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On my second day with Apple's new HomePod, I asked the artificially intelligent speaker to play some music. Siri, the virtual assistant that powers HomePod, enthusiastically replied, "O.K., let's get going with some Dashboard Confessional." Siri replied, "Sorry, I couldn't find the song 'Nobody Likes Dashboard Confessional.'" Then to my horror, HomePod continued playing a track by the emo rock band. At the time, I gave Siri a pass. After all, Apple's HomePod, a rival to smart speakers from Amazon and Google, is supposed to study your music preferences over time to create special playlists just for you. I had had only one day with HomePod. But after a week during which I asked HomePod to play my favorite tunes from artists like Beck, Talking Heads and David Bowie the smart speaker still did not learn. Instead, like a stubborn D.J., Siri kept playing music by artists outside my music palette: Taylor Swift and Leroy Francis, to name just two. That leads to my conclusion: The 349 HomePod, which costs roughly three times as much as its competitors and arrives in stores on Friday, is tough to recommend to you, dear reader. Apple's speaker is certainly an impressive piece of hardware. Audiophiles will appreciate that it has a woofer with a custom amplifier and seven tweeters. The result is a speaker with a deep bass and rich treble that is loud enough to fill a large room with superb sound. HomePod makes the Amazon Echo and Google's Home sound muffled and tinny in comparison. But Siri on HomePod is embarrassingly inadequate, even though that is the primary way you interact with it. Siri is sorely lacking in capabilities compared with Amazon's Alexa and Google's Assistant. Siri doesn't even work as well on HomePod as it does on the iPhone. For Apple, that's unfortunate. The company was the first to bring virtual assistants to the mainstream with Siri on the iPhone in 2011, but it has since fallen behind Amazon and Google with smart speakers. Apple announced HomePod last June but then delayed its release until this year. And there are other limitations: The HomePod requires an iOS device, like an iPhone, an iPad or an iPod Touch, to set it up. To use your voice commands to play music, you will also need to subscribe to Apple's streaming music service, Apple Music. So how exactly did I reach my conclusion on HomePod? I tested it side by side with Echo and Home smart speakers, grading them on their ability to accomplish 14 tasks across several categories, including music, productivity, commuting, home automation and cooking. Let me walk you through the process and results. I started picking the 14 tasks by reading up on research studies that looked at how people use virtual assistants in the home. Activate, a management consulting firm, found the majority of people turned to virtual assistants to play music, get the weather and set a timer. Apple also provided statistics on smart speaker usage from the research firm Parks Associates. That report also found that playing music and getting the weather were the top uses of smart speakers, while roughly 20 percent of people enjoyed using them for tasks like accessing a calendar and searching for recipes. Amazon says most of its Echo customers use at least one "skill," or third party app. So I added the ability to use Uber, the most popular ride hailing service, as a test. Now onward to the tests themselves. I set up a HomePod, an Echo and a Home in my house and began with a battery of question and answer sessions. First up: traffic. Next, it was time for some cooking questions. All the speakers were able to flawlessly set a kitchen timer. But when I asked HomePod how to make pasta, Siri blanked and said, "I can't get the answer to that on HomePod." Google Home was more responsive it gave me the steps for making pasta from the recipe site Genius Kitchen. Amazon Echo was even more accommodating. Alexa listed the ingredients for a pasta dish, including noodles, milk and heavy cream, and offered to send the steps to my phone or play them aloud. Then it was time to move on to some work related tasks. I asked Siri to schedule a meeting for Tuesday. Siri responded: "I cannot access your calendar from here. Sorry about that." It couldn't look at my calendar for the day, either. Google Home and Amazon Echo, in contrast, managed to schedule new events and read my calendar for the day: a meeting in the morning, followed by a photo shoot and a business dinner in the evening. When I asked Apple about Siri's hiccups, the company said that for the first version of HomePod, it focused on including tasks that people use smart speakers for the most, like playing music and asking about the weather, and that it would continue to evaluate what other features to add over time. I wondered whether HomePod would do better with home tasks and decided to ask all the smart speakers to turn on a Wi Fi connected light bulb from the smart light company Lifx. In this test, HomePod got a higher score because setting up the smart light, which involved using the iPhone camera to scan a code on the instruction manual, was seamless and much easier than it was with Google Home and Amazon Echo, which required installing a third party app. Bonus: The light turned on when I asked. One of the most crucial tests for HomePod had to do with audio. That's because Apple has long emphasized that the smart speaker is first and foremost a music player. Phil Schiller, Apple's head of marketing, said at a gathering at the company's audio lab last week that Apple started developing HomePod six years ago with the intention of making a speaker that specialized in playing music in a unique way. The project started well before Apple introduced other services like Apple Music, which was released in 2015, and HomeKit, the home automation platform that was unveiled in 2014, he added. Mr. Schiller said Apple wanted to stay true to the original goal of the project "without ever compromising that it's a speaker first." All three speakers did great playing music. Echo, Google's Home and HomePod were each able to play specific songs by artists, generate playlists for specific artists or music genres, and play podcasts. HomePod got a higher score in audio with its superior sound quality factored in. Yet that's also where Dashboard Confessional came in and where HomePod's biggest shortcomings became apparent. Whenever I asked HomePod to "play some music," it never played music that was relevant to my preferences or listening history. That wasn't the case with the Google and Amazon speakers. When I asked those speakers to play music, the gadgets simply resumed what I was last playing on Spotify, which was satisfying. Siri also had laughably awkward pronunciations of some artist names. When I once asked HomePod to play songs by Tupac, Siri replied: "Sure, here's Tu," and after a short pause said: "Pac." (I'm not sure Dr. Dre or Jimmy Iovine, whose streaming service was acquired by Apple to develop Apple Music, would approve.) In response to my concerns, Apple said HomePod studies a customer's music preferences over time. I figured a week should have been enough. From the tests, I graded the speakers on their ability to accomplish each task on a scale from 0 to 4. (I gave a 0 for tasks that could not be done at all, a 2 for tasks that could be done with some issues, and a 4 for tasks that could be completed flawlessly.) So how did they all stack up in terms of grade point averages out of 4.0? The final results:
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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BOHNNE JONES had always dreamed of being an architect or interior designer. Suzie Ford wanted to know if the home brewed beer her husband, Todd, made was as good as people said it was, while Jan Morris figured owning a distillery would be more fun than being a divorce lawyer. They had three very different dreams, but these women had one thing in common: they all lost jobs and decided to use sizable retirement accounts to start their own businesses in very different fields. They did so by converting traditional 401(k) accounts into new retirement plans known as "rollovers as business start ups," or ROBS that they could invest in their companies. "It's fueled by the fact that stock market has returned to all time highs, real estate is up, consumer confidence is up but we're also suffering from a credit crisis, and unemployment remains high," said David Nilssen, chief executive of Guidant Financial, which specializes in helping people use 401(k) assets to invest in businesses or other nontraditional assets, like property. "People look at this because they can capitalize a business without taking on any debt." While this may sound like an easy solution to finance a company, it is incredibly complicated, and the risks of running afoul of the Internal Revenue Service or the Department of Labor, which has jurisdiction over 401(k) plans, are significant. The worst possible outcome is a triple whammy loss of a person's retirement savings, the business and a source of income if the idea fails. Adding to the complications, ROBS exist in a parallel financial universe, where those who promote the plans see them as solutions for retirement rich but cash poor entrepreneurs, while many other financial advisers see the plans as treading the line of legality. "The I.R.S. has said that they don't view them as tax avoidance schemes per se," said Carol J. Ventura, retirement specialist at H.D. Vest, a broker dealer with 33 billion under management. "They're not illegal, but the I.R.S. is saying that they have to be perfectly put in place. They're very complicated." Failure to do everything right could lead to anything from penalties to having the entire retirement plan disallowed, which would mean a big tax bill. Still, Mr. Nilssen said the idea had been gaining in popularity. He said his company had its best year in 2012 with 1,300 new ROBS and expects to do 1,700 this year. I wanted to know what the attraction was to something that seemed so complicated and magnified the sizable risk of starting any business. Here's how ROBS work: People take their 401(k) account (or other qualified retirement plan) and roll it over into a new plan that buys shares in an operating company that will own their business. Unlike most small businesses, which are set up as limited liability corporations or S corporations, a business financed through ROBS has to be a C corporation, which can issue shares and does not prohibit ownership by trusts. In many cases, people turn to ROBS because they don't have other sources of financing and have not been able to secure a small business loan.The companies of the people I spoke to were owned by anywhere from 90 percent of one person's 401(k) to 100 percent of two entire plans. That might sound simple, but what effectively happens is that the plan, not the person, owns the business. That means the person cannot act in his best interest but must act in the best interest of the plan. For example, if he wants to give himself a raise, he needs to find out what similar business owners make. "I have counseled people on how to do them correctly and then I typically say, 'I find it to be a bad idea and you're probably going to get yourself in trouble,' " said Bill Smith, a tax lawyer and managing director in the CBIZ National Tax Office. "The I.R.S. is not consistent on what it considers correct. It's very easy to mess these things up." Mr. Nilssen said Guidant helped people set up the initial plan and managed the reporting requirements. He said that of his firm's 8,500 clients, about 50 had been audited, but none had had action taken against them. Ms. Jones said that in the course of putting 260,000 of the 340,000 she had in her retirement account into buying a Decorating Den franchise in Nashville, she had several lean years during the recession, but that she is now doing well. She says she is also happier than when she was working in health care technology. But she said the paperwork to comply with the I.R.S. rules could be complicated and managing paperwork was part of her previous career. One requirement of these plans is that she and any employees pay into the 401(k) set up to buy the company. "That check has to be out the door seven days after payroll," she said. "If I'm late at writing a check to deposit my 401(k) money, there are penalties, and I've paid penalties." There are worse ways to run afoul of the law. Mr. Smith pointed to a recent United States Tax Court case, Peek v. Commissioner, where the business owners used their retirement accounts to buy a fire and safety firm and later sold it at a significant profit. The court, however, declared that their gains were taxable because they had also secured loans with their homes to buy the business. While this is something small business owners do regularly, it is a prohibited transaction under I.R.S. guidelines for ROBS. And people had better be confident this structure is right for them. Unwinding a business created through ROBS, so that the gains or losses do not have to go back to the retirement plan, may not be possible without a sale to a third party or a total loss, said Ms. Ventura. The I.R.S. rules are just too strict. But considering the enthusiasm anyone has going into a new business, particularly after years of not being terribly happy in a job, it is not surprising that details get overlooked. Ms. Morris, 61, said that after she was laid off as a lawyer, she and her husband, 63, helped their son start a brewery, and that "he was having a good time with his brewery, so I thought I could do a distillery." After taking a weeklong course in distilling spirits, she got excited about the idea and had begun applying for a small business loan when her bank suggested she talk to Guidant. Now, she said, the couple had put 100 percent of both of their 401(k) accounts into the Hardware Distillery in Hoodsport, Wash., about two hours outside of Seattle. Asked how she felt about such concentrated risk in their 60s, she said, "I think it's all going to come out O.K. in the end." If it doesn't, she added, they at least own the building. Mr. Nilssen said his firm did not counsel clients on how much of their retirement accounts to use. But to critics who say that ROBS are used primarily by older, less sophisticated entrepreneurs, he said: "People are coming to us after they've built their idea, found a franchise, or secured a business to buy. We don't get into whether or not someone should be an entrepreneur." This is where having independent legal and tax counsel is important for anyone thinking of ROBS. Scott Hanson, principal at Hanson McClain, which manages 1.6 billion, said he was generally against the idea of tapping a retirement account to invest in a business beyond taking a loan out against a 401(k), which is capped at 50,000. If people needed more, he said, they would be better off taking the money out, paying the income taxes and a 10 percent penalty if they're under 59 1/2 and setting up an S corporation that would allow them to take any losses on their tax return, which is something they cannot benefit from by owning a business through a retirement plan. "Maybe I'm biased because I've seen situations where people have drained their retirement account down to nothing and the business fails," he said. Even if everything goes well, selling the business is not as simple as it would be if the person owned it outright. Since the 401(k) plan owns the business, the person who benefits from the plan has to have the business valued and sell if for fair market value. "It's so complex that I've put it out of my head," said Ms. Jones, who is 62 and plans to work until she is 70. She said she hoped her employee would want it. "I told him that if he stayed that long he can have it, but you can't legally do that. And I can't sell it to him for 1 either because the I.R.S. won't allow this." Until that point, though, if the business is successful it can be enjoyed like any other good investment. Ms. Ford, a former community banker, and her husband, Todd, a former airline pilot, used all of their 401(k) accounts and also took out an equipment loan to start the NoDa Brewing Company in Charlotte, N.C. But they have used cash flow to expand the business three times since founding it in 2011. "We truly believed in what we were doing and understood how risky this was," said Ms. Ford, 46. "We did the market research. We hired a great team. We surrounded ourselves with good people." She added, "Worst case scenario, we would go off and get other jobs, but we just tried not to focus on that." Two years into the venture, their beer is now served at 325 sites including the major sporting arenas in the city. "We have good, consistent beer and that's the difference," she said. If only it were that simple.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Your Money
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WHITE PLAINS Luca Dal Monte is eyeing the 1966 Ferrari 275 GTB sitting on the shop floor here at Dominick's European Car Repair. He has traveled from his home in Milan to promote his latest book, a biography of the car's namesake, Enzo Ferrari. The 954 page scholarly tome (over 1,000 pages in Italian) has received rave reviews in Italy since it came out in 2016, and has been optioned for an Italian mini series. (According to Il Giornale, an Italian language newspaper based in Milan, the book reads like a novel.) David Bull Publishing recently released an English language version of the book "Enzo Ferrari: Power, Politics and the Making of an Automotive Empire" in the United States. The steel gray coupe is a fitting emblem with which to remember Ferrari the man, along with the business he founded almost 70 years ago. Like most Ferraris, the car is stunning and not cheap: It cost 14,000 when it was built more than 50 years ago about the most you could spend on a car at that time and might bring as much as 3.5 million from a collector today were it for sale, underscoring one reason Ferrari has been called the world's most powerful luxury brand. The company's success owes everything to its founder, who was born in 1898, and had little formal education. He was inspired to become a racecar driver after seeing Felice Nazzaro win the 1908 Circuito di Bologna. But it wasn't until after World War II, at the age of 49, that he created his legendary car company. Ferrari is often remembered solely as cold and calculating, with his trademark trench coat and dark sunglasses. But Mr. Dal Monte wants readers to see the genius that Ferrari possessed. Yes, he was stubborn, but he was driven and determined to be successful. He used his charm and intelligence to get others to invest in him, said Mr. Dal Monte, who saw these qualities in Ferrari's personal correspondence and his relationship with his sons, Alfredo "Dino," who died in 1956 at the age of 24 from muscular dystrophy, and Piero, who was born out of wedlock to Ferrari's longtime mistress, Lina Lardi. (Ferrari's wife, Laura, suffered severe depression her entire life, and though he had affairs with other women, they remained married until she died in 1978. Ferrari never remarried and died in 1988.) "When I was in middle school I became fascinated with Enzo." He remembers as a teenager in the late 1970s taking an hourlong train ride from his hometown, Cremona, to Modena early one morning with his brother, just to catch a glimpse of Ferrari having his morning shave at a barbershop. Ferrari stared out at them staring in at him, and smiled. 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. "Even then he was the Grand Old Man, not just of motor racing, but also of the country. You could hear him call in on some of the early TV automotive racing shows and discuss to the point of shouting with the talk show host in order to defend his cars and his drivers more the cars than the drivers, actually." Mr. Dal Monte has always loved sports cars, but his fascination with Ferrari goes beyond that. "It was his lifelong struggle to succeed, to become someone, to beat the odds, to go down in history that intrigued me," he said. What the book doesn't capture is the circuitous route Mr. Dal Monte took going from Cremona to wrangling reporters in America, the world's largest market for Ferrari, or how he came to write this comprehensive book. Mr. Dal Monte said it all goes back to his second great love (after cars and Ferrari): all things American. When he was a senior in high school, he spent a year as an exchange student in Kentucky and later attended the University of Kentucky, majoring in United States history while writing for the student newspaper, The Kentucky Kernel. Though his first impulse was to become a journalist after graduating from college, when he returned to Italy, he was offered a plum job as a top executive in Peugeot's Italian press office. Mr. Dal Monte said that his fluency in English and his knowledge of American culture helped him professionally at an early age and eventually got him the job at Ferrari. His duties grew to include overseeing the American relaunch of the Maserati brand, owned by this time, like Ferrari, by Fiat. But more the historian and journalist at heart than a marketing man, Mr. Dal Monte liked writing. His position with Maserati, which brought him back to Italy, gave him access to a wide range of primary materials. "One of the greatest assets in my research was the Alfa Romeo archives in Arese, near Milan." There he found Enzo Ferrari's personnel file from when Ferrari managed the company's race team. These files documented Ferrari's importance to Alfa Romeo, the great Italian racing power. Mr. Dal Monte's sense of history, however, was not solely grounded in dusty file folders and old racing scorecards. In addition to archival research, he moved to Modena, where Ferrari remains based, a working city that to this day also serves as a living shrine to the man and his automobiles. There he met and befriended many figures from Ferrari's life over the course of the eight years it took him to write this book. Still, "American politics is my real passion, and American history," Mr. Dal Monte confessed. In Italy, his book is titled "Ferrari Rex," a reference to Edmund Morris's three part well regarded biography of Teddy Roosevelt, "Theodore Rex." "My aim was high, to do for Ferrari what Morris did for Roosevelt."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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With the Federal Reserve under attack at home and abroad, it is making an unusual public bid to keep itself away from the political crossfire. After a barrage of criticism over the last week including from foreign leaders, Congressional officials, economists and Alan Greenspan, the former Fed chairman the Fed came out to explain its efforts to inject 600 billion more into the sagging economy. One worry of Fed watchers as well as its defenders is that some of the domestic criticism may have the subtext of challenging the Fed's traditional independence in deciding monetary policy without political interference. In a rare on the record interview, William C. Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said that the Fed's move was not intended to affect the value of the dollar, but rather to encourage a faster, stronger recovery that will also assist international growth. "We have no goal in terms of pushing the dollar up or down," Mr. Dudley said. "Our goal is to ease financial conditions and to stimulate a stronger economic expansion and more rapid employment growth." And in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the Fed's new vice chairwoman, Janet L. Yellen, defended the decision in broadly similar terms. "I'm having a hard time seeing where really robust growth can come from," she said. "And I see inflation lingering around current levels for a long time." Ms. Yellen said she was "not happy to see us caught up in a political debate." The comments by Mr. Dudley, who is also the vice chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee, which sets monetary policy, and by Ms. Yellen amounted to an unusual rebuttal, the first by top Fed officials, of criticism of its decision this month to pump money into the banking system. The plan is to spur the recovery by buying government securities to lower long term interest rates. Kenneth A. Froot, who teaches international finance at Harvard Business School, said, "The Fed needs to get the word out more clearly" because of the politically volatile times. Mr. Froot added, "This is a very rare circumstance where the basic authority we vest in institutions like the Fed has, more than ever, been challenged," by politicians and economists who are often identified with political parties. The bond markets have been increasingly uneasy about the Fed's actions. On Monday, bond prices fell and yields jumped as a result of the concerns. The criticism has tended to fall along three lines. Some have accused the Fed of deliberately weakening the dollar to make American exports more competitive. Others fear the Fed's decision could ignite inflation down the road. Still others say the policy will be ineffective absent additional fiscal stimulus. Fed officials were clearly unsettled by an opinion piece by Mr. Greenspan in The Financial Times on Thursday, at the start of meetings of the Group of 20 nations in Seoul, South Korea. Mr. Greenspan said the United States was "pursuing a policy of currency weakening" and increasing the risks of trade protectionism. In an open letter to Ben S. Bernanke, the Fed chairman, on Monday, a group of conservative economists, writers and investors urged that the Fed's action "be reconsidered and discontinued," arguing that the bond purchases "risk currency debasement and inflation." The group included Michael J. Boskin, a former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers; the historian Niall Ferguson; Douglas Holtz Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office; and the economist John B. Taylor, one of Mr. Bernanke's most prominent critics. Mr. Dudley did not single out any critic, but suggested that the criticisms were unfounded. "There is no long term conflict between what the U.S. is trying to accomplish and what other countries are trying to accomplish," Mr. Dudley said, echoing statements by President Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner. "A strong economic recovery in the U.S. is in the interests of the global economy." While Mr. Dudley said the effect on the dollar was not a consideration, he acknowledged that when interest rates adjust, "oftentimes there will be consequences for the dollar." He added, "We have seen some dollar weakness in this period, but it doesn't seem to be unusual, given the changes that we've seen in interest rates in the U.S. compared to interest rates abroad." Mr. Dudley rejected the idea that the Fed might be setting the stage for uncontrollable inflation in years to come. He said the Fed had tools for draining the bank reserves sitting on its balance sheet. "We are very, very confident that those tools will be completely effective at keeping inflation in check," he said. "We are completely willing to use those tools, when the time comes, to prevent an inflation problem. Higher inflation is not a way out. It is not a solution." Mr. Dudley argued that the Fed's efforts had their intended effect. Since August, when the Fed first hinted that it might take further steps to spur the recovery, stock prices have risen and long term interest rates have fallen. That makes it easier for consumers to buy homes or refinance mortgages, and for businesses to borrow and invest. "You've seen a significant easing of financial conditions over that time period," he said. "I have to believe that the expectation of a second large scale asset purchase program was the primary driver of those changes." Even so, Mr. Dudley cautioned, "One shouldn't view this instrument as a panacea or a magic wand that's going to make the economy recover rapidly." He said the Fed's action, known as quantitative easing, was "not going to be extremely powerful" but was nonetheless necessary to reduce the risk, however slim, of a double dip recession. "It's going to be a long and bumpy road to a strong and vigorous expansion, but this will be helpful rather than hurtful," he said. Uncertainty about fiscal policy whether the Bush era tax cuts will be extended, and in the long term, how the nation will rein in its record deficits has complicated the recovery, Mr. Dudley said. Asked whether fiscal gridlock had forced the Fed to act, he said, "We're going to worry about what we can worry about, which is monetary policy." The Fed, he said, has to "take the world as it is." Mr. Dudley, who joined the New York Fed in 2007 from Goldman Sachs, where he was the chief United States economist, also provided details about how the Fed's outlook had evolved. "We were going into the year expecting the economy to pick up steam," Mr. Dudley said. In the spring, "We were starting to see the glimmers" of a healthy recovery in private sector employment, he said. But by the summer, growth began to stall; it is now estimated at an annualized rate of 2 percent. Inflation, already low, fell further. The economy was "vulnerable to a shock that could tip us into deflation," he said. In recent speeches, Mr. Dudley and Charles L. Evans, president of the Chicago Fed, mentioned the possibility of allowing inflation to run higher in the future to make up for inflation's being too low today, an approach known as price level targeting. But in the interview, Mr. Dudley emphasized that he had not endorsed that approach. "The problem with a price level target is that it's difficult to explain what you're doing in a way that doesn't create larger anxiety about the long term inflation target," he said. "We clearly want people to understand that we are committed to price stability over the long run." Mr. Dudley declined to discuss the deliberations of the committee, but acknowledged that the decision was not easy. "Reasonable people can disagree about how big the costs are versus how big the benefits are," he said. "It's completely reasonable to expect that not everyone is going to see it exactly the same way, because these policies have not been used much on a historical basis."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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Q. Recently, my brother passed away. In the months leading to his death, he left me a series of voice messages on my iPhone, describing his health, his wishes, etc. I would like to archive these recordings somewhere other than on my phone. Is there a way to transfer voice messages to the computer? A. If your iPhone is running at least iOS 9 and you have the Visual Voicemail feature enabled, you can save, store or share those voice mail recordings with a couple of screen taps. Just open the phone app, select the Voicemail tab and choose a message you would like to preserve. When the message file opens to show the playback controls and additional caller information, tap the Share icon at the top right side of the screen.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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Researchers at Stanford University report that they can rejuvenate human cells by reprogramming them back to a youthful state. They hope that the technique will help in the treatment of diseases, such as osteoarthritis and muscle wasting, that are caused by the aging of tissue cells. A major cause of aging is thought to be the errors that accumulate in the epigenome, the system of proteins that packages the DNA and controls access to its genes. The Stanford team, led by Tapash Jay Sarkar, Dr. Thomas A. Rando and Vittorio Sebastiano, say their method, designed to reverse these errors and walk back the cells to their youthful state, does indeed restore the cells' vigor and eliminate signs of aging. In their report, published on Tuesday in Nature Communications, they described their technique as "a significant step toward the goal of reversing cellular aging" and could produce therapies "for aging and aging related diseases." Leonard P. Guarente, an expert on aging at M.I.T., said the method was "one of the most promising areas of aging research" but that it would take a long time to develop drugs based on RNA, the required chemical.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Rem Koolhaas at the Koppert Cress greenhouse in the Netherlands, a space related to his new exhibition, "Countryside, The Future," at the Guggenheim.Credit...Jussi Puikkonen for The New York Times Rem Koolhaas at the Koppert Cress greenhouse in the Netherlands, a space related to his new exhibition, "Countryside, The Future," at the Guggenheim. THE HAGUE A manifesto and love letter to the city in the 1970s, the book "Delirious New York" helped propel the reputation of a young, restless Dutch journalist and screenwriter turned architect. Nearly forgotten now, a display of drawings accompanied the book in 1978 real and also wonderfully imaginary views of the city by the author, Rem Koolhaas, and his colleagues at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, or OMA, the architecture firm founded a few years earlier by him, Madelon Vriesendorp, and Elia and Zoe Zenghelis to develop what they called "a mutant form of urbanism." "The Sparkling Metropolis," as the show was called, occupied what then doubled as storage rooms at the top of the spiral of the Guggenheim Museum. "The irony wasn't lost on me," Mr. Koolhaas remembered the other day, about the fact that Frank Lloyd Wright, the Guggenheim's architect, hated cities. We had gotten together in the Rotterdam offices of OMA. I had come to the Netherlands to talk with Mr. Koolhaas about the new Guggenheim exhibition he has put together a bookend to "Delirious New York" and, in a sense, to his career. A corrective to the focus on growing cities, "Countryside" aims to turn a spotlight on the 98 percent of the planet not yet occupied by cities. Anticipating the obvious criticism, Mr. Koolhaas describes the show as a "pointillist" portrait, a "global sampling" of "the current condition of 'countryside,'" which he acknowledges seems "a glaringly inadequate term for all the territory that is not urban." By not urban territory, in other words, Mr. Koolhaas means farms and wilderness and oceans and villages the Kalahari, the Great Barrier Reef and the Dakotas but also dense exurban clusters of high tech industrial sites and mega campuses for Amazon fulfillment centers and Tesla giga factories in places like the high desert outside Reno, Nevada. The show pings from urbanizing villages in Kenya along Chinese funded train routes, to endangered communities in Siberia where climate change is hastening the melt of permafrost. There's a bit about satellites supplying real time data to computer driven tractors plowing immense mono farms in Middle America; another about M Pesa, a mobile phone based money transfer system funding businesses in remote parts of Tanzania. And a bay in the Guggenheim rotunda is devoted to Iraqi, Syrian and other immigrants resuscitating ghost towns like Camini, in Calabria, Italy, and the village of Manheim, near Cologne, Germany. Years in gestation, the show is the collective output of an army of collaborators and students. Troy Conrad Therrien, the Guggenheim's curator for architecture, brought Mr. Koolhaas onboard in 2015 and oversaw the project's development. Among many others, Mr. Koolhaas teamed with Samir Bantal, who runs AMO, the research arm of OMA, and Niklas Maak, the excellent German architecture critic. Graphics for the museum layout and for the dense, palm size catalog are by Irma Boom, the great Dutch book designer. The catalog's size is a kind of inside joke. Mr. Koolhaas is famous for producing doorstops. He takes no clear political position on many of the hot button topics the show raises, portraying himself as a reporter not pundit, realist not cynic, equally amazed and appalled, refusing moral judgments or virtue signaling. A familiar pose by him, it may confuse some, frustrate others. The topics evolved out of "a personal journey, where our energies led us," he told me. The company's pony tailed owner, Rob Baan, greeted us at the door. In a hothouse off the lobby he fed us samples of tiny chrysanthemums, shiso leaves and a flower whose name I failed to catch that he said was used in toothpaste, which instantly anesthetized my mouth for several troubling minutes. Mr. Baan then led us through airlock doors into the iridescent greenhouses. A dozen odd years ago, the United Nations announced that this is the first urban century, the first time more than half the world's population lives in cities. Predictions were that some 70 percent of humans will be urban dwellers by 2050. Having been left for dead a generation ago, cities suddenly became the next big thing. Books and biennials about cities flooded the architecture world. As Mr. Koolhaas says, the focus on urbanism "gave people the right to ignore the countryside," incubating a "reservoir of indignation" although it's not quite clear whom he means by people. The people who turned out for Trump and Brexit certainly never forgot about themselves. Along which lines, this is the sort of show that may invite charges of slumming by a world famous architect who, it is said, often gives off the imperious, slightly impatient impression that he has something better to do. At 75, tall and imposing, given to a uniform of gray and black slacks and mock turtlenecks, he can seem almost comically restless. When I chat with his friend Ms. Boom, a warm, exuberant character, before we all head out for a Japanese dinner in Amsterdam, he paces her house like a caged tiger. He can be gruff, too, but also solicitous and generous, amusing like his prose, with a seemingly depthless appetite for new ideas and people. It says something that OMA has been an incubator for so many gifted architects, Zaha Hadid, Jeanne Gang and Sarah Whiting among them. The firm has a lot of other people overseeing projects around the world these days, which has left Mr. Koolhaas more time to ponder the Guggenheim exhibition. He traces the roots of the exhibition to walks that he took years ago around the Swiss village near St. Moritz where he and his partner and sometime collaborator, the British born Dutch architect Petra Blaisse, used to holiday. He noticed the population dropping, the town growing; cows, horses and farmers giving way to immigrant domestic workers from Southeast Asia and absentee owners from Milan who spent millions of euros converting old barns into minimalist villas. He identified gentrification, in other words. This is what piqued his interest in the other 98 percent. "Yes, there is something inherently ridiculous about suddenly realizing the rest of the world exists," he admits. But he says he learned years ago from a journalistic mentor to approach new situations as if he were a Martian, with an innocence that may appear clueless but also lets one notice what others no longer see because it has become too familiar. Mr. Therrien, the Guggenheim curator, puts it this way in the catalog: "The countryside has long always? been chock full of experts, overflowing with opinions, flooded by interpretations. But Martian strategy is necessarily unimpressed. Even the duly picked over can be a rich harvest. Calling it ignored is not ignorant, it's strategic. It's an opening." That's the hope, anyway that "Countryside," whatever criticism it provokes, ignites debate, gets people to think about developments and places that demand attention because city and country, urban and rural, are ultimately not separate issues. The show includes no buildings by OMA. The designer of the Seattle Public Library and the national library in Qatar, among other recent landmarks, makes clear that this exhibition is not about his architecture. It's useful to remember that Mr. Koolhaas started out his working career writing for a weekly in The Hague, honing a journalist's curiosity and detachment and penchant for pronouncements. He fell in with a faction of the Dutch avant garde that wasn't so much political as ironic, camp, modernist; and like his father, he also wrote screenplays, including a film noir and an unproduced script for Russ Meyer. Montage became a motif running through his books, exhibitions and buildings. "Countryside" unspools along the rotunda montage style, ideas and eras speeding by, figures unearthed like the German architect Herman Sorgel who, during the 1920s, cooked up a scheme to link Africa with Europe by lowering the Mediterranean 100 meters, irrigating the Sahara and installing new hydroelectric dams in Gibraltar and Suez to power the new continent, which he called Atlantropa. Atlantropa appears in the show alongside Stalin's and Mao's megalomaniacal plans for remaking the countryside, and also with the Great Green Wall, the African Union's current and far more benign attempt to transform a 4,700 mile long, transcontinental swath of desert into arable land. Through those airlock doors at Koppert Cress, the greenhouses looked like something out of "Ad Astra": silent spaces the length and breadth of New York avenue blocks, their atmosphere monitored like operating theaters, plants stretching as far as the eye could see in gridded rows beneath red, green or white lights. In the room of plants enveloped by a Dan Flavinesque pink light, I asked Mr. Koolhaas whether he found the greenhouse peaceful or stressful. "Definitely stressful," he said, then added, "and fantastically beautiful." Places likes these are Mr. Koolhaas's big architectural reveal in "Countryside." What he calls "post human" buildings whose boredom he finds "hypnotic" and "banality breathtaking" represent, he says, a "new sublime." He is referring to the expanding universe of data collection hubs, storage hangers and other digital era behemoths that, like Koppert Cress, are reshaping the hinterlands. Designed by codes and algorithms, not human inspiration, industrial facilities on this scale, once upon a time, employed hundreds or thousands of workers. Now, like Koppert Cress, they're staffed by two dozen or so, with implications that "Countryside" doesn't get much into. For Mr. Koolhaas, the architecture is, like 1970s New York, a kind of revelation, calamity and unfolding experiment. A new manifesto. "To drop the connection between humanism and architecture is of course extremely frightening," Mr. Koolhaas tells me when we leave Koppert Cress. "But it is also exhilarating."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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Credit...Al Drago for The New York Times As the first coronavirus vaccines arrive in the coming year, government researchers will face a monumental challenge: monitoring the health of hundreds of millions of Americans to ensure the vaccines don't cause harm. Purely by chance, thousands of vaccinated people will have heart attacks, strokes and other illnesses shortly after the injections. Sorting out whether the vaccines had anything to do with their ailments will be a thorny problem, requiring a vast, coordinated effort by state and federal agencies, hospitals, drug makers and insurers to discern patterns in a flood of data. Findings will need to be clearly communicated to a distrustful public swamped with disinformation. For now, Operation Warp Speed, created by the Trump administration to spearhead development of coronavirus vaccines and treatments, is focused on getting vaccines through clinical trials in record time and manufacturing them quickly. The next job will be to monitor the safety of vaccines once they're in widespread use. But the administration last year quietly disbanded the office with the expertise for exactly this job, merging it into an office focused on infectious diseases. Its elimination has left that long term safety effort for coronavirus vaccines fragmented among federal agencies, with no central leadership, experts say. An H.H.S. spokesperson said that the vaccine office was not shuttered. "The office was not 'closed,' but was merged with the Office of Infectious Disease and HIV/AIDS Policy and was strengthened," the spokesperson said in a statement. "All the functions continue in this new organizational structure." In a brief statement, a different spokesperson said that Operation Warp Speed was working closely with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention "to synchronize the IT systems" involved in monitoring vaccine safety data. Scientists at the C.D.C. and the Food and Drug Administration have decades of experience tracking the long term safety of vaccines. They've created powerful computer programs that can analyze large databases. The closest parallel was in the spring of 2009, when a new strain of H1N1 influenza emerged, and researchers raced to make a vaccine. From October 2009 to January 2010, it was administered to over 82 million people in the United States. As the vaccine was developed, Dr. Gellin and other federal officials and scientists organized a system to monitor the population for severe side effects and to promptly share results with the public. Eleven years later, it looks like the lessons of 2009 are being forgotten, experts say. "We got all these different agencies together, we created governance around it, we created a regular monitoring plan, as well as a public communication plan," said Dr. Jesse Goodman, the F.D.A.'s chief scientist during the H1N1 pandemic. "I think that something very much like that is even more needed now. And, you know, we haven't yet seen that emerge." In the 1970s, the U.S. government set up large scale programs to monitor vaccine safety. There was a system for parents to report symptoms their children experienced after getting a vaccine. It may get 50,000 reports from parents, doctors, hospitals and vaccine makers in a typical year. But the tool has limits: People may not report symptoms that should be investigated, or may see a connection to a vaccination where none exists. In 1990, the C.D.C. set up a new way to track vaccines that didn't depend on people coming forward. The agency worked with health care organizations to get updates on people's medical conditions. That system now covers 12 million people. Researchers can use it to look for clusters of symptoms that arise in people who get the same vaccine. Ahead of the holidays, a C.D.C. panel is set to weigh Pfizer BioNTech and Moderna boosters for all adults. What has Covid done to your country's reputation? Americans and Britons give mixed reviews. The F.D.A. authorizes Pfizer BioNTech and Moderna booster shots for all adults. When the H1N1 flu hit in 2009, Dr. Salmon recognized that these methods didn't track enough people to quickly pick up rare symptoms. He reached out to researchers at Harvard to build a new system, which came to be known as PRISM. Ten states supplied vaccination records, and five health insurance companies shared anonymous information about 38 million members. PRISM then connected the two databases to track insurance claims in the wake of vaccination. "That really gave us a ton of data," Dr. Salmon said. The researchers could come up with a background rate of a host of medical conditions. If the H1N1 vaccine was linked to cases that matched the background rate, they could dismiss the symptoms as ordinary. Only if they rose above the background rate would they be considered unusual and warrant a closer look. Scientists from various federal agencies gathered every two weeks to share data and look for worrying clusters of symptoms. Every month, outside experts reviewed the evidence and released public reports. "Vaccine programs are contingent on trust," Dr. Gellin said, "and transparency is a huge element of that." The vast majority of reports turned out to have nothing to do with the new vaccines. Just a handful of medical conditions required an intensive review. The researchers noticed that some vaccinated people developed a facial weakness called Bell's palsy, for example, but within two weeks they ruled out vaccines as the cause. The offices were merged "after a study by career staff who recommended to the Assistant Secretary for Health that this was the best way to improve the function of both offices by creating synergies and eliminating stovepipes," said Admiral Brett Giroir, assistant secretary for health, in a brief statement. "I wholeheartedly concurred with this recommendation because strengthening vaccine effectiveness and confidence and ending the H.I.V. epidemic are two of my most critical priorities. Anyone who is suggesting that we closed this office has no clue what they're talking about." But Dr. Nicole Lurie, who was assistant secretary for preparedness and response at H.H.S. during the 2009 pandemic, said the loss of the vaccine safety office was especially costly once the coronavirus pandemic hit. "The coordinated leadership for stuff like this would likely come from the National Vaccine Program Office," she said. Dr. Lurie, now an adviser at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation, has been waiting along with other researchers, month after month, for coordinated leadership to emerge from the federal government on long term vaccine safety. "There are a whole bunch of people who were really concerned about this," she said. An F.D.A. official who declined to be identified said that in the absence of the National Vaccine Program Office, F.D.A. and C.D.C. staff members were relying on relationships they had built across the agencies, meeting regularly to discuss their separate projects. That leaderless effort concerns Dr. Lurie. "There's no sort of active coordination to bring all the information together," she said. On Thursday, an expert from the C.D.C. and another from the F.D.A. gave presentations about monitoring systems at a meeting of the F.D.A.'s vaccine advisory committee. One system will use smartphone apps to stay in touch with health and other essential workers after their vaccinations. Another will look at a database of electronic health records and insurance claims, and yet another will use Centers for Medicare Medicaid data to track people over 65. Although each system may reveal important clues, they have limits that worry outside experts. Dr. Steven Black, the co director of the Global Vaccine Data Network, observed that the Medicare system only registers billing information, resulting in a time lag. "The patient has to get into the hospital, leave the hospital and a bill needs to be sent," he said. The other systems can provide safety information much faster, but they're small compared with the PRISM system, which now covers about 60 million people. The F.D.A. still uses PRISM for drug safety research, but not for vaccines. Dr. Salmon is baffled that the agency hasn't tapped into it again. "Why would you not use that?" he asked. (An agency spokeswoman said it might use PRISM in the future should the need arise.) The F.D.A. official said the agencies were still building lists of symptoms they plan to track closely. The C.D.C.'s list includes conditions like strokes and seizures. But it is also including entirely new conditions the coronavirus causes, like Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome, which affects many organs at once. The agencies are searching the scientific literature to estimate the background rates of these outcomes. But Dr. Salmon warned that lockdowns and other disruptions have made some conditions more common and others less so. Comparing the health of vaccinated people with that of people from before the pandemic may set off false alarms. Dr. Salmon and other researchers are concerned that no overarching plan for communicating findings to the public has emerged. The F.D.A. official said the agency would post its updates on its website. A C.D.C. committee will get safety data from the agencies and discuss the results at public meetings. But that may fall short of what's needed to foster public confidence. A poll conducted earlier this month by Stat and The Harris Poll found that 58 percent of Americans said they would get vaccinated as soon as a vaccine was available, down from 69 percent in August. The explosion of disinformation on social media will make clear communication vital. "I think that preparing for Russian disinformation campaigns should be part of preparing for the rollout of a Covid vaccine," said Steven Wilson, a political scientist at Brandeis University. Dr. Grace Lee, a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine and a member of the C.D.C. committee, agreed that such preparations were urgent, but said they were beyond the committee's scope: "A national communication strategy and plan is much needed."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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When Chuck and Cindy Nemser bought their Park Slope townhouse in 1966, an aunt of Ms. Nemser's observed that there was no bathroom on the main floor. "She said, 'You will regret it,' and she was right," Ms. Nemser said the other day. Ms. Nemser had been eager to move for a few years. Because of unexplained nerve pain, it had become increasingly difficult for her to live in a house with stairs. And as time passed, she and her husband found themselves less interested in tending the backyard, finally hiring a gardener. To help them sell their home and find a new one, a cousin of Ms. Nemser's connected the couple about two years ago with Stefania Cardinali, who was then an associate broker with Citi Habitats and is now at the Corcoran Group. The townhouse three stories and a basement sold for 3.3 million this past winter. The Nemsers' original purchase price was 32,500. As for their next headquarters, their wish list included, beyond a stair free home, two spacious bedrooms, a parking spot and a good view for Ms. Nemser, 78, who spends much of her time in bed. She's an art historian and an author; Mr. Nemser, 80, is a retired industrial tool salesman. Something in a high rise might fit the bill. They wanted a lobby that was "easy in, easy out," Ms. Cardinali said no steps, no long hallways, no slippery floors. The Nemsers wished to remain in New York, and particularly in Park Slope, but its housing stock is mostly townhouses with stairs rather than full service high rises. In a co op or condo building, the long term renewal of a lease from a unit owner might be a problem. "Rental stock was the most reasonable," Ms. Cardinali said. Brooklyn Heights had some possibilities, but those buildings were way over the couple's budget, which was 4,000 to 6,000 a month. Some parts of Downtown Brooklyn were chaotic, filled with noisy construction. "At the end of the day," Cathy Nemser said, "it seems that in a way, Brooklyn is not that elderly friendly unless you're just loaded." Manhattan's Upper East Side was an option. But there, buildings "were going up and blocking views," Cathy Nemser said. And some well located rental high rises were too small as well as too pricey. Ms. Cardinali checked out many spaces. "I knew in their mind's eye what they wanted, but unfortunately it didn't exist," she said. In any event, the clock was ticking. The purchasers of their house were waiting to start renovating. One winter day, Ms. Nemser was persuaded to visit some two bedrooms in Downtown Brooklyn that Ms. Cardinali thought might do. At Bklyn/Air, a new high rise on Gold Street, they saw a penthouse for 5,875 a month. But the curved living room wall did not suit. "It had a semicircle plan rather than straight lines" that would make it hard to arrange the furniture, Cathy Nemser said. Ms. Nemser also thought the bedrooms were too small. "When I heard her talking about putting the bed in the living room, I thought, 'This is not working,' " Ms. Cardinali said. A few blocks away, in what is often considered Fort Greene, another new high rise, 66 Rockwell, had two apartments with spectacular views, one renting for around 4,700 a month and the other for around 5,100. But they also seemed to Ms. Nemser to be on the small side. And both were on high floors, which would make for "a long ride in the elevator up and down," she said. "I could see it wouldn't work out, although sitting by the window you could watch all day long." They came at last to a new rental building of 10 stories, Ms. Cardinali's favorite all along. An apartment was available on the top floor. Besides two bedrooms, the place had two bathrooms and a washer dryer. Its 1,250 square feet and boxy rooms would allow plenty of space for furniture. The view included the Manhattan skyline and an exit ramp from the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. "We could do a traffic report," Ms. Nemser said. The rent was near the top of their budget, 5,495 a month, plus monthly fees of 150 for parking in the building's garage and 19 for a storage bin. It wouldn't be available for long. The Nemsers had to decide quickly. And they did, renting the apartment and moving in this past winter. Now, they are relieved to be well situated in a comfortable place, although they do have quibbles. The open kitchen doesn't quite suit. In so many listings, Ms. Nemser said, "they show you pictures of people using bar stools, but I knew I wasn't going to be doing that."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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The Hubble Space Telescope has found further evidence that plumes of water erupt through the icy surface of Jupiter's moon Europa. If the geysers do exist, they may provide NASA with opportunities to study the moon's subsurface ocean during flyby missions. "We may be able to explore that ocean of Europa for organic chemicals or signs of life without having to drill through miles of ice," said William Sparks, an astronomer with the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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In a world where content warnings have become routine at the theater, alerting viewers to potentially disturbing material, Florentina Holzinger's "Apollon" is remarkably free of disclaimers. While warnings have their merits, they also have a way of pathologizing: What you're about to see is outside the norm. With her body mutilating, blood spewing response to George Balanchine's 1928 ballet "Apollo," the Austrian born Ms. Holzinger, who lives and works in the Netherlands, puts ballet on par with other forms of disfiguring and disciplining the body (women's bodies, in particular) for the entertainment of an audience. In the riotous course of this 70 minute spectacle, you might find yourself questioning: How is stuffing a foot into a point shoe any less violent or bizarre than chewing glass, or applying a staple gun to bare skin, or swallowing a sausage shaped balloon? How is the squat of a weight lifter any less beautiful than the line of an arabesque? Ms. Holzinger, one of the six astounding performers in "Apollon" which had its North American premiere at N.Y.U. Skirball on Saturday has called the work her "Apollo sideshow." As she told the German contemporary art magazine Spike, it grew out of her simultaneous fascination with the ballet, in which the Greek god of music is visited by three muses, and with Coney Island sideshow acts, which she saw as not so different from feminist body art experiments of the 1970s. From "Apollo," Ms. Holzinger has ejected the central male presence and its attendant hierarchies. The six women all of them naked are equally god and muse, taking turns in leading and supporting roles (not that the distinctions are always so clear). Even the most cartoonish representation of masculinity onstage, a hulking mechanical bull atop a giant inflatable mattress, eventually gets dismantled, to be mounted as a characterless piece of equipment.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Is Carly Rae Jepsen hoping for a front row seat at the next Calvin Klein show, perhaps sandwiched amid ASAP Rocky, Khalid and Billie Eilish? That would be the natural conclusion for anyone watching her new video for the single "Party for One," which stars Ms. Jepsen and some of the most obvious product placement recently seen onscreen, in the form of Calvin Klein underwear. The Calvin briefs make an appearance about 38 seconds into the video when Ms. Jepsen sheds her miniskirt, and they are featured on several of her video co stars, including at least one additional woman and two men. Absolut Vodka and Postmates also have supporting roles in the video, as Ms. Jepsen and her fellow dancing lonelyhearts converge in a hotel lobby. Overall, "Party for One" is such an unmistakable ode to the troika of brands that it has not gone unnoticed by viewers. Surprisingly enough, however, Calvin Klein was not aware it was happening. "Calvin Klein did not facilitate the product placement in Ms. Jepsen's video," a spokesman said. (He had not seen or heard of the video before being contacted.) "But we are always happy to see artists engaging with our products as a form of creative expression."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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This article contains spoilers for the series finale of "Game of Thrones." The Iron Throne, the literal seat of the Westeros monarchy, is finally gone, melted down in the "Game of Thrones" series finale on Sunday by dragon fire. No longer will it beckon to those who want to play the dangerous game of thrones, even if it corrupts or kills them. Perhaps it was a good judge of character. Or at least a good judge of cruelty. A monstrosity of a chair, it was made of the twisted steel and jagged ends of swords of vanquished enemies. Historically, when a monarch sat on the throne and it sliced his or her flesh, that monarch was often believed to be unfit to rule. Read the recap of the "Game of Thrones" series finale. We never saw King Robert sitting on the Iron Throne. Ned did so only once, and seemed to squirm. Joffrey tried the throne a few times, and he seemed to enjoy it. Tommen, on the other hand, looked very ill at ease. Cersei seemed right at home on the cruel chair. And Dany wanted it enough to kill thousands of innocent people for it (and she still believed in the fairy tale of Aegon's Conquest and her family's sordid history right up until the very end).
