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Thomas Zuniga pitched a tent in his parents' backyard over Thanksgiving to maintain social distance while still sharing the holiday. To celebrate Thanksgiving with his family this year while still maintaining social distance, Thomas Zuniga pitched a tent on the front lawn of his parents' home in northeast Georgia. He called it Tentsgiving. As coronavirus cases continue to climb nationwide, Americans are rethinking their holiday traditions. For those where a Zoom holiday simply won't suffice, some are opting to pitch a tent in the yards of loved ones to create some face to face festivities, but with appropriate social distancing. After Mr. Zuniga, an Asheville, N.C. based digital content producer, was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder this spring, he took extra care to follow public health guidelines. He told his parents he didn't feel comfortable sharing indoor space over the holidays with his younger siblings, their partners, and their children, let alone possibly putting his father, who has cancer, at even more risk. Already an experienced camper, Mr. Zuniga, 33, decided he would keep his distance while reconnecting with family by turning the yard into a makeshift campground. "I joked I was at the kids' table," he said, "even though it was just me and I'm a 33 year old man." Despite the onslaught of warnings from public health officials urging against holiday travel, many Americans were willing to take the risk to visit loved ones for Thanksgiving and will likely do so for Christmas as well. Nearly one million travelers passed through airport security the week before and the weekend following Thanksgiving, according to Transportation Security Administration data, the highest volume since mid March. Two in five Americans said they would likely attend a gathering this holiday season with more than 10 people who live outside their household, according to a survey from the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Thanksgiving offered a prime opportunity to reward prior good behavior throughout the pandemic with socially distanced visiting. Rosalin Siv, a baker and founder of online New York boutique bakery The Evercake, could sense her mother was disappointed when she initially said her family wouldn't be visiting Annandale, Va. for Thanksgiving. Ms. Siv's mother, who lives alone, had closely adhered to social distancing measures, avoiding all in person socializing and unnecessary errands. As a pat on the back for her mother's efforts, Ms. Siv, 39, her husband, and their 3 year old son made the four hour drive from Manhattan for the holiday. Although the family dined inside Ms. Siv's mother's home with Ms. Siv and her family on one side of the dining room and her mother on the other they spent Thanksgiving night outside in an Airstream trailer on loan from Ms. Siv's sister's boyfriend. "Since we were so close to my mom's house, she would pop in any time. She would say 'Here's some extra blankets,'" Ms. Siv said. Some families used yard camping as a means of hosting large celebrations that otherwise wouldn't be permitted under indoor gathering restrictions. Andrew Cunningham, the Detroit based founder of the pest control resource DailyPest, 34, his wife, and two daughters were four of nearly 20 guests who camped in his parents' backyard in Knoxville, Tenn. Each of the six families in attendance received individual dinner portions, prepared by Mr. Cunningham's parents. The entire holiday was spent outside with seven tents and a pop up camper in all save for masked trips indoors to the bathroom. The country's upward trajectory of Covid 19 cases and a medical system in crisis was enough though to deter some people who had previously camped in backyards. Although she'd camped in her aunt's front yard in Springfield, Mo., over Labor Day Weekend, Blue McNiel, a jewelry merchandiser, stayed home in Kansas City for Thanksgiving, opting to hike with a friend instead of dining with family, who planned to have their meal outside, Ms. McNiel, 33, said. "To me, the most generous gift I can give to anyone is to not travel unnecessarily to see them," she said. Michael James Nuells, too, out of an abundance of caution, bucked tradition and avoided traveling to his hometown Victoria, Texas, to visit family for Thanksgiving. When friends who live nearby suggested celebrating the holiday over Zoom, Mr. Nuells, a special events manager in Las Vegas, proposed a more intimate affair: What if he camped in the yard of their new home? On Thanksgiving eve, Mr. Nuells pitched a tent in the front yard while another friend set up camp out back, much to the delight of onlooking neighbors, he said. From his tent, Mr. Nuells, 32, chatted on the phone with his hosts as they looked on from their front window. "It reminded me of being like a little kid," he said. "You always think of the telephone game: You put one can to your ear and hopefully your neighbor next door, your friend in the window, can hear you and obviously you can't." Outdoors felt more like indoors when the hosts' driveway was fashioned into a makeshift dining hall, with multiple tables erected for food and for each party to dine. Mr. Nuells' hosts even pulled their television close to the front window so their guests could watch football from the lawn. The backyard was equipped with a portable toilet and sink. Given the backdrop of this tumultuous year, not celebrating the holidays just felt wrong, Mr. Nuells said. When plans and expectations must constantly be rejiggered, spending a night in a tent on a friends' lawn was an opportunity to make new, positive memories. He anticipates yard camping again for Christmas and beyond. "I can deal with a little heat, I can deal with a little cool, I can deal with a little sweat," he said. "There are much bigger issues going on in this world. I'm happy to be alive, enjoy the company and have friends present and make the most of the situation." For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Because of this complexity, there's always more to see. (What we hear, in Glen Fogel's sound design, is mainly an amplification of the dancer's arrhythmic footfalls and breath, edged with ominous noises.) The dance accrues. The pleasure of recognition rubs against the pleasure of discovery. Each angle reveals new details, as what was foreground becomes background and what was center becomes periphery. And it isn't just a matter of observing more of what was there the first time. As the dance rotates, it changes without changing. Seen from a different angle, the line of a body suddenly sings, the space between bodies suddenly seems palpable, as potent as the bodies themselves. Tone changes. Meaning changes. It's a reminder of the importance of point of view, and of how much we miss in the ordinary way of viewing. Still, eight is enough, and it's good that the hourlong work moves on. Some of what follows is repetition for repetition's sake. Some of it running in circles is too common in the choreography of others. Some is familiar from Ms. Spradlin's previous works: model on a catwalk parading, nudity, eruptions of sexual violence. That violence might surprise you, since I've described "Y" in formal terms, but at no point is it some Apollonian study in geometry, a la Lucinda Childs. It's fleshy and sweaty and rough, in the manner of RoseAnne Spradlin. It's characteristic of her attitude and daring that after putting her choreography on a rotating platform, as it were, she takes a sledgehammer to it, smashing that opening sequence into fragments at the end. The formal risks are matched and spiced up by a sense of human danger, an aliveness that will make every performance of the repetitive "Y" not quite the same as every other one.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
This spring, as countries around the world told people to stay home to slow the spread of the coronavirus, doctors in neonatal intensive care units were noticing something strange: Premature births were falling, in some cases drastically. It started with doctors in Ireland and Denmark. Each team, unaware of the other's work, crunched the numbers from its own region or country and found that during the lockdowns, premature births especially the earliest, most dangerous cases had plummeted. When they shared their findings, they heard similar anecdotal reports from other countries. They don't know what caused the drop in premature births, and can only speculate as to the factors in lockdown that might have contributed. But further research might help doctors, scientists and parents to be understand the causes of premature birth and ways to prevent it, which have been elusive until now. Their studies are not yet peer reviewed, and have been posted only on preprint servers. In some cases the changes amounted to only a few missing babies per hospital. But they represented significant reductions from the norm, and some experts in premature birth think the research is worthy of additional investigation. "These results are compelling," said Dr. Denise Jamieson, an obstetrician at Emory University's School of Medicine in Atlanta. About one in 10 U.S. babies is born early. Pregnancy usually lasts about 40 weeks, and any delivery before 37 weeks is considered preterm. The costs to children and their families financially, emotionally and in long term health effects can be great. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, babies born premature, especially before 32 weeks, are at higher risk of vision and hearing problems, cerebral palsy and death. The best way to avoid these costs would be to prevent early births in the first place, said Dr. Roy Philip, a neonatologist at University Maternity Hospital Limerick in Ireland. Dr. Philip had been vacationing abroad when his country entered lockdown on March 12, and he noticed something unusual when he returned to work in late March. He asked why there had been no orders while he was gone for the breast milk based fortifier that doctors feed to the hospital's tiniest preemies. The hospital's staff said that there had been no need, because none of these babies had been born all month. Intrigued, Dr. Philip and his colleagues compared the hospital's births so far in 2020 with births between January and April in every year since 2001 more than 30,000 in all. They looked at birth weights, a useful proxy for very premature birth. "Initially I thought, 'There is some mistake in the numbers,'" Dr. Philip said. Over the past two decades, babies under 3.3 pounds, classified as very low birth weight, accounted for about eight out of every thousand live births in the hospital, which serves a region of 473,000 people. In 2020, the rate was about a quarter of that. The very tiniest infants, those under 2.2 pounds and considered extremely low birth weight, usually make up three per thousand births. There should have been at least a few born that spring but there had been none. The study period went through the end of April. By the end of June, with the national lockdown easing, Dr. Philip said there had still been very few early preemies born in his hospital. In two decades, he said, he had never seen anything like these numbers. While the Irish team was digging into its data, researchers in Denmark were doing the same thing, driven by curiosity over a "nearly empty" NICU. Dr. Michael Christiansen of the Statens Serum Institut in Copenhagen and his colleagues used newborn screening data to compare births nationwide during the strictest lockdown period, March 12 to April 14, with births during the same period in the previous five years. The data set included more than 31,000 infants. The researchers found that during the lockdown, the rate of babies born before 28 weeks had dropped by a startling 90 percent. Anecdotes from doctors at other hospitals around the world suggest the phenomenon may have been widespread, though not universal. Dr. Belal Alshaikh, a neonatologist at the University of Calgary in Alberta, said premature births across Calgary dropped by nearly half during the lockdown. The change was across the board, though it seemed more pronounced in the earliest babies, he said. At Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, Dr. Irwin Reiss, a neonatologist, saw a smaller drop off in premature births. At Mercy Hospital for Women outside Melbourne, Australia, there were so few premature babies that administrators asked Dr. Dan Casalaz, the hospital's director of pediatrics, to figure out what was going on. In the United States, Dr. Stephen Patrick, a neonatologist at Vanderbilt Children's Hospital in Nashville, estimated there were about 20 percent fewer NICU babies at his hospital than usual in March. Although some sick full term babies would stay in the NICU, Dr. Patrick said preterm babies usually made up most of the patients, and the drop off seemed to have been driven by missing preemies. When Dr. Patrick shared his observation on Twitter, some U.S. doctors shared similar stories. Others said their NICUs were as busy as ever. Some groups in other countries have said they didn't see a change, either. If lockdowns prevented early births in certain places but not others, that information could help reveal causes of premature birth. The researchers speculated about potential factors. One could be rest. By staying home, some pregnant women may have experienced less stress from work and commuting, gotten more sleep and received more support from their families, the researchers said. Women staying at home also could have avoided infections in general, not just the new coronavirus. Some viruses, such as influenza, can raise the odds of premature birth. Air pollution, which has been linked to some early births, has also dropped during lockdowns as cars stayed off the roads. Dr. Jamieson said the observations were surprising because she would have expected to see more preterm births during the stress of the pandemic, not less. "It seems like we have experienced tremendous stress in the U.S. due to Covid," she said. But all pregnant women may not have experienced the lockdowns in the same way, she said, as different countries have different social safety nets in general, and the stress of unemployment and financial insecurity may have affected communities unevenly. Some later premature births also might have been avoided during lockdowns simply because doctors weren't inducing mothers for reasons like high blood pressure, Dr. Jamieson said. But that wouldn't explain a change in very early preterm births, as the Danish and Irish authors found. "The causes of preterm birth have been elusive for decades, and ways to prevent preterm births have been largely unsuccessful," Dr. Jamieson said. According to the C.D.C., premature births in the United States rose in 2018 for the fourth straight year. White women had about a 9 percent risk of premature birth in 2018, while African American women's risk was 14 percent. If the trends in the data are confirmed, the pandemic and lockdowns could be something like a natural experiment that might help researchers understand why premature birth happens and how to avoid it. Maybe some maternity leave should start before a mother's due date, for example. The Danish and Irish researchers have now teamed up and are building an international group of collaborators to study how Covid lockdowns affected early births. "For years, nothing has advanced in this very important area," Dr. Christiansen said, "and it seems it took a virus attack to help us get on track." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
HARTFORD Since the invention of American musical theater, lyricists seeking a rhyme for "love" have been stuck with just a few wan possibilities, including "dove," "above," the odd "glove" and the truly desperate "shove." So, first, let me congratulate Robert L. Freedman for conscripting "mazel tov" to the cause, in a doozy of a song called "The Cookie Crumbles." That song, a highlight of "The Flamingo Kid," which opened last week at Hartford Stage, is a blistering warning from a suburban matron, circa 1963, about what happens when a woman makes the wrong choice at an early age. "Time rolls along. You'll play Mah Jongg. And that's your life." Let's just add that "life" is soon paired with "knife." Even aside from Mr. Freedman's sharp rhymes and the sinuous, sulfurous music by Scott Frankel "The Cookie Crumbles" checks off all the boxes of what great musical theater songs should do. It addresses the plot moment: Phyllis Brody is telling her love struck niece, Karla, not to get too involved with a sweet but feckless cabana boy at the El Flamingo beach club where the show takes place. It deepens our understanding of Phyllis's character while reaching out to larger issues, in this case feminist ones. And as sung by Lesli Margherita in the show's standout performance, it provides a bravura moment for the protagonist. Except Phyllis is not the protagonist. Even less is this mild new musical about fierce women. The song is a side dish that shows up what should be the entree. You may remember what "The Flamingo Kid" is really about from the 1984 movie starring Matt Dillon and Richard Crenna. It's about fathers and sons. The cabana boy, Jeffrey, is torn between his real father, Arthur, a Brooklyn plumber with conventional expectations, and Phil Brody, the slick substitute father he acquires at the Long Island club where he spends the summer after high school. Though Mr. Freedman's book for the musical no longer suppresses the Jewishness of the milieu Jeffrey's last name has been changed from Willis to Winnick, and there's even a rhyme for "shlemazel" it still follows the movie closely. Arthur (Adam Heller) expects Jeffrey to take a summer job in a client's accounting office and then go to college; Phil (Marc Kudisch) proposes a sexier future involving work at his car dealership, access to high stakes games of gin rummy and summers filled with girls in bikinis. Recognizing that the "girls in bikinis" aspect of the story might be ticklish today, the musical's creators have tried to give the show's women a makeover. Phyllis is superficial, yes, but also, in her big number, acute. Karla, with whom Jeffrey falls instantly in love, is not just a gorgeous U.C.L.A. student, as she was in the movie; she's a firebrand in training. (Samantha Massell does her best with the underwritten role.) When Jeffrey meets her she's reading "The Feminine Mystique," just published. It takes more than that, though, to remove the sting of a stereotype. Nor would a stereotype in a secondary story matter if the main one were compelling instead of bland. But with little at stake beyond Jeffrey's matriculation at Brooklyn College and with a plot that turns on a game of gin rummy that the director, Darko Tresnjak, cannot effectively stage the oomph goes AWOL. Those are but a few of the problems that make "The Flamingo Kid" a "why" musical: the kind that has you asking not how well did they do it (pretty well, considering) but whatever for. Perhaps the rights holders noticed the recent success of another choose your dad outer borough musical set in the early '60s: "A Bronx Tale." Or perhaps generational class conflict combined with early rock 'n' roll seemed sellable in the "Hairspray" manner. The score, at least, delivers on such opportunities. Though Mr. Frankel nods to the period with close harmonies and doo wop riffs, he has too much integrity as a composer to rely on mere pastiche. As in "Grey Gardens" and "War Paint," his melodies go their own delicious ways, and Mr. Freedman's lyrics (as in "A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder") handily keep up. But it's a weakness of the underlying material, which Mr. Freedman has not been able to shore up, that the Brooklyn scenes can't compare to those set in Rockaway. The songs for Mr. Heller, in terrific voice, and Liz Larsen likewise as Jeffrey's mother, feel professional if dutiful, the kind you wouldn't put at the top of your playlist but wouldn't mind hearing again. Not so their scenes, all hokum and working class Jewish cliches. The scenes of nouveau riche Jewish life at the club (where "boys can be boys" and "we pretend to be goys") are just as cliche ridden, but at least these cliches are sparkly and engaging. Phil's numbers, including one called "Rockaway Rumba," really pop, with choreography by Denis Jones bringing them to full stage life. And because the glibness of the dialogue matches that of the character, there's a feeling of momentary pleasurable alignment whenever Mr. Kudisch is speaking.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Sarah Isgur Flores, a Republican spokeswoman who worked most recently for the Justice Department, has been hired by CNN to help with the network's political coverage, propelling a Trump administration official directly into a news role for a top cable network. Her hiring as a "political editor," not a commentator, led to internal and external criticism of CNN for placing a Republican political operative in a position to help guide daily political coverage, including 2020 presidential campaign news. In an internal memo on Wednesday announcing the hire, CNN's Washington bureau chief, Sam Feist, said Ms. Isgur would spend the first few months getting to know CNN, and then "play a coordinating role" in covering politics. "We're thrilled that Sarah is coming to CNN," Mr. Feist wrote. "She brings a wealth of government, political, communications and legal experience to our team." Ms. Isgur recently worked as a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, including for Jeff Sessions, the former attorney general whom President Trump fired in November, and for Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who has overseen the special counsel's Russia investigation. She sent a goodbye email from her Justice Department account on Friday. She previously worked as a deputy campaign manager for Carly Fiorina, a Republican who ran for president during the 2016 election. Ms. Isgur was critical of Mr. Trump during the 2016 primaries and has also been critical of CNN, including complaining that the network was excluding Ms. Fiorina from a presidential debate. And years ago she retweeted a comment from a conservative news outlet that referred to her new employer as the "Clinton News Network." Mr. Feist's memo on Wednesday came after a flurry of concern and in some cases, deep frustration voiced by members of the network's political staff, according to two people familiar with the complaints. The memo was co signed by two senior CNN executives, David Chalian and Virginia Moseley. CNN has previously showed a willingness to hire employees from conservative leaning news outlets and organizations, arguing that ideological diversity is helpful in ensuring robust coverage. Kaitlan Collins, one of the network's rising star White House correspondents, was hired from The Daily Caller in 2017. But the network is a frequent target of Mr. Trump and his allies, and its journalists have faced threats of physical violence, including a pipe bomb mailed to its Manhattan headquarters last year. 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. Frank Sesno, a former CNN White House correspondent who now works as the director of George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs, said that there had long been a "revolving door" between politics and news outlets. But political aides typically have a "cooling off period" between jobs and Ms. Isgur's quick transition is unusual, he added. He said CNN should clarify what Ms. Isgur's role would be. "It's one thing if you have somebody on staff whom you can consult, and it's another thing if they are editing your copy," he said. "Pretty big difference." CNN declined to comment on Wednesday. The memo from Mr. Feist said that Ms. Isgur would help "organize and communicate between news gathering, digital and television" arms of the network, which has a sprawling news operation. Ms. Isgur did not respond to an email and a phone request for comment. Some prominent journalists have forged careers in news after working in politics, including George Stephanopoulos, who was hired as a contributing correspondent for ABC News in 1996 after serving as one of President Bill Clinton's closest advisers. His move from the Clinton White House to ABC News initially as a partisan member of a Sunday political panel, who would also do some reporting raised hackles inside and outside the network at the time. He has since risen to become the network's chief anchor and a host of "Good Morning America." And the road from political strategist to political pundit is well traveled on both sides of the aisle.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
The Covid Symptom Study, developed by Zoe Global, a health science company, in collaboration with Massachusetts General Hospital and King's College in London, had 2.5 million users who reported their symptoms in four weeks. In the absence of widespread on demand testing, public health officials across the world have been struggling to track the spread of the coronavirus pandemic in real time. A team of scientists in the United States and the United Kingdom says a crowdsourcing smartphone app may be the answer to that quandary. In a study published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, researchers found that an app that allows people to check off symptoms they are experiencing was remarkably effective in predicting coronavirus infections among the 2.5 million people who were using it between March 24 and April 21. The study, which tracked people in the United States, the United Kingdom and Sweden, found that the loss of taste and smell was the No. 1 predictor of whether a person was going to get sick with Covid 19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, followed by extreme fatigue and acute muscle pain. Using a mathematical model, the researchers were able to predict with nearly 80 percent accuracy whether a person was likely to have Covid 19 based on their age, sex and a combination of four symptoms: loss of taste or smell, persistent cough, fatigue and loss of appetite. Two thirds of those who later tested positive for the virus about 15,000 people had self reported the loss of taste and smell, the study found. Fever and cough symptoms that have been considered the most reliable indicators of infection ranked fourth and fifth on the list. "It's just such a weird symptom that doesn't occur with most other diseases so it's rarely wrong," said Dr. Tim Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology at King's College London and a lead author of the study. Because loss of smell and taste is often associated with mild cases of Covid 19, Dr. Spector said health officials could act on information provided by a surveillance app to encourage participants to isolate themselves until they were able to get tested. "The more we collect this stuff and the more we document it properly, the better we can deal with new outbreaks," he said. The researchers said they hoped the findings might persuade the World Health Organization and other health agencies to modify guidelines that currently rank fever and cough well above loss of taste and smell as symptoms for determining who to screen for Covid 19. Dr. Andrew T. Chan, a professor at Harvard Medical School and the lead investigator on the study, said a surveillance app could help health authorities identify people at the early stage of the disease who are unknowingly spreading the virus to others. "At the moment, we're mostly gathering data on the tip of the iceberg from those who are really sick and show up at the hospital. But there is a huge iceberg below of people with mild symptoms who we know are major culprits for community spread," said Dr. Chan, who is also chief of clinical and translational epidemiology at Massachusetts General Hospital. "We have no ability to track these people at home and that's a real problem." Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. If more widely adopted, the app could provide public health authorities an inexpensive tool for detecting outbreaks in cities, states and even individual neighborhoods. Given that the loss of taste and smell appears to be an early indicator of Covid 19, the information, the researchers said, would allow health officials to prepare for a spike of infections and help guide the allocation of scarce resources like ventilators for the most seriously ill, and the personal protective gear needed by medical workers. As local outbreaks subside, the app can also guide decisions about the easing of lockdowns and social distancing measures. The researchers said the app did not prompt significant privacy concerns because participants are not required to provide their names and any other personal information, only their ZIP codes. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist and chief innovation officer at Boston Children's Hospital, said the study added to the growing body of evidence that highlights the value of smartphone apps as real time disease surveillance tools. Dr. Brownstein, who was not involved in the coronavirus app study, has a decade of experience using crowdsource symptom apps, starting with an influenza app called Flu Near You, and more recently, Covid Near You, an app that has already drawn more than 600,000 users in the United States. Surveillance apps, he said, can detect an outbreak well before people begin showing up at hospitals. "Because we have such a lack of testing, this kind of data is going to give us insights into symptomatology, hot spots and the impact of social distancing," he said. "Without this information, how are communities supposed to know we're on the other side of this pandemic and whether we can reopen?" But crowdsourcing apps do not provide a complete snapshot of the coronavirus pandemic. Because users tend to be younger, they are less than ideal for charting its progression among the elderly. And they are also not a replacement for testing, which is the most effective means for tracking the spread of the disease. The data can also be muddled by people who report symptoms shared by other illnesses. "It's a sort of real time experiment done on a massive scale that couldn't have been done a couple of years ago," Dr. Spector said. The app he helped develop piggybacks on technology that King's College London has been using to track health outcomes among 14,000 twins in the United Kingdom. When the coronavirus outbreak temporarily idled the project, Dr. Spector realized their app could be easily repurposed to track the pandemic. "It was a crazy idea, but four days later we launched the app and it went viral," he said. Within three days, more than a million people had downloaded the app, a number that has since grown to 3.3 million. Dr. Cristina Menni, a research fellow at King's College and another lead author of the study, said the researchers continued to refine the app. Among their goals is finding a way to gauge whether pre existing conditions or genetic factors might magnify the health risks for people infected with the virus. But for now, she said, crowdsourcing apps may be a useful public health tool to help contain the pandemic. "Because there hasn't been widespread testing, monitoring for symptoms of the coronavirus is a very cheap and simple way of doing it," she said. "At the very least, anyone who reports a loss of taste and smell should self isolate until they can get tested."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
"I thought, his is someone I'm going to enjoy getting to know," said Ellen Floren of Chicago. Ellen Floren was not looking for love. The criminals who lured her into an online scam last summer approached her not on a dating site, where she might have been wary, but through the neighborhood hub called Nextdoor. A man who said his name was James Gibson said he'd noticed her profile on the site. He also lived in her Chicago neighborhood, he told her, specifying a street. Could they have a conversation? "He was very polite: 'I hope I'm not out of line. I just found you very attractive,'" recalled Ms. Floren, who is 67 and a part time educational consultant. They chatted on the site for a week or so. "Then it was, 'Is it OK if we email?'" She agreed. Soon they shifted to phone conversations, often lasting an hour, and to texting several times a day. "It became very seductive," Ms. Floren said. How could she help sympathizing when he revealed that his wife and child had been killed in a car crash long ago? Though they had swapped photos, they hadn't met in person; he said he was temporarily working in a distant suburb, at a high level job in communications systems, and staying at a hotel. But after a few weeks, when he said he was coming to Chicago, they arranged to have dinner. "I thought, this is someone I'm going to enjoy getting to know," Ms. Floren said. She was disappointed when the supposed Mr. Gibson got in too late to see her, then apologetically said he had just landed a big job in Europe and had to leave at once, postponing their date. The elements of deception and manipulation in Ms. Floren's saga sound familiar to those knowledgeable about the rise of online romance swindles. Con artists now find victims on any social media platform Instagram, Facebook, games like Words With Friends. But "they quickly want to remove you from the platform," said Amy Nofziger, director of the AARP Fraud Watch Network. The romancers ask to switch to text, phone or messaging apps that offer more intimacy and less security monitoring. The exchange of personal contact information also makes both parties appear trusting. The tragic personal story, the quick professions of love combined with distance that prevents the parties' ever meeting all fit the pattern, said Monica Vaca, an associate director in the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission. So do the photographs. "You feel more like you know this person because you've seen their picture," Ms. Vaca said. "Invariably, it's a photo of someone else." Weeks or months may pass before the scammers generally not individuals, but criminal rings working in shifts (hence their ability to be wooing online all day) make the key move. Reports collected by the F.T.C. from consumers and local law enforcement show how sharply online romance fraud is increasing. In 2015, the agency received 8,500 such complaints. Last year, the number topped 25,000 though Ms. Vaca cautioned that "this crime is dramatically underreported." But what really drew regulators' attention, given that other fraud categories generated more complaints, was the money involved. "It's the No. 1 fraud category if you look at the total dollars people reported losing," Ms. Vaca said. Let Us Help You Protect Your Digital Life None With Apple's latest mobile software update, we can decide whether apps monitor and share our activities with others. Here's what to know. A little maintenance on your devices and accounts can go a long way in maintaining your security against outside parties' unwanted attempts to access your data. Here's a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online. Ever considered a password manager? You should. There are also many ways to brush away the tracks you leave on the internet. In 2015, people reported losing 33 million to romance scams; last year, they lost 201 million more than victims lost to fake lotteries and sweepstakes, impostor frauds or tech support phishing. Older adults have been particularly hard hit. Anyone regardless of age, gender or education level can fall for a romance swindle; in fact, younger adults are more apt to report losing money to these frauds. "But when older people do report losing money, their dollar losses are much higher," Ms. Vaca said. The median loss for romance fraud victims in their 20s was 770. People in their 50s reported losing twice as much. The losses reached 3,000 for victims in their 60s and 6,450 for those in their 70s. "We've heard of people refinancing their homes and cashing out retirement accounts," Ms. Nofziger said. "Scammers go where the money is, and criminals know that older adults have the majority of assets in the United States." Last year, federal prosecutors brought a number of alarming romance cases. A 76 year old widow in Rhode Island transferred more than 660,000 to bank accounts she thought belonged to a U.S. Army general in Afghanistan. (Posing as a military member is another red flag, along with overseas locations.) In Oklahoma, 10 Nigerian and United States citizens were indicted in a fraud ring targeting multiple victims in three states. A grand jury in Georgia indicted a man accused of bilking a Virginia woman, who had a large trust, of 6.5 million. Ms. Floren may qualify as one of the luckier victims. As "James Gibson" was leaving for Europe, he suddenly called, saying his Netflix card had expired. "He really wanted to be able to watch movies on the plane," she recalled. "Would I please go to a Walmart and buy him a 100 Netflix card?" Gift cards, untraceable and available everywhere, have become the currency of choice for scammers, Ms. Nofziger said. But they may also ask victims to open a bank account and provide access to it, or to ship iPhones. Ms. Floren bought a gift card, reading her apparent suitor the number. Three days later, he called again, claiming to have left a bag of expensive tools in a cab. "He was hysterical on the phone," she said. The tools were worth 4,000, but he'd found replacements for just 2,600. Would she send him the money? She took a break, had a cup of coffee, wondered why an international traveler had no credit card or employer willing to help. When the man called back, she announced, "You are scamming me," tossed in a few expletives, and hung up, blocking him online and on the phone. Total financial loss: 100. When she posted about the fraud on Nextdoor and Facebook, other women said they'd been similarly defrauded. Often, though, victims feel too humiliated to talk about what happened. A 68 year old social worker in the Bay Area, for instance, asked not to be named because she still hasn't told her family about a grifter she encountered on Our Time, a dating site for singles over 50. He claimed to be an Air Force pilot, emailed her gushy poetry (probably copied from romance novels, experts say), then persuaded her to wire 1,200 to a location in the Middle East, where he was purportedly serving. "Can you believe what a sucker I was?" the social worker said. "What was wrong with me?" She regrets getting angry with a friend who questioned the relationship. With hindsight, she blames her vulnerability on the fact that her mother was dying. "With this fraud, especially, there is so much emotional trauma," Ms. Nofziger said of its victims. "They're embarrassed. Their hearts are broken. They not only lost their money, but this dream they had." She advises friends and relatives to treat victims gently. "Lead with kindness and empathy," she said. "'How could you be so stupid?' is the worst thing to say." She encourages victims to report these crimes to the F.T.C. or the F.B.I. An AARP helpline helps people file complaints. Bottom line: Anyone who appears to be pursuing romance online, while somehow never being available to meet in person, may be a fiction created by criminals. They're patient and skilled, and have plausible sounding reasons for asking for money but that's the signal for victims to flee. "Now," Ms. Floren said, "as soon as anyone would ask me for 10 cents, I'd say no." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
St. Louis defenseman Alex Pietrangelo after the Blues won last year's Stanley Cup finals over Boston. This year's playoff field is expanded, but that means teams could prepare for two months to play only three games. Now that the National Hockey League has announced this week its detailed road map for returning to action with a playoff tentatively set for mid July, it can start focusing on all the steps needed to make its plan actually happen. There are many issues, some complicated, that need to be settled over the next several weeks to yield a 24 team, two city hockey extravaganza that in its early stages would see up to three games played per day in a single arena, much like in the Olympics or the N.C.A.A. tournament. But the most important step the N.H.L. must confront to move forward is the same one that daunts the rest of the United States figuring out how to execute a coronavirus testing protocol for players, staff and family members. The N.H.L.'s complex plan to end its regular season and jump into a 24 team playoff became necessary months ago when hockey, and most sports, were forced to shut down because of the coronavirus pandemic. Resuming play could mean testing each player every night, expediting the results to be delivered in the mornings before players and staff head to arenas for games or practices. Gary Bettman, the N.H.L. commissioner, said in a news conference on Tuesday that by the end of the Stanley Cup finals the league will have administered 25,000 to 30,000 tests under the guidelines outlined in a memo on Monday. Under the league's phased plan to restart, individual teams will be responsible for testing their players and staff members when voluntary workouts at the clubs' home practice facilities begin, which could be as early as next month. Mandatory training camps are tentatively expected to start as soon as July 1, when teams would also handle testing. Once the teams report to one of two hub cities for playoff games which could begin in late July or August the N.H.L. will take over testing and its costs, which Bettman said will run into the millions of dollars. He also warned that the availability of tests will be a principal factor in choosing the two hub cities one for each conference from a list that includes Chicago; Columbus, Ohio; Dallas; Edmonton, Alberta; Las Vegas; Los Angeles; Minneapolis/St. Paul; Pittsburgh; Vancouver; and Toronto. "We need to make sure that there is enough testing available and we'll be needing lots and lots of testing," he said. "But we don't want it to interfere with the medical needs of the community. That has to come first." Players are likely to bring their families to the two hubs and, once inside, they would also need to undergo regimented testing. No plans have been made to allow guests or on who would assume the cost and administration of testing them. Bill Daly, the league's deputy commissioner, said during the news conference that if one or two players test positive, it will not cause the entire project to shut down. But if a breakout occurs, it could cause a significant disruption. "Obviously we can't be in a situation where we have an outbreak, and that will affect our ability to continue playing," Daly said. "But a single positive test or isolated positive tests throughout a two month tournament should not necessarily mean an end to the tournament." There are other more mundane health issues to be settled, too. Two and a half months have passed since most players were in playing shape, and they must resume training even before mandatory training camps open. Matt Nichol, who has trained N.H.L. players over summers for the last 22 years, said he expected more soft tissue injuries and pointed to a rash of such injuries when Germany's Bundesliga restarted earlier this month. "It's a reasonable expectation that there will be a higher number than normal," Nichol said. "If you are careful you can reduce the chances of that happening. There is time for that, but there is not time to waste." Fans are not likely to be allowed at games but there could be fake fans. Bettman indicated the television networks will experiment with ways to make the broadcasts seem normal. Selection of the hub cities is on hold as the N.H.L. tries to assess infection rates and travel restrictions with input from health officials and local government. Daly said that the league is in talks with Canadian government officials to ensure that teams would be able to freely cross borders, but Canada, which has three cities on the prospective hubs list, has a mandated 14 day quarantine for travelers arriving in the country. "We don't have a resolution there," Daly said, "but it's an ongoing dialogue, for sure." Beyond the discussions with its external stakeholders, the league must also resolve outstanding competitive and economic issues with its players for its plan to become a reality. The two tier playoff format, where the top four teams in each conference play a mini round robin tournament to determine seeding while the remaining 16 teams play best of five series, has drawn criticism. Some feel the number of playoff teams was expanded to 24 from 16 to include two more Canadian teams the Montreal Canadiens and Winnipeg Jets plus the big market Chicago Blackhawks, Rangers and Islanders. But the decision to set the playoff standings according to points percentage excluded all of the N.H.L.'s California based teams and the Detroit Red Wings, one of its most well followed franchises, from postseason play. Seven teams had their seasons ended with Bettman's announcement on Tuesday, with some, like the Buffalo Sabres and the Devils, having played fewer games than their competitors. Those teams can perhaps take solace in avoiding the headache of undertaking two months of preparation to play what could be only three games. "Who's happier than the seven teams who aren't in it?" said Steve Valiquette, the former Islanders and Rangers goalie who now serves as an analyst for the MSG Network. "Seriously, I went through this with the Islanders. We were out by a country mile and for those last two months it's tough. I'm sure they are happy to get on with their summer program and get a fresh start for next year."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Odds are you have never heard a performance of Britten's Piano Concerto, even if you're a regular concertgoer. The same holds true for another rarity, Debussy's Fantaisie for Piano and Orchestra. And while Rachmaninoff's Second and Third Piano Concertos are staples of the repertory, his Fourth Concerto tends to turn up only when an orchestra is surveying all four. Well, the pianist Leif Ove Andsnes has come to the rescue. For his stint this season as artist in residence with the New York Philharmonic, he made the adventurous decision to play these overlooked works on three programs. In October he gave an incisive account of Rachmaninoff's Fourth that made a case for this episodic piece as its composer's most experimental score. He will play the Debussy in April. On Thursday, with Antonio Pappano on the podium, Mr. Andsnes gave an exhilarating performance of Britten's unconventional four movement concerto, last heard at the Philharmonic 36 years ago. Britten was just 25 when he composed it, in 1938, though seven years later he revised it (replacing the third movement, a Recitative and Aria, with an Impromptu). I yield to no one in my admiration for Britten, and I've always liked this early concerto. But the vibrant, insightful performance Mr. Andsnes gave with Mr. Pappano and the Philharmonic was a revelation.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
When Donald J. Trump swore the presidential oath on Friday, he assumed responsibility not only for the levers of government but also for one of the United States' most valuable assets, battered though it may be: its credibility. The country's sentimental reverence for truth and its jealously guarded press freedoms, while never perfect, have been as important to its global standing as the strength of its military and the reliability of its currency. It's the bedrock of that "American exceptionalism" we've heard so much about for so long. Disinformation was for dictatorships, banana republics and failed states. Yet there it was on Saturday, emanating from the lectern of the White House briefing room the official microphone of the United States as Mr. Trump's press secretary, Sean Spicer, used his first appearance there to put forth easily debunked statistics1 that questioned the news media's reporting on the size of the president's inaugural audience (of all things). President Trump and his press secretary disputed estimates of attendance at his inauguration, but footage from Friday's event, compared with those from President Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration, showed a different story. SOUNDBITE (English) Sean Spicer, White House Press Secretary: "This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe. Even the New York Times printed a photograph showing that a misrepresentation of the crowd in the original tweet in their paper which showed the full extent of the support, depth, and crowd and intensity that existed. These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong. The president was also at the, as you know, the president was at the Central Intelligence Agency today and greeted by a raucous, overflow crowd of some 400 plus CIA employees. There were over a thousand requests to attend, prompting the president to note that he'll have to come back to greet the rest. The employees were ecstatic that he's the new commander in chief and he delivered them a powerful and important message. He told them he has their back and they were grateful for that. They gave him a five minute standing ovation at the end in a display of their patriotism and their enthusiasm for his presidency. I'd also note that it's a shame that the CIA didn't have a CIA director to be with him today when he visited, because the Democrats have chosen, the Senate Democrats are stalling the nomination of Mike Pompeo and playing politics with national security. That's what you guys should be writing and covering, that this, instead of sewing division about tweets and false narratives. The president is committed to unifying our country and that was the focus of his inaugural address. This kind of dishonesty in the media, the challenging that bringing about our nation together is making it more difficult. There's been a lot of talk in the media about the responsibility to hold Donald Trump accountable. And I'm here to tell you that it goes two ways. We're going to hold the press accountable as well. The American people deserve better, and as long as he serves as the messenger of this incredible movement, he will take his message directly to the American people where his focus will always be." President Trump and his press secretary disputed estimates of attendance at his inauguration, but footage from Friday's event, compared with those from President Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration, showed a different story. It was chilling when Mr. Trump's assertion that reporters were "among the most dishonest people on earth" became an applause line for the crowd gathered to hear him speak in front of the memorial to fallen agents at C.I.A. headquarters. Still more chilling was when the White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway appeared on "Meet the Press" on Sunday to assert that Mr. Spicer's falsehoods were simply "alternative facts." Ms. Conway made no bones about what she thought of the news media's ability to debunk those "alternative facts" in a way Americans especially Trump loving Americans would believe. "You want to talk provable facts?" she said to the moderator, Chuck Todd. "Look you've got a 14 percent approval rating in the media, that you've earned. You want to push back on us?" (She appeared to be referring to a Gallup poll figure related to Republicans' views.) And really, there it was: an apparent animating principle of Mr. Trump's news media strategy since he first began campaigning. That strategy has consistently presumed that low public opinion of mainstream journalism (which Mr. Trump has been only too happy to help stoke) creates an opening to sell the Trump version of reality, no matter its adherence to the facts. As Mr. Trump and his supporters regularly note, whatever he did during the campaign, it was successful: He won. His most ardent supporters loved the news media bashing. And the complaints and aggressive fact checking by the news media played right into his hands. He portrayed it as just so much whining and opposition from yet another overprivileged constituency of the Washington establishment. But will tactics that worked in the campaign work in the White House? History is littered with examples of new administrations that quickly found that the techniques that served them well in campaigns did not work well in government. And if they do work, what are the long term costs to government credibility from tactical "wins" that are achieved through the aggressive use of falsehoods? Whatever they are, Mr. Trump should realize that it could hurt his agenda more than anything else. Mr. McClellan's book chronicles how Mr. Bush staked that credibility on the false rationale for the Iraq invasion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and ultimately lost the confidence of Americans, hobbling him for the rest of his presidency. But the damage wasn't isolated to Mr. Bush's political standing. To this day, the American intelligence community must contend with lingering questions about its own credibility to wit, taunts from Moscow (not to mention from Mr. Trump) that assessments pointing to Russian meddling in the presidential election are questionable. After all, wasn't it wrong about Iraq? There's a big difference in importance between the size of Mr. Trump's inaugural audience and the intelligence that led to war, no question. And, as the former Bush White House press secretary Ari Fleischer noted in a conversation with me on Sunday, it's way too early to say whether Mr. Spicer's weekend performance will be the norm. The Trump team's emotions were raw over the weekend, Mr. Fleischer noted, after a mistaken pool report was sent to the rest of the White House press corps, claiming that Mr. Trump had removed a bust of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office. Zeke Miller, the Time magazine journalist who had written the report, quickly corrected it and apologized when the White House alerted him to the error. "It rightly leaves the people inside feeling that 'reporters were opposed to us all along for being racist and the first thing they did was imply we were,'" Mr. Fleischer said. Still, the weekend's events did not arrive in a vacuum. There was the report last week in The Washington Post that the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, known for high standards of accuracy, was selling a commemorative book about Mr. Trump riddled with questionable notions, such as that Hillary Clinton deserved more blame than Mr. Trump did for the so called birther campaign questioning Mr. Obama's citizenship. (After that report, the museum said it was removing the book pending an investigation into whether it met standards for accuracy.) The administration's decision to eradicate nearly any reference to "climate change" on the White House website could be expected given Mr. Trump's promises to overturn his predecessors' climate policies. But it set off concerns among climate scientists that it would extend to valuable government data fears that also apply to the sanctity of other administration controlled data. (Mr. Fleischer, for one, noted that career bureaucrats would blow the whistle on any moves to manipulate government data.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
