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For some artists, a blown deadline is a problem. For Kanye West, it is a marketing opportunity. After West missed a self imposed deadline a month ago to release his latest album, the gospel influenced "Jesus Is King," his fans went on high alert, tracking his every move and speculating about when, or whether, the album would ever come out. West further stoked the music and celebrity press by previewing the album at a series of public events, at which he portrayed the project as a major turning point. "This album has been made to be an expression of the gospel and to share the gospel and the truth of what Jesus has done to me," West told a Manhattan crowd late last month, after his first promised release date came and went. (To prevent leaks, fans' phones were secured in locked pouches.) "When I think of the goodness of Jesus and all that he does for me, my soul cries out." Thursday, Apple's Beats 1 online radio station broadcast a rambling two hour interview in which West declared himself "unquestionably, undoubtedly, the greatest human artist of all time," spoke about the roots of what he said was a "full on pornography addiction" and called his dispute with Drake "painful," but barely talked about "Jesus Is King." West then tweeted that the album was coming at midnight ... only to miss that deadline, too. (He was still working on a few songs, he said at 1:18 a.m.) Around noon on Friday, "Jesus Is King," his ninth LP, finally appeared on streaming services. But the album's chaotic rollout, and West's evolving persona, may be as important as the music itself. It is the latest in a series of strange and fascinating spectacles that began three years ago with "The Life of Pablo" an album he first teased at a fashion event at Madison Square Garden, then tweaked and revised even after it had been released to the public. West ended his "Pablo" tour abruptly after several truncated performances, and was hospitalized for a "psychiatric emergency." Then came controversy over his public support of President Trump. And, in comments promoting his 2018 album "Ye," West claimed that slavery in the United States was "a choice." (He later apologized.) Things have been quieter for West lately, as he has embraced religion and said that he stopped taking medication to treat bipolar disorder. The gospel themes on "Jesus Is King" draw on West's recent Sunday Services events, which began as invitation only performances but became part of mainstream culture when West brought one to Coachella on Easter Sunday, in April. The album features a gospel choir, performing with piano and organ, sometimes intermingled with hip hop beats and rapping by West. None of its 11 songs has explicit lyrics. One track, "Use This Gospel," features Kenny G, the smooth jazz saxophonist, whose involvement apparently came about after West hired him to perform for West's wife, Kim Kardashian West, at their home on Valentine's Day. By Friday afternoon, "Jesus Is King" was being promoted on the streets of New York through at least one roving purple bus playing the album through its speakers. Friday may have been a particularly important deadline for West: That is the release day for "Jesus Is King: A Kanye West Film," a 35 minute Imax documentary that follows West through a Sunday Service performance at an installation in Arizona by James Turrell, the visual artist known for using bright, glowing light. During his Apple interview on Thursday, West also announced another new album, "Jesus Is Born," saying it would capture one of his Sunday Services. He even gave it a release date of Christmas, which fans took with a grain of salt.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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All normally developing teenagers strive for independence, yearn to be with their peers and look ahead to the future. Given this, how do we care for young people whose wings have been clipped, who aren't supposed to hang out with their friends and whose plans have been upended by coronavirus? Here are some strategies that might help to address these unforeseen parenting challenges, especially at a time when many adults are struggling to hold it all together and may not have easy access to their usual reserves. Teenagers everywhere are facing stunning losses. Once in a lifetime events and rites of passage such as graduations, proms and springtime on college campuses have been canceled. Performances, conferences and competitions for which teenagers have been preparing for months, if not years, have disappeared overnight. While schools and teachers scramble heroically to get coursework online, gone are the clubs, teams, hallway flirtations and other interactions that leaven most students' days. The nourishment of school may be continuing in some form, but kids could rightly feel that it's long on vegetables and short on dessert. Though we can't replace what's been lost, adults should not underestimate the power of offering outright empathy to disheartened adolescents. In addition to experiencing anxiety about Covid 19, teenagers also have every right to be sad, angry and intensely frustrated about what has become of their year. Adults should not hesitate to say, "I hate that you have lost so much so fast and I am sorry it has happened. You'll get through this, but that doesn't make it any less miserable right now." When it comes to navigating painful feelings, the only way out is through, and offering our teenagers the compassion they deserve paves their way toward feeling better. The same teenagers who feel deeply upset about missing school and their peers in one moment may express delight and deliverance in the next. As much as they are grieving their losses, they may also be relieved at getting out of some commitments they never wanted to keep, or being spared ongoing daily interaction with classmates, teachers or coaches they dislike. Let's not begrudge adolescents their welcome feelings. They did not ask for or cause the current situation and should not be made to feel bad about enjoying some aspects of it. We might say, "It's OK to feel relief now too," while reassuring teenagers that embracing the upsides of the disruption does not minimize what they've lost or their worries about the impact of the virus. If you're a parent who is sticking to the social distancing guidelines, your teenager is probably already frustrated with you, as some parents are still allowing their kids to hang out as usual. To address this we might say, "I know that other parents are still having kids over, but we can't support that choice because it doesn't fit with what experts are recommending." From there, we can let our teenagers know that when turning down invites they are free to blame us, and that if local safety guidelines allow, we're open to their suggestions about how they might get together with friends outdoors, six feet apart. When adolescents can't see their peers in person, it seems only fair to loosen the rules on how much time they spend connecting online. But all bets aren't off. Now, as always, rules are still in order to keep digital technology from undermining essential elements of healthy development. Sleep, productive learning, physical activity and face to face interactions (even if only with family members for now) should not be crowded out by life online. Allow Privacy and Time Alone Of course, few adolescents will want to spend all of their new at home time with their parents or guardians. Teenagers who are formally quarantined, under shelter in place orders, or simply practicing social distancing will need and deserve privacy and time alone. Make it clear that you welcome your teenagers' company, but don't take it personally if they want you nearby but quiet (like a potted plant), or if they want to spend time holed up in their rooms or in some other private space in your home. While you are free to request or require your teenager's presence, think about approaching your teenager with an extra measure of consideration when making requests. For example, saying, "We're going to need you to supervise your sister for a couple of hours, but we know that you have plans too. How should we do this?" might be a good place to start. As we scramble to figure out new rules, systems and routines for daily living, let's remember that adolescents are usually at least as creative as adults, and will appreciate being treated as such. Don't hesitate to recruit teenagers' help. Instead of presenting them with a suggested daily program, we could say, "We're all having to invent new ways to arrange our days. Can you show me what you have in mind so that I can get a feel for your regular schedule and make sure you're covering all your bases?" Similarly, we might ask persistently grumpy teenagers how they themselves would like to balance their own right to be upset with our reasonable expectation that they not make life in close quarters miserable for everyone else. There's a lot we still don't know about how the spring will unfold for our teenagers, but there are some truths about adolescents that can help us through this difficult time: they welcome empathy, they are resilient and adaptable, and they appreciate and tend live up to high expectations.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Well
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A treatment once considered among the most promising for Ebola patients was not found to be effective in a study performed in Guinea, researchers reported Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine. The experimental treatment involved transfusions of blood plasma collected from Ebola survivors, whose immune systems develop antibodies to neutralize the virus. But the survival rate among the 84 patients in the study who received such transfusions last year was not significantly better than for previous patients who had not received transfusions. Still, the researchers held out some hope for the treatment, known as convalescent plasma. "We can only say the way plasma was used didn't show the effect we'd hoped for," said the study's lead author, Dr. Johan van Griensven, who leads the unit for H.I.V. and neglected tropical diseases at the Antwerp Institute of Tropical Medicine. The plasma treatment was at one point the top experimental therapy recommended by the World Health Organization for testing during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, which has killed more than 11,000 people. Dr. van Griensven said there was still a possibility that the treatment could be effective in certain circumstances. For example, an unusually high proportion of young children and pregnant women who received it during the study survived. However, because only a small number of them were part of the study, conclusions could not be drawn, he said. It is also possible that only plasma with very high levels of the active antibodies might be effective. The researchers had planned to quantify those levels in a specialized laboratory in France, but samples have yet to be analyzed because it took many months to gain approval to ship them. Another report published Wednesday in the same journal found a survival advantage for Ebola patients in Liberia who received an antimalarial treatment containing the drug amodiaquine. The finding was serendipitous. A Doctors Without Borders treatment center ran out of a standard malaria treatment and for 12 days used the substitute with amodiaquine. (Ebola patients in West Africa were typically given malaria treatment because the disease is so common.) Patients given the substitute drug had a 31 percent lower risk of death once the data were adjusted for other factors that could affect survival. Doctors discovered the effect only months later, when they reviewed patient records after noting that amodiaquine had shown anti Ebola activity in a laboratory study published in 2013. "What is interesting here is that we came to this a little bit by chance," said Dr. Iza Ciglenecki of Doctors Without Borders in Geneva, who was a co author. The study cautioned, however, that the survival difference could also have been explained by a negative effect of the standard malaria treatment. Researchers at the United States National Institutes of Health and the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases are planning to test amodiaquine against Ebola in animals. Experts not involved in the two papers said the researchers demonstrated the ability to collect important data in an emergency situation. Some had questioned whether Ebola survivors in Guinea would volunteer to participate in the plasma study, noting that the very idea of blood donations from strangers is alien to most people there. "If somebody gets ill, a family member will come to the center here and donate blood," said Dr. Nyankoye Haba, who directs the country's national blood transfusion center and is an author of the study. A major limitation of the plasma study was a lack of randomization. In the most rigorous studies, an experimental treatment is given only to a subset of patients whose outcomes are compared with patients not receiving the therapy. But because plasma was perceived to be so promising, and unlikely to cause harm, the researchers deemed it unacceptable to deprive some patients of the opportunity to receive it. Patients receiving the plasma transfusions were instead compared with those who had previously undergone treatment at the same Doctors Without Borders center. This was problematic because survival rates fluctuated throughout the epidemic, though any causes are not known. Thus, definitive conclusions about the effectiveness of plasma treatment cannot yet be drawn, said Dr. Luciana Borio, the acting chief scientist at the Food and Drug Administration, who was not involved in the study. Dr. Borio wrote in an email that dedicated investigators working with the community had performed "important clinical research," but that the international community now needed to "further improve the quality of clinical trials done during a public health emergency." The study itself, which involved a coalition of more than a dozen international and local institutions, is likely to leave a positive effect on Guinea. "We really have strengthened the competences of the staff in the transfusion center," Dr. Haba said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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A troupe of South Asian actors, assembled from across the globe, gathered in a Manhattan rehearsal room in March to enact, in song and dance, one of the signature schisms of the 20th century: the British mandated partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, which led to the displacement of some 15 million, deaths numbering more than a million and a legacy of barely contained border tension. As one group of actors shouted "Allahu akbar!," another answered with the Hindu chant "Har Har Mahadev." In moves closer to stage combat than dance, the cast members clashed on the studio's sprung floor as a love story played out poetically in the foreground or rather, the end of a love story, as a Muslim boy and a Hindu girl are forever separated by partition, or batwara. This scene isn't in the film "Monsoon Wedding," the 2002 indie hit from the director Mira Nair and the screenwriter Sabrina Dhawan that is the basis for their musical of the same name, running at Berkeley Repertory Theater in California through June 25. But now is a different time, to put it lightly. What's more, theater has different requirements than film, and brings fresh opportunities. In the film, the two lovers have a falling out over a class based misunderstanding, but in the musical the authors make the dispute devotional: She's Catholic, he's Hindu. The batwara dream ballet arises when Dubey's grandmother invokes India's great sectarian split as a way to warn her grandson against such division. How does this thorny episode fit into an ebullient musical about an American Indian arranged marriage? The "Monsoon Wedding" film faced a similar quandary. Ms. Nair said she intended her film to be a "reality check" on such Bollywood trifles as the popular "Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! (What Am I to You?)" Inspired by those films' populist appeal, and by the gritty, less is more Dogme 95 approach, she shot "Monsoon Wedding" in 30 days for about 1 million, mostly at a friend's home in Delhi. But Ms. Dhawan, who was a young film student at Columbia University when she wrote the screenplay, her first, remembers it a little differently. "I wanted to write a movie about sexual abuse in an upper middle class family," she said, "and Mira wanted to do a fun wedding film. We thought, well, maybe we can put those two together somehow." The film's abuse subplot, based on Ms. Dhawan's own experience with an older relative, isn't the only conflict she revisited in writing the stage version. The concept of arranged marriage a practice both she and Ms. Nair have personally avoided also presented a new chance for revision. "I've been part of the diaspora for 20 years," said Ms. Dhawan, who was raised in Delhi but has lived in New York City since college, "so I'm much more interested in the immigrant experience." That's why she has changed the film's Hemant, an American groom traveling to India to meet Aditi, his arranged bride, from a first to a second generation Indian American for the stage version. If "Monsoon Wedding" the film aimed to offer a more realistic version of a Bollywood fantasy, the stage musical returns the material to a heightened realm. As Ms. Nair pointed out, it is a natural fit for musical theater the story "has music in its bones," she effused but she has at her side collaborators, including Ms. Dhawan, who are unlikely to turn it into a frothy confection. The musical's composer, Vishal Bhardwaj, is an accomplished film director in his own right, part of a generation of Indian filmmakers who have rethought some Bollywood conventions. "What used to happen in Bollywood is, when the song came, the narrative stopped," Mr. Bhardwaj said. "But filmmakers of my age, we started experimenting with having the story and narrative not stop but move forward through the songs. That's what happens on Broadway, so that helped me." Mr. Bhardwaj has been writing songs with the lyricist Susan Birkenhead ("Jelly's Last Jam") in a long gestation process with Ms. Nair and Ms. Dhawan that goes back to 2006, when the far flung collaborators began work on the musical. The show's choreographer, Lorin Latarro ("Waitress"), said she's drawing from old school Bollywood films, as well as from her own study of traditional Bharatanatyam and Kathakali dance forms, for "Monsoon Wedding." But her biggest asset might be the triple threat Indian cast members. "They all grow up dancing," Ms. Latarro marveled. And not just dancing: "On breaks, our cast breaks into song. When we need a transition, someone just starts singing something, and we're like, 'There it is.'" Much of the "Monsoon Wedding" story has been similarly serendipitous. The film's success both in the United States and India came as a pleasant surprise to its makers. And Ms. Nair acknowledged that the notion of turning it into a musical didn't originate with her. "It was Sam Cohn's idea," she said. Mr. Cohn, a powerful I.C.M. agent, had offices across the street from the Paris Theater on the Upper West Side, where the film ran for months, and he made a habit of dropping in on it several times a week. "He told me he regarded 'Monsoon Wedding' as an antidepressant; he said it saved him a lot of treatments. And one day as he was hanging up my coat at the Cafe Luxembourg, I'll never forget it, he said, 'Mira, you really should think about making "Monsoon Wedding" a musical.' And it was like bing! A penny dropped." Though it's her first work on the stage since her collegiate days working with Badal Sarkar, a radical Bengali street theater director in Kolkata, Ms. Nair has taken to the new medium with gusto. She is one of four producers on the show, along with Margo Lion ("Hairspray") and Stephen and Ruth Hendel ("Fela!"). With a staging that aims to put the audience inside the building of a traditional Punjabi wedding tent, this "Monsoon Wedding" represents a return to Ms. Nair's roots in another way. Born in the state of Odisha in India, where the local cinema had limited offerings, the first dramatic narratives she saw weren't onscreen at all. "When I was around 13 or 14, the mythological theater would come through town the Jatra, which means literally traveling theater," Ms. Nair recalled. "It was bare props, a set of stairs in a school field. Whole tales from our ancient books, from the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, would be told with just three actors. It was this form that really enthralled me the fact that you could take people into an amazing story with nothing except the words and the performance." It's a long way from that bare field to a Broadway aimed musical, let alone Hollywood filmmaking. But "Monsoon Wedding" takes up one of Ms. Nair's pet themes: continuity in the face of rupture. As she put it, "It's really about the unbroken line of family, and the rock and roll that happens within that."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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Journalistic virtues are not necessarily theatrical ones. What's compelling in newsprint, or for that matter in life, does not always scintillate when turned into a play. That is but one of the problems with "The Emperor," a Theater for a New Audience production that opened on Sunday at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn. As an account of the fall of the Haile Selassie regime in Ethiopia, it is informative and clever, and features a notable performance by that shape shifter Kathryn Hunter. But as drama, it's dead. That's not because it's historical (or purports to be). The book it's based on also called "The Emperor" is retrospective and literary and of questionable veracity yet often feels like live footage. Written by the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, it tells the story of the 1974 revolution entirely through the words of surviving functionaries within the Selassie government and household. Most were menials. One's job was to wipe the urine off visiting dignitaries' shoes when the beloved imperial dog, Lulu, relieved himself on them. Another's was to provide pillows so that the 5 foot 2 emperor's feet would not be seen dangling from the throne. We also meet the minister of information, a grander sort whose duties were nevertheless much the same: to swab and obfuscate. The book's hypnotic power does not derive so much from its wild details as from its epically sarcastic tone. We are meant to scorn the servants not just for their delusion that they were crucially important to the empire but also for their need to believe that the emperor was infallibly good. To that end, they interpret massive corruption and even war crimes charitably. Selassie may have ordered that the "mutinous rabble" of student protesters be fired upon, but he did so, one servant explains, "only rarely." The play, adapted by Colin Teevan, retains this tunnel vision portrait of men in whom loyalty has become pathology. Ms. Hunter portrays 11 of them, including the shoe wiper and the pillow bearer, as well as the "keeper of the third door" (much more important than the keepers of the other doors) and the "cuckoo" who announces the hours. Doing little more than adjusting her posture and accent, or sometimes changing hats or turning up the collar of her gray uniform jacket, she instantaneously transforms from one to the next, for the most part keeping them distinct. But something untoward happens when these characters are swiftly inhabited onstage rather than quoted at length in print. They become at the same time odder the "cuckoo" is quite a bizarre little creature and also more sympathetic. Ms. Hunter, being an actress and not a satirist, imbues these myopic flunkies with so much dignity and humanity that we are forced to take their legitimacy for granted, regardless of historical accuracy. They live now, whether or not they did then. That's a useful tension to the extent that it makes an audience question its own place in history. If we are not part of a resistance to whatever injustices our era dreams up, will future journalists be able to say we too were lap dogs and apologists? But the universality and airiness of that argument means that there is little dramatic shape to "The Emperor." Stating and restating the same proposition for 70 minutes, albeit in different voices, it comes off as a well meaning stunt. Mr. Teevan tries to address this problem by altering stories left dangling in the original to give them the appearance of emotional resolution. Urinating Lulu, for instance, abandoned by Kapuscinski on page 5, reappears at the end of the play for a final moment of pathos. The tale of the minister of information's son, a student drawn into the revolution by the "painful inconvenience and troubling deformity" of thinking, is likewise brought to a conclusion not mentioned in the book, let alone in history. That son is played by Temesgen Zeleke, a native of Addis Ababa. In his brief scenes of conflict with Ms. Hunter as his father, we finally get a three dimensional feeling of conflict instead of a cartoon diagram. The play could use more dramatization like that and less of the mod internationalism and bizarre audience participation with which the director, Walter Meierjohann, has attempted to vary the tone. In any case, I'm not sure that having Mr. Zeleke spend most of the play sitting at the back of the stage, providing the keening voice of the people in Amharic and playing an Ethiopian lyre, is a wise way to deploy a black actor in a story about Africans. Ms. Hunter, born to Greek parents in New York, was raised in England. Contrary to social media rumors, she has never worn makeup to darken her skin in "The Emperor." (The play, a coproduction with three European theaters, had its debut in 2016.) She doesn't need to; her acting is more than sufficient to handle the job of embodying Ethiopian men. Whether she ought to be doing it is a separate question. As good as she is, I can think of lots of black actors Nilaja Sun, Sarah Jones and Anna Deavere Smith come immediately to mind who are at least as nimble. Still, I don't think anyone could have gotten more out of "The Emperor" than Ms. Hunter does. That the story is meant to be universal provides the perfect excuse for a performer of any race to take on the challenge. Unfortunately, at least as staged so coolly here, it also makes the challenge less worth it.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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Shortly after beginning her first season as assistant conductor of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra four years ago, Karina Canellakis got one of those big breaks. The orchestra's music director, Jaap van Zweden, was injured, and she was asked to lead Shostakovich's formidable Eighth Symphony without even one rehearsal. "The first time I had ever conducted the piece was as the Saturday night subscription concert," she recalled in an interview. But she triumphed: The Dallas Morning News wrote that she "rose spectacularly to the challenge," and called her debut one of the best performances of the year. Since then her conducting career has exploded, and now she is again following in Mr. van Zweden's footsteps: Ms. Canellakis, a 36 year old native New Yorker, has been named the next chief conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra a post that Mr. van Zweden held from 2006 to 2012. "It's incredible to think that I'm somehow following in that lineage, by chance," she said. She said that she had sent a message with the news to Mr. van Zweden, who is leaving Dallas to become music director of the New York Philharmonic.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
|
The American economy is picking up speed after a slow start to the year, with resilient consumer spending and a buoyant housing market just about making up for a falloff in investment by cautious companies. But the overall gains are still likely to fall short of what many experts not to mention ordinary workers would hope to see as the recovery nears the end of its seventh year. These crosscurrents highlight the challenge facing policy makers at the Federal Reserve as they weigh whether to raise interest rates when they meet in mid June, or wait until July or later in the year. On Friday, the Commerce Department raised its estimate of the pace of growth in the first quarter of 2016 to 0.8 percent, a move driven mostly by better data on inventories and housing. Other areas of the economy, especially manufacturing and mining, still face significant headwinds. One explanation for the hesitancy of businesses to spend is pressure on earnings after several years of expanding margins. The Commerce Department said corporate profits rose just 0.3 percent in the first quarter, after a 7.8 percent drop in the fourth quarter of 2015. "It just confirms that we had a soft start to the year but not quite as bad as we thought," Ethan Harris, head of global economics at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, said on Friday. "Business investment was very weak, but the one bit of positive news was a surge in home construction. We're still in the recovery stage in the real estate market, especially for multifamily buildings." The government's initial estimate of first quarter economic activity, released in late April, showed an annual growth rate of 0.5 percent. The third and final estimate for growth will be released on June 28. For the second quarter, which covers April, May and June, most experts forecast that the pace will pick up to about 2.5 percent. Underscoring the consumer's ability to shrug off the anxiety that has gripped some businesses, the University of Michigan said on Friday that its monthly survey of consumer confidence in May showed sentiment at its healthiest level since June 2015. Expectations for future growth improved among both high and middle income households, according to the University of Michigan researchers. The reports on Friday also suggest that 2016's economic trajectory will follow an arc that has bedeviled forecasters for years: a soft first quarter followed by a turnaround in the spring even though underlying conditions remain largely the same throughout the period. "There is better momentum now, but it's still a bit of a head fake," said Diane Swonk, an independent economist based in Chicago. In 11 of the last 15 years, a listless January, February and March were followed by a snapback in economic expansion in the next quarter, a trend Ms. Swonk said could not be explained by "polar vortexes and other one off factors." "It could be everything from a change in the structure of the economy to mismeasurement," Ms. Swonk said. Government agencies are working to improve their methods, she said, but budgets are tight in Washington and it has been difficult for federal statisticians to keep up with the broader shift from manufacturing to services as a growth engine in recent decades. 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. The seasonal kinks in the data can "create a false sense of security," she said, obscuring the continuing paucity of real economic gains for many Americans over time. "It was still a tepid quarter even if it was less bad. That doesn't equal good growth." Although revisions and statistical quirks are nothing new for economists, Ms. Swonk explained that they appeared much larger these days because the overall level of economic growth was low to begin with. "You notice it much more when you're skating so close to thin ice," she said. Just how thin that ice really is has prompted considerable debate within the Federal Reserve and on Wall Street as Fed officials ponder a possible interest rate increase when they meet in mid June. Until recently, most outside experts did not expect the Fed to lift its short term rate lever until September at the earliest. But the official account of the central bank's last meeting in April, released May 18, showed that policy makers were ready to tighten monetary policy in June if they thought the economy was indeed getting stronger. Ian Shepherdson, the chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, said positive recent indicators like retail sales and buoyant home prices in April strengthened the hand of Fed hawks, although they could wait, because markets remained anxious before Britain's June 23 referendum on whether to leave the European Union. With the so called Brexit vote looming, one alternate possibility would be for the Fed to hold off in June but telegraph that it plans to move at its July gathering, Mr. Shepherdson said. Next week should provide greater clarity on the economy's real momentum. On Tuesday, the Commerce Department will report on consumer income and spending in April, and Friday will bring the Labor Department report on May unemployment and hiring, a crucial metric for the Fed. Buried in the details of the gross domestic product report on Friday were signs that inflation was picking up to more normal levels after years of dormancy, Mr. Harris said. In particular, he said, the so called core measure of consumer prices rose at an annual rate of 2.1 percent in the first quarter, just above the Fed's 2 percent target. "This nudges the Fed closer to a rate hike, although June is still very much up in the air," Mr. Harris said. "They want to see clear evidence that the second quarter is stronger than the first quarter." Mr. Shepherdson also called the decision a close call in a note to clients on Thursday. "We're sticking to our September base case," he said, "but we fully accept that June and July are also very real possibilities."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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Manhattan in the 1950s was an extraordinary place, particularly in the ecosystem where Bosworth found herself, roiled with changing social mores and artistic experimentation. A lifelong diarist, it appears that Bosworth can pluck verbatim exchanges from her journals, which makes her story deliciously vivid, if not exactly precisely crafted. After a Reno divorce and upon graduation, Bosworth is accepted into the Actors Studio, home of the Method (and also known as the Zoo, in the words of one of its founders, Elia Kazan), which gives her a front row seat into all sorts of shenanigans and brushes with fame. Steve McQueen takes her on a motorcycle ride to Central Park, after which he asks her, quite nicely, to stop mooning after him. Geraldine Page dressed like a bag lady, but was incandescent onstage. Jane Fonda was known for vomiting in the bathroom. Bosworth shares a cab with a dreamy Marilyn Monroe and Harry Belafonte, and is locked in a closet by Arthur Penn. Irritated by Bosworth's prim refusal to swear, he shuts her in until she can properly shout the F word, in preparation for a raw emotional scene in which she plays a young woman at an abortionist's office. As Bosworth leaves the one and only orgy she attends (she did not participate), she runs into a man dressed in priest's robes that another attendee tells her was George Plimpton. Bosworth had grown up in a star studded household, where her father's "left wing buddies," as her mother called them, were regular fixtures. Lillian Hellman, feisty, homely and wearing Balmain, might drop by to talk politics with the director Herman Shumlin. Montgomery Clift was a frequent visitor, too; he liked to stretch out on the living room floor and chain smoke (a smitten, preteenage Bosworth would salvage one of his cigarette butts as a souvenir). At the "21" Club, her father's favorite lunch spot, she would join him at his regular table, right next to that of Mrs. Douglas MacArthur, and amid the scrum of lobbyists, columnists and television personalities and executives, all of whom would greet Bosworth's father with affection. He would rail against Joe McCarthy, and drink steadily until his words slurred his daughter watching, as always, wary and anxious. So it was a fraught and frightening household from which Bosworth endeavored to extricate herself. Hence her early marriage, though the conflation of sex with true love was also a factor. Bosworth was a virgin, and a Catholic, when the opportunistic Mr. Bean scooped her up in a local bar. She thought she had committed a mortal sin in sleeping with him. After all, it was 1951 (the following decade, when the Pill was approved by the F.D.A. for contraceptive use, it was still illegal in eight states). Bosworth's mother's idea of sex education had been to hand her daughter the novels of Colette. Bosworth's coming of age tale is emblematic of the times, when women were poised to take control of their own bodies, yet still confined by restrictive cultural norms and legal hurdles. (As her first husband slaps her around in the back of a taxicab, Bosworth begs the driver to stop. "He's the boss, lady," he tells her.) It was a time, as she writes, when "women bargained with sex for love and money, or they were too repressed and ignorant beyond belief." It is also the tale of a young woman trying to shake off an emotional numbness that will dog her for years. You can see how investigating the lives of Montgomery Clift (a gay actor in a punitive time, who turned to alcohol and drugs after a car accident destroyed his face), Diane Arbus (a suicide), Marlon Brando and Jane Fonda (a suicide survivor with daddy issues) would be appealing, even necessary, to a suicide survivor and child of an alcoholic, as Bosworth is. "You never get over it," J. Anthony Lukas, the author and another suicide survivor, tells her. "You just get used to it."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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The shock waves of civilization travel through rocky ground and, at times, ricochet around the globe, as geologists know from decades of listening for earthquakes with sensitive seismometers. The human pulses come from heavy traffic, football games, rock concerts, fireworks, subways, mine explosions, rock drilling, factories, jackhammers, industrial blasts and other activities. In 2001, vibrations from the collapse of the World Trade Center registered in five states. Seismometers even picked up the impacts of the two airplanes. Now, a team of 76 scientists from more than two dozen countries reports that lockdowns from the Covid 19 pandemic led to a drop of up to 50 percent in the global din tied to humans. The main quieting, from March through May, was compared with levels in previous months and years. "The length and quiescence of this period represents the longest and most coherent global seismic noise reduction in recorded history," the scientists reported on Thursday in the journal Science. The quieting, they added, resulted from social distancing, industrial shutdowns and drops in travel and tourism. The overall decline far exceeded the kind typically observed on weekends and holidays. Devices for measuring earthquakes go back at least to the early part of the 18th century, when pendulums were used to display ground motions. In 1895 an Irish engineer, John Milne, established on the Isle of Wight a modern seismometer center that quickly grew into the world's first global network, with 30 overseas branches. By 1957, an international group of seismologists listed 600 stations. The devices can pick up vibrations not only from earthquakes and human activities but from hurricanes and the crashing of ocean waves on shorelines, as well as the impacts of rocky intruders from outer space.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Forget Edna Mode that is, if you can. Edna, the pint size fashion potentate of "Incredibles 2," casts a tall shadow in the world of style, her outsize specs, out of this world wardrobe and briskly authoritative attitude calling to mind a salty composite of fashion stars Rei Kawakubo, Iris Apfel and Edith Head, among them. True, Edna is a certified scene stealer in this sequel to the 2004 Pixar animated feature, but she isn't alone. Another standout in a smartly outfitted cast that makes this one of the most style savvy movies you're likely to see this year is Evelyn Deavor, a 21st century tech wizard, who wears her hair in ragged auburn thatch and has a marked predilection for gauzy man cut shirts and wicked ankle boots. She is inspired in part by Patti Smith and Annie Lennox, and boasts no fewer than 20 distinct costume changes, crazily extravagant by cartoon standards. In animation, with its relatively constrictive budgets, "a character's accessories are always the thing that goes first," Ms. Imagire said. "But it's the accessories that make the look, and with this movie we got to give her awesome giant bag. She's got a hat and big glasses. We got to make earrings for her. I love that she has faux snakeskin boots." Yet all that flair is eclipsed at times by the movie's formidable setting, a 20,000 square foot Palm Beach modernist home where the heroically endowed Parr family Helen (Elastigirl), Bob (Mr. Incredible), Violet, Dash and baby Jack Jack set up housekeeping. "The house was a character in the film," said Ralph Eggleston, a Pixar Animation Studios director and production designer. A riveting fusion of the fantastical and real, it is perched over a waterfall, its opulent landscape echoed in interior features including the stream that meanders from room to room and continues underneath the house, traveling all the way to Municiberg, the film's metropolitan hub. Floor to ceiling windows offer panoramic views. It's a retro futuristic superhouse complete with a fireplace masking a secret garage where Helen stows her Elasticycle; a space age mobile that hovers over Jack Jack's crib; a conversation pit in the great room; and movable floors that slide open to reveal an assortment of reflecting pools. The house is built on a spectacular scale intimidating even to its superhero residents. "They talk about that in the film," Mr. Eggleston said. "They see it as too much for them." Like Edna, the house is a composite, its chief influences including the James Evans house in New Canaan, Conn., with its cantilevered angles, and, Mr. Eggleston said, James Mason's house in the movie "North by Northwest." Its rambling public rooms are wildly theatrical, its more compact ones suggest an unexpected intimacy, and its over the top decorative features offer opportunities for any number of pratfalls. The house's chief inspiration, Mr. Eggleston said, was the lavish Modernist setting in the 1968 Blake Edwards film "The Party." In that movie you see Peter Sellers lose his shoe in one of the reflecting pools. It's a scene that's paralleled in "Incredibles 2" when Bob stumbles over one of the house's oddly placed mini lagoons. "As designers we get to make it look like it all works," Mr. Eggleston said, gleefully, "and we don't have to worry about code."