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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The coronavirus guarantees that for the foreseeable future President Trump will be right where he likes to be: front and center, with the spotlight squarely on him. His likely Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, is an afterthought as the nation grapples with a challenge to public health and the devastating fallout that comes from shutting down large portions of the economy and ordering millions of people to stay home under almost all circumstances as has been done in California, New York and other hard hit states. This presents a rare opportunity for the president, whatever you think of him: He can do well by doing good because his political interests perfectly align with what's right for the country, and by that I mean the whole country and not just his supporters and potential supporters. While his opponents try and figure out how to keep their campaigns energized under these highly unusual circumstances, the president can demonstrate leadership under duress. After early delays in responding to the emerging threat from the virus, for which he has come in for substantial criticism, Mr. Trump has recently taken a stronger stance, invoking the Defense Production Act, passed during the Korean War, and calling himself a wartime president. Even Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York said that he and Mr. Trump were "fighting the same war" and were "in the same trench," while also describing the president as "very energetic" and "very creative." But there's still much to be done, and how the president leads will determine both his political fate and the fate of the nation. His future is very much in his own hands. Doctors and other health care workers in the United States have run short of critical supplies like masks and gowns, meant to protect them from contracting and spreading infection. In some areas the shortages are so bad that they have taken to social media to ask for help. This is absurd. While American hospitals and doctors are concerned about shortages, China is supplying virus stricken Italy with critical supplies, and the Chinese billionaire Jack Ma of Ali Baba has sent a million masks and 500,000 coronavirus test kits to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This is an act of humanitarian graciousness and also a poignant display of power. It humiliates the United States and Europe by exposing our inability to produce the vital health care supplies necessary to treat our people in times of crisis. It turns out that the soft power associated with the financialization of the economy the shift away from manufacturing and the ascendancy of banking and finance is actually a weakness when the real world of deadly pathogens intervenes and requires the hard power of lifesaving medicines, protective masks and ventilators. Yes, the outbreak of the coronavirus has exposed how ill prepared we are to deal with the threat of pathogens, but that gives the president both the opportunity and the responsibility to lead the nation in building that capacity. Take the C.D.C., for example. It is true that the agency botched both the tests and the testing regime in February. That's in the past. I don't believe that political judgment will be rendered on that if the president is seen to have successfully handled the crisis as a whole. Under ordinary circumstances, no one expects a president to be in minute by minute control of the C.D.C.'s testing regime. But when a weakness is exposed by a crisis, people do have a right to expect the president to act decisively to correct it and to strengthen the system so that it doesn't happen again. Mr. Trump would serve the nation well by developing a comprehensive means of addressing viral outbreaks. What his administration is doing now is necessarily the real time, beta version of that plan. Officials should be monitoring both successes and failures, and change tactics quickly when necessary. That can be broken into three parts. First, create institutional capacity and responsibility. This could be within a reformed C.D.C. The agency began life in 1942 as the Office of National Defense Malaria Control Activities. It's time to reinforce the agency's role in actively defending the nation from deadly pathogens. This will require more money, but however much that will be is a pittance compared with what is being spent dealing with the coronavirus. But there must be a single hierarchy with both authority and responsibility for identifying pathogenic threats, marshaling and administering the resources to deal with them, and coordinating responses with other nations. Second, develop domestic manufacturing capacity. It is imperative that the United States identify critical resources that must be manufactured, along with their component parts, domestically. Key pharmaceuticals and other health care equipment are an obvious place to start. These are strategic necessities akin to the Department of Defense ensuring that essential military gear is made here. Mr. Trump took the right first step by invoking the Defense Production Act. Now he must use it. Longer term, the federal government must pass "buy American" legislation for a wide range of products. Using preferences won't do; everyone knows how to get around them. The federal government must also be prepared to be the buyer of last resort that keeps manufacturing of important products with low profit margins viable in the United States. We must treat antibiotics, vaccines, masks and other medical items as though they are vital to our national security, because they are. Third, there must be a science and technology initiative directed at developing new means of identifying pathogens and other public health risks, testing for them, containing them, treating them and, ideally, curing them. Increasing the capacity of our health care system to handle pandemics is essential. It will save lives and reduce the need for the widespread shutdowns and quarantines we're now experiencing and will thus prevent the accompanying economic destruction that on its own will cause much suffering. Focused efforts that lead to new scientific discoveries could not only prevent or dramatically limit future outbreaks but could also create a virtuous cycle of discovery and development that makes the country more secure and more prosperous. If Mr. Trump does these things, he will see the nation through a major crisis, put his naysayers to shame and create a lasting institutional legacy that will make the nation more secure in the future. What's more, it would enable the United States to help friends in need. For all the claims that Mr. Trump's America First foreign policy degraded America's leading position in the world, his critics seem to have forgotten that exporting our manufacturing base to China also meant abandoning America's ability to lead in many situations like this one. America wasn't the country shipping crucial supplies to Italy because we couldn't. We don't even have enough to meet our own needs. That is a far more dangerous surrender of American leadership than is wanting to reduce America's involvement in military conflicts abroad. The world looks to America for leadership, but that leadership comes with responsibilities. We could send plenty of management consultants and bankers to hard hit Bergamo, but it wouldn't help. There are plenty in New York, and it's not helping there either. Sending ventilators and masks and pharmaceuticals would help, but we don't have that ability. If the president prepares a plan to build the domestic capacity to quickly and effectively address future public health threats, Americans will be more secure, the world can have confidence in American leadership in times of crisis and Mr. Trump will have earned the support of American voters in November. This will require the president to buck some conventional Republican sentiment about the proper use of government power. But the true spirit of conservatism recognizes that there is no more legitimate use of that power than to protect American lives. Now is his chance to do just that. Christopher Buskirk ( thechrisbuskirk) is the editor and publisher of the journal American Greatness and a contributing opinion writer.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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The Conde Nast leaders Anna Wintour and Roger Lynch at a fashion show in New York last year. This was supposed to be Conde Nast's year. The publisher of Vogue, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker was going to be profitable again after years of layoffs and losses. Then advertising revenue suddenly dropped as the coronavirus pandemic cratered the economy. More recently, as protests against racism and police violence grew into a worldwide movement, company employees publicly complained about racism in the workplace and in some Conde Nast content. In response, the two leaders of the nearly all white executive team the artistic director, Anna Wintour, and the chief executive, Roger Lynch offered apologies to the staff. Tumult has hit Conde Nast, a company built partly on selling a glossy brand of elitism to the masses, at a time when its financial outlook is grim. Last year, the U.S. division lost approximately 100 million on about 900 million in revenue, said several people with knowledge of the company, who were not authorized to speak publicly. The European arm also had losses. Mr. Lynch said in an interview Friday that he was "not familiar" with the cited figures, adding that the company's merger of its domestic and international operations, part of a recent restructuring, had been costly. In April, the company instituted pay cuts for anyone making over 100,000. Then came layoffs 100 jobs gone out of roughly 6,000. Conde Nast is one of many media organizations, including The New York Times, whose employees have questioned company leaders as people around the world have taken part in protests prompted by the killing of George Floyd, a black man who died last month in Minneapolis after a white police officer pinned him to the ground. The company has been led by the Newhouse family since 1959. Steven Newhouse heads the parent company, Advance, and his cousin Jonathan Newhouse is chairman of Conde Nast's board. Advance also controls more than 40 newspapers and news sites across the country. Many of them, including The Plain Dealer of Cleveland and The Star Ledger in Newark, have struggled. The Newhouse family has protected itself against losses with significant investments in the cable giant Charter and the media conglomerate Discovery. Before the internet took readers away from print, Conde Nast was known for thick magazines edited by cultural arbiters who traveled in the same circles as the people they covered. As digital media rose, Conde Nast was slow to adapt. Budgets tightened. Magazines including Gourmet, Mademoiselle and Details folded. By the time Mr. Lynch, a former head of the music streaming service Pandora, succeeded Robert A. Sauerberg as the chief executive last year, Conde Nast was in triage mode. After his arrival, it unloaded three publications: Brides, Golf Digest and W. On Monday, Conde Nast reckoned with how the company deals with issues related to race. Adam Rapoport, the longtime top editor of Bon Appetit, resigned after a photo surfaced on social media showing him in a costume that stereotypically depicted Puerto Rican dress. She recalled a 2018 meeting of editors to discuss how to make the magazine's Instagram account more diverse. In a room of about eight editors, three were people of color. "And we're all very junior, no power," Ms. Walker Hartshorn said in an interview. "I was like, 'You're asking us how to make our Instagram black without hiring more black people?'" At a company forum on Tuesday, Mr. Lynch said Bon Appetit employees should have raised their concerns earlier, a comment that rubbed many the wrong way. In a closed door session later that day, he apologized to a group of staff members who had pushed for Mr. Rapoport's ouster. "I want you to know I take this personally, and I take personal responsibility for it," he said, according to an audio recording of the meeting obtained by The New York Times. A onetime banker at Morgan Stanley, Mr. Lynch spent much of his career at Dish, the satellite TV service. As a hobby he played lead guitar in a classic rock cover band, the Merger. He moved from San Francisco to New York and updated his wardrobe to join Conde Nast. Mr. Lynch, 57, has emphasized diversity efforts and environmental programs in emails to the staff. He said in the interview on Friday that he was developing an overall company strategy as he assembled his executive team. In December he hired Deirdre Findlay as the chief marketing officer, making her the company's highest ranking black executive. His former executive assistant, Cassie Jones, who is black, quit shortly after he gave her a gift she considered insulting, three people with knowledge of the matter said. In November, after she had spent four months working for him, Mr. Lynch called Ms. Jones into his office and handed her "The Elements of Style," a guide to standard English usage by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. Mr. Lynch said he thought she could benefit from it. 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. With its suggestion that her own language skills were lacking, the gift struck Ms. Jones as a microaggression, the people said. A few days later, she quit. Before leaving the headquarters at 1 World Trade in Lower Manhattan, she placed the book on his desk. Mr. Lynch said he hadn't meant to insult Ms. Jones, who declined to comment for this article. "I really only had the intention like every time I've given it before for it to be a helpful resource, as it has been for me," he said. "I still use it today. I'm really sorry if she interpreted it that way." Before Mr. Lynch's arrival, David Remnick, the editor in chief of The New Yorker, objected to a plan that would have lowered the magazine's subscription price and raised ad rates. He has brought aboard a diverse crew of journalists, including Jia Tolentino, Hua Hsu and Vinson Cunningham, while adding digital subscriptions. Three people with knowledge of the company said The New Yorker was likely to surpass Vogue as Conde Nast's biggest contributor to U.S. profits by the end of 2020. The people added that about 80 percent of The New Yorker's revenue came from readers, which helped the magazine weather the advertising downturn. The magazine did not cut staff during the recent layoffs. On June 4, Ms. Wintour sent an apologetic note to the Vogue staff. "I want to say this especially to the Black members of our team I can only imagine what these days have been like," Ms. Wintour wrote. She added, "I want to say plainly that I know Vogue has not found enough ways to elevate and give space to Black editors, writers, photographers, designers and other creators. We have made mistakes, too, publishing images or stories that have been hurtful or intolerant. I take full responsibility for those mistakes." The British born Ms. Wintour has been credited internally for championing Radhika Jones, one of few top editors of color in the company's history. Ms. Jones, the former editorial director of the book department at The Times who took over Vanity Fair from Graydon Carter in 2017, changed the magazine's identity. The first cover subject she chose, for the April 2018 issue, was the actress and producer Lena Waithe, a black woman photographed by Annie Leibovitz in a plain T shirt. Later covers featured Michael B. Jordan, Janelle Monae and Lin Manuel Miranda. Ms. Jones has put out 16 Vanity Fair covers featuring people of color. When Ms. Jones arrived, she was pilloried by fashion insiders who questioned her style sense. Her choice of legwear tights with illustrated foxes drew stares, according to a report in Women's Wear Daily. Ms. Wintour later showed her support for Ms. Jones at a welcome party by handing out gifts: tights with foxes on them. Two executives criticized Ms. Jones's plan, according to three people who were at the meeting and were not authorized to discuss it publicly. In particular, Susan Plagemann, the chief business officer of Conde Nast's style division, challenged Ms. Jones at length, saying the plan would be difficult to sell to advertisers. To defuse the tension, Ms. Wintour banged her fist on the table, saying, "We need to move on," according to the three people who were at the meeting. Ms. Plagemann, who is white, joined the company in 2010 as Vogue's chief business officer and worked closely with Ms. Wintour; in 2018, she was elevated to her current job. Three people with knowledge of the matter said she was vocal about her negative view of Vanity Fair under its new editor. She had criticized Ms. Jones's choices of cover subjects, telling others at the company that the magazine should feature "more people who look like us," two of the people said. A third person said he had heard her use words expressing a similar sentiment. All the people said they interpreted the phrase and similar remarks as referring to well off white women who adopt an aesthetic common among the fashion set. Through a Conde Nast spokesman, Ms. Plagemann denied making those statements and denied expressing a dim view of Ms. Jones's Vanity Fair. In the interview on Friday, Mr. Lynch addressed Ms. Jones's stewardship of the magazine more broadly. "The challenge with her taking that new direction would be alienating some of the traditional Vanity Fair audience," he said. "I really applaud what she's done." The uprising at Conde Nast was overdue, some staff members said. "We've been asking for change for months now," Sohla El Waylly, an assistant editor at Bon Appetit, said in an interview. In the Tuesday meeting with Bon Appetit staff members, Mr. Lynch said he hoped to prove a commitment to diversity with the choice of Mr. Rapoport's replacement. Later in the call, he suggested that some staff members wanted to hurt Bon Appetit financially to bring about change, a comment that irked some in the meeting. Ms. El Waylly, who was a regular guest on the show, said her addition to "Gourmet Makes" had been cynically motivated. "They just want me there to play the part to make it look like they have people of color on staff," she said. She said she was not paid for her appearances, as her white counterparts were. Conde Nast disputed that and said Ms. El Waylly's salary covered her video appearances. On Wednesday, the company's head of video, Matt Duckor, stepped down. Several employees had accused him of bias. Many people at the company are rooting for more change.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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DURHAM, N.C. Dr. Luke Smith drove slowly through the unlit streets of a neighborhood filled with immigrants, searching for an address among small houses with windows ribbed by iron bars. Pharmacy bags lay at his feet. His mission: to deliver medication to patients too frightened to pick up their prescriptions. On this evening, Dr. Smith, a psychiatrist, was looking for the family of a 12 year old boy with attention deficit disorder. Like most people who have sneaked into the United States illegally, the boy's parents, from Puebla, Mexico, do not have drivers' licenses. Now, when they drive, being stopped at one of the frequent traffic checkpoints here can have consequences far more costly than a fine. Shaken by the Trump administration's broad deportation orders, they and many others like them are retreating into the shadows, forgoing screenings, medications and other essential medical care. Several times a week, Dr. Smith picks up prescriptions at pharmacies, then meets patients at their homes to hand them the medications they require. Across the country, from Venice, Calif., to Brooklyn, clinics that serve an immigrant population report a downturn in appointments since the administration's crackdown. In a recent national poll of providers by Migrant Clinicians Network, which is based in Austin, Tex., two thirds of respondents said they had seen a reluctance among patients to seek health care. Some parents have been withdrawing children from federal nutrition programs to avoid scrutiny. In Baltimore, health care workers who have for years visited Latino neighborhoods to test people for sexually transmitted infections now wait in vans outside 7 Elevens and Home Depots. "It's been like a ghost town," said Dr. Kathleen R. Page, co director of Centro SOL, a health center for Latinos at Johns Hopkins. Experts say the toll for avoiding the health care system is far reaching. Poorer Latinos, in particular, suffer from high rates of obesity, diabetes, liver disease and high blood pressure. "Patients who are already sick will have a much harder time getting better," Dr. Page said. Those who don't get care for infectious diseases, she said, "are much more likely to transmit infections to others." Yet as medical costs present a burden for millions of Americans, many people question why citizens who can scarcely afford their own health care should support through taxes the care of those living here illegally. One provider surveyed in the Migrant Clinicians Network poll wrote: "There has been a fair amount of animosity towards me for helping the workers. Locals think that the workers are receiving grand benefits." Here in central North Carolina, where immigrants work in tobacco fields and chicken processing factories, and wash dishes and clean bathrooms in booming downtown restaurants and hotels, some health care providers are going to unusual lengths for patients. This fall, when Dr. Smith met the boy's parents at school and told them that medication could help their distracted, failing son, the father was standoffish and suspicious. But since then, the boy's diligence, grades and self esteem have improved and so has Jorgito's confidence in Dr. Smith. Despite the family's entreaties to stay, Dr. Smith begged off. It was nearly 10 o'clock. Another family was waiting for medicine. Except for absolute necessities, Rodolfo, an itinerant construction worker who entered the United States illegally from Puebla six years ago, does not leave his house these days. But for a month now, his 8 year old daughter, Leslie, has been doubling over in pain after meals. So, uneasily, on buses and on foot, Rodolfo took her to the community health clinic in Carrboro, a liberal, well heeled town just west of Chapel Hill. In the exam room, the child shrank into herself, stiff and uncomfortable. Lisanna Gonzalez, a family nurse practitioner, could find no physical cause for her discomfort. Eventually Leslie admitted she was terrified that she would come home from school one day and find her parents gone. Kids were always talking about it, she said, even teasing her. Her brother, 13, kept showing her social media updates about raids. Fear is making people sick, said Dr. Evan Ashkin, a professor of family medicine at the University of North Carolina who directs a residency program for doctors who work with poor patients. She handed Rodolfo a checklist, assembled by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, on how to prepare for a possible deportation: Decide who can care for your children. Write down their medications and important phone numbers. Tell your family whom to call if you are detained. Providers at these federally qualified health centers, which receive some government funds to serve the uninsured and underinsured, do not ask patients about their citizenship status. Instead, the patients, who are required to pay a modest clinic fee, must show proof of residence and income. For decades, these clinics have been safe havens. When police officers parked in the Carrboro clinic's lot for a coffee break, a doctor chased them off because she didn't want patients to be frightened. Now some insulin dependent patients have been no shows at appointments. Diabetes patients, who must exercise, have told doctors here they will not even walk around the block, skittish about the cruising police cars even though a few departments have announced they will not check immigration status. Dr. Ashkin has built up relationships with many uninsured immigrants over the years. But recently a longtime patient, pregnant but having first trimester bleeding, refused to take his advice to go for an ultrasound at the university medical center at Chapel Hill. She was fearful that immigration agents might be waiting. Fortunately, the bleeding stopped. Referring to the dread among his patients, Dr. Ashkin said, "Their trust in us is breaking down." This is not the first time that fear has kept undocumented patients away. Researchers found that in the wake of expanded immigration enforcement in Arizona in 2010, illegal immigrants used health services less frequently, according to a study published in The American Journal of Public Health. After a large federal immigration raid in 2008 in Postville, Iowa, babies born to Latinas had a 24 percent higher risk of low birth weight than those born a year earlier, according to a study published this year in The International Journal of Epidemiology. The effects of deferred health care will be felt in many ways, experts said. Hospitals and emergency departments, exponentially more expensive than primary care, will treat more sick patients, said Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. School systems will feel the impact of more students with a range of health related challenges. Researchers have also looked at the question of federal benefits for illegal immigrants. Many are paid off the books in cash. But certainly not all. Between 2000 and 2011, immigrants not authorized to work here contributed between 2.2 billion and 3.8 billion a year more to Medicare than they withdrew, according to a 2016 study. Jose, 42, works year round for a tobacco grower; his wife, Irma, 44, picks tobacco and also works at a local steakhouse, wiping down tables and mopping floors. They do not have Social Security numbers because they are here illegally. "The client is grieving the possibility of not seeing the therapist again," Ms. Siu said. "So saying goodbye with hugs and tears each time is a form of control, because it's on their own terms." El Futuro has waiting lists of people who want help. But in a survey of patients, the clinic found that some people are afraid to come in. Elizabeth, 27 and here illegally, is among them. With great reluctance she showed up at the clinic for an interview with a reporter, arriving late, uneasy. Apologizing, she said she leaves her apartment these days only to go to the grocery store and to her job as a hotel maid. She has no one who will care for her two young children if she is deported, she explained haltingly, tears welling up. And in Mexico, another danger awaits: her ex boyfriend. Years ago, when the couple arrived in North Carolina, she said, he began to beat her so badly that she finally called the police. They arrested him and had him deported. Now, fearful for her children and for her own safety, Elizabeth is consumed by anxiety. Her nightmares from that violent period are back. After recounting her story, Elizabeth walked toward El Futuro's reception area, clutching her 5 year old daughter's hand. Even if she cleared the clinic's wait list, she said, it just seemed too risky to come back.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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Zilberman mitigates some of the perils of the project by subtly differentiating his movie's perspective from Amir's. At a screening at the New York Jewish Film Festival earlier this month, the director said he had opted for several distancing devices odd angles, no melody in the score to keep viewers from getting swept up in Amir's point of view. Halevi is in virtually every scene, often in close up or with the camera over his shoulder, and is frequently isolated within the claustrophobic, squarish frame. (The actor's sly smile is chilling at the beginning and becomes more so as the movie goes on.) The son of Yemeni born parents, Amir is shown as a striving law student with a chip on his shoulder. He pursues a relationship with Nava (Daniella Kertesz), whose parents, settlers in the West Bank, would rather see her involved with someone else. (Their first scene together is a rare occasion when "Incitement" seems too on the nose: "I'm like a laser pointer," he tells her. "I wonder what your next target is," she replies.) The product of a politically divided household his father, a Torah scribe, supports the Oslo Accords on which Rabin staked his leadership, while his mother does not the movie's Amir surrounds himself with toxic influences. Early in the film, he listens intently to a rabbi who defends Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 praying Muslims in Hebron in 1994. He has a crackpot dream of starting a vigilante militia that will do things the Israel Defense Forces will not, and using religious retreats to lure recruits. Those close to him ignore or dismiss as jokes his declarations that someone should kill Rabin. The most generous interpretation of the rabbis from whom he seeks religious justification for an assassination is that they see his questions as hypotheticals. Potently, "Incitement" depicts Amir as just one member of a self reinforcing fringe. Few people he interacts with challenge his beliefs. Zilberman gives the movie an extra charge by fluidly interweaving scenes of the dramatized Amir with news clips of political speeches and rallies from the time the sort of rallies at which posters might show Rabin's face caught in cross hairs. The overall sense is that, with conditions set, incitement is an easy, even passive process and that Amir's murder of Rabin is not only a tragedy, but also a cautionary tale. Not rated. In Hebrew, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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A Speedier Way to Catalog Human Cells (All 37 Trillion of Them) There are some questions in biology that you'd think were settled long ago. For instance: How many types of cells are there in the human body? "If you just Google this, the number everyone uses is 200," said Jay Shendure, a geneticist at the University of Washington. "But to me that seems absurdly low." A number of scientists like him want to build a more complete catalog. Yet there are an estimated 37 trillion cells in the human body. The traditional ways to identify cell types such as carefully tracing the shape of individual cells under a microscope are too slow and crude for the job. On Thursday, Dr. Shendure and his colleagues published a report describing a speedy new method for taking such a cell census. Instead of inspecting one cell at a time, they measured the activity of genes inside 42,035 cells at once. Although still at an experimental stage, the method may become an essential tool for cataloging every cell type in the human body, experts said. "It's a really important piece of work," said David M. Miller, a cell biologist at Vanderbilt University, who was not involved in the study. "With this approach, you can do more for a whole lot less work, and a whole lot less money." In the laboratory, scientists easily discern the difference between, say, a muscle and a nerve cell. But these broad categories encompass many different types of cells. A muscle cell might be a skeletal muscle cell, the kind you use to walk or lift a cup. Or it might be a smooth muscle cell lining your small intestines, making it ripple with contractions. Our hearts are built of special muscle cells all their own, known as cardiomyocytes. Even these come in different types. Some contract the chambers to pump blood, for example, while others conduct electric impulses around the heart. Genetically speaking, all cells in the body are identical. They all carry the same 20,000 or so protein coding genes. What distinguishes each type is the particular combination of genes the cell uses to make proteins. The first step in this process is making a copy of the gene in the form of a molecule called RNA. The cell uses the RNA molecule as a template to build a protein. Dr. Shendure and his colleagues reasoned that the distinctive collection of RNA molecules floating around inside a cell could provide clues about the cell's type. To measure that RNA, they developed a kind of molecular "bar coding." In the first step, the researchers pour thousands of cells into hundreds of miniature "wells." Each well contains molecular tags that attach themselves to every RNA molecule inside the cells. The process is repeated two or more times until each cell ends up with a unique combination of tags attached to its RNA molecules. Dr. Shendure and his colleagues then break open the cells and read the sequences of tags at once. The "bar codes" allow the scientists to see which genes are active in each cell. Cells of the same type should share many of those genes in common. "We came up with this scheme that allows us to look at very large numbers of cells at the same time, without ever isolating a single cell," said Dr. Shendure. He and his colleagues call their method sci RNA seq (short for single cell combinatorial indexing RNA sequencing). To test it, they set out to classify every cell in a tiny worm, Caenorhabditis elegans. Scientists know more about C. elegans's cells than any other animal's. In the 1960s, the biologist Sydney Brenner made it a model for investigating biological development. Dr. Brenner and later generations of scientists tracked the worm's growth from a single cell to about 1,000 cells at maturity, classifying them into types with a microscope. Eventually, scientists plucked individual cells from the worm's body and painstakingly measured their DNA activity. Dr. Shendure and his colleagues decided to see how results from sci RNA seq compared to those from decades of research. They raised 150,000 C. elegans larvae and then doused them with chemicals that broke them apart into individual cells. (Each larva has 762 cells, not counting the cells that will become eggs or sperm.) They then tagged all the RNA in the cells. With the new method, the researchers were able to identify 27 cell types that had been identified in previous studies. But the team also was able to break them down into smaller groups, each with a slightly different pattern of gene activity. They identified 40 different kinds of neurons, for example, including very rare types. In few cases, only a single such neuron develops in each worm. "I was excited because it worked extremely well they uncovered results that will be valuable for me and for the whole field," said Cori Bargmann, an expert on C. elegans at the Rockefeller University. Yet for now, sci RNA seq falls far short of capturing the full complexity of cell types, even in such a simple animal. Dr. Shendure and his colleagues could not match some of their clusters of neurons to a known type of cell, and they did not find most of the 118 different types of neurons that earlier studies have documented. "We don't consider this a finished project," said Dr. Shendure. Dr. Bargmann and her colleagues are already trying to match Dr. Shendure's results to neurons in the worm. "Of course, there is more to do, but I am pretty optimistic that this can be solved," she said. Sarah A. Teichmann, a cell biologist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute who was not involved in the new study, said the report illustrated how fast the field of cell typing has moved. In a review posted on the pre publication service Arxiv, Dr. Teichmann and her colleagues noted that it was only in 2009 that scientists managed to measure gene activity this way in a single cell. They broke the thousand cell barrier just three years ago. This exponential increase will be crucial to the success of the Human Cell Atlas, an international initiative of which Dr. Teichmann is a joint leader. The researchers plan to create a complete catalog of every cell type in the human body.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Sam Lloyd, a longtime television and film actor who appeared in the television shows "Scrubs" and "Desperate Housewives," died on Thursday at the Barlow Respiratory Hospital in Los Angeles. He was 56. The cause was complications of lung cancer, his family said in a statement. In January 2019, Mr. Lloyd began experiencing headaches and sought medical attention, according to a GoFundMe set up for the actor. A scan revealed a mass on his brain, and he soon underwent surgery, but the tumor was "too intertwined" to be removed, the website said. Mr. Lloyd was told that the cancer in his brain had metastasized from his lungs. Additional scans showed that the cancer had spread to his liver, spine and jaw. Mr. Lloyd acted in dozens of television shows and films, including 95 episodes of "Scrubs" as Ted Buckland, a sad sack lawyer with a hangdog look and low self esteem.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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The standard repertory in classical music is often standard for good reason: Great works are gifts that keep on giving with repeated hearings. But what about repeated recordings? It's one thing to hear young pianists take on Rachmaninoff's mighty Third Piano Concerto in concert, with its in the moment excitement. But do they really need to record it? After all, the market is saturated with several dozen recordings. I grew up with Van Cliburn's classic live one from Carnegie Hall, with Kirill Kondrashin conducting the Symphony of the Air, shortly after Cliburn had become an overnight superstar after winning the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. Just three years later, Byron Janis, another young American, recorded the concerto with Antal Dorati and the London Symphony Orchestra, a performance some Rachmaninoff devotees consider even better. And the exhilarating, exhausting discography piled up, with spectacular older accounts by Horowitz, Kapell, Argerich and others, and more recent ones by Leif Ove Andsnes and Evgeny Kissin. And don't forget Rachmaninoff's own recording!
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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A small start up has received the green light from the federal government to do something that NASA has not done for more than four decades: land on the moon. Moon Express, based in Cape Canaveral, Fla., announced Wednesday that it had received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to set a robotic lander on the moon. That feat would win the Google Lunar X Prize competition for the first private organization to reach the moon and an accompanying 20 million reward. But more than the prize, company officials say that it will be the opening of a profitable frontier for entrepreneurs. "Rephrasing John F. Kennedy, we choose to go to the moon not because it's easy, but because it's a good business," said Naveen Jain, the Moon Express chairman. "Everything we fight over whether it's land or it's fresh water, whether it is energy is in abundance in space." Moon Express has a ways to go before it can reach the lunar surface, which it hopes to do next year. It still has to assemble the lander. The rocket that it plans to launch on has yet to fly even once. And one of its competitors could beat it to the moon, and the 20 million. The approval reflects an effort to encourage 21st century commercial space endeavors while staying within an international space treaty written 49 years ago when outer space was a rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the idea of a start up going to the moon an unlikely fantasy. "There are a lot of things in the treaties we're testing the limits of right now," said Henry R. Hertzfeld, a professor of space policy and international affairs at George Washington University in Washington. "We're trying to define them in ways that will encourage private investment and private opportunities but not violate any international agreements." At present, commercial ventures have gone as far out as geosynchronous orbit, the telecommunication satellites that fly 22,236 miles above the Earth. Moon Express wants to go 10 times as far, to the moon, a place where just three nations have landed: the United States, the Soviet Union and, more recently, China. The X Prizes, started by Peter H. Diamandis, an entrepreneur, seek to recreate the barnstorming prizes of the early 20th century that spurred aviation advances like Charles Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic. The first X Prize, for the first private piloted vehicle to reach space, led to the development of SpaceShipOne, a rocket powered plane that made two flights in two weeks in 2004 to win the 10 million prize. In the bubbly optimism that followed, the X Prize Foundation enlisted Google to finance reaching the loftier target of the moon. The Google Lunar X Prize, announced in 2007, called for putting a spacecraft on the moon that would be able to send back video and images and also move more than 500 meters. The first team to achieve that would claim 20 million; second place would be rewarded with 5 million. More than 30 teams signed up, including Moon Express, founded in 2010 by Mr. Jain, who made a fortune creating the website InfoSpace and then lost most of it in the internet bust of 2000; Robert D. Richards, a space entrepreneur; and Barney Pell, a former NASA computer scientist. The original deadline, at the end of 2012, was extended several times; now the remaining 16 teams have until Dec. 31, 2017, to claim the prize. Two teams, Moon Express and SpaceIL, an Israeli nonprofit, have secured launch contracts for their spacecraft. The United States fought to include that clause, rejecting the Soviet view that space exploration should be limited to governments, said Matthew Schaefer, the director of the space, cyber and telecommunications law program at the University of Nebraska. While the American negotiators did not necessarily foresee a company like Moon Express, "the U.S. government wanted to keep that option open," Professor Schaefer said. Nonetheless, that would have been a roadblock, said Dr. Richards, Moon Express's chief executive, because the United States did not have any procedures for authorizing and supervising what companies like Moon Express want to do. "Any application to the U.S. government would have been vetoed by the State Department, due to the lack of regulatory frameworks that would allow the U.S. government to remain in compliance with the Outer Space Treaty," he said. Instead, the process for approval was routed through the F.A.A., which regulates commercial rocket launches and payloads headed to space. In 2013, Bigelow Aerospace, a company that builds inflatable structures that could one day be used as lunar habitats, suggested that the F.A.A. use this process to coordinate competing commercial efforts, at least among American companies. Moon Express has now employed this payload review process for its lunar trip. The F.A.A. sent its approval on July 20, the 47th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon. Mr. Jain said that low cost missions to the moon under 10 million would transform space exploration. But the company has revealed little about its customers and much of the hoped for business like the mining of platinum and helium 3 is speculative. (The helium 3 would be for fusion power plants that do not yet exist.) At present, there is little worry that the moonscape is about to be scarred by a commercial onslaught. The MX 1 is about the size of a coffee table, and NASA has left far more litter on the moon, most recently crashing its Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer into the far side of the moon in 2014. Of more concern is the preservation of earlier artifacts like the Apollo landing sites, especially as the Lunar X Prize offers a 4 million bonus for broadcasting video from one of those sites. Moon Express said that it had not yet decided on a landing site, but that it would defer to NASA's wishes and stay away from the Apollo sites. Mr. Jain said the greatest opportunities were the ones not yet imagined, just as Apple, when it created the iPhone, did not foresee the explosion of apps that would run on the device. "More importantly," Mr. Jain said, "we don't know what the Pokemon Go of the moon is going to be."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Brianca Hadnot's high school students in Houston started writing letters the day after George Floyd was killed. As protests gained momentum around the country, she worried about them attending and possibly being tear gassed or shot with rubber bullets. Writing, she said, was another way the students could take action against police brutality. "A letter is one of the most undervalued but important ways of expressing yourself," said Ms. Hadnot, who teaches sophomore literature and writes under the name Brianca Jay. "It doesn't have to be perfect or written with the best grammar and semantics and flowery prose. It just has to be you." The students, with help from other community members, have written 75 letters so far, addressed to elected officials including local legislators and the president of the United States. Snail mail has taken on fresh resonance in this period of isolation, grief and unrest. Sympathy cards are selling out as the coronavirus's toll continues to rise. Constituents are mailing in primary election ballots and addressing handwritten notes to local officials with compliments and complaints. (In some cities, they may also be sending letters to the police.) Many more are writing postcards to friends and loved ones, and calling for the United States Postal Service to be saved from its dire financial straits. First class mail has been a declining category for the Postal Service for over a decade. It will be a few months before the service publishes statistics on mail volumes for April and May, but it did see "significantly higher product sales" of items including stamps in April, according to a representative. A Postal Service survey whose results were published in May found that one in six consumers had sent more mail to family and friends during the pandemic. Kenzie Myer, 21, said that she wasn't a letter writer before the pandemic, which forced her to leave a study abroad program in London and return to her home in Pennsylvania. "I came back and hadn't seen any of my friends from my home school," Ms. Myer, a rising senior at Arcadia University, said. "I started sending them letters." Most of them open with a disparaging line about her "garbage handwriting," she said, then become more personalized. For a friend whose 21st birthday passed in lockdown, she wrote about how she couldn't wait to celebrate in person. For her partner, who lives in Australia, she writes "a lot of sappy stuff" and smears the page with roller ball perfume. She posts her correspondents' responses on her bedroom wall near her desk. Justin Hodges, 46, moved to Chicago three years ago and soon received a postcard from a local candidate. "This was not some soulless mass production," he said. "Someone took the time to spell my name correctly and draw stars and hearts. It's more personal." Eventually Mr. Hodges, a former flight attendant and now self described "stay at home cat dad," started writing postcards for her campaign as a volunteer and then for an organization that encourages people in swing states to vote. Over the last month, he has written 500 postcards that will be sent to Wisconsin voters closer to the general election in November. The coronavirus has made many people realize just how important the Postal Service is, Mr. Hodges said, even as it feels like it's under siege. "We've gone to this online society, but letters encourage voter turnout and civic engagement. They're warm and personal tangible." When Laura Stanfill, 44, is ready to send out her weekly batch of letters, she and her 12 year old daughter walk to the mailbox near their home in Portland, Ore. "We've made this 'just the two of us' walks. We wear our masks, and she complains about her mask and we talk," she said. On April 13, Ms. Stanfill's best friend of over 30 years died of complications from Covid 19. She sent out sympathy cards. "Then I wanted to send more," said Ms. Stanfill, who is a writer and the publisher of Forest Avenue Press. She started collaging cards with paper scraps and magazine clippings and sending them to friends, family and acquaintances alike. "All this letter writing and card making is a way forward in my grief," Ms. Stanfill said. In addition to the cards, she's also exchanging "letters" with a pen pal by filling up a single notebook passed back and forth across the country. "We're centered at home, and to be able to share something and send something to a person we can't see feels really important." That sentiment seems to bridge generations. In Los Angeles, Ronan Bowie, 4, has enjoyed receiving riddles from his grandmother in Tucson, Ariz., by mail. "We'd have to wait a few days for the answer to arrive," said Ronan's father, Soren Bowie, 37. "That got him excited about the mail in a way he'd only been with packages before." Ronan started exchanging letters with his best friend from school. "I miss you" may be the only text in these letters, which are full of a lot of drawings and stickers. "They see each other on Zoom sometimes," said Mr. Bowie, who is a writer. "But for a child, I think there's something much more tangible to a thing you hold and have to find a place for in your house."
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Style
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Dr. Melynda Audrey Barnes and Karim Zeddam Oussayef were married Aug. 25. The Rev. Roxanne R. Birchfield, an evangelical Christian minister, officiated at Hasbrouck House, a hotel in Stone Ridge, N.Y. Dr. Oussayef, 35, is a facial plastic surgeon on the staff at Harlem Hospital, and also has a private practice. She graduated from Stanford and received a medical degree from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She is the daughter of Ayn S. Hill of Los Angeles and Robert W. Barnes of Garden Grove, Calif. The bride's father, an electrical engineer, was the owner of Northwest Test Instruments, which was a San Jose, Calif., supplier of oscilloscopes. He also restores vintage Porsche engines. Her mother retired as an accountant in the tax collector's office of Los Angeles County. She now is a volunteer providing water and other hydrating drinks to the homeless and elderly population in and around Los Angeles. Mr. Oussayef, 37, is a partner in Desmarais, a patent litigation law firm in New York. He graduated cum laude from the University of Rochester and received a law degree magna cum laude from Boston University.
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Fashion & Style
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GREENWICH, Conn. Megan Rapinoe, the American soccer player so decorated with medals and trophies that she's practically gilded, has a book coming out on Tuesday. But it's only kind of about sports. Yes, important games are reconstructed and injuries recounted. But readers will also learn about redlining and how Black service members were excluded from the G.I. Bill. She writes about the pay disparity between male and female professional soccer players. And her white privilege makes its first appearance in the prologue: "A small, white, female soccer player even a lesbian one with a loud voice and pink hair lands differently in the press than, say, a six foot four inch Black football player with an Afro." Absent from the book are the standard admonishments that if you just work hard enough, you will, somehow, become a professional athlete. "You know who else works hard?" Rapinoe writes. "Everyone." Indeed, her memoir, "One Life," tracks the arc of her political awakening at least as much as it follows the path of her sports career. In the book, we find a thoroughly modern athlete who plays hard and wins a lot of games, then funnels her public profile and social media following into activism, not just endorsements. "There's nothing that I could tell someone about my journey as an athlete that would help them become an elite athlete," Rapinoe said in an interview last month, a bright blue beanie pulled over the pandemic haircut she received from her fiancee, the W.N.B.A. star Sue Bird. "I wanted to write this book because there's so much more happening here than the sports," she added, "and I think we can use that as a vehicle to really talk about what I see as the most important work in my life, which is all the stuff we're doing off the field." Rapinoe, 35, has been playing soccer professionally for more than a decade, but she burst into national consciousness in 2016. That was the year when she followed Colin Kaepernick in taking a knee during the national anthem, and when she filed a federal complaint, with four of her teammates, against the United States Soccer Federation for wage discrimination. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. As she writes in the book, even though the women's team has won far more games and titles than the American men, a top women's player could expect to earn less than half what a comparable player on the men's squad makes. But as an athlete, her public profile has certainly been helped by the women's team's success. Rapinoe has an Olympic gold medal and two FIFA World Cup title medals, which she thinks are under some paperwork in her office in Seattle. After last year's World Cup victory in France, there were TV interviews, magazine covers and a ticker tape parade, and the team was presented with the keys to New York City. She also caught the ire of President Trump on Twitter when she said that she would refuse an invitation to celebrate their win at the White House. With all that came the chance for Rapinoe to write a book. By her own admission, she does not hold her liquor terribly well, and she rolled into a day of meetings with publishers nursing a hangover after a friend convinced her to end a night at the Tribeca restaurant Marc Forgione with an ill advised shot of Chartreuse. The last meeting of the day was with Ann Godoff, the Penguin Press founder who has edited writers like Ron Chernow, Zadie Smith, Michael Pollan and Karl Ove Knausgaard. Not the kind of person who would seem a natural fit for a traditional sports memoir. Yet Godoff saw Rapinoe's story as one of transformation from athlete into activist, and she thought her life would appeal to a wide swath of people. "To tell you the truth, I went after this, and I don't really do that very much any more," Godoff said. Particularly appealing to Godoff, a gay baby boomer, was how out and proud Rapinoe has been. "We can do something for a generation much younger than you and much, much younger than me," she recalled saying to Rapinoe. "If I had read this book as a 13 year old girl," Godoff added, "something would have changed for me. And I think we'll have that." The title of Rapinoe's book, "One Life," was Godoff's suggestion; it comes from the Mary Oliver poem "The Summer Day." ("Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?") Godoff edited her, too. She connected Rapinoe with the author and journalist Emma Brockes, who agreed to ghostwrite the story. They spent two days at a Sheraton hotel in Orlando and many hours on the phone, as Brockes absorbed Rapinoe's life story and learned to channel her voice though Rapinoe is not shy about cursing, and that had to be winnowed down. "She agreed she'd give me everything she could and then withdraw or redact stuff," Brockes said. "When it came to it, she was incredibly open and honest and very little came out nothing really. We just took down the expletive count." Brockes also spoke extensively with Rapinoe's family, especially her fraternal twin sister, Rachael, and spent time with their mother, Denise, whom Brockes the mother of twin girls herself has subsequently called for parenting advice. Rapinoe was raised in Redding, Calif., a conservative town where her mother worked as a waitress and her father, Jim, worked in construction. Denise is described as the lodestar of a big, loud family, full of opinions and advice Rapinoe has "Mammers," her mother's nickname, tattooed on her left wrist. (In true 2020 style, it was a stick and poke tattoo given to her by a W.N.B.A. referee on her last night in the league's bubble.) Rapinoe is also open in the book about the ongoing drug addiction of her brother, Brian, who has spent years in and out of prison. He is described with great tenderness and an eye toward the systems that have contributed to his troubles. "The way people serving time are spoken of reminds me of the myth peddled by right wing politicians that the only difference between the rich and the poor is the latter's own fecklessness," Rapinoe writes. "If you are a 'repeat offender,' it's not because of structural failings within the system, just as if you are a drug addict, it's not because opioid manufacturers aggressively marketed their drugs at you until you were hooked. Instead, you are in jail, or an addict, because that is, at root, who you are." She is candid about her romantic life, chronicling relationships with, among others, Abby Wambach, a former teammate who is now married to the writer Glennon Doyle. As told in the book, when Rapinoe arrived at college and realized she was a lesbian, her life suddenly made sense. "Clearly I'm gay and why didn't anyone tell me?" was her first thought, she wrote. "And number two: This is awesome." The relationship that gets the most attention is her partnership with Bird. Since leaving the W.N.B.A. bubble in which Bird's team, the Seattle Storm, won this year's championship the couple has been living in Greenwich, Conn., where they have been swimming, using a Tonal, which is like a high tech Murphy bed version of a weight machine, and riding their Peloton. Despite being one of the most decorated soccer players in the country, Rapinoe says she's not so good at the Peloton. When the output of the thousands of users who participate in each ride are displayed, she said she consistently hovers around the bottom 30 percent. But before heading to Greenwich, Rapinoe and Bird took a trip with some friends to Antigua, where they got engaged. Rapinoe was lounging on the side of a pool, and when she went to stand up, somebody said it looked like she was kneeling. She hadn't planned on proposing just then, she said, but she'd been thinking about it daily for months, and there was no real question for either of them that they would eventually get married. "We locked eyes, and I thought, this is definitely the moment," she said. So Rapinoe, who wears a lot of jewelry, took a simple gold band off her own finger and proposed. A picture of that moment went viral. Even former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. retweeted it and offered his congratulations. No such congratulations were forthcoming from Mr. Trump.
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Books
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EL CAMINO: A BREAKING BAD MOVIE (2019) Stream on Netflix. Over the course of its five seasons, "Breaking Bad" transformed the character Jesse Pinkman from a dewy eyed, small time drug dealer into a hardened (if also penitent) desperado. The series began with Jesse (played by Aaron Paul) joining forces with Walter White (Bryan Cranston), a New Mexico high school chemistry teacher who starts cooking and distributing crystal meth to pay for cancer treatment. The last time we saw Jesse after the drug empire the pair built together had collapsed he was a scarred man speeding into the night behind the wheel of a stolen Chevrolet El Camino. This sequel, an epilogue of sorts from the series's creator, Vince Gilligan, picks up the story from there. "It's a chapter of 'Breaking Bad' that I didn't realize that I wanted," Paul said in a recent interview with The New York Times. "And now that I have it, I'm so happy that it's there." THE PARTS YOU LOSE (2019) Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. In a curious bit of timing, "El Camino" isn't the only movie out right now that casts Aaron Paul as a criminal. The actor also stars in this thriller, which was released in theaters last week and is available to rent digitally. Paul plays an injured fugitive who is taken in by a young boy on a snow packed North Dakota farm. The boy, Wesley (Danny Murphy), nurses him back to health as a way of escaping from his mean father (Scoot McNairy) and bullying that he faces because he is deaf.
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Television
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DNA evidence retrieved from elephant dung, tissue and hair can help identify the origins of illegal ivory, a new study finds. Researchers at the University of Washington and Interpol developed a method to extract DNA from samples of ivory, and compared the gene sequences with those obtained from dung and tissue samples. More than 85 percent of the forest elephant ivory seized between 2006 and 2014 came from elephants innortheast Gabon, the northwest of the Republic of Congo, southeast Cameroon, and an adjacent reserve in the southwest of the Central African Republic. The researchers found that more than 85 percent of the savanna elephant ivory seized between 2006 and 2014 came from elephants in East Africa. The findings could help target poachers: About 50,000 African elephants are killed each year, and the animals are at risk of extinction.