At their sagging, graffiti tagged worst, the blue plywood fences that surround construction sites can be symbols of everything that went wrong in the housing bust, as stalled projects languish behind them. But for some developers, these fences can be a sign of opportunity. Rather than a stalled development, they see a project with all of its city approvals in place, that might fairly easily be restarted. For Gale International, a developer new to New York's housing market, that just add water quality was a chief appeal of a site tucked behind a fence at 21 West 20th Street, between Fifth Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas. Gale bought the site last month for 9.75 million from the Extell Development Company, which had done most of the legwork needed to build a condominium there. Now, picking up where Extell left off, Gale plans a 15 story building with 12 condo units. Work on the building, which will have colored sections and an unusual cantilevered shape to wrap around an adjacent parking garage, is expected to start in March and finish by 2014. "It was ready to go, which took a lot of the variables away," said Stan Gale Jr., a vice president of the firm, which is best known for its suburban office parks and for mixed use communities in Asia. Because the approval process in Manhattan can take years and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, "there was a tremendous amount of savings, which was attractive," Mr. Gale added. For its part, Extell sees the location as desirable but the site as too small scale to mesh with the its current focus on lofty high rises. "I love the market there," said Gary Barnett, the chief executive of Extell. "It was just too small for us to do." The benefits to Gale of a turnkey site were significant. To start with, the midblock site, which once was home to a parking lot, came with a poured foundation and current building permits. Another plus was that approval had been granted for a tall new building despite the landmark neighborhood, the Ladies' Mile Historic District, where such undertakings can meet stiff resistance. In 2008, the Landmarks Preservation Commission unanimously voted to allow Extell to build a condo there, having been won over by the design from Beyer Blinder Belle, an architectural firm known for its historic renovations. Gale will retain its design. Acquiring this kind of ready to go site can cost extra; brokers say that buyers can pay 30 percent more for a site that has its demolition work complete, some framework in place and approved plans. And in the case of West 20th Street, the added value of Extell's prep work may not mitigate the project's overall cost. The construction at the site will be complicated, because the building has to go up and over the garage next door. Still, Gale might be glad that there is no need for further public hearings on the project, which in 2008 generated strong local opposition, prompting Community Board 5 to vote against the proposal, 26 to 1. Neighbors were concerned that its main section would be too skinny for the area, which is dominated by wide former department stores. But hurdles remain. The state has not yet approved a condo offering plan, and Gale has yet to decide on a catchy name for the project. Construction financing, estimated at around 20 million, has been lined up from the lender BRT Realty Trust, according to company officials. As currently proposed, most of the units will have two bedrooms and two baths, and start at 1,300 square feet. There will also be four penthouses, all of which will have outdoor space. The penthouses will mostly be in a wing that cantilevers over the parking garage, giving the entire project the shape of a "7" when viewed from the street. Still, it may be hard to see that the structure is a single building. The stem of the "7" will have more glass and steel than the cantilevered portion, which will be faced in beige brick to match the garage below. As part of the deal, Extell will keep that garage, a seven story 1920s building operated by Icon Parking Systems, though Gale will refurbish its exterior. The presence of the cantilevered portion would complicate any future redevelopment of the building, but Mr. Barnett is content to let people keep their cars there for a while. "It has good cash flow," he said. While prices aren't set yet, Gale says it hopes to get 2,500 a square foot for the top floor units, which would be on par with similar new condos in the neighborhood. Walker Tower on West 18th Street, for instance, lists units around the same rate. But Brian Babst, a vice president of the Corcoran Group who frequently sells in the neighborhood but is not connected with either project, said that comparing the two buildings might be misleading. "Walker Tower is offering itself as a white glove product, which it can do because there will be one person behind a desk and another who gets a cab for you," he said. Citing the staffing level expected at 19 West 20th Street, he added, "You can't really say the same when there's one person in the lobby." Not only does 21 West 20th Street represent a new direction for Gale, but it also marks the first development project led by Mr. Gale, 28, a fourth generation member of a longtime local real estate family. In 1922 his great grandfather, Daniel Gale, founded the Long Island brokerage known today as Daniel Gale Sotheby's International Realty. It was his father, Stan Sr., who branched out into development, including several New Jersey office parks, though most of these assets were sold to the Mack Cali Realty Corporation in a 545 million deal in 2006. Previously, Stan Gale Jr. lived in Shanghai, where he helped to oversee the company's master plan for Meixi Lake, a 150 million square foot mixed use project in central China. He also worked on Gale's Songdo project, a 100 million square foot city in South Korea that will include 20,000 homes, as well as hotels, offices and parks, when completed in 2017.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
David Korins, a creative director and designer whose work includes the set design for "Hamilton," had a challenge: designing an exhibition for Sotheby's from the large, varied family collection held at the historic Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, England. He said he wondered, "How can I bring the experience of a really permanent, physically permanent place to New York City and give guests the feeling of what it's like in the DNA of that experience?" The exhibition, "Treasures From Chatsworth," will open to the public June 28 in New York in Sotheby's newly renovated galleries. Admission will be free. Mr. Korins said his "aha moment" came last summer, when he was staying at Chatsworth, home to the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, for several days as he was conceiving the exhibition. He had gotten up early and sat for a long time in one room. "I began to really let my eyes wander around the room, and not just the big beautiful pieces of art but the furniture and the corners of the room," he said. He realized that he didn't just want to make the artwork and objects part of the exhibition; he wanted to include the details of the house itself. In the form of blown up 360 degree sculptures, Mr. Korins will magnify small details table legs, moldings, chair feet, corners of rooms and use them as vitrines and set pieces for the artworks and objects on display.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Here's a look at the most memorable moments for better or for worse at the Oscars on Sunday, starting with Tiffany Haddish and Maya Rudolph stealing the show. The Presenters Who Should Be Promoted to Hosts Tiffany Haddish and Maya Rudolph were by far the funniest presenters of the night, complaining about painful high heels and complimenting each other's bathroom emergency scenes in "Girls Trip" and "Bridesmaids." Other presenters were either forgettably banal or chillingly awkward (sorry, "Star Wars" people), so the duo of Ms. Haddish and Ms. Rudolph was an even more welcome presence. Could there be a hosting gig in their future? Margaret Lyons The Host Who Should Quit When He's Ahead The Oscars are infamous for bloat, so why add to that with onerous gags? Last year, Jimmy Kimmel dragged people who thought they were on a star tour into the Dolby Theater; this year, he interrupted a screening of "A Wrinkle in Time" at a nearby multiplex to have celebrities distribute snacks. It's not funny, it doesn't add anything, and when winners' speeches are cut short to make room for bits like this, one can't help but wonder why. Mr. Kimmel's monologue was fine, but between this and the done to absolute death "feud" with Matt Damon, he wound up in the red for the night. Margaret Lyons But there Mr. Peele stood, accepting the original screenplay statue for "Get Out." He wasn't sure it was possible to get there, either. "I stopped writing this movie about 20 times because I thought it was impossible," he told the audience. "I thought no one would ever make this movie, but I kept coming back to it because I knew if someone let me make this movie, that people would hear it and people would see it." Boy did they. The film earned more than 255 million worldwide, along with critical raves and industry awards that put it at the center of a cultural moment. Mekado Murphy The E! show before the ceremony felt as though it was on the brink of blowing up at a moment's notice, with a sexual harassment claim against the host, Ryan Seacrest, hanging over the festivities. Mr. Seacrest has strongly denied the allegations, and NBCUniversal, the parent company of E!, opted to keep him as host of its red carpet coverage after an investigation by an independent counsel. Still, viewers wondered if a celebrity would turn the questions around on Mr. Seacrest, or if he would willingly address the accusation. But no such confrontation was broadcast, and his interviews with celebrities stuck to the typical fare of fashion and film. Mary J. Blige, Christopher Plummer, Allison Janney and other Oscar nominees talked to him. But as Us Weekly reported, none of the five women up for best actress stopped by. Daniel Victor In an Academy Awards ceremony centered on an exceptional number of gifted nominees over 40 many of them women the standout fashion moment was unquestionably that of Rita Moreno. The 86 year old actress belongs to a specific elite. Beyond her gift for collecting statuettes (she is an EGOT having earned an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony), Ms. Moreno is sharp minded and witty, a longtime dancer nimble enough as an octogenarian to skitter across a stage in front of millions and to do it in heels. Presenting the Academy Award for best foreign language film to the Chilean movie "A Fantastic Woman" Ms. Moreno scored major style points by dressing in a repurposed version of an outfit she wore to collect her own Oscar, for "West Side Story," in 1962. The full skirt was made from the weighty brocade cloth typically used for a kimono obi. Before the ceremony, Ms. Moreno explained that it had been fashioned for her in Manila. Back then, actresses were expected to provide their own get ups for award ceremonies, without the help of stylists. The comedian Tiffany Haddish, perhaps the brightest light of this awards season, showed up on the red carpet wearing a traditional Eritrean gown, a homage to her late father, and hopped a velvet rope to jump in front of Meryl Streep, whom she curtsied to. But it was Ms. Haddish's decision to wear her white Alexander McQueen dress onstage as a presenter that really popped. Ms. Haddish wore the same frock on the red carpet for "Girls Trip" and onstage as host of "Saturday Night Live." During that gig, she noted that the gown had cost more than her mortgage and that she would wear it again and again. "I don't give a dang about no taboo," she said. Seeing her wear it again to the Oscars only underscored her persona as the down to earth funny woman people can't seem to get enough of. Cara Buckley The Envelope Least Susceptible to Mix Ups With new practices in place, it would be hard for the Oscars to repeat last year's best picture mix up. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences confirmed several changes in January, including that presenters make sure they have the correct envelope before they go onstage, with that fact confirmed by stage managers, too. PwC accountants were forbidden from using social media during the show, in hopes of reducing distractions. But the biggest change became quickly apparent as Viola Davis presented the award for best supporting actor. The gold, bold type on the envelope, loudly announcing the name of the category, was so unmistakable it could be read clearly on TV. Last year's envelope was an elegant red, but the lettering on it was rendered in a light, not easily readable gold. Daniel Victor Before introducing the award for production design, Lupita Nyong'o and Kumail Nanjiani made one of the night's most pointed political statements. The two introduced themselves as immigrants Ms. Nyong'o was born in Mexico and raised in Kenya; Mr. Nanjiani is from Pakistan and then made a not so subtle appeal on behalf of the so called Dreamers, who are in the United States under the policy of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. Their future remains in limbo after President Trump moved to end the program. Ms. Nyong'o and Mr. Nanjiani, without mentioning the politics of immigration directly, briefly spoke about dreams being the "foundation of Hollywood" and the United States. Mr. Nanjiani, who was nominated for best original screenplay for "The Big Sick," closed by saying, "To all the dreamers out there, we stand with you." Sopan Deb Keala Settle's commanding performance of "This Is Me," nominated for best song, should have opened the show. The lyrics ("I'm not scared to be seen/I make no apologies, this is me") so perfectly sum up what became the themes of the night diversity, empowerment, inclusion and it was among the few moments of the nearly four hour telecast when the audience seemed to come alive. (Viola Davis clapping and singing along became an instant meme.) It was also a song from a movie that was enormously popular with audiences but sneered at by film critics "The Greatest Showman," which has collected 165 million, passing "La La Land" to become one of the biggest musicals in box office history. Brooks Barnes	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
When the unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin was killed in 2012, Florida's self defense law known as Stand Your Ground became the subject of much public discussion, though it was ultimately not used in court to defend the shooter, George Zimmerman. The artist Adam Pendleton nevertheless believed that the law informed the acquittal, which helped prompt the "Black Dada Flag (Black Lives Matter)" he created for the Venice Biennale in 2015. "Zimmerman got off because he 'stood his ground,'" Mr. Pendleton said in a recent interview at his Brooklyn studio. "I'm trying to find language that stands ground. I think language that stands ground is 'Black Lives Matter.'" This week a monumental version of that Black Dada flag was planted on Randalls Island as part of Frieze New York. Selected for the fair's first six month long installation, the flag waves near what was historically known as Negro Point (now Scylla Point), between Harlem and the South Bronx. The project is grounded in two of Mr. Pendleton's favorite subjects history and language and comes at a time when the 34 year old artist is increasingly in the limelight. He has had no fewer than four solo shows in five years at Pace the youngest artist the gallery has represented since the 1970s. Museum shows have followed, along with the attention of highly visible private collectors like Michael Ovitz and David Martinez, as well as Aby Rosen and Alberto Mugrabi, who together purchased the work by Mr. Pendelton that is currently on view at Lever House on Park Avenue. Last fall, Mr. Pendleton achieved a record price for his work at auction: 225,000 for one of his "Black Dada" paintings, nearly four times Christie's high estimate. Koenig Books published a hardcover version of his "Black Dada Reader" a 2011 spiral bound selection of essays originally photocopied and passed among friends one of The New York Times's Best Art Books of 2017. "Language shapes our experience or it gives shape to the things we experience," Mr. Pendleton said. "It compels me, it pushes me forward." Those who know him well say the young artist has an old soul, and that he is committed to investigating and honoring the past. Together with the artists Rashid Johnson, Ellen Gallagher and Julie Mehretu, for example, he is helping to rescue the North Carolina house of the singer and civil rights activist Nina Simone. "He has several passions and he approaches these passions from many different directions," said Laura Hoptman, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art who contributed an essay to Mr. Pendleton's "Black Dada" book. "This is a very contemporary way of looking at the world and a very contemporary way of approaching art." In discussing his work, people in the art world often make reference to the wall drawings of Sol LeWitt, the collages of Robert Rauschenberg and the text heavy works of artists like Glenn Ligon and Christopher Wool. Indeed, words are central to Mr. Pendleton's practice, which also takes the form of sculpture, film, performance and video. His black on black "Black Dada" paintings which incorporate letters from the titular phrase reference the artistic and literary movement that arose in reaction to what he has referred to as the "state sanctioned physical and intellectual brutality" of World War I, as well as LeRoi Jones's 1964 poem, "Black Dada Nihilismus." While Mr. Pendleton may qualify as a millennial, he does his reading in hard copy, rising around 5:30 a.m. in his apartment in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn to immerse himself in books or essays before breakfast. He typically gravitates toward cultural theorists, poets and critics Stuart Hall's posthumous memoir, "Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands," about growing up in Jamaica in the 1930s; Fred Moten's "In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition," on the connections between jazz, sexual identity and radical black politics; Judith Butler's "Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence," a look at the vulnerability and aggression that followed Sept. 11. "I'm pretty sure he came into this world as a 50 year old man," Ms. Edwards said. "He's a sage." The shelves in Mr. Pendleton's Richmond, Va., childhood home included the poets Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich. His mother, a retired elementary schoolteacher, wanted to be a writer (his father, a contractor, is also a musician). Young Adam started writing poetry and plays at an early age. "My mom said, 'When you buy a book you're not really spending money,'" he said. "I would never buy 100 shirts a year, but I know I buy 100 books a year." Painting for hours a day in his basement as a teenager, Mr. Pendleton finished high school two years early, studied art in northern Italy and then moved to New York. He came out to his mother as gay on New Year's Eve 1999, just before the new millennium. "I think I wanted it to be something I would remember," he said. (He married Karsten Ch'ien, co founder of the Yumami Food Company, two years ago.) "My parents did this really generous thing," Mr. Pendleton, said of growing up with his older brother and younger sister. "They let us be who we are." Reviewing the artist's first solo show, "Being Here," at Wallspace in 2004, Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times that Mr. Pendleton's "text based works bring a no frills simplicity to interactive art." He went on to show his work at Yvon Lambert's gallery, but it was his 2007 Performa performance piece, "Revival," in which he combined reading with a gospel choir, that put Mr. Pendleton on the map. "A commanding performer, he delivered a soliloquy, part sermon, part aria," wrote Holland Cotter in The Times, "of spliced together quotations about family, marriage, AIDS and racism." Thinking back on the project now, Mr. Pendleton said, he is somewhat incredulous, describing himself as "maybe gracefully naive." With his work now hanging in institutions like MoMA and the Tate, Mr. Pendleton said the current effort by museums to better incorporate black artists has only just begun. "I hope they realize how deep they have to go, how long it will take," he said. "It can't just be one show," he added, citing as an example the survey of little known sculpture by the American artist Jack Whitten, which opened April 22 at the Baltimore Museum of Art and comes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in September. "It has to be many many shows, many essays, many conversations. There's a lot of work to be done." Sara Friedlander, the head of Christie's Post War Contemporary Art department in New York, said that Mr. Pendelton's auction strength is reflecting a transition in art buyers. "We're in a moment right now where people are not just about what they're looking at on their walls, but the intention and the meaning behind it," she said. Mr. Pendleton, she added, "is making art that is about a specific moment in history that we all have to pay attention to." Despite the commercial pressures, the artist insists he has stayed focused on the work. "The studio is the first place I want to be and the last place I want to leave," he said. Still fresh in his memory are the days when he first moved to New York City, found himself "overwhelmed" and moved upstate to Germantown for five years in part because it was more affordable. When recalling how a landlord let him live rent free for the first six months, Mr. Pendleton's eyes fill with tears. However difficult the road has been at times, Mr. Pendleton said his upbringing kept him feeling rooted and supported. "I knew I could go home it allows you to take risks," he said. "Even now I think to myself: at least I can go home."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
LOS ANGELES By one measure of success, the 28 year old artist Awol Erizku has possibly already peaked. In February he was revealed to be the photographer behind Beyonce's pregnancy announcement, which quickly became the most popular Instagram post ever with over 10 million likes. The image shows her kneeling in front of a floral wreath so large it looks like a throne. But Mr. Erizku, who landed his first New York gallery show before he earned his M.F.A. from Yale, said that sort of record breaking is not the attention he craves. This is just one sign of how thoroughly the artist (pronounced AY wol eh RIZ ku) operates within the traditional biennial obsessed art world, even as he manages through social media and other platforms to reach a much broader public. He D.J.s here and there and makes mixtapes to play during gallery shows to "make my peers feel welcome." At his Los Angeles studio recently, Mr. Erizku showed his new artwork while listening to Jim James, Future and Kodak Black. That new work is heading to Europe for his first gallery exhibitions there: His defiantly anti Trump show "Make America Great Again," at Ben Brown Fine Arts in London, opens on April 20, and his more playful "Purple Reign," at Stems in Brussels, opens a day later. There are the basketball hoops, which he uses as stand ins for the black male body. There are the numbers that reference Los Angeles gangs or slang, like a new corrugated steel piece spray painted with the number "12" for police. "It's a little Cy Twombly ish, but if you go to any kid on the street they will know what it means," Mr. Erizku said. You can also see a Trump era development: the image of a black panther, which he has lifted straight from the logo of the Black Panther Party, now roams throughout his work, climbing an American flag or clawing a bed of roses. It also appears atop the slogan "Make America Great Again" on a red baseball cap that the artist is selling "to have something affordable in the show." As for the use of the panther image, "I don't want to take something so powerful and cheapen it by using it too much, like wallpaper. I want to give it more power," said Mr. Erizku, who speaks rapidly, enthusiastically. "I'm putting it out there because I'm black and I'm Muslim and this is everything Trump has tried to stand against." "I don't think this show is anti American, but it is definitely anti Trump," he added. "All the people he's hating on do make America great." Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the artist grew up in the South Bronx in what he calls a working class family. (His father's history as a janitor figures into new work at Ben Brown in the form of an actual mop bucket placed in front of one painting.) He said that he never considered being an artist until he found himself bored in a high school art history class and realized it was because of the surfeit of white bodies in the art. "We were looking at the painting 'Girl With a Pearl Earring' and at that moment I felt I wanted to be an artist so I could bring more people who looked like me, my mother and my sisters, into history." In college at Cooper Union, he took a step in that direction: He posed one of his sisters in place of Vermeer's Dutch sitter, hair tucked in a similar blue and gold scarf, and called his photograph "Girl With a Bamboo Earring." Its inclusion in a group show at the FLAG Art Foundation helped him land representation by a New York gallery when he was only 24. Later works riff on contemporary greats as well, like the basketball hoops with gold plated nets he lined up on the wall to mimic Donald Judd's plexiglass "stacks." Mr. Erizku's 2015 film "Serendipity," which debuted at a MoMA PopRally party, features a pedestal holding a bust of Michelangelo's "David." He smashes the bust and replaces it with one of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti "My way of saying 'black lives matter' in a way only I knew how," he offered. He designed a Snapchat filter for the work's premiere, so a project logo appeared on videos taken there. He returned to photography for a 2015 solo show at FLAG, for which he paid sex workers in Ethiopia to assume classic poses of models from Ingres and Manet paintings. Stephanie Roach, FLAG's director, described this project as the opposite of exploitative: "He empowered the sitters, allowing each woman to interpret the pose differently and respecting their individuality. He captured these women with such beauty and integrity, like he did with his sister and Beyonce."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
THE RENTERS Maral Usefi and Neal Cimochowski have worked hard on their walled garden. It wasn't really a need for a larger apartment that drove Maral Usefi and Neal Cimochowski from their 350 square foot one bedroom in the West 90s. Their 2,050 monthly rent was "hard to give up," Ms. Usefi said. The cozy apartment had been hers for several years before she was joined there by her fiance, who had been living in Astoria. They wanted a place that was more theirs than hers and they craved some kind of outdoor space. They wanted to "go outside without having to go to the park," Ms. Usefi said. She asked her agent, Leslie Lazarus of DJK Residential, whom she met through a friend, to hunt for a one bedroom in their neighborhood. From the Upper West Side, it was a quick subway trip to Ms. Usefi's Midtown office, where she is an executive producer for Al Jazeera America, and an easy drive to Greenwich, Conn., where Mr. Cimochowski is a middle school technology teacher. They also wanted a decent kitchen, and laundry in the building. The couple, whose wedding is planned for July, knew their wish for outdoor space would narrow their options. "You might have to give up interior size, or the finishes might not be as nice," Ms. Lazarus said. Still, plenty of small Upper West Side buildings had ground level backyards or top floor terraces. WEST 80s A ground floor apartment in a rowhouse had a garden, an item high on the wish list. But the kitchen wasn't for serious cooks. Ashok Sinha for The New York Times At 3,200 a month, a ground floor apartment in the West 80s was a bit above their 3,000 budget, but had a nice outdoor garden reached through a large window. However, the kitchen fell short. It had an electric stove and and a convection microwave oven, "kind of like those toaster ovens built in," Ms. Usefi said. "It looks like a microwave but it does have a function for baking." They decided to hold out for a gas stove and a regular oven. A fifth floor walk up in a small co op building in the West 90s was for rent for 2,995 a month. The living room, bright and handsome, had a washer dryer. "That was a little weird, but it was behind a closet type door so that was O.K.," Ms. Usefi said. The bathroom had only a shower, so small that "Neal would have been squeezing his elbows together to fit." A terrace was off the bedroom, which included a Murphy bed. The couple gave the place a pass. Most of the apartments they saw weren't right. ""I felt guilty, almost," Ms. Usefi said. "I would know within minutes and feel a little like I was wasting people's time." WEST 90s A one bedroom in a fifth floor walk up had a terrace going for it. But the bedroom was tiny and the bathroom was tub free. Ashok Sinha for The New York Times Mr. Cimochowski, who had a more flexible schedule, occasionally showed up for appointments on his own. At an apartment on West 86th Street, he was concerned about a hissing radiator. He didn't know "if it's something that happened on and off and doesn't really get fixed, or something that you call and get fixed, and it's doing the same thing a week later and you end up living with it." One day after work, Mr. Cimochowski went to see a ground floor apartment with about 500 square feet in the West 70s. Ms. Lazarus had arranged for him to view the place before a scheduled open house, and he liked it instantly. Though the bedroom was small, he thought they should take the place. "We should go with your instinct," Ms. Usefi told him. "I don't want to risk losing a place you love." The landlord was hesitant to rent the place if both weren't there to approve. With any possibility of disagreement, "it is best to get everybody on the same page from the beginning," Ms. Lazarus said. When Ms. Usefi saw the apartment, she loved it, too. The kitchen had a gas stove, a proper oven and even a pot rack. A sliding door led to a large enclosed garden. The couple signed on, arriving earlier this spring. Their rent is 2,900 a month and they paid a broker fee of 15 percent of a year's rent, or 5,220. "Leslie's fee was high but she was worth every penny," Ms. Usefi said. The bedroom has just enough room for a bed and a night stand. "When you're looking for something so specific as outdoor space, you have to let some other things go," Ms. Usefi said. "We are going to live with the small bedroom because we love the outdoor space so much." They also had to let go of their wish for an in building laundry room. "It's not great to have to walk to the laundromat, but you know the machines are going to work," Ms. Usefi said. (Their old building had two washers and two dryers, one or more of which was often broken.) Street parking for Mr. Cimochowski is more difficult than before. "I'm still trying to find the right strategy," he said. He is honing his technique, and can now tell if the nearby Beacon Theater is hosting an event that draws a mature audience drivers of cars with Connecticut and New Jersey plates will be trawling for spots. The couple had fun cleaning the yard, which seems to them like their own secret garden. They weeded and sodded, built a pergola and planted a peony bush. A neighbor has a basketball hoop out back, but they haven't seen anybody using it. Another has an outdoor whirlpool bath, which they ascertained by using satellite view on Google maps. They haven't seen anybody using that, either. If it were his, Mr. Cimochowski said, "I'd be out there all the time."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Documents released on Friday showed that the day before they dropped all charges against the actor Jussie Smollett, who had been accused of staging a hate crime, prosecutors deliberated over the precise wording of their explanation, cognizant of how the public might perceive their sudden withdrawal from the case. According to correspondence released by the Cook County State's Attorney's Office, prosecutors had been discussing the resolution of the case with Mr. Smollett's lawyer in the days leading up to March 26, when the office dropped all 16 felony counts against him. Mr. Smollett, 36, had been accused of paying two acquaintances to stage a racist and homophobic attack against him, during which they shouted slurs and placed a noose around his neck. On March 25, Mr. Smollett's lawyer, Patricia Holmes, emailed proposed language for the state's attorney's office to use when announcing in court that it would be dropping the case. Ms. Holmes suggested that prosecutors say that Mr. Smollett is a "dedicated citizen of Chicago who volunteers and contributes regularly in the Chicago area community." Mr. Smollett had agreed to forfeit the 10,000 bond paid to release him from jail, and Ms. Holmes suggested prosecutors mention that, too. The proposed statement also suggested that the prosecutors should say that "a charge is merely an accusation and that a defendant is presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty." In emails spanning from around 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. on March 25, staff at the state's attorney's office parsed the language from the defense lawyer and edited the statement so that it would not indicate that Mr. Smollett was either guilty or innocent of staging the attack. They also sought to tone down language praising him for his community service work. "Off the top of my head, this could be construed as the defendant being able to buy his way out of the case because he is a good guy," Joseph Magats, the top deputy to State's Attorney Kim Foxx, wrote in an email to his colleagues about the defense lawyer's proposal. Risa Lanier, another top prosecutor, wrote that she objected to including the language suggested by Ms. Holmes that said Mr. Smollett should be presumed innocent unless proven guilty. Ms. Lanier suggested a new statement that cut out the defense lawyer's complimentary tone, but that also would avoid any appearance that Mr. Smollett had, in effect, pleaded guilty. "That way we aren't overselling the defendant," Ms. Lanier wrote in the email, "and we aren't indicating that his volunteer work was the result of any deal between the attorneys, which would indicate guilt." At another point in the email conversation, one prosecutor made a point to change the statement from saying that prosecutors believed this was "the most just disposition" to simply being "a just disposition." In the final statement, prosecutors did cite his volunteer work and bond forfeiture as a reason for withdrawing the case. Mr. Smollett has long been involved in the Black AIDS Institute, whose founder vouched for him in a letter that the defense lawyer passed along to the prosecutors. He has also volunteered for Rainbow/PUSH, the civil rights organization led by the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, who also sent a letter vouching for Mr. Smollett. Ms. Holmes told Ms. Lanier in a March 23 email that Mr. Smollett planned to spend 15 hours volunteering at Rainbow/PUSH over that weekend, "as discussed yesterday." After the prosecutors announced their decision, Chicago officials, including the mayor at the time, Rahm Emanuel, and the police superintendent, Eddie Johnson, denounced the office's move. Prosecutors then took the unusual step of saying that their decision to drop the charges "didn't exonerate him." Many details from Mr. Smollett's case had been concealed until last week, when a judge in Chicago ordered that Ms. Smollett's case file be unsealed. The first portion of documents released by the Chicago Police Department on Thursday showed that just days after he was indicted on Feb. 28, prosecutors told detectives that they were thinking of settling the charges. However, the documents released this week did not provide any answers about why the prosecutors so quickly decided to drop the case. The State's Attorney's Office has declined to release numerous pieces of internal correspondence, citing an Illinois law that protects their deliberations from public disclosure. Ms. Foxx, the office's top official, had removed herself from the case, and in some text messages released on Friday, her rationale for doing so differed from her office's earlier explanation: that she had contact with representatives for the actor. But in one text exchange, Ms. Foxx said that a colleague told her she needed to separate herself from the case because there were rumors that Ms. Foxx was "related or closely connected to the Smolletts." "She said it was pervasive among CPD and that I should recuse," Ms. Foxx said, referring to the Chicago Police Department. "I thought it was dumb but acquiesced," the text message said. "It's actually just racist." (Ms. Foxx is black, as is Mr. Smollett.) A Chicago police spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi, said that he was personally unaware of comments within the department of that nature. Previously released files showed that the day after the grand jury indictment, Ms. Foxx texted a colleague saying that she thought the office was treating Mr. Smollett too harshly, even though she was supposed to keep her distance from the case. There has been no evidence that she interceded to make prosecutors in her office end the case. But Ms. Foxx addressed the controversy about her involvement in the case in a statement accompanying the documents released on Friday. "I did not have a conflict of interest in this case; only a sincere desire to serve the community," she said. Nonetheless, she acknowledged the confusion about her role, saying, "I am sorry that despite the best intentions, our efforts were less than what was required of the moment."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
LONDON If there are any bright spots in the gloom surrounding the economy of Cyprus, one place to look would be about 170 kilometers south of the coastal city of Limassol. There, about 1,700 meters below the surface of the Mediterranean Sea, is a potentially lucrative natural gas field called Aphrodite. Noble Energy, the Houston based company that found Aphrodite in 2011, has drilled only a single exploratory well in the mile deep water 100 miles south of the island. But based on that early look, the company estimates that the field contains 142 billion to 227 billion cubic meters, or 5 trillion to 8 trillion cubic feet, of gas. It is a significant find potentially worth 45 billion or more at current prices, if it proves extractable. That would be enough to supply Cyprus's domestic needs for years and turn the debt strapped country into an energy exporter. "I am certain that gas will be the answer to our future," said Charles Ellinas, chief executive of the Cyprus National Hydrocarbons Co., a state concern that was recently formed to help spearhead development of a Cypriot natural gas industry. Cyprus has the potential to become one of the hubs of an eastern Mediterranean region that could become an important source of natural gas for Europe, at a time when political unrest is making supplies from North Africa uncertain. Over the past two decades an Israeli American led group of small and midsize oil companies has made a series of big discoveries in what is known as the Levantine basin, an area loosely bounded by Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Egypt. Israel, which has begun gradually tapping the gas, began production in a big offshore field called Tamar on March 30. Gideon Tadmor is the chairman of Delek Drilling and chief executive of Avner Oil, affiliates of Delek Group, an Israeli company that has led exploration in the area since the 1990s. He said the Israeli oil explorers had taken their cues from successful previous exploration to the south, in waters off Egypt. "We had a notion there was a good reason for the geological play to extend beyond the geopolitical borders," Mr. Tadmor said. While it is still hard to predict how large an exporter the eastern Mediterranean might eventually become, it is attracting industry attention well beyond the region. "If you look at new sources of supply in the eastern Mediterranean, with what we've seen in Cyprus, in Israel and other places you've got to say those will probably be the real competition," said Al Cook, a vice president on the giant Shah Deniz pipeline project that BP is leading in Azerbaijan, which is meant to transport natural gas to Europe. But enabling the Mediterranean to approach its energy potential will require navigating potentially treacherous politics. Any export deals by the Greek Cypriot government in Nicosia will risk the ire of Turkey, which warned during recent bailout negotiations that the Turkish Cypriot northern part of the island should share in any exploitation of natural resources. Cyprus has been divided since a Turkish invasion in 1974. Meanwhile, Israel, where larger gas finds have been made by Noble and Delek, will also need to figure out what export routes make geopolitical and economic sense. The priority for the Israeli government will be to make sure the country, which has long been dependent on imported fuel, is assured of sufficient domestic supplies. Only then would exports be authorized. When the government does choose export routes for its gas a decision expected soon security and political considerations will probably take precedence. While pipelines might be less expensive, Israel is wary of sending gas north through Syria and Lebanon, both of which may have offshore gas deposits of their own. Mr. Tadmor said many options were on the table for Israel as the industry awaited a decision from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's new government on whether to permit exports and in what form. "It could be L.N.G. onshore or offshore and also piped gas solutions like Jordan or even Turkey," he said. L.N.G. is liquefied natural gas, which can be carried on special tanker ships. The recent thaw between Israel and Turkey brokered by President Barack Obama has made energy cooperation between the two countries more likely. Sending gas to Egypt, which has been running short of late, is also possible, analysts say. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. Also under consideration is piping some Israeli gas to a Cypriot L.N.G. processing plant if one is built. Some of the companies are involved in both Cyprus and Israel. And the Aphrodite field may extend into Israeli waters, analysts say, which would be further reason for the countries to collaborate. "It is promising for Cyprus that companies the caliber of Eni and Total are getting involved that is an early sign of confidence," said Catherine Hunter, an analyst at the energy research firm IHS in London. As for Cyprus, it is uncertain how much the country's gas can do for its besieged economy, and how quickly. In one big concession in its recently arranged bailout, the troika of international lenders the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission agreed that the country's gas reserves would remain under Cypriot jurisdiction. Noble and its partners are preparing to drill a second well to help confirm the size of Aphrodite. So far, the volumes of gas that the companies think they have discovered, while suggesting a large find, are not far above the minimum analysts say would justify building a multibillion dollar facility to liquefy the gas for transport by ship. Mr. Ellinas says that L.N.G. is the preferred option for exporting the gas but that the big liquefaction plant he envisions for Vassilikos, an industrial site on the south coast, would cost 6 billion for the first of what might eventually be three export units. But if the costs can be justified, such a plant would provide "flexibility, security and everything else," he said. "We can export to Europe and everywhere else. If you have a pipeline and gas prices go down you are stuck." Construction of an L.N.G. plant would take four to five years, once a final investment decision was made, which could stretch the finances of the Cypriot government and the balance sheets of the companies that hold the leases for the Aphrodite field. To put the potential construction bill into perspective, Cyprus's entire economy before the crash, at least was only about EUR18 billion, or 23 billion, and the country is counting on its recently arranged EUR10 billion bailout to prevent more of its banks from collapsing. Noble, for its part, has a relatively modest annual capital budget of about 4 billion, and has commitments elsewhere, including Israel. One banker, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said the costs of developing Cyprus's deepwater gas would probably be so high that an L.N.G. project would be only marginally profitable for the government at current gas prices, unless more gas was found. Mr. Ellinas, though, predicted that much more would be discovered. Other options include a less expensive floating L.N.G. facility. The most affordable approach might be an offshore pipeline to Turkey. But no matter how grim its financial predicament, the government of Cyprus may have little interest in supplying its longtime enemy. "A subsea pipeline is a lot cheaper than an L.N.G. terminal, but a no go politically," said Laura El Katiri, a research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. Of course, Cyprus's financial meltdown could lead to new attitudes. The country could come under pressure from its international creditors to adopt quicker ways to turn gas into cash even if it meant a Turkish pipeline. And the role of Mr. Ellinas's company, which was created by the previous Cypriot government, voted out of office in February, may come under review, said Ms. Hunter, of IHS.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Self driving vehicles could upend the transportation sector and eliminate a million or more jobs. Algorithms that decode M.R.I.s put a whole medical subfield at risk. And the list of professions and sectors soon to be obsolete grows steadily by the day. New technologies are rattling the economy on all fronts. While the predictions are specific and dire, bigger changes are surely coming. Clearly, we need to adjust for the turbulence ahead. But we may be preparing in the wrong way. Both history and psychology tell us that our capacity to predict the future is limited, while our capacity to believe in such predictions is unlimited. We have always been surprised. Rather than planning for the specific changes we imagine, it is better to prepare for the unimagined for change itself. Preparing for the unknown is not as hard as it may seem, though it implies fundamental shifts in our policies on education, employment and social insurance. Take education. Were we to plan for specific changes, we would start revamping curriculums to include skills we thought would be rewarded in the future. For example, computer programming might become even more of a staple in high schools than it already is. Maybe that will prove to be wise and we will have a more productive work force. But perhaps technology evolves quickly enough that in a few decades we talk to, rather than program, computers. In that case, millions of people would have invested in a skill as outdated as precise penmanship. Instead, rather than changing what we teach, we could change when we teach. Currently, all the formal education most people will receive comes early in life. Specific skills may be learned on the job, but the fundamentals are acquired in school when we are young. This sequence learn early, benefit for a lifetime makes sense only in a world where the useful skills stay constant. But in a rapidly changing world, the fundamentals that were useful decades ago may be obsolete now; more important, new essential skills may have arisen. Anyone helping a grandparent navigate a computer has experienced this problem. Once we recognize that human capital, like technology, needs refreshing, we have to restructure our institutions so people acquire education later in life. We don't merely need training programs for niche populations or circumstances, expensive and short executive education programs or brief excursions like TED talks. Instead we need the kind of in depth education and training people receive routinely at age 13. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Stocks rise after President Biden says Jerome Powell will stay atop the Fed. In addition, we must recognize that economic upheaval at the macro level means turmoil and instability at the personal level. A lifetime of work will be a lifetime of change, moving between firms, jobs, careers and cities. Each move has financial and personal costs: It might involve going without a paycheck, looking for new housing, finding a new school district or adjusting to a new vocation. We cannot expect to create a vibrant and flexible overall economy unless we make these shifts as painless as possible. We need a fresh round of policy innovation focused on creating a safety net that gives workers the peace of mind and the money to move deftly when circumstances change. Finally, we can learn from the economist Joseph Schumpeter's prescient analysis of entrepreneurs. He noted that for new innovations to spread and improve our lives, there will always be creative destruction. For new firms and sectors to arise, some of the old ones must die. Even if we should be humble in predicting that self driving vehicles will upend the trucking sector or drone delivery will decimate supermarkets, we can be confident that some creative destruction is coming. Our current policies and impulses are to resist such destruction. If a large manufacturer is set to close, subsidies and other policies kick into action to prevent that shutdown. But while we may save a factory, ultimately we hinder the rise of new technologies; rather than propping up incumbent firms we ought to enable innovation to take its course. If that idea makes you uneasy, it is probably because our current policies do nothing to protect the most vulnerable from the costs of all this destruction. We resist letting factories close because we worry about what will become of the people who work there. But if we had a social insurance system that allowed workers to move fluidly between jobs, we could comfortably allow firms to follow their natural life and death cycle. In the 1990s, Denmark began adopting what has been called "flexicurity," combining policies that promote a flexible economy allowing creative destruction as needed with those that promote security for workers. The Danes have also emphasized lifelong learning, giving workers income support as they transition between jobs and circumstances. By contrast, the current approach in the United States could be called "flex nosecurity," which hardly seems the appropriate way of preparing for an economy of rapid change. There are surely many other ways of preparing for upheaval. We should broaden the current conversation centered on drones, the end of work or the prospect of super intelligent algorithms governing the world to include innovative proposals for handling the unexpected. One problem is that social policy may seem boring compared with the wonderfully evocative story arcs telling us where current technologies might be heading. How can the minutiae of unemployment insurance compete for attention with movies describing the birth of Skynet, the diabolical neural network in the "Terminator" series? Take "Star Trek." The future it imagines is wondrous to the point of bordering on the impossible. The laws of physics as currently understood are circumvented so that ships can travel faster than the speed of light. Unfathomable technologies are routine. People can be disassembled atom by atom and transported somewhere else, keeping their memories and consciousness intact. Any kind of food can be instantly replicated. Even the inventive "Star Trek" writers peering into the future, though, could not imagine a completely self driving Starship Enterprise. While at times the Enterprise appeared to have some autopilot capacity, it routinely relied on a navigator to pilot it and was even equipped with a view screen that looked suspiciously like a car windshield. The safest prediction is that reality will outstrip our imaginations. So let us craft our policies not just for what we expect but for what will surely surprise us.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Maureen Dowd: The Washington Post does not deserve all the credit for the Pentagon Papers. Tom Hanks: True. Confirm. And when you see our movie, The New York Times gets all of its due. There is nothing better in this world than being Tom Hanks. I'm going to confirm that. And I'll tell you why: because you will not lose your data and no one can hack your typewriter. Seeing typewriters as chic hotel decor is annoying. That actually pisses me off. Every time "You've Got Mail" is on cable TV, you stop to watch it.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
