 6 Centre Market Place. From Friday to Sunday, Simon Miller covetable Bonsai bucket bags, denim and ready to wear will be marked down up to 50 percent. At 167 Canal Street, fifth floor.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
On June 18, 2016, Tim Peake, an astronaut with the European Space Agency, came back to Earth after six months on the International Space Station. His book of photographs taken in space, "Hello, Is This Planet Earth? My View From the International Space Station," will be published on Tuesday. "One of the interesting things about what astronauts pack is what we don't have to pack," Mr. Peake said. "We don't have to pack any clothes or a wash kit. That's all provided for us onboard the space station. Your clothing is chosen in advance, so they've got the right sizes. Your wash kit is chosen, as well, although you can tell them if you like a certain shaving gel or toothpaste." Carry on restrictions onboard the Soyuz (the spacecraft that launches the astronauts into space) are even worse than a commercial airline. "The Russians give you a 1.5 kilogram allowance that you can take in the Soyuz with you, and it literally sits inside the capsule as you launch into space." Astronauts are also allowed to fill a small bag, just bigger than a shoe box, with personal items; it's delivered to the space station in advance. Here is what he took to space: "I've got two small boys who, at the time I left, were 7 and 4, and they each sleep with their own little blanket. My wife, unknown to me, cut a corner of their blankets out and snuck them in the bag. I brought photographs of family and friends for my crew quarters. I brought the watch that my wife gave me on our seventh anniversary and some coins commemorating the mission, which I give as gifts when I return."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Chuck Peddle, the engineer and entrepreneur who helped launch the age of the personal computer after designing a microprocessor that sold for a mere 25, died on Dec. 15 at his home in Santa Cruz, Calif. He was 82. His partner, Kathleen Shaeffer, said the cause was pancreatic cancer. In 1974, Mr. Peddle and several other engineers were designing a new silicon chip at the Motorola Corporation in Phoenix when the company sent him a letter demanding that he shut the project down. Mr. Peddle envisioned an ultra low cost chip that could bring digital technology to a new breed of consumer devices, from cash registers to personal computers. But his bosses saw it as unwanted in house competition for the 300 processor Motorola had unveiled that year. So Mr. Peddle moved the project to MOS Technology, a rival chip maker near Valley Forge, Pa., taking seven other Motorola engineers with him. There they built a processor called the 6502. Priced at 25 the cost of a dinner for four, and the equivalent of about 130 today this chip soon powered the first big wave of personal computers in both the United States and Britain, including the Apple II and the Commodore PET.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Commercial air travel has plummeted in the pandemic, but interest in private jet service is surging, particularly among people who have not paid to fly privately before. For years, jet service providers have ferried corporate executives and wealthy leisure travelers who paid high fees for the privacy and security. Now, those same companies are shifting to meet rising demand from people worried about getting on a commercial flight. Over the Memorial Day weekend, one of the busiest travel times in the United States in years past, traffic in the private jet industry was 58 percent of the volume from the same time last year, according to Argus, a company that tracks aviation data. But commercial flights fared worse over the holiday, plunging to 12 percent of the 2019 level. Five weeks ago, private flights had fallen to 20 to 25 percent what they were the same time last year, said Doug Gollan, founder of Privatejetcardcomparisons.com, a research site for consumers. "Now to be back to 60 percent of pre Covid levels shows the people who have access to private travel are getting back out there," he said. NetJets, the largest private jet operator in the world, is seeing a rush in interest from new customers, said Patrick Gallagher, its president. "May is on track to be the best month of new customer relationships that we've seen in the past 10 years," Mr. Gallagher said. Competitors are experiencing the same rise. Magellan Jets has seen an 89 percent increase in new customers from mid March to this past week, said Anthony Tivnan, its president. He added this was coming off a strong 2019, when the company's revenue was up 34 percent from 2018. Companies that carved out a niche with private international flights are also reporting an increase. Thomas Flohr, founder and chairman of VistaJet, which has longer range jets, said the company's refueling landings in Anchorage, a major stop for transcontinental flights to Asia, were up 250 percent since the coronavirus outbreak. "The number of fuel stops we had there in the last 60 days is unheard of," Mr. Flohr said. "It was the East moving West, and then when the pandemic shifted, it was the West moving East." Unlike commercial airlines, the private jet industry sells its services by the hour. Private jets are faster and can fly directly to most airports, while flying commercial may involve connecting flights. Service providers make money by selling charter flights, jet cards with flight hours and fractional shares of jets and individually owned planes. But as executives curtail their business travel during the pandemic, new wealthy fliers and existing customers are driving a private aviation boom. In some cases, they are actually flying and in others, they are stocking up on private flight hours. The desire is akin to hoarding toilet paper and flour at the start of the pandemic: The extra allotment provides peace of mind, even if it is never used. "Everyone from boutique companies with five to six planes to NetJets is in a good mood," Mr. Gollan said. "There were a huge amount of people who had the wealth to fly private but never bought into the pitch of business efficiency," he said, adding that wealthy people are now thinking less about the cost of flying privately then about the safety of flying commercially. Marco Fossati, a member of the multibillion dollar family that owns Star, the Italian food conglomerate, said he had little need to fly privately since he became less active in the family business. But the coronavirus caused him to rethink his plans. "At this moment, with the Covid 19, if you can afford it, fly private," he said from Miami, where he has been since the stay in place orders were issued in March. Mr. Fossati's stance illustrates a change from just a few months ago: The wealthiest are less concerned about the perception of flying privately. Mr. Collins said he had not expected the increase. In the 2008 financial crisis, private flying fell off quickly and took years to rebound. But the current crisis was set off by health concerns, not the financial markets, and demand for private flying has continued. In April, he expected to book 200 to 300 flight hours, but flight time was actually just under 1,000 hours. "We're seeing 50 percent new customers," he said, as people buy cards to use now or save for later. Worries over the environmental impact of flying privately may have taken a back seat as well. "Concerns about opulence and concerns about environmental issues are gone," said Mr. Gallagher of NetJets. Many wealthy people put up with flying commercial because they had benefits like first class, TSA PreCheck and a status that allowed them various perks. "But now," he said, "there are a lot of people out there who don't want to fly commercial if they're part of an aging population or have underlying health concerns." A person on the average commercial flight has about 700 points of contact with other people and objects, according to a recent analysis by the consulting firm McKinsey, but private flights have only 20 to 30. For travelers concerned about the environment, the private jet companies offer programs to offset carbon emissions. Terrapass, which has partnered with Magellan, can calculate carbon offsets based on the size and age of a plane and where its flying. Magellan includes carbon offsets in jet cards greater than 50 hours. New fliers may be driving some of the increase in sales, but existing clients are refilling their jet cards with more hours. "We're seeing members purchase larger increments, so someone at 50 hours is renewing at 75 hours," said Mr. Tivnan of Magellan Jets. These fliers want to lock in availability for themselves and family members, should they need it, he said. The prices are not cheap. Magellan's entry level jet card for a Hawker 400XP, which seats six to eight people, is 130,000 for 25 hours. For the 14 passenger Gulfstream 450, it's 313,950. But tax breaks are available. The CARES Act, the economic stimulus package passed in late March, waived the 7.5 percent excise tax on all private jet flights and hours bought this year. That savings adds up. The same 25 hours on the Gulfstream 450 would have been 25,000 more expensive before the tax break. Owners who put their planes into chartered service can also take advantage of tax exemptions. The 2017 tax overhaul allows an owner who uses a plane at least 50 percent for business purposes to deduct the entire purchase price in the first year of owning the jet. But that business purpose could be putting the jet into the market for other fliers to use. Experts caution, however, that the supply may catch up to the demand. The price for chartering a plane to fly in the United States as opposed to buying flight hours is low now. A one way chartered flight from New York to Los Angeles, for example, would typically cost around 30,000 for a jet that seats eight people, said Jean De Looz, head of Americas for MySky, which helps jet owners manage costs. But that has fallen to 12,000 to 17,000. "Operators are trying to get some cash flow," he said, so they are offering cheaper rates. But there are only so many private planes, and the number of people who want to use them is growing. If more people buy planes outright, fewer will be available for chartered service. There are fewer than 1,300 planes for sale built in the last 20 years the time frame that banks use in financing the purchase of a jet. "The numbers are tiny," said Dan Jennings, chief executive of the Private Jet Company, a brokerage firm. Of course, that type of economic imbalance is predicated on commercial aviation continuing to be hobbled by health fears. Even now, a billionaire like Mr. Fossati is weighing his options to fly from Miami to Switzerland. He is waiting to see what safety protocols will look like for commercial carriers, but he has also asked for quotes to fly on a private plane. "Chartering a plane for two to three hours is one thing, but over the ocean, that's very expensive," he said. "Being rich doesn't mean you have to throw away money."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
For the second night of its City Center season, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater reprised two premieres from last December and tacked on Ailey's "Revelations" at the end. If all else fails, it's a sure thing. But before we could settle into "Pilgrim of Sorrow," the opening sequence of Ailey's 1960 masterpiece, productions by Wayne McGregor and Bill T. Jones still new for the company though not so for the greater dance world were shown. In "Chroma," created for the Royal Ballet in 2006, Mr. McGregor sets a series of pas de deux to Joby Talbot's original music and orchestrations of songs by Jack White. Mr. McGregor has said that he defines the title as "a freedom from white"; the set, by John Pawson, encases the stage the floor, the walls in a white frame, which, under Lucy Carter's excellent lighting, plays off against the dancer's skin tones. Men and women with dark skin in a white space, performing a ballet? That says something. What doesn't have as much to say is Mr. McGregor's piece and, a year after the Ailey company first performed it, the dancers' approach. The choreographer's proclivity for extreme movement, which incorporates a pliant spine, quick on the trigger flexibility and hyperextension, should have an odd chewiness about it. Here, performed with more aggression than nuance, it's just tough.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
A dancer may be born with talent, but it takes more than that to get a body ready for the stage. At "Stars of Today Meet the Stars of Tomorrow," a Youth America Grand Prix gala in which young dancers shared a program with professionals, Julie Kent, the host along with Jared Angle, spoke of gratitude for the teachers, parents and students who sacrifice much in the "pursuit of bringing more beauty to the world." The first half of Thursday's program at the David H. Koch Theater, included an entrancing Busby Berkeley style fan dance by MorningStar Dance Academy of Atlanta and wrapped up with more than 250 of the competition's entrants, baby bunheads and cavaliers, performing Carlos dos Santos Jr.'s "Grand Defile." The second half, featuring professionals, or the stars of today, delivered a weak collection of new dances and video segments that looked as if they had been recorded on Skype including "Windy Sand," a sappy work choreographed by Alexei Kremnev and performed with ever outstretched arms by Joffrey Studio Company. Despite the addition of live musicians, Emery LeCrone's "Minuet from String Quartet No. 15," set to Mozart for the New York City Ballet dancers Teresa Reichlen and Zachary Catazaro, added up to a lifeless display of dips and slides. In Anton Pimonov's "Double Polka," Calvin Royal III of American Ballet Theater and Kristina Shapran of the Mariinsky Ballet shared the stage in denim shorts and brick red vests for a duet filled with playful crossings but nowhere to go.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Agrawal is a rarity: a female structural engineer in an adamantly male profession. A self proclaimed "geek," she shares her discoveries far above and below ground with an enthusiasm worthy of Dora the Explorer. She will inspire young women who are considering a career in engineering. In early chapters, Agrawal slowly builds a foundation on familiar concepts, but your patience will soon be rewarded with more esoteric investigations into "hidden engineering." Two of the most interesting chapters "Pure" and "Clean" examine water and the technologies that have been developed to collect and process it. No one cares "about poo," a drainage engineer complains in "Clean." Agrawal disagrees. In fact, she shines when explaining the sorts of things people might be too shy to admit they find inherently fascinating. In Japan, for instance, Agrawal tries out an amped up toilet, itself an engineering marvel of heat, water and music. She then leaps back to the 18th century, when Japan traded in solid human waste, a valuable agricultural commodity for an island with little land and a growing population. As the "turd trade" boomed, laws were enacted that entitled landlords to their tenants' feces (but not their urine). Agrawal hopscotches to London and its once sewage filled Thames, commemorated as "Monster Soup" in an 1828 etching, one of the book's many black and white illustrations. The river's stench was so rank that at last, in 1859, city officials approved Joseph Bazalgette's proposal for a new sewage system. Nearly 20 years in the making and 1,300 miles long, that network also created space for the London Tube, the first underground railway. The sewers moved untreated effluent from central London and out to sea. Agrawal notes that "it may come as a surprise to learn that we use exactly the same system today."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
As it looks to expand its audience, Major League Baseball is considering not only expanding the playoffs, beginning in 2022, but also adding a novel element: allowing some teams to choose their opponent. Under the proposal, confirmed by a person with direct knowledge of it, 14 of the 30 major league teams would make the playoffs, up from 10. Major League Baseball, like many other sports leagues, is concerned about appealing to younger audiences, and shaking up the playoffs might do that. The N.B.A. has also considered tinkering with its playoffs and adding a midseason tournament. The expanded baseball playoffs would bring the sport closer in line to many other major North American leagues, which tend to admit about half of their teams to the playoffs: The N.B.A. playoffs consist of 16 of the 30 teams, the N.H.L. 16 of 31 and M.L.S. 14 of 26. The N.F.L. admits a smaller percentage of teams, 12 of 32.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
It turns out those much mocked Ice Bucket Challenge videos helped do a lot of good. Two summers ago, the challenge, designed to raise money for research into amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, took the internet by storm. Supporters ended up raising over 115 million for the A.L.S. Association. Over two years, money from the challenge has helped fund the research and development of treatment drugs and has been used as prize money to entice people to design technology for people living with the disease, which causes a rapid breakdown in a person's ability to control muscle movement. The association released a chart last year showing where the funds went: 77 million, or 67 percent, went to research. 23 million, or 20 percent, went to patient and community services. 10 million, or 9 percent, went to public and professional education. 3 million, or 2 percent, went to fund raising.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Donald C. Shorter in Raven Jackson's "A Guide to Breathing Underwater," which makes good use of multiple locations. Mr. Shorter is credited with the concept and the choreography. We live in the age of the smartphone camera, aware that the everyday devices in our hands and pockets are increasingly able to record professional quality images. Dancers and those who film dance know this too, as they keep showing the world on Instagram. This aspect of how we live now was presumably on the minds of the organizers of the Mobile Dance Film Festival at the 92nd Street Y. Presented on Saturday, close on the heels of the annual Dance on Camera festival at Lincoln Center, this festival was advertised as not just new but also novel the first to require that all its selections be shot on mobile devices. Beyond the novelty, what might this requirement mean? As with the rise of video a few decades ago, the relatively inexpensive and easy to use technology has lowered the bar of entry, so one implicit expectation for a Mobile Dance Film Festival is of voices that previously might have been excluded. The 24 movies selected (viewable, until Aug. 31, at 92y.org/dance/mobile dance film festival) are diverse, at least in the sense that the filmmakers hail from 11 countries. It's a testament to the sophistication of mobile devices that the strengths and weaknesses of the films have little to do with technical issues. Several of the movies look amateurish or are just plain bad, but none because of image quality or outdated effects. The flaws are artistic: the pretentiousness, sentimentality, inscrutability and unintentional or lazy comedy that can be found in dance and film of any kind. If there aren't any aesthetic breakthroughs, there are some common tendencies. These movies get around a lot but don't last very long. Mobile devices seem to encourage mobile moviemakers. And, with very few exceptions, their works are short: less than 10 minutes, with most less than five. In some cases, the movies end before they've really begun to say anything. But in others, the brevity is just right. The one minute that Nicola Hepp's "Breathe" lasts is enough to tell the story of the title's imperative: what a hyperventilating woman in a horror movie forest must do more slowly. If Rami Shafi's "Nicole Wolcott in Washington Square Park" were much longer than three minutes, the buoyant joy of watching Ms. Wolcott, a sunny spirited dancer, splash with girls in a fountain would likely deflate. Emma Cohen's "and the pools at the end of the world where the swallow dips her wings" has three times as many words in its title as minutes in its time span. But it's a potent visual poem. A woman stands still at the shore of a body of water with tankers in the distance; through a time lapse effect, her body is gradually encased in plastic wrap. Her small motions make the wrapping seem a chrysalis, beautifully iridescent. But the setting and the sound of surf make the environmental consequences of the plastic resonate, too. As these examples suggest, including a lot of dance content was not a requirement for the festival. Only one film, Sarah Lapinsky's "Plastic Plates Don't Break," made me think, "Here's a promising choreographer." Her work, in which two people have a silent argument amid place settings to a soundtrack of dialogue from classic Hollywood melodramas, was filmed on a stage, and is most like a document of a stage work. Almost none of the others show much of an interest in choreographic continuity and development the ideas are more about film or narrative, the dancing shapeless and apparently improvised as if choreography weren't important in dance films. Is this just the taste of the selection committee? A legacy of quick cutting music videos? Or is it an effect of mobile technology: the increased ease of creating good looking images tempting filmmakers away from the difficulties of constructing coherent dances? Most often, what mobile devices seem to inspire is a desire to position dancers against the backdrops of many places. New York City is an unsurprisingly recurrent choice, but glimpses of Sweden, Kazakhstan and Poland in these films are incidental pleasures. The most extreme example of location hopping is Jay Carlon's "Dance Film Selfie," which starts appealingly with him stuck overnight in a Russian airport, passing the time by improvising a dance on an escalator and sliding around the empty terminal. We then get a montage of him behaving similarly in Long Island City, West Hollywood, Frankfurt, Pismo Beach, Melbourne, Hong Kong and myriad other points on the globe. There's a nice irony in airplane window shots of clouds the reverse of geographical specificity but the cumulative impression is that the elastic Mr. Carlon has fewer dance ideas than frequent flier miles. The film that uses the impulse toward multiple locations (and a festival wide partiality to scenes of water) most effectively is Raven Jackson's "A Guide to Breathing Underwater." We find Donald C. Shorter (also credited with concept and choreography) on a New York rooftop, his worried hand motions matching the agitation of the music, part of Ravel's "Gaspard de la nuit." Soon, we see him making the same motions, and larger ones, as if drowning, in many closed in parts of downtown. (The artful editing, by Felipe Vara de Rey, deserves mention.) When the scene shifts to him on a boat and then to a Fire Island beach, the feeling of opening up, of escape is intense, even before he strips naked and cavorts like Isadora Duncan near the waves. The freedom of his dancing has gained significance through the ways the dancer and camera have moved. If mobile devices free up more filmmakers in this way, the next mobile dance film festival could be something to see.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Cleo Wade loves you. She really does. "I don't need to know you to love you," Ms. Wade said on a recent Thursday afternoon, in her spacious one bedroom apartment overlooking Tompkins Square Park in the East Village of Manhattan. Dressed casually in a striped La Ligne sweater, she was seated on her living room floor before a wall covered with biodegradable botanical wallpaper, as lavender scented incense burned and Donny Hathaway played softly in the background. It's the type of place where one would imagine Ms. Wade dreams up her fortune cookie size poetic self affirmations like: "Self love: it costs nothing and you gain everything" "Be yourself. I love you like that." Those motivational mantras have been splattered across Times Square and her popular Instagram feed, which counts Nicole Richie and the activist DeRay Mckesson as fans. The words have also been used in advertisements for Gucci's Chime for Change campaign, stenciled on Nike AF1 sneakers and inscribed on dishes for Fishs Eddy. Pouring herself a second cup of turmeric infused ginger tea, Ms. Wade apologized for feeling tired. She had spent the previous night in a floral Erdem gown at the New Museum, where she hosted a book party with old classmates from elementary school and newer pals like Elaine Welteroth and Prabal Gurung. "If people treat 'Heart Talk' less like a book and more like a best friend, I would really like that," said Ms. Wade, 29, who has a mop of springy caramel hued hair and an enviable closet of Gucci and Stella McCartney. Her social calendar and political activism have been chronicled in Vogue and Marie Claire, and she has also been linked romantically to Senator Cory A. Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, though their current status is unknown. In the book's acknowledgments, Ms. Wade writes: "To my partner, Cory, for being a constant source of light and inspiration in my life. You have truly been my rock during this process." (Asked if they were currently dating, Ms. Wade, who is extremely reticent about her personal life, declined to clarify the status of their relationship.) Ms. Wade's new book is filled with handwritten notes and self affirming poems. Being the world's most tireless BFF is part of her package, as her book underscores. Filled with handwritten notes and underlined sentences, "Heart Talk" reads more like a user guide for a vague set of life's hardships than as anything too preachy or precious. Her brand of pin able prose (sample line: "I love myself more than I loved the idea of an 'us'") and emotional transparency (she often posts screen grabs of her girlfriends' breakup text messages) appeals to a social media generation that expresses their hopes and fears through the brevity of Instagram posts and political T shirts. Indeed, a number of young women at last month's March for Our Lives protests against gun violence quoted Ms. Wade's works on their handmade signs and tagged her on Instagram. Sample placard: "May all children have the freedom to safely be children." "I connect with my audience because I start with where they are in life, and I just try to walk with them," she said. "I want you to rip out pages and put them on your fridge." Her parents divorced when she was 5, and she fell in love with writing at 6, after taking a summer course in poetry. In high school, she experimented with a quirky fashion style cultivated from thrift shops and hand me downs. "We didn't have a lot of money, so I became expressive through whatever weird thing I could find," she said. Her fashion sensibility led her to skip college and move to New York in 2006, where she interned at M Missoni and worked as an office manager at Halston. Ms. Wade's photogenic looks and penchant for wearing arty headpieces soon helped her achieve lucrative "It" girl status that resulted in consulting for Alice Olivia and appearing in advertising projects for Cartier and Armani. "I was making money for the first time in my life, but I realized I wasn't happy," Ms. Wade said. "Nobody tells you what to do when your girlhood dreams bump into your womanhood dreams." Seeking perspective, she packed her vintage pink typewriter and traveled across the world, from Morocco to Mexico, where she reacquainted herself with painting and poetry. Fashion was replaced by a new artistic mission: "How can I be a better friend, a better sister, a better daughter and be better to other women?" she said. It was around this time, in 2014, that she posted her first Instagram poem on the "unbreakable nature" of "women everywhere." She traded her paintbrush for a pen and rebranded herself as a high profile social butterfly with a social conscience, making appearances at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia with her close friend Katy Perry and at the Lower East Side Girls Club in Manhattan with the actress Reese Witherspoon to talk about self esteem. "I watched how personal her connection was to all the girls," Ms. Witherspoon said. "They revere her in the way that you would adore your favorite loving, creative aunt or older sister." Not long after the Democratic convention, Page Six, the gossip section of The New York Post, reported sightings of Ms. Wade and Mr. Booker together at the New York Edition Hotel and at a party given by Refinery29, where Ms. Wade had created a love themed poetry installation. In an interview with NorthJersey.com last September, Mr. Booker said he has "been a bachelor too long" and that he was "hopeful" a marriage to Ms. Wade was in the cards. Putting down her teacup on one of her small serving trays that reads, "keep your reality, I am fine with my dreams," she explained that her uncharacteristic tight lips were less for personal reasons than for philosophical ones. "Listen, I put my friends' text messages on the internet," she said. "But, every time I am interviewed, who I'm dating is the second question. For Cory, it's the 10th question, even if that. It never ends up being a qualifier for men, but that's not the same for women." Appearing deep in thought as to not mince her words, Ms. Wade took a deep breath. "Men shouldn't define women who are speaking about their work and what they're trying to do in the world," she said. And just like that, she had effortlessly created another affirmation right out of thin air.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Dog People Are Loving This (at Least Some of Them) None	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
LONDON The European Parliament approved on Wednesday a measure intended to revive sagging prices and confidence in the European Union's emissions trading system, the centerpiece of Europe's effort to cut greenhouse gases and a model for similar systems around the world. The vote had taken on symbolic importance because Parliament had rejected a similar proposal in April. That vote threatened the carbon trading system, which has been emulated globally as a way of using markets to curb greenhouse gases. The measure passed on Wednesday in Strasbourg, France, by a vote of 344 to 311 after intense lobbying by the European Commission and some national governments, including those of France, Denmark and Finland. It also gained stronger backing from liberal and socialist groups. Among those opposed were the governments of Poland and the Czech Republic, which were wary of the plan's impact on their energy intensive industries. A large moderate group, the European People's Party, was divided, leading many of its members to abstain. "This was to some extent a symbolic vote indicating support more broadly for Europe's carbon policies," said Stig Schjolset, an analyst at Reuters Point Carbon, a market research firm based in Oslo. A negative vote would have meant "that European policy makers did not want to fix the carbon market and use it as a key tool to combat climate change," he said. Richard Seeber, an Austrian and spokesman on the environment for the European People's Party, voted in favor of Wednesday's legislation after voting 'no' in April. He said he was persuaded by an amendment ensuring that the intervention in the market was "a one off" and by a requirement that an assessment be made about "carbon leakage," the extent to which businesses would leave the European Union to avoid the higher permit price. "It is essential to keep the E.T.S. as the main market based instrument to fight against climate change," said Mr. Seeber, referring to the emissions trading system. The market for carbon credits reacted positively, rising to about 4.70 euros, or 6.13, per ton, a 9 percent increase for the day, on heavy volume. The approved proposal will try to shore up prices for permits to emit greenhouse gases by delaying the auctioning of some of these allowances in the coming years through what is called backloading. Carbon permits are licenses for companies to release greenhouse gases. The idea behind the European cap and trade system is to tighten the amount of permits available each year so as to make polluting more costly, forcing companies to switch to greener technologies. But Europe's prolonged economic downturn and generous allocations of allowances have created a glut of permits that cut the price to as low as about 2.75 euros a ton after the negative April vote. Open or closed on Thanksgiving? Here are stores' plans for Thursday and Friday. The high cost of gas is forcing families to cut back on activities and essentials. Clearview AI does well in another round of facial recognition accuracy tests. In a sense, the system is working by providing relief at a time of economic stress. But analysts say that a price of 30 euros a ton or higher is needed to persuade companies to switch to cleaner fuels like natural gas, the main alternative to coal for generating electric power. Coal use in Europe boomed last year. Analysts caution that the number of allowances that will be held off the market, about 900 million, is estimated to be only about half of the surplus of permits that would otherwise have built up by 2020, so it will not by itself shift the carbon market from bear to bull mode. "I think the backloading itself will have limited impact on prices because the market remains significantly oversupplied," said Roland Vetter, head of research at CF Partners, a carbon trading firm based in London. In addition, there are still negotiations with Europe's national governments and other hurdles to clear before the changes are put into effect, perhaps in the early part of next year. "This is a marathon, not a sprint, so today is not the end of the story," said Miles Austin, the executive director of the Climate Markets and Investment Association, an industry group based in London. Business groups, some of which had lobbied against the measure, were critical of what they described as interference in a market system. "Even a one off intervention undermines the principles of the emissions trading system and will make it more difficult for businesses to produce cost effectively in the E.U.," Arnaldo Abruzzini, secretary general of Eurochambres, which represents European chambers of commerce, said in a statement. But the world's pioneering carbon market has a pulse again. Among supporters of carbon trading there is now hope that Europe will in a couple of years adopt structural changes that would lead to permanently higher prices. Connie Hedegaard, the European Union's commissioner for climate action, said the purpose of the backloading measure was to "stop the bleeding with the drop in the carbon price while we were discussing more challenging issues." The simplest overall change that would raise the price would be to "reduce the cap," or permanently reduce the number of allowances available, said Robert N. Stavins, director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program. But such a move "is very difficult to do at a time like this," he said. With Europe mired in recession, politicians do not want to saddle Europe based companies with even higher costs, especially considering that their American competitors are benefiting from lower energy prices thanks to the discoveries of shale gas. Also, the United States seems to have more or less permanently rejected a cap and trade system after the House of Representatives passed one in 2009 that later failed in the Senate. For some businesses, that left the European system looking like yet another burdensome and costly regulatory initiative. "Europe thought it would take the lead and the U.S. would follow," Mr. Stavins said. Instead, the United States rejected cap and trade and that is affecting the cost of carbon intensive services in Europe, he said. Mr. Stavins said that countries like Australia, Japan and China were all experimenting to various degrees with systems like the one Europe adopted.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
You may have questions about Hawaii. Many Americans do. After all, Hawaii is quite far from the mainland United States about 2,390 miles from the West Coast. That's almost the distance between New York and Los Angeles (about 2,450 miles). So perhaps it should be no surprise that at least one high ranking federal official thinks of Hawaii as a distant island. Here are some answers to questions about Hawaii. Can you drive to Hawaii? Of course not. It is an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean. There are eight main islands: Hawaii Island, Oahu, Maui, Kauai, Lanai, Molokai, Kahoolawe and Niihau. An independent kingdom that traded with Europe after the arrival of Captain James Cook in 1778, Hawaii was annexed in 1898 by the United States several years after foreign residents including 162 American Marines overthrew Queen Liliuokalani (That was front page news). The first Hawaii statehood bill was introduced in Congress in 1921, followed by the introduction of at least 48 more over the years, The New York Times wrote in 1959. Congressional fact finding junkets had been popular for many decades. "As a result of the statehood issue," The Times said, "Hawaii contends that it is the most thoroughly investigated community under the American flag." Hawaii finally became the 50th state on Aug. 21, 1959, under President Eisenhower. Does anyone live there? Yes. About 1.36 million people more than 10 other states. (It has more land area than Connecticut and, including water, more total area than New Jersey or Massachusetts, among others.) Oahu is the most populated island, with more than 953,000 people in 2010, according to the latest census data. The state capital, Honolulu, is there. It claims to be the most diverse state, based on the 2010 census. More than 60 percent of Hawaii's people are Asian. The Filipino American population overtook the population with Japanese ancestry to become the largest Asian group in the state in 2010. In 2014, there were nearly 370,000 residents described by the census as being Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islanders. About 20 percent of the population can trace ancestry to the original population, a Pew study found. Did anything important ever happen there? On Dec. 7, 1941, "a date which will live in infamy," President Roosevelt informed the nation, "the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan." The attack on Pearl Harbor on Oahu brought the United States into World War II, leading to America's rise as the pre eminent global superpower for decades to come. So, yes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