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Science
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First rate examples of vintage 20th century design from an international group of dealers, as well as cutting edge creations. This year, there will also be an exhibition celebrating the influence of the Tokyo firm Nendo and a new feature called Collective Concept, with presentations by talents like Apparatus, Lindsey Adelman and Fort Standard. Through May 8 at 550 Washington Street; collectivedesignfair.com. The wallpaper company Voutsa opens an immersive pop up space with its exuberant patterns applied to walls, furniture and clothing, with collaborators like Sasha Bikoff, Tzelan and Paul Marlow. Through May at 179 Mott Street; voutsa.com. A 12 day series of events at the South Street Seaport (now called the Seaport District) will include conversations with prominent designers, an exhibition by Parsons School of Design and family workshops on animation (May 7) and architecture (May 14) sponsored by the Children's Museum of the Arts, as well as a design market presented by WantedDesign. Through May 17 at 19 Fulton Street (the Parsons show is at 117 Beekman Street); southstreetseaport.com/seaport culture. The design market continues through June. A group of structures known collectively as Design Pavilion will take over the newly renovated Astor Place Plaza. Highlights include an installation by Snarkitecture for the condominium development 125 Greenwich Street; a structure designed by Harry Allen with the biomaterials company Ecovative; the DuPont Corian Blur Bar by Joe Doucet; and Growth, a show of new objects curated by the American Design Club. Through May 11 at Astor Place between Lafayette Street and Cooper Square; design pavilion.com. Light projections by the designer Enzo Catellani and the glass artist Giuliano Gaigher. In honor of the Danish American furniture designer's 100th birthday, Design Within Reach is producing a side table from his first collection and selling it for 100 for one week only (after that, it will be 195). Ralph Pucci will also honor the designer with a permanent exhibit of Mr. Risom's newly reissued designs from the 1950s and 1960s, opening May 16. (The show will also include the new Gabriella bronze chair by Vladimir Kagan, who died last month.) Now in its 44th year, the annual show house demonstrates what's possible when top interior designers let their imaginations run wild. Participating firms this year include David Kleinberg Design Associates, Drake/Anderson, Sawyer Berson, Suzanne Kasler and Timothy Whealon Interiors, among others. The opening night cocktail party is May 11, and the show house runs from May 12 to June 9 at 19 East 61st Street; kipsbaydecoratorshowhouse.org. The Collections Two at Colony Colony, a cooperative showroom of independent designers, presents an exhibition celebrating the color pink and a host of activities in conjunction with it, including a drink and draw session with nude models (May 14), Design Dim Sum (May 15) and movie night (May 16). Through May 17 at 324 Canal Street; goodcolony.com. TriBeCa galleries and showrooms David Weeks Studio, Uhuru, R Company, Stillfried Wien, Oly and others stay open late with exhibit openings and cocktail receptions. The British designer Lee Broom has a reputation for innovative presentations; during last month's Salone del Mobile in Milan he turned a roving delivery van into his showroom. Broom Off Broome, his pop up space in New York, will offer some 50 products for sale, including a new lighting piece exclusive to the United States. The modular furniture company USM partnered with three noted mixologists to create custom bar carts from the components of its Haller system. The carts will be on view following a cocktail party from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. The United Kingdom based organization designjunction introduced a New York satellite of its London show last year; it's back again this year, in partnership with Dwell on Design. Presentations by Artek, Muuto, Dyke Dean and others offer a tastefully pared down sense of European modernism, accompanied by an extensive program of talks organized by Dwell magazine. Through May 15 at 540 West 21st Street; thedesignjunction.co.uk/new york. Since it was founded in 2011, WantedDesign has become one of the most vital design events outside the International Contemporary Furniture Fair. Exhibitors include established brands like Alessi and Cappellini as well as new studios presenting for the first time. Through May 16 at 269 11th Avenue; wanteddesignnyc.com. The Future Perfect presents a complete apartment designed around new furniture by the Shanghai firm Neri Hu for De La Espada, in a new condominium building developed by DDG. Through May 17 at 12 Warren Street; thefutureperfect.com and ddgpartners.com/12warren. Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec at Vitra and Axor The three level space shared by Vitra and Axor will be given over to a celebration of the French design phenoms Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, with products the brothers designed for Vitra, Axor, Artek and Nanimarquina. Through May 17 at 29 Ninth Avenue; vitra.com and hansgrohe usa.com/axor. The new Ernest showroom holds an open house presenting its indoor and outdoor furniture and products from D'Apostrophe, Royal Botania, Renson and Delta Light. Through May 15 at 255 Fifth Avenue; ernest ny.com. This is the main event, the trade fair around which the rest of NYCxDESIGN developed. The first three days are for design professionals only; the final day, May 17, is open to the public. Browse design from more than 750 exhibitors from across the world or buy products on the spot at the Milk Stand, a pop up shop presented by the blog Design Milk in a space designed by the Brooklyn firm Bower. Through mid June at 475 Fifth Avenue; muji.com/us. The interior design firm opens its studio to present its new furniture collection for Linteloo. The cutting edge furniture store presents new work by Aelfie and Studio Proba, John Hogan and Vonnegut/Kraft. Through May 17 at 405 Broome Street; mattermatters.com. The London based jewelry designer Anabela Chan will present her nature inspired creations, including sculptures made from butterfly wings, painted crystal candy dishes for Lobmeyr and fabrics for Bernhardt Textiles. Numerous showrooms Desiron, Global Views, Cliff Young, Tucker Robbins, CF Modern, Currey Company, Metropolitan Lighting, Theodore Alexander, Raul Carrasco and others will host evening events.
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Millions of Americans have already cast votes ahead of the election, and democracy demands that one of the candidates on the ballot be the Democrats' lead questioner at the confirmation hearing for Amy Coney Barrett that begins Monday. Kamala Harris isn't just a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which Republicans control and is rushing madly to ram through President Trump's chosen replacement for the Supreme Court seat formerly held by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She is also one of the sharpest questioners on the committee, setting herself apart in the nearly four years she has been in the Senate. She has cross examined everyone from Jeff Sessions to Brett Kavanaugh and William P. Barr. Voters deserve a Senate hearing where a person aspiring to one of the nation's highest elected offices gets an opportunity to hold to account an unelected judge nominated for a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court. And a nominee whom Mr. Trump is depending on to throw the election to him if it ends up in court, and to give Republicans a generation of 6 to 3 decisions on contentious issues they cannot win legislatively, because their ideas are so unpopular. This is about democracy. As Senator Harris herself observed during Wednesday's vice presidential debate, Republicans' brute force effort to confirm Judge Barrett as people head to the polls is an affront to voters. "We're literally in an election," she said. "Over 4 million people have voted. People have been in the process of voting now." Her running mate, Joe Biden, who once led the Senate committee on which Ms. Harris sits, echoed that sentiment on Thursday: "The election has begun. There's never been a court appointment once an election has begun." That was precisely the Republican argument for denying Democrats a hearing for President Obama's nominee, Merrick Garland, in 2016. Senator Harris asking Judge Barrett point blank what she meant when she said that appointing Judge Garland would "dramatically flip the balance of power" on the Supreme Court would expose this hypocrisy as well as Judge Barrett's nakedly political assessment of the Supreme Court's membership. There is precedent in the Senate for a single woman, and a prosecutor at that, as Senator Harris once was, to lead the questioning during a Supreme Court confirmation hearing. Republicans set it in 2018, when they relied on what Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, called "a female assistant" to help them examine allegations that Justice Brett Kavanaugh had, as a teenager, sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford. Republicans sidelined that woman, Rachel Mitchell, after her performance proved ineffective. Senator Harris won't have that problem, and the stakes are even higher now. Senator McConnell and Senate Republicans are barreling ahead to elevate Judge Barrett, all other legislative priorities be damned, including Americans' urgent need for economic relief from the toll of the coronavirus. They're under orders from Mr. Trump to prioritize her confirmation above all else. That says as much about Republicans' ambitions as Judge Barrett's own. Senator Harris would be well positioned to press the nominee about her role in this crazed scramble to confirm. For one, the public needs an accounting of Judge Barrett's apparent willingness to expose herself, her family and many well wishers to Covid 19 at the mostly maskless Rose Garden event celebrating her nomination at which several attendees, including Mr. Trump and his wife, may have contracted the disease. Among those infected were senators, presidential advisers and the president of the University of Notre Dame. Many of those who attended have since faced a backlash and some have expressed remorse for their own carelessness. Senator Harris could easily lead a cross examination that probes every detail of that reckless ceremony, which the government's top infectious diseases expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, labeled a "super spreader" event. Millions of Americans have forfeited or canceled weddings, family celebrations, even the opportunity to say goodbye to loved ones who succumbed to the virus. Does the judge feel any sense of responsibility for reveling at this coronavirus hot spot? What does she have to say to those people as she herself flouted guidelines that many have observed for their own health and safety? Does it weigh on her conscience? What does that say to the American public about her own judgment and prudence? Surely other Democrats have their own questions for the nominee about her record as well her views on Roe v. Wade, the Affordable Care Act and the scope of the Second Amendment, all issues where the judge's views are deeply conservative and deserve a full airing. She may also take the pressure off people like Senator Dianne Feinstein, who many Democrats believe botched Judge Barrett's prior confirmation hearing for a seat on the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and is ill equipped to question her again, especially on matters related to the judge's Catholic faith. As Senator Harris said during the debate with Mike Pence, "It's insulting to suggest that we'd knock anyone for their faith." For the sake of democracy and the future of the Supreme Court, Senate Democrats would be doing a favor to voters and the nation by yielding most or all of their time to Senator Harris at Judge Barrett's confirmation hearing. Better yet would be if the hearing did not happen at all. But in the face of Republican intransigence, we all deserve a process where someone responsive to the electorate demands answers from someone who never will be. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.
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Opinion
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"She Would Be King" is an ambitious and expansive novel that explores the nuances of Liberian history beyond its identity as a settlement for emancipated African Americans. When Wayetu Moore was 5 years old, she and her family fled Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. It was 1989 and the country was caught in a violent civil war. Ms. Moore, her father and two sisters took refuge in her maternal grandmother's home village near Liberia's border with Sierra Leone. "My dad worked overtime to preserve our childhood," Ms. Moore said. Gunshots in the distance became "dragons fighting" and dead bodies on the streets were people "sleeping on the road." "For a long time, my understanding was that we were in this game," Ms. Moore said. "We were going to see my Mom. And there was something wrong, there were some angry people walking around, but we were mostly okay." At that time, Ms. Moore's mother was a Fulbright scholar at Columbia University's Teachers College. With few ways to contact her husband and children, she flew to Sierra Leone to arrange for their safe passage. In her debut novel, "She Would Be King," Ms. Moore, who is now 33 years old, explores Liberia's history by using the same kind of magical realism her father relied on to frame the war for his children. 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. "She Would Be King," published by Graywolf this month, follows three characters, Gbessa, June Dey and Norman Aragon, whose fates eventually intersect and initiate the formation of Liberia. Gbessa is a young Vai, or indigenous Liberian, who, because she cannot die, has been exiled from her community on the suspicion that she is a witch. June Dey is an African American man whose superhuman strength allows him to escape slavery and the Virginia plantation where he was raised. Norman Aragon is a son of a white British colonizer and a Maroon slave from Jamaica who can disappear at will. The novel is inspired by a Vai legend about an old woman who beat her cat to death, only to have the feline return as a ghost to exact fatal revenge. This minor tale, told for generations and used to caution children to "always be kind to cats," Ms. Moore writes in her author's note, includes prototypical elements of Vai myths. "It was very rare in the Vai storytelling tradition that I heard a story that didn't include someone disappearing or shape shifting," Ms. Moore said. "She Would Be King" is an ambitious and expansive novel that explores the nuances of Liberian history beyond its identity as a settlement for emancipated African Americans. Ms. Moore skillfully reconsiders the idealism of the early African American settlers through their interactions with the indigenous peoples and braids together intimate story lines centered around universal themes: falling in love, defying familial expectations and the difficulties of doing the right thing. "She is establishing a different voice," Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, a Liberian poet and an associate professor of English at Penn State Altoona, said. "She is not writing about the war, she is not writing about poverty or writing about villages in a patronizing way." Ms. Wesley likened Ms. Moore's potential legacy to that of the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, whose novels about Nigeria reignited popular interest in the country's stories. "She is cracking that space in America for Liberian writers," Ms. Wesley said. "We are in a unique position to tell as many stories as possible because they have never been written," said Vamba Sherif, a Netherlands based Liberian writer. Mr. Sherif, whose debut novel, "Land of My Fathers" resembles "She Would Be King," (both are inspired by Liberian folklore and take on the country's complicated history), admires how Ms. Moore built the story of Gbessa, the book's central character and hero, out of "a single, simple legend." When Ms. Moore was a child, her parents regaled her with bedtime stories about Liberia. These tales tethered her and her siblings to the small West African country even as they moved across the United States, from New York to Tennessee and eventually Texas, where they lived in a mostly white suburb of Houston. While Ms. Moore has fond memories of growing up in Texas, it was also isolating at times. "I just wasn't hearing anything about Africa, and certainly not Liberia, at school," she said. "And that absence, I think, was just very profound." Ms. Moore's career reflects an earnest attempt to fill this void. In 2011, after getting a master in fine arts at the University of Southern California, she launched One Moore Book, a small multicultural children's publishing house. It began as an independently funded for profit venture and the first book, "J Is for Jollof Rice," was written by Ms. Moore and illustrated by her sister Kula Moore, an art therapist who lives in Houston. A few years later, she also opened a general interest bookstore in Monrovia, where she sells Liberian literature alongside Harry Potter and "Anna Karenina."
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Books
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CHARLESTON, S.C. Witold Rybczynski , an architecture critic, author and emeritus professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania , was sitting in the lobby of a chain hotel here, trying to peg the elusive charm of this city. After all, as Mr. Rybczynski wrote in his new book, "Charleston Fancy" (Yale University Press), the city of 130,000 people has no world famous buildings, no grand boulevards and few public squares of any attractiveness. And yet, nearly 7.2 million tourists visited last year. "I think a big part of it is this preserved Colonial town," Mr. Rybczynski said, noting that after the Civil War, Charleston and its beautiful old houses and buildings "just kind of went into mothballs." Later, the historic downtown was saved from the worst of urban renewal and real estate speculation because Charlestonians were very conservative, Mr. Rybczynski said, and because the history of the city and the history of families is all mixed together. "Saving an old building was really saving your family's old building," he said. "That's why they were the first city to become aware of historic preservation and to have zoning based on history." Courier Square ( Columbus and Meeting Streets ) is a massive complex of residential lofts made to resemble an old brick factory, with an adjoining five story office building made of white stucco and stone. It's the sort of "luxury" development offering 2,000 per month studios in a gentrifying neighborhood that would be very familiar to New Yorkers, but to some Charlestonians, its presence raises concerns about what will become of their city. The building seemed to want to scream this is the new Charleston! Standing across the street, critiquing Mr. Stern's design, Mr. Rybczynski said, "This has some character. He's tried to reflect the local architecture. He's made it look like two buildings just to get the mass down." Mr. Rybczynski's next stop was more representative. He walked a short distance to the Cannonborough neighborhood, to visit his friend George Holt , who also happens to be the hero of "Charleston Fancy." Mr. Rybczynski tells the story of how Mr. Holt and a group of amateur builders and developers, including an Air Force pilot and a bookstore manager, banded together beginning in the 1980s to buy, rehab and build houses in what was then a down at the heels part of the city. In time, Mr. Holt and his friends came to redevelop much of a city block, and to stuff it with more than a dozen houses they rented or sold, an approach Mr. Rybczynski approvingly calls "locatecture." Mr. Holt, a night owl, wasn't yet ready at 10 a.m., so Mr. Rybczynski stopped for a coffee break at Brown's Court Bakery , at 199 St. Philip Street . The cafe is in a converted single house, an architectural style wholly unique to Charleston. Single houses are long, two story houses with porches on one side, so instead of having front gardens, they have side gardens. They derive their name from the layout of the living quarters, which are a single room wide. It was Mr. Rybczynski's curiosity about single houses that led him and his wife, Shirley Hallam , to visit Charleston for the first time back in the 1970s, road tripping down from Canada, where he lived and taught at the time. "Even in other South Carolina cities you don't have it," Mr. Rybczynski said. "It's a kind of a mystery. Nobody is sure where it came from; nobody has copied it. It's not like a ranch house that spread all over California." Now alert, Mr. Holt welcomed Mr. Rybczynski and a reporter to his little patch of the city, at Tully Alley and St. Philip Street, a "mixture of imagination and risk taking and weirdness," in Mr. Rybczynski's description. Several of the Tully Alley homes are less than 1,200 square feet, and one of them is remarkable in its setting the Byzantine house that Mr. Holt built for himself in 1998 because he was so moved by seeing the Hagia Sophia in Turkey. It has an atrium swimming pool surrounded by an arched colonnade, a domed living room anchored by a fireplace, and floors made of marble that Mr. Holt rescued from the trash when a store downtown was being renovated. Or, rather, had, because in 2015 the house was destroyed in a fire. Mr. Holt and Mr. Rybczynski now stood in what had been the domed living area, the roof open to the sky, the pool water murky, vines growing everywhere. The whole thing looked like an ancient Mediterranean ruin. Mr. Holt, wearing a ball cap, noted how the deep colors of the walls weren't part of the original house; the heat of the fire had made them. "I want to keep all these reds," when I rebuild, he said. "I know it sounds dumb. But the house burned. Why pretend it didn't?" Mr. Rybczynski said, "It's amazing that it looks so nice in some ways. A frame building that burns looks terrible." Mr. Holt doubted he could create something like Tully Ally in the Charleston of today. It was a looser time. "So many houses were ruined then. Some were vacant," he said. "We had far fewer city employees and a more relaxed attitude. Back when we did this, expensive engineering wasn't required to build." Mr. Holt and Mr. Rybczynski made plans to have dinner that night, and then Mr. Rybczynski was off to his next stop a civic building across town that "represents the end of classical architecture in this country," he said. As he stood admiring the simplified yet elegant design, Mr. Rybczynski seemed to mourn an entire approach to building that had vanished in the decades since. "Now, when we don't have much money, we build a cheap piece of crap , " he said. "This was a different mind set. It was: We don't have a lot of resources, but we can still do something interesting." Mr. Rybczynski's last stops were in a neighborhood where many visitors begin: the Charleston Historic District. Other American cities have their history too, but here, there's not a modern glass tower, not an ugly concrete parking garage, to ruin the transporting effect. Just block after block of preserved 18th and 19th century buildings and gorgeous tree lined streets of Antebellum mansions and Federal and single houses. "The big insight that Charleston people had was that it wasn't about saving buildings," Mr. Rybczynski said. "It was about saving neighborhoods and streets." By now, it was afternoon, and hot. It was time to rehydrate inside Millers All Day, a modern take on a Southern diner at 120 King Street . Back outside after lunch, Mr. Rybczynski headed down nearby Legare Street , in one of those neighborhoods lined with painstakingly and breathtakingly restored old homes and even grander estates. The streets were virtually empty on this afternoon, a reminder that Charleston's social life has traditionally been more internal than other cities, hidden behind walls, gates or landscaped hedges. In the Colonial era, this was a consequence of slavery, Mr. Rybczynski said. Charleston was the fourth largest city in America, but fully half of its citizens were enslaved, and the slaveholders were fearful of a revolt. In "Charleston Fancy," Mr. Rybczynski quotes Frederick Law Olmsted, who visited the city in 1853 as a journalist and observed how its black citizens were "subject to arrest, imprisonment and barbarous punishment" if found on the street after a certain time of day. Today, the streets felt deserted because many of these showcase homes have wealthy absentee owners who visit intermittently. Indeed, the only people Mr. Rybczynski encountered were landscapers and tradespeople engaged in the endless primping of these architectural beauties. Walking around, he seemed a little lost. "I must confess I prefer the other neighborhood," Mr. Rybczynski admitted. "These are beautiful. But I like the funkiness of George's neighborhood, where people are trying things." He was happy to turn around and head back uptown.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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Watching HBO's "Brexit" as an American is like going to a movie with the knowledge that you're living in the sequel. Britain's world upending vote to leave the European Union currently stymied by bregrets, brecriminations and buyer's bremorse happened in June 2016. There's scant reference to our own stunning 2016 election in the film, which airs Saturday. (Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump's onetime strategist, and the billionaire conservative donor Robert Mercer are portrayed, briefly.) But the parallels need little underlining: complacent establishments awakening too late to public anger; the exploitation of nativism and bigotry; and the frightening efficiency of social media as a way to surface grievances and weaponize them. This last aspect drives "Brexit," a snappy if unsubtle first draft of history that centers on Dominic Cummings (Benedict Cumberbatch), the prickly consultant who managed the "Leave" campaign to victory. Balding, impatient and lacking in interpersonal skills, he presents less as a revolutionary than as the revolutionaries' I.T. guy. Which is sort of what he is. Cummings, as depicted here, has no burning principle beyond a vague resentment of "the system" and contempt for the people who work within it. He doesn't even like referendums, which he says reduce complex issues to binaries. But he is driven by the technical challenge and by a never entirely explained urge to disrupt politics (which he analogizes, at one point, to an operating system). Dismissing his clients' desire to build a broad coalition, he insists on running a divisive campaign in which the difference will be made by angry Britons who don't usually vote. Key to this is an offer to help target voters from an obscure tech firm: Cambridge Analytica. This is where the dun dun dunnn will play in the minds of American politics followers, who know that the firm has been implicated in exploiting Facebook data for the Trump campaign. "British democracy," Cummings realizes, "is a lab experiment for a greater prize." Cumberbatch's tight wired performance is the best thing in this brisk but mechanical retread of recent events. His Cummings is an asocial savant not unlike Cumberbatch's Sherlock Holmes with a penchant for working through his thoughts in a supply closet. (He is fixated on the idea that he can "hear" the sound of Britain, which he describes as a groan.) Perhaps, "Brexit" suggests, he is effective precisely because he's more comfortable with people as aggregates than as individuals. Read more of our Brexit coverage here. The portrayals of figures like the U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage (Paul Ryan) and the conservative London mayor Boris Johnson (Richard Goulding), on the other hand, verge on sketch comedy impersonations. Tonally, "Brexit" lands somewhere between the dutiful style of most HBO docudramas and the frantic arm waving of Adam McKay's "The Big Short" and "Vice." Political figures are identified not just with captions but also with a thumping "LEAVE" or "REMAIN" stamped on the screen. The film, written by James Graham and directed by Toby Haynes, is itself a thumping stamp, relying heavily on eureka moments and didactic scenes. During a conversation about the amount of data people volunteer to the internet, the camera lingers on passers by who are glancing at smartwatches and communing with their phones. But "Brexit" at least knows what it's about: the idea that febrile and deadly passions, stoked for years in politics and media, can be unlocked by messaging and technology like power ups in a dystopian video game. Despite its dark message, "Brexit" often has a swinging, heist movie feel, even if the safe that's being cracked is democracy. It walks through the methods of targeting people on social media by seeing what they click on (like a graphic that draws a menacing arrow from Turkey to the British Isles), then amping up the dog whistles and incitements. The passions get more vicious and personal in a striking scene, a focus group devolves into screams, tears and racism until a pro Remain member of Parliament is murdered. In Britain, the film has been criticized on points ranging from its portrayal of Leave voters to its wading into charges of election manipulation that have yet to be officially investigated. I don't claim to be able to vet its depictions of these events, much less its behind the scenes details. But taken as a broad statement, rather than a factual account,"Brexit" is sobering if dramatically flawed. In the United States, of course, HBO has a record of election movies ("Recount," "Game Change"). Until the network takes its shot at America's own 2016 surprise, consider this a preview of coming attractions.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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When it comes to eating out in New Delhi, tourists tend to stick to well known restaurants and miss out on how locals really eat, at least according to Anubhav Sapra, a longtime resident who started Delhi Food Walks to show travelers the city's authentic cuisine through themed trips in different parts of town. "You don't get a sense of the food culture here by going to fancy places, and I wanted the people who come visit to leave with a true understanding of what that is," he said. Mr. Sapra, 32, has created and leads 15 different tours, which are four hours long and include 10 stops at street stalls as well as restaurants. The Kebab Trail, for example, explores numerous varieties of the dish. Prices for each walk are between 3,000 and 4,000 rupees a person (about 48 to 64) and include all the food.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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The embattled newspaper company Tronc moved Monday to calm rising tensions at publications on both coasts, announcing that it had named new top editors at The Los Angeles Times and The New York Daily News. Jim Kirk, the former editor and publisher of The Chicago Sun Times, took over as the editor in chief of The Times, and Jim Rich, who previously served as the editor in chief of The Daily News, will return to that role. The announcement of Mr. Kirk's new position confirmed a New York Times report on Sunday that he would assume the job held by Lewis D'Vorkin, a former chief product officer at Forbes who was not a popular figure in the newsroom during a tenure that lasted less than three months. Mr. D'Vorkin will stay on at Tronc as its chief content officer, a role that involves establishing new products to distribute its journalism. In an interview on Sunday night, Mr. Kirk, 52, conveyed a willingness to improve morale and calm the tensions between managers and Times journalists. "My message to the newsroom will be that we will be working together as one team starting tomorrow to do the best work we can," he said. Mr. Rich, who served as the editor in chief of The Daily News for a 13 month period that ended in 2016, will return to his former post on Wednesday, Tronc said. Most recently, he was the executive editor of HuffPost, a job he left in December, when he said he planned to start a nonprofit news site. During his last stint at the tabloid, Mr. Rich, 46, distinguished himself with attention grabbing headlines that excoriated Republican leaders. After Donald J. Trump won the New Hampshire primary during the 2016 presidential campaign, for instance, the Daily News front page included an image of the candidate in clown makeup with the headline "Dawn of the Brain Dead Trump comes back to life with N.H. win." Mr. Rich, whose departure from the Daily News in 2016 shocked staff members, will take over for Arthur Browne, who retired at the end of December. In a statement announcing the changes, Justin C. Dearborn, the chief executive of Tronc, said, "We are continuing to invest in high quality journalism, which will always be the company's top priority." He called Mr. Kirk a "talented news veteran" and Mr. Rich "a well established media professional." At The Times, Ross Levinsohn, who was named publisher in August, was put on leave after National Public Radio published an article that detailed sexual harassment allegations made against him while he worked at other companies. On the same day, the newsroom announced that it had voted to unionize by an overwhelming margin a move that followed years of discontent. Tronc vetted Mr. Levinsohn, a former Yahoo executive, before he was hired as The Times's publisher, but company executives were not aware that he had twice been a defendant in sexual harassment lawsuits while employed by other companies, according to two people briefed on the matter who were not permitted to speak publicly about it. The fallout from the N.P.R. report on the allegations against Mr. Levinsohn, which was published Jan. 18, reached beyond Tronc on Monday, when Tribune Media disclosed in a regulatory filing that Mr. Levinsohn had notified the company last week that he was taking leave from its corporate board. (Tribune Media and Tronc, formerly called Tribune Publishing, had been one corporation, Tribune Company, before a spinoff of the newspaper business in 2014.) Mr. Kirk joined Tronc in August and became a jack of all trades for the company, serving as the interim executive editor of The Times and the interim editor in chief of The Daily News. His new appointment was largely met with a sense of relief within the Times newsroom but also a recognition that his appointment will not undo years of frustration among employees or rid the paper of its underlying financial challenges. The man he replaced, Mr. D'Vorkin, faced suspicion in the newsroom almost from his arrival, partly because of his previous role at Forbes, where he broadened the company's native advertising offerings and introduced a product that allowed advertisers to contribute material alongside Forbes articles. Newsroom skeptics feared that he would focus more on clicks and advertising innovations than quality journalism. 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. Tronc executives decided to move Mr. D'Vorkin, 65, out of the top newsroom job at a time when they were also revisiting a companywide reorganization plan, according to two company officials briefed on the discussions. The proposal seemed intended to cut costs and increase the emphasis on making Tronc's journalism better suited to digital media. Mr. Levinsohn, the publisher now on leave, was a main architect of the restructuring plan. But the plan is now in flux, according to the two people. Mr. Levinsohn's leave came at the end of an aggressive attempt by Times management to thwart the newsroom's ultimately successful union drive a campaign that occurred as the paper's editors and reporters were distinguishing themselves with aggressive coverage of sexual harassment in Hollywood and natural disasters in California. Tensions between the paper's employees and its management team had been rising since a dispute between The Times and the Walt Disney Company. After Disney banned Times journalists from attending advance film screenings following the publication of an investigative series on the company's ties to the city of Anaheim, some people in the newsroom questioned how Mr. D'Vorkin had handled the paper's response. During a staff meeting, after learning that a recording of an earlier meeting had been leaked to a New York Times reporter, Mr. D'Vorkin said that anyone involved with the act was "morally bankrupt," according to several people in attendance. His admonition further escalated the divide between employees and management. Several journalists at The Times said they worried that the company, eager to stanch the steady stream of reports other news organizations were publishing about it, had begun monitoring their phones and computers in pursuit of leaks. Two journalists said they had been warned that the company was monitoring employees' emails. In a statement, Tronc said that it was committed to respecting employees' privacy. "There's never to our knowledge been a situation where the company is monitoring people's emails," the company said. "We are deeply troubled by the way this situation is being handled," they wrote. Times journalists also said they were concerned by what they had learned of the reorganization plan which seemed to be the subject of a presentation given by Mr. Levinsohn to investors earlier this month that described a "Los Angeles Times Network." Under the proposal, newly hired editors would supervise reporting that could be fed to all Tronc publications, according to several people briefed on the potential restructuring. That system, two of these people said, would include the creation of sites that would generate their own revenue. It would rely on Tronc employees and outside contributors who are not part of any existing Tronc newsroom. In recent weeks, newsroom employees were puzzled to discover the names of several apparently newly hired editors in an internal human resources database, an image of which was shared with The New York Times. Among them were Bruce Upbin, formerly of Forbes, who was listed as an assistant managing editor; Sylvester Monroe, formerly an editor at The Washington Post, who was also listed as an assistant managing editor; and Louise Story, a former New York Times reporter and editor who was listed as a managing editor. Ms. Story has since decided not to join Tronc, writing in an emailed statement, "I had agreed to work at Tronc and at The Los Angeles Times in very high level managerial roles. But, as a result of recent significant changes in those roles, I decided not to work there in any capacity." In the internal database, the new hires were shown under Rob Angel, the chief of business development at The Times, but are now expected to report to Mr. D'Vorkin, according to a person at Tronc familiar with the personnel decision. Since Mr. Levinsohn went on leave, Tronc and Times executives met in Chicago to discuss which parts of the restructuring plan could continue, according to the people familiar with the discussions. The recent unrest has its roots in the frustration that Times employees had with previous leaders. Last year, some grew critical of several top managers including Davan Maharaj, the editor and publisher in part over the handling of an investigation into the former dean of the medical school at the University of Southern California. Tronc removed Mr. Maharaj and several other newsroom leaders in August, saying that The Times had failed to transform fast enough on the digital side. Many employees expressed optimism that the D'Vorkin Levinsohn team would foster the kind of journalism that has garnered the paper more than 40 Pulitzer Prizes. Now they are looking toward a new leader. The Los Angeles Times Guild congratulated Mr. Kirk in a statement. "We also look forward to working together in the future as one team and we look forward to hearing his plans for the paper." Mr. Kirk said that his goal as the top editor at The Times was to "double down our great coverage of California and Los Angeles and beyond." "That's what readers expect from us, and we want to continue that," he added.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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The founders of Stem Jovin Cronin Wilesmith, left, Milana Rabkin and Tim Luckow after a conference in Los Angeles last week. Stem distributes digital music and videos for artists and then helps split and send the earnings back to each creator who was involved. When Frank Ocean's album "Blonde" came out in August, it went straight to No. 1 and became the talk of the music business because it was released completely outside the usual channels of the recording industry. The mystery was how Mr. Ocean and his team did it. One answer was revealed on Sunday in an online ad promoting "Blonde" as one of the most acclaimed releases of 2016 and noting that it was "powered by Stem." That service, which began only a year ago, has quickly become a player in a fast growing corner of the music industry: online platforms that cater to independent artists by distributing their music to streaming services and organizing the many strands of royalties that accumulate from fans' clicks. Stem, founded by three 20 somethings in Los Angeles, has attracted a clientele of young artists who operate independently yet tend to collaborate frequently with other acts, some of them stars. For them, Stem's attraction is its ability to easily manage the complex "splits" the divvying up of royalties among multiple parties that result from such collaborations. Stem Disintermedia, the company behind it, has raised 4.5 million from investors, including Upfront Ventures and Scooter Braun, who is the manager for Kanye West and Justin Bieber. The indie music sector already has a well established network of alternative distribution companies like TuneCore and CD Baby, which deliver unsigned artists' work to online services for what is usually a small fee. But those services have no means to divide the royalties if a song has, say, two producers and five writers, an example of the kind of collaboration that is now common in pop. Instead, the main performer would be responsible for accounting. Stem eliminates that burden by tracking every collaborator on a song, and requiring all parties to agree on percentage splits. Milana Rabkin, Stem's chief executive and one of its founders, compared the service to online payment apps that let friends easily split a restaurant tab. "In a world where Venmo exists," Ms. Rabkin said in an interview, "why isn't there a Venmo for Apple and Spotify?" Stem's consensus model, however, could also be its Achilles' heel, since it will not allow any party to be paid until all agree on the splits, a process that gives holdouts bargaining power. Ms. Rabkin said that most projects reached consensus in a few days and that the longest had taken "a couple months." The service takes a 5 percent cut on royalties. Representatives of Mr. Ocean declined to comment on exactly how he had used Stem. But aside from the album's initial appearance on Apple Music when it was delivered directly to Apple Stem appears to have been the vehicle used to release "Blonde" to most major services. Stem distributes music to Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon, Tidal, SoundCloud and several other outlets. While Stem's model was novel when it first appeared, it now has competition. In December, CD Baby quietly introduced a new distribution service, Soundrop, which, like Stem, tracks royalty splits although without the consensus requirement and caters to a generation more likely to post songs on YouTube and think about making money later. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. "It's an opportunity to reach a demographic that wants to create differently," said Kevin Breuner, the vice president of marketing at CD Baby. "Music distribution is a secondary thought to them." Stem, by contrast, is catching on among a class of young professionals who often operate independently but may be involved in the highest creative levels of the business. Its clients include Childish Gambino and the electronic producer Deadmau5. The company says it has distributed 6,000 pieces of content that have been streamed 500 million times. Dina LaPolt, a lawyer representing Deadmau5, said her client was using Stem to track his music on YouTube, but explained that Stem's royalty tracking system was particularly important to artists in managing the otherwise daunting task of tracking royalty splits. "Music is the only business in the world where the artist is responsible for doing all the paperwork," Ms. LaPolt said. Among Stem's most vocal advocates is Anna Wise, 28, a singer and songwriter who won a Grammy Award for her work with Kendrick Lamar. She was working as a nanny before she began using the service, which she said had provided her with a steady income "enough to pay Brooklyn rent," she said and devote herself fully to making music. Her latest album, "The Feminine: Act II," released through Stem, comes out on Feb. 17.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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"Bandstand," an openhearted, indecisive new musical, wants you clapping your hands and clenching your fists, tapping your toes and blinking back tears. It is both a peppy celebration of can do spirit and a more somber exploration of what American servicemen experienced when they marched home from World War II. Directed and choreographed by Andy Blankenbuehler, the Tony Award winning choreographer of "Hamilton," with book and lyrics by the Broadway newcomers Richard Oberacker and Rob Taylor, and a 1940s pastiche score by Mr. Oberacker, "Bandstand" is an undercooked slice of apple pie, served with a dollop of anguish. Pfc. Donny Novitski (Corey Cott) saw action in the Solomon Islands and saw hell on Bougainville. Back home in Cleveland in 1945, he wants to pick up life just where he let it fall. Big dreams for a guy who can't even sleep through the night. A hunky pianist with restless fingers and floppy hair, Donny can't book gigs at the nightclubs he used to play, as their piano benches are now filled with new talent, mostly men who didn't serve. Haunted by a bad conscience and tempted by the bottle, he gets a reprieve when he hears about a Tribute to the Troops! contest. Bands from all 48 state will compete to write and perform the next great swing song "in honor of our boys in uniform." First, Donny has to put together a group, which he does in the lilting, satisfying "I Know a Guy." His lineup: bass, drums, trumpet, trombone, sax with a twist. As Donny sings, "Every horn and clarinet/Will be a military vet." All of the musicians he recruits have served. Not one came through the war unscathed. Which means they can really cook. And ache. And seethe. And they do. In the style of recent revivals of "Company" and "Sweeney Todd," the versatile actors play their instruments live, with the rest of the orchestra hidden in the pit. (Bill Elliott and Greg Anthony Rassen did the lively orchestrations.) This corps has chops, but it doesn't have a hit, not until Donny meets Julia Trojan (Laura Osnes), the widow of his war buddy, nicknamed Rubber. Turns out she's a singer and a poet and conveniently a knockout. Now the band has a vocalist and a song: "Love Will Come and Find Me Again," a bluesy tune about getting ready to date when your man is among the war dead. That no one wonders if this is the ideal tune to honor the troops is one of the piece's head scratchers. Here's another: What is "Bandstand" truly about? Wartime musicals are a tricky business. From "On the Town" to "South Pacific" to "The Sound of Music," they all have to balance martial reality with theatrical flair. Here, the push is toward "let's put on a show" jollity, shadowed by a more somber impulse to examine what it means to come home half broken. This gloomier inclination is more compelling; there's a wrenching number toward the end of the first act when Mr. Blankenbuehler uses dance, in "Right This Way," to suggest the psychological burdens these men carry. As each band member tries to move through space, he finds himself dragged down by dancers playing fallen comrades. It's a symbolic gesture that hits like a gut punch and a great argument for why theater can sometimes tell a story more boldly and more viscerally than a movie or a television show. Yet "Bandstand" can't sustain this solemnity. It's respectful of veterans, but not of itself, ultimately quitting on its own ambitions a theatrical case of soldier's heart. The script never fleshes out the members of the backing band, and in the second act with the exception of a defiant, devastating and somewhat unlikely 11 o'clock number ("Welcome Home") the show trades real and probably unresolvable conflict for familiar clashes between love and fear, art and business. Romance, record sales and a savvy contracts lawyer can fix trauma? Someone tell the V.A. A veneer of seriousness cuts down on the fun. The set, designed by David Korins, feels deliberately cramped; the lighting, by Jeff Croiter, is often sepulchral; and the cheerier numbers like "First Steps First" and "You Deserve It" sound a lot more formulaic than the darker ones. (The resolutely goofy "I Got a Theory," an ode to Cleveland, is an odd exception.) A swing band exists to set the crowd jumping and jiving, but while Mr. Blankenbuehler capitalizes on the period's shoulder shrugs and swiveling hips, big dance numbers are few, short and subdued. Swing borrows its beat from African American musical styles, as Mr. Blankenbuehler acknowledged in a recent interview, and more than a million African Americans served in World War II. But you won't find those musicians or fighters here. In some ways, that's fair. Music and combat weren't typically integrated at the time. Bringing in a significant African American character might have derailed the narrative that Mr. Taylor and Mr. Oberacker constructed. (So might the inclusion of a woman who did more during the war than languish and work at a cosmetics counter.) But that they found no way to acknowledge these contributions, except for a throwaway line about Duke Ellington, feels like a missed opportunity. At "Hamilton," Mr. Blankenbuehler learned how diverse casting can galvanize familiar stories. He and the producing team fail to apply that lesson to this show, even the ensemble. Still, you can't fault the casting of the leads. Mr. Cott, whom we last saw squatting on a park bench in the misbegotten "Gigi" revival, has a crushing charisma and a sob in the throat song style that makes the haunted, arrogant Donny mighty endearing. Mr. Cott even makes high waisted pants seem plausible. (The nifty costumes are by Paloma Young.) Ms. Osnes, a brunette with a silvery voice, puts real feeling behind Julia's loss. The expert Beth Leavel nails the underwritten role of Julia's pragmatic mother. But even fine actors can't make this story more persuasive. If "Bandstand" really worked, the finale would find you laughing and crying. Instead, you might just make like the dancers and shrug.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our twice weekly Watching newsletter here. Looking for a resolution to kick the year off? How about streaming better, not streaming less. Below are our favorite TV series and movies coming to the major services in January, plus a roundup of all the best new titles in all genres. (Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice.) "Spinning Out" has all the elements of a juicy teen drama (a rich bad boy jock, terrible parents, awkward sex, kids popping pills), but also ice skating! Kaya Scodelario anchors this surprisingly dark show as Katerina, a 21 year old former skating prodigy who fell on the ice and suffered a horrible head injury. Now she has some choices to make: Can she start skating again, this time with a partner, who happens to be the aforementioned jock? Should she move to London with her uninspiring boyfriend? What about her cute co worker? Then there's her unstable mom (a scene stealing January Jones) and precocious teenage sister, who's the current star of the rink. Making it as a female skater means being very feminine as well as very athletic, and "Spinning Out" is an unflinching look at the pain (both physical and mental) required to be that kind of beautiful. Self harm, accidental injury and mental illness are handled sensitively, but this is not a show for younger viewers. Janelle Monae narrates this Vox docuseries, which I would not recommend watching with your parents or in public. The series does exactly what its title says in great detail. Combining graphics, interviews and demonstrative footage and guided by Monae's warm, nonjudgmental voice over, the series offers a thorough education of even the most taboo aspects of its subject matter. The opening episode on sexual fantasies, especially, does not hold back from visualizing its topic in ways we can't really describe in this paper. As informative as the series is, it's also funny: Later episodes explore the history of birth control and fertility science, comparing the sperm's journey with the 1986 film "Labyrinth." Leslie Jones always seems like she's having the most fun onstage, and this hourlong special is no exception. She looks back at her life decade by decade, comparing, for example, the passage of time in her 30s with the fate of a ripe banana and roasting today's 20 somethings for marching in protests instead of being joyfully irresponsible. Now in her 50s, she is very funny on what it's like to be making money and being "white people famous," and on the various ways her body is letting her down. At one point she sings Tevin Campbell's "Can We Talk" and jumps up and down with what definitely seems like spontaneous joy when the crowd sings it back. The special is also directed by the "Game of Thrones" creators, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. The gals are back for a sixth season of shenanigans, and fans will be pleased to find that we're in classic "Grace and Frankie" territory: Businesses get launched, family tensions bubble away, Frankie smokes weed, Grace drinks martinis, and both try to build relationships with men that will rival their love for each other. The chemistry between Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin gets a lot of attention, as it should, but it is also a joy to see Tomlin's Frankie in a scene with her ex husband, played by Sam Waterson. Also: The Hanson daughters wear some really excellent suits this season. This is one of the sweetest shows on the air. Looking for a tear jerker? This anthology series is based on the true experiences of immigrants in the United States, and each episode tells a different story of triumph over hardship. It can drift into the saccharine, but "Little America" makes a convincing case that there are many ways of "making it," with characters' successes ranging from making a national sports team to having the confidence to do karaoke. The show finds humor in the strangeness of American culture, like the increasingly furious notes passed between people meditating at a silent retreat and a satisfying rant about a hamburger by a Nigerian student new to Oklahoma. Produced by Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon ("The Big Sick") and Alan Yang ("Master of None"), the stories were originally collected by Epic Magazine, and the series has already been renewed for a second season. This tense show opens with an investigation into a child's murder, in a setup you just know is too straightforward to be true. The evidence against Terry, the local Little League coach (Jason Bateman, who also directs) is stacking up, but "The Outsider" is based on the Stephen King book of the same name. Soon enough, contradictions emerge: Terry seems to have been in two places at once, and the twists keep coming. The hard nosed cop on the case, played by Ben Mendelsohn, is mourning his own child's recent death, and his confidence that he understands the world is further shaken as the strange events unfurl. The first two episodes are directed by Bateman, and throughout the camerawork effectively builds tension and a sense that no one (human at least) is really in control. The Italian director Paolo Sorrentino is back with another surreally extravagant imagining of the contemporary Vatican. Our review of his 2017 HBO series, "The Young Pope," called it both "beautiful and ridiculous," qualities that also dominate in "The New Pope." The young pope (Jude Law) is now in a coma, and so the cardinals install a successor on the papal throne: Sir John Brannox, a haunted and haunting English nobleman played by John Malkovich. Both Law and Malkovich appear naked onscreen early on, and the opening credits have women twerking in slow motion against a fluorescent cross. But for all this visual excess, the show also grapples with grief, faith and power in some thought provoking ways. Based on Lindy West's memoir "Shrill: Notes From a Loud Woman," this charming comedy's second season opens just after the first season ended, with Annie (Aidy Bryant) triumphantly storming out of the office. Whether quitting her blogging job was a good idea, however, remains to be seen. She's still on a journey to step into her power, and this season grapples a little more with what being responsible with that power looks like. At times this can lead us into that territory of casual, quarter life self indulgence staked out by Hannah Horvath on "Girls," but the show is still observant and funny. The half hour episodes really speed by, but at least this time there are eight episodes in the season instead of six.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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Plants may not be getting enough credit. Not only do they remember when you touch them, it turns out that they can make risky decisions that are as sophisticated as those made by humans, all without brains or complex nervous systems. And they may even judge risks more efficiently than we do. Those are the findings of a study published Thursday in Current Biology. Researchers showed that when faced with the choice between a pot containing constant levels of nutrients or one with unpredictable levels, a plant will pick the mystery pot when conditions are sufficiently poor. "It raises a question, not about plants, but about animals and humans, because if plants can solve this problem simply," then maybe humans can, too, said Hagai Shemesh, a plant ecologist at Tel Hai College in Israel who worked on the study. "We have a very fancy brain, but maybe most of the time we're not using it." In a set of experiments, Dr. Shemesh and Alex Kacelnik, a behavioral ecologist at Oxford University, grew pea plants and split their roots between two pots. Both pots had the same amount of nutrients on average, but in one, the levels were constant; in the other, they varied over time. Then the researchers switched the conditions so that the average nutrients in both pots would be equally high or low, and asked: Which pot would a plant prefer?