In any given week, the art galleries of New York and there are hundreds are brimful of exhibitions showcasing works old and new, conventional and avant garde, by the established and by the just discovered. This seems especially true right now, with the international art crowd set to jet into town for Frieze New York next weekend. Current shows feature repurposed pornography, depictions of the surveillance state, glass marijuana pipes, scrap metal, interpretations of a range of African American experiences, prints from the land of Bjork and a homage to the Duchamp urinal. There is magic, a little humor and no small amount of protest art. How do you navigate it all? Five art critics for The Times have fanned out across the city, each focusing on one constellation of galleries and reviewing their favorites. Interested in only painting? We have those shows. Looking for sound installations? We have those too. Art reflecting the fraught politics of our time? Of course. Pick the flavor of art that suits you: KAI MATSUMIYA A tradition of political art on the Lower East Side lives on in the work of the Austrian born New York Conceptualist Rainer Ganahl, who has been responding to current events with antic, deadpan wit for almost 30 years. The work in this packed show, "Legacy: Bush, Obama, Trump," covers, in its references, roughly half of that time. In a series of ballpoint pen drawings, he illustrates the phenomenon of combat as made for TV spectacle, introduced by George W. Bush, and of drone warfare that was business as usual during the Obama administration. More recently, he has made drawings of words that have been Donald J. Trump's weapon of choice, like "fake news," in a 1930s German designed script. The good news, which is also bad news, is that Mr. Ganahl is unlikely ever to run out of fresh material for his art. The show, which has included public readings of Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism," will close on May 3 with the release of a related book. HOLLAND COTTER TIBOR DE NAGY GALLERY "Sarah McEneaney: Land, Sea, Sleep" is an impressive update on an artist who for nearly four decades has recorded her artist's life in small, beguiling, superficially naive paintings. Ms. McEneaney is seen infrequently, usually from the back or from a distance or when she's asleep, her pets arrayed around her in settings notable for their bold colors, dense details and distortions of illusionistic space that exert a magnetic pull. The new works here document both the solitude and routine of the painter's life, as well as its perks (artist residencies! travel grants!). A stillness prevails, even when Ms. McEneaney and her partner are on a bullet train speeding across China. It slows us down to experience her spatial and chromatic daring. ROBERTA SMITH Here are more shows on the Upper East Side reviewed by Roberta Smith. 303 GALLERY Back in 1996, the astute dealer Lisa Spellman was among the first dealers to relocate from SoHo to Chelsea; now, 303 Gallery makes its home on the ground floor of one of the many brassy towers that have arisen in Highlineville. On view now is a sharp, droll exhibition of exactingly staged self portraits by Rodney Graham, the slipperiest of the half dozen conceptual photographers who came of age in 1980s Vancouver. In large lightboxes, the artist appears as a media studies professor in bell bottom corduroys, smoking in class; as a sleeping antiques dealer surrounded by tchotchkes from British Columbia; and as a private detective peeping from behind a 19th century newspaper. Like all the best wits, Mr. Graham is a tragic figure at heart these photographic performances are all elegies for an age when artists had deeper convictions than we today can muster. JASON FARAGO Here are more shows in Chelsea reviewed by Jason Farago. If You Like to See With Your Ears ART IN GENERAL Just across the East River and nestled between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, Dumbo has been one of the most on again off again art neighborhoods in the city. With the spike in tech and various creative companies occupying lofts in the area, it is on again. Janet Borden, Minus Space and Klompching have opened galleries; Smack Mellon remains a nonprofit stalwart; and Art in General, another alternative space showcasing emerging artists, moved from TriBeCa to Dumbo last year. Art in General's current show features Postcommodity, a collective of three artists participating in the 2017 Whitney Biennial whose work focuses on the Mexican American border. Here, closed circuit video and sound installations offer a poetic, sometimes creepy rumination on what it's like to cross borders and live under surveillance. MARTHA SCHWENDENER APEXART Bob Snodgrass has been blowing glass since 1971, specializing in marijuana pipes, as he explains in a charming short documentary attached to "Outlaw Glass," an exhibition at this gallery organized by the marijuana writer David Bienenstock. He first sold the pipes outside Grateful Dead concerts. Several cases here of elaborate, brightly colored pipes made by Mr. Snodgrass's spiritual descendants, while fascinating, tend toward the showy or grotesque, like a jar of green pickle shaped pipes by Elbo, or "Smokin Sasquatch," an intricate, smokable man beast holding a joint of his own, by Coyle. (Artists of paraphernalia for what is still mostly an illegal product tend to go by nicknames.) While Mr. Snodgrass also does skulls and dragons, most of his pipes, made from clear, wavy glass and colored with mists of molten silver, look like delicate, lovely instruments borrowed from an elfin orchestra. WILL HEINRICH Here are more shows in SoHo, TriBeCa and the West Village reviewed by Will Heinrich.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Rick Ludwin, the NBC executive in charge of late night programming, addressing the news media in 2009. That year Conan O'Brien became host of "The Tonight Show," replacing Jay Leno, who was given his own prime time show. A year later, Mr. Leno was back at "Tonight." Rick Ludwin, who oversaw late night programming at NBC for many years but is probably best known for backing the sitcom "Seinfeld" when it seemed the network might drop the show before it started its storied run, died on Sunday in Los Angeles. He was 71. His death, at a hospital, was caused by organ failure, said Daniel Ludwin, his nephew. Mr. Ludwin was in charge of NBC's late night shows including "Saturday Night Live," "The Tonight Show," "Late Night With David Letterman" and assorted specials when he became part of the "Seinfeld" origin story, as it evolved from a possible one time 90 minute special to fill in for "S.N.L." into a weekly series, about four misanthropic friends in Manhattan. In the beginning, at screenings of the pilot for what was then called "The Seinfeld Chronicles," created by Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, audiences were underwhelmed. "The test audiences felt the supporting cast was not strong enough and Jerry himself was a weak lead," Mr. Ludwin said in "Seinfeld: How It Began" (2004), a documentary that was part of a "Seinfeld" DVD release . But Mr. Ludwin who was not a comedian but had once sold jokes to Bob Hope felt that Mr. Seinfeld had an original voice that needed a champion who was willing to take a chance on the show. Mr. Ludwin took on that role. "I felt we had a show there," he said in the documentary. In his pitch to Brandon Tartikoff, the president of NBC Entertainment, he recalled, he told him, "I'll take two hours out of my specials budget, split that into four half hours, and that will be our order for 'Seinfeld.'" The four shows ran on Thursday nights in May and June of 1990 as a prelude to the 12 episodes that began airing in January 1991 and a full season that began the following fall . Though not an immediate hit, "Seinfeld" became one of the seminal sitcoms of all time. "I could do a Bob Hope imitation and he'd like to hear me do it," Mr. Ludwin said in a 2007 interview with The Miamian, the alumni magazine of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, which he had attended. "I found out later that I was one of the few people he'd talk to before the show." Richard Adam Ludwin was born on May 27, 1948, in Cleveland to Daniel and Leanore (Prucha) Ludwin. His father was the supervisor of parks and recreation in Rocky River, a suburb of Cleveland; his mother owned a construction, heating and air conditioning company. Rick's early fascination with television found an outlet at Miami University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in communications. While there, he hosted a comedy variety series on the campus TV station. "I had this love for live television," he told The Miamian. "There was nothing more exciting." After earning a master's degree in communication s at Northwestern University, Mr. Ludwin worked for TV stations in Detroit and Chicago before moving to Philadelphia for a job as a producer of "The Mike Douglas Show," the long running daytime talk show, and a talent booker for it. He was hired by NBC Entertainment as director of variety programs in 1980, a job that let him work on prime time specials with Bob Hope. He eventually rose to executive vice president of late night programming and specials. His immersion in late night made him an aficionado of its hosts and programs, dating to the days of Steve Allen in the 1950s. NBC's long dominance of the hours after prime time gave him some perspective on the difficulty of hosting successful late night programs. In an interview with The New York Times in 2001, Mr. Ludwin recalled reading about the host of a new talk show a man he did not name who had said that he had taken the job to have more time with his children, which acting had not afforded him. "I thought: 'Do you think taking this job is going to give you more time with your kids? Come on down, let's see your best pitch, pal.'" Referring to the show, he added, "It was over shortly ." In the early 1990s, Mr. Ludwin was one of the executives at the NBC studios in Burbank, Calif., who oversaw the difficult changeover of "Tonight" hosts from Carson to Jay Leno. Like many of them, he preferred the easygoing Mr. Leno to the irascible Mr. Letterman , who had long hoped to replace Carson. Mr. Ludwin was also Conan O'Brien's advocate when Mr. O'Brien struggled with bad ratings and barbed criticism after replacing Mr. Letterman at "Late Night ." "Pretty much everyone at the network thought I should be canceled," Mr. O'Brien said on Monday night in paying tribute to Mr. Ludwin on "Conan," his show on TBS. "He argued passionately for me with the network, and he helped keep me on the air during those first two years." Mr. Ludwin was in favor of the network's decision to have Mr. O'Brien replace Mr. Leno as the host of "Tonight" in 2009. At the time, NBC had given Mr. Leno a nightly prime time show. Neither show thrived, and Mr. Leno returned to "Tonight" in 2010. Mr. O'Brien left NBC for TBS later that year .	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
They have not only played tennis in front of big crowds on the Adria Tour. They have hugged, high fived, and partied together: Some of the players even formed a line and did the limbo on a night out in Belgrade, Serbia. But the consequences have quickly become much more serious than the mood with two of the tour's main attractions, Grigor Dimitrov and Borna Coric, announcing they tested positive for the coronavirus and another, Viktor Troicki, doing so, according to a Serbian media report. And on Tuesday, Novak Djokovic, the top men's singles player who organized the exhibition series in the Balkans, said he and his wife, Jelena, both tested positive for the virus. Nick Kyrgios, tweeting from his home nation, Australia, called it "a boneheaded decision" to play the event. Dimitrov, the Bulgarian star and a 2019 United States Open semifinalist, announced his test result on Sunday after returning to his base in Monaco from the tour's latest stop in Zadar, Croatia. "I am so sorry for any harm I might have caused," Dimitrov said on social media. Coric, a promising Croat ranked 33rd in men's singles, said on Monday that he also had tested positive. So have Troicki, a prominent Serbian player; Christian Groh, Dimitrov's coach; and Marco Panichi, Djokovic's fitness coach, according to media reports in Serbia. Three other players on the Adria Tour Alexander Zverev, Marin Cilic and Andrey Rublev announced Monday that they had tested negative for the virus but would be self isolating for 14 days. "I deeply apologize to anyone that I have potentially put at risk by playing this tour," Zverev, the seventh ranked men's singles player, said on Twitter. Dimitrov's announcement forced event officials to call off Sunday's final between Djokovic and Rublev. Djokovic, who was in frequent physical contact with Dimitrov during the tour, returned to Belgrade to await his test result. The remainder of the Adria Tour, scheduled to head to Montenegro this week, is now very much in doubt. But the response over the lack of social distancing which included pickup basketball and a group photo with ball kids from some in the tennis community has been swift and severe. "I sum it up as a horror show," Bruno Soares, a member of the ATP Player Council, of which Djokovic is president, said in an interview with the Brazilian news outlet GloboEsporte. "Enormous irresponsibility and huge immaturity. They were totally careless, and it's difficult for me to find the words." No paragon of self restraint, Kyrgios has been suspended from the tour for misbehavior and fined frequently. But in this health crisis, he has urged tennis to take a conservative approach, as he also criticized the recent decision to hold the 2020 United States Open on its originally scheduled dates. But the U.S. Open and the regular tour events that will precede it are to be played without spectators and with strict social distancing requirements. There have been no such limits on the Adria Tour, in part, as Djokovic has explained, because local authorities did not require them. Serbia and neighboring countries have had comparatively few positive coronavirus cases and reported deaths. Even before Dimitrov and Coric tested positive, there was concern about the optics of full stadiums and partying players with so many still suffering worldwide. "You've got to be aware of who you are and leading by example," said Patrick McEnroe, an ESPN analyst and former player who has recovered from the coronavirus, referring to Djokovic. He added that it would be "hard to imagine" another top player, like Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer or Serena Williams, holding a similar tour. When the men's and women's tours shut down in March because of the pandemic, Djokovic was undefeated on court in 2020, but he has hardly been on a winning streak during the extended break. He has incited controversy by questioning the necessity of an eventual coronavirus vaccine and explaining that he would have a hard decision to make if getting one were required by the tour. When the U.S. Open announced its plans to protect players from the virus by limiting the size of entourages and restricting players' movement, Djokovic was an outspoken critic of the idea, calling the plan "extreme" and questioning whether he would play. But the risks of taking a less cautious approach are now clear, particularly in a sport with an international group of players who have to travel. "Hopefully people will be able to discern that this isn't an issue with the concept of returning to tennis but of how you return to tennis," said Mark Ein, the owner of the Citi Open in Washington, which is scheduled to be the comeback event for the ATP Tour in August. "Even if places feel safe, it's still prudent to take the basic precautions." Andrea Gaudenzi, the ATP chairman, said the tour had recommended that players competing on the Adria Tour and in other unsanctioned events take "proper precautions and respect social distancing." But ultimately the ATP had no jurisdiction to impose safety regulations. "Obviously we feel sorry for the players," Gaudenzi said in a telephone interview. "We want them to recover as soon as possible. I know there has been a lot of criticism, but on the other hand, we at the ATP, the U.S.T.A., and everybody, we have to be careful because we also have to be conscious that even with extreme measures, you could actually end up having some players testing positive. You don't need players and people hugging each other for someone to test positive. So we're all running the risk." The positive tests on the Adria Tour could help make subsequent events safer, Gaudenzi said, by making players more willing to stay in the restricted environment imposed to reduce the risk of infection. "It's a little bit like when you tell your kids when they try to learn to ride the bike to wear the helmet," Gaudenzi said. "It's 'no, no, no'. And they ride the bike, they fall, and then they wear the helmet. Now we all know we can get this very easily, so we're going to be even more careful, and maybe we will have a little bit more tolerance toward the bubble." It is also a reminder to event organizers like Bob Moran, the tournament director of the Credit One Bank Invitational, a six day women's team exhibition in Charleston, S.C. of the importance of safety measures. The participants in the event, which is set to begin without spectators on Tuesday, include Sofia Kenin, this year's Australian Open champion, and Sloane Stephens, a former U.S. Open champion. According to Moran, players have been practicing social distancing and wearing masks on site when not training or competing. Nets and sitting areas are being sanitized after practice sessions. "Honestly, I think it's two different animals," Moran said of his event and the Adria Tour. He added: "The players who have tested positive are all players these women know and have spent time with. It's very unfortunate. I hate to see this happen and hate to see it happen now, but it's just again re emphasizing why we're taking all the precautions we are taking."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
When Ziad Ghandour was planning to build a dream house for his family in Los Angeles he decided to go big really big. At 35,500 square feet, the home would be one of the largest in a city filled with large homes. Now, nearly a decade and 20 million later, Mr. Ghandour said his dream house has turned out to be a nightmare. Construction began in 2012 and was supposed to take two years to complete. Mr. Ghandour said it ended up taking nearly five, and the original cost of 13 million grew by an additional 7 million. Fixing the remaining structural and cosmetic problems, he said, could run in the millions on top of that. "The meter is still running." Around 2016, as the home was nearing completion, Mr. Ghandour said he started to realize that in addition to numerous delays and a blown budget, "you could tell this would be a botched job." He said problems ranged from the home's appearance to water leaks and basic structural concerns. Still, he and his family moved into the home in early 2017. And that's when even more problems became apparent, Mr. Ghandour said. During the Bel Air fires last fall, he said soot seeped through various cracks, making the indoor air quality so bad that he, his wife and three children had to decamp to a hotel for several days, even though the house wasn't in a mandatory evacuation zone. Mr. Ghandour said he had paid a premium to have a near hospital grade HEPA air filtration system installed since his 13 year old daughter was born with special needs that include respiratory problems. The system was supposed to keep unfiltered outside air from entering the home. More frequently, whenever it rains, Mr. Ghandour said there are several rooms that have water leaks, including an HVAC room with sensitive electronic equipment. The house, which is divided into three separate structures, includes a building that was designed to hold a sauna, steam room and showers. Mr. Ghandour said the leaking is so bad in that building that it sits unfinished and entirely empty. Back in 2009, when planning for the project began, Mr. Ghandour, the founder of a Los Angeles based venture capital firm, said he interviewed four contractors and ultimately decided to take the unusual step of hiring a commercial builder after being approached by a well known company. He said they sold him on the idea that they would be perfect for the job because a home as large as his wouldn't be like building a typical single family house. So why hire a typical homebuilder? Plus, the exterior his architect designed would have more in common with an office building or commercial space. The company he hired was Lendlease, best known for its construction work on high profile projects like the National September 11 Memorial Museum at the World Trade Center, the Sydney Opera House in Australia and the Petronas Twin Towers skyscrapers in Malaysia. "Lendlease sold me on that they'd be able to translate that experience into high end homes," Mr. Ghandour said. Though representatives of Lendlease told him they hadn't yet built any comparable luxury homes, Mr. Ghandour said he was assured that his project would get special attention because it would be their first. "They said, 'We'll start a new line of business and this will be the showcase, the showpiece,'" he said. Lendlease declined to comment on Mr. Ghandour's characterization of its proposal or confirm whether the company had previously built any luxury homes of that scale. A spokeswoman said the company has built more than 400 residential projects, mostly in military master planned sustainable communities for the Department of Defense. Mr. Ghandour said he pleaded with Lendlease to get its subcontractors to fix various problems along the way. At one point, he said, Lendlease stopped responding, so he hired a high profile construction lawyer, Robert Mann, to pursue a legal claim against Lendlease in 2016. He wants the company to pay for the necessary repairs he has made, plus other damage he still needs to fix. "What I was hoping for them from the beginning was that they'd just do a good job," Mr. Ghandour said. "And if they didn't do that, then they'd fix whatever wasn't done right." Representatives from Lendlease said they were unable to comment on any of Mr. Ghandour's claims because the case is now in binding arbitration. "We disagree with Mr. Ghandour's claims and regret that the matter has gone this far without resolution," the company said in a statement. Mr. Ghandour said the company did attempt to fix some issues, to no avail. An exterior stucco wall, for example, was meant to look smooth but instead has the look of crumpled paper that has been somewhat flattened. Mr. Ghandour said Lendlease's subcontractor unsuccessfully attempted to fix it four times. Other areas of the house could be even harder to repair. A large room at the top of the stairs was framed crookedly, six inches out of square, said Mr. Mann, the lawyer. Mr. Ghandour said he didn't notice the error until the room's hardwood floors had been laid down and there was a gap that required an awkward triangular piece to fill. Now "it basically can't be fixed" without reframing the building, Mr. Mann said. He also said the home's drywall was of a low quality finish more commonly found in tract homes or lower end commercial buildings. Replacing it would be extremely costly and would likely require Mr. Ghandour and his family to move out for several months. Mr. Ghandour said the toll on his family life has been "devastating." During construction, he moved his family four times, signing short term leases after receiving assurances that he would be able to move into his home soon. By the time the property was cleared for occupancy, his oldest daughter had gone away to college. He said the stress of the project also took a toll on his marriage. "We're still patching it back together," he said. Jason Kellogg, a South Florida based construction litigation lawyer who isn't involved in Mr. Ghandour's case, said the recent boom in mega mansion building has prompted a growing number of inexperienced builders to try to get into the business. Though very large homes are in some ways similar to commercial structures, he said, mega mansions are still best handled by contractors who have experience building large residences. Because "once problems start," he said, "they become immensely costly."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
MADRID Spain's banking crisis has moved into the courtroom. On Wednesday, a Spanish national court judge ordered Rodrigo Rato, a political ally of Spain's prime minister and former head of the International Monetary Fund, to appear in court to face criminal fraud accusations over his recent stewardship of the giant mortgage lender Bankia. Bankia, which the government seized in early May, is at the center of the financial storm that has led Spain to seek a European bailout of its banks. But several other Spanish banks are also embroiled in court cases, brought by politicians, shareholders and prosecutors, as well as the government's own bank overhaul agency. The spate of lawsuits could further complicate efforts to clean up and consolidate Spain's banking sector, given that Madrid has yet to complete the terms of the 100 billion euro ( 125.3 billion) bailout that euro currency union finance ministers agreed to last month. "We are entering a new phase in this banking crisis, adding to the questions of solvency the need to establish accountability for past mistakes," said Jose Luis de la Calle Sanchez, an independent lawyer who specializes in banking matters. The Bankia case in particular is highly politicized. Bankia has longstanding ties to the governing Popular Party, and the case against it was brought by one of Spain's opposition parties, Union, Progress and Democracy. Among its accusations, the U.P.D. party wants to hold Mr. Rato and others responsible for accounting irregularities that led Bankia to restate its 2011 results after it was seized in May. Suddenly, a reported profit of 309 million euros became a loss of almost 3 billion euros, the largest in Spanish banking history. No formal charges were brought against Mr. Rato and the others on Wednesday, nor was a date set for court appearances. Still, the accusations made by the U.P.D., if proved, could lead to prison sentences. For falsifying accounts, for instance, the recommended sentence is one to three years' imprisonment. Among other banks entangled in legal cases are Novacaixagalicia, Banco de Valencia and CatalunyaCaixa three institutions that the state has put up for sale after it seized them to save them from collapse. Like Bankia, those banks have suffered unsustainable losses from bad loans, many of them resulting from the bursting of Spain's real estate bubble. On Wednesday, public prosecutors in Barcelona said they would investigate the compensation packages of former executives of CatalunyaCaixa. Last month, the national bank overhaul agency, known as the Frob, initiated legal action against former directors of Banco de Valencia over possible management irregularities. Separately, Spain's antifraud investigators filed a lawsuit on June 25 against five directors of Novacaixagalicia over the generous terms that they had set for their own retirement benefits. One of the five directors, Julio Fernandez Gayoso, resigned three days later as co chairman. But Bankia, which is expected to receive at least 19 billion euros in European bailout money, is Exhibit A in Spain's banking debacle. Mr. Rato is the most prominent of the 33 former Bankia executives and directors named in the criminal fraud case being overseen by Judge Fernando Andreu of the National Court. One of the other directors subpoenaed on Wednesday is Angel Acebes, who was justice minister and interior minister in the administration of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar. Mr. Rato was economic minister under that same prime minister, while Mariano Rajoy the current prime minister was deputy prime minister. All represented the Popular Party, which was voted from power in 2004 but returned last November with Mr. Rajoy as prime minister. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. Mr. Rato was made chairman of Bankia in 2010, after it was created in a government supervised restructuring that tried to salvage a number of weaker savings banks, or cajas, by consolidating them. From 2004 to 2007, he was managing director of the I.M.F., having won the job on his reputation for presiding over Spain's economic boom during the Aznar government. But the collapse of Bankia has tarnished his reputation. And the substantial restatement of its results has stunned shareholders, many of whom are clients of the bank who bought the stock when Bankia had its initial public offering last year. Aemec, an association of Spanish shareholders, has so far collected more than 2,000 individual complaints by Bankia shareholders in preparation for a separate lawsuit against the company's former directors over whether the bank misinformed investors in its I.P.O. prospectus. Javier Cremades, chairman of Cremades Calvo Sotelo, a Madrid law firm that is representing Aemec, said that civil action was "the best way to recover the money of shareholders." But he said that he welcomed the national court decision to proceed with a criminal case against Mr. Rato and fellow directors, which could help the civil claim. Spain's financial crisis, partly a result of the 2009 collapse of the real estate prices that had driven its economic boom in the early 2000s, has already led to extensive consolidation of the banking industry. Much of the downsizing has involved the cajas, which headed property lending during the boom years but whose number has dwindled to a dozen, down from 45 as recently as early 2010. During that time, almost 5,000 consumer branches have been closed, according to the Spanish association of cajas. But winnowing the top management ranks of the cajas has not proved easy, as many directors maintain close ties to regional politicians and have resisted ceding any control over institutions that were long run like personal fiefs. Mr. Fernandez Gayoso, who was ousted as co chairman of Novacaixagalicia last week, is 80 years old and had been a caja director for the last four decades. In an interview, Francisco Perez Martinez, a junior judge in Mallorca, predicted that shareholders would file more lawsuits against bank directors in coming months, accusing them of accounting and management irregularities related to favors they might have granted to other businessmen and politicians. Mr. Perez said that he was looking into Banco de Valencia not in his capacity as a judge but as a native of Valencia and shareholder of the bank to determine how that bank could have reported a profit in the first quarter of 2011, only to need rescuing by the Frob in November.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Re "Sanders Is Winner in New Hampshire" (front page, Feb. 12): Bernie Sanders is the dream candidate for Donald Trump. He is not even a real Democrat and never got any significant legislation passed in the Senate. He talks about health care and a free education for all, but would have no legislative pull to bring that off. He is 78 and recently had a heart attack. He is popular with younger voters, who generally have low turnout, because he promises them free stuff. Bernie Sanders would be another George McGovern, who lost every state but Massachusetts. He would certainly make Mr. Trump's campaigning easier. Mr. Trump would raise the specter of socialism and it would not be a lie. About 10 years ago, my sister came down from Vermont to celebrate Thanksgiving. As we were sitting down for drinks the night before, her cellphone rang. She answered it and said: "Oh, wow! Hello. No, I can't think of anything. Thank you." I asked her who it was. She said: "That was Senator Sanders. He wanted to know if I had anything on my mind." I'm an Amy Klobuchar man. But anyone who counts Bernie out is a damned fool. The total of the votes for the moderates in the New Hampshire election far exceeded those for the so called progressive wing. Instead, the emphasis has been on Bernie Sanders apparently seizing control in the Democratic race. He won by a small margin, and even if his support is combined with that of Elizabeth Warren, who like him had a geographic advantage, what is significant is that a large majority of New Hampshire voters repudiated them in favor of those with more moderate stances. This is what is significant in the primary.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
How Much Watching Time Do You Have This Weekend? None Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, our TV critic Margaret Lyons offers hyper specific viewing recommendations in our Watching newsletter. Read her latest picks below, and sign up for the Watching newsletter here. This weekend I have ... a few hours, and I want to expand my mind 'The Midnight Gospel' When to watch: Now, on Netflix. This series combines audio from the podcast "The Duncan Trussell Family Hour" with animation by Pendleton Ward, the creator of "Adventure Time," and the result is a practically pulsating specimen of imagination and philosophy. The audio is philosophical conversations about death and purpose, but the visuals are of wild, psychedelic adventures on distant worlds, creating a sense of cosmic humor. Watch the second episode first the pilot is more like a teaser, but Episode 2 is a more fully realized piece. From there, it's so lovely I felt like an astronaut marveling from afar at all of our beautiful, tiny lives. 'Twin Peaks' When to watch: Now, on CBS All Access, Hulu or Netflix. I've been thinking about the original incarnation of "Twin Peaks" because thanks to responsible mask usage, I can't see people's mouths anymore and "Twin Peaks" is among the most orally fixated shows ever. If you've never watched it, don't let the volume of discourse convince you that it's some huge endeavor: There are only 30 episodes in the original series. I'm lucky to live among fellow mask wearers, and I feel sustained and encouraged by the mutuality. But I also miss some nonverbal modes of expression, and watching an episode of "Twin Peaks" feels like parking myself in front of a SAD lamp during the winter. Maybe you need some artificial sunlight, too. ... many hours, and I need the strong stuff 'Lost' When to watch: Now, on Hulu and IMDb TV. Friends, it's time. There is no better binge than Season 1 of "Lost," so if you're feeling a little bummed about missing barbecues and social time this weekend, put on "Lost" and realize you would have canceled those plans in a heartbeat to stay home and find out more about that dang island. We all want to be engaged with the world, to understand and support people and to be understood and supported back. But sometimes ... you just need an escape. "Lost" is fully engaged with genuine human emotion, so it's not some spiritually barren experience. And it's exciting and engrossing enough to keep the outside out, even for just 44 minutes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
None Tracy Nguyen for The New York Times Now Lives: In a five bedroom house in Hidden Hills, Calif. , with two roommates. Claim to Fame: Mx. Adams, who identifies as gender nonconforming, is an artist who works as the creative director for SZA, the Grammy nominated singer songwriter. "A lot of my work is trying to figure out how I can bring ideas from the idea world into the physical world," said Mx. Adams, who shot the cover and promotional videos for SZA's 2017 album, "Ctrl." Mx. Adams is also a founder of Art Hoe Collective, a platform that promotes works by queer artists of color and other marginalized people through Instagram and gallery shows. Tracy Nguyen for The New York Times Tracy Nguyen for The New York Times Big Break: For Mx. Adams, Instagram is not just a place to post images. "I've been online since I was like 14 and on Tumblr, so pretty much all my friends I've met on the internet," Mx. Adams said. In 2016, Mx. Adams sent SZA a message on Instagram complimenting her outfit. "I messaged her once, like, 'Oh, your fit is fire.' And she messaged me back like, 'Dude, I love your fits, too,'" Mx. Adams said. "We started hanging out, and I guess she saw in me that I needed to channel my creative energy into something outside school." Latest Project: Mx. Adams appears in a Nike advertising campaign called Women Coach LA, which recruits female coaches for youth sports in Los Angeles. "As a weird boy girl, I feel like it's important for kids to see that there isn't one type of girl who does sports," Mx. Adams said. "As a novice skateboarder, I'm partnering with them to show that sports can be a cool, fun thing rather than something full of pressure." Tracy Nguyen for The New York Times Next Thing: Work with SZA continues at a feverish pace. One of their new projects is Ctrl Fishing Co., a clothing line that uses sustainable fabrics like recycled tie dye . "One of the really cool ways we can do that is through fashion, but we're also working on some programming to get that out to kids," Mx. Adams said. In Their Blood: Mx. Adams's father, Marino Adams, was a huge artistic influence. "In his free time, he D.J.ed and co produced my mom's play, 'Black Girl You've Been Gentrified,' and helped her get it at Joe's Pub. He was artistically inclined, but ended up doing business his whole life and passed away kind of early," Mx. Adams said. "For me, it's about making sure I pursue what makes me happy."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Celebrating the close of its 50th anniversary season, Boston Ballet has come to Lincoln Center with two programs at the David H. Koch Theater. The second program, which opens on Friday, includes two masterpieces of different stages of radical modernism, Vaslav Nijinsky's 1912 "Afternoon of a Faun" and George Balanchine's 1972 "Symphony in Three Movements." The first program, which opened on Wednesday, is all postmodern, all chic, all wiseguy, all full of theater games, all laden with production concepts and entirely loathsome. It opens with "The Second Detail," made in 1991 for the National Ballet of Canada by the choreographer William Forsythe, whose influence can be felt on the other two works. Some choreographers create stage worlds in which we may believe; Mr. Forsythe, by contrast, makes antiworlds, stagings in which the whole idea of belief on our part would be superfluous beside his complex display of artifice. We seem always to hear his voice saying: "I'm not making a ballet. I wouldn't sink so low. I could of course make a ballet if I wanted. Just look at how I present this grand jete fouette, these double pirouettes that begin on one diagonal but end on another, these three groups moving around asymmetrically each in different material. But mere ballet isn't conceptual enough in our poststructuralist era, is it?" Instead he gives us a world of alienation a silly, slick one where classicism is just a facade. As usual, his stage is lighted from above (his design) and is accompanied by taped, post techno rock music by Thom Willems. The look and the sound alone successfully, modishly keep us at a distance. The performers, in pale overall tights, don't dance so much as exhibit dancerliness. They take various steps and moves the off balance, hip thrusting style of Balanchine, the marking steps of pop backup groups, the casual arm swinging of (among others) Twyla Tharp, and more and present them all as isolated effects. ("Do you see how I'm lingering in this off kilter position? Now watch how I prolong this passe. Aren't I le dernier cri?") It's all very "moi," and the attitudinizing manner is all very late 1980s fashion.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Having migraine headaches increases the risk for cardiovascular diseases, a new study has found. Using the Danish National Patient Registry, researchers matched 51,032 people with migraines, 71 percent of them women, with 510,320 people in the general population without migraines. The subjects were, on average, age 35 at the start of the study, and researchers followed them for 19 years. The absolute risk for cardiovascular disease was small, unsurprising in a group this young. Nevertheless, after adjustment for other variables, over the course of the study people with migraines had a 49 percent increased chance of heart attack, and roughly double the risk of stroke. They also had a 59 percent increased risk of a blood clot in their veins. These risks were even higher in the first year after a migraine diagnosis. The observational study, in BMJ, found no association of migraine with peripheral artery disease or heart failure. "We now have accumulating evidence that migraine is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. It's important to take it into consideration," said the lead author, Dr. Kasper Adelborg, a postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University. "And it's important to find out if the agents that prevent migraine could also reduce the burden of cardiovascular disease."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
The movie tackles multitudinous themes in its roughly 100 minutes, from the significance of Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of slavery in the United States, to the legacy of racism in predatory bank lending practices. But what's most impressive is the amount of space Peoples's black female characters inhabit in the narrative. Instead of just depicting the myriad ways black women carry their communities, the movie goes further to explore how these women and black girls support each other in a world that often fails them. Even during their tensest moments, Turquoise and Kai share kisses and knowing smiles, or play fight and cuddle, repeatedly underscoring the tenderness in their relationship. The movie also takes time to consider what it means to come of age as a black girl. Its best moments are the ones focused on Kai when she is hanging out with her mother, teaching her father a viral dance or practicing her own moves in front of the mirror. They show that Kai's present is just as worthy of a cause to fight for as her future. Miss Juneteenth Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. Rent or buy on Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Anyone who has experienced the unbearable closeness of voting in the House of Representatives knows it's a health hazard, even under normal conditions. As soon as bells buzz across the Capitol, 435 House members, on a good day, (plus delegates) race to the floor. The fastest option the "members only" elevators each comfortably holds eight people. Ten, if you squeeze. During a vote, members pack in close enough to sense what their colleagues ate for lunch. These are extroverted pols who can't help but take advantage of a confined space to tell jokes and laugh loudly. When the elevators reach G 3, in the basement of the House Office Buildings, an open air trolley whisks members to the Capitol building. Each car comfortably accommodates four during a vote, it's usually six, sometimes more. It makes the New York City subway system seem civilized. Then members crowd into yet another elevator that lifts them to the House chamber, where they scramble into narrow rows and aisles, sometimes stepping over each other's legs to squeeze in. Small groups of friends and allies huddle in the aisles and corner seats. This setup is built for the most sociable people on earth not for the purposes of social isolation. Trying to follow distancing precautions in this environment is nearly impossible. This was apparent on April 23, when Congress approved a 484 billion coronavirus relief bill. With the help of the attending physician, Dr. Brian P. Monahan, representatives were called in nine groups of about 50 to 60 at a time. Organized in alphabetical order, first came representatives from Abraham to Cheney. Voting usually takes 15 minutes but it took over an hour to reach representatives Representatives Small to Zeldin. And there was another group those who had missed the vote left to go. Shortly after that experience, Dr. Monahan warned that it would be risky for the House to return this week. Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced: "If the Capitol physician recommends that we not come back, then we have to take that guidance." The Senate, meanwhile, has reconvened. They say they'll follow distancing procedures, but their track record is pretty dismal. Before they broke for April recess, journalists observed senators standing way too close for comfort huddling shoulder by shoulder and clustering in groups instead of maintaining the recommended six feet. There's voting by proxy, for example. Representative Jim McGovern, chairman of the House Rules Committee, proposed this and other remote measures to the Democratic caucus on April 16. Mr. McGovern's approach would allow most members to stay at home while a few remained physically present and cast votes on behalf of their colleagues. Those voting remotely would follow security precautions, submitting a letter to authorize and authenticate each vote. Mr. McGovern calls this approach "low tech," and purposefully so it doesn't require new technology that might further delay voting or open the process to interference from hackers and foreign actors. Although voting by proxy on the floor would require a change to chamber rules, it has precedent in House and Senate committees so we know it's possible. Still, House Republicans immediately opposed Mr. McGovern's proposal and pushed Speaker Pelosi to delay a vote on changing the House rules. On Monday, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy outlined an alternative plan for reopening the House, suggesting a staggered business calendar, rotating large groups, and voting at the end of the week instead of every few days. All of this aims to prevent the House from going remote. "There is something special with people meeting face to face," Mr. McCarthy told The Associated Press on Monday. I know from my time in Congress how much it means to connect in person. But there's something even more sacred than meeting face to face and that's the commitment to keep the American public safe. Because this isn't just about the health of lawmakers. It's about the heightened risk to congressional staffers, Capitol subways operators, cleaners and cafeteria workers. It's about the safety of constituents, who will be put in increased danger when representatives return home from Washington, which has a considerable number of Covid 19 cases. It's about whether our lawmakers could help spread the virus. And it's about the message sent to the general public when leaders gather in large groups defying the exhortations of public health experts everywhere. It sets a terrible example. I was in Congress on 9/11. We were determined to reconvene as soon as possible to show the world that democracy would not be delayed. When we met that night, we powerfully demonstrated to Americans everywhere that we'd not be stopped or slowed down by our enemies. This crisis is different. Today, a return to normalcy doesn't signal resolve it sets a foolish example by exposing our lawmakers to illness and endangering the public. Essential workers are taking heroic risks because we desperately need them and there's no way for them to do their jobs if not in person. But Congress has viable alternatives. Americans everywhere have had to adjust their lives and businesses to this new environment. Why can't our leaders do the same? It's not about lawmakers avoiding work. It's about making sure they can do their jobs safely until they can go back to the old days of cramming into elevators on Capitol Hill. Steve Israel served as a Democratic representative in Congress from New York from 2001 to 2017. He is the director of the Institute of Politics and Global Affairs at Cornell University. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
The Online Gene Test Finds a Dangerous Mutation. It May Well Be Wrong. Dr. Joshua Clayton, a 29 year old radiology resident at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, wanted to learn about his ancestry. So he sent a sample of his saliva to 23andMe, the genetic testing company. His report was pretty mundane no new revelations. But then he sent the profile created by 23andMe to a separate company called Promethease, which promises to do a more in depth analysis for genetic mutations that cause disease. The news was not good. Dr. Clayton got back a report with a sinister red box at the top saying he had a mutation linked to Lynch syndrome, a frightening genetic disorder that leads to potentially deadly cancers at an early age. In an interview, Dr. Clayton said he "knew, at least cursorily, that false positives were common with these tests." But "that didn't change the frightened feelings or concern, because I certainly couldn't blow it off." After two weeks of panic and yet another genetic test at a company with expertise in medical diagnostics, he learned the red box result was wrong. He simply didn't have the mutation. More Americans are embracing consumer genetic testing, but the Food and Drug Administration limits what major firms like 23andMe or Ancestry.com can say about a consumer's health. So many people are taking an additional step: uploading all the raw data created by these companies to second companies for additional analysis. But these are not firms certified to provide medical diagnoses, nor are they sophisticated academic centers. Companies like Promethease warn customers not to regard their results as medical diagnoses. Mostly, they are comparing a consumer's raw data to gene variants reported to be linked to disease. But it's not at all clear that consumers understand how uncertain their results may be. There are no systematic studies of how often the direct to consumer results and third party analyses are wrong. In one small study, Ambry Genetics a lab certified to do medical testing looked at 49 samples sent in by physicians whose patients had been told that they had disease causing mutations by third party interpreters. Ambry found that 40 percent were wrong. In addition, some genetic variations classified by second companies as threatening actually were benign. This tiny sample doesn't prove that the false positive rate is 40 percent. But patients like Dr. Clayton are not uncommon, genetic counselors say. And they are increasingly worried about the flip side: false negatives that reassure consumers who actually should be worried. Dr. Judy Garber, director of the Center for Cancer Genetics and Prevention at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, said one of her patients was told by a consumer testing company she had Li Fraumeni syndrome, which greatly raises the risk of a number of rare cancers. Further testing showed that diagnosis was wrong. "It makes you worry about the people who don't come in," said Dr. Garber. "People think they are getting the same kind of genetic testing as they would get from a certified clinical laboratory," said Stephany Tandy Connor, a genetic counselor at Ambry. "Nothing could be further from the truth." Even some doctors are misled by the reports, she said. Of course, companies like Ambry have an interest in making sure their business is not usurped by consumer testing firms. But it's also true that the method used by consumer companies is very different from those used by certified clinical laboratories. Consumer companies method look for changes in tiny segments of genes, rather than examining the entire gene and looking for alterations. That is cheap but not comprehensive. And because they are not making medical diagnoses, these companies are not subject to the sort of quality controls as certified labs, which require extensive confirmation that results are free of errors. Compounding the problem, the second companies rely on databases that may contain errors so even if the genetic alteration found by the first company is correct, the analysis can be wrong. Ambry found such patients in its recent analysis. Greg Lennon, a co founder of Promethease, said that the company's reports include a disclaimer saying the data are "not intended for medical or health purposes." Customers are warned to seek out "an independent, clinically validated test" if they are told of a mutation and to seek out a genetic counselor. When errors occur, they usually derive from mistakes in the raw DNA data, said Mike Cariaso, also a co founder of Promethease. 23andMe offers limited medical testing for example, looking for three of the most common mutations in breast cancer genes that occur mostly in Ashkenazi Jews. But there are thousands of other alterations in those genes that the company does not track. The F.D.A. has given 23andMe approval to do similar testing for 10 disorders linked to genetic mutations, but not for the huge number of others, including Lynch syndrome, that companies like Promethease look for. The variations in DNA in 23andMe's raw data "are not for medical or diagnostic use," said Shirley Wu, the company's director of product science. "The data hasn't undergone the same kind of quality control and validation as our variations in our health reports." She had Dr. Clayton's DNA tested at a lab certified to make the diagnosis. That was how he found out the report was wrong. He was lucky, he said, that he had medical training and knew where to find help. "I don't think that applies to a lot of people," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Maybe it's never too late to tweak a movie or to try. In December, after "Cats" had opened, the beleaguered musical encountered fresh derision when word spread that Universal was shipping theaters a new version with improved effects. "Sonic the Hedgehog" didn't undergo tinkering beyond the 11th hour, but until now, this videogame to screen adaptation was best known for having its release delayed to address fans' reactions to the trailer specifically, to the way Sonic looked, which suggested that photorealism has its limits when the subject is a spiny blue mammal from space. Sonic now resembles a cartoon hedgehog instead of a spray painted marmot. But if anything was done to de genericize the script, it hasn't helped. Not that the Sega games in which the fleet footed hero zips around doing flips and collecting gold coins (which here encircle the Paramount mountain) gave the director, Jeff Fowler, much to work with.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
The shift in American fashion continues. Diane von Furstenberg, creator of the wrap dress, empowerer of women and founder of the company that bears her name, has named a presumptive heir and he is a man. On Monday, Ms. von Furstenberg announced that she had appointed the Scottish designer Jonathan Saunders as chief creative officer. As such, he will be in charge of all aspects of design for the company including fashion, art direction and advertising and work with the chief executive, Paolo Riva, who joined DVF a year ago. "It is time to reboot, and in a fresh way," Ms. von Furstenberg said. "I have been looking for someone to be my heir for years, and now I have found him." Though Ms. von Furstenberg, 69, will continue as chairwoman, the appointment will free her "to use my voice more," she said. "I want to focus on my work with women, public speaking and philanthropy." She is also thinking about her legacy and how she wants to be remembered. One answer is "as someone who told women they could be the woman they wanted to be," she said. Another may be as the founder of a brand who prepared for the future of that brand, a transition that has not traditionally been a strong point in the industry. Recently, though, that has begun to change. Before his death, Oscar de la Renta named Peter Copping as his successor, and though the adjustment at that label is ongoing, the sheer fact that it planned for the future was an important development. Given the number of labels with mature founders at their helm (Giorgio Armani and Ralph Lauren spring to mind), that Ms. von Furstenberg is thinking the same way is significant. And it is bound to be noted. "I will be there to give them the juice, of course," Ms. von Furstenberg said, "but I will absolutely let them run the show." Whether this is true remains to be seen. It is a complicated emotional proposition to hand over to another the reins of a company you built. After Hubert de Givenchy sold his company to LVMH, he was critical of their stewardship; ditto Yves Saint Laurent, who often dismissed Tom Ford's work when he was creative director of YSL. (Granted, neither Mr. de Givenchy or Mr. Saint Laurent had any say over their brands at that point, so their powerlessness may have had something to do with their comments.) Ms. von Furstenberg has worked with other artistic directors, most recently with Michael Herz for two years, and before that with Yvan Mispelaere, from 2010 to 2012, and she had been enthusiastic about their potential before breaking up with them. But this is the first time she has publicly ceded the creative leadership of her label, which suggests she is serious. "It is a big commitment," Mr. Riva said. Ms. von Furstenberg said, "It's all in the timing." The move follows the retirement of Donna Karan and the refocusing of the company on the contemporary line DKNY under designers Maxwell Osborne and Dao Yi Chow, as well as the recent decision by PVH to consolidate Calvin Klein under a single designer, as yet unnamed. Less dramatic, but also significant, is the addition of Laura Kim and Fernando Garcia, founders of the buzzy new label Monse (and Oscar de la Renta alumni) to oversee the team at Carolina Herrera. Together the moves add up to a potential redefinition of New York fashion under a new generation of designers. Still, the choice of Mr. Saunders, 38, suggests that, at least for DVF, a radical rethink is not in order. Mr. Saunders, born in Glasgow and trained as a furniture and textile designer at the Glasgow School of Art, and Central Saint Martins in London, introduced his own label in 2003 and became part of a new wave of London designers including Christopher Kane and Peter Pilotto. Like Ms. von Furstenberg's work, Mr. Saunders's has been marked by vibrant shades and fluid prints, as well as an easy silhouette that placed pattern at the core of its identity, though he also has a more architectural sensibility that may help to modernize the brand. Aesthetically, the appointment makes a lot of sense. "I've had my eye on him since he started," Ms. von Furstenberg said. "I think his sense of color is better than anyone else in the world." Yet despite the endorsement of figures like Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, and Diane Kruger and an investment from the financier Eiesha Bharti Pasricha, Mr. Saunders closed his doors last December for what he identified as "personal reasons" (they seem to have had a lot to do with the perennial complications that come from outside funding). Ms. von Furstenberg came calling soon after. "When I heard what happened with the company, I thought, 'We have to meet,'" she said. They finally sat down last month, and agreed that Mr. Saunders would embark on a limited consultancy for DVF. "I thought we should get engaged before we got married," said Ms. von Furstenberg, who tends to talk about the designers she works with in relationship metaphors. "But he came for the weekend, and we all fell in love. It felt so right. We talked until 3 in the morning, and I thought, 'I can't lose him.'" After a whirlwind few days, the contract was signed.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