With fossils and DNA, scientists are piecing together a picture of humanity's beginnings, an origin story with more twists than anything you would find at the movie theater. The expert consensus now is that Homo sapiens evolved at least 300,000 years ago in Africa. Only much later roughly 70,000 years ago did a small group of Africans establish themselves on other continents, giving rise to other populations of people today. To Johannes Krause, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Human History in Germany, that gap seems peculiar. "Why did people not leave Africa before?" he asked in an interview. After all, he observed, the continent is physically linked to the Near East. "You could have just walked out." In a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications, Dr. Krause and his colleagues report that Africans did indeed walk out over 270,000 years ago. Based on newly discovered DNA in fossils, the researchers conclude that a wave of early Homo sapiens, or close relatives of our species, made their way from Africa to Europe. There, they interbred with Neanderthals. Then the ancient African migrants disappeared. But some of their DNA endured in later generations of Neanderthals. "This is now a comprehensive picture," Dr. Krause said. "It brings everything together." Since the 1800s, paleontologists have struggled to understand how Neanderthals are related to us. Fossils show that they were anatomically distinct, with a heavy brow, a stout body and a number of subtler features that we lack. The oldest bones of Neanderthal like individuals, found in a Spanish cave called Sima de los Huesos, date back 430,000 years. More recent Neanderthal remains, dating to about 100,000 years ago, can be found across Europe and all the way to southern Siberia. Scientists who study ancient genes search for two kinds of genetic material. The vast majority of our genes are in a pouch in each cell called the nucleus. We inherit so called nuclear DNA from both parents. But we also carry a small amount of DNA in the fuel generating factories of our cells, called mitochondria. We inherit mitochondrial DNA only from our mothers, because a father's sperm destroys its own mitochondrial DNA during fertilization. Years ago, Dr. Krause and his colleagues started their search for ancient Neanderthal genes in a fossil by looking for mitochondrial DNA. After discovering mitochondrial DNA in some fossils, they later managed to find nuclear DNA. The genes held some surprises. For example, bits of DNA in living people of non African ancestry come from Neanderthals. When modern humans expanded out of Africa, they seem to have interbred several times with Neanderthals. Those children became part of human society, passing on their genes. But a finger bone and a tooth from a Siberian cave called Denisova left Dr. Krause and his colleagues with a baffling puzzle. Inside those fossils, the scientists found sequences of mitochondrial DNA that were not human or Neanderthal, but something else a distant branch of the family tree. The Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA was much closer to our own. Later, the researchers managed to recover the nuclear DNA from the Denisovan finger bone, which showed Denisovans and Neanderthals were more closely related to each other. As scientists found ancient DNA in more fossils, our history has come into sharper focus. Scientists now estimate that the common ancestor of modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans, lived between 765,000 and 550,000 years ago. About 445,000 to 473,000 years ago, that common ancestor's descendants split into two lineages. One eventually led to modern humans, while the other led to Neanderthals and Denisovans. After years of investigation, however, Dr. Krause still did not understand why the nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA of Neanderthals seemed to have different histories. The former pointed to a link with Denisovans, the latter to humans. Last year, the researchers announced they had gathered a small fraction of the nuclear DNA from the same Sima de los Huesos fossil. That genetic material looked like it belonged to a Neanderthal, not a Denisovan. Dr. Krause and his colleagues have now discovered new Neanderthal DNA that they believe can solve the mystery of this genetic mismatch. In 2013, one of Dr. Krause's graduate students, Cosimo Posth, examined a Neanderthal fossil from a German cave called Hohlenstein Stadel. He was able to reconstruct all of its mitochondrial DNA. Dr. Posth estimated that the Neanderthal fossil was 120,000 years old and, more important, that it belonged to a branch of the Neanderthal family tree with a long history. He and his colleagues determined that all known Neanderthals inherited their mitochondrial DNA from an ancestor who lived 270,000 years ago. All the data pointed to a sequence of events that could solve the puzzle that had bedeviled Dr. Krause for so long. The common ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans spread across Europe and Asia over half a million years ago. Gradually the eastern and western populations parted ways, genetically speaking. In the east, they became Denisovans. In the west, they became Neanderthals. The 430,000 year old fossils at Sima de los Huesos Neanderthals with Denisovanlike genes capture the early stage of that split. "Now you have this hybrid child, which is probably pretty unusual looking," Dr. Siepel said. "One way or another, this hybrid individual was absorbed into Neanderthal society." Dr. Siepel warned that the hypothesis hinges on the new DNA found in the Hohlenstein Stadel fossil. Dr. Krause and his colleagues are now trying to retrieve nuclear DNA from the fossil. The research at Sima de los Huesos shows just how far back in time scientists can now search for genes. The most revealing DNA might come from the mountains of Morocco. There, scientists may be able to find genes from the earliest Homo sapiens, which they can then compare to Neanderthals'. "These are things that I never thought possible five years ago," Dr. Krause said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Rudolph Johnson, the up and coming Atlanta rapper known as Marlo, who loomed large among his city's rap heavyweights even as he remained an underground figure and ambivalent local celebrity, was shot and killed there on Saturday night, the police said. He was 30. The Atlanta Police Department said that officers had initially responded to a single vehicle accident on I 285, west of downtown, around 11:30 p.m. and discovered the driver deceased, with gunshot wounds. "At this time, investigators believe the victim was the intended target of the gunfire and they are working to determine the circumstances surrounding the shooting," the police said in a statement. The Fulton County Medical Examiner's Office confirmed on Sunday that Mr. Johnson had been killed. The shooting came amid a rash of gun violence in Atlanta in recent weeks, following a turbulent period of protests against the police killings of Rayshard Brooks there and George Floyd in Minneapolis. "It has to stop," Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said last week. Marlo, or Lil Marlo, who was also known locally as Young Rudy or Rude, turned to music relatively late in life, hoping to escape what he referred to as "the streets" a world of guns and drug dealing that had surrounded him as he was raised in some of Atlanta's most neglected neighborhoods. In 2017, he signed to Quality Control Music, the homegrown label that had minted stars like Migos and Lil Yachty, alongside his friend and collaborator Lil Baby, who went on to become one of hip hop's biggest new stars. "Two words," Pierre Thomas, the Quality Control executive, said at the time of the pair: "Real Atlanta." Marlo went on to release five mixtapes with the label, including his debut, "2 the Hard Way," with Lil Baby, followed by "The Wire," "9th Ward God," "The Real 1" and "1st and 3rd," from this year, which featured appearances by Future, Young Thug and Gucci Mane. Admittedly not a natural M.C., Marlo got by on the authority of his hard boiled and hyperlocal street tales, delivering boasts, threats and regrets in a distinct, wheezing squeal that he was still developing. Though not a presence on the Billboard charts, he represented a distinct strain of cult favorite regional rapper and connector, especially in Atlanta, commanding respect from his more established peers as he inched toward a breakthrough. "I ain't tripping," Marlo said of his gradual rise toward the mainstream. "I had to be new to the block before. So it just is what it is." As his partner Lil Baby racked up industry accolades, Marlo told his fellow rapper, "No matter what I'm doing, you keep going." Rudolph Simmons Johnson was born on May 1, 1990, and raised in Bowen Homes, one of Atlanta's most notorious and crime ridden housing projects, which was demolished in 2009 after a string of killings. "I know how to survive in the jungle," said Marlo, who called his Bankhead neighborhood and the Bowen projects the "home of the murderers and them drug dealers," and whose music told of witnessing violence and crack sales from a young age. Mr. Thomas, who has worked to convince his Quality Control artists that music is a safer path, said in a 2017 interview, "All of us come from the same background I know the lifestyle," adding, "I know what it's like trying to get out the hood, trying not to make the same mistakes and putting yourself in the position to go back to prison." Marlo called Mr. Thomas "a real battery pack in me," an inspiration to try to choose the studio over the street. "So much potential that the world didn't get a chance to see," Mr. Thomas wrote Sunday on Instagram. "It's really hard for me to say RIP."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
LONDON When Daniel Birnbaum announced last summer that he was stepping down as the director of the renowned Moderna Museet to join a virtual reality start up, it raised eyebrows in the art world. After all, the Swedish curator was at the top of his game, working with some of the art world's most prestigious institutions. In addition to the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Mr. Birnbaum had led biennials (including Venice, in 2009) and a prominent art school (Frankfurt's Stadelschule). He had been a jury member for the Turner Prize in Britain and organized countless contemporary art exhibitions. Why would he leave all this behind to work with VR, a technology still in its infancy? In an interview in February, only a few months after he took over the company's artistic leadership, Mr. Birnbaum, 55, seemed relaxed and energized. From his office at Somerset House, a neo Classical building housing arts spaces that overlooks the River Thames, he's been overseeing Acute Art while also planning a new curatorial venture: a VR focused booth titled "Electric" at Frieze New York, which runs May 2 5. VR generally refers to high resolution experiences that use a headset to place viewers in immersive environments. Video game developers have found commercially viable uses for the medium, and moviemakers have also dipped their toes in: Last year's Venice Film Festival had a dedicated section for VR works. And slowly, cautiously, virtual reality has made its way into the contemporary art world, too, with biennials and art institutions presenting works that come to life inside those big black goggles. Viewers have lined up in response. For example, Jordan Wolfson's "Real Violence" caused a stir at the 2017 Whitney Biennial with its graphic depiction of the artist brutally attacking a stranger on the street; at the Berlin Biennale in 2016, Jon Rafman's "View of Pariser Platz" showed the famous Berlin square being swallowed by an apocalyptic explosion. Stepping into this volatile landscape, Acute Art sees itself as something between a production company and an artist studio. Dedicated solely to creating works of contemporary art, it started out with a roster of world famous artists who were completely new to the medium: Anish Kapoor, Jeff Koons and Marina Abramovic have all since made their first VR works with the company. For his Frieze New York booth, Mr. Birnbaum has selected several works produced by Acute Art, such as Mr. Kapoor's "Into Yourself, Fall," a stomach churning plunge through the viewer's own body into a kind of afterlife, and a new work by R. H. Quaytman that responds to the mystical paintings of the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint. Mr. Birnbaum said it was also important for him to include artists whose work wasn't produced by Acute Art, like Rachel Rossin an outlier in the field because she does all her own coding. Mr. Birnbaum said he was aware that these might be the first VR art experiences for some in the Frieze audience. "For the normal art world, it's a novel thing," he said. "I hope this will create curiosity." This means that the studio setup changes with each new work: One week, a row of computer screens showed clay animals that team members were digitally animating; the next, they were modeling NASA data to recreate outer space for Antony Gormley's "Lunatick," a work produced in collaboration with the astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan. The mastermind of Acute Art's technical output is Rodrigo Marques, the chief technology officer, who works closely with artists. On a visit to the office in February, Mr. Marques was overseeing the programming of Mr. Gormley's piece, using design and animation software to recreate the environment of space as realistically as possible, as requested by the artist. The piece begins with the viewer alone, exploring a remote island, before zooming into the atmosphere and landing on the moon. There, the viewer can wander in low gravity across reproductions of the cratered surface. Making this technically feasible calls for massive amounts of information to be processed in milliseconds. "The amount of visual data required to simulate space is huge," Mr. Marques said. For a 2017 work by Olafur Eliasson, the Acute Art team created an uncanny reproduction of a waterfall with a realistic rainbow shimmer. (It was a nightmare to build, Mr. Eliasson said.) The Berlin based artist is used to working with digital technology, and has employed at least one programmer in his studio since 2008. Mr. Eliasson said that the experience of working with Acute Art opened up new technical possibilities: "The level was way beyond what I would normally have access to," he said in a telephone interview. Although tech companies, including HTC Vive, Oculus and Google, are also working with artists to create VR works, they often have a more commercial attitude, Ms. Rossin explained. "They're used to how advertising works," Ms. Rossin, who is based in New York, said in a telephone interview. But Acute Art, Mr. Eliasson said, was solely interested in making art that suits the artist. "They fundamentally wanted it to be the best possible art work," Mr. Eliasson said, "and the technical solutions had to fit to that." High grade technical solutions don't come cheap, and yet no money changes hands between Acute Art and the artists they work with. Instead, the company is funded by Gerard De Geer, a Swedish businessman and art collector, and his son Jacob. The company's original business model involved making the works Acute Art produce available to headset owning subscribers for a monthly fee, but the pay wall was dropped in June 2018. "We are keen on having the largest outreach," said Irene Due, the communications director of Acute Art. "If our aim is to get the biggest outreach, you have to make it free." Essentially, the business is betting on the artistic value of their products translating into commercial value down the line, presumably through a traditional gallery model of selling a small number of limited editions, although the company's representatives were vague about their long term strategy. "Our focus is to develop the works at this stage," Ms. Due said. Mr. Birnbaum said that one of VR's biggest challenges is how to show it to large audiences. Until headsets are widely available, Acute Art is making do with phone ready 360 degree video, or it is relying on gallery and museum shows where headsets can be provided. At Frieze, Mr. Birnbaum has chosen to show simplified versions of all the works he is presenting, leaving out audience interactions so that more people can watch them: Viewers will be able to move around the virtual worlds, but won't be able to have an effect on their environment. Engagement takes time to explain to the viewer, and that slows things down. But does this show the best of what VR can do? That is just one of VR art's many unanswered questions, and Mr. Birnbaum raised some more: "How will this be shown? How will it be collected? Will it at all be sold?" He seemed comfortable to leave these unresolved for now, but he acknowledged the future was uncertain. "I hope I won't regret it," he said of his move to VR. "I don't yet."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Sergei Filin, the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet who was partly blinded last year in a brutal acid attack that stunned the dance world, paused for some eye drops then put on his brown tinted wraparound sunglasses before making his way to the theater. There he took his seat as one of the judges of the Youth America Grand Prix dance competition on Monday afternoon at the N.Y.U. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, where he was greeted with the kind of ovation complete with hoots and hollers that is more commonly given on such occasions to a precocious young dancer's pirouettes than to a judge. The lights dimmed, and Mr. Filin removed his dark glasses and began watching as boys 12 to 14 from all over the world danced, using a yellow pencil to fill out evaluation forms with 29 categories on their technique, their artistry and the general impressions they made. Earlier that day, in a wide ranging interview about his recovery, the scandal that rocked the Bolshoi and his goals for one of the world's most storied ballet companies, Mr. Filin, 43, said that while his eyesight was now good enough for him to judge, it remains extremely hampered. Mr. Filin said that the sight from his good eye, his left, fluctuates but hovers around 50 percent, and that his doctors are still working to try to save his right eye after 27 surgical procedures in Moscow and Germany. "We have great expectations and hopes that not only can the right eye be preserved, but that it will also gain some sight," he said, through an interpreter. Mr. Filin had reached one of the pinnacles of the dance world artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow when he became world famous for all the wrong reasons last year after a pair of attackers threw acid in his face on the night of Jan. 17, 2013. A disgruntled soloist with the company was later convicted of ordering the attack, which pulled back the curtain on the festering atmosphere of bitter rivalries, factions and politics that had long plagued the Bolshoi. Asked if the Bolshoi had begun to heal in the year since his attack, and since a slew of bitter charges and countercharges about everything from casting to pay surfaced in its aftermath, Mr. Filin said, "It's primarily myself who has to heal, because I bore the main blow myself." Sergei Filin, the Bolshoi's artistic director, in New York. "I think it's not the Bolshoi Theater that needs some kind of remedy or healing," he said. "I think it's those people who were creating this atmosphere for all these months which finally resulted in this terrible attack. The theater itself is quite healthy." But noting the "hatred and hostilities which precipitated the attack," Mr. Filin expressed hope that the outrages of the last year could help strengthen the Bolshoi by clearing the air. "If my being the victim could help remedy the situation, I would say it's a good result," he said. Mr. Filin lamented that the scandals had distracted people from the most important thing about the Bolshoi: the artistry of its dancers, and its attempts to preserve a rich heritage, including the works of Yuri Grigorovich, the Soviet era choreographer who dominated the theater for decades and still oversees some productions there, and newer works by Alexei Ratmansky, a more recent former artistic director there who is now one of the world's most sought after choreographers. "One of the major aims of the Bolshoi Ballet is to keep the right balance between the heritage the heritage of the Soviet period, the heritage of what is called the golden age of Soviet Ballet and the classical versions of that period and also to bring in works by outstanding contemporary choreographers," Mr. Filin said. Since the attack, he has divided his time between Germany, where he is receiving treatments, and Moscow. He went on tour with the Bolshoi earlier this year to Paris, where the company danced Mr. Ratmansky's "Lost Illusions," and to Norway, and said that he intends to accompany it to New York this summer when it plans to dance "Swan Lake," "Don Quixote" and "Spartacus," one of Mr. Grigorovich's best known works, at the Lincoln Center Festival. Under Mr. Filin, the Bolshoi has drawn dancers not just from its own school but from elsewhere in Russia and the world. He said that he was delighted with the way David Hallberg, who became the first American star to enlist permanently with the company, had become "a great Russian dancer" and a partner of Bolshoi stars, especially Svetlana Zakharova. He praised many of the troupe's recent arrivals, including Evgenia Obraztsova, a former dancer with the Mariinsky Ballet in St. Petersburg who joined the Bolshoi in 2012, and Olga Smirnova, who joined the Bolshoi after graduating from the Vaganova Academy in St. Petersburg in 2011 calling her "one of the most interesting, most unusual young talents in the world of ballet."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Richard L. McCormick, a self described "faculty brat" at Rutgers University who learned to swim at a campus pool on College Avenue in New Brunswick, N.J., and grew up to become the university president, announced on Tuesday that he would step down from that post at the end of next year to return to teaching at Rutgers, of course and writing. "I used to be a scholar of American political history, and I fancy I can do that again," he said at a news conference. Dr. McCormick, 63, who still recalls tagging along to campus events with his mother, an administrator, and his father, a history professor and dean, taught at Rutgers for 16 years before leaving to become provost of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and then president of the University of Washington in Seattle. Since returning to Rutgers as president in 2002, he has engineered a historic reorganization of the university, increased fund raising and overseen new building projects and academic programs all during a period of painful state budget cuts. Before he departs the presidency, Dr. McCormick said Tuesday, he plans to push ahead on the 1 billion fund raising campaign announced last year, to work to get a bond issue to finance construction of new academic buildings and maintenance on existing ones and to move forward on a proposal to make Robert Wood Johnson Medical School part of Rutgers. "I'm not leaving yet, and I set forth a fairly ambitious agenda for the year ahead," he said in an interview. Greg Trevor, a Rutgers spokesman, said the university would "move quickly" to find a replacement. People inside and outside the university credited Dr. McCormick with guiding Rutgers during a time of enormous fiscal pressures. New Jersey's largest and most prestigious public university, Rutgers now receives an annual appropriation of about 400 million from the state the same amount as in 1994, when it had 12,000 fewer students. The university anticipates 58,000 students in the fall. "The challenges facing presidents of public institutions these days are pretty significant, and Richard McCormick rose to be that dynamic leader necessary in these tough economic times," said Pamela Lampitt, a state assemblywoman who heads the Legislature's Higher Education Committee. "He believes in Rutgers and what a great education can do for people." Dr. McCormick's tenure was not without controversy. The athletic department, and in particular, the football program, was criticized for lavish salaries and shaky management. In 2008, a review committee that Dr. McCormick appointed accused him of being "too passive in exercising his authority" over athletics. Weeks later, he asked the athletic director to resign. "Rutgers athletics grew very quickly and successfully, but without putting in place all the checks and balances and openness in decision making that it should have had," he said in the interview on Tuesday. "And we fixed those things." As football was growing, the administration demoted six other teams to club status, including men's tennis, men's and women's fencing, and men's swimming and diving. "We can't afford to run 30 intercollegiate sports," he said. "Maybe Harvard and Stanford can, but we can't, so I had to make some hard decisions." In just the past year, he has coped with a student sit in that lasted 36 hours and the suicide of Tyler Clementi, the freshman whose roommate is accused of using a webcam to secretly watch and stream video from another dorm room of Mr. Clementi's intimate encounter with a man. "There have been headlines I'd rather not have been written," Dr. McCormick said. Perhaps his greatest legacy will be the consolidation of an unwieldy collection of colleges that, in Dr. McCormick's view, short changed students. He abolished individual colleges, including Rutgers, Livingston and Douglass, establishing in their stead the School of Arts and Sciences, with uniform admissions standards and academic requirements. Considerable resistance came from alumnae and students of Douglass College, one of the oldest women's schools in the United States. But the administration devised a compromise, allowing students to live in single sex dormitories and pursue women's studies in the newly named Douglass Residential College, which is more of a physical campus than an academic institution. "Rutgers was cobbled together with different institutions in different places Camden, Newark, New Brunswick and so every president has faced the challenge of bringing this university together," Dr. McCormick said. "We now have a unified School of Arts and Sciences and got away from a system in which there were all kinds of constraints on students if you live here, you can't study this. It was a system of gotchas." But money troubles hampered his leadership. A history professor who spoke on the condition of anonymity on Tuesday, saying she did not want to alienate Dr. McCormick because he would be returning to her department full time, said that relations between the president and the faculty had become strained over the years. "When he came in, there was a lot of optimism: it was like, 'Jersey guy comes back to lead the university to glory,' " she said. "But every time we turn around, someone is saying, 'Do more with less.' He did not cause that, but that's the climate he experienced here." Dr. McCormick acknowledged those fiscal realities in his announcement. "Across the nation, the handwriting is on the wall, and whether you like it or not, state support for higher education has been on a two decade long decline," he said. "I and every president wish we could reverse that."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
About 7,000 years ago, gentoo penguins first came to Ardley Island in the South Shetlands chain just off the Antarctic Peninsula. The island is a little over a mile long, almost small enough for a classic castaway cartoon, except that it is the Antarctic. And instead of a lone palm tree, there are now about 5,000 breeding pairs of gentoo penguins, one of the largest colonies in the Antarctic, and a lot of guano (penguin excrement), much of which is washed into the freshwater Ardley Lake, where it accumulates in the sediment. In that guano, scientists have found the record of a recurring natural historical drama. Three times since the gentoos arrived on Ardley, the colony was devastated by volcanic eruptions. The ash and smoke killed them or drove them away. Penguins gather in colonies to breed, so there may well have been chicks caught in the ash fall even if adults escaped. The landscape the eruptions left cannot have been hospitable, because each time it took 400 to 800 years for a colony of similar size to re emerge.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
With its latest EP, "Map of the Soul: Persona," the Korean pop group BTS has matched a chart feat last reached by another foreign born boy band: the Beatles. The seven song "Map of the Soul: Persona" (Big Hit), sung mostly in Korean, opened at No. 1 on the latest Billboard album chart, with the equivalent of 230,000 sales in the United States, including 196,000 copies sold as a full album and 37 million streams, according to Nielsen. Those 196,000 full album sales a robust number these days, when some chart toppers fail to crack 500 were helped by a canny strategy of selling four collector versions on CD, with variant packaging. "Map of the Soul: Persona" is BTS's third No. 1 in less than a year, after "Love Yourself: Answer" in September and "Love Yourself: Tear" last May, when BTS became the first K pop act to land a No. 1 album in the United States. According to Billboard, the Beatles were the last group with three top sellers in such quick succession, with its three "Anthology" volumes, in 1995 and 1996. BTS, which performed on "Saturday Night Live" two weeks ago, is the most visible of a new wave of K pop bands Blackpink, a girl group, just made a splash at Coachella and has managed to cross over with clever music videos and guest appearances by Western stars like Halsey, who sings in Korean on the song "Boy With Luv." (Another track, "Make It Right," is partly written by Ed Sheeran.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
You have a gene called PNMA6F. All people do, but no one knows the purpose of that gene or the protein it makes. And as it turns out, PNMA6F has a lot of company in that regard. In a study published Tuesday in PLOS Biology, researchers at Northwestern University reported that of our 20,000 protein coding genes, about 5,400 have never been the subject of a single dedicated paper. Most of our other genes have been almost as badly neglected, the subjects of minor investigation at best. A tiny fraction 2,000 of them have hogged most of the attention, the focus of 90 percent of the scientific studies published in recent years. A number of factors are largely responsible for this wild imbalance, and they say a lot about how scientists approach science. Researchers tend to focus on genes that have been studied for decades, for example. To take on an enigma like PNMA6F can put a scientist's career at risk. "This is very worrisome," said Luis A. Nunes Amaral, a data scientist at Northwestern University and a co author of the new study. "If the field keeps exploring the unknown this slowly, it will take us forever to understand these other genes." A gene may come to light because scientists encounter the protein it encodes. At other times, the first clue comes when scientists recognize that a stretch of DNA has some distinctive sequences that are shared by all genes. But giving a gene a name doesn't mean you know what it does. Consider a gene called C1orf106. Scientists found it in 2002 but had no idea of its function. In 2011, researchers found that variants of this gene put people at risk of inflammatory bowel disease. Yet they still had no idea why. In March, a team of researchers based at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., solved the mystery. They bred mice that couldn't make proteins from C1orf106, and found that the animals developed leaky guts. That protein, the scientists discovered, keeps intestinal cells properly glued together. Now investigators have a new way to look for treatments for inflammatory bowel disease. Researchers noticed that something was wrong with the study of human genes as early as 2003. Just a small group of them attracted most of the scientific attention. Genetics has changed dramatically since then. Scientists now have a detailed map of the human genome, showing the location of just about every gene on the human genome, and the technology for sequencing DNA has become staggeringly powerful. Recently, Dr. Amaral and his colleagues checked to see if researchers had broadened their focus by analyzing millions of scientific papers published up to 2015. Our knowledge about human genes, the team found, remained wildly lopsided. Not only did Dr. Amaral and his colleagues document the ongoing imbalance, they tested 430 possible explanations for why it exists, ranging from the size of the protein encoded by a gene to the date of its discovery. It was possible, for example, that scientists were rationally focusing attention only on the genes that matter most. Perhaps they only studied the genes involved in cancer and other diseases. That was not the case, it turned out. "There are lots of genes that are important for cancer, but only a small subset of them are being studied," said Dr. Amaral. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Just 15 explanations mostly accounted for how many papers have been published on a particular gene. The reasons have more to do with the working lives of scientists than the genes themselves. For example, it's easier to gather proteins that are secreted than ones that stay trapped inside cells. Dr. Amaral and his colleagues found that if a gene creates a secreted protein, that gene is much more likely to be well studied. It's also easier to study a human gene by looking at a related version in a mouse or some other lab animal. Scientists have succeeded in creating animal models for some genes but not others. Genes that are studied in animal models tend to be studied a lot in humans, too, Dr. Amaral and his colleagues found. A long history helps, too. The genes that are intensively studied now tend to be the ones that were discovered long ago. Some 16 percent of all human genes were identified by 1991. Those genes were the subjects of about half of all genetic research published in 2015. One reason is that the longer scientists study a gene, the easier it gets, noted Thomas Stoeger, a post doctoral researcher at Northwestern and a co author of the new report. "People who study these genes have a head start over scientists who have to make tools to study other genes," he said. That head start may make all the difference in the scramble to publish research and land a job. Graduate students who investigated the least studied genes were much less likely to become a principal investigators later in their careers, the new study found. "All the rewards are set up for you to study what has been well studied," Dr. Amaral said. "With the Human Genome Project, we thought everything was going to change," he added. "And what our analysis shows is pretty much nothing changed." If these trends continue as they have for decades, the human genome will remain a terra incognito for a long time. At this rate, it would take a century or longer for scientists to publish at least one paper on every one of our 20,000 genes. That slow pace of discovery may well stymie advances in medicine, Dr. Amaral said. "We keep looking at the same genes as targets for our drugs. We are ignoring the vast majority of the genome," he said. Scientists won't change their ways without a major shift in how science gets done, he added. "I can't believe the system can move in that direction by itself," he said. Dr. Stoeger argued that the scientific community should recognize that a researcher who studies the least known genes may need extra time to get results. "People who do something new need some protection," he said. Dr. Amaral proposed dedicating some research grants to the truly unknown, rather than safe bets. "Some of the things we would be funding are going to fail," he said. "But when they succeed, they're going to open lots of opportunities."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
The scene: Visitors in the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens near London have reported hundreds, if not thousands of bees, especially bumblebees, sick or dead, beneath fragrant, flowering Tilia trees. Similar reports have been made in other parts of Britain and Europe, as well as the United States as long ago as the 16th century. "It doesn't make sense, does it, dead bees under trees?" said Philip Stevenson, a chemical ecologist at the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens and the University of Greenwich in the United Kingdom. Exhibit A: The basswood tree, also known as Tilia, linden or lime (not to be confused with the kind that make green fruit) is native to southeastern Europe. It is found in cities and parks all over the world. And when other food sources have run out late in the season, bees depend on Tilia. "It's a huge source of nectar, often overlooked, and it's covered in thousands of bees in late summer," Dr. Stevenson said. But then some of them die. In the 1970s, scientists fed eight bees nectar from Tilia flowers, and they died too. It was determined that nectar from the tree contained a toxic sugar, called mannose, that poisoned and killed the bees. The theory pervaded public opinion and scientific literature for years. Not so fast. In the 1990s, scientists used more advanced techniques to search for the sugar again in the nectar and in the bodies of dying bees that fed on the trees. There wasn't much there. And when they fed the bees the tree's nectar, they survived. In the earlier experiment, the bees had most likely died of starvation. Six additional incidents were reported across the state, according to Aimee Code, a pesticide program director at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. In 2015, Oregon banned the use of four pesticides on Linden trees, and the mass bee deaths seemed to stop. So the pesticides may have contributed in these cases. But what about historical accounts could it just be nature taking its course? "There are so many bees on Tilia trees in the height of summer, some of them are going to die and just drop to the ground because they're old," Dr. Stevenson said. Or predators, like wasps, may kill them. Indeed, all bumblebees die at the end of the season, except for the queen, who stores up food and hibernates to start a new hive the next spring. Could it be that the bees simply starved? Most deaths occur at the end of the blooming season, when Tilia nectar supply becomes limited, and the bees have less energy stored up to keep them going. But there's a problem with this hypothesis: "We get dead bees at Kew even when there's other stuff around," Dr. Stevenson said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
A slow start finds Jim and his customized R.V. in the snowy vastness of northern Maine during hunting season. A regular visitor to this wilderness, Jim is ideally placed to click into survival mode when a deer stalking incident uncovers a dead woman, a bag bursting with cash and a passel of furious thieves. For the rest of the movie, he will engage in a panting cat and mouse with a dwindling group of far heartier pursuers, and some of his dodges will even seem credible. Most of the time, though, when Jim fares poorly in a fight, we're just glad he's getting the chance to sit down. As derivative as its title and as implacable as its declining hero, "Blood and Money" suffers from near calamitous narrative lapses. The script, by Barr and two others, presents Jim's crucial connection to a struggling waitress (Kristen Hager) in little more than outline. And by gesturing broadly toward Jim's painful past without fully cluing us in, the movie provides only the barest justification for his descent into vigilantism. His growing need for a stiff drink, however, is all too easily excused. Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Rent or buy on FandangoNOW, iTunes and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
