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Credit...Laylah Amatullah Barrayn for The New York Times Three months ago, when New York government officials ordered nonessential businesses closed to slow the spread of coronavirus, high end retailers sheathed their stores in plywood barriers, as though readying for civil unrest. Did Louis Vuitton and Coach anticipate this human rights movement catalyzed by the police killing of George Floyd? Probably not. The reflexive impulse to protect property is a deeply American one, ingrained in this country's foundation and upheld more consistently than probably anything else. Luxury stores seized in flimsy plywood are a neat visual synecdoche for a country governed more by fear than sense. The effect of seeing entire commercial districts embalmed in plywood is jarring, a hostile landscape of bland, beige blankness. In the graffiti tradition, the presence of blankness is known as "fresh walls," its precious existence an invitation answered gleefully with tags and pieces activated not just by the defiance of their making, but also by being seen an affirmation of humanity. In the absence of in person commerce, looking becomes heightened. It feels like a miracle of restraint that New York's street artists largely heeded the public health emergency and stayed home, leaving most of the city's rolling plywood fields undisturbed. In the last few weeks, however, as the country convulsed into protests against police brutality that were met with more police brutality, that inertia began to give way. In New York, some retail stores, previously content to leave their plywood barriers blank when no one was around to see them, and others newly boarded, began deploying artwork ostensibly directed at the protests. The Museum of Ice Cream in SoHo painted a brand consistent bubble gum pink tribute to black victims of police violence under the unfortunate preamble "I SCREAM FOR ..." After receiving criticism for insensitivity, the museum's founder apologized, had the preamble removed and repainted the plywood black. After its windows were smashed, Kith, a brand that pulped hip hop and streetwear culture into a smooth simulacrum that traffics in notions of community, encased its entire frontage in a massive black box painted with a three story quote from Nelson Mandela that seemed more interested in aesthetics than coalition. The worst of these offer the same ambiguous sentimentality and vague uplift that upscale stores like Club Monaco were already employing before the protests began. The Hanro store next door to the Whitney (its own glass walls blotted out with boards) declares "Love. Unity. Respect.," a tepid platitude that signifies nothing in the face of righteous unrest. It's not hard to identify a brand's motivation here: wanting to soften the brutal optics of its own self interest. As thousands of New Yorkers emptied into the streets in recent weeks, some image consultants correctly identified that their brands would be caught naked. Earlier this month, the artist Shantell Martin shared a screenshot on Instagram of an email she said she received from the advertising firm McCann, soliciting her to create a Black Lives Matter mural on Microsoft's boarded Fifth Avenue store "while the protests are still relevant." Such language gave the lie to what Ms. Martin called "performative allyship." Art can soothe, but it can also manipulate, cajoling pacification when rage is more appropriate. The most immediate problem with these kinds of murals is that they exist under the pretext of looting or rather the perceived, racialized threat of looting, the material impact of which hardly skims the existential one that protests seek to redress. It is simply impossible to call for racial equality with a gesture that prioritizes property value. The cognitive dissonance of a store commissioning a graphic representation of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assertion that a riot is the "language of the unheard" on its riot proof barricade would be parodic if it weren't so damning. Because rioting is a legitimate expression of pain, the active, exuberant presence of materials designed to dampen that expression can be viewed as unsympathetic, even antagonistic. This moment has, again, exposed the limits of corporate solidarity, designed more to defend shareholder integrity than agitate for social justice. All of these examples are distinct from the protest art, murals, posters and graffiti writing on trains and elsewhere commemorating the lives of Mr. Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Kimani Gray, Tamir Rice and other black Americans killed by the police, or in other acts of racial violence, that have sprouted in nearly every major American city. In SoHo one recent weekend, I watched artists quietly add their own murals to blank squares of plywood, forming an open air gallery of genuine grief and solidarity, untethered by commercial interests. Their message is unequivocal. The images are genuine because they serve all of us.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
West Berkeley's warehouse district has long been known for high end lumberyards, tile shops and other stores serving creative homeowners, a kind of D.I.Y. answer to the upscale showrooms of San Francisco's Design District. Recently, the area's large, relatively affordable spaces have begun attracting a different creative crowd: innovative culinary entrepreneurs looking to spread their wings. Even some big boys are jumping in. Last June, the Bay Area based specialty chocolatier TCHO moved its headquarters to a 49,000 square foot facility here. This new wave of good food purveyors is making the neighborhood a draw for foodies as well as design lovers. The chef Shotaro Kamio opened this intimate spot in late 2013, inspired by the cuisines of Japan's mountainous Tohoku region, where he grew up. The cod poached in sweet miso artfully balances buttery and delicate flavors. In a warehouse fronted by a tasting room done up in white subway tile, this three year old brewery is one of a handful in the country dedicated solely to sour beer. The dry tartness serves as a backdrop for unusual flavorings like zesty lemon peel, grassy green tea or fresh raspberries, which come through with stunning clarity.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
BALTIMORE At Everest Greenish Grocery, a brightly lit store on a faded corner of this city, nothing is more popular than a chocolate flavored little cigar. They are displayed just above the Hershey bars along with their colorful cigarillo cousins white grape, strawberry, pineapple and Da Bomb Blueberry. And they were completely sold out by 9 one recent evening, snapped up by young people dropping by for a snack or stopping in during a night of bar hopping. "Sorry, no more chocolate," the night clerk, Qudrad Bari, apologetically told a young woman holding a fruit drink. In 2009, Congress passed a landmark law intended to eliminate an important gateway to smoking for young people by banning virtually all the flavors in cigarettes that advocates said tempted them. Health experts predicted that the change would lead to deep reductions in youth smoking. But the law was silent on flavors in cigars and a number of other tobacco products, instead giving the Food and Drug Administration broad discretion to decide whether to regulate them. Four years later, the agency has yet to assert that authority. And a rainbow of cheap flavored cigars and cigarillos, including some that look like cigarettes, line the shelves of convenience stores and gas stations, often right next to the candy. F.D.A. officials say they intend to regulate cigars and other tobacco products, but they do not say how or when. Smoking opponents contend that the agency's delay is threatening recent progress in reducing smoking among young people. Cigarette sales are down by a third over the past decade, according to federal data, but critics of the agency say the gains are being offset by the rise of cheaper alternatives like cigars, whose sales have doubled over the same period and whose flavored varieties are smoked overwhelmingly by young people. Loose tobacco and cigars expanded to 10 percent of all tobacco sold in the United States in 2011, up from just 3 percent in 2000, federal data show. "The 20th century was the cigarette century, and we worked very hard to address that," said Gregory N. Connolly, the director of the Center for Global Tobacco Control at the Harvard School of Public Health. "Now the 21st century is about multiple tobacco products. They're cheap. They're flavored. And some of them you can use anywhere." The F.D.A. is now wrestling with how to exercise its authority over an array of other tobacco products. In recent weeks, for example, it sent warning letters to several companies that it says are disguising roll your own tobacco as pipe tobacco, a practice that industry analysts say has become a common way to avoid federal taxes and F.D.A. regulation. "The giant has finally awoken and hopefully will do its job," said Ron Bernstein, the chief executive of Liggett Vector Brands, a cigarette producer that is worried about unfair competition from cigar makers and others. Mitchell Zeller, 55, a public interest lawyer who became the director of the F.D.A.'s Center for Tobacco Products this spring, acknowledged in an interview that the emergence of new tobacco products meant a new look was needed. "What we've seen in the past 10 years is this remarkable transformation of the marketplace," Mr. Zeller said. "There are products being sold today unregulated products that literally did not exist 10 years ago." But new rules have to be grounded in scientific evidence, he said, and written to withstand legal challenges. The tobacco industry won a recent court fight against graphic images on cigarette labels. As for the criticism that the agency has been slow to act, Mr. Zeller said, "Message received." "We shouldn't need 40 years of study to figure out that chocolate and grape flavored cigars are being smoked by young people," said Matthew L. Myers, the president of the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids. Traditional handmade cigars were seen as a luxury for older men, but much of the recent growth has been in products sold in convenience stores to low income customers. Flavored cigars now represent more than half of all convenience store and gas station cigar sales, up nearly 40 percent since 2008, according to Nielsen market data analyzed by Cristine Delnevo, a tobacco researcher at Rutgers University. A three pack of Good Times flavored cigarillos at Everest costs 99 cents, an alluring price for the store's clientele: young, poor African Americans. On a recent evening, Mr. Bari, a native of Pakistan, was in a generous mood. He had just broken his Ramadan fast with sweet tea and was helping a customer with the last 30 cents needed for a pack of Newports. But he said flavored cigars were actually more popular in his store than cigarettes. Sometimes people pay for them with spare change. Jay Jackson, a 19 year old nursing assistant in hospital scrubs, rarely has the 6.50 for a pack of cigarettes, which she also smokes, but can usually come up with a dollar for the kind of cigar she likes. Flavors improve the taste of cigars that are otherwise so harsh they make her light headed, she said, paying Mr. Bari for two chocolate and cherry. Mr. Bari said he remembered only strawberry, vanilla and chocolate when he first arrived 10 years ago. "Now look at this," he said, motioning toward the cigar shelf disapprovingly. Some companies are producing small filtered cigars that look like cigarettes in brown wrappers, avoiding the federal taxes and F.D.A. regulation required for cigarettes. Mr. Bernstein, the cigarette producer, contended that such cigars made up much of the recent increase in cigar sales. A typical pack of 20 costs about 2, compared with about 6 for a pack of cigarettes. Tobacco in cigars is cured by a different method than tobacco in cigarettes. And cigars come in a wrapper made of tobacco, while cigarettes are wrapped in paper. Smaller cigars popular among young people tend to be inhaled more, making the health risks similar to cigarettes. Nationally, about one in six 18 to 24 year olds smoke cigars, federal research shows, compared with only 2 percent of people over 65. More than half of the younger users smoke flavored cigars, with the highest rates among the poorest and least educated. Those are familiar circumstances in certain parts of Baltimore, where life expectancy for men can be as low as 63 years, a level last seen for all American men in the 1940s. The smoking rate here is double the national one a pattern that Devin Miles, a high school junior who started smoking cigarettes when he was 10, said was obvious at his school. "Everybody smokes, even the teachers," he said. Cigar producers say they are bracing for F.D.A. action, even as sales have flattened in the last few years, dampened by new taxes. But they question a flavor ban, pointing out that the F.D.A. has yet to prohibit the most common flavor, menthol, in cigarettes and that chewing tobacco still comes in flavors. "We continue to ask the question, 'What's the rationale?' " said Joe Augustus, a spokesman for Swisher International, a cigar producer. Flavors have existed "since the beginning of time," he said, and are popular with "the guys who are cutting your lawn and fixing your car." There is also evidence that cigar purchases are related to marijuana use. In a survey of 5,000 middle and high school students in Massachusetts in 2003, researchers found that about a fifth were using cigar wrappers to smoke marijuana.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
The engagement of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle last week inspired a wave of news coverage and online excitement. And that raised a question that comes up every time a British royal does something big: Why do Americans care? After all, as an op ed in The Washington Post argued recently, the founding fathers "violently overthrew our tea sipping stamp taxing overlords in large part so that we should not have to genuflect in front of the altar of royal bloodlines." Right? Yet Americans do love a British royal wedding. In 2011, they reacted with similar excitement to the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, and to the births of their children that followed. These bouts of monarch mania in the former colonies have played out in a pop culture environment shaped by imported shows like "Downton Abbey" and "The Crown." British programming, long a staple of American public television, has spread to online services like Netflix, Britbox and Acorn TV. Indeed, from "The Great British Bake Off" to the creeping adoption of British slang, we appear to be living in a golden age of American Anglophilia, or an affection for the English and their ways. Interest in the House of Windsor may be the most distilled version of that trend. President Obama even remarked upon it in 2015. "I think it's fair to say that the American people are quite fond of the royal family," Mr. Obama said during a White House visit from Prince Charles. "They like them much more than they like their own politicians." So what is the appeal? Observers of American Anglophilia say it is complicated. Tom Sykes, an Englishman in Dublin who writes about the royal family for The Daily Beast, described the royals as the ultimate celebrities, albeit ones with "some meat on the bone." "I do think if you're going to be interested in celebrities you don't know," Mr. Sykes said, "the royal family are probably more interesting people to be interested in than the Kardashians, say, because of the thousand years of history behind them." The era of prestige television has helped cultivate and encourage these trans Atlantic tastes by making escapist fare instantly, and repeatedly, accessible in a way that rental VHS versions of "Howards End" were not for an earlier generation. Streaming services have helped introduce Americans to shows like "Downton Abbey" and "The Crown," turning them into critical darlings and bestowing American celebrity upon their British stars, like the actors Michelle Dockery and Claire Foy. And while the monarchy may be the most popular institution in British public life, some in Britain criticize it as out of touch, said Suzanne Mackie, the executive producer of "The Crown," whose second season begins this week. "There would probably be an apathy, an ambivalence, and some people would even be ill disposed to them symbolically in what they represent," said Ms. Mackie, who is British. "So it's always interesting to us to counter that with the American relationship with the royal family and interest in the royal family." Ms. Mackie attributed the royal family's appeal, in part, to "the mystique, the mythology around the throne and the monarchy." But for Americans, not just any royal will do. The August wedding of Prince Phillip and Danica Marinkovic in Serbia made barely a ripple in the United States. "Americans are particularly interested in the British monarchy, it's not just monarchy in general," said Arianne Chernock, a historian at Boston University. "You don't see the same kind of interest directed at the Japanese Crown. I think it is about this special relationship, at root." And so the engagement of Prince Harry to a biracial actress (Ms. Markle's mother is African American) was celebrated as a moment of inclusivity, even though the House of Windsor is not even the first in Europe to welcome a black princess or duchess into the royal family.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
While the rest of America was roaring to jazz during the '20s, in a small corner of the South, where back roads snake through early morning mist and porches are used for melody making as much as sitting in rocking chairs, another form of music was quietly taking root. In the heart of southern Appalachia, at the convergence of northeast Tennessee and southwest Virginia, a set of early recording sessions, conducted by a New York City record producer over two epoch making weeks in the summer of 1927, would catapult the careers of the Carter Family from Virginia, the "first family of country music," and the Mississippi singer and songwriter Jimmie Rodgers, who would become known as "the father of country music." The recordings would become an inflection point in the history of what we now refer to as country music. And though musicologists may take issue with the assigning of its origin to any one time or place, the famous Bristol Sessions of 1927 were influential enough to be widely referred to as the "big bang" of country music, a topic that the documentarian Ken Burns is taking a broad look at in an upcoming series on PBS. In April, I headed east of Nashville to the place where those early sessions were recorded, and where the music they gave birth to are celebrated: the Tri Cities of Kingsport, Johnson City and Bristol, which is a two state town straddling the border of Tennessee and Virginia. In 1998, Congress named Bristol the "Birthplace of Country Music." Sixteen years later, the Virginia side built the 24,000 square foot Birthplace of Country Music Museum, a sleek Smithsonian Institution affiliate and part of the nonprofit Birthplace of Country Music organization, which, during the third week of September, hosts the Bristol Rhythm Roots Reunion, one of the largest assemblages of country music, Americana, roots and bluegrass in the United States. After heading east toward the mountains, I hit the Cumberland Plateau and rolled down the windows to let in the cool air. Two hours on, I was planting my bags at an Airbnb rental in Johnson City, and the largest of the three towns in the Tri Cities area. Johnson City appears on a number of lists of best places to live and visit, and is home to East Tennessee State University, which offers Appalachian related studies. Ted Olson, a professor of American Roots Music in the Department of Appalachian Studies and an expert on the Bristol Sessions, said country music primarily sprang from two "seedbeds": "One was, of course, Appalachia," he said. "The other was the Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana area." If Bristol is the birthplace of country music, then Ralph Peer, the record producer from New York City, acted as stork. Mr. Peer, armed with new portable technology including a type of carbon microphone that made sound recordings considerably truer traveled to Tennessee to record what he called the area's "hillbilly music." He put out the word, and they came by foot, horse and buggy, train and car from the surrounding mountains to assemble in a hat warehouse on State Street in downtown Bristol, Tenn. In all, 19 individuals or groups recorded 76 songs. My goal was to meet Rick Dollar, former executive director of the Appalachian Cultural Music Association and a longtime torch bearer of issues surrounding the region's musical history. Mr. Dollar had recently hosted Ken Burns's documentary crew, who had been traveling through the area. "Appalachian style music has enhanced or motivated every style of music that you can think of from blues to rock to country. And it all just keeps growing and changing every day," said Mr. Dollar, who was, until recently, the executive director of the Mountain Music Museum, a small gallery that told the story of southern Appalachian music for more than 20 years before it closed this summer. Roy Acuff's fiddle (which was found on Goodwill's website by a volunteer) and first pressings of the Carter Family classic "Keep On The Sunny Side" were among the exhibits, all of which will go to the Birthplace of Country Music Museum or be returned to their owners. We went on to discuss the period of the late 1920s and its influence on the region's music. Mr. Dollar emphasized that the Bristol Sessions weren't the only recordings made in the area. "What a lot of people don't understand is that in 1927 and just after, there were sessions all around here, and they went on for two to three years." Johnson City, indeed, had its own set of sessions in 1928 and 1929, as did Knoxville, Tenn., the latter capturing a diverse gathering of African American blues and gospel singers and musicians. The assumption that the songs that came from the Appalachian Mountains all passed through the hands of Scottish and Irish immigrants leaves out other groups in what was certainly a complicated tapestry of people who arrived in the mountains over the years. Leslie Riddle, an African American musician and friend of A.P. Carter, would famously wander with him through the mountains looking for songs to record for Ralph Peer. "Over the years, word of mouth has gotten around about the Down Home," said Mr. Snodderly, a working singer, songwriter and musician who also teaches music at E.T.S.U. "In 1976, we opened up a place where people would have to listen to music or at least behave." That evening, no one talked over a nearly spectral folk duo from Nova Scotia, two women who switched from fiddle, banjo, guitar and mandolin while harmonizing to deliciously grim original songs, still somehow managing to incorporate foot percussion. As I drove back to my Airbnb late that night, I thought about the people I had met so far, some more incidentally than others, but many who have lived shoulder to the mountains for generations. Ask five people what they think Appalachia is, and it's possible to get five answers, because Appalachia is, according to some cultural anthropologists, a cognitive region as much a state of mind, as it is a specific place. On an overcast morning after coffee the following day, I departed Johnson City for Bristol, Va., and the Birthplace of Country Music Museum in the heart of town, an unmistakable brick and glass building that forms a dramatic V at the corner of Cumberland and Moore streets. Visitors open the doors to a two story glass foyer and a sculpture, nearly as tall, composed of images of the 1927 musicians and the city of Bristol. The gallery is an interactive telling of the Bristol Sessions through images and artifacts, including relevant instruments like the fiddle, banjo, harp guitar, guitar, kazoo and jaw harp, as well as film and music. It also includes a 110 seat theater. Though the museum focuses on the 1927 sessions, it uses that story to tell ancillary narratives about the role of sacred music and life in Appalachia at the time. The museum's head curator, Rene Rodgers, said that explaining the story well was part of the mission. For instance, a Carter Family tree shows the original Carter family, which blossomed into three generations of musicians to include A. P. and Sara's children, Joe and Janette Carter, and the enduring group of Maybelle and her daughters, Helen, June and Anita, and their children. June Carter would famously marry Johnny Cash in 1968, and together they would become one of country music's most enduring couples. Jimmie Rodgers, who would die at 35 from complications related to tuberculosis, is featured in several places, from a panel on the stars of the sessions to a signed guitar and photographs. In honor of his contributions, Meridian, Miss., holds an annual Jimmie Rodgers Music Festival each May. "I think the thing about our museum that works so well for the people who visit is that it has a really nice narrative arc," Ms. Rodgers said. "We want them to understand that they the Bristol Sessions were a part of a larger picture that had to do with recordings in other places and technological developments in the recording industry at the time." After viewing the film "Bound to Bristol," which explains why Ralph Peer picked the area to find talent, and some of the stories behind the artists who recorded, visitors come to the large round Bristol Sessions station. There they can listen to songs that were released after the Sessions, including "Are You Washed in the Blood," by Ernest Stoneman His Dixie Mountaineers, and "Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow," by the Carter Family. Further into the exhibition, visitors can also hear interpretations by other artists, such as the Tenneva Ramblers' "The Longest Train I Ever Saw," later reimagined by Lead Belly as "In the Pines" and Nirvana as "Where Did You Sleep Last Night." While it was still light, I drove to the nearby Mount Vernon Methodist Church, a small, steepled sanctuary with a gabled roof. Clinch Mountain rises above the church, which also overlooks an extraordinarily green valley: hill and hollow. I found the headstones of A. P. and Sara Carter and remembered their 1928 song, "Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?" Perhaps you'll plant a flower On my poor unworthy grave Come and sit along beside me When the roses nod and wave ... I was certainly in the middle of nowhere, but it still felt like a place that beckons people to return one way or another. Appalachia, it appears, is a place defined as much by music, faith and family as it is by county and state line, and from where I stood that felt abundant. Colleen Creamer, a writer based in Nashville, is a frequent contributor to the Travel section.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
SAN FRANCISCO Uber says it is not renewing its permit to test self driving vehicles in California until the police and regulators wrap up an investigation into how one of its autonomous vehicles struck and killed a woman in Arizona last week. The company decided to withdraw its renewal application late last week. The move came to light in a letter that California's Department of Motor Vehicles sent to Uber on Tuesday. The letter informed Uber that its testing permit will expire on Saturday and that it will have to address "any follow up analysis or investigations from the recent crash in Arizona" if it applies for a new permit in the future. The loss of the permit, reported earlier by The San Francisco Chronicle, is the latest roadblock for Uber as the company weighs the future of its self driving car program. Uber halted all testing of its driverless cars after one of them killed Elaine Herzberg, 49, who was walking her bicycle across a road in Tempe, Ariz. The car was going 40 miles per hour and did not slow down before impact, the Tempe police said. Arizona's governor, Doug Ducey, ordered the company to suspend the testing of its autonomous vehicles on Monday, eight days after the crash, saying footage of the accident "raises many questions about the ability of Uber to continue testing in Arizona." Uber said it withdrew its California application on Friday because it wouldn't have been able to respond to questions from the state's regulators until it had time to review the findings of the investigation in Arizona. Uber initially applied to renew its permit a few days after the crash. When the D.M.V. opened the mailed application on Friday, it called the company to confirm, a department spokeswoman said, and Uber asked to withdraw the request. The D.M.V. asked for the withdrawal in writing, and it received an email on Saturday. Uber has said it is cooperating with investigations by the Tempe police, the National Transportation Safety Board and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. None of the investigations have determined whether Uber was at fault in the crash. The intense focus on the accident has also prompted Uber's suppliers to evaluate its technology. On Tuesday, a spokesman for Nvidia, a supplier of semiconductors and other computer hardware used in Uber's autonomous vehicles, said it was suspending its tests of self driving cars on public roads in order to "learn from the Uber incident." The price of Nvidia shares fell 8 percent on the news. Uber has not said when it plans to resume testing its autonomous vehicles. The bulk of Uber's testing was in Arizona, but it was also driving autonomous vehicles on roads in San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Toronto. Alexis Campbell, a community relations manager for Pennsylvania's Department of Transportation, said it would work with Uber to ensure that safety was the top priority if tested was restarted in the state. Uber has had a rocky history with the California D.M.V. In 2016, Uber started testing its self driving cars in San Francisco without a permit, arguing that one wasn't necessary because a safety driver was monitoring the vehicles. The D.M.V. disagreed and ordered Uber to apply for a permit. When Uber refused, the department revoked the registrations for the 16 cars that Uber was testing in the city. After California revoked the registrations, Mr. Ducey said Arizona welcomed Uber's cars with "open arms and wide open roads." In a public showing, Uber loaded its cars onto a truck and hauled them to Arizona. Uber eventually applied for a permit and resumed testing in San Francisco last March.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
With its freshly color coded cardigans, my pandemic closet was looking pretty sharp, I thought until I saw Joshua William Gelb's. Soon after Covid 19 hit New York, he emptied his, painted it white, reinforced it with plywood, removed its door and turned it into a cross disciplinary performance lab. (Here's how he did it.) You wouldn't think that the 4 foot wide by 8 foot tall space, approximately the same shape as an iPhone screen, would be big enough for a play, let alone an avant garde company. Yet the closet, only 2 feet deep, is one of the stars of Gelb's Theater in Quarantine series, which since late March has produced, on a biweekly schedule, some of the new medium's most imaginative work from some of its simplest materials. As in silent movies, clowning, movement and mime are usually part of the mix. "The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy," which was livestreamed on Thursday evening and will remain available in perpetuity on Gelb's YouTube channel, has all of those and then some. Based on a 1957 story by Stanislaw Lem, the Polish science fiction writer most famous for "Solaris," it concerns an astronaut named Egon who, passing through a minefield of gravitational vortexes, is caught in a causal loop paradox that bombards him with innumerable (and insufferable) alternative selves. Lem's story is a satire of the infinite human capacity for self defeat, with the various Egon incarnations bickering and undermining one another as the gyrations of space time bend them into conflict. When "a meteor no bigger than a pea" pierces the ship's hull, destroying the rudder, everyone has ideas about fixing it but since it's a two man job, making cooperation essential, nothing actually gets done. Philosophical cleverness is the story's top note; beneath it you may scent the sad bouquet of solitude, even among a crowd. That makes the tale wonderfully apt for our social distancing moment, if not an obvious match for a small camera and a tiny stage. Adapting Lem's story, the playwright Josh Luxenberg has thus replaced the satire with slapstick: The virtuosic Gelb, playing all the Egons, is often to be found wriggling through his ship's trapdoors or bopping himself on the head with a skillet. Instead of Intergalactic Groundhog Day the result is more like the Three Stooges in Space, except there are as many as 26 stooges involved and they're all as bossy and testy as Moe. If the closet, representing all the chambers of the spaceship, is one of the show's stars, the other is Gelb himself; no other humans appear in "The 7th Voyage" nor have any appeared live so far in the Theater in Quarantine series. That's in part because Gelb, who has asthma, is loath to leave his East Village railroad flat or otherwise take risks with the coronavirus. But, chicken and eggwise, that sense of isolation is also the product (or result) of a bracing aesthetic that can arise from deprivation. Not that the production is technologically impoverished. Using standard phones, cameras and computers running software repurposed for digital production, the director Jonathan Levin has devised a sophisticated mise en scene. To "stage" the multiple Egon scenes, he layers recorded takes of Gelb with live ones in which he interacts with himself. By turning the camera 90 degrees, he creates scenes that simulate weightlessness and horizontality, much as the director Stanley Donen made it appear, in "Royal Wedding," that Fred Astaire was dancing on the ceiling. In this case, though, lacking a rotating set on an MGM soundstage, Gelb has to adjust his posture to create the illusion of floating at the top of the closet while actually supine on its floor. Considering the shoestring budget Theater in Quarantine, working with Sinking Ship Productions, put the show together for 6,000, most of it going to pay the artists "The 7th Voyage" looks and sounds terrific. The set and costume design by Peiyi Wong are homemade marvels reminiscent of both Cornell boxes and coffins; the staticky video design by Jesse Garrison and the spacey music by M. Florian Staab smartly update the ominous vibe of 1950s sci fi. But as is often the case with new modes of presentation, hyperattention to surfaces comes at some expense to depth. Even at only 35 minutes, "The 7th Voyage" is emotionally slim, with a busy skin and not much psychology. Likewise Lem's story, which implies truths without filling them in, can read like a mathematical proof. Both are elegant and nimble and dry. That's not necessarily a bad thing, especially as established theaters wait out the pandemic, lumbering and slumbering toward Bethlehem. It's more of a nascent thing. Theater in Quarantine only recently added words to its repertoire; in May it presented "an unauthorized edit" of Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape." (An adaptation of "The Secret Miracle" by Borges is scheduled for Aug. 27.) But as the company advances further into spoken theater, I hope it finds ways to flesh out its smart playfulness with how can I put this? more human gravity.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
A live production of "Rent" airs on Fox. And awards season blazes on, at the Screen Actors Guild Awards. RENT 8 p.m. on Fox. Fans who have only seen high school productions (or middle school, or elementary school, or all three) of Jonathan Larson's 1996 musical riff on "La Boheme" have at least one major reason be excited about this live television adaptation: Michael Greif, who directed the original production at the New York Theater Workshop and a more recent Off Broadway production, is working with Alex Rudzinski (who in recent years directed "Grease: Live!" and John Legend as Jesus in "Jesus Christ Superstar" live in concert) to bring the musical to TV. That's about the most qualified team one could hope for, and the cast is delightfully varied: Vanessa Hudgens (of "High School Musical" and "Grease: Live!"), the pop singer Tinashe, Brandon Victor Dixon (Leslie Odom Jr.'s replacement as Aaron Burr in "Hamilton") and Valentina ("RuPaul's Drag Race") are all featured. The story concerns a group of New York artists living in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic though it's not all gloomy. "Puccini's ravishingly melancholy work seemed, like many operas of its time, to romance death," Ben Brantley wrote in his 1996 review for The New York Times. "Mr. Larson's spirited score and lyrics defy it." 25TH ANNUAL SCREEN ACTORS GUILD AWARDS 8 p.m. on TBS and TNT. With awards season in full swing, the SAG awards arrive Sunday night to add fuel to an already roaring conversation about who stood out onscreen in 2018. Anyone who watched the Golden Globes a few weeks ago or read the list of Oscar nominees released this week will find much that's familiar. (Lady Gaga? Glenn Close? Rami Malek? Richard E. Grant? Olivia Colman? They're all here.) But with the SAG ceremony, those performances are more or less isolated from the movies they came from; more even than usual, the actors themselves get center stage. This year, the ceremony will be hosted by Megan Mullally.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
A former major league pitcher was found dead from a self inflicted gunshot wound after he was identified by the authorities as a suspect in the killing of his former girlfriend in Arizona, the authorities said. The police found the body of the retired pitcher, Charles Haeger, about 4 p.m. local time on Saturday along a trail at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon in Northern Arizona, Sgt. Ben Hoster of the Scottsdale Police Department said in a statement. Mr. Haeger's unoccupied minivan had been found that morning near Flagstaff, Sergeant Hoster said. The police had been looking for Mr. Haeger, 37, since Friday in connection with the fatal shooting of his former girlfriend, whom the authorities identified as Danielle Breed, 34. On Friday afternoon, Ms. Breed's roommate had returned to their residence in Scottsdale, just east of Phoenix, when "he heard multiple gunshots coming from her room," Sergeant Hoster said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
LOS ANGELES Relativity Media, emerging from bankruptcy, is adding some star power to its executive ranks. On Thursday, the company said the actor Kevin Spacey would become chairman of its Relativity Studios unit and Mr. Spacey's business partner, Dana Brunetti, would become president. The appointments occur as Relativity acquires Trigger Street Productions, a film and television production company operated by Mr. Spacey and Mr. Brunetti. Trigger Street has been known for its involvement with the "Fifty Shades of Grey" film and the "House of Cards" series on Netflix. Before Relativity's bankruptcy filing last year, Trigger Street's dealings with the company included the development of a film based on the Benghazi terror attacks, a project that Mr. Brunetti later said was sidelined by the studio's financial woes. (Paramount Pictures will release a different Benghazi film, "13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi," on Jan. 15.) The star executive alignment is not without precedent in Hollywood. Tom Cruise, for instance, for a time joined his producing partner, Paula Wagner, in running the United Artists studio. Relativity did not disclose financial terms of the Trigger Street deal.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Doctors are closely watching about 200 people in Spain after a patient at a hospital in Madrid died of Crimean Congo hemorrhagic fever, the first time the disease has been found in Western Europe in someone who had not traveled to an endemic area. The patient apparently caught the virus after being bitten by a tick, and then passed it to a nurse before he died. It has been known for five years that some ticks in Spain harbored the virus. Crimean Congo hemorrhagic fever is fatal in about 30 percent of cases, according to the World Health Organization. It is normally found in Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans and Central Asia south of Kazakhstan. It killed 20 people in Pakistan this year. It usually strikes herders, slaughterhouse workers and others in contact with tick covered animals, but it can also be passed in human blood and bodily fluids.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Thousands of football fans are flying into Phoenix this week for the Super Bowl on Sunday, but will locals be joining in the festivities? Are they embracing their roles as hosts, or just bracing themselves? Fernanda Santos, chief of the Phoenix bureau of The New York Times, believes the citizens of Phoenix are ready for the revelry. "This is a perfect place for a party," she said. Especially this time of year, when temperatures are in the merciful 70s, instead of the 100s, she said, "People want to be out and about." The city of Phoenix is transforming its downtown from roughly Jefferson to Monroe Street and Central Avenue to about Third Street into a pedestrian area, where revelers can walk with cocktails in hand, catch free concerts and watch fireworks. There is even a rock climbing wall called the Grand Canyon Experience.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater. 'APOLOGIA' at the Laura Pels Theater at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater (in previews; opens on Oct. 16). It's Kristin's birthday. And it's very unlikely she is getting her wish. In Alexi Kaye Campbell's play, directed by Daniel Aukin, Stockard Channing stars as Kristin, an art history professor and onetime '60s radical who is visited by the sons she abandoned and their girlfriends. Hugh Dancy and Megalyn Echikunwoke co star. 212 719 1300, roundabouttheatre.org 'DANIEL'S HUSBAND' at Westside Theater Upstairs (previews start on Oct. 18; opens on Oct. 28). Michael McKeever's play, perhaps the world's first gay marriage tragedy, which had its New York premiere in 2017, returns for an encore performance. While the play has some awkward dialogue and some very unlikely plot details, it's still a tear jerker. Matthew Montelongo and Ryan Spahn return to their original roles. 212 239 6200, danielshusband.com 'EMMA AND MAX' at the Flea Theater (in previews; opens on Oct. 14). Todd Solondz, the filmmaker ("Welcome to the Dollhouse," "Happiness") most likely to make you throw in the towel on humanity, writes and directs his first play. Ilana Becker, Rita Wolf, Zonya Love and Matt Servitto star in a New York story about love, marriage and survival. 866 811 4111, theflea.org 'GLORIA: A LIFE' at the Daryl Roth Theater (in previews; opens on Oct. 18). Journalist, activist and foundational second wave feminist, Gloria Steinem has been in the figurative spotlight for five decades. That light is a little more literal now. In this play, written by Emily Mann and directed by Diane Paulus, the actress Christine Lahti portrays Ms. Steinem. The first act is biography; the second is a talking circle. gloriatheplay.com 'THE LIFESPAN OF A FACT' at Studio 54 (in previews; opens on Oct. 18). Comma drama. This three character play, adapted from a book by the essayist John D'Agata and the fact checker Jim Fingal about the seven years spent checking one of Mr. D'Agata's stories and the shifting definitions of truth. The show stars Bobby Cannavale as the writer, Daniel Radcliffe as the fact checker and Cherry Jones as the editor. Leigh Silverman directs. 212 239 6200, lifespanofafact.com 'MOTHER OF THE MAID' at the Public Theater (in previews; opens on Oct. 17). Joan of Arc's mother was last seen at the Public in the finale of the misconceived "Joan of Arc: Into the Fire," and now she's back again in Jane Anderson's play. Under Matthew Penn's direction, Glenn Close stars as the peasant woman surprised to have birthed such an extraordinary daughter. 212 967 7555, publictheater.org 'THE NICETIES' at Manhattan Theater Club at City Center, Stage II (previews start on Oct. 12; opens on Oct. 25). A white history professor and her black student brave a fraught office hour in Eleanor Burgess's play, first seen at the Huntington Theater Company. Kimberly Senior directs Lisa Banes and Jordan Boatman in a two hander that explores the values and desires underpinning the American experiment. 212 581 1212, manhattantheatreclub.com 'RAGS PARKLAND SINGS THE SONGS OF THE FUTURE' at Ars Nova (in previews; opens on Oct. 15). In 250 years, the moon is a casino, Mars is a labor camp and GMO humans are built in a lab. But at least there are still singer songwriters. In this avant retro musical, the composer Andrew R. Butler and several actor musicians make protest anthems new again. Jordan Fein directs. 212 352 3101, arsnovanyc.com 'SCHOOL GIRLS; OR, THE AFRICAN MEAN GIRLS PLAY' at the Lucille Lortel Theater (previews start on Oct. 16; opens on Oct. 22). The students of Aburi Girls' Senior High School are back for another semester. MCC offers an encore run of Jocelyn Bioh's giggly, trenchant comedy, directed by Rebecca Taichman. Reviewing the run last winter, Jesse Green wrote, "The nasty teen comedy genre emerges wonderfully refreshed and even deepened by its immersion in a world it never considered." 866 811 4111, mcctheater.org 'TRAVISVILLE' at Ensemble Studio Theater (in previews; opens on Oct. 12). William Jackson Harper, a longtime Off Broadway favorite and more recently a sitcom star, makes his playwriting debut. Set in an unnamed city in the 1960s, his drama centers on a group of ministers and a few congregants negotiating civil rights and personal wrongs. Steve H. Broadnax III directs. ensemblestudiotheatre.org 'THUNDERBODIES' at Soho Rep (previews start on Oct. 16; opens on Oct. 27). The war is over and everything is weird in America, including the weather. The breathlessly inventive Soho Rep presents the world premiere of Kate Tarker's play. Directed by Lileana Blain Cruz, the play, which stars Deirdre O'Connell and Juan Carlos Hernandez, coins a new and very relevant portmanteau: "normible," normal and terrible at the same time. 866 811 4111, sohorep.org 'ANTIGONE IN FERGUSON' at Harlem Stage (closes on Oct. 13). Sophocles's tragedy of individual rights and civic wrongs, updated by Theater of War, ends its Harlem run. Conceived and directed by Bryan Doerries and starring a rotating cast, including Samira Wiley and Paul Giamatti, this production, Ben Brantley noted, "echoes and assumes new forms in the divided America of the 21st century." 212 650 7100, harlemstage.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
SUZY BOERBOOM, a registered nurse, retired for the first time after a 35 year career in health care and ownership of several Curves exercise locations. She then devoted five years to helping her three daughters raise their children. "I was very close to both my grandmothers," Ms. Boerboom said, "and I wanted the same relationship with my grandchildren." But after several years, she felt too restless to retire, she said. "I just didn't feel relevant," Ms. Boerboom, now 66, said. "I was beginning to feel a little bored, and a bit out of the mainstream." So in 2009, she started Welcyon, Fitness After 50, a health club business that aims to help older people become fit and stay that way. Ms. Boerboom, working with her husband, Tom, from their Edina, Minn., headquarters, is now busy franchising the centers. Ms. Boerboom said she "failed" at retirement, joining a group of people who are sometimes labeled workaholics or, more kindly, "driven achievers," who work simply because they love it. For many, the "ideal retirement includes work in some capacity," says Ken Dychtwald, founder and chief executive of Age Wave, a group that researches the aging population. Many retirement dropouts are highfliers who land right back in the executive mix. Of course, many over age 55 work to pay the bills, but others just want to keep busy, so they help a family member's business. These workers are swelling the ranks of the work force aged 55 years and older. There are more people in the retirement age work force than at any time since the 1960s, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics has found. About 33 million seniors are currently employed, up 49 percent from the 23 million such workers a decade ago, according to the government data. This is a reversal from the 1950s, when, benefiting from Social Security and company pensions, people began retiring at earlier ages than ever before. In 1960, according to federal statistics, only about 40 percent of workers over 55 were in the labor force compared with nearly twice as many, or 80 percent, in 1900, an era when relatively few people ever left work unless they had to because of illness or physical disability. By the 1970s, the percentage of the upper age labor force fell even further, to the 30 percent range. But it began climbing back up again in the late 2000s, spurred by the economic collapse in 2008. This year, the 55 and older segment returned to 1960s levels of around 40 percent, as many people work to rebuild their retirement savings or supplement their Social Security payments. But financial need and the desire for new challenges are not the only factors driving how workers approach retirement. People are looking at decades, instead of years, of retirement, and they are rethinking traditional pastimes like travel, golf and bridge. As a result, a preponderance of the people in their 50s want to work in some capacity. Mr. Dychtwald said that three fourths of those older than 50 queried in a recent study by Age Wave and Merrill Lynch Global Wealth Management said they wanted to work. The "Work in Retirement: Myths and Motivations" study, which was conducted last March, found that about two years before retirement, more than half of those who plan to work after age 55 are taking "substantial steps" to prepare for their next work experience, which could include updating their skills or looking to expand a hobby, and about 54 percent felt financially prepared for retirement. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' Further exploring motivation, an AARP survey, conducted in January 2014, found that about a third of retirement age people said they worked because they enjoyed it. That is equal to the percentage of those who said they had to work for financial reasons, according to the study called "Staying Ahead of the Curve: The AARP Work and Career Study." The AARP research found that 55 percent of retirees are employed voluntarily, including the 25 percent who reported working because they wanted to be physically or mentally active. The study queried 1,502 people 45 through 74. Such "driven achievers" include Ronald E. Stewart, the chief executive of PRGX Global, a business analytics and information services provider, who segued from a 30 year career at what is now Accenture. He prepared for life without a workplace, but also kept looking for business opportunities. "I was the oldest guy in the Atlanta office," he said of his 2007 retirement at 53, and "I was tired of being constantly on the road for work." After winding down for a brief period, he decided to keep his hand in the working world by starting a private equity investment firm with former colleagues. "It was a little bit of a toe in the water," he said of the venture. But then an unexpected opportunity enticed him to pursue a completely new business. In 2008, he opened a hamburger restaurant with a young man he had mentored for years while volunteering for Atlanta's Big Brothers, Big Sisters program. Mr. Stewart quickly had to learn day to day restaurant operations after helping open FLIP Burger Boutique, which he calls "fine dining between two buns." "Waking up and doing something you want to do sort of gets in your DNA," he said. "I never felt comfortable chilling out, and I always had a desire to keep moving." Part of that was serving on the PRGX board, and last year his fellow directors asked him to become chief executive of the 1,600 person company. He is once again the "oldster" among his colleagues, but Mr. Stewart said he had no plans to retire soon. That is not uncommon. Those still working after 65, the Age Wave study found, stay in their second employment for an average of nine years. That is almost the amount of time Jack Butorac, the chief executive of Marco's Pizza, has spent at that company since he came out of retirement twice, after decades in the food industry. "I failed miserably at retirement," said Mr. Butorac, 66, of Louisville, Ky. His plan of traveling, polishing his golf game and spending time at home "was just boring," he said. He had been an executive at Hormel Foods, beginning his career by making Spam in the company's packing plant in Minnesota. He also worked at Chi Chi's Mexican restaurant chain and Fuddruckers. During his unsettled second retirement, he learned about Marco's Pizza, based in Toledo, Ohio. He went on a road trip with a friend to sample the food at five outlets and loved its taste and consistency. "It was delicious," he said. "I saw an opportunity to expand the company nationally so, in 2004, I decided to buy the franchise rights." In the decade since then, he said he still finds time to pursue golf and traveling with his wife their latest trip was a Baltic Sea cruise but, mostly, he spends his time flying, and sometimes driving, the 300 plus miles between his home in Louisville and Marco's headquarters, overseeing the chain's expansion. To some degree, failure is not an option, he said, adding, "I'd go crazy with nothing to do." So he is immersed in plans to open more than 1,100 stores in coming years, with an eye to rivaling the pizza giants Domino's and Pizza Hut. "And we are just getting started," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
DAVID N. CAMPBELL'S path to creating and running a volunteer organization began when he heard about the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. His response was something he had not seen coming. "When I heard about it, I was overwhelmed," said Mr. Campbell, 72, a former technology executive. "In my gut, I knew I had to help." He had never been to Thailand, and his experience as a volunteer had been limited to overseeing a United Way campaign in Buffalo. The one week visit Mr. Campbell had planned turned into a one month stay, and a new way of life. Ten years later, he runs an organization, All Hands Volunteers, a nonprofit based in Mattapoisett, Mass., that has dispatched 28,000 volunteers to 45 global disaster zones from Indonesia to the Philippines, Peru, Bangladesh and Haiti, as well as to dozens of domestic sites hit by tornadoes, hurricanes and flooding, including Detroit and Long Island and Staten Island after Hurricane Sandy. The work is varied: rebuilding houses, packing knapsacks with school supplies for children, debris removal and basic gutting and cleanup. In exchange, All Hands provides volunteers with tools, meals and communal living arrangements at no cost. "Now I'm a member of the Good for Nothing Club," said Mr. Campbell, who does not take a salary. "We want to do good for nothing." But sometimes the world does pay you back. On Tuesday, in Tempe, Ariz., Mr. Campbell is to receive a cash prize of 100,000 in recognition and support of his work. He is one of this year's six winners of the Purpose Prize awarded to Americans 60 and older who have had an impact on the world. The award was created by Encore.org, a nonprofit organization that's building a movement to tap the skills and experience of those in midlife and beyond to improve communities. A common spine runs among all of the winners: "An increasing number of people over 60 want to leave a legacy and do something that makes their children proud," said Ann MacDougall, president of Encore.org. "They're thinking about what's going to be read at their funeral. Not that it's right around the corner, but they start thinking in those terms." Now in its ninth year, the Purpose Prize will award 100,000 each to two winners and 25,000 each to four others. Charles Irvin Fletcher, 76, a former microwave systems engineer, will receive this year's other six figure prize. After retiring, Mr. Fletcher, a lifelong horse lover, spent five years and 5,000 hours volunteering at a therapeutic riding center in the Dallas area dedicated to equine therapy for children with disabilities. "While the children enjoyed the ride, I didn't see any healing, and I thought more could be done and more should be done," Mr. Fletcher said. So he researched ways to provide science based equine therapy. He met with medical specialists to learn about brain development and created a network of experts. Then in 2001, he founded SpiritHorse International, a nonprofit based in Corinth, Tex., 30 miles north of Dallas. His ranch is now home to 31 horses and ponies, and is the headquarters for a worldwide network of 91 licensed therapeutic riding centers that serve children with disabilities in the United States, South America, Africa and Europe. At Mr. Fletcher's ranch in Corinth, roughly 400 children with disabilities, some as young as nine months, receive free weekly riding sessions on ponies with names like Buttercup and Peter Pan. The riders have a variety of medical conditions, including autism, Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis and spina bifida. He added, "The reason this therapy works so well is that children with disabilities also have a very open spirit, and the horses sense it." Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' The Rev. Richard Joyner, 62, pastor of the Conetoe Baptist Church in rural North Carolina, who created the Conetoe Family Life Center, will receive a 25,000 Purpose Prize on Tuesday. The center uses its 25 acre garden to improve the health of the congregation members and to increase the members' high school graduation rates. "It's not easy getting people in the South away from fried chicken and sweet tea," Pastor Joyner said. In 2005, Pastor Joyner had faced too many funerals at his church of 300 congregants. In one year alone, 30 under the age of 32 had died. Most of the deaths were health related, stemming from poor diet and no exercise, he said. His own sister and brother had died of heart attacks. So he founded the center, which offers after school and summer camp programs for children 5 to 18. The youths plan, plant and reap the produce, which, in turn, they peddle at farmers' markets, roadside stands and to local restaurants. They also maintain beehives to produce and supply honey to low income neighbors. The income they earn goes to school supplies and scholarships. Getting involved with farming was not easy for Pastor Joyner. "I was a sharecropper's son, and we experienced a lot of racism," he said. "I never wanted to ever have anything to do with farming." But that changed. "The eyes of the youth have helped me to see the land in a different perspective," he said. "Land is the soul. Farming gives these youths, who are struggling, the power to grow something that impacts the health of their family." As healthy eating and exercise have become routine, people in the community have lost weight, emergency room visits for primary health care have dropped by 40 percent, and the number of deaths has dwindled. The youth are enrolling in college and finding jobs. As for Pastor Joyner, who runs five miles every other day and works in the garden, "After being a preacher for 25 years, I never thought I would be doing something other than trying to get somewhere for a vacation at this age." The other 2014 Purpose Prize winners who will receive 25,000 awards are: Dr. Pamela Cantor, 66, a child psychiatrist who runs an organization called Turnaround for Children in New York City. Her group helps schools counter the effects of poverty on student learning, reaching tens of thousands of children in low performing public schools. Mauricio Lim Miller, 68, who founded the Family Independence Initiative in Oakland, Calif., which helps families in poverty. For example, families in the initiative have pooled their resources in 40 "lending circles" worth 1.5 million that have helped them pay down debt, provide funds for education and start new businesses. Kate Williams, 72, who runs an employment program at LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired in San Francisco, which helps the blind find jobs. In addition to the six winners selected from a pool of nearly 800 nominees, 38 Purpose Prize fellows will be honored for contributions to their communities. The awards are sponsored by the Atlantic Philanthropies, the John Templeton Foundation, Symetra Financial Corporation, the MetLife Foundation and the Eisner Foundation. Most of the winners tapped their own resources to start their endeavors, sometimes using credit cards or savings accounts or, in one case, Social Security checks. Others raised money from personal connections. "We encourage people who want to move the needle to consider what interests and passions they already have and review their skills those are more transferable than they think," Ms. MacDougall, Encore.org's president, said. "Seek out a group whose mission you admire and see if there's a way to get involved by volunteering, joining a board or acting as a project adviser," she said. "People who have organized things, been in marketing or sales or have managed people are in demand." The Purpose Prize recipients are free to use their jackpot any way they like. But don't expect to see them buying new cars or taking trips to the Caribbean. "My big reward is seeing these children improve," Mr. Fletcher said. "I love watching a little boy with cerebral palsy, who can barely walk, trying to run to get to his pony."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Handel was a savvy career strategist. So what could he have been thinking when he slipped his opera "Semele" onto the boards at Covent Garden during the Lenten season of 1744? By this point, having accepted that the appetite for Italian opera among London audiences had dwindled, Handel was writing popular English language oratorios. "Semele" was a hybrid, adapted from an existing opera libretto by William Congreve, though Handel stipulated that it be presented at Covent Garden in the manner of an oratorio. But the subject matter an unabashed celebration of erotic desire and dreams of immortality, and a story of adulterous love was hardly suitable for Lent. "Semele" ran for only four performances, followed by two more later that year. Then it languished until the mid 20th century, when audiences realized that, with its inspired music, dramatic complexity and psychological insight, "Semele" is one of Handel's masterpieces. "Semele" was met with enthusiastic ovations on Sunday at Carnegie Hall, where it received a marvelous concert performance by the English Concert, a superb period instrument orchestra whose annual spring visit to Carnegie is a must for Handel lovers. They were joined by the aptly named Clarion Choir (Steven Fox, artistic director) and six splendid soloists, all led by the conductor Harry Bicket.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. "I usually start behind the neck," Grace Granatelli said from her plump brown sofa. "There's two pressure points back behind the ears that help relax them a little bit." In her lap, she held the head of Sketch, her mixed beagle rat terrier, as her fingers traced small circles through his fur. Ms. Granatelli, whose passion for dogs can be glimpsed in the oil portrait of her deceased pets and the bronzed casts of their paws, started an animal massage business during the recession after taking several courses and workshops. Her primary form of advertising was her car, with its "K9 RUBS" license plate and her website, Pawsitive Touch, stenciled onto her rear window. But in 2013, Arizona's Veterinary Medical Examining Board sent her a cease and desist order, demanding that she close up shop for medically treating animals without a veterinary degree. If not, the board warned, every Swedish doggy massage she completed could cost her a 1,000 fine. To comply with the ruling and obtain a license, Ms. Granatelli would have to spend about 250,000 over four years at an accredited veterinary school. None require courses in massage technique; many don't even offer one. Animal masseuses are hardly alone. Over the years, states across the country have added licensing requirements for a bewildering variety of jobs, requiring months or years of expensive education, along with assessing costly fees. Today, nearly 30 percent of the American work force needs a license to work, up from about 10 percent in the 1970s, according to Morris Kleiner, a professor of public affairs at the University of Minnesota, who has studied the issue. The Obama administration and the conservative political network financed by the Koch brothers don't agree on much, but the belief that the zeal among states for licensing all sorts of occupations has spiraled out of control is one of them. In recent months, they have collaborated with an array of like minded organizations and political leaders in a bid to roll back licensing rules. On Friday, the White House announced that it would provide 7.5 million in grants to organizations interested in working with states to reduce overly burdensome licensing and make it easier for licensed practitioners to work across state lines, an issue of particular importance to military families. "This grant is the first time the federal government has directly gotten involved to help states that want to reform their licensing practices," Jason Furman, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said in an interview. "It was something a Democratic president proposed and a Republican Congress passed." "Why in the world do we regulate barbers?" asked Mark Hutchison, a Republican and the lieutenant governor of Nevada, which shares billing with Arizona as one of the states with the most burdensome licensing requirements, according to the Institute for Justice. "A bad haircut is the last thing that a person is going to put up with and return to. It is the ultimate example of self regulating industry." The problem is particularly acute for military spouses, who move frequently, as well as veterans and immigrants, who may have extensive training but lack a particular state's seal of approval. And there are at least 27,000 different licensing restrictions across the states affecting people with arrest and conviction records. Most of them permanently disqualify applicants, meaning a minor transgression as a teenager can prevent someone from working in many fields decades later. The most regulated states, paradoxically, are red. "Even Republican governors with Republican legislatures in pretty conservative states have still found it extremely difficult to effect change," said Dick M. Carpenter, strategic director of the Institute for Justice. "When there is an effort to dial back legislation, then the licensed industry turns out with huge counterattack. This is the same story that plays out in every state." Only rarely are licensing requirements removed. Last month, though, Arizona agreed to curb them for yoga teachers, geologists, citrus fruit packers and cremationists. But dozens more professions escaped the ax. "Arizona is perceived as a low regulatory state, but this was the most difficult bill we worked on this session," said Daniel Scarpinato, a spokesman for the Republican governor, Douglas Ducey. Licensing boards are generally dominated by members of the regulated profession. And in Arizona, more than two dozen of the boards are allowed to keep 90 percent of their fees, turning over a mere 10 percent of the revenue to the state. Once the lawsuit is finished, Ms. Whitmore said, it is possible the board will offer more guidelines. Ms. Kelly, whose strong hands can zero in on a knotted muscle like a heat seeking missile, said she was continuing to work despite the order from the licensing board. She grew up around horses at her father's riding stable in Long Island and has taken several courses and workshops in equine massage Local veterinarians have frequently referred horse owners to her. "They don't want to do it," said Ms. Kelly, who charges 55 for an approximately 90 minute massage. "It takes too long."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