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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"Dinozord" summons past friendships and political struggles, reckoning with what it means to seek beauty, to write or sing or dance, when surrounded by violence and loss. Mr. Linyekula was joined by the dancers Jeannot Kumbonyeki, Papy Ebotani and Yves Mwamba; the countertenor Serge Kakudji; and the actor Papy Maurice Mbwiti. Between passages of precarious movement a skittering dance for Mr. Ebotani that ends with him collapsing to the floor; a duet in which one man arranges another's unresponsive limbs; an electrifying solo for Mr. Kumbonyeki to Jimi Hendrix's "Voodoo Chile" the cast shepherds a red chest filled with tattered papers across the stage, carrying it like a coffin or letting its contents spill onto the floor. Those notes are said to belong to Mr. Linyekula's friend Kabako, a writer with lofty literary dreams who died of plague, "a disease I thought only existed in books," Mr. Linyekula says. Through memories shared about him, Kabako becomes an elusive, there but not character, as does Dinozord, who, we're told, was a dancer in a 2006 precursor to this work. Here he seems more mythical than real, an emblem of disappearance. Speaking through text projected on a wooden panel, he identifies himself as "the last of my tribe," comparing himself at once to Mozart's "Requiem" a "final flare of virtuosity" and to all that society has deemed unworthy, "the spittoon of the republic." Whose stories endure and whose vanish? At one point we see photos that Mr. Muhindo took in prison and hear his recollections: "Torture was on the daily agenda until it became another organ in my body." As the dancers stand in place and circle their hips, it could be their own memories setting them in motion. The same could be said of the cast of "Festival of Dreams," a presentation of Crossing the Line and Dancing in the Streets directed by Mr. Linyekula and Moya Michael. Twenty one dancers from It's Showtime NYC, a program that supports the professional development of subway dancers, each had moments to shine, breaking out backflips, handstands, gliding footwork and spidery contortions. But more indelible was how fluidly they worked together, passing energy to whoever was in the spotlight. When they formed a circle, the edges were never static.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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If watched directly from above, most dance performances would lose their savor. Bird's eye views are flattening. The tops of heads are seldom expressive. But "Falls the Shadow," the dance work that Daniil Simkin is presenting at the Guggenheim Museum on Monday and Tuesday, is designed to be looked down on by spectators standing on the whorled ramps of the building's vast rotunda. But there's more to see than foreshortened figures. Imagine a nearly ceaseless stream of digital imagery, beginning with unusual shadows. Computer generated projections envelop the performers with auras as elastic as bubbles, shimmering and rippling at the edges like the hot air of a mirage. Sometimes the shadows linger after bodies exit, like the quick fading imprint of fingers pressed on pale skin, or maybe like the soul after death. Other times, the shadows swing around rapidly, suggesting the restless dance of a virtual sun. Or the projections seem more like smoke, which the dancers seem to blow at one another in the manner of battling wizards. The projections also cohere into patterns on the floor that resemble designs in sand, and as the dancers move, their bodies appear to scatter the grains, their slides and spins kicking up virtual dust. The digital imagery isn't confined to the floor. It flows up the sides of the space: a dark stain spreading, a flood rising, a supernova exploding. The light show travels to the spectators, surrounding them. It takes on the whole rotunda as its canvas, connecting the dance with the architecture. "Falls the Shadow" is the second entry in the Works Process Rotunda Project performances commissioned to address the architectural properties of the Guggenheim's interior, which Frank Lloyd Wright certainly didn't envision with dance in mind. The first installment, presented by the tap dancers Michelle Dorrance and Nicholas Van Young in February, dealt mainly (and ingeniously) with acoustical challenges and possibilities. Mr. Simkin is much more focused on the visual dimension, and for his purposes, the rotunda's white surfaces and top down perspectives are a boon. For the past few years, Mr. Simkin, a Russian born principal dancer with American Ballet Theater, has been devoting some of his time off to a side project, Intensio, combining dancers of his high caliber with the latest developments in technology. One line of experimentation has involved electronic shadows on the stage floor, an effect that can be hard to see from the seats of many conventional theaters. That's not a problem at the Guggenheim. Here's how it works: An infrared camera scans the dancers' outlines, 60 frames per second, even as they move, and transmits that information to a computer, which then projects images around the dancers. As Mr. Simkin explained during a recent rehearsal, the speed of the computer processing is crucial. "If there is a lag, the brain sees it as a technological trick," he said. "If there is no lag, as we can do it now, it is like magic, giving another layer to the movement like a big dress, my father says." Mr. Simkin's father, Dmitrij, is the project's video designer. He has been concentrating on set and video design since retiring from his own career as a ballet dancer in 2007. A shared interest in dance and technology bonds father and son. "We live in fascinating times," said the younger Mr. Simkin. "We have all these new technological tools, but we don't know how to use them yet. I want to see what is possible when you combine them with dance, if the sum can be greater than the parts." It is important to Daniil that the video be integrated and balanced with the dancing. "Otherwise, it becomes gimmicky," he said. He had to get familiar with the technology very quickly. After a crash course in the possibilities, he created the choreography with the cast Mr. Simkin; the Ballet Theater soloist Cassandra Trenary; and two contemporary dancers, Ana Lopez and Brett Conway but without the video. Later, during tech rehearsals, he made adjustments. More adjustments were made necessary by the Guggenheim's layout. "The space makes you look very small," Mr. Cerrudo said. "Many very beautiful movements that we created in the studio meant nothing when viewed from the ramps."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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In a frank and lengthy interview in Variety this week, Barbra Streisand dropped one very notable aside: that two of her dogs were clones of a previous dog, Samantha, who had recently died. Here, Ms. Streisand explains how this medical marvel, born of sadness, came to pass. I was so devastated by the loss of my dear Samantha, after 14 years together, that I just wanted to keep her with me in some way. It was easier to let Sammie go if I knew I could keep some part of her alive, something that came from her DNA. A friend had cloned his beloved dog, and I was very impressed with that dog. So Sammie's doctor took some cells from inside her cheek and the skin on her tummy just before she died. And we sent those cells to ViaGen Pets in Texas. We weren't even sure if the cells would take. Meanwhile I missed Sammie so much that I went out and adopted a rescue dog. She was a little Maltipoo and I named her Sadie, after the first dog I ever owned, given to me by the cast of "Funny Girl" on my 22nd birthday.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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Memo to the new owner of the 1954 Mercedes Benz W196 grand prix car after the Goodwood auction: About half a century ago I was privileged to drive your new toy, and it's a hoot. Just be careful about shifting gears, because the pattern is backward from what we think of as normal. It was the summer of 1960, when I was a reporter and part time racing driver living in Germany, with some success in the latter pursuit thanks to a few very good cars. Through my work I became friendly with various Daimler Benz executives, including Artur Keser, head of public relations, and Rudolf Uhlenhaut, chief engineer for passenger cars. The multilingual Keser was the company's good will ambassador. Uhlenhaut, who was also responsible for racecar development, was capable of lap times nearly equal to those posted by Juan Manuel Fangio and Stirling Moss, at the time two of the world's fastest drivers. A call came from Keser. "Come on down, you can drive Fangio's car and Uhlenhaut's coupe tomorrow," he said,
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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David Kordansky with Rashid Johnson's sculpture "High Time" at the Kordansky gallery in Los Angeles. "He has been ambitious in trying to figure out ways for his gallery to better reflect the world that we live in," Mr. Johnson said, "and the concerns many of us have about it." LOS ANGELES David Kordansky keeps one of Bob Weir's guitars and Jerry Garcia's amplifiers in the office of his gallery here in Mid City. Love of the Grateful Dead, says the artist Mary Weatherford, helps explain Mr. Kordansky's approach to being an art dealer. "The Grateful Dead is how Kordansky thinks," she said. "There is a structure, but within the structure is improvisation." While the Covid crisis has tested his capacity for improvisation, the Black Lives Matter movement has fueled Mr. Kordansky's impatience for change. So, in addition to opening his gallery's new exhibition space along South La Brea Avenue in September and adding important artists over the last seven months namely the renowned post minimalist Richard Tuttle Mr. Kordansky has used this forced hiatus to examine his own role and responsibility in helping to foster a more equitable art world. The police killing of George Floyd "was a dramatic wake up call for me an opportunity to think of these notions of equity, diversity and inclusion in the space of my business," said Mr. Kordansky, 43. "This is about changing the DNA of my business." Those conversations helped fuel Mr. Kordansky's decision to hire seven more people of color over the last year (there had been 3 out of a staff of 35). He also contributed toward a fellowship established this month by the artist Charles Gaines to fund the tuition of Black art students in the renowned M.F.A. program at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), where Mr. Kordansky studied with Mr. Gaines. "He has been ambitious in trying to figure out ways for his gallery to better reflect the world that we live in, and the concerns many of us have about it," said Mr. Johnson, who joined the gallery in 2008 and was its first Black artist. "Racism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia the gallery is working with artists that attack and consider these issues in their projects." To be sure, there is considerable frustration among people of color that the commercial art world has taken so long to recognize the importance of diversity on their staffs and their walls. Only recently has there been some effort to grapple with the scarcity of Black owned galleries. And Los Angeles has been developing a strong network of Black art professionals at places like The Underground Museum, Mark Bradford's Art Practice and the California African American Museum. Some Black art professionals view as paternalistic the dealer David Zwirner's recent decision to give Ebony L. Haynes, a Black gallerist, her own space to run, however well intentioned. Similarly, some are bound to see Mr. Kordansky's consulting of Black artists as part of a problematic tendency in many fields to give Black staff members the burden of diversity efforts. But Black artists at the gallery say their dealer has been considering these issues for some time and started including Black artists more than a decade ago. "Just look at his program someone like Rashid Johnson, like Sam Gilliam David was the one who had the foresight to see that work for what it is," said Mr. Pendleton, whose show which opens Nov. 7 will feature a video portrait of the choreographer Kyle Abraham. "You can point to an artist like William Jones or even the abiding respect he has for Charles Gaines and you get a sense that this is a deeper endeavor." The gallery has been having conversations over the past two years with the Racial Imaginary Institute, an interdisciplinary cultural organization, about potential collaboration. The institute has curated an online group exhibition, opening Oct. 21 "Listening for the Unsaid" and will benefit from the proceeds along with the artists in the show, who include Danielle Brathwaite Shirley, Nate Lewis, Azikiwe Mohammed and Kiyan Williams. "It can't be business as usual anymore for me," Mr. Kordansky said. "We show a number of artists of color, but that diversity was not reflected in the individuals who occupy the space of the gallery." "We have to look in the mirror and as soon as we can begin to make these changes within the system of my gallery, then we can become an example for others," he added. Ms. Halsey, who joined the gallery in 2018, said Mr. Kordansky has accommodated her demand that a portion of her work be reserved for Black collectors and that she has been heartened by the increasing diversity of the staff. "The gallery is starting to look different," she said. "It's becoming a reflection of the real world." In June Mr. Kordansky hired Ola Mobolade, a diversity consultant, "to literally change the entire infrastructure," he said, including "the procedures and the criteria around new hires, how to create a diverse work space that is inclusive of people of color and individuals who have been left out of the conversation." Ms. Mobolade said she was struck by Mr. Kordansky's "unflinchingness" in developing a strategy that is systemic. "The work we're doing is not easy and it's not quick," Ms. Mobolade said. "The art world is so far behind." As Black artists have become increasingly in demand, many have moved on to some of the megadealers. But several artists at Mr. Kordansky's gallery have notably stayed put, in part because they say he is as focused on nurturing their careers as he is on their commercial potential (one exception is Simone Leigh, who moved to Hauser Wirth and recently became the first Black woman to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale). "David has been the best thing for me," Mr. Gilliam said. "He's an artist himself and he works for you." Mr. Kordansky, who grew up in Hartford, Conn., going to the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art there, started out wanting to be an artist. But at Cal Arts, he realized that instead, he "wanted to create some kind of foundation for my peers and colleagues." In 2003, he opened a gallery space in the Chinatown section of Los Angeles, moved to Culver City in 2008 and then to his current location in 2014. Bespectacled and youthful, Mr. Kordansky can come across as an earnest, impassioned graduate student who uses phrases like "peel back the onion," "dig into the marrow of our being" and "try to be a conduit of love." But he recognizes that he can sound in his words "hippy dippy." Artists say his intensity furthers a spirit of community at the gallery. "It's like being on a fantastic soccer team," said Ms. Weatherford, who joined the gallery in 2013. "He's almost creating his own work of art himself by gathering together a group of artists." "Some galleries have never had an African American artist, or maybe only had one how can you be a gallery based in North America and not have an African American as a critical part of your program?" Mr. Pendleton continued. "That's never been the case with David. He shows queer artists, Black artists it just seems to be a part of who David is. It should be a part of who we all are."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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Reviews like these are hard to come by. "Stupendously bold and expressive," said The Wall Street Journal. "Instinctive brilliance," said New York magazine. "Downright powerful," said Entertainment Weekly. "Blistering" and "a knockout" said The New York Times. But Lauren Ridloff, starring on Broadway in "Children of a Lesser God," is so new to the theater world that she's not sure what to make of it. On the day she was nominated for a Drama League award, she wondered, "Should I be excited?" as she searched for information about the contest. A week later, glancing at a phone at home in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, she beamed as she saw that she had been nominated for an Outer Critics Circle Award. And then came the Tony nomination, on a rough morning when her 6 year old had woken her at 5 a.m., demanding a bath. It's been a long journey in a short time for this 40 year old former kindergarten teacher who has been deaf since birth, has no professional stage acting experience, and who describes herself on her Google Plus bio as a "stay at home mama." As the play's run nears its end, she is taking meetings with casting directors, posing for photographers, signing autographs at the stage door, saying good night to her two boys (the younger son is now 4; both are deaf) via FaceTime. "My life has changed in every way," she said in one of several interviews conducted with the assistance of an American Sign Language interpreter. By now, Ms. Ridloff's unusual path to Broadway has become a part of the revival's lore. She had left teaching to take care of her boys when the director Kenny Leon reached out, looking for a sign language tutor. They met in a coffee shop and practiced signs for foodstuffs; they went to a museum to learn colors; they walked under a bridge to study transportation. Every Tuesday for a year, she taught him about sign language, and, in the process, about deafness. Mr. Leon, in the early stages of developing a revival of "Children of a Lesser God," had lined up a leading man Joshua Jackson, best known for television work including "The Affair" but no leading lady, so he asked Ms. Ridloff to pinch hit at an early table read. And just like that, without even auditioning, she won the role. "If you didn't know her resume, you'd swear she'd been doing this her whole life," he said. "You're dealing with an actress that doesn't know what she's doing, and communicating with her in a language she doesn't speak, and trying to connect another actor to her but she had a presence that I thought could transfer easily to the stage, and she has instinct enough that she can't make a false move." After an initial run last summer at the Berkshire Theater Group, in Stockbridge, Mass. ("It was like a boot camp for me," she said), the revival opened on Broadway last month. Critics were underwhelmed by the production, but mesmerized by Ms. Ridloff; sales were soft, and the show's lead producer has announced that its final performance will be May 27. "I'm sad that this production is shuttering just when it was picking up speed and force," Ms. Ridloff said. "I feel that everybody who has been involved in this story cast, crew, even audience members has changed and emerged better people. We listened." The role of Sarah Norman, a cleaning woman who falls for a teacher at a school for the deaf, is a plum one for deaf actresses. Phyllis Frelich won a Tony Award playing the part in the original Broadway production, which opened in 1980, and Marlee Matlin won an Academy Award for the 1986 film adaptation. "The play had a huge impact on the growing awareness of the deaf community, its culture and American Sign Language," Ms. Matlin said by email. And Ms. Ridloff, she said, "brings a fluidity and lightness to the role that I hadn't seen before." Some critics have objected to the sexual politics of the play a teacher getting involved with a woman he is supposed to be educating and its traditionalism Sarah's fantasies are domestic, including a microwave and a blender. "That's where you can see, perhaps, the time period the play comes from, and if the play was rewritten now she might be excited about different things," Ms. Ridloff acknowledged. "But, in her defense, I got really excited about having a Vitamix." For Ms. Ridloff, the most jarring aspect of doing the play has been that it requires her, in one brief, angry scene, to use her voice, which she had ceased doing at age 13 to prevent people from unfairly assessing her intelligence based on her vocal intelligibility. "When she gets to that part, that rawness is real," said Julie Hochgesang, a childhood friend who teaches linguistics at Gallaudet University. "And the rest of it the woman learning to be her own and being so freaking graceful and strong through all of it that's real too." Ms. Ridloff compares the experience of using her voice during the play to a crotch shot, saying that at first she felt exposed, and vulnerable, and ugly. "I cried thinking about it," she said. "I lived in fear of that part." Now, she said, after nearly a year with the role and help from a vocal coach, "it feels empowering to me like finally I own every part of myself." But she said, "I don't see myself ever using my voice on a conversational level that's just not who I am." Ms. Ridloff grew up in Chicago, where she was born into a hearing family. Her father is Mexican American, and her mother is African American. She parries a question about her identity, saying, "What's the point?" "For me, culturally, I'm deaf," she said. "I'm a deaf woman, and my life choices are made because of my experience of growing up as a deaf person." When she was a baby, her parents thought she might have a developmental delay, but by the time she was 2, after moments like the day at the beach when she was the only toddler who didn't turn to look at a passing fire engine, they knew she was deaf. A doctor suggested that the deafness would limit her educational and professional achievement, but her parents refused to accept that they set about learning sign language, sent her to Catholic school with hearing children. She did well, and then, when she was 13, she was sent to Washington to attend the Model Secondary School for the Deaf. "That was an awesome, amazing experience," Ms. Ridloff said. "I was just like everybody else." She started to pursue the arts, but tentatively. "I was so scared to be around other people, I selected the least popular activity, and that was ceramics," she said. She went on to explore drama she was Dorothy in a production of "The Wiz" and to embrace cheerleading, becoming one of the first deaf cheerleaders to represent the United States in an international competition. She studied creative writing at California State University, Northridge, a school that has become a magnet for deaf students. She was crowned Miss Deaf America in 2000 ("There was no swimsuit competition it was about ambassadorship, not beauty, and I did a performance of 'The Giving Tree,' because I love Shel Silverstein.") She also joined Deafywood, a comedy troupe, developing her dance skills. Hoping to become a children's author (still an aspiration), she moved to New York to study education at Hunter College, and took a job teaching kindergarten and first grade at Public School 347, a Manhattan school for children who are deaf, hard of hearing, or born to deaf parents. "Other teachers would come down, just to see her sign a book, because of the beauty of how she would read," said Gary Wellbrock, her co teacher. "What she did in the classroom is very much what she is doing onstage even if you don't know sign language, she is setting something up that is drawing people in to her, and you want to watch." She did a little deaf community theater, some film work for friends, and had a small part in "Wonderstruck" (as Pearl, the maid). The role of Sarah has proved to be unexpectedly exhausting. Just as singers tax their vocal cords doing eight shows a week, Ms. Ridloff is experiencing strain on her arms and shoulders as she works to make sure her signing is visible toward the back of the theater. And then there is the furious argument her character has with an apprentice teacher over whether to challenge the school's hiring practices a stunning scene in which the characters' signing, which is not translated for the audience, becomes both faster and bigger. "I'm getting a total workout," Ms. Ridloff said. She and her husband, Douglas Ridloff, a deaf artist and performer who oversees a monthly, multicity, American Sign Language poetry slam, live in a tight knit section of Williamsburg. (One next door neighbor learned sign language so he could communicate with them.) They don't see a lot of theater, because it's so rarely interpreted for the deaf, and, Mr. Ridloff said, "I'm not crazy about Broadway shows in general. I'm more of a movie guy." To maintain her strength, and calm, Ms. Ridloff runs daily, between three and five miles, generally over the Williamsburg Bridge or into Greenpoint, reviewing lines in her head, or trying to meditate. On two show days, she runs in Central Park between performances. "Sometimes I'm inside this black box all day, and I forget what people are like," she said, noting that, unlike hearing performers, she can't tell when the audience is laughing or crying, restless or rapt, except by watching Mr. Jackson's pacing for cues. "It's nice to go out and look at people, to think about their movements and interactions, and I can bring all that with me." She's not sure what's next after "Children" wraps up, she plans to make homemade (lavender scented) playdough with her boys, and, she hopes, to take a vacation. But, ultimately, she said, "I feel like acting is a study of humanity, and I am loving that." "I don't know if casting directors are ready to look at me and think that this woman could be someone that's more than just deaf," she said. "I would like to be a superhero."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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The stage loves a dining room table. This single piece of furniture represents sustenance and communion, and domestic dramas set at the table are pun very much intended the bread and butter of theater. But for all the ways family plays reveal truths, trauma and traditions, they take on greater weight as I think about them this Thanksgiving, during a pandemic demanding all of us to figure out whether we can safely see our loved ones, and if so, how. That's not to say that family get togethers onstage tend to go well. Tracy Letts's Pulitzer Prize winning "August: Osage County" is the contemporary standard bearer for all hostile family dramas. We join the Westons, a trash fire of a family racked with bitterness, guilt and resentment, in their Oklahoma home on the occasion of the absence, then death, of the patriarch, Beverly Weston. Fed up with the family's cruelty, Ivy, the middle daughter, declares to her elder sister: "I can't perpetuate these myths of family or sisterhood anymore. We're all just people, some of us accidentally connected by genetics, a random selection of cells. Nothing more." Not exactly an episode of "Full House." But she (and the play) are right that the myth of family often wilts before the real deal. The Westons twist their intimate knowledge of one another to degrade, intimidate and manipulate. Be careful what you're wishing for this holiday season: "August: Osage County" shows us that a family around a dinner table can be a battlefield but here the wounds are personal. The same is true of Stephen Karam's fantastically brutal (and simply fantastic) "The Humans," in which the Blake family, natives of Scranton, Pa., convene at the Manhattan duplex apartment of their younger daughter Brigid and her boyfriend Richard. Erik, Brigid's father, is remote, supposedly because he hasn't been sleeping well, and her mother, Deirdre, tries to connect with her daughters but is often dismissed. Amy, the older daughter, is ill. And Momo, Erik's aged mother, is barely lucid. "The Humans" debuted Off Broadway in 2015 and went on to win the Tony Award for best play when it moved to Broadway. I saw a virtual production this fall courtesy of the Olney Theater Center, and found the limitations of the form to be surprisingly effective. One of my favorite recent family dramas Zora Howard's stunning "Stew" isn't set at the dining room table at all. This four character play, a Page 73 production that I saw early in the year, is set around the kitchen table, a space where food is labored over and recipes are passed down. In depicting three generations of Black women repeatedly preparing the dish of the title, the play makes clear how the domestic space can be a place of comfort and nourishment. This is set against the troublingly repetitive patterns in their lives: The men are all absent, and each woman seems doomed to the same fate of an early pregnancy and a challenging life as a single Black mother. When a family congregates at a table, the past never remains the past, but sidles up to the present. As with the cooking in "Stew," we find cycles and repetition in the shuffling of chairs, the recounting of old stories, the echoes across generations. Thornton Wilder's one act "The Long Christmas Dinner," from 1931, is set in the dining room of the Bayard family home. Time passes discreetly, from one holiday dinner to the next, and characters enter from the wings, pass through, and exit, signifying the string of births and deaths that mark a life. But Wilder takes this even further, showing how the family table is often where history repeats itself. As the generations progress in "Christmas Dinner," the Bayards take the very seats of their predecessors, often repeating the very same sentiments. It's a conceit that has been since borrowed by others, and speaks to a longstanding fear: How many times have you said, with whatever measure of humor or dread, that you've turned into your parents? There is something holy to this, too. Wilder's table marks a rite, like a sacrament, where a congregation of people figuratively and literally break bread. Reading the play recently, in light of surging Covid 19 cases and the seemingly endless deaths we've faced in 2020, I found its reflections on mortality darker than even the playwright may have intended. How many of our holiday dinner tables will have seats left empty for those absent, or passed? For others, this holiday will mean virtual gathering or no celebration at all. Those obstacles have already reached the Apples, Richard Nelson's imagined Rhinebeck, N.Y., family, who in a series of four plays first presented at the Public Theater, meet for meals and chat in real time (with food sometimes cooking as we watch). "What Do We Need to Talk About?," the first in a recent follow up trilogy created for a virtual medium, proves that there need not be a physical table for telling exchanges to ring true. Separated by the pandemic, the Apples now share a meal via Zoom, and though we can't see every dimension of their interaction the way they sit, where they sit, how they eat, how they move around each other the interruptions and gaps in their conversations still have weight. So do the ways they talk about eating, and the stories they tell. The Apple Family Plays have often felt trapped by the bubble of privilege in which the central white family lives. But the pandemic may have granted them a new heft, depicting a family meeting at a family table that no longer exists. Aspects of the ceremony of gathering and cooking and eating and cleaning up are stripped away, leaving only individuals and what they have to say to one another.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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LONDON The death of the It bag may have been greatly exaggerated. After years of department store footwear expansion, with Harrods in London opening a 42,000 square foot shoe floor, Macy's in New York raising that to 63,000, and the Level Shoe District in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to 96,000, their focus has shifted somewhat further up the body. Or so it seemed last week when the London emporium Selfridges unveiled the first phase of what it says will be the world's largest handbag hall. The redevelopment is part of a 300 million pound, or 374 million, refurbishment of its flagship store on Oxford Street (and what it says is the largest investment ever made by a department store worldwide). The size of the current luxury handbag area will be tripled to house more than 7,000 different accessories, like sunglasses, scarves, tech trinkets and handbags. The area will cover 61,000 square feet, more than a third of the store's total ground level space, and accommodate more than 70,000 items on any given day. Brands will include Hermes, Chanel, Valentino, Charlotte Olympia, Sophie Hulme and Chrome Hearts, with prices from PS30 for an Anya Hindmarch embossed leather sticker to more than PS20,000 for some bags. By comparison, the world's second largest handbag department, at Galeries Lafayette in Paris, is 53,820 square feet. "I think it is important to point out that it was actually never our objective to create the world's biggest luxury accessories hall biggest doesn't necessarily mean best," said Sebastian Manes, the buying and merchandising director for Selfridges. "But we have had this plan in the pipeline for many years now, and once we had packed in the fruits of all our work, research, experimentation and innovation, it took this much space to contain it all." The accessories hall will be in the store's new eastern wing, designed by David Chipperfield Architects. (The architects are also responsible for transforming the United States Embassy on Grosvenor Square, a few blocks away, into a luxury hotel.) A soaring, triple height entrance will open into the white marble floored accessories area: a vast vaulted single space with neo Classical columns and a 14 seat circular cocktail bar at its center. Mr. Manes said that over the last decade, despite the focus on footwear, the store's handbag sales have grown rapidly. "Women began to really see quality accessories as investment pieces," he said. "More value for money than a clothing purchase in the sense they can be used every day, last for a long time if well maintained, and mixed and matched to suit a wide range of occasions." Gone are the days when most women were single mindedly loyal to a single brand or style of handbag Prada's nylon backpack, say, or Louis Vuitton's Murakami tote but that does not mean they are not buying bags. Rather, they may have traded the one for the many, not to mention the idiosyncratic and independent. The rise of Mansur Gavriel, anyone? Indeed, handbag led accessories sales have rocketed in the past decade. According to analysts at Exane BNP Paribas, bags account for almost 30 percent of the total global luxury market, up 18 percent from 2003. Bags generate high sales per square foot, often without discounts, though those numbers have declined somewhat in recent years as smaller sizes (with smaller prices) have re emerged in popularity. The trend toward luxury names placing more time and money into their own store network has also changed the dynamics of the market, although Mr. Manes says this could ultimately prove advantageous for multibrand stores like Selfridges. "Many brands are keen to see a rise in flagship focused shopping, but many consumers find it an intimidating and slightly claustrophobic experience," he said. "That's why we made a point of making the hall as large and airy as possible, full of varied options and with wide, open entrances from branded space to space." Mr. Manes also pointed to the increasingly social and experience led component of successful bricks and mortar retailing. Whether he is correct will be seen this holiday shopping season; the entire hall is set to be completed by 2018. The question now is whether other landmark stores (Saks, we know you're watching) will follow suit, ushering in a new golden age of bags.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. It's wondrous, isn't it, how the people just keep coming out? Day after day, night after night, in dozens of cities, braving a deadly virus and brutal retaliation, they continue to pack the streets in uncountable numbers, demanding equality and justice and, finally, prompting what feels like real change. How did this happen? How did Black Lives Matter, a hashtag powered movement that has been building for years, bring America to what looks like a turning point? I have a theory: The protests exploded in scale and intensity because the police seemed to go out of their way to illustrate exactly the arguments that Black Lives Matter has been raising online since 2013. By "the police," I mean not just state and municipal police across the country, but also the federal officers from various agencies that cracked down on protesters in front of the White House, as well as their supporters and political patrons, from police chiefs to mayors to the attorney general and the president himself. Black Lives Matter aims to highlight the depth of brutality, injustice and unaccountability that American society, especially law enforcement, harbors toward black people. Many protesters set out to call attention to the unchecked power of the police, their military weaponry and their capricious use of it. They wanted to show that the problem of policing in America is more than that of individual bad officers; the problem is a culture that protects wrongdoers, tolerates mendacity, rewards blind loyalty and is fiercely resistant to change. More deeply, it is a law enforcement culture that does not regard black lives as worthy of protection. And what did the cops do? They responded with a display of organized, unchecked power on camera, in a way that many Americans might never be able to unsee. To understand why this moment may prompt structural change, it is worth putting the latest protests into a larger context. To me, the past two weeks have felt like an echo of that heady moment late in 2017, after The New York Times and The New Yorker exposed Harvey Weinstein's history of sexual assault. At the time, MeToo, as an online rallying cry against sexual abuse and harassment, was more than a decade old. The Weinstein story didn't create that movement, just as the videos of George Floyd's death at the hands of the Minneapolis police didn't create Black Lives Matter. Instead, the Weinstein news broke the dam. Since then, MeToo activism has gone on to upend society in a way that felt revolutionary. It feels like the dam is breaking again. The movement behind Black Lives Matter has taken to the streets before but nothing on this scale, with this intensity. And not with these results. The National Football League was once a powerful and bitter rival; now it has embraced the movement, though it still has not apologized to or signed Colin Kaepernick, the player who first knelt in protest against police brutality. Politicians at every level are professing newfound support, and, right before our eyes, the Overton window of acceptable public discourse about police reform has shifted to include terms like "demilitarize," "defund" and "abolish." It's not clear how far the politics will go, but the shifts so far are significant. "Never before in the history of modern polling has the country expressed such widespread agreement on racism's pervasiveness in policing, and in society at large," The Times reported last week. More important, we are no longer just talking about imposing new limits on how the police can operate. We're finally asking more substantive political questions: What roles should be reserved for the police in our cities, and what roles would better be served by hiring more teachers, social workers or mental health experts? In Los Angeles, where leaders on the left and the right have long showered resources on the police, the mayor has now proposed spending 250 million more on social services and 150 million less on policing. Last week, New York's mayor, Bill de Blasio, resisted cutting the 6 billion police budget; on Sunday, he promised future cuts. And in Minneapolis, a veto proof majority of City Council members pledged to dismantle the city's police department. The proximate cause of the latest protests was the horror of George Floyd's death. But we've seen videos of cops killing black men before and they have rarely led to criminal prosecution, let alone broad societal upheaval. What's happening now is about more than that video. Just as, after the Weinstein story broke, when women came forward with stories too numerous to ignore or dismiss, what we've seen in the last two weeks are episodes of excessive force too blatant and numerous to conclude that the problem is one of a few isolated cases. The evidence of police brutality has become too widespread even for elected officials to ignore. They can no longer easily coddle police unions in exchange for political support; now ignoring police misconduct will become a political liability, and perhaps something will change. Alex Vitale, a sociologist and the author of "The End of Policing," which argues for a wholesale dismantling of American policing, told me that he has high hopes for structural change because organizers had laid the groundwork for it. "My reason for optimism is that before Minneapolis happened, there were already dozens of campaigns to divert police funding," he said. "So that's why that demand emerged so quickly people were already doing that work." Vitale also suggested that the movement can take hold permanently, that what's happening now has cracked "the 'ideological armor'" of policing in America. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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At many colleges and universities, from underfunded institutions to top tier private colleges, many students have found themselves unable to meet basic needs during the coronavirus pandemic. Financial insecurity, previously accelerated by rising tuition costs and living expenses, has become even more acute because of the closure of campuses, loss of jobs and slashing of budgets. In response, across the country, students have created mutual aid networks: raising and redistributing tens of thousands of dollars to help their peers cover housing, medical costs, food and other essentials. Generally, students send in requests for small amounts of money, and network organizers will send them the funds using payment apps like Venmo. "The pandemic has obviously exacerbated a lot of the inequalities that exist on college campuses," said Neha Tallapragada, 19, a sophomore who helped start an aid network at Rice University. "That's really been a painful experience for a lot of students. Students have been laid off from their jobs, or they've had to take on new responsibilities because of losses in family income, perhaps due to Covid related layoffs." At some schools, students who depend on dorms for housing have struggled after their campuses closed. "We're trying to fulfill a lot of the needs that have been exacerbated or are there in a greater degree due to the pandemic," Ms. Tallapragada said. At its core, mutual aid is a form of charity in which neighbors or peers work together to help each other out on a case by case basis. (The term is often attributed to "Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution," a 1902 essay collection by the Russian social theorist Peter Kropotkin, who argued that voluntary cooperation has been key to the flourishing of human civilization.) Not all the aid networks operate in the same way. At Rice, aid recipients must provide a school ID number, while at Vanderbilt University, students and alumni have created a network for sharing temporary housing in addition to their cash distribution efforts. At Northeastern University, organizers aren't distributing money at all; instead, they use donations to stock a free food pantry and distribute personal protective equipment on campus. Giving out money is "not something that we're opposed to, but it isn't something that we've been asked for by students," said Madeleine Allocco, 21, a junior at Northeastern who has helped with the organizing. The aid networks are entirely student run, operating outside of any official college administration oversight. To date, the Georgetown mutual aid network has raised 25,000 from current students and some alumni, and has distributed 20,000. The money, which is meant to be used for "textbooks or weekly groceries, medication, things like that," has been raised from more than 900 donors, Ms. Huynh said, "so it's really shown the power of small grass roots movements." Sara Goldrick Rab, a sociology professor at Temple University who studies college affordability, said: "These mutual aid networks are springing up because the new economics of college, which is what I tend to call it, puts students at a significant economic disadvantage." She cited exorbitant tuition costs and ever rising living expenses to argue that college students, in general, are often misrepresented as more privileged than they are and that was even before the pandemic. "We did a survey of 38,000 students around the country, and nearly three in five students were dealing with either homelessness, housing insecurity or food insecurity," she said, referring to a June study of the pandemic's devastating effect on student finances. "Students continue to lead the fight to address their basic needs," she said. Campus mutual aid networks mirror similar efforts that have sprung up in communities nationwide this year. But several college organizers defined their efforts as distinctly left wing and political. "It's a form of community care that is in response to the failures of capitalist structures," said Hadeel Hamoud, 20, a junior and one of the founders of Duke Mutual Aid, who cited the Black Panthers' aid program as an inspiration. Ms. Tallapragada at Rice was one of several students who said they started their networks based on the advice of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, who wrote a 12 page mutual aid manual with the activist Mariame Kaba, and tweeted about it in March. "Myself and a lot of other college students at different colleges have been referencing that tool kit," Ms. Tallapragada said. A mutual aid network at Duke University was started in mid March, after the college sent students home because of the pandemic for the first time. Lily Levin, 19, said that she and her fellow organizers at Duke initially ran their network as "a kind of reciprocal exchange," a forum where students could offer housing or other material goods to those in need. "But as time passed, like, even after the first week, it became really clear that most people did need financial aid much more than they needed kind of those material goods," she said. The network began soliciting donations in increments of 100, distributing 20,000 from March to May. Then organizers hit a snag: Venmo began declining transactions because of how much money they were sending and receiving. The group paused their efforts and consulted with a tax lawyer at Duke, who suggested that they team up with a local nonprofit called Durham Congregations in Action. Now, it's easier to handle funding, Ms. Levin said, because "we are attached to a nonprofit, but we aren't one ourselves." "Seeing our parents struggle throughout this time, and then going on social media and seeing, like, my friends or acquaintances having the time of their lives even amidst this pandemic, was something that was really, really just I wouldn't even say shock," she said. "I think I kind of expected that, but it's nonetheless still very disappointing." "We go to school with, you know, like, TikTok influencers and students who come from royal families, or ambassador students who can afford to donate a lot more into mutual aid," Ms. Chen said. The average donation is 20, she said, which reveals "who's contributing to this and who our message is reaching." "Primarily that's the people that are using mutual aid for themselves, but can give back to it whenever they can, to support students that they know are also going through difficult times," she said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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What happens to forgotten memories old computer passwords, friends' previous phone numbers? Scientists have long held two different theories. One is that memories do not diminish but simply get overshadowed by new memories. The other is that older memories become weaker, that pulling to mind new passwords or phone numbers degrades old recollections so they do not interfere. The difference could be significant. If old memories stay strong and are merely papered over by new ones, they may be easier to recover. That could be positive for someone trying to remember an acquaintance's name, but difficult for someone trying to lessen memories of abuse. It could suggest different strategies for easing traumatic memories, evaluating witness testimony about crimes, or helping students study for tests. Now, a study claims to provide evidence of memory's weakening by showing that people's ability to remember something and the pattern of brain activity that thing generates both appear to diminish when a competing memory gets stronger. Demonstrating sophisticated use of brain scans in memory research, authors of the study, published Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience, appear to have identified neural fingerprints of specific memories, distinguishing brain activity patterns produced when viewing a picture of a necklace, say, from a picture of binoculars or other objects. The experiment, conducted by scientists in Birmingham and Cambridge, England, involved several stages with 24 participants first trained to associate words to two unrelated black and white pictures from lists of famous people, ordinary objects or scenes. They then completed several tasks in a brain scanner. First, they were shown a cue word and asked to recall the image they had been trained to link to that word so that image would become the dominant memory. (For consistency, they were asked to recall the first image they were trained on.) For example, if the word "sand" was associated first with Marilyn Monroe and then with a hat, scientists wanted participants to indicate that they were recalling Monroe by pressing a button. Each cue word was sprinkled into the test four times, so scientists could see if participants looking at the word "sand" increasingly chose Monroe over the competing memory of the hat. They did. Next, scientists wanted to see what happened to the hat memory: Did it stay as intact as Monroe although it was not being used, or did it become weaker? To gauge this, scientists showed people two different pictures of Monroe and two hat pictures, asking them which version they had been trained to recognize. If the hat memory had not degraded, scientists reasoned, people would pick the right hat as often as they picked the right Monroe. To measure success, scientists devised a standard: how well people recalled the correct picture of an unrelated famous person or object. These were images they had been shown early in the study but would have no reason to recall well because they had not been cued to remember them. For faces, a standard was two Albert Einstein pictures, and people picked the right Monroe about as well as they picked the right Einstein. For objects, a standard was two pictures of goggles. It turned out people were worse at picking the correct hat; they remembered the correct goggles better, even though their memory of goggles had not been reinforced. Brice Kuhl, a psychology professor at New York University who was not involved in the study, said that strongly suggested that competing memories get weaker, that when people repeatedly pulled out the memory of Monroe in the word test, their recollection of the hat diminished so they did worse at recalling it later. "You might think it would be better or at least the same" as the standard pictures, he said, "because you've just actually had a reminder for the hat, the cue word" in the previous scanner test. That people had trouble remembering the right hat, he said, makes it less likely the hat memory was simply overshadowed by Monroe. "It's pretty hard to think that your inability to pick the right hat has anything to do with Marilyn Monroe at that point." Next, researchers obtained a "neural signature" of Monroe, the hat and other images by recording brain activity in the prefrontal cortex as participants viewed each picture six times, said a study author, Maria Wimber, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Birmingham. These MRI images highlight the part of the brain's visual cortex where researchers saw activity when people recalled images that they had been trained to link to a word. Matching those signatures to brain patterns from the "cue word" test, researchers saw that when the word "sand" was first shown, people's brains reflected both Monroe and hat patterns, but with subsequent "sand" cues, their brains produced fewer hat traces. "We watched the memories being suppressed, actively degraded," said Dr. Wimber, whose collaborators included Michael C. Anderson, a longtime proponent of the memory suppression theory. "It's not just that the target memories get stronger; the other memories get weaker." That interpretation is not necessarily accepted by proponents of memory overshadowing and similar theories. "I buy that the brain patterns becomes less and less similar to the hat," said David E. Huber, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, calling the neural signature technique exciting. "Their interpretation of that is that the memory of the hat has been degraded. It's also possible that increasingly, you've learned to think about something other than the hat." Dr. Huber noted that while people performed below the standard level at picking the right hat, it was surprising they were not better than standard with Monroe. Dr. Wimber said that had surprised her, too, but her theory is that mental blurring occurs "the more often you bring a picture back to mind," so details get lost. Kenneth Norman, a Princeton neuroscientist who was also not involved in the study, said he believed it showed a memory weakening effect, but that "forgetting is multiply determined, and the two main explanations, they're not mutually exclusive." He said therapeutic applications of memory weakening could include extinguishing fears of something like snakes. "If you show someone a cartoon image of a snake, cute, funny," he said, "in the moment you've caused liking the snake to overcome not liking the snake. If you want to actually weaken a memory, what you need to do is flush it out. It's the process of the memory coming to mind as a competitor, but losing the competition."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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To get through the stuck at home days of the coronavirus pandemic, Americans have spent significantly more time than usual in front of the TV, gorging on streaming shows, news programs, old sitcoms and video games. But new data shows that, little by little, they have started to wean themselves from their favorite lockdown diversion. The peak came toward the end of March. The average viewer logged 40 hours of TV time during the week of March 16, according to Nielsen. The next week, that number crept up to 41, well above the 33 hours during the same week in 2019. Throughout April, Americans have grown less reliant on Netflix, cable news and Animal Crossing: The amount of TV time has declined slightly in each of the last four weeks. For the week of April 20, the average viewer spent 38 hours in front of the TV, three hours below the peak. "The week of March 16 was that inflection point when live sports was canceled and more stay at home orders were put in place," said Peter Katsingris, a senior vice president at Nielsen. "Everything all hit at once, and boom." While television use has spiked during an anomalous time, several entertainment executives said the last seven weeks might be a turning point. With movie theaters shuttered and Hollywood studios making some films immediately available for streaming, people have changed how they get their entertainment and there may be no going back to their old viewing habits. HarrisX, a research firm, noted that 74 percent of American homes now subscribed to a streaming service a figure that went up by roughly 2.5 million in the first three months of the year. "Sheltering in place has been a boon for the entertainment streaming industry," said Dritan Nesho, an analyst and the chief executive of HarrisX. Others are less sure of what will happen when daily life returns to something more like normal. Netflix, coming off the biggest month in its history, cautioned in an investor note last week that shareholders could expect viewership numbers to shrink and subscriptions to level off. The service could take a hit in the coming months, Netflix warned, "depending on many factors including when people can go back to their social lives in various countries and how much people take a break from television after the lockdown." Richard Rushfield, the writer of Ankler, a Hollywood newsletter, has argued that, post pandemic, people will not want to do anything that reminds them of this time. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes has taken the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. "I don't think 'movies are dead' or that the corona period is going to kick off a brand new love affair between America with their couches," he wrote in his newsletter. "I think the 'Get me out of this place' backlash has even greater potential to hurt the services after all this ends than anyone is factoring in." In an interview, Mr. Rushfield expanded on the thought. "The supply of great shows is bigger than it's ever been, but it's not infinite," he said. "I think people are beginning to exhaust the shows they are really dying to watch. After finishing the fourth season of 'Call the Midwife,' they might be wondering what it's like to see a squirrel run up a tree." During the stay at home weeks, viewers have craved both news programs and escapist fare, splitting their TV time between the likes of Anderson Cooper and Bea Arthur, with one balancing the other. Cable news networks have had ratings records. In April, Fox News and MSNBC had among their highest viewership totals of their 24 years on the air. CNN's viewership totals have also skyrocketed. The evening news shows on ABC, CBS and NBC, which not long ago seemed like relics of an earlier media age, have continued to draw audiences much larger than the norm. But viewers have lately been watching the news a bit less. News programming amounted to 19 percent of total TV time during the week of March 16. By April 6, that number was 17.5 percent, according to Nielsen. A Hulu spokeswoman noted that "comfort viewing" had been more popular than usual. In April, Hulu viewers watched nearly 11 million hours of the vintage sitcom "The Golden Girls," the spokeswoman said. That show and the long running "Law Order: Special Victims Unit" have both ranked in Hulu's top 10 in recent weeks. According to Magid, a research company, American viewers have been seeking out "fun" shows at a time when the Covid 19 death toll in the United States has climbed to more than 60,000 and some 30 million people have lost their jobs. There has been less desire for "intelligent" or "original" programming, Magid said. So the timing may not have been ideal for a pair of lushly produced period dramas that made their debuts in recent weeks: Hulu's "Mrs. America," a limited series starring Cate Blanchett and Rose Byrne that chronicles the fight over the Equal Rights Amendment, and HBO's "The Plot Against America," a six part adaptation of Philip Roth's alternate history novel created by David Simon and Ed Burns. Both were well received, but they may not find bigger audiences until Emmys time. With college and pro athletes on the bench, sports starved viewers have glommed onto whatever they can get. The first night of the National Football League draft a remote program, with homey production values and key scenes set in left tackles' living rooms averaged 15.6 million viewers, a 37 percent increase over last year's slickly produced broadcast. Hollywood stars have been trying to keep busy, with film and TV sets shut down. An Instagram video of celebrities interpreting John Lennon's "Imagine" came in for harsh criticism last month, but nearly 21 million people watched "One World: Together at Home," a remote concert featuring Lizzo, Lady Gaga and Elton John that was broadcast April 18 across 26 American television networks. The late night crew has adapted. The CBS host Stephen Colbert has adjusted his at home wardrobe from formal (suits) to casual (collared shirt, rolled up sleeves). NBC's Jimmy Fallon has replaced his usual sidekick, Steve Higgins, with his two daughters. On ABC, "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" has morphed into "Jimmy Kimmel Live at His House." It is now a half hour program, to make way for an earlier "Nightline." Trevor Noah has been working overtime on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," lately called "The Daily Social Distancing Show," with 45 minute episodes instead of the usual 30. Through it all, Netflix has been dominant, taking nearly every slot in Nielsen's weekly lists of the 10 most viewed streaming shows this month and last. Its breakout documentary series "Tiger King" was huge early in the lockdown. A Netflix original movie, "Spenser Confidential," starring Mark Wahlberg, was less discussed on social media but attracted an even larger audience, according to the company. A new Netflix reality show, "Too Hot to Handle," plays almost like fantasy in the current environment. It gathers a group of young people and puts them in close physical proximity on a Mexican beach. "Nobody can keep it in their pants these days!" intones the voice over as the show starts. At a time when strangers must keep six feet apart, it leapt straight into the Netflix top 10.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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For those working in the restaurant industry, "Every day is a negotiation: of labor costs, food costs, rent, insurance, health inspections, and the art and craft of creating an experience special enough to keep people coming through the doors," writes Priya Krishna in her Op Ed, "How to Save Restaurants." The pandemic raised the stakes of that balancing act. Safety restrictions and lockdowns have put even more pressure on the industry's already shaky economic models, pushing staff and owners to the edge physically, mentally and financially. The trickling return of indoor dining across the country including in New York this week may offer restaurants some relief. But will that extend to workers? Can restaurant owners weather the pandemic's long term effects? We reached out to people working in restaurants around the country to see how their lives and livelihoods have changed since the coronavirus. "We're punching above our weight so far and keeping everyone employed," writes Robert Hoover, whose restaurant in Stowe, Vt., was able to continue service by setting up picnic tables on its large front lawn. But, he says, "winter will bring a very different economic story, and not just here." More accounts from restaurant workers follow. They have been edited for length and clarity. The pandemic drilled in the message that our restaurant was dedicated to profits, not people. We did not close for a single day, and we were not provided with P.P.E. until July. There was no pandemic pay, no offer of financial assistance, no specific rules in place for shutting down if one of us tested positive. Yet our owner did not step foot into the restaurant for almost four months out of self concern. I ended up leaving. Aubrey Schefft, 26, Cleveland Heights, Ohio I have an advanced degree, and I've worked in hospitality my entire life as a choice. Now I am unmoored, searching for what's next. I no longer want to work in a field that is so broken. I want health insurance, a 401(k) and a fair wage, and I want to know the people that work with me have job security and are also being treated and paid fairly. It's pathetic that these asks are so far fetched in today's climate, and I have decided I can't keep subjecting myself to this. I don't know what's next but after working in a field I love for 20 years, I have to move on. Elizabeth Kelso, 34, Los Angeles I quit in March. I was expected to work and endanger my health (and my family's) for far less money. I refused and so was not able to collect unemployment. Broke, unemployed and terrified, I'm scared for my future with no financial security to speak of. I want out of the industry but jobs are scarce. Ryan Robertson, 43, Colorado 'Job security? Not even on the docket.' I'm a sommelier and bar manager at a fine dining restaurant in Hawaii and part of a management team driving the restaurant's adaptation. I now spend very little time tableside and more time getting promotions like wine discounts onto Instagram. Like so many others in this state, we lost a major source of revenue when travel shut down. We reopened Aug. 6 at 50 percent capacity, which so far has yielded about 25 percent of pre Covid revenue. The Paycheck Protection Program money makes this sustainable for one more month. And even if a new round of P.P.P. doesn't come through, we've decided to forge ahead. In the unknowably distant future, the return of tourism to Hawaii is dependent on an effective vaccine, economic security, cultural attitudes and politics. In the meantime, you can get a hell of a great deal on a bottle of wine. Job security? Not even on the docket. James L. Lunchick, 61, Waikoloa, Hawaii The restaurant where I work is inside a theme park. It was closed for four months because they couldn't reopen until the park did. We are now operating four days a week at 50 percent capacity but our income is down 60 percent compared to before Covid because we depend on tips. My husband and I both work there, so our household income is tight. Luckily we have a union and there are policies in place that have helped secure our jobs. However the company is suffering. Financially, it's a big gamble. Paola Gonzalez, 33, Davenport, Fla. 'I'm so grateful to have the owners that we do' I was a lead server at an almost 70 year old fine dining restaurant in Seattle with views of Lake Union. Guests dressed to the nines, and we served beautifully plated food and an award winning wine list. In March we shut all that down and launched three new concepts in three days: drive through burgers, a bagel shed and family meal delivery. When the weather got warmer, we opened a casual crab shack in the parking lot. Customers now come in flip flops, and my goal is to deliver safe service by giving people as much space as possible. At this point, we've closed the crab shack because of wildfire smoke and fall weather. Almost the entire staff has been laid off with eyes toward being brought back before the holidays. I'm immensely proud of our entire team for pushing forward through all of this, and I'm so grateful to have the owners that we do. They could have laid us all off six months ago. They chose to stay open and fight. Michael Campbell, 28, Seattle I was working at two restaurants in N.Y.C. Both shut down on the same day in March. It was terrifying! I made a quick decision to file for unemployment that day, and it was a wise move. We've been taking care of each other and staying close since the shutdowns. The restaurants have offered family meals to any of us in need, and there are constant GoFundMes for staff and our regular guests have been so generous. Associations have sponsored grants, and spirit companies have given money to applicants. Just so much love. Being locked down was the right thing to do, but it is an extrovert's nightmare. I am ready to go back to work, precautions and all! Monica Elliot, 49, New York, N.Y. 'My job is so much more serious' I went from being a server whose primary concern was people having a nice evening out, to a possible transmitter of a horrible virus. My job is so much more serious and ominous than it used to be. A lot of my time is spent gauging how comfortable customers are with me approaching the table when they have their masks off, or explaining our safety measures and our bathroom procedure. I had a Covid scare and my restaurant had to shut down for days. Several of us had to get tested. It turned out to be negative, but I've never felt so horrible. I know that made us lose money. Grace Guber, 21, Maplewood, N.J. Before all this I was a bartender. Now I'm a server bartender bar manager bar back food runner busser host. I ask about a hundred people a day to please wear a mask when staff is at the table and I'm forced to get within a foot of about 95 of those people, unmasked. I'm exhausted. I'm making less money, working more hours and I know I am lucky to have a job at all. Mostly, though, I'm afraid. The owners are pushing for us to reopen inside and there's nothing I can do to stop it. I'm afraid I'm going to get sick, or worse, unwittingly give it to my girlfriend or her parents. I just wish I felt one iota of control over the situation. Olivia, 27, Washington, D.C. I'm a server and bartender at a Chicago restaurant that's part of a large corporate group. We were all furloughed in March and collected unemployment. In June, when Illinois allowed patio dining again, a few of us with seniority were asked to come back to work. Our teamwork has never been better. We all hold each other accountable in a healthy way because we're all collectively making money for each other. But I find we are also a lot angrier, stressed and cynical toward the public that wants to support us, but is also putting our lives at risk. Customers need to adapt to us. We have guests that have trouble following our simple mask guidelines. They don't realize we're stretched thin. They act as if everything is back to normal when it clearly isn't. The pandemic has taught all of us that the service industry is and has always been propped up by its lowest paid workers. Jeremy Mendoza, 27, Chicago 'The model has always been flawed' I have been professionally cooking for eight years and in love with food for much longer. The passion wakes us up in the morning, the excitement invigorates us every shift and the familial atmosphere of the kitchen sustains us. It's how we justify our low wages, long hours and lack of health care. The pandemic has caused me to lose faith in the traditional restaurant model. I am no longer interested in running a kitchen or having my own restaurant. I have no interest in contributing to the underlying manipulation that occurs in every kitchen that allows for low wages. I am not sure what the future holds, but this is not it. Joshua Needleman, 31, Brooklyn, N.Y. I'm an independent owner and operator and have spent 43 years in restaurants. I was able to raise my family on the income generated by working hard and building a strong business. Those of us who have spent a career in the business have many advantages: owning real estate, established banking relationships and rainy day funds. How will I now be able to pass that opportunity on to my employees? We are about to lose an entire generation of young restaurant owners because they will not have the deep roots needed to stay in business through the pandemic. How will the government work with young restaurateurs to rebuild the foundation of our industry? Steven Langer, 66, Denver
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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One worthy mission of Ballet NY, a chamber troupe founded in 1997 and still hanging on, is to offer chances, and trained dancers, to budding choreographers. So it might have been disappointing that the company's program at Ailey Citigroup Theater on Tuesday featured no new works. Three out of the four pieces had been made for other groups. Yet this, too, was part of a worthy mission: allowing the creations of lesser known choreographers to be seen again, embodied and interpreted by different dancers, giving those works a chance at an extended life. Commissioning work is a gamble; choosing works to import is a display of taste. Antonia Franceschi's "Kinderszenen" is a fine choice. Set to Allen Shawn's "Childhood Scenes" (played with incisive energy on Tuesday by the pianist Yoshiko Sato), it is openly and beneficially indebted to the ballets of George Balanchine. (Ms. Franceschi danced with New York City Ballet in the 1980s before moving to England.) It is particularly Balanchinian in its structuring: its clever transitions, the fluid relationship between classical steps and the score. The virtues of "Kinderszenen," a work for three couples, brought out the strengths and weaknesses of Ballet NY's roster. The variety of steps exhibited solid if not scintillating technique, especially among the men. But the piece also exposed some roughness in the dancers' rhythm and, more jarringly, an inconsistency of stage presence. At Ailey Citigroup, the short distance between performers and audience exacerbated the problem. In "Dreams," a trio by Margot Parsons, a veteran teacher and choreographer well known in Boston, two of the women from "Kinderszenen" were steadier less flustered, perhaps, by this piece's more consistent pressure. In Timothy Church's costumes, the three woman looked like muses, and Ms. Parsons's handsome groupings could have made the ballet static. Yet it had momentum. Movement along tracks with a stiff arm extended suggested fate or the inexorable advance of time.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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The owner of Junior's moved his cheesecake factory from Queens to Burlington, N.J., where he found more space for less money. BURLINGTON, N.J. Junior's might make the quintessential New York cheesecake, but its owner, Alan Rosen, has quickly learned that baking it in suburban New Jersey is much easier. For Mr. Rosen, trading his 20,000 square foot bakery in Maspeth, Queens, for a 103,000 square foot facility in Burlington, N.J., has been akin to giving up a cramped city apartment for a mansion in the country. Even the adage about getting more for your money has proved true: Junior's paid 3.8 million for the sprawling property, about the price of a three bedroom apartment in Manhattan. "We've got grass to mow," said Mr. Rosen, strolling the grounds of the seven acre lot on a drizzly June morning. "I'm not sure exactly where it stops; that's how you know you've got a lot of land." He has several loading docks. Seven? No, six. No matter. At his Queens location, which will close in July, a month before its lease expires, he has only two. The cream cheese for his famous cheesecakes has to be delivered there daily because he has nowhere to store it. But in Burlington, 40,000 pounds of cream cheese hardly fills a wall of one of the company's two refrigerators, which are about five times the size of their predecessors in Queens. The bakery also has six blast freezers, which can freeze a cake solid in about two hours. Visitors to the original Junior's restaurant on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn still eat cake freshly baked at the restaurant's 8,000 square foot on site bakery. But all other delectables will be made in New Jersey, including those sold at the company's other restaurants, in grocery stores and through its mail order business. Mr. Rosen, whose grandfather Harry Rosen founded Junior's on Election Day in 1950, hopes the move will propel the family business further onto the national stage, allowing it to open new restaurants (Florida and Las Vegas top the wish list) and sell to more grocery stores around the country and abroad. The Queens bakery operated at full capacity 24 hours a day, seven days a week to make about two million cakes a year. Already, the company is producing as much in Burlington in a 50 hour week, with mixers, ovens and assembly lines that dwarf the ones in Queens. In the last three months alone, Junior's has added over 600 stores to its distribution list. "We have room to breathe now," said Mr. Rosen, whose company bakes a wide variety of cakes. With all the extra space, it might eventually start a gluten free line. In moving to Burlington, Mr. Rosen joins a long (and growing) roster of food manufacturers and distributors that call the Garden State home. The state has been aggressively luring businesses (and enticing others to stay) with lucrative incentives, like the 30 million, 10 year tax break it awarded Wenner Bread Products, which signed a lease for space in New Brunswick last year, moving the bulk of its operations from Long Island. Critics of the incentive programs argue that the subsidies do not create enough jobs for the money spent and, in some cases, are unnecessary. Mr. Rosen, however, said he bought the Burlington facility without any subsidies or tax breaks. He considered staying in New York, looking at locations in the five boroughs, but found them too expensive. A Bronx facility cost about 20 million. "Cheesecake is a good business, but it's not that good," he said. Over the last year, food and beverage companies have leased 2.1 million square feet of space in the state and 13 more companies are aiming to rent a total of 2.8 million square feet, according to data provided by the real estate company Jones Lang LaSalle. Last year, Peapod, the online grocer, opened a 345,000 square foot distribution center in Jersey City. In April, Goya, the Latin American food purveyor, opened a 900,000 square foot headquarters and distribution center in Jersey City, less than a mile from its former headquarters in Secaucus, which it is renovating. It plans to sell a second Secaucus plant and in July will close its Long Island facility. And this fall, Fratelli Beretta, the Italian meat company, will open a United States headquarters and processing plant in Mount Olive, N.J. "It's definitely a trend," said Robert C. Kossar, executive managing director with Jones Lang LaSalle. The companies that are relocating to or expanding operations in New Jersey "are all over the board from farmers' markets to production to e commerce. It's really cutting across all aspects of the food and beverage industry." Food companies produce and distribute a product that is, for the most part, cheap and heavy. New Jersey offers two important advantages that help keep costs down: Property generally costs less to rent or buy than it does in New York City, and the state's location puts trucks within a day's drive of 40 percent of the entire American population. Nevertheless, Goya nearly left New Jersey for Suffern, N.Y., Mr. Unanue said. An 82 million, 10 year tax credit from the state persuaded the company to stay. Jersey City gave Goya a 20 year tax abatement, worth about 8 million. In turn, Goya built a 127 million facility on 47 acres, with a 600,000 square foot warehouse, a test kitchen and laboratory for quality control. The company is also modernizing its Secaucus production plant, bringing a rail line to that building. It will be complete in July. "For them, making the decision to make that kind of capital investment was certainly enhanced by the availability of the incentive," said Michele Brown, the president of Choose New Jersey, a nonprofit organization that promotes business in the state. "It made it feasible for them to do it." Companies seeking a state subsidy are required to certify that they would leave the state without the incentive. But some doubt the sincerity of those claims. "They do this whole certification song and dance," said Jon Whiten, deputy director of the New Jersey Policy Perspective, a group that has been critical of the incentive program. "But when the rubber hits the road, it remains unclear if companies were really planning on leaving." Goya, the largest Hispanic owned food company in the country, built its brand by providing not only staples like beans and rice, but also Latin American specialty items like canned chipotles, tomatillos and masarepa, the ground corn flour used to make arepas. Mr. Unanue's grandfather founded the company in Lower Manhattan in 1936 by importing sardines from Morocco when he could not get them from Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Every night, 60,000 cases of goods pigeon peas, black beans, yellow rice and pork rinds leave the Jersey City warehouse by truck, headed to grocery stores, bodegas and markets across the region. The new facility is less than 10 miles from Manhattan and within a short drive of the 4.3 million Latinos who live in the New York Northeastern New Jersey region. "We have to be in this market," Mr. Unanue said. But for Junior's, the move to southern New Jersey has not diluted the company's identity as a New York brand. The original cheesecake recipe a blend of cream cheese, heavy cream, sugar, eggs and a touch of vanilla has not changed in 65 years. If time hasn't altered the recipe, neither will a 75 mile move, Mr. Rosen said. "I love New York," he said. "We're a New York company, but like the Jets and the Giants, we play some of our games in New Jersey."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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The Brevard site has become a part of the Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival's annual events. If you're headed to Florida, the festival kicked off this week and runs to Monday. But there are plenty more opportunities in other places to scurry over piles of sharp objects and maggot infested mystery mush to catch a glimpse of some of the exotic flying things that are drawn to landfills. If that sounds like fun, consider this your guide to dirty birding. First, call to see if the local landfill allows visitors. If it does, you will probably take a safety class and sign a release. Don't just show up or sneak in: Some landfills have kicked birding groups out for breaking their rules or disrupting their work. Wear boots, long pants and a hat. You will have to learn to ignore the stench, and bring a change of clothes for those at home who can't. To spot highfliers, carry a pair of binoculars or a telescope. Expect a lot of birds. In Florida, birders have spotted white ibis, cattle egrets, eagles, herons, wood storks and cranes. But the landfills there are best known for gulls of many species from all over the East Coast. There are fairly significant numbers of lesser black backed gulls, a European bird that has showed up in the United States in the last few decades. Right now a project is banding and tracking them to find out their origin. "We do not where these birds are coming from despite the fact that there are thousands," said Michael Brothers, a manager at the Marine Science Center in Ponce Inlet, Fla.