European lawmakers barraged Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, on Tuesday with a litany of questions about his company's global power, its role in elections and its misuse of user data. One even raised the prospect of breaking up the social media giant. But the meeting in Brussels ended with members of the European Parliament complaining that Mr. Zuckerberg had used the session's odd format to evade specific questions and just repeat statements he had made in the past. Several shouted follow up questions out of turn, one complained that he had asked six yes or no questions to which he received no clear reply, and another argued that Mr. Zuckerberg had used the event's structure to deliberately sidestep details. Before it descended into frustration, the meeting had been billed as part of Mr. Zuckerberg's apology tour for Facebook's mishandling of its users' data. European authorities have emerged as the world's most assertive watchdog of the technology industry, and many wanted a chance to publicly grill the chief executive after revelations in March that a British political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, had improperly obtained and used the information of millions of Facebook members. But the session with Mr. Zuckerberg, which was scheduled for one hour and 15 minutes, was set up so that lawmakers asked questions one after the other without a pause for answers. That left Mr. Zuckerberg only minutes to speak at the very end, allowing him to select which questions to address in a general way. "Mark Zuckerberg is getting away without responding to citizens concerns," Udo Bullmann, the leader of the Socialists and Democrats group in the European Parliament, tweeted later. "We need a real back and forth with all the relevant MEPs in the room." Mr. Zuckerberg's visit to the European Union's typically sleepy Parliament starkly contrasted with his grilling in Congress last month over the Cambridge Analytica revelations. Over two days of appearances on Capitol Hill, which were televised live and became a media spectacle, Mr. Zuckerberg faced hours of questions from lawmakers and repeatedly said Facebook could do better. Read more about Mr. Zuckerberg's testimony to the Senate and the House. Mr. Zuckerberg had initially resisted meeting with the European authorities, and his appearance on Tuesday was a limited concession. Europe's Parliament is markedly weaker than Congress, and it does not have the power to regulate Facebook. The session was originally scheduled to be held behind closed doors, but after an outcry in Brussels, Facebook agreed to make the questioning public by streaming it online. Mr. Zuckerberg's spoke ahead of the European Union's introduction of a strict data privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation, on Friday. The rules, among the toughest in the world, empower regulators to fine companies up to 4 percent of their global revenue for privacy violations equivalent to 1.6 billion for Facebook. Read more about what the new European privacy rules mean for you. The meeting with Mr. Zuckerberg brought a rare buzz to the European Parliament. The body's live stream for his appearance temporarily crashed, most likely because of the high interest in the meeting. Security around the Parliament building was extremely tight, at a level typically reserved for national leaders. "People are thrilled to put Zuckerberg on the grill," said Karl Pincherelle, an aide to a French member of the European Parliament. Mr. Zuckerberg began the meeting by keeping to the conciliatory script he had used in Washington. He read a statement in which he apologized for Facebook's role in the spreading of misinformation, foreign interference in elections and the mishandling of customer data. "It is time to discuss breaking Facebook's monopoly," said Manfred Weber, a German lawmaker and the leader of the European People's Party, which makes up the biggest bloc in Parliament. He added that the company had "too much power." Another member asked if Mr. Zuckerberg wanted to be remembered in the same high regard as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, or for undermining democracy. In all, nearly a dozen lawmakers spoke, each with multiple questions, some of them very detailed and pointed about issues such as online bullying and election interference. Throughout, Mr. Zuckerberg, dressed in a dark suit and purple tie, sat stone faced, jotting down notes and occasionally sipping from a glass of water. Once the lawmakers finished asking their questions, Mr. Zuckerberg largely avoided answering specifics and repeated previous statements. He mentioned Facebook's development of artificial intelligence technology to spot violent content and bullying, and its partnerships with fact checker groups to prevent the spread of misinformation. He also referred to setting up Facebook in his Harvard dorm room, something he frequently noted during his testimony to Congress. The largely rote responses drew the ire of lawmakers as Mr. Zuckerberg concluded, saying he wanted to be "sensitive to time" after the meeting went 15 minutes past its agreed to length. It was left to Antonio Tajani the president of the European Parliament, who had proudly announced on Twitter just days earlier that Facebook's chief would attend a session in Brussels to respond to lawmakers' criticism. In the end, Mr. Zuckerberg agreed to respond to their questions in writing. Mr. Tajani later said that he had devised the format of the questioning because the European Parliament typically does not invite chief executives for meetings and so was treating him as a private citizen. Ultimately, it all lasted less than two hours. As lawmakers headed for a news conference, Mr. Zuckerberg made a swift exit. He was next set to visit Paris, with lunch on Wednesday with President Emmanuel Macron. Asked about the time constraints by his frustrated fellow members of Parliament, Mr. Tajani referred to the Facebook executive's travel schedule saying, "There is a flight." He insisted at a news conference afterward that the meeting had been "a great success." Others said more needed to be done. Guy Verhofstadt, president of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe group, tweeted: "Today's pre cooked format was inappropriate ensured Zuckerberg could avoid our questions. I trust that written answers from Facebook will be forthcoming. If these are not accurately answered in detail, the EU competition authorities must be activated legislation sharpened."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
PARIS On March 3, 1927, on a cold, windswept beach in Wales, John G. Parry Thomas, a working class engineer, steeled himself to set a land speed record. The year before, he'd pushed the mark to 169 miles per hour, then to 171. But his aristocratic archrival, Sir Malcolm Campbell, reached 174, and just a month later Parry Thomas was trying to regain the record. His car, nicknamed Babs, with a chain drive from a pre World War I Mercedes, was little removed from the days of bicycles and horse carts. It was powered by a 27 liter 12 cylinder American Liberty aviation engine, 10 times as large as those in modern cars. Braking was more of a hope than a reality. Parry Thomas cracked the big V12's throttles, and Babs lumbered down the beach. At well over 100 m.p.h., something perhaps a patch of wet sand, a snapped chain, a collapsed wheel caused the car to slew wildly, then roll over and catch fire. Parry Thomas was killed instantly. He was buried near his beloved Brooklands racetrack; Babs was interred where it came to rest, left to disintegrate in a briny grave. But the story didn't end there. Owen Wyn Owen, a car enthusiast and proud Welshman, had grown up hearing Parry Thomas's story, and in 1969 he excavated Babs. Over the next decade, he restored what he could and re created what he could not, and Babs's thunder was heard once again. Now Owen's son, Geraint Owen, is Babs's caretaker. At Retromobile, the classic car exhibition here this month, Babs appeared alongside one of Sir Malcolm's first record setting "Bluebird" cars, an 18 liter, 350 horsepower Sunbeam, and their engines fired in concert, delighting and startling the crowd. "We hadn't run the car in 10 months," Mr. Owen said. "We got a very late call from Retromobile, saying, 'Look, can you come?' I wasn't going to have the Sunbeam Bluebird running and Babs not." Parry Thomas and Sir Malcolm were rivals, he said, but "I suspect they would have been English gentlemen and smiled nicely and doffed their caps at one another." Though Retromobile is so full of glittering automotive prizes that even Bugattis barely stand out, underdogs like Babs offered some of the most compelling stories. Jean Redele's Alpines, sleek rear engine fiberglass sports cars that shimmered in French racing blue, punched well above the weight of their small Renault engines to dominate rallying and small bore endurance racing in the 1960s. A selection of the late Mr. Redele's masterpieces was featured, including an A110 that won the Tour du Corse and the Coupe des Alpes rallies in 1968 with a roof so thin for lightness that it can be pushed in with a finger. Mr. Redele, a Renault dealer in Dieppe, France, started his racing shop in the mid 1950s, and a decade later he was set to challenge the big boys Ferrari, Ford, Porsche at Le Mans, with a larger V8 engine. He certainly felt pressure to win, said Herve Charbonneaux, an organizer of the exhibit and friend of the Redele family: In 1967, President Charles de Gaulle visited the Paris Auto Salon and, viewing the new A221, said, "You know, Mr. Redele, this is for the French. You have to win now." He never did win Le Mans. It wasn't until 1978 that Alpine, then fully under Renault's control, captured the 24 hour race. But for racers in the epic Paris Dakar rally (or Dakar, as it's now known, having moved to South America because of security concerns in Africa) 24 hours is barely long enough to get warmed up. High tech half million dollar machines dominate the Dakar now, but there was a time when two brothers could compete in a car cobbled together in their garage. Inspired by the new freedoms of the 1960s, two young French mechanics, Bernard and Claude Marreau, set off for India in a Renault 4 that had been modified into a camper. Exhilarated by their adventure, they looked for other ways to test their mettle, and in 1971, in a Renault 12, they broke the record for driving the length of Africa, covering the 9,700 miles from the Cape of Good Hope to Algeria in just under nine days. More African experiences followed, including a trip to deliver food to the Tuaregs of Mali during a 1976 famine. So when the first Paris Dakar was announced for 1979, the Marreaus rushed to sign up. The brothers started with a lowly Renault 4. They converted it to 4 wheel drive, braced the chassis and built a snorkel exhaust by routing the pipe over the roof. "Every night we had to completely repair the car," Bernard Marreau said. "We slept only two hours out of every 48." They finished second to a Range Rover. "The first and second Dakar was the rally of the garage inventors," Mr. Marreau said, but the race quickly captured the imagination of the public and big money sponsors. With their experience, the Marreau brothers, nicknamed the renards du desert, or "desert foxes," were coveted as drivers. In 1982 they won the overall Paris Dakar at the wheel of a factory Renault 20. Of course, the 1 percent was well represented at Retromobile, too. The rajas, maharajas, ranas, maharanas, nawabs, mirs and other royals who governed India under British rule had a remarkable appetite for European luxury cars. Need a hunting vehicle? How about an aluminum body Rolls Royce with a rear facing rumble seat, the better to guard against a tiger attacking from behind. Want to impress the locals? The 1910 Brooke Swan Car has feathers of wood and plaster; a swan's neck and head, with eyes that light up, that sprouts from the hood. About a third of the cavernous hall at the Paris Expo center was given over to vendors selling miracle oils, vintage owner's manuals and tables of obscure vintage parts, from Art Deco hood ornaments to rubber trim for a lowly Peugeot 104.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Have you ever wondered how a play gets turned into a movie? Or do you just want to hear your favorite stars talk about filmmaking? The latest episode of Offstage, The New York Times streaming event series on theater, explored the journey from stage to screen through several of the most anticipated films nearing release. First, the Oscar winning actress Viola Davis, the director George C. Wolfe and the actors Colman Domingo, Michael Potts and Glynn Turman spoke with Times reporter Reggie Ugwu about "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom." The film adaptation of August Wilson's celebrated play, which explores the history of blues music, also stars Chadwick Boseman in his final movie role. Then, "The Prom." Chad Beguelin, Bob Martin and Matthew Sklar, co creators of the musical turned film, discussed the project's transformation which includes Meryl Streep, James Corden and Nicole Kidman joining the cast with Times chief theater critic Jesse Green.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Exposure to air pollution in the womb is associated with an increased risk for high blood pressure in childhood, researchers report. The study, in the journal Hypertension, measured air pollution exposure in 1,293 pregnant women by matching each mother's address with readings from the nearest air quality monitor. Researchers recorded levels of PM 2.5, particles so small that they can enter the lungs and bloodstream. The investigators found that compared to the one third of children exposed to the lowest PM 2.5 levels, the one third exposed to the highest were 61 percent more likely to have high blood pressure between ages 3 and 9. Each 5 microgram per cubic meter increase in PM 2.5 led to a 46 percent increased risk for pediatric hypertension. The study controlled for the mothers' age, smoking, blood pressure and other factors as well as for preterm birth, gestational age and other variables in the babies.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
The dirt bikes and their exuberant operators are the saving grace and joy of the sincere if overstuffed drama "Charm City Kings." These aren't just any rides and riders. They're more like horses and cowboys, with wild moves and flamboyant tricks that can bring to mind a rodeo show. At other times, though, when a particularly skilled rider drives his all terrain vehicle down a Baltimore street, popping wheelies or standing tall in the saddle, you're suddenly watching a charioteer in his glory. There are moments of great athleticism and beauty in these scenes, which help lift this overly, at times ponderously plotted movie about a boy spinning in circles at the proverbial crossroads. Just 13, Mouse (the appealing Jahi Di'Allo Winston) lives with his mother (Teyonah Parris, doing much with little), who's often heading off to work, leaving him to watch over his kid sister. Mouse would rather hang out with his friends (who wouldn't?), ride his bike or gawp at the vrooming spectacle he longs to join. And while he has dreams, he has enough baggage to fill several overhead compartments. The filmmakers give Mouse a lot to navigate on his journey, including a dead brother, a new girlfriend, catastrophic role models and two father figures an ex con and a cop who embody opposite forks in the road. (The rapper Meek Mill is a standout as the ex con.) There's a sick dog and a gun, which inevitably goes off. There are also too many characters, a handful of whom are worth noting simply because of how they represent racial difference. There's an angry cop and a nice veterinarian, both white and both of whom have less impact and narrative weight than some unfriendly grocery owners, Asian stereotypes who scowl at Mouse when he and his friends shop. Things happen and then more things happen, little of it surprising. The movie was inspired by the documentary "12 O'Clock Boys" (2014), a beautifully impressionistic, tightly constructed look at the Baltimore dirt bike scene. In a fleet 75 minutes, the documentary's director, Lotfy Nathan, tells the story of a young boy named Pug, his family and his world. Oscillating between the sweeping and the detailed, Nathan also squeezes in a lot about the institutional forces that help circumscribe the riders' lives, including the police (often hovering above in helicopters) and the local media that reports on the, yes, sometimes dangerous scene, as if it posed a veritable menace to civilization.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
A new Starz series follows a group of Los Angeles millennials. And Janelle Monae, SZA and Yolanda Adams are among the performers at an Aretha Franklin tribute show on CBS. NOW APOCALYPSE 9 p.m. on Starz. If you have premium cable, you might as well enjoy the freedom it offers filmmakers who want to explore adult matters. Or millennial matters. This proudly hookup stuffed comedy series, a brainchild of the New Queer Cinema pioneer Gregg Araki and the Vogue sex columnist Karley Sciortino, follows a group of 20 somethings, including Avan Jogia and Kelli Berglund, exploring themselves and each other in a color drenched Los Angeles. It shares some themes with Araki's "teenage apocalypse trilogy," about teens dealing with isolation and sexuality. "We started during the twilight years of the Obama administration," Araki recently told The New York Times. "That's why the show has that almost utopian quality of free love these kids having sex and figuring themselves out. Then 2016 happened. There's always been that darker, Lynchian aspect of the show, but that became more pronounced." FINDING JUSTICE 8 p.m. on BET. This documentary series looks at inequality in predominantly black communities in six American cities. Sunday night's debut episode looks at activists in Tampa, Fla., protesting the state's "Stand Your Ground" law. Later episodes center on Baltimore, Minneapolis and St. Paul, Atlanta, Los Angeles and St. Louis.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
WASHINGTON Over the last year, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a Milwaukee group that has financed decades of research into curbing the power of public sector unions, hired three new staff members: a fund raiser, an administrative aide and a program officer. It enlisted a recruiting outfit called Talent Market, which helps staff free market advocacy groups, think tanks and foundations. In two of those cases, the Bradley Foundation, whose efforts Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin drew on, hired candidates whom Talent Market's executive director, Claire Kittle Dixon, had recommended. "She has a personal knowledge of the conservative movement and lots and lots of contacts," said Michael W. Grebe, who is stepping down as the foundation's president this year. Such is the foundation's confidence in Ms. Kittle Dixon that it asked her to assist in finding Mr. Grebe's successor. Unlike many long established job placement services on the right and the left, which devote most of their efforts to posting ads or advising job seekers, Talent Market is essentially a full time recruiting operation. In the case of the Bradley Foundation, Mr. Grebe said, Ms. Kittle Dixon was involved at every step, from writing the job description to unearthing candidates and encouraging them to apply. She is, in effect, the visible hand for those who worship the invisible hand. Libertarian groups and activists backed by deep pocketed conservative donors have been successful in recent years in pushing beyond Washington into dozens of states. They have provided the intellectual and political muscle for elected officials who have rolled back regulations, cut taxes and tried to remake public education. Perhaps most significantly, they have helped pass anti union legislation in once heavily unionized states and embarked on well organized campaigns to discourage workers from paying union dues and fees in liberal bastions like Washington State. "At the state level, some of these so called think tanks are beginning to do the real organizing work against unions," said Steve Rosenthal, a former A.F.L. C.I.O. political director who now tracks the flow of conservative money into anti union efforts. The strategy depends on a cadre of committed recruits, which is where Ms. Kittle Dixon and Talent Market come in. The firm's reason for being, according to its website, is to ensure that the "free market nonprofit sector has the talent it needs to defend liberty." In this vein, Talent Market says it has helped over 160 organizations find personnel since its founding in 2009, including prominent ones like the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Charles Koch Foundation. But it has also been active among more obscure players, ensuring a level of quality control and ideological cohesion at free market groups across the country. In many ways, Ms. Kittle Dixon is the casting director for the so called liberty movement. "The infrastructure for the collectivist left is massive, between academia, government, unions, higher ed, and K 12," said Jon Caldara, president of the Independence Institute in Denver, another client. "For those of us who want to counter that, it's harder to find exactly the right people." Talent Market, he said, "helps take a lot of the mystery out of hiring." Ms. Kittle Dixon, who declined to be interviewed, is impeccably credentialed for the role. A protegee of Whitney Ball, a prominent figure in free market philanthropy, she has toiled for years in the liberty movement. 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. After earning a master's degree in public policy from Georgetown, she worked on talent development at the Koch Foundation in suburban Virginia, where she ran an internship program along with a fellowship known as the Koch Associate Program. She later became research director of a free market think tank in Ohio. She has crossed paths with hundreds of libertarian wonks and activists over the years and stayed in touch with many of them. Job matching networks that serve a particular ideological niche have been around since at least the 1980s, when the Heritage Foundation created what became a widely trafficked database of jobs with conservative organizations and politicians. Another group called the Leadership Institute has long hosted a job bank and advised young conservatives on how to find entry to middle level positions. The left has created a similar infrastructure, with a variety of email lists and message boards connecting activists and operatives with prospective employers. One, called JobsthatareLEFT, started in 2002 "as a way to help a few unemployed campaign staffers seek lefty jobs," according to its Google group page. It says it has shared over 20,000 positions with 25,000 members since then. Another group, called Inclusv, has helped progressives of color land jobs. Paul Oyer, a labor economist at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, said there are two characteristics that make niche matchmaking services successful: If the niche can claim a lot of members, and if not being in the niche is a "deal breaker" for those who are in it. Talent Market gives every indication of serving such a niche. To upload a resume or sign up for the site's newsletter, a candidate must first answer three questions on "the best way to solve societal problems," "the proper function of government," and the prospect's "view of how markets function." (Sample option: "Free markets almost always lead to the most efficient allocation of resources.") Like most of the organizations it advises, Talent Market is a nonprofit. It charges clients no fee, subsisting instead on contributions from donors, foundations and other nonprofits. It appears to be a bargain. Talent Market received at least 120,000 a year from 2011 to 2013 from DonorsTrust, a so called donor advised fund provider that helps wealthy people contribute anonymously to free market causes, according to Internal Revenue Service filings. Other conservative and free market groups, like the State Policy Network and the Vernon K. Krieble Foundation, have contributed over the years. Clients say Talent Market excels at finding hard to attract fund raising staff members and at time consuming searches for senior officials. But its greatest value may be in connecting far flung organizations with talent they might not otherwise find. "Washington, D.C., is one giant high school campus everybody knows each other," Mr. Caldara, the Denver activist, said. "But those of us fighting for limited government in the states are spread apart. Sometimes the best person for a job is not someone in our current state." Mr. Caldara said his organization recently hired a fund raiser from the Washington area whom Talent Market brought to its attention. By contrast, Sherry Ettleson, a full time recruiter for progressive nonprofits who may be the closest counterpart of Ms. Kittle Dixon on the left, says her efforts focus almost entirely on Washington, New York and San Francisco. Ms. Ettleson says this is because she does not have connections outside those cities, and because the network of progressive think tanks and advocacy groups is not as well developed in other regions as it is on the right. "The left was slow to that game," she said. There is almost no corner of the country where Ms. Kittle Dixon has not dispatched conservative crusaders. Since late 2014, according to its monthly newsletter, Talent Market has placed people at the Freedom Foundation in Olympia, Wash.; the Beacon Center of Tennessee in Nashville; the James Madison Institute in Tallahassee, Fla.; and the Ashbrook Center in Ashland, Ohio. Until recently, Michael Schaus lived in Colorado, where he was a freelance writer and the host of a local talk radio show. Last autumn, he contacted Ms. Kittle Dixon, who encouraged him to pursue his interests in the policy world. Ms. Kittle Dixon, he said, alerted him whenever she came across an opening that fit his ambitions and skills. After the first interview she brokered, Ms. Kittle Dixon contacted him again to see how it had gone and whether she could refine the search further. But in this case, it was unnecessary. The Nevada Policy Research Institute offered him a job as its communications director, and he accepted, attracted by the organization's focus on taxes and education reform. The whole process lasted roughly one month. "She was good at what she does," Mr. Schaus said. "I love the job. I'm doing the type of stuff I like. It's been a good success."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. 'One of the Healthiest Dictators Ever Elected' President Trump's former doctor Harold Bornstein recently said that Trump crafted the language in a glowing health report Bornstein signed off on in 2015. The letter read: "If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency." The late night hosts were far from surprised to learn that Trump was behind the hyperbole. "His doctor wrote a letter calling Trump the healthiest president ever, but now the doctor is saying Trump dictated the letter himself. Trump was like, 'Yes, I dictated it, and I am one of the healthiest dictators ever elected.'" JIMMY FALLON Stephen Colbert said he had copies of letters that Trump had dictated to his other doctors. "I guess that explains these other doctors' notes, like this one from Trump's dentist: 'Most teeth ever. Much longer tongue than Obama.' And his podiatrist's report: 'Feet of a god, unless there's a draft, in which case bone spurs. Sad!'" STEPHEN COLBERT President Emmanuel Macron of France slipped up during a joint news conference with Malcolm Turnbull, the Australian prime minister, calling Turnbull's wife "delicious." Trevor Noah had some fun with that. "Whoa, back off, Pepe Le Pew, that's someone's wife. You know, it would have been cool if the Australian prime minister thought it was some sort of custom and rolled with it if he was like, Australian accent 'Thank you, President Macron, your wife is quite shaggable as well. I'd totally snack on 'er.'" TREVOR NOAH As it turns out, it was an innocent mistake: The French word for delicious delicieux can also be used to mean "charming." But for a moment, Noah was concerned. "I was worried that when Macron came to the U.S., instead of him rubbing off on Trump, it was Trump that was rubbing off on him. Like, they held hands and suddenly Macron was like French accent , 'Madame and monsieur, we will make France great again. Who is going to pay for eet? Belgium!'" TREVOR NOAH Bee had some sharp words for Zuckerberg. But then she cleverly pointed out that like almost everyone else in the media, she depends on Facebook to get content to viewers. "Hey, you oatmeal colored tadpole man! You'd better knock it off with the 'Who, me? I'm just a cute little millennial' schtick. You are one of the most powerful men in the world. You built this monster and it made you rich. It is your job to kill it. Get this shit under control before you 'oopsie' another genocide. I mean, if you don't mind, sir. I mean, please don't tank our Facebook videos. Don't forget to like and share!" SAMANTHA BEE "7 Eleven has announced they're going to be offering healthier options for their customers. That's nice. The C.E.O. said, 'We want our customers to live to be as old as one of our hot dogs.'" CONAN O'BRIEN "A group of House Republicans has nominated President Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize. As evidence, they pointed out that Trump has managed to avoid an all out war with North Korea, and Melania." CONAN O'BRIEN "Mueller said he could issue a subpoena for the president to appear before a grand jury. I don't know about that. I understand what you're saying, but if you want Trump to show up, you can't threaten to slap him with a subpoena you have to offer to spank him with it." STEPHEN COLBERT, making a reference to one of the actress Stephanie Clifford's claims about an affair with Trump Bee didn't just take on Zuckerberg. In the wake of the White House correspondents' dinner, she had a few things to say about Sarah Huckabee Sanders, too.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
MENLO PARK, CALIF. Ann Lam delicately places a laboratory slide holding a slice of brain from a living human onto a small platform in a room the size of a walk in refrigerator. She closes a heavy door and turns to a row of computers to monitor her experiments. She is using one of the world's most sophisticated and powerful microscopes, the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, to learn about the distribution of metals in the brains of epilepsy patients. But she has another reason for being here as well. Traditional techniques for staining brain tissue produce byproducts and waste that are hazardous to the environment. And often, this sort of research is performed on animals, something Dr. Lam insists on avoiding. The radiation that illuminates the Stanford microscope was once a waste product produced by the particle accelerators. Now that it has been harnessed recycled, in a sense she is able to use it to examine tissue removed from living human patients, not animals. For Dr. Lam, those are important considerations. Indeed, scientists like her worry that neuroscience has become a dirty business. Too often, they say, labs are stocked with toxic chemicals, dangerous instruments and hapless animal subjects. Funding often comes from the military, and some neuroscientists fear their findings may soon be applied in ways that they never intended, raising moral questions that are seldom addressed. In 2012, Dr. Lam and Dr. Elan Ohayon, her husband, founded the Green Neuroscience Laboratory in a former industrial building in the Convoy District, an up and coming San Diego neighborhood. Solar panels rest on the roof, and a garden is lovingly tended on the second floor. Dr. Lam and Dr. Ohayon refuse to experiment on animals, a mainstay of neuroscience research, and will not conduct research with military applications. At scientific conferences around the country, they have been urging scientists to stop clinging to dated notions of normalcy and deviance. "Our dream is to create an educational training program in green neuroscience where people can really study ethics, philosophy and experimentation all at the same time," she said. At a time when research often seems to suggest that humans are neural puppets, Dr. Lam and Dr. Ohayon are chasing projects intended to show how brain functioning is connected to free will and personal freedom. And they are believers in transparent, open source science: They are committed to publishing findings and data without restrictions sometimes even as they happens during experiments. Their ideas have raised eyebrows in scientific circles and hopes. "The lab is one of the laboratories that has a chance to become a place where new ideas in artificial intelligence and neuroscience come from," said Hava T. Siegelmann, a professor of computer science who studies neural systems at the University of Massachusetts. But their rigid opposition to animal research in particular may come at a steep price. "They don't want to play the game," said W. McIntyre Burnham, a neuropharmacologist at the University of Toronto, with whom Dr. Ohayon studied. "They may be the wave of the future, but I think they may also have trouble getting support." The two came to the idea of an alternative approach to neuroscience on a backpacking trip on Vancouver Island in 2011. Dr. Lam was ending a postdoctoral fellowship, and the two scientists were worried about the direction of neuroscience. As it turned out, they were not the only ones. Eventually they found a kindred spirit in the neuroscientist Jay S. Coggan. The Green Neuroscience Laboratory is affiliated with and shares offices with the NeuroLinx Research Institute, which he founded. Dr. Coggan had earlier grown disappointed with the "establishment" science in which, he says, academic research and corporate profit priorities are increasingly indistinguishable. He bootstrapped the research laboratory with his own money and now supports it with funding from a variety of private individual contributions and scientific research grants. NeuroLinx now supports a range of research projects, including an exploration of the way dolphins sleep, an effort to create a computer simulation of the ubiquitous lab worm C. elegans (known as the Open Worm project), and an exploration of nerve damage in diseases like multiple sclerosis. Dr. Ohayon had done early research in the field of autonomous agents based on neural networks, computing models inspired by biological nervous systems, but stopped for almost a decade because of worries about military applications of the technology. Now he has returned to the research: In the Green Neuroscience Laboratory, a sandboxlike table is home to small robot used to model neural network behavior. The research group recently published work exploring the basis of neural activity needed to support movement in an environment. But Dr. Ohayon is treading gingerly, looking for ways to ensure that his findings are not misused. "We have to treat neuroscience and robotics like we treat biological and chemical weapons," he said. Dr. Lam and Dr. Ohayon have decided that all of their research projects must have two components. One is the "familiar and experimental" outline of the scope and requirements of the project, Dr. Lam said. The other is a bit more unusual: "A parallel green paper that guides the study and helps explore the application guidelines." In short: How can the study be done ethically, and how can the finding be used ethically? Dr. Lam and Dr. Ohayon have begun to travel around the country, speaking about the moral quandary they believe faces neuroscientists. They start by reviewing dystopian futures as described in science fiction. "You know all of that stuff?" they ask. "It's much worse." Brain technologies emerging today may put anything that George Orwell might have imagined to shame, they say. The government's ambitious effort to map the human brain, they note, also includes research into whether information can be "written" into the brain. "The problem is that we haven't learned from history," Dr. Ohayon said. "Now we know what science can create."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
The auction will also feature a handful of early motorcycles, including a pair of 1911 Indian 4 horsepower Singles, a 1909 Indian 5 horsepower Light Twin and a 1914 Indian "Hendee Special" 7 horsepower Twin, all in unrestored condition. There will also be a rather strange two wheeled entry a 1978 Transitron Mk II Electric Prototype and although its pre sale estimate is 25,000 to 35,000, whether it fetches that much depends upon prospective buyers' attraction to bulky, unconventional gear. There is, of course, a large slate of American classics, like a 1959 Ford Galaxie Skyliner with a retractable hardtop and a 1953 Buick Skylark convertible. But for those more interested in the offbeat, the auction will feature a 1941 Chrysler Windsor Town and Country nine passenger barrelback station wagon as well as tiny beach cars like the Mini Moke and the Fiat Jolly.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
ATHENS, Ohio For hundreds of grown men and women here, work can mean sticking fingers into models of the human mouth, or trying to talk while peering at their tongues in mirrors or while hopping up and down stairs. They are foreign graduate students at Ohio University who are spending up to two hours a day learning how to speak so that their American colleagues and students will understand them. Many of them spend more than a year in the program, and they are not allowed to teach until their English instructors say they are ready. It is a complaint familiar to millions of alumni of research universities: the master's or doctoral candidate from overseas, employed as a teaching assistant, whose accent is too thick for undergraduate students to penetrate. And it is an issue that many universities are addressing more seriously, using a better set of tools, than in years past. "These are often students whose reading and writing in English is excellent, but whom Americans have a very hard time comprehending, and it calls for a lot of work," said Dawn Bikowski, the director of the English Language Improvement Program here. At American universities, one in every six graduate students hails from another country about 300,000 of them, almost half from China and India, according to the Institute of International Education. In science and technology fields, foreigners make up nearly half of the graduate students. Those from China and other East Asian countries are often like Xingbo Liu, a graduate student in nutrition here, who said she had taken English classes nearly all her life. "But we only learn how to write and read," she said, "how to choose the right answer on a written test." Many Indian or African students have done most of their formal education in English and are comfortable speaking it, but with accents that challenge American ears. "This is something that nationwide, people are paying a lot more attention to," said James Tierney, the director of the English Language Program at Yale University. Universities worry not only about the foreigners' ability to function as students and teachers, but also about "competing on an equal footing in the job market when they graduate." Graduate students require particular attention because their exposure to American education and culture can be much narrower, said Julia Moore, the director of the English Language Program at Northwestern University, with "friends, colleagues, roommates and even faculty mentors who speak their languages." In addition to requiring language instruction for many graduate students, Northwestern enrolls them in a monthlong summer immersion program in American language and culture. In some cases, university action has been prodded by politicians. Louisiana, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Washington have laws requiring that instructors be intelligible, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, and similar bills have been introduced in many other states in the last decade. Foreign applicants to American universities must submit scores on standardized tests of their English skills. In the not too distant past, that almost always meant a written exam. But university officials say that the growth of tests that include oral components has given them a much better idea of applicants' speaking skills. The test most commonly used by American institutions, the Test of English as a Foreign Language, or Toefl, added a spoken portion in 2005 when it was first administered online. The company that produces the exam, ETS, says that 98 percent of people who take it now take the Internet version, which includes listening and speaking. In another step forward, professors say, increasingly sophisticated software programs analyze and critique speech. One program, NativeAccent, which became available three years ago, has been adopted by more than 100 universities. Briju Thankachan, an Indian graduate student here in instructional technology, has spent hundreds of hours using NativeAccent. The software can isolate hundreds of pronunciation issues and even show animations of how to position parts of the mouth for each sound. The comprehension problem is far from solved. Even at an institution like Ohio University, with an unusually robust remedial program, undergraduate students say they have run into hard to understand teaching assistants. "You get better at understanding after a while, and they're willing to talk it over again, but it can be hard," said Karen Martinez, a sophomore from Chicago. The university's efforts to address the accent problem date to the 1980s. Every foreign student's command of spoken English is assessed on arrival, and each year about 300 go through the improvement program, part of the linguistics department. In classes, the students learn to break language into individual sounds, forcing them to be aware of how each part of the mouth is positioned to make a particular bit, while instructors contort their faces and touch their tongues to drive home the point. Students take sentences apart to learn rhythm, emphasis, pauses and rising and falling pitch elements that can convey as much information as words and reinforce them with stair hops and other physical exercises. "Many people come here without having learned intonation at all," said Lara Wallace, a lecturer in linguistics. "Everything comes out in a flat monotone, which makes an accent even harder to understand." Students are assigned to practice in computer labs, using the speech analysis software, and possibly the most unpopular exercise recording audio or video of themselves speaking. They have to transcribe those recordings verbatim, with every pause, false start, repetition or "um" noted. "I like it and I hate it," said Xuan He, a 24 year old sociology student. "Every time, I feel like I sound very stupid. But it is useful."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
A German historian said in new research that The Associated Press, the international news organization based in New York, formally cooperated with Nazi Germany in the 1930s, including the employment of a photographer who worked for a Nazi propaganda division. The research by Harriet Scharnberg, of Martin Luther University, argued that The A.P. was complicit in allowing the Nazis to "portray a war of extermination as a conventional war." Her research was reported Wednesday in The Guardian. The Nazi regime cracked down on local and international press with a restrictive law in 1933, but The A.P. was able to report in Germany until 1941, when the United States joined the war. In a statement, The A.P. said that until Ms. Scharnberg's research, it "had no knowledge of any accusation that material may have been directly produced and selected by Nazi propaganda ministries." "A.P. rejects the suggestion that it collaborated with the Nazi regime at any time," the company said. "Rather, The A.P. was subjected to pressure from the Nazi regime from the period of Hitler's coming to power in 1932 until the A.P.'s expulsion from Germany in 1941. A.P. staff resisted the pressure while doing its best to gather accurate, vital and objective news for the world in a dark and dangerous time."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
But also: Why is she telling us this? That's one of those critical questions that unfailingly sound grumpy and pedagogical, yet I never did figure out the answer. I don't think Ms. Baron ("A Very Common Procedure") did either. "I'm sorry. I really am," Ginnifer says to the audience in her Texan lilt, sounding confused. "I am telling you this so we what?" Played by the likable Ana Reeder, Ginnifer stands on a nearly bare stage (the set is by Steven Kemp) under bright white lights (by Josh Bradford), pouring out her story. Not always truthfully, mind you; she lies even to herself. But this is personal stuff about Jason's ordinary teenage sweetness and her solitary grown up life, about her mother's death and her faraway only sibling, who doesn't much care to be related. Martin Zimmerman's "On the Exhale" another current solo play about gun violence, also with a female narrator, at Roundabout Underground is a somewhat fantastical tale, its action driven by the grief of an immediate survivor. "When It's You," with its wry Everywoman of a narrator, is more drawn to the commonplace. One of Ms. Baron's concerns here is social isolation in a world of electronic connection. The disaffected Jason, who never moved out of his parents' house, was one kind of loner, while Ginnifer is another the dutiful daughter who valued family enough to nurse her ailing mother and now has no husband or children of her own. Which would be fine if Ginnifer were O.K. with it, but she's not.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
The British artist Damien Hirst will exhibit new works from his series of spot paintings at a stately home in Britain. The exhibition, titled "Colour Space," will open in March at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, in the southeast of England; the mansion was built in the 1720s for Britain's first prime minister, Robert Walpole. Roughly 50 of Mr. Hirst's new works will go on display in the state rooms of a building that once housed a world class collection of European old master paintings. "I originally wanted the Spots to look like they were painted by a human trying to paint like a machine," Mr. Hirst said in a statement. "'Colour Space' is going back to the human element, so instead you have the fallibility of the human hand in the drips and inconsistencies."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Woody Allen and Mia Farrow in the 1980s with, from left, Fletcher, Dylan (in Farrow's arms), Moses, and Soon Yi. A look at major events in the complicated history of the director, his children and the Farrow family as a new documentary revisits the case. For years, the account given by Woody Allen's then 7 year old adopted daughter Dylan Farrow in the days following Aug. 4, 1992, when she says he sexually assaulted her, has been central to her case against him. The specialists who heard the child's account then and in later years have been divided on whether it was credible or whether it was coerced by her adoptive mother, Mia Farrow. But the public has only heard Dylan, as an adult, recount what she told her mother nearly 30 years ago. Now Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick's four part documentary, "Allen v. Farrow," which premieres on HBO on Sunday at 9 p.m. Eastern (and streams on HBO Max), will for the first time include video footage of Dylan, recorded by her mother, describing what happened to her just days after she said Mr. Allen molested her. The film is the latest development in a case that has been debated for nearly 30 years. It made headlines again in 2014 when Mr. Allen received a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes and Dylan Farrow wrote an open letter, posted by the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, recounting her story in detail in response. Then, in September 2018, New York magazine published a lengthy interview with Soon Yi Previn, her first extended remarks on her relationship with Mr. Allen, who began to date her mother, Mia, when Ms. Previn was a young girl. Mr. Allen and Ms. Previn began a romantic relationship in 1991, when Ms. Previn was 21. Mr. Allen has long denied assaulting his daughter and argued that Mia Farrow coached Dylan to say she had been assaulted after discovering that Ms. Previn and Mr. Allen were having an affair. This timeline highlights important dates and developments in the narrative that has its roots in the 1970s. Based on New York Times articles and other news reports, it is a guide, not a comprehensive accounting, and will be updated periodically. Mia Farrow and her husband, Andre Previn, adopt Soon Yi Previn, from Korea; she is believed to be about 7 years old. According to Dylan Farrow, Mr. Allen abused her that day, touching her genitalia. She was 7 at the time. She detailed her accusation in January 2018 on "CBS This Morning": DYLAN FARROW: I was taken to a small attic crawl space in my mother's country house in Connecticut by my father. He instructed me to lay down on my stomach and play with my brother's toy train that was set up. And he sat behind me in the doorway, and as I played with the toy train, I was sexually assaulted ... As a 7 year old I would say, I would have said he touched my private parts. KING: All right. All right. FARROW: As a 32 year old, he touched my labia and my vulva with his finger. Casey Pascal, a friend of Ms. Farrow's, tells her that Dylan's babysitter described observing Mr. Allen in a position with Dylan that seemed inappropriate. According to Vanity Fair, Ms. Farrow immediately asked Dylan about it, and she gave her account to her mother. Ms. Farrow calls Dr. Coates, the psychologist, and says Dylan has complained that Mr. Allen has abused her. A major question later considered in court was whether Ms. Farrow had coached her daughter during this period. According to later court testimony by Dr. Coates, she is struck by Ms. Farrow's calm during the call, as opposed to her agitated state in the Aug. 1 call. Mr. Allen sues Ms. Farrow in New York State Court for custody of Ronan, Dylan and Moses Farrow. Mr. Allen releases a statement confirming his relationship with Ms. Previn, saying it is "real and happily all true." The same day, the Connecticut State Police announce they are investigating Mr. Allen. The focus: the allegations that he molested Dylan. Mr. Allen sues Amazon for canceling a 68 million movie deal. (Amazon had backed out amid renewed focus on Dylan's allegations.) Weeks later, The Times reports that Mr. Allen is shooting a new movie in Spain, backed by the Barcelona based conglomerate Mediapro. When asked why it was working with Mr. Allen after Amazon had stopped doing so, Mediapro said in a statement, "We have a 10 year relationship with Mr. Allen and, like all projects we produce, we judge the creator by its work." Mr. Allen and Amazon settle; terms are not disclosed. Grand Central Publishing, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, announces that it will publish Mr. Allen's memoir, "Apropos of Nothing," on April 7. The book is described as a comprehensive account of his life, "both personal and professional," including details about his relationships with "family, friends and the loves of his life."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