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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TO LOVE AND TO CHERISH: 's fourth novel "An American Marriage" Oprah's latest book club pick, currently sitting at No. 2 on the hardcover fiction list traces the lives of Roy, a black man wrongly convicted of rape, and his wife, Celestial. Their stories unfold through the letters they write each other while he is in prison. "The horror of this story lies in its banality: An innocent man, happily married, who does all the right things to succeed, is nonetheless sidelined to a concrete cell," Stephanie Powell Watts wrote in the Book Review. The idea for "An American Marriage" came to Jones one day in an Atlanta mall. She told NPR, "I overheard a couple arguing. He looked fine, but she looked great. And she said to him, 'Roy, you know you wouldn't have waited on me for seven years.' And he said, 'I don't know what you're talking about; this wouldn't have happened to you in the first place!'" In her first draft, Jones focused on Celestial. "But writing about her didn't seem quite honest," she explains. "Roy's situation is so urgent that I just needed to hear his voice. So then I rewrote the whole thing from his point of view. The draft was solid, but I thought it was too familiar it was basically a reboot of the 'Odyssey.' Roy was a man returning home after a tremendous battle, and all he wants is to find a faithful wife and a gracious house." Then, when hearing the poet Claudia Rankine read from her book "Citizen," the lines "What happens to you doesn't belong to you. It's not yours. Not yours only" struck her. "This is when I came to understand that what happens to Roy may be an ancient story, but there is a modern way to tell it," she says. Wrongful imprisonment and mass incarceration are topics that have "always been at the forefront in black communities," Jones explains. "Since childhood, I have harbored a fear that prison would abduct the men in my life. I think I can trace it back to when I was a little girl and my father came home late, after getting lost trying to give our housekeeper a ride home."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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When Kima Jones, an independent publicist based in Los Angeles, agreed to help the poet Tyehimba Jess with his publicity campaign for his second collection, "Olio," she knew it would be a breakout work. "I was still a baby publicist. I did not have a long list of clients. I didn't have a long list of contacts," Jones said. "But I believed in the book from the beginning and what I really believed in was that it was genre defying poetry." In 2017, "Olio" won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. It would be easy to write off the story of "Olio" as a coincidence. In an ideal world there is no causal relationship between publicity and a book's critical, or even commercial, success. But publicity plays an important and often misunderstood role in how a book and, ultimately, its writer live in the public imagination. And it's why Jones is determined to use her company, Jack Jones Literary Arts, to change the way writers of color, especially women, and their work are received by the world. "I think what drew me to publicity and marketing was I really want to see folks win," Jones said. "At the time so many books that I loved weren't getting critical attention, and those were always black books." Jack Jones is only in its third year of operation and Jones has seen a lot of winners. She worked with Angie Thomas to promote "The Hate U Give," and with Leesa Cross Smith on her debut, "Whiskey and Ribbons," which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize. Since its founding, Jack Jones has expanded rapidly. In 2017, Jones hired her first employee and moved the company from her home to an office in downtown Los Angeles. She also added a writers retreat exclusively for women of color which, now in its second year, has garnered the support of literary heavyweights such as Roxane Gay, the author of "Bad Feminist," and the poet Natalie Diaz. At the urging of Angela Flournoy, the author of "The Turner House," Jones is also starting a speaker's bureau, which represents R.O. Kwon, the author of "The Incendiaries," and John Keene, who won a 2018 MacArthur "genius" grant, among others. "People don't really think about what goes into making a book successful," said Flournoy, who is also a friend of Jones's. "And Kima is really revolutionary with the books that she has helped to amplify." From that moment, Jones began writing in earnest, turning "anything into a story" and filling notebooks with adventures. She found power in these tales, which she says helped her through six years in the foster care system. 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. "You are changing schools two to three times a year depending on how often you leave a home. You just don't tell people that you are a foster care kid," she said. "You create a story around your life and what is happening to it." In 1994, when she was 12 years old, Jones was reunited with her family and moved to Poughkeepsie, N.Y. She stayed there for several years and enrolled at Dutchess Community College before transferring to Sarah Lawrence. For a variety of reasons, a combination of financial issues and bureaucracy, Jones did not finish her degree. "I love learning, but I don't like schools and I don't particularly care for most institutions," she said. Jones went on to work a series of odd jobs: "Every working class job in America that you can probably think of, I've done it," she said. These included being a nurses' aide, a 911 dispatcher and a saleswoman for leather goods and luggage. In 2013, she was accepted as a PEN America Emerging Voices fellow. That January, she moved to Los Angeles where she immersed herself in the literary scene and began to lay the plans for her current career. The program was only nine months long and, with a one time stipend of 1,000, offered little in the way of financial support. But at the end of her fellowship, Jones decided to stay in Los Angeles and continue writing. Jones always knew she wanted to start a company related to publishing. Her love of small press books and her frustrations with the way published black writers were frequently overlooked, led her to settle on publicity and marketing. It would allow her to choose her own clients and be her own boss. However, despite the independence it can afford, publicity is a difficult space for a woman of color to break into because like most of the publishing industry, it remains dominated by white women. "For so long publishing has had a very white culture," said Hannah Ehrlich, the director of marketing and publicity at Lee and Low, a multicultural publishing house that conducts representative surveys of diversity across the industry. "You have huge markets that are being underserved or untapped because there is no one in the room to suggest going to those outlets for coverage, or those outlets are not being valued as important places to market a book and the result, of course, is that maybe those books don't reach their desired audiences and don't sell well." Jones started Jack Jones Literary Arts in March 2015 and her first clients were Tananarive Due and Dolen Perkins Valdez. "Of course two of the most respected black women in African American literature say hey, I want to work with you on my book. It was instant credibility," she said. Due knew Jones initially as a writer. Their work had been included in the same anthology, "Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History," in 2014. "People forget sometimes Kima is also a writer," Due said. "Our meeting was really in an artist to artist capacity." But Due was immediately taken by Jones and her planning abilities, particularly after she planned an event for the anthology. So she hired Jones the next year to promote her first collection of short stories, "Ghost Summer." For Lilliam Rivera, the author of "The Education of Margot Sanchez," working with Jones was a "no brainer." The two were in the same PEN Emerging Voices cohort and bonded over being Los Angeles transplants. When it came time for Rivera to choose a publicist, she chose Jones. "I didn't have to explain, yes, let's hit up all these outlets that are geared to Latino markets," Rivera said. "It was really important for it to be tied to my community, to the people who needed to read the book, and Jack Jones just really understands that." "The mission was never just about publicity for me," Jones said. "I want to work with not just authors, but also publishing houses and presses that are interested in new and profound literature that is taking different risks and challenges." When Jones meets with a client, she tries to figure out what they want for themselves. She still hits the same targets as other publicists, such as getting excerpts, interviews and features into newspapers and magazines, but she also creates campaign goals aligned with the client's aspirations, which often reflect who they are or what they value. "Everyone's big dream is different," Jones said. "Some people's big dream is NPR, some people's big dream is Oprah, some people's big dream is their school deciding to use their book in curriculum." She also sends the books to her sisters, whom she calls her "barometers" and is very close to. "All of my sisters are moms, they are busy with their children," she said. "If they can make time for a book and fit it into their lives and finish it, then I know other people will do that."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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In the world's ongoing quest to respond to the SARS CoV 2 coronavirus, one of the tools most often invoked and hailed is testing testing for current infections, to determine who is ill and contagious, and testing for antibodies, a sign of past infection and possibly, too, of future immunity. The goal is to identify people who might spread the virus and isolate them, and to allow anyone protected from reinfection to resume an active social and professional life. Democrats in the United States Senate have proposed a plan for "fast, free testing in every community." At a recent news briefing, Andrew M. Cuomo, the governor of New York State, declared: "The more testing, the more open the economy." President Trump's new business advisory council has warned that the American economy will not rebound until wide scale screening takes place. But there are major problems with this approach. Far too few tests are available in the United States. Some are shoddy. Even the ones that are precise aren't designed to produce the kind of definitive yes no results that people expect. The first type of test, the reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT PCR) test, diagnoses SARS CoV 2 infections by analyzing cells collected from the nose or back of the throat. It converts the cells' RNA into DNA and then, using polymerase enzymes, duplicates the DNA again and again, so that there's enough of the virus that it can be detected, if it is present at all. This process is known as "amplification." As of April 27, about 5,593,000 such tests had been performed in the United States, according to the COVID Tracking Project. That's far less testing, per capita, than in many other advanced countries, and it's not nearly enough, especially since people will need to be screened repeatedly: Anyone who tests negative for SARS CoV 2 today could be exposed to it tomorrow, particularly in areas where the virus is spreading rapidly. Yet for all the calls and recommendations to get many more tests done, there is a more fundamental problem that is far less recognized: The accuracy of RT PCR tests is inherently limited. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recommends 40 cycles of amplification, but even after those, too little of the virus's genetic material might be present to be detectable. One consequence is that even when diagnostic tests aren't faulty and they are performed properly, some people who test negative for SARS CoV 2 actually are infected a reading known as a "false negative." In a recent study by researchers at the Cleveland Clinic of five commonly used diagnostic tests, nearly 15 percent of the results were false negatives. Chinese scientists published a study in February that found the false negative rate of some tests conducted at the Third People's Hospital in Shenzhen, southern China, between Jan. 11 and Feb. 3 was as high as 40 percent. An article published earlier this month in Mayo Clinic Proceedings cautioned that "even with test sensitivity values as high as 90 percent" (really rather precise), the danger posed by false negative results that is, the health risk created by infected people mistakenly being told they are infection free was significant and that it would only increase as testing increases overall. The second kind of test is serology, which detects the presence of antibodies to the virus in the bloodstream. Antibodies are evidence of the body's reaction to an infection, of the fact that a person was previously infected; their presence might also suggest that the person is now immune to the virus. We say "might" and "suggest," not "prove," because the notion that immunity to SARS CoV 2 can be acquired through infection is only, for now, an assumption based on past experience with other viruses. No scientific studies have confirmed this hypothesis yet. Scientists worldwide are working to determine if in the case of SARS CoV 2, too, infection confers immunity, and if so, how effectively and for how long. But the first serological studies made public to date have been flawed or too easy to misinterpret. In a much discussed study of 3,330 residents of Santa Clara County, Calif., conducted in early April, 2.5 percent to 4.2 percent of the subjects tested positive for antibodies to SARS CoV 2 a finding suggesting that some 50 to 85 times more people in the community had been infected than the official figures stated. The study, which had not been peer reviewed before publication, came under fire for various methodological flaws, including selection bias: Recruitment for the study was conducted via social media, and some subjects might have volunteered in order to get tested because they had reason to believe they had been infected. One question that debate has highlighted is whether a study conducted in a suspected hot spot of infection in Santa Clara County or anywhere can hope to say something useful about the population as a whole or any other group beyond its own subjects. Consider also this serological study conducted in the town of Gangelt, Germany: Some 15 percent of residents tested were found to have SARS CoV 2 antibodies but the town was the site of a carnival thought to have been a super spreader of infection. As for the blood work itself, serological tests, like RT PCR tests, have inherent limitations to do with accuracy. Even the most precise antibody tests don't produce neat, binary results. Measuring antibodies isn't like determining if a light has been switched on or off; it's more like gauging the intensity of a bulb controlled by a rheostat. One example: In the early days of an infection, while a patient's immune system is still revving up, their antibody levels might be too low to detect. At the same time, it is also a principle of epidemiology that the lower the prevalence of an infection in a studied population, the greater the chance that testing for antibodies will yield false positive results. (That's because when testing in a population with few total cases of infection, the number of false positives will make up a larger share of all positive results.) And the consensus among the leading epidemiologists and clinical lab experts we talk to regularly is that, to date, only between 5 and 15 percent of the population of the United States has been infected with SARS CoV 2. These features are one reason an April 17 advisory from the F.D.A. recommending the use of serological tests simultaneously warned that the agency "does not expect that an antibody test can be shown to definitively diagnose or exclude SARS CoV 2 infection." Last Friday, the World Health Organization released a scientific brief that said, "There is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from Covid 19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection." Given these limitations, what, then, can be done to put in place an effective, large scale testing program in the United States? After the outcry over the initial failure of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to develop reliable RT PCR tests, the F.D.A. invoked emergency provisions to allow the use of Covid 19 test kits without their needing to undergo the agency's standard review for accuracy. As a result, coronavirus testing in the United States is a Wild West, with at least 61 new RT PCR tests and more than 136 unvetted antibody tests currently in use. The F.D.A. must bring order to this chaos and determine which tests work well. It should stick to its normal review process but expedite it by giving it top priority with its clinical reviewers and bringing in more reviewers as necessary. The rush for widespread testing has also created unprecedented global demand for essential test components, like the reagents needed to process RNA and the swabs used to collect samples for RT PCR tests. Major shortages could persist for months in the United States and elsewhere: Demand is likely to outstrip even increased production, as more and more countries try to test an ever larger share of their populations. Governments throughout the world and the research, medical supply and clinical lab industries must unite to vastly increase global production of reagents and sampling equipment. Achieving this will take months and require building new capacity, presumably with public subsidies. The time and costs involved will be considerable, but such an effort is the only way to test large populations for this infection (and for others in the future). A blue ribbon panel of public health, laboratory and medical experts, ethicists, legal scholars and elected officials should be convened immediately to set out a road map with realistic goals for testing and contact tracing. It should also develop a national strategy for monitoring hot spots of cases and the cycles of troughs and spikes in infections that will almost certainly continue until an effective vaccine is widely available or much of the population has become immune to the virus. In the meantime, and for as long as testing for SARS CoV 2 is too limited or unreliable, the United States must ramp up what public health professionals call "syndromic surveillance": the practice by medical personnel of observing, recording and reporting telltale patterns of symptoms in patients so that local health authorities, mayors and governors can anticipate and plan for the likely spread of a disease. This system, supported by funding and technical assistance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been put in place for seasonal infectious diseases like influenza and are currently being used to track Covid 19 symptoms. It should be expanded to include even more reporting locations. Getting a handle on this pandemic will take many more months, and in the United States, as elsewhere, the effort will only succeed with the public's cooperation. Much resolve will be needed to endure physical distancing measures over the long haul, including through the next waves of infection that are bound to hit. And people cannot be expected to accept the great economic and social costs required if they do not also understand the limitations of this campaign. Informing the public involves clearly acknowledging what is still not known about this virus, and it involves stating what tests simply cannot do. It also means accepting this painful paradox: We turn to testing in the hope of managing the pandemic, but testing won't get better until the pandemic gets worse. Michael T. Osterholm ( mtosterholm) is director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. Mark Olshaker is a writer and documentary filmmaker. They are the authors of "Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs." The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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MUNICH This year's Theatertreffen, the annual festival of the best in German language theater, was supposed to be something different. After years of criticism that the event was a boy's club that ignored female artists, Theatertreffen's organizers had introduced a quota: At least half the productions would be directed by women or majority female collectives. As it turned out, that wasn't even the biggest change to the festival this year. When the coronavirus pandemic meant that the event, held each May in Berlin, couldn't go ahead as planned, its organizers salvaged what they could by shifting it online. Starting May 1, the festival made recordings of select productions available to stream on its website. Of the six streamed productions, four are directed by women, an even more favorable ratio for female theatermakers. The decision to bring in a quota came after years of debate about gender imbalances in German theaters, newly amplified in the age of MeToo. (Productions from Switzerland and Austria, countries where issues of gender parity in the arts have received less attention than in Germany, are also eligible.) Last year, a third of the productions were directed by women, which was a marked increase from 2018, when only a single production directed by a woman made the cut. "It was really embarrassing," Shirin Sojitrawalla, a theater critic and selection committee member, said in an interview with The Times that year. She added that achieving gender parity at the festival would be difficult when comparatively few women direct for the country's major stages. There was "Chinchilla Arschloch, waswas," for instance, directed by Helgard Haug, a member of the German arts collective Rimini Protokoll. First performed in Frankfurt, it features three nonactors with Tourette's syndrome who candidly discuss their conditions over the course of a semi scripted performance that features soliloquizing, musical routines, games and audience participation. Sometimes they are called on to suppress their tics; at others, to indulge them. (A favorite tic is to shout out "Heil Hitler!") Beyond opening up a safe space of sorts for the performers, the show's conceit, of subjecting theater to a high degree of unpredictable behavior, is the show's most unusual aspect. Witty and sympathetic though it is, the video of the 100 minute performance is tough going. More than other shows that formed Theatertreffen's digital package, this one suffered in recording from the loss of the immediacy and unpredictability that is unique to live theater. Also inhabiting the more experimental fringes of theater was Anta Helena Recke's "Blows to Humanity" from the Munchner Kammerspiele. The young German Senegalese director's chamber production is a meditative and mysterious treatise on the subjective power of the gaze. The points of contact range from Freud to German Romantic painting to postcolonial theory over a sparse, hourlong production that asks questions about observing and being observed. Some might consider it open ended, but the production struck me as underdeveloped. In any event, like "Chinchilla Arschloch, waswas," it hardly seemed to warrant its coveted spot in the festival selection. The festival trod more artistically solid ground with its less experimental offerings. Sandra Huller's revelatory performance as Hamlet made Johan Simons' sparse production of Shakespeare's tragedy feel like an honorary member of this female led theater crop. As the melancholy Dane, Huller, an actress best known for her performance in the 2016 breakout German movie "Toni Erdmann," digs deep into the character's grief and isolation in this spare yet faithful production, which originated at the Schauspielhaus Bochum. I was dismayed that Anne Lenk's sleek and edgy production of Moliere's "The Misanthrope," one of the few choices I agreed with the selection committee on, wasn't included in the digital lineup. In its absence, the only canonical stage work directed by a woman was Claudia Bauer's production of "Sweet Bird of Youth" from the Schauspiel Leipzig. Bauer, whose "Tartuffe" was a highlight of last year's festival, has taken Tennessee Williams's lurid 1959 play and given it her characteristically flamboyant treatment. Yet the most surprising thing about the production is how faithful it is to Williams's text, about a failed actor who returns to his hometown on the Gulf Coast with an aging starlet. Looking for his high school sweetheart and his lost youth, he discovers a trail of alcoholism, drug abuse and sexually transmitted disease. The video projections, fog machines and frantic musical performances add tedium rather than excitement to Williams's twisted soap opera. While the acting is impressively energetic, it is impossible to care about any of the characters in this shrill production. In the end, Bauer leaves her fine actors stranded in a freak show that never touches a core of humanity. The result isn't tragic, merely grotesque. That production, the German premiere of Alice Birch's "Anatomy of a Suicide," was also the festival's most gripping entry. The young British playwright's 2017 work is a harrowing examination of three generations of women grappling with depression and the legacy of suicide. Katie Mitchell's production, originally seen at London's Royal Court Theater, transferred to the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg late last year. (The Atlantic Theater Company presented the New York premiere in February.) Birch burrows deep inside her emotionally complex characters as they navigate life saddled by society's oppressive expectations. Mitchell, a British director, is perhaps the most acclaimed female theatermaker working in Europe today. She is no stranger to German stages, where she has long brought her rigorous and technically precise aesthetic to both drama and opera. The most unusual thing about "Anatomy of a Suicide" is that the three plot lines, spanning decades, are narrated simultaneously. Mitchell stages each story on a different section of the stage, and the spectator's attention darts between the three discrete narratives, steering through the web of overlapping dialogues. The result is an absorbing, demanding play, and production that, sadly, suffers on video. In this German theater festival, it seemed more than a touch ironic that a British playwright director team should provide the most incisive and compelling female perspective. Perhaps homegrown female directors are less interested in examining issues explicitly from a woman's point of view. Based on the evidence of this Theatertreffen a small but telling sample even if the future of German theater is female, it may not look that different from what we have already.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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THE hot spot here seems to be the Mall at Short Hills, a posh center with 160 stores covering 1.3 million square feet. Off an exit ramp of State Route 24, it has a Bloomingdale's, a Macy's, a Neiman Marcus, a Nordstrom and a Saks Fifth Avenue, plus dozens of specialty shops and, of course, valet parking. Kathy Fitzgerald Cocca, a vice president for corporate communications of Public Service Electric and Gas, and her husband, Mike, have lived close to the mall for the last 16 years, but the abundance of shopping and restaurants is far from the only reason they have enjoyed Short Hills, a picturesque, lush suburb with lots of elbow room. "I like being a half hour from New York City, and I like being five minutes from the mall," said Ms. Cocca, who with her husband bought a 1929 Tudor here for 875,000 in 1996, "but when I drive up Nottingham Road to my house, I always smile. It's so pretty." Stewart Hartshorn, a 19th century tycoon who made his fortune making spring roller shades, clearly did not have a giant mall with Bulgari, Fendi and Dior in mind when he began to buy about 1,500 acres in Essex County with the idea of creating a comfortable commuter suburb. The shopping is more like the icing on the cake. According to a history written in 1946 by his daughter, Cora Hartshorn, he named his development Short Hills after the Lenape name for the area, Little Hills. Never incorporated, it is now part of the Township of Millburn, total population about 20,000. But Short Hills has its own ZIP code, 07078, and its lot sizes tend to be larger than Millburn's. Jason Grossman, who works for a New York real estate investment group and moved to New Jersey 10 years ago from New York City, finds the commute from Short Hills manageable. "It's very close to the city, and it's a convenient place to live as a commuter," said Mr. Grossman, who takes the New Jersey Transit Midtown Direct line into the city and also makes business trips out of Newark Airport, about 15 minutes away. "You're really five minutes away from practically everything." "When your commute goes from 10 to 15 minutes to an hour and 10 minutes door to door," he added, "it takes a little bit of an adjustment. But when you think about it, anywhere you live in the 'burbs is going to be at least a commute of 50 minutes to an hour. It's something we all give up to get more space." The public schools are a particular source of pride. The Millburn Township School District has five elementary schools, a middle school and Millburn High School, which was judged in 2008 and 2010 to be the No. 1 public high school in the state by New Jersey Monthly magazine. A high percentage of Millburn graduates are accepted to top colleges and universities, according to the state Department of Education. "The education absolutely cannot be beat," said Sandra Haimoff, a speech therapist who also serves as Millburn Township's part time mayor. "This reason alone is why so many people want to move into the area." And as usual, that quality comes at a price. Of the 77 residences for sale in the 07078 ZIP code recently on the Garden State Multiple Listings Service, none were listed for less than 500,000, and 36 were asking more than 2 million. A three bedroom 1962 ranch renovated in 2006 had an asking price of 999,999. Vera Chapman, an agent for Keller Williams Realty in neighboring Summit, said the fields most heavily represented in Short Hills were finance, pharmaceuticals, publishing, medicine and law. "Home values in Short Hills have not seen the significant downturn that other towns have experienced," Ms. Chapman said. "Its proximity to Manhattan, the ease of commuting on the Midtown Direct and its excellent school system have helped the home market." Also, by suburban standards, the area has a measure of ethnic diversity. According to 2010 census figures, for instance, 15 percent of the students at Millburn High School speak a first language other than English; 3.6 percent speak Mandarin and 2 percent speak Korean. "It's kind of a melting pot," Mr. Grossman said. "It's not as diverse as New York City, but it's pretty diverse." Bordered by Route 24, which provides access to Interstate 78, Short Hills is tucked into a hilly, sylvan pocket in the southwestern corner of Essex, surrounded by Millburn, Summit and South Mountain Reservation. Millburn and Summit have shopping (and restaurants and theaters), but Short Hills also has its own strip shopping centers. The topography gives it a different feel than neighboring areas. Streets meander over hills and past large lawns. Houses run the style gamut, from rangy antiques to new stone edifices to tidy (though not inexpensive) ranches. Marcia Wilf, an educational philanthropist, recently listed her eight bedroom eight bath 1937 colonial, with guest house, on 3.5 acres on Hartshorn Road for sale (asking price, 3.6 million, reduced from 4.995 million) in order to downsize to a condominium in Verona. But she has mixed feelings about leaving, after 30 years, because, as she said, "I just liked everything." "The best thing was when my son was growing up, you never had to worry about anything happening in town," she recalled. "It was a nice, comfortable feeling. You never had to worry about the kids going into town at night." Residences on the Garden State Multiple Listing Service with Short Hills mailing addresses ranged from a three bedroom 1926 colonial, for 599,000, to a six bedroom colonial on 5.39 acres, built in 1938 and renovated in 1995, for 8.995 million. In the middle, at 1.995 million, is a five bedroom colonial built in 1951 and renovated in 2006, with an annual tax bill of 18,396. Lisa Baratto, Millburn Township's tax assessor, said 257 houses sold in Millburn and Short Hills in 2010; the average sale price was 1.178 million. She said 217 houses sold in the corresponding period this year; the average sale price was 1.118 million. According to Trulia, the median sale price in Short Hills from November to January was 850,000, or 11.7 percent lower than the median a year earlier. Joanna Parker Lentz, an agent in Westfield for Prominent Properties Sotheby's International Realty, says homes in Short Hills have tended to retain their value better than in surrounding towns. And, considering the cost of the real estate, she said, taxes are more reasonable than in other towns. That is in part because the mall and other commerce provide a strong tax base, Ms. Parker Lentz said. "Short Hills has definitely been more resilient," she added, alluding to the market downturn, "but there are still bargains to be had." The Short Hills station is on the Morris and Essex train line. On weekdays from 5 to 9 in the morning and 5 to 9 in the evening, 14 Midtown Direct trains make the 45 minute trip to and from Penn Station 7 each way. A monthly pass is 233. Permit parking for residents is 300 a year, 200 for six months. There are about 300 spaces near Short Hills station; these fill more quickly than at Millburn, the next stop, but permit holders can park at either station. Mayor Haimoff said a parking deck was planned at Millburn station. Accessibility to South Mountain Reservation is considered a huge asset, but there are several smaller neighborhood parks, including the busy and well maintained Gero Park, a 36 acre expanse off White Oak Ridge Road, which has a clubhouse, a pool, a playground, a par 3 golf course, tennis courts, basketball courts and several baseball fields. A family membership to the pool is 260 a year, a babysitter's membership 120 (weekdays only). A season pass to the golf course is 75. There are also four free summer concerts on Sundays at Taylor Park. Three of the five primary schools are in Short Hills: Deerfield, Glenwood and Hartshorn. Enrollment is about 500 at Deerfield, which runs through Grade 5. Average class size is 18.5; the state average is 18.2. Millburn Middle School, in Millburn, has about 1,100 students in Grades 6, 7 and 8. The high school has about 1,400 students in Grades 9 through 12. SAT averages last year were 627 in math, 600 in reading and 611 in writing, versus 520, 496 and 499 statewide.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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A roaring fireplace and attentive service is enough of an invitation to stay and sip awhile. Emon Hassan for The New York Times
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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On Monday, the company disappointed Wall Street with the news that subscriber growth for its streaming video service had slowed significantly during the second quarter. Also disconcerting was that Netflix added far fewer subscribers over all during the period than expected, which the company blamed on news media coverage of its plans for price increases. Netflix added just 1.7 million new streaming members in the three months that ended June 30, about half the 3.3 million net additions from the same period the previous year. That anemic growth for both United States and international subscribers came in well below its forecast of 2.5 million new members. The development sent Netflix shares down as much as 16 percent in after hours trading on Monday, representing the second earnings report in a row that has sparked a double digit plunge in the company's stock price. Reed Hastings, the company's chief executive, typically avoids getting swept up in the ecstasy and the agony for Netflix on Wall Street and beyond. Yet during an earnings call, he apologized to investors "for the volatility." "I know it's not easy on everyone," he said. "The big picture is very much intact, and we're very excited about it." Mr. Hastings finds himself in a starkly different position from just six months ago, when he stood onstage at the big consumer electronics show in Las Vegas and declared that Netflix would conquer the global market for streaming television, adding more than 130 countries to its world service map. At the time, the company's share had been soaring, surging 135 percent in 2015 as the top performer on the Standard Poor's 500 stock index. So far this year, Netflix's share price has declined about 14 percent. And Mr. Hastings now is defending the feasibility of the company's long term outlook. He reiterated the company's goal of reaching 60 million to 90 million subscribers in the United States. (Netflix now has 46 million subscribers in the United States.) He also is sticking to his promise to deliver material profits in 2017 and beyond after running roughly at break even profitability through this year. "I don't see why 10, 20 years from now, why every American household isn't subscribing to Netflix, except for maybe competition," Mr. Hastings said. "So we've got to stay on our toes on that basis." Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Still, the company has much to prove. Executives said that while gross additions were on target, there was more churn than normal, largely because of the completion of its two year plan to increase monthly prices for subscribers. By the end of this year, Netflix will have completed a so called grandfathering plan to increase prices. In the United States, three different tiers now cost 8, 10 and 12. In the United States, Netflix added just 160,000 new streaming members during the quarter. Executives said that neither increased competition from other streaming services nor market saturation was a factor in the slowing growth in the United States. Outside the United States, Netflix added 1.5 million new subscribers, for a total of 33.4 million. In a letter to shareholders, Mr. Hastings acknowledged that Netflix was not growing "as fast as we like or have been." "Disrupting a big market can be bumpy, but the opportunity ahead is as big as ever," he said. Still, some analysts pointed to the company's financials as proof that it would continue to deliver on its plans in the long term. Net income for the quarter was 41 million, up 58 percent from 26 million during the same period last year. Total revenue was 2.1 billion, up 27 percent from 1.6 billion in the same period last year. "While results are softer than expected, I think the market is underappreciating acceleration in revenue," Anthony DiClemente, an analyst with Nomura, said in an email. "Netflix is transitioning from a story about net growth in subscribers to one of growth in revenue and margins," he added. "They continue to grow international over the long term, and nothing happens overnight."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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CHICAGO After a drought in new construction dating back to the 2008 financial crisis, downtown Chicago is suddenly awash in new hotel projects. No fewer than a dozen new hotels representing about 2,700 rooms have recently opened or are under construction, and additional projects seem to be announced on a weekly basis. These include four and five star properties by international names like Langham and Loews, as well as numerous smaller lifestyle hotels by a range of independent operators. The boom, say developers and analysts, is driven by strengthening fundamentals of the market. Adam McGaughy, managing director of the Midwest hotel business of Jones Lang LaSalle, a large real estate services firm here, said, "The city exceeded its 2007 occupancy peak of 74.4 percent last year and there's lots of room for average daily rate growth. When that happens, new supply starts to become part of the conversation." Chicago is the country's fourth largest hotel market behind Las Vegas, New York and Orlando, Fla., with a downtown total of about 37,000 rooms. In the past, the industry has depended on the city's lakefront McCormick Place convention complex to spur growth. What makes this boom different is that it is being driven largely by smaller lifestyle hotels that appeal to leisure and international travelers. Ben Weprin, president of locally based A. J. Capital Partners, who has three such projects under construction, said: "Conventions are not our primary focus. We aim for a younger demographic that likes to go out to restaurants and bars. We try to create a town square atmosphere in our properties." According to TR Mandigo Company, a hotel consulting firm here, leisure travel now accounts for about 15 percent of the downtown hotel market. That is an increase from 10 percent in the early 2000s, and further increases are anticipated because of an aggressive city marketing program instituted by Mayor Rahm Emanuel. "The mayor has made tourism a priority," said Donald Welsh, chief executive of Choose Chicago, the city's tourism and convention bureau. Over the last 18 months, he added, the city has opened 10 international tourism offices in countries like China, Japan, Brazil and Britain, and it is also running 30 second television ads promoting Chicago as a vacation destination in cities throughout the Midwest. Many of the new hotels are in areas that, until recently, were not considered tourist zones, the most notable of which is a five block stretch of Michigan Avenue just south of the Chicago River where four new projects are under way. John Rutledge, chief executive of locally based Oxford Capital Partners and a leading downtown hotel developer, pointed to the attractive features of the neighborhood that lend themselves to hotels. For one, he said, old classic buildings there can be adapted to intimate hotel spaces. Another asset is its proximity to popular areas, like the Loop business district, Millennium Park, Navy Pier and the North Michigan Avenue shopping district. Mr. Rutledge recently paid 53 million for the London Guarantee Building, a lavishly ornamented 1920s era office building at the northern end of the district, where he plans to build a hotel with more than 400 rooms. He expects to begin construction early next year, and to be finished in fall of 2015. Mr. Weprin of A. J. Capital also has a project in this area, a 250 room hotel carved out of the landmark Chicago Athletic Association Building on Michigan Avenue across from Millennium Park. His partner for the project is John Pritzker, founder and director of Geolo Capital, a San Francisco investment firm that specializes in hospitality and entertainment projects. Mr. Pritzker, who grew up in Chicago, is the son of the late Jay Pritzker, founder of the Hyatt hotel chain. The Chicago Athletic Association dates from 1893 and was designed by Henry Ives Cobb, a leading 19th century architect here. The building has a Venetian gothic facade and an extravagant interior of cast iron staircases, vaulted ceilings, elaborate tile floors and 15 working fireplaces. "People get an amazed look on their faces when they go into that building," Mr. Pritzker said. "They can't believe something like that still exists." The hotel, which will have 250 rooms and be operated by Geolo Capital's Commune Hotels and Resorts division, will cost 125 million and be finished in late 2014. It has not been named yet. Mr. Weprin's other notable project is a new 50 million Soho House in the west Loop meatpacking district, another emerging neighborhood known primarily for its restaurants and night life. His partners are Nick Jones, founder of the London based Soho House, and Shapack Development of Chicago. The hotel, which will open next spring, occupies an old industrial building on Green Street and will have about 40 rooms plus extensive restaurant, bar and spa facilities. "We've been looking for the right site in Chicago for quite a few years," said Mr. Jones. The meatpacking district, he added, is "buzzy and interesting and lots of new things" are opening there. Not that Chicago is turning its back on the convention business or large convention hotels. A new 316 room Langham Hotel on the north bank of the Chicago River and a new 460 room annex to the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place have recently been completed. Next up in this category is a Loews Hotel, which will occupy the lower floors of a 52 story residential building under construction on the north bank of the Chicago River several blocks from Navy Pier. The developer is the DRW Trading Group of Chicago. The hotel to be owned by Leows will consist of about 400 rooms plus 25,000 square feet of meeting space. It will open in 2015. The hotel is costing about 400,000 a room, or about 160 million. Jonathan Tisch, chairman of Loews, said, "Chicago continues to be a city that event organizers look to and since we typically do about 50 percent group business that should benefit us."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Two Magical Places That Sent Apollo 11 to the Moon and Back DOWNEY, Calif. The people and places that brought us Apollo 11 are disappearing. While the astronauts and NASA's mission control in Houston garnered the most attention during the moon landings, an army worked to put the pieces together across the country. That included the rocket scientists in Alabama who developed the Saturn 5 rocket, the women who sewed the parachutes, the Navy divers who met the astronauts after splashdown. "Thank you, the 300 and some thousand Americans working on that program," Michael Collins, the command module pilot of Apollo 11, said in a recent interview. "They all did their jobs so properly." The two key pieces that were the astronauts' home during their lunar trips were built on opposite sides of the country. The Apollo capsules rolled off the assembly line in Downey, Calif., a small city 15 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles. Fifty years ago, NASA owned a 160 acre swath of Downey the size of two Disneylands that was home to factories, offices and test facilities. In 1961, only a few months after President John F. Kennedy announced the goal of putting astronauts on the moon by the end of the 1960s, North American Aviation, which leased the Downey site from NASA, won the contract for the cone shaped command module and the accompanying service module, which provided the propulsion and power. North American also won the contract to build the second stage of the gigantic Saturn 5 rocket. Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. To appreciate the whiplash pace of aerospace progress during the 20th century, look at the life of Ernest Finamore. When he joined Grumman as a teenager during World War II, he riveted together TBF Avenger torpedo bombers, propeller warplanes with a top speed of 275 miles per hour and a range of 1,000 miles. By his 40s, he was a lead inspector for the construction and testing of the lunar lander, which would make history a quarter million miles from Earth. Mr. Finamore, 93, shared a memory of the day he bumped into Neil Armstrong. As he was working in the lunar module cockpit there was a knock on the door. "The guy comes in and bumps shoulders and all," Mr. Finamore said. "And then I took another slow look and he says, 'Hi, I'm Neil Armstrong.'" Mr. Armstrong looked out the window and asked about a device called a touchdown rod, which would register when the spacecraft had landed. Mr. Armstrong complained that it might bend up and become ensnared with the ladder that he and Mr. Aldrin would climb down. An engineer was called in and agreed, and the rod was removed. (The rods on the other three landing pads remained.) Mr. Armstrong also laughed at the two stools in the cockpit. Mr. Finamore recalled him asking, "'When I'm going to have time to sit down?' I said, 'Oh, O.K. Take the stools; save more weight.' This is how things happened.'" Many Americans thought that the dream of the moon was impossible, but Apollo was a siren call to engineers. Charles Lowry was living in Columbus, Ohio, a parachute expert working at a division of North American focused on fighter jets . He remembered being in church when the topic came up. "At some point, the leader said, 'I understand now that the United States government has a plan to go to the moon. How many people really think we're really going to the moon?' And my hand went up. I looked around me, and no other hands went up. Not even my wife's hand." "We could essentially sink the spacecraft, which we did," said Wilfred Swan, a structural engineer who worked on the command module, recalling a test that failed. The engineers had to not only go back and change the design but also retrofit capsules that were in production, Mr. Swan said. Mr. Swan remembers encounters with Alan Bean, who later walked on the moon during Apollo 12. He had been assigned to work on recovery systems. "I never knew he would just walk in," Mr. Swan said. The two would go to a conference room and discuss the status of the capsule. Mr. Swan kept in mind that Mr. Bean would be one of the people who might directly suffer if the engineers made a wrong decision. "That did not mean that I gave him incorrect information," Mr. Swan said. "Just couldn't say words like, 'You may die.'" Shelby Jacobs also worked at Downey, but on the second stage of the Saturn 5 rocket. Mr. Jacobs is best known for a camera system that captured iconic movies of the separation of the first and second stages of the Saturn 5, including the interstage the ring connecting the two stages falling back to Earth. "NASA said, 'Show me,'" Mr. Jacobs said. "They were concerned if it didn't separate properly, we could lose the whole vehicle and the whole crew and everything." In the 1960s, there was no way to beam high resolution video of a fast moving rocket back to ground, so Mr. Jacobs figured out how to protect the camera from the violent shaking of the rocket. "After it took the film, it was ejected out," he said. "It had fins that deployed that kept it right side up. It had parachutes when it landed and beacons to be picked up in the ocean. These films were developed after the flight." The cameras flew twice, on crewless test flights of the Saturn 5. Mr. Jacobs possessed a uncommon characteristic among the Apollo engineers: He was black, and had to overcome those who doubted he was smart enough. "I exceeded the low expectations, to the surprise of people," Mr. Jacobs said. Mr. Jacobs also commuted from Los Angeles, where blacks were permitted live in those days. "When I worked here, I couldn't live here," he said. Others made their own sacrifices. Mr. Blackburn was performing a test of a piece of equipment when a technician improperly fed ultrahigh pressure gas through a flow meter. He could hear the pressure building but could not get away. The flow meter exploded, shattering its glass front. "Imagine getting hit in the face with a sandblaster," he said. "I couldn't see anything." Initially, the computer on the lunar module had 33 kilobytes of memory. Today's computers have millions of times more. A beefed up version doubled the memory to 66 kilobytes. "Once we got that additional memory, we had no trouble putting digital autopilot into that additional memory, " Dr. Gran recalled. Fifty years ago, as Apollo 11 made its way to the moon, the people who built the spacecraft followed with pride and some nervousness. When the lunar module, named Eagle, was finally on the moon, Dr. Gran said, "Then I jumped up and down. It's like winning the lottery." Others were also elated, but had more yet to worry about. The parachutes of Charles Lowry were still packed, waiting for the return to Earth. That development was more arduous than first anticipated, as the command module had gained weight during its development. The parachutes had to successfully slow down 13,500 pounds. But four days later, on July 24, 1969, the astronauts returned to Earth. The parachutes deployed, and Mr. Lowry could celebrate, too. "It was," he said, "an amazing feeling of 'Yeah, we really did it.'" The Downey and Bethpage sites have faded into history. Grumman emptied its Long Island headquarters after it was bought by the Northrop Corporation in 1994. North American, which merged with Rockwell International, later designed and built the space shuttles. In 1996, the aerospace piece of Rockwell was sold to Boeing, which abandoned the Downey site in 1999. "That was really hard, to watch them tearing down not just history," Mr. Blackburn said, "but removing a major part of my life."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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If you were taking a waterfront stroll along the bottom tip of Manhattan late Sunday afternoon, you may have happened upon seven people dressed in white, their limbs twisting gently in the breeze like the branches of the surrounding trees. This was not a color coordinated group of tai chi practitioners. This was the Trisha Brown Dance Company, performing an excerpt from Ms. Brown's final work, "I'm Going to Toss My Arms if You Catch Them, They're Yours" (2011). Ms. Brown has retired, but her company continues, led by Carolyn Lucas and Diane Madden. One of their strategies for keeping her work alive is "Trisha Brown: In Plain Site," a project in which the company performs short works and excerpts from its repertory, chosen for a particular location. On Sunday, the place was Robert F. Wagner Park, where the hourlong performance of 10 pieces and extracts was part of the River to River festival. The grove of trees made a lovely setting for "I'm Going to Toss My Arms." The grass softened the landings in a multi person version of "Falling Duet (I)" (1968). And the harbor view provided a striking backdrop for a bit of "Present Tense" (2003), which, unlike the preceding two pieces, featured music (a John Cage recording). This sequence indicated a free and nonchronological mixing of the distinct periods of Ms. Brown's work: most noticeably, of early experiments like "Falling Duet (I)," made to be performed without music in unconventional settings, and later larger scale pieces, created with music and for the proscenium stage.