THE minivan was a cliche almost from the moment the first Dodge Caravan rolled off Chrysler's assembly line in 1983. It was the boxy family hauler aimed at harried soccer moms, a symbol of the soul crushing conformity that was the price Americans paid for suburban comfort. As the vehicle enters its fourth decade, we can add some new cliches. It is the Rodney Dangerfield of the automotive world, whose 15 minutes of fame may be over but whose demise has been greatly exaggerated. Admittedly, these are not the best of times for the minivan, whose sales have declined from a peak in 2000, when Americans bought 1.37 million of the snub nosed parent traps, close to 8 percent of new car sales. Then, buyers could choose from at least 21 models, according to Motorintelligence.com, which tracks the industry. This year, industry experts expect sales to drop below 500,000, about 3.5 percent of the market. It is also a much thinner market, as four vehicles the Honda Odyssey, Toyota Sienna, Dodge Caravan and Chrysler Town Country account for almost all sales. "People have been writing about the 'death of the minivan' for a long time," said Jessica Caldwell, a senior analyst at Edmunds.com. "No one should expect a return to the glory days, but sales seem to have bottomed out, and it looks like it has found its niche as an enduring option in the marketplace." Now, then, is the right time not to bury the minivan but to praise it. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but a minivan has never been just a minivan. Like muscle cars and sport utility vehicles, it has also been a powerful symbol and a metaphor, of hopes and dreams, as well as compromises and disappointments. Its history is inextricably braided to major social and economic trends as well as to gender politics that have reshaped America since the 1980s. The minivan's family tree has many roots, including the Stout Scarab, a poor selling vehicle introduced in the early 1930s that had many minivan characteristics, and the Ford Econoline cargo van, introduced in 1961. Its most interesting antecedents are two vehicles that embodied the culture wars of the 1960s: the Volkswagen bus embraced by counterculture hippies and station wagons, which represented the conformist "Father Knows Best" mentality of postwar America. In a delicious, we all end up like our parents twist, some of those aging flower children would help feed the minivan boom. The minivan was born a legend, the vehicle that saved Chrysler and helped make its chief executive at the time, Lee Iacocca, a star. The carmaker was largely being kept afloat through loan guarantees from the government when Mr. Iacocca took its helm in 1979. In 1983, it introduced the Dodge Caravan and the Plymouth Voyager. They were instant hits: Chrysler sold 209,895 minivans during the first year, turning around the company's fortunes. GM introduced its own minivans in 1985 (the Chevrolet Astro and GMC Safari), and Ford followed in 1986, with the Aerostar. "The minivan was revolutionary in many ways because it was one of the first vehicles designed from the inside out," said Alexander Edwards, president of Strategic Vision, a San Diego market research firm that does work for the car industry. "It didn't have much under the hood, and its outward appearance was anything but stylish, but the interior space of the vehicle was designed to provide space and comfort that the main family vehicle at the time, the station wagon, didn't." Instead of forcing the smallest children to pile into cargo space without safety restraints, the minivan provided a third row of seats. It was low to the ground and provided a sliding door so children could get in and out of it easily, even in tight parking spaces. Through the years, minivans evolved to provide ever more home style comfort, essentially becoming living rooms on wheels. Cup holders, juice box holders, dual zone temperature controls, wireless headphones, DVD players, televisions, iPod controls, heated steering wheels, umbrella holders and vacuums were just some of the accessories added. Mr. Edwards said the minivan's focus on the interior reflected a change in car culture. "Car buyers in the 1960s and '70s knew a lot more about cars, their inner workings, than people in the late 1980s and 1990s, so it was natural for consumers to focus more on what they knew." But the ultimate domestic vehicle was soon cast as a symbol of shackled domesticity, with the "minivan stigma" attached to soccer moms who, it was said, so closely identified with the vehicles that they surrendered their identity, their autonomy, to the demands of family and suburban life. A 1997 article in The New York Times captured this dynamic when it quoted Barbara J. Byer, a mother from suburban Detroit, on why she traded her minivan for an S.U.V. "I wanted to be a mom," she said, "yet I wanted my own identity." "There is no denying the stigma," admitted JoAnn Heck, director of consumer and market insight for Chrysler, which still controls about half of the minivan market. When Kristen Howerton, a professor of psychology at Vanguard University in Costa Mesa, Calif., began writing a blog about her efforts "to keep my sense of self, my passion, as I became a mother," she knew exactly what to call it: Rage Against the Minivan. "The idea of the minivan encapsulated everything I was talking about," she said in a recent phone interview. "Cars say a lot about our values and aesthetics, and the minivan is almost the perfect metaphor for being a mom vanilla and there to serve a purpose." Ms. Howerton, who has four young children, is well aware of the irony that she now drives a 2006 Toyota Sienna minivan. Despite all the cultural baggage, she says, it is "very convenient." The minivan's identification with women added to its stigma. Even though sales figures indicated that men, perhaps influenced by their partners, accounted for about 60 percent of new minivan sales, many of them recoiled at the idea of driving a mommy mobile. And, despite marketing efforts to recast minivans as swagger wagons and macho mobiles, minivans seem indelibly associated with more feminine images of family and comfort. It is no surprise that the chrome plated titan of rugged adventure fantasies the S.U.V. rose up after the minivan. It also offered lots of interior space, though not as much as the minivan. What it lacked in comfort as it bounced down the road it made up for in a high riding design that bespoke power and security, which appealed to men and women. It is hard to find anyone in the car business who argues that S.U.V.'s are more practical or functional vehicles for what buyers actually want their vehicles to do. But in the complex world of cultural signifiers, S.U.V.'s clicked. Through August of this year, the S.U.V./sport wagon market was about 10 times as large as the minivan's, according to Motorintelligence.com. In terms of median age (around 50), income (about 91,000 a year) and marital status (married), buyers of minivans and S.U.V.'s have long been peas in a pod. About two thirds of the buyers of new minivans and S.U.V.'s tend to vote Republican, said Mr. Edwards of Strategic Vision, which surveys 500,000 new car buyers each year. (By a two to one ratio, buyers of new hybrid vehicles are Democrats). Within this relatively homogeneous pool, Mr. Edwards said, there are notable lifestyle differences. People who buy minivans are much more likely to say they attend church than those who purchase S.U.V.'s. They are more likely to list family gatherings, reading and volunteering as favorite pastimes, while S.U.V. buyers are more likely to enjoy camping trips, hunting, going to sporting events and home repair projects. "Generally speaking," Mr. Edwards said, "people who buy minivans are saying family is at the center of their lives, and S.U.V. buyers are saying, 'I am more than family oriented. I am more capable, sporty and fun.' " Not everyone has accepted the minivan stigma. Dempsey Bowling, a 43 year old Dodge and Chrysler salesman in American Fork, Utah, spent years modifying his turbocharged 1989 Dodge Caravan for track and street racing. "I used to drive around, see someone at a stop light and give them the sign that I wanted to race," he said. "People at first would not take it seriously." When they revved the throttle, he knew they had accepted the challenge. "I loved the way the engine would respond. Once the light turned green, the other car would take off, but I would have to get halfway through the intersection before I got a turbo boost spike, the tires would start spinning and I'd be gone." The adage that children express their individuality by rejecting their parents' choices may be the minivan's last, best hope. "When the millennials who grew up in S.U.V.'s start having families of their own, they probably won't want the same cars their parents had," said Ms. Caldwell of Edmunds.com. "To express their individuality, they may opt for a minivan, or even a station wagon."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
The clean, well lighted place is glowing. Even from the sidewalk, even without windows you can see through. There it is on Lafayette Street, a salt lamp of retail real estate, a frosted beacon. There is a name printed banner flying above, but if you are coming here, you probably don't need it. You already know, deep in your pores, that you are at the new Glossier flagship store. Glossier, if you don't have a friend, a colleague, a daughter or a niece who swears by it, is a digital first beauty company that was founded in 2014. It speaks to its customers as a friend would and sells its friends lots and lots of jelly cleanser and Boy Brow (essentially mascara for your eyebrows), which is not strictly speaking a new invention, but has nevertheless shot this product to top selling status. Emily Weiss, the founder and chief executive, is as close as we've come to a millennial Estee Lauder, but unlike Estee Lauder, Glossier has bypassed department stores altogether. Ninety percent of Glossier's revenue comes from online sales. But even many of those who can (and do) order online found the option to shop in person irresistible, as Glossier discovered when it opened a shoppable showroom space here, in what was then its office building, in 2016. Lines formed down the street; more than half a million customers came through, the company said. "Once they got upstairs, they didn't shop and go," Ms. Weiss said. "They really hung out, sometimes for hours. At one point, someone even ordered pizza." So for Glossier's second and largest permanent shop, which opens on Nov. 8, Ms. Weiss and her team wanted to offer an experience. Glossier is a social club for the like minded, an auto body shop for the human body. (The staff, called offline editors, wear mechanic's jumpsuits, hand dyed in the hue that Glossier helped to standardize as "millennial pink.") It offers what are quickly becoming the three Cs of the digital era: community, conversation and content. Glossier is not optimized for quick shopping. (For that, you can order online and pick up.) The main shop space is up a winding staircase, in a womblike haven. Once there, customers are encouraged to try anything and everything on, to chat with their "editors," their friends and the person at the next makeup mirror. All of the products are arranged within easy reach at communal tables, with sinks in an ad hoc bathroom (the "wet bar") for washing them all off to try again. In an adjacent room, human size tubes of Boy Brow Glossier's own version of Claes Oldenburg sculptures stand upright in front of mirrors, waiting for selfies. "It's encouraging people not to shop the space but use the space," said Christine Gachot, a founder of Gachot Studios, the interiors firm that worked on the design with the architecture studio P.R.O. "We're not focused on selling you stuff," she said. "We don't have people working on commission. When you're in such a transactional time a time of Amazon having engineers working on cross selling and upselling and better and better algorithms to get you to buy stuff it's really important to create spaces and experiences that help you feel things." Asked to describe the feel of the space, Ms. Weiss settled on "adult Disneyland." Like Disneyland, Glossier offers an otherworldly experience, where frosted windows keep out the street views and the warm light and pinkish ambience are keyed to flatter. But Ms. Weiss does not dream of a retail empire. There are no plans for future permanent locations, though there will be some pop ups. Her bigger investments are in technology and e commerce, including a Glossier owned social platform. "We think a lot about Apple as we think about our design and experience," Ms. Weiss said. Those are the heights of Glossier's ambition, fueled by its latest round of funding: 52 million. (It has raised 86 million since its founding.) Ms. Weiss imagined her beacon as a New York landmark to be, drawing well moisturized pilgrims the world over. Imagine the itinerary!	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
The Caribbean island of St. Barts , a commune of France, is making a strong recovery following the damage that it sustained from last summer's Hurricane Irma, according to several hotel owners, restaurant managers and flight charter companies (Hurricane Maria did minimal damage to the island ). St. Barts has a population of around 10,000 people and is roughly 13 square miles in size; its main industry is tourism, according to Nils Dufau, the president of the St. Barts Tourism Committee and a vice president with the local government. Although the island's airport, Saint Barthelemy Airport, which serves only small commercial and charter aircraft, closed for just a few hours following Irma in September, the hotels didn't fare as well: many of the 28 properties, the majority of which are less than 50 rooms, were damaged and forced to close, and so were more than half of the island's 800 villas. The stores and restaurants in Gustavia, St. Barts main town and capital, were also temporarily shut, and its streets were strewn with rocks and debris from seawater that flooded the downtown. Today, the island is cleaned up and ready to welcome visitors. St. Barts' main attractions include its 17 white sand beaches, surfing, snorkeling, diving and boating, and Mr. Dafau said that visitors to the island can enjoy all of these diversions as they did before Irma. The debris from the storm that littered parts of the island was cleared within a few weeks, he said. "Our streets are immaculate, and Gustavia looks better than it did pre Irma because we've replanted it with 1,500 trees and plants, which is more than we had before," Mr. Dufau said. Most of Gustavia's 150 stores were open by Christmas, and all were open by early March. The dining scene, too, is back: most of the isle's 65 or so restaurants are open, except for those that are part of hotels that remain closed. Bonito Saint Barth, a popular French and Caribbean restaurant in downtown Gustavia with water views, reopened on March 10 following two months of construction; Irma caused the restaurant's roof to cave in and destroy the bar and most of the furniture, according to the general manager Nicolas Gicquel. The reopening has had a warm reception. "We have been full every day and have many reservations for the next few weeks," Mr. Gicquel said. And Nikki Beach Saint Barth, a sought after beach club and restaurant, is reopening on March 30 with a new outdoor sushi bar and rotisserie. The majority of the accommodations on St. Barts are villas there are 2,200 villa rooms, compared with 600 hotel rooms, and in early March, around half of the villa inventory was available to book , according to Mr. Dafau. Ashley Lacour, the president of Sibarth Bespoke Villa Rentals, which has a portfolio of 220 villas, said that some of these homes had damage from Irma and had to close, but most have been open for reservations since December. "Some of the impacted villas have been renovated so they're new," he said. Post hurricane prices for villa rentals remain the same as before the storm Mr. Lacour said that the average price for a three bedroom villa in the summer is between 10,000 and 20,000 a week. During the island's peak season from December through February, that price jumps to between 30,000 and 40,000. Unlike villas, hotels, especially luxury beachfront properties, are taking longer to open because many had severe flooding that caused extreme damage; around 15 of the island's 28 hotels are currently open while the rest are expected to open before the end of the year. Hotel Christopher, a 42 room upscale property in the residential neighborhood of Pointe Milou, for example, is targeting an October reopening. The general manager Christophe Chauvin said that Irma damaged 70 percent of the hotel. "Our beachfront restaurant was completely destroyed, and the ocean flooded our pool," he said. The property had more misfortune after the storm: it underwent an eight million euro renovation and was scheduled to open in early March, but after a fire in its fine dining restaurant, the opening has been delayed. However, Mr. Chauvin said that the hotel's spa and beachfront restaurant will be open by the end of March. "We can offer some sort of escape to locals and villa renters," he said. And Eden Rock, one of the island's most high end hotels, has plans to reopen this December, according to the general manger, Fabrice Moizan. "We had mainly water damage from the storm and are in the middle of a big renovation that includes a stronger infrastructure to prevent such a big impact when another hurricane happens," he said. Another high end property, Hotel Manapany, was already closed for a renovation when Irma hit and reopened on March 13 with 43 redesigned rooms and a new pool and spa. The owner Anne Jousse said that the property is nearly full during the St. Barts Bucket Regatta, an internationally known boat race and boat show that's taking place from March 15 to 18. Many charters flights to St. Barts are back on their pre Irma schedules. Tradewind Aviation, which operates between 15 and 30 shared charters a day from San Juan and Antigua to the island, has the same flight schedule as it did this time last year, said the co owner David Zipkin. He said that business is up in March, compared with last March: the company has 4,000 bookings for the month, a 30 percent jump from 2017. Mr. Zipkin, who travels to St. Barts frequently, was last there in late February and said that it was as picturesque and alive as ever. "The island is beautifully green, and there are people out and about in the stores and restaurants and on the beaches," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Members of several fraternities and sororities at Michigan State University have been ordered to isolate for two weeks after a coronavirus outbreak on campus. Wisconsin's chancellor urged students to "severely limit" their movements after more than 20 percent of its tests on students over Labor Day weekend came back positive. At Iowa, where the fall semester is less than a month old, more than 1,800 students have tested positive, and there are a whopping 221 cases in the athletic department alone. It was against this backdrop that the Big Ten Conference, with the virus running rampant on many of its campuses, reversed course on Wednesday and declared it would play football starting next month. Conference leaders, who only five weeks ago postponed the fall season until the spring, said the science related to the pandemic had changed so much over the intervening 36 days that it was now safe to play. The way the decision was met with hallelujahs in locker rooms, coaches' offices, the warrens of social media occupied by die hard fans and even at the White House to say nothing of congratulations offered up by several reporters on a conference call with Big Ten leaders it might have seemed as if Jonas Salk had risen and delivered a new vaccine. Alas, a more fitting image is this: the conference presidents, fitted with fire retardant suits, ordering another cocktail while their houses continued to burn. When Northwestern's president, Morton Schapiro, was asked how, with freshmen and sophomores prohibited from living on his university's campus and classrooms closed for the fall semester, it was appropriate for his football team to be playing, he replied, "That's a great question." He then made a cursory effort to answer it. "I did grapple with it, thinking that part of the campus is closed and maybe you shouldn't play football until the campus, we hope, is open for the winter quarter, the first week in January," said Schapiro, the chairman of the Big Ten's council of presidents and chancellors. "At the end of the day, I found the arguments that if we could do it safely, we can play football and the other fall sports, there's no reason not to go ahead and do it." As it turns out, Schapiro was one of 11 presidents who flipped on the original decision. That group included Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway, a former Stanford football player who told NJ.com last week that he was worried about where the virus was headed next month, and that the push forward by the Southeastern, Atlantic Coast and Big 12 conferences had revealed a warped set of values. (A Rutgers spokesman said Holloway was unavailable for an interview on Wednesday.) The science that turned the decision, the conference said, centered on one item: the Big Ten's ability to procure rapid testing capabilities, which it said would allow colleges to test their football players (and other fall athletes) on a daily basis. Rapid tests, though, have been found to be less accurate than other versions. They can miss infected people carrying small amounts of the virus, producing false negatives, or detect people at the tail end of infections who have only dead virus, producing false positives. Daily testing could help weed out those inaccuracies. Commissioner Kevin Warren, who was filleted last month for cloaking the decision not to play in secrecy, promised transparency on Wednesday. And then, a few minutes later, he refused to say who the Big Ten was contracting with for the testing. When the Pac 12, another of the nation's biggest conferences, pulled the plug on football on Aug. 11, only hours after the Big Ten, it at least cited three criteria for a potential return to play: improved testing, more information on virus related side effects (including heart inflammation) and a reduction in community infection rates. The Big Ten said it was addressing many of those concerns. In addition to daily testing, it said it would require all coronavirus positive athletes to undergo a cardiac M.R.I. exam. But those expensive machines rarely exist in college towns; the closest one to Penn State, for example, is a nearly two hour drive away, in Harrisburg, Pa. "Access would be a major issue if we said every athlete needed to get one of these," said Dermot Phelan, a cardiologist in Charlotte, N.C., who is an adviser to the Atlantic Coast Conference, whose teams have already begun their seasons. As for community infection rates, there are no stated thresholds that would keep the Big Ten from playing. James Borchers, the team doctor at Ohio State, who directed Saturday's medical presentation to the conference's presidents, said the important metrics are the team positivity rate (among the players) and the population positivity rate (players, coaches, staff). If the players test above 5 percent or the population rate exceeds 7.5 percent over a seven day period, football activities must cease for seven days, the league said. But John Swartzberg, an infectious disease professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, said that broader campus and community infection metrics should be essential in determining whether sports are played. Swartzberg, who said he was speaking for himself and not the Pac 12 medical advisory board, of which he is a member, added: "To assume otherwise essentially says that the athletes are living in a bubble completely unrelated to the surrounding community." Of course, that seems to be precisely the point for the Big Ten. By now, it is a hollow exercise to wonder if the same testing regimen being created for and offered to the Northwestern football team will be presented to Northwestern's theater department or marching band at least not until they, too, bring in the millions of dollars in television revenue that the athletic department does.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Families that share a business or other financial interests can struggle like any other. But their squabbles can do more than ruin an awkward summer barbecue. At stake is the economic stability of the business as well as the financial comfort of the family members. In these disputes, money can act like kerosene on the flames of family discord. The typical reaction after a fight with a relative is to take a break, but those linked by financial interests are more likely to hire lawyers and fight for what they believe is theirs. In an effort to keep a bad situation from getting worse, families are turning to so called chief learning officers to help them learn to work together. The hope is that a more aligned family will make better decisions that will benefit its members and its business. The chief learning officer is well established at large companies. In 1990, Jack Welch created the role at General Electric when he was chief executive. In the last three decades, people filling this position have acted as corporate educators. Their focus is on creating programs to train employees to make them and the company more productive. In family operations, the role has morphed slightly: The focus is on training the relatives to be business owners and to think about the future of the enterprise. Greg McCann, founder of McCann Associates, acts as a chief learning officer for family businesses as well as a counselor to those who want to assume his role in a family enterprise. He said that getting families to shift their focus toward unity could be difficult, but that in the long run, they had more clarity about who they were and what they wanted. And sometimes, they chose not to stay together. "I always ask them, 'Do you want to be the last but most efficient Blockbuster store owner?'" he said. "The world is changing really quickly. You can't just make the Blockbuster store layout better. You have to think, 'How do we go from Blockbuster to Netflix?' Most families get that." Mr. McCann said the process started with the family itself. "We say the family defines success, but what's needed is a definition of family goals," he said. Haws, a 100 year old family company in Sparks, Nev., that makes drinking fountains and emergency equipment, found itself needing to redefine its corporate structure when a member of the family left the company abruptly. "We had family members in the business and assumed they were looking after each other," said Tom White, the chief executive and the husband of one of the owners. "They weren't." Stephanie Kilroy, his sister in law and an owner of the company, said the family business hadn't been mismanaged; it had been "unmanaged." So the family created governance policies to help align its members and run the business more efficiently. But it became clear that more help was needed, so the family brought in Mr. McCann. In the process, it decided that the best solution would be for Ms. Kilroy and her sister, Mr. White's wife, to buy out the other relatives. "We had tiptoed around the deeper issues that related to family dynamics, and it really caught up to us," Ms. Kilroy said. "We worked on resetting the family ownership group and committing to the emotional intelligence aspect of families in business together." The task can be long and arduous. Mr. McCann said the first year was particularly intense and time consuming because it required the families to talk about issues that they may have been glossing over for years. The families that have thought about personal and professional growth are typically the most successful; those whose members are not committed to one another on a personal level often struggle because they fail to see the purpose in keeping the business together. Some families stop the process when they realize what it entails, Mr. McCann said. "They'd like to be in shape, but they don't want to run or lift heavy things," he said. Ruth E. Steverlynck, a chief learning officer and a founding partner of Your Family Enterprise, said she spent years with her clients. She said many families thought that once they had the legal documents like wills, trusts and partnerships in place, their job was done. Likewise, they might be thinking about family governance, but still need guidance. Chief learning officers, she said, are available "to help families learn and develop, to really help families get excited about learning together and why it matters." Duncan Taylor has been running Taylor Made Sales Agency, an equestrian sales and boarding company in Nicholasville, Ky., with his brothers for more than 40 years. After working with McCann Associates, he learned his leadership style was not a good match for his brothers' way of working. "I've always been the brother coming into the meeting pushing and pushing an agenda," he said. "I'm a thinker, not a feeler, and I have three brothers who are feelers. When I get into the room, I shouldn't push so much. I should throw the idea out on the table and ask for input." Chief learning officers can help break through an impasse by showing each side how the other is thinking. Mr. Taylor said he was listening to his brothers more and asking more questions. "Before, they were thinking I wasn't respecting them, when I was thinking I'm just trying to get things done for the business," he said. "Now, they're giving their thoughts more. They're not so easily caving in just because they want to get out of the meeting." He said this revelation had come at a crucial time for them because their children were beginning to show interest in the business. A chief learning officer at a top corporation earns around 140,000 a year, according to job sites like Indeed and LinkedIn, and those who work for family businesses make about the same. Mr. McCann said that he charged 400 an hour, and that the first year of a project typically ran 80,000 to 150,000. Being the chief learning officer in a family run business is different from being one in a larger company because family members have different levels of involvement. Some work in the business, while others are merely shareholders. A chief learning officer has to consider the qualifications of the relatives as well as the potential for clashes with others. "The ability to have the difficult conversation is the best way to ensure families last 100 years," Mr. McCann said. "It's the difference between hiring one sibling versus having a hiring policy." What most of the founders are looking for is a way for their children to run the company together or find a way to part amicably. But a chief learning officer's role is to be realistic. "I say, 'If we roll the clock ahead 20 years, what do you want it to look like?'" Ms. Steverlynck said. Some families may not want to remain in business together, she said, while others want to build a dynasty. Either way, they have to take the first step. And that's a learning exercise for any family.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Donald Trump and the Republican Party are trying to distract you from their catastrophic failure. Two months ago, as the world knows, Trump was praising China's government for its handling of the coronavirus outbreak, while downplaying the severity of the threat to the United States. "We have it totally under control," he said in an interview to CNBC on Jan. 22. "It's one person coming in from China and we have it under control. It's going to be just fine." For good measure, he said it again on Twitter: "China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!" Now, of course, Trump simultaneously denies that anyone could have known about the pandemic ("I would view it as something that just surprised the whole world") and claims to have predicted the extent of the disaster ("This is a pandemic. I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic"). Similarly, he's moved from praising President Xi Jinping's government to attacking it. He's also changed the language he uses to describe the pathogen that causes Covid 19. After weeks of saying "coronavirus," he now calls it the "Chinese virus." The administration says it's simply holding Beijing responsible for spreading the disease. And it is true that the Chinese government suppressed information and punished whistle blowers, hiding the potential danger until it was too late. But given the president's previous praise for China's response, that explanation doesn't hold up. The likely truth is that Trump is flailing. His change in language came shortly after the stock market collapsed and the president faced harsh criticism for his sluggish response to the outbreak. Rather than face his failures the United States is far behind its peers in testing, and its hospitals are largely unprepared for a surge of the severely ill Trump turned to racial demagoguery. He would bounce back not by fixing his mistakes but by fanning fear of foreign threat. Following the president's lead, Republican lawmakers, activists and officials have adopted the president's language about the virus while avoiding any discussion of his response to the outbreak. Senator John Cornyn of Texas told reporters that "China is to blame because" of "the culture where people eat bats and snakes and dogs and things like that." Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader of the House, called the disease "Chinese coronavirus." And on Twitter, Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa wondered what all the commotion was about: "I don't understand why China gets upset bc we refer to the virus that originated there the 'Chinese virus' Spain never got upset when we referred to the Spanish flu in 1918 1919," he wrote, in his typically hurried style. None of this is the least bit clever. Trump failed to act when it was most important, and now his allies are flooding the zone with rhetoric meant to move attention away from the president's poor performance and toward an argument over language. One might think that Republicans have an interest in pushing the administration into a stronger response, but the truth is that Trump wasn't the only member of his party to downplay the threat who knew better. In January, just over two weeks after she was sworn in, Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia was part of a private briefing on the coronavirus provided by administration officials, including Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. That same day, according to The Daily Beast, she and her husband began to sell millions in stock, a process that continued over the next few weeks. They also made a purchase: between 100,000 and 250,000 worth of shares in a company that specializes in technology that helps people work remotely. Loeffler seems to have sensed danger. But that's not what she said to the public. "Democrats have dangerously and intentionally misled the American people on Coronavirus readiness," she said on Twitter in February. "Here's the truth: realDonaldTrump his administration are doing a great job working to keep Americans healthy safe." In February, Richard Burr, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, co wrote an op ed in which he assured the public that "the United States today is better prepared than ever before to face emerging public health threats, like the coronavirus." A few days later, however, he sold somewhere between 628,000 and 1.7 million in stock, according to ProPublica. And a few days after that, NPR reported, he warned representatives from select companies and organizations (including donors to his 2016 re election campaign) that the virus might move local communities to close schools and force the federal government to mobilize the military in response to acute medical need. "We're going to send a military hospital there; it's going to be in tents and going to be set up on the ground somewhere," Burr said. "It's going to be a decision the president and DOD make. And we're going to have medical professionals supplemented by local staff to treat the people that need treatment." It's tempting to say that now is not the time for partisan recrimination. But this is the second consecutive Republican administration to lead the United States to disaster. The difference is that it took George W. Bush most of his two terms to bring the country to the brink of economic collapse Trump has done it in less than four years. He's even hit some of the same milestones; Bush let Hurricane Katrina drown New Orleans, Trump let Hurricane Maria destroy Puerto Rico. In other words, now absolutely is the time for recriminations, because it's the only way we might avoid another such administration in a country where control of government moves like a pendulum. The public needs to know that the Republican Party is culpable for the present crisis, just as it was culpable for the Great Recession, even if it did not originate either. It needs to know that in the face of a deadly pandemic, some Republican lawmakers appear to have looked to profit rather than to prepare. It needs to understand that the deadly incompetence of Republican governance is a feature, not a bug.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Shoulder to shoulder and mask free: Several attendees at the announcement of Judge Amy Coney Barrett's selection as a Supreme Court nominee have since tested positive for the coronavirus. There is a line from Hannah Arendt's 1951 book "The Origins of Totalitarianism" that I've thought about constantly during the last four years. "Totalitarianism will not be satisfied to assert, in the face of contrary facts, that unemployment does not exist; it will abolish unemployment benefits as part of its propaganda," Arendt wrote. A regime dedicated to creating its own reality doesn't just use language to lie. To truly animate lies, those in power must behave as if they're true, no matter who gets hurt. For the past seven months, Donald Trump's big lie has been that the coronavirus isn't as dangerous as scientists say, and that his administration has the virus under control. To sustain this lie, Trump's circle has had to reject the mitigation and containment strategies that many other countries have used to get a handle on the pandemic, because those strategies are tangible reminders of the threat the virus poses. The face mask is the ultimate symbol of the frightening abnormality of this moment, and so the Trump administration treated masking as a sign of disloyalty. It's not just that Trump himself frequently declined to wear masks. He mocked Joe Biden for wearing them, and discouraged their use in his presence. "Everyone knew that Mr. Trump viewed masks as a sign of weakness," Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times reported this weekend, citing White House officials. They quoted Olivia Troye, formerly one of Mike Pence's top aides on the coronavirus task force: "You were looked down upon when you would walk by with a mask." So it's not surprising that the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, the very face of administration propaganda, didn't wear a mask when briefing reporters on Sunday, even though she'd been exposed to the virus. On Monday news broke that she'd tested positive, making it clear that she'd put those reporters in danger. Or, I should say, further danger: Three journalists covering the administration had already tested positive on Friday, underlining what a perilously infectious environment this White House has become. Two of McEnany's deputies in the press shop also tested positive that's in addition, as of this writing, to Trump, his wife, his campaign manager, his personal assistant, his informal advisers Kellyanne Conway and Chris Christie, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee and three senators. In June, when the coronavirus tore through senior political and military ranks in Iran, it was seen as a sign that the country's sclerotic leadership might be teetering. "They have not been completely straightforward with their people," Gen. Frank McKenzie, commander of U.S. Central Command, was quoted saying at a think tank event. "And as a result of that, the distrust you begin to see within Iran of their leadership is perhaps magnified." Iran's government, he said, was "struggling." Now ours is too. The problem is not that a sickened Trump can't perform the duties of the president. After his diagnosis, a strange political fiction took hold that American national security would be threatened if Trump were incapacitated, as if Trump ordinarily does work that protects the nation's interests. In truth, while it's scary that Trump is making decisions while on a steroid with documented psychological side effects, when it comes to the stability of our government, it's hard to see how it matters whether the president watches Fox News and tweets from the White House or from a suite at Walter Reed. What's alarming, rather, is that each new diagnosis in the White House demonstrates how thoroughly this administration has been infected by its own disinformation. The refusal to take basic precautions against the pandemic is the starkest evidence yet of how our government has morphed into a personality cult. The out of control spread of the coronavirus in the White House is a microcosm of its out of control spread in the country, where on Friday new cases hit the highest point since mid August. What matters now is whether the Covid 19 cluster at the pinnacle of Republican politics acts how the Chernobyl disaster did in the Soviet Union, further exposing a regime rotten with mendacity. That's far from guaranteed. In the hospital, Trump and his enablers worked to minimize the perception that he was really sick. His doctor misled the public about the president's condition. Trump staged photo shoots of faux work sessions and risked the health of Secret Service agents to drive by a gathering of fans. If a critical mass of people continue to trust Trump, the way he's spinning his ordeal might lead them to take the coronavirus even less seriously. Announcing his discharge on Monday, Trump tweeted that he felt better than he had in 20 years, saying: "Don't be afraid of Covid. Don't let it dominate your life." But Americans should fear Covid. And if coronavirus dominates our lives, it's because an administration charged with protecting us is so subservient to the president's lies that it can't even protect itself.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Steve Defontes spent years living in West Orange, N.J., and commuting to work in Lower Manhattan before he decided, last year, that he was ready for a change. When his house sold faster than he expected, he was forced to make a quick decision about where to go, and his mind naturally went to the town he had been driving to each day to catch the PATH train: Harrison, N.J. "I asked myself, 'What can I do that will disrupt my life the least?' And I thought of all those buildings that were going up around where I parked my car every day," said Mr. Defontes, 45, the president of Big Idea Advertising. In December, he moved into a one bedroom, one bathroom apartment in one of them, a luxury rental building a three minute walk from the new PATH station, cutting his commute in half. And at 2,180 a month, he estimates his rent is about half of what he would pay in a similar amenity filled building in New York City. The move was expedient, but the outcome turned out to be much better than Mr. Defontes anticipated. Arvind Garg also took a practical route to Harrison. After getting a job in New York City four years ago, Mr. Garg, a financial data analyst who is now 38, planned to move north from New Brunswick, where he was living at the time. But Jersey City, he decided, was too expensive, and Newark too unpredictable. In Harrison, he thought, he would be able to find "a nice house with good people around." In 2017, after renting for a couple of years, he and his wife paid 630,000 for a newly constructed two family house at the north end of town. They live in the bottom two floors and rent the two bedroom unit upstairs for about 2,000 a month. Although the house is "cookie cutter if you've seen one, you've seen them all," Mr. Garg said, he is happy with their choice of Harrison, where they have enrolled their 2 year old daughter in the town's free preschool: "It's a nice community, it's closer to the city and my work, and there's plenty of parking." Tucked into an elbow of the Passaic River across from Newark, this 1.2 square mile town was home to large manufacturers like RCA, the Edison Lamp Company, Otis Elevator and the Hartz Mountain Corporation for much of the 20th century. But the factories that made all those radio tubes, light bulbs and pet products have been replaced in recent years by high end apartment buildings and hotels. Now residents, builders and investors are predicting that Harrison just one PATH stop beyond the Journal Square station in Jersey City will be the next Jersey City or Hoboken: an urban setting offering millennials an easy commute into the city. "It's too good to be true right now," said Lino Silva, 63, a partner at TIBO Construction, describing his second career of flipping houses in Harrison, which began six years ago after 35 years of owning a liquor store and deli in neighboring East Newark. "You buy a property, knock it down, build it up, and it's sold. Most of the time it's being sold without it even being built yet." David Antunes recognized the potential in Harrison years ago, when he was living in Brooklyn and doing celebrity hairstyling at NBC. "I saw the renaissance was going to take place, and I totally wanted to be part of it," said Mr. Antunes, 49, who grew up in Newark and bought a two bedroom riverfront condominium in Harrison in 2007 for 485,000, opening a hair salon in town as well. "It did take a while to get here," he said. "But I'm so glad I've been a part of it." It's a tale of two towns in this Hudson County municipality of close to 18,000 residents. North of the Interstate 280 overpass, the neighborhoods largely retain the feel of older urban towns in North Jersey: tightly packed blocks lined with two and three family homes (although many are being rebuilt), mixed with small apartment buildings, churches, shops and ethic restaurants. Harrison's multifamily zoning makes single family houses relatively scarce. 