When Donna Adelsberg ran into her best friend's ex husband at the supermarket a few years ago, she intended to leave him standing by the deli with his pastrami and her cold shoulder. "I hadn't seen him in years, and I had pictured all these things I would say to him if I ever saw him," said Ms. Adelsberg of Lutherville, Md. "I wanted to be prickly. Because that's what you do when you have a best girlfriend. You're on her side." Peter Bronson Tracy, the man standing before her, had been married to Linda Wilk Tracy, Ms. Adelsberg's longtime friend. Ms. Adelsberg's mild revenge fantasy instead was derailed by Mr. Tracy's demeanor that day at Graul's, the local grocer. Something in Mr. Tracy had shifted since his 2015 divorce "He started talking about Linda," she said, "telling me how much he appreciated my support of her. He was really sentimental." Mr. Tracy fell in love with Ms. Tracy's warmth and instinct to nurture. Her love for him had rebellion at its roots, both said. "I was a blue blood," he said. He was a lacrosse playing boarding school boy at the Berkshire School in Sheffield, Mass., "and that was different for Linda." By the time they were married, he had converted to Judaism and she had learned plenty about lacrosse, which Mr. Tracy went on to play at Ohio Wesleyan and still plays recreationally. As 20 somethings, Mr. and Mrs. Tracy settled in Cockeysville, Md. He went to work managing a construction company. She started out as a clothing boutique manager before beginning a decades long career as an executive assistant in the surgery department at Johns Hopkins Hospital. In 1981, their son Joshua was born. Six years later came a second son, Joel. Life got busy. Their marriage was a machine powered by family goals, and it never stopped humming. If trouble was looming, neither acknowledged it. And then the bottom dropped out. When Ms. Tracy tries to trace the path that nudged them to the precipice of divorce in 2015, after 37 years of marriage, she talks first about her struggle with adjusting to life as an empty nester, in the mid 2000s. "From my perspective, it was supposed to be, 'Now it's our turn to have fun, to rediscover each other,'" she said. "But Peter thought, Now that I don't have to take anybody to practice and go to games, I'm going to play more lacrosse." A more concrete beginning of the end came in 2009, when a friend died suddenly of a heart attack. At the funeral, Ms. Tracy encouraged Mr. Tracy to get his own heart checked. When doctors told him he had asymptomatic coronary artery disease and would need a quadruple bypass, he began his withdrawal from the marriage. Mr. Tracy's reaction to his diagnosis had been disbelief. "This is going to sound naive, but I was 57 and it was the first time in my life it occurred to me that my body could let me down," he said. "I had always been an athlete." When he asked if he could put his surgery off six weeks to play in a lacrosse tournament and doctors told him no, he felt helpless. And scared. "You come out of that surgery needing a lot of taking care of, and I wasn't ready for that. I didn't want to be dependent on anybody." This included his wife. The nurturing instinct that attracted him to Ms. Tracy suddenly felt smothering. "I didn't want her taking care of me," he said. Ms. Tracy, sensing his resistance, felt stung. "To me, it felt like he wanted me to get the hell away from him," Ms. Tracy said. Her friends, including Ms. Adelsberg, rallied. "Linda was devastated, but for the longest time she was trying to work with him on some of the issues he was having," Ms. Adelsberg said. "She was optimistic until it was clear that optimism wasn't going to win." After more than a year of post surgery tension, Mr. Tracy moved out in 2012. "I thought it would be temporary, but it didn't turn out that way," he said. Their sons were stunned. "I didn't take it very well, and I don't think my brother did, either," said Joshua Tracy, now a professional glassblower in Baltimore; Joel Tracy works as a high school teacher in Brooklyn. "You grow up, and you get to a certain point and you figure, if something's going to happen, it would have happened by now. It blindsided all four of us." Between the separation and the day the divorce was official in 2015, Ms. Tracy lost her mother to lung cancer and her father to complications from Alzheimer's disease. The universe, she felt, was telling her something. "I knew I had to heal myself, try to figure things out and learn to be alone," she said. In his new home in Pikesville, 10 minutes away from Lutherville, Mr. Tracy focused on his commercial building and management company, KasCon, while piecing together a new life. He maintained personal if not geographical distance. "I missed my family, but I backed off because I thought it was best for Linda and the boys," he said. Eventually, with the help of friends and therapy, Ms. Tracy found her footing as a single person. She tried online dating with what she called "mixed results." "I met a number of interesting people as well as some truly not interesting people," she said. "I truly believed I was going to have another great love in my life." Mr. Tracy had already dipped into the dating pool. But he was having trouble letting go the past. "Linda was always on my mind," he said. By 2017, the Tracy sons' sense of loss and confusion over their parents' broken relationship was dissolving. Each was thinking about marriage himself. "I was finally feeling whole again," Joel Tracy said. Both got engaged within a few months of each other, prompting Mr. and Ms. Tracy to consider their responsibilities as parents of two soon to be grooms. Ms. Tracy wanted to take the families of her future daughters in law to dinner. To be cordial, she asked Mr. Tracy if he wanted to join. "He readily agreed," she said. "As crazy as it sounds, there was never a lot of acrimony between us. And we wanted our sons to know we could come together for them, that we could play nicely in the sandbox together." At the time, neither realized just how nicely they might play together again. When Joel got engaged in March 2018, his parents took a train to Manhattan to meet his fiancee's parents. Sometime during that three hour journey, Mr. Tracy spilled the contents of his heart. "I told Linda I was always in love with her, despite our divorce and separation," he said. By the time of Joshua's June 2018 wedding in Baltimore, the Tracys had begun meeting, secretly, for walks and breakfast dates in Lutherville. "We wanted to keep it on the down low because I didn't want to do anything to steal the thunder of the bride and groom," Ms. Tracy said. Despite their efforts, the cat was mostly out of the bag by Joshua's wedding reception. "Peter held my hand during the ceremony, and people observed us dancing," she said. "A couple of my girlfriends pulled me aside and said, 'Is there something we should know?'" Their sons got suspicious, too. "Everyone was coming up to me at the wedding like, 'What's going on with your parents?'" Joshua said. "I was on cloud nine to begin with. This was like the cherry on top." In May 2019, Mr. and Ms. Tracy bought a new house together in Lutherville. In September, they took a three week trip to Italy. Mr. Tracy had already bought an engagement ring to replace the one Ms. Tracy traded in after their divorce for diamond stud earrings. On the evening of Sept. 28, after they finished dinner at Trattoria Al Giardinetto da Severino in Venice, he took Ms. Tracy's hand and, for the second time in four decades, asked her to marry him. The bride, in a move that surprised friends who has asked whether she planned to wear cream or gold, wore a black tuxedo she found at Octavia, a Baltimore boutique, and paired it with three strands of pearls. Mr. Tracy wore a custom suit by Tom James. He entered to a piano rendition of Willie Nelson's "You Were Always on My Mind." When she entered, carrying a bouquet of lilies, the piano player switched to "At Last." "Our parents have shown us that when two halves come together to form a whole, the results can be quite wonderful for quite some time," Joshua said. "But sometimes those halves drift apart, and only when they heal and grow can they become whole for themselves again. Two halves don't make a whole, two wholes make a whole." Through tears, he added, "Mom and Dad, it is a privilege and an honor to bear witness to this union today." Before he pronounced them remarried, he paused to hear vows they had written for each other. Mr. Tracy choked back a sob as he recalled first setting eyes on Ms. Tracy in 1974. "I realize now the perfect match has always been there," he said. Ms. Tracy sounded an optimistic note. "Remember," she said. "It's never too late to live happily ever after." Mazel Tov At the end of the ceremony, Joel Tracy passed his father a glass to break underfoot, a Jewish tradition. His brother, Joshua, said, "May your love sustain you and keep you together for as long as it takes the pieces of the glass to come back together. In other words, may you stay together forever."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
A new study offers important information to men who are facing difficult decisions about how to treat prostate cancer in its early stages, or whether to treat it at all. Researchers followed patients for 10 years and found no difference in death rates between men who were picked at random to have surgery or radiation, or to rely on "active monitoring" of the cancer, with treatment only if it progressed. Death rates from the cancer were low over all: only about 1 percent of patients 10 years after diagnosis. But the disease was more likely to progress and spread in the men who opted for monitoring rather than for early treatment. And about half the patients in the study who had started out being monitored wound up having surgery or radiation. The patients are still being followed, which should reveal whether the death rate will eventually increase for the men assigned to monitoring. Doctors say the findings should help reassure men that surgery and radiation are equally reasonable choices in the early stages of the disease. "I can counsel patients better now," Dr. Freddie C. Hamdy, a leader of the study from the University of Oxford, in England, said in an interview. "I can tell them very precisely, 'Look, your risk of dying from cancer is very, very small. If you receive treatment you will get some benefit. It will reduce the disease from growing outside your prostate, but these are exactly the side effects you might expect.'" Active monitoring involves regular clinic visits with physical exams of the prostate, periodic biopsies and blood tests for prostate specific antigen, or PSA, a substance that may indicate the disease is worsening. Between 40 and 50 percent of men with early prostate cancer in the United States now choose active monitoring. The study, published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, was the first to include detailed information from patients about the side effects of treatment. Men who had surgery to remove the prostate were the most likely to have lingering impotence and urinary incontinence. Those given radiation reported bowel problems after six months of treatment (usually with gradual improvement) but not urinary incontinence. Sexual function also diminished after radiation, but recovered somewhat. But there were no differences among the three groups in anxiety, depression or their feelings about how their health affected their quality of life. Dr. Peter T. Scardino, a prostate surgeon and chairman of the department of surgery at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York who was not involved in the study, said the research was important because there was little previous data comparing surgery, radiation and careful monitoring in men with early prostate cancer. Dr. Scardino said the findings helped confirm that active monitoring is a valuable approach for many men. He said that it was appropriate for a third to a half of men with early prostate cancers, and that only a third of those patients would need treatment within 10 years. But Dr. Scardino emphasized that the monitoring must be done regularly and with great care, for the rest of a patient's life. He added that an important message from the study is that early prostate cancer is not an emergency, and men have time to decide what to do about it. Worldwide, there were 1.1 million cases of prostate cancer and 307,000 deaths from it in 2012, the latest year data were collected by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. In the United States, about 181,000 cases and 26,000 deaths are expected in 2016. The average age at diagnosis is 66 in the United States, and the disease rarely occurs in men under 40. Most men who have prostate cancer do not die from it, according to the American Cancer Society. The disease often grows very slowly but not always. Some cases are potentially deadly, but tests cannot always tell which ones. The uncertainty leaves many men in a quandary, particularly because of the bowel, bladder and sexual problems from treatment. In 2012, the United States Preventive Services Task Force, an independent panel of experts picked by the government, recommended against routine screening for prostate cancer with the PSA test. The group said screening finds many tumors that may never have harmed the patient, and leads too many men into unneeded surgery or radiation, with their troubling side effects. Dr. Hamdy's team set out to address the quandary. They studied 1,643 patients in Britain ages 50 to 69 who had early prostate cancers, found with routine PSA testing and then a biopsy if the PSA was abnormal. All the cancers were localized, meaning they were confined to the prostate and had not spread to nearby tissue outside the gland, or to distant organs. The patients had PSA measurements of 3 or higher, and about three quarters had a Gleason score of 6; the rest had higher Gleason scores. Gleason scores are a measure of aggressiveness and range from 6 to 10 in cancers, with higher scores being worse. The patients were then assigned at random to one of three groups: A third had surgery, a third had radiation, and a third had active monitoring. Though death rates from the cancer did not differ, more men on active monitoring had progression. The disease spread to distant parts of the body in 33 men on monitoring, 13 who had surgery and 16 who had radiation. The differences were statistically significant. Other progression, to nearby tissue outside the prostate, was also more common with monitoring: 112 cases, compared with 46 each in the surgery and radiation groups. As time went on, more and more of the monitored patients wound up having treatment. Dr. Hamdy said not all those who left monitoring actually needed treatment. "We know that 80 percent of them had not shown signs of progression," he said, adding that anxiety on the part of the patients or their doctors, or some suspicion of progression, may have pushed them into treatment. Robert Boulton, 76, a retired maker of rubber gloves, was initially assigned to active monitoring but switched to radiation treatment after four years, when his PSA went up. In an interview, he said two doctors recommended the treatment and one opposed it, so he went with the majority advice. He said his only side effect was what he called "man boobs," swelling in the breast area from the hormonal treatment that is given along with radiation. Another patient, Douglas Collett, 73, was also assigned to active monitoring in 2008 and has stayed with it. When he was first told he had cancer, he wanted to get rid of it immediately, he said. But when he learned more about the disease and the side effects of treatment, waiting made more sense, and he actually felt relieved when he was picked for the monitoring arm of the study. He realizes the disease could progress, he said, and if it does he will probably have radiation to treat it. In the meantime, he said, "I'm fit as a flea."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Dan Flavin's outsize light sculpture looked like a luminous frame. Not one to miss an opportunity, Tara Subkoff posed strategically in front of it, its rectangular shape and pastel fluorescence complementing the candied pink of her Simone Rocha dress. "There's an optimism to this piece," Ms. Subkoff said. That suited her. "I'm the kind of person who sees the glass as half full." Ms. Subkoff, 46, had paused for a closer look at the Flavin, her first stop on a serpentine tour of the new Museum of Modern Art on a recent Wednesday. The space, opened up and chicly redone, was a fitting setting. An actress, artist and, in an earlier life, unregenerate gadabout, Ms. Subkoff seemed intent on presenting the world with a shiny, self assured and elegantly gift wrapped version of herself. She had slipped off her satiny Moncler parka and drifted past the entrance, ignoring its showy welcome sign, to make her way to the escalators, scouring a map along the way. She had come with a mission: to locate the work of Pope L., an artist perhaps best known for strapping himself to a skateboard, donning a Superman costume and crawling the length of Manhattan. Wandering along MoMA's broad corridors, which meandered like avenues from east to west, she was suddenly disoriented. Not that she minded. "Getting lost in a place like this makes you feel like a kid again," she said. "It's a playground. It allows you to see things through the eyes of a child. That's the real job of a museum, to make us all feel like children, to make us see things with fresh eyes. MoMA got it right." As she spun around, random scenes caught her gaze. "This is magic," she said, having stopped abruptly at the sight of a somberly lighted black box on an upper floor. It was home to "Rainforest," an installation conceived by David Tudor, of bell , bucket and pipe shaped pendants suspended from the ceiling, each emitting the rustles and murmurs of an imaginary jungle. She poked her head inside what looked like the supersize hair dryer to listen to the sounds of vagrant winds, chittering birds and wildlife, as rapt as if she had entered some mystical chamber of wonders. Puzzled at the sight of her, a visitor asked discreetly, "Is she an actress?" Well, yes. And no. She counted the artists Rita Ackermann, Richard Phillips and Dash Snow as friends and collaborators. Even now her inner circle includes Mirabelle Marden, an artist and daughter of the artist Brice Marden, and the photographer Jessica Craig Martin. "I was very much this Edie Sedgwick of the art world at that time," Ms. Subkoff recalled. "I had a big Chelsea loft and had my friends all over to my house for parties. I spent almost every night out with Dash and Dan," she said, referring to the artist Dan Colen. Living perennially in the public eye, she was tagged an "It" girl. But invoke that phrase now, and she bristles. "I've never been an 'It' girl," Ms. Subkoff said. "An 'It' girl is a socialite or someone with money who goes to parties or someone who doesn't do anything and is famous for doing nothing." She appeared in the 1997 romantic comedy "As Good as It Gets" and in Whit Stillman's 1998 film, "The Last Days of Disco," among other movies. Four years ago, she made her directorial debut with " Horror," about a rich girl sleepover gone awry, a film that was coolly received. These days, Ms. Subkoff is reinventing herself once more with a multimedia installation at the Hole, a gallery on Bowery (through Nov. 17). The focal point is "Deepfake," a 25 minute video that follows a character, Eve, as she drifts through the California desert. In the room's center, poised on a rotating bed, Eve glances into a cellphone camera to admire her porcelain features. For Ms. Subkoff the work is a testament to her vociferous feminism. "I was exploring the concept of what it means to get older and for there to be a newer, upgraded version of yourself, a kind of A.I. sex companion available for male consumption," she said. The show also marks a turning point on her road to self discovery. To reach it Ms. Subkoff had to clear a few hurdles. More than a decade ago she received a diagnosis of a brain tumor and underwent a craniotomy, an experience that cost her time and momentum. "A brain tumor is a stigma, a real stigma," she said. "A lot of people think you're contagious or dead." But Ms. Subkoff, who clearly thrives on exposure, did not miss the chance to put her trials on show, detailing the excruciating episode in Harper's Bazaar and The Huffington Post. It's her work that sustains her, and the sense that she has found her place. She is still chary of labels but calls herself an artist. Wandering back toward the MoMA entrance, now thronged with late day visitors, Ms. Subkoff said, "All these years later I'm just coming out of the closet. "It's scary," she said, her voice trailing. "I feel vulnerable."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
The actor Santino Fontana had his legs waxed for the first time last year. His chest, too. He mastered, mostly, how to walk in heels and riddled out which lipsticks flatter him. (He's an autumn. Clearly.) Last spring, during a turn in "Hello, Dolly!" he brought Bernadette Peters pictures of himself in a variety of women's wigs. "Pretty girl" she scrawled next to some of them. Beside others: "Not so pretty girl." "Like what even is a feminine side?" Mr. Fontana said recently, at a theater district bistro, as he pushed a pile of pear salad around his plate. A Broadway veteran, Mr. Fontana, who turns 37 on March 21, is originating his first true male musical lead in "Tootsie," which starts previews at the Marquis Theater on March 29. If you squint, it's his first female lead, too. "He has created two very different characters who live in the same body," Robert Horn, the show's book writer said. "Tootsie," based on the 1982 Dustin Hoffman film, with music and lyrics by David Yazbek, tells the story of Michael Dorsey (Mr. Fontana), an underemployed actor and top notch narcissist. Desperate for work, he grabs a wig and a dress, crashing a friend's audition in female drag. (In the movie, it's for a soap opera, here a misbegotten Broadway musical: "Juliet's Curse.") He lands the part. Michael Dorsey becomes Dorothy Michaels. Dorothy Michaels becomes a star. Mr. Fontana's feminine side sings a lot of the Act One numbers. Broadway loves men who dress, and occasionally sing, as women. Take, say, "La Cage Aux Folles" and "Kinky Boots," as well as the developing productions of "Mrs. Doubtfire" and "To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar," which cast Mr. Fontana in an early reading. But Mr. Fontana typically presents as a lyric tenor, not a contralto, and he has never worn women's clothes before, except once, in the 8th grade, when he skirted up as a cheerleader for a school skit. "It killed," he said. The two times I met him, once in Chicago last fall and once in New York in late winter, he was dressed low key bro ishly in jeans and baseball caps. One cap was red, the other one, classier, a houndstooth tweed. Dorothy is a departure. And speaking of support, how strange does it feel to spend eight shows a week in pantyhose? "It's not any weirder than anything else," Mr. Fontana had told me when we met for an iced coffee just before his final performance in Chicago. "It's all weird. If you're really doing your job, you're never being yourself." Still, he was looking forward to that last show. "Oh my God, I'm just so happy I don't have to shave tomorrow," he'd said. "And I don't have to wear that corset." But what makes "Tootsie" weirder, aside from the corset, aside from the twinned roles, aside from barn raising a multimillion dollar show that lives or dies on laughter, is the moment in which it arrives. Broadway has been reckoning, slowly, imperfectly, with the idea that musical comedies need to offer female characters full interiority and that maybe abuse physical, psychological, verbal isn't so forgivable or funny. That "Tootsie" is another musical with an all male creative team makes it essential that it does right by women, even women played by men. But doing right can't in any way stifle its reckless, headstrong comedy. Which is all to say that Mr. Fontana has some big kitten heels to fill. Mr. Fontana was born in Stockton, Calif., the younger child of a teacher and an agronomist. He grew up in a small town in Washington state, playing baseball and acting in school plays: Wilbur in "Charlotte's Web," Jesus in "Godspell." At the University of Minnesota, he completed a classical training program and at 24 he returned to Minnesota, playing Hamlet at the Guthrie. The Star Tribune compared him to the "whiny 'Friends' star David Schwimmer," then fell for his antic style. He broke into Broadway quickly, playing mostly secondary roles, like the brother in "Billy Elliot," like the brother in "Brighton Beach Memoirs." He did play the prince in "Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella," opposite Laura Osnes, but he wouldn't really count that as a lead. "I would say, like, 'I love how much Laura has to do,'" he said. His voice work in "Frozen"? Another prince, another second man. But as his friend, the playwright Stephen Karam had told me, Mr. Fontana "is meticulous in understanding every inch of a role." So before he sat, before he stood, before he mimed putting on earrings, he took a few breaths to decide how and why Michael might move just then. Each gesture had to be made precise, intentional, cogent. "He's intense in the best way," said Mr. Ellis who had told the show's producers he would only direct if Mr. Fontana could star. The word "intense" came up a lot when colleagues discussed Mr. Fontana. Also: "Smart" and "passionate" and "focused." Is someone so "focused" tough to work with? A lot of people will recognize Mr. Fontana from "Crazy Ex Girlfriend," a popular television comedy that he insisted on exiting, a possible red flag. (For the record: He says he left because he'd never intended to do an hourlong series, because his wife's career is in New York, because he missed theater. TV can wait until he's "tapped out," he said. Skylar Astin now plays the role.) But every colleague I spoke to described his playfulness, his generosity. "He's never throwing you under the bus to get a laugh," said Joanna Gleason, who starred opposite him in Mr. Karam's "Sons of the Prophet." Still, the character of Michael, a perfectionist and a straight shooter, pursuing his art like some creepy stalker, came easily. (Is Michael Mr. Fontana minus any emotional intelligence? Basically.) Dorothy was a tougher nut. She couldn't be a joke, she couldn't be a caricature. Michael invents her on the fly, yes, but the audience should still feel a waft of estrogen whenever she walks on. To make Dorothy so persuasive that his wife has asked to hang out with her at home ("I was like, 'You're nuts,'" Mr. Fontana said), he began with hair and makeup looks matter! Months before rehearsals for the Chicago tryout began, he sent some early makeup tests to Mr. Ellis, who emailed back asking, "What sick world are you in?" He interviewed a bunch of women, his wife, his family, his friends, studying physical vocabulary. He borrowed especially from his mother. She doesn't see the resemblance. He worked with Joan Lader, his longtime voice teacher, to find the right timbre for Dorothy. "It's not a cartoon voice," Ms. Lader said, speaking by telephone. "It's not like Mickey Mouse, it's not really falsetto." The notes, she said, "sound quite female." In Dorothy, Mr. Fontana found a character who has to walk the tightrope (yes, in heels) that many professional women will recognize. "She has to be," he said, "assertive, but not bitchy, compassionate, but not emotional." And unlike Michael, she still finds the energy to take care of everyone else in the room. Mr. Fontana had more to do. He wanted a show that would be worthy of Dorothy, of the women who inspired her. He advocated for an ending in which Michael owns up to the women he'd defrauded, something the movie doesn't include, "which is shocking," he said. And he arranged a meeting with the writer Rebecca Traister, who happens to be a staunch "Tootsie" fan, to discuss the show's gender dynamics. They had several conversations that Ms. Traister, speaking by telephone, described as complicated and nuanced. The first talk was on the day of Mr. Fontana's first chest waxing. "I felt he was extremely attuned to experiences he might not have been attuned to before," she said. "He was deeply committed to this being a feminist show and that he wanted to do everything in his power to make it one," she said. Mr. Fontana wasn't quite so forthright with me. Maybe he didn't want to mansplain. The only time he used the word feminist was in praise of Ms. Traister. Maybe he didn't want to take up more space than an actor should. But he did say, more generally, that while it's up to men to listen to women it's also up to them to become part of the conversation. "I want to help," he said. Standing up for his character has made him more aware of how men treat men, how men treat women, how people compliment his wife's looks before they mention her talent, how his co stars might sometimes need an escort to the subway, "because it's dangerous to walk! Down the street!" He added a few expletives. As Ms. Fontana told me, "This experience has given him true empathy." He has had to listen to people obsessing over his hair and clothes and figure "Pretty girl," "Not so pretty girl" and he has had to obsess over them, too, while also arguing about what a woman can do and say and be. After the Chicago run, Ms. Fontana overheard her husband speaking to the costume designer, William Ivey Long, about that awful corset. As an actress who has sometimes had to sacrifice comfort for aesthetics, she listened in. She heard him ask if they could lose the corset, if they could find something less snug. And then she heard him say, "But I don't want to sacrifice the waistline in that red dress." Just what a woman or a man passionately committed to playing one would say.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
MOSCOW After years of delay, the largest oil field outside the Middle East started producing crude on Monday, offering a valuable new deposit to meet the world's rising energy needs. The first oil to flow from the Kashagan field, in Kazakhstan, was just a trickle. But a consortium of oil companies, including Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips of the United States, have ambitious plans to increase production over the next several years. "This is one of the most complicated projects in the world," Claudio Descalzi, the chief operating officer for exploration and production at Eni, the Italian oil company involved in the project, said in a telephone interview. "It's really an historical moment. It's first quality oil, very light oil, and we are close to countries that are growing, and that present the best markets." When geologists discovered the field in 2000, it was the largest new deposit since the discovery of the Prudhoe Bay field on the North Slope of Alaska in 1968. And it remains so today, suggesting that such oil sources are becoming harder to find.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Victoria Smith, who has the design blog SF Girl , used Benjamin Moore's Onyx on her home in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. New on the Block: The Little Black House A year ago, partly in response to the election, I began compiling pictures of black houses on Pinterest and persuaded my husband that we should paint our house some shade of black. I stayed in a black cabin in the Hudson Valley on a retreat with a girlfriend. I collected paint chips, like Benjamin Moore's Soot. I wanted my house to be, as Morrissey crooned, "The color I feel inside." Everyone I told had strong feelings about my decision to paint my house black."Metaphorically speaking, you mean?" my friend said when I told her about my craving for darkness. My father said I was crazy. My painter tried to convince me that the color would fade in five years. I live in the suburbs, and no one in my suburb paints a house black. In my suburb you're expected to paint your house white. Or gray. Or taupe. Black represents sadness, anger or grief for many. But that's not all. A 2004 study of college students' responses to color found that black also evokes a sense of richness and power. Black can be enveloping and warm, and even signify high drama, noted Judith Gura, a professor of design history and theory at the New York School of Interior Design. In medieval times, Ms. Gura said, black was associated with royalty; it was luxurious. Black can be practical too. In northern Europe, where tar was used as a water sealant on exteriors, the color stuck. But those black buildings are in Scandinavia or the Netherlands, far from my pallid neighborhood. Now I have more allies. In the past couple of years, black homes have cropped up on the internet, dominating decorating sites like Dwell, Gardenista and Apartment Therapy. The Black Houses Tumblr has amassed pages and pages of black homes in rural, urban and desert settings. Shou sugi ban, the ancient Japanese technique of charring exterior wood, became a thing. PPG Paints named Black Flame its 2018 color of the year. Nashville based O'More College of Design coated its 2017 show house in black. And in October, Phaidon Press published "Black: Architecture in Monochrome," with examples of 150 black exteriors. Then the impossible happened. HGTV the model of mainstream American cheerful design chose to color its 2018 Dream Home Sherwin Williams's Tricorn Black. Brian Patrick Flynn, an Atlanta interior designer in charge of the Dream Home, said he often used black in his designs (Tricorn Black and Glidden's Onyx Black are his favorites) because it gives a house without architectural significance some identity. Mr. Flynn's own home is painted black; so is his cabin about an hour outside of Atlanta. He said he believed this interest in black was a reaction to the white paint and white kitchen trend, which started during the housing market crash a decade ago. People turned to white because if they wanted to sell their houses, they needed the color to be simple and inoffensive. "We've gone from everybody doing things that are really safe with white or cream or dove gray," Mr. Flynn said. Now people are sick of the news. They're miserable about the world. They want to take charge of their homes. "I think people are embracing things that may have been considered risky before and saying, 'Let's just go for it,'" he said. Black is a color of provocation. Nineteenth century anarchists waved their black flag. Twentieth century fascists loved it. Beat poets, punks and Goths made it their brand. The Black Panthers wore black leather jackets and black berets. When the fashion designer Rei Kawakubo introduced everyday black clothes in the early 1980s, critics described the collection as "post atomic." Most recently, black is what women in Hollywood and Congress chose to wear to express solidarity with victims of sexual assault. In early 2016, Victoria Smith of SF Girl, a design blog, painted her home in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles Benjamin Moore's Onyx. She latched on to black after seeing a slew of houses painted that color in Amsterdam. For her, black houses are symbols of power. "It's like, don't mess with me," she said. Ms. Smith was initially worried about her neighbors' reaction. "I think they thought I was some Goth person," she said. Then more people in the neighborhood began painting their homes black. Was she bothered by the imitations? No, she said. She was flattered. For Abigail Ahern, an interior designer and retailer in London, black is warm and mysterious but also a courageous color for women to slather on walls. "You have to have a certain amount of confidence to use black, and I think we all have more confidence than ever before," she said. "We're channeling our own direction." She first painted a small alcove black in her 1860s four story Victorian, then became so entranced that she painted her entire interior and exterior black and filled her garden with furniture and accessories to match. That wasn't enough. So she developed a line of dark hued paint. Her most popular color: Hudson Black."Black gives me a feeling of empowerment," she said. "I know that's really silly because it's just a can of paint, but it actually really does."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
These new Earth size planets orbit a dwarf star named Trappist 1 about 40 light years from Earth. Some of them could have water on their surfaces. Not just one, but seven Earth size planets that could potentially harbor life have been identified orbiting a tiny star not too far away, offering the first realistic opportunity to search for signs of alien life outside the solar system. The planets orbit a dwarf star named Trappist 1, about 40 light years, or 235 trillion miles, from Earth. That is quite close in cosmic terms, and by happy accident, the orientation of the orbits of the seven planets allows them to be studied in great detail. One or more of the exoplanets in this new system could be at the right temperature to be awash in oceans of water, astronomers said, based on the distance of the planets from the dwarf star. "This is the first time so many planets of this kind are found around the same star," Michael Gillon, an astronomer at the University of Liege in Belgium and the leader of an international team that has been observing Trappist 1, said during a telephone news conference organized by the journal Nature, which published the findings on Wednesday. Scientists could even discover compelling evidence of aliens. "I think that we have made a crucial step toward finding if there is life out there," said Amaury H. M. J. Triaud, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge in England and another member of the research team. "Here, if life managed to thrive and releases gases similar to that we have on Earth, then we will know." Cool red dwarfs are the most common type of star, so astronomers are likely to find more planetary systems like that around Trappist 1 in the coming years. "You can just imagine how many worlds are out there that have a shot to becoming a habitable ecosystem," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's science mission directorate, said during a NASA news conference on Wednesday. "Are we alone out there? We're making a step forward with this a leap forward, in fact towards answering that question." Telescopes on the ground now and the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit will be able to discern some of the molecules in the planetary atmospheres. The James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch next year, will peer at the infrared wavelengths of light, ideal for studying Trappist 1. Comparisons among the different conditions of the seven will also be revealing. "The Trappist 1 planets make the search for life in the galaxy imminent," said Sara Seager, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not a member of the research team. "For the first time ever, we don't have to speculate. We just have to wait and then make very careful observations and see what is in the atmospheres of the Trappist planets." Even if the planets all turn out to be lifeless, scientists will have learned more about what keeps life from flourishing. Astronomers always knew other stars must have planets, but until a couple of decades ago, they had not been able to spot them. Now they have confirmed more than 3,400, according to the Open Exoplanet Catalog. (An exoplanet is a planet around a star other than the sun.) The authors of the Nature paper include Didier Queloz, one of the astronomers who discovered in 1995 the first known exoplanet around a sunlike star. While the Trappist planets are about the size of Earth give or take 25 percent in diameter the star is very different from our sun. Trappist 1, named after a robotic telescope in the Atacama Desert of Chile that the astronomers initially used to study the star, is what astronomers call an "ultracool dwarf," with only one twelfth the mass of the sun and a surface temperature of 4,150 degrees Fahrenheit, much cooler than the 10,000 degrees radiating from the sun. Trappist is a shortening of Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope. During the NASA news conference, Dr. Gillon gave a simple analogy: If our sun were the size of a basketball, Trappist 1 would be a golf ball. Until the last few years, scientists looking for life elsewhere in the galaxy have focused on finding Earth size planets around sun like stars. But it is hard to pick out the light of a planet from the glare of a bright star. Small dim dwarfs are much easier to study. Trappist 1 periodically dimmed noticeably, indicating that a planet might be passing in front of the star, blocking part of the light. From the shape of the dips, the astronomers calculate the size of the planet. Trappist 1's light dipped so many times that the astronomers concluded, in research reported last year, that there were at least three planets around the star. Telescopes from around the world then also observed Trappist 1, as did the Spitzer Space Telescope of NASA. Spitzer observed Trappist 1 nearly around the clock for 20 days, capturing 34 transits. Together with the ground observations, it let the scientists calculate not three planets, but seven. The planets are too small and too close to the star to be photographed directly. All seven are very close to the dwarf star, circling more quickly than the planets in our solar system. The innermost completes an orbit in just 1.5 days. The farthest one completes an orbit in about 20 days. That makes the planetary system more like the moons of Jupiter than a larger planetary system like our solar system. "They form a very compact system," Dr. Gillon said, "the planets being pulled close to each other and very close to the star." In addition, the orbital periods of the inner six suggest that the planets formed farther away from the star and then were all gradually pulled inward, Dr. Gillon said. Because the planets are so close to a cool star, their surfaces could be at the right temperatures to have water flow, considered one of the essential ingredients for life. The fourth, fifth and sixth planets orbit in the star's "habitable zone," where the planets could sport oceans. So far that is just speculation, but by measuring which wavelengths of light are blocked by the planet, scientists will be able to figure out what gases float in the atmospheres of the seven planets. So far, they have confirmed for the two innermost planets that they are not enveloped in hydrogen. That means they are rocky like Earth, ruling out the possibility that they were mini Neptune gas planets that are prevalent around many other stars. Because the planets are so close to Trappist 1, they have quite likely become "gravitationally locked" to the star, always with one side of the planets facing the star, much as it is always the same side of Earth's moon facing Earth. That would mean one side would be warmer, but an atmosphere would distribute heat, and the scientists said that would not be an insurmountable obstacle for life. For a person standing on one of the planets, it would be a dim environment, with perhaps only about one two hundredth the light that we see from the sun on Earth, Dr. Triaud said. (That would still be brighter than the moon at night.) The star would be far bigger. On Trappist 1f, the fifth planet, the star would be three times as wide as the sun seen from Earth. As for the color of the star, "we had a debate about that," Dr. Triaud said. Some of the scientists expected a deep red, but with most of the star's light emitted at infrared wavelengths and out of view of human eyes, perhaps a person would "see something more salmon y," Dr. Triaud said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Among all the world's uncertainties, at least one matter seems settled: Batteries and electric motors will have a major role in powering the cars and trucks of our future. What is far less certain is how large that role will be, or how quickly the shift to electrification will happen. The trend of electric powered cars has grown far beyond hybrids like the ubiquitous Toyota Prius. Early this year, Ford Motor announced that it would develop hybrid versions of both its brawny F 150 pickup, the country's best selling vehicle, and the performance focused Mustang. Last month, Volvo said that starting in 2019, all of its newly released models would be hybrid or all electric. This was quickly followed by the news that France and Britain plan to ban the sale of new petroleum burning vehicles by 2040. But gas and diesel powered engines are not done yet. Just as electrified cars whether hybrids or pure battery powered models seem headed for market dominance, Mazda announced a breakthrough in gasoline engines that could make them far more efficient. It is the latest plot twist in a century of improvements for internal combustion engines, a power source pronounced dead many times that has persisted nevertheless. Here is some truth squadding on the latest in auto technology. Why all the excitement about the new gas engine technology? Mazda said it had made a big advance in a combustion method commonly known as homogeneous charge compression ignition, which would result in gasoline engines that are 20 to 30 percent more efficient than the company's best existing engines. Researchers around the world have tried to crack this process for years, but it has never really left the laboratory. Mazda, which now markets no hybrid vehicles, calls the engine Skyactiv X and says it is scheduled for a 2019 introduction. In simplest terms, the big difference with the new engine is that under certain running conditions, the gasoline is ignited without the use of spark plugs. Instead, combustion is set off by the extreme heat in the cylinder that results from the piston inside the engine traveling upward and compressing air trapped inside, the same method diesel engines use. The efficiency gains come with the ability to operate using a very lean mixture very little gas for the amount of air that a typical spark ignition engine cannot burn cleanly. So there is still some life left in gasoline engines? Definitely. John Heywood, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, predicts that in 2050, 60 percent of light duty vehicles will still have combustion engines, often working with electric motors in hybrid systems and largely equipped with a turbocharger. Vehicles powered purely by batteries, he estimates, will make up 15 percent of sales. The power boosting advantage of turbochargers is widely deployed today, but in coming years it could be tilted toward the design of smaller engines that still meet customers' needs. "The real benefit comes from downsizing," Dr. Heywood said. "That reduces friction, which chews up a significant part of the energy input." Dr. Heywood, who has pondered whether he would best serve his students by teaching combustion or electrochemistry, addresses the challenge of gasoline's future from a somewhat different direction: the practical limitations of battery electric cars. "Holding a gas nozzle, you can transfer 10 megawatts of energy in five minutes," he said, explaining today's refueling reality. To recharge a Tesla electric at that rate today, he said, would require "a cable you couldn't hold." The question is how much better gas engines can get. Conventional piston engines have come a long way, and technical refinements like direct fuel injection, variable valve timing and cylinder shutdown systems are now widespread. Along with innovations in lightweight body materials and dual clutch transmissions, mileage has steadily improved, so naturally, further gains are now harder to come by usually in single digit percentages. That depends on what is meant by "electric." In the United States today, only about a dozen new models run solely on motors powered by batteries; five times that many models in showrooms use some combination of a gasoline or diesel engine and an electric motor. These hybrids, some of which carry large batteries that can be recharged by plugging into grid power, can be very efficient. But because of the extra equipment, their initial cost is higher. Electrified cars of all types are selling briskly compared with previous years, but they are still a tiny portion of the total market in this country. In July, hybrids and electrics accounted for 44,000 sales in a total market of 1.4 million vehicles. Even the plans in Europe to ban the sale of new gas or diesel powered cars will take decades to fully kick in. The rules would not take effect for more than 20 years. In addition, the average age of the 270 million light duty vehicles on the road in the United States today approaches 12 years, so even if sales of new petrol burning cars stopped immediately, it would take more than a decade for the fleet to switch over. But cars like the Toyota Prius can still be more economical, right? Hybrids like the Prius may continue to save money at each fill up, but that's not the whole story. In its test of the 2017 Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivan, a plug in model that the government says can drive 33 miles on battery power alone, Car and Driver calculated the payback of the 2,100 hybrid premium to be more than eight years (based on driving 12,000 miles a year and before any tax incentives). So, yes, there are savings if you drive lots of miles or tend to hold on to vehicles for a long time. The calculus shifts if gas gets more expensive. That said, the hybrid is friendlier to the planet in terms of tailpipe emissions and greenhouse gases. What else should we expect with engines further into the future? By 2050, Dr. Heywood's studies project, today's fuel economy could be doubled. "A quarter to a third of that improvement would come from improvements to the vehicle," he said, in areas like aerodynamics and weight reduction. Other promising areas include variable compression ratios a technology Nissan plans to introduce next year and making better use of available fuels. That question of whether to teach combustion or electrochemistry? Dr. Heywood still wrestles with it, though he admits that the answer is "both of the above." The topic has become the theme of a presentation he has prepared and the concept of electrification can be found on most pages.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
For years, the 11th and 12 arrondissements, two formerly quiet, working class neighborhoods in eastern Paris, have been the preferred location for the French capital's best young chefs. Why? Affordable apartments assure a hungry young clientele for the new restaurateurs who choose the area for its low rent commercial spaces. Now a growing number of the city's fledgling cooks are setting up shop in another atmospheric old working class quarter: Montmartre, a hilltop district in the 18th arrondissement best known for the Sacre Coeur basilica and the artists who once lived and worked here Toulouse Lautrec, Utrillo and Modigliani, among others. Today, most of the action is on the back of La Butte (the mound, in French), as the locals call this spot in the center of Montmartre. Here on the north facing slope of the district, arty younger Parisians who'd rather spend their money on good food than rent are flocking to a wave of excellent new and reasonably priced casual restaurants, including one that was just awarded a Michelin star. Aside from the miniature Jeff Koons style sculptures adorning the tables, this year and a half old place on a quiet side street looks like countless unremarkable middlebrow neighborhood restaurants in Paris. The locals know better, since young chef Laurent Magnin's superb contemporary French cooking had made it one of the capital's most exciting dark horse tables. In early February, though, it won a star in the 2018 Michelin Guide to France, so the secret is out. Still, the snag for some may be that there's no a la carte menu here. Instead, they only serve multicourse, blind tasting menus, although food phobias and allergies are respected. The menu changes often but dishes like risotto garnished with veal stock lacquered crayfish; grilled sea bream with peanut sauce and a deconstructed paella are as beautiful to taste at as they are to behold. Good value for the money, and open for both lunch and dinner on Saturdays, too.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
The flu vaccine is more effective than expected, federal health officials said on Thursday at a special news conference held to discuss the dangerous flu season, which is expected to kill more than 50,000 Americans. This year's vaccine is about 25 percent effective against the H3N2 strain of flu that is causing most illnesses and deaths, said Dr. Anne Schuchat, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In a bigger surprise, the vaccine is about 51 percent effective in children, according to the C.D.C.'s preliminary analysis. In Australia, the same vaccine was rated about 10 percent effective overall against H3N2, and a recent Canadian analysis found it to be about 17 percent effective there. (The C.D.C.'s final analysis will not be ready until the flu season ends in late spring.) Dr. Schuchat and Alex M. Azar II, the new secretary of health and human services who led the news conference, also pointed to a C.D.C. study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics showing that two thirds of the 675 children and teenagers who died of flu between 2010 and 2016 had not gotten the vaccine the year they died. "Go get a flu shot!" Mr. Azar said loudly as he ended his portion of the news conference. "Do it for yourself, your family and your community!" He, his wife and his children had all had flu shots, he said, and so had President Trump. The vaccine is 36 percent effective overall, Mr. Azar said, and 59 percent effective in children. He compared the vaccine to seatbelts. "Imagine if we could cut our chances of being in a car crash by 36 percent, or our child's by 59 percent," he said. The comparison was only partly correct but very apt. The figures refer to the effectiveness of the vaccine against all circulating strains, including H1N1 and B strains, which have only barely begun to appear this year. Alex M. Azar II, Secretary of Health and Human Services, in Washington on Wednesday. But seatbelts are a telling analogy for flu shots. Studies done since the 1970s have shown them to be only about 40 percent protective against preventing any injury in a crash. But they are highly protective against death; that is, when crashes are so severe that some occupants are killed while others live, it is almost always the ones not wearing belts who die. Likewise, studies like the C.D.C.'s suggest that flu shots do a better job of preventing death than preventing sniffles and aches. Mr. Azar's news conference, at H.H.S. headquarters, was brief and unusual. It was held midafternoon on only a few hours' notice. It was televised, but no questions were taken from outside the room. The event ended with a large panel of experts awaiting questions. Only one was asked: whether administration officials wished they had done anything differently about flu this year. Dr. Schuchat replied by describing problems that vaccine makers face. She did not address a bigger issue of concern to the C.D.C.: Only about 40 percent of Americans get flu shots each year by the time the season begins in November, and that number has been going down, not up.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Who Needs a Ring to Propose When There Are Puppies and Paintings? Forget the diamond engagement ring. These days, anything from a leaf to a puppy will do the job, as couples seek out ways to create their own love narrative from the very beginning. "Customization is at an unprecedented level among couples who are engaged, or nearly there," said Kylie Carlson, the chief executive of the International Academy of Wedding and Event Planning, an online school with seven global campuses. "Instagram and Pinterest offered unprecedented access to ideas and examples," she said. "For better or for worse, some were eager to be that next viral hit." Whether guided by the hope of fame or the simple desire to do their engagement their own way, the latest crop of newly engaged couples aren't flashing sparklers. "The trend of bending the rules started a few years ago, and has been gaining steam ever since," said Lauren Kay, the deputy editor of The Knot. "While a ring is meant to be a symbol of love, other things can absolutely take its place," she added, "especially if jewelry isn't important to the couple, or if a diamond is a stretch financially." Damon Jones said he and his now wife, Eve Ewing, a writer, are averse to diamonds because of the mining injustices. Mr. Jones, an economist, also believes that the value of diamonds is inflated through marketing and rationing. Mr. Jones suggested that instead of a diamond ring, they create a scholarship so their engagement investment could have more of a lasting impact. The Ewing Jones Scholarship sends a Chicago high school freshman to a nonprofit summer program called the Leadership Academy at the W.E.B. Du Bois Scholars Institute at Princeton University. (The couple declined to disclose the amount of money they put into the scholarship.) "For the price of a midlevel diamond engagement ring, we could send a student to this program for two summers," Mr. Jones said. "Of the two decisions, to embrace an act of service and to avoid a common tradition, the former was the more important thing that we focused on." Others are avoiding that common tradition simply because of the expense. The typical American spends about 4 percent (or two weeks) of annual pretax income on an engagement ring, according to an online poll conducted for The Upshot by Morning Consult. The average cost for an engagement ring last year was 5,000, according to the WeddingWire, a research and wedding planning website. The Knot reported an average of 6,351 in its 2017 study, up from 5,095 in 2011. An engagement ring wasn't present when Grant Dragan, 37, an investment banker from Chicago, proposed to his now wife, Kathleen Dragan, 38, a children's book author. After telling her that she was his best friend, he asked her to marry him, presenting her with plane tickets to visit Paris. She was ecstatic. "I didn't care at all about the lack of a ring," said Ms. Dragan. "Your engagement says a lot about who you are as a couple, and in my mind, we were equal partners who loved adventure and were excited about our future together." For Stephanie McKenna, 30, of Oakland, Calif., the entire proposal and what followed was representative of her alternative views on weddings and marriage, where a diamond didn't belong. She also didn't wear a white gown for her wedding day, which was last May. She opted instead for a gold beaded 1920s dress. Ms. McKenna, who is a graphic designer, took her then boyfriend, John McKenna, a 34 year old bartender and bladesmith, on a trip to New Mexico, where she proposed to him with an engraved tie bar. Following the proposal, the couple got matching engagement tattoos on their ring fingers. "Will you be my mommy?" the paper said. Merav Ruthman jumped up and down, as she had always wanted a dog, and was just waiting for the right time in her life to adopt. She was so excited, in fact, that she initially missed what the paper said at the bottom: "And will you marry my daddy?" Mark Ruthman proposed to Merav Ruthman with the promise of a puppy, which they later adopted. When the confusion was cleared, she accepted his proposal, and the couple adopted a dog together, a basset beagle mix, before getting married. Other times, the non diamond proposal was exactly what was requested. Nivard Bronckaers, a 28 year old lawyer living in Brussels, fell in love with his boyfriend on date No. 3. They discussed marriage and the prospect of a diamond engagement ring.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