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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If Bukowski were alive, that would probably be fine with him too. Bukowski relished his image as a swaggering outsider, the kind of man who, having consented to read his poetry at a college, "put down my poems and asked if anybody wanted to arm wrestle." (Someone did; naturally Bukowski won.) In "On Drinking," his escapades are entirely typical and roughly as follows: He goes to, copes with or barely avoids jail. He mouths off to cops. He gets into unprovoked fistfights that take three pages to describe and that involve dozens of barehanded punches to the head. He offers to clean a bar's dirty blinds for money and whiskey, and then, Tom Sawyer style, persuades the other patrons to do the job for him. He is coated in vomit and/or blood with the regularity of an E.R. nurse. He pleasures, or fails to pleasure, scores of women, none of whom are dissuaded by the foregoing vomit or blood. And he wants nothing to do with modern writers who "lecture at universities / in tie and suit, / the little boys soberly studious, / the little girls with glazed eyes." This boozy, cartoon machismo has generally served Bukowski well, in the sense that 25 years after his death he still has a sizable audience by the standards of a fiction writer and a colossal audience by the standards of a poet. As you might expect, that readership is not there for displays of technical prowess. The poems in "On Drinking" are distinguishable from the prose mostly by virtue of line breaks that are inserted in why not fashion; as in, "once in Paris / drunk on national TV / before 50 million Frenchmen / I began babbling vulgar thoughts / and when the host put his hand over my / mouth / I leaped up from the round table ..." There's basically no difference between these lines and the prose narrative that precedes them, except that the prose involves an extended brawl while the poem includes Bukowski pulling a knife on some French security guards. But to say that Bukowski doesn't care about technique is not to say that his work is uncalculated. His relentlessly autobiographical approach leads to a dilemma that American poets in particular have been familiar with for well over half a century. This is the fact that, as the poet and critic Donald Davie once put it, a writer who trades on the raw facts of a rough life often "confesses to discreditable sentiments or behavior, but in doing so he demands credit for having the courage or the honesty of his shamelessness." Or in Elizabeth Bishop's slightly tarter formulation, such a writer is constantly saying, "I do all these awful things but don't you really think I'm awfully nice?" And Bukowski does want to seem awfully nice very much so. It's interesting to go through "On Drinking" and note the many things that Bukowski either omits or wants the reader to avoid thinking about. Consider "night school," which is set in "the drinking driver improvement school" and involves "the test / to see if we have been listening / to the instructor." During a break, Bukowski naturally goes to get a beer, and later discovers he's the only person to have gotten all the test questions right, making him, the poem wryly concludes, "the class / intellectual." But why is he in the class? Because he was driving around drunk. Did he hurt anyone? Did he kill anyone? This is one of several times in "On Drinking" that Bukowski talks about plowing around hammered in a car, yet every episode carefully avoids any sense of the possible horrific consequences for other people and returns us instead to the comfortable presence of that charming rogue, Charles Bukowski. He's so funny, so honest. You want to hang out with him, maybe have a few cold ones. But this artfully contrived camaraderie is fragile. When a writer focuses more on forming a community with his readers than conveying the fact of an experience, he can be left high and dry when the assumptions undergirding that community change. People think about drunken driving much differently in 2019 than in 1981, when "night school" was published. They also think differently about gender and the women in "On Drinking" only occasionally get names, although they do sometimes get ages. In a poem titled "who in the hell is Tom Jones?," we're told that Bukowski was "shacked / with a 24 year old / girl from New York / City" when suddenly "this 34 year old / woman / arrived," after which there was naturally a "whirling of wildcats" that is delightful to Bukowski, because "it's not often at the / age of 55 / that such splendid / action occurs." Readers in 2019 may well be blinded by the force of their eye roll.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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SAN FRANCISCO It was a happy day for the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla: He lost his battle. On Monday, the United States Supreme Court refused to hear Mr. Khosla's appeal to overturn a ruling that the beach access path cutting through a coastal village he owns near Half Moon Bay, Calif., must stay open. Now Mr. Khosla, a billionaire who founded Sun Microsystems and helped lay the foundations of the consumer internet, has to apply for a permit to close the narrow road down to a popular surfing spot known as Martin's Beach. That's it. But over nearly a decade in the courts, the battle became deeply symbolic to Mr. Khosla, who has said he was fighting on principle to stop a violation of property rights. So why was he likely to be happy he lost? He has said he never wanted to win. As the case wound its way up to the Supreme Court, it threatened to gut California's Coastal Act of 1976, which enshrines public access to beaches as a right. "If I were to ever win in the Supreme Court, I'd be depressed about it," he told The New York Times this year. "I support the Coastal Act; I don't want to weaken it by winning. But property rights are even more important." The situation began shortly after 2008 when Mr. Khosla bought a 53 acre hillside on the Northern California coast. It had about 47 cottages on it and was known as Martin's Beach. While the previous owners had largely left the gate to the beach open and charged for parking, Mr. Khosla decided not to do the same. He tried to close the road, immediately sparking a controversy. Over the years, the battle grew increasingly contentious. At one point, Mr. Khosla, who owns the land through a holding company, hired guards to stand at the top of the road. In 2012, five surfers were arrested and became known as the Martin's Five. The Surfrider Foundation, which led the fight to keep the road open, hailed the Supreme Court's decision as one that saves the coast from being slowly privatized by wealthy landowners. "Whether you have to drive an hour to the coast and picnic or whether you can spend 32 million and buy property adjacent to the coast, the beach belongs to everybody," said Eric Buescher, an attorney working on the case for the Surfrider Foundation. "The Coastal Act survives the whims of a billionaire and continues to protect the people of California." If the Supreme Court had heard the case and ultimately ruled in favor of Mr. Khosla, the ruling could have not only reshaped the laws that govern 1,100 miles of California shoreline but also affected public access to beaches, lakes and waterways in 22 states, according to the Surfrider Foundation. "This case reaffirms that you cannot make a unilateral decision to shut down a beach that has provided generations of families with memories," Lisa Haage, chief of enforcement at the California Coastal Commission, said in a statement. For Mr. Khosla, this means the state is forcing him to keep open a money losing business. The beach, he had argued, is not as popular as it used to be, and charging for parking no longer covers the cost of an attendant and maintenance of public facilities. "No owner of private business should be forced to obtain a permit from the government before deciding who it wants to invite onto its property," Mr. Khosla's lawyer Dori Yob Kilmer said in a statement. "No business owner should be forced to obtain a permit from the government to shut down a private business, to change prices from those that existed in 1972 (as the state has demanded) or to change hours of operation." The Supreme Court's action on Monday ends this peculiar saga, which has captivated Silicon Valley. Well, it may end it. Mr. Khosla, who referred questions to Ms. Kilmer, must now apply for that permit to close the road to Martin's Beach. "If denied," Ms. Kilmer said, "we will start this process over again."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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Americans juggle a lot of interest rates in their daily lives. They pay interest on car loans, credit card balances and mortgages. They earn interest, at least a little, on the money they save with banks. Tech nically speaking, Federal Reserve officials did not touch any of those rates when they announced a quarter point interest rate cut on Wednesday, the first cut in a decade. The rate they reduced is the federal funds rate, which is what banks and other financial institutions charge one another for very short term borrowing. Most consumers don't do that sort of overnight borrowing, but the Fed's moves still affect the borrowing and saving rates they encounter every day. The effect is not always direct or immediate, so consumers probably will not wake up on Thursday to find that all of their favorite rates have changed by a quarter of a point. There is even solid evidence that the mere expectation that the Fed would cut rates on Wednesday had already pushed down some of the key rates that consumers pay . Here's where you might see effects from the cut . When the Fed held rates near zero for years after the 2008 financial crisis in hopes of stoking growth and job creation, there was basically no financial incentive to save money with a bank. Near the end of 2015, the average one year certificate of deposit account yielded an annual return of just over 0.25 percent, according to Bankrate.com. Fed officials have raised rates nine times since then, by a quarter point in each instance. The increases have lifted savers, though not by that much. The average yield on a one year C.D. briefly cracked 1 percent this year. But it has fallen since then, as has the average yield on the five year C. D ., amid bigger hints from Fed officials that a rate cut was in the works. The trend could continue . If you borrowed money to buy a house late last year, you were unlucky and it cost you. In November, as the Fed neared what appears to have been the end for now at least of its slow march of interest rate increases, the average rate on a 30 year mortgage was nearly 5 percent. It has since fallen to 3.75 percent. The slide was tied to expectations that the Fed was going to cut rates, said Greg McBride, Bankrate.com's chief financial analyst, and for consumers, it is probably the most consequential effect of the shift in the Fed's policy path. It is also probably fully priced in, unless the Fed shows a strong hint that more rate cuts are coming. "Mortgage rates are tied to long term rates, so they move well in advance," Mr. McBride said. "Any further movement in mortgage rates will be tied to the outlook ahead." Historically speaking, mortgage rates do not have much farther to fall. In the past half century, the average 30 year rate has never dipped below 3.3 percent. One interest rate that has risen by as many percentage points as the federal funds rate in the past few years is the one you probably wish would stay lower: the average interest rate on credit card debt. It is now nearly 18 percent, and unlike savings yields and mortgage rates, it has not fallen in recent months. That probably means you should not expect it to fall immediately after Wednesday's cut. Rates on car loans have risen since 2016, but they fell back slightly this year. After peaking near 5 percent at the end of last year, the rate on the average five year loan for a new car is now just under 4.75 percent, according to Bankrate.com. Like rates on credit cards, the rate on car loans does not always move in line with the Fed: It fell in 2016 even as the Fed raised rates. Those rates help explain, in part, why most economists do not expect that a single Fed rate cut will be enough to change consumers' spending habits. "The impact on the household budget of one rate cut is inconsequential," Mr. McBride said. "It's not like it's going to unleash a flurry of consumer activity" In the scope of your financial life, of course, what you pay to borrow or what you are paid to save typically takes a back seat to more basic questions about how much you are able to work and to earn. Those questions appear to be on Fed officials' minds as they cut rates. "It's better to take preventative measures than to wait for disaster to unfold," John Williams, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said two weeks ago, in comments that were widely interpreted as signaling that the rate cut was on the way. In other words: By moving to reduce rates, now and possibly again this fall, policymakers are trying to reduce the risk that millions of Americans could be thrown out of work. They are trying to ward off the prospect of a job killing recession by giving the economy a little extra boost.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Your Money
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Ricardo Buchanan, a handyman at Esplanade Gardens in Harlem, writes down ideas as they occur. "When you repair something, it is a wonderful thing," he says. "But writing writing, writing I feel liberated and free." Ricardo Buchanan scrawls words on scraps of paper that he keeps in his uniform pocket. I hear the sounds of gunshots, screams and death down the block There are index cards, napkins and phone bills inscribed with original verse, ideas that will swell later, at home or on a bench in the park, at lunchtime. He thinks about injustice, and about love and sadness and people while he is at work at the sprawling Esplanade Gardens, a co op in East Harlem, tending to plumbing or electrical malfunctions, tiling and all else that can crumble or fail. "When you repair something, it is a wonderful thing," said Mr. Buchanan, 60, who has been a handyman since arriving in New York from Jamaica in his 20s. "But writing writing, writing I feel liberated and free." "But I am not angry," Mr. Buchanan said with a smile. " 'Mad' represents 'Motivation and Determination.' " He said he wants to publish a book of poetry, sometime soon. Similar passion can be found across the city in other subterranean workshops, nooks and utility closets, under elegant awnings and inside brass fitted vestibules. Sometimes hidden, sometimes in plain sight, artistry sustains those who keep apartment houses running all over town the way it always does, completely and involuntarily. At 110 East End Avenue, riffs of electric blues guitar accompany the whirring of washing machines. In a darkened room in the basement, down the hall and around the corner from the laundry facilities, the building handyman, Arthur Passamonik, sits at a heavy old desk. Under it is a Peavey amplifier that he found about a year ago near the elevator, where people toss their trash. In a closet that contains cabinets and cardboard boxes, he has stored a guitar since beginning work here 15 years ago, the least precious of seven that he owns. If a tenant has not stopped in to request that he fix a shower head or install a socket, he retrieves his instrument and practices, surrounded by wiring, cords, brooms and buckets. "When something comes as a passion, you stick with it for the rest of your life, somehow," said Mr. Passamonik, 57, who first heard American music as a child in Warsaw, Poland. During Communist rule, records were unavailable or too expensive to buy, he said. But for one hour every night, around 7, a certain radio station played Jimi Hendrix, Deep Purple and, best of all, bluesmen like B.B. King, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Muddy Waters. "It is magical music," he said. "When you are a guitarist and you don't know how to play blues and jazz, you forget about the instrument. This music creates in you your future, who you want to be." Mr. Passamonik wants to be, and is, a musician. His ambition now is to be widely heard, and he is in the midst of producing a 15 song CD. He said he immigrated to the United States in 1981 to "make life better" and play guitar. He landed in Brooklyn and still lives there with his wife. He got a job on an electronics factory assembly line in Brooklyn, and after 10 years began working as a handyman in the Tudor City apartment complex in Manhattan. He studied English, which he learned from friends. ("Musicians have good ears.") At night and on weekends, he played in bands, mainly in Polish neighborhoods. All along, he practiced, wrote lyrics and sang as he does now, for at least three hours a day at home after work. "Every single hour makes you better, whatever you do," Mr. Passamonik said. "My dream is not to be a handyman the hammer and nails, it's what the money comes from. I'd like to be in Madison Square Garden to play my blues, my jazz, but I guess that is everybody's dream, to be what your passion is." The story of unexpected talent, or finding it in humble places, is not remarkable. People who paint and write and sing emerge from all sorts of backgrounds and circumstances. Certain types of employment might not suit a creative temperament, or might sap inspiration or tire a person physically. But working in a New York apartment building, particularly with one's hands, would seem to serve an artistic pursuit, particularly if it is visual. Painters, sculptors, illustrators and photographers work as porters, handymen, cleaners and doormen in all five boroughs, according to Lenore Friedlaender, the assistant to the president of the city's 70,000 member building workers union, 32BJ SEIU, which has had an active Arts Committee for the last nine years. The union, whose members are mostly men, holds an annual art show, hangs work year round at its West 18th Street headquarters and arranges exhibitions at other locations. Ten members are showing their art at 1199 SEIU, a health care workers union, at 330 West 42nd Street. "You lucked out, there is only one pair of slacks." Some of the co op's residents know that their doorman crafts three dimensional objects like fish and birds from found materials when he is not behind the lobby desk accepting deliveries or announcing visitors. (He also carves wood figurines.) "When people find out, boom, they're giving me stuff," said Mr. Santorelli, 73, who has received boxes of cork, computer disks and bottle caps, a couple hundred of which he transformed into an owl that hung at an exhibition sponsored by the investment company AIG. A participant in the show now at 1199, he said he was asked to make something "fall ish." "So I made them a straw hat scarecrow," he said. "My wife liked it so much that I had to make three more, one for her and my daughters." He has unearthed clocks, parts of fences and picture frames from the trash, and redeployed them. "From the bed slats on a futon, I made an Italian American flag," he said. Before he took the doorman position 18 years ago, Mr. Santorelli worked in the building as a porter and handyman for 10 years, enjoying the opportunity to tinker whenever he had down time. Earlier, he was the assistant floral designer at the St. Regis Hotel, but left when salaries were cut. An East Harlem native, Mr. Santorelli remembers his mother's drawing of a tiny bird on a branch and the question that she posed to him, "Did you see the bird fly?" In his young head, the bird grew feathers and took off, he said. Soon, he was drawing, too. "If you wanted to go to the Boys Club early in the morning, you could go to the art room," he recalled. "A German ex paratrooper named Ralph gave me a huge piece of paper and one direction: 'Do something.' " These days, when Mr. Santorelli is not in the Lenox House foyer, spending time with his five children and five grandchildren or recycling treasures, he views New York, and his life, through a camera lens. Taking photographs as he walks sometimes 20,000 steps a day he said that art provides the freedom to see the world the way one wants to. "I'm 73 and everything is new." Marlon Moreira, 49, splits his duties at 320 East 72nd Street in Manhattan: On some days, he's a handyman in khakis, on others a doorman in a black Pershing cap. He was just 17 when he moved to the Bronx from Ecuador. His parents had left him with grandparents eight years before. "It created a kind of anger in me," he said. "I remember seeing paintings by Frida Kahlo and that was my escape from being angry. I just focused myself and painted." Mr. Moreira pulls the 1930s era scissor gate shut and sends the service elevator a flight down to his handyman base of operations. Above the lift's brass wall panel, he has taped a photo of the eldest of his three sons, superimposed upon an American flag. "He did three tours in Iraq," said Mr. Moreira, ratcheting open the gate. "He's O.K." In the basement, a tidy maze of halls and doorways, an image of another American flag, roughed up with sandpaper, hangs over a desk. "I brought the paint from home and worked on it during a break. Sometimes, when it's a real heavy day, I might go in the back and sketch a little. I wish I had 30 hours a day and not 24." Intricate abstract drawings in marker lean against a wall in a packed closet. Apartment building salaries pay for rent, health care and raising families. For these artists, they also pay for musical instruments and paint brushes and canvases. Most do not earn much money from their art, if any, but they cling to the same ambitions that they had when they were young. Julius Gaston, 58, a porter at three of Argo Real Estate's rental buildings on 83rd Avenue in Kew Gardens, Queens, is a painter who works in acrylics and pencil. He has sold his still lifes, landscapes and figures for as much as 1,800, but relies on his regular paycheck. Mr. Gaston has taken care of the property's three buildings for 11 years. "I make sure to do a great job, so the flow of money isn't interrupted, but the art is always on my mind," he said. "All day, I think about how to mix the colors to get the look, so when I'm mopping the floor or taking out the garbage, I think of those things." He paints for about three hours each night, after work, sometimes in the basement workshop that comes with his day job. "To put a three dimensional image on a two dimensional surface, oh, it's beautiful," he said. "It's the most fantastic thing." The notion that the creative process never ends is not lost on these particular artists. Striving is inherent in their outlook and seems to galvanize their discipline, their disposition and their optimism. "I am always looking for inspiration," Mr. Gaston said. "I have not done my best work yet."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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When 14 dancers step onstage for Rebecca Lazier's "There Might Be Others," they won't know what's going to happen. That might be true of any live performance, but Ms. Lazier, a choreographer drawn to volatile group dynamics, and her musical collaborator, Dan Trueman, are especially interested in composing on the spot. Inspired by Terry Riley's indeterminate musical score "In C," they've developed sound and movement modules to be arranged and manipulated spontaneously by the performers. It's a work about the art of making decisions, wherever they may lead. It's a cross cultural exercise, too. The work comes to New York Live Arts in Chelsea by way of creative residences in Turkey, Poland and Canada. Ms. Lazier has invited performers from each country to join her cast of exceptional New York dancers and a rotating ensemble of 12 musicians, including members of Mobius Percussion and So Percussion. (Wednesday, March 16, through Saturday, March 19; 212 924 0077, newyorklivearts.org.)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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The radio host Tim Sweeney is a celebrity in the world of electronic music, and a virtual unknown everywhere else. He first came to prominence through his association with DFA Records (the home of LCD Soundsystem and the Rapture), and he is best known for his radio show, "Beats in Space," which airs on WNYU FM (89.1) every Tuesday night in New York City. The show turns 20 this year. Over the course of its existence, underground electronic music has undergone a seismic shift. New music these days is less likely to bubble up through the clubs and record stores of New York. More often, it is blown in from abroad, pushed by a diffuse global scene. Mr. Sweeney and his show have managed to remain at the center of it. We caught up with him to discuss his legacy and the future of "Beats in Space." Q.: It's very difficult to define your taste; it's basically underground electronic music. The name "Beats in Space" encapsulates it better than almost anything else could. A.: You know, to be honest, I don't really like the name anymore. I've kind of always wanted to change it.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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Right inside the designer Simone Rocha's new store, on Wooster Street in SoHo, is a sculpture by the Chinese artist Ren Ri: a wall of stacked plexiglass cubes filled with shapely honeycombs. The artist lets the bees sculpt, rotating hives in progress so that the colony changes direction as it builds. The hives' folded shapes remind me of thick clothes balled up. The honeycombs are beautiful, I can see that, and yet my body is in fear mode, which means hot skin, lungs shrunk like socks and a blood borne message: Run. In the Simone Rocha store, there is nothing real to fear. The single room is high and airy, its design is thoughtful and inviting, and the clothes are as narratively mesmerizing and original as the sequence of Louise Bourgeois paintings on the back wall. Still, my heart clenches. "Have people told you this sculpture makes them want to die?" is how I greet the saleswoman in this shop. She says no with a kind smile. I let my friend Audrey choose something to try on while I try to forget what I've seen and temper the misspent adrenaline. She is drawn to a pair of white perforated leather sneakers ( 585), which look as if someone had folded lace napkins into shoes, a very clever table trick. We also admire a pair of leather boots with a Perspex heel ( 1,149) and a pair of slides with rose boucle fabric bunched across the strap ( 620). There are Perspex display cases all around the store. Focus on the hard and smooth. I stare at a set of broderie anglaise dresses hung in a cylindrical cage. I open the door and step in, and touch the intricate pattern of holes in the white fabric. (They're not organic enough to freak me out.) Ms. Rocha's clothes are airy and all frills. She takes the girliest accents (bows, ruffles, puffy sleeves all pretty high on my list of fashion fears) and reclaims them. Up close, her fabrications are enchanting: Most pieces in the store that come in chiffon, gabardine or cotton poplin also come in tulle in the same cut. It's as if each of the designer's ideas came to her first as a ghost. Simone Rocha introduced her namesake label in 2010, right after graduating from Central Saint Martins in London. In 2015, she opened a store there, and in 2016, she won the British Fashion Council's women's wear designer of the year award. A cute fact: Ms. Rocha's father, the fashion designer John Rocha, won the same award in 1993. The two designed the interior of the store together. Molding that lines the wall is shaped like budded roses, designed by Ms. Rocha herself. Looking at her designs, you would think her name means rose, but in fact it is Portuguese for "rock." Audrey and I set ourselves down a little too hard on the white benches: The stone is so soft it looks plush. Also solid: the enormous polished onyx slab that serves as the counter at the back of the store. I open the dressing room door and am confronted with a paper chair. It's carved, with exposed holes like stacked cardboard viewed from the side. It looks a lot like ... honeycomb. The saleswoman quickly comes in and takes the chair out. "It's so light!" she says. I try on a black skirt with ruffles spiraling down from the waist like M. C. Escher stairs ( 1,250). By the bottom, they slump off, draping in strips. An apathetic ruffle is one of the funnier wordless jokes that can be made. On top, I try a boxy little shirt with oversize half cap sleeves that rest like an abbreviated cape ( 1,250). "What happens if you flap like a bird?" Audrey asks from the stone bench. She tries on a pair of gray Prince of Wales checked pants ( 900), with ruffles looping down the thighs where punk suspenders might hang. I decide to tackle a fashion fear: poof sleeves. On the hanger, the nude sheer trench looks as if its sleeves are exaggerated and flouncy. On, it's clear they're cut to cup the shoulders, and the effect of the extra fabric is that of a hugging shawl built into the construction ( 1,280). Nothing to fear here, nor in a black and red checkered chiffon dress with a ruffled bib ( 2,350). We circle the jewelry set out on cushions on the Perspex display columns. Simone Rocha's jewelry is more affordable than her clothes (though I think it's cool she hasn't succumbed to setting out a stack of T shirts; cotton poplin and earrings under 1,000 was her retail compromise). Audrey tries on a magnetic single earring; two crystal globs snap onto her ear from either side ( 520). It looks as if she has grown her own rock candy. I try a single smooth stone strung on a long chain ( 175). It's lovely, almost long enough to dangle in front of my heart, now beating regularly. I take a deep breath.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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Despite the nostalgia for Goa , the petite state on India's western coast, held by Mumbai residents, restaurants featuring its cuisine seafood forward, infused with vinegar and heat, the legacy of four centuries of Portuguese rule colliding deliciously with Indian flavors and ingredients are scarce in the city. So when rumors began circulating that the all star team behind Mumbai's cult favorite Bombay Canteen including the celebrated New York City based chef Floyd Cardoz were planning an ode to Goa, city diners immediately began clearing their calendars. While the group has strong ties to the state Mumbai born and bred Mr. Cardoz is Goan; Yash Bhanage , the chief operating officer, studied there; all of them visit frequently it wasn't what they initially had in mind. When they first came upon the space that would, last October, be unveiled as O Pedro, it was actually Mexican cuisine they first intended to spotlight. The pivot makes some sense: just as Mexico is a common American destination for spring breaks and honeymoons, Mr. Bhanage said, "for a lot of us in India, it's Goa." In the end, the group went with a fusion approach, incorporating Portuguese fare as well. "It does feel like Goa, but not really," Mr. Cardoz said. "And that was a goal that we had. We want the food to be authentic and also be playful."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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My grandfather didn't always shave alone. In the modest guest bathroom of our house in Orlando, Fla., sometimes I was there at his side, wanting to shave with him or pretend to. He would fill the sink with hot water, grab a disposable razor, hand me one with a plastic guard covering the blade, and together we would lather up. I remember the sandpaper sound the razor made as it scraped away his whiskers. I couldn't wait to be able to do the same. At age 15 I finally had some stubble, but it was so sparse that my face looked as if it were specked with dirt. I checked the mirror and told myself I would be able to grow a beard by age 18. At 20 I started growing out my whiskers in an attempt to look older for a role, Judge Brack in Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler." After two months the results were in: bare cheeks, a fuzzy brown mustache, seven chin hairs. It was embarrassing, given that the 18 year old playing Hedda's love interest had grown a thick beard in a week. I comforted myself with the notion that I would have better luck by age 25.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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Is Betelgeuse about to blow? Probably not, but astronomers are having fun thinking about it. Over the last three months, the star, which marks the armpit of Orion the hunter, has mysteriously dimmed to less than half its normal brightness, markedly altering one of the great sights of the winter sky. At the beginning of January the star was fainter than ever before observed, according to Edward Guinan of Villanova University, who has been compiling data on Betelgeuse. In its "fainting" spell, Dr. Guinan said, the star has dropped from seventh to twenty first on the list of brightest stars in the sky. But even so dimmed, Betelgeuse is still too bright to be easily observed and measured by large professional telescopes at least not without damaging sensors that were designed to wring every faint photon from the blackness of space. Rebecca Oppenheimer, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, said she had managed to observe Betelgeuse with the 200 inch telescope at Palomar Observatory in California last week, but it had left an afterimage that put their detector out of service for a day. The next time around, she said in an email, they plan to cover part of the giant mirror, to cut down on the amount of light it receives. "Ha ha, kind of ridiculous," she wrote. "But, well, the science must go on!" Last week Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, circulated a request for amateur astronomers to observe and monitor Betelgeuse's brightness.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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It's getting to the point where when I walk past all the abandoned storefronts strafing New York City, I begin to imagine all the other things they could be used for. Impromptu raves or hardcore shows. Floor to ceiling floral displays. Short run theaters for one or two person plays. Housing for the unhoused. The idea that they might someday again be stores is beginning to feel fanciful. There is perpetual tension between, on the one side, soaring rents and the increasingly cliched and untrue notion of New York as a moneyed town and, on the other, the cold realities that living here, creating here and shopping here are less tenable than ever. Forgive the mangled Jane Jacobs, but storefront shopping thrives when there is an active sense of civic engagement, and it is a crucial feeder of that energy. Without stores, you'll just stay home, scroll through memes, buy a toothbrush off Instagram, and lie about how happy you are that you don't get enough sunshine. In this climate, any seedling attempting to break through the ashes of New York's retail apocalypse is welcome, especially in men's clothing, which is historically underserved even at its peak. And which, thanks to Supreme and its many direct and indirect imitators, has essentially been reframed as an online game in which winners win garments and also the right to profit off those garments by selling them to those who are bad at the game. Still, it is now essentially imperative to figure out your value proposition online before attempting to express it in a physical space. Such is the case with 18 East and Adsum, newish men's wear brands making artful post street wear, which both have opened storefronts in recent months. Adsum is in a basement space in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, just across from the three story titan that used to be the overextended emporium Gentry and now sits empty, a testament to the burst men's wear bubble; 18 East is in a former massage parlor in NoLIta. Both brands frame their release cycles in terms of drops, after the Supreme model of frequent (or in these cases, semi frequent) releases. Both emphasize sustainability and transparency. And both brands take structurally similar but aesthetically distinct approaches to infusing elegance into active clothing. Perhaps the best offering is the barn jacket, a sleeker version of what you may find at L.L. Bean or Eddie Bauer, and with less drape, but with a collar that retains its firmness ( 112, down from 225). On the whole, the clothes are quiet problem solvers, designed to be unremarkable even when they're, sometimes, remarkable. Of the two, 18 East has grander and more vivid ambitions. The brainchild of Antonio Ciongoli, who worked at Polo before heading up the Neapolitan casual line Eidos (a sub brand of Isaia), 18 East takes function oriented basics with nods to skateboarding and hip hop and refracts them through global artisanal processes: block printing from India, Cham weaving from Vietnam and so on. The results both rethink what constitutes American heritage wear, and also find a common ground between slow production techniques and streamlined release cycles. The richness of the fabrics here is consistently striking. About a year ago, I bought a fleece vest with a crimson colored floral chest pocket from one of the company's early drops, so there was no need to double down. But there were plenty of other appealing options: a meaty black roll neck Irish fisherman sweater with yellow embroidered embellishment made with Inis Meain ( 545); a filmy purple corduroy work shirt block printed by hand in Bagru, in Rajasthan, with a leaf motif ( 95); even the Donegal on a bucket hat made with Molloy Sons ( 135) that collapses in just the right mid 1990s way. Though they're working similar ideological territory, the stores differ widely in their tack; 18 East is a more particular proposition than Adsum. Also, the silhouettes at 18 East are a little wider, and sometimes lumpier, and vary from item to item, while Adsum is consistently slim. The 18 East clothes feel lived in before they ever leave the rack. Nevertheless, the sensations of visiting these stores is strikingly similar. I went to both twice, a couple of weeks apart. In each store, it was the same person who greeted me both times, a laid back guy who appeared to be enjoying the hanging out and soft sell casual conversation that you can't replicate online. For these companies, physical retailing is just a small part of the broader business, and accordingly, there is something tentative about these ventures the spaces are modestly sized, the sell is very informal. (The 18 East office is in the rear of the store you can peek into it.) It wasn't that long ago that we were thinking about newish stores in the city as locales for community, places for people to gather. But the realities of running a store have all but decimated that model. Now, just getting the chance to breathe is a victory.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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One year out from the 2020 elections, presidential candidates face legal roadblocks to acquiring the tools and assistance necessary to defend against the cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns that plagued the 2016 presidential campaign. Federal laws prohibit corporations from offering free or discounted cybersecurity services to federal candidates. The same law also blocks political parties from offering candidates cybersecurity assistance because it is considered an "in kind donation." The issue took on added urgency this week after lawyers for the Federal Election Commission advised the commission to block a request by a Silicon Valley company, Area 1 Security, which sought to provide services to 2020 presidential candidates at a discount. The commission questioned Area 1 about its request at a public meeting on Thursday, and asked the company to refile the request with a simpler explanation of how it would determine what campaigns qualified for discounted services. Cybersecurity and election experts say time is running out for campaigns to develop tough protections. Christopher Wray, the F.B.I. director, warned in April that Russian election interference continued to pose a "significant counterintelligence threat" and that Russian efforts in the 2016 and 2018 elections were "a dress rehearsal for the big show in 2020." A bill introduced last month by Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, would have allowed political parties to provide greater cybersecurity assistance to candidates. But it stalled in the Senate after the majority leader, Mitch McConnell, said he would not bring any election security bills to the floor for a vote. The 2020 campaigns themselves are unlikely to have the expertise to track disinformation campaigns or to build sophisticated defenses needed to ward off hackers. In most cases, they cannot afford to pay outside experts market rates for such services, as required by federal election laws. To thwart digital threats and phishing attacks, multinational corporations spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, at minimum, on security. Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, has said the bank spends nearly 600 million a year on security. Bank of America's chief executive has said the bank has a "blank check" when it comes to cybersecurity. Security experts note that despite significantly smaller head counts presidential candidates and their campaigns are among the most targeted organizations in the world. Ms. Rosenberger knows the risks faced by campaigns. As a foreign policy adviser to Hillary Clinton in 2016, she saw firsthand the real world effects of these attacks. In what's called a spearphishing attack, Russian hackers compromised emails belonging to John Podesta, then Mrs. Clinton's campaign chairman, and employees at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "If we're putting campaigns on the front lines alone, and they're having to defend themselves alone, then we've lost," she said. But guarding against Russia is just one of the challenges, officials and experts said. "Russia drafted a playbook that other international actors can use," said Nathaniel Persily, co director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center and a law professor at Stanford Law School. "We should not be surprised if other nation states and stateless entities try to take a page from the Russian playbook in the next election." There are also concerns that domestic players could do the same thing. Last month, the F.E.C. ruled that a nonprofit organization, Defending Digital Campaigns, could provide free cybersecurity services to political campaigns. But the ruling was narrow, and applied only to nonpartisan, nonprofit groups that offer the same services to all campaigns. Defending Digital Campaigns was founded by Robbie Mook, who ran Mrs. Clinton's 2016 campaign, and Matt Rhoades, who managed Mitt Romney's campaign in 2012. But nonprofits can only do so much, experts said, and in many cases there are private companies with better technology for fending off hackers. The case heard this week by the F.E.C. involves Area 1, which says it has developed tools to block spearphishing attacks. In anticipation of future attacks, a number of candidates running for office in 2020 contacted Area 1 to ask for its anti phishing services, said Oren Falkowitz, a former analyst at the National Security Agency who helped found the company. Area 1 works with a number of large corporations and assists smaller firms and nonprofits, charging a rate lower than what it charges big clients, Mr. Falkowitz said. He noted that the pricing model was fairly standard. Other tech companies like Dropbox and Slack give away many of their services to individuals and smaller organizations, but charge larger businesses to use their products. Lawyers for three of the 2020 candidates that contacted Area 1, who could not be named because of confidentiality agreements, told the company that they worried that by using Area 1's services, the campaigns might run afoul of campaign finance laws. Area 1 made a formal request to the F.E.C. to ask for an advisory opinion in April. As part of its request, Area 1 asked the commission to grant the company the same exemption the F.E.C. granted to Microsoft last year. The F.E.C. ruled that Microsoft could offer "enhanced online account security services to its election sensitive customers at no additional cost" because Microsoft would be shoring up defenses for its existing customers, not seeking to curry favor with political candidates, and would be acting on a nonpartisan basis out of business interests. But on Monday, lawyers for the F.E.C. said Area 1's request did not meet the same bar as Microsoft and the company's services looked too much like a political contribution. The commission has been sensitive to the influx of so called dark money into campaigns and maintains a high bar for granting exemptions because of concerns that an exemption could create a loophole for corporations looking to influence an election. Daniel A. Petalas, outside counsel for Area 1 and a lawyer at the firm Garvey Schubert Barer, said the draft opinion was based on a misunderstanding. In return for helping the candidates, Area 1 could gain valuable research, he said. "Area 1's whole purpose, their whole basis for being, is attacking the phishing issue," Mr. Petalas said. "There's really nowhere it's more dramatically presented than in the election context, given what happened in 2016." Election security experts said lawmakers must address rules that prohibit cybersecurity firms from providing assistance to campaigns. "The idea that this is even an issue is just insane," Mr. Persily said in an interview Tuesday. For now, campaigns must fend for themselves, and most are vulnerable to more phishing attacks. "On the cyber side, campaigns obviously have to do a lot to have much, much tougher defenses than they had in '16, and I see very little of that so far," said Ms. Rosenberger, the former Clinton worker.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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MAYBE it is Wendell McCrady Jr. who best understands the value of the rust speckled roadster tucked away in a storage shed in this Akron suburb. Not the monetary value of the car, built by a Brooklyn born racing driver who some still argue was the actual winner of the first Indianapolis 500 mile competition a century ago this weekend. But what the car meant to people like Mr. McCrady who grew up in Akron, the town that became known as Rubber City. "I guess," said Mr. McCrady, a concrete finisher who now lives in Copley, "I might not exist if it hadn't been for that car." The explanation, a tale rich with history, takes nearly as many turns as some races. The car is a 1917 Mulford Special Roadster. The 10 foot long, two seat runabout was built by Ralph K. Mulford, the driver credited with finishing second to Ray Harroun in the 1911 Indy 500. Mr. McCrady, 56, found the Mulford Special in a barn five years ago and became consumed with lifting the car, its builder and its story out of obscurity. Mulford was an early racing hero, according to the historian Joseph Freeman. Mulford will be included in Mr. Freeman's yet to be published book, "Second to One" (Racemaker Press, Boston), about the drivers who missed out on Indy immortality in finishing no better than second place. Mulford was a fierce competitor on the track, twice winning national driving championships. But he was also "a sportsman, a real gentleman away from it, a religious man and a Sunday school teacher," Mr. Freeman said in a telephone interview. As an automaker, Smiling Ralph, as Mulford was called, was less successful. Reports show that he twice tried to start his own company, building two cars in 1915 and five more in 1922, but both times the businesses failed. In between, in 1916 and 1917, he built two cars for personal use, a four seat sedan for his wife and a two seater with an Opel body for himself, according to a letter he wrote years later. He traveled to Akron and elsewhere looking for proper tires for those cars, he later testified. Fast forward to 1925. On May 12, a Michigan inventor, Alden L. Putnam, received a patent for low pressure balloon tires larger than earlier tire designs and containing a greater volume of air similar to those being made in Akron, according to Detroit newspapers. By then, the B. F. Goodrich Rubber Company of Akron was promoting its Silvertown Balloons to "cushion yourself against rough travel." And after Peter DePaolo won the 1925 Indy 500 on Firestone balloon tires, they became the talk of the industry, Mr. Freeman said. Three years later, the Steel Wheel Corporation of Detroit, which had acquired Putnam's patent, filed suit against Goodrich. Steel Wheel demanded that Goodrich stop producing the balloon tires and asked for reparations on the tires already sold. "Should the court ruling favor the Steel Wheel firm, millions of dollars in damages will be involved," The Detroit Free Press reported. Moreover, a victory against Goodrich would have brought similar suits against other Akron tiremakers, including Goodyear and Firestone. That dire situation never came to pass. Testifying that he had bought the balloon tires fitted to his roadster in 1919, years before the patent was approved, Mulford became the savior of Akron's rubber industry. Moreover, he testified, he had found similar tires when he visited Goodyear's plant in Akron. "Since there's no name of a tire like these, I'm going to suggest we call them balloon tires," he told Goodyear officials, he said. In June 1928, United States Judge Arthur Tuttle ruled in favor of Goodrich. After the verdict was read, the judge went for a spin in the roadster with Mulford. Then the little car and its story all but disappeared. Almost two decades later, Goodrich workers found the Mulford Special in a plant building in downtown Akron. They were preparing to throw it out when a former Goodrich employee, Rex T. Brown, recognized the car from the trial, The Akron Beacon Journal reported, and bought it. Mulford confirmed in a letter to Mr. Brown in 1953 that the roadster was indeed the car from the 1928 Detroit trial. Mr. McCrady bought it in 2006. He had never been a collector of antique cars, he said, preferring Chevrolet Corvettes, but he became fascinated by the histories of the car and the man. Mulford was inducted into the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Hall of Fame with the class of 1953 54. He died in 1973 at age 88. According to Mr. Freeman, the historian, Mulford continued to make a steady living with a repair garage in his later years. Neither of Mulford's grandsons, Ralph Mulford III or Jeffrey Mulford, returned repeated calls for comment. Mr. McCrady keeps the car out of sight. Its 1914 Chevrolet engine has not been started in about a decade, and the tires from the trial were replaced long ago. The original blue paint is worn, and it wears a substantial coat of rust. The roadster's most distinguishable feature may be its double pointed fenders. In its February 2009 edition, Hemmings Classic Car confirmed that Mr. McCrady had found the last known Mulford car in existence. Mr. Freeman reviewed photos of the car for The New York Times and said he, too, is convinced it is the real thing. "I even remember seeing a handwritten note from Ralph Mulford mentioning that was the car that he took to Akron," Mr. Freeman said. Once the identity of the car was verified, Mr. McCrady began a mission to let the world know about the Mulford's historical significance.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Oct. 26 Nov. 1. Details and times are subject to change. ESSENTIAL HEROES: A MOMENTO LATINO EVENT 9 p.m. on CBS. This one hour, star studded special aims to raise awareness and joy in the Latino community, which has been disproportionately affected by the coronavirus pandemic. Hosted by Eva Longoria, Gloria Estefan and Ricky Martin, the event will feature musical performances, comedy sketches and documentary shorts from Lin Manuel Miranda, Pitbull, Rita Moreno and others. HALLOWEEN BAKING CHAMPIONSHIP 9 p.m. on Food Network. After creating devilish desserts in the shape of haunted houses, demon dolls and Halloween costumes, the four remaining bakers in this competition show will face off for the championship title on the season finale. Their task? Create cakes that look like severed limbs, as well as cakes that appear to float in thin air. The judges Carla Hall, Stephanie Boswell and Zac Young will decide who will win the 25,000 prize. 2020 BET HIP HOP AWARDS 9 p.m. on BET. Snoop Dogg, T.I. and Monica will present this year's BET Hip Hop awards, with performances from Lil Wayne, Cordae, 2 Chainz, City Girls and Ty Dolla ign. This year, DaBaby is up for 12 awards, including hip hop album of the year, followed by Roddy Ricch with 11 nominations. Megan Thee Stallion and Drake were each nominated for eight awards. THE SOUL OF AMERICA 9 p.m. on HBO. This documentary examines U.S. history as it pertains to the current political climate. The writer and historian Jon Meacham looks back at some of the nation's biggest challenges including the women's suffrage movement, the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, McCarthyism and the Civil Rights movement to understand how it has come up against forces of hatred and division. In addition to Meacham, the film features insights from Lisa Tetrault, George Takei and Representative John Lewis, who passed away in July. THIS IS US 9 p.m. on NBC. The Pearson family returns for the fifth season of this drama, catching up with siblings Kevin (Justin Hartley), Kate (Chrissy Metz) and Randall (Sterling K. Brown), and revisiting moments in their past as they search for fulfillment in the present day. On the premiere, the trio celebrates their 40th birthday. BURNING OJAI: OUR FIRE STORY 7 p.m. on HBO. In December 2017, the Thomas Fire raged through the California town of Ojai, destroying nearly 282,000 acres of land and devastating the area's homes and businesses. In this documentary, the filmmaker and Ojai resident Michael Milano follows residents who were directly impacted by the wildfire, as well as the town's repair efforts. THE BEST MAN (1964) 8 p.m. on TCM. This film adaptation of the 1960 play chronicles a contentious political battle for the presidential nomination. Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner and written by Gore Vidal, the film follows William Russell (Henry Fonda), the intellectual former secretary of state, and Senator Joe Cantwell (Cliff Robertson), a populist and ruthless opportunist, as they try to win over voters and secure endorsements. "Mr. Vidal shows us how a dirty political fight can destroy our best presidential aspirants," Bosley Crowther wrote in his New York Times review at the time. "It's something to think about." SUPERSTORE 8 p.m. on NBC. This workplace comedy which follows the employees of the fictional megastore Cloud 9 returns for a new season. On the premiere, Amy (America Ferrera) tries to instill some order among the store's employees as they grapple with how the coronavirus pandemic will shift their duties and work culture. BEFORE DAWN (1933) 8:30 p.m. on TCM. This thriller follows a clairvoyant, a police detective and an Austrian psychologist as they hunt for 1 million hidden by a recently deceased gangster. After an old woman mysteriously dies in the house where the loot is said to be hidden, a detective, Dwight Wilson (Stuart Erwin), enlists the help of a clairvoyant woman, Patricia Merrick (Dorothy Wilson), to solve the murder and find the money before anyone else does. In his New York Times review, Mordaunt Hall wrote, "There are enough killings and accidental deaths to satisfy the most ardent enthusiasts of such thrillers." CITIZEN BIO 9 p.m. on Showtime. This documentary, directed by Trish Dolman, takes a deep dive into the world of biohacking embraced by a community that believes advances in gene editing technology make it possible for people for perform genetic experiments at home, often augmenting their own bodies to create experimental drug therapies and treatments for diseases. The film also looks into the life and work of Aaron Traywick, a self proclaimed biohacker who was mysteriously found dead at the age of 28. THE HAUNTING (1963) 6 p.m. on TCM. In honor of Halloween, Turner Classic Movies has an all day spooky movie lineup that includes this horror film, directed by Robert Wise. It follows an anthropologist who heads off to conduct an experiment at a decrepit mansion in New England said to have supernatural powers. Once there, he and his team begin to experience terrifying, unexplained phenomena. The movie was based on Shirley Jackson's 1959 novella, "The Haunting of Hill House," which also influenced the Netflix series of the same name. Earlier in the day, you can catch DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1932) at 7:15 a.m., and THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (1945) at 2:45 p.m. The Stanley Kubrick classic DR. STRANGELOVE (1964), follows at 8 p.m.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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When you shop for cat food online, Amazon knows who you are. When you look for the best airfares for summer vacation, Google knows who you are. Soon, when you get behind the wheel, your car may recognize you, too. Using cameras with facial recognition software and other biometric indicators, automakers are looking to personalize the driving experience with cars that stare back at you, quietly adjusting seats and driving modes. They may even anticipate your wants and desires by playing your favorite music based on your mood. And it's not only about convenience, but also about the possibility of improving safety and security. "It's not just about personalization," said Zachary Bolton, a systems and technology engineer at Continental Automotive Group, explaining the sophistication of such systems. "We can use the gleam, the twinkle in your eye to determine precisely where you're looking." Engineers can then dynamically adjust the so called human machine interface, putting critical information, say, about a stalled car up ahead, or the fact that you are about to exceed the speed limit, directly in a driver's line of sight on the dashboard or in a display on the windshield. Conversely, by tracking downward eye movements, the car could "see" that a driver was distracted and sound a warning. Continental has already demonstrated in car systems that allow drivers to register their faces using something as simple as a driver's license picture. An interior infrared camera is used to overcome potential obstacles like sunglasses, which would stymie a conventional video camera. Putting the camera in the center instrument cluster also helps to pinpoint the driver's eyes, even if she's wearing a hat. The biggest technical challenge glare caused by sunlight can be filtered out using machine learning, Mr. Bolton said. Once the car knows who you are, systems in vehicles like the Chrysler Portal concept car would automatically adjust the seat for maximum comfort, select a driving mode (for example, one driver likes to let the car do most of the work; another likes taking control in sport mode) and suggest a destination based on the owner's past behavior. Watching a driver's face can also give a car important clues about that person's state of mind. For several years, carmakers like Ford and tech companies like Intel have been interested in determining whether a driver is happy or sad. Depending on your mood, a car could change its tune, playing a bouncy Beach Boys song and changing the interior lighting to improve your attitude. Honda's NeuV concept car, for example, has a large customizable LCD dashboard and a cloud connected, onboard computer that uses artificial intelligence to interact with drivers. NeuV employs what the company coyly refers to as an "emotion engine" to grease the wheels of the conversation, and its automated personal assistant can read "facial skin vibrations" to help it isolate the driver's voice and better understand spoken commands. There are practical reasons as well, designers say, for detecting a driver's emotional state: A calm driver is a safer driver. So cars that recognize when you are becoming angry and thus prone to road rage could potentially quell annoying bells and chimes in the car and play some mellow jazz to soothe you. By replacing keys and remote control fobs, biometrics like facial recognition could also make cars more difficult to steal. In its prototype FF 91 sport utility vehicle, the electric car start up Faraday Future uses an external camera mounted in the door frame to detect the car's owner and automatically unlock the vehicle. Such techniques can create new security challenges, however. In this digital age, our faces are everywhere: in online company profiles, on Twitter accounts, even tagged in friends' Facebook accounts. Finding an image to print out and foil a car's facial recognition system would not be very difficult. Fortunately, engineers have devised high tech countermeasures. Stereoscopic video cameras, for example, can tell the difference between a flat image and a three dimensional object. Continental's cameras measure the distance of reflected light off various parts of a person's face, ensuring that it is a real object rather than a high resolution shot of the owner's visage. "Some systems have added blink detection and aliveness detection," said Steve Grobman, chief technology officer for security at Intel. But he acknowledged that it was still possible to thwart such technology. "We had 3 D masks printed that we ordered and were able to trick some systems," he said. But he said most thieves would be unlikely to go to such extreme lengths to steal a car. "It all depends on the level of accuracy you need," said Yoni Heilbronn, chief marketing officer of Argus Cyber Security, which works with automakers to short circuit hacking threats. "Retina scans are even better than facial recognition" as a potential solution, he said, "but by adding another level of authentication you lose some of the convenience." On the other hand, high tech personalization could be used not only to create amenities for single owners, but also to instantly adapt a vehicle to suit a variety of drivers. Valets, for example, could be automatically prevented from accessing personal information in a navigation system or driving faster than, say, 30 miles per hour. In a ride sharing situation, such systems could also be used to quickly tailor a car's interior to the physical characteristics of different drivers and passengers. Even airbags could be fine tuned, reducing the intensity of their deployment depending on the size and position of a driver or young passenger. Some elements of the personalized driving experience are already coming to cars. By the end of the year, Ford plans to add Amazon's Alexa personal assistant to some of its cars, said Dave Hatton, manager of Ford's mobile applications for connected vehicles. It will not only allow personalized music stations to play with a voice command, but also enable drivers to juggle chores like adding items to an existing grocery list with just a few words. Such convenience may come with some trade offs on privacy. "It's a huge concern," said John Simpson, privacy project director at Consumer Watchdog, a nonprofit advocacy group. "All that data is in some database without your consent or knowledge about how it's going to be used," he said, adding that there was little if any current government regulation to curtail such use. Using traffic tracking programs like Waze, some consumers have already signaled their preference for convenience in return for giving up some information like their location. Programmers also point out that such services are optional: You don't have to let the company track you but then you may get stuck in traffic for 45 minutes. Today, basic biometric technologies like facial recognition software are used for everything from signing into Windows laptops to thwarting toilet paper thieves in Beijing. Fingerprint readers are commonly used to unlock smartphones. As consumers become more accustomed to such systems, the introduction of the technology in vehicles may seem like a natural evolution rather than a creepy intrusion. And it could be fun. Consider the entertainment and social media repercussions in the vein of James Corden's "Carpool Karaoke" segments. A built in camera could record and broadcast your singalong on Facebook or Twitter assuming the car was in autonomous driving mode. Of course, drivers could grab quick selfies on the road, too. "It's a novel ideal," Mr. Bolton said, "but remember that an infrared camera makes your face look a little like a skeleton, so it's not that flattering."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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Eating fermented soy products may reduce the risk of premature death, researchers report. Some soy products, like tofu, are not fermented. But others miso, natto and tempeh, for example are made using bacteria or mold in a fermentation process. Soy sauce, if made in the traditional way, is also fermented. The study, in BMJ, followed the diets and health of 92,915 Japanese men and women aged 45 to 74 for an average of 15 years. During this time, 13,303 of the study participants died. After controlling for other diet components, hypertension, diabetes, smoking, alcohol intake and other factors, the researchers found that compared with those in the lowest one fifth for fermented soy intake, those in the highest one fifth had a 10 percent lower risk of death from any cause. Those in the highest one fifth for natto intake, but not miso, had an 18 percent lower risk of cardiovascular disease death, possibly because of the lower sodium content of natto. The study was prospective with a large sample and long follow up, but the authors caution that it is an observational study that does not prove cause and effect, and that there were many other variables they were unable to account for.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Well