MONTPELLIER, France At the end of her new solo, "Goldberg Variations," on Tuesday night at the Montpellier Danse festival, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker held up a hand to stop the applause. "I want to thank you for being here," she said. "This is a difficult time; without live audiences, there would be no performing arts." The solo was supposed to have had its premiere in May and been presented again during the Montpellier festival's 40th anniversary season this summer. Then, like every other cultural event in Europe and beyond, the festival was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic. But unlike many summer festivals, which pushed back their programming to 2021, Montpellier Danse has gone ahead, and so has "Goldberg Variations," which had brief runs in Belgium and Austria this summer before coming here. Jean Paul Montanari, the director of Montpellier Danse, isn't pretending that it's business as usual at this year's festival, which opened on Sept. 19 with Dominique Bagouet's 1990 "So Schnell" and will close on Dec. 28 with a work by Mourad Merzouki. "The dance professionals from all over the world, the intensity of many performances happening at once, the encounters in the street, the heat of summer, all of that is gone," Mr. Montanari said in an interview. With a great deal of juggling, the festival managed to keep 75 percent of its program, he added. And he echoed Ms. De Keersmaeker's point. "The essential is there: presenting work to an audience." Still, coronavirus cases have spiked again in France, and on Wednesday night President Emmanuel Macron imposed a curfew of 9 p.m. in nine cities, including Montpellier. The good news is that the theaters can remain open; the festival has simply moved shows to a 7 p.m. curtain. On Tuesday, Ms. de Keersmaeker's gratitude seemed reciprocated by the audience, who sat rapt (and masked) through the two hour work, in which she dances to Bach's monumental composition played by the remarkable young Russian pianist Pavel Kolesnikov. Her decision to make a solo piece was oddly apposite. In interviews, Ms. De Keersmaeker has said that she began to create the solo in New York in January, while working on the Broadway production of "West Side Story," well before the coronavirus was perceived as a global problem. After the show shut down, she returned to her home in Belgium, suddenly free of her usual commitments to her company and school, and continued to develop the material. It's been 40 years since Ms. De Keersmaeker began her professional career with another solo, "Violin Phase," also made in New York. She recently turned 60, and "Goldberg" is a long way from the insistent formal brilliance of "Violin," though there are echoes. They are soft but present, the reverberations of 40 years of life lived, experienced and shown in the body. Ms. De Keersmaeker, who begins the piece in a sheer black dress and ends it in gold sequined shorts and trainers "Go, 60 year old women!" a woman behind me said can sometimes look like a teenager onstage, but she doesn't try to impress with her physical prowess. Her movement is simple: the spiraling turns, swinging legs, gestural vocabulary and sudden weighted drops of the body that always inform her work, and that can seem casual, almost pedestrian without the athletic attack of her younger dancers. But that casualness is deceptive; as she moves, Ms. De Keersmaeker and Mr. Kolesnikov become partners in an exploration of the large scale architecture and the tiny nuances of the music. Mr. Montanari, who has been the festival's director since 1983, said he chose to open the festival (now called "Montpellier Danse 40 Version Two") with "So Schnell," reconstructed by Catherine Legrand, to honor Bagouet, who founded the festival in 1980 and died, of AIDS, in 1992. Ms. Legrand took away the colorful costumes of the original, and dressed the dancers all in black; watched on video (the festival gave me access to films of several works that had already taken place), the effect was spare and arresting, with a clean, Merce Cunningham influenced vocabulary and scattered patterning that often evokes bird or animal life. The anniversary edition was to celebrate a new generation but also look back at the festival's history, Mr. Montanari said. In addition to Bagouet, he programmed artists he considered important to the festival: Jiri Kylian of the Lyon Opera Ballet, Raimund Hoghe, Ms. De Keersmaeker and Emanuel Gat. (The Batsheva Dance Company, a frequent visitor to the festival, was supposed to bring a new work by Ohad Naharin, but was unable to travel.) "Jean Paul has a way of acknowledging the process of an artist he believes in, rather than specific pieces," said Mr. Gat, an Israeli choreographer who lives in Montpellier. "You don't have the sense that this is your only chance." His new work, "Lovetrain2020," his 10th piece for the festival, premiered in early October. Even onscreen, "Lovetrain2020" was marvelous, a rambunctious yet rigorously staged piece for 14 dancers, set to tracks by the British pop group Tears for Fears (big in the '80s), outlandishly costumed by Thomas Bradley: ruffles, peculiar shapes, huge skirts, missing parts of clothes, plaid mixed with satin. Mr. Gat melds gestural detail with larger scale movement, sometimes working against the music's rhythms, sometimes with them, frequently in silence. This eccentric physical dialogue with the music mostly in a minor key and vaguely gloomy in content (did you know that the group's name comes from their interest in primal scream therapy?) yet somehow gloriously singalong is exhilarating. "Lovetrain2020" is everything the small scale, often somber work made for video during the past months is not. It's loud, joyous, physical, close. Although it's a million miles from the introspection and internalization of "Goldberg Variations," the two dances are alike in a very important way. Both are celebrations of the body, of performance, of life.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
SAN FRANCISCO Federal authorities have arrested two founders of a virtual currency that raised 32 million from investors last year and won an endorsement from the boxer Floyd Mayweather. The co founders of the Centra virtual currency, Sam Sharma and Robert Farkas, were arrested on Sunday, a day before the Securities and Exchange Commission released a complaint against the men and announced that it was halting the project. Centra raised 32 million last summer and fall in a so called initial coin offering, a method of fund raising in which companies sell custom virtual currencies. The Centra team said at the time that the Centra token would give investors access to a new virtual currency exchange and a virtual currency debit card that would operate on the Visa and Mastercard networks. The S.E.C. said in its complaint that the Centra team had never received approval from Visa and Mastercard and had misled investors on several other counts. The S.E.C. said that several of the executives listed on the Centra website were fictitious. Most of the claims in the S.E.C. complaint were detailed in an article in The New York Times about Centra in October. A co director of the S.E.C.'s enforcement division, Stephanie Avakian, said in a statement that the Centra co founders had "sold investors on the promise of new digital technologies by using a sophisticated marketing campaign to spin a web of lies about their supposed partnerships with legitimate businesses." Lawyers for Mr. Sharma and Mr. Farkas did not respond to emails seeking comment Monday evening. The authorities did not charge a third man who had been listed as a Centra co founder, Raymond Trapani. Initial coin offerings, or I.C.O.s, emerged suddenly last year to become one of the most popular ways for start ups to raise money, with investors pouring more than 6 billion into such offerings. But I.C.O.s operate in a regulatory gray area, and that has drawn a swift blowback from authorities around the world. The Centra founders appear to have been the first people arrested because of a coin offering. In addition to the S.E.C. complaint, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York brought criminal charges against Mr. Sharma and Mr. Farkas including conspiracy to commit securities fraud, securities fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and wire fraud. Mr. Farkas had a flight reservation to leave the country on Sunday but was arrested before he could board the plane, according to the S.E.C. complaint. The complaint alleges that the men "engaged in an illegal unregistered securities offering and, in connection with the offering, engaged in fraudulent conduct and made material misstatements and omissions designed to deceive investors in connection with the offer and sale of securities in the Centra I.C.O." The chairman of the S.E.C., Jay Clayton, has said that most tokens offered through coin offerings should be categorized as securities and registered with regulators, which few have done. Mr. Sharma announced that he was leaving Centra after the Times article was published last fall, but the company has continued its operations and said this week that it would release the "Centra Roadmap 3.0" at a conference in South Korea. After the arrests were announced on Monday, the price of Centra's token on virtual currency exchanges crashed and the administrators of a Centra chat room on the Telegram messaging app expressed confusion. "The admins have no more info then you," an administrator named Tomo wrote to the other users.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Even extended periods of frigid weather, like the one in New York last week, are unlikely to have any noticeable effect on the bedbug population. You Won't Like This News About Bedbugs, Ticks and the 'Bomb Cyclone' Some creepy facts: A cockroach can live about a month with its head cut off. In its 300 million or so years on this planet, its relatives have survived an asteroid that wiped out dinosaurs, an ice age and an atom bomb. These vile pests the color of excrement reproduce all year and know where to find warm places to hide. So that "bomb cyclone" of a cold spell that froze much of the United States? It's like nothing for the roaches or most other creepy crawly pests. Yes, it's been cold, really cold but you survived. Don't think your worst nightmares didn't. According to Mr. White, you'd have to leave a book in your freezer for up to two weeks to make sure the cold fully penetrated it to kill bedbugs. But the cold we just experienced didn't last that long and many things bedbugs might use as shelter are bigger than books. "Cold is widely thought of as a fairly ineffective way to deal with bed bugs," said Mr. White. Even a prolonged polar vortex bomb cyclone death trap probably wouldn't be enough. Mr. White said he once received an email from someone who tried to freeze bedbugs out of a sofa on a snowbank in a super cold Canadian city. Three months later, they were still alive. If the cold snap persisted, you might be surprised to learn that you'll see more of certain home invaders in the spring, said Richard Cooper, another entomologist at BedBug Central. That's the case for crickets, ants, wasps, ladybugs or stink bugs that generally live outside and creep in only on occasion. That's because many adult insects sleep off winter in dormancy. A warm winter or a winter with a lot of ups and downs can break that dormancy and trick these pests into coming out too soon, much like flowers that bloom too early during a winter warm spell. Those insects then have a greater chance of dying before ever seeing spring. Can't we at least tell you that the "bomb cyclone" killed off some ticks? Probably not, said Thomas Mather, "The Tick Guy," an entomologist at the University of Rhode Island who directs their TickEncounter Resource Center. Put a deer tick the kind that carries the bacteria that causes Lyme disease in a freezer overnight, and that sucker will die. But give it a night outside in well below freezing temperatures under some snow, and in the morning its writhing, living body will greet you. Dr. Mather demonstrated this during the recent cold snap. In the Northeast, adult deer tick populations start peaking after the first frost: "Right away they're sort of showing, 'I'm not afraid of the cold,'" said Dr. Mather. That's because they have survival tricks. A tick dies moving from a warm room to a freezer because water in its cells freezes, crystallizes and breaks its cell membranes. But ticks acclimate outside where temperature changes more gradually. With time, they move water out of their cells before it ruptures them. Other outdoor critters can produce antifreeze proteins. Ticks also escape cold temperatures by insulating themselves beneath a blanket of leaf litter and snow. Polar vortex, bomb cyclone, cold snap whatever you call it it hasn't affected spring tick populations before, and it probably won't now, according to Dr. Mather. "These bugs have been around longer than people, and they probably have gone through cold temperatures before," Dr. Mather said. If they hadn't survived, "we would have called them extinct."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Many classical artists have had barely a week off in their careers. But with performances now on hold worldwide for months to come, what creative projects are they working on? These are edited excerpts from their conversations with Joshua Barone, Corinna da Fonseca Wollheim, Anthony Tommasini, Seth Colter Walls and Zachary Woolfe. When I play music, I can forget about the virus. I am continuing with Beethoven's "Diabelli" Variations, which I was meant to record at the end of April; every day, I do a run through so I can keep it close to me. I am also making programs for the next seasons: Mozart, Kurtag, late Schumann. The other day, I read through Janacek and Bartok. If this goes on for a long time, I will go back to Chopin that I haven't done in years. Composers are very jealous. I have been too involved with German music, and Chopin was very cross the last time I tried to play his music. So I will try to take some effort and love with him. I am perfectly happy just playing alone. Most people need the public; I am actually very happy without. And I love to be able to play badly. I've been writing my memoir for five years. Usually I do everything to postpone it. But this is a good time to work on it. There is so much quiet. The phones hardly ring. That's the only part I like. I hate what's happening to the world, the country, the people. I've written maybe 300 pages, and I'm not even half done. I sent it to the editor, and he likes it. But I really want criticism. I like constructive criticism. It's funny, because I skipped around. I did my childhood in one fell swoop, because I'd written it in my journals years ago. I like to discuss my movies, the creative process that led to them. And I completely forgot about my music career. So now I'm just catching up on some of my albums. I haven't been singing, but I can think of several albums I have in me that I want to do. One I'll probably call "Songs I Forgot to Sing." Oh, and I'm going to have a Zoom Passover, with my friends Alan and Marilyn Bergman. I started learning JavaScript. It has been interesting for me to learn a completely new idiom to be able to look at code and see what it does, in a similar way to looking at a music score and being able to hear how it sounds. I came up with this project, "Alone Together." A lot of composer colleagues have salaried positions. Others are freelance, and vulnerable. I started calling colleagues with positions and asking them for help with our community, asking them to recommend freelance composers to write solo violin pieces. I guaranteed the money personally: 500 per 30 seconds of music, a respectable rate. I'm going to play the 16 pieces from my apartment, over Instagram, and I'm donating my time and work. All the money is going to these composers. My wife and I, we're in our 70s; we're hunkered down. I'm just so humbled by these stories of the health care workers. A friend of mine sent me a photo of tents going up in Central Park, and said how it reminded him of my setting of Walt Whitman's "The Wound Dresser" since that memory Whitman had was of tents that were erected on the National Mall. In terms of any potential artistic response, what comes to mind is a quote from Wordsworth, about poetry being "emotion recollected in tranquillity." I think people imagine that artists are combing the headlines for an idea. But I think, at least in my case, if I have a response, it would have to come at a time when I feel that tranquillity. We developed a digital season. Every Wednesday morning, we're going to pull from our vault a show that has not been seen since the concert, available on YouTube. And we are posting musicians' concert streams, and reading through government funding to advise clubs and jazz organizations of where there may perhaps be some desperately needed funding. I have a stack of things I should or could be doing. But I just couldn't do that stuff. For the first eight days I was in a daze. Once that cleared, I was trying to ask what it meant for my practice and what I had to offer the world right now. So much of what I do is full body listening experience, so I started doing these experiments. It's been really exploratory, but I've made full body listening recipes for objects around the house. There's one where I do this very slowly evolving physical choreography with two big glass jars, like classic Mason jars, around my ears. I'm just about to finish the video score of it now. The sound piece is made for computer speakers. The artist Leah Wulfman is working on the videos, abstracting them and denaturing them a bit. I'd like the turnaround to be fast, so it might be a little lo fi. This week, I'm trying to finish a happy song. I've got this song in progress, which is based on one my father and I used to perform as a duet when I was 5 or 6. When either of us were feeling down, we could play this. It didn't have words; you'd whistle it. I've tried to add encouraging words. We're in the "home, home on the range" period: "where seldom is heard a discouraging word." I'm just starting to read up on Ethel Smythe the writer and composer and thinking about programming around her and Virginia Woolf with Alice Sara Ott, a pianist. I'm making music at random points of the day with my husband, Christian Reif it's a privilege to have a piano in the house and someone who loves to make music. He and I so rarely get to just play through things. We are either working on material together, or assisting each other as we prep for an engagement. So it's so nice to just enjoy the time without external pressure or purpose. About four years ago, I played Schubert's Opus 42 A minor Sonata, and not very well. So I'm trying again. The notes are unbearably difficult, and the concept, too. And Yo Yo Ma and I are hoping that in the next few weeks we might have the possibility of doing some streaming of Beethoven sonatas. My wife, Yoko, and I are big opera buffs, so we are really taking advantage of this wonderful Met Opera streaming initiative they are doing every night. It takes three hours of liberation from the newspaper and the news. People die in opera, but never of coronavirus. What do I get out of being a performer, host or curator? Yes, it is the music. But another thing is community: bringing people together in a joyful way surrounding art. That was missing all the sudden. How can we still provide that for people? We ended up doing "Living Music" (which was originally planned as a podcast, then debuted early as a Facebook Live series). Just having this event and having people talk to one another, and playing and having drinks at the computer every time we've done of these shows, I have been given that community based high that I crave and love. So we're going to do "Living Music" for as long as this quarantine goes on. It is wonderful to have all the time in the world for new scores. One I am learning is the Kurtag opera, "Fin de Partie," that we are giving the American premiere of next season. And then I picked up a violin somebody loaned me. I'm planning this week to practice and get a little bit in shape again and play the Bach partitas. Not only is it incredible music, and fantastic for your technique, but the healing factor is there. Whenever I play Bach, he makes me the most happy person in the world. Somehow he has the ability to clean you inside. The third thing is that I am starting, very carefully, to write a piece myself. If the piece is ready, maybe I can call it composing. Before that I want to be extremely modest: I first want to see if what comes out is OK. I'm staying home and writing music and not doing anything. I'm working on a piece called "Circus Days and Nights," an evening of opera, theater and circus. It doesn't connect very much with what's going on the streets of New York or elsewhere. We don't need any more of that. I am learning a lot of new repertoire. I am looking into the whole collection of Beethoven sonatas; I just play one after the other. With Debussy also, I have a three volume collection, and I am trying to learn it all. I never had the time to practice weeks and weeks without being pushed to play the repertoire that I'm supposed to perform. Now I can just read through everything with no time pressure. A thing that's been keeping me busy is collaborating with Zack Winokur to create something for the digital space centered around our show "The Black Clown." The development is being supported by the Lincoln Center at Home platform. There will be conversations between myself, creative team and cast members and various literary and artistic guests. There will be footage from the show, live performances by myself and cast members, and a living library offering a multifaceted look at the production research, archive materials and resources that expand our conversation. I'm making music more than ever. It was so unexpected to have all this free time on my hands. I've been spending a lot with Bach and Beethoven. Bach, because everything starts and ends there, so I've been playing the "Goldberg" Variations; the toccatas; a beautiful Busoni piece, "Fantasia on J.S. Bach." And Beethoven, reading through all the piano sonatas, especially spending time with the "Hammerklavier" and Opus 111. I've been getting to know more recent music, too: works by Rebecca Saunders, Unsuk Chin, Enno Poppe. I'm learning Berio's Sequenza, which I'm scheduled to play at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival this summer, if it happens. I've also been studying the Brahms symphonies, and the Wagner operas the "Ring," "Tristan" partly through the Met broadcasts. I played through the score to "Das Rheingold" at the piano. How great is that? It did take me a while to settle down and get my routine and discipline. Little by little I'm quieting down, working on material. I'm vocalizing every day; I'm doing physical exercises every day. I'm working on a gigantic new piece, so it's giving me some time. in a way it's the third piece of a trilogy about our relationship to nature. The working title is "Indra's Net"; it's concert music slash music theater and also an installation. Once I got over having my meltdown about being all alone, I was grateful. Even if you're grieving, you can create and there can be moments of joy in the grief.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Like most children learning to read, I leaned heavily on illustrations to help me understand and enjoy stories. Images provided a bridge to comprehension when words were little more than mysterious hieroglyphs. But as I became more comfortable with the words and moved on to chapter books and novels in upper elementary school, I missed that extra layer of story the art had provided. Illustrations can arm apprehensive new readers with confidence, particularly if they're visual learners. They also offer a space in the story to pause, to reflect on the meaning of what one has just read. To read a book with pictures is to place oneself in those images, connecting more deeply to the characters and their world. It wasn't as if illustrated novels didn't exist when I was growing up who doesn't have fond memories of "Winnie the Pooh" or "The Wind in the Willows"? but it seemed they'd fallen out of fashion since the heyday of A.A. Milne and Kenneth Grahame. In my own work I have found myself looking backward for inspiration, writing and illustrating to fill a gap on today's shelves. It makes me smile to see a change starting to ripple through the industry. In the wide acceptance of graphic novels for children, in the inclusion of more art in books for elementary readers transitioning to novels, illustration is once again being championed beyond picture books. Daniel Kraus's THEY THREW US AWAY (Henry Holt, 256 pp., 16.99; ages 10 to 14) is the first book in The Teddies Saga, a trilogy for middle grade readers. In the opening chapters we meet Buddy, the leader; Sunny, the brave one; Horace, with PTSD; Sugar, damaged yet sweet; and finally Reginald, the sage. These are not your typical heroes. They're Furrington Teddies, teddy bears in their own apocalyptic world. 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. Sensitive readers beware: Tea parties and snuggles are juxtaposed with trash heaps where one could lose a stuffie at a moment's notice. The wording is playful and descriptive, and Sugar's commentary injects humor. This is Kraus's first foray into middle grade novels, but it's in line with his previous fantasy adventure successes (from "The Shape of Water" and "Trollhunters" for adults, both written with Guillermo del Toro, to the young adult duology "The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch"). In this reviewer's imagination, it also brings to mind the weird contrasts and visuals of Wes Anderson's film "Isle of Dogs." It is probably not appropriate for the youngest audiences. But those looking for a dark and suspenseful tale will find this one truly captivating. SKUNK AND BADGER (Algonquin Young Readers, 136 pp., 18.95; ages 8 to 12), by the Newbery Honor winner Amy Timberlake ("One Came Home"), is the first title in a new chapter book series. Serious, set in his ways Badger lives alone until the day freewheeling, happy go lucky Skunk shows up on his doorstep. He's come to move in. Badger is a workaholic, while Skunk has a penchant for babble and clutter. The unlikely friendship story of two very different personalities is wordy fun, with laugh out loud dialogue. It's impossible not to think of Arnold Lobel's classic "Frog and Toad" series as you get to know Timberlake's charming odd couple, Skunk and Badger. While the characters are anthropomorphized creatures, this book defies age grouping. Anyone who has shared a living space with siblings, classmates or grown adults can relate to this witty and whimsical tale. Although the curmudgeonly figure who undergoes a change of heart is an old trope, going at least as far back as Dickens, this story gives it a quirky new twist, by detailing with meticulous specificity Badger's and Skunk's interests, respectively, in the fields of geology and ornithology. Lovers of rocks and chickens, and nerds of all stripes, will crack a smile at the expert descriptions of the main characters' favorite endeavors. Scratchy yet sophisticated ink drawings by the Caldecott Medal winner Jon Klassen ("I Want My Hat Back") add warmth to the already cozy text. A mix of color pieces and black and white vignettes, they give this handsomely designed book the look and feel of a classic. SAUCY (Caitlyn Dlouhy Books/Atheneum, 304 pp., 17.99; ages 8 to 12), by the National Book Award and Newbery Medal winner Cynthia Kadohata ("The Thing About Luck," "Kira Kira"), introduces a family with quadruplets. At just 11 and a half years old, Becca's three brothers seem to have their lives all figured out. She worries she'll never find a passion of her own, until the night she finds a sickly piglet. Becca feels she's meant to protect this defenseless life, and that doing so will lead to something bigger. Her growing awareness and compassion soon spread to friends, families and communities working toward a common goal: to save Saucy and her piggy brethren. This story tackles some of the harsh realities of factory farming, through the lens of an empathetic young girl with precocious yet limited understanding and a big heart. It's a great jumping off point for conversations about activism, animals, modern food production or finding one's path in life. Fans of Wilbur in E.B. White's "Charlotte's Web" will no doubt fall hard for Saucy and the caring family that rescues her. If Kadohata's heartfelt story doesn't tempt readers to rescue a pig, Marianna Raskin's endearing drawings surely will. These expertly placed images of Saucy, Becca, her family and the small town they inhabit will tug at you long after you close the book. Lauren Castillo, a Caldecott Honor winner, is the author, most recently, of "Our Friend Hedgehog: The Story of Us." Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
The Weeknd's album "Starboy" (XO/Republic) returns to Billboard's No. 1 spot after five weeks, with 18,000 sales and 59 million streams, according to Nielsen. But some of the most interesting developments in music sales are not in what made it to No. 1. In the first chart to be published since "La La Land" swept the Golden Globes, soundtracks have a strong showing, with five albums in the Top 10 related to movies or musical theater. "Moana" (Walt Disney), the soundtrack to the recent Disney animated film which includes songs written by Lin Manuel Miranda, the creator of "Hamilton" rose four spots to No. 2, its highest chart position since the album came out two months ago. The "Hamilton" cast album, a steady seller for more than a year, is No. 6 this week. Three more soundtracks fill out the bottom of the Top 10: "Sing" (Republic) is at No. 8, "Suicide Squad: The Album" (Atlantic) is No. 9 and "Trolls" (RCA) is in 10th place. The soundtrack to "La La Land" (Interscope), which has had little effect on the charts so far, rose to No. 15 in the week leading up to the Golden Globes, and it may rise higher, with the album shooting to the top of iTunes's rankings. (This week's chart covers sales made through Thursday.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
COLUMBUS, Ohio When suburban malls began to stagnate in the early 1990s, the parent company of the retail stalwarts Bath Body Works and Victoria's Secret took a chance on a different kind of shopping experience. The company, L Brands, had bought 1,300 acres of meadows and forests on the west side of Interstate 270, just a mile from its Ohio headquarters, northeast of the state capital's downtown. Unsure about what to do with two square miles of undeveloped land along Interstate 270, Leslie H. Wexner, the company's founder, turned for guidance to two developers: one based in New York, the other based in Miami and a native of Istanbul. What the three came up with joined a Midwestern retailer's view with a New Yorker's experience of urban street life and a European's devotion to food and sidewalk culture. Since construction began on Easton in 1993, the project has produced 3.7 million square feet of retail space in 280 stores and 4.2 million square feet of Class A office space in 21 buildings. There are also hundreds of hotel rooms and apartments. The area became one of the first sizable multiuse developments to spring from a Midwest greenfield, inspired by the same principles of accessible public spaces, proximity and human scale that distinguish American towns built before 1900. "Before automobiles, this is how America was built," said Christopher B. Leinberger, a developer and the chairman of the Center for Real Estate and Urban Analysis at George Washington University. "It petered out after World War II, when we built the drivable suburban model. Only in the early 1990s did we realize there was an embryonic market for urbanism." Today, with over 400 acres still available for development, Easton is a continuous construction site. The newest district is Easton Square Place, a 100 acre cluster of office buildings where Alliance Data and Abbott Laboratories have settled. The Georgetown Company, the real estate firm based in New York that is Easton's master developer and financial partner, just completed a three story, 240,000 square foot office building for Alliance Data. Two more Alliance Data projects, an 86,000 square foot building to be completed this year and a second 240,000 square foot office complex, are scheduled to be finished in 2017. Construction of a 215,000 square foot building for Abbott Laboratories is scheduled to be completed early next year. The total cost of the four buildings is 135.6 million. Last August, the nearby 54 acre, 600,000 square foot Easton Gateway opened. The 150 million shopping center, anchored by Whole Foods Market and Dick's Sporting Goods, also includes restaurants. Over the next decade, about 2,000 residential units are expected to be built within the district. Developers and architects say Easton has contributed to several influential turn of the 21st century trends in land use and community design. It helped to reintroduce density as an attractive and profitable real estate design principle. All of the clusters in Easton are tightly aligned outdoor districts. The dominant structure is the 50 million, 600,000 square foot Station building, with a towering ceiling, space for dozens of stores and a cinema complex. It copies the scale and open air design of a 19th century train station shed and adjoins the 90 acre Town Center, the hub of the development, which features 240 retail stores and restaurants, a grid of sidewalks and narrow streets, fountains and a central square. The Town Center breached the dominance in retail of indoor malls, with its emphasis on storefronts and pedestrians, instead of vehicles and parking. And such town centers nationwide are adapting Americans' buying habits and entertainment patterns. A number of town center developments with similar design principles were constructed in or near major cities in the early 1920s. The most durable, said Mr. Leinberger of George Washington University, is Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, Mo. Most of the initial mixed use developments, though, succumbed to the advent of suburban indoor shopping malls, starting in the mid 1950s, which were built along major boulevards, and elevated climate control, retail uniformity and acres of parking to top shopping priorities. "You could say that the period from 1950 to 1990 was an urban planning aberration," said Yaromir Steiner, the chief executive of Steiner and Associates in Columbus, who moved to the area to help design and develop Easton Town Center. "We are finally correcting all of this." Mr. Steiner was the developer from Istanbul with whom Mr. Wexner worked on the Easton concept. He had developed CocoWalk, a popular open air shopping and restaurant district in Coconut Grove, Fla. The other developer was Marshall Rose, chairman of the Georgetown Company. "This development generates 150 million annually just in food sales," said Adam R. Flatto, Georgetown's president and chief executive. "People respond to Easton as a social experience. They enjoy being here." Lee Peterson, an executive vice president at WD Partners, a national design consultancy based in Columbus, estimated that after the development of Easton, roughly 120 other mixed use town centers have been built across the country. Town centers, he said, are defying the trend of declining retail store sales nationwide. "Town centers fit the scale that people like," Mr. Peterson said. "Bigger isn't better. Better is better." One of the newest projects taking a cue from Easton Town Center is Liberty Center, north of Cincinnati. Constructed on 64 acres, where Interstate 75 and State Route 129 converge, the 300 million project opened late last year and encompasses 800,000 square feet of retail space, 75,000 square feet of office space and 240 residences. Liberty Center was developed by Steiner and Associates and Bucksbaum Retail Properties. Steiner and Associates collaborated with Olshan Properties, formerly Mall Properties, to also develop the 300 million Bayshore Town Center in Glendale, Wis., north of Milwaukee. Bayshore opened in 1954 as a strip mall. In 1974 it was rebuilt as an indoor mall. Sold in 2004 for 40 million to Mall Properties, Bayshore Town Center opened in 2006 with a one acre central square, 1.2 million square feet of retail space, 180,000 square feet of offices and more than 100 apartments.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
The International Gymnastics Federation announced on Thursday that female gymnasts born in 2005 will be eligible to compete at the Olympic Games in Tokyo postponed to July 2021 even though they would not have been allowed to if the Games were held this summer. That means some athletes who would have made the team if the Olympics were held as scheduled this summer, now may have their spot taken by a younger athlete. Konnor McClain, one of the top junior athletes, had her sights set on making the team in 2024. She will turn 16 next February, which now makes her eligible to compete for a spot on the U.S. team next summer. Her training plan had been designed to have her peak at just the right time for the 2024 Olympics. McClain said her coach had been cautious not to push her too early to try to prevent her from getting injured. She has been practicing more difficult skills, but was not planning on competing them yet. "I think it's a little more scary because she's been on a path where she had four years to do everything," her mother Lorinda McClain said in a phone interview last month. "She's on a great path. Her and her coach have a schedule going. It's going to be a lot different for her and her coach." Many in the gymnastics community do not like the new rules, including Cecile Landi, who coaches Simone Biles. "I have nothing against the 2005 generation, but I don't agree with this decision," Landi said in a tweet. "It will be the 2020 Olympics so the rules should remain the same as this year." The federation also announced that there were no plans to move the 2021 World Championships, which are scheduled for Oct. 18 24, 2021, in Denmark. On Thursday we told you what the Yankees were up to. Now let's observe the equal time rule. Mets' catcher Wilson Ramos has a few new teammates: his children. His daughter and son got some practice off a tee on Thursday, with Ramos proudly watching behind them. Ramos also got a workout in, taking some swings and doing some catching. With no access to fields, pitcher Marcus Stroman improvised and made his own bullpen on a dock. Last week, a barefoot Dominic Smith stood in as Stroman's catcher as he practiced in a parking lot. The two also stayed competitive, participating in a virtual beer pong tournament. They aren't the only Mets practicing together. Jeff McNeil and Brandon Nimmo have been working out together in Nimmo's garage. McNeil has also been spending lots of time with his dog Willow, who he adopted at a Mets game last season. Horse Racing Is Still Running (in Some Places) Horse racing is about the only American sport that is still underway. And a little track in Nebraska that railbirds mostly ignore in normal times is suddenly getting outsize attention. Fonner Park stopped racing on March 16 because of the coronavirus but started up again a week later, without fans. In March, betting on races at Fonner Park was up 272.2 percent over the previous year, even though there were 21 fewer races, according to figures compiled by Horse Racing Nation. The meet has been extended to April 29. "It exceeded our expectations because we did not expect as many other tracks to cancel racing," Chris Kotulak, the track's chief executive, told The Grand Island Independent. "So the limelight that we believed we were moving into just got a lot brighter than we expected." Bettors nationwide are suddenly desperately interested in Nebraska racing. "We got a call from some guy in Ohio who wants to buy a Fonner Park T shirt," Kotulak said. The focus on Tuesday was on the Pick 5, which requires selecting the winners of five straight races. The total bet by players trying to hit that jackpot on Tuesday was 3.6 million, plus another 500,000 or so bet earlier. In the end, 203 gamblers in Nebraska, Ohio, New York, who knows? picked five winners, earning 16,888.40 for a 1 bet. It's a pretty sure thing that many of them have never been anywhere near Grand Island, Neb. But it wouldn't be a day at the races without some disgruntled fans. In the first leg of the Pick 5 there was controversy, the horse racing site Paulick Report said. Finisher Where's Rufus crossed the line first but was disqualified for interfering with the second place finisher Taylor's Prince, a decision that seemed to be marginal. This could not have pleased those who chose Where's Rufus in the Pick 5, and then hit the next four winners, missing out on the jackpot. Even as the world changes, horseplayers stay the same. VICTOR MATHER Is This It for the XFL? While the pandemic has caused a steep economic blow to many sports leagues, no major ones have yet gone out of business. But there was disquieting news for fans of the XFL, the football league that launched this season and made it through five games before being stopped by the virus. At the time, it vowed to return in 2021, but on Friday the league decided to suspend its operations and lay off most employees. It was not immediately clear if the league would be back next season, but certainly the signs were ominous. An email to a communications executive at the company on Friday afternoon was returned as undeliverable. VICTOR MATHER	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Every year, Handel's "Messiah" is a communal ritual a glittering parade of recitatives, arias and choruses that binds listeners and performers together in a story of promise, betrayal and redemption. But not this year. In 2020 the oratorio, if you listen to it at all, will be by necessity a private matter. And many artists for whom it is a beloved (and remunerative) staple remain almost entirely out of work. In this context, the emotional arc of "Messiah" from comfort to grief to eventual relief can feel more powerful than ever. Here, listen along as seven singers and two conductors offer a behind the music guide through the work. When you step up to the stage at the beginning of "Messiah," every eye in the room turns to you. For the next three minutes you have complete command over everyone's emotions. "Comfort ye" is my moment to take everyone's anxiety, and pause for a second to reflect on why we're here. You come after the overture, which is this almost chaotic moment, like everybody bustling about trying to get presents, or running to Carnegie Hall after a busy day of work. And then the beginning of "Comfort ye" is so solemn. What I'm after is a sense of calm. It's all about long lines. Baroque ornamentation is fun, but here, it's about taking time and not doing anything too flashy. It's a bubbling up of excitement, this secret you can't wait to tell. It starts with exuberant champagne bubbles in the strings, and by the time you're ready to sing you almost can't contain your excitement. It's like you're addressing a friend who's been grieving and maybe has been home alone for a while, and you come over and say, OK, get your coat on, we're going to have a great time: "Get thee up into the high mountains!" The music sounds like skipping through a meadow. I don't know how you can say the words "rejoice greatly" without smiling. But the challenge is how to make the joy last so it doesn't feel false or overdone. In the da capo section on the words "Shout! Shout!" instead of letting them get louder, I now make it more internal. Something to rev yourself up. Straight from the beginning, the phrases expand with each iteration. And the melismatic passages are exciting, almost like a game. Once you're past the technical part of it, it's very easy to find the playfulness in this aria. The da capo is ecstatic, with ornaments on top of ornaments. If you speed up the "A" section and slow down the "B" section which usually sounds like a cavalry charge then you can hear the flagellation, you hear Christ being tortured. My job is to transmit the personal horror and shame of being responsible. In 2014 I was singing the aria in Kansas City. This was the year of the Ferguson riots following the killing of Michael Brown. As I was singing, I thought of him and all the others who have been murdered by an unjust system. I thought, I get to be a survivor and tell the story of my brothers, my sisters, who were scorned and shamed and spited and spat upon. And I have to carry that shame: of what Americans should feel allowing the system to go on as long as it has. What Handel is good at doing is creating amazing emotional contrast. At the very end of this piece is the crux of humanity: The iniquity of everyone is going to be laid on this one person. Up until then you have this comedy of sheep turning around and running away I always think of an English sheepdog trying to round everyone up and all of a sudden it comes down to this very profound moment. In the runs, everyone in the choir gets to weave and turn away. And then people sing "Everyone to his own way" over and over, and it's all on one note, like everyone running into a fence and not knowing what to do. Jonathan Woody, bass baritone: 'Why do the nations so furiously rage together' I performed "Messiah" in Kansas City in December 2016. The recent election was on everyone's mind. In between the dress rehearsal and the concert I read about a politician who, speaking about the Obamas, said something about Michelle returning to the Serengeti to live as a man. I read it on my phone and it broke my heart. In performance that day, what I was really doing was asking the people in the audience: Why do we hate each other, mistrust each other, dehumanize each other? I look around the world that we live in where we continue to treat people terribly. When Handel sets these rage arias, I get the sense that he understood that also. The world he lived in was not any less tumultuous than the one we live in today. I hear it in the music, in the intensity of the string figures, those 16th notes. I hear that angst. So much of the magic is the sheer jubilation that Handel conjures. The "Hallelujah" chorus sets out a firm, memorable exposition and then takes us to what is a short but extremely touching section about transformation. Then, through a sequence of sequentially rising pedal points on the words "King of kings," he creates a sense of uplift, followed by a compaction of "Hallelujahs" as they barrel toward that cliff's edge before the final absolute affirmation. It's an incredible structure. When everyone in the hall rises from their seats it's an amazing moment. You feel the energy shift in the house. And I see the glow on the faces of the choir as though they are a mirror reflecting what the audience is doing. Because of that choreographic moment, you get the sense that we are really on the same level. It's magical and hair raising. Jolle Greenleaf, soprano: 'I know that my Redeemer liveth' I see this as an opportunity to share a message of hope and love during a season when it's getting darker, when people are looking for meaningful connections and ways to manage their emotions through the holidays. I try to look out at the audience and make as many personal connections with the people there so that they can feel that there truly is hope, that I'm a vessel for that hope. The tune feels very expansive. It just glides in a way that you can add ornaments to it. Those ornaments help create the gold filigree that you would see in a tapestry. Of course there is acknowledgment of darkness: "Though worms destroy this body." I was 35 when I was diagnosed with cancer. It made everything related to death feel more fresh and raw and scary. But there's power in reclaiming that and singing about hope despite that fear. This aria is about awe in every possible form. There's the reverent awe of someone shocked into paying attention, hearing this mystery that says that no matter who you are, you are going to be raised after death, and no matter what trials you've gone through, you will have everlasting life. And then it's the amazing sense of awe you get from hearing a rare trumpet solo. I just love that sense of grandeur: Even though it is a triumphant piece there is such mystery and quietude. The "B" section is a moment for reflection. As if shocked by this awesome presence, you need to take a moment: What have I just experienced? It's a joy to sing those lines in one breath, to heighten the drama and really cinch these incredibly long phrases together. And to come back to the "A" section, now highly ornamented with all the regalia of your own vocal prowess and the entire emotional experience of having gone through this story. Not only to see, but to share. It's the greatest moment onstage to be able to say to the audience: This is for you and this is with you.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Jawsh 685's TikTok sensation was an international arrival for siren jams, a recent youth culture phenomenon in Pacific Islander, or Pasifika, communities in New Zealand and surrounding areas. During the early months of pandemic isolation, there were few distractions as cathartic and cheering as the Culture Dance challenge on TikTok, set to the squelchy, loping "Laxed (Siren Beat)," by Jawsh 685. The choreography that became associated with it was, by TikTok standards, elementary a casual semaphore of joy with a mild wiggle of the waist. Almost anyone could participate, and participate they did. In thousands of videos, people did the dance and showed off clothing particular to their heritage Korean, Nigerian, Ukrainian, French, Brazilian and so many more. It was a 10 seconds at a time Olympics opening ceremony, a digital treaty of global harmony. Even in its most generative and enthusiastic moments, social media rarely feels like a truly unifying force. But scrolling through the videos was a genuine tonic, a little flicker of hope for common language and understanding. "One of my friends heard it and was like, 'I'm pretty sure this is your beat,'" Jawsh, 17, said in an interview last month conducted over Zoom, a bunk bed he shared with his younger brother visible in the background. He wore a hoodie advertising his crew, Loud Stylah, with the name stylized in Old English font. He'd been posting his songs to YouTube, but, unknown to him, someone else had edited "Laxed" down to a catchy snippet, and TikTok lit the match. Not long after, Jason Derulo recorded a version with lyrics, and after some behind the scenes back and forth, an official version of that song, now titled "Savage Love (Laxed Siren Beat)," went on to become a global smash, topping charts in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Britain and more. Currently, it sits at No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100. "Laxed" is both modern and traditional the pacing and melody are indebted to Polynesian music, and also classic reggae. (Laxed is short for relaxed.) But its texture is specifically of the moment each note sounds as if it had been sucked through a glitchy vortex and spit back out. Which in a way, they had been. "Laxed" was also an arrival on the world stage for siren jams an emergent scene filled with producers specializing in music suited for blasting through sirens attached to the front of cars and bicycles. It's a recent youth culture phenomenon in Pacific Islander, or Pasifika, communities in New Zealand and surrounding areas. "My siren jam is somehow the most known ever now," Jawsh said, incredulously. And "Savage Love" has become perhaps the biggest global hit to emerge from a Pasifika act since OMC's wry 1995 lounge rock smash "How Bizarre." Jawsh's music is "an authentic snapshot of youth music culture out here," said Faiumu Matthew Salapu, an Auckland music producer who records as Anonymouz. "Back in the '90s the dominant frequency was subs, subwoofers in cars. It's just fascinating that in this day and age that frequency has shifted over to treble. It's all about like the most piercing frequencies. And it's massive. You can't really go anywhere in South Auckland without people just jamming these sounds." On YouTube, you can find clips of young people wiring up sirens to their cars and bicycles as a meta speaker system. It's the sort of phenomenon that triggered the usual skepticism from older generations and at least a handful of moral panic local news reports lamenting that young people were stealing sirens from schools for the purpose. But while Salapu noted that siren culture is "anti establishment, rebellious," he also pointed out that much of the music emerging from that scene has strong connections to the sounds of earlier generations. "That frequency range and that style of melody is prevalent in a lot of Pacific music out here," he said. "We hear these progressions in our church music." Graham Reid, a former journalist who teaches New Zealand pop music history at the University of Auckland, noted the connections between Jawsh's music and reggae, adding that "the reggae beat is just a shift from what we call the 'Maori strum,'" pointing out the way "Laxed" sits "just behind the beat that's a kick back, Pasifika thing." Jawsh 685 born Joshua Nanai is the third oldest of four children born to a father from Samoa and a mother from the Cook Islands, who met in New Zealand. (685 is the country code for Samoa, though Jawsh has never been there.) Manurewa, in South Auckland, has been a magnet for Pasifika communities for decades. "A lot of people like to talk down on where I'm from," Jawsh said. "It's not as bad as what people say." His parents listened to "old island music," Elvis Presley, and also Britney Spears and Mariah Carey. But he listened primarily to siren jams on YouTube, where a few channels specialize in posting the latest ones, all produced and released independently. When he decided he wanted to make them himself, he reached out to the one producer he was acquainted with, who wouldn't give up all the secrets. So Jawsh set out to teach himself. As with many production styles, there are sample packs passed around that contain loads of foundational sounds to build songs around. Working on a broken laptop and using the ubiquitous production program FL Studio, Jawsh said he made the original "Laxed" beat in around four hours. Unlike many traditional pop or hip hop producers who might primarily focus on the beat and leave the songwriting to others, Jawsh included melodic top lines in his production. In essence, he'd laid out a blueprint for a singer to pick up on and add to, which is exactly what Derulo did. Over the course of this year, Derulo, an early 2010s pop R B star, had become something of a TikTok phenomenon, micro attuned to the app's trends. In May, after Jawsh's song had become a TikTok staple, Derulo put lyrics to it calling his version "Savage Love" even though he and Jawsh hadn't yet come to a formal arrangement. Eventually, though, representatives for the two artists ironed out a deal to properly release the song with Jawsh as the primary artist and Derulo the featured guest. (Representatives for Derulo did not reply to requests for comment.) Despite the friction, Jawsh was excited to see that a star of Derulo's stature had glommed on to his composition. "It's exciting to know that you made the melody, and then now you're hearing someone sing words instead of the melody itself," he said. His career is being built slowly, one piece at a time. The K pop idols BTS will appear on a remix of "Savage Love," arriving on Friday. He's released a second single, "Sweet Sour," which features vocals from Lauv and Tyga, artists who, like Derulo, Jawsh has never met (and depending how long quarantine lasts, might not for some time). His sudden success has also helped his family by the time of a second interview late last month, his family had moved to a bigger home, where he finally had his own bedroom. In that room, Jawsh continues to record new songs for a debut EP. While he feels a loyalty to the culture of siren jams, he's lately started listening to more American hip hop, and eventually wants to expand his production repertoire beyond siren jams to trap and drill. The official "Savage Love" video was filmed separately, with Derulo in Los Angeles and Jawsh in Manurewa, where he's thoroughly immersed in his cultural signifiers: Samoan flags, local dances and, of course, a fleet of siren augmented bicycles and cars. Funnily enough, though, Jawsh himself never had a siren on his bicycle up until a couple of months ago. But now he's riding around Manurewa, blasting Pop Smoke, waiting for the chance to hop on a plane and hear his siren echoing around the world.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Q. When I write emails to colleagues and friends after typing the first several letters of the email address on my Mac using the Mail app, the program automatically fills in the balance of the address. I have 20 years of history of email, and often the address used is no longer the correct one. How do you get rid of old addresses? A. When some of the email addresses in the Mail program's memory become obsolete, you can prune the outdated entries or update them on the spot. In the Mail app, go to the Window menu and choose Previous Recipients. The Previous Recipients box opens with a list of addresses you have used for earlier messages. To delete an old address, select it and click the Remove From List button in the bottom left corner of the box. To select multiple names for removal at once, hold down the Mac's Command key and click through the list.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Q. How do I efficiently manage my email with three devices: computer, phone and tablet? Do I have to read, save, delete email three times, or can I easily sync them? A. Most mail programs give you the choice of two ways to set up an account on a computer or mobile device either with the IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) standard or POP (Post Office Protocol). If you want to keep your mailbox in sync across multiple devices, choose the IMAP method. Compared with POP, IMAP is a newer technology for managing messages and handles checking the same mail account on multiple devices much more smoothly. With IMAP, even though you can see your mailbox in the mail program on your computer and devices, IMAP messages actually live on the mail server. When you read, delete or flag a message, you are performing that action on the mail server. The mail apps on your other devices see the change when you view the updated mailbox.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