117 CROSS STREET A two family house with a total of five bedrooms and five bathrooms, built in 2019 on 0.06 acres, listed for 715,000. 973 204 0861 Laura Moss for The New York Times South of the overpass, on Frank E. Rodgers Boulevard (named for a former mayor who served for nearly 50 years), are mid rise, glass and steel rental buildings with names like 330 Harrison Station, Urby, Cobalt Lofts, Vermella and Steel Works, where residents enjoy outdoor pools, firepits, yoga classes and cafes. This area, sometimes called SoHa, also has two hotels and the mushroom shaped Red Bull Arena, home to one of the area's professional soccer teams. Luis Pinto, a real estate agent with the Bixler Group, grew up in Harrison and has seen the town go through various changes over the years. "It's always been an immigrant place Peruvian, Portuguese, Spanish, Irish, Chinese, Italian, Pakistani, Nigerian," said Mr. Pinto, 44, who is part of the once predominant Portuguese community. "It's very diverse, and everybody really likes each other." 201 DEY STREET, NO. 119 A two bedroom, two and a half bathroom duplex condominium, built in 2008, listed for 475,000. 201 889 2085 Laura Moss for The New York Times What may appear to recent arrivals like an overnight transformation is, in fact, the long awaited manifestation of a 22 year old redevelopment plan to turn 250 acres of industrial land into transit oriented residential and commercial properties, with most of the buildings in proximity to the 256 million PATH station that opened in June. As of mid October, there were 27 properties for sale in Harrison, from a new two family house with seven bedrooms and five bathrooms listed for 784,999, to a one bedroom, one bathroom condominium in a three story building listed for 199,000. River Park, a condominium complex facing the Passaic River and the Newark skyline, currently has four units for sale, from 410,000 to 475,000. The average sales price for a home from January through mid October of 2019 was 478,000, compared to an average price of 425,000 for the same period in 2018, according to the New Jersey Multiple Listing Service. In mid October, there were 17 rental properties listed on the MLS, ranging from 1,200 to 3,200 a month, but that doesn't include apartments in new high rises, which handle their own leases, Mr. Pinto said. Monthly rents in the new buildings range from 1,735 for a studio to 4,700 for a two bedroom apartment. Residents who gravitate to the northern end of town will find a verdant escape in the 46 acre West Hudson Park (which Harrison shares with Kearny), with walking trails, tennis courts, ball fields and fishing ponds. Pocket parks near the town hall and Holy Cross church also offer a respite from urban life. Those living in the northwestern section bask in the aroma of fresh bread emanating from Pechter's Baking Company, a regional producer of baked goods that has a small retail store on site. Dining options are more plentiful in the older part of town, or across the Jackson Street Bridge in the Ironbound district of Newark. When an international match is being played at the 25,000 seat Red Bull Arena, which opened in 2010, the area comes alive with the colors and gear of the participating nations, said Mr. Defontes, the advertising executive: "When it's Ecuador, everybody who comes out is wearing the Ecuadorean colors. On another day, it's all Brazilian flags and shirts." Harrison is about nine miles west of Lower Manhattan and accessible via the Holland Tunnel, although most commuters opt to take the PATH train, which runs 24 hours a day from Harrison. The PATH train to the World Trade Center takes about 20 minutes; those going to Midtown Manhattan can switch trains at Journal Square and travel to 33rd Street in about 28 minutes, a short walk from Penn Station. A single PATH ticket is 2.75; a monthly pass is 89. Running for re election in 1912, President William Howard Taft was urged to visit Harrison during his campaign tour. Before a crowd of more than 6,000 residents and workers, the president proclaimed, "You should be proud of this hive of industry." The phrase was adapted to become the town's now outdated nickname, the Beehive of Industry. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Given enough intellectual muscle, any outre story can probably be pounded into a musical. For evidence, look no further than "Sweeney Todd," "Fun Home" and "Hamilton," three great shows of forbiddingly unlikely origin. But the authors of "The Boy Who Danced on Air" have taken the challenge of difficult source material too far. Their troubling new musical, which opened Thursday in an Abingdon Theater Company production, was inspired by "The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan," a 2010 documentary about, well, pedophilia. Sure, the practice of bacha bazi "boy play" in the Dari language of Afghanistan includes much more than that. As Tim Rosser (who wrote the show's music) and Charlie Sohne (who wrote the book and lyrics) explain in a program note, it is also an "ancient tradition where wealthy men buy boys from poorer families" and "train them to dance." So the sexual abuse, which the show does not ignore, is seen in the context of historical precedent and local culture, much as those who defend it ask us to see genital cutting. Imagine that musical. This one is about Paiman, a boy of 16, who was only 10 when he was sold to Jahandar, a married man then about 40. Jahandar explains that Paiman's father "didn't want you as much as I do." But now that Paiman is sprouting peach fuzz, tradition decrees that their liaison must be severed. Jahandar arranges to marry him off: a prospect that each of them, in different ways, dreads. The ick factor here is dangerously high, a problem that the production, directed by Tony Speciale, labors hard to mitigate through aesthetics. We see the preteenage Paiman only in silhouettes projected on the fabric of a tent, which allows for clever distortions of scale. (The lighting design is by Wen Ling Liao.) The sexual content is similarly euphemized, in dances charmingly choreographed by Nejla Yatkin and in a few shirtless cuddles that suggest romance more than predation. It would be enough of an achievement to make this story, which also involves forced cross dressing and a great deal of violence, palatable. ("Kid Victory," another recent musical involving pedophilia, faced a similar challenge.) But Mr. Rosser and Mr. Sohne were even more ambitious: They have two more stories to tell. In one, Paiman develops a crush on another dancing boy, Feda, who dreams of escaping to seek fame as a singer in the big city. (That would be Chaghcharan.) Paiman wants to go with him but must first overcome his fear of leaving (or being punished by) Jahandar. A love ballad ("When I Have a Boy of My Own") ends the first act with a kiss. I wish the creative team had been content to tell just that story: a familiar one in outline, certainly, but rich in unusual details. And the pedophilia story, though awkwardly handled, at least raises gripping issues. But the third story is entirely misbegotten. Taking a stab at political relevance, it features Jahandar stewing over the broken promises of the lately ended American intervention in his country. This leads to the show's over the top, and then over the over the top, tragic ending. That Mr. Rosser and Mr. Sohne, both in their early 30s, are able to make this material sing at all is almost alarming. It takes talent, yes, but also a certain amount of glibness to give the adult men lyrics like "Year by year the boy learns his place" and to turn Jahandar's turbulent interior monologues into credible song. Still, the music high end theatrical pop adorned with melisma and other Silk Road accents rewards the ear and is well orchestrated by the composer for a small combo including the lutelike Afghan rubab. What's more, it is beautifully sung by cast members obviously hired for their voices. And, it must be said, for their looks. It could not have been easy for the creative team to find performers like Troy Iwata (Paiman) and Nikhil Saboo (Feda): actors who read young enough onstage but not too young for comfort. Still, the question arises: Whose comfort? Because musicals always justify their main characters, even their wicked ones, just by letting them sing, "The Boy Who Danced on Air" was doomed by a paradox built into its premise. To make a successful musical on this subject would require exquisite discretion, but discretion is exactly what the subject forbids.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
After It All, Serena Williams Still Has No. 24 In Sight After her latest long and unexpected break from the sport she once dominated, Serena Williams will return to competition next week at a new tournament, the Top Seed Open in Lexington, Ky. What's different about this layoff is that Williams's comeback to tour level tennis will be part of everyone else's. Professional players have been on hiatus because the coronavirus pandemic shut down both the men's and women's circuits in early March. "That's the biggest difference," Williams said during a pretournament news conference on Saturday. "Instead of me being injured, it's kind of like everyone had to take a break and a pause, and it will be really fun and interesting to see how we play. I feel like everyone has an opportunity to actually be more fit now, because we spent so much time at home to just kind of work on yourself and your life and your game." The question is, how does this collective break affect Williams's chances of winning the United States Open, the Grand Slam tournament scheduled to begin on Aug. 31? "I think she has the same chances that she has had since the birth of her daughter," her coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, said in a telephone interview from France this week before traveling to Kentucky. "She absolutely has the level. It still depends a great deal on her whether she wins a Grand Slam. The Covid, for me, has changed absolutely nothing in that department." Mouratoglou, who has coached Williams since 2012 and helped her win 10 of her 23 Grand Slam singles titles, spent much of the pandemic break at his academy near Nice, France, starting an exhibition league, Ultimate Tennis Showdown, designed to particularly appeal to younger, non hardcore tennis fans. But he still believes in the old guard when it comes to women's tennis and has remained adamant since Williams became a mother in 2017 that she still has what it takes, even at this late stage in her career, to win her 24th Grand Slam singles title and tie Margaret Court's record. She has come agonizingly close. Since returning to the tour in 2018 after a difficult childbirth, she has reached four Grand Slam finals two at Wimbledon and two at the U.S. Open losing all of them in straight sets. After winning her first tournament as a mother in January in Auckland, New Zealand, she arrived with renewed momentum at this year's Australian Open, only to play one of her shakiest recent matches in a third round loss to Wang Qiang: the highest ranked Chinese player, whom she had overwhelmed, 6 1, 6 0, at the 2019 U.S. Open. There were doubts about Williams's fitness and ability to handle the biggest moments before the pandemic, and those doubts remain as she returns at age 38 with the U.S. Open again in her sights. "I see myself doing it all if happens," she said of the tennis schedule, including the European clay court circuit set to follow the U.S. Open. Williams, who has a history of blood clots and has had life threatening pulmonary embolisms that affected her lungs, could potentially face greater risks than an average world class athlete if she contracts Covid 19, the disease caused by the virus. "I don't have full lung capacity, so I'm not sure what would happen to me," she said. "I'm sure I'll be OK but I don't want to find out. I have like 50 masks I travel with. I never want to be without one." Williams,, last competed on Feb. 8, when she was upset by Anastasija Sevastova of Latvia in a Fed Cup match. Since then, she said she has been "a little bit of a recluse" and has mostly been at home in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., with her husband Alexis Ohanian and their 2 year old daughter Olympia. She and Ohanian, a venture capitalist, have invested in a National Women's Soccer League expansion franchise in Los Angeles (Olympia is an investor, too).They also built a gym at home and a tennis court with the U.S. Open's new hardcourt surface. "I go there and it's my own sanctuary," she said of the court. "I was like why haven't I done this 20 years ago?" Williamswas active on social media during the shutdown and often kept it lighthearted: singing along to the Frozen 2 soundtrack with Olympia and posting a workout with her older sister Venus Williams where they adopted Arnold Schwarzenegger accents and talked about "pumping iron." But she also has ventured into deeper and more topical territory: focusing on the Black Lives Matter movement and social justice. On Instagram, she interviewed Ohanian at home about his decision in June to step down from the board of directors of Reddit, the social network he co founded, and to call for an African American to be chosen as his replacement. The conversation focused on Ohanian's increased awareness of his "white privilege" and his desire to "lean into the pain" of knowing that he is "racist because of a system I inherited." Williams later interviewed Bryan Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative who has advocated for prisoners on death row and for lowering the rate of incarceration in the United States. She called him "a super hero" and talked about the resistance she and her sister faced when they arrived on tour and eventually dominated in the early 2000s. If Serena heard loud cheers, she said her "heart would sink" because she knew Venus had lost a point or the match. "But if it was complete silence, then I would be like, 'OK, she's winning,'" Serena said. The negative reaction at that early stage was certainly not all because of race. The Williamses' initial Grand Slam duels and finals were often, awkward constrained occasions because the sisters were so close off the court (as they remain) and unable to compete with their customary fire. But Serena emphasized the challenges that come with succeeding in a predominantly white sport. "I played not only against my opponent," she said. "I played against crowds. I played against fans, and I've played against people, and as things have gone on, I've been able to have a tremendous amount of more fans, and it's been a wonderful experience, but I worked really hard to get this experience." Williams complained about at one stage being "underpaid": likely a reference to having lower off court earnings than Maria Sharapova earlier in her career despite having a superior record. Williams also expressed frustration at the way her own game is sometimes characterized. "Tennis is a mental game and Black people are athletic," she said, referring to the stereotype long held by some that Black athletes succeed because of strength and athletic ability, while their white counterparts rely on their intelligence. "So whenever I would win, it's like, 'I'm so athletic.' No, actually I use my brain a lot more than I get credit for. I really use my brain a lot out on the court. Yeah, I'm powerful, but the most powerful players don't win 23 Grand Slams." Winning her 24th with a new generation of players rising would be perhaps her finest achievement. The situation in which tennis finds itself only makes the chase more intriguing. It will not have a full strength field. Ashleigh Barty of Australia, the No. 1 women's singles player, already has withdrawn. So have No. 5 Elina Svitolina and No. 7 Kiki Bertens, and No. 2 Simona Halep is leaning that way, too. But major threats remain. Will Williams's deep experience and greater familiarity with comebacks give her an added edge against her younger opponents? Or will she lack the runway to find top gear? She could have returned for the doubleheader later this month in New York: the Western Southern Open followed by the U.S. Open in a so called bubble with strict health and safety restrictions. But she decided instead to give herself more matches, which came as quite a surprise to Jon Sanders, tournament director of the new Top Seed Open, a lower tier WTA event. "My initial response was, 'This isn't real right?'" he said this week. Williams, ranked No. 9 in singles, is the only top 10 player in the tournament, which will be the first tour event in North America since the pandemic and will be played without spectators. But the field has ample star power with No. 11 Aryna Sabalenka of Belarus, No. 14 Johanna Konta of Britain, American teens Amanda Anisimova and Coco Gauff and the 40 year old Venus Williams. "They did play fabulous matches, and if they had not played as well, Serena would have had the chance to come back," he said. "The others are of course progressing and are strong, and I am not trying to undervalue them. But Serena is Serena, and the real Serena in full possession of her powers and with a winning mind set, the person who will stop her is not yet born. Actually she is surely already born but she's not ready yet." For Mouratoglou, the keys for Williams to break her streak in New York are optimum fitness, quality matches in the lead up and the right mental approach, likely a new mental approach. Blocking out No. 24 is not an option. "When you have an elephant in the room, you can say you don't see it, but it's not easy to believe it," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
What books are on your nightstand? I take it you mean the imaginary Doric column that supports a teetering pile of current and old books that the interviewee wants to bring to the reader's attention. My actual nightstand is a small wood table with a box of Kleenex, a two year old Garnet Hill catalog and a cough drop on it. When I go to bed I bring with me the book I am reading during the day. Right now it is the British edition of Sally Rooney's brilliant, enigmatic new novel, "Normal People." How do you organize your books? I organize them by genre. The largest section is fiction, which I alphabetize. I also alphabetize poetry. The other sections biography, autobiography, theater, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, classical literature, literary criticism, art, photography, books by friends are not alphabetized. I can find my way around them. I have been doing a lot of rereading in recent years. Why have a large library and not use it? Why keep books, if you are not going to read them more than once? For the decor? The answer isn't entirely no. A book lined room looks nice. I like walking into my living room and seeing the walls of books with faded spines that have accreted over many decades. Read our review of "Nobody's Looking at You." What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves? "Our Princesses and Their Dogs," by Michael Chance, which was given to me by my British son in law for Christmas a few years ago. People who know me associate me with cats rather than dogs, but in this case that has no bearing on the book's prominent place in my heart. It was published in 1936, when the princesses' uncle Edward had not yet abdicated and their dad was just Bertie, Duke of York. But it is almost as if the author could see into the future and recognize the family's special monarchical fitness. Its benign charisma wafts out from delicate black and white photographs, and from a text that can only be read if it is not to be found entirely risible as an allegory of the relation of royalty to its people. Chance writes largely from the points of view of the family's happy dogs two corgis named Dookie and Lady Jane, three Labradors named Mimsy, Stiffy and Scrummy, a Tibetan lion dog named Choo choo, a golden retriever named Judy and a cocker spaniel named Ben pausing only to praise the owners for being "not merely people who love dogs but warmhearted, human people who, understanding their animals, are therefore understood by them in return." At 9, Elizabeth already has the kindly placidity of the queen she is to become. Five year old Margaret steals the show with her mischievous charm. Margaret's adult life of petulant desperation, mordantly chronicled in Craig Brown's 2018 book "Ninety Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret," could not have been foreseen in a million years by readers of "Our Princesses and Their Dogs." Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. What books would you recommend to someone who wants to know more about American culture? "Democracy in America," by Alexis de Tocqueville, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," by Mark Twain, and "The Other America," by Michael Harrington. Which writers novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets working today do you admire most? The poet Louise Gluck, the short story writer Alice Munro, the journalist/essayist Ian Frazier, the journalist/biographer Calvin Tomkins, the critic Sharon Cameron, the journalist/essayist Michael Greenberg, the art historian Michael Fried. May I stretch your "working today" criteria to include Richard Wilbur and Philip Roth, who, in the eye of eternity, were still working the day before yesterday? Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like and didn't? Barack Obama's "Dreams From My Father." It is good or good enough ("You're likable enough, Hillary") but it isn't Rousseau's "Confessions" or Gosse's "Father and Son." The extravagant praise it received seemed excessive to me. Obama himself is another matter. I came to intensely admire and appreciate him over the years of his presidency. I believe he is a great man. What kind of reader were you as a child? An avid reader, to use Robert Gottlieb's wonderful phrase. I read everything in sight. I read the Grimm fairy tales, "Heidi," "Little Women," "Emily of New Moon," "Little Lord Fauntleroy," "The Snow Queen"; I went to the library every week and took out the four books you were allowed to borrow. I liked contemporary romantic novels with hints of sex ("he unbuttoned the top two buttons of her blouse"). My father would give my sister and me classics for birthdays and Christmas "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," "Les Miserables," "David Copperfield" among them. I didn't differentiate between the adult masterpieces, the cheesy adult books and the children's classics. Bookish children are not critics. They just like to read. What do you plan to read next? I plan to go back to "Bleak House," which I put aside during the holidays. It was like a boulder that was standing in the way of shorter books that were in the house, tempting me with their bigger type and smaller ambition. For example, Alexander McCall Smith's cozy (though by no means trivial) new No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novel, "The Colors of All the Cattle." Now I am ready to return to the wild terrain of Dickens's great work. Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain? I love all of Jane Austen's major heroines Lizzie Bennet, Fanny Price, Emma Woodhouse, Anne Elliot and Elinor Dashwood and one of Tolstoy's heroes, Prince Andrei. I also very much like Antonia Shimerda, the heroine of Willa Cather's "My Antonia." A favorite antihero or villain? There are none. I follow the author's direction to despise him or her. On second thought, I must confess to a sneaking liking for the antiheroine Lizzie Eustace as Trollope himself surely had. Which genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid? I like books in the genre that could be described as the bee in your bonnet genre, books in which the author has an obsessive thesis, and argues it so brilliantly that you come away completely convinced and elated by the erudition that has powered the argument. Some examples are: Edward Said's "Orientalism," Leo Steinberg's "The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion," Ted Hughes's "Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being" and Edgar Wind's "Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance." Among the genres I avoid are books on bodybuilding and moneymaking. What's the last book you recommended to someone in your family? The 13 volume edition of Anton Chekhov's stories translated by Constance Garnett.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
So this is what Manhattan looked like in the tipsy yesterday of Prohibition, when drinking was an illicit thrill you couldn't get enough of, and the world was best seen through a martini glass preferably of cut crystal and filled to the sloshing point with bathtub gin. The view, I must say, is divine. Imbibe freely, all you kombucha swilling health nuts of the 21st century, of the cocktail being served at City Center, where the delirious Encores! concert production of Cole Porter's "The New Yorkers" runs through Sunday. The only hangover symptom you'll feel is the blush that comes from having laughed incontinently at jokes that don't seem all that funny in the daylight. Directed by John Rando, with a choice cast of singing shtick artists, "The New Yorkers" makes the most puerile silliness seem deeply sophisticated and high sophistication look sublimely silly. It evokes those hedonistic early talking pictures, before the censors got their hands on Hollywood, when nobody appeared to have been told that the Jazz Age was over. Don't be fooled, though. This blithe and boozy production is a product of painstaking theater archaeology, by a team led by Jack Viertel, the Encores! artistic director. Working from salvaged, in some cases long lost scripts and scores, Mr. Viertel, Mr. Rando and the music director Rob Berman have reanimated a show that seemed eternally down for the count after it ended its 168 performance Broadway run in 1931. The effect is of attending one of those glamorous rooftop nightclubs where bright young things in black tie and tinsel gathered in the wee hours in Busby Berkeley and Astaire Rogers movies. The floor shows that Fred and Ginger enjoyed in those films must have been a lot like "The New Yorkers," a musical steeped in the energetic world weariness for which the name Cole Porter became a byword. Porter's accomplices in creating this show included its star, Jimmy Durante; its book writer, Herbert Fields; and the New Yorker magazine cartoonist Peter Arno, who with E. Ray Goetz devised the original story. Arno was famous for his lascivious drawings of top hatted sugar daddies and decolletage flashing gold diggers. This musical's opening scene is one of those cartoons come to life. A ravishing young woman in a chic flapper ish ensemble rushes into a medical examining room. Caption: "Doctor, I'm sick, so you've simply got to examine me. Shall I strip?" An unwelcome throwback to a best forgotten era of sexist naughtiness? As it turns out, no one is merely a sex object in this tale of a romantic collision between high (really high) society and the underworld of bootleggers. Men and women alike have prodigious and actively indulged appetites for anything that might further the pursuit of a good time. Alice Wentworth (the lady on the examining table, played to sparking soubrette perfection by Scarlett Strallen) has fallen hard for a hunky speakeasy owning gangster, Al Spanish (Tam Mutu, in tasty shades of noir). Alice's mom, Gloria (Ruth Williamson), and pop, the filthy rich Windham (Byron Jennings), don't object to the liaison; they have their own dubious love affairs to focus on (with their torrid lovers played by Tyler Lansing Weaks and Robyn Hurder). But Alice is engaged to a doughy upper crust type, Phillip Booster (Todd Buonopane), while Al has been keeping time with his club's chanteuse, the peerlessly named Mona Low (Mylinda Hull). Then there's the problem of those syndicate boys especially one Feet (short for Effete) McGeegan (Arnie Burton) who don't like Al's muscling in on their caviar empire. As the club headliner, Jimmie Deegan (Kevin Chamberlin), might say: "Go figure! Ha cha cha cha!" Deegan was first played by Durante, who used his own songs (like "The Hot Patata") for "The New Yorkers," and Mr. Chamberlin, without resorting to cheap impersonation, captures the zingy flavor of that top banana. It is he who ends the first act with an anarchic, tear down the house number devoted to the all American properties of wood. (Go on, chant along with him: "Wood! Wood! Wood! Wood!") And what does that have to do with the story? Really, need you ask? The plot here is just an excuse for talented singers, dancers and joke slingers to show up in (and step out of) the gladdest of rags (Alejo Vietti did the costumes) and do do that voodoo that they do so well. That's a paraphrase from a Porter song that is not in this show, but could well have been. The interpolated Porter numbers include "Night and Day" and "You've Got That Thing." Among the original top drawer selections from the show: "Love for Sale" (delivered with Billie Holiday reediness by the cabaret artist Cyrille Aimee), "Take Me Back to Manhattan" and "Say It With Gin." Such numbers are rendered with equal measures sass and satin by the Encores! orchestra, framed onstage by the white deco drapes of Allen Moyer's set, and perfectly matched by Chris Bailey's antic and graceful choreography. The lyrics and dialogue lean toward shameless double entendres and smutty schoolboy puns. A quick sampling of both: "You can make me sweetheart, but please don't make me be good." "I laid 'em in the aisles! That's the only place I ever get to do it!" "I'm building a perfect physique/And besides I want you to holler Hooray/When you see me in my so to speak." The cast says and sings such lines with a shiny, arch free cheer that repels prurience and captures the breakneck giddiness of an age when the Algonquin Hotel was the epicenter of worldly wit. Porter's impeccable tongue twisting lyrics have been mastered with style by all involved, though in this regard it's hard to top Mr. Burton channeling the epicene spirit of the 1930s character actor Eric Blore doing the encore demanding patter number "Let's Not Talk About Love." Of course, love is talked about, endlessly and exhaustingly. But it's not the first subject on everybody's mind here. Nor, all evidence to the contrary, is the joy of gin. What "The New Yorkers" celebrates above all are the hard loving, hard playing characters of its title. When Ms. Strallen and the cast close the show with a goose bumps raising rendition of "I Happen to Like New York," there's no doubt that what you're hearing is a city's sacred national anthem.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
WASHINGTON The technical problems that have hampered enrollment in the online health insurance exchanges resulted from the failure of a major software component, designed by private contractors, that crashed under the weight of millions of users last week, federal officials said Monday. Todd Park, President Obama's top technology adviser, said the failure occurred in the part of the Web site that lets people create user accounts at the beginning of the insurance sign up process. The crash prevented many people from viewing any of their insurance options or gaining access to information on what federal subsidies might be available. "At lower volumes, it would work fine," Mr. Park said of the Web site, healthcare.gov. "At higher volumes, it has problems." "Right now," he added, "we've got what we think we need. The contractors have sent reinforcements. They are working 24 7. We just wish there was more time in a day." In some cases, the Web site does not recognize users who established accounts before Oct. 1, when the online marketplaces opened for consumers to shop for insurance. Other users are prevented from establishing accounts. Some who successfully established a marketplace account received an e mail asking them to verify their e mail addresses, but the link provided did not work. The identification of the software component as the main cause of the Web site's problems was the most detailed explanation that federal officials have given since the online marketplaces opened. The officials also rejected mounting criticism about the Web site's overall design, saying that the rest of the site appears ready to handle the large volume of traffic. But because of the initial failures, other parts of the complex system have yet to be proved under the intense strain of real world conditions. And outside experts said that White House officials should have spent more time tending to the computer code and technology of the Web site, rather than recruiting Hollywood celebrities to promote it. Those comments echoed similar criticism on sites across the Internet, where Web designers and developers speculated about the reasons for the ongoing problems at the Web site, healthcare.gov. One discussion on the popular Web site reddit.com was titled "How not to optimize a website." White House officials declined to identify the private contractors who had built the account creation function, citing a decision to keep that information private. They said the contractors had moved that part of the new system to beefed up hardware and were busy rewriting the software code to make it more robust and efficient. In the past week, wait times have dropped by half, officials said. Officials said they had also added staff members at call centers to provide customers an alternative to the online system. The Web site currently says that people "in a hurry" can apply faster at a government call center using a toll free telephone number, (800) 318 2596. But an operator at the call center said Monday that he could not help because he, too, was "experiencing technical difficulties with the Web site." Aneesh Chopra, who preceded Mr. Park as the federal government's chief technology officer and helped create an earlier version of healthcare.gov, said he was confident that the system would be working effectively in the coming weeks. Mr. Chopra noted that when United Airlines and Continental merged their online reservations systems, it took weeks to iron out problems. "This is par for the course for large scale I.T. projects," Mr. Chopra said. "We wish we could launch bug free, but in reality that's not that easy to do. The reality is that if you have a product that people want, people will tolerate glitches because they expect them." The prime contractor for the federal exchange CGI Federal, a unit of the CGI Group, based in Montreal and the company operating a "data services hub" for the government Quality Software Services Inc., a unit of the UnitedHealth Group told Congress at a hearing on Sept. 10 that they were ready for a surge of users when enrollment opened on Oct. 1. But in recent days, officials at the companies declined to answer questions about the Web site's problems. Linda F. Odorisio, a spokeswoman for CGI, and Matthew H. Stearns, a spokesman for UnitedHealth, refused last week and again on Monday to answer questions about their companies' performance. Both companies said they had passed operational readiness reviews conducted last month by the federal government. The Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said that CGI had received 88 million for work on the federal exchange through March, while Quality Software Services had received 55 million for work on the data hub. The hub allows exchanges to get information about a person's income and citizenship from the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies. As the engineers for the contractors struggle to recover from the Web site's failures, officials said, the partial shutdown of the federal government is also hampering efforts to carry out Mr. Obama's health care law and has slowed work on a federal insurance marketplace for residents of more than 30 states. All insurers participating in the federal exchange have been assigned an account manager, who serves as the primary point of contact with the exchange. The account manager is supposed to assist insurers, clarifying their responsibilities and answering questions about the federal Web site, enrollment transactions and other operational matters. But many of the account managers have been furloughed in the shutdown. The Obama administration has drafted a manual describing operations of the federal exchange, including the enrollment process. But federal officials said the shutdown had delayed a final review of the manual by lawyers and other federal employees who have been furloughed.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
The broadcast rights to the Southeastern Conference's biggest football games, like the annual Iron Bowl matchup between Alabama and Auburn, have been purchased by Disney, meaning that all of the league's games will appear on its networks including ABC and ESPN for 10 years starting in 2024. The agreement, announced Thursday evening by the ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro at Disney's investor day, will end the SEC's nearly three decade association with CBS, and give Disney ownership of all of the SEC's lucrative, and accordingly expensive, media rights. ESPN will pay the SEC around 300 million annually for the rights, according to two people with knowledge of the agreement who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not permitted to speak publicly. That is nearly a sixfold increase from the 55 million annually CBS currently pays. ABC will show Saturday afternoon SEC games, "as well as selected Saturday primetime football games" according to an SEC news release. That is in addition to other SEC football games that will appear across ESPN cable channels and the ESPN streaming service. "We will be able to schedule games on any network in any of the windows, which will allow for flexibility in that regard vis a vis teams that would prefer to be at night and afternoon," said Burke Magnus, an ESPN executive, at a news conference. Greg Sankey, the SEC's commissioner, indicated that Disney's scheduling flexibility across times and networks was a key consideration in the conference's sale of the rights to it. "One of our primary goals was to improve the television scheduling process in ways that will benefit our students, coaches, alumni and fans," Sankey said in the news release. "With all SEC events now under The Walt Disney Company umbrella, we were able to craft an agreement that includes more lead time for many game time announcements, and in many ways modernizes the college football scheduling process." The new deal, worth at least 3 billion in total, adds on to Disney's existing foothold in the SEC. CBS has been the signature television home of SEC football since 1996, and of the conference's championship game since 2001. Even after ESPN signed a 2 billion agreement with the SEC in 2008, and then created the SEC Network in 2013 and extended its agreement with the conference through 2034, CBS retained the rights to one SEC football game each week. Importantly, CBS also got the first choice of games each week. The network's 3:30 p.m. Eastern slot was effectively appointment television on autumn Saturdays, and CBS also had some SEC doubleheaders and the league championship game. The SEC and CBS signed a 15 year rights agreement in 2008, just before an explosion of television money reached college sports. Even after the SEC expanded and created the SEC Network with ESPN, the financial terms of its agreement with CBS remained unchanged and ultimately became a fantastic bargain for CBS. With the new agreement, the SEC could overtake the Big Ten Conference as the richest league in college sports. The SEC, home to 10 of the last 14 national champions in football, swaggers more than any other league in college football, with a slogan "it just means more" that elicits as many knowing nods as sneers and jokes. The conference, which is based in Birmingham, Ala., and includes powerhouses like Alabama, Florida, Georgia and Louisiana State, distributed more than 624 million to its 14 schools for the 2018 19 fiscal year, the most recent year for which data is available. Only a decade earlier, the SEC, then with a dozen members, paid out 132.5 million to its universities. And while the league can credit ESPN for much of its recent financial rise, CBS has remained an integral part of college football culture in the South. Many fans referred to the longtime announcers Verne Lundquist, who retired from SEC football in 2016, and Gary Danielson by their first names. This fall, even the pandemic delayed Masters golf tournament effectively planned the timing of its third round to accommodate sunset and CBS's plans for the Alabama at L.S.U. game, an ordinarily titanic matchup that has long drawn viewers. (The game was eventually postponed because of coronavirus issues at L.S.U., and the rescheduled matchup drew disappointing ratings, partly because of how L.S.U. has declined since it won last season's national title.) It became apparent a year ago that the SEC's relationship with CBS would conclude at the end of the contract, if not sooner, as conferences struck ever richer deals. Sports Business Journal reported last December that CBS had pulled out of bidding on an extension of the agreement.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