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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For years, American companies have been saving money by "offshoring" jobs hiring people in India and other distant cubicle farms. Today, some of those jobs are being outsourced again in the United States. Nexient, a software outsourcing company, reflects the evolving geography of technology work. It holds daily video meetings with one of its clients, Bill.com, where team members stand up and say into the camera what they accomplished yesterday for Bill.com, and what they plan to do tomorrow. The difference is, they are phoning in from Michigan, not Mumbai. "It's the first time we've been happy outsourcing," said Rene Lacerte, the chief executive of Bill.com, a bill payment and collection service based in Palo Alto, Calif. Nexient is a domestic outsourcer, a flourishing niche in the tech world as some American companies pull back from the idea of hiring programmers a world away. Many of these domestic outsourcers are private, little known companies like Rural Sourcing, Catalyte, Eagle Creek Software Services and Onshore Outsourcing. But IBM, one of the country's foremost champions of the offshore outsourcing model, has announced plans to hire 25,000 more workers in the United States over the next four years. As a result, the growth of offshore software work is slowing, to nearly half the pace of recent years. "The nature of work is changing," said Vishal Sikka, chief executive of Infosys, an Indian outsourcing giant. "It is very local. And you often need whole teams locally," a departure from the offshore formula of having a project manager on site but the work done abroad. "It's not enough to have people offshore in India," he added. Infosys announced in May that it planned to hire 10,000 workers in the United States over the next two years, starting with centers in Indiana and North Carolina. The offshore industry is not imperiled, analysts say. But from 2016 to 2021, the offshore services industry will have average yearly growth of 8 percent, the research firm IDC estimated. The rate in the previous five years was 15 percent. "Domestic sourcing is here to stay, and it's going to grow rapidly," said Helen Huntley, an analyst at the research firm Gartner. The first wave of internet era digital change in business, starting in the 1990s, focused mainly on automating back office tasks like payrolls and financial reporting. The software involved was a collection of huge programs maintained by armies of engineers. The internet allowed that work to be sent to low wage nations, especially India. That brought the rise of the big outsourcing companies like Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys. Offshore services companies still excel at maintaining the software that runs the essential back office systems of corporations. But today, companies in every industry need mobile apps and appealing websites, which can be made smarter with data and constantly updated. That software is best created by small, nimble teams, working closely with businesses and customers not shipped to programmers half a world away. Nexient, which has its headquarters in Newark, Calif., has three delivery centers in the Midwest: in Ann Arbor, Mich.; Okemos, Mich.; and Kokomo, Ind. It employs 400 people, up from 250 two years ago, and plans to hire a few hundred more over the next year, Mark Orttung, the company's chief executive, said. The company's business model is fairly typical for onshore companies. On projects, it will send members of a team to the client for a couple of weeks to study the business and meet their counterparts. Bill.com even interviewed and shared in the selection of five Nexient engineers who would work on the joint team. Mr. Lacerte of Bill.com had farmed out technology work over the years, but the headaches of navigating time zones, cultures and language often outweighed the cost savings. Those problems went away when he hired a domestic outsourcer. A set of tools at the desk of a Techtonic apprentice. Techtonic began the apprentice program in 2014, and has hired 90 percent of the graduates. Ryan David Brown for The New York Times Nexient has set up its centers away from the coastal high tech hubs, like the Bay Area and New York, to tap skilled people who want jobs in the technology economy without leaving the Midwest, where living costs are far less. Monty Hamilton, a former Accenture consultant, took over Rural Sourcing in 2009, when it had just a dozen employees. Today, the company has 300 workers in four delivery centers: in Albuquerque; Augusta, Ga.; Jonesboro, Ark.; and Mobile, Ala. The payroll will reach about 400 people by the end of the year, Mr. Hamilton said. "Every business now realizes it's a digital business," he said. "They need technical help, and that's really driven the demand for our U.S. based talent." Politics seem to be playing a role, too. The American onshore companies say they are seeing a postelection spike in client inquiries, as President Trump lobbies businesses to create more jobs in the United States and seeks to curb immigrant work visas. "The election has brought a lot of attention to these issues and to us," Mr. Orttung said. "But nobody buys because of that." Rising labor costs abroad also make domestic sourcing more attractive. A decade ago, Mr. Hamilton said, an American software developer cost five to seven times as much as an Indian developer. Now, he estimates, the gap has shrunk to two times. The standard billing rate for his engineers is 60 to 70 an hour, compared with 30 to 35 in India, Mr. Hamilton said. Catalyte, based in Baltimore, has doubled its work force in the last two years, to 300 people. To accommodate rapid growth, Catalyte is scouting locations for two new centers, which the company hopes to open by the end of this year, said Michael Rosenbaum, founder of Catalyte. Training is a vital capability for all the onshore companies, but few have gone as far as the Techtonic Group in Boulder, Colo. Once a committed offshore outsourcer, Techtonic has made nurturing homegrown talent the centerpiece of its business. In 2014, it set up a training academy that feeds graduates into its Department of Labor approved apprenticeship program for software engineers. In the past couple of years, 30 people have gone through the program, which lasts six to nine months. Techtonic has hired 90 percent of the graduates, and many later became employees of its corporate customers, starting at salaries between 65,000 and 75,000. Techtonic has an ambitious expansion plan, going to 10 new cities in the next three years and hiring 100 developers in each city, said Heather Terenzio, the company's chief executive. "American industry has relied too much on overseas technology workers and neglected the potential talent here," she said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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PROM time has come and gone, and while it didn't affect me or my sons this year (I'm too old, they're too young), it still caused a reminiscent tightening in my stomach. The prom, along with its endless pre and post events, is just one more social trial that adolescents face in their school years and yet another test of their relative popularity, of fitting in, of being accepted. And it got me thinking about popularity. It's important for most teenagers, but sometimes even more so for their parents. In my community, parents often like boasting (thinly veiled by mock dismay) that their children are at parties every weekend and never around the house. I have, for example, a friend whose son is academically proficient and involved in school and outside activities. Yet, he is not a big socializer. "It's hard," she says. "When other parents talk, it's easy to feel like something is wrong with your child, even when there isn't." So I wondered, is popularity always a good thing? And how does it play out in life after high school? Mitchell J. Prinstein, a professor and director of clinical psychology at the University of North Carolina, outlines the way researchers often look at popularity: there are the students he calls "high status," like the student council president or the captain of the football team. "Some of the most popular kids are very much disliked by other kids," he said. This may be partly envy, but sometimes these standout teenagers can be bullies or part of the mean girl clique. Another kind of popularity is what Professor Prinstein calls "likeability." That is how much a person is liked or preferred by peers someone other people enjoy hanging out with on a Saturday night. These teenagers tend to be well adjusted on many levels, including enjoying good relationships with their parents and other adults, as well as being able to master diverse social situations. "They tend to be carefully attuned to the norms of their peer group," said Joseph P. Allen, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. "They're less trendsetters than trend spotters." Surveys estimate that about 20 percent of students in any school are highly liked, about 50 percent are average having some friends, but not necessarily a lot and the rest are considered neglected or rejected students. These are either ignored or actively disliked. That pretty much sets the scene for most high schools we know. I fell into that vast middle ground I had a group of friends, was involved in various school activities and sports (and yes, I went to the prom). But I certainly didn't scale the glittering heights of popularity. Still, the real question is, what does being popular in middle and high school tell us about the world outside the bubble of adolescence? Does it matter? Professor Allen, who is also the co author of "Escaping the Endless Adolescence" (Ballantine, 2009), has some answers. He has been following a demographically diverse group of 185 students from Charlottesville, Va., since they were 13 years old; they are now 24. He plans to continue studying them for several more years. Professor Allen is using the criteria of likeability, rather than high status, to define popularity. His longitudinal study has found that the more popular teenagers were more likely to get into trouble with mild deviant behavior, like shoplifting or vandalism, and to drink or smoke marijuana. "This is the currency of adolescents," Professor Prinstein said. "It's one way to signal to their peers that I'm not doing what adults want. I'm autonomous and independent." Much of that small time crime disappears as the students age, Professor Allen said, but the drinking and marijuana use actually tended to become even more of a problem in college and afterward. While not every highly social teenager engages in substance abuse, "we find that the popular kids are more vulnerable," he said. The very thing that makes teenagers popular being in tune with the needs and norms of their peers can have negative consequences, he added. The good news is that it's not necessary to have loads of friends or to rank high on the popularity scale to feel good about yourself, researchers have found. If your child has a few close friends who make her feel accepted and liked, is doing fairly well academically and is involved in a few activities in or out of school, then you probably have little to worry about. "They're learning to be both connected and autonomous," Professor Allen said. In fact, another study of 164 13 and 14 year olds, a subset of Professor Allen's group, found that teenagers who perceived themselves as well liked and comfortable with their peers were just as socially successful over time as those who were deemed popular by others. This internal sense of social acceptance, the study's authors said, may be as or more important in the long run than the number of friends you have. But there is some evidence that being more popular may have some long term economic benefits. Using information from 4,330 male respondents from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study one third of a continuing random sample of more than 10,000 men and women who graduated from Wisconsin high schools in 1957 a group of economic and labor researchers reported in 2009 that they had found a link between number of friends and higher earnings in the future. The participants were asked in a 1975 survey to name their three closest same sex friends from high school. Controlling for all other factors, including intelligence, the 2009 report found that being nominated as a close friend by one person is associated with earnings that are 2 percent higher later in life. Nominations by five people equaled a 10 percent increase in wages. It may be that being named as a close friend indicates good social skills that are beneficial throughout life, said Gabriella Conti, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Chicago and lead author on the report. Certainly there is evidence that the qualities we usually associate with being well liked being extroverted, emotionally stable and self confident usually help on the job. "A lot of work being performed in the current workplace is not done in isolation," Brent A. Scott, an assistant professor of management at Michigan State University who wrote his doctoral dissertation on popularity at work. "People need to be socially capable in teams, and to be successful they need to navigate the social landscape. Popular people are more capable of that." But there are other qualities that contribute to being well liked professionally that may not have carried much clout in school, he said, like being conscientious about your job. The good news for all of us is that once we leave high school, there are far more ways to flourish than in the narrow confines of adolescence. How many of us have had the rewarding experience of going to our school reunion to discover that the mighty have fallen, or at least are just as human as the rest of us? The bigger puzzle, I find, is why so few people actually believe in retrospect that they were popular in high school. "Because it's a jungle," Professor Allen said. "Even if you were popular, you still had experiences of being left out and rejected. No one goes through unscathed."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Your Money
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AMONG the early industrialists of Germany pioneering figures like Karl Benz, Gottlieb Daimler and Ferdinand Porsche, all linked to prominent automotive brands there is one whose name remains resolutely unfamiliar to Americans: August Horch. But even if the name is barely recognized in the United States, where the Horch brand had little presence, the influence of the company's founder is certainly felt. In a career that coincided with the dawn of the auto industry, Horch, who died in 1951, built cars that rivaled German competitors like Mercedes Benz in style and prestige. Yet a quirk of corporate maneuvering that took place a century ago all but sealed Horch in obscurity. After a decade of building cars and racing them successfully, Horch was forced out of the company he founded. He started a new company in 1909, also called Horch, but was compelled through legal actions to change the name. Horch's solution was clever. The family name, which means "hear" in German, was replaced by its Latin equivalent: Audi. The Horch and Audi companies were each folded into larger conglomerates in later years, with the Horch nameplate disappearing from cars entirely after World War II, while the Audi brand, as part of the Volkswagen empire, continues to thrive. There is a jewel of a museum named for the man in this small city, about 190 miles south of Berlin in what was East Germany, where Horch lived and worked for much of his life. The museum displays provide a worthy reminder of his innovations as well as other new technologies that helped to define the auto industry during its formative years. Developments like the early use of 6 and 8 cylinder engines, high strength steels, advanced carburetors and transmissions and the introduction of left hand drive to Germany can be seen in a collection that traces the history of Horch and Audi along with DKW and Wanderer. Together, the four brands are represented by the interlocking four rings of Audi's logo. Recognition for the artistry of Horch cars has been plentiful in recent years. In 2008, for example, a rare 1938 Horch 853 Special Roadster was sold in London for about 1.8 million by RM Auctions. And in 2009, the cognoscenti at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance chose an elegant 1937 Horch 853 cabriolet as Best of Show. The concours chairwoman, Sandra Button, described it as "very Teutonic, but also almost French." Zwickau is not a typical stop for most American tourists, though it's little more than an hour's drive from the ornately restored city of Dresden. The museum, at No. 7 Audistrasse, opened in 1988 with only five cars to display. It has since evolved into a modern exhibition of vehicles, words and pictures, and part of it is now housed in the original Audi factory. "Many people come to us and say we have the prettiest museum in Europe," the director, Rudolf Vollnhals, said. "Our visitors are enthusiasts, and we draw about 70,000 a year." The museum itself is built on two levels, connected by ramps and easily negotiated. Chronology plays a part, as the displays trace the Horch legacy, dating from 1899, when August Horch Cie was founded. After establishing Audi, Horch continued his participation in German road racing as a way to demonstrate the performance of his products. The point is reinforced by a yellow Audi Type B racecar from 1910 that greets visitors to the main hall. The advent of World War I complicated the car business in Germany, and much of the industrial facility was committed to military use. By the late '20s, Horch was in financial trouble. Audi was sold to a newly formed conglomerate called Auto Union that incorporated the DKW, Wanderer and Horch nameplates. Daimler Benz bought Auto Union in 1959, selling it five years later to the Volkswagen Group. The museum is financed in part by Audi and by the Federal Republic, and supported as well by contributions, said Mr. Vollnhals, who is an employee of Audi. There is another piquant tale told in the museum. "From 1957 until 1991, the Trabant was built here and turned out more than three million cars over 30 years," Mr. Vollnhals said. The museum building was part of that production complex. On a tour of the museum, the affable guide explained that all but two cars in the collection are operable, but he declined a request to try out the 1911 Horch Phaeton on the autobahn. "It took five years to restore," he said. As well as the cars, engines and chassis on display, there is a wood paneled office, with payroll account books on the desk, that Horch used. There is also a replica of an old German filling station. Part of the museum is devoted to a workshop where visitors can see a cutaway Audi and production machinery from the earliest days, including an engine test rig. There is also a small theater showing a film that details the history of Zwickau's auto industry. In the Trabant area, several of the much maligned cars are on view, most of them made of Duroplast, a composite of cotton from the Soviet Union mixed with resin and cooked to 370 degrees Fahrenheit. Sheet metal wasn't available in the Soviet controlled part of Germany, our guide explained, as it was embargoed by the West. "At any rate, you had to wait 10 years to get one," he said. "You could always sell a used Trabant for at least the price of a new one." The August Horch Museum is at 7 Audistrasse, Zwickau, Germany and is open daily except Monday. Admission for adults is about 7; special rates for families and groups are available. More information is available at
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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A conventional news conference would hardly suffice for the debut of the 2014 Range Rover Sport, Land Rover executives thought, so on March 26, the night before the New York auto show opens for two days of press previews, the new S.U.V. is to be revealed in a Hollywood caliber video. The video's story line seems straightforward enough: a red Range Rover Sport is packed into a shipping container, which ultimately arrives in New York for the hero to take delivery. A frenetic crosstown dash amazingly leads to the vehicle's destination, the official unveiling in Midtown. The video will be broadcast on the Internet, and the live press event in Manhattan is expected to include an appearance by Daniel Craig, the reigning Agent 007 of the James Bond film franchise. The choice of location was no flight of a director's fancy, given that New York is the world's biggest market for the Range Rover Sport, according to the company. While Land Rover representatives remained more secretive than the Spectre crime syndicate regarding Mr. Craig's participation, behind the scenes access to the filming was offered to a reporter. Over several days and weeks ahead of the auto show's opening carefully selected locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn served as backdrops for the video that would lead to the Sport's cinematic entrance.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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THE worst wildfire season in years is forcing many Californians from their homes and has caused the destruction of hundreds of houses, cars and other property. Amy Bach, executive director of United Policyholders, a nonprofit group that assists consumers with insurance issues, urges homeowners who live in areas at risk of wildfires to double check their policies to ensure they have adequate coverage to rebuild their home if it is destroyed. While California is prone to devastating fires, she says, they can occur elsewhere as well, particularly in other parts of the West. (CoreLogic has published an analysis of residential wildfire risk in 13 states.) You can take your policy limit, she suggests, and divide it by your home's square footage to get a rough estimate. If the number is less than 200 per square foot, you're probably underinsured and should consider purchasing more coverage. You should also make sure you have "code upgrade" coverage, which helps cover the cost of bringing your new home up to the latest building standards. "Think about, 'What would a contractor charge to rebuild from the ground up?'" Ms. Bach said. The United Policyholders website has tips and resources for handling a claim. Damage to your home from a wildfire is covered by a standard homeowner's insurance policy, as damage from any other sort of fire would be, said Janet Ruiz, a spokeswoman in California for the Insurance Information Institute, an industry sponsored group. Repair and cleaning of smoke damaged furniture and water damage, from firefighting efforts are covered as well. The amount a policyholder receives depends on how much coverage was purchased and, if applicable, the deductible the amount paid out of pocket, before the policy pays. In addition, standard policies cover "additional living expenses" in the event of a disaster, including a fire. That includes the cost of living away from home if there's a mandatory evacuation, or if the home is damaged and uninhabitable. Such costs include hotel bills, meals out and other expenses while the home is being rebuilt, as well as the purchase of new clothing. Save receipts to document your expenses, Ms. Ruiz advised. Coverage for additional living expenses varies by insurer, but policies often provide coverage for 20 percent of the total insurance on your house. In addition, some policies may set time limits on coverage. You can usually purchase additional protection for an extra premium. One type of wildfire damage that typically isn't covered, however, is the destruction of landscaping and plants around your home, according to the National Fire Protection Association. Ms. Ruiz, an insurance industry veteran, recently learned firsthand what it's like to have property threatened by a natural calamity. Last Saturday, she and her husband were forced from their house in Hidden Valley Lake, Calif., near Middletown, by the Valley Fire, one of numerous wildfires that have recently devastated parts of drought stricken California. Ms. Ruiz said she was driving home when she saw flames and had to turn around. Her husband was at the house and had to evacuate. "It was pretty scary for him." The couple learned this week that their house was spared. They have not yet been allowed to return to the property to assess the damage, since there are still hot spots in the area and emergency crews don't think it's safe. They expect to return on Sunday. Here are some questions and answers about insurance and wildfires: Will I pay a higher homeowner insurance premium if my home is near a fire prone area? Various factors go into your insurance premium, and living in a higher risk area affects your rates, as does your home's proximity to firefighting resources, Ms. Ruiz notes. Rates have increased for some homeowners in California, as a prolonged drought has fueled fire risk. Are there discounts available if I take steps to protect my home from wildfire? Lorraine Carli, vice president of outreach and advocacy for the National Fire Protection Association, said some insurers may offer discounts for homes in communities that had taken steps to reduce wildfire damage like clearing brush and vegetation to create a buffer around buildings. USAA, for instance, now offers insurance discounts for homes in California, Colorado and Texas that are in areas designated by the association as "Firewise." You can learn more about the "Firewise" program on its website. What if my car is damaged or destroyed in a fire? Damage to your car typically would be covered under the optional, "comprehensive" portion of your automobile insurance policy, which generally covers damage that is not caused by a car accident.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Your Money
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DENVER What caused nearly every employee of the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art to resign en masse last week? Was it a difficult museum boss who staffers say worked them to the point of exhaustion for low wages and treated them with little respect? Or was it the result of a plan that backfired a plan hatched by a handful of disgruntled workers who, as Ron McMahan, a board member, put it, tried to "take over" control of the institution? The museum and its ex employees are offering starkly different accounts as the museum is reeling after losing five full time staffers, at least two part time visitor services workers, and seven contract support staff and educators on June 13. The museum, in Boulder, Colo., remains open and some emergency help has been brought on, but maintaining the exhibitions and public programming will be a challenge, said David Dadone, the executive director. The dispute dates to March 11 when five staff members sent a letter to the board accusing Mr. Dadone of misdirecting funds intended for educational programs, failing to deliver on programs promised to donors, violating labor laws and engaging in a pattern of abusive behavior toward subordinates. "How many organizations expect employees to work for 10 to 12 hour shifts without even a single 15 minute break," Nora Lupi, the former visitor services and membership manager, wrote in her resignation letter, which was sent to The New York Times. "How many institutions expect someone who makes less than 14/hr to be on call 24/7 for operational, managerial and executive assistant demands?" But the board contends that it investigated the allegations, going so far as to hire a lawyer, Gwyneth Whalen, a former Boulder County District Court judge now in private practice, to examine the charges. Her report, conducted through interviews over several months, concluded on June 6 that "there is no basis to the allegations concerning labor law violations and mistreatment of staff," according to a statement on Monday by the board.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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There are few people I'd want to be stuck in a room with, but the Irish playwright Enda Walsh makes for good company in close quarters. In "The Walworth Farce"; "The New Electric Ballroom"; and, more recently, his co writing effort with David Bowie, "Lazarus," Mr. Walsh has made isolation awfully alluring. If you don't know him, you should, and thanks to St. Ann's Warehouse and the Irish Arts Center, theatergoers have two chances this month. In "Enda Walsh in NYC," a mini festival of sorts running now, St. Ann's will stage the American premiere of "Arlington," an Orwellian play about a woman stuck alone in a room, waiting for her chance to start a life outside. And Irish Arts will present "Rooms," a series of short works being presented in a Clinton tire shop that will soon be the new home of the center. Being stuck in a tire store sounds pretty good in this case. (Through May 28; stannswarehouse.org, irishartscenter.org.)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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A roundup of motoring news from the web: It did not take long for Chevrolet to turn a faux pas into advertising. The day after Rikk Wilde, a San Francisco area zone manager for Chevy, said on national television during the World Series that the new Colorado pickup truck had "technology and stuff," the brand added a hashtag to the phrase and incorporated it into a campaign. (USA Today) Robert Hegbloom, who took over Chrysler's Ram truck brand in August, said this week that Ram's reliability had been affected by technology in the cockpit. Chrysler brands fared poorly over all in the Consumer Reports reliability study released earlier this week. (Automotive News) A Russian billionaire, Viktor Kharitonin, bought the Nurburgring racetrack in Germany this week. Capricorn, the German company that tried to buy the world famous circuit this year, was unable to pay the full price. (Autoweek) Car and Driver magazine said in a recent article that the traditional horse drawn carriages in Central Park make for a better tourist experience than the electric eCarriage proposed by a Florida company called Creative Workshop. (The New York Daily News)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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Latest Project Iain plays a first grade outcast in HBO's "Big Little Lies" alongside Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Shailene Woodley (who plays his mother). "My main tool is my imagination," he said, when asked how he prepared for the role. "I love playing. Things like Transformers. Movies is basically just playing, but bigger, and people watching." Next Ms. Pillet, who is with Abrams Artists Agency, has lots of roles lined up for Iain this year, including in "I'm Not Here," "The Glass Castle" and "Our Souls at Night," a Netflix produced film starring Jane Fonda. "I get so happy just saying her name," he said of Ms. Fonda, who plays his grandmother. "I mentioned I liked fishing but I don't want to hurt any fish. She said, 'Well, there's a thing called fly fishing with bent hooks so it doesn't hurt the fish.'" The next day, she booked a fly fishing trip for the two of them. Meanwhile, Iain continues to do theater reviews, about once a month. "For now I'm happy doing both," he said. "The good thing about being a kid, you don't have to be like 'O.K., this is going to be my job.'" Stage or Screen? Iain has enjoyed seeing firsthand how movies and television shows are made, but he still prefers the stage and praises the immersive nature of theater. "You get so lost in it, you actually think it's a reality," he said. "And it's much better, in my opinion, than television or movies because they're actually right in front of you."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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Sometimes, the best gambles don't pay off. For instance, in 2016, Netflix signed up eight oddball comics, none of them famous, and gave each a half hour to create a series of interwoven character scenes. "The Characters" was a new kind of sketch show, less an ensemble than a series of mini showcases, tied together by a strangely elegiac opening sequence and a commitment to weird, unruly comedy. It did not go viral. In fact, it came and went without generating much attention at all, and the project was abandoned after one season. And yet, if "The Characters" was a failure, it belongs to the tradition of "Fridays" and "The Dana Carvey Show": noble experiments, unjustly overlooked, that in retrospect were a hotbed of comedy talent in early stage careers. The sensibilities on display, from raucous gross outs to refined clowning, were too divergent to appeal to the same person. And the quality was decidedly uneven, but the ambition was not. The most tightly written episode is from Tim Robinson, who would go on to make the best new sketch series in years, "I Think You Should Leave." The 2016 half hour anticipates and even exceeds that cult hit, sharing a fascination with deranged fantasy lives, pranks gone wrong and the fine line between desperation and bluster. Robinson begins with a parody of a Sinatra type ("Ole Two Eyes," he's called) swaggering his way through a casino until Lady Luck turns on him and he deflates spectacularly, absurdly, even tragically. But Robinson's satire really finds its quirky voice when it goes more abstract, playing a member of the Pointer Brothers band, whose entire act is to charge onstage with rabid cheer and glittery costumes and point at audience members again and again, a one joke conceit that should quickly wear out its welcome. But Robinson imbues his buffoons with such compassion that you end up invested in their inevitable downfall. There's also the boasting pro wrestler who keeps losing and the lonely dad who falls in love with his daughter's boyfriend Robinson somehow finds the comedy in you caring about them. It's an unusual trick. Lauren Lapkus is another comic whose later triumph was anticipated in "The Characters." Her bravura performance in the David Spade movie "The Wrong Missy" proved to be a mainstream breakthrough. Not since Chris Farley has Spade found a partner with as much reckless abandon, stealing every scene with ruthlessly funny physical comedy and bold comedic choices. There's a similar gusto to Lapkus's episode here, which shows off her remarkable range, shifting from a Kardashian like sadist named Whitney Peeps, constantly petting her own hair, to the eye rolling teenager Todd Chiklet and the world's saddest stripper, Bamanda. The episode begins with a dating show in which Peeps cruelly eliminates pathetic bachelors with the catchphrase "Your 15 minutes are over," but this satire of reality television is the jumping off point for other interwoven stories. This is the structure of most of the episodes, evoking the model of "SCTV" more than "Saturday Night Live." Phil Burgers, who goes by the name Dr. Brown and who has directed some of the most inventive experimental comedians working on the West Coast, pulls off the feat of shooting an episode in a single shot, which zips in and out of buildings, up and down stairs and through hallways as he changes clothes and wigs and switches characters on the fly. It's not the funniest episode, but it's the most elegantly orchestrated. And there are moments of inspired nonsense, like a quick scene in a fancy restaurant where a waiter asks Burgers how he wants his steak cooked. He stammers, mulling for an uncomfortably long time, while the camera pans around his guests at the table; by the time the shot pans back to him, he's turned, randomly, into a werewolf. Then he says: "I'll have the fish." Many of these comics use tricky camerawork to play multiple roles in the same scene. Henry Zebrowski, who has brought rabid soccer fan energy to sketch work, plays a terrible version of himself during the cave man days, the present and even in the afterlife. In an especially chameleonic episode, Natasha Rothwell (Kelli on "Insecure") not only shifts from a bossy toddler to a senior citizen talking about her days as a nurse during World War II, but in a scene of New York jury duty, she also plays four characters battling in the same room, a tour de force portrait of city life. While Kate Berlant also takes on several roles, her standout is Denise St. Roy, an impossibly pretentious artist who is the subject of a fawning documentary. Berlant, a singular talent, has never quite found the right vehicle for a breakout, but she gets close here. She has an ear for hackneyed slang as well as Kanye like self importance (her character vows never to touch money unless she's destroying it), and I could see her satirical portrait being expanded into a movie. John Early, who has since starred in "Search Party" and has a small part in Berlant's episode, plays a hack Southern comic and the kind of clueless millennial who gets bruised in a trust fall. Paul W. Downs practices broader, more adrenaline fueled sketch work. Downs starts by snorting the longest line of cocaine I have seen onscreen and adds a scene in which a particular diner complains to a waiter about the severed penis in his pasta. Many of the comics showcased on this series cut their teeth in alternative sites as well as improv houses, but in recent years, an explosion of character comedy has emerged on social media. Since I wrote about a few of the most popular front facing camera artists at the start of the pandemic, this field has become more crowded with new viral stars emerging seemingly every day. My current favorite is the prolific Blaire Erskine, an Atlanta comic who has a knack for poking fun at the big story of the day through fictional characters in the background, like the wife of the head of QAnon or the daughter of Jerry Fallwell Jr. There is a rich talent pool of character comics on social media who already have built in audiences and who could form the foundation of a new sketch show. These comics generally, though not exclusively, aim for the zeitgeist. "The Characters" seemed indifferent to it. That's part of its charm, but also perhaps why it was not renewed. I have no idea how many people watched the show when it first ran, but by placing bets on weird comics who went on to greater success, Netflix burnished its reputation in a way that doesn't show up in an algorithm.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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Growing Pains for Field of Epigenetics as Some Call for Overhaul Our genes are not just naked stretches of DNA. They're coiled into intricate three dimensional tangles, their lengths decorated with tiny molecular "caps." These so called epigenetic marks are crucial to the workings of the genome: They can silence some genes and activate others. Epigenetic marks are crucial for our development. Among other functions, they direct a single egg to produce the many cell types, including blood and brain cells, in our bodies. But some high profile studies have recently suggested something more: that the environment can change your epigenetic marks later in life, and that those changes can have long lasting effects on health. In May, Duke University researchers claimed that epigenetics could explain why people who grow up poor are at greater risk of depression as adults. Even more provocative studies suggest that when epigenetic marks change, people can pass them to their children, reprogramming their genes. But criticism of these studies has been growing. Some researchers argue that the experiments have been weakly designed: Very often, they say, it's impossible for scientists to confirm that epigenetics is responsible for the effects they see. Three prominent researchers recently outlined their skepticism in detail in the journal PLoS Genetics. The field, they say, needs an overhaul. "We need to get drunk, go home, have a bit of a cry, and then do something about it tomorrow," said John M. Greally, one of the authors and an epigenetics expert at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. Among other criticisms, he and his co authors Ewan Birney of the European Bioinformatics Institute and George Davey Smith of the MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit at the University of Bristol in England argue that in some cases, changes to epigenetic marks don't cause disease, but are merely consequences of disease. Some studies, for example, have found that people with a high body mass index have unusual epigenetic marks on a gene called HIF3A. Some researchers have suggested that those marks change how HIF3A functions, perhaps reprogramming fat cells to store more fat. If that were true, then drugs that reverse these changes might be able to help obese people lose weight. But Dr. Smith and his colleagues have found that overweight subjects experienced epigenetic changes to HIF3A only after they put on weight. James M. Flanagan, a senior lecturer at Imperial College London, agreed with Dr. Smith and his co authors that tracking epigenetic changes over time can be revealing. "It's the best way to go about it," he said. But these experiments are especially hard to set up, he noted, because scientists have to gather blood or other genetic samples from healthy people and then wait years for some of them to get sick. In other cases, apparent changes in epigenetic marks may actually be the result of different kinds of cells becoming more or less common in people, Dr. Greally and his colleagues also warned. "That's where things get hairy," Dr. Greally said. Smoking, for example, triggers a boom in immature blood cells, which carry epigenetic marks different from those of other cell types in the blood. Rafael A. Irizarry, an applied statistician at Dana Farber Cancer Center and the Harvard School of Public Health, said new methods could help researchers steer clear of this confusion. Scientists can sort cells into different types before looking at their epigenetic marks, he said. It's even becoming possible to look at the epigenetics of one cell at a time. "But it makes the process way more expensive," Dr. Irizarry said. Dr. Greally and his colleagues note another source of confusion: Normal genetic variation leads some people to produce different epigenetic marks than others. If researchers were to find that alcoholics carry an unusual epigenetic mark, for instance, that wouldn't necessarily mean that it resulted from heavy drinking. These people may have a genetic variation that puts them at risk of alcoholism and, perhaps coincidentally, creates an unusual epigenetic mark on their DNA. Dr. Greally said these possibilities have been neglected because scientists have been so captivated by the idea that epigenetic marks can reprogram cells. "Since you don't talk about anything else, you interpret the results solely through that little sliver of possibility," he said. He and his colleagues go so far as to claim that no published results on the links between epigenetic marks and disease "can be said to be fully interpretable." Other experts feel that such an indictment is a bit too broad. Dr. Flanagan pointed to several recent studies in which scientists confronted the very challenges that Dr. Greally and his colleagues wrote about. Last year, for example, a team of European scientists investigated how smoking causes lung cancer. They took advantage of large scale studies in Australia, Norway and Sweden that collected blood from tens of thousands of people and tracked their health for years. The scientists found that smokers who got lung cancer tended to lose the same epigenetic marks on a pair of genes.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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The coronavirus pandemic is now upon us, and data from other countries shows us clearly where we are headed. Every country affected by this crisis has handled it on a national basis. The United States has not. State and local governments alone simply do not have the capacity or resources to do what is necessary, and we don't want a patchwork quilt of policies. There is now only one question your team must answer for you: Can we slow the spread of the disease to a rate that our state health care systems can handle? The answer increasingly looks like no. But that does not mean we should not try. There are fewer options available at this late date, but the federal government should move to implement them swiftly. There are three clear imperatives we need to address. Slowing the spread of coronavirus is a function of testing and reducing the density of public gatherings. So first, Mr. President, you must stop the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from overregulating the testing process, and authorize states to certify a wider array of testing labs and methods. On Friday, you said that your administration had agreed to allow New York State's public health department to authorize local labs to perform the state's approved coronavirus test a good first step. Your administration also approved high volume automated testing by the Swiss diagnostics maker Roche. But these moves are insufficient. Because of the high demand for testing kits nationwide, many labs with Roche machines will be unable to obtain enough of the company's testing kits for weeks or even months. There are other labs that can do high volume coronavirus tests that do not use Roche kits. But these machines cannot be used without further F.D.A. approvals, of the sort Roche received on Friday. That means that while New York is conducting thousands of tests a day, we are still below our full testing capacity because many labs still rely on low volume manual testing. Mr. Trump, don't let bureaucracy get in the way of fighting this virus. Break the logjam, let states fully take over testing so they can unleash hundreds of labs tomorrow and bring testing to scale. It is the only way we will have a chance of keeping up with the rapid spread of this contagion. Second, the closing of schools and businesses has federal implications, even if these are state or local decisions. When one state unilaterally closes businesses, people typically cross state lines to look for open businesses elsewhere. If the purpose is to keep our citizens home and out of crowded spaces, such inconsistency in state policies is counterproductive. There should be a uniform federal standard for when cities and states should shut down commerce and schools, or cancel events. All of this disruption will have immense financial and economic impact, and federal assistance will be needed to soften the blow. When schools close, localities will need help to provide meal programs to students and child care programs to parents. Unemployment will skyrocket, as will insurance, health care and education costs. The federal government must not only make aid available, it must also ensure that its assistance is distributed in clear, uniform ways. No state should be penalized for doing the right thing in trying to protect its residents during this crisis. Third, you must anticipate that, without immediate action, the imminent failure of hospital systems is all but certain. According to one projection, as many as 214 million people in our country could be infected over the course of the epidemic. Of those, as many as 21 million people could require hospitalization. This would crush the nation's medical system. New York State has just 53,470 hospital beds, only 3,186 of which are intensive care beds. Our country as a whole has fewer than one million staffed hospital beds, fewer proportionately than China, South Korea or Italy. Ask your experts, how many intensive care beds do we need for our vulnerable populations, and how many do we have now? The scarcity portends a greater failing and a worse situation than what we are seeing in Italy, where lives are being lost because the country doesn't have the health care capacity. States cannot build more hospitals, acquire ventilators or modify facilities quickly enough. At this point, our best hope is to utilize the Army Corps of Engineers to leverage its expertise, equipment and people power to retrofit and equip existing facilities like military bases or college dormitories to serve as temporary medical centers. Then we can designate existing hospital beds for the acutely ill. We believe the use of active duty Army Corps personnel would not violate federal law because this is a national disaster. Doing so still won't provide enough intensive care beds, but it is our best hope. In short: Localize testing, federalize shutdowns and task the Army Corps of Engineers to expand hospital capacity. I make these suggestions not as a Democrat but as one of the nation's most senior governors and a former cabinet secretary who knows the capacity of the federal government. We have had disagreements about your actions against New York, which we can pursue at another time. Today, let's work together as Americans. Time is short.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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Re "'BagelGate' Serves Up a Full Platter of Tasty Puns After de Blasio's Toasty Tweet" (news article, Jan. 16): Thank you for giving us something to laugh about and chew over that isn't partisan politics or anti Trump rhetoric. Maybe all political debates should start with the question to all participants: "What is your favorite bagel?" It would not only break the ice, but it would also tell us something personal about the person answering. At heart, don't people ultimately vote for those with whom they feel some emotional connection?