LIMA, Peru When he was a boy in the late '80s, Elmer Hualinga would go to the nearby ravine to catch some odd fish. He'd see them floating on the water, motionless, covered in a slimy black substance. That didn't seem to concern the elders of Nueva Andoas, Mr. Hualinga's Quichua community in the Peruvian Amazon near the border with Ecuador. They would yank the creatures from the dark water, rinse them off and take them home to cook. Mr. Hualinga, 38, is now a Quichua leader himself. "I'm not going to blame my ancestors," he tells me by phone, "but that's how we ate, without knowing that we were contaminating ourselves." The Quichua or Kichwa are one of 51 Amazon nations that have inhabited Peru for millenniums. And for almost half a century, they have lived in the basins of the Pastaza, Tigre, Corrientes and Chambira Rivers, territory they share with Block 192, the country's largest oil field. The Block holds an infamous record: 155 oil spills in the last nine years. I listen to Mr. Hualinga from Lima, the capital of Peru one of the most oil dependent countries in Latin America and I contemplate the high price Indigenous people in the Amazon pay so that we can sustain our comfortable lives. "Black gold" from the Peruvian Amazon fuels, along with natural gas and coal, 85 percent of the country's energy consumption. Building a nation's economy on the exploitation of its natural resources has a cost, but above all it incurs a debt. In Peru we owe that debt to the environment and Indigenous peoples. The pandemic caused by a novel coronavirus that probably spread to humans from a wild animal in part as a result of the destruction of ecosystems in China has increased this debt. Peru has the highest mortality rate from Covid 19 in the world. When the state of emergency began in March, Indigenous people who had been working in the cities lost their jobs and returned to their villages, spreading coronavirus to their families. As of the end of August, at least 37 health centers in Indigenous communities had closed: Their doctors and nurses were infected and there was no one to replace them. This is a death sentence in a region where more than 50 percent of the native communities do not have health centers, and those that do exist often don't have water, electricity or enough doctors. At the beginning of September, the Ministry of Health registered more than 18,000 Indigenous people infected with Covid 19 in the Peruvian Amazon. The most affected tribes are the Awajun and the Kichwa. Although there is no official figure, the Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest registered 387 Indigenous deaths from Covid 19 through the end of August. The actual number is likely higher: Many who died were symptomatic, but no tests were performed. Since 2008, Mr. Hualinga has worked in the Quichua territory as a volunteer Indigenous environmental monitor. He sets off at dawn with a GPS, a tablet and a camera to document the disaster the oil spills leave in their wake: lagoons with oil film on the surface, black puddles near yucca and banana farmsteads. Mr. Hualinga sends the information he gathers to the Quechua Indigenous Federation of Pastaza to alert the environmental authorities. He says he hopes that his people, his children, won't be sickened by the oil as he has been. The problem is, the spills don't stop. Just since the beginning of the pandemic, 14 oil spills have occurred in the Peruvian jungle. Eight of them are in Block 192. Frontera Energy del Peru S.A., the company in charge of that block, has not been operational for months, but the crude from its facilities continues to seep into the water and soil. "Nobody is containing the spills," warns Mr. Hualinga. "There are places where oil accumulates and the rains make it overflow." Environmental authorities are still investigating the causes, but it's clear that the oil company doesn't maintain its old wells and pipes, which leak and need constant cleaning. Between 2000 and 2019, there were 474 oil spills in the Peruvian Amazon: 65 percent were caused by corroded pipelines and the operational failures of companies like Pluspetrol Norte, the predecessor of Frontera Energy, the country's most polluting oil company. In Block 192 alone according to a report by the National Coordinator for Human Rights and Oxfam about 2,000 sites have been devastated by oil activity. Thirty two of these areas contain enough contaminated material to fill 231 national stadiums. The health consequences of oil spills are dire. In 2016, specialists from the Ministry of Health collected blood and urine samples from 1,168 people living in the area around Block 192. Half of those evaluated, including Mr. Hualinga, his wife and their young son, had toxic metals lead, arsenic, mercury, cadmium at levels higher than those permitted by the World Health Organization. This can affect the nervous system and the brain's ability to learn, and can cause hypertension, kidney failure and cancer. This catastrophe is unfolding in a place where seven out of 10 people are poor, where there is no drinking water, and where women and children fall ill with anemia because of chronic malnutrition. The Quichua people of Nueva Andoas are at high risk for any disease, let alone a pandemic that has already killed more than 31,000 Peruvians, a death toll approaching that of the war waged against the terrorist group Sendero Luminoso or Shining Path. If before the pandemic it was already very difficult for Indigenous peoples to access vaccines and medicines to treat epidemics like dengue and H.I.V., how will they ward off this new coronavirus? Six months after the emergency declaration spurred by the pandemic, and fed up with the authorities not listening to them, residents of several Amazon communities are demanding medicine, medical attention and food for survival. Others are organizing to protest, and some have been shot by the police in response. On the Amazon border, where the Quichuas live, no one has officially died yet from Covid 19. Given the lack of medicines, patients are being treated with medicinal plants and herbal teas. In Nueva Andoas, 60 percent of people have tested positive using rapid tests, including Lucas, Mr. Hualinga's 11 year old son, whose blood is contaminated by the oil spills.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
NASA scientists revealed images of Ultima Thule, an object 4 billion miles from the sun. Pictures of the so called contact binary were captured by the New Horizons mission on Jan. 1. Here's where we were just a couple days ago on Dec. 31, 2018. This was humanity's best image of Ultima Thule made by New Horizons at a range of about half a million kilometers out. Well, that image is so 2018. Meet Ultima Thule. applause Just like with Pluto, we could not be happier. What you're seeing is the first contact binary ever explored by spacecraft. At a Wednesday news conference, scientists announced some results from the flyby of the most distant object ever visited. LAUREL, Md. Ultima Thule, an icy world 4 billion miles from the sun, looks like a big snowman. At a news conference on Wednesday, scientists working with NASA's New Horizons mission released several images that the spacecraft took as it flew by on Tuesday, New Year's Day. Planetary scientists have never before seen a close up of a body like Ultima Thule. It is likely a fragment that coalesced more than 4.5 billion years ago and which has remained in the deep freeze of the solar system's Kuiper belt ever since. If it is indeed a pristine planetesimal, a building block of the planets, studying it will offer clues to how Earth and its neighbors formed. On Tuesday, scientists released a blurry picture of this small world, also known by its official designation 2014 MU69, taken before the flyby from a distance of half a million miles. It sort of looked like a fuzzy bowling pin then. Now, much more has come into focus. Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. The scientists now say with confidence that Ultima Thule long ago was what they call a "contact binary." "Two completely separate objects that are now joined together," said S. Alan Stern, the principal investigator for the mission. Such contact binaries appear to be common in the outer solar system, but, Dr. Stern said, "This is the first object that we can clearly tell was born this way," By contrast, he suggested, scientists did not know for sure whether other two lobe bodies most notably the rubber ducky like Comet 67P/Churyumov Gerasimenko were two objects that came together or one larger body that had eroded into its current shape. A contact binary fits with some theories of how the planets formed that clouds of pebbles clumped together into larger lobe size bodies, and then these two lobes gently bumped into each other and stuck. "It's actually gratifying to see these almost perfectly formed contact binaries in their native habitats," said Jeffrey M. Moore, the leader of the mission's geology and geophysics team. In at least the general outlines, he added, "our ideas of how these things form seem to be somewhat vindicated by these observations." He said that the two lobes must have hit at very low speeds, a few miles per hour at most. Dr. Moore said that the mottled appearance of the surface with dark streaks were suggestive of hills and ridges. As yet, there are no obvious craters visible. "We see no unambiguous evidence," Dr. Moore said. "I'd be surprised if there are not at least a few." Color images show that Ultima Thule is reddish. A ring of brighter, less reddish material circles the connection between the two lobes, possibly loose material that rolled down and piled up at the bottom of the slopes. The details of the shape conclusively answer the mystery of why New Horizons did not detect variations in Ultima Thule's brightness as it approached. Typically, an irregularly shaped object will have a rhythmic pattern of brightening and dimming as it rotates. But here, the spacecraft was looking down at one of the poles, so essentially the same side of Ultima Thule was facing the spacecraft the entire time. The first batch of science data from the flyby arrived on Earth on Tuesday afternoon. More than 100 scientists, including Heidi B. Hammel, a planetary scientist and a media liaison for the science team, gathered in the evening for a look. "Everybody was there," Dr. Hammel said in an interview. "They all wanted to see it. The picture goes up and everybody applauds and cheers. Immediately, the chatter starts." Dr. Stern highlighted the precision that was required for the rendezvous with Ultima Thule. "It's only really size of something like Washington, D.C., and it's about as reflective as garden variety dirt," he said. "And it's illuminated by a sun that's 1,900 times fainter than it is outside on a sunny day on Earth, So we're basically chasing it down in the dark at 32,000 mph." He also addressed a controversy over the nickname that the New Horizons team had chosen. Ultima Thule is a Latin phrase that means "a place beyond the known world," but it was also adopted by Nazis to refer to the birthplace of the so called Aryan race. "The term, Ultima Thule, which is very old, many centuries old, possibly a thousand years old, is a wonderful meme for exploration, and that's why we chose it," Dr. Stern said. "Just because some bad guys once liked that term, we're not going to let them hijack it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
In New York City, it is not unusual to find a day care center on the ground floor of a brownstone or high rise, a situation that can force toddlers and tycoons to coexist side by side. In some instances, neighbors form a close bond with the business, while others might have a harder time making peace with teeter tottering in the backyard next door. For Wendy George Bush, opening Weebee Kids Daycare was not only a strategic career move after the birth of her third child, it was a way to form a stronger connection to her community. "The school crossing guard knows us, she refers a lot of people to the day care for us," Ms. George Bush said. "The man at the corner store we go in there and the kids know him, they'll purchase items," she said, describing one of the day care's organized neighborhood outings. The topics parents are talking about. Evidence based guidance. Personal stories that matter. Sign up now to get NYT Parenting in your inbox every week. Ms. George Bush, 46, a former school safety officer, said while there have been some in the neighborhood who didn't like the idea of a business opening up in a residential space, most of the community has embraced Weebee Kids. She runs the facility where on a recent day there were nine children ranging from five months old to preschool age on the first floor of the Bedford Stuyvesant home where her husband grew up. "One parent lives a few blocks down, she rang my bell and said, 'I have my grandbaby and I don't have any Pampers.' I said, 'What size do you need?' We always have them, we're able to share." She said that the children also benefit from all that the neighborhood has to offer. "One time around the corner we met an African drummer, he was banging on the drums, the kids were just standing there watching him," she said. "Then we did bucket drumming with the kids, out in the front of our building." One neighbor, Irene Taylor, 74, a retired New York City schoolteacher, noticed the day care and decided to get involved. "I introduced myself to Wendy, started talking to her and giving her advice. And I started to interact with the kids and talk to some of the parents. I see what she's doing for the kids in the neighborhood." Ms. Taylor, known as "Mama" by the locals, has lived in Bed Stuy since she was 16, with a foray to Georgia after she retired. "Without places like this, I don't know what the neighborhood would be like," she said. A community facility like a day care is often permitted in a residential zone, said Rachaele Raynoff, press secretary at the Department of City Planning. But, she added, "regulations may differ based on the zoning district in which a building is located." Of course, day care centers aren't always a welcome addition to a neighborhood. Jaime Lathrop, a lawyer in Park Slope, Brooklyn, who handles real estate litigation and transactions, said that parents, and particularly mothers, often see day care centers as appealing business ventures that make it possible to work while they have small children, and that might be eligible for state subsidies. But for some homeowners, it comes as an unhappy surprise when what they thought was a strictly residential building is suddenly home to a business that operates from early morning into evening. "This is one of the many drawbacks to owning," Mr. Lathrop said, as it is difficult to escape a home day care that opens in your building. "If you were renting, you could simply move without all the costs and headache and indirect taxation through transfer taxes." According to the state Office of Children and Family Services, any day care program that serves three or more children for more than three hours a day must obtain a license or registration certificate, and must show that it meets certain requirements related to its space and the ratio of students to staff. The state agency's preliminary 2017 data show that out of approximately 10,500 day care centers operating in New York City, 6,720 were home based. In the Murray Hill section of Manhattan, Kara Turrisi Greenwood, 40, lives above Wee Ones Club, a preschool that she started as a Mommy and Me class in 2004 in the front room of the townhouse that her family owns. Initially, older community members in the neighborhood were not thrilled by the prospect of the Mommy and Me class. "They kept saying, 'There's an illegal day care running!' Then the city would come in and say, 'This is clearly not a day care, have a nice day,'" Ms. Turrisi Greenwood said. The Mommy and Me class did not allow drop off, diaper changing, food prep or dispensing of medication, activities that would require a license for the facility to either operate as a family day care that serves up to eight children, or a group family day care that can accommodate up to 16 children. Still, there were plenty of families in Murray Hill looking for the kind of services Ms. Turrisi Greenwood offered, and she had a hit on her hands. So she decided to expand, and obtained her license to run a group child care service. Then during a marathon two years of work and study, she earned a master's degree in education at Bank Street College. Earning the degree seemed more cost effective than hiring a salaried employee with the credentials, which allow her to enroll students from nursery school up to second grade. Soon she found she needed to expand into two neighboring townhouse buildings, which she bought. She connected the ground floor spaces by adding internal doorways. Ms. Turrisi Greenwood has rented out the second and top floors of the buildings to other tenants. "You buy it, you mortgage it, you rent it out," she said matter of factly. During her time running Wee Ones Club, she married Kurt Greenwood, 42, a stay at home father to their sons, Fisher Greenwood, 6, and Hunter Greenwood, 4. Fisher graduated from Wee Ones Club, which Hunter currently attends. Living directly upstairs from the school can sometimes blur the lines between work and home life, but she wouldn't have it any other way. "The preschool was one of the reasons I wanted to move here," Ms. Weldon Leimbacher said. "It's one thing if you're in your 20s and you're changing apartments all the time and going roommate to roommate. It's another when you're an adult and you need a space you can feel stable in." Another family, who opened an in home day care center in their high rise building in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, also initially met with resistance, but was eventually embraced by the community. Jordana Levine's landlord at first did not like the idea of her running a day care out of the apartment she shares with her husband, Glen Ross, 61, who now helps run the school, and their 10 year old twins, Beriah and Mordechai Ross. "He worried the neighbors might be upset," Ms. Levine, 51, said of her landlord. There was good reason to be skeptical, since the couple lived on the third floor of the building, with neighbors above and below. "Then an apartment on the ground floor became available and he asked if we would be interested. We saw it and realized it would be great." The couple opened Morah Jordana's Schoolhouse (Morah means teacher in Hebrew), accommodating no more than 12 children a day, from ages 6 weeks to 3 years old. All of their advertising has been word of mouth, and if a spot opens up, it is quickly filled. "The vision I had in mind was very warm and like a home," she said. Of course, this has meant making some alterations to their two bedroom apartment. "We don't have any adult furniture," she said, explaining that the family uses a fold up Ikea table that does double duty as a safety gate blocking off the kitchen when school is in session. "It's a land of kids." For the first three years, Ms. Levine used her bedroom as a nap area, but now the bedrooms are no longer a part of the school. "One day it hit me, this is a crazy quality of life for me and my husband," she said. She also stopped storing day care items in the twins' room, reorganizing the hallway closet to suit her needs. Ms. Levine, who described herself and her husband as "not neat," said the day care has forced them to be more organized. Pack n' Plays are stored in the hallway closet and brought out during rest time. When a baby fussed before falling asleep one recent day, she pulled out a large cardboard room divider to create a more tranquil area and it worked. The day care uses the building's communal gated playground during the day, making sure to store all of the ride on toys at the end of the day in an unfinished basement room that the building's porters let them use. An older neighbor across the way often keeps her door open to feel more connected to the children, and has read to them on occasion. Likening the operation of the day care to a theatrical performance, Ms. Levine said she and her husband set the stage each night so that they can open the doors in the morning, ready to greet their small customers. "Every day we have to be bright and create this loving atmosphere," she said. Even some young, single men see the benefits of living in a building with a day care center on the ground floor. On the Lower East Side, Kevin Brosnan, 23, a client strategy manager at BounceX, saw the All My Children Daycare on the first floor of his six story building as a boon. His roommates, Dennis Kennelly, 23, an analyst at Guggenheim Securities, and Matthew Killip, 24, a paralegal at Cahill Gordon Reindel LLP, agreed. The roommates attended high school together in Manhattan and then reconvened post college to rent their first apartment together. "Our favorite neighborhood is the Lower East Side, and we really wanted our first apartment to be there, but we didn't want to live above a bar," Mr. Brosnan said. Their balcony overlooks the backyard where the children play, so if one of them is home from work during the day, he is likely to hear the high pitched squeals of tricycle riding children. For the three men, living above a day care center is just another one of those unique New York things. "When people visit us, we tell them to look for the All My Children day care," Mr. Brosnan said. "When the kids are coming in, it feels like being back in school. We saw the day care as a positive."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
A national popular vote would have eliminated that benefit. As the region's political leaders recognized, passage of a constitutional amendment instituting a national popular vote would have spawned strong legal and political pressures to enfranchise African Americans. Even if those pressures could be resisted, an Alabama campaign pamphlet noted in 1914, "with the Negro half of our people not voting, our voice in the national elections, which is now based upon total population, would then be based solely on our voting population and, therefore reduced by half." The political consequences of a national popular vote could simply not be countenanced. By the 1940s, many Southerners also came to believe that their disproportionate weight in presidential elections, thanks to the Electoral College, was a critical bulwark against mounting Northern pressures to enlarge the civil and political rights of African Americans. In 1947 Charles Collins's "Whither Solid South?," an influential states' rights and segregationist treatise, implored Southerners to repel "any attempt to do away with the College because it alone can enable the Southern States to preserve their rights within the Union." The book, which became must reading among the Dixiecrats who bolted from the Democratic Party in 1948, was highly praised and freely distributed by (among others) the Mississippi segregationist James Eastland, who served in the Senate from 1943 until 1978. Driven by such convictions, the white supremacist regimes of the South stood as a roadblock in the path of a national popular vote from the latter decades of the 19th century into the 1960s, when the Voting Rights Act and other measures compelled the region to enfranchise African Americans. There was, of course, resistance to the idea of a national vote elsewhere in the country, but it was the South's well known adamance and the fact that Southern states alone could come close to blocking a constitutional amendment in Congress that kept the idea on the outskirts of public debate for decades. Numerous political leaders who personally favored a national popular vote, like Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. of Massachusetts, a Republican, in the 1940s, concluded that such a reform had no realistic chance of success, and they shifted their advocacy to less sweeping measures. The politics of race and region also figured prominently in the stinging defeat of a national popular vote amendment in the Senate in 1970 the closest that the United States has come to transforming its presidential election system since 1821. Popular and elite support for the idea had mushroomed in the 1960s, leading in 1969 to the House of Representatives voting overwhelmingly in favor of a constitutional amendment that would have abolished the Electoral College. The proposal then got bogged down in the Senate during a year when regional tensions were high: two Southern nominees to the Supreme Court were rejected by the Senate, and the Voting Rights Act was renewed over the vocal opposition of Southern senators. Meanwhile, the national popular vote amendment was stalled in the Judiciary Committee, which was chaired by none other than Senator Eastland. When the amendment resolution finally came to the floor of the Senate in September 1970, thanks to the prodigious efforts of an Indiana senator, Birch Bayh, it was greeted by a filibuster led by segregationists Sam Ervin and Strom Thurmond (with an assist from the Nebraska Republican Roman Hruska). Although things were changing in the South, its political leaders remained steeped in the values and perspectives that had informed their hostility to the civil rights movement and the Voting Rights Act. "The Electoral College," wrote Senator James Allen of Alabama in 1969, "is one of the South's few remaining political safeguards. Let's keep it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
LONDON The artist James Bridle remembers the first time he heard of military drones. Back then, some seven years ago, it took intensive online searching to track down an image of one. As reports of drones as weapons of war and instruments of surveillance became more common, he wanted to understand them better. For him, they were an idea without a physical reality. Mr. Bridle found and downloaded the plans for a type of drone used by the United States Air Force and, using string and chalk, drew a full size outline of the aircraft on the tarmac of the parking lot behind Bridle's London studio. Seeing the form sketched out as if the drone were casting a full scale shadow over an urban setting revealed that this previously unseen combat apparatus had a wingspan about the length of a bus. As an artist, Mr. Bridle is interested in the relationship between the digital and physical world, in how the former changes the way we think about the latter. "Drones are one of those technologies that seemed to go from science fiction to completely mundane without going through a critical thinking stage," he said. "It seemed to stand for so much: war, crime, violence and technology." He has since realized versions of the work, called "Drone Shadow," in locations from Washington to Istanbul. The latest version of "Drone Shadow" falls across the atrium of the Imperial War Museum London as the first work in the exhibition "Age of Terror: Art Since 9/11." Curated by Sanna Moore, the show explores how artists have responded to conflict since those calamitous events. Taking the attack on the World Trade Center as a cultural turning point, the exhibition "reflects on the continuing state of emergency we've been in and how the world has changed: mass surveillance, civil rights, detentions without trial," Ms. Moore said. The scale of "Age of Terror" the largest contemporary art exhibition ever staged by the Imperial War Museum reflects the increase in the number of artists responding to conflict in recent years, Ms. Moore said. The show opens with works that respond directly to Sept. 11 before moving on to consider how the attacks have permeated daily life, in the United States and beyond. Some began in the immediate aftermath: Tony Oursler started filming the footage used in his work "9/11" in Lower Manhattan soon after the second plane hit. The piece "9/12 Front Page" by the German artist Hans Peter Feldmann assembles 151 newspaper covers from around the world from the following day, many carrying the same photograph. "Age of Terror" examines a pattern of cause and effect, drawing links between the attacks on Sept. 11, associated conflicts in the Middle East and the rise in state control and surveillance that accompanied the amorphous war on terror. In Jitish Kallat's "Circadian Rhyme 1" (2011), figurines arranged in a row undergo body checks by security officers, a sight now familiar in an increasingly suspicious culture. Ms. Moore's show also looks at what she called "the spread and institutionalization of violence" through works by Coco Fusco and Martha Rosler. During the American led interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, Ms. Rosler reprised and implicitly drew parallels to a collage practice she initiated during the Vietnam War. In "House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, New Series" (2004 8), Ms. Rosler, as she had in those earlier works, pasted images of apparently distant violence into idealized pictures of the home of an American family. In Fusco's video "Operation Atropos" (2006), the artist subjected a group of her female students to an immersive P.O.W. simulation staged by retired United States Army interrogators. Like Ms. Rosler's work, "Operation Atropos" compresses the perceived distance between the United States and its theaters of conflict. The concluding segment of the exhibition examines the destruction, displacement and physical threat in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, and the impact it has had on the idea of home. Most of these artists were informed by "personal experience," Ms. Moore said. Among them is the Iraqi Kurdish photographer Jamal Penjweny, who after years as an acclaimed war reporter returned to fine art, hoping to create a more nuanced vision of Iraq. In his photo series "Saddam Is Here" (2009 10), ordinary Iraqis including a dentist, a shepherd, a butcher and a soldier hold head shots of the dictator's face in front of their own, suggesting an indelible, internalized legacy. In the opening section of the show, Gerhard Richter's "September" places the Sept. 11 attacks in the context of a century of violence. Completed in 2005, "September" is an antiheroic historical painting: a work of modest size that, through scraped off paint, retains the dissolving forms of the twin towers as the second is engulfed in the fireball of an exploding plane. Mr. Richter was 13 years old when his home city of Dresden was devastated by Allied forces in 1945. "September" follows bodies of work by the artist addressing his own family's military involvement, the postwar rebuilding and rearming of Germany, and the terrorist activities, trial, imprisonment and deaths of the Baader Meinhof Gang. Jake and Dinos Chapman's "Nein! Eleven" (2013) two towers of mutilated toy soldiers, many wearing Nazi armbands also places the war on terror in a historical context. "Nein! Eleven" is one of a series of "Hellscapes" grotesque sculptural landscapes populated by nightmarish figurines engaged in acts of brutal violence that the brothers commenced in 1999. "We are interested in the ideological justification for state violence and the mythologized threat of terror, and how the two interlace," Jake Chapman wrote via email. "Our work tickles the dark underbelly of all things nice, so that it coughs up its sinister truth." For Mr. Bridle, the roles of art and political activism are different. "Thinking through other ways of representing and talking about things is important," he said. "In the case of the drone, someone else needed to represent it other than the military itself." This commitment to creating an alternative, unofficial depiction of conflict places Bridle's work on an unexpected continuum with that of the embedded war artists long associated with the Imperial War Museum. Bridle's projects have had an impact on the way drone strikes have been reported. Between 2012 and 2015, the artist posted satellite images on Instagram every time the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported a drone strike outside official theaters of combat. "Dronestagram" offered a drone's eye view of the landscape that had been bombed. The images were subsequently used in the news media, said the artist: "Reports that would usually have featured a Ministry of Defense image of a drone were instead publishing images of the landscape in which the strike had taken place." Rather than the work of war artists delivering images from a remote battleground, "Age of Terror" is the product of a war without boundaries art from an era marked by ubiquitous threat and paranoia. It is an exhibition in which the war is here and now. The institution dedicated to conflict has turned to the art of our everyday.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
On Monday, about 1,000 people, most of them young women, lined up at a New York City theater for a poetry reading by Rupi Kaur. Giant fake sunflowers outside made a safe space for guests to pose for Instagram in their hijabs, baseball caps, pantsuits, combat boots and cocktail dresses. Then on Tuesday came a big and quietly savage profile in The Cut. On Wednesday, The Guardian published an article on the "inevitable backlash" against her. What a week! Ms. Kaur, who is 25 and Punjabi Canadian, is used to the ups and downs. In the three years since her blockbuster "Milk and Honey" was first self published and later picked up by Andrews McMeel Publishing, she has dealt with all the issues other women face on Instagram and off: comparisons, aggression, bullying. But she has also built a community and an audience there in particular, with 1.6 million followers. Daunted by the tough stuff, she remained, because "it came back to the accessibility," she said. "Instagram makes my work so accessible and I was able to build a readership," Ms. Kaur said recently in a cafe in SoHo. "But then I always feel like within the literary world there's of course downsides, because you have that label attached to your work and then, for some reason, that means you aren't a credible literary source." Instagram was where, in 2015, Ms. Kaur first seized on some fame, when the platform removed a photo of her. In it, she was in bed, back to the camera, with fake menstrual blood stains on her sweatpants and sheet. Instagram said the removal was an accident, and then returned it; now it's just shy of 100,000 likes. Ms. Kaur appended a note: "i will not apologize for not feeding the ego and pride of misogynist society that will have my body in an underwear but not be okay with a small leak." "Milk and Honey" has sold 2.5 million copies worldwide and has been translated into 25 languages. Over the last two years, it has spent 77 weeks on The New York Times Trade Paperback Best Seller List. Her second book, "The Sun and Her Flowers," was released this week and is No. 2 on Amazon's best seller list. But Instagram is really where she publishes. Some of Ms. Kaur's poems are just a line, like "i think my body knew you would not stay." It lends itself to parody. Her themes don't vary too much: heartache hurts, love heals, women are strong, loving yourself is key to most things. Her work has been criticized as "disingenuous," and it's true that Ms. Kaur stays remarkably on brand. Ms. Kaur too has been accused of writing about experiences that she hasn't had herself. Asked about this, she shrugged. "It's so complicated," she said. It's also not, historically, a requirement for poetry. Writing poems is how she processes the news and the world around her, she said, and for what she hasn't lived, she tries to understand. The underlying message of all this criticism is that Ms. Kaur's work isn't "real literature." The literary world doesn't have a great track record of embracing or even acknowledging artists like Ms. Kaur, who are different in some notable way, but who attract an enormous and fervent audience. This dynamic has cropped up recently with the writers Lang Leav (with whom Ms. Kaur shares a publisher) and Tao Lin. Like a Kathy Acker or even a Patti Smith before them, these writers also weren't seen as important, largely because of their too youthful or too female readership. "Critics might think that Kaur's readership is young and female, so her work can't be serious, which is obviously wrong," said Matthew Hart, a professor of English and comparative literature Columbia University. "Her style doesn't seem naive." But Austen died 200 years ago. Ms. Kaur's work reminds us that the ordinary business and experience of millennial minority women is not to be dismissed. I spoke with dozens of Ms. Kaur's fans and critics, most of them young women. Those who dislike her work agree with enthusiasts that she's addressing weighty issues like violence, sexual assault and trauma in a way that is admirable. "We're best friends and we've been apart for two years, but we'd send each other her poems on Instagram when one of us was feeling down or lonely," said Katharina Gadow, 28, who attended Ms. Kaur's reading with a friend who had just moved to New York. For Shannon Donnelly, 24, "Milk and Honey" was "sometimes difficult to read" because she has struggled with depression and anxiety. Ultimately, reading the book was like "working through my pains with a therapist," she said. Ms. Kaur has "hit the nail on the head in every single way," said Tiffany Praimnath, 19. "Guyanese culture is reminiscent of Indian culture to me, especially how men treat women, and I think because Rupi's of Indian ancestry, that really resonated." Many fans told me they share her poems with friends via Instagram or screen shots sent as texts, as encouragement or as a way to let Ms. Kaur's work speak for them. Ms. Kaur becomes permission and voice both, a reminder and a vehicle that they have every right to speak, even when they are made to feel like they should be silent. Organizations including the National Eating Disorders Association, Moms Can Code, and Curvy Girls Scoliosis all broadcast Ms. Kaur's work on social media as encouragement, solidarity or motivation. "Rupi's not like other writers, and that's exactly why I like her," she said. Her mother was beside her. "She's thought provoking in a different way, and she opened my eyes to issues not normally talked about in Indian families things like abuse, violence towards women, trauma," Ms. Gupte said. "Her poems are important to South Asian women like me. She's breaking into this industry that doesn't represent people who look like her who look like me."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Galder Gaztelu Urrutia's horror thriller "The Platform" has been a regular fixture on Netflix's daily Top 10 since it hit the streaming service last Friday, and no wonder: with its generous helpings of cannibalism, suicide, starvation, blood, guts and feces, how could it not be a crowd pleaser? A gnarly mash up of midnight movie and social commentary, the picture is overly overt but undeniably effective, delivering genre jolts and broad messaging in equal measure. David Desola and Pedro Rivero's screenplay focuses on a brutal experiment in social conditioning and blunt Darwinism. In a vast, vertical prison, each floor consists of a single, small room, inhabited by two cellmates. In the middle of each room, down the center of the building, is a giant hole where a descending meal platform a kind of mass dumbwaiter stops once a day, for the briefest interval. It is loaded with food and drink at the beginning of its descent, and "if everyone ate only what they needed," an administrator explains, "the food would reach the lowest levels." But this is a 200 story prison, so if those on the higher floors stuff their faces (and they all do), things can get more than a little desperate down below.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Nakesha Williams Died Homeless on a Manhattan Street. Should She Have Been Forced Into Treatment? On Sunday, The Times published a heartbreaking story about a standout student at Williams College who later developed mental problems and ended up homeless, a fixture on a grate at 46th Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan. The woman, Nakesha Williams, died in 2016 at age 46 after turning down many offers of help over the years and despite extraordinary efforts made by outreach workers and friends. Many readers wondered: What can be done for someone like Ms. Williams, who is plainly mentally disabled but rejects help? We asked Sam Tsemberis, founder of Pathways to Housing, a nonprofit that helps homeless people secure housing and supports for daily living. Mr. Tsemberis previously worked for Project Help, Mayor Edward I. Koch's involuntary commitment program for homeless people with mental illness. Our conversation has been edited and condensed. Why can't someone like Ms. Williams, who seemed clearly to have a delusional illness, be involuntarily committed? Involuntary commitment laws balance the rights of people with mental illness and protection of the public, and the standard for commitment is that the person presents an "immediate danger to self or others." She didn't meet the immediacy criteria. There's debate over this provision. In New York, we have a law Kendra's Law that allows for broader inclusionary criteria so that, for example, commitment can be based on a person's history of noncompliance in treatment. A doctor or a family member would have to petition the mental health court in the hospital. But even if someone had brought her to the right psychiatrist, the question is: What happens after that? In my experience, we would bring people like her to Bellevue, and 30 days later they'd be discharged and back on same heating grate as before. What if she just did not understand she was mentally disabled? If you look at her from a "strengths" rather than "deficits" perspective, she was extremely resourceful. She knew exactly where it was safe to stay; she was lucid in interviews; she knew her dilemma regarding shelter that she felt safer away from people than in a crowded place. The minute anyone said, "You need treatment," they got onto the list of people she'd never engage with again. She didn't want treatment. What are the options when someone refuses help? What are some common reasons they refuse? There's a quote from Marsha Linehan, the famous therapist: to engage with someone like Ms. Williams requires a "radical acceptance of her point of view." A program that could offer housing in a dignified way with no requirement to be in treatment, but a lease, privacy, security I think might have helped in this case. I'm not saying that involuntary commitment is off the table. I'm being pragmatic. If commitment is the right thing to do, then let's do it, take the person to Bellevue, and get meds that's fine. But many people in these circumstances need other options. Why do so many people like this end up homeless or in jail? Is it the lack of beds, or the law? There is overrepresentation of people with serious mental problems on streets who then end up in jail. If someone has a mental illness and they're not working, and they lose their housing then unless they have someone to help, they're at high risk for homelessness. Once you're broke and on the street, there's no way you can come up with the first month's rent and a security deposit for an apartment. You're not getting back into housing. And yet many programs that try to help require treatment first, before anything else. In this case, if you managed to get her to a hospital for treatment, or involuntarily committed well, as soon as she's out, that's the end of that relationship. Under New York law, what is the procedure by which a person like Ms. Williams, who's putting herself at risk, could be treated involuntarily? You would have to make the case by petitioning the mental health court in a hospital. This can be a family member, or a member of a treatment team one of the mobile teams, who have been trying to get her treatment would have to make that case that she'd been noncompliant with the treatment and is a danger to herself. And sometimes that kind of intervention is effective. The order allows you to bring the person back into the hospital if they're not taking their meds. On the risk side, it creates an adversarial relationship. You're supposed to be helping this person, and yet you have the authority to yank her back to the hospital when things aren't going well. Is there a better way to balance people's right to make their own choices and their health? I would ask: Why do we have homelessness to begin with? Why is it that even this woman, a graduate of Williams, ends up on street? How is it that we don't do something about that first? More mental health treatment is not going to help people find a place to live. The idea of choice is intimately connected to radical acceptance of another person's point of view: whose choices matter most, and whose are most effective in solving this problem. People can't imagine this woman living in her own apartment. But she stayed with a friend in Brooklyn, on the couch, and did fine. And she navigated her way to California, and to Washington D.C. If she can do that, she can navigate her way around an apartment.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
IHOP has new burger offerings, and in order to promote those offerings, it is pretending to change its name to IHOb in a marketing campaign. The "b" stands for burgers. IHOP (which we will insist on calling the chain until it becomes a correctable error ) announced the fake name change last week, but kept the public in suspense about what the b stood for until Monday . In the announcement, IHOP substituted "b's" for "p's" as if it were a leader of a burger gang whose nemesis is a pancake gang. Flipping the acronym's final letter as one might flip a hamburger got the company a lot of attention: IHOP, IHOb and International House all began to trend on Twitter almost immediately. Many people said they were distressed, some because they hate the sound of the new word, others because they love pancakes. (Pancakes remain on the restaurant's menu.) Still others pointed out that the "changed" logo, with its lowercase b, resembled that of o.b. tampons. There are many words that start with b that we would have preferred to burgers. They include: But burgers? Might as well call it International House of Basic and have done with it. A spokeswoman for the global flapjack dwelling, Stephanie Peterson, said that even the company, which engineered the reaction, had been surprised by its force. "We thought that people would have fun with this, but never did we imagine that it would grab the attention of America the way it did," she said. P and b are both bilabial plosives, meaning that your mouth does the same thing when you make the sound of both letters. The difference is that "b" is voiced, which for some people, makes it sound funny or strange coming at the end of a word. Brad Haley, IHOP's chief marketing officer, said that the idea had been proposed by the marketing firm Droga5 in November. He said that only one IHOP location, on Sunset Boulevard, had undergone a design change in response to the new (fake) name, which is meant to promote a product line of Ultimate Steakburgers. Droga5 had originally pitched a campaign based on the idea of "pancakes, pancakes, pancakes," Mr. Haley said. "So we said that's great, we agree with that approach obviously and we subsequently hired them. But we said, there will come times when we want to promote something other than pancakes. They came back with the idea of IHOb." Mr. Haley said that the burgers were "the most extensively tested new line of menu items that IHOP has ever done," and that he expected them to be available for a long time. And while he spoke about the IHOb marketing campaign, which is set to wind down at the end of the summer, in the past tense, he was already looking forward to the days when people would be nostalgic for it. "We'll certainly get back to promoting breakfast items some time after this," he said. "But I think IHOb will resurface at that point to hearken back to this fun time people are having right now."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
The culture war will come for us all. On Sunday, it came for a Washington Post reporter, Felicia Sonmez. Nine people were killed in a helicopter crash in Calabasas, Calif., that morning, including the basketball legend Kobe Bryant and his 13 year old daughter, Gianna. The news rocketed around social media, where mourners shared their heartbreak at the news. As is common with major breaking news, some reports were inaccurate or false, layering anxiety on top of grief. Into the mix, Ms. Sonmez tweeted the link to a 2016 article from The Daily Beast about a young woman's accusation that Mr. Bryant had raped her in Colorado. Criminal charges against him were dropped in 2004 and a civil suit was settled out of court. The tweet highlighted the fact that Mr. Bryant's legacy is fraught and complicated, and attracted the attention of fans as well as trolls who bombarded her inbox with abuse and posted her home address online. Ms. Sonmez then posted a selection of the threats she received, without obscuring the names of the people who had sent her hate mail. She slept in a hotel on Sunday night, fearing for her safety at home, she said. We don't know all the details, but it seems that The Post's managing and executive editors were not pleased. They chastised her over email and placed her on administrative leave while the organization reviewed whether she had violated the company's social media guidelines. Their reasoning on Monday: "The tweets displayed poor judgment that undermined the work of her colleagues." The Post reversed her suspension on Tuesday, roughly 36 hours after the initial tweets, stating that senior managers had concluded that Ms. Sonmez's tweets didn't violate company policy. This, of course, was obvious to almost everyone but The Post's higher ups. It was impossible to imagine how posting a link to a story by a different publication on Twitter could undermine the work of colleagues. Just as it was impossible to imagine which colleagues would have felt undermined (more than 300 of Ms. Sonmez's colleagues expressed solidarity with her in a letter from The Post's union to management). There remain glaring questions. Did the executive editor, Marty Baron, inquire about Ms. Sonmez's safety when he emailed her to criticize her tweets? What, beyond a reflex for online civility, led The Post to determine the reporter was "hurting this institution" by discussing a part of Mr. Bryant's legacy that appeared in The Post's own news pages? Why, after years of watching journalists, women and vulnerable individuals being trolled and abused by viral outrage online, are newsrooms still falling for the same Gamergate style tactics? The Post's official statement (it doesn't quite rise to the level of an apology), which included the caveat "we consistently urge restraint" for reporters online, doesn't begin to answer these questions. Mr. Baron released a memo to Post staff on Thursday admitting "It is not always easy to know where to draw the line" on many of these issues. Notably, the memo did not include an apology. The incident also raises headier questions, including: In the world of online journalism, what specifically do writers owe to their publications via their social media presence? Surely, there's a bare minimum if they're collecting a paycheck. Journalists obviously shouldn't undermine their colleagues with cheap shots or reckless speculation as to others' work. They should stay professional. After that, things get murky. Twitter is a Gordian knot of news and opinion that can't be untangled. Inside publications, news and opinion bleed together; opinion writers report while reporters opine via news analysis. Partisan commentary, once a third rail for objective reporters, is omnipresent on Twitter. In the past, news organizations and the people who work for them would never have called the president a racist. Some now do so explicitly. Newsrooms and even the platforms have struggled with finding a new standard in the Trump era of disinformation; meanwhile, journalists are expected to sort it out in real time, while on the job. And to get it right or face consequences. Journalists who build followings online, in part by being incisive, combative, funny and omnipresent on Twitter, are often hired because of that exposure because they're a known quantity. At a larger organization, though, those same attributes may quickly be seen as a liability. Publications hire diverse outspoken writers and then get anxious when these writers start tweeting about politics. Some outlets ask staffers who don't cover incendiary beats like politics to refrain from commenting on political goings on. But what happens when politics touches everything? For those who've made a name being outspoken, suddenly saying nothing is a statement in itself. For newsroom leaders the questions get tough, fast. Few if any outlets seem to want to draw exact lines. And so they become blurred. There's also a double standard. While few publications would say it, it's all but required for young journalists to jump into the culture war online. It's a way to find stories. And in a volatile industry it gets you noticed. Being "part of the discourse" each day means being marketable. It helps writers, but it also bolsters publications, helping promote big stories and creating all kinds of dystopian forms of content like "microscoops," or breaking news too small to merit its own article but enough to tout to competitors on Twitter. This exposure is a drug for journalists. The real time sparring and feedback is seductive, and the endorphin boosts of constant mentions is addictive. But it's also exposure in the truest sense: great visibility and great vulnerability blended seamlessly together. Though an argument could be made that all the time wasting, in jokes and gaffes from idle reporters and editors on Twitter subtly undermine the rigorous parts of the work, newsrooms benefit greatly from the constant exposure of their journalists. Reporters use Twitter to poke and prod sources. Writers sometimes enhance their stories with long tweet threads that explain the reporting process. And reporters build trust with audiences by including or signaling to their audience perspectives in their online analysis (Ms. Sonmez, who has come forward with details of her own sexual assault, told her colleague Erik Wemple that her tweets were, in part, to make survivors like herself who follow her feel seen). When important news breaks, newsrooms claim credit when their reporters break it first on Twitter. Which is why The Post's statement, especially its urging of restraint, is so fraught. The same editors who want restraint from reporters online during a celebrity death would most likely also be furious if their Capitol Hill reporters were slow in live tweeting a hearing or impeachment proceeding and fell behind the competition. Restraint is a virtue in journalism, no doubt, but so are tenacity and transparency. The message is contradictory: Broadcast everything, but exercise restraint. Twitter isn't real life, but tweets can and will get you fired or suspended. But these qualities have been in conflict and competition for long before Twitter and newsrooms understood a journalist's exposure during breaking news and had their backs accordingly. Evidence suggests that's not always the case in the face of a cascade of online outrage. That's less a change in the industry than it is a failure of newsroom leaders to understand the information war it sends its journalists out to fight in each day. While the internet's culture war dynamics are fraught, they're not all that hard to understand. They come in the form of intimidation and threats toward journalists and angry campaigns toward advertisers and executives. Some of the responses are posturing and some are real, but all are engineered for maximum virality and outrage. Yes, sometimes journalists make mistakes. Sometimes work will harm the institution or undermine co workers, but newsroom leaders ought to be trained to distinguish trolls from good faith criticism. It's a weird moment that newsrooms aren't talking about enough. Just as social media platforms allow celebrities, politicians and influencers to circumvent traditional press gatekeeping, the same thing has happened to journalism's own practitioners. Despite all the social media guidelines, there's an unanswered question: Who do those followers really belong to? Perhaps it's most accurate to say they're an asset and a liability for both parties. Everyone's exposed. But there's an asymmetry to that exposure. The culture war will come for us all, institutions and individuals alike. One group can weather the storm, the other needs protection. Newsrooms need to get smart, prepare and protect their foot soldiers. It's the least they can do. 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
WORCESTER, Mass. The Holy Cross women's ice hockey team averaged nearly 20 victories over the last 10 seasons while hanging six conference championship banners at its home rink, the Hart Center. The senior tri captains, Tori Messina, Julie Matthias and Sam Girard, helped the team win one of those banners, and the Crusaders posted a 62 17 3 record in their first three seasons. "We were so used to winning," Messina, a defender, said. But this season, the team's first in Division I, Holy Cross has had to get used to losing. It is 1 28 3 entering its final game on Friday night, at home against Providence. The other 34 Division I teams have each won at least two games. The Crusaders have been shut out in 11 games and have been held to one goal in 14 others. They failed to score on their first 43 power play opportunities after scoring at a 30 percent clip last season. "No team I've had has ever faced more challenges," said Peter Van Buskirk, who has coached the program for 19 of its 20 years, taking over in its second season. Before that, he coached the Holy Cross men's team for 10 seasons between 1979 and 1997, reaching the postseason eight times. The former athletic director Nate Pine said it had always bothered him that women's ice hockey was the only sport of the 27 at Holy Cross that was not playing in Division I. And when Holy Cross's former league, the New England Hockey Conference, decided it wanted only Division III institutions as members, the college began looking for a new hockey home. Pine, who left Holy Cross in January to become the athletic director at Air Force, approached the Hockey East commissioner, Joe Bertagna, whose league had an uneven number of women's teams, nine, including top programs like Northeastern, Boston College and Boston University. "As we continue to make investments over the next four, five years, we expect to be where we want to be," Pine said in his final week at Holy Cross. "We're not in this to be an also ran." The news that Holy Cross would join Hockey East came just two months after North Dakota announced that it was dropping its women's program, along with two other sports, for budgetary reasons. Before Holy Cross, the last new women's program in Division I was Merrimack College's, which joined Hockey East for the 2015 16 season. Last September, L.I.U. Brooklyn said it would have a Division I team beginning in 2019 20, which would bring the number of those programs to 36 nationally. Northern Michigan is also exploring adding a women's team. (There are 60 Division I men's hockey teams.) It is not unusual for a college team to struggle after moving up a division. Bertagna said he thought it was harder for a program to move up a level than to start a team from scratch. Compounding the difficulty for Holy Cross, it began this season with only one class that had been recruited for Division I competition. Not only were returning Holy Cross players accustomed to winning, so were many of the incoming freshmen. Forward Carlie Magier won state championships for Belle Tire Hockey Club in Detroit, and goalie Jada Brenon won New York State titles while playing for the Nichols School in Buffalo. "This is a new challenge," said Magier, who is tied for second on the team with 11 points. "I was looking forward to it. We expected to have bumps in the road." One of those bumps came against Connecticut on Oct. 13, when some teammates expressed frustration with one another on the bench as an early lead devolved into a 7 2 loss. It was addressed immediately after the game, and now, Brenon said, "This team gets together better than any team I've been on." Surprisingly, Holy Cross's lone victory came Nov. 30 at home against Northeastern, which was ranked No. 5 at the time and is currently No. 3. Down by two goals in the first period, the Crusaders rallied for a 5 3 victory. Matthias called it "the most fun hockey game I've ever played in." She added, "We finally got what we'd been working for." Messina said she was crying on the bench as the game wound down. "I don't think I breathed the last 10 minutes," she said, laughing. Before practice on Jan. 15, Van Buskirk, 76, told his team he would retire after the season. He said that he had begun thinking about retirement last year as he was preparing for his second hip replacement but that he relished the challenge of competing in Hockey East. The next Saturday, at home against Maine, they scored twice in the third period for a 2 1 lead, only for Maine to tie the score with an extra attacker with less than a second left. Holy Cross had to settle for an overtime tie. What this season isn't providing in victories, it is providing in perspective, as well as an appreciation for the course the team is charting for the future. "I look at hockey so much different now," Girard, one of the senior captains, said. "I enjoy the competition every time we play. I wouldn't trade this for the world."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