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As the season begins to tilt toward cold weather, it looks like you'll be spending a bit more time at home kidding, of course, we'll all just continue to not go anywhere and search our streaming services, which sure seemed to have an unlimited supply of things to watch, for anything new. So, again, we're here to help: This month's suggestions include sex comedies, character driven dramas, crime thrillers and even (if you can imagine such a thing) an earnest documentary. Porter's film tells a quintessentially American story with structural ingenuity and stylistic flair, interweaving past and present to both summarize Lewis's remarkable history and capture how he spent his final years, traveling the country to crusade, campaign and inspire. The film is aware, as its subject was, that history is never in our past, and Porter wisely uses the 2018 battle for the Georgia governor's seat as a contemporary analogue, underlining the continuing stakes of voting rights. But most of all, she captures Lewis's warmth and personal charm; it's a pleasure merely to spend 96 more minutes in his company. A soldier and mother returns from an extended tour in Afghanistan and finds rebuilding her bond with her young son to be as stressful as combat in this modest, patient and sensitive familial drama from the writer and director Claudia Myers. Michelle Monaghan (best known to mainstream audiences as Tom Cruise's wife in the "Mission: Impossible" films) is astonishingly good as the Army medic Maggie Swann, who has been gone for so much of her son's life that she doesn't even know how to connect, and Myers has a keen ear for the specific ways kids can push their parents' buttons and escalate conflicts. It makes for difficult viewing, but Myers's intelligent script is attuned to the difficulties of re establishing trust and love within these precarious relationships. She feels for her protagonist without apologizing for her flaws, granting the complexity of this woman and her situation a refreshing counter to the sinner/saint split of too many cinematic mothers. And the pointed, poignant ending will absolutely rip you to shreds. Kids love to have sleepovers so why can't their parents have a little fun themselves? That's the premise of this freewheeling, entertaining sex comedy from Patrick Brice (who also wrote and directed the markedly different "Creep" movies), in which the L.A. newbies Alex (Adam Scott) and Emily (Taylor Schilling) make friends with fellow parents Kurt (Jason Schwartzman) and Charlotte (Judith Godreche), and find the kids' chaperoned overnight becoming a journey of tentative sexual discovery for the grown ups. Slight (a mere 79 minutes) but light, Brice's film displays a winking sense of ribald humor and a sense of sexual fluidity that's a welcome counterpoint to the casual homophobia of too many contemporary comedies. You might think it impossible to make a movie in which magic conveys a sense of cool but you'd think again after taking in this dramatic thriller from the writer and director J.D. Dillard ("Sweetheart"). Jacob Latimore is charismatic as a scholarship student who takes a desperate turn to drug dealing after a family tragedy, and realizes his gift for magic may be his only escape from the clutches of a kingpin (Dule Hill, from "Psych" and "The West Wing," playing nicely against type). Dillard proves a stylish storyteller, and his film is fast paced and lived in, building with force to an eminently satisfying climax. Robert Duvall's fourth film as writer and director isn't quite as confident or successful as his earlier "The Apostle" and "Assassination Tango." But it's well worth seeing, a mixture of crime thriller and familial drama in which the sins of the past come around to the present, ready to collect. Its main draw is, of course, a fully realized and beautifully textured Duvall performance, as he fleshes out the contradictions of his Texas ranch owner, who, nearing the end of his life, is trying to mend old fences. Chief among his obligations is his estranged son (James Franco), and the picture's best scenes are their duets, as these two stubborn men attempt to work through their prickliness and age old resentments, fumbling toward some kind of honesty and truth. It's easy to dismiss contemporary, gentrified Brooklyn as bland and boring, a perception that the writer and director Dustin Guy Defa does his best to deflate with this giddily dizzy comedy. Assembling an occasionally intersecting ensemble of unapologetic eccentrics and lovelorn weirdos, it's the kind of movie in which an entire plotline can hinge on the authenticity of a rare Charlie Parker album, and the wary musings of a watchmaker can feel like a manifesto. Some of the faces in Defa's cast are familiar Michael Cera, Abbi Jacobson, Philip Baker Hall while the rest (particularly Bene Coopersmith and George Sample III) should be. Keanu Reeves stars as a family man who indulges his worst instincts and pays the price in this remake of the 1977 exploitation film "Death Game." Lorenza Izzo and a pre "Knives Out" Ana de Armas co star as two fetching young women who appear at his door in the middle of a rainstorm, stranded and wet and asking for help while promising carnal possibilities; they deliver on that promise, and much more besides. The director Eli Roth ("Cabin Fever") unapologetically indulges in the sleazy premise, while remembering that no great grindhouse movie takes itself too seriously, and the comeuppance of the climax unfolds with ticktock ingenuity and gleeful garishness. Such winks are nowhere to be found in this month's most challenging recommendation, the horrifying tale of a young woman who meets a seemingly benign suburban couple who kidnap and terrorize her, a harrowing ordeal that seems unavoidably pointing toward her own death. The writer and director Ben Young based his film on several real life cases in the Australia of his youth, and blurs the line between drama and true crime to great effect, using the stylistic flourishes of a horror film instead of the flat, documentary style aesthetic of "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" and its ilk. It is not, to be clear, a fun watch. But the craft on display, and the skill of the performances, make it impossible to shake.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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Tourists this summer at the Acropolis in Athens. Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece welcomed an influx of sun seeking tourists. TARIFA, Spain Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece are hoping that this year's record influx of sun seeking tourists and their money from Northern Europe will continue past summer's end. Call it an alternative financial bailout. As Europe's peak holiday season draws to a close, Spain and the other countries of Southern Europe hit hardest by the euro debt crisis are reaping the benefits of increased tourism. Anita Burgler, a 43 year old Swiss kite surfing fanatic, chose this resort town on the Strait of Gibraltar to spend her first ever Spanish holiday. She heard it has some of the strongest winds in Europe. In Tarifa, she found the wind swept coastline that she expected. It might have been just a bit crowded for her taste. The shore is, she said last week, "just very busy, with too many other surfers to really enjoy myself." So she and her 45 year old partner, Urs Baur, who also had never vacationed in Spain, spent much of their two week holiday enjoying other activities that included whale watching, hiking and a day trip to the picturesque town of Ronda. But Tarifa has not necessarily seen the last of Ms. Burgler this year. She said she was almost certain to cancel her annual kite surfing winter holiday to Egypt's Red Sea, booked for November, because of security concerns. Instead, she will consider another visit to Tarifa, whose waters will be colder but far less crowded than in August. Indeed, political turmoil elsewhere around the Mediterranean has benefited Europe's southern coast. Last week, an association of entrepreneurs in the Canary Islands, the Spanish archipelago off West Africa, forecast that before the end of the year, their region would welcome an additional quarter million people who had initially planned to escape Europe's winter cold by vacationing in Egypt but now planned to go elsewhere in response to the military takeover and rioting. Spain has perhaps been the main tourism beneficiary of the repercussions of events in the Arab world and Turkey, according to travel experts and early estimates. Tourists visiting Spain spent 32 billion euros, about 42 billion, in the first seven months of the year, up 6 percent from 2012 (including spending on transportation), according to data released last Tuesday by Spain's tourism ministry. Tourist spending is a small fraction of the 1.3 trillion Spanish economy, but it is a financial bright spot for a country that has not had many in recent years. In the first seven months of 2013, Spain welcomed a record 34 million foreigners, a rise of 4 percent from a year earlier. British visitors accounted for almost a quarter of the total. But the strongest percentage rises came from tourists from Russia, up more than 30 percent, to 840,000, and the Nordic countries, increasing 18 percent to 2.9 million. Many analysts now expect the number of foreign tourists visiting Spain in 2013 to breach 60 million for the first time, besting the record of 59.2 million visitors in 2007. Demand has been strong enough that in some countries, hotels have been able to raise prices. Jurgen Ringbeck, who oversees the transport, tourism and travel practice at the management consulting firm Booz Company in Germany, said it was striking how far "the Spanish market has been able to capture more demand even by increasing prices." He said the average cost of a Spanish hotel room had climbed more than 20 percent since 2009, reaching about 70 a night on average this year, which is also above the precrisis level of 67. "The pricing power of the Spanish market is surprisingly strong," Mr. Ringbeck said, "which shows that operators have really understood that their major competitors in North Africa are no longer in a position to be very attractive." Open or closed on Thanksgiving? Here are stores' plans for Thursday and Friday. Not all the South European travel markets have pricing power. Greek operators have opted for more aggressive pricing and more package holidays than in the past, said Mr. Ringbeck, who estimated that Greece's hotel prices were down around 10 percent from last year. The Greek travel sector, which represents as much as 15 percent of Greece's 251 billion economy, has had to claw its way back after crippling transport strikes and other labor protests scared away many tourists. Although Greece remains in financial trouble and is expected soon to need even more international assistance, Yannis Stournaras, the Greek finance minister, told Parliament last week that Athens was on target to raise its gross domestic product this year, mainly because of tourism. The number of visitors to Greece is expected to top 17 million this year, up from 15.5 million in 2012. The Bank of Greece says revenue from tourism rose 18 percent in the first half of the year, to 4.4 billion. In Portugal, meanwhile, tourism revenues rose 8.2 percent in the first half of the year, also as a result of more visitors from Northern Europe and Russia. And even though large scale infrastructure spending almost dried up in Spain after 2008, some tourism related investments have gone ahead. A dredging project has eased access for cruise ships to the inland river port of Seville, where Christopher Columbus started one of his famous voyages. Last Tuesday, the Azamara Quest, a cruise ship operated by Royal Caribbean International, docked in Seville for a two day visit with about 600 tourists aboard. From January to July, ships carrying almost 10,000 passengers traveled to and from Seville, a rise in traffic of 28 percent from a year earlier, according to the local authorities. Here in Tarifa, Javier de la Rubia, the third generation owner of a hotel, reopened his establishment in July after 18 months of renovations that involved adding another floor and an underground parking garage. The bursting of Spain's construction bubble in 2008 meant that "building companies were at a standstill," he said, "so this was the right timing to negotiate the terms that I wanted." Some towns have found new ways to pull in tourism dollars. Last week, Bunol, in eastern Spain, caused a stir when it began charging visitors to attend its "Tomatina," a tomato hurling street party that started in 1945 and has become one of Spain's best known summer fiestas. The town hall sold 15,000 tickets to visitors for 13 each, while setting aside 5,000 free tickets for residents.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Global Business
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LOS ANGELES When the Broad opened here in 2015, it was hard to predict what the museum would offer beyond the blue chip art collection formed by its founders, Eli and Edythe Broad. Now the museum's commitment to hosting traveling exhibitions from other institutions to refresh its own program is becoming clearer. Having already signed on to host a survey of Yayoi Kusama's "Infinity Mirrored Rooms" in October (the show originated at the Hirshhorn Museum), the Broad has just finalized plans to take a six decade survey of Jasper Johns next February from the Royal Academy of Arts in London, becoming the show's sole American venue. The show, "Jasper Johns: 'Something Resembling Truth,'" would also be the first major survey of Mr. Johns, 87, in the Los Angeles area since his groundbreaking Pasadena Museum of Art exhibition in 1965 under Walter Hopps. "And Johns has made a few things since then," the Broad's director, Joanne Heyler, said dryly.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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SEATTLE Amazon released the first Echo smart speaker three years ago, not long after the company's attempt at a smartphone proved to be a humiliating failure. So far, the results for the Echo have been anything but humiliating. Now, having grown more confident that it understands the fickle market for consumer products, Amazon is making it clear that the Echo and other hardware powered by Alexa, the intelligent assistant behind the devices, present the company with one of its brightest opportunities. On Wednesday, Amazon introduced an array of new Alexa devices that are smaller, less expensive and, in some cases, built for specific areas of the home, including an alarm clock, Echo Spot, that is designed to sit on night stands and desks. Amazon prides itself on its almost pathological focus on what its customers want, rather than what its competitors are doing. But its new Alexa products are clearly a response, at least in part, to new smart speaker offerings from Google and Apple. Amazon is betting that it can defend its franchise by using an old trick aggressive pricing and by finding ways to embed Alexa's hooks more deeply into customers' lives.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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LONDON Already reeling from a banking crisis that is threatening its financial credibility, Ireland suffered another setback on Thursday when fresh data showed that its ailing economy shrank 1.2 percent in the second quarter. The decline, after growth of 2.2 percent in the first quarter, surprised many analysts, who had expected the expansion to continue. It also raised the daunting prospect that the Irish economy, hamstrung by a real estate market that has slumped 50 percent and banks that are barely lending, may not soon recover. The bad economic news, combined with continued uncertainty over how much more the country must invest in its depleted banking companies, led to a further increase in Irish 10 year bond yields, to a record of 6.6 percent. Weak growth spells trouble for Ireland in two important respects. With a budget deficit equal to 11 percent of gross domestic product, the economy desperately needs a pickup to generate tax revenue. Perhaps more important, though, is the effect on its banks. As the government is largely liable for the country's worst performing loans, a stagnating economy means more real estate loans going bad that the government must cover especially in the case of Anglo Irish, the troubled commercial bank that the government now controls. The total cost to the government to fix the banking system is expected to be close to 30 percent of overall economic output. Not all economists were surprised by the new data, however. Antonio Garcia Pascual, an economist for Barclays Capital, said the figure was to be expected, given the government's fiscal retrenchment and the unwillingness of consumers to spend. "I don't think this is terribly bad news," he said. "It was discounted in the market." The Irish economy sank 7 percent last year, and many economists expect it to shrink 1 percent this year. Mr. Garcia Pascual said he expects growth of 2 percent next year. Still, the markets were not so sanguine, latching on to the figure as a sign that the economy was headed for a double dip recession. The cost of insuring Irish debt hit a high of 4.9 percent. Adding to the negative mood, the data provider Markit reported that its preliminary purchasing managers' index for the euro area fell in September. The decline, which was more than had been expected, reinforced the view among analysts that the recovery in the euro zone was losing steam. Stocks in Europe were off about 1 percent in late trading. In Ireland, which was among the countries hardest hit by the crisis, the cuts to public sector wages and pensions have been the most severe. That gave the government some breathing room last year as Greece and Spain drew investor scrutiny. Unlike those two countries, though, Ireland has also experienced a full fledged banking crisis, leading the government to guarantee the liabilities of the major banks. It is now becoming clear that the bad real estate debts that brought down the banking sector are not improving with time, and as a result, the country's debt is expected to approach 110 percent of gross domestic product. The Irish government has said that within two weeks it will announce the full cost of propping up Anglo Irish, which was nationalized early last year. The government is expected to put in 25 billion euros, or 33 billion, and it said that the bank would be split up and eventually wound down. But with political pressure on the government building, investors worry that the subordinated debt holders of Anglo Irish who in liquidation would be paid after senior bondholders might be forced to take a loss on their holdings. The disappointing G.D.P. number is likely to force the government to make another round of spending cuts to compensate for continued weakness in tax revenues.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Global Business
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At the Manhattan apartment of Dr. Phyllis Harrison Ross, Robert Berman, an owner of Capo Auction, and Katie Hustead, background, of Paper Moon Moves, a company that specializes in seniors, confer with the client. Dr. Harrison Ross is moving from her home of 48 years into an apartment building tailored to seniors. In her long career as a psychiatrist, Dr. Phyllis Harrison Ross has been described by friends and colleagues as practical and calm. But two other traits, humor and patience, went right out the window when she decided to downsize. "You ask yourself what you want to keep, and the answer is 'everything,' " said Dr. Harrison Ross, who turns 80 next month. "It's an emotional roller coaster that takes a toll on you. It's very tiring. "I thought I could get down to the bare essence of things myself," she said. "But that proved to be very difficult, much more than I had expected." Moving is stressful at any age, but for those who have lived in one place for many years, getting rid of things that have accumulated over decades is a large barrier to overcome. Senior move managers specialize in the issues that comes with downsizing, including donating and selling items and hiring movers. In New York, these managers maneuver through the often stringent moving and trash disposal rules adopted by co ops and condominium buildings. They also deal with out of town family members who may want items sent to them. They pack and unpack; they call the cable company. Most also help with decluttering and organizing the homes of seniors who wish to stay put. The specialty is new, so no one can estimate just how many senior move managers there might be in the United States. But Mary Kay Buysse, the executive director of the National Association of Senior Move Managers, said: "Our membership has grown from 22 members in 2002 to nearly 1,000 members today. Though most of our current data is anecdotal, we know members managed over 100,000 senior moves last year." She added that total revenue among the members was about 150 million last year. Dr. Harrison Ross, a commissioner of the New York State Commission of Correction and chairwoman of the commission's medical review board, said she first thought about moving from her four bedroom co op on the Upper West Side about five years ago, but didn't start looking for a smaller place until health issues took a toll about two years ago. She asked a friend to help her get organized. But the two puzzled over how to get rid of large items or whom to call to sell furniture and artwork. Then Dr. Harrison Ross's real estate agent referred her to Katie Hustead, who with her husband, Joseph Weston, runs Paper Moon Moves, a Brooklyn company specializing in seniors. She talked to Ms. Hustead on the phone and met with her in person before she signed on. "It's very important to hire someone that you can trust, because the decisions you're making are very emotional," Dr. Harrison Ross said. "Once I knew I could trust Katie, things started to move forward, because any suggestion she would make, I knew she had thought about what was important to me." Most senior move managers in New York charge about 100 per hour, higher than the national average. In a 2014 survey conducted by the National Association of Senior Move Managers, 50 percent of the respondents said they charged between 41 and 60 per hour. "This is helpful because it shows the client that you can't bring everything, because it simply won't fit," Ms. Hustead said. She also takes dozens of photos of the insides of cabinets, closets and dressers, so if she is asked to unpack after the move, she can recreate the placement of things for her clients. Move managers also have a long list of contacts for specific tasks, Ms. Buysse said. For example, a good move manager will know not to call a top tier auctioneer for something worth a few thousand dollars, and know which estate liquidators or junk haulers work well with seniors. Move managers can also step in when adult children don't live near their parents or don't have time to help sort through belongings. Judith Kahn, who owns Judith Moves You, a Manhattan company that specializes in senior moves, said most seniors can handle an organizational task for only about three hours a day, which can frustrate adult children who have flown in for the weekend and want to get things done quickly. Linda E. Frankel, a move manager and owner of Artful Transitions NYC in Manhattan, said many urban seniors don't cull their belongings simply because they don't have a car to easily transport things. Ms. Frankel said she uses nonprofit organizations like the City Opera Thrift Shop or Housing Works because they have trucks that can be dispatched for large pickups. Items with monetary value are either handed over to auction houses, which take a commission after the items are sold, or to estate liquidators and dealers, who give the seller money upfront. Documents that can authenticate artwork are key, said Robert Berman, an owner of Capo Auction in Long Island City, Queens, who visited Dr. Harrison Ross at home one afternoon. After looking at her furniture and artwork, which included paintings by Herbert Gentry, an African American expressionist painter, Mr. Berman took the Whitney baby grand piano, which had been given to her by her parents. She kept the paintings. "This is a nice size, perfect for a Manhattan apartment," Mr. Berman said of the piano. He estimated it could fetch between 800 and 1,200, from which he would receive a 23 percent commission. Midcentury modern furniture is perhaps most coveted by dealers, while most ornate dining room sets especially those that come with china cabinets, buffets and hutches will not sell, according to Ms. Frankel. "It's sad, because dining room sets were the biggest purchases people of this generation made, and it holds huge sentimental value," she said. "But even their kids don't want it." A member of the staff of Judith Moves You organizes the bookshelves in the bedroom of the client's new apartment. Emon Hassan for The New York Times She often shows her clients how low similar furniture has been priced on internet commerce sites and how long it takes to sell such items, which quells most ambitions to seek top dollar. Instead, she tells clients that the most likely scenario is that "someone will buy it from a dealer or a thrift store and it will have a new life," Ms. Frankel said. That said, people hire move managers not just for their organizational skills but for their discerning eye. Ms. Frankel once came across an Arabic manuscript in a pile of books; her client had no idea where it had come from. Ms. Frankel had a hunch it was a rare find and she was right; the book was a late 17th century Ottoman Quran and sold, she said, through Sotheby's London in 2014 for about 50,000. Move managers can be found online. Many are referred by real estate agents, estate lawyers, geriatric care managers and staff at senior living facilities. Not surprisingly, specialists in senior moves say their business is growing. According to the New York City Department for the Aging, about 1 million individuals in the five boroughs were 65 years and older in 2010. By 2030, the number is expected to grow to about 1.35 million. The Department of City Planning estimates there will be a total of 8.8 million New Yorkers by 2030, up by about 7 percent from the estimated 8.2 million figure for 2010. "There are things in there that we thought would be great to use in our vacation home, which we never purchased," he said. Mr. Cigna said their spacious apartment seemed more and more crowded. A referral from a friend led to Mr. Weston of Paper Moon, who helped them cull their belongings. "By doing all of this now, I think we'll be able to make quick decisions if and when we decide to move," Mr. Pandina said. Many, however, don't call move managers until the situation is dire. Fran O'Brien, 52, found herself in such a jam when her mother's health rapidly deteriorated. By early this year, it was clear that her mother, Astrid O'Brien, needed round the clock care, and her parents would have to leave their home of 54 years in Riverdale, the Bronx. "It is truly a frightful prospect to suddenly have to determine what you want to keep," said Robert O'Brien, Fran O'Brien's father. "I became anxious because I knew I couldn't do this alone." In early March, Astrid O'Brien moved into an assisted living facility in Paramus, N.J., and Ms. Kahn of Judith Moves You was hired to sort through the couple's things. The O'Briens, both philosophy professors at Fordham College at Lincoln Center for more than 50 years, had over a thousand books, mostly on philosophy, Ms. Kahn said. Ms. Kahn and Mr. O'Brien, 85, pared down the collection to about 300 books. Mr. O'Brien said he couldn't believe how quickly Ms. Kahn worked. In a few weeks she managed to get him moved in with his wife, who died four days later at age 82. "Judith's expertise and know how was simply priceless," he said. "I didn't want to spend the little time I had left with my mom packing boxes in the Bronx," Ms. O'Brien said. "It was such a relief when I found Judith."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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A roundup of motoring news from the web: Mercedes Benz unveiled Future Truck 2025, an autonomous tractor trailer concept, at a recent commercial vehicle conference. The truck, which the automaker hopes will make highways safer, would give truck drivers a less hands on "transport manager" role. The driver would still get the truck started and merge it onto the highway, but then the truck would drive itself, Mercedes said. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, about 333,000 large trucks were involved in crashes in 2012, killing nearly 4,000 people. (Wired) Two new studies conducted by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety and the University of Utah have found that although hands free infotainment technologies were intended to reduce distracted driving, they are actually making the problem worse. One study looked at Apple's voice activated Siri interface and the other delved into the infotainment systems offered by automakers like Chevrolet, Chrysler, Ford, Hyundai and Mercedes Benz. Siri scored the worst overall for distraction. Of the infotainment systems tested, Chevrolet's MyLink fared the worst. (Detroit Free Press) Chrysler announced on Tuesday that 18,245 Ram C/V Tradesman cargo vans from the 2013 15 model years were being recalled in the United States because of a defect that could cause inadvertent air bag deployments. The automaker said that it had received 25 reports of unexpected deployments, but that it was not aware of any accidents or injuries related to the problem. (Reuters) General Motors said on Tuesday that it was recalling 7,600 Chevrolet Caprice police cars from the 2011 13 model years because of a problem that could allow the vehicles' automatic transmissions to be shifted out of the park position without depressing the brake pedal. (The Detroit News)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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A Five Bedroom House on the Coast of Anguilla This Mediterranean style house, known as Villa Amarilla, was built by its owners in 2008 on a rocky foreshore of the 35 square mile Caribbean island of Anguilla. The five bedroom house, which has five full and two half bathrooms, is on a half acre lot, with a separate cottage and a pool terrace. Italian influences are evident in the yellow stucco walls and red tile roof. A bougainvillea draped pergola shades the wrought iron and glass double front door, with the sea visible beyond the entrance hall, through three sets of floor to ceiling French doors along the back wall of the living room. "You can see the view even before you enter the house," said Leslie el Effendi, one of the home's eight owners. Numerous French and sliding doors, terraces and a terra cotta tiled balcony stretching across the back of the two story house also offer panoramic vistas. Inside, the house has a "Moroccan flair," Ms. el Effendi said. Beneath the entry hall's vaulted ceiling, squares of bright blue porcelain tile on the floor are crisscrossed with wood grained ceramic planks, a motif that extends to the living room, which has a coffered ceiling with exposed beams. On the other side of the entrance hall is a media room with arched windows and a master bedroom with a dressing area and a colorfully tiled en suite bathroom with dual vanities, a private commode and indoor and outdoor showers. Twin staircases flank the entry hall, leading up to four bedrooms, each with an en suite bathroom and walk in closet, as well as access to a central balcony. The easternmost and westernmost bedrooms have outdoor showers and private balconies. All of the furniture comes with the house, Ms. el Effendi said, including the coral laden chandeliers and sconces and the white Chinese Chippendale dining set. The home has 16 air conditioners and a full house generator. Windows and doors are equipped with impact glass. Last year, the house survived Hurricane Irma unscathed, although the landscaping needed some touch ups, said Wicky el Effendi, an owner. An outdoor kitchen on the terrace has a bar and a barbecue. Cushioned seating areas occupy the two outer corners of the terrace. "That is usually where we are at sunset," Leslie el Effendi said. The heated infinity saltwater pool has tiled lounges and a spa. A balustrade surrounding the terrace continues down a double staircase to the lawn overlooking the sea. There is also a laundry room with a separate entrance from the driveway and a stand alone cottage with a gym and a full bathroom. The house is about a five minute drive to the white sand beach at Shoal Bay East and is within walking of Island Harbour, a "picturesque fishing village" known for "beach bars and more elegant restaurants," as well as an ice cream shop that rents kayaks, said Scott Hauser, the owner of Anguilla Properties Sotheby's International Realty, which has the listing. Most Americans fly into the neighboring island of St. Maarten and take the 20 minute boat ride from a pier near Princess Juliana International Airport, Mr. Hauser said. The home is a 20 minute drive from the Blowing Point ferry terminal on Anguilla and 15 minutes from Clayton J. Lloyd International Airport, used by small private planes and island hoppers. Before Irma, sellers were more reluctant to negotiate prices, he said, noting that the "bread and butter of the market" are homes in the 750,000 to 1.5 million range. John Wigley, a lawyer and a manager at Anguilla Realty, said that in some ways Irma "was a good thing, because people have become more realistic about selling their homes." Still, he added, some buyers "have a misconception" that they can scoop up "damaged properties quite cheaply." With most of the island's homes built from concrete, he said, "it doesn't work like that." Before 2017, the luxury market was "quite buoyant," drawing "significant attention, particularly from high net worth buyers," said Robert Cooper, director and editor of 7th Heaven Properties, which specializes in Caribbean real estate. In the wake of Irma, Mr. Cooper said, "there was a sharp drop in inquiries and home sales." But in the "relatively small, high end real estate market," asking prices did not drop significantly. At the top of the market in Anguilla, he said, "world class, ultraluxury" beachfront residences can still sell for as much as 20 million. And in recent years, a few condominium developments have offered buyers "the opportunity to purchase a slice of this high end destination through a more modest investment," Mr. Cooper said, with "the added benefits of resort style amenities and the worries of long distance ownership removed." Since reopening post Irma in April, one 5.2 million condominium has sold at the 136 unit Four Seasons Resort and Residences Anguilla, with 25 more on the market (43 have sold since 2016, when the Four Seasons rebranded the former Viceroy property). Prices for fully furnished suites, townhouses and villas range from 750,000 for a deluxe studio to 10 million for a 9,500 square foot, five bedroom, five bathroom beachfront home with a pool. When they are not in residence, buyers typically put the homes in a hotel rental program, said Nick Cassini, president of IMI Worldwide Properties, which is marketing the homes with Douglas Elliman. (A 10 million villa typically rents for 6,000 to 8,000 a night, and can fetch as much as 25,000 a night around Christmas.) Though "comparatively small," Anguilla's real estate market is among "the top tier of Caribbean luxury property markets," Mr. Cooper said, noting that several properties "offer very high rental income generating potential, and a track record of hosting world famous celebrity guests." Anguilla primarily attracts buyers from the United States and Canada, particularly those who live in the Northeast, with a few from Chicago and Toronto, and some from the United Kingdom and Europe, Mr. Hauser said. Shoal Bay, on the northeast coast, and Meads Bay and Barnes Bay, to the southwest, are "traditionally popular" with foreign buyers, Mr. Cooper said. Buyers at the Four Seasons come "from all over the world," Mr. Cassini said, including from Italy, Sweden, England and Canada. Most, however, are from the northeastern United States, with some from Arizona and North Carolina. Foreigners not only buy property in Anguilla for their own use, but also for its potential to generate rental income. The owners of Villa Amarilla, four couples from Texas, frequently rent the property, Ms. el Effendi said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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There is some truth to the longstanding anecdote that your locks can lose color when you're stressed. A team of researchers has found that in mice, stressful events damage the stem cells that are responsible for producing pigment in hair. These stem cells, found near the base of each hair follicle, differentiate to form more specialized cells called melanocytes, which generate the brown, black, red and yellow hues in hair and skin. Stress makes the stem cells differentiate faster, exhausting their number and resulting in strands that are more likely to be transparent gray. The study, published Wednesday in Nature, also found that the sympathetic nervous system, which prepares the body to respond to threats, plays an important role in the graying process. "Normally, the sympathetic nervous system is an emergency system for fight or flight, and it is supposed to be very beneficial or, at the very least, its effects are supposed to be transient and reversible," said Ya Chieh Hsu, a stem cell biologist at Harvard University who led the study. The sympathetic nervous system helps mobilize many biological responses, including increasing the flow of blood to muscles and sharpening mental focus. But the researchers found that in some cases the same system of nerves permanently depleted the stem cell population in hair follicles. The findings provide the first scientific link between stress and hair graying, Dr. Hsu said. Stress affects the whole body, so the researchers had to do some sleuthing to figure out which physiological system was conveying its effects to hair follicles. At first, the team hypothesized that stress might cause an immune attack on melanocyte stem cells. They exposed mice to acute stress by injecting the animals with an analogue of capsaicin, the chemical in chili peppers that causes irritation. But even mice that lacked immune cells ended up with gray hair. Next, the scientists looked at the effects of the stress hormone cortisol. Mice that had their adrenal glands removed so they couldn't produce cortisol still had hair that turned gray under stress. The system responsible for the appearance of silvery strands turns out to be the sympathetic nerves that branch out into each hair follicle in the skin. The researchers found that the sympathetic nerve cells released a neurotransmitter called noradrenaline that was taken up by nearby melanocyte stem cells. Then a series of events unfolded in quick succession: The melanocyte stem cells proliferated and turned into specialized pigment producing cells, which abandoned their niche near the base of the follicle and left the hair without a source of pigmentation. In Dr. Hsu's study, acute stress depleted the entire melanocyte stem cell population in mice in just five days. The researchers also found that, in petri dishes, noradrenaline prompted human melanocyte stem cells to proliferate, suggesting that the same acceleration of hair graying occurs in people, too. "I was amazed by how dramatic this change is," said Mayumi Ito, a biologist at the New York University School of Medicine who was not involved in the study. In her own research on aging mice, the graying process was gradual: The depletion of melanocyte stem cells led first to a few salt and pepper strands and then to gray or white fur, much as humans begin to see more white hair as they get older. Dr. Hsu's team also found that the graying process in mice could be halted with drugs known as CDK inhibitors, which stop the proliferation of stem cells, or by blocking the release of noradrenaline. The findings underscore the consequences of triggering a survival mechanism when the situation isn't life threatening. "Stress is a normal part of life, but there are situations where stress is helpful and situations where it is detrimental," said Subroto Chatterjee, a biologist at Johns Hopkins University who studies the effects of stress on the cells in blood vessels.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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We live in unsettling times. This isn't news both the mainstream media outlets and their alt news adversaries agree on this point, even if they disagree about what, exactly, has gone wrong. As unnerving as the last few American decades have been, it feels as if the last couple of years have been quantifiably different from what came before, and that the wall that once separated reality from fiction has been beaten into a pile of stones. 's new novel approaches this shift in the zeitgeist by taking us back to the early '90s and focusing on a time when out and out liars could still surprise us, when arguments were about interpretation rather than facts themselves; a time when the denial of objective reality could still frighten. It's a time Flanagan knows well, because the story he tells is his. "First Person" takes as its inspiration John Friedrich, the famous con man who embezzled a few hundred thousand Deutchmarks in his native West Germany, faked his own death, then reappeared in Melbourne in the 1970s under a new name. By the 1980s, he had become the executive director of the National Safety Council of Australia (a public nonprofit that works to prevent industrial and road accidents), and proceeded to use his position to defraud the banks of hundreds of millions of dollars. When he was finally caught in 1989 and put on trial, Friedrich hired a Tasmanian aspiring novelist named to ghostwrite his autobiography for 10,000, which the young Flanagan was instructed to complete in just six grueling weeks. In this fictional version of the story, Flanagan gives us Kif Kehlmann, a fledgling writer living hand to mouth with his pregnant wife and their daughter in Tasmania. Kif is approached by Ray, a fast living, dissolute childhood friend, with the offer of a real writing gig. The famous Siegfried "Ziggy" Heidl, a con man set to be sentenced for defrauding the banks of 700 million dollars while running the Australian Safety Organization, needs a ghostwriter for his autobiography. The publisher will pay 10,000 for six weeks' work. What seems a straightforward proposition is anything but, for Ziggy Heidl is anything but a willing collaborator. He won't settle down to work, instead reaching for the desk phone to engage in conversations with lawyers and journalists who, Kif begins to suspect, aren't on the line. Heidl departs on a dime for business lunches that may or may not occur. And when Kif holds him still and tries to gather facts, Heidl instead launches into wandering lectures on philosophy and humanity, quoting aphorisms and advising Kif on how to live his life. 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. Like Ziggy Stardust, Heidl has an "exotic charm." He's a chronic seducer who has learned, like every good con man, that his victims will always meet him halfway. "Trust is the oil that greases the machine of the world. Even people we hate we trust. That's how it is. And, amazingly, mostly it works." He also understands the power of flattery: "So obvious, so easy. It's not foolproof, but it is proof of fools." Frustratingly for his biographer, specifics are not part of Heidl's repertoire. "The greatest of prophets has but the vaguest of messages," he tells Kif. "The vaguer the message, the greater the prophet." All Kif can glean are tantalizing hints of an epic, dangerous life work for the C.I.A. and NASA; corpses in Chile, Laos, Indonesia; a paranoia that "the banks" are out to assassinate him and the mystery of an A.S.O. bookkeeper who vanished in 1987. Questions, not answers. Shadows without substance. All of it, quite possibly, a lie. As a creature of his time, Kif is horrified by Heidl, for whom basic facts birthplace, documented events, motivations can never be nailed down. Contradictions are made without apology or explanation. How can someone get away with denying reality? Is it the endless Machiavellian play of the ultimate con man, or does Heidl believe what he says when he says it? Is this, Kif wonders with the naivete of a time that isn't now, the face of evil? As the weeks slip away, Kif despairs of ever finishing the book and earning the money his family desperately needs. Heidl feels none of his urgency. Instead, he seems more interested in drawing Kif into his world, creating in him an acolyte. In explaining how he kept his scam going for so long, Heidl says, "I made it up. Every day, just like you. Like a writer." And then, moments later: "What do you think a businessman is? A politician? They're sorcerers they make things up. Stories are all that we have to hold us together. Religion, science, money they're all just stories. Australia is a story, politics is a story, religion is a story, money is a story and the A.S.O. was a story. The banks just stopped believing in my story. And when belief dies, nothing is left." While Heidl as a character is deeply compelling, and Flanagan writes with acute sensitivity about Kif's swelling anxieties made deeper by his gradually crumbling marriage, for a long stretch the story idles, taking us through the circular routine of Kif's daily slog. He heads into the publisher's office, either despairing or full of renewed purpose, and Heidl parries successfully. It's a relief when the six weeks runs out and the story steams ahead again, taking unexpected turns and raising the stakes for everyone. Here, too, is where Flanagan's thinly veiled autobiography ends, for instead of growing into a Booker Prize winning novelist, Kif finds success creating reality TV shows, where fiction and reality are indistinguishable. It's a sign of the times. "We need a man like Ziggy now," Ray tells him. "Someone who does, someone who gets it done. Not for himself. For others. For us." Heidl may have cheated the banks, Ray points out, but the banks cheat everyone else, and perhaps they deserve to be swindled even more. Looking around, Kif realizes that Ziggy Heidl was not so much the face of evil as he was the face of the future. This fact is brought home when Kif visits New York and drinks with Pia, his old editor. They're accosted by one of her authors, a glittering young literary star from Brooklyn who only writes autobiography. With the absolute surety that only experience can erode, she says, "Just the thought of a fabricated character doing fabricated things in a fabricated story makes me want to gag. I am totally hoping never to read another novel again." Kif, who long ago gave up novels for reality TV, doesn't bother to argue it's their world now, anyway, not his. Like so much autobiography, "First Person" is about nostalgia, for a lost age when once we could be horrified by outright lies, use the word "evil" to describe it and fear what might follow our acceptance of it.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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Car to quit, and in every wide corner Of Kansas where going to school means At least one field trip To a slaughterhouse. I want so little: another leather bound So good when I taste it I can tell you How it's made. I'd like us to rethink What it is to be a nation. I'm in a mood about America About the Lord. God save the people who work In grocery stores. They know a bit of glamour Is a lot of glamour. They know how much It costs for the eldest of us to eat. Save My loves and not my sentences. Before I see them, Add flair to the smile they can't see
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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Legend has it that shortly after Shakespeare premiered "Macbeth," London's theaters were shuttered by plague. Four centuries later, the playwright and screenwriter Paul Rudnick's "Coastal Elites," arriving on HBO Sept. 12, has embraced the soliloquy as the defining art form of the era of social distance, where we poor players strut and fret our hours on the webcam. With the director Jay Roach, Rudnick rejiggered five monologues originally intended to be performed live at the Public Theater into intimacies delivered straight to the lens as if venting to a therapist on Zoom. As it was for the Bard, the topic is the tyrant king whose outrages have pushed a Queens public school teacher named Miriam (Bette Midler) into madness. Midler's scene is set in a police station, a hint that even her character's witty self awareness about cultured women like her, who signify their opinion on their tote bags, has its limits. (As does the camera, which Miriam leans into urgently, distorting her face as she describes ripping off a man's MAGA hat and racing to the sanctuary of a theater, as though she's Quasimodo atop Notre Dame.) Has she become the monster?