MADRID Politicians here seem to be mystified as to why Spain is, once again, the European country hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic. They have blamed the recklessness of youth, our Latin inability to keep our distance, and even immigration. And yet all this time the answer has been right under their noses: Nothing has eased the spread of the virus as much as their own incompetence. Spaniards patiently accepted the toughest confinement in Europe during the first wave of the virus in March, enduring serious economic losses in exchange for protecting the lives of their elders and the most vulnerable. We have been among the most disciplined in adhering to regulations like wearing masks, which are used by more than 84 percent of the population. Yet, today we are seeing our sacrifices being squandered by a political class that did not hold up its end of the bargain. On Monday, the Madrid government imposed a partial lockdown in 37 areas; on Wednesday it requested urgent assistance from the army and the dispatch of at least 300 doctors after being overwhelmed by a new wave of infections. Spain had the virus under control when it ended the state of emergency on June 21. Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez declared victory and organized a hasty loosening of lockdown that included the reopening of the tourism industry. Responsibility for health care management was handed off from a central government that had handled the pandemic ineptly (Spain led in mortality and health worker infection rates) to the country's 17 autonomous regions, which have not done any better. That there were a few exceptions, such as the northern region of Asturias, only underscores the widespread failure. Before this second wave, there was plenty of time to put in place measures that have shown their effectiveness in Asian countries and have lessened the impact of the pandemic in closer ones, such as Portugal. But our politicians decided to ignore them: Health care systems were not fortified, plans were not made for the reopening of schools, and the tracking system recommended by all the experts was not put into place. One of the keys to slowing the spread of the virus is to perform polymerase chain reaction testing on as many people as possible who have been in contact with infected people. But the average number of potential cases that Spain manages to trace is lower than Zambia (9.7 for every confirmed Covid 19 case), one fourth that of Italy (37.5) and one twentieth of Finland (185). Our politicians have little incentive to strive for excellence, because they know that Spaniards' loyalty to their parties rivals their loyalty to their favorite soccer teams. Ideology and partisanship carry more weight at the polls than the candidates' preparation, honesty and experience, sending them the message that their success doesn't depend on their management or the results they obtain. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it's that the price of not having our very best at the helm is too high. While political parties continued to deflect blame about who was responsible for the first wave, the second wave was already underway. Now it is out of control and dozens of places are once again enduring lockdown restrictions. Hospitals, which have a chronic deficit of doctors, are experiencing deja vu. The health care workers we applauded as heroes in March and April view "the spectacle of our political leaders with dejection and indignation," according to the General Council of Official Medical Colleges of Spain. Of course, these frustrations are not unique to Spain. The confluence of the pandemic and the emergence of populism and extremism around the world, from the United States to the Philippines, has hindered responses that are based on knowledge, science and effective management. But in the case of Spain, these problems transcend the current situation. Our political parties have become organizations that are hermetically closed to outside talent. Spaniards do not elect individual candidates, but choose a regional party list with candidates selected by the parties in a process where intrigue and relationships count more than competence. Most of our representatives arrive at positions of responsibility with no experience beyond the political. Only 36 percent of Congress members in 2018 declared that they had ever worked in the private sector. In normal times, Spain's political dysfunction was less obvious. But the pandemic has revealed a painful truth: Incompetence costs lives and ruins economies. This is evident in the region of Madrid; today the financial and governmental center of Spain is in dire straits. New York and Madrid were in similar situations in June. After initially being hard hit by the coronavirus, both cities seemed to have the pandemic under control. Since then, the region of Madrid has seen cases multiply to 772 per 100,000 inhabitants while New York has kept the situation under control with 28 infections per 100,000 inhabitants. There is no mystery here either: The difference is explained by the number of trackers, hospital support, prudent reopening of businesses, and tests. In recent months, the president of the community of Madrid, Isabel Diaz Ayuso, a member of the conservative Popular Party that has been ruling the region for 25 years, had promised trackers, health care reinforcements, and schoolteachers, who have arrived late or not at all. In addition to the tensions with the central government, experts' recommendations have been subject to political opportunism, measures have been put in practice too late and, characteristic of Spain's ruling class, blame has been spread to avoid responsibility. Reversing mediocrity in Spanish politics will require profound reforms that must begin with education, whose benefits in fostering a new generation of leaders may not appear for years. But nothing is stopping us from beginning with more concrete measures that could slow our political decline. It is crucial that Spain reform electoral law so that voters choose their representatives directly, rethink the territorial organization that has caused a lack of coordination among regions, and strengthen the independence of the government institutions, which are filled with politicians who offer blind loyalty to their political parties. Yet none of this will matter if Spanish leaders aren't held accountable at the polls. In the next election we should not forget those responsible for the disastrous handling of the coronavirus pandemic. David Jimenez ( DavidJimenezTW), a journalist, is the author, most recently, of "El director." This essay was translated by Erin Goodman from the Spanish. 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
YOKOHAMA, Japan When the skin care company Shiseido opens its 76,000 square foot "global innovation center" in this city 20 miles south of Tokyo to the public next week , there will be a grand S shaped staircase for the taking of selfies; a terrace on the 15th floor, also ideal for selfies; and a theater for lectures and demonstrations, which, presumably, will show up in the background of many selfies. A global innovation center tailored for social media, or S/PARK, as Shiseido is calling this complex of research labs and public space, is part of a many layered rebranding underway for the 147 year old maker of skin care, makeup and perfume. While the West has gone mad for Korea's K Beauty, deploying snail serum face masks at sleepovers and on selfcaresundays, J Beauty isn't exactly a global phenomenon. Shiseido, which has 46,000 employees around the world and is aiming for sales of 11.6 billion by 2020, would like to change that. "Japanese beauty has more to do with, if I may get a little philosophical, searching for the truth," said Daniel Bruzzone, a senior vice president of marketing for the company. "You will find the Japanese more scientific and concerned with technology than the very cool, attention grabbing, colorful and playful K Beauty."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
"We Demand a Change," a mural in Miami, was made by Manuel Oliver, with a portrait of his son, Joaquin Oliver, in its center, one of the 17 victims of the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. The work is part of "Parkland 17," an art exhibition organized by Dwyane Wade of the Miami Heat. MIAMI Wielding a paint roller like a cudgel in a video seen by 2.1 million people, Manuel Oliver quickly almost angrily imprints his message on the mural in wide, black strokes: "We Demand a Change." In the middle of the mural is a portrait of his son, Joaquin Oliver, one of the 17 victims of the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., last month, wearing a black woolen hat and a slight smile. For Mr. Oliver, an artist and photographer who has lived for 14 years in Coral Springs, Fla., near the school, painting the mural on Saturday in a pop up gallery in Miami's Wynwood neighborhood was his first act as what he calls a "graphic activist," a position he has adopted in the wake of the killings. "Now I have a new role and I'm going to play that role until the end," Mr. Oliver said in a telephone interview on Monday. "The role is to support the agenda of the kids who are demanding answers to what's going on," he said, referring to demonstrations by Parkland survivors and others in which they call for stronger controls on guns. The mural was part of an exhibition, titled "Parkland 17" and set up in an otherwise empty warehouse, that was dedicated to the memory of the victims. It included 14 empty school desks with the names and ages of each dead student, two desks signifying teaching staff members, and a patch of grass with painted football field lines, in honor of the school's assistant football coach. There was also a phone booth from which callers could contact their elected representatives. The exhibition, assembled by the artist Evan Pestaina, was initially intended to last only two days Saturday and Sunday, for a total of 17 hours but because of "overwhelming demand" it will reopen this weekend, the curator, Calyann Barnett, said. "We might add to it for this weekend," she said. "Some other family members might want to hang something. Maybe they had kids who were going to college and the parents may want to hang the school colors, that sort of thing. The parents could bring their acceptance letters or anything they want to share." The exhibition was prompted by the Miami Heat guard Dwyane Wade, who was a hero to Joaquin Oliver and for whom Ms. Barnett serves as creative director. After the National Basketball Association star heard that the young Mr. Oliver, an avid sports fan, had been buried in a Wade jersey, he visited the school on March 7 and spoke with students. "I come from a community in Chicago where our youth are getting killed daily and don't have the same voice, don't have the same light on them that Parkland has," Mr. Wade said after the school visit, according to The Associated Press. "These kids understand what they have." The art exhibition was "his way of honoring them," Ms. Barnett said. After the artist completed the mural, he signed it with a reference to his 17 year old son's nickname: "Guac's Dad. Love you Forever." Then, Mr. Wade and several Parkland students added messages and their signatures to the wall. "We won't forget you, so we will make sure they don't," Mr. Wade wrote. The show also promoted the "March for Life" rally on March 24 in Washington, which many Parkland survivors are expected to attend. Mr. Oliver, who more than a decade ago contributed a photograph titled "Rebuilding Peace" to the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York, was grateful for the opportunity to take part in the Wynwood show. "I had a lot of feelings I've never had before while painting," he said. "I'm trying to stay strong with this situation."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
You may not know much about helium, except that it fills birthday balloons and blimps and can make even the most stentorian voice sound a bit like Donald Duck. But helium is an important gas for science and medicine. Among other things, in liquid form (a few degrees above absolute zero) it is used to keep superconducting electromagnets cold in equipment like M.R.I. machines and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which uses 265,000 pounds of it to help keep particles in line as they zip around. Helium's role in superconductivity and other applications has grown so much that there have been occasional shortages. The gas forms in nature through radioactive decay of uranium and thorium, but exceedingly slowly; in practical terms, all the helium we will ever have already exists. And because it does not react with anything and is light, it can easily escape to the atmosphere. Until now, it has been discovered only as a byproduct of oil and gas exploration, as the natural gas in some reservoirs contains a small but commercially valuable proportion of helium. (The first detection of helium in a gas field occurred in the early 1900s when scientists analyzed natural gas from a well in Dexter, Kan., that had a peculiar property: It would not burn.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Our weekday morning digest that includes information about hotels and resorts, with deals, tips and anything else that travelers may want to know. Four Seasons continues its expansion through Asia. The luxury hotel brand is set to open its first hotel in Seoul on Oct. 15. The Four Seasons Hotel Seoul, in the city's Central Business District, will be the chain's first in South Korea and its 24th in Asia. The 317 room property will have seven restaurants, including an Italian and a Japanese restaurant, as well as a three level gym and fitness club, The 65,000 square foot space has a gym, exercise class studios like Pilates, three pools and a golf driving range. It will also have a Korean sauna with several bathing areas and a spa. Rooms from 445,000 won ( 395) a night. Spa Nalai at the Park Hyatt New York recently introduced its International Series, a menu of services inspired by other Park Hyatt locations for a limited period of time. The current focus is Dubai: Spa guests can choose a 90 minute massage that uses oil made from ingredients found in Dubai, such as sage. Another option is the Gold Vitality facial, a 90 minute treatment featuring a 24 carat gold exfoliator. "When you think of Dubai, you think of gold and opulence, and through these treatments, we want to invoke a sense of place," says Lynne Bredfeldt, the Park Hyatt's New York director of public relations. Next up in the series is Park Hyatt Zanzibar. Prices from 350. Ayurveda the ancient Hindu practice of healing medicine is now at the Peninsula Hotels. The Hong Kong based chain, which has 10 locations worldwide, started a range of Vedic aromatherapy spa services called Sattva by Simply Peninsula and designed by the Australian spa brand, Subtle Energies. Eight new treatments combine classic ayurvedic methods with contemporary massage techniques such as lymphatic drainage while incorporating essential oils, Himalayan crystal salts, clays and herbs. Options include a Himalayan crystal salt body scrub and the Sattva Shirodhara, where warm oil is poured over the forehead to help soothe the nervous system. It is followed by a face massage with a second oil infused with Indian rose and tuberose. A line of Sattva by Simply Peninsula retail products will be available later this year. Prices from 205.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
But there are several factors that might have made book sales at the beginning of this year slightly worse than those in the same period last year. Like the movie business, publishing depends heavily on a few outsize hits each season to drive profits. In the early part of this year, there wasn't a huge, breakout best seller, certainly nothing like 2015's "The Girl on the Train," which came out in January and sold two million copies in just over four months. The adult coloring book fad, which provided a huge boost to publishers and booksellers last year, has started to fizzle, possibly driving down sales this year. (In 2015, some 12 million coloring books were sold in the United States, up from one million in 2014.) And the surge in downloadable audiobook sales might account in part for the decline in hardcover and e books, if more people are listening to books instead of reading them. But perhaps the biggest factor affecting publishers' revenue, and one that is not likely to go away soon, is the decline in e book sales, Mr. Cader said. While publishers once fretted that digital book sales were eroding more profitable categories like hardcover, they now are finding that e books which cost next to nothing to produce and zero to ship and which can't be returned as unsold merchandise by retailers are critical profit engines. But e book sales have fallen precipitously for months, in part because many publishers have raised their prices after negotiating with Amazon and gaining the ability to set their own prices. The decline of digital sales and stabilization of print may have also led to higher returns of unsold merchandise from booksellers, reducing revenue. And while some book buyers may have traded e books for print books, others may be buying cheaper, self published e books on Amazon. Those reasons may partly explain why separate data from Nielsen, which tracks only print trade book sales, looks so different from the publishers' numbers. Nielsen BookScan data showed that sales of print books were up by 16.4 million units in the first half of this year, as Mr. Cader noted on Publishers Marketplace.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
The United States has been engaged in land wars in the Middle East for so long that it's easy to forget some of our nation's most significant battles have been fought at sea. Two good new books remind us of the importance of maritime warfare in our national history. Nathaniel Philbrick demonstrates once again with IN THE HURRICANE'S EYE: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown (Viking, 30) that he is a masterly storyteller. Here he seeks to elevate the naval battles between the French and British to a central place in the history of the American Revolution. He succeeds, marvelously. He can relate in a word or two what others might take a chapter to expound. For example, his phrase "Washington's tightly coiled response" captures the tense tone of much of Washington's wartime correspondence. Nor is Philbrick afraid to make sweeping assertions. He writes that "the bitter truth was that by the summer of 1781 the American Revolution had failed," in that it was a stalemate that many Americans no longer supported physically or financially. Victory would be secured, he continues, not by Americans but by French funds, guns, ships and soldiers. (Philbrick also does hurricanes well.) On top of that, at a time when many books of military history have poor maps or none, this book has many, all of them instructive and graceful. As a writer, I'm envious of Philbrick's talents, but as a reader, I'm grateful. Trent Hone's LEARNING WAR: The Evolution of Fighting Doctrine in the U.S. Navy, 1898 1945 (Naval Institute, 34.95) is quite the opposite, a dry volume written for military professionals. But there is a place for such works, especially when they show how organizational change can be the key to victory. Even so, Hone tells the story of the 1942 43 Guadalcanal campaign particularly well. That history is often related from the Marine Corps's point of view, which in painful summary is that the Navy ran away and left the Marines to fight it out alone against the Japanese. As Hone tells it, Navy commanders knew they were outmatched by the Japanese but also recognized that Guadalcanal was a decisive campaign of the Pacific War. Understanding those stakes, they engaged in suicidal missions in an effort to keep the Japanese Navy from bombarding the Marine airfield on the island and also from landing reinforcements. But the most intriguing chapter is Hone's study of a critical but largely unrecognized reorganization that transformed Navy operations beginning in late 1942. The problem was that commanders of warships were being cognitively overwhelmed by all the new information thrown at them in battle. In addition to traditional sightings and signaling, they were now receiving reports by radio from aircraft and from other ships, as well as from radar readings. The Navy's answer was to design a new Combat Information Center on each ship. Through it, all that data could be continually funneled, sifted, integrated and passed to the captain and others on the vessel who might need it, like gunners. Such an improvement may seem mere common sense, but then many great innovations do seem obvious in retrospect. Interestingly, Adm. Chester Nimitz told skippers what to do (establish the new centers) but not how to do it. This meant that different ships devised different approaches, which provided the basis for subsequent refinements. Hone's history is good as it goes, but it would have been better had he also addressed the Navy's clear failures of the time. For example, it seemed unable to devise an effective response to the German U boat campaign along the East Coast in 1942. Also, it went into the war having developed a deeply flawed torpedo, the Mark 14, which among other things often failed to detonate, and sometimes ran 10 feet deeper than intended and so passed under enemy warships. These problems seem to raise a few doubts about Hone's thesis that the Navy went into the war as an innovative, flexible organization brilliant at learning from its mistakes and so able to address them quickly. The American effort in Liberia had a dual purpose: to fend off encroaching colonial powers, but also to help the 15,000 former American slaves who colonized Liberia to subjugate the approximately 730,000 indigenous people who resented the newcomers. One of the most effective American advisers was Col. Charles Young, who was born a slave in Kentucky in 1864, fought for the Army in the Philippines, was briefly acting superintendent of Sequoia National Park, was active in the N.A.A.C.P. and wound up serving repeated tours in Africa. The book is instructive in the multiple hazards and difficulties of foreign training missions. Liberian government officials wanted to have a military force, but feared having one that was too effective. In a terrible irony, at one point they shunted aside the American advisers and used their own troops to round up indigenous people, who then were shipped to forced labor camps elsewhere in West Africa. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. It's not often that a work of medieval military history reminds me of a minor BBC comedy show, but that's the case with THE VIKING WARS: War and Peace in King Alfred's Britain, 789 955 (Pegasus, 29.95), by Max Adams. Reading this quirky book, with its heavy reliance on the evidence of coins (where they were minted, what king was depicted on them, what dates they carried, where they were unearthed), brought to mind "Detectorists," a charming television series made a few years ago about the loves and feuds of two amateur archaeologists in eastern England. Adams's book isn't really a military history, and his publisher has done him no favor with the book's American title. It was published last year in Britain as "AElfred's Britain: War and Peace in the Viking Age," which is a more accurate description. Battles do not figure largely in it, but the reasons for war and their outcomes do. The question of how wars are financed is about as far as one can get from traditional military history about great generals and decisive battles. Yet funding is, of course, essential to conducting almost any war. And as Sarah E. Kreps, the author of TAXING WARS: The American Way of War Finance and the Decline of Democracy (Oxford University, 29.95), points out, war taxes are an especially American issue, given that the United States was founded partly as a result of disputes with Britain over payment of the costs of the French and Indian War, and of the continuing defense of the Colonies. But the financing of wars has become a peculiar political issue nowadays, notes Kreps, a former Air Force officer who teaches government at Cornell University. While our recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been controversial, she observes, how we pay for them has not been. Despite our current partisan polarization, politicians of neither party raise the issue much. She concludes that there now exists a broad, quiet political consensus to insulate the American people from the human and financial costs of their wars. This agreement is insidious, she writes, because it has undermined democratic accountability. One complaint: A volume written by an Ivy League professor and published by Oxford University Press should not contain historical howlers. Two that I noticed: She has Harry Truman losing to Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, and refers to "the Tea Party Massacre and the origins of the American Revolution," a seeming conflation of the Boston Massacre of 1770 and the same city's Tea Party three years later. What does William T. Sherman's march through Georgia in 1864 have to do with today's controversy over Confederate monuments? Lots, I think. The monuments quarrel grows in part out of an incomplete understanding of our past. Monument supporters charge that taking them down reduces our history, but the problem is that many of the people involved in the controversy simply don't know enough history. Imagine, for example, if Southern plantations were more accurately called "slave labor camps." Would young lovers then still dream of being married in such places? But Sherman did achieve his goal of eviscerating Southern morale, both at home and at the front, where rebel officers realized that their families and homes were unprotected. By doing that, Sherman helped bring an end to the war. He should be ranked among our top five generals, ever. Dickey, the author of "Empire of Mud," looks at the march mainly through the eyes of soldiers and other participants, like nurses. Perhaps as a result of this perspective, he tends to overemphasize the role of subordinate commanders like John Logan, while underestimating Sherman's extraordinary ability to juggle troop movements, logistics and intelligence, all while adapting to a new way of war built around the railroad and the telegraph. So "Rising in Flames," while interesting, is unlikely to take a place alongside essential texts like Joseph T. Glatthaar's "The March to the Sea and Beyond." Speaking of Glatthaar, his new book, THE AMERICAN MILITARY: A Concise History (Oxford University, 18.95), carries precisely the right title. In just 127 small pages of text, Glatthaar, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, gallops through American military history from the French and Indian War all the way to Iraq and Afghanistan. Impressively, he manages to provide a lot more than battle histories, deftly delving into technological advances, social changes and political contexts. Anyone looking for a place to begin understanding the military history of our country would do well to start here. It is all too easy to forget the costs of war for the people who wage it. Some 2.5 million Americans have served in Afghanistan and Iraq. In AFTER COMBAT: True War Stories From Iraq and Afghanistan (Potomac, 29.95), Marian Eide and Michael Gibler seek to construct one big narrative from interviews with 30 veterans about their experiences in those countries. Does this approach work? Yes, and far better than I expected. I finished this book wishing that there were companion volumes for the American Revolution and the Civil War. Eide, an English professor at Texas A M, and Gibler, a former Army officer, have compiled what amounts to a primer on what it was like to be enlisted in the Army in the post 9/11 era. People who know the military won't be surprised by much, but others can learn a lot from it.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
It's going to be quite a while before anyone sees "Hamilton" onstage again. But there's now another option: Disney announced Tuesday that it plans to stream a filmed version of the stage production beginning July 3 on Disney Plus. The plan is a pandemic prompted shift: Just three months ago, Disney announced that it was preparing the film for release on Oct. 15, 2021. But the cancellation of all live performances, as well as the uncertain appeal of movie theaters, led the company to fast track the film, moving up the release date by 15 months. "In this very difficult time, this story of leadership, tenacity, hope, love the power of people to unite against adversity is both relevant and inspiring," Disney executive chairman Robert Iger said on Twitter.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Tana French has started to move away from using detectives as narrators. "The detective is a symbol of authority and restoration of order," she said. "What do we say by consistently having that authority figure?" Ever since she released her debut novel, "In the Woods," Tana French has drawn such a devoted following that it borders on cultish. In the last 13 years, she has published seven novels that won over millions of fans with their twisty, nuanced plots. But for the last few months, French has been struggling to write. She's too anxious about the state of the world. "I've realized how much of this gig is your subconscious, and my subconscious, like everybody else's in the world, is a smoking crater right now," she said during a video interview from her home in Dublin, where she has been in varying degrees of lockdown with her husband and two daughters. "It's all used up by dealing with what's going on around us and trying to process it." Fortunately for her millions of fans, French finished a book at the end of February, before the world and her subconscious shut down. "Pandemically speaking, my timing was pretty good," said French, who has flaming red hair, wide set hazel eyes and a striking energy level despite the late hour in Ireland. Her new novel, "The Searcher," out on Tuesday from Viking, departs from her earlier work. After writing six mysteries in her "Dublin Murder Squad" series, featuring a cohort of detectives, French has been experimenting with stand alone novels. "The Searcher" unfolds in a rough, wild landscape where farmers and locals know every bit of each other's business and are suspicious of outsiders. It is her first book set outside of Dublin and her first to feature an American protagonist a gruff, retired Chicago police officer named Cal Hooper, who hopes to find peace and quiet in an idyllic Irish village (spoiler: he doesn't). With "The Searcher," her eighth book, French is also venturing into a new genre. Though there's a mystery at its core, "The Searcher" feels almost as much like a western as a suspense novel. French never picked up a western until recently, when she read Larry McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove" on the recommendation of the journalist and novelist Patrick Anderson. French devoured it and moved on to other dark westerns, including Charles Portis's "True Grit" and Patrick deWitt's "The Sisters Brothers." She was fascinated by how morally ambiguous the characters and their actions were. "I love that about westerns so much, that they don't try to pretend it can ever be clear," she said. French started wondering what would happen if she applied some of that to an Irish village and came up with a classic hero in Cal a lone stranger who comes to town and disrupts its social fabric, exposing secrets and tangling with local vigilantes. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. Veering into western themes might seem strange for a writer who has built a fan base with her gritty and psychologically acute Dublin suspense novels. French's books have sold around seven million copies worldwide close to four million copies in the United States alone and are published in 37 languages. But French has always defied easy categorization and flouted mystery genre conventions, even seemingly inviolable ones, like solving the actual mystery. "With novels in this genre, there's this desire for breakneck pace and a big twist at the end, and she never felt any pressure to do any of that," the novelist Megan Abbott said of French. "She takes the classic elements of those story structures, but she's not buying into any of it." French has been called both "our best living mystery writer" and "a mystery writer for people who don't read mysteries." Her work has been compared to writers as varied as Thomas Hardy, Ruth Rendell, James Ellroy and Donna Tartt. Among her peers, she's admired by Marlon James, Stephen King and Gillian Flynn, who has called French's work "absolutely mesmerizing." Her novels are often less about solving crimes than examining the aftermath of trauma and the unreliable nature of memory, as well as the social systems and entrenched class disparities that can give rise to violence. To a degree that is perhaps uncharacteristic for a writer of mysteries, a genre that often demands meticulous planning, French seems to thrive on uncertainty. She concedes that plot is not her strong suit. Rather than mapping out the twists and turns of an investigation, she starts with a character and a setting and feels her way to a story. French, who is 47 and has dual American and Italian citizenship, traces her comfort with ambiguity to her nomadic upbringing. Born in Vermont, she grew up on several continents, as her family moved around for her father's job as a developmental economist to Florence, Italy; then Washington, D.C.; then Lilongwe, Malawi; then Rome. Relocating so frequently made her a keen observer of cultural subtleties. "Every couple of years you had to start over, trying to decode a new place," she said. "Reordering yourself was part of my childhood. It shows up a lot in what I do." She's lived in Dublin, where she went to Trinity College, since 1990. French didn't start writing seriously until she was 30. For years, she worked as an actor, a career that felt natural for someone who was used to instability. In 2002, when she was between jobs and found work on an archaeological dig near a forest, a dark thought lodged in her brain: She imagined what would happen if a group of children went into the woods to play, and only one came out. She jotted the idea down on a phone bill but didn't start writing until a year later. It turned into her first novel, "In the Woods," which featured Rob Ryan, a detective whose investigation into a girl's murder takes him back to the same woods where, as a boy, he witnessed a crime so horrific that he blocked it from his memory. When she submitted the manuscript to publishers, French was so broke that she struggled to pay her electricity bill. A publisher offered her an advance of around PS15,000 (about 20,000) for world publication rights, but she held out and got a better offer, according to her agent, Darley Anderson, who sold the book to the British publisher Hodder Stoughton for 10 times that initial offer in a two book deal. "I'm probably the only person who went into writing for the job security," French said. "This felt so stable and so secure and so lovely." Her debut received ecstatic reviews and several prizes, including the Edgar Award for best first novel. The natural move would have been to follow up with a series, starring the same detective, as many of the genre's most successful authors, from Agatha Christie to Arthur Conan Doyle to Dorothy Sayers, have done. Instead, French took a supporting character, Rob's partner, Cassie, and made her the heroine of her next novel, "The Likeness." It follows Cassie as she goes undercover to investigate the killing of a young woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to her. In her third book, "Faithful Place," French plucked out a character from "The Likeness" Frank Mackey, the detective who put Cassie on the murder case. French followed with three more "Dublin Murder Squad" books, then surprised her fans with a stand alone novel, "The Witch Elm." "It's very easy to fall in that trap where you know what works for you and you keep writing the same book over and over," she said. Recently, she has moved away from detectives as her narrators, both because she wants to keep reinventing herself, and because she started to question their centrality in crime fiction. "The detective is a symbol of authority and restoration of order," French said. "What do we say by consistently having that authority figure?" With "The Searcher," she probes further at this question and adds the issues of systemic racism and police violence. She was wary at first of writing about police brutality, as a white writer living in Ireland, where killings by police officers are rare. "I was reluctant to touch on the U.S. side of this at all," French said. "I'm not convinced that I have any right to speak about that." But she felt she needed a reason for why the novel's retired policeman left America in disillusionment. So she gave him a back story in which he harbors regrets over his role in a near fatal shooting, when his partner fired at a fleeing Black teenager. After the incident, Cal corroborated his partner's story that the teen was reaching for something in his pocket, even though Cal didn't quite believe that. "I tried to make sure that it was about this guy realizing that his own perceptions were flawed and not necessarily trustworthy, and he could not afford to believe that right and wrong were as simple as he had always wanted them to be," French said. "The morality involved in his job was much too complex and jagged and all wrong for him to feel like he could do it and be a good person any longer." After finishing "The Searcher," French has been toying with ideas for a new novel, though she said "it hasn't been easy to have enough brain power to do anything useful." After experimenting with western themes, she wants to try her hand at folk horror, in the vein of Shirley Jackson, the author of "The Haunting of Hill House." Lately, French has been rereading "vast quantities of Agatha Christie," which she compared to comfort food. "I know everything will be sorted out in a couple of hundred pages," she said. No one would say the same about a Tana French novel.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Dawson Riverman's parents tried to help him make the best of it. Born without fingers on his left hand, Dawson struggled to perform even the simplest tasks, like tying his shoes or holding a ball. "God made you special in this way," his parents told him. But by age 5, Dawson was demanding tearfully to know why. The Rivermans, of Forest Grove, Ore., could not afford a high tech prosthetic hand for their son, and in any event they are rarely made for children. Then help arrived in the guise of a stranger with a three dimensional printer. He made a prosthetic hand for Dawson, in cobalt blue and black, and it did not cost his family a thing. Now the 13 year old can ride a bike and hold a baseball bat. He hopes to play goalkeeper on his soccer team. The proliferation of 3 D printers has had an unexpected benefit: The devices, it turns out, are perfect for creating cheap prosthetics. Surprising numbers of children need them: One in 1,000 infants is born with missing fingers, and others lose fingers and hands to injury. Each year, about 450 children receive amputations as a result of lawn mower accidents, according to a study in Pedatrics. State of the art prosthetic replacements are complicated medical devices, powered by batteries and electronic motors, and they can cost thousands of dollars. Even if children are able to manage the equipment, they grow too quickly to make the investment practical. So most do without, fighting to do with one hand what most of us do with two. The materials for a 3 D printed prosthetic hand can cost as little as 20 to 50, and some experts say they work just as well, if not better, than much costlier devices. Best of all, boys and girls usually love their D.I.Y. prosthetics. They are not designed to look like replacement parts. One popular model, the Cyborg Beast, looks like a limb from a Transformer. The Raptor Hand and Talon Hand 2.X do not suggest disability; they hint at comic book superpowers. And they are not made to be hidden indeed, they can be fabricated in a variety of eye catching fluorescent colors, or even made to glow in the dark. The fingers are closed by flexing the wrist, which pulls on cable "tendons." Move the wrist again, and the hand opens. The hands are printed in pieces, which are assembled by volunteers, or by parents and children themselves. More than 50 groups, such as Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops and schools like Convent of the Sacred Heart in Manhattan, have created hands for about 500 children. "We have several thousand people on our site who are asking to help make hands," said Dr. Schull, a research scientist at the Rochester Institute of Technology. "What could be more rewarding than using your 3D printer to make a hand for someone?" An online tool on the E nable website, the "Handomatic," is used to fit the prosthesis to the child. A parent enters a series of measurements, and the tool spits out a custom design for the child that can be downloaded into the printer. Each hand takes about 20 hours to print and another two or three hours to assemble. (Designs also can be downloaded from Thingiverse, a website run by MakerBot, a manufacturer of 3 D printers.) Assembly tutorials are available on YouTube. It is not much harder than putting together a complex Lego kit, said Ivan Owen, one of the inventors of the 3 D printed hands, who made Dawson's hand. "We released the designs into the public domain so there'd be no patent and everyone could do whatever they wanted with it," he said. "So many people contributed their time to improve on the initial design. I feel blessed." "It looks even cooler than the picture, " he said. "It looks like Ironman or Spider Man." He was once teased for his disability, said his mother, Melina Brown, of Opelika, Ala., who now volunteers for E nable. "Now he's different in a cool way, and the other kids say they want a new hand, too." Health care providers are beginning to take note. In September, Johns Hopkins Hospital in Maryland and E nable hosted their first 3 D printing conference involving the medical community, volunteers, recipients and manufacturers. The hospital has purchased a 3 D printer and has begun printing free prosthetic devices for children. "Anyone can get one of these hands it doesn't matter what insurance or health provider you have," said Dr. Albert Chi, an assistant professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins Medicine. "To be able to provide such a functional tool for anyone with congenital hand or limb loss, it kind of brings you to tears a little bit."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