An AIDS Museum: The Challenges Are Huge, but the Timing Is Right SAN FRANCISCO The National AIDS Memorial Grove in Golden Gate Park here is a somber glen of plants, trees, walks, grass and cairn, with thousands of names etched in stones and pavement. Visitors' emotions run high, but the details of exactly how AIDS devastated and transformed the world are not found here. "The story of AIDS is more than a disease," said John Cunningham, executive director of the grove. "The real underpinnings of that story are about humanity, social justice, human rights and what it means to be a citizen of the world. Somehow there needs to be a keeper of the story." Now there is a move to create just that: a place to chronicle the AIDS tragedy more comprehensively, to explore the pandemic's many facets in a permanent national exhibition and repository. It would be similar to institutions commemorating other cataclysmic events: the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the National September 11 Memorial Museum in Manhattan and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in Japan. The effort is in its nascent stages, being discreetly explored by the staff and board of the grove, which Congress designated a National Memorial in 1996. (It is the only AIDS related monument to receive such status.) So far, the grove has engaged consultants, some with a history of fund raising for museums, to begin gauging the interest of wealthy donors, especially those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. It seems appropriate that this city, one of the hardest hit by AIDS in the country, would be the project's home. This is where one of the first known reports of the disease was made public, in 1981. Robert Campbell, a public health nurse known as Bobbi, posted photos of his lesions from Kaposi's sarcoma, a cancer often associated with AIDS, in the window of a pharmacy here, hoping to connect with others who might be suffering. The city was also the original site of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, which today has 48,000 panels, each paying tribute to a person who died of AIDS. Some 14 million people have viewed portions of the quilt. The vision for the new project calls for something "architecturally significant," according to a draft of an internal document shared with The New York Times. "More than a museum or memorial, it will be a center of social justice and conscience and a platform for action." But fund raising is only one of several challenges. American reactions to AIDS form one of the most contentious and divisive chapters in recent history. The disease's first victims in the early 1980s were mostly gay men, and the White House initially responded with what has been described as a cruel lack of interest, an attitude that helped spread fear and discrimination. This has led to questions about how the AIDS story should be told, and who gets to tell it. There is also no precedent for a large scale permanent exhibition dedicated to exploring a disease. Even more daunting, perhaps, is that museums tend to capture the past, and AIDS remains relentlessly present. Worldwide, 39 million have died; an estimated 36.7 million are currently infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, or have the disease; and more than two million become infected annually, according to the most recent statistics from the Joint United Nations Programme on H.I.V./AIDS. Anti retroviral therapies can reduce the infection to a chronic but manageable condition, yet nearly half of those with H.I.V. are not receiving them. Sub Saharan Africa is the most affected region, but even in the United States, where AIDS prevention efforts and lifesaving drugs have existed for decades, an estimated 1.2 million people are H.I.V. positive, with nearly 40,000 new cases diagnosed each year, according to the most recent figures from amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research. When the New York Public Library, which has one of the nation's largest archives on AIDS and the gay rights movement, presented "Why We Fight: Remembering AIDS Activism," in 2013, the show drew both large crowds and a protest. The day the show opened, activists disrupted the gallery. "They wanted to be sure that people knew that AIDS isn't history," a library spokesman said. Communicating that message and the rest of the tragedy's complexities is difficult with the grove alone, and organizers feel they have a mandate to go further. "Our congressionally designated responsibility is to be the memorial," said Mike Shriver, the grove's board chairman. "And a natural hardscape and landscape feature has limitations." Despite all the challenges, though, it may be precisely the right time to pursue the idea, considering how museums based on other tragedies have evolved and become extraordinarily successful. The Sept. 11 and Holocaust museums often require timed entry tickets. "A comparison to the Holocaust is somewhat apt," said Sean Strub, one of the earliest chroniclers of the AIDS epidemic, a New York activist who learned in 1985 that he was H.I.V. positive. Some memorials to Holocaust victims began to appear immediately after the end of World War II. Mr. Strub, who was also the founder and publisher of POZ magazine, which describes its audience as people living with, or affected by, H.I.V./AIDS, from 1994 to 2004, said the years that followed the war allowed people time to "process grief." Then, during the 1960s and '70s, depictions of the Holocaust became more prevalent in books and popular culture. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter established the commission that eventually led to the museum in Washington. The movement to commemorate the AIDS pandemic could be seen as following a similar path, Mr. Strub said. In the early 1990s, the number of deaths peaked in the United States. "People were dying so fast you didn't have time to cry," he said. Artists and writers captured the tragedy as it claimed lives, some with surprising commercial success, which helped breach mainstream American consciousness. The hit musical "Rent" won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996, and the film "Philadelphia" won two Academy Awards after its premiere in 1993. In the mid 1990s, as this battle for hearts and minds was waged, effective medical treatments arrived. In 1998, The Bay Area Reporter, a gay San Francisco newspaper, ran the headline "No Obits," indicating that this was the first edition of the weekly since 1981 without a single AIDS related obituary. It was a sign of a major turning point in the fight against the disease. In recent years, a growing number of memorials have appeared. The New York City AIDS Memorial, an impressive metal canopy composed of triangles at the former site of St. Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village, was dedicated three months ago, on World AIDS Day, Dec. 1. Last month, the London Assembly voted to establish an AIDS memorial there. West Hollywood, Calif., will soon begin construction of a 2.5 million AIDS Monument, consisting of a forest of soaring reflective pylons. Councilman John J. Duran, who is H.I.V. positive, led the project and said that although the city had a population of only about 36,000, some 10,000 of its residents had died of AIDS between 1980 and 1995.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Ahead of the curatorial events, the museums will also use their own Facebook pages, starting on Thursday, to simulate the experience of viewing all five paintings in a gallery, allowing the audience to compare and examine them as if they were in a three dimensional environment. The virtual gallery will include narration by van Gogh's great grand nephew, Willem van Gogh, who will share memories of the paintings, which were created in 1888 9 for a visit by the artist Paul Gauguin to van Gogh's house in Arles, France. The Facebook Live event is being led by the National Gallery in London, which in 2014 brought together its own version of "Sunflowers," and that of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, for the first time in 65 years. Jennifer Thompson, curator of the Facebook Live event at the Philadelphia Museum of Art which houses the only version of "Sunflowers" in the United States said she believed it was the first time that art museums in different countries had used social media to highlight works that are unlikely to be seen together in one physical space.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Alzheimer's Tests Soon May Be Common. Should You Get One? None Amanda Lucier for The New York Times Not long ago, the only way to know if someone had Alzheimer's disease was to examine the brain in an autopsy. That is changing and fast with brain scans and spinal taps that can detect beta amyloid, the telltale Alzheimer's protein. There is a blood test on the horizon that can detect beta amyloid, and researchers are experimenting with scans to look for another protein, called tau, also characteristic of Alzheimer's. As this sort of diagnostic testing becomes widespread, more people who fear their memories are slipping will face a difficult question: Would I really want to know if I were getting Alzheimer's disease? "This is a new era, and we are just at the precipice," said Dr. Gil Rabinovici, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco. A positive test could help you get your affairs in order and plan your future. And a drug company, Biogen, claims to have the first treatment that may slow the course of the disease if begun early enough. Health insurers are prohibited by law for now, at least from denying coverage if you have Alzheimer's. But there is nothing that prevents long term care and life insurers from denying you. Will your friends stay with you? How about your spouse? What would it be like to live with the knowledge that you will eventually be unable to recognize your family, or even to speak? For some who have been given diagnostic tests, those questions are all too real. When Dr. Daniel Gibbs, 68, a neurologist in Portland, Ore., noticed his memory starting to slip, he wanted to know if it was Alzheimer's. He had seen its damage all too often in his patients. So he received brain scans for beta amyloid and took cognitive tests. He knew that in people like him with mild memory problems, the combination can cinch a diagnosis. The result? He was in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. Now he worries about his future. Alzheimer's is "an ugly way to die," he said. He has told his family that if he gets something like pneumonia, they should withhold treatment. The sort of testing Dr. Gibbs had can be expensive, and diagnostic brain scans usually are not covered by insurance. The tests are not for the worried well whose memories are intact. But they are available at some medical centers to those with mild memory problems. Generally, even people without memory problems who have amyloid plaques in their brains are more likely to progress to Alzheimer's, said Dr. Ronald Petersen, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. But not everyone does progress. Even when they do, it can be years before there are symptoms. Outside of research studies, Dr. Petersen said, "we do not do amyloid scans on clinically normal people, because we don't know what to tell them." Dr. Rabinovici, of U.C.S.F., sees people who are distressed by their memory problems, knowing something is wrong and unable to get an answer from their doctors. "Often doctors can't definitively tell them if their memory loss is related to aging," he said. "A lot of times, doctors dismiss it and tell patients: 'You are fine, it's normal. You are 75 or 89 and depressed. Why not try an antidepressant?'" Before he offers diagnostic testing, Dr. Rabinovici sits down with patients and their families and asks how will they feel if the test is positive or negative. Most who receive positive diagnoses have told him that after the initial shock, they did not regret being tested. "It ends the diagnostic odyssey," he said. "It ends the uncertainty." A brain scan is reviewed by doctors at Banner Alzheimer's Institute in Phoenix. Dr. Jason Karlawish, an Alzheimer's researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, did a formal study to gauge patients' responses to learning that they had elevated levels of amyloid in their brain. He did not see catastrophic reactions to the bad news. No one died by suicide. Instead, many said they were taking steps to slow Alzheimer's, putting their faith in healthy diets and exercise although no lifestyle measures have been shown to have an effect. But some were not so sure getting a diagnosis had helped them. "You've now told me something about my future," Dr. Karlawish recalled one patient telling him. "I can't unlearn this." For some, the diagnosis has unleashed a storm of emotions. Wallace Rueckel, 75, of St. James, N.C., worries about what will happen as his disease progresses. He has been reluctant to let people other than relatives know he has early Alzheimer's disease. "I don't want people to feel sorry for me," he said. Jay Reinstein of Raleigh, N.C., 58, learned he had early stage Alzheimer's disease in March of 2018. He stepped down from his job as an assistant city manager in Fayetteville, N.C., later that year. "I was numb," Mr. Reinstein said. "I loved working. Work was my life. That was my identity." And he was not the only one left reeling by the diagnosis. "My wife is not doing well with this," Mr. Reinstein said. "It has really taken a major toll on our family. I have become depressed." He worries what his life will be like in a few years. He worries that friends will fall away. Mr. Reinstein has changed his diet, and now he exercises. He and his wife have made a will. He decided to become active in the Alzheimer's Association and to do what he can to destigmatize the disease. He is trying not to let the diagnosis take over his life. "I don't want to be defined by the disease," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
A 1970 jumpsuit by Rudi Gernreich in "Gender Bending Fashion," at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The designer is pivotal to fast changing notions of gender in fashion. BOSTON It is a cat suit, not a thesis statement, and yet somehow the snug Rudi Gernreich garment with its band collar, dot pattern and Julie Newmar aura emblematizes both the promise and the shortcomings of "Gender Bending Fashion," a naggingly ill defined survey of a century of gender blur. Using haute couture, ready to wear and streetwear as its vehicle, the exhibition, organized by Michelle Tolini Finamore at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, builds on a 2013 show by the curator that examined stubbornly entrenched gender associations we make with the color pink. This time around, Ms. Finamore ambitiously set out to track the steady, if occasionally zigzag, evolution of the ways in which most everything we think about fashion has been governed by that hoary and tyrannical old bogeyman the binary. That her show opens as binaries themselves are being dismantled ought to energize a curatorial exploration of the countless ways fashion has been used across history to torque, comment upon or altogether flout the rigid rules of sexuality and gender. (Cue: Joan of Arc.) Yet, disappointingly, it underscores instead the risks to this and other traditional institutions of being outpaced by cultural fault lines opening up outside its walls. I stared for a while trying to figure out what about it bugged me and then remembered that, in March, Westling had gone public with his gender transition. Although he continues to model, it is now as Nathan Westling. I flipped open my phone then to Instagram and up popped a viral image of Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez shaking hands at the Capitol with Jonathan Van Ness, the bearded grooming expert from the Netflix reality show "Queer Eye." She was wearing a snappy magenta pantsuit for the photo op; he was dressed in a pink sweater and a pleated midi skirt. That cat suit previously mentioned was designed in 1970 by Mr. Gernreich; and if ever there were an unjustly neglected American designer and gender rebel, he's the one. Just under two decades ago, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia staged a curatorial rescue operation, attempting to retrieve Mr. Gernreich from obscurity and restore him to his rightful place in fashion history. This visionary Austrian born immigrant arrived in the United States in 1938 with his parents, penniless Jewish refugees from Hitler's Anschluss, and went on to become one of the most decorated designers of his era; a four time winner of the Coty American Fashion Critics' Award (the forerunner of the CFDA Awards); an inductee in the Fashion Hall of Fame and, according to Time, one of the "all time fashion icons." The Philadelphia show, "Fashion Will Go Out of Fashion" using an often quoted Gernreich aphorism was adapted from one mounted a year earlier at the Neue Galerie Graz in Vienna and might well have succeeded in its mission had fate not intervened in the form of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which occurred just days before it opened. Revolutionary frocks were the last thing people had on their minds at the time. It seems almost too obvious to note how much more potent the Boston show might have been had it treated Mr. Gernreich as pivotal to fast changing contemporary notions of gender in fashion, rather than a way station on the long road from Deuteronomy ("The woman shall not wear that which pertains to a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment") to "RuPaul's Drag Race." "I realized you could say something through clothes," Mr. Gernreich once said in an interview with the The Los Angeles Times. To better understand him as a radical explorer of fashion's tropes as stealth instruments of activism, consider his matching 1970s miniskirts for men and women, his unisex cat suit or the military looking "Kent State Ensemble" that is included in the Boston exhibition while his braless bathing suit and infamous breast baring "monokini" for a time the most notorious article of clothing on the planet mysteriously are not. (Costing 24 and never intended for mass production, the 1964 monokini was denounced by the Soviet Union, condemned by the Vatican and deemed immoral by the Republican Party, which somehow found a way to blame its existence on the Democrats.) Mr. Gernreich, who died in 1985 at just 62, frequently prophesied that the day would come when clothing would no longer be segregated into categories of male or female, and it is no stretch to see in him a progenitor of contemporary adherents to that notion designers as otherwise unalike as Alessandro Michele, the creative director of Gucci, or Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons, or Alejandro Gomez Palomo of the Madrid based label Palomo Spain. A further line of descent can easily be traced from Mr. Gernreich who helped found and fund the Mattachine Society, one of the earliest "homosexual rights" organizations in the country to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender pioneers Ms. Finamore positions as central to the evolution of fashion away from the binary and its constrictions, and whose video accounts of their struggles to find dimensioned expression of their sexualities and genders are projected in the Krupp Gallery adjacent to the main exhibition. It may be too much to ask that a tuxedo worn on a dummy convey the subtle complexities at work in a performance by Marlene Dietrich in the groundbreaking, pre Code classic "Morocco," a 1930 film directed by Josef von Sternberg and still shocking in the adventurousness of its sexuality and gender play. (For those who have not had the pleasure, a precis: Dietrich, as the cabaret singer Amy Jolly, dresses in top hat and tails, performs a salacious song in French, kisses a female audience member on the lips and seduces a young Legionnaire played by Gary Cooper, who looks outlandishly pretty and half as butch as she does.) Though hardly less intellectually ambitious than the Boston exhibition, the crowd pleasing blockbusters familiar to us at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art are seldom forced to sell a thesis as intricate as Ms. Finamore's in "Gender Bending Fashion." A jeweled papal tiara tends to speak for itself. It is far more challenging to communicate persuasively how transgressive Yves Saint Laurent's tuxedo evening suit for women the famous "Le Smoking" must have seemed when introduced in 1966; or to frame for viewers the symbolism worked into a suit from a 2003 Viktor Rolf show inspired by fashion's favorite androgyne, Tilda Swinton, and featuring a jacket with multiple collars from which the head of a pale Swinton lookalike emerges like that of a luna moth shedding its chrysalis; or to annotate the geopolitics underpinning the creation of a skirted man's suit from his audacious 1985 collection titled "Afghanistan Repudiates Western Ideals" by an unknown named John Galliano. Even the Alessandro Trincone outfit a skirt covered with scores of poetically drifting scraps of fabric that opens the exhibition challenges viewers to piece together its lineage both as an article of clothing and a gesture of provocation. Sure, it helps to know that the Atlanta rapper Young Thug caused an internet brouhaha when he wore it on the cover of his 2016 mixtape album, "No, My Name Is Jeffery," and Ms. Finamore makes the obligatory citation. Yet the history of renegade sexuality is often a story of missing begats and in cases like that of, say, a pioneer like Mr. Gernreich, it feels obligatory both to retrieve them and to note for viewers that we have been down this road before. For an exhibition as scrupulous as "Gender Bending Fashion" is about providing a map of the way stations along the arc of gender identity and expression "agender" to "genderqueer" to nonbinary to trans the effort to establish lineages can seem disappointingly attenuated. Before Young Thug came along, after all, there was Prince in his heels and velvets, and Andre 3000 in his platinum wigs and pink jumpsuits, and Little Richard in his eyeliner and lacquered beehive, and the blues singer Gladys Bentley headlining the Ubangi Club in Harlem in a white top hat and tails "a large, dark, masculine lady whose feet pounded the floor while her fingers pounded the keyboard," as Langston Hughes once wrote, adding of this particular and largely forgotten gender bender that she was a "perfect piece of African sculpture, animated by her own rhythm." Through Aug. 25 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 465 Huntington Avenue, Boston; 617 267 9300, mfa.org.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Full reviews of recent dance performances: nytimes.com/dance. A searchable guide to these and other performances is at nytimes.com/events. American Ballet Theater (through Saturday) American Ballet Theater concludes its spring season with three more performances of Alexei Ratmansky's handsome, opulent reconstruction of "The Sleeping Beauty," featuring palatial sets and poetic pas de deux set to Tchaikovsky's stirring score. The production is a clever quilt of the famous ballet's history: Mr. Ratmansky incorporated steps from the 1890 Russian premiere and borrowed from the avant garde costume design of a 1921 staging. A real treat for aficionados. Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, 212 362 6000, abt.org. (Brian Schaefer) Ronald K. Brown (through Sunday) Better Days was a disco club in the 1970s and '80s near Times Square, popular with the gay crowd. Mr. Brown's all male dance of the same name, made in 1998, tells of loss, love and perseverance. At the time, he meant AIDS. This week, audiences may find themselves thinking of Orlando. That work, on Program B, joins others from Mr. Brown's repertory, including "Four Corners," a nice example of Mr. Brown's blend of African and modern dance with a halo of spirituality. Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, Manhattan, 212 242 0800, joyce.org. (Schaefer) Bryant Park Presents Modern Dance (Friday) For two more Friday evenings this summer, the vast Bryant Park lawn will become an open air dance theater and picnic hot spot with an annual series produced by Bryant Park Presents and the arts organization Inception to Exhibition. Each week, three companies take the stage over two hours; the presented work tends to be upbeat and more physically vibrant so as to compete with the pulse of the city around it. This week, participating artists include WillyLaury Co, Bare Dance Company and Sean Curran Company. (Also on July 8.) At 6 p.m., Bryant Park, Avenue of the Americas at 42nd Street, 212 768 4242, bryantpark.org. (Schaefer)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
What to See in New York Art Galleries This Week The history of postwar American abstract painting remains a work in progress. We are barely beginning to understand its sheer multiplicity in terms of the artists' races and cultures and the works' physical character. New information arrives in regular and humbling batches. The latest is Joe Overstreet's stunning exhibition "Innovation of Flight, Paintings 1967 1972" at Eric Firestone. With 20 rarely seen works, it covers a brief period when Mr. Overstreet's disavowal of painting's usual standards and practices was unfolding rapidly in several directions, alongside efforts by Sam Gilliam, Harmony Hammond, Alan Shields and Howardena Pindell, among others. Of central importance was Mr. Overstreet's jettisoning of traditional stretcher bars, anchoring his work to walls, ceilings, floors or a mix thereof with thin rope, metal eyes and handsome knots. As the show's subtitle suggests, evoking lightness and levitation was clearly a goal; some paintings here seem ready for takeoff. Another goal: giving equal prominence to how he painted and what he painted on. Sources and inspirations seem to include Jackson Pollock, Jules Olitski, African textiles, American Indian symbols and things nautical. All together, the pieces deviate wildly in technique, combining stain, hard edge and shaped painting. Stretched taut, carefully draped or seemingly suspended, these structures evoke tents, gliders, banners and even spaceships and maps. But these suggestions are all tempered by Mr. Overstreet's brilliant use of color and process, and by beauty. An early example that uses stretchers is "North Star" (1968), whose crackling bands of color involve both hard edge and stain painting and whose rectangular shape is transgressed by numerous notches, as well as by two cutout squares, so that it resembles a large mask. "For Happiness" (1970) also combines multiple painting techniques; it has 13 ropes that jauntily tilt its surface back and forth in space, challenging understanding of the piece as a whole. In contrast to this complexity, "Hoo Doo Mandala" and "Mandala" (both 1970) are relatively square and frontal, but also gently billowed and scalloped by their anchoring ropes. Their radiant, asymmetrical geometries are reminiscent of everything from semaphore and hot air balloons to tantric painting and the early Modernist works of the married artists Sonia Delaunay and Robert Delaunay. In several works from 1972, Mr. Overstreet switches to an explosive, staccato drip technique, whose intimations of starry skies are regularly contradicted by dividing lines or added segments of canvas, leaving us suspended between deep space and eccentric objects. I look forward to seeing these exuberant, groundbreaking creations becoming standard in museums and new art histories. ROBERTA SMITH The ready made, an industrially manufactured object repurposed as art, was popular in the 20th century. But could there be such a thing as ready made photography? Jared Bark could be said to have found it in his "Photobooth Pieces" at Yancey Richardson. Mostly created between 1972 and 1975, these arrangements turn the strips of four photographs that were made in booth machines into artful grids. Mr. Bark made his first work of this sort in Times Square in 1969. After that, he traveled around the country, asking people at Woolworth's drugstores to step inside the machines and pose. (He also acquired his own booth in 1972.) The resulting portrait grids, with their serial repetition of images, contain elements of Minimalism and Pop Art, as well as of the filmic realism of '70s auteur directors like Robert Altman. The range of humanity on display here is also impressive particularly when compared with that of similar projects, like Andy Warhol's photo booth works as people of all ages and ethnicities appear in photos taken in, for instance, Phoenix or Provo, Utah. It took Zoe Pettijohn Schade as long as a year and a half to make each of the intricate large gouaches in "Shifting Sets," a show lining the walls of Kai Matsumiya's tidy Stanton Street gallery. Weirdly timeless meditations on death, they simultaneously evoke cutting edge Photoshop effects and rococo wallpaper, with tiled and overlapping imagery that includes skulls from the Parisian catacombs; toy army men in marbleized silhouette; and delicate, color graded pigeon feathers modeled on one blackening example the artist found in her garden. What's most fascinating, though, isn't the pieces' nominal content so much as the seeming evanescence of the labor that went into them: If you lean in close, you can see every semi opaque brush stroke in every pale gray feather, but from any greater distance, such small evidences of the artist's time and attention disappear in the overall dazzle. The same kind of visual dynamic flickers across the whole of "Crowd of Crowds: 100th Monkey" (2017), which is covered in diagonal rows of grimacing, long tailed primates. Because some of them are ghostly gray, and others mere silhouettes filled in with more feathers, skulls, or tombstones, it can take minutes of staring to notice just how simple the pattern is. WILL HEINRICH Contemporary art has been experiencing a ceramics renaissance for several years now, though its full breadth remains underexplored by galleries and museums. "Clay Today," a new exhibition at the Hole, provides a welcome, if not rigorous, introduction to the utterly creative and clever ways that artists are using this material. The exhibition opens with a showstopper near the entrance: Francesca DiMattio's "Boucherouite IV" (2017), a blue and white human size figure of sorts, whose body is a technical marvel of zigzagging rows of clay fringe. Bulging with appendages, "Boucherouite" incorporates items like a flowered porcelain handle and a Delftware vessel. Traditional ceramics have not been completely abandoned, but rather overtaken by experimentation. This feeling is echoed in Trevor Baird's vases adorned with panels of comics, and in Rebecca Morgan's gorgeously goofy face jugs. Allison Schulnik's "Rutile Pink Unicorn Vessel" (2017) is a simple, oversize urn whose surface is teeming with miniature versions of the title creature. In other places, clay looks a lot like something else, as in Diana Rojas's riff on a retail display of shoes. The most compelling of such works hang on the wall: Valerie Hegarty, Thomas Mailaender and Jesse Edwards have turned ceramics into imitations of paintings, photographs and TV sets, with the objects getting flatter as the illusionistic space deepens. In the show's most exciting art, firm reference points slip away. Two pieces by Shinichi Sawada recall the ritual objects of a lost society. Heidi Lau's "Seventh and Eighth Level of Hell" (2018) evokes an alien, ominous world that incorporates elements of our own. And Roxanne Jackson's "Wild Mineral" (2017) suggests the sawed in half skull of a dangerous, mythical creature. These works, grouped along one wall, demonstrate what can happen when clay becomes a vessel for pure imagination. JILLIAN STEINHAUER	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
The New York Times won two Pulitzer Prizes on Monday, bringing to 127 its total since the annual journalism awards were first given out more than a century ago. The Times was recognized this year for its reporting that raised legal and moral questions about how President Trump built his business empire and for editorial writing that shed light on race in modern America. Read the work below or browse all of the 2019 Pulitzer winners and finalists. Here's a list of all of the awards and recognition The Times has received over the past century. David Barstow, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner received the award for explanatory reporting in recognition of their work providing an unprecedented look at the Trump family's finances and poking holes in the myth that Mr. Trump has cultivated of himself as a self made billionaire. They reported that Mr. Trump had actually inherited much of his wealth from his father and had participated in questionable tax schemes, including outright fraud. The investigation built on a 2016 article for which the three reporters obtained Mr. Trump's 1995 tax records. Motivated by that reporting, which showed how the president could have avoided paying taxes for nearly two decades, the reporters set out to paint a picture of Mr. Trump's finances from 1995 to 2005. Their efforts lasted more than a year, combing through over 100,000 pages of documents and interviewing multiple key sources. Along the way, they made a number of revelations. "We just kept finding stuff and finding stuff," Ms. Craig said when the article was published. Among the revelations: that Mr. Trump's father, Fred C. Trump, had skirted paying taxes on millions of dollars in gifts to his children by using a middleman company, All County Building Supply Maintenance. The investigation was published on the front page of The Times on Wednesday, Oct. 3. The next day, New York City officials said that they and state regulators had started to examine whether the Trump family had underpaid taxes over several decades. Brent Staples, a member of the editorial board of The Times, received the prize for editorial writing for a series of essays showing how America continues to be tormented by its racist past. It is the first The Times has won an award in the category in 23 years. Digging into such subjects as the suffrage movement's betrayal of black women, racist tropes and monuments to white supremacy, Mr. Staples brought attention to lesser known stories. In May, for example, he wrote about how Southern newspapers perpetuated racial violence. "The real damage was done in terse, workaday stories that justified lynching by casting its victims as 'fiends,' 'brutes,' 'born criminals' or, that catchall favorite, 'troublesome Negroes,'" he wrote. "The narrative that tied blackness inextricably to criminality and to the death penalty survived the lynching era and lives on to this day." Mr. Staples also wrote at length about the recently discovered remains of 95 African Americans in Sugar Land, Tex., and the debate over what to do with them. The remains, he argued, should be memorialized where they were found because of what they revealed about efforts in the southern sugar industry to replace slave labor with an infamous convict leasing system. "Abolition crushed the industry, but the convict leasing system resurrected it in a form that can legitimately be seen as more pernicious than slavery: Slave masters had at least a nominal interest in keeping alive people whom they owned and in whom they held an economic stake," he wrote. Mr. Staples, a 34 year Times veteran, joined editorial board in 1990. Before that, he served as an editor on The New York Times Book Review and an assistant editor for metropolitan news.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Lounging on a cerulean leather chair at his store on the Lower East Side, a glass of Bunnahabhain 12 year old Scotch in hand, Vivek Nagrani talked about the two types of men who frequent high end clothing shops. "There's Banker A, who goes to Harvard, Goldman and buys a Lamborghini," said Mr. Nagrani, 44. "Or there's the guy who went to community college (his parents had no money)," he said, "but he loved finance and made his way to the top. Our client tends to be that guy. Top of the industry, but he had to earn it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
If you're missing the chilly joy of ducking into a movie theater on a sweltering day, welcome to the club. Ditto for attending concerts, plays, sporting events and awkward variety shows on the last day of summer camp. Our usual forms of entertainment are scarce right now, but here's a fresh alternative: Jesse Eisenberg's Audible Original, "When You Finish Saving the World." The idea for the five hour, 17 minute audio drama, available on Tuesday, grew out of a conversation between Eisenberg the star of movies such as "The Social Network" as well as an author and playwright and a friend who confessed that he had no emotional connection to his newborn daughter. "He was mortified and felt terribly guilty. I thought this was an interesting dynamic to explore," Eisenberg said in a phone interview. "Then I met these great producers who told me about a new format which is fiction created exclusively for audio. The internal struggle of a character who is emotionally a bit stifled seemed perfect for that medium." "When You Finish Saving the World" tells the story of the Katz family over 30 years. First, we hear from Nathan (voiced by Eisenberg), a young father struggling to connect with his newborn son; then Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard), that same baby, now grown into a 15 year old blundering through adolescent angst in 2032, which makes the present look downright blissful; and, finally, Rachel (Kaitlyn Dever), a wide eyed, well intentioned student trying to get her bearings at Indiana University in 2002. Her path is about to make a zigzag that will lead her to become Nathan's wife and Ziggy's mother. Each character takes shape through his or her own series of audio files. Nathan's are intended for a couples' therapist and Ziggy's for a futuristic bot therapist he has been "sentenced" to see. Rachel's cassette tapes are intended for her high school boyfriend, who is awaiting deployment to Afghanistan. These dispatches are whispered and wept from a variety of locations, including a guest room, a bathroom and a Subway sandwich shop. They give you the forbidden thrill of reading someone else's mail, with the added bonus of being able to hear the sender's voice. The experience is reminiscent of watching a play the intimacy and urgency of "Dear Evan Hansen" come to mind to the extent that brief pauses between sections are as jarring as the house lights coming up in a hushed theater. One might wonder about the logistics of producing anything during a pandemic, let alone a three part drama with music and sound effects such as a baby crying, a party raging, a button clicking on an old fashioned tape recorder. (Keen eared Subway enthusiasts may question the crinkly noise of a sandwich being unwrapped it sounds like it may be the wrong paper.) 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. Here's how it all came together. Eisenberg spent several months writing the script, even meeting with veterans to find the right military base for Rachel's story. "When a friend who was stationed in Karshi Khanabad in Uzbekistan told me about his experiences, I knew I had the right location," Eisenberg said. "All of the military stories are based on friends' experiences, and I lined them up on the same timeline as U.S. politics in 2002, so Rachel would have to struggle to navigate two opposing worlds: a boyfriend stationed overseas and an antiwar, liberal college campus." In the early weeks of 2020, Eisenberg recorded his part in a Newark studio, then traveled to Vancouver's Gastown neighborhood to record with Wolfhard in a studio owned by the singer songwriter Bryan Adams. Wolfhard's section happens to include singing and a slew of made up slang delivered with a fluency only an actual teenager could muster. Wolfhard, 17 and best known as Mike Wheeler on the Netflix series "Stranger Things," said: "It was therapeutic. I got to be kind of a brat for a change. Hopefully I'm not as much of one in real life." Of his invention of the hipster lexicon of the future, Eisenberg said, "Ziggy is one of these pretentious kids who adopts something before general society agrees that it's palatable. My only inconvenience was, anytime I came up with a new word, I would immediately search in Urban Dictionary and discover that it meant something that was horribly sexually perverse." Wolfhard put Eisenberg in touch with Dever (a Golden Globe nominee for "Unbelievable") and, in March, she and Eisenberg met up at a Los Angeles coffee shop, Joan's on Third, to discuss the project. "Jesse was the last person I shared a cookie with in the real world," Dever said. "It was classic chocolate chip," Eisenberg recalled. "Had I known the world was about to change, I would have gotten something else." With California on lockdown, logistics presented a challenge. "Where the suspense came in was figuring out how to record Kaitlyn's part of the story," Ghiazza said. The team at Audible put together a kit containing "everything she needed to turn her home into a professional recording studio" including a microphone, audio interface, monitor, Bluetooth mouse, pop filter, microphone stand, headphones and cabling. Dever said she could hear Eisenberg in her headphones, but otherwise she was on her own in a bedroom closet. "There was something about being in the comfort of my own home that made everything more relaxed and casual. It took the pressure off," she said. "When You Finish Saving the World" is also being made into a movie, with some adjustments like taking place in the present day. Other details will remain the same: Julianne Moore, who plays Ziggy's mother, runs a shelter for victims of domestic violence in the film, just as Rachel does in the audio version. "She's a mother who is a hero to thousands of people but feels less comfortable as a mother to one," Eisenberg said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
music This pelican spider's appearance may give you a chill, but lucky for us, it's only the size of a grain of rice. So, no worries, unless you yourself happen to be a very small spider. This creature hunts its own kind. These strange looking pelican spiders were first discovered in 1854. Not alive, they were preserved in 50 million year old amber. It was decades later that these tiny creatures, thought to be as extinct as the dinosaurs, were discovered thriving in Madagascar, and in South Africa, and Australia. Why those three countries? Before 175 million years ago, those areas were neighbors, so the spiders probably already existed. Then, the supercontinent Pangaea broke up, leaving us with the arrangement we have today. But even though these spiders may seem like living fossils, they are fierce predators. They hunt at night, tracking lines of silk that other spiders trail behind them. When they catch their prey, they stab it with fangs at the end of those long appendages that look like a pelican's bill. But the prey also has fangs, so the pelican spider holds its meal at arm's length until it dies, and then devours it. An example I give in talks is when your little brother's trying to hit you, and so you put your hand on their forehead, and they can't reach you. laughs Dr. Wood and a colleague recently identified 18 new species of these spiders in Madagascar. Madagascar is a hotspot for biodiversity, so it's important to document what's in its ecosystems. But the spiders are clearly worth studying just for themselves and their extraordinary alien beauty.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Public schools in Montclair, N.J., would lay off as many as 70 teachers, including reading and math specialists, and would no longer offer French and Spanish classes in elementary grades. Westfield would not be able to buy library books or replace aging computers, and a popular middle school tradition the fall play could disappear. Cresskill could see class sizes climb to 35 students in middle and high schools, it may charge students a fee to play high school sports, and it could eliminate middle school athletic teams. The three districts and others like them across New Jersey have long attracted families because they offer some of the best public education in the state. But now many of these top school systems are preparing to reduce the academic and extracurricular opportunities that have long set them apart. Gov. Christopher J. Christie, striving to close a budget deficit that he says is about 11 billion, has proposed reducing direct aid to nearly 600 districts by an amount equal to as much as 5 percent of their operating budgets. Overall school aid for the next fiscal year, which begins July 1, would fall to 10.3 billion, from 11.1 billion this fiscal year. The governor's proposal would eliminate state classroom money for 59 districts, including Ridgewood, Millburn and Glen Ridge, though state education officials said they would still get money to help pay expenses like teachers' pensions and Social Security benefits, special education placements and debt service. Mr. Christie's proposal still needs the approval of the Democratic controlled Legislature. But many school districts are bracing for the worst, given the state's dire financial condition and the reluctance to raise taxes on residents already facing tax burdens that are among the nation's highest. The New Jersey School Boards Association, which surveyed school officials about the state aid cuts, found that 268 districts would lay off teachers and that 185 would make cuts to their education programs. In addition, 206 districts said they would reduce the number of extracurricular activities, and 96 would charge students an activity fee for the first time. Districts are also seeking to save on teachers' salaries and benefits, with 195 considering reopening contracts with local teachers' unions. An additional 265 are already at the bargaining table. As an incentive, Mr. Christie this week announced a proposal to give additional state aid to districts that negotiate salary freezes. The school boards association received responses from 323 of the state's 588 districts about how they were preparing for the possible loss of state money. "Districts are walking a very fine line," said Frank Belluscio, a spokesman for the association. "They have to preserve as much of the school program as possible without shifting too much of the burden over to the property tax payer." While the cuts would affect virtually every district, they have provoked particular anger in communities that have long promoted the quality of their schools. Many of those districts have been chipping away at their high caliber programs in recent years, caught between local opposition to higher property taxes and a shrinking share of state aid. For example, Westfield, with 6,275 students, would lose 4.2 million, or 90 percent, of its direct state aid. "People are really upset," said Anne Riegel, a mother of two who said she moved to Westfield because of its schools. "What it seems like is the schools will provide substantially less, and our taxes will still go up with the governor's cuts." Margaret Dolan, the Westfield schools superintendent, said the district was trying to find savings wherever possible: buying fewer supplies like paper and pencils; putting the school calendar online; and charging students 100 a year to participate in high school sports or clubs. Even so, Westfield would have to lay off as many as 30 employees, including up to 17 teachers. "We took a scalpel and we carved and carved, but now we're down to the bone," Dr. Dolan said. "Clearly, the state has no interest in either the taxpayers or the students in the public schools in Westfield." Cresskill would lose more than 1.1 million, nearly 95 percent, of its state aid. And the remaining amount, 63,066, would have to be returned to the state to help reduce the debt service on money that the state had borrowed to finance school construction projects, district officials said. "We are all absolutely stunned that our entire state aid is being taken away," said Loretta Bellina, the Cresskill schools superintendent. "We understand what the governor is trying to do, and everyone has to step up to the plate, but you can't resolve this in 60 seconds or less." Cresskill, with 1,750 students, has proposed increasing its property tax by 4 percent this year compared with 3.4 percent the year before to offset about half of the loss in state aid. The rest would come from laying off up to 10 teachers and classroom aides, increasing class sizes and cutting some extracurricular activities. The West Windsor Plainsboro Regional School District, with 9,821 students, is planning to cover a loss in state aid of more than 7.5 million, a roughly 71 percent reduction, by outsourcing its building and grounds maintenance, which would eliminate 102 custodial jobs. Teachers and administrators have agreed to give up salary increases for three months, as well as other benefits, and at least five retiring administrators would not be replaced. In Montclair, school officials say that they will save their core academic programs, even if they have to sacrifice things like school librarians, reading and math specialists, an R.O.T.C. program, the high school gymnastics team for girls and foreign language instruction at elementary schools.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
Caution! This article contains spoilers for "Avengers: Endgame." Superhero sequels often introduce subtle changes to the characters' costumes in order to sell more toys, but few of these comic book movies take their makeovers as far as "Avengers: Endgame." Only half the cast of last year's "Avengers: Infinity War" survived the decimating snap of Thanos (Josh Brolin), but perhaps inspired by that supervillain's planet spanning quest to accrue flashy jewelry, the leftover heroes in "Endgame" are emboldened to take new risks with their looks. After all, we're now 22 movies into this cinematic saga; whose hair couldn't use a little zhuzh? Still, not all superpowered makeovers are created equal. Here are six of the most talked about new looks, some of which are more successful than others. Read our review of "Avengers: Endgame." Catch up on all the M.C.U. movies in two minutes. Revisit Princess Shuri with Letitia Wright. Viewers may be jolted by how quickly the Avengers dispatch their mortal enemy Thanos in the first act, but I found myself far more shook by Thanos rocking a casual T. Not armor, not spandex, not even a nice space henley: Thanos is straight up wearing a T shirt, one that you or I could buy if stores made them in Size XXXXXXXXXXL. Is this a look better suited for the cover of Men's Health than for striking fear into the hearts of the Avengers? To me, Thanos become a touch less intimidating when you realize he shops for clothes at Old Navy, but perhaps there's just no stopping the Mad Titan when he sees the sign "50 percent off." Marvel will soon shoot a prequel plumbing the back story of Scarlett Johansson's superspy, but what I'd really prefer to see is a stand alone film explaining the thought process behind her two tone look in "Avengers: Endgame," where Black Widow's red roots and yellow tips collide with all the panache of a boardwalk Popsicle. What exactly is this look meant to convey? Is it a clumsy tribute to Agnes Varda? Has Widow become so absorbed in her work that she hasn't bothered to do away with the bit of blond left over from her "Avengers: Infinity War" hairstyle? And are we really meant to think that the radioactive red growing out of Johansson's scalp is a natural color? Even the Marvel movies' convoluted approach to time travel somehow makes more sense to me than Black Widow's many hairstyles. After several films where the adorably shambling Mark Ruffalo would transform into an inarticulate muscle monster, "Avengers: Endgame" springs one last surprise: Now that the Hulk and Banner have become better integrated, the big green guy can converse so naturally that you'll go, "Whoa whoa whoa, is that Noah Centineo?" When we catch up with the Hulk after a five year time skip, he's also ditched his frayed purple shorts look for a more sophisticated glow up of Warby Parkers and knit cardigans, but it's his new personality that really completes the makeover. Hulk is no longer just a meathead hunk; now, he's a meathead hunk with a surprisingly nimble comic touch. In other words, they turned Hulk into a Hemsworth. Perhaps that's a fitting trade, as Chris Hemsworth's own Avenger has seen better days when it comes to his fitness. When Thor is reintroduced after the big time skip, the whole notion of the gratuitous Marvel shirtless scene is turned on its head: Hemsworth's unkempt god has let himself go, trading his superhero physique for a transformational beer gut. (You can almost picture Christian Bale leaning over to his movie date and whispering, "Only amateurs use special effects.") But this is a new Thor, one who won't let the occasional crack from Tony Stark get him down: The only tweak Thor sees fit to make to his new appearance is a nifty beard braid before the final battle. Thicc Thor is all about body positivity, drinking beer, and reminding everyone that he once dated Natalie Portman, and who can blame the big guy? It's tragic when Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) loses his family in the first few minutes of "Avengers: Endgame," because they were clearly the only people holding him back from a full on midlife crisis makeover. Once Black Widow goes to find Barton in Japan after the time skip, he's traded his arrows for a sword, inked his entire left arm like he's about to hand you a flyer for his Dashboard Confessional cover band, and shaped his hair into an unholy faux hawk. After watching Brie Larson sport a bare face image in her stand alone "Captain Marvel" feature earlier this year, it may be somewhat startling when she applies a dark lip and some blush for her second scene in "Avengers: Endgame." It's like when a castaway goes au naturel for an entire season of "Survivor," then shows up to the live finale with a smoky eye and lip gloss. She's well within her rights, but it just takes a little getting used to. Far more successful, to my mind, is Captain Marvel's five years later look: After the time skip, she rocks a bold, short pompadour that is the hairstyle equivalent of suddenly getting a DM from Kristen Stewart. As far as I'm concerned, it is the makeover of the film and I would follow that hair into battle any day. Even Thanos can't resist, head butting Captain Marvel during the final fight in a fruitless but perfectly understandable attempt to get closer to the movie's best new haircut. With Iron Man and Black Widow both dead and Captain America newly age accelerated, will Captain Marvel's hair become the new leader of the Avengers? "Endgame" may provide rare closure for this interconnected saga, but for Brie Larson's quiff alone, I'm ready to greenlight a sequel.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
He almost never got to Jerusalem. In 1958, Israeli intelligence received a tip on the whereabouts of Adolf Eichmann, and sent an agent to stake out a working class Buenos Aires suburb. When the agent got there, and saw for himself the ratty house on the unpaved street, he concluded that the intelligence was off. "The wretched little house," the agent's case officer wrote, "could in no way be reconciled with our picture of the life of an SS officer of Eichmann's rank." But it was Eichmann and two years later, a team of Israeli agents swooped in on him at a bus stop, abducted him, and soon bundled the sedated Nazi onto a plane to Tel Aviv. The epochal trial that followed transformed the world's understanding of the Holocaust, and not only that. It also played a crucial role in the development of international law, and it was a crucible for Israel, a young state still absorbing, with tensions, the arrival of European Jews. Eichmann's abduction in Argentina and prosecution in Israel are the subject of "Operation Finale: The Capture and Trial of Adolf Eichmann," a new exhibition at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan. The show goes longer on spy thrills than on moral and legal perplexities, though that may have been inevitable given its co organizer: none other than the Mossad, the intelligence service that is Israel's equivalent of the C.I.A. The agency's involvement surely explains why "Operation Finale" dwells more on the hunt for Eichmann than on his subsequent trial, although the show ends with a shattering hammer blow: the actual bulletproof glass dock where Eichmann sat in Jerusalem. Most of the archival materials here, from nifty Cold War era spy gear to Eichmann's false passports and personal effects, come directly from Mossad's archive. Many are only recently declassified. (The exhibition is curated by Avner Avraham, a former intelligence agent, and produced by the Mossad and two museums: Beit Hatfutsot, the Museum of the Jewish People, in Tel Aviv and the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage in Cleveland, where this show appeared last year.) A brief but horrific prologue outlines Eichmann's place in the Nazi regime. In 1934 he joined the Sicherheitsdienst, the party's intelligence agency, and later became chief of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, based in Vienna. He mapped out the Nazis' bizarre early plan to deport Jews to Madagascar, and then had even more sinister responsibilities. A table of figures here, drafted in 1942 at the Wannsee Conference outside Berlin, is as flat and bureaucratic as any other government document: Romania, 342,000; Slovakia, 88,000; the "Generalgouvernement," referring to central Poland, 2.28 million. They are numbers of Jews, more than 11 million in total, whose extermination Eichmann and other Nazis planned there. In the last days of World War II, Eichmann would personally oversee the deportation of 400,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. After the fall of the Third Reich, Eichmann was briefly in American custody. He escaped, lived on a chicken farm for two years, then fled again, eventually making his way to Argentina. In time he obtained a job with Mercedes Benz his employee ID card is here, with his assumed name, Ricardo Klement, beneath his chillingly recognizable photograph in thick spectacles. He might have lived out his days there, but in 1956 a German Jewish emigre grew concerned about a boy his daughter was dating, and determined that the boy's father was a wanted man. He alerted a German state prosecutor, who soon made contact with Israeli intelligence. The bulk of "Operation Finale" is devoted to Eichmann's abduction from Argentina, masterminded by the Mossad and encouraged by David Ben Gurion, Israel's founding prime minister. Investigators compared Nazi era portraits to surveillance photographs and confirmed, by the shape of his ears, that Klement was indeed Eichmann. A team of more than two dozen Israeli agents was dispatched, and on May 11, 1960, the team snatched him off Garibaldi Street, bundling him into a car with bogus license plates. We see the keys and cigarette holder he had when he was kidnapped. Here is Eichmann's false Israeli passport, used to board a delayed El Al flight, and the taped over goggles he wore all the way to Tel Aviv. There is also newly filmed testimony from Rafi Eitan, an agent in the operation, though the overproduced videos in this show are bombastic and superficial, more appropriate to the History channel than to a rigorous exhibition. Ben Gurion's announcement that Eichmann was in Israeli custody and would be prosecuted under Israeli law shocked the world. The trial was held nine months later, in a converted theater in Jerusalem, and is recreated in the final gallery here via three video projections arrayed around the unnerving, immediately recognizable defendant's box. The image of Eichmann, impassive, untroubled, his lips pursed, is projected behind the glass booth, while to either side are the judges, the prosecutors, the spectators, and more than a dozen witnesses testifying, one by one, to what they had seen and suffered in the death camps. Eichmann was convicted, sentenced to death and hanged in 1962: the only civil execution in Israel's history. (That could change if Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has his way; last week he called for a reintroduction of the death penalty after the killings of several Israeli settlers in the West Bank.) A number of Israeli intellectuals, including the philosopher Martin Buber, pleaded for a commutation of the death sentence, on the grounds that "we are granting a victory for the enemy over us, and we do not want this victory." But most Israelis were relieved, and the Eichmann trial began a new chapter for Holocaust survivors, who now spoke more openly of what they had endured after two decades of public silence. The trial was transformative, but whether it was entirely just is not a question raised by this exhibition, which prefers the relics of James Bond like spycraft to moral and legal dilemmas. Hannah Arendt, who covered the trial for The New Yorker, is briefly name checked in a final video, but there is little engagement with the enduring philosophical questions she raised on the meaning of justice, on individual versus state guilt, and on the shades of difference between "crimes against humanity" and "crimes against the Jewish people." The legality of Eichmann's abduction and juridical legacy of the trial are also shortchanged. Eichmann, after all, was kidnapped from a sovereign nation without warning, and American newspaper editorials, not to mention the American Jewish Committee, sharply criticized Israel's actions. (Argentina lodged a complaint with the United Nations Security Council, which was later withdrawn.) And while Eichmann's crimes predated the foundation of the State of Israel, the court set an important precedent by affirming that it had universal jurisdiction over crimes as grave as genocide. It also placed, in a way the Nuremberg trials did not, the voices of victims at the heart of the proceedings. Arendt considered those individual voices extraneous to the question of Eichmann's guilt, but victims' testimonies have since become a central plank in the practice of international justice. These philosophical dilemmas and legal repercussions don't much trouble "Operation Finale," whose overly pat narrative may reflect its genesis within an Israeli government institution. Yet standing in front of the dock, that upright glass coffin familiar from a thousand newsreels, is a humbling experience. Not only does it contract the barbarism of the Holocaust into a single, indelible form; it also looks forward, and serves as a quiet commendation of the troubled institution built to prosecute the Eichmanns of our own age. That is the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which the United States and Israel too refuse to join.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
AMELIA ISLAND, Fla. On a steamy March day, Jerry Seinfeld stood before a group of men, most of them in polo shirts and loafers, in a muggy tent here at the Omni Amelia Plantation Resort. "Thank you, insane car people," he said to a round of applause. He was here because "the Jerry Seinfeld Collection," a fleet of 18 cars 16 Porsches and two Volkswagens was to be sold that day by the auction house Gooding Company at its annual Amelia Island auction. "Let me be honest with you," Mr. Seinfeld said. "I could have gotten rid of every one of these in one day with no problem. But I wanted to be here with you all, who see these things the way I do and enjoy it the way I do. I want to see your face and feel your enthusiasm." With that, he ceded the stage to Charlie Ross, the veteran British auctioneer. "Feel the enthusiasm!" Mr. Ross shouted before introducing the first item: Mr. Seinfeld's unrestored 1966 Porsche 911 with a color described as "sand over brown." Mr. Ross mentioned the catalog's description of its "delicious" interior smell. "It was Jerry who said, 'Smell it,'" he said. "Well, I did. I sat in it and smelled it. And it was wonderful." The vehicle sold for 275,000 (and a 10 percent buyer's premium). Up soon after was a blue 2011 Porsche 997 Speedster, the ninth of 356 produced. It included "a lot of cool, bare carbon fiber, which I never get tired of," the catalog quoted Mr. Seinfeld as saying. And it fetched 440,000. If the Porsches attracted serious, or at least wealthy, collectors, the two Volkswagens, a 1960 Beetle and a 1964 camper van, were of greater interest to fans of Mr. Seinfeld's, said Bill Noon, a classic car dealer from San Diego. The Volkswagens, he said, "were the giggle and grin lots to bookend the big sales." A deep round of applause indicated that things had taken a more serious turn with the introduction of the next lot: a 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder, not unlike the one James Dean was driving when he died. "You can't drive a sonnet by Shakespeare or a symphony by Beethoven," Mr. Seinfeld said of this car in the catalog. "But this would be the automotive equivalent." After Mr. Ross wielded his magic, it sold for 5.335 million. Astute viewers of "Seinfeld" have noted the poster of an airborne Porsche in the apartment of Mr. Seinfeld's TV character. Since the show ended in 1998, he has become increasingly associated with collectible cars, especially Porsches, first through the star crossed construction of a bunkerlike garage near his Upper West Side home and, more recently, through his web series, "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee," which gives nearly as much time to vintage automobiles as it does to its guests, who have included Mel Brooks and President Obama. Magnus Walker, the scruffy Porsche collector and blogger, said he was in attendance to get a close up glimpse of this portion of Mr. Seinfeld's fleet. "There's a certain attraction to this particular collection all coming out in one go," he said, "especially since he's chosen to go this way rather then selling them off privately." Since Mr. Walker makes a point of bargain hunting for the air cooled Porsche 911 models he favors, he didn't bid on the Seinfeld cars. He said he has noticed an increasing number of "Ferrari guys or Lamborghini guys coming into the Porsche world," making it more of a challenge to get the cars he wants at a decent price. One such guy is Tony Shooshani, a real estate developer from Los Angeles. "He's a Porsche guy, I'm a Ferrari guy, and I'm branching out to be in his world," Mr. Shooshani said of Mr. Seinfeld. He made the winning bid of 363,000 for a white and black 1989 911 Carrera Speedster, described in the catalog by Mr. Seinfeld as having a "'Star Wars' Storm Trooper look with snazzy low cut top." Mr. Shooshani received a confirmation form for the vehicle and a chit entitling him to a photograph with Mr. Seinfeld. "He just told me about the car and the way he drove it and how much he loved it," Mr. Shooshani said he was told after acquiring the car. He attended the event with his girlfriend, Danielle Alura, a 2015 Miss U.S. International beauty pageant contestant. It's hard to gauge the premium placed on Mr. Seinfeld's cars, but later in the auction a 1989 Speedster similar to the one purchased by Mr. Shooshani (but not owned by Mr. Seinfeld) sold for 209,000. During the day, Mr. Seinfeld parted with a light yellow 1974 Porsche 911 Carrera 3.0 built for the IROC racing series (for 2.31 million) and a 1959 Porsche 718 RSK ( 2.86 million). Not all pre auction estimates were met. A 1973 917/30 Can Am Spyder racing car with a projected price of 5 million to 7 million sold for 3 million. All told, the 18 Seinfeld Collection vehicles brought in roughly 22 million.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