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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Elizabeth Cullinan, Writer With an Eye for Detail, Dies at 86 At 22, Elizabeth Cullinan began her working life with an entry level job at The New Yorker. Her task was to type manuscripts submitted by literary lions like John Updike, James Thurber and E.B. White. Perhaps it was muscle memory from all that typing, but soon enough she was writing stories herself of New Yorker quality and being compared to Chekhov and Joyce. The magazine began publishing her in 1960. By the time Ms. Cullinan died on Jan. 26 at 86, her oeuvre consisted of two volumes of short stories, most of which had appeared in The New Yorker, as well as two novels, "House of Gold" (1970) and "Change of Scene" (1982). She never became well known, but her relatively modest output earned her outsize critical acclaim. "Miss Cullinan is always intelligent, precise and skillful," Joyce Carol Oates wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1971, "turning out stories of near faultless craftsmanship." The Times critic John Leonard wrote of her, "When you can say in eight pages what most novelists have never been able to say at all, heavy breathing notwithstanding, you are a first rate writer." Her story "A Story in the Key of C," he said, "shines with such love that to summarize is to smudge it." Ms. Cullinan trained her exacting eye on the details of the human condition, which she observed as her characters sought to cope with one another and their pasts in tense, even suffocating familial circumstances. "House of Gold," which won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award, is the portrait of a devout lower middle class Irish Catholic family assembling for the death of the matriarch in the pre Vatican II era. "What is so strangely impressive" about the novel, Richard M. Elman wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "is its complete dedication to the ordinary, to sensation, event, process, detail: the feel of cool water splashed against the wrists on a sultry day; the way sweat rises on the shoulder blades against a young girl's dress; the curious antisepsis of a nun's bright blue eyes; or the slightly sour smell on the cheek of death." Her two volumes of short stories, "The Time of Adam" (1971) and "Yellow Roses" (1977), included all 23 that had been published in The New Yorker, as well as others published elsewhere. Irish themes including domineering matriarchs, dutiful daughters and the rituals of Catholicism pervade Ms. Cullinan's work, and she often wrestles with issues of Irish American identity, though as a whole her writing transcended easy categorization. Her protagonists were typically young women who spurned their mothers' examples of domesticity, enjoyed professional careers and led transgressive lives in secular Manhattan. In "The Sum and Substance," a story from "Yellow Roses," Ellen MacGuire is in the hospital for the removal of an ovarian cyst. While she is in agonizing pain, her mother appears with a jar of face cream. When Ellen says she doesn't care how she looks, her mother responds, "You will, dear." Ms. Cullinan helped redefine Irish American literature, veering away from the male tradition of "ward bosses and henchmen, larger than life political fixers, tavern social life and father son relationships," Patricia Coughlan, who taught Irish literature at University College Cork, wrote in a 2017 essay in The Irish Times. "With quiet irony but consistently," Ms. Coughlan wrote, "she resists assumptions that women's concerns and experience are supplementary to men's." "Her characters were all based on real people, and if you knew them, you could recognize them," her friend Thomas Cahill, the author of "How the Irish Saved Civilization" (1995), said in an interview. "She wasn't terribly solemn," he added. "She noticed both the light and the dark." Elizabeth Irene Cullinan was born on June 7, 1933, in the Bronx to Cornelius and Irene (O'Connell) Cullinan. Her father worked in insurance, and her mother was a homemaker and a piano teacher. Elizabeth attended the Academy of Mount St. Ursula in the Bronx and won a scholarship to Marymount College in Manhattan, from which she graduated in 1954. The next year she landed her first job, in the typing pool at The New Yorker. The work was a short geographical distance from her home "but culturally worlds away from her relatively unprivileged, devout and largely anti intellectual Bronx childhood," Ms. Coughlan wrote. At The New Yorker, Ms. Cullinan was a secretary to William Maxwell, one of the magazine's celebrated fiction editors, whom she regarded as a mentor. "Working for William Maxwell was like nothing else in this world except reading his novels," she wrote. "It made me a writer." After the magazine published three of Ms. Cullinan's stories, Mr. Maxwell told her to "go and be a writer," which she did. From 1961 to 1963 she lived in Ireland, where she wrote "House of Gold," considered her most important work.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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Globe Life Field will be the site of this year's World Series the first to be played at a single ballpark since 1944. This is not your grandfather's postseason. In the 1950s, when the teams with the best record in each league advanced directly to the World Series, baseball staged only 61 postseason games over the entire decade. This fall alone, there could be as many as 65. That's because of a new playoff format Major League Baseball devised for 2020, which created a round of eight best of three series to start the postseason. With no revenue from regular season ticket sales, the league and the union could not resist the allure of extra money from postseason TV rights. Some 2020 regular season innovations will be shelved for the postseason: extra innings will not begin with a runner on second base, and there will be no seven inning doubleheader games. But this postseason will be quite different from a typical October, so here's what to expect: How many teams will qualify? Sixteen of the 30 teams will make the playoffs, making this the first season in which more than half of all teams will qualify. From 2012 through 2019, only 10 teams made it. Tiebreakers will not be determined by play in games; the first tiebreaker is head to head record (if applicable), and the next is intradivisional record. If the teams are still tied, the next tiebreaker is the teams' record in their final 20 division games (plus one until the tie is broken). What happened to the wild card game? It's gone. From 2012 through 2019, baseball staged a one game knockout round between the two best teams in each league that did not win their divisions. Now, instead of just two elimination games before the division series, there will be at least eight, and with a maximum of 16. None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. How will the new first round work? In each league, the division winners and the team with the best second place record will host all first round games in the best of three format. The teams will be seeded Nos. 1 through 8, with 1 playing 8, 2 playing 7, 3 playing 6, and 4 playing 5. The top three seeds will be division winners, the 4 through 6 seeds will be the second place teams, and the 7 and 8 seeds will be the wild cards. When will the games take place? The first round runs from Tuesday, Sept. 29, through Friday, Oct. 2. The A.L. games will be played on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and the N.L. games will be played on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Unlike in the N.F.L., the teams will not be reseeded after the first round meaning that the winner of the 1 vs. 8 series will play the winner of the 4 vs. 5 series, and the winner of the 2 vs. 7 series will play the winner of the 3 vs. 6 series. The postseason will unfold after the first round the same way it has since 1995, with four best of five division series, followed by two best of seven League Championship Series and the best of seven World Series. Where will those games be held? After the first round, baseball goes into a bubble of sorts, with the four A.L. teams traveling to Southern California and the four N.L. teams to Texas. The winners of the 1 vs. 8 and 4 vs. 5 first round A.L. matchups will play their division series at San Diego's Petco Park, with the other division series taking place at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. The winners of the 1 vs. 8 and 4 vs. 5 first round N.L. matchups will play their division series at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas, with the other division series taking place at Minute Maid Park in Houston. (Both Texas parks have retractable roofs.) The teams will stay in their regions for the Championship Series, which will run from Oct. 11 through 18. All A.L.C.S. games will be played at Petco Park and all N.L.C.S. games at Globe Life Field. There will be no days off within any of the first three playoff rounds. Wait, did you say no days off? That's right teams will play three days in a row in the first round, five days in a row for the division series and seven days in a row for the L.C.S. This is different from the previous format, which had off days for travel after Games 2 and 4 of the division series and after Games 2 and 5 of the L.C.S. In the old format, a pitcher could start the division series opener, then pitch again in Game 5 on his usual four days of rest. Now, the Game 1 starter would have to go on short rest for Game 5. Likewise, in the L.C.S., the Game 1 starter would not be able to pitch again with regular rest until Game 6. The absence of off days will make it harder for managers to use their best pitchers as readily as they have in recent years. Some highlights of the recent trend: None In 2017, the Los Angeles Dodgers used reliever Brandon Morrow in 14 of their 15 postseason games. None In 2018, five different Boston Red Sox pitchers appeared as both starters and relievers in the postseason. None In 2019, the Washington Nationals used three pitchers Max Scherzer, Stephen Strasburg and Patrick Corbin for a combined 89 1/3 innings, nearly 60 percent of the team's total. Clearly, the new schedule will place an unprecedented emphasis on the depth of teams' pitching staffs. What is the format for the World Series? The entire World Series will be held at Globe Life Field, making this the first time one ballpark will host every game since 1944, when the Browns and Cardinals squared off in Sportsman's Park in St. Louis, which they shared as their home park. The difference now is that the setting will be the first ever neutral site, because the hometown Rangers will miss the playoffs. Even without travel, though, the World Series dates are locked in for the broadcaster, Fox, meaning there will still be the usual days off after Games 2 and 5. The series begins on Tuesday, Oct. 20, with a potential Game 7 scheduled for Wednesday, Oct. 28.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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WASHINGTON When a dozen protesters in green T shirts showed up two years ago at the Federal Reserve's annual conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo., they were regarded by many participants as an amusing addition. Two years later, they have won a place on the schedule. The protesters, who want the Fed to extend its economic stimulus campaign, are scheduled to meet on Thursday with eight members of the central bank's policy making committee. At the start of a conference devoted to esoteric debates about monetary policy, officials will hear from people struggling to make ends meet. The Fed's effort to show that it is listening to its critics reflects the central bank's broader struggle to find its footing in an era whose great challenge is not the strength of inflation, but the weakness of economic growth. Officials are wrestling with the limits of monetary policy, the focus of the conference, even as they try to address simmering discontent among liberals who want stronger action and among conservatives who say the Fed has done too much. The meeting also represents an unlikely victory for Ady Barkan, the 32 year old lawyer who decided in 2012 that liberals should pay more attention to monetary policy. He now heads the "Fed Up" campaign, a national coalition of community and labor groups that plans to bring more than 100 protesters to Jackson Hole. "We want to make sure that regular voices are being heard," Mr. Barkan said in beginning the campaign two years ago. The American economy, he said, was not working for all Americans particularly not for blacks and other minority groups. Fed officials so far have chosen to accommodate the group by applauding its efforts at public education, not by seriously engaging its arguments that interest rates should be raised more slowly. Esther George, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, which hosts the Jackson Hole conference, arranged Thursday's meeting with the activists. She said in an interview earlier this year that the Fed must balance job growth with other issues, like financial stability. "I am completely sympathetic," she said of the group's concerns. But she cautioned that the Fed's powers were limited. Pushing too hard to lower unemployment could lead to higher inflation, or speculative bubbles, that would force the Fed to raise interest rates more quickly. The resulting economic volatility could end up doing more harm than good. "The Federal Reserve has become somehow the answer to many problems far beyond what we can actually address," she said. "I wish I could fix all of it with a tool like monetary policy. But we can't." Even Mr. Barkan's supporters acknowledge the long odds. Fed Up's budget has grown to 2 million this year, from 145,000 in 2014, mostly from Good Ventures, a nonprofit foundation created by the Facebook co founder Dustin Moskovitz, which describes the campaign as "relatively unlikely to have an impact." Fed Up's more visible success has come in pursuit of a longer term goal: advocating for changes in the Fed's governance that could eventually shift its decision making. In a report published earlier this year, Fed Up highlighted the Fed's lack of diversity. There are no blacks or Hispanics among the 17 officials on the Fed's policy making committee of 12 regional bank presidents and five governors. No black or Hispanic has ever served as president of a regional reserve bank. Moreover, the report said that whites composed 83 percent of the directors of the Fed's 12 regional reserve banks, who select the regional presidents. Narayana Kocherlakota, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, said that the absence of minorities was "quite troubling." "Those kinds of persistent absences of key demographic groups really suggest that the appointment process, there is something that can be fixed there," he said. Fed Up also argued that bank executives should not sit on regional Fed boards. Under current law, bankers hold three of the nine seats on each board. The regional reserve banks are owned by the commercial banks in each district, although they operate under the authority of the Fed's board, a government agency whose members are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. In May, 127 congressional Democrats signed a letter to Janet L. Yellen, the Fed chairwoman, calling attention to the Fed's lack of diversity and the influence of the banking industry. On the same day, a spokesman for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign said in a statement that "Secretary Clinton believes that the Fed needs to be more representative of America as a whole and that common sense reforms like getting bankers off the boards of regional Federal Reserve Banks are long overdue." Two months later, the Democratic Party adopted a campaign platform that included similar language, the first time in recent decades it mentioned the Fed. Andrew Levin, an economist at Dartmouth College, said Fed Up's greatest chance for significant influence was not in framing the current debate about interest rates, but in changing the Fed itself. He co wrote a report that the campaign published Monday detailing a proposal to make the Fed a fully public institution. "Having a diverse set of policy makers including African Americans and Hispanics will influence the Fed's decision making," he said. "And it should. The public should have confidence that the public is well represented at the F.O.M.C. table." Mr. Barkan started the "Fed Up" campaign after joining the Center for Popular Democracy in 2012, a few years after graduating from Yale Law School. He had read a 2011 article by the journalist Matthew Yglesias, titled "Fed Up." Unions and other advocacy groups were focused on minimum wage laws. Mr. Barkan was compelled by the argument that they also should be focused on interest rates. "Even if they move once less over the course of several years, that's still massive," he said earlier this year. "The number of people who have jobs because of that, or higher wages, that dwarves a 15 an hour wage increase in a smaller city."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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Traditionally Bharatanatyam conveys Hindu religious stories, in part through an intricate lexicon of hand positions known as mudras. Ms. Vasudevan performing solo except for two assistants who help with minimal set and costume changes makes reference to gods and myths and the history of the dance form, offering witty lessons in mudras and their meanings. But the tales she imparts come from her own life as a woman born in southern India and living in New York. Some of these are almost mythically tragic, particularly the final one, in which she recounts with uncanny evenness the night her cousin Karthik killed his wife, three children and mother in law before killing himself. Lighter moments find her chatting with her grandmother about marriage and walking through the red light district of Lahore with her British boyfriend. Her delivery is sometimes cloying, sometimes deeply absorbing. At her wildest, Ms. Vasudevan swirls and skids through white flour she has laid on the ground, propelled by a recording of roaring drums. (The extensive program notes, which include a "conceptual story map" detailing the work's three sections, inform us that this is a dance of the god Shiva as lord of cremation, surrounded by ash.) Yet it's her simpler gestures like the slow, deliberate action of feeding her grandfather, as she recalls spending time with him in India that say the most.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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The inspiration for the decor came from Valentino Garavani's book "At the Emperor's Table." A few years ago, I attended a dinner at the Chateau de Wideville, Valentino Garavani's country pile outside Paris. It was a gala, full of famous guests and gowns, but the part of it I remember most was the sight of the rolling green lawn spread out beyond the grand maison, bordered by ribbons of white pebble paths that were being raked, just so, by a host of tuxedo clad men. It was the first time I had seen actual men raking such paths, and I remember thinking I probably would never see it again not in fashion, at least. Increasingly, the life that a successful designer once led, full of Picassos and Biedermeier and Feadships, seems like a memory from another, preindustrial time. As Mr. Garavani knows. He was, after all, the subject of a 2008 documentary entitled "The Last Emperor," and last month published a book, "At the Emperor's Table," both artifacts conceived to memorialize a lifestyle that is being lost. But while the former is all about what was, the latter, full of recipes and elaborate table settings, is more of a how to for what still could be. "Once upon a time it was usual to give beautiful dinners, in the 1980s, the 1990s," Mr. Garavani said, when I asked him about the book, "but now it is all seen as less important. It is unfortunate. A beautiful, interesting table is an expression of a joy and respect for your guests, or just yourself. Even when I eat alone, I always have the table set in an amusing way." This made me wonder: Did I feel joy when I ate? I certainly had never considered my table setting "interesting." Had I fallen victim to the dinner party equivalent of athleisurewear? Were my dinner parties actually leggings? This was not a happy thought. Maybe, I decided, it was time to test the Valentino approach. It was the holiday season, after all. A super fancy table would not stick out that much. My husband and I would recreate Wideville in Brooklyn, minus the pebble paths and staff, and taking into account the fact that our wedding china and silver had been put away years ago in favor of child and dishwasher safe plastic. I would use the book as my guide. Immediately it was clear there were going to be problems. Mr. Garavani, as the sumptuous photographs show, likes to adorn his tables much as he adorns his evening gowns, but instead of lace and paillettes, he uses Meissen, porcelain asparagus and silver waterfowl. Also many different kinds of linens. I do not own any tablecloths, nor do I have many decorative objets. A quick survey of our breakfront yielded: one duck shaped china egg warming tureen that my husband had sneaked onto our wedding list as a joke, thinking, in his misguided youth, that no one would buy it (it was the first gift that arrived); and some bulbous glass grapes I bought at a flea market in a fit of nostalgia for my grandmother. Then there were the menus. Or lack of menus. Instead of organizing his book by meals, Mr. Garavani organized it by his homes (Gstaad, London, New York, the yacht, Wideville), which made it hard to even understand what was a first course and what was an entree. Also, the photos, while gorgeous, were difficult to deconstruct. Was that salmon actually cooked? It looked awfully ...smoked. Maybe Mr. Garavani believed in only two courses? Maybe this was a skinny fashion thing, where the food was less important than the styling? We were clearly going to need help. I called Mr. Garavani. "Always three courses," he said. "It's tradition." O.K., then. In the end, we chose the menu mostly according to accessibility of ingredients and equipment (a lack of a soda siphon pretty much mitigated against the beet cream), as well as efficiency: vegetable tempura (made by my husband), salmon stuffed with spinach and egg and covered in zucchini scales (made by me) and chocolate torte (made in advance by me and my older daughter). The recipes were a little vague. The zucchini, for example, looked a lot like cucumber in the picture, and there were no details on whether to saute or boil the spinach (just "cook the spinach"), but this was not Mr. Garavani's fault, as he told me he does not cook. His chef cooks; he creative directs! On to the creative directing. "It is absolutely not enough to have plates, glasses, some flowers," he said. "You need to give people something to look at. You need to mix things up. It is not possible to do a spare table. Hundred year old saltcellars are fun. I have a mania for china. I have been collecting for 40 years, going to auctions at Sotheby's, Christies." "What if you don't have that much china?" I asked tentatively. "Color," he said. "I always do some color. A table is an expression of the person who is setting it." Now we were getting somewhere. Color I could do. Mix I could do. Just one more thing: tablecloths? "I like a beautiful wood table," Mr. Garavani said. "It is nice to eat on top. But you need a wonderful napkin. If you do the napkins nicely, it gives the effect the owner of the house knows what's going on." That, it seemed to me, was a good tip. The table took about as long as the torte and the salmon combined (including baking time), in part because it involved scouring the house for any potentially "fun" objects that could double as decorations, and in part because I had to get all sorts of stuff out of storage. Out came the silver. Out came the crystal (glasses of many colors). Out came china salad plates. Out came some silver plated charger plates my mother gave me that I had stared at puzzled and put away. With them, my striped plastic dinnerware and water glasses of assorted shapes and patterns, since we had broken so many that we didn't have more than six of any kind. I am being high/low, I told myself. Oh and the napkins? Ripped from a MYdrap roll, as perfectly starched and crisp as if I had ironed them myself. As if I knew what was going on. It was as more ish a table as I had ever set, and while it looked (to me, anyway) a little over the top, it also felt satisfyingly fancy. It reminded me of an experience I had a few years ago at the Met Costume Institute ball, when the Valentino brand was my host and had insisted I wear a long dress, even though I never wear long dresses (I was married in a short dress), and I ended up in a floor length seafoam green A line gown. Though I felt like a ship skimming o'er the waves as I moved, everyone I met said: "Wow! I have never seen you like this," in an ultimately very pleasing way. My guests had much the same reaction when I asked what Valentino might have thought. "I think they would have given the food and decor a good rating," said my friend Sally, who knew of what she spoke, having once been a guest at Giancarlo Giammetti's house, at a party for Elizabeth Taylor (Mr. Giammetti being Mr. Garavani's longtime business partner). "But possibly they would have liked the wait staff to be in house livery," she added, referring to my 9 year old son, who had butlered coats. "It was a bit of a surprise in your house, but it didn't feel entirely inauthentic," agreed Siddhartha, who has worked at fashion brands from Paris to New York. "There was no mozzarella on the menu, no Gwyneth or Anne Hathaway, but there were stimulating discussions on literacy, gender, being a New Yorker and the West's distorted view of Islam." "Why don't we use this stuff more?" my daughter asked later, when we were wiping down the crystal. An unexpected bonus to dipping into the Valentino world without the Valentino staff: Though it definitely requires serious prep and cleaning time, it can be a bonding experience. And I wonder why, I thought, I have never asked it before?
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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They called it the "Greenspan put," and it reassured a generation of traders. If economic storms were gathering, the top central banks most important the Federal Reserve, then led by Alan Greenspan could and would step in to prevent disaster. Because the traders effectively had a put option, they could safely bet that the markets would survive even the worst crisis. This year, volatility has soared and share prices have fallen sharply, in part because few think there is a Bernanke put, or, for that matter, a Trichet put. It is far from clear that the authorities could stem a new panic, and even less clear that many would be willing to try. In other words, the slogan for markets as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meet this week in Washington could well be, "You're on your own. Don't count on anybody to bail you out." The situation is thus drastically different from that of three years ago, when I.M.F. World Bank meetings served as a forum to find joint strategies to ameliorate the financial crisis that had followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Now there appears to be division and disarray within Europe and the United States. Central bank efforts to help the economy have become politically controversial, and there has been infighting at both the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve. At the European Central Bank, the departing president, Jean Claude Trichet, has faced sniping from Germany and the resignation of Jurgen Stark, a German member of the bank's executive board. Mr. Stark cited personal reasons, but his departure was widely interpreted as a repudiation of the bank's purchases of bonds issued by troubled European nations. At the Fed, Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman who succeeded Mr. Greenspan, has faced dissents within the central bank on recent efforts to stimulate the economy. There was a long lived bipartisan consensus in the United States it lasted at least from 1992, when Mr. Greenspan helped banks recover from bad loans to Latin American nations, through 2008 that the Fed was expected to steer the economy and would be treated gently by politicians. Presidents tended to reappoint Fed chairmen, even those appointed by predecessors of the other political party, in part because of fear that markets would be outraged by any effort to politicize monetary policy. There have been six presidents since Paul A. Volcker took over at the Fed in 1979, but Mr. Bernanke is just the third chairman. That consensus seems to have vanished, with candidates for the Republican presidential nomination vying with one another to show their hostility to Mr. Bernanke, even though he is a Republican who previously served as the chief economic adviser to President George W. Bush. One candidate, Mitt Romney, has said he would ask Mr. Bernanke to resign. Another, Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, suggested that Mr. Bernanke might be trying to stimulate the economy to aid President Obama's re election campaign. On Tuesday , Republican Congressional leaders took the extraordinary step of publicly calling for the Fed to do no more. That did not stop the Fed from announcing some initiatives on Thursday, but they were relatively small and disappointing to investors. Share prices fell sharply after the announcement. The political challenges may make it harder for the Fed to do much more over the next year, even if the economy is weaker than expected. Similarly, Mario Draghi, the Italian central banker who will take over from Mr. Trichet on Nov. 1, will be under great pressure from Germany to avoid actions that might increase inflation, even if they may be needed to prevent a new financial collapse. At the same time, European governments have found it hard to agree on effective action. A July 21 agreement, which was supposed to provide money for Greece while limiting the losses for banks, has yet to be put in place, and markets seem convinced that a Greek default is inevitable. Italy is the latest country to find bond markets hesitant to provide funds. European banks, many of which were slower than American ones to raise capital when investors grew more friendly in 2010, may need to be rescued again precisely because of fears that the rescuers of 2008 national governments may not be able to meet their obligations. At a meeting of European finance ministers last week, Timothy F. Geithner, the United States Treasury secretary, pleaded for coordinated action. "Governments and central banks need to take out the catastrophic risk to markets," he said. After he left, Austria's finance minister said Americans should stop lecturing Europe. Those countries that can borrow money easily and cheaply most important, Germany and the United States are reluctant to do so, even with the threat of a new recession seeming to grow. The Germans argue that other European nations must cut back spending to regain competitiveness, that there is no gain without pain. Mr. Obama has proposed a new stimulus program, but it faces uncertain political prospects only weeks after the two parties agreed to seek consensus on ways to reduce government spending. Large banks around the world have seized on the disarray of governments to begin campaigns to reduce regulation, complaining that new rules adopted after the 2008 debacle threaten growth. They want capital rules eased and hope that few will remember it was their excessive risk taking, relative to the capital they had, that helped to create the 2008 disaster and that threatens a new one. Some politicians join in that complaint, saying current problems stem from excessive government interference in the economy, particularly in free markets. Those who remember the "Greenspan put" may find that argument odd. It is the fear that governments may not ride to the rescue that seems to have unnerved markets. Perhaps it is the low expectations that provide the best hope for some kind of success at the meetings of the I.M.F. and the World Bank. Three years ago, it was widely expected that governments and central banks could act cooperatively and effectively. Now any indication they can still do so would come as a pleasant surprise.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Global Business
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SIEM REAP, CAMBODIA For decades, archaeologists here kept their eyes on the ground as they tramped through thick jungle, rice paddies and buffalo grazing fields, emerald green and soft with mud during the monsoon season. They spent entire careers trying to spot mounds or depressions in the earth that would allow them to map even small parts of Angkor, the urban center at the heart of the Khmer empire, which covered a vast region of what is now Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam and Laos from roughly A.D. 802 to 1431. In modern times, little material evidence existed beyond a network of monumental stone temples, including the famed Angkor Wat, and the sprawling settlements that presumably fanned out around the temples long since swallowed up by the jungle. But earlier this year, the archaeologists Shaun Mackey and Kong Leaksmy were armed with a portable GPS device containing data from an aerial survey of the area that is changing the way Angkor is studied. The device led them straight to a field littered with clods of earth and shot through with tractor marks. It looked to the naked eye like an ordinary patch of dirt, but the aerial data had identified it as a site of interest, a mounded embankment where the ancestors of today's Cambodians might have altered the landscape to build homes. Buddhist monks prepared for a blessing ceremony next to a helicopter carrying lidar equipment that has given researchers an aerial view of the ancient Angkor empire. Damian Evans/French Institute of Asian Studies in Paris, via Associated Press Almost immediately after stepping onto the field, Mr. Mackey, his eyes glued to the ground, pounced on a shard of celadon pottery. Soon the team had turned up a small trove of potsherds and began taking copious notes. An aerial lidar image of Ta Prohm, founded in the late 12th century. "It's not sexy, like a temple, but for an archaeologist it's really interesting that we have this representation of cultural activity," he said. He and Ms. Kong Leaksmy are part of a consortium of scholars called the Cambodian Archaeological Lidar Initiative (CALI), which uses a technology known as lidar to shoot ultraquick pulses of light at the ground from lasers mounted on helicopters. The way they bounce back can show the presence of subtle gradations in the landscape, indicating places where past civilizations altered their environment, even if buried beneath thick vegetation or other obstructions. The soft spoken, fedora clad Mr. Mackey, a 14 year veteran of fieldwork here, noted that before lidar's availability, an accurate ground survey of archaeological features in the Cambodian landscape entailed years or even decades of work. CALI's helicopters flew for 86 hours in March and April of 2015 over 1,910 square kilometers, or 737 square miles, with Buddhist monks blessing the lidar sensors before takeoff. The data generated during the flights, based on roughly 40 billion individual measurements, is now being verified and made public. "We had hit a roadblock in terms of technology until recently," said Damian Evans, the archaeologist who heads the initiative. "The vegetation was obscuring these parts of Angkor and other monumental sites. The lidar allowed us to see through the vegetation." The Secrets of an Empire The result, Dr. Evans said, has been an unprecedented new understanding of what the Khmer empire looked like at the apex of its power, with lidar generated maps revealing an intricate urban landscape stretching across several provinces of modern day Cambodia, along with a sophisticated network of canals, earthworks and dams that the Angkorians used to control the flow of water. "It is pretty amazing," he said. "The larger the temples are, the larger the urban infrastructure around it is likely to be, so they weren't lost, in the sense that we assumed that they must be there. But, of course, that is an entirely different thing from being able to see it in incredible detail and how it works and how it functioned, how it evolved, the morphology of these places." An aerial lidar image showing the outlines of a settlement around Beng Mealea, a temple. The group is now using the maps to make more targeted excursions into the field, "ground truthing" the lidar data to ensure that it is accurate and to determine where digging might be useful. On a recent mission, Mr. Mackey barreled down a freshly paved road in a pickup truck driven by Ms. Kong Leaksmy. Although the Khmer empire's great stone monuments have endured for centuries, spawning a 60 million a year tourism industry and preserving information about the dynasty of god kings who ordered their construction, the stuff of everyday life at Angkor, made from wood, mud, thatch and brick, has long since rotted away in the hot and humid climate. Almost nothing has been known about the lives of those who built the temples and served its rulers who they were, how they lived, what they believed. David Chandler, a professor emeritus at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and a leading historian of Cambodia, said the new lidar data was particularly exciting because it was providing more information than ever about how ordinary people lived in the Khmer empire. Historians had assumed that the residents of Angkor existed "these temples certainly didn't get built by themselves," Dr. Chandler said and they had cobbled together some understanding of the area's population through inscriptions, notes from a Chinese diplomat who visited Angkor, and a few other sparse clues. Dr. Chandler compares the process to trying to understand American history from a small collection of obituaries and Fourth of July speeches. But with lidar made maps, people who had spent their lives trying to retrace Angkorian history could actually see for the first time an intricate network of houses, gridded streets, canals, bridges and even mud and brick palaces. "People imagined it was a city, but they didn't know how to imagine it, because they didn't know what it looked like, Dr. Chandler said. "Now they do." "This is where Angkorian research is going to go from now on: research into the people who built the temples, not the people whom it was built for," he added. "It's putting the population of the city back in view." The Greater Angkor Project, a team from the University of Sydney in Australia, has been trying since 2010 to identify and excavate ancient mounds believed to have been households in the Angkor Wat compound. When the team started its research, it spent months simply trying to identify where all the mounds were. But after it received preliminary lidar data in 2012, it realized immediately that the mounds were arranged in a tight grid pattern, indicating houses lined along roads, as in a modern city. "Lidar made everything new and exciting," said Heng Phipal, a Cambodian archaeologist who worked with the project. Since then, members of the project have used lidar to target areas for deeper excavation, unearthing sandstone from the temples that might have been recycled into floors for city dwellers, and analyzing a garbage dump on the Angkor Wat grounds full of burned food remains and broken ceramics. They have found some of the first evidence of what Angkorians ate (rice and pomelo fruit) and how they cooked (in earth pots over fires). And they have come to understand that the gridlike pattern inside Angkor is just part of a much larger urban agglomeration, challenging conventional wisdom that the temple cities were discrete and self contained. "Previous maps only show us different temples they look like different units, where settlements around them seem to be concentrated around these temples but with lidar we know that is not actually the case," Mr. Heng Phipal said. "We know it was all inhabited, and the city is larger than expected." Being able to see the true scope of the city has led to discoveries in other areas, too. Lidar has helped find the giant quarry field where most of the sandstone to build the temples was taken from, and has identified mysterious earthen spirals close to Angkor Wat and a few other temples that might have served aesthetic or religious purposes. At a remote but massive temple called Preah Khan of Kompong Svay, which the Khmer king Jayavarman VII used as a base to raise an army against invaders from the east, scholars had worked for over a decade to determine what lay below the surface, with little success. They ultimately concluded that the area was not thickly settled. But the lidar data revealed a dense cityscape that even included the same spirals seen at Angkor Wat, and helped pinpoint areas for archaeologists to dig that had not been looted.