The Wall Street Journal is conducting a review of hundreds of articles by Jay Solomon, who was the paper's chief foreign affairs correspondent. He was fired on Wednesday after evidence emerged that he had possibly become entangled in the commercial dealings of an Iranian born aviation titan who was a key source for some of his stories. Karen Miller Pensiero, who oversees newsroom standards, is leading the review. It is part of The Journal's response to an article published by The Associated Press on Wednesday that described communications between Mr. Solomon and the businessman, Farhad Azima, about a possible business venture involving aerial espionage in Iran and a 725 million defense related contract with the United Arab Emirates. The Associated Press contacted the newspaper on Monday about documents that appeared to connect Mr. Solomon and Mr. Azima. That day, Paul Beckett, The Journal's Washington bureau chief, was summoned to the company's New York headquarters, where he met with top editors on Tuesday about The A.P.'s impending story. Early Wednesday, employees in The Journal's D.C. bureau sensed that Mr. Solomon, 49, was in some trouble. Around 3 p.m. Mr. Beckett sent an email calling for a staff meeting. The meeting was brief. Mr. Beckett told the employees that he wanted them to hear from him that Mr. Solomon had been fired and that The A.P. was going to publish a story that would raise some questions about him.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
After an extended hiatus, HBO announced late Thursday that it is bringing back its anthology series "True Detective" for a third season. Only a few details are known but the Oscar winner Mahershala Ali will star in the series, playing a state detective in Northwest Arkansas as a crime plays out in the Ozarks. "True Detective" creator Nic Pizzolatto is once again writing nearly all of the show David Milch, the creator of the HBO series "Deadwood," "John From Cincinnati" and "Luck," co wrote one episode and he will also direct several episodes. Jeremy Saulnier ("Blue Ruin") will direct the remainder of the series.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Three of the nation's major drug manufacturers sued the Trump administration on Friday to block a rule that would force them to put the price of their drugs in television advertisements beginning this summer. The lawsuit, filed Friday in federal court in Washington, D.C., by Merck, Eli Lilly and Amgen, as well as a trade group for advertisers, argues that the rule is illegal because it violates the companies' First Amendment rights. It also claims that the ad disclosures, which require drug manufacturers to include the list price of any drug that costs more than 35 a month, could mislead consumers because insurers often cover the bulk of a drug's cost. "We believe the new requirements may cause patients to decide not to seek treatment because of their perception that they cannot afford their medications, when in fact many patients do not pay anything near list price," Merck, whose top selling product is the pricey cancer drug Keytruda, said in a statement. Lilly, which is one of three manufacturers of insulin under scrutiny for rising list prices said the federal government had overstepped its authority. "The impetus for the lawsuit is drug prices in TV ads, but the crux of it is H.H.S. not having the authority to mandate this action," the company said in a statement, referring to the Department of Health and Human Services.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
SAN DIEGO At lunchtime on a Thursday, people seated at picnic tables dotting the Quartyard sip coffee from Meshuggah Shack. Music wafts from speakers, and the scent of sausages from S M Sausage and Meat fills the air. As the day wears on, the scene will fill out, and coffee will give way to craft beer served from a bar fashioned out of a shipping container. For now, the Quartyard conceived of and built by a Rad Lab, a student led organization, and the community is a beer garden, event space and dog park in the downtown East Village neighborhood of this city. Its projected transition from 25,000 square foot vacant lot to urban park to housing is part of a larger plan to create an employment hub in the neighborhood's tech corridor. That project, known as Makers Quarter, aims to turn six blocks of mixed use development into one million square feet of office space, 145,000 square feet of street level retail space, 800 residential units and 72,000 square feet of public open space over the next seven to 10 years. Planners want to expand on the existing identity of the neighborhood, defined by artists and artisans, and attract and retain a robust talent pool for the local innovation economy. Stacey Pennington, the master planner on the Makers Quarter project, described the vision for the neighborhood from a picnic table at Silo, an auto repair lot that has been turned into a community venue. It is currently a vacant lot that can be rented out for events, with 24 original murals by local artists. "We were not just going to jump into building buildings right away and just expect people to come and things magically come together," said Ms. Pennington, who founded the urban planning and design firm SLP Urban Planning. "We had this ongoing vision for how the neighborhood would develop and transform." In their planning, Ms. Pennington and her team including a local artist, Christopher Konecki; Matt Carlson from the real estate firm CBRE; and Ron Troyano, event manager for Silo used ideas from tactical urbanism, a movement in which residents and communities try out temporary projects. Their goal is to see how the projects might work out long term to build an identity for Makers Quarter. "For several years we test ideas," Ms. Pennington said. "The ones that work shape the future. The ones that don't, we learn from." Mike Lydon, a New York based planner, helped articulate the movement in a 2011 book, "Tactical Urbanism: Short Term Action for Long Term Change." Among its best known manifestations are the pedestrian plazas in Times Square. A pilot program to reduce vehicular traffic in that part of Manhattan was such a hit that the plazas became permanent. A signature event of the movement is "Park(ing) Day," in which public parking spaces are turned into pop up parks once a year; over 140 cities worldwide take part. The Makers Quarter plan is inspired by the neighborhood's legacy: It has a history of furniture building, auto dealerships and repair shops, and produce packaging and shipping. Today it is home to two incubators. One, the Moniker Group, provides co working space in a rehabilitated warehouse to emerging artists. And Fab Lab is a digital fabrication laboratory equipped with 3 D printers and other tools for experimentation and creation of prototypes. The city government embraced the dynamic approach to planning. Todd Gloria, a member of City Council, joked, "There isn't a 'shipping container' portion of our development code" to cover the repurposed containers that serve as seating for the beer garden at the Quartyard, designed by students at the nearby NewSchool of Architecture and Design. "But," he added, "there's grass roots pressure saying, 'We don't want an empty lot,' combined with a business community concern to attract and retain high quality employers. That says to City Hall: Get it done." In the early stages, the team reached out to the community and planned public events in neighborhood spaces like Silo, the Quartyard, a community garden and a site at 1425 E Street, all of which have been or will be transformed and incorporated into the future Makers Quarter plan. "We clearly saw that there is an unmet demand for genuine connection in this urban neighborhood that we should embrace and promote," said Mr. Carlson, a senior vice president at CBRE. The site on E Street, called the Warehouse, now houses Fuse Integration, a research and development firm specializing in software and technology with a large number of government and military clients. "It is a total shift from what is expected in my primary market space," said Sumner Lee, president of Fuse Integration. "As the colonels and captains come to my office, they say this place looks different." The warehouse space has been built out but retains a raw quality, as well as most of the original murals commissioned for the Makers Quarter opening in 2013. "When I bring people here, I get to tell the story of how design and creativity can have a positive impact," Mr. Lee said. Makers Quarter's location in the tech corridor of the East Village means it is ripe for employer driven development. The East Village is east of the Gaslamp Quarter, a trendy entertainment district full of popular restaurants and boutique shopping, and south of Balboa Park, home to museums, theaters, the San Diego Zoo and hundreds of acres of open space. In the next phase of Makers Quarter's development, ground was broken in April for Broadstone Makers Quarter, a 265 unit mixed use residential project on the former site of a Goodwill store. The community garden, in a lot around the corner from Moniker, has secured a new space in Makers Quarter to make way for 50,000 square feet of creative office space, which is scheduled to break ground this summer. And Quartyard's days are numbered. The Holland Partner Group, based in Vancouver, Wash., has submitted a design review for a 34 story, 427 unit residential tower on the city owned parcel. Though the beer garden was always intended to be temporary, more than 2,800 have signed a petition to save or relocate it. Commercial tenants in the East Village cite the advantages of a changing neighborhood dotted with bars, restaurants and retail space, anchored by Petco Park, home of the Padres. The ballpark, about a mile from Makers Quarter, opened in 2004 and was part of a redevelopment plan for downtown. Underground Elephant, a technology company specializing in online customer service platforms, moved into an 83 year old warehouse just blocks from the Quartyard three months ago that passers by regularly mistake for a new restaurant. Jason Kulpa, the company's chief executive, said he had considered moving his 100 person operation to Brooklyn or San Francisco, but decided to remain in the area because of its quality of life and lower costs. The city's weather, easy beach access, public parks and dozens of craft breweries are also selling points to the millennial talent pool from which tech companies draw, he said. "This will be a tech center: Silicon Valley South," he said. Red Door Interactive, a marketing and advertising agency, has been in the East Village for 14 years and moved from an 11th floor space to ground floor Class A office space adjacent to Petco Park in 2013. "I want our people to be inspired," said Red Door's chief executive, Reid Carr. "Who knows who you're going to run into, what you're going to see, what new concept will inspire a new way of thinking. It's why we're down here and not up there anymore. It's amazing what a barrier an elevator is."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Your personality in high school may help predict your risk of dementia decades later. Researchers reached this conclusion using a 150 item personality inventory given to a national sample of teenagers in 1960. The survey assessed character traits sociability, calmness, empathy, maturity, conscientiousness, self confidence and others using scores ranging from low to high. For their study, in JAMA Psychiatry, scientists linked the scores of 82,232 of the test takers to Medicare data on diagnoses of dementia from 2011 to 2013. They found that high extroversion, an energetic disposition, calmness and maturity were associated with a lower risk of dementia an average of 54 years later, though the association did not hold for students with low socioeconomic status. Calmness and maturity have been linked to lower levels of stress, which may help explain the association. Lower socioeconomic status, which often increases chronic stress, may negate the apparent benefits of those personality traits. "The study was not set up to discern a causal link," said the lead author, Benjamin P. Chapman, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Rochester. "Most likely these traits lead to all kinds of other things over 50 years that culminate in a diagnosis of dementia. We tried to rule out as many other factors as possible, but our findings are suggestive, and we don't want to draw strong conclusions about causation."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
Jon Gibson, a saxophonist and composer who played a foundational role in Minimalist music, died on Oct. 11 in Springfield, Mass. He was 80. The cause was complications of a brain tumor, said his son, Jeremy Gibson, a musician with whom he frequently collaborated. Jon Gibson, who also played flute and keyboards, was best known as a member of the Philip Glass Ensemble from its founding in 1968 until last year. He participated in the first performances of watershed Glass works like "Music in Twelve Parts" and "Einstein on the Beach" and performed with Mr. Glass around the world until health problems prompted his departure in 2019. His mastery of circular breathing and other techniques made him a crucial asset to the development of Mr. Glass's sound. "His technical abilities were beyond what anyone else was able to do," Mr. Glass said in a phone interview, "and he brought everyone else around him up to his level. He was very gentle with everyone, and very generous." Without Mr. Gibson, Mr. Glass added, "the music wouldn't have grown in a certain way that it could grow." Mr. Gibson collaborated as well with the other three composers now recognized for establishing Minimalist music in the United States: He participated in the world premieres of Terry Riley's "In C" and Steve Reich's "Drumming," and he was briefly a member of La Monte Young's Theater of Eternal Music. An inveterate and eager collaborator, Mr. Gibson also worked with composers who had little or no connection to Minimalism, including Christian Wolff, Robert Ashley and Annea Lockwood. As a composer, he pursued a panoramic span of disciplines, from unaccompanied saxophone performance and tape collage to fully staged opera. His most ambitious creations include "Voyage of the Beagle," a music theater piece about Charles Darwin, which Mr. Gibson created with the director JoAnne Akalaitis from 1983 to 1987; and "Violet Fire," an opera about the inventor Nikola Tesla, which was introduced in Belgrade in 2006 and staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music the same year. Dance was a constant interest for Mr. Gibson, who married an esteemed choreographer, dancer and teacher, Nancy Topf, in 1973. (She died in 1998 in a plane crash.) Mr. Gibson created works with her and with other renowned choreographers, including Merce Cunningham. A collaboration with Lucinda Childs produced several significant creations, including "Relative Calm," an evening length piece with lighting design by Robert Wilson, mounted at BAM in 1981. Works like "Visitations" showed a looseness rooted in improvisation, reflecting Mr. Gibson's enduring interest in jazz and Indian music. The gentle, organic murmurations of that piece, which employed recorded environmental sounds, made an impression among New Age devotees. His music, the composer Britton Powell wrote in the introduction to an interview he conducted with Mr. Gibson for Bomb magazine, "evokes a sense of uncharted exoticism that invites the listener to spin the compass and follow." "His phrasing and textures," he added, "float like smoke in the air boundless, serpentine and weightless." Jon Charles Gibson was born in Los Angeles on March 11, 1940, to Charles and Muriel (Taylor) Gibson, both educators. He grew up in El Monte, a suburb. He pursued visual art starting in childhood, and an early interest in jazz performers like Paul Desmond, Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan led him to take up the saxophone. After his family relocated to Northern California, Mr. Gibson studied at Sacramento State University. He earned a bachelor's degree at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University) in 1964. At the University of California, Davis, he pursued a growing interest in avant garde composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. He helped form an improvising group, the New Music Ensemble, which recorded two albums. Moving to San Francisco, Mr. Gibson collaborated with Mr. Reich and Mr. Riley and came into contact with other Bay Area luminaries like Pauline Oliveros and Phil Lesh. He honed his jazz skills by studying with the saxophonist John Handy, and he studied South Indian vocal music at the Ali Akbar College of Music. Mr. Gibson went to New York in 1966, and there Mr. Riley introduced him to Mr. Young; the two would work together until 1970. Mr. Gibson also resumed his collaboration with Mr. Reich, who wrote "Reed Phase" for him; it was Mr. Reich's first piece applying phasing techniques to live performance. Mr. Glass, after arriving in New York from Paris in 1967, was introduced to Mr. Gibson by Mr. Reich. Mr. Glass promptly recruited him for his new ensemble, sparking a partnership that would endure for more than a half century.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
A Chelsea brownstone at , which was built in 1840 but reinvented for the 21st century as a svelte townhouse, sold for 16 million and was the most expensive sale of the week, according to city records. The property taxes for the 5,000 square foot residence, which provides an additional 1,000 square feet of outdoor living and entertaining space, have not yet been determined. The multimillion dollar gut renovation was carried out by Stephen Fanuka, the host of the DIY Network's "Million Dollar Contractor," and Suk Design Group at the behest of the owners, Bill Bryan White and Joseph Bryan Eure, who ultimately chose to sell the finished product rather than move in. The house, a designated landmark, was promoted in an Architectural Digest "Driven by Design" tour and was the site of an Obama fund raiser in October. The couple paid 4.6 million for the house in 2012; the makeover took two years. As freshly configured, the 17 foot wide townhouse has four bedrooms, four full baths, a powder room, four gas burning fireplaces and three bright exposures, thanks to the installation of windows overlooking the trees in Clement Clarke Moore Park. The facade is enhanced by period appropriate iron grillwork; the rear garden has mature plantings.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Now Lives: In a 1950s two bedroom apartment in West Hollywood, Calif. Claim to Fame: Mr. Yang is an online personality and film director who is best known for his role on BuzzFeed's "The Try Guys." The show blends whimsical humor with earnest social commentary through outlandish scenarios, like simulating labor pains and checking for prostate cancer in a doctor's office. As the series has taken off over multiple seasons, he has become a prolific comedic performer and a role model for other Asian American social media stars. Big Break: After graduating from film school at the University of Southern California, Mr. Yang found his way to the video branch of BuzzFeed in 2014, where he was given free rein to experiment with writing and directing novel story formats. His early work explored pervasive stereotypes about Asian Americans and body issues, including the popular, "Women's Ideal Body Types Throughout History," which, with more than 44 million views on YouTube, remains one of BuzzFeed's most watched. The positive reaction to the candor and reliability of some of these early works encouraged sketches examining even more provocative topics, leading to the conception of the Try Guys. Latest Project: Mr. Yang plans to leave BuzzFeed this year and start his own production company with the rest of the Try Guys cast. There he hopes to create innovative unscripted comedy that digs into the psyche of millennials and sensationalized internet culture.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
One Traveler May Have Brought Zika to the Americas in 2013 The Zika virus now spreading widely throughout the hemisphere probably arrived in the Americas in a single traveler in the second half of 2013 almost a year earlier than previous estimates according to a new study of the virus's genome led by Brazilian and British researchers. Experts were divided in their opinions of the new study, published Thursday in the journal Science. Some praised the work, while others said it was too limited to draw such a specific conclusion. By counting mutations in the viral genomes in different blood samples over time, the scientists created a "molecular clock" that estimates how fast the virus mutated. The researchers then compared new samples with earlier ones from Asia, where the Zika virus had circulated for decades, and from the South Pacific, where it began circulating in 2007. The team calculated that the Zika virus arrived in the Americas between May and December 2013. They also concluded that it probably but not necessarily arrived in Brazil first. The virus was not positively identified in Brazil until May 2015. But by then it had clearly been circulating in the country's northeast for many months, because cities there were experiencing large outbreaks of a mysterious disease causing rash, fever and bloodshot eyes. The new study relies on just 23 viral genomes. They include samples of Zika virus obtained in Thailand, French Polynesia and the Cook Islands and 20 in the Americas, including nine from Brazil and the rest from Colombia, Martinique, Haiti, Guatemala, Suriname and Puerto Rico. The Haitian virus was noted as being particularly unusual, because it was collected in December 2014 more than a year before the virus's presence in Haiti was confirmed by the W.H.O. this past January. The gene sequences from the Americas were all closely related, and most resembled one collected in French Polynesia in November 2013. Two earlier studies have suggested that the virus reached Brazil either with the influx of athletes and tourists arriving for the 2014 soccer World Cup, which was played in host cities all over Brazil in June to July that year, or for the Va'a World Sprints, a set of outrigger canoe races held in Rio de Janeiro in mid August of that year. Those assumptions were based on air traffic patterns, not viral sequencing. A large Zika outbreak in French Polynesia began in 2013 and spread to New Caledonia, the Cook Islands and Easter Island. No soccer team from the South Pacific played in the 2014 World Cup, but many teams from the affected South Pacific nations were among the 2,000 paddlers competing in the Va'a. The new study notes, however, that French Polynesia's outbreak peaked and crashed in only five months, and was nearly over by February 2014, making it unlikely that the virus left there for Brazil in July or August. "I think we can now discount the whole World Cup connection," said Kristian G. Andersen, a disease geneticist at the Scripps Research Institute, who said he felt the number of sequences used in the study was "fairly small but enough so that the main conclusions are likely to be valid." The new study's researchers also noted that, in June 2013, the FIFA Confederations Cup, a prelude to the World Cup, was played in Brazil. It included a team from Tahiti, which is part of French Polynesia; the team played one game in Recife, one of the northeastern cities where the outbreak was first seen. Oliver G. Pybus, a disease geneticist at Oxford University and one of the paper's authors, said the virus's arrival during the Confederations Cup was "within the range of possibilities but not something you can capture scientifically." That tournament took place before the first cases in French Polynesia were reported. Until this year, however, few doctors had even heard of Zika, and it was often misdiagnosed as dengue or other diseases. Peter Palese, the chairman of the microbiology department at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, who has calculated molecular clocks for flu viruses, said he felt that calculating a virus's geographical movements based on so few genome sequences was "to be quite harsh, ridiculous." "You need hundreds or even thousands of strains to really say anything," he said. But Michael Worobey, a disease geneticist at the University of Arizona, said he found the new study's findings "robust" because the genetic sequences were long and had what he called "a clear, clocklike signal." "People have a tendency to not imagine that viruses can circulate under the radar for a long time," Dr. Worobey added. "But H.I.V. circulated for decades in Africa before it was noticed." "Yes, the tip of the Zika iceberg rose up in Brazil," he added. "But the base of the iceberg might be a little more complicated than some people getting on a plane for a sporting event."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Exposure to Zika while pregnant does not mean a child definitely will be born with microcephaly, an unusually small brain and head, or have Zika related health problems. But the risk is real, and pediatricians are trying to figure out how to follow these children, and how to take care of the ones who do have problems. While nobody knows the actual risk of Zika exposure to a fetus, studies have suggested that between 1 percent and 13 percent of pregnant women infected with Zika in the first trimester will have a child with microcephaly, but more could have children with more subtle developmental problems related to in utero exposure to the virus. Earlier this month, the American Academy of Pediatrics announced a 350,000 grant from the Department of Health and Human Services to create a network of pediatricians prepared to deal with a generation of children with Zika related health problems. When babies are born with damaged brains because of Zika they will need medical care and their families will need support. But how do you prepare for a new and evolving and still poorly understood clinical challenge? Pediatric experts got together over the summer to talk about it. The meeting was convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in collaboration with the American Academy of Pediatrics, and it brought together a range of pediatric subspecialists, from neonatology and neurology, infectious diseases and developmental behavioral pediatrics, rehabilitation medicine, ophthalmology and orthopedics and more. There's so much we don't know. Dr. Peter Jay Hotez, the dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said several big questions need to be answered. How does the virus do its damage? What is the full spectrum of damage, from the clearly visible microcephaly to less visible neurological changes? And what happens to babies exposed to Zika after birth, when the brain is still developing? The meeting yielded interim guidelines, published in the C.D.C. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. "Initially at C.D.C., our biggest goal was to make sure pregnant women didn't get Zika," said Dr. Sonja Rasmussen, a pediatrician and clinical geneticist who is the director of the Division of Public Health Information Dissemination at the C.D.C. "This meeting was really trying to make sure those babies have the best chance to reach their fullest potential." For the children born with microcephaly, whose fetal brain growth has clearly been disrupted by the virus, the recommendations draw on the very recent and quickly evolving experience of doctors in Brazil. These babies are at risk for seizures, feeding problems, tightly contracted joints, thyroid problems, eye problems, and developmental delays. They need regular neurological examinations, hearing tests, vision tests, hormone tests and lots of medical backup. "If you see a child who has such significant microcephaly, you know the issues," said Dr. Fan Tait, a pediatric neurologist who is one of the associate directors at the A.A.P. and took part in the meeting.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
Typically, David Lee Roth spends his days, or at least his nights, "in tactical spandex, moving at 134 beats per minute," he said. But now the 65 year old Van Halen singer is just like the rest of us: stuck at home and obsessing about pandemics. However, the past few months in quarantine have led Roth to an old pursuit, with new focus. Since April, he has filled his days creating Covid themed drawings he calls them comics and then sharing the finished works, one each week, on his social media channels. The art, like Roth's music and disposition, is vibrant, whimsical and somewhat unconventional. In moments, it is confrontational. Several drawings feature his own face. Many are filled with images of frogs. What sparked this surge of artistic expression? "Well, I lost my job!" Roth cracked over the phone from his home in Los Angeles on an afternoon in late June. As recently as March, Roth was on tour as a solo act, supporting Kiss in arenas across the United States. Earlier in that run, Roth, who has also worked as an E.M.T. in New York, had battled an unspecified illness. "I'm not so unconvinced I didn't have the corona," he said. "Man, they gave me enough prednisone to put boots on the moon! We left a trail of groupies, rubble and incandescent reviews. But I don't want to go back through it." In his recent artwork, that social commentary has elicited a strong response. In one piece, he declares a name change. "Diamond Dave following Lady Antebellum's (now 'Lady A') example, will be dropping the 'Lee,'" he wrote below a drawing of, naturally, a frog. "From now on he wants us all to call him 'David L. Roth' or simply 'El Roth.'" To many, it diminished the steps white artists are taking to correct racism. "Humor not jokes humor, the best stuff, isn't funny at all," Roth said, defending his work. "My version is the truth dipped in sugar. And maybe it's a little sugar and spice. But the good stuff compels discussions." Art, he continued, "has been a constant in my life. My hand has always been in wardrobe, background sets, stage sets, album covers, video direction. This is part of it. And there's craft involved, so there's a little bit more heft to some of the statements." Roth laughed. "This is the adult table; as a fellow artist, I sense you understand that." "Next question!" These are edited excerpts from the conversation. I saw a story about Mark Twain it was not his biography, it was a fictional piece with actors. And at the end of it ol' Sam passes on, but he doesn't go to heaven. He's in the backyard where he grew up in Hannibal, Mo. And a little girl walks up and he goes, "Who are you?" She says, "I'm Becky Thatcher, and I've got some friends who are waiting to meet you." And all the characters that he created come on up to greet him. So, I started my guest list. And probably the only one of that retinue that I could even spell, much less draw, was the frog from Calaveras County from the short story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" . Many of your drawings include a reference to the "Soggy Bottom." I took this, at least in this context, to be a play on the phrase "draining the swamp." If I explain it, it's a bumper sticker. If I let you explain it, it's art. But you're very close to exactly accurate. Can you describe your artistic process? My approach is the best of both worlds: vintage and hyper atomic digital. Sort of like watching "Dragnet" on your iPad. You know, I moved to Japan for two plus years to study Sumi e and calligraphy, and four nights a week I trained and then I did homework. Jesus, I've spent thousands of hours learning to operate a horsehair brush with a block of ink that I grind myself. Hasn't changed its recipe in 700 years. So everything in the comics is hand drawn all the typeface, all the colors, the line work, the lighting. And once I'm done, I work with Colin Smith, the Led Zeppelin of Adobe Photoshop. Together we scan everything, and then I'm able to move into areas that otherwise weren't graphically available without decades of effort. How does using digital manipulation transform the original work? Many of these colors can't be found outside the cyberverse. It's a world unto itself. Serves a well purpose, because almost all of our fine arts and graphic consumption these days is interactive with a screen, whether it's on your PC or your wristwatch. We're actually back to Maxwell Smart and his shoe phone. "Somebody is on my Nike!" What appeals to you about using brush and ink as a means of artistic expression? Hold on. This isn't expressing myself. This is performance therapy. I'm venting. I'm angry. And I am not asking for forgiveness. And this is how I do it. People don't usually think of David Lee Roth as angry. That's because I have transcended it. It is that secret magic when you take something that is essentially sad and find humor, eloquence and sometimes illumination in it. What is your view of this country's response to the Covid 19 pandemic? I sure wish our country had taken a Marine Corps approach to Covid. Instead of creating a divide, good or bad, right or reasonable, wrong or otherwise. One of your pieces features the phrase "No politics during happy hour," which feels to me like it could be an encapsulation of the Van Halen ethos. Can you say more about the piece that seems to be a response to Lady Antebellum's name change? It had connotations of personal politic. I sought to have a little fun at the expense of others, whose vision I will respect. And in lieu of the inevitable false footed copycats I pretended to be one. But the supposed name change really drew some ire in terms of some folks posting from an arch right wing stance: "Another left winger takes a fall." Hey, I'm a combat hippie peace, love and enough guys and gears to defend the expletive out of it. You need one to support the other. Would it be correct to identify David Lee Roth as left leaning? I love civil rights. Equal rights. Women's rights. Kids' rights. The rights of the rights. OK? The entire list. But conversely, I'm prepared to shave my head, join the Marines and go defend those rights. That in itself isn't really a left wing statement. Or it didn't used to be when I was growing up. But I grew up in a really great time and a really great space during integrational busing in the '60s. I went to schools that were 90 percent Black and Spanish, and I was in the color guard with a crew cut. Every morning at seven we'd march to put up the flag. And then at night we'd go to Kenny Brower's brother's house, smoke pot and listen to that new Doors record. Combat hippie! You were on tour when the lockdown began. As a lifelong performer, was it difficult being forced to leave the road so hastily? You last toured with Van Halen in 2015. Do you think it'll ever happen again? I don't know that Eddie Van Halen is ever really going to rally for the rigors of the road again. The guitarist first announced he had cancer in 2001, and it has recurred since. I don't even want to say I've waited I've supported for five years. Because what I do is physical as well as musical and spiritual you can't take five years off from the ring. But I did. And I do not regret a second of it. He's a band mate. We had a colleague down. And he's down now for enough time that I don't know that he's going to be coming back out on the road. You want to hear the classics? You're talking to him. For how long will we continue to see new artwork from David Lee Roth? Like the tattoo artist said, 'til I don't have any friends left! Until my Instagram's empty! I can do this endlessly. I hadn't considered this as something other than after dinner at the campfire. But lo and behold, people have taken a real fascination. Given that fascination, will these drawings eventually be offered for sale? In terms of what I really do for a living, as soon as the B list that's Beyonce, Bono and Bruce Springsteen say it's OK, I'll be back singing and dancing and selling you T shirts. But in the interim, I am drawing and painting every night. And the fact that there's an audience for it is quite a tickle. So of course I'll make it available. You bet. I just didn't see it coming. Laughs But like my sister says, I seem to miss the big stuff.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
SAN FRANCISCO When Facebook employees woke up on Wednesday morning, many found they could not perform even the most basic work tasks. Their calendars were not working. Nor were campus maps that help people find their co workers. They were unable to check Facebook's latest shuttle bus schedule. And they could not see what the company's cafeterias were serving for lunch. That's because those features run on Facebook's internal, custom built iPhone apps and Apple had shut them all down, according to nine current and former employees of the companies, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The situation stemmed from a dispute after Facebook violated Apple's rules by publicly distributing a research app that allowed it to snoop on users' online activity. When Apple discovered the transgression this week, it revoked Facebook's special access to apps and updates that run on its iPhone software. That immediately cut off Facebook's 35,000 workers from its internal iPhone apps. And the problem snowballed when mobile apps like Workplace and Messenger two internal communication tools also stopped working, frustrating employees and resulting in hours of lost productivity. Late Thursday, Apple relented and restored Facebook's access. Yet the episode was a stark reminder of where the power really lies in the technology world. While Facebook is the world's biggest social network, Apple controls the distribution of apps including Facebook's on its phones. That power is a longstanding concern for Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder and chief executive, making his company beholden to the rules of others. The spat underscored the tensions between two of Silicon Valley's largest tech companies, which have competed for years over talent and new technologies. Recently, each has taken potshots at the other over data privacy, with Apple's chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, trading slights with Mr. Zuckerberg in interviews. Facebook also worked last year with a public relations firm, Definers Public Affairs, to urge reporters to scrutinize Apple and other tech companies. And Apple has made changes to some of its tech features that limit the ability of Facebook and others to track users. Apple did not immediately have a comment on Thursday after reinstating Facebook's access to its internal apps. In a statement, Facebook said it was "getting our internal apps up and running" and added, "To be clear, this didn't have an impact on our consumer facing services." In an interview on Wednesday, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, said of the dispute with Apple, "Obviously we want to be in full compliance with all of our partners." She added that the Facebook research app at issue hadn't been a secret and had been operated only with its users' consent. Apple also briefly demonstrated its power on Thursday with another Silicon Valley giant, Google. Like Facebook, Google had violated Apple's rules by publicly distributing an app, Screenwise Meter, through a special Apple developer program. The internet search company said some of its internal apps that run on iPhone software were temporarily disrupted. Two Google employees, who declined to be identified because they were not allowed to speak publicly on the matter, said iPhone apps for internal services like hailing a bus or viewing cafeteria information were not working. In addition, apps testing unreleased updates of Google products such as Gmail and Google Maps were unavailable, these people said. The disruptions were earlier reported by the technology website The Verge. A Google spokeswoman, Suzanne Blackburn, said in a statement that the company expected the issue to be resolved "soon." A spokesman for Apple, Tom Neumayr, said it was working with Google to reinstate access "very quickly." He declined to comment on whether Apple had revoked Google's access or if it was a technical glitch. Apple's dispute with Facebook this week was rooted in the social network's practice of scooping up information on its users' practices, a way for it to gain insight into their digital habits so it can improve products to keep consumers regularly coming back to its site. In 2013, Facebook acquired Onavo, an Israeli company that collected information on how customers used every app on their phones. Onavo's findings helped Facebook executives predict which apps were rising and trending across App Stores. That gave Mr. Zuckerberg, who colleagues have said was highly dependent on the data, the foresight to try to buy Snapchat long before it went public. Although that effort failed, Facebook has built products, like live video streams and group video chat, based on information gleaned from Onavo's app. Last year, Apple updated some of its privacy policies and forced Facebook to remove Onavo's app from its App Store. But Onavo had other ways of collecting consumer data that bypassed some of Apple's restrictions. In 2016, the Onavo team had created a research app that vacuumed up all of a user's phone and web activity; Facebook paid people ages 13 to 35 to install it. Then Facebook distributed the app under an Apple program with a special approval process if apps are used only for internal testing. On Tuesday, the technology news site TechCrunch published a report detailing Facebook's research app and its public use, which violated the rules of Apple's program. Facebook immediately pushed back on privacy concerns and said it was not tricking users with the research app. "There was nothing 'secret' about this; it was literally called the Facebook Research App," Arielle Argyres, a Facebook spokeswoman, said in a statement. "It wasn't 'spying' as all of the people who signed up to participate went through a clear on boarding process asking for their permission and were paid to participate." She added that fewer than 5 percent of users in the research program were teenagers and that all had obtained signed parental consent forms. But Facebook had no comeback for sidestepping Apple's rules. On Wednesday morning, Apple revoked Facebook's "enterprise developer certificate" and paralyzed the social giant from deploying its internal iPhone apps. "Facebook has been using their membership to distribute a data collecting app to consumers, which is a clear breach of their agreement with Apple," Tammy Levine, an Apple spokeswoman, said at the time. "Any developer using their enterprise certificates to distribute apps to consumers will have their certificates revoked, which is what we did in this case to protect our users and their data."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Dorothy Malone with Rock Hudson in the 1956 movie "Written on the Wind." Ms. Malone won an Academy Award for her performance. Dorothy Malone, the sultry blond actress who won an Academy Award for playing an unapologetically bad girl in "Written on the Wind" and found television stardom as a repentant one on "Peyton Place," died on Friday in Dallas. She was 93. Her daughter Mimi Vanderstraaten confirmed the death, at an assisted living facility, where Ms. Malone had lived for the last 10 years. Ms. Malone was 31 and had been in Hollywood for 13 years when she was cast as Marylee Hadley, a spoiled, sex crazed young Texas oil heiress, in "Written on the Wind" (1956). The film, directed by Douglas Sirk, Hollywood's master of glossy melodrama, also starred Rock Hudson and Robert Stack. The three starred again together two years later in Sirk's drama "Tarnished Angels," in which a reporter (Mr. Hudson) falls for the sultry wife (Ms. Malone) of a barnstorming pilot (Mr. Stack). But Ms. Malone's career appeared to succumb to what some call the Oscar curse. After winning the award, for best supporting actress, she never had as juicy a role again. Seemingly well chosen follow up parts among them the suicidal first wife of Lon Chaney (James Cagney) in "Man of a Thousand Faces" (1957) and the self destructive daughter of John Barrymore (Errol Flynn) in "Too Much Too Soon" (1958) did little to advance her career. By 1963 she was starring as one of the adults on the sidelines in "Beach Party," with Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. The next year she won the role of Constance McKenzie, a sexy but seemingly repressed small town New England mother with a dark secret, on the ABC series "Peyton Place." Based on the film based on Grace Metalious's best selling novel, it was television's first nighttime soap opera and a solid ratings hit. Ms. Malone almost died in the fall of 1965, as the second season began, undergoing emergency surgery to remove blood clots from her lungs. She was in critical condition for almost two weeks but returned to the show in January 1966 and played the role for a total of four seasons. She was written out of the show's final season after she complained that her character's story lines were lackluster. Ms. Malone sued the producers, and the matter was settled out of court. Dorothy Eloise Maloney was born on Jan. 30, 1924, in Chicago and grew up in Dallas, one of five children of Robert Ignatius Maloney and the former Esther Smith. Two of her sisters died of polio in childhood, and a brother was fatally struck by lightning in his teens. Ms. Malone attended Southern Methodist University, where an RKO talent agent saw her in a 1943 school production and soon whisked her away to Hollywood. She was accompanied by her mother. Ms. Malone's first credited feature film role was in "Too Young to Know" (1945), a war drama with Joan Leslie and Robert Hutton. But she was first noticed, by audiences and the film industry alike, in "The Big Sleep" (1946), in which she played a seductive bookstore clerk who took off her glasses, loosened her brown hair (Ms. Malone's natural hair color) and invited Humphrey Bogart to stay awhile. That year she also played Cole Porter's bright eyed cousin in the Porter biography "Night and Day," which starred Cary Grant. For the 1954 musical romance "Young at Heart," Ms. Malone went blond to play Doris Day's sister and found that audiences liked her that way. She made seven films in 1955, among them "Artists and Models," a Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis comedy in which she played Shirley MacLaine's roommate and Martin's love interest; "The Fast and the Furious," an early Roger Corman production (connected with the later series of films in name only); "Battle Cry," in which she seduced Tab Hunter; and "Sincerely Yours," in which she played Liberace's fiancee. When movie roles thinned out, Ms. Malone turned to television, appearing in a wide range of series. Shortly after she played Van Johnson's wife in the 1976 mini series "Rich Man, Poor Man," she placed ads in Hollywood trade publications seeking work in television, onstage, anywhere. Her final film appearance was as a smiling lesbian ax murderer in "Basic Instinct" (1992). Ms. Malone married and divorced three times. Her first husband (1959 64) was Jacques Bergerac, a French actor who later became a cosmetics company executive. They had two daughters. A brief marriage to Robert Tomarkin, a stockbroker, in 1969 was annulled after only a few weeks. In 1971 she married Charles Huston Bell, a Dallas businessman and hotel executive. They divorced in 1974, but she remained in Dallas. Besides her daughter Mimi, Ms. Malone is survived by her other daughter, Diane Thompson; six grandchildren, and her brother, Robert B. Maloney, a senior federal district judge in Dallas. Ms. Malone's bad girl image endured throughout her life. In 2004 an exhibition of photographs by the filmmaker John Waters included nine images of Ms. Malone with the upturned collar that was her subtle sex symbol signature. But from the beginning, she seemed to appreciate the value of that typecasting. "She is a strumpet of the first order," Ms. Malone said of her sexy character in "Written on the Wind," speaking to The Dallas Morning News in 1956. "It certainly will be talked about. "And there's nothing an actress needs more, inside of Hollywood and out, than to be talked about for a performance, I mean."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Simon Marsov, a 25 year old management consultant from Moscow, flew to the resort town of Sousse, Tunisia, by the Mediterranean last summer because he wanted to experience a foreign place on the cheap. Lalioui Faouzi, a 26 year old dentist from Algiers, said he made the 11 hour drive in late summer to Hammamet, another resort on Tunisia's east coast, because the hotels were cheaper than those in Algeria, the beaches were livelier and he didn't need a visa. Visitors from Algeria and Russia arrived in record numbers in 2016 and helped save Tunisia's seaside hotels from a second abysmal summer. Western Europeans continued to largely shun the small North African country in the wake of two massacres of tourists in 2015. But now there are signs that Tunisia's Continental visitors are returning, giving rise to hopes that the hobbled tourism industry might get back on its feet this year. The major package tour operators Thomas Cook and TUI Group say that they are seeing growing bookings from France and Germany, traditionally Tunisia's biggest sources of European visitors. Some hotels, like the Golden Tulip Carthage, say they are as busy as they were before the 2011 revolution in Tunisia, which fueled the so called Arab Spring in the region. And tourism officials, noting tight security and no terrorist attacks on tourists in the past two years, note that the number of foreign arrivals has jumped by more than a third in the first four months of this year. Still, the overall number of foreign visitors to this crossroads of Arab, African and European cultures, and home to a stunning collection of Roman ruins, remains well below that of the peak years before the revolution: 4.5 million last year, compared with 6.9 million in 2010. Tourism was picking up in 2013 and 2014, but the cruises stopped coming when their passengers were among the 21 fatally gunned down by extremists at the National Bardo Museum in Tunis in March 2015. Three months later, 38 sunbathers and hotel guests 30 of them British were shot dead in a rampage by a lone assailant at a beachfront resort near Sousse. Britain imposed a countrywide travel ban, which is still in effect, and a number of nations including the United States warned against travel to certain parts of Tunisia, like the southeast region bordering Libya. "That was a knockout," said Zouhair Mbarek, whose Batouta Voyages Events company used to organize cultural tours for Western and Japanese tourists. The scent of sunblock on sunburned Western tourists vanished from the pool decks and seaside promenades that summer. While other operators folded, Mr. Mbarek switched to local and corporate clients and started new companies in business coaching and video. He said his travel business had been in a slump until the end of last summer, when the Chinese started coming. In his office in Tunis in September, he joked about popping champagne when a Hong Kong travel agent committed to sending seven culture tour groups in the coming months. Since then, he has had groups of 20 to 30 Chinese tourists arriving each week, trooping to cities like Douz, on the edge of the Sahara in the southwest, and Kairouan, home to one of Islam's holiest mosques, in the north central region. Now his tourism trade is about half of what it was before the revolution. But like many others in the industry, he knows that the country will be dogged not only by its own political and economic troubles and the continuing Mideast turmoil, but also by the chaos and violence in neighboring Libya, where the Islamic State is fighting to secure strongholds. "Tourism will not recover very soon in Tunisia until Libya returns to calm," Mr. Mbarek said. In the meantime, the industry has been trying to fix what hotel owners, tour operators and former and current tourism officials admit was a broken model: marketing Tunisia for decades almost exclusively as a cheap, sea and sun, package tour destination. They neglected the country's cultural sites, missed out on the book it yourself digital revolution and largely ignored other sources like Eastern Europe, Asia and the Middle East. After a decade, they are still debating whether to open Tunis to low cost carriers like Ryanair. The first priority was security. Now black uniformed police officers with assault rifles are stationed under big umbrellas at resort roundabouts and in armored trucks on the French colonial boulevards of the capital. Before 2015, hotels in Tunisia had hardly any security. Now they check the trunks and undercarriages of vehicles pulling up to the gates, and the higher end hotels have metal detectors. The police also monitor the routes of tourists traveling to historic sites like the Roman ruins of the ancient mountaintop city of Dougga. There, on an early afternoon, the only sounds amid the second and third century temples and stone streets rutted by chariot wheels were bleating sheep and the wind blowing through olive trees and my tour guide's ringing cellphone as the police called to check on us. "It's terrible for me when it's quiet," another guide, Mona Begaoui, said amid remnants from the golden age of Roman Africa, including a largely intact but empty amphitheater. "If it's one group I'm happy; sometimes it's nothing." Tourism officials have put more emphasis on promoting sites like Dougga and the well preserved amphitheater of El Jem, one of largest in the Roman Empire and modeled on the Coliseum in Rome. They are seeking to draw more international visitors to events like an annual music festival in Carthage and a new, electronic music rave in the Sahara near Tozeur, where a "Star Wars" movie was filmed. The officials created new websites and platforms on Twitter and Instagram and marketed to specific countries like Algeria and Russia, as well as Belgium, which relaxed its travel ban on Tunisia this spring. The efforts to lure Russians were especially fruitful, with more than a tenfold increase in tourists last year, to 623,000. Last spring, Abdellatif Hamam, then the head of Tunisia's National Tourism Office, flew 440 Russian travel agents to Tunisia to pamper them at Djerba island hotels, show them the new armed patrols and persuade them to start organizing tours. He was aided by the fact that in late 2015 Russia essentially shut off travel to two of its top tourism destinations Egypt and Turkey creating a big opening for Tunisia. Russia still bans flights to Egypt after the explosion of a Russian airliner over the Sinai Peninsula in October 2015. For much of last year, Russia banned charter flights to Turkey after a Turkish fighter jet in November 2015 shot down a Russian military plane near the Syrian border. The lifting of that ban late last summer is likely to mean fewer Russians for Tunisia and more for Turkey, which is even cheaper, said Mr. Marsov, the Russian tourist. He vacationed in Turkey a few years ago, but was so impressed with Tunisia last summer, he said, that he might come back. Mr. Marsov added that he knew the rap on his countrymen: that they book cheap, all inclusive tours and stay glued to the hotel "like a jellyfish on the beach." He, too, was on a package trip nine days for 500 at a hotel in Sousse with stained carpets in the hallways and a large, airy atrium with clusters of Russians keeping the bar waiters busy. But he said he also wanted to discover "a very different country, a bit wild but attractive," so he added a desert safari and a day trip to the ruins of ancient Carthage. He had no qualms about safety. He once considered taking job in Burkina Faso in West Africa, which has its own troubles with terror groups. In comparison, he said, "Tunisia is like Switzerland." Not quite. The trains I rode were late and had broken seats. Streets in the capital and even the resorts were often strewed with trash. And while Tunisia's revolution was seen as a success that put the country on a path to democracy, the economy is weak, unemployment is high and militant threats persist around the country, including at its borders with Algeria and Libya. The troubles, for some, have brought opportunities. At the Golden Tulip Carthage, bookings started picking up last summer, in part because the general manager, Ghassan Jana, pursued more new markets, hosting travel agents from Iraq and his native Jordan, for example. But mostly, he said, it was because "we are selling security and not rooms."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