PARIS The call to Vincent Grandil's Paris law firm began like many others that have rolled in recently. On the line was the well paid chief executive of one of France's most profitable companies, and he was feeling nervous. President Francois Hollande is vowing to impose a 75 percent tax on the portion of anyone's income above a million euros ( 1.24 million) a year. "Should I be preparing to leave the country?" the executive asked Mr. Grandil. The lawyer's counsel: Wait and see. For now, at least. "We're getting a lot of calls from high earners who are asking whether they should get out of France," said Mr. Grandil, a partner at Altexis, which specializes in tax matters for corporations and the wealthy. "Even young, dynamic people pulling in 200,000 euros are wondering whether to remain in a country where making money is not considered a good thing." A chill is wafting over France's business class as Mr. Hollande, the country's first Socialist president since Francois Mitterrand in the 1980s, presses a manifesto of patriotism to "pay extra tax to get the country back on its feet again." The 75 percent tax proposal, which Parliament plans to take up in September, is ostensibly aimed at bolstering French finances as Europe's long running debt crisis intensifies. But because there are relatively few people in France whose income would incur such a tax an estimated 7,000 to 30,000 in a country of 65 million the gains might contribute but a small fraction of the 33 billion euros in new revenue the government wants to raise next year to help balance the budget. The French finance ministry did not respond to requests for an estimate of the revenue the tax might raise. Though the amount would be low, some analysts note that a tax hit on the rich would provide political cover for painful cuts Mr. Hollande may need to make next year in social and welfare programs that are likely to be far less popular with the rank and file. In that regard, the tax could have enormous symbolic value as a blow for egalite, coming from a new president who has proclaimed, "I don't like the rich." "French people have an uncomfortable relationship with money," Mr. Grandil said. "Here, someone who is a self made man, creating jobs and ending up as a millionaire, is viewed with suspicion. This is big cultural difference between France and the United States." Some rich citizens have already left. In recent years, the actress and model Laetitia Casta, the chef Alain Ducasse and the singer and actor Johnny Hallyday all moved away to avoid high taxes. Many companies are studying contingency plans to move high paid executives outside of France, according to consultants, lawyers, accountants and real estate agents who are highly protective of their clients and decline to identify them by name. They say some executives and wealthy people have already packed up for destinations like Britain, Belgium, Switzerland and the United States, taking their taxable income with them. They also know of companies start ups and multinationals alike that are delaying plans to invest in France or to move employees or new hires here. Whether many wealthy residents will actually leave and companies will change their plans, of course, remains to be seen. Some of the criticism could be political posturing, aimed at trying to dissuade the government from going through with the planned tax increase. But some wealthy people left after Mr. Mitterrand raised taxes in the 1980s. And more recently, the former Victoria's Secret model Laetetia Casta, the restaurateur Alain Ducasse and the singer Johnny Hallyday caused a stir by moving to countries just across the border to escape the French treasury's heavy hand. Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. There is no question Mr. Hollande is under fiscal pressure. He has pledged to reduce France's budget deficit, currently 4.5 percent of the nation's gross domestic product, to 3 percent by next year, to meet euro zone rules. The matter of how best to hit that target, though, is as much a political question as a fiscal one. Mr. Hollande was elected in May on a wave of resentment against "les riches" company executives, bankers, sports stars and celebrities whose paychecks tend to be seen as scandalous in a country where the growing divide between rich and poor touches a cultural nerve whose roots predate Robespierre. Half the nation's households earn less than 19,000 euros a year; only about 10 percent of households earn more than 60,000 euros annually, according to the French statistics agency, Insee. There is currently no plan to change the tax rates for most people, which is 14 percent for the poorest and 30 percent for the next rung. For higher earners people with incomes above 70,830 euros a year the tax rate will soon rise to 44 percent, up from 41, in a change that was already set before Mr. Hollande's election. A tax accountant in Paris with many wealthy clients, Steve Horton, has calculated that a two parent, two child household with taxable annual income of a bit more than 2.22 million euros ( 2.75 million) now has after tax take home pay of about 1.1 million euros ( 1.35 million) under France's current tax system. That household would end up with 780,000 euros, or 966,000, if the Hollande tax took effect, Mr. Horton says. (The same family, with comparable income in Manhattan, would take home 1.55 million, the dollar equivalent of 1.25 million euros, after paying federal, state and city income taxes, he calculated.) Taxes are high in France for a reason: they pay for one of Europe's most generous social welfare systems and a large government. As Mr. Hollande has described it, the tax plan is about "justice," and "sending out a signal, a message of social cohesion." That struck a chord with voters angry about the wealth divide. And it is supported by some economists, including Thomas Piketty, a professor at the Paris School of Economics, who has conducted studies indicating that high earners will not work less hard if taxed more. But some say France could send out the wrong signal. "People have an acceptable amount of taxes they are willing to pay," said Mr. Horton, the accountant, "and if it goes above that, they will move somewhere that's more reasonable."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
"Which is weird, but at least it explains why Melania started smoking unfiltered Pall Malls." SETH MEYERS "In fairness to his chief of staff, you try breathing in a room where a man just went through four cans of hair spray. You'd cough also." JIMMY KIMMEL "Can you imagine working for that guy? As Trump 'George, the Iranians are clearly in violation can we start over? That guy blinked, O.K.? Stop the blinking. If your eyes are thirsty, they can have a Diet Coke like the rest of us.'" STEPHEN COLBERT "Wow, he's got to get over that. If Trump can't talk while people coughed, he's never going to be able to debate Bernie Sanders." JIMMY FALLON Trump also sparred with Stephanopoulos over recent polls that indicated voters preferred Joe Biden. "Trump basically treats polls the way some people treat their bathroom scales. When you're happy with the number, 'This is science! That's what I weigh!' But if the number isn't what you want it to be, it's, 'This expletive is going back to Bed Bath Beyond!'" TREVOR NOAH "The Trump campaign acknowledged that the polls are real, but calls them 'incomplete and misleading,' saying they represent a 'worst case scenario' for voter turnout. It's true. Voters turning out is their worst case scenario." STEPHEN COLBERT " Imitating Trump Yes, the polls show I won everywhere. I defeated the Golden State Warriors to become the N.B.A. champs, I won 'America's Got Talent,' and 'Donald, will you accept this rose?' 'Why, yes I will. Thank you.'" STEPHEN COLBERT This weekend, O.J. Simpson introduced his official Twitter account with a video declaring that he "has a little getting even to do." "If you're O.J. Simpson, there are some phrases you should never use. 'I got a little getting even to do?' No. 'Have you seen my gloves?' No. And the worst one: 'Pass me the knife.' No, O.J., you cut your steak with a fork, my friend." TREVOR NOAH "Imagine getting a push notification saying 'O.J. Simpson is now following you.' That's the scariest phrase in the English language. He should have joined Snapchat at least Snapchat destroys the evidence for you." TREVOR NOAH "He's only been on Twitter for like four days, he's already got almost 700,000 followers. The last time O.J. had this many people following him he was on the 405 headed to the Mexican border." JIMMY KIMMEL "Even crazier, O.J. just got a message from Trump asking him if he'd be the White House press secretary." JIMMY FALLON "I know this is the wrong take, but he looks terrific. I mean, dude's 71. What's your secret? I mean, your other secret." SETH MEYERS James Corden is in London all week, where he employed some celebrities to play dodgeball: Team U.S.A. (Michelle Obama, Allison Janney, Melissa McCarthy, Kate Hudson, Lena Waithe and Mila Kunis) versus Team U.K. (Corden, Harry Styles, Reggie Watts, Benedict Cumberbatch and John Bradley).	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Credit...Andy Haslam for The New York Times This week, we roam France, sampling three regional cuisines: the richness of Gascony (below), the earthy pleasures of Medoc, and the new vibrancy of Bordeaux. Also check out the Food section's guide to French cooking and our survey of five classic specialties, from bouillabaisse to galettes. Look closely at a map of southwestern France and you'll notice it: a blank spot just west of Toulouse where the place names thin out and the train lines and expressways veer away, like a stream flowing around a boulder. That blank spot is Gascony, one of the most rural regions in all of France. Gascons are for the most part proud of their provinciality, and many of them have developed the curious habit of describing their bucolic land in terms of all the things it doesn't have: big cities, mass tourism, traffic, urban stress, high speed rail service, autoroutes, soaring real estate prices, hordes of Parisians snapping up summer homes and so on. I spent most of a year there to gather material for a culinary memoir and can confirm the absence of all those things. One sometimes hears Gascony referred to as "the other South of France" by boosterish types mindful of the immense popularity of Provence and the Cote d'Azur, which lie some 250 miles to the east. And to be sure, if you plant yourself on a restaurant "terrasse" on the main square of Auch (pronounced OWE sh) Gascony's historical capital in, say, late September, you might easily convince yourself you're in Mediterranean France, what with the date palms and the nice looking people in sunglasses sipping rose and talking in the bouncy accent of the Midi. But then your meal arrives, and the illusion vanishes faster than a cold pastis on a hot day. For Gascon food is richer than the sunny cuisine of Provence. It is unabashedly, defiantly rich. Duck fat, not olive oil, is the local currency. Everything gets cooked in it: potatoes, sausages, eggs, and in the case of confit, that pillar of Gascon farmhouse cooking duck itself. Gascons consume foie gras, which is made on family farms all over the region, with casual regularity, and consider the delicacy about as decadent as a pork chop. Gascony is not merely distinct from Provence and the Cote d'Azur. It is, in my estimation, better. Gascony is more open, more soulful, more deeply French, and, in its un self conscious devotion to tradition, more pleasurably frozen in time. Its cuisine is arguably less sophisticated than Provence's, and yet it is more firmly rooted in the land it sprang from, and it is, I put to you, enjoyed with lustier abandon. You don't have to live in Gascony for many months, as I did, to discover these truths. Even a week or so spent eating and drinking your way around the Gers, the 60 mile wide departement that constitutes Gascony's heartland, is enough to spark a lifelong love affair. The Gers is not very big, but it gives travelers room to breathe. Only 840,000 tourists visited the departement in 2015. (By comparison, a staggering 11 million visited the Alpes Maritimes, which includes Nice and Cannes.) Though the Gers is not France's most sparsely populated district, it is the most agricultural, with more of its land under cultivation than that of any other French district. Humans in the Gers are vastly outnumbered by livestock, especially ducks. Also interesting fact the humans who do live there live a long time. The administrative region encompassing the Gers boasts one of the country's highest rates of life expectancy at birth, and its residents have fewer heart attacks than almost any other regional population in France. Both those facts tend to be met with incredulity by visitors encountering Gascon cooking for the first time. It is a cuisine best eased into perhaps at the Hotel de France in Auch, a grand old dowager on the main square that has recently been given a face lift. The hotel is the onetime fief of Gascony's most famous chef, Andre Daguin, who is no longer at the stoves but still lives down the street. In the postwar years Mr. Daguin vociferously promoted Gascon food and wine all over France, and the Hotel de France menu still reflects the touchstones of the cuisine: roasted magret, duck confit with Tarbais beans, a salad topped with cured duck breast slices and confited duck gizzards, a terrine of foie gras. The wine to drink with this fare, indisputably, is Madiran. Made from tannat grown along the Gers's western fringe, the wine is dark and tannic and tastes of earth and cooked plums. With dessert: a late harvest Pacherenc, Madiran's white counterpart, a sweet wine of a depth and structure to rival that of Sauternes. To wind things up: a snifter of Armagnac, Gascony's barrel aged grape brandy, and perhaps some chocolate. Even a casually upscale Gascon meal, it must be said, requires a certain fortitude. Gascony unlike Paris or the Loire Valley, say is not a popular destination for bucket listers seeking grand chateaus, opulent palaces and soaring basilicas. The region's patrimonial treasures are often tucked out of sight, as if waiting to be given their moment. Take Auch's cathedral. Just down the street from the Hotel de France, the 16th century Cathedrale Ste. Marie is a fine enough specimen, with its handsome twin bell towers and restored stained glass windows. But its piece de resistance lies hidden in a vaulted ceiling choir entered via an internal doorway that admits visitors for the price of 2 euros ( 2.12). Arrayed along the choir's perimeter are 113 thronelike "stalles" of intricately carved oak. Comprising thousands of painstakingly rendered figures and scenes depicting the life of Jesus and other biblical episodes, some of them in gruesome detail, the stalles constitute the most jaw dropping feat of woodworking craftsmanship I have ever seen. According to what little literature on the cathedral I have come across, the names of all but one of the carvers, an artisan from Toulouse named Dominique Bertin, have been lost to time. Most of the Gers's other guidebook approved attractions and touristy restaurants, what few there are are concentrated north of Auch, along a well beaten trail that stretches between the picturesque hilltop town of Lectoure and the fortified village of Fources. The route also encompasses the popular medieval bastion of Larressingle and the imposing 14th century cloister at La Romieu, as well as the prosperous village of Montreal du Gers, where, at an inviting restaurant called L'escale, you can have a swank al fresco meal of roasted capon in a foie gras and morel sauce while seated beneath the graceful arcades of the town square. Those destinations are certainly worthy ones, particularly on a weekday between October and May, when you will have a decent chance of having them nearly all to yourself. I especially like Lectoure, with its single thoroughfare that arcs over a high ridgeline, turning every side street into a picture frame for the rolling Gascon countryside far below. Most tourists move on after paying a visit to Lectoure's small cathedral and its handful of gift shops, or they book a room and a table at the fancy ish Hotel de Bastard, which serves an excellent appetizer of foie gras accompanied by slices of Lectoure melon, a variety of cantaloupe for which the town is famous. But to my mind Lectoure's singular point of interest, its very raison d'etre and why I go back again and again is the Cafe des Sports. This is, unequivocally, my favorite bar in France. The high ceilinged, slightly gone to seed establishment is festooned with rugby ephemera the sport being as sacred to Gascons as duck fat and is furnished with a long wood bar, a couple of rickety barstools, and, teetering slightly on the beer stained wood slat floor, a dozen or so zinc topped tables. On any given evening a mix of thuggish jocks, crusty looking paysans, well heeled retirees, urbane day trippers from Toulouse, teenagers and children can be found tucking into cheap entrecotes and duck legs. At the bar's far end, an ancient looking glass and wood partition protects a private meeting space that could well have been the origin of the expression "back room deal." On one recent visit, I could see a dozen men seated around a banquet table, plotting who knows what. On another visit and this is an anecdote that speaks volumes about Gascons' trusting nature a stranger in a rugby shirt nonchalantly deposited his kindergarten age child at the table I was sharing with my wife and then 7 year old daughter. "You don't mind watching her for a minute?" he said, and dashed out. Before I could worry too much, he was back. Seeing that his daughter and mine were getting on fine, he lingered at the bar to chat with some friends. The Cafe des Sports aside, Lectoure is a typical prim and prettified French village, and in this respect is an anomaly in the Gers. The principal towns of the Gascon heartland are for the most part unprepossessing: gritty market hubs that, on the face of it, hold little appeal for the tourist. And yet they offer the patient and curious visitor a chance to tune in to the rhythms of a rural lifestyle that is dying out elsewhere in France. To spend a market day morning in, say, Fleurance, Mirande or Nogaro is to witness old fashioned Frenchness in a very pure distillation a collective affirmation of the things the French hold most sacred: fraternite, gastronomie and, to a lesser extent, morning drinking, cigarette smoking and cheek kissing. To wit: Mirande's Monday market. Held in a covered hall, the marche brings this drab burg of 3,500 souls to crackling life. The vibe is like that of a small county fair, except with much better food. A tour of the stalls offers a crash course in Gascon cookery: confit duck legs nestled in chilled rendered fat, putty colored fattened duck livers, goose and pork rillettes, pate de tete, Basque chorizo, immense rounds of tangy Tommes des Pyrenees cheese, fresh brook trout, all manner of nuts and dried fruit, gariguette strawberries, greengage plums, and on and on. The real education, though, is to be found in the gusty banter between vendors and customers a uniquely Gascon admixture of chops busting, gossip, rugby talk and, almost without fail, recipe swapping. Nowhere outside Gascony have I had to summon more patience while waiting in line at a rural market. The conversations, as a rule, are supercharged by lots of coffee and, often, lubricated by glasses of wine, beer or Floc (an Armagnac spiked aperitif) purchased at the buvette, or drinks counter a fixture of any respectable Gascon market. The procuring of provisions always concludes with lunch. Virtually every substantial Gascon town has its bustling, market adjacent chalkboard menu joint. Mirande's is called, prosaically, Le Grand Cafe Glacier. On my most recent visit there, a wine braised pork cutlet with haricots verts and a gratin dauphinois set me back 8 euros; a half carafe of the house red cost a few more. The meal bargains to be had in Gascony's no frills market cafes the Cafe du Centre in Maubourguet, the Cafe du Centre in Fleurance (no relation), Le Divan in Eauze harken back to a bygone era, as do the menus, which on rush rush market days frequently consist of the plat du jour and little else. Often, the only question asked by your harried server is which color of wine you want. Gascony is fundamentally a rural place, and to imbibe its true essence you have to leave the towns behind and venture deep into the countryside, preferably on foot. This is an easy thing to do, for the Gers is laced with thousands of miles of walkable farm roads and hiking trails, making village to village jaunts an appealing proposition. Such excursions are in my opinion the best possible way to work up your appetite. The French divide hikes into two categories: grandes randonnees and petites randonnees. The former are for the type of person who thinks nothing of carrying a 50 pound pack up a mountain and can discuss at length the wicking properties of various synthetic fabrics. The latter are for dabblers, like me, who get kvetchy when an outdoor activity starts to eat into the dinner hour. Though the Gers does have one grande randonnee route a multiday loop that starts and ends in Auch the departement is a paradise for day hikers. I've hiked many petite randonnee routes in the Gers, using the magnificently detailed TopoGuides, published by the Federation Francaise de la Randonnee Pedestre; or, when hiking with my daughter, the slim but excellent family oriented trail guide "Les Sentiers d'Emilie dans le Gers." Most marked trails in the Gers are loops of under 15 miles, many much shorter. One of the loveliest plunges into the deeply corrugated terrain north of Lupiac, which happens to be the birthplace of Charles Ogier de Batz de Castelmore, better known as D'Artagnan, by far the world's best known Gascon and a man of large appetites. The trail follows easements through ancient family farmsteads and bisects a shady wood, a remnant of the Gascon forests that served as hunting grounds for local feudal estates. Another terrific hike starts in the village of Maumusson Laguian and weaves through the vineyards of Madiran. From the hill crests, on a clear day, you can see the Pyrenees, and in summer the air is filled with the smell of hay, wild grasses and damp earth. I'm particularly fond of the latter hike because if you start right after breakfast, you can be done in time to have lunch at the nearby Ferme Descoubet. This family run duck farm will, if you call ahead, prepare a real deal Gascon home cooked meal and serve it to you in a low ceilinged farmhouse dining room alongside an ancient looking stone hearth. On my last visit, the farm's owner presented me with an entire, perfectly medium rare duck breast, its fatty skin crisp and just shy of charred. The juicy magret had been grilled, cut into quarters, and arranged around a bed of fried potatoes with a deep, roasted flavor that could only have come from a communion with hot duck fat. Ferme Descoubet lies at the far western edge of the Gers, near where the dense hills of the Gascon heartland flatten out into the alluvial plain of the Adour River. This is sleepy Gascony's even sleepier hinterland. Here, I have experienced a level of solitude that is hard to find anywhere in mainland France, and I have often been overtaken by the pleasant sensation of coming unmoored from the here and now. It is a feeling that is easy to achieve in Gascony. One of my favorite spots in all of France is a remote settlement deep in the Adour River valley called Mazeres. It consists of nothing more than a few houses gathered around a towering, fortresslike 12th century church that looks way too big for its back of beyond surroundings. To visit the church you have to walk across the road to the house of the "gardien" and ring the doorbell, which is an actual bell hanging from the home's old stone gate. If he is home, the white haired man, possessed of an impressive knowledge of the church's history and, more important, a key to the place, will show you around the cool, dark sanctuary and point out the room's marble reliquary, which looks like a creepy dollhouse. Then, in typical Gascon fashion, he will probably engage you in a conversation about the weather and, by way of parting, tell you where you should have lunch.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
On Wednesday, Representative David Cicilline, Democrat of Rhode Island and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee's antitrust subcommittee, opened a half virtual hearing on "Online Platforms and Market Power" with a combative opening statement: "Our founders would not bow before a king. Nor should we bow before the emperors of the online economy." That set the tone for the hours of sharp questioning of four of the wealthiest people on the planet: Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Tim Cook of Apple, Sundar Pichai of Google and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, whose companies have a combined market value roughly equivalent to the G.D.P. of Japan. Given the history of Silicon Valley's relationship with Washington, the intensity and precision of some subcommittee members' questions were remarkable. It is a sign that significant tech regulation may be closer than we think. Despite its techno libertarian image, the tech industry has had close political ties for decades and remarkable success in getting what it wants. In the late 1970s, venture capitalists and semiconductor chief executives got Capitol Hill and the Carter White House to agree to tax cuts and looser financial regulations. In the 1980s, a group of young legislators became such boosters of the industry that they were known as "Atari Democrats." Ronald Reagan extolled Silicon Valley entrepreneurship and helped tech companies fend off Japanese competition. The bipartisan love affair intensified in the 1990s as Bill Clinton and Al Gore invited tech executives to shape early internet era policymaking. Newt Gingrich, then the Republican speaker of the House, talked up cyberspace and formed close alliances with libertarian minded tech thinkers. His party's leaders convened "high tech summits" on Capitol Hill. The lightly regulated online economy we have today is a product of that decade, when Silicon Valley leaders persuaded starry eyed lawmakers that young, scrappy internet companies could regulate themselves. Washington's embrace of tech continued even as questions emerged about the industry's wealth and power. A 2013 Senate hearing to interrogate Mr. Cook about Apple's tax avoidance quickly was sidetracked by lawmakers gushing to the chief executive about his company's innovative products. Mr. Pichai faced tough questions at a 2018 House Judiciary hearing, but also was showered with praise. "Google is still the story of the American dream," declared Representative Robert W. Goodlatte of Virginia, the committee's chairman at the time. Those days seemed a dim memory Wednesday. Instead, the mood recalled the traffic safety debates of the mid 1960s that helped catalyze significantly more regulation for the auto industry. After a steady drumbeat of studies and some short lived congressional inquiries, traffic safety exploded into the public consciousness starting with Senate hearings in the summer of 1965, where top auto executives faced sharp questions about their lax approach to safety. The evening network news programs showed Robert F. Kennedy, a newly elected senator from New York, grilling the leaders of General Motors about the tiny amount the company spent on safety research. Later that year a young lawyer advising the Senate committee, Ralph Nader, published a blockbuster expose of the industry, "Unsafe at Any Speed." This combination of political and media scrutiny led to passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966, which mandated seatbelts and additional car safety features, as well as road improvements like guardrails and traffic barriers. Wednesday felt like Big Tech's Ralph Nader moment: the pointed questioning by committee members, notably its Democratic women like Representatives Val Demings of Florida, Pramila Jayapal of Washington, Lucy McBath of Georgia and Mary Gay Scanlon of Pennsylvania; the crescendo of investigative journalism that, in part, led to this week's hearing by shining a critical light on Big Tech's practices. And now, this House subcommittee is merely one of several legislative or regulatory bodies considering limits on Big Tech's power. "It appears to me," Mr. Bezos observed, "that social media is a nuance destruction machine, and I don't think that's helpful for a democracy." (Mr. Zuckerberg's reaction to that statement sadly was not visible to the audience.) Large tech companies also have prepared for the regulatory onslaught by starting some of the most well funded lobbying operations in Washington. They learned a lesson from Microsoft, whose presence in the capital before its antitrust case in 1998 consisted of one employee who worked out of the back of his car because he lacked proper office space. Although the trial didn't end with Microsoft being ordered to break itself apart, it taught the company that government regulators needed to be taken seriously. And as a result Microsoft tamped down its most aggressive market practices, and escaped much of the yearslong policy scrutiny now facing its peers. Then there is the sticky problem of public opinion. During other seminal moments carmakers in the 1960s, tobacco in the 1990s the problems posed by unregulated bigness were clear cut. Cigarettes killed people. Cars were unsafe. Tech's consumer dangers are harder to see and acutely feel on an average day: misinformation, an incomplete search result, an unfairly promoted link, privacy erosion, a skewed algorithm. We may wish we used our smartphones less, or worry about what overuse of social media is doing to our communities and brains. But we still routinely check our Facebook pages, buy apps via Apple, and click "buy" on Amazon Prime. Even if, as some representatives noted, we do so because we have little alternative. What happens next will depend on many things, including the November election. But this week marks the end of Washington's great love affair with tech, one that helped make these companies' bigness possible in the first place.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Liberals love to blame Milton Friedman for the misbehavior of American corporations. Friedman, a free market ideologue, published an essay 50 years ago this week in The Times Magazine in which he argued that corporations should not go beyond the letter of the law to combat discrimination or reduce pollution or maintain community institutions. Corporations, he said, have no social responsibilities except the sacred responsibility to make money. The essay was a big hit with the executive class. Rich people were only too delighted to see selfishness portrayed as a principled stand. Friedman's creed became the standard justification for corporate callousness. The Business Roundtable, a leading lobby for large companies, declared in 1997 that maximizing profit was the purpose of a corporation. Critics have been fighting ever since to get corporations to acknowledge broader responsibilities. It's the wrong battle. Instead of redefining the role of the corporation, we need to redefine the role of the state. Friedman's essay was part of his broader campaign to revive faith in the power of markets. He and his intellectual allies argued that if corporations focused on making money, and government got out of the way, the economy would grow and everyone would benefit. For decades, policymakers have embraced his advice. They have slashed taxes; sought to undermine unions; and reduced some kinds of regulation, notably in financial markets. Regulators made it easier for companies to shovel money to shareholders by repurchasing their own shares, and companies increasingly compensated their executives with shares of company stock, aligning their financial interests with those of the company's other shareholders. It's been an experiment on a grand scale, and the results are depressingly clear. Growth has slowed, and much of the available gains have been pocketed by a small minority of very wealthy Americans. The shareholding class keeps getting richer; the rest of the nation is falling behind. There is an air of desperation about the incessant efforts to address these problems by jawboning corporations to be better citizens: the pleading with Facebook to take responsibility for the filth it publishes; the campaigns to convince banks to steal less money from customers; the public shaming of restaurants that refuse to give paid leave to sick employees. There may be some value in challenging executives who are careful to tip their waiters handsomely, who reliably put water bottles into recycling bins, who think of themselves as committed to social justice, to bring those values to the office. But promises are cheap, and corporations are particularly likely to abandon benevolence during downturns just when it's needed most. Last August, with great fanfare, the Business Roundtable revised its statement about the purpose of corporations, acknowledging obligations to employees, suppliers and the broader community. But Tyler Wry, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, found that companies that had signed the Business Roundtable statement were more likely than other big companies to announce layoffs in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic even as they paid out more money to shareholders. Government remains the most powerful means to express our collective will. The necessary solution is to create stronger incentives for good behavior and laws against bad behavior. Instead of urging power companies to burn less fossil fuel, tax carbon emissions. Instead of pleading with McDonald's to raise wages, raise the federal minimum wage. Instead of shaming Amazon for squeezing small business, enforce antitrust laws. Government also needs to do more to support economic growth. Friedman's negative vision of government has helped to obscure the ways the public sector can help the private sector, for example by investing in education, infrastructure and research. The outsize political influence of corporations and of those made wealthy by corporations is certainly one reason for the widening gap between what the law requires and what many Americans would like the law to require. But there is no sense in waiting for corporations to disarm voluntarily. The rules must be changed, and the process begins at the ballot box. Corporations have a valuable role to play in American society, and they contribute primarily by trying to make money. Friedman's narrow point is mostly correct. The missing part is the role of government in ensuring that those profits do not come at the expense of society. The economist Robert Solow once observed that when he listened to his liberal colleague John Kenneth Galbraith complaining about the flaws of markets, he found himself reminded of the virtues. When he listened to Friedman, by contrast, he was reminded of the flaws. After 50 years of listening to Friedman, it's time to do something about the flaws. Binyamin Appelbaum ( BCAppelbaum) is the author of "The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets and the Fracture of Society" and a member of the editorial board.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Gail Reiken Tuzman grew up in Canarsie, Brooklyn, but spent most of her adult life in Montclair, N.J. That's where she and her husband reared their two sons, in a three story four bedroom colonial style house. She was widowed five years ago. Last spring, newly retired from her job in technology at Rutgers University, she prepared to downsize and move to Manhattan. The Montclair house was in great condition and along the Fourth of July parade route "a very big deal in Montclair," Ms. Tuzman said. She received several offers. A contract was signed in two days, for 841,000. Ms. Tuzman, 62, wanted to rent rather than buy, "because I didn't know how I would like it," she said. Her wish list included a quiet location, a living room that was large enough for a dining table and enough sun so that she would not need to turn the lights on during the day. She would have liked a two bedroom to make it easier to put up her sons when they visited, but the monthly rent for a two bedroom would be in the high 3,000s or low 4,000s. Her budget was in the low 3,000s per month, so a one bedroom would have to do. Ms. Tuzman went on Facebook to solicit input on neighborhoods from her Manhattan friends, many of whom she knew from the Miramar Ski Club, which runs bus trips for members to Vermont. She gathered that Midtown would be too busy; the East Side, lined with hospitals, too riddled with sirens. So she decided to focus on the Upper West Side. Besides, her boyfriend whom she had met swing dancing lived there. Ms. Tuzman monitored listings daily, and soon gave up emailing in reply, realizing that calling was more productive. "I could get my questions answered immediately," she said, though sometimes she was told the apartment in question was already rented. Ms. Tuzman ruled out ads that showed apartments with bars on the windows or trees outside, assuming those were on low floors, too close to noisy traffic. She liked a one bedroom with 700 square feet in a co op building on West End Avenue in the low 90s. It was on a high floor with a great Hudson River view. The closets were deep but small; the kitchen was narrow. She made a return visit to measure it. The bedroom wasn't quite large enough for a bed, two end tables and a dresser. And the rent was just under 3,500 a month, more than she wanted to pay. A friend from the ski club, leaving for part of the summer, offered to rent Ms. Tuzman his West Side studio while he was away. "I realized, I don't have to settle," she said. "If I don't find a place by the time I have to move, I can store my stuff, I can stay with my boyfriend, I can rent my friend's apartment." Though she worried her budget was insufficient for a doorman building, she saw an ad for a 3,150 a month one bedroom in an amenity laden condo building in the West 90s. It had more than 700 square feet, with big windows facing a side street, providing a generous view of open sky. There were three large closets and a kitchen that "was not terrific but would do," Ms. Tuzman said. She was delighted with the building's gym. "It isn't just a gym it's a fitness center," said Ms. Tuzman, a former physical education teacher. The offerings included squash and basketball courts, table tennis and a swimming pool. But she wasn't ready to commit, having made an appointment to see a two bedroom downtown at Dorchester Towers, an enormous 1964 white brick condo building on West 68th Street. The apartment, for 3,400 a month, seemed more like a one bedroom divided into two. And Ms. Tuzman, who planned to keep her car, knew that street parking was especially scarce in that part of town. So she negotiated for the apartment in the West 90s, settling at a monthly rent of 3,100 for one year, with an option to renew the lease at the same rent. "This apartment was so different from anything else I saw," she said. As it happened, she did not have to store her possessions, move in with her boyfriend or rent her friend's studio. And she did not have to compromise much on her wishes for a new home. Her place doesn't face a main street, so she hears only the occasional siren or sanitation truck, plus some ventilation noise when a window is open. The living room is large enough for a couch and a dining table. Back in Montclair, "I was happy my gym was as close as it was a five minute walk," she said. "Now it is a one flight walk. I could take an elevator, but I take the stairs."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
David Brooks is on the right path, but he doesn't go far enough. Our society has become too imperiled by divisiveness and tribalism to hope that anything less than compulsory national service could save it. I was drafted into the U.S. Army at the height of the Vietnam War. Trained as an infantryman, I landed in a combat unit hard up against the DMZ. Though I didn't always share my comrades' worldviews, I learned how to rely on, work with and love the hillbillies, urban blacks, Native Americans, Chicanos, farm boys and misfits who had been thrown together in the platoon I came to think of as a family. Fifty years on, it's that shared experience that draws us together year after year. Oh, yes, we argue about sports, politics and much else. But the deep personal regard keeps things respectful, civil and productive. Our democratic experiment assumes calls for responsible participation by all citizens. How's that working for us?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Left: Museum of the City of New York; Right: Angel Franco/The New York Times Left: Museum of the City of New York; Right: Angel Franco/The New York Times Credit... Left: Museum of the City of New York; Right: Angel Franco/The New York Times No village street better illustrates how the artists' studio movement of the 1910s swamped the original private house character of the Village than Waverly Place between Sixth Avenue and Washington Square West. An immaculate row of prim 1840s brick houses on the north side coolly faces down the insouciantly picturesque artists' studios on the south. Both, as it turns out, are in short supply. In the mid 19th century, this block of Waverly Place played a mild second fiddle to the certifiably grand houses of Washington Square. Nos. 107 to No. 111, a nearly pristine series of brick houses, survive. No. 107 has remarkable Greek Revival ironwork. That was the house of Asaph Stone, a Boston born merchant and importer. In 1854, he and his wife and daughter Mary, who had just finished her studies abroad, went down with the steamer Arctic when it sank after being rammed by another ship. The elite began leaving the neighborhood within a few decades, most before 1891, when an apartment house invaded what were once sacred precincts. This was the modest Cecilia at 116 Waverly. Vincent Pepe smelled the turpentine on the wind and began fixing up run down houses for this new kind of tenant, remaking them with Mediterranean style facades. Among them was the old Greek Revival house at 124 Waverly, inhabited by an artificial limb maker and a chauffeur, not the types to respond to the emerging charms of the city's Latin Quarter. Pepe evicted them so he could redo the place to suit artists. But prospective tenants including the sculptor Rudolph Evans, who took the top floor studio and would go on to do the statue of Thomas Jefferson at the Jefferson Memorial complained about the loss of the original architectural features. Pepe relented and in 1917 expressed surprise to The Real Estate Record and Guide: "It seems that the mahogany doors, with silver knobs and old marble mantels and columns, possess particular charm." In the end, he gave No. 124 a simple stucco front but left its Greek Revival door surround. For Pepe, there was certainly charm in running the numbers after the renovation, the rent roll at No. 124 rose to 4,700 from 1,000 per year. This chapter of Village history is deftly captured by Andrew Scott Dolkart in his 2009 book "The Row House Reborn." The income level bounced up a few notches with the arrival of the society portrait painter Murray Percival Bewley. In 1920, around the time The New York Sun wrote that Bewley "paints cleverly, perhaps too cleverly," he bought the old brick house at 114 Waverly Place, retaining the little known William Sanger to turn it into one of the most memorable residences in New York not solely because it has been painted salmon pink for decades. Sanger gave his client a sumptuous Mediterranean facade, with wide arched window openings, broad French windows and, at the top, a strange arcade of mini windows below a striking half oval studio window. By 1940 almost all the old private houses had been converted to apartments and studios; the census of that year found the actor Joseph Cotten, just beginning the film "Citizen Kane" with his friend Orson Welles, in an apartment at No. 122. Change has again overtaken Waverly Place. Everett Shinn's old house, No. 112, has been immaculately renovated with honey colored French windows and now bears a plaque declaring it the "Richard Easton Carriage House," even though there is not the slightest trace of a carriage entrance. (Mr. Easton worked on Wall Street, but cashed out and created what his Web site describes as "the world's most exclusive dating club.") Cotten would gasp at his old building, No. 122, fixed up within an inch of its life, with frosted glass windows, impeccably cleaned brick and top drawer replacement windows. Building records indicate it was renovated half a dozen years ago by Gerald Rosenfeld, the former head of investment banking at Lazard Freres. It is now for sale for 18.9 million. Across the street the sober Federal style houses have been polished like a pair of cavalry boots from John Lobb; the black painted front door of 111 is as flawless. On the south side, next to the Bewley house, is an astonishing project: Spruce 116 Waverly L.L.C., for which the principal is not identified, has taken the bedraggled old Cecilia, a near tenement, and converted it into a private house. This indicates that the stock of private houses eligible for restoration has just about been exhausted, and supports the maxim of the Stribling broker Kirk Henckels that the New York market is so hot, "there's simply a shortage of unaffordable housing."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Headed out east for the long weekend? Fendi is kicking off FendiRoadTrip, a traveling retail concept in which a customized Ape a version of the distinctive three wheeled Italian truck created in the late 1940s loaded with accessories like Dotcom bags ( 2,400) and ABC fur charms ( 600) will roll into the Surf Lodge on Thursday through Monday as its first stop on a tour of the United States and Canada. At 183 Edgemere Street, Montauk. The Los Angeles based designers Jenni Kayne and Marysia have teamed up on a swimwear capsule available at Ms. Kayne's Hamptons pop up that includes chic black styles with just the right amount of coverage, like a crisscross back maillot ( 339). At 2 Main Street, Southampton. Sticking in the city? A festive lightweight jersey nautical stripe tee ( 83, originally 115) is among the select styles Saint James is offering for 30 percent off. At 319 Bleecker Street. On Saturday, Ralph Lauren will open a fragrance salon at the brand's uptown flagship to coincide with the debut of Ralph Lauren Collection Fragrances, a range of 10 eaux de parfums, including A Portrait of New York, A Legacy of English Elegance, and Treasures of Safari (each 240 for 100 ml), informed by the spirit of travel and the destinations that have most influenced Mr. Lauren. At 888 Madison Avenue.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
The past year was an exceptionally active, unusually silly and indubitably worrying one for pop music lawsuits. In August, after determining that Katy Perry's "Dark Horse," a very generic trap song, had borrowed from "Joyful Noise," another very generic trap song by the Christian rapper Flame, a jury awarded Flame and his co plaintiffs 2.8 million in damages. (Perry is appealing the verdict.) In October, the inactive third rate emo band Yellowcard sued Juice WRLD for 15 million over perceived similarities between one of his big hits, "Lucid Dreams," and one of their non hits, "Holly Wood Died." After the rapper's death in December, the band announced it was still moving forward with the litigation. In both cases, the alleged musical connection is flimsy at best. But these are the sort of claims that have found oxygen in the wake of the "Blurred Lines" ruling in 2015. In that case, a jury awarded the estate of Marvin Gaye 7.3 million (later lowered to 5.3 million) after it determined that Robin Thicke, Pharrell Williams and T.I.'s song had a little too much in common with Gaye's "Got to Give It Up." It was preposterous, and chilling as well. Not only could you be held liable for theft, intentional or otherwise, but you now could be held liable for being influenced, too. Occasionally, pop innovates in a hard stylistic jolt, or an outlier comes to rapid prominence (see: Lil Nas X), but more often, it moves as a kind of unconscious collective. An evolutionary step is rarely the product of one person working in isolation; it is one brick added atop hundreds of others. Originality is a con: Pop music history is the history of near overlap. Ideas rarely emerge in complete isolation. In studios around the world, performers, producers and songwriters are all trying to innovate just one step beyond where music currently is, working from the same component parts. It shouldn't be a surprise when some of what they come up with sounds similar and also like what came before. The idea that this might be actionable is the new twist. Every song benefits from what preceded it, whether it's a melodic idea, a lyrical motif, a sung rhythm, a drum texture. A forensic analysis of any song would find all sorts of pre existing DNA. A copyright troll exploits that, turning inevitable influence into ungenerous and often highly frivolous litigation. And given how lucrative the "Blurred Lines" judgment proved to be, it has become a de facto blueprint for how claims about originality will be litigated moving forward: If there is a whiff of potential borrowing on a song (and there almost always is), the borrowed might come knocking. This forecloses on the possibility that there is some value in copying, or duplicative ideas. It also suggests that all copying is alike the brutally unethical kind, and also the Leibniz Newton kind. It fails to make a distinction between theft and echo, or worse, presumes that all echo is theft. It ignores that the long continuum of pop revisits sonic approaches, melodies, beats and chord progressions time and again. It demands that each song be wholly distinct from everything that preceded it, an absurd and ultimately unenforceable dictate. What's left in its wake is a climate of fear. In some recent cases, you can sense pre emptive gamesmanship, as when Taylor Swift gave a writing credit to Right Said Fred for a cadence on "Look What You Made Me Do" that recalled "I'm Too Sexy." Or the rapid settlement Sam Smith reached with Tom Petty for perceived similarities between "Stay With Me" and "I Won't Back Down." Whether there was a direct borrowing didn't seem to matter; the potential for the perception of theft was enough to instigate an arrangement. In these situations, the alleged source song was a popular one the case could be made that even if there was no direct influence, there was an ambient one. Copyright law makes no distinction between conscious and unconscious copying, which means that even though fully unpacking claims like these might mean parsing the difference between outright and unconscious theft, or between thievery and parallel influence, those distinctions may well be, apart from the determination of damages, moot. Cases like that are the exception, though. Most of the allegations that have been brought in recent years stretch the bounds of credulity. A singer songwriter named Steve Ronsen suggested that a passage in "Shallow," the Lady Gaga/Bradley Cooper hit from "A Star Is Born," is partly derived from one of his songs, "Almost," and threatened a lawsuit. The Weeknd was sued by a trio of songwriters Brian Clover, Scott McCulloch, and William Smith who allege that his song "A Lonely Night" was a rip off of an unreleased song called "I Need Love" that they'd written more than a decade earlier. Migos were sued by a rapper, M.O.S., who said that the title phrase of their song "Walk It Like I Talk It" had appeared in a song of his more than a decade prior (the case was dismissed). Miley Cyrus is being sued by a Jamaican performer, Flourgon, over a lyric in her song "We Can't Stop." Ed Sheeran has been the target of several lawsuits; an infringement claim for an ostensible borrowing on "Shape of You" from a singer named Sam Chokri has his royalty payments for that song on hold. But in almost all of these cases, the scope of the alleged infringement is so minor, so generic, that it suggests that a basic element of composition is up for an ownership grab. Perhaps these claims are legitimate. There is, maybe, a slight chance of that. Theft is not unheard of. The signature boast in Lizzo's No. 1 hit, "Truth Hurts," was lifted from a tweet, and went wholly uncredited until two songwriters who worked with Lizzo at a session that initially yielded that critical line publicly staked a claim for credit. Lizzo responded by announcing a lawsuit seeking to have their claims formally declared invalid and, for good measure, extended songwriting credit to the author of the tweet. Sometimes these quibbles come down to a determination of who has the permission literal or social to borrow, and from whom. Perry's "Dark Horse" was a late career attempt to absorb trap music, a genre far from her comfort zone. In a sense, the lawsuit by Flame, by no means the only performer to have used a similar sounding beat, was a kind of culture borrowing tax. Or maybe Perry could have had an outcome more like Ariana Grande, whose 2019 No. 1 "7 Rings" was the subject of several claims about its originality, particularly a cadence associated with 2 Chainz or Soulja Boy. In this case, Grande had already ceded 90 percent of her royalties to the Rodgers Hammerstein Organization (the song interpolates "My Favorite Things" from "The Sound of Music"). But after a meeting with 2 Chainz, the two agreed to collaborate on a pair of songs. Similarly, an air clearing phone call brought a claim by Three 6 Mafia against Travis Scott to a swift and amicable resolution this year. The echoes deployed by Grande and Scott were intentional homage. In hip hop especially, artists frequently incorporate fragments of earlier songs as a kind of wink, or nod to a forebear. But depending who's doing the nodding, it doesn't always go smoothly. In 2014, Drake revisited lyrics by the Bay Area hip hop elder Rappin' 4 Tay, who, unimpressed, chose to publicly invoice Drake for 100,000. (As of last year, Drake had not paid.) If echoing is always going to be treated as thievery, then songwriting credits and payments should be trickling back way past the 1970s and 1980s, all the way back to Robert Johnson and the Carter Family and Chuck Berry and the Last Poets perpetual royalties for foundational innovations. The idea that there is a determinable origin point where a sonic idea was born is a romantic one. But a song is much more than romance these days it is an asset, and a perpetual one at that. Note the recent boom market in the rights to song royalties. Check out the listings on royaltyexchange.com, where you can bid on fractional ownership to the rights for thousands of songs. Or the catalog gorging happening in the music publishing sector, with firms like Kobalt and Merck Mercuriadis amassing huge catalogs. Strategies like these are the equivalent of placing bets on every square on the roulette table. A fractional claim (via songwriting or sample credit) on a pop megahit can mean millions of dollars. This system encourages bad faith, long shot action. Juries filled with non music experts are ill suited to make decisions in cases that tend to come down to the testimony of dueling musicologists. Perhaps a better solution is needed: an arbitration panel, with buy in from all the major record labels and song publishers, where claims can be adjudicated by a jury of peers. That system would certainly have spared Led Zeppelin, which has been embroiled in a copyright suit over "Stairway to Heaven" with the trustee of the singer of Spirit, a 1960s psychedelic rock band. That case, even flimsier than the "Blurred Lines" one, has dragged on since 2014 and will continue in 2020. But a similar fate might be destined for "Blurred Lines," too. Last fall, Pharrell Williams, the song's producer, gave an interview in which he described his work on the song differently than he had in his sworn testimony. A few weeks later, the Gaye estate filed a motion accusing him of perjury and asking a judge to revisit the decision. Even 5.3 million doesn't buy restraint.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Wendell Pierce: 'I Still Have Fear, But Now I Have Courage' Wendell Pierce is having a very good year. He is in two festival prize winning movies ("Clemency" and "Burning Cane") and an Amazon television series ("Jack Ryan"). He helped save a radio station, WBOK AM, in his hometown New Orleans. And now he is starring as Willy Loman in a production of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" in London's West End, where the play begins previews Oct. 24 following a well received run at the Young Vic. "This is one of the most memorable years of my career," said the actor, best known as Bunk in HBO's "The Wire." "What I try to do is the trifecta television, film and theater every year and this is just the epitome." "The thing about Wendell is you can't help but love him," said Marianne Elliott, who is directing the production with Miranda Cromwell. "He brings to the part a vulnerability and a massive heart, so even though that character has flaws and makes tremendous mistakes, you feel his pain, and you're hoping for him all the time." These are edited excerpts from an interview with Pierce. How would you describe Willy Loman? Willy Loman is a man who believes in meritocracy. He believes if you do the things that are necessary, you should achieve certain things in life. And he's a man who is lost in the denial of what's really happening in his life, which is that he's not doing that well. Tell me about your previous encounters with the character. I read it in high school. I saw it on television with Dustin Hoffman. And I have since gone back to see the Lee J. Cobb. I saw Brian Dennehy and Philip Seymour Hoffman archive footage. And I've seen the movie with Fred March. Did you ever think you might play the role? No. I was terrified, and had a sense of unworthiness. And still in the midst of it every night I feel like I'm at base camp at Mount Everest looking up, knowing that I have to summit by the end of the evening. Why did you want to take this on? I knew that it would challenge me like no other role. It is the American Hamlet. And now that I've done it, I'm going down the list of all the roles that I want to do: Richard III and Walter Lee ("A Raisin in the Sun"). I want to do Astrov ("Uncle Vanya") again. I'm ready to do my Othello, and look forward in the years to come to do a Lear. I'd love to do "Invisible Man" if there was an interpretation of that. I still have fear, but now I have courage. What was your thinking about having black actors play the Lomans? Arthur Miller never mentions race in the play. It's really an examination of the human psyche, which is universal. Some scenes read so differently now. When I'm caught in the hotel, I tell the woman, "Go into the bathroom there may be a law about this in Massachusetts," and that line rings out because now you see this black man with a white woman in 1949, knowing that black men have been lynched and killed for less. And in the restaurant, it's like, "Let me put you in the back, let me put you out of sight we can't have Negro patrons in here." The interpretation is not in competition with the play. It illuminates it even more. Are there any changes to the script? The only thing is a school it's U.C.L.A. instead of Virginia, because a black man couldn't get into Virginia in 1949. And then there is an insult from another salesman when he goes to a store. When Dustin Hoffman did it the word was "shrimp." When Lee J. Cobb was doing it they made it "walrus." So I was thinking, as an African American man, what would be the greatest insult? So we say nothing, and you hear the racial epithet. I just dropped a word, and it rang out, because everyone knows what the word is. What have you learned about yourself from the part? I discovered a great fear: Are my best days behind me? Yes. The lesson you have to learn is redemption. Ultimately in a very awful way, Willy makes a choice that I would not make, and I have to tell myself constantly, "Dude, you cannot accept this choice." But I can have an understanding of why he did it . Is there any thought of bringing this production to the United States? Ideally I would love to do it on Broadway. But it's such an American play, I would love to do it at the Kennedy Center, at the Orpheum Theater in San Francisco or the Fox in Detroit. To do it in different American cities this interpretation which I think is historic it would be a great honor. There are nibbles and, if there aren't, there's the chum that I'm throwing out. The role must be exhausting. People always, at the end of the evening, say, "Wow, you seem so up." I'm like, "Yeah man, I just climbed Mount Everest."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