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Two months ago, the conductor James Levine, having been fired by the Metropolitan Opera for sexual misconduct, sued the company for breach of contract and defamation. Now the Met is suing him back, arguing in court papers filed on Friday that Mr. Levine harmed the company, and detailing previously unreported accusations of sexual harassment and abuse against him. The filing paints the clearest picture yet of the investigation that led the Met to dismiss Mr. Levine, its longtime music director and its artistic backbone for more than four decades. The company says it found credible evidence that Mr. Levine had "used his reputation and position of power to prey upon and abuse artists," citing examples of sexual misconduct that it says occurred from the 1970s through 1999, but does not name the victims. When a 16 year old artist auditioned for Mr. Levine in 1979, the suit says, Mr. Levine questioned him about his sex life. Two years later, it says, Mr. Levine entered the young man's dressing room in a bathrobe to discuss an upcoming performance. Mr. Levine made sexual remarks or inappropriately touched the man at least seven times over a period of 12 years, the suit says. After Mr. Levine offered to drive another singer home from an audition at the Met in 1985, the lawsuit says, he locked the car doors and groped and kissed the man against his will. After the encounter, it says, Mr. Levine placed him in "in a prestigious program" at the Met. The lawsuit also describes inappropriate conversations that Mr. Levine initiated with another artist in 1989 about masturbation, pornography and penis size, and a failed attempt by Mr. Levine in 1994 to get a man to accompany him to a restroom at the opera house to watch him masturbate. In addition to serving as the Met's music director and later music director emeritus, Mr. Levine oversaw the company's prestigious young artist development program, which can serve as a career springboard. In 1999, the lawsuit says, Mr. Levine inappropriately touched one of its members on his knees, legs and hands. About a year later, it says, he invited the young artist into his dressing room "to engage in sexual activity." Lawyers for Mr. Levine denied the Met's allegations in their own court filing on Friday. "The truth is that Levine did not commit any acts of sexual misconduct against any individuals, much less the unnamed individuals referred to," his lawyers wrote. "The Met's so called 'investigation' of Levine's conduct," they added, "was nothing more than a pretext for the Met to suspend, fire and defame him." The Met's new filing cites seven accusations of misconduct by Mr. Levine, five of which have not been previously reported. The other two men have already shared their accounts publicly and Mr. Levine has denied their accusations: James Lestock, a cellist who said he was abused for years beginning when he was a student of Mr. Levine's; and Ashok Pai, who said that he was abused by Mr. Levine beginning when he was 16. Nine men in total have come forward with accusations of harassment or abuse. The lawyers dispute the Met's description of Mr. Levine's relationship with a third person he believes he can identify, the young man who was visited by Mr. Levine in a bathrobe. Their filing describes him as a close personal friend of Mr. Levine's and says that he did not work at the Met at the time of the incident and that Mr. Levine had more than 140 letters from him. The filing adds that "bathrobes are commonly worn by musical performers backstage in the theater, and there was nothing inappropriate or improper about Levine wearing one." Mr. Levine's suit against the Met says that he "categorically denied having ever been engaged in an abusive sexual relationship." He has sought at least 5.8 million in damages his contract included a 400,000 annual salary and a 27,000 fee for each performance and his suit paints his firing as part of a longstanding effort by Peter Gelb, who became the Met's general manager in 2006, to oust him from the company. The Met is now suing Mr. Levine also for at least 5.8 million arguing that his misconduct violated his duties to the Met and caused the institution harm. "By engaging in repeated acts of sexual misconduct during his association with the Met," it says, "including during the period that Levine was responsible for the Young Artist Program, Levine unquestionably violated his duty of loyalty." The company suspended Mr. Levine in December, and commissioned an outside investigation into his behavior, after reports appeared in The New York Times and The New York Post detailing accusations by several men who said they had been sexually abused by him decades ago, when they were teenagers or students of his. The Met fired Mr. Levine in March after the investigation found what it called "credible and corroborated evidence of sexual misconduct during his time at the Met, as well as earlier." A few days later, Mr. Levine sued, accusing the company of defamation and breach of contract. The Met's suit says that the company "has and will continue to incur significant reputational and economic harm as a result of the publicity associated with Levine's misconduct." The company was already in a difficult financial position before the scandal broke, battling the high costs of putting on grand opera amid a box office slump. On Friday, Moody's Investors Service Inc., the credit rating agency, downgraded the Met's bonds to Baa2 from Baa1, citing its "thin liquidity and the fact that it has not yet been able to reach its endowment fund raising targets combined with ongoing labor costs pressures and capital needs." One of the Met's strengths, it noted, was its strong donor support, which the company relies on.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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LONDON Family life doesn't have much going for it in "The Duchess of Malfi," the blood bath of a play from John Webster in which corpses are piled high by a conclusion that is merciless even by 17th century standards. Centering on an ill fated Italian noblewoman and her two venomous brothers, this favorite of the London stage has resurfaced in a sleek, stylish production from the director Rebecca Frecknall, at the Almeida Theater through Jan. 25. Frecknall made her name on this stage with a highly abstract production of "Summer and Smoke" in 2018 that made its way to the West End. The similarly stripped back, installation art feel to her latest production is of a piece with the Almeida's Continental aesthetic, as filtered through such English directors as Robert Icke, a former Almeida artistic associate. Much of Chloe Lamford's set itself ready for display in Tate Modern is given over to a glass box that makes the characters into human specimens on display. Microphones appear on cue, and chapter headings let us know where we are in Webster's labyrinthine narrative. The characters tumble toward the abyss, as Lydia Wilson's transgression prone Duchess lingers in view of the audience even after Webster's text has relegated her to oblivion: The onstage structure becomes a transparent mausoleum whose inhabitants won't be so easily dispatched. And so the play's women become silent witnesses from beyond the grave to the bloodshed of the men, who behave like beasts. (One of them Jack Riddiford's Ferdinand, the more outwardly crazed of the brothers starts thinking he's a wolf.) It's a play that honors its author's near contemporary, Shakespeare, while mining even further depths of depravity. Politics, and not (thank heavens) the threat of spilled blood, weigh heavily on a father and his daughter in "Snowflake," the Mike Bartlett play at the Kiln Theater through Jan. 25. The timing means that Clare Lizzimore's lit fuse of a production will finish just a week before Britain is set to leave the European Union, as Brexit, after many delays, finally takes place. Andy (Elliot Levey), the 48 year old widower and father who gets the entire first act to himself, is pro Leave, though he's far more concerned about reconnecting with his estranged daughter than with matters of state, at least at first. That explains his jittery anticipation as he paces a church hall in the run up to Christmas, in the hope that the child he hasn't seen in three years will make a festive season appearance to her still devoted father. (Her affection for him, we quickly realize, is more ambivalent.) After the intermission, Bartlett brings into the fray the errant Maya (a spiky Ellen Robertson). Her conciliation minded girlfriend, Natalie (Amber James), arrives first so as to smooth the way for the set to that follows. Maya, it comes as no surprise to discover, isn't just emphatically pro Remain but views Andy as a relic from a bygone era: a man whose enthusiasm for James Bond and "The X Files" consigns him to an uncritical past that the culturally hyper aware Maya wants no part of. "The X Files," to her, is merely "two white people scared of aliens." Bartlett has explored such competing mind sets before, in the richer, more nuanced "Albion," which will return to the Almeida next month. By comparison, "Snowflake" seems slight: an exercise in theater as showdown, but one that, to its credit, values both points of view. Bartlett's neat title refers to the wintry conditions of the holiday season when the play is set, as well as to those overly emotive, fragile members of the younger generation to which Maya and Natalie belong. And Levey, a reliable ensemble player too rarely given such a hefty part, tears into the play's lead role as the well meaning parent who can't budge a child's implacable resolve. Can these two find a shared way forward, and will the divided country they inhabit? Bartlett suggests only that identity politics alone won't take you very far. Within families, love is helpful, too. That's assuming, of course, that you know who your family is. The revelation of an unknown family member signals the provocative starting point of "The Arrival," at the Bush Theater through Jan 18. This 70 minute two hander is the bristling playwriting debut of Bijan Sheibani, the well established theater director whose National Theater production of "Barber Shop Chronicles" traveled to New York last month, and who doubles as his own keen eyed director here. Set on an unadorned, circular stage that suggests a gladiatorial ring, the play introduces two British Iranian brothers, five years apart in age, who meet for the first time. Tom (Scott Karim), 35, the older, was put up for adoption before Samad (Irfan Shamji) was born.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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Frank Bauman, via the Museum of the City of New York Frank Bauman, via the Museum of the City of New York Credit... Frank Bauman, via the Museum of the City of New York An exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York including photographs that have never been published before shows the pioneering player with his teammates and his family. In 1947 the New York Post sportswriter Jimmy Cannon wrote that Jackie Robinson "is the loneliest man I have ever seen in sports." Robinson had recently made his debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers as a 28 year old who had led the charge to racially integrate Major League Baseball. The isolation was real. He endured racist taunts and death threats, in addition to being shunned by some of his teammates. Yet a new photography exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York "In the Dugout With Jackie Robinson: An Intimate Portrait of a Baseball Legend" gives a broader view of Robinson's life on and off the field. In about 30 photographs, all taken in either 1949 or 1953 and mostly unpublished, he is seen surrounded by teammates and family members. The images were originally shot for Look magazine by the staff photographers Kenneth Eide and Frank Bauman. The exhibition also has rare memorabilia, like a baseball signed by the 1952 Dodgers and a glove that belonged to Robinson. A home video shows Robinson hitting baseballs to his son, Jackie Jr., and some other neighborhood children in Connecticut. On Jackie Robinson's 100th Birthday, 100 Photos of an Icon Claire Smith: Jackie Robinson Showed Me How to Fight On, Not Fight Back Robinson wasn't the first black player in the history of Major League Baseball. That distinction belongs to Moses Fleetwood Walker, a catcher for the Toledo Blue Stockings in the American Association in 1884. He only played one season because of an injury and soon after, black players were banned. But Robinson's legacy is unmatched: He not only inspired generations of Americans to pursue baseball but also helped black football and basketball players gain acceptance in their leagues while devoting himself to the civil rights movement before his death at the age of 53 in 1972. Robinson's special relationship with Look magazine is apparent in the show. He wrote three articles in 1955, including one called "Now I Know Why They Boo Me," which can be read at the exhibition. Robinson also announced his retirement through Look, instead of at a news conference, an unusual move at the time. The magazine donated its New York archives to the museum in the 1950s, and for years the negatives and contact prints were buried in its basement. Over the last year, Sean Corcoran and Susan Gail Johnson, the exhibition's curators, combed through hundreds of negatives before finally picking the ones that would be on view for this small yet powerful show. At Home With His Family Robinson is seen at home with his wife, Rachel Robinson, and his son, Jackie Jr. Many of these stills are from 1949, two years after he had entered the major leagues. Another photograph shows Robinson typing, an indication of how much Robinson wanted to be in charge of his own story. The Robinsons married in 1946, just before spring training in Florida, and that same year, Rachel gave birth to Jackie Robinson Jr. He later died in a car crash in 1971 at 24. The exhibition also shows Robinson late in his career, in 1953, seemingly having positive interactions with his teammates, as well as some with Robinson shirtless, which would not have been published at the time. In one of the shirtless photos, Robinson is seen talking to a white teammate in the clubhouse. Museum officials believe he is Carl Furillo, an all star right fielder. "His guard is down. This is a completely intimate moment," Mr. Corcoran said in an interview. "You don't know what they're saying, but they're having some sort of serious but open discussion with each other." These photos show Robinson perhaps a bit more at ease than he was as a rookie, partially because at this point, he had shown himself to be one of the best players in the league, which resulted in him being more accepted in the locker room .
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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AMSTERDAM Reviewers have compared it favorably to J .D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye," Albert Camus's "The Stranger" and Karl Ove Knausgaard's "My Struggle." In The Irish Times, Eileen Battersby called it "one of the finest studies of youthful malaise ever written," and in The Guardian, Tim Parks described it as "not only a masterpiece but a cornerstone manque of modern European literature." The novel being praised, Gerard Reve's "The Evenings," was originally published in 1947. But English language readers are only now getting a chance to judge this Dutch classic for themselves. Pushkin Press released the first English translation of the book, by Sam Garrett, in Britain in November, and will publish it in the United States on Jan. 31. Fresh admiration for "The Evenings" comes as no surprise to readers in the Netherlands. The Society of Dutch Literature ranked it as the country's best 20th century novel and its third best of all time. Long taught in Dutch high schools as a turning point in the country's literary canon, it has never gone out of print here. "The Evenings" ("De Avonden") takes place over the last 10 nights of 1946. It's narrated by Frits van Egters, a 23 year old clerk in Amsterdam who still lives with his parents in a cramped apartment near the Amstel River. Frits is occupied during working hours, but in his free time he struggles with a sense of anxious aimlessness and isolation. Inwardly, he dissects the absurd banality of his life while he observes, with an acute sense of cynicism and occasional brutality, the slow decline of his doting middle age parents. Little mention is made in the novel of the impact of the cataclysmic Second World War that has just ended, or of the Dutch famine (known as "the hunger winter" in the Netherlands) that claimed about 22,000 lives just two years earlier, at the end of the Nazi occupation of the country. The story is nevertheless steeped in a sense of postwar gloom, and the dark humor that pervades the book underscores the difficulty of finding meaning in a world torn asunder. 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 his protagonist, Reve was 23 in 1946, living in Amsterdam and grappling with postwar realities while trying to find his writerly voice. He wrote "The Evenings" at 24, and it was an instant success, earning him the Reina Prinsen Geerligs Prize, given to the best young writer in the Netherlands. A complex and unclassifiable personality, Reve had rebelled against his communist, atheist parents by converting to Roman Catholicism a rather unusual move that some thought might be a strange joke, since he also came out as gay and wrote vividly about homosexuality. Daniel Seton, the commissioning publisher for Pushkin, learned about "The Evenings" from Victor Schiferli, a specialist in fiction at the nonprofit Dutch Foundation for Literature in Amsterdam. After "The Evenings" was published, Reve "was very famous and he was on TV all the time, loved by everybody," Mr. Schiferli said. "But privately, he suffered from depression most of his life, from alcoholism, things that were not really known to the public." The author's life was marked by scandals. A Dutch government official denied him a travel grant because of his vivid depictions of masturbation, and later the Belgian king refused to present him with a literary prize, because Reve's partner had been accused of indecency with a minor. Reve was also prosecuted for blasphemy in 1966, because of an essay in which he expressed a wish to have sex with God, who was depicted as a donkey. Mr. Seton was immediately taken with "The Evenings." "It just completely got me under its spell," he said. "It's a very strange book, very funny, very dark." The novel is already in its fifth printing in Britain, a fact that is encouraging to Steerforth Press, the small independent publisher handling the distribution of the novel in the United States. Book sellers in the United States have already ordered 3,000 copies, and a second print run is underway. "The Dutch view is that this is the postwar novel that revolutionized Dutch literature stylistically," said Adam Freudenheim, the publisher and managing director of Pushkin Press. "For me it does really connect to so many books from that period, like Salinger or Camus, who portray this alienated young man in a kind of existential crisis," he added, echoing comparisons that have been made by reviewers. "I also feel that there's a direct line from it to Knausgaard's autobiographical novels, in which a lot of time is spent on not a lot happening." Boredom is certainly one of the central concerns in "The Evenings," as Frits frequently notes the insistent march of the hours. "He sighed, hung the shaving mirror back on its peg beside the kitchen window and went into the living room," Reve writes. "He sat down on the divan. 'We're more than halfway,' he thought, 'the afternoon started an hour ago. Valuable time, time irretrievable, have I squandered.'" Mr. Schiferli was Reve's last editor at De Bezige Bij, the book's original Dutch publisher, and was in charge of republishing Reve's work when the author was in his 70s and suffering from Alzheimer's. He said Reve had an uneasy relationship with "The Evenings." Reve felt it "was a beginner's work, although the audience didn't see it that way," Mr. Schiferli said. The writer later adopted a quite different style of writing, "more baroque, more in your face personal," Mr. Schiferli added. "He never read 'The Evenings' after he wrote it, until the 1990s, when he was invited to read the whole book for the radio. After that, he said something like, 'Well, apparently it's not so bad after all.'"
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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"Killerman," Malik Bader 's latest super violent crime thriller (after the brutal "Cash Only" in 2016) , starts out slow and sticky, then gradually gathers steam and substance. The result might feel overlong and overwrought; yet thanks to Bader's clever plotting and fruity dialogue as well as strong supporting players this grimy picture climaxes more satisfyingly than expected. Smack in the center is Moe Diamond (a guarded Liam Hemsworth ), an ambitious Manhattan jeweler and sought after money launderer. When his friend and partner, Skunk (Emory Cohen), suggests using a multimillion dollar stash for a quick drug deal, Moe is wary: The money is being held for Skunk's skeevy Uncle Nestor ( Zlatko Buric ), a ruthless gangster who plans to use it to purchase politicians.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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In 2016, Mount Sinai Hospital opened its Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery in Manhattan. The documentary "Born to Be," directed by Tania Cypriano, follows the work of one of that center's pioneering surgeons, Dr. Jess Ting. Ting began as a general plastic surgeon; he only entered the field of transgender surgery 18 months before filming began. "Everyone thought I was nuts," he says, when he stepped up to join the Mount Sinai center. Unlike too many others, in medicine and the world, he seems to understand transgender people and their needs on an instinctive level. Patient, good humored and thoughtful, he's always looking for ways to improve surgeries, none of which are depicted explicitly here.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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The writer Jean Raspail in 1995. He described himself as "right wing, even right right wing." Jean Raspail, an award winning author best known for "The Camp of the Saints," a novel that envisions a takeover of the Western world by immigrants from developing countries and that was embraced as a cautionary tale by white supremacists, far right political figures and a member of the Trump administration, died on June 14 in Paris. His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by one of his publishers, Editions des Equateurs. His funeral on Wednesday at the Church of Saint Roch in central Paris drew more than 1,000 people, including many conservative public figures. Mr. Raspail, a writer initially known for his travelogues, influenced generations of far right readers with "The Camp of the Saints" (1973), in which he describes in denigrating detail how a million frazzled migrants from India reach the French Riviera and eventually take over the country. For decades, its most fervent readers have declared it a prophecy of the extinction of Western white populations by vast numbers of newer arrivals, a theory known among white supremacists today as "the great replacement." (The term was popularized by another French writer, Renaud Camus). In New Zealand, the man who killed 51 people at two mosques this year named his manifesto "The Great Replacement." And the shooter in the El Paso, Texas, massacre that left 20 dead last August mentioned the theory in a four page screed he had written. Mr. Raspail "was one of the last members of the old, reactionary right in France, and his death is seen as a major loss for those circles," said Jean Yves Camus, an expert on extremist movements (and no relation to Renaud Camus). "The Camp of the Saints" gained attention in the United States last year, when it was revealed that as a Senate aide before Mr. Trump became president, Stephen Miller, now the president's immigration adviser, had written approvingly of the novel in emails to an editor at the right wing website Breitbart. The former Trump strategist Steve Bannon also once asserted that European countries were confronted with an "invasion" that resembled the one described in "The Camp of the Saints." Mr. Raspail's 1973 novel has gained a new readership in Europe since it has experienced a new wave of immigration beginning in 2015. Mr. Camus told The New York Times in November, "People now buy 'The Camp of the Saints' because they want to read the book written by the writer who saw what would happen before everybody else." Jean Raspail was born on July 5, 1925, in Chemille sur Deme, France, and spent his youth roaming North and South America, often in the footsteps of French explorers of the 17th and 19th centuries. He published his first travelogue, based on a trek from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska, in 1952. He published dozens of travel books and fictional works set in Japan, the French West Indies, the Levant and Latin America. His novel "I, Antoine de Tounens, King of Patagonia" received the Academie Francaise grand prize in 1981. He was awarded its grand prize for literature, for his body of work, in 2003. Yet it is "The Camp of the Saints," which The Times and others have called a racist novel, that has become most closely associated with him. The novel dehumanizes the migrants, portraying them not as distinct individuals but rather as a mass of microbes, or rats. "To let them in would destroy us," the narrator says. "To reject them would destroy them." The migrants occupy houses owned by white citizens, kill factory owners who had hired them, and rape white women and girls. The plot extends beyond France: In London, the white population leaves the city in trains while millions of dark skinned people camp in the streets. In New York City, the mayor has to share his official residence with black families. In crude, racist terms, the narrator describes how a "black flood" reaches global Western cities. Although Mr. Raspail repeatedly denied being a racist, he said he would not change a line of the book. In the magazine Le Point in 2015, he described himself as "right wing, even right right wing." The novel was not markedly successful early on. When it was published in the United States in 1975, a Times review compared reading it to "being trapped at a cocktail party with a normal looking fellow who suddenly starts a perfervid racist diatribe." A new edition of "The Camp of the Saints," published in France in 2011, became a best seller. Since then the us vs. them rhetoric has reached new readerships, many of them young, as Europe has faced a wave of immigration starting in 2015. In one of his last public appearances, in October, Mr. Raspail drew hundreds of fans for a book signing at a Parisian bookshop that promotes conservative writers. In a foreword to the 2011 edition, he wrote that he was a "Francais de souche, and proud to be so," using an expression that, roughly translated, means people of French stock or of white European descent, a term often used in far right circles. He predicted that the "white race" would be overwhelmed in the 2040s or 2050s. He is survived by his wife, Aliette; a son, Quentin; a daughter, Marion; two grandchildren; and five great grandchildren. His funeral on Wednesday was one of the first large scale gatherings in Paris since France eased measures to contain the spread of the coronavirus. Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far right party National Rally, has often cited "The Camp of the Saints" as a source of inspiration, having read it when she was 18, she s aid. On the day of Mr. Raspail's death, she urged her Twitter followers to read the book, or to read it again. For many of his supporters, what distinguished Mr. Raspail was not his xenophobia but the myth he had created around the territory of Patagonia, which spans Chile and Argentina. (He had jokingly declared himself consul general of it.) "He had created his own world and community through his books in Patagonia," said a longtime friend, Philippe de Villiers, a conservative writer and the founder of Le Puy du Fou, a historical theme park in western France. He added, "He knew that what matters for a population is its collective imagination."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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Where the Rat Pack Era Meets the Spirit of Donald Judd After falling for the bright azure sky, craggy mountains and Rat Pack lore of Palm Springs, Calif., in the 1990s, Clive Wilkinson finally bought an empty lot there in 2009, intending to build a getaway of his own. "You felt you were on holiday, even though you were only two hours out of L.A.," said Mr. Wilkinson, 65, a Los Angeles area architect, explaining the lure of the city. "Of course, it's got a little bit of this legacy of the '60s," he added, when it was a hangout for entertainers like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. For years, Mr. Wilkinson saved money to build. Then, in 2015, something unexpected happened: The owner of the neighboring property asked if he would be willing to part with his land. "I didn't want to sell, so I threw out a very big number," Mr. Wilkinson said. Much to his surprise, the neighbor agreed to pay it. "Then I was in the odd position of having a lot of extra money," he said. Flush with cash and more eager than ever to build a vacation home in Palm Springs, he made quick work of finding a replacement property, paying 900,000 for a low slung, 1955 ranch house on a double lot in the Historic Tennis Club neighborhood. The home had barely been touched since it was built and seemed to be begging for a gut renovation. And it had a large pebbled yard, but no pool, which Mr. Wilkinson viewed as another opportunity to bring his design vision to the property. He also liked that the house was a short walk from Melvyn's restaurant, a onetime celebrity magnet steeped in Sinatra stories that opened in 1975 and was still going strong. "I took out all the carpet and tile, just to expose the concrete floors," he said. He also demolished the wall between the kitchen and living area, and enlarged openings in the living room and bedroom walls to add big glass doors with views to the yard. For the new kitchen and dining area, he designed simple cabinets, a large island with integrated banquette seating and a boxy dining table with benches, all out of Douglas fir plywood. "It was very Donald Judd influenced," he said. He used the same material to create built in cabinetry and bedside tables in the two bedrooms and in the self contained guest suite, or casita, by the garage. The largest, most attention grabbing feature he added was the pool, an irregular, asymmetrical affair with a waterfall fountain. The form of the pool, Mr. Wilkinson said, grew out of his desire to install it as close to the house as possible without harming any trees. "There was this one glorious, big ficus sitting in the middle," he said, so he bent the pool around it. "I wanted to use the shade of the tree" for the pool deck, he said. "Then the steps into the pool are positioned so that if you're sitting on them, you're looking at the best view, which is the mountains." There were a number of other changes less exciting but equally expensive along the way. The roof, it turned out, needed to be replaced, the exterior needed new stucco and the original plumbing pipes had to be removed. "It was all lead piping," Mr. Wilkinson said. "We had to replace that with copper." They also had to dig up parts of the concrete flooring to renovate the bathrooms. By the time the construction and landscaping was completed in September 2016, he had spent about 525,000. Since then, the home has served many functions. Last October, Mr. Wilkinson and his new wife, Elisabeth, 49, eloped there. "We went off to Palm Springs one weekend, hired a local minister, got married at the house and didn't tell anyone," Mr. Wilkinson said, until they returned to Los Angeles. "We went over to Melvyn's that night for a big dinner and danced in the bar." Now that the secret is out, the couple makes weekend visits with Mr. Wilkinson's children, Hayden, 8, and, Keira, 7, and Ms. Wilkinson's daughter, Chloe, 13. Mr. Wilkinson's ex wife also sometimes uses the house with the children. When no family members are there, he rents it out on Airbnb. And a couple of times, he has invited his employees out for an elaborate dinner. "We put them up in a local hotel," he said, "and had a 40 person dinner at a single long table between the house and the pool." For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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SINGLE FAMILY home sales in Westchester were down about 4.5 percent in 2011 from the year before, and dollar volume was off about 6 percent partly the result of the downward trend of house prices, said P. Gilbert Mercurio, who recently retired as chief executive of the Westchester Putnam Board of Realtors. Yet despite this and other discouraging news from Westchester's housing market, 2011 was not a bad year for everyone. Several brokerages reported banner years among them McClellan Sotheby's International Realty in Pelham; Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty in White Plains; Houlihan Lawrence, based in Bronxville; and Keller Williams NY Realty in White Plains and Bedford. Also, some agents racked up more sales in 2011 than before the housing market imploded several years ago. Westchester's top producing agent, Nancy Kennedy of Houlihan Lawrence, logged upward of 60 million in sales last year, more than when the market was at its peak five years ago. Houlihan Lawrence, which has offices in several counties with 15 of Westchester's 20 top producing sales agents, captured 34 percent of the total dollar volume in the county 2.6 billion in 2011, similar to 2010. In 2009, it captured 30 percent. For most, however, the market barely lumbered along. Many agents dropped out of the field altogether. As a result of the hard times, membership in the Westchester Putnam Board of Realtors fell in recent years to 6,700 from 8,000 a decline that prompted its merger on Jan. 1 with counterpart groups in Rockland and Orange. Similarly, some agencies were absorbed by larger ones, notably Nelson Vrooman GMAC Real Estate in White Plains, which was acquired by Better Homes and Gardens Rand. Those who thrived in 2011 attributed their success to a combination of variables, including an aggressive response to a recalcitrant market specifically, increased advertising and greater reliance on the Internet and technology. Another factor was New York City's strengthened market, which allowed more property owners to sell their condominiums and cooperatives there and move north. In Pelham, 29 miles from Manhattan by Metro North dollar volume increased, said Sona Davidian, an owner of McClellan Sotheby's. The tally for all sales in town was 166 million in 2011, up from 147 million in 2010. According to Ms. Davidian, McClellan Sotheby's made 82 million of that amount; in 2010, it took in 64 million. The agency sold just three more houses in 2011 than in 2010, but of the total, more were on the expensive end. Gary Leogrande, the principal of Keller Williams NY Realty, took a different tack. Whereas other agencies shied away from foreclosures and short sales, he said his agency embraced them, becoming a specialist in the field. "Five years ago most of the transactions we completed were normal, not distressed, sales," said Mr. Leogrande, the president of the Empire Access Multiple Listing Service. "Now 15 percent of our business is short sales and and/or bank owned properties, and it's paid off for us." Mr. Leogrande's brokerage logged more than 100 million in Westchester sales last year, exceeding the previous year's levels, he said although he declined to reveal the numbers for 2010. To beat the odds in an ailing market, agencies like Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty went on the offensive by acquiring smaller, struggling agencies, said J. P. Endres, the office manager for Rand in White Plains. "While others were closing, we expanded," said Ms. Endres, who is also the secretary treasurer of the New York State Association of Realtors. "Some people get paralyzed in a market like this one. Others forge ahead." In addition to Nelson Vrooman, her agency acquired the Gorbutt Group, an independent firm in White Plains, and Century 21 Wolff, which had several offices in the county. It also opened offices in Larchmont, Scarsdale and Somers, going toe to toe with agencies well established in those towns. Better Homes and Gardens Rand, which has offices in Putnam, Orange, Rockland and Dutchess Counties, has also begun expanding into northern New Jersey and is now eyeing Connecticut, Ms. Endres said. She also said its White Plains office alone completed 100 million in sales in 2011, up from 56 million in 2007. "The key is how you handle yourself in an adverse market," she said. "In flush times, like 2005, anybody can sell a house; in tough times, it's another story." Ms. Kennedy of Houlihan Lawrence, which had 15 of the county's top producing brokers, proved that point. Her year was "one of the best years I've ever had," she said. One tactic adopted by Ms. Kennedy who works out of Houlihan's Croton office, and who has just assumed the presidency of the Hudson Gateway Association of Realtors, the newly merged trade group was to jettison the adage that all real estate is local. "As the market became more challenging," she said, "I expanded my territory. You can't afford to specialize anymore in a specific territory, or for that matter, even limit yourself to a specific price range. "In past years, buyers moved on to another broker if they weren't able to find a house in your area," she said, adding that the new rule in a changed market is to "stay with a client wherever they go, until they find the house of their dreams and the deal is done."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Eric Wu, the chief executive of Opendoor, said the company's goal is to make moving as simple as the click of a button. SAN FRANCISCO Opendoor, a start up that flips homes, attracted attention in June when it announced it had raised 325 million from a long list of venture capitalists. The financing valued the four year old company at more than 2 billion. That was only an appetizer. Three months later, Opendoor has more than doubled its cash pile. On Thursday, the company said it had gotten a 400 million investment from SoftBank's Vision Fund. The valuation for Opendoor remains the same. The so called mega round for Opendoor was not the Vision Fund's only major real estate related deal on Thursday. The firm also co led a 400 million investment in the high end brokerage Compass that valued the company at 4.4 billion. The hauls are part of a race by investors to pour money into technology for real estate, or what Silicon Valley now calls proptech. Having watched tech start ups upend old line industries like taxis and hotels, venture capitalists are casting about for the next area to be infused with software and data. Many have homed in on real estate as a big opportunity because parts of the industry like pricing, mortgages and building management have been slow to adopt software that could make business more efficient. Last year, real estate tech start ups raised 3.4 billion in funding, a fivefold increase from 2013, according to the start up data provider CB Insights. One firm, Fifth Wall Ventures, is entirely dedicated to proptech. "Tech is starting to make inroads to becoming adopted, and it's opening the eyes of investors," said Jeffrey Housenbold, a managing director at SoftBank's Vision Fund. Until recently, the biggest tech innovations to hit the residential real estate market have come from listing sites like Zillow and Redfin. But the start ups in the new wave are tackling a wide range of areas appraisals, building management, financing, co working, co living, building amenities and empty retail space. The Vision Fund, one of the most aggressive investors in real estate tech start ups, has written large checks to Katerra, a construction company; WeWork, an office rental company; Lemonade, a home insurance start up; and Oyo Rooms, a hotel company in India. Mr. Housenbold said SoftBank's deep pockets it has 98 billion in cash to spend might be influencing the market. "Given the vast amount of attention on the Vision Fund, people have become more curious," he said. Opendoor, one of the largest start ups in the proptech category, gives the Vision Fund an entry into residential housing. The Silicon Valley company was founded in 2014 by the venture capitalist Keith Rabois and Eric Wu, who is Opendoor's chief executive. With the money from SoftBank, it has raised more than 1 billion from investors including Khosla Ventures and GGV Capital. Opendoor's goal is to make moving as simple as the click of a button, according to Mr. Wu. While that remains a far off reality, the company has simplified the process of selling a home. It uses a combination of data, software and a team of 50 human evaluators to assess a home's value. If a customer accepts Opendoor's value for their home, the company will buy the property, charging a 6.5 percent fee on average. The company said it offers sellers certainty many conventional home sales fall through and flexible closing dates, helping them avoid paying double mortgages. It also eliminates the need for a real estate agent. Opendoor employs 100 licensed real estate agents to advise customers if they request it. Opendoor buys only homes built in 1960 or later, worth 175,000 to 500,000 and not in need of major renovations or repairs. Operating in more than a dozen cities, mostly in the South, it bought 316 million of homes in August, up from around 100 million in January. After some light fixes, it sells the homes in an average of 90 days. Before its latest cash infusion, Opendoor planned to expand into one new city a month. Now it plans to double that pace. The company said it expects to be in 22 cities in the United States by the end of the year. Its growth has spawned competitors: OfferPad and Knock offer comparable services to Opendoor, and Zillow and Redfin, which are both publicly traded, have entered the house flipping market as well. "For a while, we were literally the only ones doing this because it's complex," Mr. Wu said. Size is an advantage, he said: More transactions mean more data to help Opendoor price its offers more accurately, as well as more buying power with local suppliers for renovations. Mr. Wu said he believed that reducing the annoyances and costs of moving would entice more people to do it, which would increase the size of the market. "There are a finite number of homes, but if people are moving with more frequency, that increases the liquidity of the supply in the system," he said. Opendoor's business model has not been tested by a major dip in the housing market, causing some skepticism about whether it can work over the long term. "The vast majority of investors who hear about it initially think it's a bad idea," said Stephen Kim, an analyst at Evercore ISI, a market research company. But the skepticism often fades as they realize Opendoor makes money by providing a service to home sellers, rather than on price appreciation, Mr. Kim said. Even if the company breaks even on a sale, the transaction fees are a meaningful business. Jason Childs, Opendoor's chief financial officer, said the company's geographic diversity and 90 day average flips helped shield it from a potential housing market crash. In the housing crash a decade ago, the holders of long duration assets were affected the worst, he said. Opendoor's Phoenix operations are already profitable, excluding the cost of its headquarters in San Francisco, and Dallas is "on the edge of profitability," said Mr. Childs. The company's long term success relies on its ability to accurately price homes. Half of the people who now get offers from Opendoor sell their home to the company. Opendoor did not provide data on how close its offers were to the ultimate sale price of the homes it did not buy. In recent months, aided by the promise of cash from SoftBank, Opendoor has also expanded into the business of selling homes directly to customers, instead of going through brokers in the traditional way. It acquired Open Listings, a home shopping site, to offer a service it is calling a "trade in," where Opendoor handles the entire buying and selling process for a person or family. That service is now available in Dallas. It also began offering mortgage and title services to buyers. But Mr. Wu does not foresee one thing going away completely: the job of the real estate agent. Rather, he expects an agent's work to shift to more of an advisory role, instead of an administrative one. "The thing that cannot be automated is this notion of advice what neighborhood, what school district, how much you can afford," he said. "It's important to have someone who is an expert alongside you."