A family in isolation is a kind of science experiment. Gifty, the neuroscience graduate student at Stanford who narrates Yaa Gyasi's second novel, "Transcendent Kingdom," compares her relationship with her mother to the first bit of laboratory science she remembers performing. Gifty and her middle school classmates submerged an egg in various solutions, then watched as it was denuded of its shell, swelling and shriveling, changing shape and color. Intended to demonstrate osmosis, the experiment, Gifty reflects later, suggested the central question about her and her mother: "Are we going to be OK?" "I didn't want to be thought of as a woman in science, a Black woman in science," Gifty thinks early in the novel; she is no more interested in the "immigrant cliche" of the academically successful child whose striving parents sweat blood for her success than Gyasi is in a novel that pits the home culture against the outside world to see which one wins out. Instead, Gyasi builds her characters scientifically, observation by observation, in the same way that her narrator builds her Ph.D. thesis experiment a study of reward seeking behavior in mice that self consciously mirrors her brother Nana's struggle with opioids. Gyasi sometimes reminds me of other writers who've addressed the immigrant experience in America Jhumpa Lahiri and Yiyun Li in particular but less because of her themes than her meticulous style, as when Gifty says of her lab partner: "It embarrassed me to know that I would have been embarrassed to talk about Nana's addiction with Han," a sentence whose awkwardness is in the service of its emotional precision. This book was one of our most anticipated titles of the month. See the full list. Gyasi's style here is especially striking given the time traveling fireworks of her enormously successful debut, "Homegoing" (2016), an examination of the effects of African, British and American slavery on one Ghanaian family over three centuries. Some readers of "Transcendent Kingdom" may miss the romantic sweep of that novel and the momentum Gyasi achieved by leaping a generation and a continent every few chapters. If "Homegoing" progressed in more or less linear fashion, in this book narrative time is more relative; like one of those rubber balls attached to a paddle, it rebounds between Gifty's childhood and her brother's death by overdose, her elite education and her mother's suicidal depressions. That bouncing around also beautifully captures the rhythms of life with a depressive, the way that the shadows of the past persist in the present. While Gifty shares some biography with Marjorie, a character in "Homegoing" both grow up in Huntsville, Ala., and encounter a "crazy" person on a trip to Ghana the picture of mental illness in "Transcendent Kingdom" is darker and more nuanced. Gifty, who prefers evidence to anecdote, cites a study of schizophrenics in India, Ghana and California; while the Indian and Ghanaian subjects hear benevolent voices, sometimes those of friends and family members, the Californian schizophrenics are "bombarded by harsh, hate filled voices, by violence, intrusion." It's not, as Gifty's mother suggests, that mental illness is an invention of the toxic West, but that the way it's experienced on either side of the ocean is different, depending on the surrounding culture.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
What is a person of principle to do when the ruler he serves is consumed with reckless vanity? For Sir Thomas More, the sharp witted chancellor at the center of Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons," there is no question of following along. Even when he's sent to the Tower, his life in peril, he remains a quietly intransigent dissenter to the rampaging egomania of King Henry VIII. "This is not the stuff of which martyrs are made," More says of himself to his wife, Lady Alice. But he'll prove that assurance wrong, and when he does in Christa Scott Reed's fitful production in the Acorn Theater at Theater Row the forced sundering of their bond will genuinely sting. With Michael Countryman as a mild, sweet More and Carolyn McCormick as a fiery, steely Alice, the fond tenderness between them is the anchor of the play. The king (Trent Dawson) is not that kind of husband, of course. He's determined to trade his queen for a newer model, and if that means breaking with the pope and declaring himself the head of a new church, so be it. Viewing this course as a violation of divine law, More refuses to endorse it and is charged with treason. "A Man for All Seasons" won the Tony Award for best play in 1962, and its revival by Fellowship for Performing Arts would appear to be well timed. Mr. Bolt's text ponders issues that gain urgency in any politically tumultuous moment: the conscience and courage of the powerful, and the impact of ordinary people. (The narrator, played too heavy handedly by Harry Bouvy, is called the Common Man.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
What books are on your night stand now? There are no books on my night stand, because I'm a lifelong insomniac, so eight or nine years ago, I thought: "Don't read in bed. It's too stimulating. Watch TV instead. It's boring." And it's true. TV is boring, but apparently not boring enough to make me fall asleep. So now instead of being overstimulated and awake, I'm bored and awake. What has your postelection reading looked like? My postelection reading has looked pretty much like tea leaves, with just exactly the success you might imagine. I've definitely noticed since the election that even though generally I have a lifelong preference for reading fiction, I have less interest in it now. Except for rereading, which I've been doing a lot. Especially John O'Hara. I suppose this is my way of comforting myself. What's the last great book you read? This really kind of stumped me. Unlike almost everyone else I can think of, when I say great, I mean great. Not just great this year or not just extremely good. I know you're not supposed to have this kind of old fashioned hierarchy of books. But I do. So I'm trying to think of the last really great book I read. And all I can come up with is something I reread, which was "Memoirs of Hadrian," by Marguerite Yourcenar, which is actually great, and by great, I mean forever. What's the best classic novel you recently read for the first time? "Little Dorrit." I never was a Dickens fanatic. Except for "Martin Chuzzlewit," which I loved. But I was looking for something to read and I asked Deborah Eisenberg and she said, "Have you ever read 'Little Dorrit'?" Which I had not, and I was so startled since she rarely recommends a book that wasn't written by a dead Hungarian that I immediately read it, and I loved it. What's your favorite book no one else has heard of? This is a question that I really find odd. How do I know what no one else has heard of? I can name books that I think are fairly obscure. I could say Henry Green. But now, as of last summer, everyone is reading Henry Green. There is a writer named Wyndham Lewis, whom you're supposed to hate, but I don't. He wrote a book called, "The Apes of God," which is a book I particularly like and am interested in. I suppose other people like it and have heard of it, but I assume it is obscure enough for this answer. Which writers novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets working today do you admire most? This is something I usually avoid answering, because you always leave someone out. But I wrote up a list. Toni Morrison, Deborah Eisenberg, Lynne Tillman, Wallace Shawn, Junot Diaz, Ben Katchor and Cynthia Ozick. Who is shockingly smart. Whose opinion on books do you most trust? Pretty much all the time. Especially if I'm supposed to be doing something else. I was very frequently punished for reading as a child because I was reading when I was supposed to be doing homework. I got in trouble in school for reading, I got in trouble at home for reading. My mother would actually bang on my door and say, "I know you're reading in there!" In my adult life, I've gotten in trouble for reading because I'm not writing when I'm reading. So it's really rare that reading is unaccompanied by guilt for me. But I've learned to live with it. I feel guilty pretty much all the time. The only time I read without feeling guilty is on a plane, because what else could I possibly be doing? Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. What moves you most in a work of literature? I think it might be the word "move" that kind of perplexes me, because that's a word connected with emotion. I don't really seek out emotion when reading. The feeling that's most important to me when reading is that I'm absorbed. I just want to be taken away. I really like being dazzled. That would be nice. The thing I care least about in reading is the story. I just don't care that much about stories. That may have to do with being older. Tell me a story I don't know. But really, I read in order not to be in life. Reading is better than life. Without reading, you're stuck with life. Which genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid? In my lifetime, I've read one zillion mysteries. This is not because I care about who did it. I don't care. And I almost never figure it out. I don't have that kind of mind at all. I don't care who did it. I have reread mysteries numerous times and I don't even remember who did it. I've read all the Agatha Christies. I've read all the Nero Wolfe books by Rex Stout. He wrote many of them, but not enough for Fran. I'm always hoping to find one I've never read. It's the same as the New Yorker's dream of finding an extra room in your apartment that you didn't know was there. One thing I like about mysteries is that they end. Which is true of so little else. I have avoided science fiction my entire life, or any kind of fantasy. When the Harry Potter books came out, I bought the first one because everyone said how great it was. But I didn't like it. And I realized I would not have liked it as a child either. I'm not saying I don't love her, because she did a great thing. To see children lined up outside bookstores that was fantastic. But those kinds of books. . . . It's like adventures or people who climb mountains or jump out of airplanes; I find real life challenging enough. How do you like to read? Paper or electronic? One book at a time or several simultaneously? Obviously, paper. I mean, actually, on his show once, Jimmy Fallon gave me a Kindle. He actually gave it to me as a present. I said: "I know you gave me this because I don't have one. You know what else I don't have? A Bentley." I don't think they're horrible. I don't object to them. I'm just not interested in them. People are always showing me this stuff like I'm from outer space and I've never heard of it. I have really bad eyesight, so they always tell me you can make the type bigger. I suppose that would be a good thing for me, but I don't care. I'd rather squint. I see people using them on the subway. It seems to me that the majority of people you see reading on these things are in their 40s. I see fewer kids reading on them, and by kids I mean people in their 20s. These are the people I see most frequently reading actual books, which I find very encouraging. How do you organize your books? My books are organized first by category. Fiction, letters, essays. Those kinds of categories. And then there are many subdivisions. Then within categories, they're alphabetized. I always have arguments with the guy who helps me organize my books, because I have a biography section. He says: "You can't have a biography section. You have to have them arranged by writer. For instance, Henry James's fiction, then the letters, the biographies, etc." And I say: "I know. That's the right way to do it. But that would take up too much space." All the apartments I buy or rent are for my books, not for myself. I don't need the space. I'm 5 foot 4. I have a whole bookcase that this guy calls "your crazy books." The crazy book category. Those books are not alphabetized. I also have a large reference library. I have numerous encyclopedias; I have many, many dictionaries. I actually bought myself the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1978. I always wanted it, and when I wrote my first book and had some money, I bought it. I didn't have it growing up; I had the World Book, because it was less expensive. The Encyclopaedia Britannica was so hard to buy, I can't tell you. I had to make one million phone calls. Because it was generally sold on an installment plan. They didn't know how to send these books to someone who is just going to send a check. Nobody uses these books anymore, but I do. When the second edition of the O.E.D. came out, there was nothing I wanted more. It was like 10,000. I had a friend who owned a bookstore, and I begged her to let me buy it at cost, and she did. It was still several thousand dollars, but I'm delighted to own it, even though I think it's now free on the internet. You're in the process of moving your personal library. What's that been like? Believe me, I'm not in the process of it yet. Because it's so awful, I keep putting it off. But I just did it a year and a half ago. They come and pack the books. That takes three days. But two times before that, it took two months to organize them first. I have many bookcases. They have glass doors. They are mostly 19th century. The books all go in certain places in my apartment. I like to have fiction in the living room, reference books in the writing room. I have 10,000 books. I know this because I move them. When I move, I go through them and take some out. Many books come to this house unbidden. And unbidden books, I don't want to keep them. Once the books are all rearranged, I can put my hand on any book. I know where they all are. What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves? I don't know. Maybe my small library of soap carving books, because most people don't have them. People are surprised at the fairly large number of cookbooks I have, because I don't cook. I hate cooking, and I never cook. But I like to eat, and I like to read about food. The very first book in my library was a book my mother bought me at a house sale in the late 1950s called "Six Little Cooks." She bought it for a quarter. I couldn't believe that I was allowed to have such a beautiful thing. This was my first book that I thought of as very valuable. It's a story about a woman who goes to visit her niece and her friends and decides to spend the summer teaching them how to cook. It's signed by the author and all the girls. Maybe because of this book, and maybe because they used to be so cheap (they no longer are), I have quite a few cookbooks. What's the best book you've ever received as a gift? I don't know. I've received some really wonderful books as gifts. I have some first editions of Dawn Powell, whom I love. I would never buy these books. I buy books to read. It adds about 80 zillion dollars to the price of a book to have a signed or first edition. I have some first edition Thurbers. I'm thrilled to have them, believe me. I got a first edition Thurber for my birthday this year, and that was the last book to make me laugh out loud when I reread it. I got kicked out of class in third grade reading Thurber. I couldn't contain myself. I could not stop laughing. But not all funny writers are necessarily funny in that way. Oscar Wilde is probably the wittiest writer in English, but he doesn't make me laugh out loud. There was a writer named Peter De Vries who did make me laugh out loud, so hard that when I was reading one of his books when I was in the hospital as a teenager, the nurse took it away from me because she thought I was going to break my stitches. Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain? I don't really have these kinds of favorites. I probably had them as a child. I associate having favorite things with being a child. I'm not youthful enough to have these kinds of favorites. What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most? I was a constant reader. Just like I am now. I was constantly reading. I read under the covers with a flashlight. I loved "The Secret Garden." The ones every girl my age read. I also have a lot of my mother's books. Mostly I went to the library as a child. "Heidi," Nancy Drew. I would say mostly conventional kinds of books. You're organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite? None. I would never do it. My idea of a great literary dinner party is Fran, eating alone, reading a book. That's my idea of a literary dinner party. When I eat alone, I spend a lot of time, before I sit down to my meager meal, choosing what to read. And I'm a lot better choosing a book than preparing a meal. And I never eat anything without reading. Ever. If I'm eating an apple, I have to get a book. Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn't? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing? I wouldn't say disappointing or not good, but I will say that I have never enjoyed reading William Faulkner. I am not saying he's not a great writer. I will just say that I prefer not to read him. I don't enjoy reading him. I did not acquire the ability to not finish a book until I was 50 years old, which probably has to do with scarcity as a child: You have a book finish it! But I've made a number of decisions since then. If you don't like a book, stop reading it. If you don't like a movie, walk out. Life is not a jail sentence. When I used to be able to go into bookstores all the time, when there were lots of bookstores, I could read a few sentences and put it down. Now I hear about a book and get someone to order it on the internet, and when the book arrives I find I don't like it. I only read for pleasure. I don't have to finish a book. Sometimes, I don't realize how little I care about a book. Sometimes, I start reading a book and then realize I forgot I was reading it. And it disappears under a pile of books. Whom would you want to write your bio? I would say Carolyn Keene. Because then at least I know they would find the culprit. If I'd known Carolyn Keene was not a person as a child, I would have been crushed. All women my age loved Nancy Drew books. In the '80s, they had this Nancy Drew party to celebrate some new editions, and every single woman writer in New York was there, dying to talk about Nancy Drew. There weren't many books about girls, let's face it. It was pretty uncommon. What do you plan to read next? I don't plan my reading. I really don't. I'm always surprised. I can't believe that people keep these lists of the books they read. People are so organized! This is a cast of mind so different from mine. I do have piles of books that I haven't read yet. When I finish a book, I go through that pile. I recently noticed a book that hadn't been read through two moves. I'll give it to someone. It's a good book. It's just not for Fran. If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? It would depend on who's reading it to him.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
A pregnant woman in Puerto Rico has become the first American whose fetus developed microcephaly because of a Zika infection acquired in the United States, the territory's health department said on Friday. Dr. Ana Rius, the island's health secretary, said the fetus, which was not carried to term, had developed a shrunken skull and calcified spots in the brain, suggesting inflammation and cell death. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which confirmed the presence of the virus in brain tissue from the fetus, released a statement saying the case "saddens and concerns us as it highlights the potential for additional cases and associated adverse pregnancy." The agency has estimated that 20 percent or more of the island's 3.5 million residents will become infected with Zika this year. The Senate is poised to vote next week on funds to combat the spread of the virus, which is expected to arrive in Southern states as summer approaches and the mosquitoes that carry the infection begin to spread north. Administration officials had requested 1.9 billion in emergency funding and have been sharply critical of Republicans in Congress for failing to provide it. The White House has transferred 510 million intended to counter the Ebola virus to the fight against Zika. The fetus in Puerto Rico was miscarried in the second trimester, and a local doctor, suspecting Zika related brain damage, sent it to the C.D.C., said Dr. Johnny Rullan, a former territorial health secretary who is an adviser to the governor for the epidemic. He did not know at what week of pregnancy the miscarriage occurred, but congenital brain damage related to Zika has been detected as early as the 19th week. Sixteen of the infected women have given birth so far, "and the babies are progressing normally," Dr. Rius told El Nuevo Dia, a local paper. The children will be monitored for three years. Dr. Rullan suspects that there have been 80,000 infections since January, assuming about 10,000 cases for each case of Guillain Barre syndrome, a creeping paralysis caused by an autoimmune attack on the peripheral nerves triggered by a Zika infection. As of this week, there have been eight confirmed Guillain Barre cases since the year began. Puerto Rico has also seen one Zika related death in an adult. It occurred in February in a man in his 70s who recovered from Zika but succumbed to immune thrombocytopenic purpura, another type of autoimmune reaction. There have been two other cases of microcephaly in the United States thought to be related to Zika. One involved a child born to a woman in Hawaii who had spent the early part of her pregnancy in Brazil. The other involved a pregnancy aborted by a Washington, D.C., woman who became infected on a trip through Mexico, Belize and Guatemala. Only about a third of the roughly 15,000 pregnant women in Puerto Rico have been tested, Dr. Rullan said. "The doctors are not being aggressive enough, and the insurance companies are not," he said. "We had a conference, and I told them we need to do all 15,000 immediately, whether they have symptoms or not." He added, "I think a case of microcephaly will get people going."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
HONG KONG The bankruptcies of three American solar power companies in the last month, including Solyndra of California on Wednesday, have left China's industry with a dominant sales position almost three fifths of the world's production capacity and rapidly declining costs. Some American, Japanese and European solar companies still have a technological edge over Chinese rivals, but seldom a cost advantage, according to industry analysts. Loans at very low rates from state owned banks in Beijing, cheap or free land from local and provincial governments across China, huge economies of scale and other cost advantages have transformed China from a minor player in the solar power industry just a few years ago into the main producer of an increasingly competitive source of electricity. "The top tier Chinese firms are kind of the benchmark now," said Shayle Kann, a managing director of solar power studies at GTM Research, a renewable energy market analysis firm based in Boston. Pricing of solar equipment is determined by the Chinese industry, he said, "and everyone else prices at a premium or discount to them." Besides Solyndra, the other two American manufacturers that filed for bankruptcy in August were Evergreen Solar, of Massachusetts, and SpectraWatt, a New York company. Another company, BP Solar, halted manufacturing at its complex in Frederick, Md., last spring. Those bankruptcies and closings represent almost one fifth of the solar panel manufacturing capacity in the United States, according to GTM Research. Solyndra and Evergreen in particular suffered because they pursued unusual technologies whose competitiveness depended on their using less polysilicon, the main material for solar panels. That has become less important because polysilicon prices have tumbled more than 80 percent in the last three years as output has caught up with demand. Analysts say that two American companies remain strongly placed. One is First Solar, the largest American manufacturer, which uses a different technology but has its biggest factory in Malaysia. The other, SunPower, is much smaller but is an industry leader in the efficiency with which its panels convert sunlight into electricity, so that they sell at a premium to Chinese panels. But with Beijing heavily supporting its industry, the Chinese companies are forging ahead. "There is no question that renewable energy companies in the United States feel pressure from China," said David B. Sandalow, the assistant secretary for policy and international affairs at the United States Energy Department. "Many of them say it is cheap capital, not cheap labor, that gives Chinese companies the main competitive advantage." China's three biggest solar power companies Suntech Power, Yingli Green Energy and Trina Solar have all in the last two weeks announced second quarter sales increases of 33 to 63 percent from a year earlier. Yingli and Trina were also profitable in the quarter. Suntech posted a loss, mostly because it broke a longstanding agreement to buy solar wafers critical components in the manufacturing process from a Singapore affiliate of MEMC Electronic Materials of Missouri. Suntech aims to make more wafers itself. Shares in large and small Chinese solar power companies have mostly rallied in the last two weeks on the New York and Hong Kong stock markets, as investors have welcomed their strong quarterly results and the prospect of dwindling competition from Western rivals. Besides the bankruptcies in the United States, solar power companies in Germany, another big producer, have been laying off workers and retrenching. The recent strength of Chinese stocks "truly reflects the low cost base of the Chinese solar manufacturers, and it is great to see their positioning, particularly relative to their American and European counterparts," said K. K. Chan, the chief executive of Nature Elements Capital, a Chinese clean energy investment company based in Beijing. He attributed the Chinese industry's low costs not to inexpensive labor in China high technology solar panel manufacturing is not labor intensive but rather to free or subsidized land from local governments, extensive tax breaks and other state assistance. Solar panel prices have plunged by 30 to 42 percent per kilowatt hour in the last year as manufacturers have sharply increased capacity, particularly in China. Meanwhile, demand has been somewhat weak in the main markets in the United States and Europe. Costs for electricity generated by utility scale solar installations now approach costs for natural gas in some markets, like California's, when subsidies of as much as 30 percent of the price are included. However, costs remain well above the cost of electricity from coal. The United States and the European Union have tried to build demand for solar power by subsidizing the buyers of solar panels. But increasingly those subsidies are being used to buy solar panels from China. The Chinese government has pursued a different policy course. Instead of subsidizing the purchase and use of solar power, China has focused on building the competitiveness of the country's manufacturers. As a result, China exports 95 percent of the solar panels it produces. The United Steelworkers union filed a legal complaint a year ago with the United States government, asking the Obama administration to investigate China's clean energy subsidies and other policies and to bring cases against them at the World Trade Organization. The organization's rules strictly prohibit export subsidies, to prevent countries from buying market share in foreign markets for their producers. The administration did challenge one Chinese government practice: giving subsidy grants of 6.7 million and 22.5 million to Chinese wind turbine manufacturers that agreed not to buy imported components. China agreed in June to discontinue the practice, but by then it had already built the world's largest wind turbine manufacturing industry over the last five years and now has highly competitive Chinese producers for almost every component. Nkenge L. Harmon, a spokeswoman for the United States trade representative's office, said on Thursday that the agency's investigation continued into whether other Chinese green energy policies might violate W.T.O. rules.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
You can pick up the caricature crawl at Minetta Tavern on Macdougal Street in the West Village (Season 5), where the barroom displays rows of them, some by the noted artist Franz Kline. The line, "The steaks are supposed to be good here," was heard in the episode, and it's true; the very flavorful Tavern Steak ( 28) with a pile of crisp fries is a deal. Solid cocktails here, including a Brooklyn ( 16), a Manhattan variation made with rye, Amaro Lucano and maraschino liqueur. The dining room is more fun than the bar. P.J. Clarke's on Third Avenue (at 55th Street) was in an episode in Season 1 Peggy did the Twist here. It's still a party after more than a century in business (born 1884). The Supremes' "Stop! In the Name of Love" was on the sound system when I walked in the other night. (First "Mad Men" signifier: A woman at the bar had a canvas tote bag that read "Life Imitates Ads." Second: I got a perch under an old print ad for Utica Club, headlined "Our Beer Is 50 Years Behind the Times.") And a few minutes later the personable bartender George Arnioitis one of his tattoos reads Each Day Is a Gift was singing along with Al Green's "Let's Stay Together." No Twists, but it was early. The hamburgers are good (the Clarke Burger with cheese is 12.50), the drinks well made (the bright Sidecar includes Hennessy Cognac and Giffard curacao, and a sugar rim; price 15). The Sidecar is also the name of an inviting P.J. Clarke's establishment around the corner on 55th. A manager at Clarke's told me to walk two doors down, ring the bell and wait for the buzzer to let me up to the second floor. I stood there for several long minutes until I realized the door was unlocked. Do not let this happen to you. One of the many pleasures of "Mad Men" is wondering where Don, Pete, Joan, Peggy and Roger might drink now (midway through a Manhattan, that list can be more expansive): It's easy to see any and all at the Pegu Club on West Houston Street, having a signature Pegu Club cocktail (London dry gin, bitters, orange curacao, fresh lime juice; 13) and letting the Frank Sinatra Harry James recording of "Castle Rock" kick off the evening. Much of the advertising business has moved downtown so a drink at the airy Crosby Bar at the Crosby Street Hotel in SoHo may be in order: a finale on a recent night was the Charles Bronson ( 18.50): Bulleit bourbon, sweet vermouth, yellow Chartreuse, Punt e Mes. Bronson movie it could evoke: "The Great Escape."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
PARIS Deep in the bowels of the Palais de Tokyo, a building dedicated to modern art, down a back stairway strafed with graffiti and through many a wandering hall, Rick Owens was leaning against a wall on Thursday afternoon, considering doom. "It's a doomy moment," he said, "in a doomy era. We've all been thinking the system got so oversaturated, it had to go bust at some point. This is it." Because his consideration of doom had gotten him thinking about his doomy adolescence in Porterville, Calif., where he had felt stifled by conservatism and found relief in the music of the English singer Gary Numan. So this winter he had emailed Mr. Numan out of the blue, and asked if he could use some of his original tracks something deeply personal for a show, and Mr. Numan had said "sure," dug them up out of his manager's basement, and sent them over.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Only one of the title characters in "The Rape of the Sabine Women, by Grace B. Matthias" a new play by Michael Yates Crowley is a living human. She is Grace, a teenager in a generic Springfield where the football team reigns and "weird" girls get called pigs with impunity. But the ancient Sabines have equal billing. Memorialized in myth and in the painting "The Intervention of the Sabine Women" by Jacques Louis David, they are here to remind us, through the story of their abduction by Roman warriors and their peacemaking during the ensuing war, of the long and almost foundational role of rape throughout history. If Mr. Crowley has set out to write nothing less than a treatise on rape culture, now and forever, he wants his play, which opened on Sunday in a Playwrights Realm production at the Duke on 42nd Street, to be so much more. A serious effort to dramatize a rape and its repercussions, it also dares itself to be a satire, a high school comedy and a coming of age story in which victimization is turned into strength through insight. That's a lot for a play to be, and the mix is not always comfortable. Part of the discomfort is deliberate: Mr. Crowley is demonstrating that the history of rape runs straight through all of the other kinds of stories we tell. Still, he is at his most sure footed sticking to this particular story, in which Grace, a brainy but awkward 15 year old girl hovering at the far margins of the popular crowd, is raped by Jeff, a boy she likes on the football team. Neither the act nor her emotional response to it is oversimplified. Jeff isn't the obvious Neanderthal on the team naturally called the Romans but rather the Neanderthal's sensitive sidekick, and Grace maintains romantic ideas about him even after the crime. She'd like to forgive him, as she believes the Sabine women forgave their Roman rapists in marrying them. But she is stripped of these illusions by the responses of everyone around her. Monica, her cheerleader friend, hectors her to keep quiet, and the local media personified by a buffoonish anchorman composite called The News focuses on the potential damage to the Romans' season. Her neighbors turn on her, too, invoking the classic, if contradictory, "she asked for it" canards: She was drunk when it happened. She shouldn't have been alone with the boy in the first place. She didn't say no, so that must have implied consent. These and other details recall real rapes, especially the 2012 case of a 16 year old girl in Steubenville, Ohio, who was sexually assaulted by members of the high school football team while she was unconscious after drinking. The two teenage boys in that case were convicted, but sexual assault charges against a player in another football related case the same year, in Maryville, Mo., were dropped. (He later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was sentenced to two years' probation.) Mr. Crowley draws on elements from both cases to create a dramatic situation in which Grace can find no way to prevail not legally, not spiritually against an entrenched system of post rape revictimization. Abstracting that situation, though, are filters and frames that are too baroque for the play's own good. Its overdeveloped thematic superstructure includes not only the Sabines, whose leader, Hersilia, makes occasional spectral appearances, but also Grace's obsessions with abandoned mines, perpetual fires and hunky firemen. Other elements are underdeveloped: Grace's father has left the family, disappearing beyond even the reach of email, and her mother, who works a night shift, is reduced to a rarely heard offstage voice. That Grace nevertheless emerges as a well rounded character is partly the result of the touching conviction Susannah Perkins imbues her with. As she did playing a brainy, atrocity obsessed teenager in Sarah DeLappe's "The Wolves," Ms. Perkins manages the tricky task of suggesting the inconsistencies of a character in the process of formation and deformation at once. Watch how she uses her baggy sweater as both security blanket and armor. But if Ms. Perkins manages to shoulder the symbolic baggage that Mr. Crowley has burdened Grace with, most of the other characters sink under his satire. The Neanderthal teammate (Alex Breaux) is a ludicrously overcompensating closet case, and Monica (Jeena Yi) is a by the numbers frenemy. Jeff, played with daring sympathy by Doug Harris, is less monochrome but remains largely hollow for reasons that seem more political than dramatic. And the variously incompetent, venal and cynical counselors, lawyers and "male experts on rape" are obvious straw men. By the time Mr. Crowley starts aiming his arrows at such low hanging fruit as Wikipedia, you may feel, as I did, that the project of examining rape culture has taken a back seat to the project of making that examination less grim. Unfortunately, the meant to be funny material is too unsophisticated for both the subject and the audience. Because we already know this territory pretty well, the satire seems obvious. And the Sabine material, jimmied into an art history class, feels for most of the play like footnotes. That's a shame because other elements, sticking closer to the main story, remain fresh and challenging. At several points, the director Tyne Rafaeli opens the blue curtains on Arnulfo Maldonado's high school auditorium set to reveal mysterious scenes such as the one in which Grace and Jeff swim together in a lake at night. In their complexity and danger, these scenes let real discomfort into a discussion that otherwise seems too eager to say the right thing. Not that saying the right thing is always wrong. A valid purpose of theater can be to show us how people survive the sadly common disasters of being human. "A good story, well told, can extend the space in which we are free," the playwright writes in a program note. In that sense, Grace's connection to the Sabine women, and the equivocal lesson she eventually draws from them, are useful and give the play an unexpectedly strong finish. Didactic it may be, but in a crisis, as in a fire, one is grateful for even unsubtle signs marking the path of escape.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