THE INEVITABILITY OF TRAGEDY Henry Kissinger and His World By Barry Gewen When the nefarious Cardinal Richelieu died in 1642, Pope Urban VIII is said to have declared: "If there is a God, the Cardinal de Richelieu will have much to answer for. If not ... well, he had a successful life." Henry Kissinger likes that anecdote. He cites it in his writings. This is, perhaps, projection. Has Kissinger, sly and witty, revived the tale as a wink toward his elegists? He has surely enjoyed success secretary of state, winner of the National Book Award and the Nobel Peace Prize yet always in chorus with charges of sin. Barry Gewen tackles the contradictions, and offers absolution, in "The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World," a timely and acute defense of the great realist's actions, values and beliefs. "We dismiss or ignore him at our peril," writes Gewen, a longtime editor at The New York Times Book Review. "His arguments for his brand of realism thinking in terms of national interest and a balance of power offer the possibility of rationality, coherence and a necessary long term perspective at a time when all three of these qualities seem to be in short supply." In our current age, when demagogues and dictators once more stomp about the stage, Kissinger is "more than a figure out of history," Gewen writes. "He is a philosopher of international relations who has much to teach us about how the modern world works." We know Richelieu as the archfoe of "The Three Musketeers," but Alexandre Dumas based the character on a very real prelate whose Machiavellian talents helped hatch the concept of the nation state. As chief minister to the king of France for most of two decades, he was not above siding with Protestant tyrants to stir chaos in the Holy Roman Empire, and so keep France a pre eminent power. He "achieved vast successes by ignoring, and indeed transcending, the essential pieties of his age," Kissinger wrote, admiringly, in his book "Diplomacy" a history of the craft. Kissinger, too, has little use for pieties. Canonical neoconservatives, Wilsonian dreamers, crusaders for human rights and other adherents of American exceptionalism ended his active career in government in 1977. Indeed, a striking aspect of Kissinger's brand of realpolitik is the range of his array of enemies: Dreamy leftists accused him of war crimes as right wing anti Communists maligned him as a squish. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. Like Richelieu, Kissinger believes that a constellation of states, each striving for its own selfish interests, and offsetting rivals, can bring order in a way no church or empire can. "The well being of the state justified whatever means," Kissinger wrote in "Diplomacy" (a book that Gewen calls a near masterpiece). "National interest supplanted the medieval notion of a universal morality." Writ larger, a "balance of power replaced the nostalgia for universal monarchy with the consolation that each state, in pursuing its own selfish interests, would ... contribute to the safety and progress of all." A cold and cynical world, to be sure. But also a more stable one, perhaps. Gewen's book is a thoughtful rumination on human behavior, philosophy and international relations, not a womb to tomb biography. We learn little about Kissinger's marriages, children or business clients, or the cultural phenomenon he became in the mid 1970s. The reader will find Max Weber, Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Nietzsche in these pages, but nary a reference to Jill St. John. What Gewen focuses on, and excels at, is the story of how the rise of gangster dictators left an irradicable impression on the Jewish intellectuals who escaped Nazi Germany before World War II. These men and women Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Hans Morgenthau and Kissinger bent their brilliant minds toward the questions raised by the century's savagery. They concluded that human beings are timorous and manipulable vessels who could not be relied on to recognize and resist evil at least not before the Imperial Japanese Navy broke the still of a Sunday morning in Hawaii. Kissinger, and Gewen, acknowledge a use for Wilsonian romanticism. It is hard to recruit an army with the battle cry: "Restore the balance of power!" It was America's naive idealists bleeding out on Iwo Jima or Omaha Beach in the cause of human rights and justice who bred Kissinger's affection for his adopted country. "Nowhere else is there to be found the same generosity of spirit and absence of malice," Kissinger wrote in his memoirs, as in "small town America." Yet Kissinger "was separated from most other Americans by his sense of tragedy," Gewen writes. In Germany, "he had seen how the processes of democracy could go disastrously wrong." Thus, the famous realism. "The task for policymakers in his view is a modest, essentially negative one," Gewen says: "Not to steer the world along some preordained path to universal justice but to pit power against power to rein in the assorted aggressions of human beings and to try, as best they can, to avert disaster. This is a perspective shaped by pessimism." Fair enough. Who will enter an argument about appeasement with Kissinger, whose uncles, aunts and cousins died in the death camps, who fled Germany with his parents and brother as a teenager and returned in soldier's gear to fight for its liberation in 1944? Not Gewen, who most capably illustrates how the lessons of Munich steered two generations of American statesmen during the Cold War, and into killing grounds like Southeast Asia: none more so than Kissinger and his boss, Richard Nixon. As Gewen sees it accurately, for the most part Richard Nixon dictated the strategy, and Kissinger supervised its execution. When they clicked, it was magnificent. The rift between the Soviet Union and China may have been, as Kissinger has said, inevitable. But Nixon's insight to seize the moment and exploit the split was not. On his return from Beijing, and that planet shaking handshake with Mao Zedong in 1972, Nixon told aides that he hoped his breakthrough would keep the peace for 20 years. By his definition of peace the absence of a conflagration on the scale of the two world wars we are now at half a century and counting. Hundreds of millions from China, India and other lands have escaped famine and want and acquired stakes in a global economy in which all agree that a nuclear war would be bad for business. It's Kissinger's embrace of "whatever means" and his facile dismissal of the "medieval notion" of universal morality that give critics ammunition. The ends were grand, but the means so often awful. Nixon and Kissinger expanded the war in Southeast Asia, leaving Laos a cratered wreck, Cambodia a charnel house, Americans at each other's throats and Vietnam with an armistice that yielded neither peace nor honor. They countenanced the right wing coup in Chile and stood by as the government of Pakistan launched a genocidal campaign against its Bengali minority. For all the billions on the prosperous side of the scale, there are a million and more on the counterweight who saw loved ones slaughtered and tortured and homes destroyed, who died horrific deaths in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Chile and Bangladesh in the service of power politics. Nixon and his right hand man made the calculation that these lives were worth the sacrifice. Pope Urban had it right. If there is a God, Kissinger has much to answer for. Gewen does not dodge the butcher's bill. He takes on the "war crimes" arraignments in chapters on Chile and Southeast Asia, concluding that the threat posed by Chilean socialism to hemispheric tranquillity generally absolved the United States for helping to foster a bloody coup, and that the Cold War necessity of preserving U.S. "credibility" and "prestige" justified Nixon's callous choice of four more years of war in Southeast Asia. Often, Gewen is persuasive and often persuasively reasonable. He endorses Kissinger's realism, but he is not an absolutist. "Without a moral component," he writes, "foreign policy could be a rotten, blood drenched business." He notes how times can change how Ronald Reagan's Wilson like crusade against Communism seems, for the late 1980s, as apt as Kissinger's policy of detente a decade earlier. Yet when proposing Kissinger's brand of realpolitik as a model foreign policy for our time, he chooses to portray Nixon and his adviser at their most penetrating. That is overselling. After learning of the White House secret taping system, Kissinger rightly feared that he would come across as a "perfect fool" for his groveling. The tapes serve as a fact check for historians, showing the unsightly side of Kissinger: craven, wrongheaded, paranoid. The author says that the moment for Nixinger's realpolitik philosophy "has come round again." In the 21st century, American foreign policy "has bounced from crisis to crisis with uncertain aims and little or no long range outlook. Henry Kissinger's philosophy of realism provides both." As with almost any question involving Nixon, the answer is "Yes, but." Gewen doesn't posit how Kissinger would apply his philosophy to specific challenges like Islamic fundamentalism, Russian cyberwarfare, Brexit, immigration, the loss of American high wage jobs or the decline of national allegiance among those most profiting from globalization. But we would be wise to remember that, along with the virtues that Gewen finds in Kissinger's performance, there was also incoherence, irrationality and shortsightedness. Kissinger may have much to teach, but we take him as our model with care. Realists in sway to power can be just as unhinged as crusaders with a cause. Listen to the tapes from December 1971, as Pakistan slid to war with India. Nixon and Kissinger tilted toward Pakistan in part because it was serving as their conduit to China, in part because India had signed a treaty with the U.S.S.R. and in no small part because the terminally insecure Nixon felt slighted by Indira Gandhi. Violating U.S. law, Nixon and Kissinger moved arms to Pakistan. They viewed the conflict through a Cold War prism, instead of a regional rivalry, and, ranting in the Oval Office, nudged each other toward a nuclear "final showdown" with the Soviet Union. "I consider this our Rhineland," Kissinger raved. If India was allowed to dismember Pakistan it would wreck the balance of power, reward aggression and the United States would be "finished ... through ... forever." Nixon brought Kissinger back to his senses and then fretted in private that his national security adviser might need psychiatric care. The lessons of Munich can be overlearned. A world viewed only through the lens of power can be as dangerous as that soaked in sentiment. Kissinger and his kindred spirits may be right to alert us to the shortcomings of faith, hope and democracy. But for all of the merits that Gewen identifies in Kissinger, realism, too, is no guarantee against delusion.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Want more basketball in your inbox? Sign up for Marc Stein's weekly N.B.A. newsletter here. Sabrina Ionescu could spend a considerable amount of time, if she wished, dwelling on everything that was snatched away from her in what was scripted to be a momentous year. She prefers to focus on the fortune that enabled her to avoid surgery after a nasty ankle injury prematurely ended her rookie season with the W.N.B.A.'s Liberty. "With everything that's happened, with everything that's been out of my control, I've just handled it the best that I can," Ionescu said. Last fall, Ionescu, 22, returned to the University of Oregon for her senior season, rather than turn professional, to try to win the N.C.A.A. title that had eluded the Ducks in the 2018 19 season. When the coronavirus pandemic wiped out the 2020 N.C.A.A. women's basketball tournament in March, Ionescu moved on to the W.N.B.A. She was the No. 1 over all pick in the draft in April and one of the most celebrated rookies in league history only to sustain a season ending injury in the second quarter of her third pro game. Ionescu rolled her ankle when she stepped on the foot of the Atlanta Dream's backpedaling Betnijah Laney. The Liberty, who had six other rookies besides Ionescu, sank to the league's worst record (2 20) without her. The injury, Ionescu said, was "definitely" the most severe of her career. It added another layer of struggle to a year that began with deep sorrow, after her friend and mentor Kobe Bryant and Bryant's 13 year old daughter, Gianna whom Ionescu mentored were among nine people killed in a Jan. 26 helicopter crash. Ionescu spoke to The New York Times about the numerous challenges she has faced in 2020, spending time with Bryant's family and life in the W.N.B.A. bubble at IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla. How are things going on the rehabilitation front? I feel really good. Everything's been going well, progressing as it should. It's just been fun and exciting to get back out there and start playing and practicing. How did you deal with the shock of having an injury so soon in your pro career? It happens. It really wasn't the end of the world. It wasn't like my senior year of college or anything. I'll have many, many more opportunities to play in the league, so it really wasn't like a devastating experience. I kind of just took it for what it was and moved on. The game before, to go for 33 points against the Dallas Wings, what did that feel like to be able to perform at that level so quickly? I just felt comfortable. I obviously learned from the first game Ionescu shot 4 for 17 from the field in her debut against the Seattle Storm and just kept watching film and was just able to find my shots and felt more and more comfortable. You faced big expectations throughout your college career, but how much different do pro expectations feel being drafted to turn around a struggling franchise? They don't feel any different at all. The expectations I have for myself are always higher than anyone else's, regardless of what level I'm playing at. It didn't really matter that I was a rookie or it was my first year. I still had that same high level of expectation. What was life like for you in the W.N.B.A. bubble? It's really hard, and it's definitely not ideal. I think they did a great job keeping it safe and doing the best that they can with the short notice of having to kind of start the season and try to keep our best interests at hand. But, obviously, to eat, sleep and breathe your job is not always the best route that you could possibly take. It definitely wasn't easy being away from family and that support system, especially in my first year, and then obviously getting injured and kind of being stuck in that bubble and not being able to readily see who I need to see right away. But I think they did a great job just being able to keep us safe. Hopefully, if there's a situation like this next year, we can just learn from it. If next season is closer to typical, after spending your whole life on the West Coast, what do you imagine living and playing in New York will be like? Hopefully really fun. I'm not nervous to get out there. I'm really excited to get out to Barclays and to be able to play with fans in an arena. Hopefully that happens, and we can get back to a little bit of the normal way of playing sports. We've seen a few videos and pictures of you spending time with Kobe Bryant's family. How helpful is it, if that's even the right word, to grieve with them? I think it's helped all of us, just to be able to see each other, be around each other, tell stories, obviously be there for the good and the bad times, whatever it is. I'll always be close to his family, and I think they know that they'll always be close to me. So it's been great to be able to just spend time with them, and that's honestly been a blessing that I've been able to have that opportunity to be down in L.A. and see them. To be asked to speak at Kobe's memorial service I honestly can't even imagine taking that on. It was difficult, but it was also an honor. Obviously being around such great people that were in attendance, some great teammates, all of his mentors, really everyone that was there it was something that I am so happy that I was able to do and was asked to do. At this point of your rehab, how much are you able to do? I'm able to do just about everything that I want. I'm not playing live now and probably won't be for a while, just because there's no point playing live. It's not necessarily for my health or my ankle, but just due to Covid 19 and everything going on. I don't really feel like I want to go to a gym and start playing with random people at this point. How hard is it for someone as competitive as you to be patient? I'm actually pretty patient. I'm just making sure I'm staying healthy. There's nothing really I'm rushing back for, so I think that's definitely helped me. There's not a game in a week that I need to get ready for. I have a while until next season, so I think this is going to be a time to just get my body where I want it to be. You ask; I answer. Every week in this space, I'll field three questions posed via email at marcstein newsletter nytimes.com. Please include your first and last name, as well as the city you're writing from, and make sure "Corner Three" is in the subject line. Q: Any compelling reason M.V.P. voting shouldn't include the playoffs, other than hidebound tradition? DavidJManson from Twitter Stein: You presumably won't like this answer, but I'm firmly in the camp that believes that the N.B.A.'s Most Valuable Player Award system is just fine the way it is. The award Giannis Antetokounmpo won on Friday for the second consecutive season is a regular season award. The N.B.A., remember, is forever searching for ways to add meaning to its 82 game regular season, so suggesting changes that potentially diminish the regular season further is a nonstarter. The case can be made that with the whole league forced to a neutral site to finish the season because of the coronavirus pandemic wiping out home court advantage and devaluing playoff seeding there was no bigger prize from the 2019 20 regular season than the trophy Antetokounmpo just won. There have also been calls for a third trophy to be awarded every season to the individual deemed "best player." The thinking there is that neither the regular season M.V.P. Award, which typically goes to the player deemed to have the strongest 82 game resume, nor the N.B.A. finals M.V.P., awarded for postseason brilliance, is guaranteed to identify the game's most outstanding individual force. My counter to that has always been: Why do we need a "best in the world" trophy? Michael Jordan held that status for the bulk of his career everyone knew he was the best, and that was a trophy in itself. The annual M.V.P. race allows us to have a meaningful (and theoretically enjoyable) debate about who had the best season. If the exercise was intended to identify who would be the No. 1 pick in an N.B.A. pickup game, we could do that before opening night pretty much every season. Lots of things need fixing these days, in basketball and throughout the world, but this isn't one of them. Not when Antetokounmpo, no matter how disappointing the Bucks were in the playoffs, had a historically dominant regular season. Q: You made an error in the Sept. 8 newsletter. Scott Perry is a Black general manager with the Knicks. As with all the other executives you list, Perry's decision making power may be in question, but his exclusion from the list is a mistake. Bobby Elliott The Nash news was much more of a curveball. It was widely assumed in league circles that he didn't even want to work as a full time assistant coach with an N.B.A. team, let alone accept the challenge of ushering Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving and the rest of the Nets to title contention. Before my Sept. 3 tweet that he had been hired as the Nets' new coach, Nash's name hadn't been publicly mentioned in connection with the Brooklyn job or any other. So we'll score the Nash appointment as the far bigger surprise, while conceding that Pirlo is under even more pressure than Nash in Year 1. Nothing less than a league title and a deep run in the Champions League will be expected from Juventus and its rookie manager because the Italian soccer media make New York's ballyhooed press corps seem welcoming. I expect Nash to get the longer grace period, especially with Durant and Irving both likely returning from lengthy injury absences. The Celtics have played 12 consecutive games in these playoffs without the home team winning any of them. The streak included the last two games of Boston's first round sweep of Philadelphia, every game of the Celtics' seven round epic with Toronto in the second round and the first three games of the Eastern Conference finals against Miami. As my colleague Tom Haberstroh of NBC Sports noted last week, Boston's second round matchup with Toronto was the first in more than 600 best of seven series in N.B.A. playoff history in which the home team failed to win a single game. In the four second round playoff series, "home" teams were 5 19. Home teams have combined to finish above .500 in every postseason since the N.B.A. instituted a 16 team playoff format for the 1983 84 season. I seem to get pushback every time I bring this subject up on Twitter, but it is a statistic we can't lose sight of because these playoffs at a neutral site and with zero travel are unlike any other in league history. The conditions are the same for every team, true, but this will be justifiably recorded by some historians (me included) as a different postseason than we've ever seen. There have been nine comebacks from a 3 1 series deficit since the N.B.A. moved to the 16 team playoff format. Five of the nine have happened in the past five years, starting with Houston's comeback against the Doc Rivers coached Los Angeles Clippers in 2015. There were two such comebacks in 2016 (Golden State over Oklahoma City in the Western Conference finals and Cleveland over Golden State in the N.B.A. finals), and Denver delivered two in the first two rounds of these playoffs. The Nuggets' second round resurrection against the Clippers inflicted the eighth Game 7 defeat of Rivers's coaching career. The array of first round picks Kentucky Coach John Calipari has sent to the N.B.A. 29 in 11 seasons with the Wildcats entering the Nov. 18 draft has earned zero N.B.A. titles. But that drought could end this season with Denver's Jamal Murray, Miami's Bam Adebayo and Tyler Herro and the Los Angeles Lakers' Anthony Davis still in contention for the 2020 title. (Boston's Enes Kanter signed for Kentucky but was not allowed to play for Calipari because of N.C.A.A. eligibility issues.) Hit me up anytime on Twitter ( TheSteinLine) or Facebook ( MarcSteinNBA) or Instagram ( thesteinline). Send any other feedback to marcstein newsletter nytimes.com.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
BEIJING A Chinese start up that appears to have mastered the art of keeping people glued to their smartphones also has a knack for something else: drawing the ire of China's censors. The country's top media regulator on Tuesday ordered the company, Bytedance, to shut down its app for sharing jokes and silly videos. Vulgar content on the Neihan Duanzi app had "caused strong dislike among internet users," a brief notice from the State Administration of Radio and Television said. The company was told to clean up its other platforms, too. The shutdown was only the latest blow for Bytedance, one of the world's most successful technology start ups. Just a day earlier, its flagship app, a popular news aggregator called Jinri Toutiao, was pulled from app stores for unspecified reasons. And last week, Huoshan, the company's platform for sharing slice of life video clips, vanished from app stores after China's official television broadcaster rapped it for glorifying underage pregnancy. In a statement posted Wednesday morning, Zhang Yiming, Bytedance's founder and chief executive, said he had spent the previous, sleepless night in deep reflection, gnawed by "a guilty conscience." "Content had appeared that did not accord with core socialist values and was not a good guide for public opinion," Mr. Zhang wrote. "Over the past few years, we put more effort and resources toward expanding the business, and did not take enough measures to supervise our platform." He added that Bytedance would expand its team for monitoring content to 10,000 people from 6,000 currently. The company's travails show how the government in Beijing has broadened its restrictions on what people see and say on the internet. Regulators are increasingly suppressing content that they deem pornographic or in poor taste, and not merely material that touches on politically sensitive topics such as regime change or personal freedoms. The authorities are also scrambling to keep up as a new wave of Chinese apps, many of them built around short, spontaneously recorded video clips or live streams, helps people communicate and express themselves in new and hard to supervise ways. Bytedance which investors valued at more than 30 billion recently, putting it more in the financial league of Airbnb or SpaceX than of Buzzfeed or Vice has assembled a confederation of these buzzy new apps. And it has made no secret of its desire to dominate phone screens across the rest of the world, too. The company says it uses artificial intelligence technology to figure out what users like, then makes sure they are fed more and more of it. Read a few articles on the trade spat between the United States and China, and soon your Toutiao feed will be populated with news on international relations. Watch a bunch of stand up comedy shows, and before long the app will suggest new comics who might appeal. Bytedance has spent top dollar hiring engineers and software experts to fine tune its recommendation technology. "It's like having a chef in your house who knows what kind of food you like," said Xu Qinglu, a 22 year old student and Toutiao user in Beijing. "I think the app is not harmful," she added. "The people who use it should be responsible for their own behavior." At an event in Beijing last month, Mr. Zhang said he hoped that more than half of the company's users would come from outside China within the next three years. At the moment, he said, one in 10 of its users was overseas. First, though, the company needs to continue thriving in China. Bytedance's detractors say that salty, unwholesome material the sort that has the Chinese government on edge these days is exactly what the company's apps have specialized in, and is a major reason for its popularity. "Will a cleaned up Toutiao still have an edge?" said Neil Arora, an American investor who previously worked in venture capital in Beijing. "Toutiao's strong team, refined algorithms and locked in users may help it adapt," said Mr. Arora, who is not a Bytedance shareholder. "However, the bigger danger is that all news apps may lose out, with users pulling away from sanitized news feeds for entertainment elsewhere." Hans Tung of GGV Capital, a venture firm that operates in both China and the United States and is a Bytedance shareholder, said he was confident the company would continue to add more types of material not just the lowbrow kind to its platforms. "The Toutiao we see today is not the Toutiao it will be five years from now," he said. "It's better to go through this rodeo a few times," Mr. Tung said of the latest rebuke from regulators. This way, he said, the company will be motivated to move more quickly in courting users who want higher minded stuff. Toutiao aside, three other popular news apps including one run by Tencent, the giant Chinese conglomerate were also taken down from stores this week. Another fast growing video app, Kuaishou, was removed last week alongside Huoshan, and also for featuring videos made by teenage mothers. In response, Kuaishou's parent company said it would increase the size of its content monitoring team to 5,000 from 2,000. A posting from Kuaishou on one hiring website last week says the company is looking for people with bachelor's degrees or higher. Candidates with "good political awareness" and "strong political sensitivity and discernment" are preferred. Being a member of the Communist Party or Communist Youth League is also a plus, the listing says.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Downstairs at the Beverly Hilton hotel on Feb. 11, 2012, black cars delivered celebrities, among them Serena Williams, Britney Spears and Gayle King, to Clive Davis's annual Grammys party. Upstairs in Room 434, the coroner's office tended to the body of his biggest star, Whitney Houston, who had been found dead in the bathtub earlier that day. Police investigators removed empty bottles of liquor while the wails of her daughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown, could be heard down the hall. Chaka Khan later went on CNN and said Mr. Davis's decision to proceed with his party was an act of "complete insanity." "She was a lonely voice," he said of that criticism a few weeks ago, sitting in his corner office at Sony's new headquarters near Madison Square Park in New York. Mr. Davis, 85, is a legend in the music business. He signed Janis Joplin in 1967, turned Barry Manilow into a star in 1975 and orchestrated the reinvention of Aretha Franklin in 1980. Others he worked with over the years have included Patti Smith, Alicia Keys, Bruce Springsteen, Simon Garfunkel, Lou Reed and Carly Simon. Then came mixed reviews and the debut at the festival of "Whitney: Can I Be Me," a contrasting documentary that casts Ms. Houston as a victim of the music business's most base inclinations. (It is currently airing on Showtime.) Much like last year's Academy Award winning documentary "O.J.: Made in America," it raises difficult questions about race and arrives at the conclusion that there was a psychological cost to being a black superstar whose image was created with the express purpose of maximum crossover. Kenneth Reynolds, who worked at Arista, the label founded by Mr. Davis and on which Ms. Houston made her career, recounts how material that "was too black sounding was sent back." Kirk Whalum, who played saxophone on several of Ms. Houston's tours, describes a woman who became devastated to learn that black people were calling her "White ney" and a "sellout." Mr. Davis isn't the principal villain in this other film. There is much blame directed at Ms. Houston's mother, the gospel singer Cissy Houston, and various members of the Houston clan, who had been on her payroll for many years. Another powerful component of this documentary is the on camera testimony of more than a half dozen colleagues of Ms. Houston's, who say that the singer's spiral into addiction had as much to do with her sexuality as it did with race. Ms. Houston's relationship with Robyn Crawford, an essential person in her camp from before Ms. Houston became famous until 1999, was the subject of speculation and gossip. Now, the narrative that the two were lovers had gained real currency, even without confirmation from Ms. Crawford. When Aretha Franklin traded in the analog soul sound and distinctly political edge of her work at Atlantic for the consumerist, synthetic pop of Arista , The Washington Post described her first album there by saying "The queen of soul seems to be striving for a new role the queen of sap." The effect was sad, but few could deny Mr. Davis had an ear. Carly Simon also had a comeback with Arista. She adores Mr. Davis, who had some great advice for her over the years. But she also said, "His energy, his testosterone, all his hormones were ignited by having the biggest No. 1 records." She added: "He is on the side of the winner at all costs, and the cost can be very high. The cost can be somebody's career or somebody's innateness." Mr. Davis grew up in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, where he was a member of the high school honors society, which was called Arista. While he was in college at New York University, his parents died in close succession. It was devastating, but the loss turned out to be propulsive. "Life can change on a dime," he said. After Harvard Law School, he worked at a law firm, then joined CBS Records (later Columbia) in 1960 as one of two in house lawyers. At the time, its main business was classical music, Broadway cast albums and middle of the road pop singers. But profits were dropping. Mr. Davis understood that the future was in rock 'n' roll. Within seven years, at 35, he was running the label. At the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, he heard Janis Joplin and described it as almost like finding religion. Yet when she came to Columbia's offices and suggested that they seal the deal with a trip to bed, Mr. Davis demurred. In 1968 she finished her first album, and Mr. Davis thought that its single "Piece of My Heart" was too long and didn't repeat the chorus enough. He went into the studio and re edited it for radio on his own. He played his version for Ms. Joplin and gently coaxed her into allowing the label to release it. One might assume Ms. Crawford would have made an exit soon after the wedding. Instead, she remained for seven years as part of the management team, locked with Mr. Brown in what several people in "Whitney: Can I Be Me" describe as a battle for the ear of Ms. Houston. During that time, Mr. Davis receded somewhat from the picture. Ms. Houston starred in films that grappled more directly with African American issues but descended further into her own addiction. Whatever had led Ms. Houston to pick Mr. Brown, their addictions helped make it real. "It may have seemed dysfunctional, but that doesn't say anything about whether they loved each other," Mr. Edmonds said. "She loved him like crazy, and he loved her like crazy." She suffered an overdose during the making of the 1995 film "Waiting to Exhale." Then she pulled out of big promotional appearances for "The Preacher's Wife" because of "throat issues." "Money doesn't make you happy," she said. "Fame certainly doesn't make you happy. People will tell you that who are famous. You've got to find the happiness within yourself. You've got to know who you are before you step into this business, because if you're trying to find it, you'll probably wind up being somebody else that you probably don't even like." He wrote her a letter: "Dearest Whitney, you know my love for you goes beyond the professional nature of our relationship, which in and of itself is almost as long as the age you were when I met you. To put it succinctly, I am seriously concerned. I know that I have absolutely no right to reflect on anything but your professional recording career, so let me address that. You have not done a studio album in seven years. You have only recorded a total of seven pop songs during the last five years and those were chosen to integrate into the characters of two motion pictures. So insofar as your position as the number one contemporary recording artist in the world is concerned, you have been practically missing in action."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Barbie Ferreira is 20 not too young, it would seem, to feel nostalgia for a time when Coachella, the California music festival that for many marks the advent of spring, seemed rife with possibilities, not least the chance for sartorial self invention. "The last time I went, about two years ago," Ms. Ferreira, a model, said wistfully, "you'd see a lot of people wearing these craziest looks: allover fishnet, braided scarves, flowering head gear, tattoos and zigzagging body art and all kinds of mismatched chains. "The point was to be wild, to not look like everybody else." She was describing a way of dressing, and a state of mind, that rising numbers of retailers are scrambling to distill, a make it up as you go fashion moment massed under the rubric "festival style." Festival has parallels as well with the retail season billed as resort or cruise, the antiquated concept once aimed at older, affluent consumers planning their late winter getaways. "It's become the new cruise," said Marybeth Schmitt, the H M communications director for North America. "It sets up a fantasy, a younger person's vision of a holiday that's set not in the tropics but the desert." Among those exploiting the trend is Bloomingdale's, with embroidered denims, flouncy cross stitched peasant shirts and festival oriented collaborations with Beltaine, 7 for All Mankind and other brands. That selection, which goes on display next week in an in store boutique, is supplemented by an online "festival edit" and by an entire bank of zanily exuberant Lexington Avenue windows. "Festival it's sort of its own fashion season, much like prom is," said Liz Jones, a vice president and divisional merchandise manager at Bloomingdale's. "Consumers see it as a destination, a happening, something that millennials are planning on and imagining as part of their lives." Forgoing a store within a store, Neiman Marcus is operating an online only festival edit to lure younger customers. Other predominantly youth oriented merchants and fast fashion outposts include Zara, with its daisy embroidered tops, frayed denim minis and floral kimonos; Urban Outfitters, with a web based festival edit encompassing tube tops, cropped T shirts and leopard print shorts; and Topshop, offering sequined jumpsuits, crocheted bra tops and tasseled sundresses. Nor are cosmetics and accessories left out of the mix. Net a Porter and Forever 21 are promoting wares that include pearly foundation, glow in the dark sneakers and fringed Saint Laurent sandals. These days merchants, and designers, acknowledge the trend as a cultural bellwether, as was perhaps inevitable. The scene each year is densely populated by so called influencers: Zoe Kravitz, Emily Ratajkowski and Jaden Smith and their ubiquitous like, their media savvy followers inclined to copy every well placed ruff and frill on Instagram feeds of their own. "Festival has become one of our most important seasons," said Linda Chang, the vice president of merchandising at Forever 21. "It's anticipated by our customer. Starting in March, they come in specifically asking for a festival look." Among college age shoppers, the season has supplanted "spring break," a subcategory that, in the phrase of Jaclyn Johnson, a trend watcher and the chief executive of Create Cultivate, an online platform and conference series geared to digital entrepreneurs, "has become too cheesy and uncontrollable." Festival fashion has taken over the market, she said, getting the 18 to 21 demographic that luxury marketers tend to miss. Neiman Marcus, for one, is not about to take that chance. "Now that so many people are shopping online, the ability to editorialize is what attracts customers," said Ken Downing, the store's fashion director and senior vice president. Its website's magazinelike display type and photography aim to sell a concept, the idea of a look. "Festival season has its own sensibility," Mr. Downing said. Whether or not one actually decamps for the desert, a festival edit is a road map for young customers. It becomes their runway, one that is, he said, "less esoteric and arguably more relevant to the way they live." Still, there are skeptics who deplore the codification and rampant exploitation of a style that originated in 1960s counterculture. Rachel Zoe, who sells her own festival inflected fashions on her website, some with subtle references to Woodstock, remarked that today the granddaddy of festivals lives on primarily as a fantasy. As may be only fitting. "'Festival,' I call it karaoke culture," said Elisa Goodkind, a stylist turned author and social media entrepreneur. "It's a fake version of the real thing, commodified to the point that it's frozen." The stores themselves segregate items pink tulle maxiskirts, a metallic anorak, denim shorts, hoodies and slip dresses among them which are generally stripped of frills for added versatility. "We've homed in on a lot of cleaner things," said Joshua Kalipeni, a spokesman for the chain. "A lot of these things are meant to have a life beyond festivals. After all, once the season is over and done, where are you going to wear a fringed maxiskirt?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Timothy S. Naimi, an alcohol epidemiologist and professor at Boston University's Schools of Medicine and Public Health, said the one in 10 figure "is an impressive number and it's concerning." The number is "undoubtedly an underestimate," he added, because people tend to miscalculate how much they actually drink and heavy drinkers are less likely to be available or to be included in surveys for other reasons. Dr. Han said he hoped the study would emphasize the importance for clinicians to screen older patients for alcohol use and to educate them about how their bodies become more sensitive to alcohol as they age. The study did not examine the causes of excessive drinking or whether this number represents an increase or a decrease from previous years. However, Joseph J. Palamar, an associate professor at New York University School of Medicine and an author of the study, pointed to the cohort itself as a factor. "I believe that this is driven in part by the baby boomers aging," Dr. Palamar said, about a group that was more likely to experiment with drugs and alcohol than the generation before it. Dr. George F. Koob, the director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, one of the organizations that funded the study, said the findings confirmed trends they have been monitoring. In 2017, epidemiologists at the institute published a study using data from 2001 2 and 2012 13 that showed that problem drinking was rising among older Americans.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Every black southern family that I'm aware of has a cold case. The murder of a family member by a white man about which records might have disappeared or been deleted. It's family oral tradition that keeps the story alive. My grandfather, Mack Hopkins, was stabbed by a white man on July 9, 1934. He told my mother that when he arrived at Erlanger Hospital in Chattanooga, Tenn., he overheard a doctor say, "Let that nigger die." My mother was 16 at the time. My grandfather did die, and his killer remained free. His death was my first encounter with the criminal justice system. Now, I'm trying to gather details about the murder of his sister Ready, who died after being struck by a car in Anniston, Ala., in the 1960s, while walking down a road. The two young white men in the vehicle that killed her, who were probably drunk, told family witnesses that they thought that she was a telephone pole as though she never existed. What happened to Mack and Ready could have happened to any black person. Maybe a future Justice Department will reopen these files so the murderers no longer walk free. Like many black men, I've had numerous encounters with the police. Growing up in public housing, I learned at an early age that the Fourth Amendment didn't apply to my family or our neighbors. The police would burst into our apartments at any time they wished. I've had police draw guns on me. Once, in 1958, Buffalo police stopped a car in which my companions and I were riding and pointed guns at us. They'd mistaken us for some other blacks. In 1972, my wife and I were living in the Berkeley Hills neighborhood of Berkeley, Calif., while I worked on a novel. We used an advance from Doubleday to pay our bills. A policeman entered our small apartment with a gun drawn. He said he was investigating a homicide. But he left without any further discussion. I believe I'd aroused suspicion from the neighbors because I was a black man working at home. The same excuse was used when the police came to our apartment on St. Marks Place in Manhattan on more than one occasion in the summer of 1969. Perhaps it had something to with my association with an underground newspaper that reported on police brutality. Reading Natalie Robins' "Alien Ink: The F.B.I's War on Freedom of Expression," I learned that I may have been monitored by the F.B.I. in that era. William J. Maxwell wrote in "F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature," that many black writers of my generation were. In 1975, I was invited to do a reading of my poetry by the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa at the University of Colorado Boulder. Those chosen to put me up that night were two white men. They were wearing sweaters and seemed to be mimicking a counterculture style, but I noticed that they were a little too clean cut. The next day, as I was departing for the airport, one of my hosts told me that he had a bag of "good grass" as a gift to me. I rejected it. When I arrived at the Boulder airport, I was taken into a room. Officers inspected my carry on bag and found only pens and paper. (I was working on a review of a biography of Muhammad Ali for The New York Times.) The scariest incident, which I've written about over the years, including in "Another Day at the Front: Dispatches From the Race War," occurred in New York City. I was walking down the street in the company of two companions. Seeing two policeman exiting a restaurant holding bags, I quoted, in a voice loud enough that one of them heard me, from a recent report on police corruption that accused officers of accepting bribes. A few moments later, my friends and I were continuing our walk when suddenly a police car sped toward us. The cop who overheard me took me in a room and started punching me. We were taken to "The Tombs," a New York City jail that was so dark and dank it reminded me of a medieval prison. Later that day, the same cop came to my cell and offered me a deal. He said that if I pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct I'd only have to spend a weekend at Rikers Island. Thousands of poor people take deals like this, whether they're guilty or not. Unlike them, I was a member of a network of writers and artists, who put up the bail. I told him that I was going to obtain a lawyer. On the day of the trial, I put on my only suit. A three piece pinstriped number. If I was going down, I would go down with style. I took the stand and told the judge what happened, while the two policemen sat, alternately glaring at me and smirking. While I was telling the tale, I received encouraging looks from the blacks and Puerto Ricans in the courtroom. They knew the deal. The judge pronounced me guilty but then left the courtroom without sentencing me. My lawyer said that he'd never seen anything like it. In 1967, shortly after arriving in Los Angeles from New York, I was walking to the library. Suddenly, plainclothes officers jumped out of a car. They grabbed a pouch that I was carrying. Finding only notes and a pen, they explained that they thought that it was a woman's purse. Before the detectives re entered their car, I said, "Gee, you can't even go to the library anymore." I get chills when I think about that remark. Given the actions of the Los Angeles police since then, I know I could have been brutally beaten. In the 1980s, I was driving home from a rehearsal of my play "Mother Hubbard" when the Berkeley police officers came bearing down on me. They said that somebody had robbed somebody. I was so tired I told them that I didn't feel like robbing anybody that night. When they found out who I was, they sped away. Years later, when I arrived at John Wayne Airport, in Orange County, Calif., as a guest of the California Institute of Technology, three officers followed me and the two professors, my escorts, into the parking lot. They identified themselves as narcotics detectives. They wanted to know why I'd chosen a different exit from the other passengers. The explanation was simple: The other passengers had to pick up their luggage while I had only a carry on; I was scheduled to return to Oakland, Calif., the same day. But the situation got tense. One of my escorts, the professor and magazine publisher Kofi Natambu, said he thought that it was "going to go down." Did I insist upon my rights like Sandra Bland did when she was harassed by the police? No, I showed them the contents of my bag because I didn't want them to plant narcotics on me en route to the police station. I've had a number of encounters with the police since then. They've occurred mostly at traffic stops, even near the campus police at the University of California, Berkeley where I taught for 36 years. I've been followed by campus security at the California College of the Arts where I now teach. I'm well aware that the privileged white males who monopolize the news and opinion space would probably call me paranoid. The legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin has written that racism in law enforcement, which he admits has "persisted for many decades of American life," has "led to a tradition of black hostility to officialdom," and "fostered a mode of conspiratorial thinking that outstrips reality." But having lived in an Oakland ghetto for 40 years, I've seen a side of the police that has escaped the scrutiny of those who comment about race from Cambridge, Mass., and the Georgetown section of Washington. In my neighborhood, before it became gentrified, black residents were often pulled over for not coming to a full stop. Once, when it happened to me, my fine was 100. When I arrived at the Oakland courthouse, I found that all of those who were there to pay penalties were either black or Latinx. Not long ago, my wife and I decided to take time off from errands to take a walk in Oakland's lovely Mountain View Cemetery, a well known landmark. I was lying on the grass before a mausoleum. It was a beautiful California day. Next to me was a bed of roses. I had Randi Rhodes on my earphones. Perfect. Here come the cops. I pointed them out to my wife. She said "maybe it's a coincidence." I told her that when we left they'd leave, too. Which is exactly what happened.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
THE BUYERS Stephen Bailey and Adrienne Cheatham at home in their new apartment in a Harlem high rise. She is a chef, so the kitchen was all important. Around three years ago, Adrienne Cheatham took a seat next to Stephen Bailey at Vinateria, a wine bar in Harlem. They started talking. They started dating. Last summer, they began planning their wedding. Both were renting in Harlem; Ms. Cheatham, a studio, and Mr. Bailey, a one bedroom in a condo building. "It was a good bachelor pad, but it wasn't a long term kind of solution," said Mr. Bailey, a graduate of Emory University and Yale Law School, and the founder and chief executive officer of execonline.com, which offers online leadership programs to organizations. The couple's priority was the kitchen. Ms. Cheatham, who like Mr. Bailey is in her 30s, is a chef and the founder of the SundayBest pop up dining series. She grew up in Chicago, helping out at the restaurants her mother managed, and later went to Florida A M University and the Institute of Culinary Education in New York. She was runner up on the most recent season of the Bravo TV show "Top Chef." "Gas was not negotiable," Ms. Cheatham said, but gas stoves are common in the city. Less common, but equally essential, was ample counter space. The couple's budget was wide: 1 million to 2 million or so. "They wanted to see what value they would get at different price ranges," Mr. Chukudebelu said. To their surprise, they ran into a lot of problematic layouts. In one place, a renovation had turned two small bedrooms into one large one, and the dining room had become a bedroom, with a shuttered window open to the kitchen a floor plan that seemed awkward to them. The couple looked at a three bedroom in a building on West 124th Street, but decided the kitchen was too small. Katherine Marks for The New York Times An early contender was a three bedroom of nearly 2,000 square feet with a rooftop view, in a boutique condominium building on West 124th Street. The price was just under 2.2 million, with monthly charges of about 1,500. They weren't happy, however, with the allocation of space. "The living room was so huge you could have carved out five more feet, which would have made the kitchen so much better," Ms. Cheatham said. But the price was at the top of their budget, and the couple decided not to pursue the apartment. A three bedroom condo with 1,300 square feet on Frederick Douglass Boulevard was listed for 1.625 million, with monthly charges of less than 1,000. The views were great, but again the layout was odd. The living room was triangular, with a blunted point. They couldn't figure out how they would arrange their furniture. They also visited a three bedroom on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, but the triangular living room ruled it out. Katherine Marks for The New York Times The couple went to see a glassy condo building a bit farther east with plenty of amenities. There, they visited a three bedroom with around 1,450 square feet, listed for a little more than 1.8 million. But on a higher floor, a two bedroom with similar square footage was listed for a lower price, 1.699 million. They were curious about the apportionment of space, but the place had been rented out and was not yet being shown. "Amuche was able to work his magic and get us in" to see it, Mr. Bailey said, "even though they weren't ready to show it." The apartment the couple chose is in a 10 year old building with a 24 hour doorman, a gym and a bike room. Katherine Marks for The New York Times As they entered, Ms. Cheatham said, "Stephen walked straight to the windows, and I was looking at the counter space." The place had a larger living and dining area than the three bedroom downstairs and a view that took in New Jersey. The counter space was more than enough. Still, Ms. Cheatham hesitated at the idea of two bedrooms rather than three. "Did we want to sacrifice a bedroom for more open space in the main area?" she wondered. The couple bought the unit last fall for 1.6 million; monthly charges are about 1,000. Then they began a renovation that included the replacement of all the kitchen appliances. They moved in just before their March wedding in New Orleans, Mr. Bailey's hometown. Ms. Cheatham, who began her career as a pastry cook, baked the wedding cake. Their new Sub Zero refrigerator regulates temperature, humidity and airflow. "Even blackberries, which have a short shelf life, don't mold for, like, two weeks," Ms. Cheatham said. "We travel and leave some groceries in the fridge, and they are still fine." They added a 110 bottle Sub Zero wine cooler. "Both of us are huge wine lovers," Mr. Bailey said. "We met over a glass of wine." The kitchen sink has a Moen professional faucet that "has nice water pressure and a nice high arc, so it stays out of the way if I need to get in the sink to cut octopus apart or scale some fish," Ms. Cheatham said. And she chose a Viking stove. "I needed something that had higher B.T.U.'s," she said. "You can heat things up faster if you have more firepower, so if I have a large pan, I have a large fire that can get my whole pan hot." Recently, the couple gave a dinner for 15, and both kitchen and living room were up to the job. "We love the place so much," Mr. Bailey said. "Do we really live here? You have to remind yourself you are not crashing in someone else's apartment. I love it even more because I know that Adrienne loves it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Infectious passion for dancing has been the special thrill of New York City Ballet since the start of this year, and during the spring season that ended on Sunday the level kept rising. The sheer danciness of Alexei Ratmansky's "Namouna: A Grand Divertissement" on opening night was irresistible. Justin Peck's new "Everywhere We Go," the season's big premiere, had weak aspects, yet just look at how its cast was dancing its heart out! No wonder it won ovations. And the dancing in the season's 11 Balanchine ballets (13 if you count the "Jewels" trilogy as three) was frequently superb. It's just over seven years since I moved to New York for this job; this season was the company's best so far. Breakthroughs kept happening from artists at every level. Three young women beneath the principal level Ashley Laracey, Lauren Lovette and, especially, Ashly Isaacs made fresh, eloquent, impressive debuts in challenging ballerina roles. Russell Janzen's debut performance as the male protagonist of "Robert Schumann's 'Davidsbundlertanze'" was the finest account of this role to date, and the next week he was finer yet. Mr. Janzen and Ms. Isaacs are both in the corps; many audience members didn't know who they were before 2014. Sara Mearns and Tiler Peck, now entering the high summers of their artistry, both reached an extraordinary series of new peaks that, again and again, made City Ballet the place to be this spring. Robert Fairchild's naturalness onstage and constant devotion to revealing everything in the choreography makes him the most beloved male dancer in New York. Though he's different in each role, people watch him as if he's their particular friend. Even the company's most seasoned dancers were making advances. Abi Stafford in June 1 's "Concerto Barocco" seemed eagerly to be taking major steps. Megan Fairchild made a "Who Cares?" debut in May that gave her a new kind of swing. In the "Midsummer Night's Dream" divertissement in June, she gave hints of aspects of calm legato phrasing and even arabesque line her dancing had lacked. As Helena in "Midsummer," Rebecca Krohn showed a new impetuous sweep. Jared Angle, often squiring Ms. Mearns at her most audacious, began to shake off his own customary cool (in the flourishes of the "Midsummer" divertissement he had real swagger); and the romantic chivalry he brings as Maria Kowroski's partner in "Davidsbundlertanze" made me notice that role more than ever before. Sure, there were exceptions from this springtime sparkle: Gonzalo Garcia and Ask la Cour remain principals who color all their roles gray, while the dancing of the soloist Megan LeCrone stays grim and spiky. There are steps notably the complex, beaten jump (called either cabriole/entrechat trois or jete battu), but also the fundamental step of Balanchine training, the battement tendu in which those of us who watched City Ballet in Balanchine's day recall an electric charge now missing. Several dancers tend to chase after the beat rather than anticipate it. Nonetheless, this season had virtuoso examples of dancers playing with time, balance and phrasing. In the "Fascinatin' Rhythm" solo in the June 1 "Who Cares?," Ms. Peck went beyond her own extraordinary skill, lingering where there is no time to linger and then speeding with bewildering velocity. Ms. Mearns found heart stopping hesitations in "Davidsbundlertanze" and, at the opposite end of the spectrum, an exhilarating full throttle coloratura in "Walpurgisnacht Ballet," contrasting huge off balance audacity with magisterial high speed footwork. Whether or not the dancers of yesteryear were even better, it was often easy to watch without being haunted by ghosts of performances past. City Ballet has, in Desdemona's words, a divided duty looking back to honor the legacies of Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, and looking forward by presenting more new choreography than any other important company. Many of us remember past seasons in which both aspects disappointed: the old looked old and gray while the new proved forgettable. And certainly Benjamin Millepied's "Nevermore" (2013), which had several performances this spring, is memorable solely for its ridiculously audible costumes. But all the Balanchine and Robbins ballets were seriously alive, while Justin Peck's new "Everywhere We Go" faults notwithstanding is a truly substantial piece of work. The work has three main couples: Ms. Kowroski and Mr. Fairchild, Tiler Peck with Amar Ramasar, Stirling Hyltin and Andrew Veyette. Followers of the company will know that these couplings are unusual, yet here they look perfectly at ease. (This was the season when Mr. Ramasar bloomed into a valuable, ardent performer; this was the ballet in which he was at his best.) Each couple shows us a different kind of relationship, just as the group scenes cover moods from comedy to distress. On the one hand, Mr. Peck is saying "Life contains all this." On the other hand, less touchingly, he's saying, "Look how much ground I can cover." And tensions abound throughout the ballet: We're always aware that the choreographer is showing off his skill, but we're also aware that he's showing off his dancers, and new facets of them. Nothing here was more heartening than the fervor of the corps and soloists; it's been the hallmark of all of Mr. Peck's ballets for City Ballet. He's still a young choreographer. There remain questions that his work has not answered well. The most important ones are to do with music and musicality. How good is his taste in music? Large parts of Sufjan Stevens's score for "Everywhere We Go" do not repay repeated listening, and its Broadway brassy aspects seem disagreeably akin to the Busby Berkeley aspects of Mr. Peck's skill. How able is he to apply his skill to revealing the workings of music? Can he portray moods of intimacy and personal conflict? The Kowroski Fairchild and Peck Ramasar duets seem mere sketches of the dramas they might contain; at least one solo for Teresa Reichlen seems emptily showy; and the sequence in which the corps sits up and smiles at the audience is irksomely cute. But I don't want any passages cut; I merely long for some sections to be stronger. It's a big, ambitious, diverse spread; that's its real essence. And those dancers! There are jumps that happen too unexpectedly and too fast to analyze what they are, even when they get repeated, but what you can't miss is the intensity with which they're executed. Everyone onstage performs as if these moves were the breath of life.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Choosing one's words carefully: something every writer must do. This scrutiny can fatigue the people in our lives. "It ain't that deep, Dominique," I've been told by loved ones. But not to my kind of brain. It's all very deep. Growing up, I used to think in "novel speak." My mind would narrate my actions as if I were reading my own life. Because I had always wanted to be a writer, I liked the idea that someone would one day read my thoughts and every misunderstanding about me would be vindicated. I was certain that my thoughts were far too deep to be comprehended, and I would someday be persecuted for them. Then it happened. The first time I had to choose my words carefully. Eight years old. Second grade at Bates Academy in Detroit. And somehow in my grand imagination, I thought I was pregnant. Now I had no idea how one got pregnant. But that was inconsequential. I was convinced that it was very real, and that I better do something about it fast. It occurred to me in the middle of a reading lesson in Mrs. Hardamon's class. Typically, I loved this class. Not because Mrs. Hardamon was particularly sweet. She was a tough woman who expected a lot from 7 and 8 year olds. Talking when you were supposed to be doing your classwork, for instance, could mean you were put in a corner or forced to change your desk, possibly placing you next to your second grade arch enemy. But I loved Mrs. Hardamon's class, because we had lots of free reading time, and I was deeply into mysteries. Encyclopedia Brown and the Choose Your Own Adventure books were my jam. Mrs. Hardamon had us reading beyond our grade level, and rambunctiousness was not tolerated. Second grade was no place for games. On this fateful day, my stomach was hurting something awful. In hindsight, it was probably gas. Or an upset stomach mixed with gas. Whatever the case, my stomach was moving. What in the hell is moving inside of my stomach? OH. MY. GOD. I'm pregnant! This, I thought, is what it must feel like to have a baby moving inside of you. I should say that my mother, at this time, was also pregnant. I had placed my hand on her belly and felt my baby brother moving inside of her numerous times. I figured pregnancy must feel like whatever the hell was moving around in my own stomach. And I immediately started sweating bullets trying to contemplate how I was going to get out of this mess. I couldn't tell anyone. I knew that much. I had never, up to this point, considered how babies were conceived. All I knew was that if I stayed in school, did my homework, finished all of my reading assignments, and obeyed my parents and every other adult in the world, I was not supposed to get pregnant. So, I raised my hand. In the middle of the reading lesson. Mrs. Hardamon was sitting at the front of the class. The rest of us were following along in our textbooks as Kristalyn read aloud. (Side note: I had a rivalry going on with Kristalyn. During a black history performance, Mrs. Hardamon gave Kristalyn the part I wanted and made me her "understudy." I was still not over it.) So when I raised my hand during Kristalyn's turn to read, Mrs. Hardamon gave me the side eye. As if to say, "Dominique's being a hater again." She called on me, "What is it, Dominique?" "I need to go to the office. I'm not feeling well." Mrs. Hardamon was skeptical. Was this an excuse to play in the halls, as one was apt to do when bored with the reading lesson? "Describe how you're feeling." OH HELL. This was the moment of truth. Did this woman expect me to tell the entire second grade that I was pregnant? I would be stoned. Branded with the scarlet letter "P." And the most stressful thing about it? I had no idea how I got into this situation! You sit down for a reading lesson and poof you're preggers. I wanted to scream "I didn't do it!" But that almost always meant that you did. So I thought to myself, describe the feeling of pregnancy without actually indicting yourself. Choose your words carefully, sister. "It feels like..." I hesitated. "...something's going to burst from inside of me!" I waited nervously for her reply. Also, I wasn't sure how long it took for the baby to drop, but my stomach was moving furiously and I might go into labor right on these desks. Mrs. Hardamon got the picture. "Go! Take the pass." By the time I got home to my parents, I had been nursed and given Pepto Bismol and told everything would be O.K. in the morning. I never did tell them I believed I was pregnant. As long as I could get away without exposing myself, I would. My words had spared me social persecution. And fortunately, Pepto seemed to be the cure for young pregnancy. Unfortunately, it wasn't the cure for the 12 year old foster girl in my neighborhood who I later discovered was really pregnant. By then I was 14 and still just as baffled. I knew I'd never be able to find the words to explain her situation to myself or anyone else. There would be years of neglect and abuse and trauma trapped inside of that tale and it was the sort of mystery that would remain unsolved for generations. I always hoped that somehow the right words would soothe whatever went unhealed in her world and in my own. And that someday I would discover a language to defy any limitations, for myself, for the people in my neighborhood, and for all the second graders out there in need of magic words to get them out of the deepest troubles. It is the ongoing quest of my writing career.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Mariah Carey, the superstar singer who has lived in the public eye for three decades, has acknowledged that, in 2001, she learned that she had bipolar disorder. Ms. Carey disclosed the diagnosis in an interview with People magazine's editor in chief, Jess Cagle. A preview of the magazine's cover story was published online Wednesday. The full interview will be available Friday. The interview marks one of the first instances in which a celebrity of Ms. Carey's stature has acknowledged her struggles with mental illness. In the interview, she explained why she had not previously revealed the diagnosis. "I didn't want to carry around the stigma of a lifelong disease that would define me and potentially end my career," she said. "I was so terrified of losing everything." Ms. Carey said that she had lived in "denial and isolation and in constant fear someone would expose me," and that she had come forward after the burden became too heavy to bear. She is in therapy and taking medication for bipolar II disorder, a disease that can cause sudden and extreme shifts in mood, among other symptoms. People magazine declined to explain how the interview had come about, saying only that Ms. Carey had trusted Mr. Cagle to tell her story. A publicist for Ms. Carey did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Ms. Carey was a teenager in the late 1980s when she was recruited by Tommy Mottola, the president of what was then CBS Records, to become a pop star. Her fame was swift with the backing of the label, and that placed enormous pressure on her from the beginning. She spent long hours in the studio recording her debut, "Mariah Carey," and was nominated for four Grammys in 1991. She won two that year, including the award for best new artist. Her third album, 1993's "Music Box," was also an enormous commercial success. By 2000, Billboard had crowned her the artist of the decade. But the money behind Ms. Carey's rise led to suspicion. Industry observers questioned the singer's initial unwillingness to tour and asked whether her voice was less impressive than it sounded on record. The scrutiny increased in 1997, when Ms. Carey and Mr. Mottola parted ways, and she began to experiment with her style. In the summer of 2001, after a drawn out feud with her label, and the release of a new single, Ms. Carey was hospitalized for exhaustion. Soon after, her film project "Glitter" was released and widely panned by critics. The latter half of her career has been characterized by inconsistent performances, and a string of high profile relationships that have been obsessively covered by the tabloids. She retained her hitmaking abilities (the blockbuster songs "We Belong Together" and "Touch My Body" were released during this period). For many critics, Ms. Carey's music had become less of a focus than her public persona and live performances. In 2017, she was widely ridiculed for her failed lip syncing performance on ABC's "Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve With Ryan Seacrest" in Times Square. Ms. Carey's disclosure of her diagnosis follows admissions of mental health problems by other celebrities. Last year, Chrissy Teigen wrote an essay about her experience with postpartum depression for Glamour magazine and Selena Gomez told Vogue about her struggles with anxiety and depression. But Ms. Carey started her career during a different era and her interview with Mr. Cagle breaks new ground. She told People that she had decided to speak partly on behalf of others who might be suffering. "I'm hopeful we can get to a place where the stigma is lifted from people going through anything alone," she said. "It can be incredibly isolating. It does not have to define you and I refuse to allow it to define me or control me."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Credit...Vincent Tullo for The New York Times They rehearse at night and learn choreography with breathtaking speed. They dance for crowds that extend into the thousands. Sure, New York City is home to lots of dance troupes, but if you're a dance fan these two groups may not even be on your radar. Don't be a snob. The Brooklynettes and the Knicks City Dancers perform intricate choreography during the breaks between quarters of pro basketball games, in arenas with 360 degree views. And they are not messing around. "I'm like, you just think we appear and it's perfect?" said Alyssa Quezada, the coach of the Knicks City Dancers, with a laugh. "Do you know how much work goes into it?" Hours before the players show up, the dancers measure their spacing on the court. (They use cracks and lines on the floor as a map for their spots.) And they must know their steps. At a recent Knicks City Dancers rehearsal, Ms. Quezada had a firm message: "Carve this into your muscle memory because we don't have time to go back over this a million times on Sunday" game day. Ms. Quezada runs a tight ship because she has to. The dancers are part time, so they have a lot of choreography to churn out. Her position as coach is part time, too. "I asked for that," she said, "because I want time to pursue other dance opportunities." In 2014, the Knicks City Dancers changed their approach, from 50 second routines rooted in pop, street jazz and hip hop, to 90 second numbers aligned more with Broadway or the Rockettes. Now the group's goal, Ms. Quezada said, is "to create a production a show in the middle of a basketball game." The Brooklynettes, with unabashed athleticism, stick (with certain exceptions) to choreography that lands in a hip hop and street jazz vein. The spirit is Brooklyn, and the routines range from one minute to 90 seconds. As for the tone? It depends. At a recent rehearsal, Adar Wellington, the Brooklynettes' coach and choreographer, brought more than high kicks for a new number. She brought a theme female empowerment. "For this one," she said, "I would like us to get into a character." She gave them a back story: You're a woman. Your boyfriend is bad news. "You think, what's the worst possible time to end this?" Ms. Wellington said. "Nets versus Knicks finals. Game seven. All his boys are over. You go to the bathroom, you gather your emotions and you come out and break out into this dance." But as Ms. Wellington explained during rehearsal, "The only thing that should be feminine" she marked the word with air quotes "is this." She turned to profile with deeply bent knees and rose while arching her back. "Everything else should be grounded," she said. "A more masculine approach." Though one is a glamorous throwback, the other urban and modern, the Knicks City Dancers and the Brooklynettes share a problem: How do you make a basketball crowd pay attention to dance? "Dynamics is huge here," Ms. Wellington said. "Because of the arena setting and it being in the round, it's important that the choreography reads from the very top row. A lot of choreographers that are very established they've worked in theater, in movies don't realize that it's just very different here until they get in and are like, Oh wait no one's going to see this little movement unless they're in the front row." She encourages outside choreographers to create big movement and prefers that transitions into new formations take as little as four counts. "There should never be any sections that are breathers," she added, referring to less strenuous moments when a dancer can catch her breath. "The entire thing should be jam packed." Marc Bauman, senior vice president and executive producer for in game entertainment at Madison Square Garden, was formerly the supervising producer at "Live from Lincoln Center." Early into his job at Madison Square Garden, he came to the conclusion that the choreography needed improving. "Before me, it had been two or three people rotating through," he said. "Sort of rinse and repeat." Now, higher profile choreographers work with the Knicks City Dancers, including Mandy Moore who did the dances for "La La Land" and Serge Onik of "So You Think You Can Dance." Mr. Bauman, who knows the dance world, would love it if Susan Stroman or Mark Morris would consider creating dances for the group. Ryan Heffington, who has choreographed Sia videos as well as the Netflix series "The O.A.," is on his wish list. With his theatrical background, Mr. Bauman has made other changes, like incorporating blackouts before performances to capture the crowd's attention. "It's all of it: The lighting, the costuming, the music selection," he said. "It's concise. The dance team has to have a shape." For him, shape refers to the choreography's point of view. "Some of that is precision, grace, the beauty of the line," Mr. Bauman continued, noting that for the great choreographer George Balanchine "the most beautiful part of the dancer's body was the hand." One way, both teams know, is through choreography with something to say and dancers who perform it with intention. At one point during the rehearsal for "Like a Boy," Ms. Wellington told her team "to be internal a little bit more, even though we're never internal." In the contest between subtle and strong, strong usually wins out when you're preparing for an arena show. Much of the dancers' attention is focused on performing stylized precision at breakneck speed rather than on nuance and details. But Kathryn Mulcahey, a Brooklynettes dancer and one of its three captains, said that there's another fundamental ingredient. "We want the energy and the vibe to be more important than our spacing," she said. "We have to feel each other. At the end of the day, we say to each other: 'Just dance.' "	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