HOW TO MURDER YOUR LIFE A Memoir By Cat Marnell 374 pp. Simon Schuster. 26.99. ALL THE LIVES I WANT Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers By 242 pp. Grand Central Publishing. 26. There was a moment, sometime between 2008 and 2010, when a woman's insides her exploits, her eating habits, her feelings, her sex life became a lucrative internet product. Women, of course, have been writing about such things for years, including on the internet, but commodifying that writing had proven fraught. Marketing the entirety of the self through a personal blog like Heather Armstrong's Dooce, or Emily Gould's iteration of Gawker led to writer burnout and reader disillusionment. A better, more sustainable way to commodify the self was to do so piecemeal. For female authors, this meant writing personal essays on the most sensational slivers of their lives. For websites, this meant paying those authors hundreds of them, the supply was nearly unlimited somewhere between 0 and 100 for each sliver. I know about this economy because, for about four years, I was part of it. I was happy to participate: I had a day job, and I thrilled at the idea of my words in print. I never lied or did something ill advised just for the story. I just mined my life for the weirdest, best and most tragic jewels until they were gone. For many, the personal essay industry reaped something darker. The web magazine xoJane, founded by Jane Pratt (formerly of Sassy and Jane), was one of the first to tap into this energy. Pratt, whose guiding ethos seemed to be "the more personal and vulnerable a writer is, the better," encouraged her staff and freelancers to write that way online. The result was a slew of essays, like those that make up the wildly successful "It Happened to Me" series, ranging from "I Became Celibate to Heal From Sexual Abuse" to "My Baby Daughter Died at Two Weeks Old." Cat Marnell was central to this trend. She was ostensibly xoJane's beauty editor, but her posts usually written while high, in the early hours of the morning gradually morphed into a diary of addiction. A meditation on Whitney Houston's overdose went viral; so did a video of Marnell snorting fancy bath salts. Marnell became a New York media celebrity, got fired/quit xoJane when her drug use the very thing that made her such a lucrative writer became worrisome to H.R. She started writing a drugs column for Vice, and became a late night, strung out, makeup smeared fixture of Alphabet City. She eventually disappeared into her own addiction but not before selling her memoir. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. It took three years, the threat of a ghostwriter and several trips to rehab, but Marnell's final product, "How to Murder Your Life," is far more than the sum of her collected columns. She traces her life story in a manner that manages to be at once sensational and matter of fact: the general negligence of her well to do parents, the fantasy of boarding school and the brutal reality, the addiction to Adderall and boys and the dedication to bodily perfection that gradually spirals her into a second trimester abortion and expulsion six weeks from graduation. Marnell treads a knife edge between glamorizing her own despair and rendering it with savage honesty. Several sections read like the drug fueled interludes of "The Goldfinch": queasy making stuff far more effective than a "scared straight" narrative. She propels the reader through what could seem like repetitiveness (drugs, binges, bad mistakes, sprawling parties) with the skill of a pulp novelist. In the introduction, she frankly admits, "If you are grossed out by 'white girl privilege' (who isn't?), you might want to bail now," before averring, "There's nothing I can do about that. Believe me, I have tried to cut this chapter out twice! My editor keeps making me put it back in." The exclamation points, the name dropping, the absence of social media, the obsession with print culture and "downtown kids" and Manhattan (the word "Brooklyn" barely appears in the book) "How to Murder Your Life" feels like an artifact from a previous New York, previous internet, previous calculus of celebrity. The book's success stems from the wobbliness with which Marnell renders those worlds: Are they gross or sexy? Does she hate her body and run it toward destruction, or does she simply understand how female suffering has been rendered erotic? In "All the Lives I Want:Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers," teases similar tensions. Massey shares several broad characteristics with Marnell: an obsession with New York, oscillation between ambition and addiction, frankness about disordered eating and drug use. Massey is three years younger than Marnell enough time, in internet years, to make her part of a new generation of personal internet essayists, more circumspect and savvy about how to exploit their own narratives. Massey has excavated major parts of herself online one of her first forays into online writing was a piece for xoJane entitled "I've Never Had an Orgasm and I'm the Only Person That Doesn't Care" and has fought the "pink ghettoization" of writing about women's issues, arguing that such work is just "part of the familiar hazing ritual that many women go through when we aren't ushered into media through more respectable channels." With "All the Lives I Want," Massey continues to tell stories of herself, this time through analysis of celebrity women. In 15 brief essays covering a couple of dozen female celebrities and fictional characters, she makes claims like "Courtney Love, you see, is a witch." Each meditation reads much like an online essay: trenchant in places but in need of a ruthless edit, loosely researched, with individual lines ripe for tweetability and a stomach punch of a kicker. Massey is best when she pinpoints the particular viscousness of living under patriarchy. An essay on Fiona Apple and Lana Del Rey observes that both women attract "men who can smell the blood on the places where a woman is breaking"; elsewhere, she intermingles the narrative of how Britney Spears's body became public property with the way men call her body "perfect" only when it's below a healthy weight. But many of Massey's best points are swallowed by their extension to too many celebrities in too little space. As a result, she does a lot of telling the audience, in finely wrought, declarative sentences, how female celebrities have been mistreated by the world that venerated them but does very little showing how that came to pass. Showing, after all, is the heart of the personal essay: People are enthralled less by the conclusions the author makes about her life than by the details that allow readers to come to their own. Which isn't to suggest there's no place for women to write analysis, or fiction, or whatever they please just that Massey's particular voice, like Marnell's, works best when sharpened to a point, tilling the raw ground of the personal. There's danger there, of course: If you've murdered your own life, either in practice or through the act of flattening it on paper, what's left to live? But I think Marnell and Massey are working toward something different: They figured out their words can build fires, and they're learning how to torch the ground, rather than themselves.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
For Mona Chalabi, 33, a Brooklyn based artist and illustrator, data has been a special kind of solace during the pandemic. "Let's say I'm really freaking out about Covid I'll remind myself of what the case rate is per 100,000 residents rather than looking at these overall numbers," she said in a recent interview over Zoom. Parsing through numbers and turning them into something that people could easily understand, and even find comfort in, has always been Ms. Chalabi's method. Her latest artwork, presented by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and on view through Nov. 30 in the Westfield World Trade Center, is titled "100 New Yorkers." It uses census data to depict the racial, social and economic diversity of the city. In one corner, people crowd around a hot dog cart. In another, a man sits on a piece of cardboard with a cup, asking for change. A majority of the characters are people of color, from all walks of life. "I am trying to show the population of this city in a way that allows that same population to feel seen in the data," said Ms. Chalabi, who is originally from London. "I hope that when you pass those 100 characters, you see yourself." Ms. Chalabi is also not afraid to get more political in her work. This summer, a few weeks into nationwide protests against police brutality, Ms. Chalabi posted a bar graph on Instagram that served as a reminder of the length of some of the most consequential civil rights protests in history from the Greensboro sit ins (176 days) to the Montgomery bus boycott (382 days). "I'm energized for the long days ahead," she wrote in the caption. At the time of our conversation, Ms. Chalabi was on the last day of a self imposed quarantine. A few weeks earlier, she had traveled to London to visit her mother, and Ms. Chalabi shut herself in her apartment as soon as she returned to New York. Normally, Ms. Chalabi would be skateboarding at basketball courts (something she picked up in summer camp where, as she tells it, it was just her "and a bunch of boys"), but when we spoke, she had spent much of her time indoors, watching TV, drawing and dealing with her landlord. "Maybe hearing about my days at home is going to be boring or maybe it's going to be an accurate depiction of most of our lives," Ms. Chalabi said, in true self deprecating British form. These are edited excerpts from our conversation. I don't think London is home anymore. And I also feel scared about leaving this country because this is where I built my career, and if I were to leave, can I sustain my career? I'm sick of these four walls but I can't imagine another four that I would be happy in. After getting out of bed, I just got into my routine with work. For better or for worse, it really is the thing that gets me out of my head. The act of concentrating takes me away from whatever else it is I'm worried about. I'm taking a screenwriting class at the moment with a friend of mine. So at 2 p.m. we both logged on for that. There are 20 other people in the class and obviously they don't know that my friend and I already know each other, so sometimes it feels like we're back in school, texting on the side while the class is going on, being like, "Oh my God, Brad just won't stop biting his fingernails." Then I binge watched the entirety of "The Duchess" by Katherine Ryan. I know it has taken her a long time to get to the point where she's able to write a scripted show on Netflix, and it paid off. I think the show is fantastic. It was just really great to be cheerleading as you're watching. I'm in the process of pitching a book, so on Monday I had three calls with different publishers. I think the first call went really badly. I went to drink some of my coffee and just completely poured it down me. And no one on the call said anything, so I was like, "OK, I guess I'm just going to have coffee all over me for the rest of this call, but also could you please give me money?" I also had a call with TED because I'm working on a podcast with them that will basically do what I do use data to answer questions. At 5 p.m., I came back out of the bathroom to find my landlord in my apartment. Sometimes she just walks in, which is another reason why I'd like to move. So, I had a bit of a tete a tete with her. And then, at about 8 p.m., I started watching TV. I only recently discovered that I hate watching new things because I don't know what's going to happen and it stresses me out. So I've just been watching "Succession" over and over. I think I've watched it seven times now. Also, I'm always using my ex's login whenever I go onto HBO. Every single time I do it I'm like, "I shouldn't be doing this." I also just finished reading "Moms" by Yeong shin Ma. It's a graphic novel about a bunch of women in their early 50s that I thought was really, really beautiful. I had a phone call with Rebecca Carroll a WNYC journalist who has a podcast called "Come Through." I kind of wish I hadn't done it because she asked me what my most memorable moment of the year was and I started crying really hysterically. I was talking about a Black woman in the U.K. who worked as a transport worker and a white dude said to her, "I've got Covid," and then spat on her. Then she, in fact, contracted Covid and died and left behind her child . I had just been thinking about that series of events so much and, at that point, it was my first time saying it out loud. To say it out loud was quite upsetting. I just continued working. I usually work up until dinner and then, after I have dinner, the only work that I will do is the illustrations or photo editing stuff because it requires less brain power.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
From left: Barbara Garrick and Laurence Lau (with Liam Craig at right) as old acquaintances who reconnect in middle age in "Later Life." So much that was written by A. R. Gurney, the very American playwright who died last year at 86, could have been subtitled "Death of a Dinosaur." Not that anything as apocalyptic as an ice age, or even as melodramatic as a murder, shadows the discreetly lighted drawing and dining rooms, the private clubs and terraces with views, in which much of Gurney's work takes place. Yet in play after play, this prolific and elegant dramatist whose hauntingly sober comedy "Later Life" has been revived by the Keen Company created characters who were facing the Darwinian end of their species. The classic Gurney type was pale of skin (though slightly ruddier after summers in Maine or winters in Florida), courteous by nature and descended from a long and unbroken line of Anglo Saxons. When confronted with the threat of its imminent demise, this subspecies does not assume the fight or flight crouch common to creatures in jeopardy. No, the default posture for this endangered being in moments of crisis is polite passivity. Or as a bemused observer in "Later Life" notes of its classically Gurney protagonist, "When you die, you'll probably say, 'Excuse me.' " That character, a recently divorced banker and lifelong resident of Boston, is named Austin. In the production of "Later Life" that opened on Wednesday night at Theater Row, he is portrayed by Laurence Lau, who has the generic, square jawed handsomeness of the Arrow Collar Man, once the standard for bland virility in 20th century advertising. Unlike Charles Kimbrough, who created the part in the play's 1993 premiere, Mr. Lau invests Austin with very little comic idiosyncrasy. His version of the character is upright, forthright and transparent almost to the point of invisibility. Similarly, the revival in which he appears, directed by Jonathan Silverstein, is most notable for its lucidity. It's a gentle production that lets Gurney speak for himself, without flashy interpretive obstructions. While this approach may not make for thrilling theater, it does allow you to see Gurney plain. And I came away from this production with new respect for "Later Life," which now seems to me one of his most eloquent statements on an archetype that hears the chimes at midnight almost from the moment of birth. The plot of this 90 minute work functions as a sort of lab experiment for our dubious hero. Austin goes to a party at a friend's house and is introduced to a woman named Ruth (a down to earth Barbara Garrick), who tells him they have met before, when he was stationed with the Navy in Italy several decades earlier. Guided to the quiet of the terrace by their host (the al fresco set is by Steven Kemp, with autumnal lighting by David Lander), Austin and Ruth become increasingly attracted to each other. Our almost lovers' conversation is periodically interrupted by an assortment of other guests (all appealingly embodied by Jodie Markell and Liam Craig, in quick change mode). These intruders are, like Austin and Ruth, in their late middle age. And they wonder, via subjects that range from quitting smoking to moving house, how much they are still capable of change. Gurney lets us know he is putting Austin's adaptability to the test from the very beginning. "I'm setting the stage here," says Sally (Ms. Markell), the party's host, in the play's opening lines, as she arranges a terrace table for two. "That's all I can do. Just set the stage." Enter Ruth, attractive and newly separated, and a reminder of the many roads Austin has never taken. She hasn't been able to stop thinking about him since their brief first encounter, she tells him, mostly because of his assertion as a young man that his life, even then, was a process of "waiting for something terrible to happen." In prefatory notes for "Later Life," Gurney thanks the great American novelist Henry James. And this play seems to be a variation of sorts on James's novella "The Beast in the Jungle" (which, by the way, has been newly adapted in a play with music that opens in May at the Vineyard Theater). If you know the plot of James's "Beast," you know how things will turn out. That "Later Life" still engages us has to do with how carefully the script allows its hero the chance to break his stasis. But Austin just can't rise to the opportunity. Gurney has created this paradoxical loser of a born winner a man whom life has blessed with creature comforts and stability with equal compassion and exasperation. This production doesn't ultimately provide the emotional payoff we were hoping for, but it reminds us of what a craftsman Gurney was, and how many rueful shades of warmth he could find in frozen lives. Mr. Lau's performance provides just enough hopeful signals of melting for us to feel the bona fide tragedy of a man and a class doomed to extinction.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
The most unsettling clown I saw this year was not the Joker or Pennywise, but a well meaning jerk named Nate. Played by Natalie Palamides in drag, with hair drawn on her exposed chest, Nate rode a small motorcycle onto the Bell House stage in Brooklyn in June, stopping to chug beers, swing an ax, and wrestle and grope audience members with permission. This was a prelude to the really confrontational part, a solo dramatization of a date, an acrobatic act of puppetry with a mannequin, that ends with a question for the crowd: Was this rape? "Nate," a hit at the 2018 Edinburgh Festival Fringe , was a startlingly unusual creation a clown show about consent that managed to be funny and ferocious, broad and nuanced, a prank on the audience that felt like a tickle. Though the show was recently filmed for a comedy special produced by Amy Poehler, it's hard to imagine it will capture the daredevil energy in the room. I would have called it singular until last weekend, when I saw Courtney Pauroso 's "Gutterplum," another anarchic show from Los Angeles, which was filled with spilled fluids and elegantly crass physical humor. "Gutterplum," which runs for two more performances Saturday at Union Hall in Brooklyn, can seem like a companion piece to "Nate," which sends up unhinged femininity instead of toxic masculinity. This show has a linear narrative that follows the sweep of the life of one woman, Dale Ravioli , from childhood to old age. But the story is not what you are going to be talking about afterward. It's the aggressively bizarre collection of moments, the flights of ridiculousness that you can't believe you are seeing. In no other show this year will you see an elderly character wearing a wig of pub ic hair at her crotch while playing air guitar or a younger one spider walking topless while growling demonically. Did I mention this freak out of a performance also happens to be a tender romance? Early on in "Gutterplum," whose title is never explained, Pauroso invites a man from the audience to play kick the can. This begins a series of vignettes tracing a relationship and the awakening of a sexual life in a few inventive gestures. There's a scene portraying puberty that resembles nothing so much as the transformation of a person into a werewolf, but the monster this time is a party girl who parrots sentences like "I actually like the taste of beer" and "Don't tell my dad." And yet, Pauroso doesn't sneer at its central character. The comedy comes from the juxtaposition of the outrageous and vulgar physicality with jarring notes of sentimentality. After doing a strip tease, which skewers objectification while taking part in it, Pauroso sings a heartfelt ballad. At the start of the show, she picks up a blue exercise ball and gently tosses it into the audience; after encouraging a patron to throw it back, it hits her in the face, catapulting her backward. She plays this game again with similar results. But the third time the audience member tosses it back, her blank eyed innocence falls and she grabs it, fakes throwing it back and says pointedly: "You think I can't catch a ball?" Over the next hour, Ravioli loses her virginity, falls in love, has an abortion, grows old, suffers loss and faces death. But the structure of the episodes follows the same pattern as that game of catch, inviting the audience to play, then shocking us with a trick. While she is always a step ahead, Pauroso pretends otherwise. Both she and Palamides are smart acts working hard to appear stupid. The same week that "Gutterplum" had its New York premiere, Zach Zucker , another young Los Angeles modern clown, put on his own pratfalling, beer swilling clown performance in the character of Jack Tucker, the world's worst stand up. Pumping his fists in the air, he strutted onstage, his fly undone, falling on his face, assisted by an intricate sound design that jacked up the energy. He is a familiar type: The comic with infinite confidence and no skill. In "Nate," she opens up a conversation about sexual assault in the MeToo era, broaching the issue directly but also through the form of interactive theater itself. Every time a clown asks you to sniff the flower in his lapel then squirts water in your face, the laugh rests on a minor humiliation. Comedy often depends on ethically slippery manipulation, misleading setups and disorienting punch lines. Palamides makes the coercion in audience participation more explicit, forcing some uncomfortable questions. Along with "Nate" this summer, she presented another solo show, "Laid," which began with her hatching out of a giant foam egg, only to then pull an egg out of her dress, crack it open and then, with a hot plate nearby, face a decision: Should I eat or raise it? Over and over, she replays this scene, sometimes emphasizing absurdity, other times pathos. It's a show about the anxiety of parenthood in which a fragile woman gets a huge amount of egg on her face. But it's also about a mother murdering her children. Keeping both options alive and telegraphed to the audience with a minimum of language is a hell of a juggling act. While these shows deal with dark subject matter, they somehow maintain a sunny optimism, perhaps a response to the stereotype of the sad clown , but just as likely, a reflection of personal taste. The new vaudevillians, like Bill Irwin and David Shiner who emerged in the 1980s and '90s, aimed to reinvigorate clowning by deconstructing or winking at classic tropes. These young performers seem less tethered to the legacy of bowler hats and giant shoes. As artists searching for originality often are, they borrow from a variety of sources, including burlesque, circus, experimental theater and stand up. And perhaps what makes them seem so thrillingly unpredictable is that they don't seem to be reacting against a tradition as struggling to forge their own.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Credit...Andrew Mangum for The New York Times Where Has Your Tween Been During the Pandemic? On This Gaming Site When her middle school closed in March, Garvey Mortley stopped going to lacrosse practice and playing drums in the school band. With so much time at home, she leaned into another interest: Roblox, an online gaming site and app with Lego like characters and millions of virtual worlds to explore. Sprawled on the floor of her living room in Bethesda, Md., Garvey began logging more hours in the online universe, building virtual houses, adopting digital pets and racing other players in obstacle courses. She said she now plays Roblox on her laptop for up to five hours a day while chatting with friends on her phone, up from an hour or two before the pandemic. "It's like my main passion," said Garvey, 12. "It's pretty diverse, and you can meet people around the world." The coronavirus has created some pandemic winners as people shop in droves on Amazon, buy Peloton bikes to exercise at home and head to drive in movies. For children, there are pandemic victors, too and chief among them is 14 year old Roblox, which was already popular but has become wildly so since people have been urged to stay at home. Since February, the number of active players on Roblox has jumped about 35 percent to reach 164 million in July, according to RTrack, a site that tracks Roblox data. About three quarters of American children ages 9 to 12 are now on the platform, according to Roblox. And players spent 3 billion hours on the site and app in July, twice as much as they did in February, the company said. Inside Roblox, which is free to play, gamers create an avatar. They can play the site's millions of games, bringing their character into environments ranging from tropical islands to haunted castles and bustling towns. Their avatars can engage in first person combat, decipher puzzles or participate in egg hunts while chatting and interacting with other players. Gamers pay real money often 5 or 10 at a time to become premium members and to purchase an in game currency called Robux, which lets them buy clothing, weapons and even hot air balloons for their characters. "At a time like this, where people are housebound, being able to escape into the digital world and have these kinds of fun, imaginative experiences with a friend, is very, very relevant," said Craig Donato, Roblox's chief business officer. For players, Roblox has an element of never ending discovery because independent developers create more than 20 million new games a year for the platform. And for those developers who are mostly teenagers, college students and young adults operating solo or with a small team the recent spike in Roblox's popularity means boom times for them, too, since they get a cut of the money that users are spending on their games. But after the pandemic hit, Ms. Shoemaker saw a surge of interest in her two Roblox games, Mermaid Life, a fashion focused role playing game, and My Droplets, a pet simulation game. Players have paid for extra content in those games, and for the hats she made for users' avatars that she sells across the site. Ms. Shoemaker said she has now made about 500,000 through Roblox, most of that since March. Before the pandemic, she could afford to pay just one or two people to help her. Now her game studio, Fullflower Studio, employs 14 contractors and she is plotting new games. "It feels incredible," Ms. Shoemaker said. "People used to tell my mom, 'Stop letting her play this video game; it's not going to get her anywhere.' And it's getting me somewhere." Roblox said it has more than 2 million developers, 345,000 of whom make money and who split their profits 50 50 with the company. Dozens of the top developers make millions of dollars, the company said, and top games in the past have generated an average of 2 million to 3 million a year. Revenue from Roblox's mobile app, which most players use, totaled 493 million in the first half of the year, up from 228 million in the same period a year ago, according to SensorTower, an analytics firm. Roblox declined to disclose its financials, except to say it was cash flow positive. Roblox, which is based in San Mateo, Calif., was founded in 2006 by Erik Cassel and David Baszucki, who were engineers and entrepreneurs. Mr. Baszucki is the chief executive; Mr. Cassel died of cancer in 2013. The start up has raised 335 million from investors including Meritech Capital Partners and the Chinese internet giant Tencent. In February, when it raised fresh financing from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, it was valued at 4 billion. In Roblox's early years, its growth was slow. But activity began picking up in 2015 and 2016 as technological tweaks made it easier to play on phones and Microsoft's Xbox. Roblox has now become at least as popular as Minecraft, one of its main competitors, said Craig Sherman, a venture capitalist at Meritech. Even with its recent surge in activity, Mr. Sherman said, Roblox is "on the cusp" of more growth. He said the platform has become a foundation for people to start businesses on, similar to YouTube. "Roblox is becoming this generation's version of going to the mall or downtown with your friends, and Covid probably helps accelerate that," he said. Some children who grew up on Roblox have never left. Alex Balfanz, 21, started coding games on Roblox when he was 9. In 2017, as a high school senior in Orlando, Fla., he released a Roblox game called Jailbreak, in which people's avatars are prisoners attempting to escape from jail or police officers trying to keep them imprisoned. Mr. Balfanz said he watched in astonishment as Jailbreak tallied more than 70,000 players at once on its first day. The game has now been played more than 4 billion times and makes several million dollars a year, which Mr. Balfanz said he splits with his business partner. In the pandemic, Jailbreak has reached even greater heights. Mr. Balfanz said that on the best days, the game has 80,000 to 90,000 people playing at once, compared with 40,000 to 60,000 before. So Garvey made a YouTube video explaining the history of blackface in the United States and urged Roblox users to dress their avatars in Black Lives Matter T shirts instead of changing their skin color. "I took an educational route," Garvey said. "I was trying to just seem a little helpful, not just angry at everyone." Garvey's mother, Amber Coleman Mortley, said she was proud of how Garvey reacted. She said she views Roblox as an ideal place for education, especially with in person learning and socializing curtailed. "Play is the way that the human mind learns best," she said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
It's often useful to prepare for a concert by checking out past recordings by a composer or ensemble. But it can also be fun to attend a show blind, with no informational baggage. On Tuesday, I took the unprepared route to a concert by the Bozzini Quartet, the first installment of this year's Time Spans festival, which runs through Saturday at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in Manhattan. I came out of the show a proselytizing convert to the music of Linda Catlin Smith. Her string quartet "Folkestone" (1999) quickly revealed points of affinity with other music of the late 20th and early 21st centuries including the patient thematic unfolding of Morton Feldman, as well as the quiet dynamics familiar to composers of the Wandelweiser collective. The work never rose above a generally hushed volume, but its contrasts rang with real force. (It stuck in the memory, too, and compelled me to purchase two of Ms. Smith's impressive recent albums "Drifter" and "Wanderer" from the imprint Another Timbre.) The Bozzini Quartet played this delicately intense music with subtle aggression, an approach that worked equally well for Cassandra Miller's "About Bach," a work that hitches its references to Bach's great Chaconne to some high pitched violin parts that sounded as though sung through clenched teeth. As with the memorable edition of the Time Spans Festival in 2017, this year's series, presented by the Earle Brown Music Foundation, followed no particular aesthetic. By taking in multiple concerts, you're guaranteed a good smattering of contemporary styles and, almost certainly, some works that seem comparatively thin. Wednesday's concert, by the often compelling ensemble Alarm Will Sound, was devoted to new compositions that seemed undercooked. I often love Alex Mincek's music, whether he's stirring a chamber ensemble into hyperkinetic activity or working with the extended ranges of instruments. But an excerpt from a planned evening length work, "Chimeras," belabored its use of an electronic element: a piped in vocal part which "spoke" with an automated phone operator's voice (before being chopped into less intelligible fragments). A stark seriousness of mood came through, but not enough of Mr. Mincek's florid instrumental imagination which meant that the Alarm Will Sound players were too often sidelined. "The Intention" was a collaboration between the composers Chris Stark and King Britt, who joined Alarm Will Sound on electronics. This piece also struggled to make the most of its ingredients, with the occasional interjection of Mr. Britt's samples or a stretch of hip hop influenced percussion coming and going without leaving much impact on the other players' parts. The most persuasive performance on Wednesday was of Zosha Di Castri's whirlwind "Phonotopographie" a piece that opened with fast riffs in the winds and eventually carried Alarm Will Sound out the doors of the hall, after a short parade through the aisles. The Talea Ensemble played two similarly energetic pieces, by the composers Felipe Lara and Oscar Bettison, on Thursday. Mr. Lara's "Fringes" featured groups of players bordering the audience on three sides. The work throbbed throughout its duration, more than 20 minutes, by dealing out a steady stream of quick accelerations, motivic pileups and eerie pauses haunted by experimental effects. (In a post performance question and answer session, Mr. Lara said he was trying to exploit zones where "timbre becomes harmony," and harmony, in turn, becomes "noise.") Mr. Bettison's three movement "Livre des Sauvages" had a consciously madcap air reminiscent of John Adams's Chamber Symphony. But instead of Mr. Adams's concert music vision of Schoenberg, mixed with tunes of what he has called "good cartoons," Mr. Bettison sounded as though influenced by songs improvised by children on some sugar strewn playground. The work was willfully wild in its asymmetric repetitions and at times seemed to delight in the possibility of becoming obnoxious but was also hard not to love for its headbanging inventiveness. (The arrangement's vitality brought out some astonishing playing from the ensemble, too.) The final Time Spans concert, on Saturday, brings the JACK Quartet together with live electronics, supervised by members of the SWR Experimentalstudio of Freiburg, Germany. Even though Mr. Lara has another piece on this program alongside works by Sabrina Schroeder and Georg Friedrich Haas the result will probably sound little like anything else from this week's concerts. After all, what makes this festival valuable is its reliable variety.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
The city of Bakersfield, Calif. emerged in the 1950s to rival Nashville as the place defining country music. The Bakersfield sound clung tenaciously to country's most twangy, sinewy elements bluegrass, Western swing, honky tonk, rockabilly to accompany lean, down to earth, working class storytelling. Buck Owens and Merle Haggard were the city's superstars, but this copious 10 CD set, which includes an extensively researched hardcover book, digs far deeper. It starts with Library of Congress recordings of migrant Southwestern farmworkers in California real "Okies" and celebrates Bakersfield's studio mainstays. It rediscovers rowdy rarities like Phil Brown's "You're a Luxury" and Rose Stassie's "Out of My Mind." Instead of well worn hits, it selects lesser known cuts from Owens and Haggard, including their barely distributed debut singles. While Nashville eventually won country radio, at least Bakersfield never got slick. JON PARELES "HERstory Vol. 1" is a selective but not wrongheaded retelling of the early years of Mary J. Blige's career, when she emerged from Yonkers with a hefty, scarred voice and became an essential component of the hip hop soul melange that Sean (Puff Daddy) Combs was helping build. Her collaborations with rappers were foundational, and many of the most important ones are here, including "I'll Be There for You/You're All I Need to Get By" with Method Man and "Can't Knock the Hustle" with Jay Z (from his debut album, "Reasonable Doubt"), though the latter is only on the physical versions of this release. JON CARAMANICA A doorstop of a box that celebrates peak Garth mania, that period in the early 1990s when Garth Brooks took the smoothed out country music of the 1980s, pumped it up with steroids, gave it a polished gleam and took it to arenas around the nation (and later, to Central Park). This set, which contains four albums and his live triple album, is available in analog and digitally remastered versions. But it's slightly haphazard: It includes "No Fences," a diamond certified album from 1990, and "The Chase," an almost diamond certified album from 1992, but not "Ropin' the Wind," a diamond certified album from 1991. Fans of the studio version of "Papa Loved Mama": I don't know what to tell you. CARAMANICA Burial's morose dampness and hooligan thump were among the defining sounds of British music in the mid 2000s. Since then, however, he's receded somewhat. This two and a half hour compilation comprises most of what he's released since his second album, in 2007. He's been working with a slightly broader palette there are touches of techno and garage here but in the main, his commitment to dark dance floor shards is persistent and bracing. CARAMANICA In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Narvel Eatmon, the self styled Cadillac Baby, owned a club and a store that sold records on the South Side of Chicago. He started the short lived labels Bea Baby, Key, Key Hole and Miss barely footnotes now in blues history. He recorded performers who played the club and other local talent including Hound Dog Taylor, James Cotton, Sunnyland Slim, Eddie Boyd and a handful of gospel groups. Bea Baby's biggest hit was Bobby Saxton's 1960 single "Trying to Make a Living." Saxton disappeared into obscurity, as did many of the other performers on this comprehensive collection. But in bare bones studios, with amps cranked up and bluesmen who could shout, Cadillac Baby captured a vital era. Six decades later, songs by L.C. McKinley, Willie Williams, the Daylighters, Little Mack Simmons, Andrew "Blueblood" McMahon, the Gospelaires and others still hold their raw spark. PARELES Before he became one of the world's biggest pop stars, Nat King Cole was a young jazz pianist developing his craft on the Los Angeles club scene. This imposing collection, available as 10 LPs or seven CDs, shines a light on this lesser known opening chapter of his career. It contains all of the nearly 200 tracks Cole is known to have recorded in the late 1930s and early '40s, just before he signed with Capitol Records and leapt into the national spotlight. At times, his dazzling piano playing calls Art Tatum to mind; elsewhere, singing lighthearted ditties like "There's No Anesthetic for Love" in a repartee with his trio mates, he sounds a lot like Louis Jordan. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO From one angle, John Coltrane's career was a case study in nonstop evolution: He was forever breaking new ground, then moving swiftly along to the next revelation. In a different sense, his legacy is tied to a constant: The classic quartet that he held together for four years in the 1960s changed jazz forever. So this box which collects the 37 tracks he recorded for Prestige Records in 1958 invites a celebration of Coltrane untethered from the standard narratives. In that year he was still experimenting with a variety of bands (Red Garland, Kenny Burrell and Donald Byrd were some of his side musicians) while settling deeply into a harmonically complex style, one that would define his output in the years immediately ahead. RUSSONELLO This ambitious boxed set tracks one of reggae's biggest and most diverse success stories, VP Records, as it helped shape the sound of the genre, one single at a time. This collection, limited to 2,000 copies, features plenty of popular crossover hits, from Beenie Man, Ini Kamoze, Sean Paul and more. But thankfully, they're mere footnotes to the larger story here, which is about how faithful roots reggae has remained over the decades, how flexible dancehall has been, and how owing to the ubiquitous influence of songs like Yellowman's "Zungguzungguguzungguzeng" this music from Jamaica has seeped into the sounds of the rest of the world. CARAMANICA In the age of digital ephemera, music can be released in a way that's permanent but also disorganized a link might live forever, but your ability to index, locate or remember it could fade. Such is the case with Drake's early to mid 2010s loosies, which were largely released on SoundCloud and include some of his most memorable, and fraught, music. "Care Package" finally brings these songs to streaming services, and they showcase Drake's emotional sinew at its most rarefied the tough tender push and pull of "Paris Morton Music," the callow chest puffing of "Dreams Money Can Buy." CARAMANICA Bob Dylan recorded "Blonde on Blonde" in Nashville in 1966, but when he returned in 1967 after his motorcycle accident, his seclusion in Woodstock and the "Basement Tapes" sessions with the Band he was intent on mastering the terseness and deceptive simplicity of country tradition, first with the skeletal, Sphinx like "John Wesley Harding" and then with the jovial, honeyed "Nashville Skyline." He's both apprentice and master on "Travelin' Thru," which gathers outtakes from those years, including Dylan singing part of "Wanted Man," a song he wrote for Johnny Cash, an early Dylan advocate. The handful of outtakes from "John Wesley Harding" are more foursquare, less swinging and less tense than the superior album versions. And there's no undiscovered masterpiece; "Western Road," a previously unreleased song, is just a blues pastiche. A jokey session with Cash, and duets from the first episode of Cash's television series, show what happens when two lifelong mavericks try to harmonize. PARELES The pianist Fred Hersch might be jazz's patron saint of restraint. He can push hard against the rhythm or abandon a piece's harmony altogether without seeming like he's gotten his hands dirty or gone overboard. Yet he never feels impassive or aloof, either: There's tremendous emotional complexity to his contrapuntal, Romantic influenced style. Like Bill Evans, his clearest progenitor, Hersch thrives in a trio format, and for the past decade he has led an expert combo featuring the bassist John Hebert and the drummer Eric McPherson. This compact box features all five albums the group has recorded together, three live (including the double disc "Alive at the Vanguard") and two in the studio. RUSSONELLO Strut Records' Nigeria 70 series continues to unearth remarkable tracks that were previously unreleased outside Nigeria. The musicians were listening to music from nearby Ghana and Benin and to American funk and rock as well as local traditions; they sang, sometimes in English, about black pride, political strife, love and, in a song by Etubom Rex Williams and His Nigerian Artistes, "psychedelic shoes." Each of the dozen extended songs only one runs less than five minutes sets out a different polyrhythmic mesh of guitars and percussion (and sometimes horns). The dance floor tested grooves tangle and flex and evolve as they go especially the prismatic Ukwuani style of the International Brothers and Rogana Ottah His Black Heroes. PARELES For its 30th anniversary, Warp Records selected 10 radio sessions each the length of an EP, but pressed onto a 12 inch LP from its archives spanning 1990 (LFO) to 2019 (Kelly Moran, Mount Kimbie, Bibio). Collectively, they testify to Warp's aesthetic: largely but not exclusively electronic, full of loops but welcoming interruptions, blurry at the edges, more moody than propulsive but not ruling out an occasional dance beat. In these sessions, tracks are perpetually in beta mode, getting tweaked through real world experience. Oneohtrix Point Never hews closely to the studio versions of his music (a technical feat); Boards of Canada recasts its loops and transposes its chord progressions. Flying Lotus, leading a virtuosic jazz ensemble, lets improvisation reign. Kelly Moran, whose compositions explore the gonglike or clanking resonances of a prepared piano, remakes her pieces in ways that are barer and more impulsive; Bibio, a guitarist and singer songwriter who harnesses electronics, becomes folkier but no less precise. The boxed set lumps together the rare and the redundant; luckily, each session is available separately or streaming. PARELES	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
In 1988, the Japanese director Isao Takahata broke new ground in animation with "Grave of the Fireflies," an almost unbearably grim story of children in a devastated post World War II Kobe. That picture used the medium of animation not just to depict the deprivation and suffering of its young characters, but also to show their memories and the better world they imagine. "Funan," a new and striking animated film directed by Denis Do, tells the story of a Cambodian family separated during the Khmer Rouge ordered migrations of the mid 1970s. Here, a child, separated from his parents and moving from labor camp to labor camp, does not find solace in memories or imagination. Most of the movie focuses on the parents and their determination to escape their own enslavement and find their son.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
As Amanda Seales strode into Ginny's Supper Club, the nightspot under the Red Rooster in Harlem on a recent Thursday, a young woman pulled her aside, saying, "You are fabulous, honey." At the fan's request, the two took a pout perfect selfie. "Tag me," said Ms. Seales, an actress, comedian, writer, producer, hip hop artist, radio personality, slam poet and former V.J., who moved to Los Angeles in 2015. She had spent the previous 12 years in Harlem, trying to get famous. To come back having mostly succeeded means she'll gladly pose for any number of selfies. Taking a seat near the bar, Ms. Seales, 36, who plays the fancy publicist Tiffany on "Insecure," ordered cod fritters and sipped sparkling water as she nodded in time to the alto saxophonist Sharel Cassity. Ms. Cassity was blowing a golden instrument, as sleek and streamlined as an Art Deco train, and in the candlelight, Ms. Seales was golden herself, from the tips of her springy curls to the toes of her metallic sneakers, with a plunging pale gilt dress in between. After the set, Ms. Seales put on her leather jacket and emerged onto Malcolm X Boulevard, marveling how much had changed since she left Harlem. She moved there in the early 2000s after graduating from SUNY Purchase. While living in the Sugar Hill neighborhood, she made the rounds, auditioning for television, recording hip hop tracks, free styling with the Roots and D.J.ing at the Apollo. To make ends meet, she was a waitress at the Sugar Shack and a hostess at the Odeon; she was fired from Heartland Brewery. She once tried to book Ginny's for "Mo' Betta Wu," a cabaret show she produced that reinterpreted Wu Tang songs as jazz standards. The club turned her down. "Remember when you were begging them to let you on here," she said to herself. Now the club wouldn't work for her anymore. "It would fill up too fast," she said with pride. Harlem itself has also changed. She was amazed by what she called "the next level Whole Foods" on West 125th Street. Still, this trip to Harlem wasn't as traumatic as the one she took last year, when she'd gone to get some West Indian food from a favorite place and found a Papa John's instead. As she walked south on Malcolm X, she could see the apartment of a friend, the actor Brandon Victor Dixon. She remembered how, more than a decade ago when she booked a gig as a V.J. on MTV2, he'd said to her, "You're about to blow up." She did, but it took a while. (She texted Mr. Dixon, who is appearing as Aaron Burr in "Hamilton," and asked to meet up. Mr. Dixon texted back: "Onstage woman.") Ms. Seales landed the "Insecure" role after meeting Issa Rae, the series' creator, via Twitter. The casting directors initially asked Ms. Seales to audition for the role of Tasha, a foxy bank teller, but Ms. Seales knew this wasn't for her. "I don't have the proportions for 'hood hot,'" she said. So Ms. Rae asked her to read for another role, Tiffany. Tiffany is smart, sociable, a little princessy. And the role called for a 30 something Ivy League graduate. "Oh you mean, my actual life?" Ms. Seales said, though she prefers sparkly kicks to glass slippers. A block away, she arrived at Harlem Shake, a retro themed diner, where she ordered truffle fries. Harlem Shake divides its wine into three categories: Cheap, Good, Bourgie. "You know which one Tiffany would choose," Ms. Seales said, before sticking with a watermelon cooler. Ms. Seales has forceful opinions about race, class and gender, and she isn't shy about expressing them on Twitter, in her comedy, over fries. A recent viral moment: confronting Caitlyn Jenner about racism during a dinner party livestreamed on Katy Perry's YouTube channel in June. "This country is here for you," she told Ms. Jenner. "This country ain't here for me in the same way, sis." During that charged conversation, Ms. Seales kept herself calm by digging her nails into her palm while she spoke. She knew that being seen as "another angry black woman," she said, might devalue the message. As she moved to an outdoor table at Harlem Shake, Ms. Seales was feeling anything but angry. She smiled when a vintage Mustang rolled past. "I love cars," she said. "I'm a nerd." Other enthusiasms: "Star Wars" (She has a Jedi tattoo and a cat named Lando Catrissian), "Star Trek," "Lord of the Rings" and "Harry Potter." Ms. Seales wears her nerdiness proudly. She has a master's degree from Columbia University's Institute for Research in African American Studies and goes full fangirl on black academics. She is pitching a game show, "Smart Funny Black," which tests contestants on their knowledge of black history and culture. She's also busy with her stand up, sketch writing, an autobiographical YouTube show ("Get Your Life") and an advice series for Harper's Bazaar"("Gem Droppin'") not to mention her new status as a regular on "Insecure."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Behind black doors, what used to be a trendy restaurant in New York had been stripped to its concrete bones. Wires and cables snaked along the floor. Ceiling lights twinkled in the gloom. There was no sign of the brand behind the renovation: Pepsi. Known for its beverages, Pepsi is now moving into the restaurant business. The 5,000 square foot space on the same block as Milk Studios in Chelsea (Pepsi insists it resides in the ultrahip meatpacking district) will become Kola House, a restaurant bar event space that the company hopes will be both social hub and testing ground for new products. "This isn't a pop up," said Seth Kaufman, PepsiCo's chief marketing officer for beverages in North America. "This is something much bigger than that." Mr. Kaufman said he wanted Kola House to offer visitors "a premium experience," and to that end, it will not be plastered with the Pepsi logo or filled with Pepsi products. Everything at Kola House will be centered on the kola nut, a bitter fruit that contains caffeine and gives cola beverages their name. Essentially, Pepsi is trying to market its product without marketing its product. Mr. Kaufman's ambitions may seem outsize for a space still under construction. But his vision reflects how brands are trying to connect with consumers in ways beyond TV commercials and online ads. Kola House is designed for the social media age. However grandiose, Pepsi's goal is that visitors particularly influential ones will talk about Kola House on Facebook and Twitter and post pictures on Instagram. A cocktail made with kola extract, devised by Alex Ott, that may be served at Kola House. Nancy Borowick for The New York Times PepsiCo, the parent company of the Pepsi brand, reported that its sales dropped 5 percent in the third quarter, to 16.3 billion, though it said its North American beverage business was performing well. Still, Americans are turning away from sugary sodas and drinks, and brands like Pepsi are trying to come up with new ways to bolster their image and attract consumers. "People consume content with a speed that we've never experienced before," said Mauro Porcini, head of design for PepsiCo. "That's why, to be relevant online in these conversations, these companies need to activate offline in the best possible way." With Kola House, Pepsi is following in the footsteps of other consumer brands that have opened upscale spaces in fashionable neighborhoods. The yogurt company Chobani, for example, opened a flagship cafe in SoHo in 2012, where customers can snack on sweet and savory yogurt combinations. In 2015, Nike opened a showroom and fitness studio, also in SoHo, called 45 Grand. And of course, Apple is perhaps the king of turning stores around the world into sleek spaces where consumers go to hang out, not just buy products. Consumer companies that set up shop in hip areas are trying to seem more on the edge and exclusive, said Allen Adamson, a branding expert and the former chairman for North America at Landor Associates, a global brand company. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. The danger for a big, mainstream brand like Pepsi, however, is that it will look more like a dad at a high school party than a member of the cool kids club. "They could be in the right place, but just because they're hanging out with the right brands doesn't mean they're going to attract the right buzz," Mr. Adamson said. "While they can buy Super Bowl spots, they can't buy edge, they can't buy panache, they can't buy sizzle." Pepsi is still working out the final details of Kola House. It has not yet named an executive chef, and the menu is undecided. The company is aiming for a spring opening, but it does not have a firm date. There are no plans at the moment to open permanent Kola Houses in other cities. (There are, however, plans to have temporary Kola Houses at big events like Lollapalooza.) "This will continue to be something we learn from," he said. "A year after it launches, there will be components of it that look different than when it launched because that's what marketers need to do these days." Pepsi declined to say how much Kola House would cost to operate or for how long the company had rented the space. But Mr. Kaufman said it was a "significant undertaking" that was being run by the marketing department. Pepsi is expected to introduce the Kola House concept in San Francisco in the days leading up to Super Bowl 50. Pepsi will also sponsor the Super Bowl halftime show and run a television commercial during the game that will focus on music and well known songs. Before the game, Pepsi will set up what it is calling a modular Kola House ("rather than a pop up," Mr. Kaufman said). There it plans to serve kola sliders, made with wagyu beef and caramelized onions, and beef tartare with caviar and kola truffle aioli. On the beverage menu is a drink called East Meets West, a pearlescent, vodka based cocktail with kola bitters. The permanent Kola House in New York will include space for live entertainment. Mr. Kaufman and Mr. Porcini both emphasized that the Pepsi branding would be subtle a logo here or there, but nothing too obvious. "Consumers will love your brand because your brand enables you to have the experience, but they don't want to have the brand in their face," Mr. Porcini said. "It needs to be very subtle, elegant, sophisticated." To that end, he said, there will be a small Pepsi logo on the sculpturelike bar fixture, but there will not be bottles of Pepsi and bags of Fritos lying around. "We are in a time where we have to transform how we connect with and engage consumers," Mr. Kaufman said. "If brands don't do that today, they will be irrelevant tomorrow, whatever tomorrow is."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