The Only Home Her Daughter Has Ever Known To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. In a small auditorium at St. Ann's Center for Children, Youth and Families in Hyattsville, Md., 26 year old Susana Chiang and I talk softly through our masks. Nearby is a well loved plastic playhouse, where Ms. Chiang's 4 year old daughter is preparing us pretend food. She serves invisible ice cream and pasta with pepper and eggs. Children always seem taken with the essential vocations food service, mail delivery, health care, parenthood as though they're born with a sense of what's important in the world. As her daughter plays, Ms. Chiang explains how she came to be at St. Ann's, which offers shelter, counseling, education and child care to mothers and pregnant girls and women in crisis. After completing four years of college without earning a degree, Ms. Chiang moved back in with her mother, with whom she had a troubled relationship. She got a job at Dunkin' Donuts. It was "not what I thought I would be doing," she said. Ms. Chiang entered a "really unhealthy relationship." And then she discovered that she was pregnant. Worn down and uncertain, she found her way to St. Ann's, where she has lived for nearly five years, paying a small monthly fee (now waived during the pandemic) that has allowed her to save much of the rest of her money. It is the only home her daughter has ever known. Ms. Chiang's life stabilized at St. Ann's. She earned a certification to work as a nursing assistant and began considering her prospects for a career. About two years ago, she got a job as a teaching aide at a Montessori school. Ms. Chiang loves her work. "Kids meet us where we are," she said. "They're always living in the present moment. They're really grateful." When schools closed down in mid March, Ms. Chiang was furloughed. She applied for unemployment benefits but received a notification that she was ineligible, without a clear explanation as to why. With no income, she began spending the money she has saved during her time at St. Ann's. "It's been stressful," she said. Ms. Chiang has poured herself into her online teaching certification program. She volunteered on a couple of occasions to babysit the children of other residents of St. Ann's as they worked their essential jobs. St. Ann's is home to women who work in nursing homes, grocery stores and big box stores employment considered, even under coronavirus related restrictions, necessary to the functioning of civil society. These workers are now widely recognized as essential, but their compensation, benefits and status in society hardly reflect how critical they are. Lazett Henry, 25, is one such worker. When she arrived at St. Ann's four years ago, she had just lost her job, apartment and car because of domestic violence. "I was going through a lot mentally and emotionally," she told me. "I was very dependent upon him, so when things went bad, it took a toll on me." At St. Ann's, she was able to regain a steadier emotional footing and to go back to work as a certified nursing assistant at a local urgent care center. "We're all scared at my job," she said. "We don't know where the virus is or who has it." The staff at St. Ann's is concerned as well, but there was never any discussion of turning essential worker residents away. "We never call ourselves a shelter," said Sister Mary Bader, the center's chief executive officer. "We call ourselves a program. Shelter has connotations of a dormlike setting, bedbugs, anything but a home. But this is home." St. Ann's offers several programs, including child care, therapy, career counseling, tutoring, and classes on parenting and life skills. Since the pandemic began, the center's board of directors has also funded twice weekly meals for all the families Chinese takeout or pizza. Sister Mary strives for touches like that things that are personal and loving but not overbearing or condescending. Part of St. Ann's mission is to help mothers back onto their feet materially, but there's another aspect, too: Celebrating "their human worth and their dignity," Sister Mary said, "that's part of the mission." It's necessary work. The virus has revealed a paradox at the core of American life: The people whose work we rely on the most often have the least to show for it. "You're starting to see the need times 10," Shaneen Alvarez, director of clinical and social work services at St. Ann's, told me. "Some of these families started out with very little; now they have nothing. It's exacerbating the challenges that they had before this." But the women of St. Ann's remain hopeful and dedicated. "When I got here," Ms. Chiang tells me, "there were all these people around me who wanted to support me. I'd never had that before. I started doing things, you know?" She still suffers from anxiety, intensified by the pandemic, and from self doubt. It isn't easy to be a single parent at any time, much less during the coronavirus. "Sometimes I wonder: Did I make the right choice?," she says. Ms. Chiang's daughter darts up for a hug. "But she's thriving all the time, and she makes me so happy. I'm just so grateful that there was a place like this." Ms. Henry feels the same. "I'm very proud of myself," she says, as her two sons chase each other, laughing, around the playhouse in the auditorium. "I'm in school, I'm working, and I'm stable. That was the lowest point in my life, and now I've come so far." Sister Mary acknowledges that since her organization is run largely on donations, the economic downturn has her concerned about the center's finances and those of the mothers who live here. "But no one's going to tell them that they're going to be leaving," she adds. "They can stay here until whatever has become unstable in their lives is back on track." 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
"No show gets a free ride because you had a success before. You're as naked as you were the first day you worked, and you better make it good." For more than half a century, Harold Prince produced or directed many of the most successful and influential musicals on Broadway. singing "The Pajama Game." singing "West Side Story." singing singing "Fiddler on the Roof." singing And "Phantom of the Opera," the longest running show in Broadway history. singing singing Prince, perhaps more than anyone else, trailblazed a new direction for the modern musical. We sat down with this Broadway titan in September 2008, to discuss his career and the astounding 21 Tony awards he has won, more Tonys than anyone else. "It's a nice thing to get them, but they are not a measure. 'West Side Story.' That never got a Tony. That was history making, but not celebrated at its time. History is littered with great works of art that got terrible reviews originally. And they survived." Harold Prince was born in 1928 and raised in New York City during the Great Depression. As a young boy, his family often took him to the theater, where he loved to escape. "I was a very solitary kid. I had a theater made of cardboard, and I would listen to the opera on Saturdays and Milton Cross would tell the story of the opera." Announcer: "The opera house is in complete darkness for this opening storm raging scene." "And I would move little tin people around on the stage. It was my solitary, imaginative world. The world that I conjured up in my head was much more real than the world outside." But the hardships of the Great Depression took its toll on Prince. And at the age of 14, he had what he says was a nervous breakdown. "I wandered the street having kind of conversations in my head. I came to my parents and said, I think there's something really wrong. It's just a black cloud over everything. And within a space of about three months, it began to go away. The legacy of it was that I came out of it a different person extremely ambitious. I wanted what I wanted, and I was going to get it." He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1948. "I came back to New York. And then I thought, what am I going to do?" What he did was write a letter to George Abbott, Broadway's most important producer and director at the time, asking for a job. "I said, I would like to work for you. I live with my parents and the subway's a nickel. I can afford to work for six months for nothing. And here was the clincher if you can tell that you're not paying me, then fire me, please. It's a very intriguing thing." Abbott took Prince under his wing, employing him primarily as an assistant stage manager. By 1954, after a two year stint in the Army, an opportunity came his way a book about a strike in a pajama factory, courtesy of his friend and future producing partner, Robert Griffith. "Bobby Griffith called me one day and said, there's a book review in The Times. It seems like a musical. I called around to find the agent. He said, you know I've had another offer. Leland Hayward has made an offer. And I think there will be other offers. What can you guys give me that would persuade me? We said, well, if we could talk George Abbott into directing it, would that interest you? He said, if you can talk George Abbott into directing it, the book is yours." singing Reporter: "This was your first show and you had a hit." "Huge hit. Huge hit. On the opening night at the St. James Theater, Bobby Griffith and I were on either side of the stage. And when the show was over, we simply walked across the stage and embraced each other. It was a giant smash, long lines the next day, and so on." Directed by Abbott and Jerome Robbins, and choreographed by Bob Fosse, "The Pajama Game" won the Tony award for best musical. "It's often very hard to follow a hit with another hit. There's a sophomore jinx, but you did." "Yeah. Well, George Abbott found a book called 'The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant.' He said, I think it'd make a good musical. Want to do it? A year later, we opened. It was a hit." singing "Damn Yankees," a tale of a man who sells his soul to the devil to help the Washington Senators win the pennant. It was directed by Abbott, and again, choreographed by Fosse. singing Then came a landmark in Prince's career. Stephen Sondheim had become a good friend. But in the mid 1950s, Prince had become a Broadway success, and Sondheim was still hoping for his first Broadway credit. "He was working on what became 'West Side Story.' He was Lenny Bernstein's lyricist." The show lost its producer while in development and was without financing. Prince told Sondheim that he and Robert Griffith were interested in producing it. "I said, could you put together the authors? And we would hear the score. Steve had been told by Lenny never to play the score for anyone. So I went to Bernstein's apartment and Lenny played the score. And I started to hum along the score, and he stopped halfway through it and said, that's what I've always wanted: A musical producer who really understands music. And I never did tell him that I'd heard the score dozens of times." singing singing "We loved it and turned to them and said, we'll do it. But we have to raise the money very quickly. We had such a successful track record that, I'd say, we're doing a musical. Please tell us within the next 24 hours whether you want in. And within 24 hours, everyone was in. And we had it." singing "West Side Story" made its debut on Broadway in 1957. "It was not as big a hit as the first two. That I would stand at the back of the theater and I thought, you're backstage at theater history. And by God, you're a small part of it." singing In 1961, Prince suffered a major shock when his producing partner, Robert Griffith, died suddenly. "Bobby was playing golf and had a heart attack and died the next day. I was at the hospital. And I mean, what could be more shocking? He was in his 50s. And I thought, you know, it's sort of the end of the world. I really relied on him enormously." Prince had already been thinking about doing more than producing hits and the loss of his producing partner spurred him on. "What I really wanted to do was that cliche. What I really want to be is a director." His first notable hit was "She Loves Me" in 1963. singing Then in 1966, came his groundbreaking musical, "Cabaret," based on Christopher Isherwood's "Berlin Stories," and with a score by John Kander and Fred Ebb. singing "I've always thought the two years in Uncle Sam's army provided a deductible. I used to hang out in Stuttgart in a cheesy, bombed out church cellar where there was an M.C. you can see what's coming and three bovine chorus women. And I just loved it. I sat at the bar for hours and hours and this little guy, painted with lipstick and false eyelashes, who was about as funny as the entertainer, but tragic and wonderful. And I came back with him all those years later and I said, we should create a role for the M.C.. He is the entertainer, but we should make him metaphorical. He should represent Berlin and the depths of the Depression eager to please, hopeless, bad taste, energetic. And as the evening goes on, he should turn into the Nazis. So that by the time the evening is over, he's pulled Germany out, but he's consummate evil." singing "Cabaret" was a revelation. It moved the musical away from straightforward storytelling and into a fragmented narrative form, one that would influence much that came after it, including such landmark musicals as "A Chorus Line" in Chicago. "You have to express yourself, not the status quo, by being more daring, by really expressing who you are, and by making the musicals what you think musicals should be." "Cabaret" established Prince as a director. And then he reunited with Sondheim and they created show after show. "Company," with its non linear libretto about a man of 35 afraid to commit to a relationship. "Follies," about a reunion of chorus girls in a ruined theater 30 years after their youthful success. "A Little Night Music," based on a movie by Ingmar Bergman. And "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street." singing "Directing, I had to hopefully find something of myself. It was a lot easier when you're working with Steve Sondheim, let me tell you, because he was of the same mind. And he was courageous as hell." More hits came in the late 1970s and the 1980s. Prince and Andrew Lloyd Webber teamed up to make "Evita" and "Phantom of the Opera." "He said, I'm thinking of a musical idea. Do you think there's anything in 'Phantom of the Opera?' And I said, I'll do it. And he said, why do you want to do it so much? I said, because it's romantic. Let's do a Victorian romance, larger than life. Let's take the theater and turn it into another world, and have the audience come in from the street and just enter that world, like so many children. Put a mantel of romance over them." singing "The very thing that brought me into the theater in the first place: escape." singing Prince's own imagination continued to challenge theatergoers. "I'm trying desperately not to be the old director who tells anecdotes to the company, instead of directs the play. I live for the next musical. I live in the future. I'm totally mindful that nobody will ever have the life I've had in the theater. That's past. And that's damn sad."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
The spontaneous outpouring of protests are occurring as many states have warily begun reopening after weeks of stay at home orders with millions of American unemployed. Restaurants, schools, beaches and parks are under scrutiny as the public tentatively practices new forms of social distancing. In Los Angeles, where demonstrations led to the closing of virus testing sites on Saturday, Mayor Eric Garcetti warned that the protests could become "super spreader events," referring to the types of gatherings, usually held in indoor settings, that can lead to an explosion of secondary infections. Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a Republican, expressed concern that his state would see a spike in cases in about two weeks, which is about how long it takes for symptoms to emerge after someone is infected, while Atlanta's mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, advised people who were out protesting "to go get a Covid test this week." Some infectious disease experts were reassured by the fact that the protests were held outdoors, saying the open air settings could mitigate the risk of transmission. In addition, many of the demonstrators were wearing masks, and in some places, they appeared to be avoiding clustering too closely. "The outdoor air dilutes the virus and reduces the infectious dose that might be out there, and if there are breezes blowing, that further dilutes the virus in the air," said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University. "There was literally a lot of running around, which means they're exhaling more profoundly, but also passing each other very quickly." The crowds tended to be on the younger side, he noted, and younger adults generally have better outcomes if they become ill, though there is a risk they could transmit the virus to relatives and household members who may be older and more susceptible. But others were more concerned about the risk posed by the marches. Dr. Howard Markel, a medical historian who studies pandemics, likened the protest crowds to the bond parades held in American cities like Philadelphia and Detroit in the midst of the 1918 influenza pandemic, which were often followed by spikes in influenza cases. "Yes, the protests are outside, but they are all really close to each other, and in those cases, being outside doesn't protect you nearly as much," Dr. Markel said. "Public gatherings are public gatherings it doesn't matter what you're protesting or cheering. That's one reason we're not having large baseball games and may not have college football this fall." Though many protesters were wearing masks, others were not. SARS CoV 2, the virus that causes the Covid 19 disease, is mainly transmitted through respiratory droplets spread when people talk, cough or sneeze; screaming and shouting slogans during a protest can accelerate the spread, Dr. Markel said. Tear gas and pepper spray, which police have used to disperse crowds, cause people to tear up and cough, and increase respiratory secretions from the eyes, nose and mouth, further enhancing the possibility of transmission. Police efforts to move crowds through tight urban areas can result in corralling people closer together, or end up penning people into tight spaces. And emotions have been running high, Dr. Markel said. "People get lost in the moment, and they lose awareness of who is close to them, who's not, who's wearing a mask, who's not," he said. The biggest concern is the one that has bedeviled infectious disease experts since the pandemic began, and it's the coronavirus's secret weapon: that it can be transmitted by people who don't display any symptoms and feel healthy enough to participate in protests. "There are a huge number of asymptomatic carriers, and that makes it hugely risky," Dr. Markel said. Dr. Ashish Jha, a professor and director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said more than half of coronavirus infections are spread by people who are asymptomatic, including some who are infected but never go on to develop symptoms and others who don't yet know they are sick.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Homes listed at about the median price in their borough, clockwise from upper left: Queens , single family, 475,000; Bronx , two family, 395,000; Brooklyn , condo, 657,000; Staten Island , single family (right half), 379,000. With the prevalence of fierce bidding wars for apartments in Manhattan, homes that get poached within a day of the open house, and interest rates that keep inching up, a buyer could become so frustrated by hunting for real estate in the 212 area code that he or she might just decide to give up. Which might not be such a bad idea, come to think of it. If those buyers rechanneled their searches away from Manhattan, they might discover there are still hefty discounts to be had in the other boroughs, despite all the drumbeating about how certain areas have recently achieved parity with Manhattan. (Sorry, Brooklyn!) Of course, picking a home also means factoring in layouts, style and neighborhood, and more specific qualities, like whether it has a garden. And certain types of homes don't exist in any meaningful way in certain boroughs. If you have your heart set on a high rise glass walled starchitect created condo, chances are you're going to bypass Staten Island, where single family houses are the rule. Likewise, two families are the most frequently traded category in the Bronx, so unless you feel like playing landlord, or have a need to house a mother in law, that area may not merit much of a look. But instead of some ivy draped West Village town house, say, a buyer could pick up a similar size split level ranch in Queens, with a driveway and a garage, and have oodles of cash left over for tomato plants. A borough by borough analysis follows of the median prices for specific segments of the market, based mostly on data supplied by Miller Samuel, the appraisal firm, from Jan. 1 through mid August. And to expand the range of opportunities, also included is what you might end up with if you decided to stretch and double the median price. The condo craze of the past decade, which ebbed during the recession but is surging again, can seem a phenomenon exclusive to Manhattan, with so many developers competing to build the island's tallest condo. But Kings County has also added condos at a brisk and sustained clip, to the point where they now change hands there more than any other kind of home. Sure, stoop fronted brownstones may be the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of Brooklyn, but these condos are often one and the same, tucked inside those filigreed row houses, a few units at a time. In late August, it went into contract for above the asking price, said Nichole Thompson Adams, the listing agent. "This part of Brooklyn is really taking off." Even so, the Quincy Street dwelling went for a fraction of the cost of the typical condo in Manhattan, where the median condo sale price is 1.23 million. But for all its well preserved historic districts, Brooklyn has also been awash in some major construction projects, especially in Williamsburg, where warehouses have given way to block size developments that feature pools, yoga rooms and parking garages, and upstairs, exotic wood finishes. Double the median condo price in Brooklyn, and you could score something along the lines of Apartment 4 V at 80 Metropolitan Avenue, a two bedroom, two bath corner unit with wenge vanities and a Bosch dishwasher. It recently went into contract for the asking price, 1.329 million. That complex, with 119 units, sold out in 2011, for prices that averaged 730 a square foot, said Jay Overbye, the Halstead Property agent who handled sales for the building before it opened, and also took care of the resale of No. 4 V. Now, though, units routinely sell for 1,200a foot, he said. "It's certainly not the deal it once was," Mr. Overbye said. "But 1,200 a foot in Manhattan? That would be hard to find." The median for single family homes in Brooklyn is 566,000, and homes for around that price can be more easily found outside of brownstone Brooklyn, in neighborhoods like Midwood and Mill Basin. That's a far cry from Manhattan, where town houses on the Upper East Side, in Greenwich Village and across Harlem go for a median of 3.4 million. Still, modest two family homes sell better than other types of properties in the borough. Indeed, they make up 28 percent of all sales, as compared with 20 percent for one family homes, and 18 percent for co ops. Condos, which pop up in disparate corners of the borough, are a distant 8 percent of the sales pool, based on a New York Times analysis through the first six months of the year. The preponderance of two families, often with a unit on the ground floor and another above it, partly explains why the Bronx has the highest percentage of renters in New York, with 81 percent of its residents mailing a monthly check to a landlord, versus 69 percent in the city as a whole, according to data prepared by Susan Weber Stoger, a researcher in the sociology department at Queens College. The median price for two family houses here is around 373,000. Take 1948 Clinton Avenue, near the Cross Bronx Expressway in the Tremont section. Built in 1899, the six bedroom house underwent a 100,000 top to bottom renovation after it was purchased from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The 2,500 square foot house is listed at 395,000 with Joseph Anthony Associates. But doubling the median sale price in the Bronx delivers quite a different type of two family, away from the borough's rougher central portions. Spend 779,000, for example, and you might wind up with 574 Edison Avenue, a 1935 Craftsman in the Throgs Neck section, next to Long Island Sound and near Westchester County. The house, listed with Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage, offers a first floor unit with two bedrooms and a living room with a beamed ceiling and working fieldstone fireplace. The upstairs second unit also has two bedrooms. The quarter acre corner property, which includes a garage, is bounded by a picket fence. "There are also a lot of fruit trees and specimen plants," said Clayton Jeffrey, the listing broker. "Not only will you never find anything like this in Manhattan, it's very rare for the Bronx." The median price for single families in the Bronx is about 365,000, a price that has held almost flat from 2012, and they are scattered from City Island to Woodlawn. The median price for Bronx condos is 132,000, considerably lower than that in any of the other boroughs. Riverdale, on the Hudson River on the western flank of the Bronx, offers both older and newer varieties. There's RiverPointe, a 1980s development on Johnson Avenue, and from 2008, the Solaria, nearby on West 237th Street. In Queens, many buyers are looking for single family houses, and the median price is 485,000. None Testing the Limits: Only three of New York's 25 tallest residential buildings have completed safety tasks required by the city. The Downside to Life in a Supertall: 432 Park faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high rises may share its fate. Luxury Developers' Loophole: Soaring towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city's labyrinthine zoning laws. An Evolving Skyline: The high rise building boom has transformed the city's skyline in recent years. Its impact will echo for years to come. Hidden Feats: Our critic looks at some supertall N.Y.C. buildings and how the ingenuity of engineers helped build landmarks. In that ballpark is a 1935 Tudor at 138 08 175th Street in Jamaica, near the Locust Manor stop on the Long Island Rail Road. Listed at 475,000 with Century 21 Milestone Realty, the house, on a shaded block with similar architecture, has two bedrooms, one and a half baths and an eat in kitchen. But with twice as much buying power, the options seem to grow geometrically. A 1965 split level ranch, with four bedrooms and three and a half baths and a one car garage, is available for 938,000. Located at 63 58 252nd Street in the eastern enclave of Little Neck, and looking more like lawn dotted next door Nassau County than closer to Manhattan Queens, the neighborhood is popular with overseas Asian buyers, says Kimberly Oppy of Laffey Fine Homes, the listing broker. "Prices are going up out here because of low inventory elsewhere," Ms. Oppy said. "But we are seeing people come this far out who still will commute to Manhattan." And alongside the 3.43 million median price for a single family town house near Central Park, perhaps, that 938,000 offering can seem appealing. The median for co ops is 185,000 and is significantly less than the Manhattan median of 659,000. Look for them out here in red brick buildings in Kew Gardens, Corona and Jackson Heights, among other areas. The median sale price of single family houses is 388,000. For that kind of money, buyers can pick up dwellings like the semidetached home at 217 Slater Boulevard, in the Dongan Hills section of the South Shore. It has three bedrooms and two and a half baths across two floors. Originally listed with Dynasty Real Estate at 389,000, it was recently reduced to 379,000. The home was flooded by Hurricane Sandy, but has been rebuilt with new heating and cooling systems, said Madeline Taormina, the listing agent. Or, plunk down about twice as much and walk away with a totally different type of structure, like the Second Empire antique at 163 Clinton Avenue, in the North Shore enclave of Randall Manor, listed at 639,000. Shingled, with a mansard roof and a wraparound porch, the Victorian house is being pitched at Manhattanites unable to afford that island, said Catherine McCarthy Turer of Stribling Associates, the listing agent. "I don't think people know there are these pockets of great architecture on Staten Island," she said. And in words that could augur the next exodus away from the outer boroughs and into even farther out enclaves, Ms. McCarthy Turer added that, "they went to Brooklyn first, and now they are getting priced out of there, too."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Front seat passengers in some small sport utility vehicles may not be as well protected as drivers in certain types of crashes, according to recent tests of seven vehicles by the nonprofit Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. The tests, known as small overlap frontal tests, were similar to the kind that the institute conducts by directing the front end impact to the driver's side of the vehicle. But in these latest tests, whose results were released on Thursday, the impact was on the S.U.V.s' front passenger side. Among the small S.U.V.s tested, a 2015 Toyota RAV4 received a rating of "poor" on its passenger side results. A 2014 Nissan Rogue and 2014 Subaru Forester received "marginal" safety ratings for front seat passengers. All seven vehicles had received the highest rating "good'' for protecting drivers in earlier, similar crash tests. But sitting next to the driver can be a riskier proposition. Of the seven, only a 2016 Hyundai Tucson earned a "good'' rating on the passenger side test. The remaining three a 2015 Buick Encore, a 2015 Honda CR V and a 2015 Mazda CX 5 were rated "acceptable.'' (The different models reflect the first year in each case when modification were made that enabled the vehicles to earn their "good" ratings for the driver side tests.) The findings matter because more than 1,600 passengers in the right front seats of vehicles of all types died in frontal crashes in 2014, according to the federal government's fatality data. It is not known how many of those crashes were of the sort replicated by the insurance institute's tests, which involve 25 percent of the front end of a vehicle striking a rigid barrier at 40 miles an hour. The test, which uses dummies, aims to show what happens when a vehicle runs off the road and strikes an object like a tree or utility pole. The insurance institute, which has been conducting this test for four years, was aware that automakers were focusing their initial safety improvement efforts on the driver's side of vehicles given that there is always a driver in the car, but not necessarily a front seat passenger. "Some manufacturers told us that in the short term they could make more driver's side modifications to more vehicle models to improve safety rather than making improvements to both sides,'' said Becky Mueller, a senior research engineer at the insurance institute and the lead author of the report on the latest tests. But the expectation was that automakers would start to make modifications to the passenger side as well. "We are now four years into the testing and we want to remind manufacturers that the short term doesn't last forever," Mrs. Mueller said. "Consumers are going to want the same level of protection for drivers and right front passengers," she said. "They expect that when we rate a vehicle 'good,' it applies to both sides of the vehicle." The small overlap frontal test is the newest of the insurance institute's crash tests. It began in 2012 as the institute, which is funded by the insurance industry, was trying to determine why people were still being seriously injured or killed in frontal crashes, despite seatbelts, airbags and "good" frontal crash test ratings. One of its studies of newer vehicles found that small overlap frontal crashes accounted for about 20 to 25 percent of those injuries and deaths. Automakers began redesigning their vehicles to get better scores on the new test and provide better protection. The insurance institute said that since the test's introduction, 13 automakers have made structural changes to 97 vehicles. Because crash forces in the small frontal overlap test are concentrated on the front wheel, suspension and firewall, the passenger's survival space can be seriously compromised by intruding structures. The front wheel can be forced back into the footwell, resulting in serious and debilitating leg and foot injuries on the driver's side as the test dummy's feet and legs get caught up in the metal pedals. It is also easy for drivers and passengers to hit their heads and chests against metal structures, like the instrument panel, protruding into the vehicle. "If the structure is so badly intruded, the airbag can't do its job effectively," Mrs. Mueller said. In the Toyota RAV4 test, the intrusion into the interior of the vehicle on the passenger's side was 13 inches deeper than on the driver's side. And the RAV4's passenger side door popped open, which in a crash would put the occupant at risk of being ejected. In 2013, when the RAV4 was tested for the first time, it got a "poor" small overlap rating. The 2015 model received a good rating, but Toyota did not make the same safety improvements to the passenger side. In a written statement responding to the new test results, Toyota said, in part: "The I.I.H.S. small overlap test is severe, specialized and goes beyond federal vehicle safety requirements. "Rather than waiting to re engineer both driver's and passenger's sides,'' Toyota added, "we took immediate steps to enhance performance on the driver's side." The company said that it had incorporated safety enhancements on both sides for vehicles built on Toyota's new platforms, beginning with the 2016 Prius. With the Nissan Rogue, maximum intrusion on the passenger side was 10 inches more than on the driver's side, and the door hinge pillar, which is at the bottom of the passenger compartment where the rocker panel meets the A pillar a front roof support was torn off completely, although the door remained closed. In a written statement, Nissan said: "Nissan is committed to the safety and security of our customers and their passengers. We are aware of the I.I.H.S. testing and we are currently reviewing the details to assess opportunities for improved performance.''	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Budget cuts may have taken more than 30 million out of the Brownsville Independent School District's budget for the next two years, but administrators say they are working to preserve financing for one key pot of money: the chess budget. This academic year, it totals 400,000. "I don't think there's any other school district in the nation that puts dollars of any consequence into chess," said Jay Harris, who coordinates the district's program. But for Brownsville, a border city that is one of the poorest in the nation, the "royal game" serves as an avenue to success and a source of pride that many believe is worth the investment. This year, roughly 4,000 students have signed up to participate in the district's chess offerings, which include regular tournaments. Mr. Harris said it was typical to see 500 to 800 students at an event.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
The house fit all their criteria, but before going inside to meet their real estate agent, Stephanie Marra sat in the car beside her husband, Donald Marra, and began to cry. "I told him, 'We're never going to get it,'" she said. "'Why are we even looking?'" The Marras were discouraged. They had been ready to move from their White Plains rental apartment for a couple of years, and they had already seen dozens of homes, starting in Ridgefield, Conn., before shifting to Westchester County. They had looked in Chappaqua, Briarcliff Manor and Croton on Hudson, and then they discovered Katonah. There, they were enticed by the reputation of the schools and the charming Katonah Avenue downtown. "We knew this was where we wanted to be," Ms. Marra said. "But for every house we were interested in, there were so many other buyers interested, too." Back in the summer of 2016, sitting in their car in front of the house, Mr. Marra convinced his wife that they should go in. That same day, they made a full price offer, and a few months later, they moved into their new home: a 2,000 square foot, three bedroom colonial, built in 1975 on half an acre. They paid 630,000 and, Ms. Marra said, "We were beyond thrilled." Katonah is one of three hamlets in the northern Westchester town of Bedford. As such, its borders are undefined. The United States Census Bureau categorizes Katonah as a "census designated place," a narrow 0.8 square miles encompassing the business and historic districts, often referred to as "the village," with a population of nearly 2,100. But many residents and real estate agents consider Katonah a broader area. Chris Burdick, Bedford's supervisor, estimated that the hamlet covers roughly 12 square miles, with a population of around 7,000 "about 40 percent of the population of Bedford," he said. "It's the town's biggest hamlet." Big or little, and despite a transition over the past three decades from working class to a more affluent demographic, Katonah maintains a small town ambience. Growth is limited by Bedford's zoning laws and by Katonah's placement within the New York City watershed. "There are tremendous constraints on development," Mr. Burdick said. Katonah's less than a mile long commercial corridor runs north south, paralleling the Metro North Railroad tracks. It contains two small shopping centers as well as Katonah Avenue, with its restaurants, businesses and eclectic boutiques, many occupying turn of the 20th century Victorians. The rest of the hamlet is predominantly residential. West of Katonah Avenue is the Katonah Village Historic District (on the National Register of Historic Places since 1983), where shingle style colonials and ornate Queen Annes perch on quarter to half acre lots. Nearby, a cluster of homes forms a neighborhood around Todd's Pond. Lots are larger on Katonah's outskirts, east and northeast of the tracks and farther west. Harold Girdlestone, Bedford's sole assessor, said that in the 0.8 square mile central hamlet there are approximately 479 single family homes, 21 condominiums and 70 multifamily homes. There are also 40 rental apartments in six buildings and 17 mixed use buildings with 43 residential units. Inventory across the hamlet is significantly higher than it was last year, said Donna Garr, an agent at William Raveis Real Estate: "The competition is driving prices down, and activity is picking up." Data from the Hudson Gateway Multiple Listing Service indicated that, in the central hamlet, as of Sept. 26, there were 10 single family homes on the market. They ranged from a three bedroom, 816 square foot ranch, built in 1940 on 0.14 acres and listed at 419,000, to a four bedroom, 2,700 square foot converted barn, built in 1954 on 0.59 acres, listed for 1.15 million. There was also a 2,600 square foot multifamily for sale for 950,000, as well as five rentals, from a two bedroom, 1,040 square foot apartment in an 1890 multifamily building renting for 2,000 a month, to a four bedroom, 2,850 square foot colonial, built in 2001, for 6,000 a month. Two of the rentals were also listed for sale. The median sales price for a single family home during the 12 month period ending Sept. 26 was 610,000, down from 729,000 during the previous 12 months. The median price for a multifamily house was 518,000 this year, up from 395,000 last year, and the median monthly rental was 2,800, up from 2,400. Katonah is a walkable place, where neighbors run into one another taking their children to school, doing errands downtown or heading to and from the train. Ms. Garr, a 13 year resident, described it as down to earth and inclusive. The hamlet is also a place rich in cultural and recreational offerings. The Katonah Village Library has a full calendar of events, among them the 52 year old Katonah Poetry Series. The library's gallery is one of 12 stops along the self guided, monthly Katonah Art Stroll, which Ms. Yanish helped organize last year. Another stop is the Katonah Museum of Art, featuring changing exhibitions in a space designed by the modernist architect Edward Larrabee Barnes. Katonah is served by the 55 square mile Katonah Lewisboro School District, which also serves the town of Lewisboro, including the hamlets of Cross River, Goldens Bridge, South Salem, Waccabuc and Vista, and parts of the towns of North Salem and Pound Ridge. According to Lenore Person, the district's communication specialist, of the district's 2,911 students, 1,078 are from Katonah. Students attend one of three elementary schools for kindergarten through fifth grade. Most Katonah residents send their children to Katonah Elementary, in the hamlet; the rest attend Increase Miller Elementary, in Goldens Bridge. All district students converge at John Jay Middle School for grades six through eight, then move on to John Jay High School. The middle and high schools are on adjacent campuses in Cross River. On the 2017 2018 state assessments, 73 percent of Katonah Elementary's fourth graders were proficient in math and 68 percent were proficient in English language arts; statewide equivalents were 48 percent and 47 percent. At Increase Miller Elementary, 78 percent of fourth graders were proficient in math and 69 percent were proficient in English language arts. "Destruction to Katonah": So reported The New York Times in April 1893, when New York City announced plans to flood the village in order to develop a system of reservoirs. Rather than accept their fate, residents decided to move. Katonah was then a mill town on the Cross River. When the Katonah Land Company bought farmland a mile south, villagers set to work relocating roughly 55 buildings houses, barns, stores and a church to their new home. Many were dragged intact by draft horses along a track of soaped up timbers, sometimes while inhabited by families. Some were taken apart and reassembled at the new location. New Katonah, as it was called, was designed by the landscape architects G.S. and B.S. Olmstead in a Celtic cross pattern, which remains at the intersection of Parkway and Bedford Road. Today, the area's wide, leafy streets are lined with homes hauled there over a century ago. "Many communities grow up haphazardly," said Christina Rae, assistant to John Stockbridge, the town historian. "But this community came together to make a conscious decision about who they wanted to be and how they wanted to be." For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