A field of dead saigas in Kazakhstan in May 2015. The die off of the endangered antelopes was found to be caused by bacteria that somehow became harmful after particularly warm and wet weather. Among saiga antelopes, the month of May ought to be about new life. But in 2015, it was just the opposite for the Betpak Dala saiga population in central Kazakhstan. In only three weeks, about 220,000 of the critically endangered antelopes, most of them newborns and mothers that had gathered to calve, dropped dead across an area the size of Britain. In a study published today in Science Advances, researchers presented a preliminary account of the cause of the mysterious die off: Bacteria called Pasteurella multocida, which seem normally to exist harmlessly in saigas' tonsils, somehow invaded their guts, poisoning their blood and breaking down their organs, leading to death within a few hours. The mechanism that allowed the bacteria to become so harmful is still unclear, but the scientists believe it had something to do with a peculiarly wet and warm period before the outbreak. "One possible explanation might be that climate change is driving these events," said Richard Kock, a professor at the Royal Veterinary College in London and an author of the paper. There have been a series of such die offs in recent years, he noted, but the team found no evidence for these events before the 1980s. READ: Animals Die in Large Numbers, and Researchers Scratch Their Heads Scientists now need to model how climate change might affect saigas in the future, particularly if unusually wet and warm weather events become more common in their range. In the new study, Dr. Kock and his colleagues first confirmed that P. multocida was the immediate cause of death in 2015. They ruled out other pathogens and toxins (including Russian rocket chemicals, as a handful of ecologists had speculated). They found nothing significant in the soil or the vegetation the antelopes had been exposed to, and determined that the animals were not nutritionally deficient or immunosuppressed. What did show a strong correlation with the die off in 2015 as well as two similar events in 1981 and 1988 were the average relative humidity and average minimum temperatures in the 10 days leading up to mass mortality. During these 10 days, if relative humidity is greater than 80 percent, there's a strong possibility of outbreak, said Wendy Beauvais, a postdoctoral student in veterinary medicine at Cornell University and an author of the study. It's clear that an environmental trigger allowed the bacteria to wreak havoc, but how remains a mystery, Dr. Kock said. The 100 percent fatality rate that occurred in 2015 was unprecedented among similar outbreaks in other large mammals. "I've worked with many nasty things," he said. "You always get survivors." Another contributing factor may be the saiga's unique life history. Since females give births to unusually large calves, they tend to be stressed and more susceptible to disease during calving season. Furthermore, the antelopes have evolved specific mechanisms to deal with cycles of weather extremes in the Eurasian steppe, including their Seussian trunks, which facilitate heat exchange and keep out dust. The more "fine tuned" an animal is to specialized conditions, the more vulnerable it might be to change, Dr. Kock said. Going forward, conservationists perhaps won't be able to stop environmental change, but they can try to make sure the world's five saiga populations are resilient enough to cope with disease outbreaks, said E.J. Milner Gulland, a professor of biodiversity at Oxford and an author of the paper. This means managing other threats, such as encroachment on the saigas' habitat and poaching. "Saigas have a history of bouncing back," she said, "so we always have hope."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
The privately owned bridge between Progreso, Tex., and Nuevo Progreso, its Mexican neighbor, is one of the busiest exit points for American corn.Credit...George Etheredge for The New York Times The privately owned bridge between Progreso, Tex., and Nuevo Progreso, its Mexican neighbor, is one of the busiest exit points for American corn. RIO GRANDE CITY, Tex. Caught quite literally in the middle of the international debate over the way the United States trades with its southern neighbor are two Texans named Sam. Sam Vale and Sam Sparks Jr. own two bridges that stretch across the Rio Grande, connecting farmers on either side with markets on the other, and linking communities in South Texas and northern Mexico that sometimes meet in the middle. The majority of border bridges belong to the government. But the Sams are exceptions, private owners of crossings collecting tolls that can exceed 30 per truck. "We used to joke that if you want to own a bridge, you have to be named Sam, Sam or Uncle Sam," said Mr. Vale, who owns a two lane crossing in Rio Grande City, a bit more than an hour's drive from Mr. Sparks's four lane roadway. Both men are second generation bridge owners. But now their unique revenue stream could be in jeopardy. The Trump administration wrapped up a fifth round of wrangling over the North American Free Trade Agreement, or Nafta, this week in Mexico City. President Trump has pursued an aggressive rewrite, pushing to protect American workers and stem the flow of goods from Mexico. The focus on trade is exposing cracks of tension between the president and a constituency otherwise aligned with his economic instincts. Major retailers and manufacturers are mobilizing to keep the deal alive and to protest rules that could make it more expensive to bring parts and products in from Mexico. For the bridge moguls, anything that stanches the flow of traffic could be costly. Trucks carried 373 billion in cargo across bridges on the southern border last year, accounting for 71 percent of all trade in goods with Mexico, according to the American Trucking Association. "Nafta benefits this bridge big time," said Mr. Sparks, who voted for Mr. Trump. "We kind of want them to leave it alone." Mr. Sparks and his three siblings own the Progreso International Bridge, serving Progreso, Tex., a town blanketed by ranches and farmland. A border wall built on American soil runs through his property, and he can open it by punching a code into a keypad on its facade. The bridge is a study in a trade deal that has been a boon to some American farmers and hurt others. For American corn, Progreso is one of the busiest exit points in the country. Nafta was a windfall for American grain producers, who have more efficient operations than their Mexican counterparts. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. It's a different story for watermelons and onions, which are trucked in from the depths of Mexico, filling the northbound lanes of Mr. Sparks's bridge on their way to American stores. Fresh fruit and vegetable harvesters in the United States complain about competition from a neighbor that can grow some crops year round and pay farmhands much less. Mr. Sparks would like to see more trucks going south on his bridge, but he sees the give and take as unavoidable. "We export a lot of products through our bridge, and we get paid a toll, and we want that to continue," Mr. Sparks said. "But to do that we need fair trade. Mexico has to benefit from that. Canada has to benefit. If everyone is getting a good deal, it just works." Beyond the truck traffic, the town of Nuevo Progreso, at the southern end of Mr. Sparks's bridge, has found creative ways of cashing in on its proximity to Americans. There are abundant taco shops, tequila that can be bought and consumed in the streets, and many, many dental clinics. More than 100 dentists' offices cater to an American clientele seeking fillings and root canals at a fraction of the cost at home, along with 80 pharmacies offering pills and medical treatments at a cut rate. The attractions draw more than 800,000 pedestrians across Mr. Sparks's roadway every year, at a cost of 50 cents apiece. Some of them meet in the middle. Maria Maldonado lounged on a bench atop the bridge's walkway on a recent afternoon, facing a placard that announces the spot where Mexico ends and the United States begins. Ms. Maldonado, 33, lives in Nuevo Progreso and works in a taqueria there. She was waiting to meet her nephew, an American citizen who works as a carpenter 10 miles north of the border and has diabetes. "He wants medicine," she said, holding up two plastic bags, "and tortillas." Mr. Trump's hard line on immigration could eventually slow foot traffic, experts say, by discouraging tourists from Mexico. But proposals on the Nafta negotiating table would more directly affect trucks and what they carried. The administration has floated the idea of increasing the American made content in goods traded through the pact and requiring renegotiation every five years. Mr. Trump said last month that the United States might end the deal altogether. "Business loves certainty, and they aren't getting any," said Raymond Robertson, an economist at Texas A M University. Border bridges, he said, are "ground zero for Nafta trade, so if you start reducing the U.S. Mexico trade, it will hit them first." If it becomes expensive to send products north, Mexico could turn to one of the 45 countries with which it has free trade agreements. Long the leading destination for American corn, Mexico has increasingly turned to suppliers in Brazil to hedge against Mr. Trump's tough talk on trade. "If Mexico diversifies, what are these bridge operators going to do?" Mr. Robertson asked. It's a good bet that Mr. Vale will survive. The 74 year old took the reins of the Starr Camargo Bridge around 1980, when it was an unremarkable passageway, handling cars and pickups traveling between two impoverished towns. Then Nafta was signed in 1993, and the number of commercial trucks went from one a week to as many as 300 a day. Mr. Vale takes in around 4 million a year in tolls. (Mr. Sparks, 63, would not specify his revenue, but it is also in the millions.) Mr. Vale has also pursued an array of ventures beyond the bridge. A column of eighteen wheelers that were waiting to cross belongs to him, and so does the sand in them. He brought the dolomite limestone from a mine in Mexico, and it will travel to concrete producers and asphalt plants across South Texas, earning Mr. Vale millions each year. He owns about 60 acres around the bridge, and a railroad that runs through the property and links to a Union Pacific line. He is paid to transport pipes, lumber and sheet metal on rail cars that come in from a town a few miles away, but still on the American side. That mix of ventures has allowed Mr. Vale to indulge in some other pursuits. He drives a cherry red Mercedes Benz drop top with a license plate that reads "Cizzle." He has nine black German shepherds some of which were flown from Prague for breeding that live in climate controlled doghouses scattered across his properties. "Central air and heat, insulated cedar wood homes," he said. "Everybody has them in Texas." Mr. Vale does not love leaving Texas, but he has made six trips to Washington since the election to make his case to lawmakers. His pitch is simple: "Don't hurt the country, don't hurt the businesses that support you, Mr. President. Don't hurt the people who are critical to the economic survival of the United States."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
The French circus company Akoreakro was one of the more traditional acts at this year's Letni Letna festival of contemporary circus in Prague. It presented a show called "Dans ton coeur" ("In Your Heart"). PRAGUE This city has a well documented taste for the surreal. It is, after all, the home of Franz Kafka and the artist David Cerny, whose absurdist sculptures, dotted around town, include babies crawling vertically on a tower. It should come as no surprise, then, that a festival of contemporary circus complete with wacky characters and reality bending tricks has become one of Prague's top cultural events. Started in 2004, Letni Letna (a name combining the Czech word for "summer" with the name of the park where most performances take place) has grown steadily and drew 45,000 visitors last year. This summer, a bright lineup of Czech and international companies pitched their tents for the festival's 15th edition and gave a snapshot of a thriving genre. It is a significant development for the performing arts as a whole, because, as Letni Letna's family heavy crowds attested, circus still often acts as a gateway to theater and dance for younger audiences. In Letna Park, on a hill not far from Prague Castle, everything was designed to draw them in. Access to the festival grounds and some performances was free; circus workshops and other activities fostered a lively atmosphere during the day. And in the tents, the productions on display could rival much of the physical theater performed these days on proscenium stages. This year, Letni Letna welcomed a large contingent of companies from France, a country that has actively promoted its circus innovators. Three of them Betes de Foire, Cirque Inextremiste and Akoreakro could not have been more different in scale and tone, and yet each subverted expectations in delightful ways. Betes de Foire's show, "Petit theatre de gestes" ("Small Gesture Theater"), created by Laurent Cabrol and Elsa De Witte, is chamber circus: Its tiny tent accommodates just 140 spectators, shown to their seats by the duo themselves. The performance has the feel of a silent film: Ms. De Witte, a trained seamstress, runs what looks like an old fashioned workshop from behind her sewing machine, while Mr. Cabrol clowns and juggles to her cues. Both are veteran performers, and "Petit theatre de gestes" relies on the characters they create to set up an intimate atmosphere. The comedy is gentle and self deprecating, with little nods to circus traditions. Their poodle, Sokha, plays an unlikely circus animal too lazy to follow instructions, and puppets with wiry bodies and expressive painted faces get their own acrobatic displays. Cirque Inextremiste's sense of humor is far less politically correct. "Extension," created in 2014, brings gas tanks and an excavator to the stage, and revolves around the revenge of a paraplegic performer, the charismatic Remi Lecocq. His wheelchair is stolen by the two other performers at the start of the show, leaving him to hop around in a bucket. ("Extremites," Cirque Inextremiste's previous production, subjected Mr. Lecocq to similar jokes.) Mr. Lecocq returns with the excavator to wreak havoc on the thieves' balancing acts, performed with wooden planks positioned on the gas tanks. When the machine hauls one of the planks, and the two men, high up in the air and then spins them around, their devil may care nonchalance is as impressive as the feat of equilibrium. With Mr. Lecocq's fully realized character at the wheel, Cirque Inextremiste also does inclusiveness without the reverence so often reserved for disabled performers. Even after the curtain calls, this sardonic show can't resist one more uncomfortable joke: He reappears in his wheelchair as the janitor tasked with cleaning up confetti, and (jovially) makes the children in the audience feel guilty enough to join him. Akoreakro, which presented "Dans ton coeur" ("In Your Heart"), seems like a far more traditional circus troupe by comparison. It specializes in acrobatics, including trapeze acts, which require a larger cast. Unlike other companies at the festival, it also chose to bring in a theater director, Pierre Guillois, to shape this new production's narrative. "Dans ton coeur" loosely follows two factory workers who fall in love in a production line scene akin to the one in Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times." Their domestic life is set up in an entertaining section in which Claire Aldaya (the only woman in the cast) performs aerial tricks around the house; she has her heart broken when her partner cheats on her with a drag queen. (Who knew a trapeze could double as a sex swing?) Mr. Guillois and Akoreakro do well to integrate impressive feats into individual scenes, and they can rely on a live band for musical support throughout, but "Dans ton coeur" is a reminder that circus doesn't necessarily lend itself to realistic story lines. The characters have little depth, and their ultimate reconciliation is far less interesting than the final, virtuosic trapeze display. Ms. Aldaya also has to contend with scenes in which she is chased by menacing men. While she ultimately challenges them and is victorious, that's not exactly consistent with the character that's been set up. Since its inception, Letni Letna has also encouraged the development of contemporary circus in the Czech Republic, a country with a long mime tradition: Jean Gaspard Deburau, the 19th century mime who performed under the name Baptiste and was a key figure in Marcel Carne's film "Children of Paradise," was born in Bohemia (now Czech territory). Jiri Turek, Letni Letna's founder and director, is himself a former mime artist. Through the event, he has nurtured a number of young Czech companies that now tour abroad, including La Putyka (not present at the festival this year) and Losers Cirque Company. Losers Cirque Company is already a mature ensemble. The show it presented, "Vzduchem" ("Air"), was among the most poetic offerings, blending circus with contemporary dance. Its central character entertains dreams of flying, spurred on by an encounter with a quartet of birdlike performers. With vertical metal bars and a large net, they created a wistful, shifting landscape. Czech talent also populated the Children's Stage, a tent dedicated to the youngest audience members. Bratri v tricku (the Trick Brothers), a duo formed in 2009, brought offbeat energy to a juggling show, "Praseci cirkus" ("Pigs' Circus"), that featured flying pigs and pink flared pants. It was, like much of the contemporary circus at Letni Letna, character driven and compelling beyond the virtuosity on display. This takes some of the pressure off the performers: Even if a trick goes wrong (and some did, inevitably, over the weekend I was there), it's not the end of the performance. On the contrary, the magic that happens when circus skills and dramaturgy blend is as potent as any performance genre. Contemporary circus is neither lowbrow nor highbrow. It's merely good theater, and if children flock to it, so much the better.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
After taking over as the chief executive of Tribune Publishing in 2014, Jack Griffin withstood a string of controversies and criticisms and a decline in the company's share price to about 7 from nearly 25. The one thing he could not survive was a new investor who initially seemed like a potential savior. When Michael Ferro, a Chicago entrepreneur and the majority owner of The Chicago Sun Times, took a 44 million stake in Tribune Publishing in early February, many there thought the move might give Mr. Griffin more cash to pursue acquisitions and more leverage to stave off potential takeover bids. At the time, Mr. Griffin described the investment as one that would help Tribune Publishing execute its strategic plan. The company owns The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and The Hartford Courant, among other newspapers. Less than three weeks later, Mr. Griffin has been abruptly replaced. The news, first reported by Politico, was announced in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission early Tuesday. Mr. Griffin will be succeeded by Justin C. Dearborn, the former chief executive of Merge Healthcare, and a close associate of Mr. Ferro. Current and former Tribune Publishing staff members, speaking on condition of anonymity, attributed the move to Mr. Ferro. The company declined to comment on Mr. Griffin's departure. In a subsequent statement, Mr. Griffin said he had laid the foundation for the future success of the company and that "the timing is right for a new leader to come on board and lead Tribune Publishing through its next phase of transformation." Mr. Griffin helped oversee Tribune Publishing's spinoff from its own parent company, now called Tribune Media, after years of turmoil. But he has been criticized recently by, among others, current and former members of the staff, and by civic leaders in Los Angeles, for cost cutting that they said endangered The Times and for the lack of a clear plan to turn around the company's newspapers. They are struggling, as are many in the industry, as precipitous downturns in print advertising are not being made up by digital revenue. In a memo to staff members on Tuesday, the company said that Mr. Dearborn believed "that Tribune Publishing has a significant opportunity to leverage technology to increase the value of our content and distribution channels." Before his appointment, Mr. Dearborn accompanied Mr. Ferro to some Tribune Publishing meetings, according to a person briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity. 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. Mr. Ferro, who also became board chairman upon making his investment, said in a statement, "The board thanks Jack Griffin for his significant contributions and wishes him the best of luck in his future endeavors." Robert Feder, who operates an independent website and has covered the news media in Chicago for decades, said it seemed clear that Mr. Ferro was "carrying out a strategy that he had planned from the beginning to take over the company." Mr. Ferro, he said, was expected to make further executive changes, which could include "most of the people who were top executives around Griffin." The plans, he said, could be unveiled early next month, around the time of the company's earnings call. Mr. Griffin's departure represents the latest upheaval for Tribune Publishing's newspapers. The Tribune Company, its corporate antecedent, was bought by the Chicago billionaire Sam Zell for 8.2 billion in 2008. Less than a year later, in the face of reports of erratic management, it tipped into bankruptcy, listing 7.6 billion in assets against a debt of 13 billion. In 2014, after years of dealing with the bankruptcy and its fallout, the company spun its newspaper assets out into a separate company, Tribune Publishing, which it left with 350 million in debt. Mr. Griffin, who had consulted on the company's spinoff, was appointed chief executive. The Los Angeles Times, its flagship newspaper, responsible for the largest portion of the company's revenue, has waged a continuing battle with its ownership through the years. Two former top editors including Dean Baquet, now the executive editor of The New York Times left after refusing to cut newsroom jobs. Despite their efforts, the newsroom, once staffed by 1,200 people, declined to about 500. And late last year, Mr. Griffin fired Austin Beutner, the recently appointed publisher of the newspaper, who had injected a sense of optimism into the newsroom, after the two disagreed about strategy. Many of those who protested Mr. Beutner's firing have held out hope that the Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad, who previously expressed an interest in leading a group to buy The Times as an act of civic benevolence, would do just that. It was not immediately clear on Tuesday what impact the change in Tribune leadership might have on the newspaper's future. In the Times newsroom on Tuesday the feeling was one of resignation from afar. The journalists, said one person who was there, had been through this before.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
They were told not to go to their schools or offices. Concerns about long lines and shortages had discouraged them from going shopping. They could not visit libraries or museums; no concerts or shows were being held. There were no sporting events on TV, and only so many times that they could watch "Love Is Blind." So, during an anxious weekend when the coronavirus outbreak had forced the closure of many cultural institutions and the cancellation of countless events, some Americans did what they still could to take their minds off the widespread uncertainty: They went to the movies. Though filmgoers did not turn out in overwhelming numbers a Friday afternoon showing of Ben Affleck's alcoholism recovery drama, "The Way Back," at the AMC Magic Johnson Harlem in Manhattan was attended by only one customer they came to sit in darkened rooms and escape into other people's stories because it was all they could think to do. Seated alone and well off to the side of a theater at Landmark's Century Center Cinema in Chicago, Mike Donovan, a 66 year old retiree and volunteer prison chaplain, explained that he had gone to a Friday matinee showing of the period drama "First Cow" practically out of habit. Across the country, movie fans went in search of a sense of normalcy and continuity, and cinemas did what they could to provide it. At the AMC Magic Johnson Harlem, employees wore plastic gloves to sell candy from concession stands and scrupulously wiped down touch screens on self service soda dispensers. "Into the Unknown," a power ballad from "Frozen 2," played loudly through the sound system of a largely empty lobby. Marion Johnson, accompanied by her 5 year old daughter, Karie, said they had gone there that afternoon from the West Farms neighborhood of the Bronx to see the Pixar movie "Onward." Explaining that her daughter's classes and after school activities had been canceled, she said, "Usually on Fridays, her school has Fun Fridays. I figured we'd do our own thing make our own Fun Friday." Johnson said that despite public warnings to avoid crowds and practice social distancing, she did not believe their movie outing was risky. "I was a little skeptical about going further downtown, to tell you the truth," she said. "But I don't see anything wrong with it." Still, they encountered a few tense moments, not all of which were supplied by the movie. "Somebody was coughing," Hurz said with a chuckle, "and I said, My God, I don't know how they could think of coming to this movie with a cough." At a theater in Inver Grove Heights, Minn., Denny and Peg Tetu said they planned to sit in the back row of their afternoon showing of the romantic drama "I Still Believe" and wipe down their seats with Lysol. Though the couple, both 84 year old retirees, said they had canceled a cruise they planned to take next month, they did not think twice about making this trip to their local cinema. "We just watched people come in and hoped that nobody sat close to us," said Denny Tetu, a former history teacher. About 10 other people were in the auditorium, seated widely apart. "We weren't even within 100 feet of anybody," said Peg Tetu, an ex medical technician. The weekend's box office total was 55.3 million, according to Comscore hitting a two decade low. But even before the coronavirus pandemic upended daily life, the movie business was already experiencing downturns this year. For the first 71 days in 2020, ticket sales at the North American box office stood at 1.74 billion, according to Paul Dergarabedian, a senior media analyst at Comscore. That figure, he said, represents a 5.6 percent decline from the same span in 2019, when 1.85 billion worth of tickets had been sold, and a steep 25 percent drop from that period in 2018, when 2.32 billion had been sold. Even if theaters continue to keep their doors open, prospects for the weeks to come aren't promising. Hollywood studios have begun delaying the openings of their most imminent releases. Those included potential blockbusters like "A Quiet Place Part II," the sequel to the hit 2018 horror film; a live action remake of the Disney animated feature "Mulan"; and "No Time to Die," the latest entry in the long running James Bond franchise. Production has been suspended on numerous other projects. For now, trailers for movies that are still slated for release in the spring and summer look like tantalizing windows onto a simpler, more orderly era. They held other, unexpected resonances, too: before a Friday night showing of the Vin Diesel action movie "Bloodshot" in South Orange, N.J., a pair of teenage girls laughed uneasily during a preview for the World War II drama "Greyhound," which features Tom Hanks, who disclosed Wednesday that he had tested positive for coronavirus. (Hanks received the diagnosis in Australia, where he had been working on a biopic about Elvis Presley.) But when a trailer for "Irresistible," a political satire written and directed by Jon Stewart, showed a Republican campaign operative licking the face of a Democratic rival, the gag was met with stony silence. Big chain theaters and art house cinemas alike implemented their own rules about social distancing. The box office at Film Forum displayed a sign listing coronavirus related precautions at the theater, which had restricted its seating capacity to 50 percent, in line with government recommendations. A notice in the men's bathroom advised patrons not to use the middle of three sinks if possible. (On Saturday evening, the theater announced that it would close the following day.) But a Friday afternoon showing of "The Passing of the Third Floor Back," a 1935 feature co written by Alma Reville, the wife and frequent collaborator of Alfred Hitchcock, was attended by 23 moviegoers, who mostly clustered in the front half of the tunnellike auditorium but were otherwise reasonably spread out. Lynne Sherman, 71, a semiretired patternmaker, said she had gone to the film because "I just like oddball black and white old films." She added, "I can't stay in my house all day." Bruce Eder, 64, a writer, said he had ventured out because he was a fan of the film's star, Conrad Veidt. Though the spread of coronavirus was in the forefront of everyone's mind, he said: "I don't feel personally jeopardized by it in any way, even though I'm in the age group that theoretically is more susceptible. I'm afraid that some of the reactions officially that are going on it's making me think of how we dealt with Vietnam. To save the village, we had to destroy it." At the evening showing of "Bloodshot" in South Orange, the spouses Richard and Yvette Martin, both 53, of Maplewood, N.J., said they went to see the film on a date night. "I'm not going to be in fear of doing my regular activities," Richard Martin said, noting with a laugh that his wife had a long, puffy winter jacket on with the hood up. "She grabbed the door with a piece of tissue," he said. "I am playing it safe. I have my hand sanitizer in the car. I washed my hands for 20 seconds with warm soap and water. Everything else is business as usual." "We didn't want to stay in the house tonight," Yvette Martin said. "We wanted to get out and do something different." Reporting was contributed by Brooks Barnes and Beandrea July in Los Angeles; Ben Kenigsberg and Jason Bailey in New York; Bruce Fretts in South Orange, N.J.; Scott Tobias in Chicago; Christina Capecchi in Inver Grove Heights, Minn.; Cameron R. Flatt in Columbia, Mo.; and Rebekah Zemansky in Phoenix.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
This article is part of a series aimed at helping you navigate life's opportunities and challenges. What else should we write about? Contact us: smarterliving nytimes.com. Solo travel, among other benefits, means never having to compromise your plans. But some destinations by virtue of language, ease of transportation, expense or level of hospitality offer easier going than others. Here are five spots around the globe that fit the bill. If you're looking for a beach adventure, look past the honeymoon and family focused all inclusive resorts that line the Caribbean coast of the Yucatan Peninsula, a.k.a. the Riviera Maya, and make your base the bustling town of Playa del Carmen. It has its own beach, of course, but also offers quick trips via ferry to Cozumel to snorkel the Mesoamerican Reef. By night, Playa, as it is called, offers loads of entertainment including open air restaurants, beachfront dance clubs and shops lining the pedestrian only Quinta Avenida that stay open late. Accommodations run from thrifty off the beach inns to grand beachfront resorts. Travelers bound for the Riviera Maya fly through Cancun, where the average ticket from the United States is down 36 percent this month to 339 round trip, according to the airfare prediction app Hopper. In about the same time it takes to fly from New York to Los Angeles, you could be tipping a Guinness in Ireland instead. "Dublin is perfect for first time solo travelers," Robert Firpo Cappiello, editor in chief of Budget Travel, a digital magazine, said in an email. "It is a quick flight, English is spoken everywhere, the city is easily navigable and the locals are incredibly welcoming and helpful." The Irish famously love their pubs, and no one will look sideways at a single traveler at Davy Byrnes, where the fictional Leopold Bloom of James Joyce's "Ulysses" drank. Tours abound; see the city the sporty way with Sight Jogging Dublin Tours. It's far and the language is indecipherable to many, but Thailand bundles unique culture, beautiful beaches and great value. In Southeast Asia in general, Mr. Firpo Cappiello said, "the travel infrastructure is very solid, and many of our readers have reported that they had an easy time getting around, meeting other solo travelers, and that English was spoken widely." Bangkok is a natural starting point and the gateway to the beaches south or hill country north. The nation's affordability is a big draw. "It is really inexpensive, so you can stay in luxury hotels for less than 50 a night as well as bungalows on the beach," Lisa Imogen Eldridge, who blogs about solo travel at GirlabouttheGlobe, said in an email. "Street food is fantastic and is less than 2 for fresh pad thai." The favorable exchange rate against the U.S. dollar 1 currently gets you 1.31 Canadian is a strong argument for Canada in general. With its relaxed West Coast vibe, diverse population, temperate climate and accessibility to natural attractions, Vancouver might be the country's most solo friendly city. For sporty types, Vancouver has its own temperate rain forest within city limits in Stanley Park. Or you can hike the Grouse Grind path up nearby Grouse Mountain. The city's food scene draws on the bounty of the Pacific Ocean and the province's eastern Okanagan wine country. Do a D.I.Y. progressive feast at the Granville Island Public Market, or hit trendy Yaletown and emerging Gastown for everything from oyster bars to a First Nations teahouse. For adventure travelers, Iceland offers rugged mountain hikes, thermal pools and whale watching. While Reykjavik can be expensive, getting there is not. Wow Air, an Iceland based carrier, offers free stopovers on flights between North America and Europe, so you can combine it with a Dublin trip for around 400 from Boston. "Iceland is one of my favorite countries for solo travelers," Matt Kepnes, who blogs about travel at Nomadic Matt, said in an email. "The locals are really friendly and welcoming to outsiders" and, he added, "it's the safest country in the world so you don't have to worry about crime." Some trips an African safari, for example, or the Inca Trail in Peru are harder to do on your own. Geckos Adventures is now offering guided tours for 18 to 29 year olds in exotic locales at relatively affordable prices. A nine day safari in Zimbabwe and South Africa, for example, starts at 915. The company says most of its guests are solo travelers, and it commonly pairs them with same sex roommates; if you require a single room, expect to pay a single supplement ( 170 in the case of the African safari). Want more? You might also like: The best tricks to save on airfare How to eat on a budget while traveling	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
The film scholar Thomas Elsaesser at a film Festival in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in 2017. "He was there when modern film studies was really beginning," a colleague said. Thomas Elsaesser, an influential German born film scholar and teacher whose writings brimmed with a fascination for Hollywood melodramas, the works of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Weimar era movies, died on Dec. 4 in Beijing. He was 76. His wife, Silvia Vega Llona, said he had been on a lecture tour in China and was found in his hotel room after he had failed to show up for an appearance. He later died of cardiac arrest in a hospital, she said. "I spoke to him a few hours before he died and he was fine," she said by phone. Mr. Elsaesser's many books and more than 200 essays established him, beginning in the mid 1970s, as a leading figure in film criticism. He also started and ran major film studies departments at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England, and the University of Amsterdam. "He was there when modern film studies was really beginning, when the understanding of film was switching from 'I like that film' to actually studying it," Dana Polan, a professor of cinema studies at New York University, said in a phone interview. In the early 1970s, Mr. Elsaesser (pronounced el SASS er) founded Monogram, a British film journal, where he wrote three essays about classical Hollywood films that built his international reputation. One essay, "Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama," analyzed films by the director Douglas Sirk, who was also German, and the "melancholy energy" that colors, sets and camera movements create in melodramas. "In the Hollywood melodrama, characters made for operettas play out the tragedies of mankind, which is how they experience the contradictions of American civilization," Mr. Elsaesser wrote. "Small wonder they are constantly baffled and amazed, as Lana Turner is in 'Imitation of Life,' about what is going on around them and within them." Mr. Elsaesser memorably described the melodramatic story of Mr. Sirk's "Written on the Wind" (1956): "Dorothy Malone wants Rock Hudson who wants Lauren Bacall who wants Robert Stack who just wants to die." An early essay by Mr. Elsaesser in "Fassbinder" (1976), edited by Tony Rayns, elevated the director's profile for English speaking cinephiles. Mr. Elsaesser's book "Fassbinder's Germany: History Identity Subject" (1996) offered a much broader assessment of his work. When he considered "Despair" (1978) in the Fassbinder volume, Mr. Elsaesser described the director's body of work as a "magnificent, but also always magnificently failing, efficiently deficient identity machine." Mr. Fassbinder's characters, he wrote, have "antagonistic doubles, each with a bewildering array of mirroring possibilities." Thomas Peter Elsaesser was born on June 22, 1943, in Berlin and moved to Mannheim with his family when he was about 8. His father, Hans, was an engineer for Siemens, the German industrial conglomerate. His mother, Trudell, was a landscape designer. As a boy, Thomas was introduced to Hollywood pictures by his maternal grandmother, who had a fondness for Burt Lancaster, and to European art films by his parents. "So I grew up with two apparently conflicting cinematic traditions," he said in an interview at a conference held in 2014 by the scholarly Society for Cinema and Media Studies. He had "a love of Hollywood movies, melodramas, weepies, action films," he said, "and a deep respect for European cinema at the same time." Mr. Elsaesser studied Russian and Polish literature at the University of Heidelberg before leaving for England, where he graduated from the University of Sussex with a bachelor's degree in English and French comparative literature. He had started a film magazine and ran a film club at the university. He spent eight months in Paris between 1967 and 1968 at studying further at the Cinematheque Francaise, the great film archive, where he recalled seeing 600 films and filling many bound notebooks with comments jotted down in the dark. He then returned to England, where he started a film journal, Brighton Film Review, which was succeeded by Monogram. He earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Sussex in 1971. His dissertation compared the histories of the French Revolution written by Jules Michelet and Thomas Carlyle. Mr. Elsaesser was hired by the University of East Anglia in 1972 and taught European Romanticism and literary modernism there. He soon added film courses to his workload and began the university's film studies department in 1976. He was the department's chairman for a decade before leaving to join the University of Amsterdam in 1991, where he built a vibrant film and television studies department. After retiring in 2008, he was a visiting professor at Columbia and Yale. His books also include "New German Cinema: A History" (1989), "Weimar Cinema and After" (2000), "European Cinema: Face to Face With Hollywood" (2005) and "Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses," with Malte Hagener (2010). In a tribute posted this month on the website of Necsus, a media studies journal, Mr. Hagener wrote that Mr. Elsaesser's intellectual curiosity had been "so immense and unstoppable that it could become threatening at times." A conversation with him was demanding, Mr. Hagener said, because "he kept on asking and pushing ahead." Mr. Elsaesser's relentlessness had its purpose, he added. "Film studies was not a game," he wrote. "It was no cinephile pub quiz we were involved in." In addition to his wife, who teaches art and history of documentary at the New School, Mr. Elsaesser is survived by his sister, Regine Elsaesser. After decades of writing about films, Mr. Elsaesser finally wrote and directed one: "The Sun Island" (2017), a documentary that used old family footage, letters and photographs to tell a complex story about his paternal grandfather, Martin, the chief architect of Frankfurt from 1925 to 1932; his grandmother Liesel; and Leberecht Migge, a landscape architect with whom she had an affair. Mr. Elsaesser was moved to create the film after plans were announced to structurally alter the historic Wholesale Market Hall in Frankfurt, which Martin Elsaesser had designed in the 1920s, to make way for the new headquarters of the European Central Bank, which opened in 2014. "I didn't suddenly discover that I wanted to be a filmmaker," he said in an interview in 2018. "I usually say I'm not a filmmaker; I just happened to make a film."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
In recent years, the U.S. government has considered removing protections for the Canada lynx, which has been listed as a threatened species. But a recent study in Washington State shows the medium size wild cat continues to be very much at risk in the Northwest. The largest scale survey of lynx in the state relied on 650 cameras triggered by motion detection. The cameras captured two million pictures during the summers of 2016 and 2017, which researchers and undergraduates at Washington State University then scanned looking for lynx. Led by Travis King, a graduate student, the team found the wild cats in only about 20 percent of 2,700 square miles of potential habitat, according to the study, published online last month in the Journal of Wildlife Management. "There was quite a bit of concern about lynx in the state, which is why we initiated this study," said Dan Thornton, a senior author of the study and an assistant professor at Washington State. "That concern is warranted given what we found." No one knows the exact number of lynx in the region, though the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife estimated in 2016 that there were about 54 animals, an estimate that Dr. Thornton's analysis supports. But the situation is probably even worse than what the Washington State team recorded just a few years ago, Dr. Thornton said. In 2018, catastrophic forest fires burned through some of the areas that still had lynx. The habitat area affected by the fires will likely take 20 to 40 years to recover, he said, by which point the climate will have warmed further and the lynx will be even less likely to move back in. "It becomes a spiral downward, which is what we're worried about," he said. The lynx population is believed to be healthy in Alaska and parts of Canada though there isn't a lot of solid research about lynx near the Canada United States border, or how they interact with populations in the lower 48 states, Dr. Thornton said. In Canada, it's still legal to hunt or trap the animal. Climate change is likely the main reason for the declining population, he and other lynx experts said, driving a combination of factors: warmer temperatures, which the cold adapted lynx don't like; forest fires; and less snow cover, which reduces the animal's competitive advantage and won't support its main prey, the snowshoe hare. "Many of us have been predicting that over the long term this species would be lost from most of its southern distribution," said Dennis Murray, a professor of biology at Trent University in Ontario, Canada, who was not involved in the study, though he has researched lynx for more than three decades. "Can anything be done? Probably not. We're probably stuck as bystanders, just watching this happen." But having information about the lynx's whereabouts is crucial for public policy, such as the government's decision about whether to delist the lynx, said Jeff Lewis, a conservation biologist at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. The lynx was added to the list of threatened species in 2000, Dr. Thornton said, because there was no management plan to protect it. Now, there is such a management plan, which is why the federal government is considering the delisting move. But the same factors reducing habitats in Washington are likely at play in Montana and Colorado, which also have lynx populations as far south as the animals can survive. "The long term trajectory is going to be a challenging one for lynx across their southern range," Dr. Thornton said. Dr. Lewis praised the new study for adding to existing knowledge, but said he'd also like data about the quality of the snowpack in the area, which determines whether snowshoe hares will stay and whether the lynx will lose its competitive advantage over other mid size cats, like bobcats and coyotes. "There are substantial unknowns and ongoing threats that play into this," Dr. Lewis said. "None is encouraging from the standpoint of lynx staying in Washington for the foreseeable future." Taking out top predators like the lynx can be disruptive to the entire ecosystem, Dr. Murray said. "This is really a good example of very wise use of taxpayer funds to help our understanding of how our planet is changing," he said, "and how we might able to mitigate some of those changes or at least forecast how our planet is going to change, so we know what to expect in the future."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
In the whodunit of the financial crisis, Wall Street executives have pointed the blame at all kinds of parties consumers who lied on their mortgage applications, investors who demanded access to risky mortgage bonds, and policy makers who kept interest rates low and failed to predict a housing market collapse. But a new defense has been mounted by a bank executive: my regulator told me to do it. This unusual rationale is presented by the bank executive in one of the few fraud suits brought against a mortgage banking official in the aftermath of the financial crisis the one filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission against Michael W. Perry, former chief executive of IndyMac Bancorp, which failed spectacularly in mid 2008. After being accused of fraud and misleading investors about his company's financial health just before it collapsed, Mr. Perry set up a Web site this fall to defend himself. In a document on the site, he said that a top official at the federal Office of Thrift Supervision, IndyMac's overseer, directed and approved an action related to the S.E.C.'s allegations. "It was O.T.S. who had the final say regarding IndyMac Bank's capital levels," Mr. Perry wrote. He went on to say that Darrel W. Dochow, former regional director for the Western region of the agency and a financial regulator for more than 30 years, had "specifically directed" Mr. Perry to backdate IndyMac's report to regulators to include an 18 million cash infusion that would make it appear well capitalized. The shift masked IndyMac's problems for any investors trying to assess its soundness and allowed it to continue attracting large deposits crucial to its operations. The S.E.C., in its suit against Mr. Perry, contends that more details about the cash infusion should have been disclosed, though the commission did not accuse him of accounting fraud. Mr. Dochow was not accused of wrongdoing by the commission or any other prosecutor, though his role has been criticized by the inspector general of the Treasury Department, which oversees some bank regulators. It does not appear that Mr. Perry's argument persuaded the commission to back off. The S.E.C., as is its custom, did not elaborate. A representative for Mr. Perry said he did not care to discuss the case further, but his lawyer described the lawsuit in an e mail as "exceedingly weak, unfair and meritless." Mr. Dochow, who retired as a regulator in 2009 at age 59, said: "There's a lot more than what's been written, but I can't talk. I could go to jail." The IndyMac collapse, with its multibillion dollar cost to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation fund, highlights the role played by federal overseers of financial companies in the years leading up to the crisis. It also raises questions about whether government officials should be held accountable for dubious conduct related to the failure of an institution and whether the government has avoided pursuing some cases because of the roles regulators have played. For years, some bank overseers have maintained cozy ties with the institutions they monitor, treating bankers like clients because of the fees that banks pay to be regulated. The Justice Department could not cite any regulator that it had named in a prosecution related to the crisis. However, Mr. Dochow's conduct was referred to Justice for possible criminal charges in 2009, according to Eric Thorson, the inspector general of the Treasury Department. Mr. Thorson said Mr. Dochow's action "was clearly improper and wrong." A spokeswoman for the Justice Department in Washington declined to comment on the case and on whether the department investigated regulators for possible wrongdoing. IndyMac is not the only institution whose questionable accounting was approved by regulators in recent years, though it is by far the largest of several highlighted by the Treasury inspector general. Even if regulators are involved in wrongdoing, they have some immunity. Internal disciplinary measures are rarely taken against regulators who perform badly in their jobs, say government officials. Some regulatory shortcomings may be chalked up to innocent mistakes and failures to spot problems. Still, some economists and lawyers would like the government to examine regulatory actions leading up to the financial crisis to determine whether officials actively participated in improper behavior. And, they say, in cases like Mr. Dochow's, penalties should be levied on overseers who acted improperly. "The word conspired needs to be used here," said Edward J. Kane, a finance professor and regulatory expert at Boston College who is familiar with the case. "Dochow conspired with IndyMac management to misrepresent this. He was trying to fool certainly the F.D.I.C. and the public, and anyone who lost a dollar as a creditor to this institution was harmed by relying on something they had every right to rely on." Longtime defense lawyers say one reason there have been so few prosecutions related to the credit crisis is because financial executives often solicited advice from outside parties like accountants and lawyers and experts shelter them from some potential charges because they can argue they relied on the advice. Regulatory advice may be a similar shelter against prosecution. Mr. Dochow had had a long run as a financial regulator when IndyMac ran into trouble. He started out in 1972 as an assistant national bank examiner with the Comptroller of the Currency. He rose through the ranks and in 1985, became a senior regulator with the Federal Home Loan Bank of Seattle and later with the Federal Home Loan Bank System's Office of Regulatory Activities in Washington. It was during his time in that office that Mr. Dochow played a central role in trying to stop a regulatory attempt to rein in Lincoln Savings and Loan, an Arizona institution run by Charles Keating, with 5.5 billion in assets. After regulators in San Francisco uncovered fraudulent sales and other improprieties at the institution, Mr. Dochow worked in Washington to avoid the issuance of a cease and desist order, the normal course of action in such a case, according to records handed over to Congress. The savings and loan institution failed in 1989 at significant cost to taxpayers, and Mr. Keating was convicted on multiple fraud charges, some later overturned. Mr. Dochow was demoted, according to a half dozen regulators who had worked with him, but remained a bank regulator. Once again, he worked his way up in the organization, which became the Office of Thrift Supervision. By September 2007, he had been promoted to head the Western region, reporting directly to the agency's top officials in Washington. In that position, Mr. Dochow oversaw a host of institutions that had dived headlong into risky mortgage lending. Among them were Countrywide Bank, IndyMac Bancorp and Washington Mutual, three of the most aggressive lenders and largest flameouts in the crisis. Mr. Dochow was known within the O.T.S. to be bank friendly. One former examiner said: "His approach was negotiating with the banks, as opposed to regulating the banks, and viewing them more as clients, as opposed to people or entities that needed to comply." According to three former examiners who worked with Mr. Dochow but who requested anonymity because they feared retaliation from regulatory colleagues, he would sometimes negotiate between the banks and their lower level O.T.S. overseers, arguing that an institution should be allowed to keep one component of its regulatory rating high if another was dropping. That way, the composite score representing a bank's financial standing, would change little, if at all. At other times, Mr. Dochow exhibited a close relationship with a savings and loan association when it was under investigation. In 2007, when the attorney general of New York was investigating Washington Mutual for its possible role in appraisal fraud, Mr. Dochow called Kerry K. Killinger, the institution's chief executive, to discuss the matter, according to e mail messages released by a Senate subcommittee in the spring of 2010. Washington Mutual had hired a law firm to do an internal investigation. Mr. Dochow told Mr. Killinger that he wanted to rely on Washington Mutual's investigation as much as possible as opposed to having O.T.S. officials do a completely separate one. Mr. Dochow told his superiors that he planned to leverage the Washington Mutual report but noted that "we need to be able to defend that we have done our own independent examination." Mr. Dochow retired in 2009, with his full government pension, according to the Treasury inspector general. Because of its woeful regulatory record during the recent mania, O.T.S. was abolished last summer. Of its remaining employees, 95 were transferred to the F.D.I.C., and 670 to the Comptroller's office. Michael Perry, once IndyMac's head, said he was following the direction of his federal regulator in misleading investors about his company's financial health. The S.E.C. case against Mr. Perry, IndyMac's longtime chief executive, and two former chief financial officer centers on disclosures made from February through mid May of 2008. The disclosures related mostly to IndyMac's capital and liquidity. The bank collapsed in July of that year and was taken over by the F.D.I.C., which had to pay insured depositors 10.7 billion. By early May, it had become clear inside IndyMac that it could no longer be considered "well capitalized" unless money was shifted from its holding company. This meant that IndyMac could not accept so called brokered deposits, large amounts of money from investors looking for the highest possible rates of return. Brokered deposits represented just over a third of IndyMac's deposits; without them, it would have been out of business. And so on May 9, Mr. Perry instructed his deputies to shift money into the bank from the holding company and account for 18 million of it as if it had been there on March 31. Mr. Dochow as well as IndyMac's auditors, Ernst Young, had signed off on the move, according to the Treasury inspector general. And Mr. Perry highlighted the regulatory approval in a document on his Web site. "Mr. Dochow, with full knowledge of the circumstances, communicated O.T.S.'s approval," Mr. Perry wrote. "Mr. Dochow also directed Mr. Perry to amend the bank's thrift financial report to reflect the 18 million receivable." D. Jean Veta, a partner at Covington Burling who represents Mr. Perry, said in an e mail message that IndyMac's financial statements followed accounting rules and that Mr. Perry "was a completely transparent leader who always favored more disclosure rather than less." But the O.T.S., the Comptroller's office and the inspector general's office at the Treasury Department have all said the backdating of the cash infusion was improper. Mr. Thorson, the Treasury inspector general, said last week that Mr. Perry and Ernst Young could reasonably say that they acted with permission of the O.T.S. "I'm sure they said 'O.K., that's the guy who calls the shots; the umpire has called the shots,' " Mr. Thorson said. Indeed, when asked about the IndyMac accounting, a spokesman for Ernst Young said last week that it was "approved by the bank's regulator, not Ernst Young." And there has been no enforcement action against the accounting firm. Mr. Thorson said that his referral for a case against Mr. Dochow was given to Ranee Katzenstein, an assistant United States attorney in Los Angeles, and that Ms. Katzenstein told his office she did not intend to pursue a prosecution. When reached by phone, Ms. Katzenstein declined to say why. A spokesman for her office said she could not discuss the case. The spokesman said the investigation into Mr. Dochow's actions was still open, although he cautioned that it might not yield a case. Mr. Dochow, interviewed only briefly in front of his home outside Seattle, said he could not talk, but added that "I'm not sure there's more to say." Regulators like Mr. Dochow, of course, would have the chance to publicly defend themselves if accusations against them ever resulted in court cases. It would be difficult and unusual for the Justice Department or the S.E.C. to bring a case against a bank regulator, longtime securities lawyers say. Regulators enjoy some immunity from allegations of wrongdoing under the Securities Exchange Act, which says that you cannot file a case against an officer of a United States agency for violation of a securities law if the officer was acting within the scope of the job. For financial regulators like Mr. Dochow, a conflict comes into play when banks run into trouble on one hand, regulators try to help banks maintain their stability. But, on the other hand, securities laws require companies to be transparent in their disclosures to public investors. Jeffrey M. Kaplan, a lawyer at Kaplan Walker in Princeton, N.J., said: "In a case of a regulator contributing to misrepresentations made to shareholders, you could have individual criminal liability. But those cases are pretty rare." More common are cases involving a bribe or another element of corruption. Congressional oversight could help identify regulatory misconduct, but such efforts have been less than fruitful. Indeed, when Senate investigators tried to get information about the capital backdating that O.T.S. had allowed at IndyMac and other institutions, officials from the agency were not forthcoming, said a former Senate aide who was not allowed to speak publicly about the investigation. Any financial crisis case that named a regulator probably would turn into a huge political battle, because it would question many of the nontransparent acts that bank regulators take while trying to save banks, said Denise Voigt Crawford, former commissioner of the Texas securities board and now a law professor at Texas Tech University. In any prosecution of bank regulators, she said, "you'd have the Justice Department in a fight with the policy goals of the Department of Treasury. Particularly in this environment, you know the banking regulators would fight it tooth and nail." Some longtime lawyers go further and say the overall scarcity of cases related to the financial crisis might be in part because regulators want to avoid scrutiny of their own kind. "It's not just one 30 year old wunderkind who was responsible for the financial crisis," said Dennis C. Vacco, who was the New York State attorney general in the 1990s and now is a lawyer at Lippes Mathias Wexler Friedman. "Once you start pulling the string through in these complex cases, you might be surprised what you find at the other end." Mr. Vacco continued: "What's at the end of the string? The defense may be that 'at the highest echelons of the financial institutions, we were in regular contact with the government.' "	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