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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When concerns about a pipeline were dismissed by regulators, a rural black enclave went to court and won. In the years following the Civil War, freedmen and freedwomen founded a community close to the Virginia plantations where they had been enslaved. The settlers of Union Hill in Buckingham County, Va., passed down this land over generations to today's descendants, who are now at the center of a fight to stop a proposed multibillion dollar energy project. While Union Hill may represent the remarkable history of resilience from our country's unjust beginnings, it also reveals the country's continuing imbalance of power and the decisions about whose histories we choose to honor. Five years ago, Dominion Energy, Virginia's biggest investor owned electric utility, announced plans to build a natural gas fired compressor station in Union Hill for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. The roughly 7.5 billion, 600 mile pipeline is being built by a consortium of four energy companies, with Dominion responsible for its construction and operation, and would run through West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina. These stations, which compress natural gas so it can flow through pipelines, release toxic emissions such as methane, nitrogen oxides and particulate matter into the air, increasing the health risks for residents who live nearby. Many in Union Hill responded with fierce opposition but appeals to Dominion, state regulators and Virginia's governors went unheeded. At a bare minimum, ensuring environmental justice in this case required Dominion and regulators to consider how economically disadvantaged or minority communities like Union Hill would be affected. Communities of color and people with fewer financial resources have often borne the brunt of pollution and other environmental burdens. Dominion and regulators should also have given serious consideration to an electric compressor that would nearly eliminate air pollution from the facility. They did neither. Instead of honoring Union Hill's past and present, the state's most powerful forces essentially denied its existence. The courts did not. In a win for our client Friends of Buckingham, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit this month threw out the permit for the compressor station, finding that the state failed to adequately consider the potential health effects on Union Hill's African American community. As the court noted, "Environmental justice is not merely a box to be checked." This is the eighth permit for the pipeline project that has been vacated or suspended by federal courts or federal agencies, making the future of the project uncertain. Immediately following the appeals court ruling, Dominion said it would address the issues raised by the court and submit a revised permit application to state regulators. There's a revealing counterpart to this story. In 2018, Dominion proposed siting a similar compressor station on land it owned across the Potomac River from George Washington's Mount Vernon, home to over 300 enslaved persons at the time of Washington's death. The Mount Vernon estate launched a "Save the View" campaign that gained national attention, and shortly thereafter Dominion agreed to drop its proposal and look for alternative sites. Mount Vernon tells the history of America, but so does Union Hill. Environmental justice is a commitment to right the wrongs of our past that persist today. It's no coincidence the environmental justice movement was born in the South, when in 1982 an African American community in Warren County, N.C. failed to stop the siting of a landfill that would contain soil contaminated by PCBs, but birthed a powerful new movement. Union Hill shares its story with Warren County and countless other communities faced with the unjust burden of pollution, from Cancer Alley in Louisiana to Flint, Mich. and its lead contaminated drinking water. This pattern of injustice, which often afflicts people of color and the poor, will become a more urgent problem as climate change threatens some Americans more than others. Union Hill would not be the only casualty of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. The natural gas pipeline would cross steep mountain terrain through two national forests, a national scenic trail and parkway and an endangered species habitat. Homes and farms in its path have been seized through eminent domain. And it would lock Virginia into fossil fuels for decades at a critical moment for climate action, even though the demand for natural gas in the region is likely to fall as the costs of renewable energy and storage technologies continue to fall. Union Hill would be a devastating casualty, its legacy of enslaved Virginians sacrificed to the modern hub of influence and power in the Commonwealth, reminding us again that we have not righted our past. Union Hill is as important a marker of the history of Virginia and American as Jamestown, Mount Vernon, and the state's Civil War battlefields. While Union Hill may not have behind it the resources or political clout of some of Virginia's more prominent historical sites, it is entitled to the same reverence and respect. That did not happen in this case. As the unanimous decision by the three judge appeals court panel found, state regulators "failed" in their "statutory duty to determine the character and degree of injury to the health of the Union Hill residents, and the suitability" of a gas powered compressor in the community. How we treat the story and future of Union Hill, and other communities like it, will define our history. Jeff Gleason is the executive director of the Southern Environmental Law Center in Charlottesville, Va. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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My big problem lies elsewhere. I'm instinctively suspicious of, and resistant to, "carding" procedures, meaning any admission policy based on presenting personal identification, which is what the Met is asking for from New York State residents who want to keep paying what they wish. This potentially discriminates against a population of residents who either don't have legal identification or are reluctant to show the identification they have. And it plays directly into the hands of the anti immigrant sentiment that is now poisoning this country. I cannot remember a time when a museum's unqualified demonstration of "doors open to all" would carry more positive I would say necessary political weight. This is my single biggest reservation about the Met's admission by I.D. policy. And even for legally documented citizens I see potential problems. The Met says it will not turn people away even if they don't present an I.D., though it will remind them to bring an I.D. on a return visit. I don't know what kind of guidelines will be in place for delivering such "warnings," but I can easily imagine a young person who may have no I.D. feeling discouraged from returning to the museum. SMITH And young people are very important. For example, the Met will allow students from New Jersey and Connecticut to pay as they wish. Why shouldn't that apply to students everywhere? People want to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States; a more visually literate society produces more people able to design things for factories to make. Museums directly inspire and cultivate talent and creativity. To exclude people from them is a loss that can be measured in economics, and happiness. The "pursuit of happiness" wasn't mentioned in the Declaration of Independence because it sounds good. It is an important aspect of a nation's health, on all fronts. So I worry that the Met's plan is classist, and nativist. It divides people into categories rich and poor, native and foreign which is exactly what this country does not need right now. I think this is tied to the abstract way wealth is accrued these days. In the last Gilded Age the rich had a much more literal sense of the suffering their fortunes were built on and a greater need to give back. COTTER In the pre integration 1950s and early 1960s, the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama admitted black visitors only on Tuesdays. Technically, "everybody" could enter the museum, but only if they adhered to the admission policy. And that policy effectively discouraged an entire population from ever considering the museum anything but alien territory. I am very wary of potential psychological deterrents of this kind, not only as they impact the visitor population, but also as they affect the continuing viability of the Met itself, and other institutions that present themselves as being culturally comprehensive. They need, on every level, from the reception of visitors at the door to the experience of history delivered in the galleries, to make us know this is "our history, our place." SMITH The Met says it is the only major museum in the world with a "pure" pay as you wish policy. Their attitude is that all other museums charge one way or another, including for special exhibitions, as if to say: This is inevitable, and now we will too. Actually it should be just the opposite. Pay as you wish is a principle that should be upheld and defended, a point of great pride. The city should be equally proud of it. No one else has this, although they should. It indicates a kind of attitude, like having the Statue of Liberty in our harbor. It is, symbolically speaking, a beacon.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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Are female leaders better at fighting a pandemic? I compiled death rates from the coronavirus for 21 countries around the world, 13 led by men and eight by women. The male led countries suffered an average of 214 coronavirus related deaths per million inhabitants. Those led by women lost only one fifth as many, 36 per million. If the United States had the coronavirus death rate of the average female led country, 102,000 American lives would have been saved out of the 114,000 lost. "Countries led by women do seem to be particularly successful in fighting the coronavirus," noted Anne W. Rimoin, an epidemiologist at U.C.L.A. "New Zealand, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Norway have done so well perhaps due to the leadership and management styles attributed to their female leaders." Let's start by acknowledging that there have been plenty of wretched female leaders over the years. Indeed, according to research I once did for a book, female leaders around the world haven't been clearly better than male counterparts even at improving girls' education or reducing maternal mortality. There has been solid research that it makes a difference to have more women on boards and in grass roots positions, but evidence that they make better presidents or prime ministers has been lacking until Covid 19 came along. It's not that the leaders who best managed the virus were all women. But those who bungled the response were all men, and mostly a particular type: authoritarian, vainglorious and blustering. Think of Boris Johnson in Britain, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Iran and Donald Trump in the United States. Virtually every country that has experienced coronavirus mortality at a rate of more than 150 per million inhabitants is male led. "I don't think it's a coincidence that some of the best run places have been run by women: New Zealand, Germany, Taiwan," mused Susan Rice, who was national security adviser under President Barack Obama. "And where we've seen things go most badly wrong the U.S., Brazil, Russia, the U.K. it's a lot of male ego and bluster." I think the divergence has a great deal to do with that ego and bluster. "We often joke that men drivers never ask for directions," observed Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel of the University of Pennsylvania. "I actually think there's something to that also in terms of women's leadership, in terms of recognizing expertise and asking experts for advice, and men sort of barreling ahead like they got it." He has a point. Those leaders who handled the virus best were those who humbly consulted public health experts and acted quickly, and many were women; in contrast, male authoritarians who botched the response were suspicious of experts and too full of themselves. "I really get it," Trump said when he visited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in March. Surrounded by medical experts, he added, "Maybe I have natural ability," and he wondered aloud if he should have become a scientist. While women have generally outshone men as international leaders, that does not seem true within the United States. Some female governors have done better, others worse, so there isn't an obvious gender gap at home. It's also possible that this isn't about female leaders but about the kind of country that chooses a woman to lead it. Companies with more female executives on average perform better than those with fewer women, but analysts think that the reason isn't just the brilliance of women leaders. Rather, companies that are culturally open to having senior women are also more willing to embrace other innovations, and it may be this innovative spirit that leads to higher profitability. Likewise, countries willing to elect female prime ministers may be those more inclined to listen to epidemiologists. Yet I think that there's also a difference in the leadership itself. "Women lead often in a very different style from men," said Margot Wallstrom, a former Swedish foreign minister, citing examples from Norway, Germany and New Zealand of women with low key, inclusive and evidence based leadership. Wallstrom also noted that public health is a traditional "home turf" concern for many women leaders. Grant Miller, an expert in health economics at Stanford University, found that as states, one by one, granted the vote to women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, those states then also invested more in sanitation and public health saving some 20,000 children's lives a year. Boys were thus huge beneficiaries of women's suffrage. One trap for female politicians is that brashness can be effective for male candidates, but researchers find that male and female voters alike are turned off by women who seem self promotional. That forces women in politics to master the art of communicating effectively in a low key way just what's needed in a pandemic. "Perhaps the skills that have led them to reach the top," said Rimoin, the U.C.L.A. epidemiologist, "are the same skills that are currently needed to bring a country together." 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.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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SEE Stream on Apple TV Plus. It begins with a birth: A pair of children born into a society that they can see, but that can't see them. That is the premise of this action drama series, set in a world where a virus wiped out most of the human population and rendered all the survivors blind. The story picks up centuries after that cataclysm, with the birth of the two children, whose ability to see puts them at risk of being killed by a tribe that views eyesight as a sin. Luckily for them, their father is played by Jason Momoa so they at least have a mighty guardian. The series was created and written by the "Peaky Blinders" creator Steven Knight. It exhibits, Mike Hale wrote in his review for The Times, "a ripe ridiculousness that's almost endearing." FIRE IN PARADISE (2019) Stream on Netflix. Exactly a year has passed since the fire that would grow into the deadliest wildfire in California's history first started burning. This documentary presents interviews with survivors of the Camp Fire and some of those who fought it.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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BuzzFeed News published an article this month that described what it called a "toxic work culture." In the article, former staff members said they faced "racism, fear and intimidation" and laid most of the blame on three of the show's executive producers, Ed Glavin, Mary Connelly and Andy Lassner. Former employees said they were fired for taking time off for medical leave or bereavement. Black employees said they experienced racist comments. One said that one of the show's writers had told her, "I'm sorry, I only know the names of the white people who work here." In a joint statement to BuzzFeed News, Mr. Glavin, Ms. Connelly and Mr. Lassner said: "For the record, the day to day responsibility of the Ellen show is completely on us. We take all of this very seriously and we realize, as many in the world are learning, that we need to do better, are committed to do better, and we will do better." Variety first reported on the WarnerMedia investigation. "The Ellen DeGeneres Show," the winner of dozens of Emmys, is now on summer hiatus. Warner Bros. has yet to announce how it will go on as the pandemic continues.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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Not that the episode lacks for either. On the contrary. Kreizler's makeshift detective squad, which now appears to include Police Commissioner Teddy Roosevelt, is delivered another slain child as we, in turn, are delivered a close up of the victim's empty, bloody eye socket, which Lucius probes with his finger in search of clues about the murder weapon. In another scene, John Moore awakes from a nightmare in which the young prostitute who lured him into a trap in last week's episode has his eyes similarly cut out. It's the biggest jump scare the show has served up yet. We also learn that at least two members of Dr. Laszlo Kreizler's staff his driver, Cyrus, and his maid, Mary have themselves committed murder. Those murders seem to have happened under mitigating circumstances, but still. The Scooby Doo gang this ain't. It may sound odd given that this show's sordidness has been one of my chief obstacles to taking "The Alienist" as seriously as its creators surely wish, but I found myself wishing that one of the episode's most upsetting story lines had been handled with more frankness, not less. Moore suffered more than a nightmare when he was drugged: He was sexually assaulted by the underage employees of the gangsters who own the brothel he was investigating all under the watchful eye of their police cronies, in hopes that the resulting shame would prevent him from disclosing anything he discovered. And yet Moore and the show itself seem to shake off this traumatic event within hours; in fact, it's played primarily for laughs, with an off color joke by Captain Connor and an "It's not what you think!" gag about Kreizler's gang having found him wandering around without any pants. Before long, the intrepid illustrator even returns with Kreizler to the scene of the crime, seemingly more concerned with having been robbed than raped. Elsewhere in the episode, he endures an awkward blind date arranged by his grandmother, and he finally makes his feelings toward Sarah clear with an unrequited kiss. The scene with his grandmother is as amusing as the other bits of comic relief; the kiss is effective in furthering the bizarre love triangle between our three principals. Both, however, feel deeply strange as part of a day in the life of a man who has been sexually assaulted no more than 48 hours before. It's all the more baffling because the episode is so successful elsewhere in probing the inner workings of its main characters. A marvelous, complex scene at a Vassar reunion, in which Sarah is the only remaining bachelorette, hints at a possible old fling with a classmate and a definite interest in Kreizler. These revelations take place during a daring sotto voce conversation about "doing it" and a party game in which the attendees are "murdered" when the designated "killer" winks at them. It's a game the jaded police employee reacts to with an impassive stare courtesy of Dakota Fanning, who renders her face as somehow blank and expressive at once.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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CYRILLE AIMEE at Birdland (through Nov. 23, 8:30 and 11 p.m.). An emerging vocalist originally from France, Aimee recently moved from New York to New Orleans, calling it quits with her longtime quintet and jumping into a new chapter. She has been expanding her palette and strategies, punching up her whimsical Gypsy jazz style with fresh dashes of New Orleanian rhythm, and sometimes employing a loop machine. Aimee is at Birdland this week to perform selections from "Move On: A Sondheim Adventure," her most recent album and her first without the quintet. 212 581 3080, birdlandjazz.com GUSTAVO CASENAVE QUARTET at Flushing Town Hall (Nov. 22, 8 p.m.). A virtuoso pianist who hails from Uruguay but has lived in New York for the past two decades, Casenave pulls from tango, jazz, Western classical and South American folk to create a kind of light footed chamber music with an identity of its own. He arrives at Flushing Town Hall on Friday fresh off a win at the Latin Grammy Awards, where last week he received the trophy for best instrumental album for his solo piano recording "Balance." He will perform with a quartet featuring the saxophonist Alejandro Aviles, the bassist Pedro Giraudo and the drummer Franco Pinna. 718 463 7700, flushingtownhall.org JIMMY COBB TRIO at Dizzy's Club (Nov. 25, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). This drummer's memory banks are a Trapper Keeper for some of the biggest moments in jazz history. A National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, Cobb is the last living member of the sextet that made Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue," and he has recorded hundreds of albums with other eminent jazz figures: Cannonball Adderley, Sarah Vaughan, John Coltrane and more. On his most recent album, "Remembering U," Cobb offers a musical homage to a younger compatriot, Roy Hargrove, whose untimely death last year left a gaping void in jazz. (This was also the last album recorded by Rudy Van Gelder, the fabled recording engineer, who died in 2016.) It features Hargrove's trumpet playing on three tracks, and showcases the cool synergy of Cobb's longstanding trio throughout. That group featuring Tadataka Unno on piano and Paolo Benedettini on bass will play selections from the disc at this show, presented in partnership with Newark's WBGO 88.3 FM. 212 258 9595, jazz.org/dizzys JASON MORAN AND THE BANDWAGON at the Village Vanguard (Nov. 26 Dec. 1, 8:30 and 10:30 p.m.). Moran's impact on jazz and the arts writ large continues to grow. At the end of March, at Carnegie Hall, he and the operatic mezzo soprano Alicia Hall Moran, his wife, debuted "Two Wings," a musical meditation on the Great Migration. Meanwhile, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, his first ever retrospective exhibition is currently on display, showcasing his growing body of work alongside visual and conceptual artists (and as a maker in those mediums himself). Throughout Moran's 20 year career, one constant has been the Bandwagon, his trio featuring the bassist Tarus Mateen and the drummer Nasheet Waits. They weld together straight ahead jazz fluidity, gospel transcendence and avant garde iconoclasm into an unmistakable group sound. Starting on Tuesday, the trio will continue its annual tradition of playing at the Vanguard on the week of Thanksgiving. 212 255 4037, villagevanguard.com JOEL ROSS GOOD VIBES at the Jazz Gallery (Nov. 22 23, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). Among the most promising young bandleaders in jazz, Ross has earned wide acclaim for his debut album, "Kingmaker," released this year on Blue Note Records. He boasts a dashing, prolix flow on vibraphone and a bold, fresh identity as a composer, but he also shows a real appreciation for his instrument's history: You can hear the ghosts of Bobby Hutcherson and Milt Jackson in his playing. He appears here with a slightly modified version of Good Vibes, the band from the LP: Immanuel Wilkins on alto saxophone, Jeremy Corren on piano, Kanoa Mendenhall on bass and Jeremy Dutton on drums. 646 494 3625, jazzgallery.nyc JOHN SCOFIELD AND DAVE HOLLAND at the Blue Note (Nov. 26 Dec. 1, 8 and 10:30 p.m.). There's really no way to "O.K. boomer" these two. Each has a stint with Miles Davis on his resume, and they've both been in the game for decades. But neither Scofield, an acid toned guitarist, nor Holland, a brilliantly versatile bassist, has ever planted his feet in a set approach. And both continue to work in conversation with younger musicians even as they carry the flag for the jazz rock fusion movement, in which they played an essential role. Here they will perform in an intimate duet. 212 475 8592, bluenote.net GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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LAST Monday I drove the Model S, a full size sedan recently introduced by Tesla, the California electric car start up, from Lake Tahoe to Los Angeles. I covered 531 miles and the drive took 11.5 hours, during which the car consumed zero gasoline and produced no tailpipe emissions. My route, the first a Model S owner might take using Tesla Motors' network of so called Superchargers, previewed a significant advance in the practicality of battery electric cars. Tesla's string of strategically placed high speed chargers made possible something that has not been available to American E.V. drivers: the ability to make a long distance drive in a single day. The Supercharger, Tesla's name for a proposed nationwide network of electric car filling stations, outlines the most tangible blueprint so far of petroleum free driving in the United States. "The one big holdout with most E.V.'s today is that you can't take a road trip," said J B Straubel, Tesla's chief technical officer. "What happens if I want to go across the country? I can't tell you how many times we get that question." Tesla's answer is to install powerful charging stations pumping electricity at 90 kilowatts, adding about 250 miles of range in an hour at key locations between major cities. There's plenty of range for intracity travel. The goal of the charging network is to enable intercity journeys, eventually on a nationwide basis. Before the end of October, the company plans to open its first charging locations to customers who have bought the Model S. Owners with the 85 kilowatt hour battery, which comes equipped to use the Supercharger system (the fast charge capability is optional on the 60 kilowatt hour model) will receive free electric fuel for life at the stations. Mr. Straubel said he saw the high speed chargers as "the final piece of the whole technology suite" enabling Tesla to "take on an enormous part of the market we couldn't reach before." My journey began at 6:55 a.m. at Kings Beach, Calif., elevation 6,000 feet, on Lake Tahoe's north shore. The 85 kilowatt hour battery pack, which has an E.P.A. rated range of 265 miles, was only three quarters full when I left, but the Model S had no trouble with the 100 miles, much of it downhill, to the first charger in Folsom, Calif. When I arrived, the battery pack still held 40 percent of its capacity. At 9:25 a.m. in Folsom I pulled the Model S close to the pedestal that carries the charging cable, which is only four feet long to ensure that it never falls to the ground and gets run over. The Supercharger itself, about the size and shape of a small refrigerator, sits 30 feet away. Plugging in was as easy as charging at home and simpler than using a gas pump. On the Model S, the fast charger connects to a port hidden behind a door in the driver side taillight the same one used for lower power refueling at home. Amenities near the Folsom charger, as with other Tesla network locations, were not an obvious match for the automaker's upscale demographic. Tesla identified places close to chain restaurants, restrooms, Wi Fi and motels. Twenty two minutes after plugging in, the charger had restored 100 miles of range in the Model S. It took another 20 minutes to add the next 50 miles because the rate of charging tapers down as the battery fills. Think of it as electrons having more difficulty squeezing into an increasingly crowded space. The smart strategy for fastest charging is to arrive at a destination with a nearly empty battery. Another five minutes of charging brought the estimated range to 254 miles, enough to make it to the next stop, Coalinga. Tesla engineers advised holding my speed to 70 miles per hour just to make sure. No restrictions were placed on air conditioner use, though. The Supercharger is clever in its construction. It starts with the same 10 kilowatt charger that is onboard every Model S. To build the Supercharger, the company strings together 12 of the same units, which were designed from the beginning as building blocks. "It's good modular engineering," Mr. Straubel said. "We configured all the circuitry, the power and the communications so we can just stack them up." Each Supercharger can serve two cars, and most locations will have three units. With solar panels planned for many locations, operating costs are expected to remain low, perhaps explaining the free recharges. My lunch stop at Harris Ranch, a hacienda like restaurant, added 153 miles of range before my burger even arrived. So I cleared the charging spot for another Model S, a Tesla company vehicle that had joined the trip, and returned to lunch. With way more energy than I would need to reach the next station 115 miles away, I made up time by flying along with Interstate 5's speedy traffic.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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The tube used for unmanned testing by Virgin Hyperloop One north of Las Vegas. The system aims to move people and cargo through tubes in wheel less pods. Credit...Joe Buglewicz for The New York Times The tube used for unmanned testing by Virgin Hyperloop One north of Las Vegas. The system aims to move people and cargo through tubes in wheel less pods. MOAPA, Nev. California just decided to sharply scale back its plans for a high speed rail artery meant to transform travel up and down the state. But in the desert outside Las Vegas, the transportation ambitions still seem limitless. Here, engineers working for Virgin Hyperloop One are testing a radically different type of mass transit: one that aims to move people and cargo in small wheel less pods in a vacuum tube at speeds that could exceed 600 miles per hour. Today's swiftest rail travel, at top speeds less than half as fast, would become a quaint anachronism. The company, which counts Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group as a minority investor, is one of several in the United States, Canada and other countries developing hyperloop technology. The concept was promoted by Elon Musk, of electric car and private rocket renown, and then offered by one of his companies as open source technology available to all. It works by propelling pods using magnetic levitation through a low pressure, near vacuum tube. The low pressure minimizes friction and air resistance, greatly reducing the power needed. And because the pods travel in a tube, they're not subject to shutdowns due to harsh weather, like snow or polar vortexes. We've seen this concept before. Libraries used to send book requests to the stacks in pneumatic tubes. Until 1984, a similar network whisked messages around Paris. And a series of underground tubes once dispatched mail between Manhattan and Brooklyn. The concept was even tried with people for three years in New York's subway. Beginning in 1870, Beach Pneumatic Transit, named for its developer, ran a passenger capsule moved by pneumatic power under Broadway in Manhattan, from Warren Street to Murray Street. Virgin Hyperloop One, based in Los Angeles, began testing here in 2017 and is now doing so with a full scale test track; its main competitors, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, also in Los Angeles, and TransPod, with headquarters in Toronto, expect to build their own test tracks this year. So far both are working with computer simulations. In the barren desert 35 miles north of the Las Vegas Strip, Virgin's 1,640 foot long, 11 foot high tube has been used for hundreds of runs, with an empty pod that in one test accelerated to 240 m.p.h. To avoid making anyone sick, the system would take three minutes to accelerate to that speed, and the train would need to travel six miles to turn 90 degrees, said Ismaeel Babur, one of the company's senior civil engineers. Because of its slow takeoff rate, "you'll feel 30 to 40 percent of the acceleration compared to an airplane," Mr. Babur said. The trip will be so smooth, he added, that "coffee won't slide even at 600 miles per hour." Each of the three companies has raised tens to hundreds of millions of dollars and developed its own patented approach to long distance mass transit. TransPod, with 52 million in capital, has preliminary agreements to build a six mile test track for a route that would eventually span the 180 miles between Calgary and Edmonton in Alberta, as well as a shorter track near Limoges, France, for one of several French routes under consideration. Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, which has raised 42 million, is in the design phase for a 1,100 yard test track in Abu Dhabi and is preparing to build a 350 yard test track in Toulouse, France. Virgin, which has raised 295 million, is in the developmental stage with projects in India and Ohio. Last month, the Indian state of Maharashtra declared the company's proposed hyperloop system between Pune and Mumbai as an official infrastructure project. Construction on a seven mile test track could start this year, said Jay Walder, the company's chief executive. Passenger operations could begin by the middle of the next decade, cutting travel time between the cities to 30 minutes, one fifth the current duration. "The more we see, the more we find the technology to be compelling," said William Murdock, executive director of the Mid Ohio Regional Planning Commission, a nonprofit governmental transportation agency. Virgin Hyperloop One is working on a proposed system to connect Chicago, Columbus and Pittsburgh. "Columbus is a freight logistics hub," said Mr. Murdock, who hopes that the entire hyperloop route could be built in the next 10 years. "To commute quickly between Chicago and Pittsburgh would be fantastic." All three companies contend that because of energy cost advantages over other forms of transportation, a system will be able to break even in a decade after full scale operations begin. Not only will commuters be able to get from place to place faster, but doing so will allow people to comfortably live far from their work, giving access to educational, cultural and health services normally out of reach. Hyperloop developers expect pods to carry not only people but also high value, low weight cargo, offering an alternative to carriers using high cost air transport, like FedEx and Amazon. In addition, they say, automobile manufacturers and others relying on just in time delivery of parts to keep inventory costs down would be able to get parts from distant locations. Mr. Walder, Virgin Hyperloop One's chief executive, is a former head of New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority and managing director at Transport for London. Before taking the job in November, he said, he asked Mr. Branson who stepped down as Virgin Hyperloop One's chairman last year whether he was "still fully committed to this." "Not only was he committed, but he thought it was one of the most exciting things he's ever done," Mr. Walder said. Hyperloop Transportation Technologies is taking a more holistic approach, looking to reinvent not only transport but also the way companies work and the way such a venture can be sustainably funded. The company has only 50 full time employees, but they're augmented by 800 people around the world who work strictly for stock options, in exchange for putting in at least 10 hours per week on the project. "This model gives us a fairly low burn rate," said Dirk Ahlborn, the company's founder and chief executive. "But there are communication challenges. Some teams work amazingly, and others do not perform at all. You're competing with their free time, their wives and their babies. It's definitely a different way to do things." Another difference from other transit systems will be the passenger experience. To keep the structural integrity of the near vacuum tube, there will be no windows. The experience will be no different from riding in an airplane with the shades drawn, and technical issues around maintaining the vacuum within the tube will be solved, he believes. Instead, hyperloop projects will face more mundane challenges. "Getting innovative things through the regulatory and certification environments is very difficult," Mr. Reisman said. "This could face an uphill battle in the U.S." Which companies will succeed, if any, is anyone's guess. Yet each main player is rooting for the others, knowing that one failure will put a pall over the technology as a whole. "The worst thing that would happen to us is if Virgin Hyperloop One is not successful," Mr. Ahlborn said. Whether any company can garner the necessary finance is still an open question, leading Mr. Ahlborn to wonder if any one can ultimately go it alone. "Maybe there could be a consolidation between our companies," he said. Rick Geddes, professor in the department of policy analysis and management at Cornell University, sees a different challenge. "The biggest problems for hyperloop will be securing rights of way and permitting," he said. Still, Professor Geddes believes that hyperloop systems will become a reality, as the time is ripe. "There's a sense that things are stale; we're just adding to existing modes of transport," he said. "Time is more and more a valuable commodity. The transportation industry is ready for a new way of thinking."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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NASHVILLE After what seemed like 100 years of impeachments hearings, anything uttered on Capitol Hill now sounds to my ear like the voice of Charlie Brown's teacher. Nevertheless, a few words from President Trump's State of the Union address managed to break through the wah wahs last week: "To protect the environment, days ago, I announced the United States will join the One Trillion Trees Initiative, an ambitious effort to bring together government and the private sector to plant new trees in America and around the world," he said. Could it really be true? You will forgive me for thinking there's no way it could be true. The whole point of the World Economic Forum's One Trillion Trees initiative is to reduce carbon in the environment and slow the rate of climate change by growing and preserving a trillion trees, worldwide, by 2050. But instead of addressing climate change, the Trump administration has rolled back or weakened 95 environmental protections already on the books. The burning of fossil fuels is the leading cause of climate change, but much of this administration's hostility to environmental protections is a result of its commitment to promoting the fossil fuel industry: allowing drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other public lands, approving construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, encouraging more offshore drilling in the Atlantic. The Trump administration has even gutted the popular Endangered Species Act, which was passed with strong bipartisan support at a time in history when the word "bipartisan" was not an oxymoron. Is it any surprise that the Environmental Protection Agency is now widely known among conservationists as the Environmental Destruction Agency? I'm trying to figure out how this business with trees might be different. Did the president experience a Scrooge like conversion at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, with the brilliant Jane Goodall, who supports the One Trillion Trees initiative, playing the role of Marley? If so, it would be a conversion narrative more potent than any since St. Paul was struck down by a blinding light on the road to Damascus. Paul went from persecuting Christians to becoming the faith's most famous evangelist, responsible for the spread of Christianity around the ancient Western world. Donald Trump's conversion to environmental sanity could be the start of saving the world itself.