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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David Van Zandt, president of the New School, at the inauguration of a new campus for the Indian School of Design Innovation in Mumbai, India, in 2015. The New School, in New York City, is one of the most international universities in the country. Of its approximately 10,000 students, about 34 percent are from outside the United States, the majority of those from China. The university, founded in 1919 as the New School for Social Research, comprises five colleges; the best known is Parsons School of Design. Parsons Paris, founded in 1921, draws students from around the world. The university also has partnerships with the Indian School of Design Innovation and the Dubai Institute of Design and Innovation, and smaller collaborations with institutions in 16 countries, including Israel, Japan, the Dominican Republic and the Netherlands. It is exploring the possibility of a Parsons Shenzen in China, which, like the one in Paris, would be a degree granting campus with a focus on design. David Van Zandt, who has been president of the university since 2011, plans to step down next year when his contract expires. He spoke to The New York Times about the globalization of education. This interview has been edited and condensed. What has changed with global education and universities? I think there's been a shift away from "how do you change the experience for American students" to "how do you reach non U.S. students?" That's what we're doing in Mumbai, in Dubai and in Shenzen in China. We help write the curriculum and offer other support. It's all for the locals. We get a fee for doing the consulting. If there's an ongoing relationship using our brand, we get a regular fee. Sometimes it's just one off. We actually almost had a deal with Saudi Arabia, which would have been great, but because of the Khashoggi thing, we put a stop on it. Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident and journalist for The Washington Post, was killed in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul last year. We would have been a partner, similar to Dubai. There have been concerns by students and faculty at other universities about partnering with countries with questionable records on human rights. Do you have those concerns? There's lots of things not to like about China, for example. But when we talk to our Chinese students about opening in Shenzen, there's a view that the larger the number of universities there, the more difficult it is for the Chinese government to clamp down on academic freedom or otherwise try to interfere with us. I think it's a question: Do you want engagement or do you want to be morally pure and isolate yourself? I tend toward the engagement level, particularly in the academic sphere. In China, we have very strict rules about academic freedom. We're not going to stay if the government interferes, and so far it hasn't. Some university administrators say they're taking a harder look at which Chinese students are enrolling in their graduate programs because of fear of spying. Are you concerned about that? Since we're not in the engineering/sciences fields, we're not concerned about spying. The big issue is visas and that the doors might come down. If the doors come down, we, like a lot of other universities, are going to be in a difficult position. I don't know how far these trade wars will actually go, and one of the biggest exports in our country people don't know this is higher ed. Also, from a sociopolitical standpoint you're educating people in other countries you're exposing them to the good and the bad of the U.S., which I happen to think is good, especially those from totalitarian regimes. Do you think since the 2016 election, the New School has taken stands it might not have in the past? That's sometimes a complaint from members of the community, that we're not outspoken enough. That's a personal philosophy I have, which I think a lot of university presidents share. We don't really take positions on external political issues unless it has a direct connection to higher ed. We're actually one of the four named plaintiffs in a lawsuit on a particular immigration policy that the Trump administration put out; it says if somebody overstays their visa, you start counting from the day they actually started overstaying, rather than from when they were accused of doing it. That means a lot more people won't be able to get back in the country once they leave. Those are the kinds of cases where it's very important to be a leader. Last year, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services announced this change, for certain types of visa holders; this could affect international students and exchange scholars. The New School, along with three others, filed the lawsuit, Guilford College et al. v. Nielsen et al. in Federal District Court, and dozens of other universities joined in supporting it. On May 3, a preliminary injunction was issued stopping the government from enforcing the policy. About 5 percent of your undergraduates study abroad. Do you think study abroad can in any way counter the fear of foreigners that is being whipped up in this country? I don't have any hard evidence, but my opinion would be any exposure internationally is important. I think one problem is that, because the American colleges and universities are trying to scale up, they tend to create little pods of all American students and lots of them even send their own faculty over to teach them. So you're sitting in a place in Paris and you're never really interacting with French people your age. I always thought it's much better to go to a local institution. On the other hand, Parsons Paris does serve as a landing spot for students here who want to spend a semester abroad. The big advantage there is students at Parsons Paris are from all over the world. How is the crackdown on undocumented immigrants affecting your school? There's certainly a lot of concern. One of our policies is that we don't know who is undocumented. Our basic policy is we're not going to cooperate with immigration officials absent some sort of valid legal authority. That's a fairly standard thing. There's a group of faculty and students who wanted us to declare ourselves a sanctuary campus. I decided I didn't want to do that. Why did you decide against that? I said we're doing all the things behind that all I care about really is our students and supporting them. I didn't see an advantage other than negative and saying we don't like Trump. I don't like Trump many students didn't vote for Trump, but we do have some conservative students and they tend to be quieter. I didn't see the advantage of labeling ourselves in a particular way. If there's one thing about higher education that keeps you up at night, what is it? This model just doesn't work. The median family income in the United States has stayed the same, and at the same time our costs just keep going up. It's harder and harder every year to give the faculty and staff raises. The cost of health care is going up at 3 percent every year and our ability to raise the tuition is going down. This place is in a very strong position much more than other places because we have a brand, but I'm worried about this place when it finally hits the wall. So why is your school worth 50,000 a year? We're definitely worth 50,000. We've seen the value of a college degree over a high school degree, and the difference has only increased. The reason it costs so much is because of what's demanded by the students and their parents. When I went to college, we had no orientation, my parents dropped me off, and today you can't do that. Parents and kids expect much more special treatment. A big issue on college campuses is mental health. The demands to have mental health services have only grown over time. There are jokes about climbing walls and sushi kitchens but the higher costs are really more advisers, more support for students. And also, at many colleges, faculty salaries have been driven up because there's a competition for faculty. If parents were asked, "would you pay 20,000 less if you took all this support and the additions out the orientations, the mental health?" do you think they would say yes? They would say yes if they were answering your question in the abstract, but if their kid needs some help that's different. What we do is a high touch full time residential experience not just teaching for kids between 18 and 24, and that is very expensive. Looking back, what has been the biggest challenge of being a university president? The external political environment had a big impact. When I got here, the first year was Occupy Wall Street and I think what happens on the outside reverberates on the inside. The Donald Trump situation caused all sorts of angst. I think all universities are getting more vocal in their objections and willingness to take positions or say things or cause problems or, put in the positive way, they want to be a part of the support of democracy.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Education
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Several categories of election misinformation emerged after the counting of votes began on Tuesday, much of it targeting the swing states that remain too close to call. Here are three types that are making the rounds on social media. 1. False claims of ballots being found or lost As the vote count got underway, unproven claims of ballots being found or lost falsely held up as evidence of widespread voter fraud began to emerge on Facebook and Twitter. Renee DiResta, a disinformation researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory, said these posts "repurposed user created content from Election Day, which documented one off incidents" then aggregated them "to support claims of fraud and illegitimacy." This type of post sometimes used pictures to lend an air of legitimacy to the false claim. On Tuesday evening, for example, a Twitter user commented on a news article with photos showing election workers in Fairfax County, Va., carrying sealed ballot boxes. The caption falsely stated that the batch of ballots had been found "once Virginia was looking red." Twitter labeled the post with a notice that let people "learn about U.S. 2020 election security efforts." Another common type of misleading post: that fraudulent votes were added in swing states overnight, leading to a suspicious jump in vote counts, mostly for the Democratic presidential nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr. Posts reviewed by The New York Times included specific mentions of Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia. In reality, there is nothing out of the ordinary about this process. "Processes for state elections were determined long before the first ballot was cast," said Lisa Kaplan, the founder of Alethea Group, a company that helps fight election related misinformation. "It's normal to see vote count change as states follow the procedures that they determined from the outset." A baseless narrative alleging that Arizona poll workers gave voters Sharpies to mark their ballots so their votes would be invalidated received more than 36,000 mentions across cable television and social media on Tuesday and Wednesday, according to an analysis by Zignal Labs, a media insights company. Individual tweets were posted beginning on the morning of Nov. 3, according to Zignal's data, then rose sharply after midnight on Nov. 4. Many of the posts viewed by The Times mentioned Maricopa County and Pinal County in Arizona, among other places, and raised fears about votes not being properly counted because of the way voting machines read ballots with marker ink bleeding through the paper. But both Arizona counties quickly debunked the idea of this being systemic voter fraud. Pinal County said people did not hand out Sharpies at polling places, and Maricopa County said using a Sharpie was safe for ballots there. Facebook said it had blocked the hashtag Sharpiegate by early Wednesday afternoon, meaning it is not searchable on its platform.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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The meandering routes between my suburban hometown of Hudson, Ohio, and the nearby village of Peninsula, a time capsule of a town midway between Akron and Cleveland, have had different effects on me over the years. As a restless teenager, I wandered the area in my peppy stick shift sedan, hoping to accelerate through the highs and lows of high school life and burning out a clutch along the way. (Sorry, Dad; I blame the steep hills on West Hines Hill Road.) Later, when I discovered the beauty of the waters and trails in Cuyahoga Valley National Park, the roads became a means to explore new interests in hiking, canoeing and photography. And more recently, during the coronavirus pandemic, when so much of our daily reality plays out on screens, cruising the roads and hopping out to explore both new and familiar trails has been a real world balm. Any road that gets you close to the Cuyahoga River is worth traveling, particularly in mid to late October, when the leaves erupt in a breathtakingly beautiful display. Snaking its way along a roughly 80 mile U shape path before emptying into Lake Erie, the Cuyahoga plays an outsize role in the story of Northeast Ohio; it was vital to Cleveland's industrial growth before the many fires along its waters made it infamous, helping to prompt the passage of the Clean Water Act and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency. These days, after half a century of cleanup efforts, it is held up as an ecological success story. (Having once submerged myself and inadvertently drunk a fair amount of it while sinking and retrieving a canoe, I can attest to its cleanliness.) But the river itself is often overshadowed particularly in the fall by its tangential allures: the 87 mile long Ohio Erie Canal Towpath Trail, whose light, crushed stone surface is brightly mottled with autumnal leaves; the waterfalls (around 100 in total) and rock gorges that pop with the warm colors; the Old World farms and markets, such as Heritage Farms and Szalay's, where people flock for pumpkins, apple butter, roasted sweet corn and, yes, the annual fall corn maze. The valley's unexpected grandeur is nowhere more evident than in and around Peninsula, a postcard esque (and postage stamp size) village that is, in many ways, the heart of the 33,000 acre national park. From the small train depot, board the Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad (there's even a Fall Flyer train) for a memorable view of the foliage. Roving the area by car (or on bicycle) will lead you past dozens of worthwhile trails. A personal favorite the completion of which has become a familial Christmas Day tradition is a hike that links the Haskell Run and Ledges loops and includes some of the valley's most distinctive features. Beginning near the Happy Days Lodge, built in the late 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps, the trail wanders beside a 19th century cemetery, over gentle streams (via footbridge crossings), near bat caves, and past the dramatic Sharon Conglomerate rock faces of the Ritchie Ledges, formed from the sand and quartz deposited by ancient streams all while immersing you in the richest of fall colors. The national park and its trails feel like an oasis from the suburban sprawl that surrounds them. To the east, along Route 8, commercialism in the form of car lots, industrial sites and a relatively new Costco plays the role of a sorry landscape architect. But mere miles away, and within a few steps of any given trailhead, the blunting effects of strip mall development evaporate under the fiery palettes of oak, hickory and beech trees, and amid the calls of the many migratory songbirds whose seasonal routes carry them through the park in the spring and fall. Moreover, a simple stroll along the locks of the Ohio and Erie Canal the 19th century animating spirit not just of the region's economy but also of Peninsula's development as a historical center, once home to five hotels and 14 saloons is enough to stoke curiosities about Northeast Ohio's historical ties to Connecticut, via that colony's (and, later, state's) Western Reserve. In many ways, Cuyahoga Valley can't compete with the scale or sublimity of the national parks in the West. But that's largely irrelevant. Standing among the cliffs at Ledges, or resting at the banks of Sylvan Pond on the brilliantly pigmented Oak Hill Trail, or cruising into the valley on a scenic leaf covered road to Peninsula, I feel something that for me and many others, especially in this long moment of isolation is only available in this particular pocket of the world: the decades long pull of a regenerative haven, here in my own suburban backyard. While many traditional foliage tours are done from packed trains and buses that follow well worn railways and roads, fall tourism this year demands a novel approach. And with travelers forced to chart their own course, some of the best places to take in the autumn colors are those that cannot be reached at all on the standard guided excursions. One of the most rewarding options for those living in and around Appalachia is to forgo the winding roads at lower elevations and peer down at the landscape from atop Spruce Knob, the tallest peak in both West Virginia and the larger Chesapeake Bay watershed. Nestled within a 100,000 acre section of the surrounding 919,000 acre Monongahela National Forest, the top of Spruce Knob is perched high above an all but unspoiled tract of forest extending out in all directions. At 4,863 feet, the summit provides not only breathtaking views, but also an unusual landscape of its own. Gnarled red spruce trees, after which the mountain is named, grow deformed on one side, shorn by punishing westerly winds that tear over the ridge. And stands of evergreens at the top gradually mix in with other species, like mountain ash, which produces dense clusters of brilliant flame colored berries that last through the winter, and turn from green to a spectrum of yellow and orange shades in the fall. The drive to the peak requires resolve and care. From a base point near Judy Gap, W.Va., a serpentine drive up Route 33 narrows to a nine mile stretch of old forestry road, with several blind curves and switchbacks, barely wide enough to pass traffic coming down, and with no guardrails protecting against steep drops down the mountain slope. The path is not treated to remove ice or snow. At the top, however, visitors are rewarded with a wealth of options for taking in the scenery. About 1,000 feet from the parking lot is a two story observation tower that provides an even higher vantage from which to survey the surrounding area. And the easy, half mile Whispering Spruce Trail leads visitors along a gravel path that circles the tower for panoramic views across both sides of the ridge. The more intrepid can seek out other overlooks to enjoy all to themselves. At the other end of the parking lot, the Huckleberry Trail carves a roughly five mile path along the ridge, running northeast away from Spruce Knob. The trail passes by nearly a dozen backcountry campsites that lead slightly off the trail and, sometimes, down to an opening in the trees a private window from which to view the vistas below, away from the main area. Beyond that, the trail continues to a longer loop, which passes through a number of high altitude meadows, allowing hikers an opportunity to pause and observe the woods all around the clearing. However, the full hike is over 15 miles, and frigid fall temperatures necessitate serious cold weather gear for anyone planning to camp out overnight and complete the loop over multiple days. According to the United States Forest Service, Spruce Knob lies within a day's drive of about half of the populace, accessible from points all along the East Coast and the Midwest, and roughly four hours from Washington. And while it may be the most impressive vantage point in the area, it is not the only one. Kelly Bridges, the public affairs officer for Monongahela National Forest, said that fall weather at the peak can be unpredictable, and heavy fog and clouds can, at times, obscure the very best views at the top of Spruce Knob. But on those days, an easy backup lies 10 miles northeast up Route 33 at Seneca Rocks, a soaring crag popular among rock climbers, with razor thin fins that stick up vertically and rise nearly 900 feet. There, a steep trail leads to another observation deck that looks down into the valley, where a variety of hardwood trees that thrive at lower elevations take on deep red and yellow hues along a river. For another option, partway up the route to Spruce Knob, the road divides, allowing drivers to pull off by an overlook far enough down to avoid clouds and haze, but high enough to provide a striking view. The drive through miles of national forest and up to the mountaintop is a passageway to a genuinely remote part of the East, and the Spruce Knob area offers visitors a menu of possibilities for savoring the auburn colors of fall. And in a celebration of continuity in an otherwise unfamiliar year, Monongahela, officially designated on April 28, 1920, is commemorating its centennial. A fall excursion to Grafton Notch from Portland, Maine, includes not just colorful swaths of foliage, but a Shaker community, a ghost and a stretch of the Appalachian Trail. The area's glacial gorges, waterfalls and caves add further intrigue to the predominantly beech, birch and maple forest. Not to mention, a fall drive and hike support both sanity and social distancing. Before heading out, check the Appalachian Trail Conservancy's website for its Covid 19 recommendations, which include carrying a mask and practicing social distancing when passing people on the trail. Maine visitors should check Keep Maine Healthy for the latest Covid 19 testing and quarantine guidelines. The hour and 50 minute trip from Portland begins with 10 miles of surprisingly vibrant leaf peeping on Maine's primary artery, I 95 North. At Gray, Route 26 North heads inland to New Gloucester where it passes the last active Shaker community in the country, founded on Sabbathday Lake in the late 1700s. Though closed to the public for 2020, the historic buildings and farmlands of Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village can still be easily viewed from the car. Next comes the township of Poland, namesake of the Poland Spring bottled water company and home to the Poland Spring Resort. It is also the territory of a ghost called the Route 26 Hitchhiker, which is said to manifest as a young lady wearing a fancy dress. It's rumored she died in a roadside accident on her wedding or prom night, and while she may ask for a ride, she'll likely disappear from the car before reaching the destination. Past the Oxford Casino and views of distant mountains, Route 26 parallels the Little Androscoggin River through Paris to Snow Falls, a popular pull off for the waterfalls and picnic area. In Woodstock, the Mollyockett Motel is named for a Native American Algonquin princess who is the source of many legends. The mountain views and foliage increase around Greenwood, birthplace of L.L. Bean's founder, Leon Leonwood Bean, and home to the Mt. Abram Ski Area Bike Park, popular in fall for the lift accessed mountain bike trails. Food and lodging can be had in Bethel, founded in the fertile Androscoggin River Valley in 1796, and at the Sunday River ski resort in nearby Newry. Continuing through Bethel on Route 26 North, The Good Food Store and Smokin' Good BBQ (try the smoked beef brisket or pulled pork/chicken on a bun) is a popular stop. From there, expect excellent foliage on the last stretch to Bear River Road and the 12 miles of the Grafton Notch Scenic Byway leading to the Appalachian Trail parking lot. On the way, Mother Walker and Screw Auger falls are worth a visit, and Grafton Notch Campground on the Bear River is a great option for overnight camping. Percy Warner Park and Edwin Warner Park on the National Register of Historic Places span 3,131 acres of wooded hills, open meadows and streams. The adjoining parks, which opened in 1927, offer hiking trails, mountain bike paths and bridle paths. However, a slow rolling, scenic drive through the mature deciduous forest during peak fall is nothing short of stunning: The sun strobes through the trees above drivers who share the roadway with hikers, cyclists and dog walkers. Once inside the park, the tulip poplars, dogwoods, black cherry, sassafras and pawpaw trees are breathtaking. Given the park's designation as a nature sanctuary, it's not unusual to see wild turkeys, white tailed deer, cottontail rabbits, Eastern chipmunks and coyotes. The roadway a roughly four mile loop can be found at the Old Hickory Boulevard entrance. You'll pass the tall wooden lookout that oversees the grounds (and beyond) of the annual Iroquois Steeplechase, which was canceled this year because of the pandemic, and along the route are scenic overlooks. You can also enter Percy Warner via Belle Meade Boulevard. This is the main entrance with a ceremonial style arch and dramatic limestone steps reminiscent of a European allee that was designed by the landscape architect Bryant Fleming, who also designed the early 20th century Cheek Mansion at Cheekwood Estate Gardens. From the Belle Meade Boulevard entrance, you can find trails like the Warner Woods trail, a two and a half mile unpaved walking path that traverses the interior of Percy Warner, as well as a 5.8 mile stretch of paved pedestrian trail. Next, set your GPS to Radnor Lake State Park off Otter Creek Road, another of the city's natural jewels, about seven miles east. Because Radnor Lake does not allow food, it may be wise to first swing by a Nashville standard, Mere Bulles, just off Old Hickory Boulevard, for their famous crab bisque, available to go (call first). You won't regret it (or forget it). Signage throughout the park reminds those visiting Radnor Lake to abide by appropriate social distancing rules. (For more information on Covid 19 rules, go to the Tennessee State Parks' website.) The sublime glassy Radnor Lake pulls in photographers from around mid Tennessee who often arrive early enough to shoot the morning brume that rises from the lake. Here, too, you can glimpse plenty of wildlife: deer, turtles, turkey, eagles, owls, waterfowl and coyotes; ranger led programs throughout the year include canoe floats, night hikes and wildflower walks. After a summer of record heat and forest fire smoke, a revitalizing road trip or hike in the cool hinterlands of Denver may be irresistible. Outdoor enthusiasts will have their choice of satisfying adventures and explosions of color right now: The foothills and mountains surrounding the mile high city have begun to blaze in swoon worthy, spectacular foliage, and Indian summers can stretch all the way into November before the winter snow begins to stick. Denver was founded in 1858 as a gold mining settlement, and to this day, leaf peepers will find that surrounding town and country vistas remain inextricably etched with that aspect of Colorado history. Cloaked in Victorian mining antiquity, buildings are bedecked with towers, turrets, dormers and wraparound porches, while the adjoining slopes are dotted with shaft holes, multihued rock tailing piles and tottering old mine shacks. Enveloping that human history are the ancient Rocky Mountains. The green summer tundra on the high peaks has already gone buttery yellow and blood red on top, as the tiny plants yield to frosts before browning with winter. Halfway down, the mountains are clad in evergreens, while the lower slopes will soon be lit by the luminescent gold of aspen trees. One day trip to a stunning, high alpine cirque allows you to bear witness to this whole spectacle, from aspens to tundra. It begins with a drive west on Route 285 and a turn north at Grant onto Route 62. About 5.5 miles up the 11 mile road to Guanella Pass is the Abyss Lake Trail. This challenging 7.5 mile, 3,000 foot hike passes through numerous stands of aspen, and, for the first few miles, the trail is wide enough for social distancing. Then it climbs more steeply up along a creek leading to the treeless and Lilliputian plant landscape of the 12,650 foot high Abyss Lake. Look for moose and pronghorn antelope along the way. If you'd rather stay in the comfort of your car, continue driving on the Guanella Pass Road through the aspen forest, with its golden leaves rippling in fall winds. The gravel road climbs to 11,700 feet, with views of Mounts Bierstadt and Evans above a sea of flamboyantly tinted fall willows. At the bottom of the pass road, alongside I 70, is the old mining locale of Georgetown, with an old time railroad offering daily rides through the aspen forest. Plan for the round trip drive from Denver to take about four hours. For a shorter tour, drive roughly 30 miles south out of Denver on Route 85, which takes you directly to the Waterton Canyon parking area where it intersects with the end of Colorado Highway 121. This moderate six mile hike on a dirt road, alongside the South Platte River, swirling with fishing holes, is also ideal for bicycling and horseback riding. The popular trail known for up close big horn sheep viewing has plenty of toilets and is rimmed with huge cottonwood trees that blush as ripe as lemons in the fall. But the state's oldest road trip, with brilliant foliage and Continental Divide viewing, is the four hour, 149 mile Peak to Peak Scenic Byway from Estes Park through the Gold Rush mining country to Black Hawk. One stop could be Nederland's antediluvian Goldminer Hotel, listed in the Registrar of Historic Places. Or, near the town of Ward, a 5.5 mile hike loops around the well traveled Brainard Lake but don't forget you'll be hiking above 10,000 feet. For an alternative with thicker air, begin with a 45 minute drive out of Denver to Boulder. Turning up Flagstaff Road, a six mile drive up and over Flagstaff Mountain (a quick stop on the overlook reveals a panorama of Boulder and the surrounding plains) will continue to the Myers Gulch trailhead. From there, follow the old wagon trail (with plenty of social distancing room) that winds 2.7 miles up to the top of an unnamed peak that offers incredible views. Along the way, an old hay barn and sawmill speak to the bygone homesteader and miner days in the region. The crinkling yellow leaves cast penumbral light around pale aspen trunks, while the air is redolent with that sweet, sharp smell of change found only in the autumn aspen groves of Colorado. Surrounded by this all too brief and soul stirring beauty, one is reminded, as Robert Frost once wrote, "Nothing gold can stay."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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Combined with their central locations, Mr. Kalman said, "there are probably dozens of connections where the community can actually be linked to the hotel." He noted that when he married for a second time in Ottawa, the reception was held at the Chateau Laurier. "We really didn't think of any other place," he said. Fairmont Hotels and Resorts, which still manages most of the Canadian railway hotels, is directly descended from the hotel operation Van Horne established at Canadian Pacific. It was spun off by the railway in 2001, and six years later it sold most of its Canadian properties, including the batch that went to Ivanhoe Cambridge. Mr. Theberge said that a strategic review after a change in senior management led Ivanhoe Cambridge to get out of the hotel business in the belief that better returns could be found in other real estate sectors. At the peak in 2009, Ivanhoe Cambridge owned more than 70 hotel properties worldwide. Now it is down to nine. The real estate company, which is owned by Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec, will keep three of those properties: Fairmont Le Chateau Frontenac, which looms over Quebec City and hosted meetings between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill during World War II; Fairmont the Queen Elizabeth, which sits across from a major office complex that Ivanhoe Cambridge owns in Montreal; and W Montreal, which is adjacent to the real estate company's headquarters and in which it has a 51 percent interest. Because of their status, Mr. Theberge said that the railway hotels were being sold through a special process. Fairmont retains a final say in any sale and buyers must show that they have the means and commitment to invest in the properties, which, as is the case with the Empress, can be over a century old. "These properties require constant love," he said. Ivanhoe Cambridge just spent 75 million Canadian dollars, about 70.5 million, on repairs and renovations to the Chateau Frontenac. Mr. Bosa, the president of Bosa Development, which is based in the Vancouver suburb Burnaby, said that he first looked at the Empress with an eye toward putting condominiums along part of Victoria's scenic waterfront. But when he walked through the hotel's doors for the first time, Mr. Bosa said that "I fell in love with an old mistress. It was not my traditional real estate deal. This is a true love attraction and we're going to do the right thing."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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For years, scientists and others concerned about climate change have been talking about the need for carbon capture and sequestration. That is the term for removing carbon dioxide from, say, a coal burning power plant's smokestack and pumping it deep underground to keep it out of the atmosphere, where it would otherwise contribute to global warming. C.C.S., as the process is known, has had a spotty record so far. While there are some projects being designed or under construction, only one power plant, in Canada, currently captures and stores carbon on a commercial scale (and it has been having problems). Keeping a lot of CO out of the atmosphere would require a costly expansion of the technology to many more power plants and other industrial facilities. Among the concerns about sequestration is that carbon dioxide in gaseous or liquid form that is pumped underground might escape back to the atmosphere. So storage sites would have to be monitored, potentially for decades or centuries. But scientists at Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University and other institutions have come up with a different way to store CO that might eliminate that problem. Their approach involves dissolving the gas with water and pumping the resulting mixture soda water, essentially down into certain kinds of rocks, where the CO reacts with the rock to form a mineral called calcite. By turning the gas into stone, scientists can lock it away permanently. One key to the approach is to find the right kind of rocks. Volcanic rocks called basalts are excellent for this process, because they are rich in calcium, magnesium and iron, which react with CO . Iceland is practically all basalt, so for several years the researchers and an Icelandic utility have been testing the technology on the island. The project, called CarbFix, uses carbon dioxide that bubbles up naturally with the hot magma that powers a geothermal electrical generating plant 15 miles east of the capital, Reykjavik (Read more about it here). In 2012, they pumped about 250 tons of carbon dioxide, mixed with water, about 1,500 feet down into porous basalt. The CO was laced with a radioactive isotope and there were other compounds in the water that helped the researchers trace its spread into the rock. CarbFix, a pilot program at Iceland's Hellisheidi Geothermal Power Station, seeks to tackle climate change by injecting greenhouse gasses into the ground for permanent storage. This kind of futuristic structures basically cover geothermal boreholes that specifically here on this site we had we re inject C02 and H2S gases produced by the geothermal power plant, we reinject these gases into the geologic subsurface for permanent storage Why are we reinjecting C02 and H2S here exactly at this place, first C02 and H2S are greenhouse gases so they produce global climate change. But, we inject it here in Iceland because we are basically standing on really exciting rock, so called basaltic rock, it's a volcanic rock rich in Calcium Magnesium, and these gases react with this rock and basically enable us to convert that C02 gas back into limestone which is calcium carbonate, so it is permanent storage and it can not leak out of the ground into the atmosphere. So that's the big idea here, we're tried to solve. Card: Iceland is experimenting with a way to store greenhouse gas emissions. The project known as CarbFix could serve as part of a solution to climate change. Eta: We think that our method can be applied elsewhere in our fight against global warming and climate change.the model then predicted that the C02 would turn into rock within 5 years of injection and at that time no one believed the models that it was outrageous, there's no way that it could happen this quickly but then it turns out it happened even faster, as mostly all of it was mineralized within one year Card: So far the CarbFix project has sequestered 10,000 tons of C02. Card:A tiny fraction of the 36 gigatons of C02 the world released in 2014. END CarbFix, a pilot program at Iceland's Hellisheidi Geothermal Power Station, seeks to tackle climate change by injecting greenhouse gasses into the ground for permanent storage. Bara Kristinsdottir for The New York Times Early signs were encouraging: Among other things, a submerged pump that was used to obtain samples of the mixture as it spread underground stopped working after a while because it got gummed up by calcite. And now the scientists have reported more authoritative evidence that their technology works, in a paper published in the journal Science. The scientists found that about 95 percent of the carbon dioxide was converted into calcite. And even more important, they wrote, the conversion happened relatively quickly in less than two years. "It's beyond all our expectations," said Edda Aradottir, who manages the project for the utility, Reykjavik Energy. Rapid conversion of the CO means that a project would probably have to be monitored for a far shorter time than a more conventional sequestration site. There are still concerns about whether the technology will prove useful in the fight against global warming. For one thing, it would have to be scaled up enormously. For another, a lot of water is needed 25 tons of it for every ton of CO along with the right kind of rock. But the researchers say that there is enough porous basaltic rock around, including in the ocean floors and along the margins of continents. And siting a sequestration project in or near the ocean could potentially solve the water problem at the same time, as the researchers say seawater would work just fine.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Whether you're planning a trip to Memphis, Tenn., for the National Civil Rights Museum's commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination; to take in musical history at Graceland; enjoy some of the country's best barbecue; or all of the above, here's what you'll need. We've shared packing essentials for any 36 hour trip in previous lists, so when Elaine Glusac, our travel columnist, recently returned from Memphis, we asked her to share a few specific things she was glad she brought with her or wished she had taken. Then we turned to Ria Misra, an editor at Wirecutter, for the best items to fill those needs and her expert suggestions for other things to pack to make the most of your trip. Here are their picks. None Collapsible travel tote. "I wish I had a magical bag like Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter stories to swallow up all the gear I need to travel with. Catching live music is a vital part of visiting Memphis and it's hard to dance with a giant tote," Ms. Glusac said. Since we can't magic away the inconvenience of carrying a bag around, the next best thing is a convertible bag that's flexible enough for different needs. Ms. Misra suggests the Patagonia Lightweight Travel Tote, which transforms into a backpack to carry a change of clothes and water bottle if you'll be out all day, converts back into a tote for walking between shops and restaurants, and (while Ms. Misra notes that doesn't come with a vanishing spell) it can be packed down into its own pocket when empty. None Sun protection. "A hat with a bill to shade your face is essential," noted Ms. Glusac. Wirecutter recommends the Tilley LTM6 Airflow Hat, which will protect both your neck and your face from the sun. It's comfortable and stylish, too. Even with sun protection baked into the hat's fabric, though, you'll still want to apply a good sunscreen and use it correctly. None Travel umbrella. We just mentioned sun protection, but keep in mind the weather can change quickly in Memphis. That means you'll also want a small umbrella. This Lewis N. Clark Travel Umbrella is small and lightweight enough to tuck into a bag to protect you on days that rain, but not take up too much space on sunny days. Plus, if the wind kicks up, it's sturdy enough to weather a sudden thunderstorm without buckling or breaking. None Comfortable walking shoes. "Memphis is a fairly casual town and since you also need good walking shoes you can pull off comfort and style with some pumped up kicks," Ms. Glusac said. If you don't already have a favorite, broken in pair, Ms. Misra suggests the Mizuno Wave Rider 21 or the Brooks Ghost 10 for walking around town or for cycling in Shelby Farms Park. None A collapsible water bottle, like this Platypus Meta Bottle. It's perfect for those hot Memphis days in the sun, whether you're out shopping on South Main or checking out the museums. When you do get where you're going and order a drink, the bottle collapses down to half its original size and is easily stored in your travel tote or daypack.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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Olympia Dukakis appeared in the original "Tales of the City," which aired on PBS in 1994, and has reprised the role for a new reboot on Netflix. When it comes to "Tales of the City," the nostalgia just keeps compounding. The original television mini series was already a wistful evocation of a disappearing San Francisco. And even as it played on PBS in early 1994, the internet was slouching into existence down the peninsula. With Netflix offering a new, 10 episode installment a contemporary sequel, and the fourth series based on Armistead Maupin's novels both the first series, and the late bohemian 1970s San Francisco it depicted, seem lost in the fog of time. Yet there's Laura Linney, fresh and funny as ever, once again reprising the role of Mary Ann, the Midwestern ingenue who's forever arriving in the city by the bay and having her life changed. And Olympia Dukakis, still formidable as Anna Madrigal, whose 90th birthday is the device that brings Mary Ann back to Anna's enclave in the fictional hilltop wonderland of Barbary Lane. Their presence, though, as comforting as it is, doesn't quite justify the effort expended on the new series or the nine plus hours it will take you to watch it. The real nostalgia that this slack, earnest, self help tract of a show evokes is for a time when a TV drama's main job was to tell a story. Developed by Lauren Morelli, whose previous TV writing and producing experience was on "Orange Is the New Black," this "Tales of the City" has the requisite web of plots, or at least character complications. Mary Ann's surprise visit to San Francisco is predictably extended and she struggles to come to terms with the ex husband, Brian (Paul Gross, again), and the daughter, Shawna (Ellen Page), whom she left behind. Her old friend Mouse, now played by Murray Bartlett of "Looking," still lives at Barbary Lane and still has relationship issues. Anna is once again involved in a mystery, which gets Mary Ann and the others out of the house for some amateur sleuthing and even a comic ride sharing car chase. But there's no energy or conviction in the storytelling, and while Linney, Gross, Bartlett and Page occasionally strike some sparks when they're onscreen together, scene after scene goes by free of any real dramatic or emotional payoff. Or maybe there are nothing but emotional payoffs, depending on your expectations. "Tales of the City" was of course famously trailblazing in its depictions of gay and transgender life and love in 1994; the current series expands its representation, with new Barbary Lane residents who include a young transgender man, Jake (played by a transgender and nonbinary actor, Garcia), and his girlfriend, Margot (May Hong), who are both questioning their sexuality. (And behind the camera, the show's writers and directors are mostly L.G.B.T.Q.) Jake, in particular, plays out situations with family and lovers that are new to mainstream TV. But the story lines involving the younger characters consistently default to flat, safe conversations about gender and queerness the show can start to feel like an extended TED Talk, or a long night at a boring but very affirmative gathering of friends. For a celebration of diverse identities and lifestyles, with a healthy amount of nudity and some graphic depictions of sex, it's resolutely square. This effect rules even though the writers undercut the characters' pieties now and then. One of the few really distinctive and lively scenes in the series is a direct example of this: At a dinner party, a group of affluent, white, middle aged gay men react angrily when Mouse's younger, nonwhite boyfriend calls them out for what he sees as their privilege. The ideas aren't very clear, but the emotions are sharp because actors like Dan Butler, Malcolm Gets and Brooks Ashmanskas are brought in to play the guests. Stephen Spinella gets a nice meta moment, snapping that the boyfriend doesn't understand their struggle just because he saw "Angels in America." That scene stands almost alone, though. A 1960s flashback episode, showing Anna's early days in the city, has a shape to it, at least, and benefits from the performances of the transgender actresses Jen Richards and Daniela Vega (star of the Chilean film "A Fantastic Woman"). And other performers make welcome appearances in small parts, including Mary Louise Wilson and John Glover as residents of a queer nursing home and Danny Burstein as Shawna's uncle. The original formula of "Tales of City" involved putting Linney's screwball comedy energy as Mary Ann at the center of a sexed up but fairly conventional soap opera plot. That's still the template, but what was quirky and entertaining then with Richard Kramer, a "Thirtysomething" veteran, on board as a writer and executive producer is draggy, preachy and a little morbid now. Might as well blame it on the internet along with everything else.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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An installation by the French artist Franck Scurti hangs in the living room, floating in space like a mobile. Rebecca Marshall for The New York Times His Favorite Room In 2009, Mr. Yovanovitch, whose primary residence is in Paris, bought a chateau surrounded by 90 acres of woodland that was in the same family for centuries. He turned a separate barnlike structure where hay was once stored into a warm, wood filled salon decorated with art, vintage furniture and a zigzag sofa he designed. Was it daunting to renovate and furnish what amounts to a castle? I think it was the most crazy thing I have ever done. If you think too much about possessing this kind of property, you don't, because there is too much work, too much everything. But for me, life is short, and you need to do some crazy things. Mr. Yovanovitch sits on a pine couch with soft pink cushions of his own design. He uses pink in many of his projects, because, he said, "it adds some softness" Rebecca Marshall for The New York Times The salon is fairly spare, with carefully chosen objects. What's your criteria? In every client project, and for myself, I try to make a story around the room. Here, I don't want to use any shiny fabric, bronze and so on, because it was a farm. You feel that in the architecture. I try to respect the style of the house, but in a modern way, a nicer way. I used simple objects, lots of wood. The zigzag sofa made of pine is really cool, but is it actually comfortable? The inspiration is very brutalist, because it's sharp. But it's also cozy. Because of the shape, you're sitting close to each other. Very warm and very comfortable. I love this object because it was given to me by a client. He knew that I love owls. One day, we were at a fair in Paris. I saw it and fell in love. I couldn't afford it; it was quite expensive. The next day, I received the owl in my office as a gift. It's a very good memory for me.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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Last weekend, the Metropolitan Riveters nearly re enacted "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" trying to reach their semifinal game of the National Women's Hockey League playoffs. The Riveters dealt with predawn alarms; being momentarily stranded in Charlotte, N.C.; and losing most of their equipment. The game, against the Minnesota Whitecaps in St. Paul, scheduled for last Sunday, was postponed. The semifinal will now be played Friday night in St. Paul, with the Isobel Cup final scheduled for two days later at the same rink. The N.W.H.L., in its fourth season, has had travel and weather related postponements before, as have other professional leagues like the W.N.B.A. Despite partnerships with four N.H.L. franchises, N.W.H.L. teams still travel with budgetary and time constraints. Some Riveters players who expected to play last Sunday will not be available for the rescheduled game because they cannot take the day off from their full time jobs. "It's very frustrating," Koelzer said after practice Tuesday night, beginning to choke up. "You work hard the whole season. You dedicate so much of your time. I've done my absolute best to get to every game possible. To reflect and think my season is potentially over and I didn't even know that the last game I was going to play this season was my last game, it's frustrating. It's sad." Other sacrifices were made for this unusual weekend of women's hockey in Minnesota. The Buffalo Beauts, the No. 2 seed, gave up the right to possibly host the championship game against the Riveters. The Beauts were 8 0 at their home rink this season. Last Saturday, the majority of the Riveters were scheduled on a 2:53 p.m. flight to Minneapolis St. Paul International Airport from La Guardia Airport. The team arrived at the airport two hours before takeoff, but because of wintry weather in the Midwest, the flight was canceled. Anya Battaglino, the director of the N.W.H.L. players' association, then began working with the league on other options. An early Sunday morning flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport to Minneapolis, with a connection in Charlotte, was the most feasible option. Because of daylight saving time, players woke up around 1:30 a.m. to ensure no preboarding snafus. They boarded the plane just past 5 a.m., but it had to be de iced. An hour later, the team still had not taken off, and began worrying about making its connection and reaching the arena for the opening face off at 1:30 p.m. Central time. The Riveters landed in Charlotte around 8:02 a.m., missing their 7:40 a.m. connecting flight. About an hour later, the league announced the game was postponed. "We were all so delirious and hungry and tired, I think everybody was kind of relieved," Riveters forward Miye D'Oench said. "Up until that moment, we were still sort of trying to stay in a game day mind set. It got harder to do as the day went on and more things went wrong." The Riveters touched back down in Queens early Sunday afternoon, only to learn most of their equipment and personal bags were headed to Minnesota. That was not the only headache. Battaglino, the league office and players on the Riveters, the Whitecaps and the Beauts, who won their semifinal matchup against the Boston Pride on Saturday, had to figure out when and where to hold a makeup game. But Kimberly Sass, a backup goaltender for the Riveters who documented last weekend's travel woes on social media, is starting a new full time job and cannot afford to take Friday off. On Tuesday, she wrote on Twitter that she hoped that in the future, "female professional athletes will never be faced with the decision to attend a game, or risk ruining a professional reputation at their non sport place of employment."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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Credit...Zhe Xi Luo/University of Chicago When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, Mammals Took to the Skies The Mesozoic Era, from 252 million years ago to 66 million years ago, is often called the Age of Dinosaurs. To generations of paleontologists, early mammals from the period were just tiny nocturnal insect eaters, trapped in the shadows of leviathans. In recent years, scientists have significantly revised the story. Mammals already had evolved into a staggering range of forms, fossil evidence shows, foreshadowing the diversity of mammals today. In a study published on Wednesday, a team of paleontologists added some particularly fascinating new creatures to the Mesozoic Menagerie. These mammals did not lurk in the shadows of dinosaurs. Instead, they glided far overhead, avoiding predatory dinosaurs on the ground essentially flying squirrels of the Jurassic Period, from an extinct branch of mammals that probably still laid eggs. The first Mesozoic mammal fossils came to light in the early 1800s, but for generations, paleontologists struggled to find more than teeth and bits of bone. In the late 1990s, they hit the jackpot. At a site in northeastern China, hillside after hillside turned out to contain stunning mammal fossils, most dating back about 160 million years. Researchers were suddenly able to examine entire skeletons, some still bearing impressions of skin and hair. As new fossils get unearthed, scientists are using them to draw in many previously unknown branches on the mammal family tree. All living mammals are divided into three main branches. Platypuses, which still lay eggs, belong to the oldest; their ancestors split off from those of other living mammals roughly 170 million years ago. Millions of years later, the other branch split. One lineage produced the marsupials, such as kangaroos and opossums, which finish development in a pouch. The other lineage, our own, makes up the vast majority of living mammal species. Placental mammals all develop inside a uterus, drawing nutrients and oxygen from their mothers. Some of the newly discovered mammal fossils belong to these three groups. Others belong to branches no one knew about before. Of those, some diverged from the common ancestors of living mammals, but more primitive mammals split off even earlier. When paleontologists looked at the size and shape of these fossils, they found that many did not fit the simple picture of early mammals as tiny insect eaters. To the researchers' surprise, a number of extinct species independently evolved bodies resembling those of living mammals. Some swam like otters, for example. Others scavenged, like raccoons, or dug into insect nests like today's aardvarks. Today, placental mammals like flying squirrels and marsupials like sugar gliders travel through the air from tree to tree. But Volaticotherium belonged to a different lineage and independently evolved the ability to glide. They were not the only mammals to do so, it turns out. Dr. Luo and his colleagues have now discovered at least two other species of gliding mammals from China, which they described in the journal Nature. The fossils of the new species, Maiopatagium and Vilevolodon, are exquisitely preserved, revealing many details of their anatomy. Winglike sheets of skin stretched from their cheeks to their legs and tails. They also had remarkably flexible shoulders needed to climb up trees and then maneuver through the air during a glide. Flowering trees did not yet exist, so there was no fruit to eat. Instead, the earliest mammal gliders may have leapt from tree to tree to feed on the cones of conifer trees or the soft parts of giant ferns. The new fossils demonstrate just how many surprises early mammals have left to deliver, Dr. Rougier said. "I expect we're going to keep finding more strange things."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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For the families of people near death, Trish Rogers provides a unique memorial. At the bedside, she creates a cast of the dying patient's hand, sometimes by itself, but more often joined with the hand of a loved one. The casts are exact reproductions that capture wrinkles, scars, veins, fingernails and the other odd, quirky features that make hands as distinctive as faces. She makes them free of charge for any family who requests them. Ms. Rogers, an administrative assistant in critical care at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, began making the casts more than a decade ago, after a colleague mentioned hearing about the process at a conference. Jennifer Foster, whose husband, Christopher, was struck and fatally injured by a truck last year, said that when she heard about the casts, "I knew right away that it was something I wanted." Mr. Foster, 32, had been declared brain dead. He was an organ donor, and Ms. Rogers made the cast in the intensive care unit, shortly before he was taken to the operating room. His wedding ring had been removed in the emergency room the day he was hit, and Ms. Foster was wearing it on a chain around her neck. She and Ms. Rogers put the ring back on his finger, and then Ms. Foster held her husband's hand. "I was very emotional," Ms. Foster said. "I was crying, trying to get down kind of close to where he was so I was near him." As family members watched Ms. Foster's parents and sisters, her husband's mother and other relatives Ms. Rogers guided the couple's hands, immersing them in a bucket of gel to create a mold. When the gel set, she helped ease their hands out. Then she poured plaster into the mold to create the cast. A week later she presented the cast, mounted on a wood plaque, to Ms. Foster. "It looks exactly like his hand," Ms. Foster said. "Everything is the same. I highly cherish it." She keeps the cast on a shelf in her bedroom where she sees it every day, alongside a photograph of her husband and the urn containing his ashes. "When the accident happened and I went into the hospital room where he was, I grabbed his hand and told him I'd never let it go," Ms. Foster said. "And now I'll truly never let it go." Ms. Rogers still has vivid memories of making her first cast, from the hand of a young woman who had been ill for a long time. "I remember thinking, 'Man, I need a bucket underneath my eyes,' because I just bawled," Ms. Rogers said. "For a while, I would cry at every one. Then, instead of crying I would just profusely sweat. Now I don't, because I know what this means for families." She has never made a cast of a member of her own family. "I think that's part of what drives me to do it," she said. "I wish I had one of my mother." Her mother died in 1996, long before she began making the casts. Requests for her craft have grown over the years as word has spread. Since last summer, she said, she has made about 60 casts. She usually gives the finished product to families outside the hospital, because for many it is too painful to come back inside so soon. For parents of infants who have died, Ms. Rogers has created casts of the adults' hands together cradling the child's feet. When a parent dies, she makes a cast for each child. If the children are young, families often wait until they are old enough to understand before showing them the casts. Dr. Buddy Hurst received one of Ms. Rogers's casts when his wife, Carolyn, died in 2015, after 46 years of marriage. His wife was particular about her fingernails and did her own manicures, and the impeccable results show up clearly on the cast, Dr. Hurst said. Ms. Rogers also made separate casts for his three adult daughters, each holding her mother's hand. "It was very meaningful to us," Dr. Hurst said. "Hands are really so distinctive and expressive and recognizable. It's a powerful ministry she's doing, providing these tangible memorials for people who are facing the loss of a loved one. If other places knew about it and had the capability of doing it, it would be a very valuable service for families to give them a little bit of comfort going forward."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Well
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Alan Turner in the early 1990s. Of the paintings in his first New York show, the critic John Russell wrote: "Sometimes they are very funny; but our laughter seems to die in the air, and a shiver takes its place." Alan Turner, Artist of the Evocative and the Odd, Dies at 76 Alan Turner, who drew on Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and more in acclaimed paintings and drawings that could be humorous, disturbing or poignant, died on Feb. 8 at his loft in Lower Manhattan. He was 76. The poet Lee Briccetti, his partner of almost 20 years, said the cause was progressive supranuclear palsy, a degenerative brain disorder. He had been in home hospice care for some years. Mr. Turner's art was widely exhibited and wide ranging. In the late 1970s he produced mesmerizing paintings of trees "that seemed to square off like fighters or wrap themselves around one another in a claustrophobic embrace," as Michael Brenson put it in a review in The New York Times. Then came works featuring humanoid figures and faces, the eyes, ears and other body parts distorted or bizarrely placed. "Several noses cohabit on a single torso," Grace Glueck wrote in The Times in 2000, describing an exhibition at the Lennon, Weinberg gallery in SoHo, "an eye doubles as a nose, and a vaginal cleft seams the long flat chin of a grotesque monster face." And there was work that fit into none of those groupings for instance, "Proper Breeding" (1975), now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. It's a very realistic depiction of a dachshund. Except that the dog is blue and has six legs. Alan Lee Turner was born on July 6, 1943, in the Bronx. "I was to be named after my father's father," he wrote in an autobiographical sketch in the catalog for a 2018 retrospective at the Parker Gallery in Los Angeles, "but his name had been Adolph, which did not seem a good name for a Jewish boy to be brought up in the Bronx in 1943." His father, Louis, operated the projector at the Lane movie theater in Washington Heights in Manhattan, and his mother, Rose (Taylor) Turner, worked at Stern's department store. Mr. Turner enrolled at City College, where he was on the fencing team. He started out as a mathematics major but changed to art, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1965. He then earned a master's degree at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1967. The artist David Hockney was among his teachers. "From David Hockney I learned to work from background to foreground in a painting," Mr. Turner told Dan Nadel, who curated the Parker Gallery show and interviewed him for the catalog in 2017. In 1968, when Mr. Turner was looking to avoid the draft, Mr. Hockney offered him the use of a vacant apartment he had in London. Mr. Turner later moved to an abandoned factory in London, where two other artists were living. He sneaked back into the United States briefly in 1970 to visit his mother, who was ill, and in 1972 he returned to the United States for good. In the autobiographical sketch, he said he believed he wasn't prosecuted for draft dodging because his draft record had been among those destroyed by protesters who had entered or broke into various draft board offices in the late 1960s and burned documents. Mr. Turner had his first solo show in Cologne, Germany, in 1971. His first New York show was in 1975 at the Carl Solway Gallery, where John Russell, reviewing it in The Times, found his work striking. "They are quite small pictures, neatly and carefully painted," he wrote, "with something of Magritte in the soundless and airless look of the environment; but they also have a slow burning, guarded quality that is Mr. Turner's own. Sometimes they are very funny; but our laughter seems to die in the air, and a shiver takes its place." His paintings of jumbled human figures and body parts drew particular attention. "These paintings," Mr. Brenson wrote of an exhibition of seven works at the Koury Wingate Gallery in SoHo in 1988, "have been swept along by an artistic decade caught between a stormy insistence on the body and a stormy insistence on the mind. The result is a perverse, witty and uningratiating pictorial world in which sadomasochism is inevitable and trust has been beached on the sand."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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FOR whatever reason, homes sales picked up in New Jersey in the latter part of 2011. A new statewide market report shows contract signings increased in six of the seven months from May through November, compared with 2010. Also, the inventory of homes for sale shrank every month since May, according to Jeffrey G. Otteau, an analyst, whose Otteau Valuation Group in East Brunswick does monthly reports for the real estate industry; he called the latest news a concrete sign that the market was "stabilizing." His December report was the first one in several years to sound a hopeful note. Until the state's huge foreclosure backlog comes back on the market and how fast that happens is important the market may improve sometime this year to the point that prices stop declining and perhaps even modestly start to rise. But that is the statewide picture. A great division in market fortunes between northern and southern Jersey and urbanized areas close to Manhattan and more rural regions became clear during the recent recession and remains stark in the fresh statistics. Mr. Otteau predicted that the gap would shape the timing and pattern of potential recovery, and several agents in the field agreed with him. "Simply put," said Dawn Rapa, a Coldwell Banker Elite agent working in rural Salem County, "the only people I've seen selling their houses recently are those who absolutely had to because they were in financial disarray, a job change, divorce or death." Salem County, rich in historic houses and farmland but short on well paying jobs or a quick commute to an urban center, has the largest inventory of all 21 counties surveyed: 44.5 months' worth of houses, the preponderance of them priced under 400,000. That compares with a statewide inventory of 13 months, both over all and in the under 400,000 category. Several other counties in southern New Jersey have inventories about twice the size of the state average 29 months' worth in Cumberland County, 26 in Cape May County, and 24 in Atlantic County. In Cape May and Atlantic, the primary backlog is for more expensive homes, many of them built in the boom years to appeal to shoreline vacationers. Atlantic has just shy of six years' worth of inventory in the 600,000 to 1 million range. For homes priced from 1 million to 2.5 million, the Otteau report predicted, it will take more than four years to sell the inventory in Atlantic County and close to seven years in Ocean County. In Cumberland County, which like Salem is part of the Delaware Valley area that extends eastward from Pennsylvania, the homes are mostly priced under 400,000. There are not enough homes priced higher to be statistically significant, according to the report. Ms. Rapa said she sold 37 houses in Salem County last year, but prices were down "considerably." And multiple listing numbers indicate that although inventory dipped 10 percent, there were 14 percent fewer sales over all compared with the year before. Two of the Coldwell Banker agent's listings that have sat on the market for many months despite price drops: a restored and modernized 1851 colonial in the historic hamlet of Alloway with three bedrooms and two baths, now offered at 186,000; and a four bedroom two bath house on a horse farm with a barn and 10 acres in Pilesgrove, now listed for 349,900. "We just had an offer for 312,000 on the Pilesgrove house," first listed in February 2011, said Ms. Rapa, "but the owners won't go there." The market misery is not all concentrated in the south, however. In the northernmost county, Sussex, the inventory is 20 months. In the 400,000 to 599,999 bracket, five and a half years' supply is already on the market. In the town of Vernon, which is home to several popular ski areas, and where construction was booming in the mid 2000s, the average sale price of a home was 250,000 in 2007, according to the real estate Web site Trulia. Now the site has it at 100,000. A large house set on 1.3 acres there, with a view of ski slopes from the deck, was built and sold in 2004 for 392,000. The house, with three bedrooms and three and a half baths on Cherokee Trail, has been on the market since October, and the asking price is now 358,000.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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M.S.U. Denver is a commuter school with fabulous skiing nearby so "coming back to campus for a ballgame or an event is not something that automatically happens," said Mark Jastorff, alumni association executive director. Students check in at events using digital cards or smartphone apps developed by SpotOn, a young company that serves about a dozen colleges. These include Jacksonville State University in Alabama, where some 1,400 students signed up last year to try JaxPoints, looking to enter drawings for a catered tailgate party or a parking pass. "I went to a lot of music and culture events I wouldn't have gone to," said Alex Rainwater, a J.S.U. senior who won a coveted pass to park anywhere on campus for a semester. Jered Baldwin, an M.S.U. Denver senior, had never been to a soccer game, "but I went to get my three points," he said. "Then I thought, 'I'm here, I might as well hang out and watch it.' "