These may be the last days in office for Josep Maria Bartomeu, Barcelona's embattled, unpopular president. An insurgent group, frustrated by the decline of the team and furious at how close the club came to losing the star forward Lionel Messi, has succeeded in collecting the signatures of more than 16,000 members required to call for a vote of no confidence in his board. The walls are closing in. Bartomeu must now choose an interim candidate to take his post while he awaits the results of a referendum on his leadership. If he survives that vote, he will remain in his post until the club holds elections in March. If he does not if 66 percent of those who vote turn against him he will be deposed, and the presidential election will be brought forward to January. Or, as one of the leaders of the movement against him, Jordi Farre, said, Bartomeu could fall on his sword. He could resign, saving himself the ordeal of a toxic election campaign that would serve only to heighten divisions with the club and its fan base, and take his board the board that almost cost the club the greatest player in its history with him. Bartomeu's judge and his jury on those charges will be the club's fans, or at least its members. Barcelona, like three other teams in Spain Athletic Bilbao, Osasuna and Real Madrid as well as the vast majority of clubs in Germany, Turkey and Sweden (and at many major clubs in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay) is a democracy. There is power, but there is also control. There is accountability, in a way essentially impossible in the "ownership neutral" world of English soccer, where each club exists as an entity part way between a business and a fief. And that is, without question, A Good Thing. But it is also only one side of the story. Because while democracy provides the mechanism that allows Barcelona's members to wrest power from Bartomeu, it also may explain quite how it all came to this. In theory, of course, an elected president should think about a club's long term health: investing in youth, bolstering the recruitment department, diversifying revenue streams, striking sponsorship deals. Bartomeu did some of that. He also dedicated himself to trying to turn Barcelona into a beacon of modernity; he spoke about wanting the club to be the Silicon Valley of soccer. That is the theory; the practice is different. In practice, an electoral approach encourages instant gratification. It is why, invariably, candidates for club elections in Spain promise to bring in a specific coach or sign a certain player. All of the long term planning might win minds, but any president knows that, to retain power, conquering hearts is much more significant. And so Bartomeu responded to the loss of Neymar in 2017 by spending vast and, with the benefit of hindsight, unwarranted sums on Philippe Coutinho and Ousmane Dembele. When, in 2019, Barcelona's squad was crying out for a new generation, he signed ... Antoine Griezmann. He dispensed with Ernesto Valverde, a competent but uninspiring coach, despite not having a replacement. Part of that, of course, is his poor judgment, a testament to a gift for appointing the wrong people at the wrong time. But part of it is an inevitable byproduct of a structure that discourages stability. When a club president knows there is always a reckoning around the corner, they must always be in electoral mode. They must always be searching for ways to sate their public. They are always thinking about bread and circuses. And for the most part, it works. German clubs are stable. Few live beyond their means. The boom and bust economics of England and Italy, say, are unthinkable. Fans' rights are protected, their voices heard. Games are held in sleek, modern stadiums. Television's influence is moderated. Tickets are reasonably priced. It is, to many, a model soccer culture. It is not, though, without its problems. The democracy that underpins the system is hardly the Pnyx: It can be, at times, superficial, not quite a Banana Republic but little more than a rubber stamp, with clubs' power structures dominated by unmoving cliques and vulnerable to factionalism. Economically, there are far more people working in clubs in Germany than would ever admit it in public who believe that, in order to compete in the long term, the 50 1 rule that guarantees fan control must either be modified or lifted. (It is to the credit of the rule's supporters that they do not see "competing" with clubs artificially supported by nation states as an admirable goal.) Socially, it tends to ensure Germany's clubs remain in the grip of (mostly) men who are (mostly) of a certain age and a particular, small c conservative mind set, and that younger, more diverse voices are often locked out of the conversation. German clubs can be unwieldy, cumbersome and resistant to change. That is not necessarily a weakness, but nor is it necessarily a strength. Besides, there is little proof that Germany is a rule. Every club in Turkey is owned by its members. Every president is on the permanent treadmill of election and re election. The result, in a country where prominence in soccer brings substantial political capital, is almost permanent chaos. Many there are convinced that the only way to restore the health of the country's soccer culture is to allow private investment: not just to pay down crippling, insurmountable debts but to encourage efficiency, to prevent power hungry presidents from spending vast sums of borrowed money on fading stars to try to protect their own positions. It is easy to rail against the amount of money that drifts out of soccer and into the hands of agents, but to present them as nothing more than leeches is unfair. Good agents provide a valuable service; as we have seen during the coronavirus pandemic, not all clubs can be trusted to be caring, responsible employers. The problem is not with the existence of agents; it is with the scale of the gray areas in which they are allowed to operate. Two details from my colleague Tariq Panja's reporting on yet another wonderful summer for Jorge Mendes stood out. The first is the potential conflict of interest present in the sort of deal that took Matt Doherty from Wolves to Tottenham: a player represented by Mendes leaving a club in which Mendes has considerable influence as a business partner of the owner and the representative of the manager for one where another of his clients is the coach. The second is more troubling. Mendes can earn a fee from a deal not just as the agent of a player, but as the beneficiary of a mandate from a club to sell a player: a public listing from F.C. Porto shows he received millions of dollars for helping to move the striker Fabio Silva to (you guessed it) Wolves. Somewhere in the region of 48 hours had elapsed, at a guess, between you receiving last week's newsletter and Liverpool's taking the field at Villa Park on Sunday. We do not need to dwell, particularly, on what happened next, but suffice to say that over the next 90 minutes it did not look like either Virgil van Dijk or Joe Gomez had much of an aura. Defeats happen, of course; nobody ever said van Dijk was invincible. He is as entitled to an off day, a bad performance, as anyone else. But what happened at Villa Park was no ordinary loss: The fact of defeat is immaterial, but the nature of it is not. It will be intriguing to watch, then, what effect that humiliation at the hands of Ollie Watkins has on both van Dijk and his reputation. Will opposition teams now be less intimidated by his supposed impermeability, now that Aston Villa has proved, spectacularly, that it is not necessarily a permanent state? Will his teammates be less assured by his mere presence? Will his self confidence be affected? Will his errors attract more attention? What happens to van Dijk now is, in a sense, a test of whether an aura, once acquired, can be broken. It might yet be a test of whether an aura, once broken, can be reassembled. Bob Harrison, meanwhile, is on hand to point out one of the accepted banalities of soccer coverage: the sort of thing we all accept but that, when you actually think about it, doesn't make a vast amount of sense. "When fourth officials first started holding up a board showing how much added time there would be, broadcasters broke away from actual play to show it," he wrote. "It was new. I get that. But how long has it been going? 20 years? We really don't need to see it." This is true. We don't. They could just tell us. Though I guess people who are hard of hearing might appreciate it? Or people who, like me, tend to watch soccer games with the sound off while attempting to entertain children? Maybe a good rule would be: Show it when the ball is out of play. Don't cut away from the game for it. And a strong start from Ajoy Vachher, who described my assertion expressed here that perhaps the Premier League doesn't always live up to its own billing as the best league in the world as "hogwash." "To suggest the differentiator is 'crowd noise,' or focus on spectacle rather than the quality and intensity of soccer, is so ... completely and utterly wrong, it calls into question your opinion and take on just about anything related to soccer."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
When the Pacific Northwest Ballet principal dancer Carla Korbes announced in 2014 that she would retire at the end of the next season, at 33, it came as a bit of a shock. Ms. Korbes, whose performances were a marvel of musicality and clarity, surely had many more years of dancing ahead of her. New Yorkers were especially stricken they had had only a few glimpses of her in the past decade. "I wasn't having fun anymore," she said recently via Skype, as she wrangled her 10 month old son, Rafa, at home in Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband, Patrick Fraser, a photographer. Seemingly re energized by her distance from the grind of company life and by her new job she is associate artistic director of Benjamin Millepied's L.A. Dance Project she's returning to the stage, but strictly on her own terms. She'll perform three short works, including Martha Graham's famous solo "Lamentation" and George Balanchine's "Elegie," at Vail Dance Festival: ReMix at City Center, beginning on Thursday. Thirty three is relatively young for a top dancer to retire, unless struggling with a major injury. Most stay as long as they can, partly because few make plans beyond their dancing careers. "I had in my mind I would stay until 40, 45 my idols in Brazil danced until their 50s," Ms. Korbes said. But, as she said at the time of the announcement, she found that she was tired of dancing through injuries. For 10 years, Ms. Korbes, who is originally from Porto Alegre, Brazil, was a principal the star, really at Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle. New Yorkers thought of her as the one who got away. She had started her career at New York City Ballet in 2000, but left for Seattle five years later. She was hungry for a wider range of dance: "I wanted to do works by William Forsythe and Nacho Duato and Merce Cunningham and the classics." (City Ballet's repertory is more neoclassical, anchored in the ballets of George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins.) In the long run, though, it was this very diversity, and the lack of preparation that accompanied it, that led to her early exit.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Where she goes, they follow. All 76 of them. A female duck in Minnesota has about six dozen ducklings in her care, a remarkable image that an amateur wildlife photographer captured on a recent trip to Lake Bemidji, about 150 miles northwest of Duluth, Minn. "It was mind blowing," the photographer, Brent Cizek, said in an interview. "I didn't know that a duck could care for that many chicks." It's not unusual to see many ducklings gathered together. Some 20 or 30 have been reported with a single hen. But 70 plus? "It's an extraordinary sighting," said Richard O. Prum, an ornithologist at Yale University. Experts say the photo, which has been shared among bird conservationists and featured on the National Audubon Society's website, offers an extreme example of a somewhat common phenomenon in nature. Here's a look at the story and the science behind the striking image.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
HarperCollins released the cover for Harper Lee's highly anticipated new novel, "Go Set a Watchman," on Wednesday, and hinted at new details about the book. The cover a classic and melancholy image of a dark tree with sparse yellow leaves against a dusky blue sky, with a train approaching from the distance is emblematic of the opening of the book, which begins with a grown up Scout's train ride from New York to her childhood home of Maycomb, Ala. The novel, which comes out on July 14 with a huge first printing of two million copies, has been selling briskly through preorders from Amazon and Barnes Noble since it was announced in early February. It's also been the source of some controversy among literary scholars and friends and acquaintances of the intensely private Ms. Lee; some question why she agreed to publish a novel she had set aside in the mid 1950s, while others say she has enthusiastically endorsed the book's release. The narrative of "Go Set a Watchman" unfolds in the 1950s, 20 years after "To Kill a Mockingbird," as Scout travels to Maycomb to visit her aging father Atticus Finch. Though the characters and setting will be familiar to fans of "To Kill a Mockingbird," there is little overlap between the two novels otherwise, Ms. Lee's publisher and literary agent say. The cover, designed by Jarrod Taylor in the Harper Art Department at HarperCollins, reflects Scout's journey home, Michael Morrison, the president and publisher of HarperCollins, said in a statement.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Balletomanes care about dancers more than choreography and American Ballet Theater's annual season at the Metropolitan Opera House is geared for balletomania. Most productions are given a weeklong block of performances, with different casts at each one. Aisles in the theater are often animated, with keen debates about whether Friday's cast could ever be as good as Tuesday's. This week, a run of Kenneth MacMillan's staging of "Romeo and Juliet" is representative: There has been chatter about two new Juliets, one new Romeo and a new Mercutio. Ballets, however, matter more than dancers. This "Romeo," set to Prokofiev's three act score and an international hit since it was first made in 1965, has been a company war horse since MacMillan staged it for Ballet Theater (with minor revisions) in 1985. It has started, however, to show its age. For months now, I've been wanting to hang signs saying "The eyes are the window of the soul" above dressing room mirrors at Lincoln Center (not only, but especially, at Ballet Theater). Too few dancers are using their eyes to address the various corners of the opera house; too many are aiming performances straight out as if at the rehearsal mirror. MacMillan introduced his ballet with four casts of star crossed lovers, giving leeway to individual interpretations. Nonetheless, he wanted reckless passion to dominate, with no conventional airs and graces. Romeo a taxing role appears extensively throughout all three acts, with both heroic partnering and expansive dance virtuosity. Juliet changes from an unworldly child, both bashful and playful, into an awakened sensualist whose violence of feeling initiates their wedding and impels the tragic decisions that lead to death. The 19 year old Aran Bell, making an astonishingly impressive debut as Romeo on Wednesday afternoon, is already right in almost every way. He's tall 6 foot 3 without being gangly; youthfully impulsive without being immature; and lyrically supportive as a partner. Though his face doesn't register well yet, that will fall into place once he is more used to the limelight. He danced the Balcony Scene solos assuredly, but without showing their musical point; some jumps in Act II, though well delivered, gave the wrong accents to the choreography. Nothing's wrong here that can't soon be fixed. His Juliet, Devon Teuscher (also making her role debut), is a tall ballerina with a proud temperament and fabulous Katharine Hepburn cheekbones. When this Juliet sits motionless on the bed in Act III, pausing for thought before making her big run to Friar Laurence's cell, the lift of her face, as if addressing destiny, made this potentially blank moment eventful. She's a beautiful dancer capable of classicism, repose, lyricism and ardor. So far, though, this Juliet is a pencil sketch of what it may become: Only intermittently are we caught up in her thought process. Stella Abrera, making her New York debut as Juliet at age 40 on Thursday evening, has longer experience in leading roles: She's both refined and compelling. Often too refined, though; I kept noticing artfully ballerina type effects the slow pointing of a foot when walking, the polished angling of a wrist when held aloft in the air in a part that calls for maximum naturalness. A symptom of something larger absent at Ballet Theater this season is Gillian Murphy's Juliet. The role has been one of her finest for several years: Ms. Murphy's finesse and power here are driven by passion and heroism. On Monday, she did much of it superbly not least the wonderful plays with balance in the ballroom solo, tilting now forward on point, then back. Still, she was also holding back. There were moments when, in Juliet's various runs and walks, it was distracting to note her experimenting with the texture of her footwork. The handsome Cory Stearns, her Romeo, ought to be perfect for the role. Yet he lacks blaze, as if reluctant to sweep up the theater in the heartthrob rapture you expect him to exemplify. Will he one day sustain a three act role with complete momentum from beginning to end? So far, I've never known him do so. By contrast, James Whiteside, Ms. Abrera's Romeo, is far less of a dreamboat but a far more incisive temperament. He drives the action without hesitation or caution; and at every moment he takes the audience into his and Romeo's changing thought. Even more exemplary on Thursday was Arron Scott's Mercutio. The complete stylishness of his dancing was only an incidental pleasure: wit, musicality, camaraderie, dramatic focus, exuberance and pathos were central. On Wednesday, the New York debut of Gabe Stone Shayer in the same role was impressive: less gleeful, with a touch more menace, only smudging minor details in the death scene. Daniil Simkin, who danced the role on Monday, has such panache and timing that the audience actually applauded his final moment a sign, surely, that he was registering more charm than pathos. It's on the peripheries of these characters that the production has begun to look stale. Some interpreters of Lady Capulets hint, absurdly, that she's having an incestuous affair with her nephew Tybalt; but when he dies, they make her lamentation an affair of mere show rather than tribal grief. Paris is an elegant role with marvelous costumes, so why did Thomas Forster employ the same lumbering walk he applies to inelegant characters? The three harlots are played tiresomely, without weight or seriousness. Act II is blighted by a crippled beggar who turns out not to be a cripple, yet reappears later with crutches after Tybalt has died. In some details (notably Mercutio's leading the Mandolin Dance, originally a divertissement), Ballet Theater's "Romeo" is actually better than that of the Royal Ballet in Britain, where it was first staged. But if MacMillan's ballet is to endure, all its dramatic relationships need more continuity and oomph than are currently in evidence at Ballet Theater.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
When Pearl River Mart opened its doors as a tiny downtown store peddling Chinese knickknacks in 1971, few if any businesses in New York and in the country sold goods imported from the Chinese mainland. Now, China is one of the United States' largest trading partners, and the goods Pearl River sells are no longer rarities. Those global geopolitical and economic shifts caught up with Pearl River on Tuesday, when it announced it would close its only store, located in SoHo, at the end of the year. The store can no longer afford New York's skyrocketing rents, driven in part by money from newly rich Chinese mainlanders. Rent for the sprawling, 30,000 foot store at 477 Broadway where Pearl River has been since 2003 was likely to jump from about 110,000 a month to five times that, said Ching Yeh Chen, the retailer's president. "It's just impossible for us to pay that," Mrs. Chen said. "Smaller stores like us are just moving out one after another. Instead, you have Bloomingdale's, Muji, CB2." Nathan Baden, the building's owner, said he had not discussed an exact rent increase with the Chens. "But it's a moot point," Mr. Baden said. "I don't think that they can afford to pay even twofold. The neighborhood has gotten expensive." "They were very hard working, pleasant people. We had a very good 14 years and I had no reason to terminate them, except their business has made things very difficult," he said. "I mean, you walk into any store today, and everything you buy is made in China," he said. "I just got Mr. Chen a birthday present. I went to Bloomingdale's, and the shirt is made in China." Pearl River was still negotiating with its landowner over a cheaper space on one of the upper floors of the building, Mrs. Chen said, and was also exploring a move to a more modest location south of Canal Street. The store will also shift its focus to selling online. Its 40 employees will either be offered employment at any future new store, or in its e commerce business, or will retire, Mrs. Chen said. Pearl River's four decades in New York track the opening, and rise, of China as an economic superpower, and the United States' gingerly engagement with it. Trade with Communist China had been banned for over two decades when Mrs. Chen's husband, Ming Yi Chen, opened Pearl River in 1971. But wanting to take a stand against that ban and sensing that an opening was imminent Mr. Chen decided to get a jump on what would soon become a robust trade. "We wanted to test the waters. After we tested the waters, we thought a lot of people would follow," Mr. Chen said. His first imported Chinese products were from department stores in Hong Kong, still controlled by the British at the time. A lot of Pearl River's early offerings were goods that the Chinese American community had pined for under the trade embargo, he said: simple canned fish and vegetables, Chinese made underwear, towels. But Pearl River at first was not welcomed, particularly in Chinatown. Many of its residents were allied with Taiwan and vehemently opposed trade with Beijing. "They called us traitors," said Mr. Chen, who himself was born in China but raised in Taiwan. But after President Richard M. Nixon's historic visit to the People's Republic, and the normalizing of relations between the two countries, those anti Communist feelings started to abate, and Pearl River's business boomed.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
But she wasn't. Eunice Carter did spearhead the strategy that brought down Luciano in 1936, reasoning correctly that prostitution rackets in Harlem, and how they were organized, might be the means of achieving his downfall. Carter was only the second woman in the history of Smith College to receive a bachelor's and a master's degree in four years; she graduated from Fordham Law School, started her own practice and joined the New York City special prosecutor's office run by Thomas E. Dewey. She was the only woman and the only African American among Dewey's hires, brought in, according to one historian, for "her command of Harlem pool halls as well as Albany committee rooms." Carter likely drew inspiration from her parents, William and Addie Hunton. Brilliant and accomplished, they traveled widely as key early figures in the Y.M.C.A. Eunice and her younger brother grew up, in large part, away from each other and from their parents she was, according to family lore, "their father's favorite," despite years of separation though they did spend a formative year and a half together in Germany with Addie. (Their journey home to America landed their mother in some trouble when the white woman traveling with them was detained, not realizing what a segregated world awaited them.) African American newspapers lauded Eunice's professional accomplishments as a prosecutor and public figure, noting her success working with Dewey with particular pride, but they were perhaps even more interested in covering her personal life. The Chicago Defender described her wedding to Lisle Carter, a successful dentist, as "a very impressive ceremony" and "the topic of discussion among society folk." Just a year earlier, she had been a bridesmaid at the most important social event in Harlem, the wedding of Madame C. J. Walker's granddaughter. Carter's upward career climb was especially impressive in that overt racism didn't thwart her choices. But she could never quite escape its noxious hold on American society, whether it was being paid far less than her white male peers on Dewey's staff or being passed over, in favor of a rival, for a prestigious judicial appointment. Most personally painful, however, was her brother's fervent belief in communism, which landed him in prison at the height of McCarthyism and led her to realize that her career had reached not a glass ceiling but a glass cliff.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Protesters are gathering at a time when the Covid 19 death toll rises hourly. Some protesters are armed, some have their children in tow. Their battle cry seems to be that we must open up because the American economy is more important than American lives. And President Trump cheers them on. "LIBERATE!" he tweets, as if we were being held prisoner. I have not thought of myself as a prisoner. I thought we are caring for ourselves, our families and our communities. I long for leadership from the president a calming, reasonable voice that will help guide us in these difficult times. Instead we have a partisan instigator. I do not know if we should open up sections of the country. I just know that a protest by people while clutching their AR 15s is as terrifying as the virus because they believe that American lives are worth the price of a paycheck.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Godfrey Smith, who is also the author of "Other Minds," tries to answer some thoroughly fascinating questions about what connects us to animals. He does this in vivid and scenic prose that, as he puts it, "approaches the puzzles of mind and body by exploring the nature of life, the history of animals, and the different ways of being an animal that surround us now." The book is filled with riveting anecdotes and research, interspersed with charming and informative illustrations of various time periods such as the Ordovician (when plants first arrive on land) so we can imagine just for a moment what a sampling of inhabitants during that period looked like. We discover there the Orthoceras, a straight shelled cephalopod, an armored fish and a sea lily. The whole book is a rather winning combination of not once ever making readers feel as if they are being lectured to; rather, it is the sensation of joining a wise, ever patient friend on a time traveling tour of the cognitive experiences of animals. Take, for example, the author's pause over finding a one armed shrimp during one of his dives. As Godfrey Smith describes it: "Eighteen limbs and protrusions ... a body like a Swiss Army knife." In spite of missing a claw and being surrounded by bigger, mightier animals such as mollusks and sharks "in the land of the limbless, the one armed shrimp is king." And yet, when compared with the octopus, which "can grasp and manipulate just about anything as well as doubling the length of its arms or flattening itself like a pancake," the limits of the arthropod become quite clear. Then there's the (new to me) knowledge that the dolphins we know were once land mammals returned to the sea, distantly related to the hippopotamus. And it's hard not to be amused by the mind boggling learning ability of archerfish, which acquire simply by watching other archerfish the ability to knock out flying insects by blasting them with a squirt of water until their prey plummets into the water in time for dinner. Godfrey Smith has an elegant and exacting way of urging along our curiosity by sharing his own questions about animal cognizance and the ability of some animals, like rats and cuttlefish, to "meander, drift off and dream." But perhaps the most enthralling part of this book is the author's experiences diving at famous sites now affectionately called Octopolis and Octlantis, just off the coast of eastern Australia where several octopuses live, hunt, fight and make more octopuses.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
It was 2 a.m. when Danielle Piergallini composed an email to classmates at Vanderbilt University's Owen Graduate School of Management announcing she was transgender. She had spent her first semester in the M.B.A. program presenting as male and worried what kind of response she would get after she clicked "send." Students and professors had a swagger about them, a kind of "bravado," she said, and at times it felt unfriendly. (Owen is 70 percent male; only 1 percent reported being L.G.B.T.Q. lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer in a survey last year at top business schools.) "There were moments in the first semester when I wondered if I made a mistake," she said. "Going into the type of male dominated culture that is business school doesn't necessarily send a positive signal to someone who wants to transition." So she was surprised when emails of support spilled into her inbox right away. Soon after, an administrator helped her figure out how to change her name in school records. To help spread information, Ms. Piergallini blogs and makes YouTube videos about life as a transgender woman. But she scrubbed her name from posts when she started to interview for jobs to avoid discrimination. In fact, gender didn't come up, though she gave her male name on background check forms. Ms. Piergallini had hoped her academic credentials would land her a top role in a company with health insurance that covers sex reassignment surgery, and it did. American Airlines, where she is a senior analyst in business strategy, has employment protections and trans inclusive health benefits. (She came out to her manager her second month on the job.) "Discrimination against trans people is there," Ms. Piergallini said, "but having an M.B.A. and having a good one helps you avoid a lot of those barriers and obstacles." Elite business schools have reputations as conservative, buttoned up corners of college campuses, as bastions of male dominance. Many transgender individuals tend to avoid the business world, and up until a few years ago, there hadn't been openly trans students at many prestigious B schools, if any. But more schools are stepping up, and a few transgender students have come out. The shift is important, advocates say, because the more exposure that future business leaders have to the issues, the better they will understand future trans co workers. The portion of Fortune 500 companies that include gender identity in their nondiscrimination policies increased from 25 percent to 61 percent between 2008 and 2014, according to the Human Rights Campaign, a national advocacy group. Marnie Florin, who identifies as gender neutral and goes by the pronoun "ze," organized a trans training program at Columbia Business School last year after meeting an incoming transgender student. About 200 students and staff members packed the school's largest classroom for a presentation on terminology and pronouns. "I wanted to educate people so it wasn't such a black box that they had been too scared to ask questions about," Florin said. "Now they'll act differently in the work environment, and if someone comes out as trans, they'd have a strong ally." The program will be repeated twice a year at Columbia and, Florin hopes, at Google. After graduating with an M.B.A. last year, Florin got a job there as a finance operations analyst. To Katherine W. Phillips, the business school's senior vice dean, the response to gender issues has been impressive. "What you saw was a bit of a transformation in the school," she said. In September, a newly constructed single stall restroom opened on the first floor of Uris Hall, with a sign that reads: "All genders welcome." This admissions cycle, the business school also added an option for applicants to identify as transgender. Florin, who had worked at a nonprofit, talks about arriving at business school without a role model. "I was really disappointed to find that the L.G.B.T. community at Columbia Business School consisted of so many white, cisgender men" (those comfortable in the sex assigned at birth). Few were transgender or lesbian. The number of business students identifying as L.G.B.T.Q. is about the same as the national average, at 3 percent, according to a 2014 survey at 38 top business schools by Reaching Out M.B.A., or Romba. But unlike the national picture, which is divided evenly between gay men and lesbians, the L.G.B.T.Q. community within business schools is disproportionately male, according to Matt Kidd, executive director of Romba. Of 1,400 students attending its conference and job fair last year, 62 percent identified as gay men and only 14 percent as lesbian. As for transgender students, said Mr. Kidd, "I can count on one hand every year the number who are out." A study last year by the Human Rights Campaign showed that, despite a changing social landscape, 53 percent of L.G.B.T. workers hide their sexual orientation or gender identity at work. Nearly 10 percent of respondents said they left a job because they felt unwelcome. Few out people lead large companies. Timothy D. Cook, Apple's chief executive, came out publicly as homosexual last year. Martine Rothblatt, founder of the publicly traded pharmaceutical company United Therapeutics and the highest paid female C.E.O. in the country, is a transgender woman. "Business schools are a pipeline to leadership roles, so if we want to see more out C.E.O.s, we need more out business school students who will stay out as they go into the work force," said Beck Bailey, deputy director of employee engagement at the Human Rights Campaign. Mr. Bailey, a transgender man, earned his M.B.A. last year from the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Though the college is known as a top destination for L.G.B.T. students, he said, the business school "was an island unto itself." "Business school is a microcosm of corporate America," he said. "Issues of gender fluidity and gender queerness are just really unknown." The administration was supportive but "didn't know what to do" about a student undergoing a transition. They need to understand that many transgender people try to be "stealth," he said, and pass as a man or woman rather than a trans man or trans woman. Some may never pass as the desired gender. "It doesn't necessarily mean they're ashamed of their identity," said Jillian T. Weiss, a professor of law and society at Ramapo College of New Jersey, who researches gender identity. "But they don't want to experience prejudice. There's so much of it, especially in any business environment. They're trying to succeed in a highly competitive environment and then they have a 100 pound backpack to carry." Harvard Business School's first openly transgender student, who came out in the news media in 2013, said going public was a challenge and isolating because she had to be the face of such a small minority group. Harvard business students are broken into small sections, and "they disperse all the diverse people," she said. "It's impossible for a nonmajority to be the majority. It marginalizes many different groups." She now works and lives in stealth, as a woman. Dominique, a first year M.B.A. student at Columbia Business School, has not come out to many classmates, and agreed to be interviewed only if identified by her middle name.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
"The Irishman," the director Martin Scorsese's latest crime epic (truly, at three and a half hours), premieres Friday in movie theaters around the country before reaching Netflix on Nov. 27. The film, about a hitman (Robert De Niro), a Mafia boss (Joe Pesci) and the never solved death of the Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), has been rapturously reviewed and is already a leading contender for this year's biggest Oscar categories. Here are a few reviews, interviews and features to check out if you're planning to watch it this weekend. "The Irishman" Review: The Mob's Greatest Hits, in a Somber Key The New York Times A.O. Scott, The Times's co chief movie critic, reviewed the film when it premiered at the New York Film Festival in late September. And while this is a mob movie through and through, it feels very different. "Don't get me wrong: there is plenty of grisly, crazy mob lore, blood and tomato sauce, guys with colorful nicknames, episodes that wander away from the main plot," Scott writes. "The business of graft, extortion and influence peddling occupies all these men, but "The Irishman" finds its emotional center in the vicissitudes of their friendship. This is Scorsese's least sentimental picture of mob life, and for that reason his most poignant."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
For a few hours this week, softball had a shot at something it has pursued for decades: the spotlight. The USSSA Pride and Scrap Yard Fast Pitch, two independent professional softball teams that feature some of the top players in the world, began what was supposed to be a seven game series in Melbourne, Fla., facing little competition from other live sports. Instead, the first day of the series ended with all 18 players for Scrap Yard Fast Pitch cleaning out their lockers and pledging to never play again for the organization, after its general manager bragged to President Trump on Twitter during the game that the team was standing during the national anthem. After Monday's game, players said, they returned to the locker room to discover a slew of text messages and alerts about May's post. "It was a shock," said pitcher Cat Osterman, 37, an Olympic gold medalist. "An actual, genuine, speechless shock took over our locker room." Then the players started talking to one another, pinpointing what they felt was most troubling about the post: that May had spoken for all of them without their consent, and that she ascribed political intent to their actions during the anthem that suggested opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement. The tweet was quickly deleted, apparently after it had drawn backlash online. May and Scrap Yard Fast Pitch did not respond to requests for comment. The players spent an hour discussing the issue in the locker room, and decided that they could no longer play under the Scrap Yard name. "The more we talked about it, the angrier I got, and I finally just said, 'I'm done, I'm not going to wear this jersey,'" Osterman said. "We were used as pawns in a political post, and that's not OK." The players were supported in their decision by the coaching staff. It was not the first time that May's politics had been a topic of discussion among the team, which is made up of 18 women ranging in age from 22 to 37. When Scrap Yard released a statement about the killing of George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis, it read, "We believe black lives matter, as do all lives," causing some consternation among the players. The tweet on Monday, though, struck a raw nerve. "I never really thought that she didn't care about my life or Kiki's life until that post," said Kelsey Stewart, one of two black players on the team, along with Kiki Stokes. May came to talk with the team, and again repeated that "all lives matter," players said, a phrase that has been criticized as a way to invalidate the specific concerns of black people. "People got very, very angry," said Stewart, 25, who phoned into the meeting after missing the game for personal reasons. Most Scrap Yard players are white, but Stewart said they still forcefully challenged May's comments both directly and on social media. "It was nice to know that Kiki, who's black, didn't have to do all the talking that I didn't have to do all the talking," Stewart said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Most of our workouts are at home now. Which is why it's an ideal time to get lost in the wild world of the vintage exercise video. Beyond just titans of the genre like Jane Fonda (now leg lifting on TikTok) and Richard Simmons, there were so many celebrity or just sort of celebrity ish workout videos in the 1980s and 1990s that going through them is a real tour of the era. Fabio. Dolph Lundgren. MTV's "The Grind," Raquel Welch. Flexercise, Aerobicize, Jazzercise, Booty Ballet, Crunch, Tae Bo, Buns of Steel. They feature so many things lost to time: striped leotards, elaborate pelvic thrusts, rainbow headbands, Reebok Steps. Many have been posted to YouTube, and original VHS tapes can be found if you're really motivated. One could, in theory, do the workouts from home and since the tapes were originally meant to be done at home, before gyms were everywhere, they don't usually involve much in the way of equipment. The year is 1992 and the supermodel Cindy Crawford is in full bombshell hair and a black bustier leotard or is it a bathing suit? on a beach doing arm circles to a Primal Scream remix. Maybe I've been home for too long, but I felt glory for the first time in weeks. The model workout genre rose along with the influence of the supermodel in the 1990s (another is Karen Voight's the Body Workout With Elle Macpherson, which was also shot by the sea). Ms. Crawford does side bends and notes "it's really good for tightening your waist" and later, of her modified "girl" push ups, says, "you can do boy push ups, but I can't." Mostly she doesn't speak and instead lets the disembodied voice of her trainer Radu shout out the names of the moves. There's a chair workout in an industrial style gym space (the '90s loved nothing more than a gritty looking workout space). See also: Step Reebok: The Video. The 1980s aerobic video is a wonderful genre. Many went for pep, like the Golden Door Aerobics Workout, in which a trio of blond women in candy colored leotards clap and jump to an instrumental version of the song "Maniac." But my preference is for a 1983 video starring the actress Sandahl Bergman, of "Conan the Barbarian" and "Xanadu" fame. It's an aerobic video, stark and moody, even a little surreal, with the blond former Broadway dancer on sets that are just green or blue or black and white. She wears a lot of headbands and tiny shorts and is almost always flanked by two beefcake backup dancers who are often wearing things like jeans and vests with bare chests. You couldn't really follow along even if you wanted to. There's a barre workout with no instruction and just an interlude of her dancing alone in a black room. It reminds us that movement can be dramatic and cathartic, not just chirpy. Jayne Kennedy's 1983 video is a rare corrective to the very white (and so blond) world of the vintage workout video. Ms. Kennedy, a TV personality, pageant winner and actress, advises users to "establish a positive belief in yourself" and quickly gets down to business, pointing to Tom and Vicky in the back, who will be performing the aerobics exercises on an advanced level. This has all the '80s hallmarks we have come to rely on, including striped leotards and suspenders. The music is mostly instrumental, including Michael Jackson's "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" and Diana Ross's "Upside Down." There's a bit of lightness when the whole crew laughs about how hard a leg routine is before doing floor slaps and toe raises to "Rockin' After Midnight" by Marvin Gaye. The cool down moves the action to a beach why so many beaches? and Renaldo Nehemiah, a track and field and N.F.L. star, pops in for a group hamstring workout at the end. The Cherfitness oeuvre, which includes A New Attitude from 1991 and Body Confidence from 1992, is an odd, highly specific and black clad universe. It is one in which our host Cher has chosen to wear a Bob Mackie body stocking (it appears to be the same one from the "If I Could Turn Back Time" video) while doing a routine to the 1960s era dance the Pony. She also wears a black leotard with a lace up bodice and a tutu in a step aerobics sequence and wears a kind of corset belt in a rubber band resistance training video in which she brags that she's using harder bands than her trainer. Most of the background music is sort of lite rock covers of classic hits, like "Dancing in the Street," that have not aged well. When this video came out in 1988, I was in grade school and thought that one day in the future, when I was a teenager, I too would be hosting bedroom workouts like the sitcom star and current activist Alyssa Milano. I blame '80s diet culture and a mother committed to Jazzercise. Who could blame me? The video begins with a long introduction to set up the idea of Teen Steam with Ms. Milano in a large bedroom complete with a daybed (then de rigueur). It cuts to her singing an original song about her pent up teenage stress that includes the lyrics "my parents want an angel, my teachers want a brain, my friends just want to party, and it's driving me insane." The "steam" that she can feel "rising" is what she and two friends are going to burn off. Later there is a dance workout in a fake alley yet another industrial setting! with a lot of dry ice and ripped jeans. By the time I graduated to being a real teenager, grunge had taken over, and the very idea of working out seemed laughable. I met my high school's physical education requirement by walking four laps around the track while gossiping with my friends, three times a week.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
The crowds at New York City Center's Fall for Dance festival don't applaud politely; they roar. So what happens in the absence of a live audience? In this case, at least, it creates a space to shine a brighter light on the poetics of dance. Monday night's virtual program, the second of two this year, provided many bright moments. And, similar to the first program, the City Center commissions, here by Kyle Abraham and Dormeshia, were the dances with the most resonance. They were also complete works; the older selections were excerpts, starting with three solos performed by New York City Ballet dancers from George Balanchine's "Who Cares?" (1970). The Balanchine is set to songs by George and Ira Gershwin, and in "I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise," Ashley Bouder was her usual peppy self as she bounded through the nonstop jazzy kicks and jumps spinning across the stage as if she had been on one for the last seven months. (No dancer has.) And Tiler Peck, radiating a sexy sophistication, was even more enthralling in "Fascinatin' Rhythm" as her musicality teased out playful new aspects of the solo. But in "My One and Only," Brittany Pollack, given the unenviable task of following Ms. Peck, had a mechanical air; whenever she was in a tricky spot, she just smiled extra hard. Still, it was good to see a dance with more bite. Mr. Abraham, returning to the festival with another solo for a ballet dancer last year, it was Misty Copeland showed how skilled he has become at mingling the ballet vernacular with other forms, from hip hop to West African movement. In the new solo, "to be seen," he also continued to do what he does best when working with ballet dancers: finding the person within the dancer and the bodies within a body. This time the dancer was Calvin Royal III, recently promoted to principal at American Ballet Theater. Because Mr. Royal was unavailable for rehearsals, Mr. Abraham choreographed the ballet with the help of Taylor Stanley, a City Ballet star with whom he has worked in the past. The music, I have to be honest, scared me: Ravel's "Bolero," a magnet for cliches. But Mr. Abraham used it to his advantage, seemingly inspired more by its flow than its compositional buildup. Mr. Royal began with his back to the audience, hands in his pockets. Slowly he turned, pulling up the hood of his sweatshirt before taking it off completely: Folding it, he tossed it into the wings like a bowling ball. The combination of everyday movement under Dan Scully's gorgeous lighting was instantly arresting: Mr. Royal, in his flowing white top and pants by Karen Young, glowed like a god. It might have been enough to see him glide to the music in any old way. His long, loose arms and elegance of line have a spellbinding grace. But from the start, Mr. Abraham created a breathtaking web of physical references, melding dance vocabulary with pedestrian elements an urban walk, a shoulder brush. Mr. Royal's dexterity was exacting in both his acting and dancing. It was also a dance about today: The same arms that had just painted the stage with luxurious strokes suddenly froze in the manner of "don't shoot!" His hands clenched overhead; that turned into a single arm raised. How do we move through the world, and how is our movement read? As a ballet dancer, Mr. Royal is much admired on the stage; what happens when he steps outside? In the end, there was a reason "to be seen" was set to "Bolero." It builds and grows, just like the social movements of today: Black people are demanding to be seen. The program closed with the performance that I would most want to see in person: The exceptional tap dancer Dormeshia's premiere of "Lady Swings the Blues" which she did, to music she made in collaboration with Noah Garabedian, Winard Harper and Gabriel Roxbury. A program note stated that the work "honors the generations of Black womxn whose essential contributions to the art form of tap dance have largely remained under the radar." Wearing gold shoes and a shimmering top with dark pants, Dormeshia swung her arms forward and back as she dug into her groove, speeding her taps to a ferocious frequency; occasionally, the thrill of her electric body was muted by irritating camera work close ups of her feet and murky lighting that obscured her frame. Yes, Dormeshia's feet are spectacular, but she is a dancer who uses her entire body, in all of its radiance, to produce a sound. You need all of her. But the dazzle of her dancing and her personality held it all together, with an ending that made me laugh and, certainly, crave more. With one leg locked, she used the other to gently tap in and out, faking the last by dunking her toe before it could land. In the final stretch, she extended it out and pushed her arms through the air. A queen.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
RUNNING WITH BETO (2019) 8 p.m. on HBO; stream on HBO platforms. As the United States looks ahead toward the 2020 presidential election, this new documentary looks back at 2018, when the Texas Democrat Beto O'Rourke burst onto the political scene to challenge the Republican incumbent Ted Cruz for his seat in the Senate. (Cruz came out on top in a narrow victory.) Directed by David Modigliani, this fly on the wall film follows O'Rourke for a year as he leads a grass roots campaign, visits all 254 counties in the state and welcomes voters into his life with quirky social media strategies. The Times critic James Poniewozik wrote that the documentary is "an example of the very of the moment challenge of running for office in the Trump era. To pitch yourself as a president, you must first prove yourself as a show." 30 FOR 30: QUALIFIED 8 p.m. on ESPN. The French driver Simon Pagenaud gulped down some ice cold milk after winning the 103rd Indianapolis 500 this past weekend. As fans celebrate his dramatic victory, this new documentary highlights the career of Janet Guthrie, a driver who in 1977 became the first woman to qualify for and compete in the race. Despite facing the ire of drivers who said she had no place in a male dominated sport, Guthrie kept her eyes on the prize, and finished ninth in the Indy 500 in 1978.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television

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