She had taken care of her husband for the last eight years of his life, through his blindness, through cancer and heart failure. After he died in 2002, she sold the Long Island house they'd loved and shared, finding it too filled with memories, and moved to their country home in upstate New York. Friends thought Anne Schomaker was coping well with her loss, she recalled. "I volunteered, to get myself out and doing things, to fill the gaps," she said. "I had many interests." She traveled and even tried dating again. "But I wasn't really doing well," said Ms. Schomaker, 73. "I had terrible pangs of sadness and despondency. I was missing my husband so badly." Even after seeing a therapist, which helped, she suffered from nightmares and couldn't bear to hear arias from their favorite operas. "The pain just didn't go away," she said. The death of someone beloved often brings deep sadness. Usually, however, the intense grief of early mourning begins to ebb as months pass, and people alternate between continuing sorrow and a growing ability to rediscover life's pleasures. What distinguished Ms. Schomaker's suffering was its sheer duration. She had been mired in grief for nine years when she saw an announcement from Columbia University, where researchers who had developed a treatment for "complicated grief" were seeking participants in a study. Maybe this new approach could help, Ms. Schomaker thought. Complicated or prolonged grief can assail anyone, but it is a particular problem for older adults, because they suffer so many losses spouses, parents, siblings, friends. "It comes with bereavement," said Dr. Katherine Shear, the psychiatrist who led the Columbia University study. "And the prevalence of important losses is so much greater in people over 65." In a review in The New England Journal of Medicine earlier this year, Dr. Shear listed several symptoms characteristic of complicated grief: intense longing or yearning, preoccupying thoughts and memories and an inability to accept the loss and to imagine a future without the person who died. Often mourners with these symptoms are convinced that had they done something differently, they might have prevented the death. Severe and prolonged compared with typical reactions, complicated grief impairs the mourner's ability to function. "Adapting to loss is as much a part of us as grief itself," said Dr. Shear, who directs the Center for Complicated Grief at the Columbia University School of Social Work. With complicated grief, "something gets in the way of that adaptation," she said. "Something impedes the course of healing." How common is this prolonged grief? An epidemiological study of more than 2,500 people, conducted in Germany in 2009, put the proportion at nearly 7 percent, and at 9 percent among those over age 61. George A. Bonanno, director of the Loss, Trauma and Emotion Lab at Columbia University Teachers College, said the real figure might be closer to 10 to 15 percent. Dr. Bonanno, author of "The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss," argues that resilience is the typical response to the death of loved ones. Yet, he notes, "we always see a group of people who don't recover." The problem appears more likely when a death is sudden or violent; when the person who died was one's spouse, romantic partner or child; and when the bereaved person has a history of depression, anxiety or substance abuse. Defining this sort of grief has engendered some professional disagreement. What criteria distinguish complicated grief from depression or anxiety? When does normal grief become prolonged? Researchers disagree on even the condition's name. The American Psychiatric Association, in the latest version of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, declined to classify complicated grief as a mental disorder and instead included "persistent complex bereavement related disorder" in an appendix for further study. The fifth edition, published in 2013, sets 12 months as the point past which continued symptoms of intense grief may constitute a disorder, although Dr. Shear and other researchers had proposed a threshold of six months. Some experts have argued that the available evidence doesn't support a clear distinction between longer than average grieving and mental illness. "Does psychiatry need to continually label the range of normal human emotions as disorders?" Jerome C. Wakefield, a professor of social work and psychiatry at New York University, said in an interview. By diagnosing complicated grief just six months after a death, he said, "you'll get a lot of normal people receiving treatment they don't need," including drugs. Dr. Shear also worries about "pathologizing" normal emotions. But when a woman remains unable to leave her home or answer the phone four years after the death of her adult son, as was true of one patient, something has clearly gone wrong. "If you're worried about what you're experiencing, if you're not getting more engaged in life and people around you are saying, 'Honey, stop wallowing in it,' why not get some help?" Dr. Shear said. Complicated grief therapy, developed by her center, showed greater effectiveness among older adults than interpersonal psychotherapy in a clinical trial. Subjects, including Ms. Schomaker, were given a scale with statements measuring responses to loss like "I think about this person so much that it's hard for me to do the things I normally do," and "I feel that life is empty without the person who died." Their high scores indicated complicated grief.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Trust the experts, the saying goes. But what happens when the experts can't be trusted? That's the question wealthy investors are asking after a string of cases in which advisers or sellers with blue chip reputations have been accused of either staggering incompetence or outright fraud that led to multimillion dollar losses. Unwitting buyers have been left with forged paintings that were promoted as undiscovered Modernist masterpieces, counterfeit wines and even an apparently faulty estate plan that caused a 2.7 billion yes, billion tax bill from the Internal Revenue Service. "I think there is a real assumption that when you go to top professionals you're going to get top advice, and that's a fallacy in a lot of different professions from accounting to law to medicine," said Andrew Stoltmann, a securities lawyer in Chicago, who represents people who lost money in bad investments. While faith in the experts is often justified, it is not an infallible strategy. The estate plan, for example, was created by Deloitte Tax, a unit of one of the country's biggest consulting and accounting firms. According to a lawsuit filed in September in Manhattan Supreme Court by the family of William Davidson, the former owner of the Detroit Pistons, Deloitte persuaded "Mr. Davidson to undergo a drastic reworking of his existing estate plan by using highly risky techniques, many of which Deloitte Tax did not fully understand," both to generate large fees and serve as a "marquee" name that would attract other wealthy clients. The firm promised Mr. Davidson, who was then 86 and ailing, that he would "win if he lived, or win if he died," the complaint states, yet the "errors were so profound and so numerous that they reflect reckless indifference and gross negligence." The I.R.S. characterized the plan, which was completed just months before Mr. Davidson's death in 2009, as a tax dodge and ended up charging the estate 2.7 billion in taxes. After finally agreeing in July 2015 to a negotiated settlement of 457 million (on top of 168 million in estate taxes and 82 million in gift taxes already paid), the estate is seeking to recoup those losses by suing Deloitte for 500 million. Deloitte Tax said in a statement: "We are deeply committed to our clients and stand fully behind the services our team provided to Mr. Davidson. We filed a motion to dismiss this case and are confident we will prevail in this matter." Costly stumbles are common in the world of collecting. Dozens of art lovers, for example, were duped into spending millions on forged Jackson Pollocks, Mark Rothkos and Robert Motherwells sold by the Knoedler gallery, the oldest in New York before it closed in 2011, when details of the scandal began to surface. Several of the buyers who have gone to court to recover their money have accused the gallery and its former president, Ann Freedman, of conspiring to commit fraud. Both have maintained that they had no idea they were selling fakes. So far, six of the 10 suits brought have been settled. One of those still headed for trial was brought by Nicholas F. Taubman, a philanthropist and former ambassador to Romania, who bought a forged Clyfford Still for 4.3 million in 2005. Mr. Taubman and his wife, Eugenia, were saved from buying another fake in 2007 this one purportedly by Pollock by their lawyer, Daniel Weiner, who insisted on drawing up a contract that required Knoedler to attest to the painting's authenticity without qualification. The gallery refused, insisting in an email that this was not the way the art world conducted business. In fact, the gallery had already refunded 2 million to a previous buyer after the nonprofit International Foundation for Art Research would not certify it was created by Pollock. Mr. Weiner said that reports of several fake Pollocks as well as the absence of the painting in question from the definitive compendium of the artist's work, known as the catalogue raisonne, caused him to be especially cautious. "Can you imagine buying a house or a business without a contract?" Mr. Weiner said. People, he said, "have to have the courage to push back and say, 'That's not how I do it.'" It is not always clear whether the experts knowingly swindled clients, made an innocent mistake or were grossly negligent. Prosecute scammers can also be difficult because the victims often don't want to acknowledge they were fleeced. The billionaire William I. Koch is one of the few individuals who were open about getting swindled when buying vintage wine, including some that supposedly belonged to Thomas Jefferson. "As I have learned," he wrote in a court filing, "collectors who know they have purchased counterfeit wine frequently refuse to assist in uncovering the fraud because they are either embarrassed or because they simply want to get their money back." In September, a federal appeals court upheld a 1.15 million award that Mr. Koch won against Eric Greenberg, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and fellow wine lover, who sold him 24 bottles of fake Bordeaux at an auction in 2005. In upholding the award, which included punitive damages, the court rejected the argument that the onus was on Mr. Koch to verify his purchase and cited "evidence that the defendant intended to sell counterfeit wine, at auctions aimed at the public." Still, many experts and sellers try to insulate themselves from the fallout of mistakes or fraud by inserting disclaimers into contracts and invoices. The tactic may seem ridiculous in many cases. After all, no one buys a diamond at Tiffany Company and expects to hire a second expert to verify the gem is real. But it's an argument that is frequently trotted out in cases, including those involving Knoedler. In the end, when a lot of money is at stake, it makes sense not to just take anyone's word for it. "Don't just rely on reputation," Mr. Stoltmann said. "Get a second opinion."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Kyler Murray, left, and DeAndre Hopkins have had plenty of reasons to celebrate. Hopkins leads the N.F.L. in receptions (57) and yards (704). Murray leads in total offense and is tied for first in touchdowns with seven. The Arizona Cardinals are the latest team to challenge the "N.F.L. establishment." They are dangerous subversives with a thrilling dual threat quarterback and a slick upstart coach whose gimmicky system is all dessert and no vegetables. They may be fun to watch, but conventional wisdom nervously warns that they won't amount to anything until they grow out of their rebellious phase. The Cardinals beat the previously undefeated Seattle Seahawks, 37 34, on Sunday night in a chaotic overtime thriller which played out like an overstimulated preschooler's breathless synopsis of a superhero movie. They humiliated the shame spiraling Dallas Cowboys, 38 10, the previous Monday night. Those nationally televised victories lifted the Cardinals' record to 5 2 and heralded their arrival as rising voices in the N.F.L.'s tactical revolution. Quarterback Kyler Murray is so gifted and unconventional that he makes Lamar Jackson look like a man in a gray flannel suit. Coach Kliff Kingsbury's offense is full of collegiate spread formations and intricate play designs. By N.F.L. norms and standards, the Cardinals rely too heavily on sandlot gadgetry and took too many risks when building their roster and coaching staff. Yet they are in the thick of the playoff chase just two seasons after bottoming out, at a point when typical rebuilding teams are still losing regularly while their coaches mutter about "changing the culture." The 2018 Cardinals were both terrible and dull, with Rosen showing minimal promise while executing archconservative game plans. The team's 3 13 finish left General Manager Steve Keim with the top pick in the 2019 draft and the choice between pulling the plug on Wilks and Rosen or cautiously squandering the prescribed extra year or two to confirm the many doubts surrounding them. Keim chose not only to reboot, but also to tune in, drop out and turn on. The Cardinals replaced Wilks with Kingsbury, then a 39 year old with a losing record as Texas Tech's head coach and the carefully sculpted beard of a millennial who patronized all the trendiest podcast sponsors. Keim and Kingsbury then traded Rosen and drafted Murray, the 2018 Heisman Trophy winner who started for just one season at Oklahoma, had already signed a minor league baseball contract and stood just over 5 foot 10 if you stretched the measuring tape. Fears that Murray would dash back to baseball or shatter after his first sack proved unfounded. Yet it was clear from their 2019 N.F.L. debut a 27 27 tie against the stodgy, mediocre Detroit Lions that Kingsbury and Murray would do things differently. Kingsbury deploys four or more wide receivers roughly four times as often as the typical offensive play caller, and only the Baltimore Ravens' Jackson executes more designed quarterback runs than Murray, according to Sports Info Solutions. Kingsbury stacks and spreads receivers all over the field and conceals easy short throws beneath layers of misdirection, while Murray dodges defenders and launches rockets like a video game character. Last season's results were more entertaining than effective, and the Cardinals finished with a 5 10 1 record. This year's Cardinals roster is far stronger. Keim pilfered a three time All Pro wide receiver, DeAndre Hopkins, via a trade during one of the former Houston Texans generalissimo Bill O'Brien's fits of self sabotage; Hopkins leads the N.F.L. in receptions (57) and yards (704). New superstars are emerging, too, most notably Budda Baker, an undersize ball hawking defensive back. Meanwhile, the 37 year old wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald, a holdover from the days when Kurt Warner was the team's quarterback, grooves along with the vibe like a radical professor at a 1967 Jefferson Airplane concert. The Cardinals do not appear quite ready to be Super Bowl contenders this season: Their offensive line and defense are still rather shaky, and Murray's passing remains a little too scattershot. For now, they must settle for wreaking havoc on the playoff picture and leading the N.F.L. in sheer delight. Murray was caught by cameras laughing at Hopkins thriving in man to man coverage against Seattle on Sunday night before he lofted a 35 yard touchdown pass. Kingsbury told reporters after the game that he and Murray shared a chuckle on the sideline over how it had unfolded much like in their college days. In some ways, Kingsbury and Murray are merely following in the footsteps of Mahomes and Andy Reid of the Kansas City Chiefs and Jackson and John Harbaugh of the Ravens by letting their spread formation, quarterback option freak flags fly. The Cardinals are nonconformists, just like everybody else. But they also take even greater organizational risks than the more established Chiefs and Ravens: a younger coach, a tinier quarterback, bolder trades, weirder play designs. The Cardinals are helping to redefine what's normal in the N.F.L. If they keep winning, the establishment will soon be forced to conform to them, not the other way around.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
SAN FRANCISCO A security loophole that would allow someone to add extra steps to the counter on your Fitbit monitor might seem harmless. But researchers say it points to the broader risks that come with technology's embedding into the nooks of our lives. On Tuesday, a group of computer security researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of South Carolina will demonstrate that they have found a vulnerability that allows them to take control of or surreptitiously influence devices through the tiny accelerometers that are standard components in consumer products like smartphones, fitness monitors and even automobiles. In their paper, the researchers describe how they added fake steps to a Fitbit fitness monitor and played a "malicious" music file from the speaker of a smartphone to control the phone's accelerometer. That allowed them to interfere with software that relies on the smartphone, like an app used to pilot a radio controlled toy car. "It's like the opera singer who hits the note to break a wine glass, only in our case, we can spell out words" and enter commands rather than just shut down the phone, said Kevin Fu, an author of the paper, who is also an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan and the chief executive of Virta Labs, a company that focuses on cybersecurity in health care. "You can think of it as a musical virus."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Now is the moment to ask: Do we really need to upgrade our iPhones every two years? Over more than a decade of writing about technology, reviewing a new iPhone has long been one of my simplest assignments. Year after year, the formula was this: I tested the most important new features of Apple's latest smartphone and assessed whether they were useful. Assuming the newest iPhone worked well, I generally recommended upgrading if you had owned your existing smartphone for two years. But with this review of the iPhone 11, 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max which Apple unveiled last week and will become available Friday I'm encouraging a different approach. The bottom line? It's time to reset our upgrade criteria. That's because we are now living in the golden age of smartphones, when the gadgets' improvements each year are far from seismic. Devices that debuted three years ago remain zippy and more than capable. Those with the iPhone 7 from 2016, for example, still have a very good phone with a stellar camera and fast speeds. So now is the moment to ask: Do we really need to upgrade our iPhones every two years? Based on my tests of the iPhone 11, 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max, the answer is no. Don't get me wrong: The newest models are nice. Apple has made them speedier, improved the cameras and lengthened their battery life. The new lineup also starts at a lower price of 700, down from 750 a year ago, which is a relief in an era of skyrocketing smartphone costs. But none of this is enough to warrant an immediate upgrade if you have had your smartphone for only two years. The latest iPhones just aren't a big leap forward from last year's iPhones or even the iPhone X from 2017. So here's what I ultimately suggest: You should definitely upgrade if your current device is at least five years old. The iPhone 11 models are all a significant step up from those introduced in 2014. But for everyone else with smartphones from 2015 or later, there is no rush to buy. Instead, there is more mileage and value to be had out of the excellent smartphone you already own. Comparing the iPhones 11s with the iPhone X Then I compared the results with my notes and photos from testing the iPhone X in 2017. What I found was that the iPhone 11 was better, but not profoundly so. Here were the notable differences between the iPhone 11s and the iPhone X: None All the iPhone 11 models have a new ultra wide angle lens in their cameras, which provides a wider field of view than traditional phone cameras. This makes them handy for shooting landscapes or large group gatherings. The iPhone X lacks the ultra wide angle lens, but its dual lens camera is capable of shooting portrait mode photos, which puts the picture's main subject in sharp focus while softly blurring the background. None The newest iPhones all have the same computing processor, A13 Bionic, which is about 50 percent faster than the iPhone X. While that may sound significant, the iPhone X is already incredibly fast at shooting photos and running apps and games. None The new iPhones all have longer battery life. Even after a day of heavy use, which included taking phone calls, using maps and shooting lots of photos, each iPhone had lots of juice remaining at least 30 percent by bedtime. After similar tests with an iPhone X two years ago, the battery had about 15 percent left by bedtime. None The back of the Pro models is composed of a rugged glass that makes them scratch resistant. This is impressive, but if you're spending 1,000 on a phone, you will probably protect it with a case that covers the back anyway just as many iPhone X owners do. None The Pro models have OLED displays that are slightly brighter than the screen on the iPhone X. There are lots of little things that are somewhat better on the new iPhones than on the two year old iPhone X. For early adopters who are keen to have the latest and greatest tech, those differences may add up to a substantial upgrade. But for most of us, the upgrades won't meaningfully change our phone experience. The most noteworthy new feature on the iPhones 11s is the ultra wide angle lens. Using the ultrawide mode is simple and seamless: You pinch outward to zoom all the way out. On a beach, the wider view captured my dogs playing on the sand, the ocean waves and the adjacent highway. The telephoto lens on the iPhone 11 Pro did an exceptional job zooming in on my dog Mochi's snout as she shook some water off her head. Photos taken with the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro looked crisp and clear, and their colors were accurate. But after I finished these tests, I looked back at my archived photos taken with an iPhone X. Those pictures, especially the ones shot with portrait mode, still looked impressive. Some of the low light ones looked crummy in comparison with the ones taken by the iPhone 11s, but I wouldn't recommend that you buy a new phone just to get better night photos. You could always just use flash. When should I upgrade then? Each year, the most common question I get from friends and colleagues is whether they should buy a new iPhone. So here's a list of considerations in any decision about upgrading. The simplest place to start is software. Apple's newest mobile operating system, iOS 13, will work only on iPhones from 2015 (the iPhone 6S) and later. So if you have an iPhone that is older than that, it is worth upgrading because once you can no longer update the operating system, some of your apps may stop working properly. For those with younger iPhones, there are ways to get more mileage out of your current device. While the newest iPhones have superb battery life several hours longer than the last generation a fresh battery in your existing gadget costs only 50 to 70 and will greatly extend its life. If you have the iPhone 6S from 2015 and the iPhone 7 from 2016, the iPhone 11s are speedier, with camera improvements and bigger displays. That makes an upgrade nice to have but not a must have.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Choire Sicha, the editor of the Styles desk at The Times, which reports on everything from weddings and fashion to social change and self care, discussed the tech he's using. What does your tech setup look like? And what do you do to make it look stylish? Like 19 out of 20 Americans, according to the Pew Research Center, I have a mobile phone. Like those belonging to three out of four Americans, according to the same, mine is a janky hand held device that I use for talking, playing games, reading, writing, taking photographs, keeping in touch with friends, checking weather, hate reading, Netflixing, learning chords to 1980s songs from websites that probably give me weird viruses and creating expressions of my identity to display to strangers across the internet. Why do we do that? I use this phone more than I use my office laptop. I use this phone more than I use any other device in my life, including my television. Sometimes instead of turning on the television I will just watch television on my phone. Don't tell David Lynch! I also should stop calling it my phone, because I do not make phone calls on it, because phones are fairly useless as phones and mostly because the phones are infested with incessant spam calls that apparently, as with school shootings, food borne illness incidents and the removal of registered voters from the rolls, we are incapable as a society of preventing in any way. Also, because I am on an Android phone (a Pixel XL), none of my friends will text with me, and it makes me sad. They love their beloved iMessage on their beloved, stupid iPhones. Companies don't care about us, or at least not me. They care about themselves (and about not paying taxes in America, and I get that, truly, I have been there myself). My phone does have a New York Fashion Week PopSocket on it, though, and I'm a real PopSocket convert! It makes reading in bed great again. What's so janky about your setup? What features or tools are on your wish list to make it better? It's agonizing and surreal that for this funny time window in human society there is an annual New Phone Season. Each year we are besieged by very barely updated versions of existing phones that are larger and more expensive than ever, and usually just as fragile. As the New Phone Season approaches each year it's usually September to October, when Google, Samsung, Apple and others either bring out or announce their annual lines one tries ever more desperately to time the death of one's primary digital device to coincide with it. And now the decision time is here, and I'm unhappy. The more I'm put in the position of deciding whether I will spend more than 1,000 on a "phone" (as the prime large size offering from each of the three major companies ends up being more than two weeks' take home pay for a Whole Foods employee) or daringly branch out into the slightly less premier brands, the more I realize how awful it is that these disgusting, beeping, needy Tamagotchis are my most constant companion. I have a more active friendship and, to be honest, romantic life with my phone than I do with almost any humans. Can this be good for me? Am I an experiment? At the very least I would like them to make digital devices that aren't incredibly fragile and scratchable. Right now, until they just punch the circuitry into the back of our skull, like the way they murder cows, we have to carry these things around as if they were tiny flat glass babies. Will I buy an iPhone? A Note 9? A Pixel 3? Will I buy a one way ticket off this crazy thing and set myself free? Not as long as I have a job, I suppose. Looks around office nervously In the end, as you can see in the pictures, I finally bought a Samsung Galaxy Note 9. The biggest trend around the world is that nearly every man now has a worn in rectangle in the front pocket of his jeans. I also predict that hand enlargement surgery for women will briefly become a trend until the time of the, you know, putting the phones into the skull bones. Then there are no more worries! What other tech product are you currently obsessed with? The majority of my tech use actually occurs while I sleep. I have a Wirecutter endorsed Coway air filter, which may or may not be doing anything but I love it to death, and a small symphony of Dyson fans and Bose noise machines that create an envelope of air and sound all around me, as if Kate Bush were constantly twirling at high speed while I dream the night away. This setup saves marriages and also soothes cats. If you sleep in silence next to someone, you are doing it wrong! The tongue of this whooshing envelope, if you will, actually intrudes into my person in the form of a small plastic mandibular advancement device. It's a kind of fancy mouth guard, and the technological arms race around sleep apnea is fascinating. For instance, while I was being fitted with this device it gently juts the jaw forward, basically, allowing you to breathe while you sleep and not rush toward death as quickly it was casually mentioned that if it didn't fit handily, they could install little bumps on my teeth that would fit into slots in the device, locking it in overnight, in a real steampunk nightmare of medical intervention. It fit. Does your lover or spouse report that your snoring is terrible? Do you feel exhausted in the morning? Do you feel like you have a cold all the time but you don't? Do you wake up suddenly at night screaming in panic? No, wait, that last one's normal. The rest of you, visit an otorhinolaryngologist today!	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
For the first time in its 150 year history, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has hired a full time Native American curator: Patricia Marroquin Norby. Dr. Norby who is of Purepecha heritage, an Indigenous population that primarily lives in Michoacan, Mexico will assume the role of associate curator of Native American art on Monday. She most recently served as senior executive and assistant director of the National Museum of the American Indian in New York. In a statement, Max Hollein, the Met's director, said of Dr. Norby: "We look forward to supporting her scholarship and programmatic collaborations with colleagues across the Met as well as with Indigenous communities throughout the region and continent." Before coming to the National Museum of the American Indian, which is part of the Smithsonian Institution, Dr. Norby was the director of the D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry, a research library in Chicago. She also worked as an assistant professor of American Indian studies at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, in American studies, with a specialization in Native American art history and visual culture.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Vases are vessels meant to hold cut flowers or other foliage. But they often work as decorative objects even when empty. "What I think is appealing about a vase shape is it's a little miniature piece of table architecture and really open to wild interpretation," said Richard Wright, the Chicago based auction house president and specialist in 20th and 21st century design. "I also think it's the type of piece where a designer feels a lot of freedom. It doesn't have to hold up a human being, it doesn't have to bear a lot of weight, it just has to hold some water." (And it doesn't even have to do that.) Andi Kovel and Justin Parker of Esque Studio in Portland, Ore., found freedom in blowing molten glass vases simultaneously and joining them before they cooled. At that point they continued blowing to puff up the size of the now double vase, which they call Pushmepullme. "The forming is a choreographed dance of fire, molten material and movement, and we both know our part of the dance to the point of pure instinct," Ms. Kovel said. Bari Ziperstein, of BZippy Company in Los Angeles, said she was interested in vases that "look like miniature Brutalist monuments or architectural relics," whether in use or not. Wyatt Little, a ceramic artist in Houston, makes vessels that resemble sneakers, old school computers and even a dryer vent that was inspired by a trip to a hardware store. "I fell in love with its shape, texture and flexible nature." Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, the curator of contemporary design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, said vases historically had served as markers of wealth, industrial progress and cultural style. She cited Ettore Sottsass's postmodern designs as "a great example of vases that represent a time, a movement and a consumer." Ditto for Dutch Delftware and Native American black ware pottery. "Vases quickly define the tools of our age through artistic expression," she said. "They are loaded with much more than just flowers." Juan Carlo Bermudez he goes by Carlo is so rarely seen without a hat that he feels compelled to announce that he has hair. The third generation member of a flower growing family in Colombia, Mr. Bermudez, 50, runs his business, Floresta, out of a plain brick building in Long Island City, N.Y. Floresta, which employs his niece and nephew, whom he is grooming to be the fourth generation, handles walk in requests for birthday bouquets and million dollar corporate events and weddings. A typical Floresta bouquet might have eucalyptus, berries, a succulent and an artichoke, or it might be an armload of fresh peonies tied with twine. His flowers often come not from Colombia or the Netherlands, but Okinawa, where blossoms are packed precisely and the sweet peas "are super sweet and delicate," he said. For this assignment, faced with an odd lot of vases, he said his job was not to compete with them, but to flatter them. "They are the bride," he said. He noted the radical differences in styles. "It was east, west, north, south," he said. But there were two he would buy.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Just as New Orleans gave birth to jazz around the turn of the 20th century, New York gave birth to a new sound in the '60s and '70s. It was music for dancing, a delirious blend of African and Caribbean sounds, peppered with polyrhythm. Its pioneers, mostly of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent, took those influences and created something new: salsa. (That's right, this stuff was made in New York City!) "Rhythm and Power: Salsa in New York," an exhibition opening Tuesday, June 13, at the Museum of the City of New York, explores this history in depth. Visitors will be able to see the dance's basic steps as well as more complicated movements in video projections. Also on view will be dozens of artifacts, from clothes worn by Celia Cruz to Tito Puente's timbales. A number of events are planned, including a walking tour of East Harlem and family dance parties. (Through Nov. 26; mcny.org.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
The first big event of New York Fashion Week, which officially begins on Thursday, was not the Tom Ford and Kanye West calendar breaking shows being held on Wednesday, but a Hillary Clinton fund raiser Tuesday night that drew a phalanx of fashion heavyweights. The event, a fashion show held at Spring Studios, a favorite Fashion Week venue, was co hosted by Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue, and attended by Michael Kors, Tory Burch, Diane von Furstenberg and Joseph Altuzarra, as well as others from fashion's A list. Also, it should be said, by several hundred members of the public who had paid 100 to 25,000 to see what turned out to be a parade of fancy T shirts orchestrated not only by Ms. Wintour but also by Chelsea Clinton and Huma Abedin, the top aide to the Democratic presidential candidate who recently separated from her husband, the disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner. After all, the show was not only a show: It was a fund raiser for the Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee and state candidates. And it was proof positive, as if any were needed, that caring about fashion and caring about politics are not antithetical. Plus, it was the first direct to consumer catwalk event of a season where a number of designers are experimenting with see now/shop now. After all, the T shirts created by 15 designers including Marc Jacobs, Ms. Burch, Ms. von Furstenberg and Marcus Wainwright of Rag Bone, and modeled by ballet dancers, members of the Marching Cobras New York band, and the Knicks player Carmelo Anthony and family (among others) are sold on the campaign's website for 45 to 60 each. Before the show, Chelsea Clinton wearing a T shirt designed by Ms. von Furstenberg with the words "Proud to support Mme President" scrawled across it, paired with simple black pants and black heels implored the crowd several times to encourage friends to register to vote, and to buy T shirts. As it turned out, there was a shirt option for pretty much everyone. A design from Georgina Chapman, half of the Marchesa design pair, featured black cursive lettering and beading on a dark gray background, and was paired with floor skimming ball gown skirts. Ms. Burch's print, worn by La La Anthony and others, had a rainbow colored font that spelled out "Women's Rights Are Human Rights." Jason Wu's was a mosaic of states in different shades of blue, seen not only on the runway but also on Ms. Wintour (who had the designer transform the print into a short sleeved A line dress) and on Ms. Abedin, who paired the T shirt with an orange skirt by Chris Gelinas. Maxwell Osborne of Public School who, with his creative partner, Dao Yi Chow, designed a simple black and white T shirt with the words "Make Herstory" printed across the front and "16" on the back, said he wanted to be part of the evening because, "as designers, our voices are only as loud as what we can do, and what we can do is design clothes." "I personally believe Hillary Clinton is the right candidate for us," Mr. Altuzarra added, clad in his own design, which reimagined the Clinton campaign's logo in a black and white optical print. "Having followed this election and its trials and tribulations, I think she is the strongest and most qualified person for the job." The woman in question was not at the event she was on the campaign trail in Tampa, Fla. which might underscore to some her personally uneasy relationship with fashion, but Grace Coddington, Vogue's editor at large, said that such a perceived ambivalence was probably a good thing. "If she was wearing the latest whatever, we'd all hate it," said Ms. Coddington, dressed in her usual black. "Honestly, she focuses on her job, which is much better." Mr. Osborne said he could relate to Mrs. Clinton's style. "It's very similar to mine: pretty easygoing and monotone," he said. "I'm sure she gets dressed really easily and as quickly as I do in the morning."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
The ocellated lizard known as the jeweled lacerta in the pet trade is born rusty brown with white polka dots. Within a few months, its skin begins to change into a dizzying, labyrinthine array of black and bright green pixels. By the time the lizard has sexually matured, reaching up to two feet in length, some 4,000 scales along its back are all black or green, possibly to accommodate a habitat change between early life and adulthood. Through the rest of the lizard's life, many of these scales will continually flip between black and green. These outfit changes are dazzling in their own right. But even more surprisingly, the lizard's patterns may unfold like a computer simulation, according to a study published in Nature on Wednesday. Studying ocellated lizards, Michel Milinkovitch, a professor of genetics and evolution at the University of Geneva, noticed the animals' scales seemed to behave like a cellular automaton, a rule based model often used in computer science. The general rule was that green scales tended to have four black neighbors, and black scales tended to have three green neighbors. Though cellular automata are commonly used to simulate biological systems on computers, this is the first example of a "living cellular automaton," said Dr. Milinkovitch, an author of the paper.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
From left: Eirini Vourloumis for The New York Times; Caitlin Ochs for The New York Times From left: Eirini Vourloumis for The New York Times; Caitlin Ochs for The New York Times Credit... From left: Eirini Vourloumis for The New York Times; Caitlin Ochs for The New York Times When my wife, Ann, gave me a food tour for my birthday on my first day in Athens a few years ago, I groaned inwardly. "Oh, great, thank you!" I said. I didn't have anything against food tours. I'd seen gaggles of food tourists in my Greenwich Village neighborhood, often clogging the sidewalk in front of Murray's Cheese with a guide shouting to be heard above the din on Bleecker Street, and they seemed to be having a swell time. But I've been writing about food for 25 years. I've authored many cookbooks, both my own and with revered chefs. I've worked as a professional cook and logged too many hours to count in some of the country's best kitchens. When I travel, I want to search out where the locals eat, and eat as they eat, among them, not isolated in a crowd of tourists. And not marching from one shop to another behind an umbrella toting guide. I didn't need a food tour. After introductions, Ms. Kolikopoulou produced a world map. We were about to taste Athens she said, and so we must first understand the cultural influences that swept through the area during the centuries since Socrates and Euclid trod the rocky Acropolis above us 2,500 years ago. Since then, Greece, a central shipping zone in the middle of the Mediterranean, has been buffeted by food cultures from all sides the Middle East, Africa and Europe and all influence the food. Our first stop was at a small stand in the square selling koulouri, the Middle Eastern sesame coated bread, a common breakfast snack on the go. We walked next to Karakoy Gulluoglu, a pastry shop. I'm not a fan of pastries, but when Ms. Kolikopoulou passed around tavuk gogsu, a sweet, vanilla custard with a bruleed top, and asked us to identify the main ingredient, I took the challenge. And was stumped. I would have found the main central market, Varvakios, on my own one of the best ways to know a city is through its markets. But I never would have sat in an all but empty diner within the market, Oinomageireio Epirus, to taste among other traditional dishes, patsas, a soup that came with a warning from Ms. Kolikopoulou that it wasn't for everyone: The tripe and hoof soup was the essence of barnyard and animal guts, an acquired taste. It was unlike anything I've tasted, and it made the portrait of Anthony Bourdain, then dead just two months, proudly displayed on the wall of the restaurant, especially poignant. This was his kind of food deep, nourishing, innardy, loaded with gelatin. Food that tastes of your own mortality. The tour concluded at Kafeneio Oraia Ellas, a coffee shop off Monastiraki Square, with a proper Greek coffee service, the coffee arriving in a briki, part of the Turkish influence on this country. The following afternoon, I reclined in a pool deck chair at our hotel, sipping a cocktail, enjoying an astonishing view of the Parthenon. How magnificent it appeared from afar against a cobalt sky. The site itself had been thronged with visitors when we'd gone, much of the grounds cordoned off by museum like roping, and I thought, "I know more about Athens, the feel, the manners, the ethos of the place from our food tour, than from hiking the Acropolis." Or, looking back on it, from any other single thing we would do in that ancient city. Mr. Lida, 60, and the author of "First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, Capital of the 21st Century," arrived early at our hotel in the Roma neighborhood, and we took an Uber to a narrow, decrepit street in the historic center of the city. Had I known to go here, I would have hesitated was it safe? (Perfectly safe, Mr. Lida assured us, as we ate a magnificent taco in a tiny shop called El Huequito). Did we know there was a significant Lebanese influence in Mexico City? Mr. Lida asked. We did not. Some 400,000 people, he said. Fifty yards down the street and around the corner, a young man cut thin slices of what looked like shawarma, but was in fact tacos al pastor: pork and spices piled high on a spit rotating before a fire. He cut slices directly onto soft tortillas, spooning two different salsas on them and handed them to us. Without doubt, it was the best taco I've ever had. Eventually we repaired to Bar La Opera, a perfect recreation of a belle epoque Parisian restaurant dating to 1895 when all the Americas looked to Europe for cultural clues. Here, over dark beer, the conversation came around to Frida Kahlo, whose house we'd visited the day before. "We're right around the corner from the National Palace," Mr. Lida said. "Where Diego Rivera's 'History of Mexico' mural is. Would you like me to see if we can get in?" In minutes we stood, in awe, before one of the greatest murals in the world, three huge walls a visual story of a country, novelistic in scope encircling a vast staircase. So this is where food tours lead, it occurred to me then from chicken custard in Athens to Diego Rivera in Mexico City. As Ms. Kolikopoulou had said, "Food is an international language. We can relate more easily to new places and people through food." Indeed, food is the only part of a culture that we take into our body, that becomes a part of us, enters our blood. Guides tend to do this work because they love food and are proud of their country. So, on a trip to Portugal, when we asked Andre Apolinario, our guide from Taste Porto, where the best suckling pig, leitao, was in his city, he shook his head. "Not in Porto," he said, and asked for my notebook. He wrote down the name of the restaurant and town, between Porto and Lisbon, where we were headed. Two days later we sat in the restaurant Mugasa, in suburban Largo da Feira Fogueira, having, yes, the best suckling pig we had ever had: tender meat, shatteringly crisp skin with, thanks to the server, the customary red sparkling wine Espumante, rather than the pinot noir I'd ordered. And from Portugal to, on another trip to Mexico, Santa Fe de la Laguna, outside the lovely town of Patzcuaro, a few hours west of Mexico City, where we ate in the home of Rosario Lucas, known in town as Nana Chayo, who is a cocinera tradicional; she earns part of the family's living cooking for tourists. She is among the Indigenous people in the state of Michoacan and prepared a traditional Purepecha meal. A bottle of local mezcal with two small glasses sat alongside the tortillas, which had been whole kernels of blue corn when we arrived, and the beef stew, churipo, she'd cooked in an earthenware pot over the flames of burning branches. This was a variation on a meal that's been consumed here for a thousand years or more. And here Ann and I sat, with our guide, Alejandro Vilchis, booked through our hotel, Casa Encantada, who had delivered us to this home. If you go to Patzcuaro someday, seek him out for personal tours. Ask him about his days as a bullfighter and he may take you out the next day for his favorite barbecue, chicken cooked on a spit leaning against a cement wall in front of an open fire, or suggest a visit to El Rosario to see the monarch migration. And as long as you are there, Diana Kennedy, a British expatriate, the "Julia Child of Mexican cuisine," is only 20 minutes away you can go say hello if she's up for it. We did all that with Mr. Vilchis on our visit. It was after 10 p.m. when we returned to Patzcuaro from this part of the journey, hungry again. A brightly lighted taco stand in the little square, Plaza Chica, had tacos Mr. Vilchis liked. Here we finished our day. Michael Ruhlman's most recent book is "From Scratch: 10 Meals, 175 Recipes and Dozens of Techniques You'll Use Over and Over." Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places list.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Gay Talese, whose comments on female writers at a conference in Boston put him in an unfamiliar forum on Twitter. On Friday, April 1, the 84 year old writer Gay Talese made his way from New York to Boston, where he was scheduled to speak at Boston University's "Power of Narrative" conference. Before boarding the Amtrak train at Penn Station, he made the acquaintance of a Red Cap agent, who recognized the author and told him how much he admired his famous 1966 Esquire profile, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold." On Sunday, April 3, the same Red Cap agent greeted Mr. Talese as he got off the return train. He told the author he heard he had gotten himself in trouble in Boston. Mr. Talese, who does not have a cellphone, much less a smartphone, and has remained aloof from social media, had no idea what the man was talking about. Back in Manhattan, he took a taxi to his Upper East Side townhouse, where he was greeted by his wife of 56 years, Nan A. Talese, the 82 year old editor and publisher who has run her own imprint, Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, since 1990. "Welcome home, darling," Mrs. Talese said. "You're all over Twitter." Checking the Internet, the author of such nonfiction classics as "The Kingdom and the Power" and "Honor Thy Father" found that for more than 24 hours, he had been the target of social media wrath. As he read tweets, he saw that it is not such a wonderful thing to be a trending topic on Twitter. The reason for the online pillorying arose from an onstage discussion Mr. Talese had taken part in the day before with Thomas Fiedler, the dean of Boston University's College of Communication. During the Q. and A. session, the poet Verandah Porche, one of the approximately 550 audience members, asked him, according to the transcript provided by Boston University, "In addition to Nora Ephron, who were the women who write who were most, who have inspired you most?" "Did I hear you say what women have inspired me most?" Mr. Talese said. "As writers," Mr. Talese said. "Uh, I'd say Mary McCarthy was one. I would, um, pause think pause of my generation pause um, none. I'll tell you why. I'm not sure it's true, it probably isn't true anymore, but my when I was young, maybe 30 or so, and always interested in exploratory journalism, long form, we would call it, women tended not, even good writers, women tended not to do that. Because being, I think, educated women, writerly women, don't want to, or do not feel comfortable dealing with strangers or people that I'm attracted to, sort of the offbeat characters, not reliable." After mentioning the unsavory types and criminals who have been his article subjects over the years, Mr. Talese said: "I think educated women want to deal with educated people. Well educated men are, like me, or almost despite education, would be comfortable with a lot of undereducated or, rather, antisocial figures. I think fiction, women are great writers." He went on to cite George Eliot and referred to "Middlemarch" as "one of the great books." After the talk, Mr. Talese attended a lunch and an evening cocktail party. While he was making chitchat, Twitter users were calling him sexist and out of touch. "In many ways Gay Talese is a revolutionary, in others he's an 84 yo guy from NJ," one tweet said. And this: "This keynote just became a case study in the deep thread of chauvinism that still runs through journalism." The hashtag womengaytaleseshouldread sprang up. Under this heading the longtime New Yorker writer Susan Orlean tweeted: "Lillian Ross. Joan Didion. Janet Malcolm. Jane Kramer. I'm just getting started here, folks." The day after his return, seated in the living room of his townhouse, Mr. Talese said it was all a misunderstanding. He said he believed the question posed to him concerned which female journalists had influenced him as a young, would be writer who was raised in an Ocean City, N.J., apartment that sat above his father's tailoring shop and his mother's dress shop. In those days, he said, his journalism heroes were sportswriters, especially Red Smith, who wrote back then for The New York Herald Tribune. But he said he was more drawn to the work of novelists including Carson McCullers, author of "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter." He said he tried to emulate her style in his early days as a reporter for The New York Times and he noted that he used a passage from her 1941 short story "The Jockey" to open the 2010 anthology of his own sports writing. "I stalled because I couldn't think of somebody when I was young and dreaming of being a journalist," Mr. Talese said, recalling the onstage moment in Boston. "I couldn't think of women journalists, but I could think of women writers. But this was nonfiction, and when I was in my formative years, there were no women in journalism who inspired me. The women who inspired me were fiction writers. "I was up there on that stage in Boston and I couldn't think of anybody," he continued. "So I said, 'None.' I was giving an honest answer. I wasn't going to be influenced by anybody at age 56 or 70 or 84. I'm not speaking about the writers of the feminist movement or the nonfiction writers for the 1970s or '80s. I'm talking about my formative years. I'm talking about ancient history now, but it's the only history I come out of. I wish someone on stage had asked me, 'What do you mean by that?'" A tweet that got under his skin was posted by a fellow keynote speaker at the conference, Nikole Hannah Jones, an investigative reporter who covers racial injustice for The New York Times Magazine: "It is inevitable: Your icons will always disappoint you." Mr. Talese said, "That's the one that truly hurt me." He added: "I'd like to talk to her sometime. Why did she have to ask for a selfie after what I said made her so upset? I want to know why. "They said people walked out. Why didn't she walk out? And she's a person of great personal achievement. She's a serious journalist, and I respect her. How could she be so duplicitous as to write me off with a quote?" As part of another tweet, Ms. Hannah Jones posted a photograph of the stylish shoes worn by Mr. Talese, who is a noted fashion plate. In reply to requests for comment, Ms. Hannah Jones said by email, "Thank you for reaching out, but I've said all that I am going to say about this." Mr. Talese said he does indeed admire the female writers of his generation and after Joan Didion, Janet Malcolm, Lillian Ross and Susan Sontag, among them. He also figures prominently in the recent HBO documentary on his friend Nora Ephron, "Everything is Copy," directed by her son Jacob Bernstein, a Times reporter. But these women, he added, did not shape him. "Gay is married to one of the top, most respected book editors in the business," said Susan Morrison, Mr. Talese's editor at The New Yorker, which has published a new Gay Talese story, "The Voyeur's Motel," in its April 11 issue. "He's raised two successful, independent daughters. He's not a misogynist by any measure. He's one of those senior writers like Lillian Ross, like Roger Angell, who are always interested in what young writers are doing reading them, encouraging them." In another critical tweet, Clara Jeffery, the editor in chief of Mother Jones, mentioned Ida B. Wells and Nellie Bly as examples of noteworthy women in journalism. Mr. Talese said that he wishes he had read their work when he was coming up, but he simply didn't know who they were. "If he had come out and said Nellie Bly, that would have been artificial," said a friend, the writer Katie Roiphe, the director of the New York University Cultural Reporting and Criticism program, who is collaborating with Mr. Talese on a book about his marriage. "He read what he read. The policing of inspiration and influence is really pathological. I believe it to be a feeding frenzy and sign of a debased discourse that passes for Internet culture. This is blood sport."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
I think it was the 50th anniversary of Woodstock last summer that finally pushed me over the edge. All summer long we'd been reliving the '60s. Again. There were the boomers, reminiscing about Howdy Doody, Vietnam, the Summer of Love. Watching all of this, I thought, well, damn. I don't have anything in common with these people at all. Which is awkward, because I too am a baby boomer. Or so I thought. Because then a friend of mine born, like me, in 1958 told me that we're not boomers. We're Generation Jones. It was a term I'd never heard before, although a quick internet search revealed that yes, Generation Jones is an actual thing. It refers to the second half of the baby boom, to a group of people born roughly from 1954 to 1965. We might be grouped with the baby boomers, but our formative experiences were profoundly different. If the zeitgeist of the boomers was optimism and revolution, the vibe of Gen Jones was cynicism and disappointment. Our formative years came in the wake of the 1973 oil shock, Watergate, the malaise of the Carter years and the Reagan recession of 1982. Above all, we resented the older boomers themselves who we were convinced had things so much easier, and in whose shadow we'd been forced to spend our entire lives. The fact that most people have never even heard of Generation Jones is the most Generation Jones thing about Generation Jones. But if you identify more with punk, funk or disco than, say, Elvis, Buddy Holly or the Beatles, you're a Joneser. Is "Leave It to Beaver" kind of a hazy memory, while "The Brady Bunch" is crystal clear? You're a Joneser. Were you too young for the draft (which ended in 1973) but too old to have to register for it (starting in 1979)? Was there a time when you cared more about CB radio than Twitter? Did you wear Earth Shoes? Were you less likely to protest the war than to streak? Hello, Mr. Jones. "Older boomers may have wanted to change the world," Richard Perez Pena wrote in these pages in 2014; "most of my peers just wanted to change the channel." The term was coined in 1999 by Jonathan Pontell, a cultural critic, who likes the double meaning of "Jones": not only the anonymity of it, but also the sense of yearning. And in an interview last week, Mr. Pontell told me he thinks that Generation Jones may play a crucial role in the 2020 election. Unlike older boomers, members of this generation are reliably conservative, perhaps because the traumas of the 1970s led us to distrust government. But Mr. Pontell thinks that Jonesers are now tipping to the left, for two reasons. First, Mr. Trump's fumbling response to the Covid 19 crisis has hurt him with Jonesers, who are part of the demographic most at risk from the disease. And then there is Mr. Trump's cruel mocking of Joe Biden's senior moments. "There are lots of seniors out there that also have senior moments," Mr. Pontell says. "They don't really like the president mocking those one bit." Donald Trump (who is, it should be noted, an older boomer) has been a fraud on so many levels, but if there's anything authentic about him, it's his air of grievance. It may have been this, Mr. Pontell says, that made Jonesers vote for him in 2016. Hillary Clinton, to them, was the epitome of older baby boomer entitlement, and if Mr. Trump stood for anything, it was for the very things Gen Jones most identifies with: jealousy, resentment, self pity. There's a word in Ireland, "begrudgery." Padraig O'Morain, writing in The Irish Times, says: "Behind a lot of this begrudgery lies the unexamined and unspoken assumption that there is only so much happiness to go around. And guess what? The others have too much and I have too little." I turned to the feminist author Susan Faludi a fellow Generation Joneser, born in 1959 for more insight. "I recognize the yearning/resenting description of that cohort," she told me. "Personally, I've always been in the yearning category a modern day Miniver Cheevy, 'born too late' to be in the thick of the '60s social justice movements, which I shamelessly romanticized. As a girl, I had, God help me, a suede fringe vest and a hippie doll that came with a sign that said 'You Turn Me On!'" But many Jonesers feel bitterness about the 1960s, Ms. Faludi said, not nostalgia: "Researching my book 'Stiffed,' I met many angry baby boomer men laid off workers, evangelicals, militiamen who felt they were slipping down the status ladder and blamed civil rights, antiwar, feminist and L.G.B.T. activism for their misery." Jonesers expected that as adults, we'd inherit the same wide open sense of opportunity as our older brothers and sisters. But when those opportunities dried up, we became begrudgers instead distrusting of government, nervous about change and fearful that creating opportunities for others would mean a diminishment of our own. And so instead of changing the world, we've helped to create this endless mess a result of the choices we've made, and in the voting booth not least. Damn. The more I think about it, the more I think I don't relate to Generation Jones either. But maybe not relating is what Generation Jonesers do best. "In a way," Ms. Faludi asked me, "aren't we all Generation Jonesers now, all still living in the unresolved rain shadow of the '60s, still fighting the same issues, still shouting the same chants ('What do we want?...')?" Maybe. But I'm hoping that this tumultuous, traumatic spring is finally the time Generation Jones and the rest of the country, too embraces the idea of transformational change. It's been 50 years now. Couldn't 2020, at long last, be the year we end the 1970s? We'll soon find out. Something's happening here, and you don't know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion

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