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Education
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As one of the fashion industry's increasing numbers of a transgender models, Yasmine Petty has reached great success. Her sprawling penthouse in Lower Manhattan, with a terrace so large it has a pool and cabana, is full of magazines like Elle, W and Hercules that feature multiple page spreads on her wearing clothing by brands like Marc Jacobs and Louis Vuitton. Ms. Petty's closet, too, is full of clothes she has modeled at international events like New York Fashion Week, fashion shows put on by Italian Vogue, and Life Ball, Europe's prestigious charity gala to support people with H.I.V. She has walked the runway with stars like Naomi Campbell and Karolina Kurkova. The prominent makeup artist Pat McGrath used her as an "ambassador." At the beginning of her career Ms. Petty said she worked with several modeling agencies that found her work, but the experience left her feeling somewhat frustrated about the direction her career seemed to be taking. Some agencies didn't know whether to cast her as male or female, she said. Often she would walk into auditions not knowing which gender she was supposed to perform until she saw the other candidates waiting in the lobby. Other times she would be booked by clients, only to have them find out she was transgender later and refuse to use the photos. "The fashion industry didn't know how to treat me," she said. "They are more familiar representing someone like themselves," she said. "If they would have existed all along, it would have been completely different. I would have walked into a casting knowing I was being represented as myself, and I don't have to hide or be afraid if the client finds out." Trans Models was started in March 2015 by Peche Di, a 27 year old trans female who wanted to advance her prospects as a model and help her community. She is working with both established talents like Ms. Petty and newer faces. A few weeks after her agency opened, she booked a client, Laith Ashley, in a prominent spread in the magazine i D. She landed the transgender plus size model Shay Neary a major campaign with Coverstory, a fashion brand. She and two of her clients became the faces of New York City's health campaign for protected sex. "We're on buses," Ms. Di said. "I get texts from my friends saying, 'You're on West Fourth Street.'" It is no longer unusual, nor a matter of secrecy, to see transgender models on mainstream runways. At the most recent New York Fashion Week, Marc Jacobs employed three: Casil McArthur among the men, and Stav Strashko and Avie Acosta among the women. Vincent Beier walked for Coach and Proenza Schouler. And while Trans Models may be the first firm of its kind in New York City, similar ones are popping up around the world. Cecilio Asuncion, the director of "What's the T," a documentary that explored the lives of five transgender women, opened Slay Model Management in Los Angeles last year. Along with walking for New York Fashion Week and Los Angeles Fashion Week, his models have also modeled for Airbnb, Spiegel, even a Brazilian vodka company. A year ago Mitr Trust, a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender charity based in India, held auditions for the country's first transgender modeling agency. As of the end of January, Britain also has its own agency based in Nottinghamshire, England, named Transgender Model U.K. In their first week of operation, they signed two models. With the attention transgender personalities have received in the press and pop culture in recent years, it's hard to imagine that transgender models are still at a disadvantage. But for many of them, transgender only agencies are still the only groups that will represent them. Ms. Di opened Trans Models after spending a decade trying to find an agency to sign her both in Bangkok, where she is from, and in New York. "They would accept a photo, but nothing would happen after," she said. She said reality hit home after she won the transgender pageant Miss Asia New York and modeled for Bruce Weber's "Brothers, Sisters, Sons and Daughters" campaign for Barneys, but still couldn't persuade a firm to sign her. Mr. Asuncion realized the plight of transgender models after filming his documentary. "I learned that what the community needed was employment," he said. "I figured why not create a space for them?" Even Ms. Petty said she went to about 30 agencies looking for someone to book her at the beginning of her career. "I was turned down by all of them." Sara Ziff, the founder and executive director of the Model Alliance, a labor advocacy group for models working in the American fashion industry, said this didn't surprise her. "For years the talent pool has been predominantly young, white, tall, thin and female," Ms. Ziff said. "While the industry is slowly evolving and becoming more inclusive, it's difficult for people who don't fit the mold to break in." Over 300 models have applied to be part of Trans Models; Ms. Di has chosen 19 so far and gets new applicants almost every day. Slay Model management represents 17 models. But while the agencies are popular in this community, it's unclear how much they really can do for clients. Opportunities for transgender models can be limited, Ms. Di said: "It's still a struggle for our agency to find consistent, paid work for models." One of her clients, Shane Henise, a 25 year old transgender man with a handsome but boyish face and giggly personality, has never been booked for a modeling job (he does get television and film gigs). "The options really just aren't there," he said. "When you think about male models, they are very tall and very built, and I'm 5 foot 5 on a good day." The jobs that do come in are from companies or publications specifically looking for transgender models. If more and more advertisers want to associate themselves with this community, that is a good thing, said Jack Halberstam, a professor of gender studies at Columbia: "A shift from including transpeople as potential models versus seeing them as completely unthinkable in these roles definitely signifies a sea change in public opinion of trans bodies," Professor Halberstam said. But it isn't the same as transgender models being able to get the same bookings as their peers. Ms. Ziff said, "A model wants to be booked for a job because she is a great model not simply because she is black so she ticks that box, or because she is trans so she ticks that box." Ms. Petty concurred. "Why couldn't I model for Agent Provocateur lingerie or why not Victoria's Secret?" she asked. "Or maybe do cosmetics for Mac or Nars. I'm very optimistic that it could happen, and it's a dream of mine. But it hasn't happened yet." Mainstream modeling agencies will tell you they also represent transgender models when appropriate. Women Management says it has two star transgender clients: Leandra Medeiros Cerezo, known professionally as Lea T, who was one of the first models to come out as transgender, and Valentina Sampaio, the current cover star of French Vogue. "We only sign clients to Women Management that we think have the merit to succeed in this business, transgender or otherwise," said Michael Bruno, an agent at Women Management. "We work to provide them the same opportunities as other models." But models seek more from an agency than professional opportunities. Mr. Henise also gets a sense of belonging from being part of Trans Models. He grew up in a religious household with parents who sent him to strict all girls schools. He said the times he spent with the people in the agency conducting photo shoots, talking about their struggles or just hanging out, were the only points in his life he had been with people just like him. Ms. Di understands what a big deal having a supportive community is for her models, and she is starting additional projects to make their lives richer and easier. With Michael Osofsky, an entrepreneur, she has begun TeaDate, a dating app for transgender people. It started up on Valentine's Day last year with 5,000 users and now has 23,000. Ms. Di is also trying to digitize the fashion booking process by building an app that connects transgender models around the world with work opportunities. "A lot of times when you first enter a trans community, it is kind of competitive, and you are surrounded by people trying to win over each other," she said. "I'm forming a community within a community that can help each other." While modeling is often dismissed as superficial, some transgender people consider it a revolutionary act, a means of showing they are just as beautiful and professional as anyone else. "You are not just a model doing your job, superficially having your photo taken," Ms. Petty said. "You are a role model; you are a leader of this movement." Professor Halberstam is skeptical of this argument, saying: "It's great that there are transbodies visible in the world, but one should be careful about what it means beyond that and about making claims politically. All visibility doesn't all lead in a progressive direction. Sometimes it's just visibility."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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PASADENA, Calif. Tensions between Netflix and traditional television networks escalated this weekend after industry executives expressed mounting frustration over Netflix's refusal to disclose ratings. At a Television Critics Association event, NBC Universal introduced viewership figures last Wednesday provided by an outside firm that suggested several of Netflix's shows fall in line with broadcast and cable shows, implying that traditional television remains vibrant. On Saturday, John Landgraf, the chief executive of the cable network FX, picked up the theme, saying it was "ridiculous" that Netflix did not release viewership numbers. Netflix's chief content officer, Ted Sarandos, shot back on Sunday, saying the numbers provided by NBC were "remarkably inaccurate" and asking why NBC would spend time and energy to "talk about our ratings." "Maybe because it's more fun than talking about NBC ratings," he said. The pitched back and forth occurred as ratings are falling for broadcast and cable networks while Netflix's offerings of original programs are growing. Mr. Sarandos said that the streaming service would spend 6 billion on content this year, and original scripted programming would be part of that budget. Television executives have been frustrated because Mr. Sarandos has at times suggested Netflix shows would fare better than what is on cable and broadcast television. Last month, for instance, he said the Netflix show "Narcos" would be the most viewed show on cable, not HBO's "Game of Thrones." "If Ted doesn't give ratings, he shouldn't then be saying, 'This is the biggest hit in the history of blah blah blah,' " said John Landgraf, chief executive at FX. "Netflix brought it on themselves when they make assertions like their show would be the highest rated cable show," Gary Newman, co chief executive of the Fox Television Group, said in an interview. Likewise, Mr. Landgraf said in an interview, "If Ted doesn't give ratings, he shouldn't then be saying, 'This is the biggest hit in the history of blah blah blah.' He shouldn't say something is successful in quantitative terms unless you're willing to provide data and a methodology behind those statements. You can't have it both ways." The battle over ratings began when Alan Wurtzel, NBC Universal's head of research, said on Wednesday that he was confronting the "800 pound gorilla" and gave the news media what he described as a "Netflix reality check." Ratings, particularly among 18 to 49 year olds, dictate how much money cable and broadcast networks make from advertisers. Mr. Wurtzel provided data from a firm named Symphony Advanced Media, which uses audio content recognition installed on phones to recognize what is being watched and when. According to Symphony's data, the Netflix show "Jessica Jones" was viewed by 4.8 million people within the first 35 days of its premiere in the 18 to 49 year old bracket important to advertisers. In that demographic, Mr. Wurtzel said that, according to Symphony's data, "Master of None" had 3.9 million viewers, "Narcos" had 3.2 million and Amazon's "The Man in the High Castle" had 2.1 million viewers. Mr. Wurtzel said the data showed that when streaming service shows debut, viewership is strong and then peters out after a few weeks before viewers return to watching cable or network television. "My only point is I don't believe there's enough stuff on Netflix that is broad enough and is consistent enough to affect us in a meaningful way on a regular basis," Mr. Wurtzel said. Mr. Newman, of Fox, was particularly interested in this. "If you look at the data, it's very compressed and it falls off," he said. "Our shows tend to be in the cultural conversation for three to four months at a time. And I think that's powerful to our advertising partners." 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. He also said that the numbers were "within the mid to upper level of cable dramas and within the ballpark of what I'd expect." Mr. Landgraf said that the data did not "feel rigorous enough." And Mr. Sarandos pushed back hard on Symphony's data, particularly its focus on 18 to 49 year olds since Netflix sells subscriptions, not advertising based on a specific demographic. "The methodology and the measurement and the data itself don't reflect any sense of reality of anything that we keep track of," Mr. Sarandos said. "That could be because 18 to 49 year old viewing is so insignificant to us I can't even tell how many 18 to 49 year old members we have. We don't track it." Mr. Sarandos, instead, pointed to the number of Netflix subscribers, which he said is about 70 million worldwide, and 43 million in the United States. In keeping with his public stance that Netflix would never release ratings, he said he did not want to engage in a "weekly arms race." "Once we give a number for a show, then every show will be benchmarked off of that show even though they were built sometimes for very specific audiences," he said. He added: "There is a very natural inclination to say, 'Relative to this show, this show is a failure.' That puts a lot of creative pressure on the talent." Meanwhile, Mr. Landgraf said on Saturday that FX pursued "Master of None" and Netflix's coming show, "The Crown," but the free spending streaming service "overwhelmed us with sort of shock and awe levels of money and commitment." FX, he said, has to be profitable whereas Netflix does not have to worry about that now. "I mean, basically, we are competing against payrolls a la the Oakland A's and the New York Yankees that are three, four times ours," he said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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Credit...Erik Carter for The New York Times LOS ANGELES About halfway through our conversation last month, Erykah Badu declared that she was 48, feeling it necessary to remind me. She did it gently, but in a way that made clear what she thought of my line of questioning about empathy, generally, and when she decided to reject anger. It's easy to think of Badu as ageless. In person, her bright eyes, smooth skin and famously fluttering voice restrained in conversation, though the occasional vowel sound answers a higher calling project youthful tenderness. As an artist, she may be even more remarkably undated. Alone in a cluster of R B stars who emerged amid late '90s exuberance, she became a folk heroine by insisting on her self worth, sold millions of albums that spawned hits and passed from one era of pop music to the next with little depreciation of her credibility. For more than two decades, she has spent the majority of each year performing for converts around the globe. Badu, who has always been the primary architect of her own legend, will extend it Friday with "What Men Want," a gender flipped remake of the 2000 Mel Gibson Helen Hunt romantic comedy. Badu's character is a cartoon version of herself. In her own wardrobe and makeup, Badu plays a flowing haired, incense burning spirit guide cum small time weed dealer with otherworldly comic timing and a tenuous foothold on the terrestrial plane. In the real world, of course, she is no possessor of mystical powers. Just a mortal, like the rest of us. One who, as she made clear, doesn't spend much of her time thinking about when or how she became who she is. "I'm 48," she said, when I asked about deciding not to be angry. And it was as if I had asked an ocean when it decided not to be a stream. I wanted to know about empathy because Badu has made it headline news. The singer has recently been accused of spreading compassion in reckless and upsetting directions, pausing a concert last month to announce that she was "putting up a prayer" for R. Kelly, the R B hitmaker who faces mounting allegations of sexual misconduct, including with underage girls. She went on, amid wails from the audience, to make a blanket call for healing, asserting that "everybody involved has been hurt and victimized in some kind of way." It wasn't the first time that Badu had espoused a fundamentalist interpretation of unconditional love. A year ago, she sparked a conflagration on social media when she told New York magazine that she "saw something good" in Hitler. At various points in recent years, she's felt compelled to express empathy for high school teachers who are sexually attracted to their female students; Bill Cosby; and slave masters, among others not commonly thought to merit a surplus of charity. At a time when the reckoning after MeToo has revealed moral decay lurking in what can feel like every corner of public life, Badu's stubborn forbearance has drawn forceful condemnation. She spoke to me about her critics, her popularizing (and losing control of) the expression "stay woke" and why she says she can't judge anyone, including people who have hurt her directly. As for her age: She's 47, as it turns out. But that's just like Badu never one to let mere reality hold her back. I'm very interested, I just don't have anything to say. As a songwriter, you have to kind of have something to say, something to record, something to ignite a conversation. I don't have anything right now. I guess I'm uploading information. After that, we'll see. Never miss a pop music story: Get our weekly newsletter, Louder. I wanted to ask you about the idea of "wokeness," which was popularized by a lyric in your song "Master Teacher" but has taken on a life of its own. It's being used against me. How do you feel about the way it's being used? It's not none of my business. I get it. I didn't intend it any kind of way, so when I say "I stay woke" I actually walked into a session to record that song of Georgia Anne Muldrow and Sa Ra already saying, "I stay woke." So, when we say that it means we just pay attention to what's going on around us, and are not easily swayed by the media, or by the angry mob, or by the group. You know: Stay focused, pay attention. The popular meaning is a little different. Is it? What is the popular meaning? I think people use it to mean enlightened in a kind of moral way, or cognizant of how power works. How people in power maintain power and oppress marginalized groups. For instance, in Black Lives Matter ... That's part of it, but it's not all of it. Stay woke just means pay attention to everything, don't lean on your own understanding or anyone else's, observe, evolve, eliminate things that no longer evolve. That's what it means. Stay conscious, stay awake. It doesn't mean judge others. It doesn't mean gang up on somebody who you feel is not woke. That's not evolved. So, when people accuse you of not being woke, do you feel like it's a misapplication? I think it's some kids saying those things. And I'm compassionate about it. I understand because we go through that phase. Those are phases of wokeness, where you are judgmental and you're strong in your opinion, and you're learning this new information, and all that's a part of building your character. As you grow more and more, you begin to eliminate the need to judge others and to crucify others and to compete, to have a word debate. You lose those interests as you grow. It's natural. These people are doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing right now. Yeah. I encourage it, argue, debate, communicate even if it's disagreeing with me, do it, that's what they're supposed to be doing. It is interesting that your response would be empathy. I think it relates to your recent R. Kelly comments, because you've said similar things in the past about other divisive or despised figures. Last year, you were trying to find nuance or compassion for Hitler and Louis Farrakhan. I wondered if you could help me understand where that impulse comes from. You know what, I wrote something about that because I didn't want to stumble through it and be misunderstood. She reads from a long statement, excerpted here. O.K. Here I go: Expressing unconditional love for both victim and accused should not be misconstrued with downplaying the fact that the victim has been horribly violated. Nor should it be mistaken for the intent to put the accused on a pedestal or to condone their actions. For me, life requires critical thinking on a subject. Critical thinking may lead to logical solutions, but it's a delicate process because we are all very delicate. Proper healing is the key. It takes the entire community. This mending takes practice because it's difficult to not always be led emotionally and impulsively. Sometimes, it takes those not very close to the situation to objectively consider all factors. Restorative justice involves finding a solution that not only helps the innocent victims cope with the trauma but to also help the violator, who in many cases, has been the victim of abuse and holds them accountable and is a huge part of recovery. This thinking may help to break the cycle of abuse and ultimately help to heal the community. That's the goal. I've never instructed a group of people to do what I do or to follow me in any kind of way. It's O.K. to disagree with me, no problem, but you cannot censor how I feel. I encourage people: If you have an opposing opinion, use it, don't be afraid. I think that's a bigger crime than anything to go with the group when you know it's not how you feel. It's not a matter of right or wrong, it's a matter of following our hearts, that's what love is. I'm curious about what you mentioned earlier about phases of wokeness. Can you tell me about the phases you went through? Oh, yeah. I mean, I remember in college we used to debate every day about things. Sometimes, violent debates where we insulted one another. It's only because we were trying to build an ego or a self. We needed to define ourselves, and you're supposed to do that. Once you learn how to have nonviolent communication, you learn how to sway the energy in a different direction, to move the conversation in a direction where love is involved. What were those arguments about, do you remember? All kinds of stuff. Malcolm X versus Martin Luther King. Michael Jackson. You know all those kinds of debates. We learned new information, and then we'd form an opinion, and you'd have an opposing group. Given the blowup online after your comments on R. Kelly, would you handle things differently if you could do it over again? There's no way to predict what people are going to use to sell magazines or papers. So that means that I would have to be watching what I say for the rest of my life. I've died on many hills. I keep coming back. I believe in love. Being misunderstood, that's little stuff, and I don't really mind being a problem that may lead to a solution. I can be misunderstood for a while, but love is not difficult to misunderstand. Love looks like compassion, forgiveness, kindness and consideration, nonjudgment, creativity. And fear looks like denial, hate or pain. I'm sorry, not pain, but to cause pain, jealousy, envy, hunger for power. Being afraid of not having enough or not being seen as enough or not being as good as something else or someone else, that's what causes all that. I think a lot of people struggle with the idea that they should reserve judgment in a case where someone is credibly accused of, or is guilty of, heinous crimes or harming people. I think if you choose to see things on both sides, then it's not very difficult, but if you do not, then you won't. Choices could be made because of fear, pain, misunderstanding, but it's a choice. I mean, I don't want to insult anyone because some people do see things from both sides, but they still decide to feel the way they feel, and it's O.K. People just don't agree sometimes. It doesn't make them any less intelligent, they just don't agree. But what if you find the other side of the issue appalling? See, for me personally, I don't judge that. I don't personalize things, even things that happen to me, I can't judge that. The laws of the universe will take care of it, definitely. That's the way it works. Those are the laws. It's something I struggle with in terms of wishing I could still listen to R. Kelly, who I was a fan of. But now I have sort of a visceral reaction to the music. It feels tainted. You say you can't help feeling that? Well, I mean, you're supposed to, that's who you are. There's nothing wrong with that. But then I don't know what to do, right? Like do I ... What do you mean? You're doing it. Well, what I'm doing is I'm not playing his music, and that makes me sad. Because I enjoyed it, it meant something to me. Oh. But it makes you sick. I understand. You could be an empath. That's empathy for pain, that's what you have. It's a beautiful thing. Well, it's hard to live that way in practice sometimes. Yeah, it is. I mean, it's a challenge every single day. But we have to live moment by moment and try our best. That's it. Don't feel guilty about who you are and how you feel. I just try every moment to be conscious and cognizant and fair, not only to others, but to Erykah.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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For the second time this week, the N.F.L. has rescheduled the matchup between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Baltimore Ravens, moving it to Tuesday night from Sunday, after the coronavirus outbreak in the Ravens' clubhouse spread further on Thursday, the original day of the game. It will be the second N.F.L. game of this season to be held on a Tuesday night; the Titans beat the Bills on Oct. 13. Because the Ravens are now playing on Tuesday, their following game, scheduled for just two days later against the Dallas Cowboys, will now be played on Monday, Dec. 7, assuming the outbreak in Baltimore does not spread further. The league shifted more than a dozen games in September and October, when many teams still had bye weeks remaining, which gave the schedule makers wiggle room in the 16 game season to accommodate postponements. If more games have to be postponed, the league may add an extra week to the 17 week regular season to allow for makeup games. The start of the playoffs would then be pushed back a week. The Steelers and the Ravens were supposed to play on Thanksgiving night, but a rash of positive tests forced Baltimore to shut its practice facility on Monday and Tuesday, and the game was moved to Sunday afternoon. On Thanksgiving, though, Lamar Jackson, 23, the Ravens quarterback and the league's reigning most valuable player, was among those who tested positive for the coronavirus as cases spread to more than a dozen players on the team, according to several media outlets.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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Two shows exploring race in America will be revived on Broadway next spring by the Roundabout Theater Company. The nonprofit company, which operates three Broadway houses, announced Monday that it would stage new productions of "A Soldier's Play" and "Caroline, or Change" this season. "A Soldier's Play," written by Charles Fuller, is about the complex racial tensions unearthed after the murder of an Army sergeant. The play was first staged Off Broadway in a 1981 production by the Negro Ensemble Company that featured a then unknown Denzel Washington. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1982; two years later it was adapted into a film called "A Soldier's Story." The new production the first for this play on Broadway will be directed by Kenny Leon ("A Raisin in the Sun") star David Alan Grier ("In Living Color") and Blair Underwood ("When They See Us"). It is scheduled to begin previews Dec. 27 and open Jan. 21 at the American Airlines Theater.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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LOS ANGELES The evolution of Giannis Antetokounmpo into a global star has been playing out for six seasons. It manifests in soaring dunks, or blocked shots from the weak side that defy logic, or wraparound passes to an open shooter, or crossover dribbles that leave defenders reeling in his impossibly long limbed wake. But Pat Connaughton, a reserve guard, did not have the opportunity to witness Antetokounmpo's feats on a daily basis until last summer, when he signed with the Milwaukee Bucks and joined his new teammates for scrimmages ahead of training camp. "You'd see him do something ridiculous, and I'd be looking around and nobody would be reacting," Connaughton recalled. "Like, 'Did you guys not just see that?'" For the players who have been around Antetokounmpo the longest, there may be an element of genius fatigue at work not that they take him for granted. Malcolm Brogdon, a third year guard, tried to provide some context for Connaughton at one of those early scrimmages. "You'll get used to it after a while," Brogdon told him. "It happens all the time." Antetokounmpo, 24, has turned the sublime into the routine. But the novelty has not worn off for N.B.A. fans, who have made him appointment viewing this season, and the Bucks have shaped themselves into contenders by following his lead. On top of that, nearly two years after Kobe Bryant, the retired Los Angeles Lakers guard, challenged Antetokounmpo to win the league's Most Valuable Player Award, he may be on the verge of upending the Eastern Conference to do so. "Everything you see about him or hear about him is how hard he works," Lakers Coach Luke Walton said, "and how great he wants to be." The Bucks improved their league best record to 48 14 after coming from behind to defeat the Lakers on Friday night at Staples Center. Antetokounmpo, who has been dealing with right knee soreness, finished with 16 points and 15 rebounds in the Bucks' 131 120 win, which qualified as a quiet effort for him. But he had his moments. Early in the fourth quarter, he sized up Mike Muscala, his 6 foot 11 defender, at the top of the perimeter. He took a couple of hard dribbles into the paint, threw his right shoulder into Muscala to knock him off balance, then dunked over him with his left hand. "Unbelievable guy," Antetokounmpo said of Gasol. "He's been to the finals. He has so much experience. I think he's definitely going to help us." The Bucks are readying for a playoff run with Antetokounmpo as their focal point. Entering their game against the Utah Jazz on Saturday night, Antetokounmpo was averaging 26.8 points, 12.6 rebounds and 5.9 assists while shooting 57.9 percent from the field. "When the season started, we knew we had something special we had a great team," he said. "But to be honest with you, no, I never thought we were going to have the best record in the N.B.A. "But I think we've worked hard for it, we go out there and show up for every game, and we try to win every game." There is no apt historical comparison for Antetokounmpo because the league has never seen anyone quite like him. He is too long and too strong, too quick and too skilled, a 6 foot 11 power forward who can defend point guards at one end and post up the league's stoutest centers at the other. As for Antetokounmpo's unique athleticism, Connaughton considers him to be something of a hybrid of Kevin Durant of the Golden State Warriors and LeBron James of the Lakers. "He's got the length of K.D.," Connaughton said, "but now he's at the point where he's got the strength of LeBron or at least he's on that trajectory. And that speaks volumes about his work ethic and his desire to be the best that he can be. Because not a lot of guys with that talent work that hard." Connaughton, whose playing time has fluctuated this season, often goes to the team's practice facility on off days for extra shooting and conditioning work. Antetokounmpo, Connaughton said, is always there, too. He is a gym rat in the second year of a four year, 100 million contract. Connaughton joined the Bucks after three seasons with the Portland Trail Blazers, and he said Antetokounmpo plays with the same motor the same mind set as Damian Lillard, the Blazers' All Star point guard. "Obviously Dame is a different player, but I think they share an inner desire," Connaughton said. "It has nothing to do with the outside. It has nothing to do with the media, the attention or the press. Like, they're in it for their own reasons the right reasons, in my opinion." Whenever Budenholzer is asked about it, which is often these days, he makes a compelling case for Antetokounmpo as the N.B.A.'s most valuable player and he cites his defense as Exhibit A. Antetokounmpo is so dynamic on offense, Budenholzer said, that it tends to overshadow everything else is does. Sure enough, he had three blocked shots against the Lakers. Antetokounmpo is not going to create headlines with bold predictions after Friday's win, he repeated familiar mantras about taking it "day by day" and continuing to "work hard" but the Bucks must be thinking big. All around them, powerhouse teams are struggling. Even the Warriors, the two time defending champions, have had issues. Few thought the Bucks would be this good this quickly, but everyone was saying the same thing about Antetokounmpo when he entered the league at age 19. Suddenly, the future is now.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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Kim Shattuck, the singer, songwriter and guitarist whose work with the Muffs made her a raucous role model and put her in the vanguard of punk bands crashing into the mainstream in the 1990s, died on Wednesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 56. The cause was complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, said Cary Baker, whose publicity firm, Conqueroo, represents Omnivore Records, the Muffs' current record label. Ms. Shattuck made music that combined bubble gum melodies with roaring guitars. Her lyrics could be tender, but she concealed her vulnerability behind a sneering veneer. And she was widely acclaimed for having one of the greatest screams in rock 'n' roll a loud, exuberant yowl that sometimes expressed unfettered joy and sometimes just punctuated a chord change. "She was always so cool and tough," Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day wrote on Instagram. Green Day regarded the Muffs so highly early in their career that it employed the same manager, label and producer. Mr. Armstrong called Ms. Shattuck "one of my favorite songwriters." When Green Day was recording its breakthrough 1994 album, "Dookie," he said, "we listened to the first Muffs record constantly." Ms. Shattuck explained her aesthetic to the website Potato Gibberish in 2007. "I'm a huge fan of sing songy lyrics and loud guitars," she said. "Whatever punk band does that gets a gold star!" Kimberly Dianne Shattuck was born on July 17, 1963, in Burbank, Calif., to Kent and Betty (Hess) Shattuck and grew up in Orange County. As a child she played records by cartoon characters like Yogi Bear and the Flintstones on her Show 'N Tell record player, sometimes accelerating them to the maximum speed of 78 r.p.m. a choice that would inform the Muffs' tempos. She later discovered her parents' McGuire Sisters albums and taught herself the principles of harmony by singing along; when she got older, she gravitated toward rock bands like the Who, Blondie and the Sex Pistols. Ms. Shattuck did not play guitar until she went to Orange Coast College, where she majored in photography and began writing her own songs. (She never graduated, and worked at a newspaper before pursuing music.) When she was learning to play guitar, her primary influences were John Lennon, Dave Davies of the Kinks and Brian Setzer of the Stray Cats. "I don't like real fast, intricate stuff," she told Guitar World in 2011. "I'm not impressed by it, and it doesn't have any melody to me." In the 1980s, Ms. Shattuck played bass for the Pandoras, an all female garage band. When she had written enough songs to start her own band, she and the keyboardist Melanie Vammen quit the group in 1990 and started the Muffs. After some personnel changes, including the departure of Ms. Vammen, the group stabilized with Roy McDonald on drums, Ms. Shattuck on guitar and Ronnie Barnett, her ex boyfriend, on bass. Ms. Shattuck said that all the meanest songs on the group's first record were about Mr. Barnett, but that when he asked who they were about, she dissembled. With alternative rock and grunge exploding in the early 1990s, the Muffs signed to a major label, Warner Bros. "They have this job to break our band," Ms. Shattuck told Rolling Stone in 1995. "And I totally feel sorry for them because it's not going to happen." She was correct. In an era when some of the unlikeliest punk acts achieved mainstream success, the Muffs' music proved to be more influential than commercially lucrative. After releasing three classic pop punk albums, including "Blonder and Blonder" (1995) the title was taken from an insult directed at Ms. Shattuck by Courtney Love of Hole and "Happy Birthday to Me" (1997), the band and label parted ways. The Muffs became famous for chaotic live shows at which Ms. Shattuck and Mr. Barnett would shove and kick each other onstage. But they achieved their greatest prominence with their cover of Kim Wilde's "Kids in America," which provided the soundtrack for the opening credits of Amy Heckerling's hit 1995 film, "Clueless." Despite this, Ms. Shattuck wasn't keen on the song. She told the website Culture Brats in 2015: "The lyrics are really stupid. It's very embarrassing to sing them." The Muffs recorded fitfully in the next two decades, making four more studio albums. The last of them, "No Holiday," is to be released this month. "Kim was a true force of nature," her bandmates Mr. McDonald and Mr. Barnett wrote on the Muffs' Facebook page. "While battling A.L.S., Kim produced our last album, overseeing every part of the record from tracking to artwork." When the Muffs were on hiatus, Ms. Shattuck played with other groups. In 2013 she joined Pixies as the bassist after Kim Deal quit the group; the band fired Ms. Shattuck after a few months. "She's very West Coast, she's very extrovert," the group's singer, Black Francis, explained to Magnet magazine. "We're very East Coast, very introvert." Ms. Shattuck told NME at the time that she was surprised by the split. "Everything had gone well, the reviews were all good, and the fans were super nice about everything. They were like, 'We love you, New Kim!'" She bore Pixies no ill will, but when she heard that Black Francis had dismissed the change by saying "there's been a shift in the lineup, big whoop dee doo," she titled the next Muffs album "Whoop Dee Doo."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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In 1988, when 's acclaimed novel, "Nervous Conditions," came out, I was 19 and living in a woman's youth hostel in Harare, Zimbabwe, while attending secretarial college. I'd never be a writer, my father said, but I may as well learn to type. The misery of that hostel, the crushing sexism implicit in that secretarial course I was feeling it all. Into that depressed season came this brilliant gem: A school friend lent me a copy of "Nervous Conditions"; it'd been published in London and, although Dangarembga is a Zimbabwean writer, it wasn't yet available in Harare. I lay on my thin bed in that hostel, which reeked of boiled cabbage, and read and reread that novel as if my life depended on it, which in a way it did, if life is who you are and what you do with the possibilities available to you. "Nervous Conditions" made clear that the systematic racism and sexism the violent facts of my own white settler childhood in pre independence Rhodesia weren't accidents but arrangements, structures that we'd all built together: the whites flogging the blacks, the near slave labor wages. Dangarembga's novel wasn't just an urgent story beautifully told; it was also a work of demolition. Narrated by a restless teenager, Tambudzai ("Tambu"), "Nervous Conditions" takes place in civil war ravaged Rhodesia during the 1960s and '70s, on an impoverished homestead and at a mission school near the border town of Umtali (now Mutare), close to the farm on which I'd been raised. It recounts Tambu's determination to get an education and to escape the poverty she was born into. Rhodesia's Education Act of 1930, making education compulsory for European children, meant that I, a minority white child, was guaranteed free schooling from the age of 6 through 15. There was no such provision for Rhodesia's majority black families. Those who put a premium on education were forced to pay for it, and typically boys, not girls, were the beneficiaries. 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. Toward the end of the novel, Nyasha, Tambu's cousin, also desperate for the liberation that education promised, has something of a breakdown. Nevertheless, she declares, "I won't grovel. I won't die." These are modest ambitions, and it says a lot about the lives of young black women in Rhodesia circa 1970 that they were objectives maddeningly hard to achieve. Fast forward 30 tumultuous years from that startling debut. Dangarembga, who still resides in Zimbabwe she is also a successful playwright, filmmaker and screenwriter has produced another masterpiece, well worth the long wait. In "This Mournable Body," she returns to the story of Tambu, who is now middle aged, without children or a husband. Having recently quit her job as an advertising copywriter, she is living in a woman's hostel in Harare. The details of her suffocating existence are deftly drawn. "That evening it is as though the hostel has folded its arms more tightly against you," Dangarembga writes of Tambu's growing sense of constriction. Still the plucky protagonist familiar from "Nervous Conditions," she applies for job after job in Harare, all the while attempting to disguise her increasingly desperate poverty and conserve the soles of her Lady Di pumps, along with her dignity and optimism. It's a soul crushing assignment, but this isn't a dreary story, though it's a tough one. Dangarembga writes with intimacy and compassion; there's a sharp poetic crack to the work that keeps the story from muddying in melancholy, as it might in the hands of a less cinematic writer. In one scene, a maid accompanied by a ferocious guard dog tries to dissuade Tambu from applying for a job with the maid's white employer. "If only you would just walk on," the maid implores her. "Because this dog is mad. Every dog Madam Mbuya has had has been like that, ever since the war. And Mbuya Riley up there is just like the dog here, if not even madder. So now, be walking!" It's not a plot spoiler to say that Tambu does not resign herself to what comes to seem her inevitable fate, but she comes close. At every turn, the humiliations pile on: the exhausting efforts to find employment, the terrible loneliness of a person who has defied her family's African traditions only to find Western ones no less limiting. Worn down, she worries about suicide: "You are concerned you will start thinking of ending it all, having nothing to carry on for: no home, no job, no sustaining family bonds. Thinking this induces a morass of guilt." Tambu doesn't kill herself her soul is too generous. She can't quench her hope, can't stop herself from trying to push back against the injustices that have her in their grip. In a final twist with shocking consequences, she manages to land an ecotourism job that returns her to her village. Her boss is a white Zimbabwean woman named Tracey who is chillingly removed from Tambu's reality. When Tambu tries to suggest names for an ecotourism project she's involved with, she's reprimanded. "Green and eco are tautological," Tracey scolds her. "Anyway, we've got that already, everywhere. Everything's Green Jacaranda eco! And you can't say village. ... That kind of promise doesn't work these days either. It's got to sound like fun, not under development, soil erosion and microfinance." Both novels are about women trying to imagine and work their way out of a narrative that has already been decided for them. Both novels are inspiring, not in spite of Tambu's hopeless situation but because through it all she never loses sight of herself while, at the same time, never underestimating the brutal reality of her predicament. In this regard, "This Mournable Body" is a story of triumph, not despair.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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The next two weeks will be frenetic but also refreshingly familiar (and presumably safe) throughout the N.B.A. The league's Transaction Game, as we like to call it, has resumed with a flourish and is one of the few aspects of the forthcoming season that should not be endangered by coronavirus interruptions. The 2020 draft, delayed since June, is Wednesday night. Free agency opens Friday at 6 p.m., Eastern time. A freeze on transactions in effect since March 13 was lifted Monday and quickly served up blockbuster trades that have Chris Paul on his way to Phoenix and Jrue Holiday poised to head to Milwaukee to team with Giannis Antetokounmpo. Forecasting what happens in the draft has rarely been more difficult, with no clear cut franchise players to choose from, but there is no shortage of around the league buzz to discuss when we tap into the grapevine: The Charlotte Hornets and the Knicks have registered the most substantive trade interest in Houston's Russell Westbrook. It must be emphasized, though, that both teams have expressed conditional rather than aggressive interest. The Knicks, for starters, have weighed a trade that absorbs the three seasons and 133 million left on Westbrook's contract, as I reported last week, but I'm told there are multiple voices in the organization that have reservations about such a move. In the Hornets' case, there is a belief in some corners of the league that their appetite for a Westbrook trade increases significantly if Charlotte does not land LaMelo Ball with the No. 3 overall pick in Wednesday's draft. Michael Jordan, Charlotte's owner, is a known Westbrook admirer. Should the playmaking Ball be drafted before the Hornets' turn at No. 3, according to the theory, there is a much stronger case to be made for trading for Westbrook in spite of the cost and attendant risk. Some league insiders believe that the Hornets, at Jordan's behest, want Ball at No. 3 should Minnesota and Golden State select Anthony Edwards and James Wiseman with the top two picks. The Athletic reported Tuesday that the Washington Wizards and the Rockets have had exploratory discussions on a John Wall for Westbrook swap. While the players' salaries make for a tidy trade match, talks have not advanced past a cursory stage with Houston looking for more than that in a potential Westbrook deal. The Election Day edition of the newsletter was headlined by the challenges the Rockets face to keep James Harden happy after their coach, Mike D'Antoni, and longtime general manager, Daryl Morey, abruptly walked away from the franchise in the wake of a second round hammering by the Los Angeles Lakers in the playoffs. Just two weeks later, Harden is forcefully angling for a trade to the Nets. The Rockets' position on Harden, for the record, hasn't changed: They don't want to trade him. Unappetizing as it sounds, Houston wants to play the long game and see if it can rebuild its relationship with Harden before conceding that trading him is the only alternative, even after Rafael Stone, the new general manager, made a forward looking move in his first major trade by agreeing to send Robert Covington to Portland for Trevor Ariza and two future first round picks. Houston reclaimed a modicum of leverage on the Harden front late Monday when New Orleans struck a deal to trade Holiday to Milwaukee, nixing the possibility of the very interested Nets trading for Holiday. Yet that alone isn't likely to lead to a change of strategy. The Rockets have Harden under contract for at least two more seasons and are not obliged to just send him where he wants. Houston also surely understands that, if Harden is traded first, it would face even more hurdles trying to move the unhappy Westbrook when the whole league knows Westbrook wants out. The Nets have a lot to think about here, too. As much as the Nets covet a third star to join Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving and a durable one given Durant and, particularly, Irving's injury histories there is much logic working against the idea of adding Harden to the mix. Durant has apparently thrown his support behind a reunion with Harden, and it must hearten (and intrigue) Nets officials to hear that Harden wants to join the project. It likewise can't hurt that D'Antoni is now an assistant coach for the Nets. Just don't forget that the ball dominant duo of Durant and Irving has yet to play one second together in a real N.B.A. game. How sure can the Nets be that Harden, after years of dominating the ball like no other, would make the needed accommodations to play in a three star alignment when we can't even be sure how the first two cornerstones will mesh? The Rockets, furthermore, will be looking for the sort of haul of future first round draft picks and players that New Orleans just scored in the Holiday trade if they do decide to part with Harden. The Nets don't appear to be in the best position to supply that. The early signals emanating from Philadelphia suggest that Morey, the 76ers' new president of basketball operations, wants to give Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons every last chance to click before trading one of them. Houston, just to name one non Nets option, could decide to wait to see if the Sixers' stance changes. As wary as the Rockets must be about doing a deal of that magnitude with Morey, we've seen that front offices that know each other well often find it easier to collaborate on the biggest of trades. The Knicks, at least so far, are taking a measured approach to the idea of trading for Westbrook. No, really. It's a serious struggle to imagine where Houston would be able to dispatch Westbrook if both the Hornets and the Knicks pass. And the Knicks' posture on Westbrook is best described as "weighing, but resisting." After surrendering so much draft capital to acquire Westbrook, Houston hopes to come away with at least one future first round pick if it trades him. The Knicks could furnish a projected late first rounder they acquired from Dallas in the Kristaps Porzingis trade, but that is the most attractive asset they appear willing to include in a Westbrook deal. The best offer Houston can reasonably expect from the Knicks features players not in the team's long term plans, such as Julius Randle and the disappointing Dennis Smith Jr., and even then it's no lock that the Knicks would agree to take on the 133 million left on Westbrook's contract over the next three seasons. Although it is widely presumed that Tom Thibodeau, the Knicks' new coach, would be in favor of a Westbrook trade given Thibodeau's longstanding win now reputation Leon Rose is the one responsible for plotting the team's course as the new president of basketball operations. Rose has had nearly nine months to map out his first major roster move. Does he really want to christen the Rose era by taking a chance on Westbrook when the point guard is no longer regarded as an automatic choice among the game's top 20 players? If so, it would be an admission that the Knicks know they are unlikely to be deemed an attractive free agent destination any time soon. Westbrook, 32, receives too much criticism for the current state of his game; let's not gloss over the fact he averaged 27.2 points, 7.9 rebounds and 7.0 assists per game for the Rockets last season before a combination of injury and coronavirus issues hampered him during the N.B.A. restart at Walt Disney World. The risks with Westbrook, though, are undeniable. He has a worrisome injury history for a player who relies on his athleticism, holds debatable appeal as a free agent draw for fellow stars and wouldn't appear to be the ideal fit alongside RJ Barrett, one of the Knicks' few keepers. Westbrook and Thibodeau are both relentlessly competitive, which seemingly makes them a match, but a measured approach here is the sensible one. Even the Knicks, famed for chasing the game's biggest names at all costs over these past two decades of futility, seem to see that. Stein: The tight turnaround is undoubtedly unfair to Denver, Boston, Miami and the Lakers, but the league has to do what's best for all 30 teams. Your suggestion, however well intentioned, would also introduce untenable complications for the league's schedule makers. It's going to be hard enough to complete a 72 game season and four full playoff rounds by mid July with a Dec. 22 start, given the current bleak outlook for how the United States is handling the coronavirus pandemic. Among the N.B.A.'s underpublicized motivations for starting the season before Christmas is to create some added cushion to finish the season by mid July even if, as many fear, there are coronavirus related interruptions. The four teams you mentioned, for the record, were compensated for their longer stays in the N.B.A. bubble at Walt Disney World near Orlando, Fla., by receiving the four largest playoff shares in the league. The Lakers, as champions, received a pot of 4,124,054 to divide. The Heat collected 2,732,699 for reaching the N.B.A. finals. The Nuggets and the Celtics each earned an extra 683,363 for making the conference finals. Q: I see you've also forgotten about Mike Miller with the Westchester Knicks and New York Knicks! This is getting disrespectful. deanjoannou from Twitter Stein: This was a response to my tweet last week about Oklahoma City's Mark Daigneault becoming the first coach in league history to coach a G League team and then be promoted to head coach of the big league affiliate by the same franchise. If you wish to award that status to Miller for his 44 game stint as the Knicks' interim coach last season, I suppose you technically can. But I think you know what I meant. After Oklahoma City filled the league's last of nine coaching vacancies by hiring Mark Daigneault, there will be seven Black coaches in the N.B.A. this season in a league with a player pool estimated at 80 percent Black. They are: Atlanta's Lloyd Pierce, Cleveland's J.B. Bickerstaff, Detroit's Dwane Casey, Houston's Stephen Silas, Philadelphia's Doc Rivers, Phoenix's Monty Williams and the Los Angeles Clippers' Tyronn Lue. Charlotte's James Borrego and Miami's Erik Spoelstra are the league's other two coaches of color. The new season will also begin with just 16 of the N.B.A.'s top 60 jobs held by nonwhite coaches and heads of front offices. The seven executives in that group with lead decision making authority are: Cleveland's Koby Altman, Detroit's Troy Weaver, Houston's Rafael Stone, Minnesota's Gersson Rosas, Phoenix's James Jones, San Antonio's Brian Wright and Toronto's Masai Ujiri. Four of the league's nine new hires are first time head coaches: Oklahoma City's Daigneault, the Nets' Steve Nash, Houston's Silas and Indiana's Nate Bjorkgren. The Clippers' hiring of the former Nets coach Kenny Atkinson to Lue's staff, which was announced on Monday, will raise the count to five head coaches from last season to take an assistant coaching job this season. Atkinson joins Mike D'Antoni (Houston to the Nets), Alvin Gentry (New Orleans to Sacramento), Nate McMillan (Indiana to Atlanta) and Jacque Vaughn (Nets interim coach to Nash's assistant). Atkinson's arrival means that three former Nets head coaches will be working as assistants in Los Angeles next season. Jason Kidd and Lionel Hollins are prominent members of Frank Vogel's Lakers staff. Hit me up anytime on Twitter ( TheSteinLine) or Facebook ( MarcSteinNBA) or Instagram ( thesteinline). Send any other feedback to marcstein newsletter nytimes.com.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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THE last time the world as we knew it seemed likely to end, Dan Tapiero thought about buying gold. He didn't tell his wife; they didn't talk about things like that. In fact he didn't tell anyone for a while. He just tried to figure out how he was going to buy physical gold as the financial markets collapsed at the end of 2008. Mining stocks were not for him, and neither was buying gold on the futures exchange. That was financial gold, meaning it existed on account statements but was not tangible. He wanted the real thing, gold in the form of bullion that he could hold in his palms, smudge with his thumbs. But Mr. Tapiero, a portfolio manager at several hedge funds over the last two decades, realized quite quickly that it was harder to fulfill his desire than he had thought. When he called up one bank he patronized in his day job, he learned it had a minimum purchase amount of 20 million worth of physical gold. Even at that amount, he could not have access to it; it would have to stay at the bank. He didn't want to buy that much, but he wanted to buy more than a bag of gold coins, or a bar or two. Most of all, he wanted to know that it would be stored someplace safe where he could get to it even if all of the banks suddenly closed for a while. "There was concern at that time that the system was frozen and you didn't really know whether you were going to be able to have access to your money or to your assets," Mr. Tapiero said. "And I started thinking, O.K., well, I'd like to own something that isn't a number on a flashing screen." Investing in physical gold has had an image problem of late. After the financial crisis, it was seen by many mainstream advisers as something that crackpots coveted. They would buy it, store in their basements and know that their wealth was secure if the world or at least the prevailing financial and political systems ended. This was easy to mock, and many people did. What, after all, would you buy with your gold if the world came to an end? Then there was the group that saw gold as a speculative bet, as something that would rise in value as fear about the global economy sunk in. That was less of a crackpot idea: the price of gold went from around 700 an ounce when Mr. Tapiero began buying it in the fall of 2008 to more than 1,900 an ounce last summer. It is now trading around 1,700 an ounce. Mr. Tapiero did not buy his bullion because he thought the world was ending. "And if it did end," he said, "I don't know that gold would be that important it might be radioactive." He also made clear that he does not keep it at his home in Greenwich, Conn. "It might not be safe," he said, "if someone holds you at gunpoint and they say, 'Show me your safe' and you open it up and all your gold is there." Instead, his gold now about 25 percent of his net worth, he said, declining to quantify it further is kept in various professionally managed vaults. We met at one in Midtown Manhattan. The vault was in an unassuming, brick office building with a completely plain, even dingy lobby. The offices of the vaulting company, which asked not to be named as a condition for granting me entry, had rows of nondescript cubicles that gave no sign beyond the company logo of what might be going on there. As for the vault itself, it looked secure from the outside. But once past the thick door, it felt completely utilitarian, even a bit grim, particularly for what it held for its undisclosed number of clients. Mr. Tapiero eyed the rows of 100 ounce bars each about the size of an iPhone and worth about 170,000 and estimated there was 4 billion worth of gold at current prices stacked on metal shelves that looked as if they were built in the 1970s. That amount of gold would fit in the back of an S.U.V. The vault company did not share the identities of other customers. But suspicion that there was interest in owning this kind of physical gold led Mr. Tapiero and a friend, Steven Feldman, to form a company, Gold Bullion International, in 2009. It allows people to buy bullion but also to have access to it and, if they want, have it delivered to their home or anywhere else. Their customers range from chief executives and entrepreneurs to housewives and grandparents buying for their grandchildren. Mr. Tapiero described their challenge as, "How do we start a company that can provide physical gold have it delivered, but also have it stored outside the banking system to the retail customer?" His theory was that gold had been misunderstood in the United States in a way that it had not been in the rest of the world. He attributed this to the inability of individuals to own gold for some 40 years, after President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 ordered any American holding more than 100 worth of gold to exchange if for 20.67 an ounce. He did this to prevent individuals from hoarding gold during the Great Depression, and the restriction wasn't lifted until the 1970s. Another reason Mr. Tapiero thinks people came to misjudge gold was the bull market in stocks from 1982 to 2007, which made owning an asset that just sits there, like gold, unattractive. Mr. Tapiero said that today gold was a legitimate investment that should be part of any diversified portfolio, because it is a hedge against a global economic slowdown and the inflation that many believe will occur when economies pick up. But like many investments, the likelihood that gold will continue to increase in value rests on the rise of India and China. There, gold is being increasingly bought as a way to demonstrate success in addition to as an investment. If you don't need to be able to put your hands on your gold to sleep at night, the World Gold Council sponsors an exchange traded fund, which trades under the ticker GLD. It allows people to buy and sell shares in a fund that owns gold, much as they would with a mutual fund that owns stocks. Jason Toussaint, managing director of the World Gold Council, said that like Mr. Tapiero, his group wanted people to see gold as something that they should always own and not something they buy only as a safe haven. "It implies people run to it and then when the storm has passed they go back to risky assets," he said. "We think the time is right to look for a new paradigm." More traditional advisers see a place for gold in some portfolios, though they put it in the same group as other alternative assets. They also advise keeping the allocation relatively low, 3 to 5 percent of a total portfolio.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Your Money
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The most territorial reporters took a squatter's rights approach get on a terminal and camp out, no matter how distant their deadline. Rather than fight, I managed to get a password for signing onto any terminal in the building. So I'd just find an open terminal in some other part of the newsroom. But that meant you were away from your phone. No cellphones then. In 1980, there was a crash in the silver market that shook Wall Street. I was writing the front page story for the next day. After filing my story from a terminal in the culture department, I got back to my desk and had three telephone messages from G. William Miller, the Treasury secretary at the time. I missed the calls. When I went to Tokyo, it was back to a typewriter and a small Underwood portable, which was the laptop of its day. We wrote stories, 200 words on a page, and hand delivered them to the Reuters office across town, to be cabled to New York. Later, we moved to small word processing computers Tandy 100s and then Tandy 200s, with phone couplers for the modem connections. In some places, the phone service wasn't good enough to transmit by modem. Then, you'd just call in your story and dictate it to the Times phone room. Then came the internet era. How did that change how you report? The internet, put simply, is a low cost communications network. Everything else, like the web, builds on top of that. And having so much information online can be a gold mine for reporting. In my case, I report on technology and economics these days. Silicon Valley is a caldron of innovation. But all the big issues surrounding technology's impact on the world like automation, economic opportunity and income disparity are playing out outside the tech hubs, across the 20 trillion American economy. Tons of research is being done on those subjects, and it's all online working papers from the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Social Science Research Network, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and scientific studies. What it means is you can test your assumptions for any trend or explanatory story. Is the lively anecdote you just came across an outlier, or representative of a broader phenomenon? Early in reporting a subject, you can get an answer to the question: What story do the numbers tell you? That is a powerful tool that applies to most fields today, including journalism.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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