The longtime friends on their new book, the pleasures and perils of childhood, and the remarkable success of their indie uke band. Roz Chast, a cartoonist for The New Yorker, and Patricia Marx, a humorist and staff writer at that magazine, have been friends ever since Marx's mother forced them together in the late 1970s. When Marx, one of the first female members of the Harvard Lampoon, had her first humor piece published (in the Atlantic) Chast illustrated the story. Marx's mother, now 92 and according to her daughter still a woman of very strong opinions, thought Marx should call the person who had illustrated her work. "It was stupid but I always do what my mother tells me," Marx said. "It was like a play date," said Chast . Chast's mother, who died in 2009, was perhaps even more formidable than Marx's mother, as readers learned from "Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant," Chast's harrowing memoir of her parent's final years. And she certainly did not believe in play dates, as we will discover. Marx grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia, one of three children; Chast, an only child, grew up in Brooklyn. They have also formed a two woman ukulele band. The other day, Chast and Marx were nesting on the sofa in Marx's East Side apartment. They played through their (short) repertoire of uke songs rewritten classics, like "Park, park, park your car, somewhere near the curb ..." sung to the tune of "Row, Row, Row your boat" and talked about their singular mothers . ROZ CHAST (looking up at Marx) I am so short waisted, when I sit down, I am shorter than you. PATRICIA MARX But I am sitting better than you. Sitting is my strength. CHAST I like to sit. I sit all day. And into the night. This is like the world's two laziest people. Though your childhoods were very different, your moms were similar in many ways. Can you introduce them? CHAST My mother was an assistant principal in an elementary school in Brooklyn. You would not want to make an enemy of her. She believed in herself and in her judgment. She was very smart. She had wanted to be a classical pianist but she grew up poor and she graduated from college during the Depression and her career took a different turn. MARX My mother is not musical at all. She probably doesn't know when to clap at the end of a performance. She was anti music. My father was very musical and played the piano all night long, which she said was anti social, which it was. My mom, like Roz's mother, is decisive and an absolutist. She has a very good eye. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. CHAST My mother had no eye. Not even one. Speaking of music, how did the band come about? MARX I went to a wedding and the guests were asked to bring an instrument and I can't play a musical instrument but I thought, How hard can it be to play a ukulele? So I bought one on Amazon and played "Here Comes the Sun" to serenade the couple and I showed it to Roz. CHAST I fell in love with it because i t's the parakeet of instruments : It's so cute and so turquoise and so cheap. Chast has lived with generations of parakeets, and two parrots. MARX And we started goofing around on email, coming up with our musical history just to make each other laugh. We were a sensation. We call our band the Ukulear Meltdown. We started as the Daily Ukuleles. Then we became the Weekly Ukuleles, then the Monthly Ukuleles, and then the Never Ukuleles. That was when Meg Wolitzer and Lorrie Moore were in the group, but we fired them because they had talent and knew how to play, which we consider pandering to the audience. Editor's note: this is a fabrication. Wolitzer and Moore were never in the band. CHAST Maybe we forgot our history, with all the drugs we were doing. General discussion of the drugs of yore, though Marx swore up and down that back in the day drugs "never had any effect on me." MARX My mother does not like to admit that anything is ever sad or wrong, so if my father would say something like, "During the Depression ..." She'd say, "Oh, Dick, there was no Depression." She was like a Depression denier. CHAST My mother was more like a personal depression denier. Her whole thing was if you were sad, she would say, "Stop staring at your navel." When I grew up, I didn't know what other people talked to each other about, because there were so many things we didn't talk about. MARX My mother was very can do. She told me, "Nobody needs more than four hours of sleep." I hate sleeping. Guilt gets me up. CHAST I like to sleep because I'm interested in dreaming, but it's more like profound laziness or momentum. Once I'm awake, going to sleep just seems so annoying, and once I'm sleeping, waking up seems so annoying. You may have difficulty with transitions. MARX In order to go to sleep, you have to do a form of exercise: brushing your teeth. One of the many titles for my unwritten memoir is, "Too Far to Walk." Both of you had parents who were deeply bonded to each other. Patty, your father thought your mother looked like Jacqueline Bisset. And your mother thought he should change his shirt. Roz, your parents were born the same year and proclaimed they were soulmates. Let's hear more about their couple hoods. MARX My mom did everything herself because it was easier and she liked things done a certain way. Once she went away for a week and my father relied so much on her that she put name tags on my father's clothes that said things like, "Wear with khaki pants Thursday." CHAST My mother was the one who made all the decisions and ran the show. My father never learned to how to drive because it made him profoundly anxious, so she did all the driving, even though she was an anxious driver, but it was a different sort of anxiety. My father didn't want to do anything. I think he would have been happy staying in the apartment, puttering around and reading the Times. MARX My mother was very blunt. We grew up before they invented psychology. So my mother felt free to criticize without thinking there would be horrible consequences. She called it constructive criticism and I valued it because I knew she was telling the truth. She once read a piece of mine in Time magazine, and said, "Guess what? I hate it! But if enough people like it, I'll change my mind," which I completely understood. CHAST My mother never offered that many opinions about my work, though sometimes she would get mad and say, "You're using me and daddy to make fun of." I'd say, "This is a general statement about, um ..." MARX And she bought that? Would you both say that your childhoods were the gift that keeps on giving, workwise? MARX Unlike Roz, I had a really good childhood. I learned the word bourgeois so I could say, "You are so bourgeois!" to my parents, because I was a Communist. A Communist in the suburbs. I envy you your worst childhood. CHAST My parents didn't try and make it bad. They were working all the time. My mother had this idea that if I ever socialized with other kids at the very best I would come home with impetigo and at the worst I would be learning things I shouldn't be learning. So my childhood was about avoiding other children. It was like being locked in a Skinner box. CHAST Both of my parents thought that whatever you did for a living, you should love it. My mother loved being an assistant principal. Even though I identified more with my father, the fact that she didn't apologize to anybody for who she was or what she wanted to do, I think filtered down. I never felt like I had to apologize for being a female cartoonist. I never even thought about the fact that I was a female cartoonist. MARX When I was growing up my parents wanted me to be a doctor, marry a doctor and have a doctor. That was just a given. Then, when I wasn't a doctor or even a lawyer, my parents adjusted and being a writer was the best thing to do. The legacy my mother impressed upon me is that you have to work hard and you don't give up and you don't whine and that's the deal. CHAST Nobody's going to hand you anything and hopefully you like what you're doing. It's like us with the band. We've made our millions and still we keep playing. MARX We just wish we were normal people, who could go to the grocery store without being mobbed. This interview has been edited and condensed, overworked and upended. The editors trust the subjects will understand the process was in their best interests. Follow New York Times Books on Facebook and Twitter ( nytimesbooks), sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
"Hello." "O.K., it's happened. We're in business." "How's this?" "I like it, Alex." "Do you always keep instruments near your bed in case inspiration strikes?" "Well, I have a piano near me all the time, and I always have a good yeah, the answer is yes." Singing: "Take me out and take me home. You're my, my, my, my lover." "I've never really been able to fully explain songwriting other than it's like this little glittery cloud floats in front of your face, and you grab it at the right time. And then you revert back to what you know about the structure of a song in order to fill in the gaps." "Where were you the moment inspiration struck?" "It was, I was in bed. I was in Nashville. I got out of bed. I think it was really late at night, and stumbled over to the piano." Voice memo: "O.K., so I had this idea that's like obviously I don't know the verse, whatever yet, but I have a pretty cool, really simple, beautiful chorus idea called 'Lover.'" "I've been thinking for years, God, it would just be so great to have a song that people who are in love would want to dance to, like slow dance to. In my head, I had just the last two people on a dance floor at 3 a.m., swaying." "What did you have in your mind? Was it the title? Was it a lyric? Was it a melody?" "It was not it was, can I go where you go? Can we always be this close?" Singing: "Can I go where you go? Can we always be this close forever and ever?" "I wanted the chorus to be these really simple existential questions that we ask ourselves when we're in love. 'Can I go where you go' is such a heavy thing to ask somebody. 'Can we always be this close' has so much fear in it, but so does love." "When did you hit upon the word 'lover'?" "Oh, I've always liked that word, but I've never used it in everyday life. When people are like, that's my lover over there or calling each other lover, I've never done that, but I've always loved it in the context of poetry or songs." "It's a polarizing word. Some people are like, 'Ugh, that word gives me the creeps.'" "Well, anything I do is polarizing. So, you know, I'm used to that." "Fair enough. So how much of the song did you get done that night at the piano in Nashville?" "The whole thing." "She sent me that voice note. Whether it's a whole song or just a little thing from her, I sort of get this big jolt, and I listen and I block out the whole world for a minute. Every lyric and melody was right there. And I was like ..." ding "... get on a plane. She came in the next day. She sat right there. She played it." "It's basically, I don't see it as piano. I think it's that kind of dreamy, guitary, throwback, but not like camp throwback." "I know what you mean." "So " piano "I thought it was the perfect song, which is really interesting because it's almost like even more of a duty to do it right." Singing: "You're my, my, my, my lover." "That seems so much better." "Yeah, I love the walk down." "That really fixes that part." "I love the walk down." "That was the only thing that " "I was trying to figure out, what the hell is going to happen there? So the " "That makes it so much better." Singing: "My, my, my, my." "When I'm working with Jack and Taylor, I'm working with two extremely creative people who are bouncing ideas back and forth so fast. So my job is to basically not slow them down in any way." "Laura's been by my side for every record I've made pretty much since people started listening to any of my records. We're all three of us are in that process together." "We're just like ugh, like it's just fun. We're fully, fully acting on impulse. And we're acting on intuition, and we're acting on excitement and oat milk lattes." "I remember the first thing I did was I went into the live room, which is right there. And at that time I had listened to a lot of Violent Femmes recently, and I was excited about how much feeling you could get out of a snare drum if it was a brush." drums "And I just remember going in and going 'psh,' one brush. I wasn't even really playing drums. I just kind of had one brush. I just " "We were using real reverbs and real tape echoes. It gives a really special character to it where it does feel nostalgic." "The bass, which is a very, very, very special bass, belongs to the studio." "He was calling that the 'Paul bass.' Is that Paul McCartney?" "Yeah." "My old Hofner bass, my little baby. Come on, baby." "We were just referencing like what would Paul do W.W.P.D.? Humming: Brum, brum, brum, brum, brum, brum, brum. The bass line is actually the hook." "It's not a true 'Paul bass' though." "It's not a true 'Paul bass' at all, but it's better at that 'Paul thump' than I've ever gotten out of the violin bass." Humming: "Brum, brum, brum, brum, brum, brum, brum, brum, brum." "The bass and the drum is sort of like if you just hear those two tracks, like the entire space is so, I think, beautifully filled." "In the studio, I'm obsessively going over every lyric and making sure that's what I want the final lyric to be. So I'll be over, in my notes, just sharpen that, hone in on that." "Were there lines that changed in that process?" "Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had toyed with the idea of being like, we could leave the Christmas lights up till April." Singing: "We could leave the Christmas lights up till January." "Doesn't everyone leave their Christmas lights up till January?" "But it's not about that being a crazy thing. It's about how mundane it is. It's about we could put a rug over there. We could do wallpaper, or we could do paint." Singing: "This is our place. We made the rules." "When young adults go from living in their family to then combining their life with someone else, that's actually like the most profound thing." "To be just telling this story I don't know. It almost feels like an old story I've heard many times. I mean, I guess it is, people falling in love." "Tell me about the importance of the bridge to you. I feel like you love a bridge. This is a special bridge. Talk to me about it." "I love a bridge. I love a bridge so much. I love trying to take the song to a higher level with the bridge." "There's these, sort of, hand plucking strings and these kind of flutes that are popping out." "I wanted it to be the first time we introduced the idea of vows." "Make it feel like a little wedding." Singing: "Ladies and gentlemen, will you please stand?" "I love to take a common phrase and twist it. So the bridge, I took all these common phrases that we say about weddings ..." Singing: "With every guitar string scar on my hand." "I like to add something that changes the phrase." Singing: "I take this magnetic force of a man to be my lover." "Without a bridge, a song can sort of feel almost like a jingle. You know when you're driving through beautiful scenery, and you're like mountains, trees. Oh my God, right? And all of a sudden you go through a tunnel and you're like, what the expletive ? And then it's back. Mountains and trees, so beautiful. It's like you need that third element to take you away from where you've been so you're so excited to get it back. Specifically in 'Lover' when you come out of the bridge and you go back into the chorus, you're just 'phew.'" Singing: "Can I go where you go? Can we always be this close, forever and ever?" "And it was all done in that one day." "Oh yeah." "I mean, I think we were all really excited when we left the studio that day." "Even if anybody had been like, I don't think this one is great, I would have been like, 'Well, I reject your feedback because I love this one.'" "It's the perfect song, and tells that story perfectly and pulls me right into where she wants me, as the listener, to be. You're my, you're my, you're my, you're my, you're my what? And then " thump Singing: "Lover." "Do you have guitar string scars on your hands?" "Well, I mean, I have extreme calluses. You can't see them, probably, but they're all and I have some from just changing strings and not being very good at it. Do you know what I mean? Like some where you're like tuning, tuning, tuning. Pop. Ow."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
DONE DEAL Liz and Doug Tiesi and their dog, Taco, in their TriBeCa loft, which was commercial space when they bought it. Looking for a way to sidestep the frenzied open houses and excruciating bidding wars that have become prevalent these days when buying a New York City apartment? Shop commercial. Developers have long profited from making residences out of warehouses, offices and manufacturing spaces. Now, with apartment listings exceedingly scarce and prices on the rise, some adventurous buyers are widening their options by turning to the commercial market themselves. Taking on such a project is no easy task. Tracking down an old office or factory space that can be turned into a home presents the biggest hurdle. But an experienced broker who can help assemble a team to deal with zoning issues and expedite paperwork can make the undertaking less daunting. There are other issues, too. Traditional residential mortgages typically do not apply, so forget about financing. "It's a pain in the neck, but there is so much value to unlock," said Robert Dankner, the president of Prime Manhattan Residential, a division of Prime Manhattan Realty, which specializes in commercial real estate. After the conversion is complete, buyers often "emerge with a great product," Mr. Danker said. "They look like geniuses." The competition for space in the 4,000 to 10,000 square foot range is more likely to be from architecture firms and tech start ups than from other residential buyers. But some people are eager for the challenge. Spotting an investment opportunity in 2010, Bob Edgell, 66, a retired power executive from Atlanta, bought the second and third floors of an 11 story mixed use Flatiron area building, paying about 2.3 million for each. He hired his nephew Herman Gareis to oversee the paperwork and renovation. He put about 800,000 into turning the 4,100 square foot third floor into a five bedroom four bath condo. In February he listed it for 5.5 million with Paula Manikowski, a broker with the Corcoran Group. It closed in mid May for the asking price. Though Mr. Edgell had to carry the cost of the empty unit for a couple of years during renovations, and to pay annual commercial taxes of about 50,000 per floor until a temporary certificate of occupancy was secured in 2012, the investment seems to be paying off. "When I started," he said, "it was a bit of risk. But as the economy recovered somewhat and the Flatiron has become a more attractive location, I've gotten several inquiries on the second floor," which is still a work in progress. How do you find a suitable commercial loft to call home? "These are like diamonds in the rough," said Mr. Dankner of Prime Manhattan Residential, who, prompted by clients' frustration with the scarce residential listings, recently stepped up his search for eligible commercial properties. "In the last 12 months, I've done three of these two in the Flatiron and another in SoHo. And considering how few exist, that's a lot." To start with, it is easier to convert spaces in buildings that have already undergone conversions. Some buyers enlist a broker knowledgeable about both the commercial and residential markets, who has already shepherded these transactions. Such a dual specialty is not common, but most major brokerage firms have someone on their roster with conversion experience to whom to refer clients. The Department of City Planning (nyc.gov/dcp) offers online maps and a number, (212) 720 3291, for information on whether a particular building's zone allows for residential conversions. Because of the complexity of conversions, the department recommends that prospective buyers also consult a land use lawyer or an architect to interpret the rules. Residential conversions are allowed in most commercial areas designated for retail and office space, but they are trickier in districts zoned for manufacturing, which can encompass everything from factories to film production studios. Many buyers find convertible spaces in neighborhoods like TriBeCa and the meatpacking district in Manhattan, and Dumbo and Red Hook in Brooklyn, which have largely shed their manufacturing past. After moving back to New York from London with her family in 2009, Liz Tiesi, an interior designer, wanted a place where she could start from scratch. Working with Cornelia Dobrovolsky, a broker at Corcoran, she found out about a six story former textile factory in TriBeCa that was being bought by a group of investors who wanted to convert it to apartments. "I wanted that scale and proportion," said Ms. Tiesi, recalling how she toured a unit in the building quietly in the middle of a workday because an architecture firm occupied it at the time. Ignoring the receptionist's desk, copy machines and conference room, she was able to see the potential in the third floor space with 12 foot ceilings and a wall of windows overlooking Franklin Street. There was also the savings. She and her husband, Doug, a commercial real estate banker, estimate that the space, fully renovated, cost 20 to 30 percent less per square foot than a regular apartment. The couple bought the place for about 800 a square foot as part of a limited liability corporation formed by the investors in June 2010. Six months later the deal closed and renovations began. The group shared expenses on elements like plumbing and common areas. The Tiesis and their two children moved into the condo in September 2011. Headaches and challenges slowed the renovations, which continued through June of last year. Floor plans needed to be redrawn to meet accessibility regulations, and the price for windows was double what had been anticipated because they had to be custom made. But in the end, Ms. Tiesi said, "it was definitely worth it, because our spaces are very unique and bespoke to us." The family's four bedroom three and a half bath apartment, now valued in excess of 1,700 a square foot, or more than double what they paid, has been featured on the remodeling and interior design Web site Houzz.com. It retains industrial elements like exposed brick, wooden columns and open space, all of which are increasingly rare features in New York City apartments. Part of the appeal of repurposed lofts is the unique detail they often retain. For instance, a 7,600 square foot commercial loft in TriBeCa listed for nearly 5 million by Jill Sloane, a broker at Halstead Property, has cast iron Corinthian columns, 28 foot ceilings, multiple skylights and a portion with a glass block ceiling and floor. If you are serious about buying a commercial unit, take an architect to see it before you fall in love. Even if a space is zoned for residential use, turning it into a home may not be possible if it doesn't meet requirements for light, air, egress and ventilation in each room, among other residential standards. Most conversions require construction changes to meet code. Some even require changes buildingwide. Earlier this year, Mr. Dankner of Prime Manhattan Residential came across a 4,400 square foot loft for sale for 3.6 million in an industrial co op building in the Flatiron district. A client of his was looking for just such a large downtown space. Like many former manufacturing buildings, it lacked a certificate of occupancy for residential use, but a number of people were residing there illegally. Mr. Dankner figured out that the building could apply for residential conversion under the Loft Law, which provides protections for artists and others who have been living in certain commercial or manufacturing lofts in the city. Coached by Mr. Dankner, the client was able to persuade the residents to take the steps to convert the building, including updating the sprinkler system and modifying the exits and entrances. The costs of the modifications about 700,000 will be split among 10 or 11 parties. The client closed on the loft for the asking price in March, and is now planning his renovation. In a typical residential renovation, certain allowances can be made: for example, small bathrooms that are functional but not up to code can be grandfathered in. But when you amend a certificate of occupancy in this case to residential from commercial such allowances no longer apply. Often, bathrooms need to be expanded, said Ralph Beiran, a principal at RMBA, an architecture firm in Manhattan. Adding space to one room involves stealing it from another and can mean redrawing the floor plan. Another common issue: Even if you meet all the requirements for obtaining a certificate of occupancy and your new space is absolutely compliant with city code, you may not be able to inhabit it if the building itself has violations. "Nine out of 10 will have a violation with the boiler or furnace or elevator," Mr. Beiran said. It's important to uncover and address any issues with the building upfront, to avoid snags. Eight years ago Carin Barbanel, a green insulation consultant, bought an 1,800 square foot loft in the flower district in Chelsea for 970,000. Although she and her family have lived there legally under a residential variance, they still haven't been able to amend their unit's status on the certificate of occupancy, because of matters as mundane as incorrect recycling separation. "It should have been a 6 to 12 month process," Ms. Barbanel said, adding that outstanding building issues have continued to thwart her efforts. Without a certificate of occupancy to attest to the unit's compliance with city code, a new buyer could find it difficult or impossible to renew homeowner's insurance policies, or to sell or refinance. Ultimately, Ms. Barbanel and a few other residents in the 16 unit building who were in the same boat took matters into their own hands. First they tackled the fees accumulating from improperly sorted refuse. "I put on a mask and gloves and started going through our garbage," she said. "It was disgusting." She supervised work on the elevator to make sure it would pass inspection. And with help from neighbors, she cleaned out the basement, clearing it of dusty sinks, old televisions and other discarded items. "We literally got rid of all that stuff, and then because the process took so long, we did that again." Ms. Barbanel hopes all the elbow grease will pay off. Now that all the fees and violations have been addressed, she said, she expects to pass her final review soon.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Yet they are only the tip of the magnificent iceberg of some 850 pieces from the Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y. Assembled over nearly three decades, the collection was given to the Fenimore by the Thaws, benefactors of several New York institutions, especially the Morgan Library Museum, which opens an exhibition of old master and Modern drawings from its Thaw Collection this month. The oldest object here, from the Seward Peninsula in Alaska, is a tiny Ipiutak polar bear effigy in carved ivory, dated around A.D. 100 600. Ears flat, teeth bared and flanks incised with riblike arcs, the animal projects a tense ferocity far exceeding its size. With its spherical shape and surface of broad, undulant bands and incised patterns, a Caddoan clay bottle found in Texas (from around 1500) recalls some very early Chinese pottery on view elsewhere in the Met. Less purely coincidental may be the crouching figure on a carved shell Caddoan gorget (or pendant) from Oklahoma, dated around 1200 1350, whose design has some of the taut compression of Mayan figuration. Especially impressive are several objects from the artists of different Pacific Northwest groups, among them a magnificent Tsimshian wood war club (around 1800 30), dense with incised patterns and images; a Tlingit basket (around 1850), ringed in striking geometries; and a nearly life size Kwakwaka'wakw Potlatch figure (around 1880 95) in carved and painted wood. Its angular forms depict a man holding a "copper": a shieldlike sheet of that metal, painted with designs, that was displayed as a symbol of wealth. Next to him stands an imposing example of an actual copper, of either Haida or Tsimshian origin, dated 1840 60. Three pigmented clay vessels diagram several centuries of cultural continuity in the American Southwest, from a Sikyati jar, dated around 1450 1500, to a related example from around 1925, by Maria and Julian Martinez, well known potters from San Ildefonso, N.M. And not to be missed is a notebook of energetic, closely observed pencil drawings, from 1880 81, by the Lakota artist Black Hawk. Its pages, all available in a digital reproduction, depict tribal ceremonies and dress, warfare, buffalo hunts and indigenous fauna, including a spread featuring three extremely alert owls and two smaller birds rendered large. If there is a lesson underlying this show, it may concern the ease with which so many non European cultures avoid crippling binaries like representation versus abstraction, art versus craft or geometric versus biomorphic. The wonders here may leave you momentarily out of sympathy with Western painting's supposedly heroic pursuit of realism, spatial illusion and one point perspective. The trilogy was conceived around an apocalyptic narrative germ, with characters like the Shaman, Young Ancient, Snake Boy and the animals Shiba and Echoing Owl. A maplike user guide lays out the first scenario: "An ancient community lives on the side of a volcano in harmonious stillness. One day, the ground beneath their feet begins to tremble." Into this classic, cataclysmic setup, Mr. Cheng injects contemporary elements, like artificial intelligence and allusions to Philip K. Dick and Julian Jaynes, whose book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" (1976) argued (controversially) that human consciousness is a learned process that is only a few thousand years old. Where "Emissaries" feels familiar is in its bombast the trilogy might be a leaner, high tech update of Matthew Barney's self mythologizing "Cremaster" film series. It also mimics the rise and decline of civilization story that was the basis for Thomas Cole's Greco Roman inspired cycle of paintings, "The Course of Empire" (1834 36). Where Cole was a master in a stalwart medium, however, Mr. Cheng is an upstart in a newer one. Sometimes he reaches a bit too far, and ideas and references outstrip images. Overall, though, with passages that suggest animal and human history's merging into a spooky state of post consciousness, "Emissaries" is impressive. To make the latest iteration of "Faules Fundament" ("Rotten Foundation"), a distressingly timely piece he originated in 1998 but that has never before been shown in the United States, Urs Fischer drove his truck to the Bronx to buy about a ton of fresh produce. He laid it out on the floor of Karma Gallery in one broad horizontal line, with two short perpendicular projections, like the Greek letter pi. He started with potatoes for stability, and then added apples, lemons, cabbages and carrots. A few green Granny Smiths sprinkled among mostly red apples create a superficial appearance of diversity, but otherwise, the fruits and vegetables he chose look like government clip art: The potatoes are russet, the onions yellow, the cabbages green. Atop this monocultural edenic bounty, with copiously sloppy handfuls of grainy gray cement and nine unevenly staggered rows of light beige cinder blocks, he built a slightly listing and occasionally gaptoothed but unmistakably solid wall. Since the piece's installation, time has withered cabbage leaves into dingy yellow paper and blackened some carrots, while bleaching others white as parsnips. The gallery smells musty and has begun to attract flies and ants. Even if the food fully liquefies, though, the wall's weight and shape mean that it's not going to fall over anytime soon. And whether you read that as a metaphor for industrialism's crushing impact on the natural world, for the white power structure of the last few hundred years, or simply the persistence of any entrenched idea, it seems pretty discouraging. But the piece's own broadly medieval insight cuts the other way: The rotting fruit and vegetables are a reminder that in the very long run, the wall will fall down, as will everything else humans build, and there's something pretty funny about that. Photorealism, a painterly style that emerged in the late 1960s and privileged hyper real depictions of mundane circumstances, had a quick rise and a quick fall: Celebrated at the seminal 1972 edition of Documenta as the next phase of Pop, the deadpan paintings of cars, diners and street corners quickly came to seem traditionalist. An ambitious museum show, reckoning with the place of photorealism within the larger history of painting, would be a welcome endeavor and audiences who still see technical acuity as a principal marker of artistic accomplishment might lap it up. (Consider the many context free slide shows on traffic hungry blogs, a la "27 Stunning Works of Art You Won't Believe Aren't Photographs.") "From Lens to Eye to Hand," on view in the Hamptons, is not that show, despite a smattering of important loans from the Guggenheim, the Whitney and the Brooklyn Museums. Its engagement with the subject is lopsided, and the presentation is dreary and overstuffed. A few lesser known names, including the intriguing Israeli painter Yigal Ozeri, hang cheek by jowl with marmoreal interiors and ghastly cityscapes. Intriguing works on paper, among them some tender watercolors of diners by John Baeder, are stuck in a hallway; it is sad that the Parrish's Herzog de Meuron designed home, only five years old, can barely support a full scale exhibition. There is nothing by Franz Gertsch of Switzerland, perhaps the best of the photorealists, and Chuck Close is represented only by a pair of minor early drawings. More worryingly, more than 50 of the 76 works here come directly from the dealer Louis K. Meisel (only two donated to the Parrish, the rest borrowed from his galleries or his family's collections). It's not a mortal sin for museums to solicit dealers when necessary: Mr. Meisel did coin the term "photorealism," after all. But such loans should be judicious, and serve shows more substantial than this bantamweight effort.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
About 400 light years from our solar system, there is a celestial body that looks like Saturn on steroids. Its rings are about 200 times larger than its counterpart here, measuring about 75 million miles in diameter. The ring system is so large, in fact, that scientists aren't sure why it doesn't get ripped apart by the gravity of the star it orbits. One reason the rings might stay intact has to do with the direction in which they spin around the object at their center, called J1407b. Scientists are not sure whether J1407b is a gigantic planet that measures many times larger than Saturn, or a failed star called a brown dwarf. There is a point in J1407b's lopsided orbit when it comes close to its sunlike star, which should disrupt the rings. But the rings remain unscathed for the most part because they spin around J1407b in the opposite direction that the object orbits around its star, according to a paper accepted in the journal Astronomy Astrophysics and posted online on Tuesday.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
She was a sprightly girl of 18 when she ascended to the throne of the British Empire in 1837, and a revered global presence a grandmotherly figure to her millions of subjects when she died in 1901 at 81. In 2019, the Victorian Era will be again celebrated throughout Britain as the country marks the 200th anniversary of the queen's birth. For those wanting to cross the Atlantic and join the celebrations, here is a roundup of the festivities that will be taking place, from museum exhibits to travel packages and tours. Where it all began Start at London's Kensington Palace, Victoria's birthplace, where a new exhibit opens on May 24, the date the future queen was born in 1819. The preserved suite of rooms that Victoria and her mother, the Duchess of Kent, once occupied, will be filled with new interactive displays and objects never before seen by the public, such as a scrapbook kept by the queen. The exhibit also includes writings and drawings from her childhood. Don't miss the Pigott Gallery, where another new exhibit re examines her life and legacy as a wife, mother, monarch and grandmother (she had nine children and 42 grandchildren), as well as wardrobe items that show the queen's fashionable side, in contrast to the black gowns she donned during her long widowhood. "We are celebrating an exceptional woman who was powerful, yet feminine, royal, and yet appealed to ordinary people.," said Polly Putnam, the curator of the exhibit at the royal palace. "They broke the mold when they made her."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
You're camping in the woods, about to tuck into some salmon you've caught when a bear appears. It's waiting for you to eat your fish, so it can swoop in to eat you. This is a steal for the bear. For the price of a human, it's bagged a human salmon combo meal. This scenario is hypothetical, but the feeding strategy it illustrates is not, according to a study published Wednesday in Biology Letters. In the report, a team of scientists from Britain and Italy termed the tactic "kleptopredation" and described it not in bears, but in a brilliantly colored sea slug, Cratena peregrina, that's about the length of a soda can tab and commonly found in the Mediterranean. These psychedelic slugs, also called nudibranchs, are known to feed on tentacled marine organisms known as hydroids, which are related to corals and sea anemones. They pop the polyps off the hydroids as one might pick a flower off a stalk. But based on lab experiments, the authors of the new paper suggest the slugs prefer to eat hydroids that have just ensnared plankton, a food item nudibranchs aren't capable of capturing for themselves. Think of it like wielding a living fishing rod. Or eating a turducken. Whichever your preferred analogy, kleptopredation using one prey item to obtain another prey item falls outside ecologists' traditional classifications of feeding behavior. There's predation, and there's so called kleptoparasitism (when one animal takes food from another animal, like a pack of hyenas stealing a fresh kill from a lion). But kleptopredation is something new.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science

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