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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Microsoft, led by Satya Nadella, was seen as the American technology firm with the deepest pockets to buy TikTok's U.S. operations. WASHINGTON The Chinese owner of TikTok has chosen Oracle to be the app's technology partner for its U.S. operations and has rejected an acquisition offer from Microsoft, according to Microsoft officials and other people involved in the negotiations, as time runs out on an executive order from President Trump threatening to ban the popular app unless its American operations are sold. It was unclear whether TikTok's choice of Oracle as a technology partner would mean that Oracle would also take a majority ownership stake of the social media app, the people involved in the negotiations said. Microsoft had been seen as the American technology company with the deepest pockets to buy TikTok's U.S. operations from its parent company, ByteDance, and with the greatest ability to address national security concerns that led to Mr. Trump's order. "ByteDance let us know today they would not be selling TikTok's U.S. operations to Microsoft," Microsoft said in a statement. "We are confident our proposal would have been good for TikTok's users, while protecting national security interests." The fast moving series of events on Sunday came as the clock ticks down on the executive order from Mr. Trump, which said that TikTok essentially needed to strike a deal to sell its U.S. operations by Sept. 20 or risk being blocked in the United States. But sale talks had been in a holding pattern because China issued new regulations last month that would bar TikTok from transferring its technology to a foreign buyer without explicit permission from the Chinese government. And any resulting deal could still be a geopolitical pinata between the United States and China. The Chinese regulations helped scuttle the bid by Microsoft. The software giant had said in August that it would insist on a series of protections that would essentially give it control of the computer code that TikTok uses for the American and many other English speaking versions of the app. Microsoft said the only way it could both protect the privacy of TikTok users in the United States and prevent Beijing from using the app as a venue for disinformation was to take over that computer code, and the algorithms that determine what videos are seen by the 100 million Americans who use it each month. "We would have made significant changes to ensure the service met the highest standards for security, privacy, online safety and combating disinformation," Microsoft said in its statement. Oracle has said nothing publicly about what it would do with TikTok's underlying technology, which is written by a Chinese engineering team in Beijing and which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has charged is answerable to Chinese intelligence agencies. That is a major concern of American intelligence agencies, led by the National Security Agency and United States Cyber Command, which warned internally that whoever controls the computer code could channel or censor a range of politically sensitive information to specific users. ByteDance and TikTok have denied that they help the Chinese government. TikTok has become the latest flash point between Washington and Beijing over the control of technology that affects American lives. The Trump administration had already banned the Chinese telecom giant Huawei from selling next generation, or 5G, networks and equipment in the United States, citing the risk of a foreign power controlling the infrastructure on which all internet communications flow. But TikTok took the battle in new directions. For the first time, the United States was trying to stop a Chinese cultural phenomenon, with an intense following among American teenagers and millennials, which carries with it the possibility of future influence. Even if Oracle may try to close a deal, it is unclear whether Beijing would create new obstacles to the process. And election year politics have hung over the negotiations from the start. Unlike many other technology companies, Oracle has cultivated close ties with the Trump administration. Its founder, Larry Ellison, hosted a fund raiser for Mr. Trump this year, and its chief executive, Safra Catz, served on the president's transition team and has frequently visited the White House. Last month, Mr. Trump said he would support Oracle buying TikTok. He called Oracle a "great company" and said the firm, which specializes in enterprise software, could successfully run TikTok. Let Us Help You Protect Your Digital Life None With Apple's latest mobile software update, we can decide whether apps monitor and share our activities with others. Here's what to know. A little maintenance on your devices and accounts can go a long way in maintaining your security against outside parties' unwanted attempts to access your data. Here's a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online. Ever considered a password manager? You should. There are also many ways to brush away the tracks you leave on the internet. "I think that Oracle would be certainly somebody that could handle it," he said. Along with Amazon, Oracle tried to win a 10 billion contract to run the Pentagon's cloud services, one of the most hotly contested technology contracts issued by the Trump administration. Microsoft ultimately won that. Oracle was also poised to provide the administration with a system earlier this year to help with a planned study that would have enabled the wide release of the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid 19. While doctors had warned the drug could have dangerous side effects, Mr. Trump had promoted its possible use to treat patients infected by the coronavirus. Oracle's relationship with the administration has drawn scrutiny. In August, a Department of Labor whistle blower said that Mr. Trump's labor secretary, Eugene Scalia, had intervened in a pay discrimination case involving the company. On a call to discuss Oracle's earnings last week, Ms. Catz preemptively told analysts that she and Mr. Ellison would not discuss reports about their bid for TikTok. The rise of TikTok in the United States has been remarkably rapid; it has taken off in just the past two years. ByteDance, founded in 2012, has raised billions of dollars in funding, valuing it at 100 billion, according to PitchBook, which tracks private companies. Its investors include Tiger Global Management, KKR, NEA, SoftBank's Vision Fund and GGV Capital. In July, as pressure from the U.S. government escalated, ByteDance began discussions with investors to carve out TikTok. But the deal quickly become a free for all with bids from various corporations and investment entities around the world and new demands from the U.S. and Chinese governments. As the deal progressed, two of ByteDance's largest backers, Sequoia Capital and General Atlantic, have sought to retain their holdings in its valuable subsidiary while saving TikTok from a ban in the United States. Both firms are represented on ByteDance's board of directors. In late August the firms teamed up with Oracle to bid against Microsoft. Microsoft, meanwhile, teamed up with Walmart to make its bid. In an interview, Brad Smith, Microsoft's president and chief legal officer, said that as he studied TikTok, it became evident that there were two distinct potential security threats. The first was that Chinese authorities, using existing and new national security laws, could order TikTok to turn over user data. TikTok tracks everything that its hundreds of millions of users watch to funnel them more videos and other material. Given that users cannot opt out of that tracking, the only solution would be to move the data on Americans to servers that are solely in the United States, Mr. Smith said. Microsoft would have located that data in the United States and, in all likelihood, so would Oracle. "Then Microsoft engineers began to see a second potential vulnerability: disinformation," Mr. Smith said, one that has also been identified by Australian researchers. The only way to assure that TikTok's Chinese engineers were not designing code and algorithms to affect what users saw, or did not see, would be for Microsoft to take over the code and the algorithms.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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Scuba divers descending to the BVI Art Reef off the British Virgin Islands may encounter schools of snapper, sea turtles and rays. But they will certainly see something not native: a giant sculpture of a mythic kraken gripping a shipwreck. The arty artificial reef is part of a wave of new underwater installations visible to divers and snorkelers. Anchoring sculptures on sandy ocean floors, these cultural attractions have a scientific double life, providing habitats for fish, invertebrates and coral. "Coral reefs are often called the rain forests of the ocean because they harbor so much biodiversity," said Duane Silverstein, the executive director of Seacology, a nonprofit that works to restore marine ecosystems, often by building artificial reefs. According to the Coral Reef Alliance, a conservation group, reefs occupy about one percent of the oceans but are responsible for 25 percent of marine life. Yet by 2050, experts say that all corals will be threatened because of overfishing, pollution, habitat destruction and more. It is a decline that the creators of artificial reefs aim to reverse. Coral grows by releasing spores that float through ocean currents until they find a structure to adhere to and upon which to grow. "If that spore were to settle on the sand floor, it would be swallowed up and suffocated," said Andy McAlexander, the president of the South Walton Artificial Reef Association in Florida. "By giving it structure to adhere to in the water column, you are providing necessary habitat for that species to flourish. Everything else just dominoes behind it." Natural or artificial, reefs provide marine life food, breeding opportunities and protection from predators. Artificial reefs, which are considered beneficial if constructed of materials that won't harm the environment and placed for minimal impact on their surroundings, range from porcelain anchors to former naval vessels. "Corals grow on the skeleton of a previous coral reef and that takes millions of years," said Joe Weatherby, the senior project manager with Artificial Reef International, which specializes in ship installations, including the Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg Wreck in the Florida Keys. "But live coral will grow in under a year when we put a clean substrate like a ship on the ocean bottom." From sunken ships and museums to submarine accommodations, underwater installations are proliferating. In November, the new Conrad Maldives Rangali Island resort in the Maldives will debut an undersea suite where the bedroom, living area and bathroom are in glass chambers resting on the ocean floor. In July, Neptune Memorial Reef, an Atlantis themed underwater crematory off the coast of Key Biscayne, Fla., expanded to accommodate the ashes of 4,000 more individuals over the existing 1,500 inset into the seascape of columns and statues. A few artists have made the aquatic environment their medium, including Jason deCaires Taylor who created the first underwater sculpture park in Grenada in 2006 as a means to draw snorkeling traffic away from the island's overcrowded natural reefs. He has since cast nearly 1,000 marine sculptures, many found in art reefs off the coast of Cancun and the Bahamas. "It's not a solution to the problems oceans are facing, but on a micro local scale it can encourage lots of marine life to settle," Mr. deCaires Taylor said, identifying climate change, ocean heating and pollution as persistent threats. "But we can use it to talk about these issues and change people's relationship to the sea, to think of it as a precious or sacred place and a unique habitat, rather than out of sight, out of mind," he added. The following new artificial reefs combine culture and conservation. In 60 foot seas off Virgin Gorda, the many tentacles of a kraken grip an actual World War II era ship, a survivor of Pearl Harbor, in the BVI Art Reef. Installed in April 2017, the subaquatic sci fi fantasy was created by a group of entrepreneurs, including Richard Branson, as both a habitat for marine life and a platform to generate local interest in ocean conservation. "We wanted to create fun, safe, exciting, Disney like dives that could also support marine science," said Aydika James, a co owner of Secret Samurai Productions, which built the sculpture. It managed to avoid damage during Hurricane Irma last fall. But a storm in March moved the entire structure 30 feet and beheaded the creature. Nonetheless, the installation has newly attracted sea life and coral growth. "You can tell it was some kind of crazy creature attacking the ship and maybe the ship beat the creature," Ms. James said. Several dive operators visiting the reef, including Dive BVI (trips from 95; divebvi.com), earmark a portion of the fee to fund swim lessons for local children. Mr. deCaires Taylor, who is based in London, has done many underwater sculpture projects. But none were as ambitious as the Coralarium, which debuted in July at the Fairmont Maldives Sirru Fen Fushi in the Maldives islands. Half submerged in about nine feet of water, the cube shaped art gallery features sculptures of human figures modeled on local islanders installed both atop it and within it. Staff marine biologists guide snorkeling tours among the art and coral plantings. "As emotional beings, we respond much more to emotive arguments than scientific facts and evidence," Mr. deCaires Taylor said. "So, I think art plays a fundamental role in connecting to people and fostering a sense of care and discussion." The Coralarium is open only to guests of the resort, where rates start at 755 (Fairmont maldives.com). Before undertaking the Coralarium, Mr. deCaires Taylor designed the Museo Atlantico, which opened in 2016 off Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. The museum, which will eventually include 300 sculptures, aims to create a fertile marine habitat with art that addresses social issues. A sculpture of a forlorn group of people in a raft, for example, references the current refugee crisis. The artist's first cold water installation introduced him to abundant sea life and, at 40 to 50 foot depths, a cobalt blue palette. "I found it better to work in," Mr. deCaires Taylor said. "The water almost has a more abstract feel." Dive College Lanzarote offers excursions to the museum (from 55 euros; or about 64; underwatermuseumlanzarote.com).
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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It was at Coney Island's Freak Bar, in the summer of 2010, where I last thought that riding a roller coaster was a good idea. What followed would forever be known as "the Cyclone incident," at least to my loved ones and me, including the friend who, after we shared a steady stream of sangria, convinced me that Coney Island's creaky landmark was the perfect "beginner's coaster." It wasn't. At Nathan's Famous, after the most terrifying one minute and 50 seconds of my life, nauseated and strangely sore, I conceded: Roller coasters were not for me. It's something I always knew to be true but could never fully admit. I still wanted to believe that I could have fun at an amusement park, because what's the point of going if I couldn't get my thrill on? After all, I could enjoy a Nathan's hot dog elsewhere minus the nausea, embarrassment and price of admission. It still pains me to think of my high school senior class trip to Universal Orlando in 1999, where I was the only member of my class who refused to ride. An empathetic friend kept me company, and we tried to replace the coaster experience with 3 D rides featuring the likes of Spider Man and the Terminator, but the charity case vibe took much of the fun out of that. But as a recent trip to Hersheypark to reclaim some lost childhood joy confirmed, amusement parks, and theme parks in particular, can still be fulfilling, especially if you can shed the shame that often accompanies those of us who prefer both feet on the ground. I always assumed that coasters were the main draw at amusement parks, but it turns out that having an appealing theme may be the most important factor in a park's success. "While, maybe, roller coasters are the single most popular type of attraction, they're really not the things that drive attendance to the top parks in the country," said Robert Niles, the editor of ThemeParkInsider.com. "It's more the characters, the brand names, it's the stuff you go to Disney and Universal to see." The resulting focus on noncoaster activities is an obvious boon to folks like me. While Disney has Mickey and Universal Studios has Harry Potter, Hersheypark and its related attractions have a common thread with even more widespread appeal: chocolate. I just happen to really like chocolate, as does my wife, who joined me on this trip, so you can imagine our joy in being able to build our own custom chocolate bars, right down to the label's design, at Hershey's Chocolate World. If you must know, I went with classic milk chocolate with pretzel bits and chocolate cookie bits (no sprinkles). Parks that can offer these types of one off experiences, along with an assortment of other engaging activities, are the ones to look for. "We're really three parks in one," said Kathleen McGraw, director of communication for Hershey Entertainment and Resorts, referring to Hersheypark, its Boardwalk section's water attractions and the ZooAmerica North American Wildlife Park. In addition, just outside the park, in Hershey, Pa., is the before mentioned Chocolate World, which also offers a chocolate making tour, a tasting session and a huge gift shop. Also nearby is the Hershey Story museum, which offers a chocolate lab class, and the 23 acre Hershey Gardens, which, in addition to its botanical offerings, has a great view overlooking the town. The most surprising activity available? The Falconry Experience, and it has absolutely nothing to do with chocolate. Our trip to Hersheypark was the first time that I felt guilt free heading into an amusement park experience, because I have since accepted that people are just wired differently, and not liking roller coasters is nothing to be ashamed of. The old me would have come up with excuses like: "Kim Jong un apparently loves roller coasters, and that kind of bothers me." The new me approached the park's other attractions with fresh eyes. I was able to enjoy lovely views from the park's 250 foot high Kissing Tower and Ferris wheel, rides that used to feel like a lame consolation prize. I also indulged in mild thrills at the Boardwalk, like a leisurely float down the Intercoastal Waterway, and traditional park games like Skee Ball and Pro Shot satisfied the kid in me (though the giant stuffed animal prizes still eluded me). It certainly helped that there was zero peer pressure from my wife to reconsider coasters. Mr. Niles, the expert from ThemeParkInsider, has visited about 40 parks around the world and doesn't pressure his friends or family either, though he does encourage people who have never ridden a coaster to try at least once. "If they've done coasters before and they say, 'no, I just don't like them,' I respect that and then point them toward something else," Mr. Niles said. "That's why good parks have a variety of things to do." There's Food, and It's Getting Better Some things you will always be able to get at an amusement park: cotton candy; hot dogs; fried dough; a really bad stomachache. In fact, chicken tenders remain one of the most popular orders at Hersheypark, ice cream being the most popular, according to Ms. McGraw. But many parks have also responded to the continuing popularity of fast casual restaurants by offering higher quality options. "Most parks, at this point, have really tried to upgrade food over the years," Mr. Niles said. "You can still get a lousy, cheap meal at any theme park if that's what you're looking for. But if you're looking for something nice, it's there at the major theme parks." Along these same lines, parks have continued to work in popular local brands and area specialties. For example, Coney Island added a Grimaldi's Pizza in 2012, and last year, Carowinds in Charlotte, N.C., introduced Carolina staples like shrimp and grits to its menus. "We're always looking at incorporating chocolate, but also local and regional favorites," said Kathy Burrows, a manager of public relations for Hersheypark. Among the highlights there are the crabfries (seasoned crinkle cut fries with a cheese dipping sauce) from Chickie's Pete's, a popular sports bar chain based in Philadelphia that opened its second stand this year. The whoopie pie, which nearby Lancaster County claims among its creations, is another park fixture. It traditionally consists of two mound shaped chocolate cakes brought together like a sandwich by a vanilla cream filling. But starting this season, customers can get them with ice cream filling, or create their own, choosing from 12 fillings and eight cake shells. This allowed us to try what I am calling the "inverted whoopie pie," which has vanilla shells and chocolate filling. Mr. Niles said that themed food was another trend, thanks to the success of Universal's Wizarding World of Harry Potter and its Three Broomsticks restaurant. The most chocolately dining option at Hersheypark is Simply Chocolate, where you can eat all kinds of things that are dipped in chocolate, from Twizzlers to bacon, or overindulge with one of its 32 ounce King Size Shakes. A bald eagle at ZooAmerica North American Wildlife Park, also at Hersheypark. While I am at peace with the fact that I will most likely never again ride a coaster, I could change my mind. Maybe something less traumatic than the Cyclone would yield different results?
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Travel
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PBS stopped distributing a talk show hosted by Tavis Smiley on Wednesday after an investigation found "credible allegations" of misconduct against him, the network announced. The public broadcasting network said it had referred claims of inappropriate behavior by Mr. Smiley, who hosts his self titled nightly program, to an outside law firm to investigate. The network said it had indefinitely suspended its distribution of the show after the inquiry uncovered allegations that were "inconsistent with the values and standards of PBS." "The totality of this information led to today's decision," the network said in a statement, adding that Mr. Smiley, 53, was also interviewed in the investigation. While PBS did not disclose the nature of the allegations, Variety reported that they involved sexual relationships with co workers.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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To his die hard fans, Mr. Sherbinski is a storied name in marijuana. A celebrated California cultivator, he helped create the Gelato and Sunset Sherbert strains that have been name checked in more than 200 hip hop songs, including "First Off" by Future and "Bosses Don't Speak" by Migos. At the Business of Fashion's Voices conference in London last year, his brand, Sherbinskis, was introduced as "the Supreme of marijuana." And when Sherbinskis released its first sneaker design last year at ComplexCon, a two day festival of hip hop and fashion in Long Beach, Calif., the limited edition Nike Air Force 1 model sold out in two hours. (There is a pair currently on eBay asking more than 1,000.) Now, devotees of the marijuana brand will have an official place to worship. Sherbinskis recently announced plans for its first store, on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles, a few doors away from a Supreme boutique.
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Style
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Le'Veon Bell's tenure with the Jets was brief, unproductive and unfulfilling and, as of Tuesday night, it was also over. The Jets released Bell, their marquee free agent signing from 2019, not even halfway through his four year, 52.5 million contract, officially terminating a tumultuous relationship that had been steaming toward a breakup. Bell, who spent three weeks on injured reserve after pulling a hamstring in the Jets' season opening loss at Buffalo, received 22 touches in two games. Apparently displeased by his use in an offense that did not maximize his pass catching skills, he took to social media after the Jets' 30 10 loss against Arizona on Sunday, which dropped them to an 0 5 record, and liked tweets advocating he be traded.
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Sports
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Gertrude Mokotoff and Alvin Mann were introduced eight years ago at a gym in Middletown, N.Y., where they still work out twice a week. "A mutual friend said to me, 'I'd like you to meet a very nice young lady,'" Mr. Mann recalled after chopping wood one recent morning at his mountaintop home in nearby Cuddebackville, N.Y. On their first date, he drove her to a restaurant in Middletown called Something Sweet. "He was a perfect gentleman," she said, and he added, "There was something about her that made me want to keep on talking." In a heartbeat, they became an item, talking about dreams and goals and sharing a life together. Mr. Mann, who had seen the world through the eyes of a young United States merchant seaman, returned from troubled seas and found enough peace and quiet in Cuddebackville to focus on getting a college degree. Ms. Mokotoff, five years his senior, had designed a home on a high ridge in Middletown and was eager to fill it with good company. Everyone in the old courtroom was smiling, especially Father Time. "This is like an early birthday gift," Ms. Mokotoff said before joining hands with Mr. Mann. She was looking ahead to Aug. 20, a day when the newlyweds will most likely have to work together to blow out the candles on Ms. Mokotoff's birthday cake all 99 of them. "So I'm 99, 98, it's just a number," Ms. Mokotoff said. "But today, I'm still 98, right? So let's not rush things." Mr. Mann, who is 94 and received a bachelor's degree in history last year from Mount St. Mary College in Newburgh, N.Y., agreed that when it comes to being old as opposed to feeling old, the numbers don't always add up the same. Long before they were introduced in the gym, the lives of Ms. Mokotoff, a former mayor of Middletown, and Mr. Mann, a retired businessman, had fully taken shape. Both are widowed from previous marriages, and they have seven children, 12 grandchildren and seven great grandchildren between them. "People always ask what it is that keeps us young," Mr. Mann said. "Of course, one part of it is medical science, but the bigger part is that we live worry free lives; we do not let anything we cannot control bother us in the least." Ms. Mokotoff, who was born in Brooklyn in 1918 to Anna Fox and Abraham Fox, a tailor, graduated from Brooklyn College and received a master's degree in biology from Columbia. As a 23 year old in 1941, she married Reuben Mokotoff, a cardiologist from Manhattan, where they lived until 1952. She then persuaded him to relocate his practice to Middletown, where Ms. Mokotoff would become a wildly popular and well regarded figure. For more than three decades, she was a biology professor, teaching medical technology and microbiology, at Orange County Community College, in Middletown, where she is now a trustee. She also started the first training program for electron microscopy technicians, all while raising four children. Instead of simply retiring in her late 60s, Ms. Mokotoff decided to give politics a try and was twice elected an alderwoman in Middletown, winning her second election by a single vote. She went on to become City Council president, and in 1989, at age 71, she became Middletown's first female mayor, serving back to back two year terms. (She later ran unsuccessfully for New York state senator.) As mayor, she was credited with spearheading the creation of a modern library in town, and for refurbishing and revitalizing the old Paramount Theater, which was built in the 1930s. She had been married for 61 years at the time of her husband's death in 2002. "My mother has always been a very bold woman," said the bride's oldest child and maid of honor, Susan Mokotoff Reverby, 71, herself retired after a 34 year career in women's and gender studies at Wellesley. "She always had an interest in helping other people," Ms. Reverby said. "Despite being a Democrat in a largely Republican town, she was still elected mayor, which gives you a pretty good idea as to how people around here felt about her." Mr. Mann was born in Manchester, N.H., on May 24, 1923. The son of Mae Mann and Hyman Mann, an insurance executive, he joined the war effort in 1943 as a 19 year old, eventually serving as a second engineer aboard cargo ships, tankers and troop ships during World War II. "It was a scary time," he said. "There were other ships sinking all around us. I was one of the lucky ones who was able to come home." Already married by the time he was honorably discharged in 1947, he opened a business in Manhattan, Temporary Office Services Inc., that provided short term secretarial and clerical help to other businesses. In 1960, Mr. Mann, who said he "could never stand living in the city," purchased his country home in Cuddebackville, in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains, which he calls "a little piece of heaven." Mr. Mann's first marriage, which lasted 20 years before ending in divorce, produced his only biological child, Mark Mann, now 71, who served as best man. Last year, Mr. Mann became the oldest person to graduate from Mount St. Mary College. The college also awarded him an honorary doctorate this past May. At 93, he drove 80 miles round trip twice a week for nearly two and a half years to accrue the 30 credits needed to obtain a degree he had started working on in his 70s, while he owned another home in Tequesta, Fla. He racked up 60 credits at nearby Palm Beach State College, and 30 more at Florida Atlantic University, before finishing up at Mount St. Mary. "We studied many historical events like World War II and the Vietnam and Korean Wars, but this was stuff I had actually lived through," Mr. Mann said. "No wonder I aced most of my exams." Keith Schuler, who has been Mr. Mann's neighbor for the past 20 years, called him "an inspiration, and an incredible human being." "This man is 94 years old, and I see him outside chopping down trees, dragging logs out of the woods with his old Ford tractor, stacking firewood and cutting the grass," Mr. Schuler said. "Then I see him and Gert running around like two high school sweethearts, holding hands and kissing, and driving to New York City on weekends. If I didn't see it with my own eyes, I wouldn't believe it." After the ceremony, Mr. Mann managed to slip out a back door and, moments later, reappeared in front of City Hall, behind the wheel of his red Toyota Corolla. As the guests began spilling onto the sidewalk, he stepped on the gas pedal and zipped past them down the street, noisily dragging soda cans tied to the back bumper below a sign that read "Just Married." He took it for a spin around the block before returning to pick up his new wife. "This is fabulous," said Charles Mokotoff, the bride's son, an internationally known classical guitarist who lent his musical talents to the ceremony. Shortly thereafter, the couple and their guests resurfaced at John's Harvest Inn, a nearby restaurant where the reception was held. Just before dinner, the bride raised the roof, and the groom's eyebrows, when she sat in a chair and hiked up her wedding dress just above her knee to reveal that she was wearing a garter. "Very nice," Mr. Mann said, his cheeks turning as red as his Corolla. "I must admit I like it." The groom was then asked how his life might change now that he's a married man, again. "Nothing is going to change," said Mr. Mann, taking his wife's hand as he spoke. "We've already done so much together, and let's face it, we both know that neither of us are likely to find anyone else," he said with a grin. "So from here on out, it's just the two of us, together, for the remaining days of our lives."
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Fashion & Style
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Maureen Dowd: Google has too much power. Anne Wojcicki: I would say they have too much power in the real estate market and they're driving up my rent. In addition to a cardboard cutout of The Rock, 23andMe's office is furnished with stuff, including a green couch, from your first New York apartment. You can't get enough of the show "Riverdale." I don't know what that is. I don't have time for TV. My kids just got into "The Simpsons," which has been a lot of fun. Richard Plepler just gave me all the CDs of "Silicon Valley" so I can watch them on the plane. I watched the first episode and there was sort of that moment of silence, like, "Wow, this is really close to home." Like when I saw the FiveFinger toe shoes, I was like, "Oh, that was a good detail." You disapproved of Sergey wearing FiveFinger toe shoes to the New York Times editorial board meeting.
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Timothy Kavanagh, 36, a recovering heroin addict and addictions counselor, was in his second year of sobriety when his brother was killed in a drunk driving accident. "I went into an overwhelming state of depression," he said. "Finding recovery memes helped me get through it." In 2015, he started to make memes about the process of recovery from drug and alcohol addiction, creating the account dankrecovery on Facebook and Instagram. Mr. Kavanagh said he hears from people looking for help every day, at least 35 a week. "It could be a question about combining coke and Xanax, to 'I'm lost and I don't know how to stop using,'" said Mr. Kavanagh, who works in community outreach in St. Louis and now collaborates with a team, who are also in recovery, to run the account. "Our team is very qualified when someone reaches out." Memes can convey a shareable feeling or emotion through comedy without the need for face to face interaction. For people in recovery, anonymity is often an important part of their sobriety and memes can be a way to process and share experiences as a strange and darkly comedic form of self care. These memes often pull from the language of 12 step based programs, incorporating experiences and vocabulary known only to members of that community. "In AA we talk about finding a fellowship," Mr. Kavanagh said. "That's a big part of being a healthy person in general, having people around you that just get you. When I stumbled into the recovery meme community it was like, 'These are my people.'" Amy, 25 (who is being identified by her first name only to protect her anonymity), posted on the dankrecovery Facebook page three years ago asking for help. "I'm a millennial so I love memes," she said in a phone interview. While in rehab she met another person who had been guided there by the dankrecovery account, she said. "What are the odds? That something created as a joke could end up helping a lot of people." She has now been sober for two years. "The power of memes is that you can, in a very simple way, express something universal that resonates with people," said Lauren, an opera singer in training and former heroin addict, who started brutalrecovery in 2018. Lauren said that the best memes come from a place of vulnerability: "We need to remember that on the inside of this is trauma, addiction and pain." After creating heckoffsupreme in 2017, Andy Hines, who worked as an accountant, began to attract more attention for his memes. He was hired to create content for a corporate social media account (this is the brass ring of the meme world to create memes for a living). Mr. Hines made memes because "it feels good," he said in a phone interview last year. "One of my big problems is that I bottle things up. It's not easy for me to directly open up about things all the time. This is a really good way to do that." In doing so, Mr. Hines helped popularize this alt comedy genre. "With memes you either have it or you don't," Lauren said. "He had it." Mr. Hines, who learned he was bipolar in 2014, was honest and gutsy in his memes, but was also struggling. In May of this year, he died by suicide. "I thought I knew where he was at, but I was 10 steps behind," said Meghan Fitzgerald, 36, an accountant, who was married to Mr. Hines and is the mother of their two sons. She still cries every day. "Mental illness is misunderstood," she said. "If it's unchecked, it will turn into a nightmare. And for him, it did." George Resch, who got sober in 2002 and started posting memes in 2015, said, "I felt a little piece of my enjoyment for life went with him." Mr. Resch has three meme accounts, including the popular tank.sinatra.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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A Team by Any Other Name Is Fine, It Turns Out When team owner Abe Pollin decided to change the name of the N.B.A.'s Washington Bullets in 1995, the two year rebranding process had the veneer of a democratic undertaking. The fast casual restaurant chain Boston Market ran a renaming contest that resulted in nearly 3,000 submissions. A seven person panel came up with five finalists the Wizards, Dragons, Stallions, Express and Sea Dogs which were put to a public vote. Jody Shapiro, who at the time ran the regional sports television network that aired Bullets games, was one of the seven panel members. His preference, the Monuments, was highly rated by the panel, but the N.B.A. rejected it because of trademark considerations. "I thought it had the D.C. connection and the sense of towering structures and buildings or individuals," he said. Despite, or perhaps because of, his participation in the process, Shapiro was never under any illusion about who was really in charge. "Truth be told, at the end of the day, Abe and Susan chose whatever they wanted to choose," he said, referring to Pollin and Susan O'Malley, then the team's president. "It was more public relations than it was actually significant." For the second time in a quarter century, a professional sports team based in the Washington area will undergo a name change and rebranding, in large part because of the name's negative connotations. On Monday, Washington's N.F.L. team announced it would drop its logo and "Redskins" name, with a new identity to be determined. While Pollin rebranded his team voluntarily he was concerned by an epidemic of gun violence in Washington and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister and a friend Daniel Snyder, the owner of Washington's N.F.L. team, was largely forced into it by sponsors who said they would end their association with the team if the name didn't change. The timing of Washington's rebrand is unique. "Any redesign is either done with a franchise acquisition or done with a big transition," like relocation or the unveiling of a new stadium, said Mark Verlander, who has designed the logos for a number of N.F.L. teams. Altering a professional sports team's identity is a huge undertaking that typically takes anywhere from six months to a couple of years. Research is conducted, design firms are contracted, hundreds of logos are mooted, trademarks are secured, merchandise is produced and marketing plans are rolled out. The N.F.L. has a creative services division to help teams through such occasions. This rebrand could be particularly difficult, as the trademarks to a number of possible names that have bandied about over the years, like the Redtails and Monuments, are owned by the same man. None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. Matthew Wolff is a graphic designer who focuses on the visual identity of soccer teams, though he has participated in redesigns for North America's big four professional sports teams. He designed the uniforms France wore while winning the World Cup in 2018, as well as the instantly iconic Nigeria jerseys from the same men's tournament. He said that a logo should be "a mirror, an avatar of self identification" for fans. This is particularly explicit in soccer, where team names are less prominent on uniforms and supporter culture can define a team in the eyes of outsiders. This is not necessarily true in American football. There are of course names that explicitly reference regional identity, like the New England Patriots, but in the N.F.L. identity often works in reverse. Nobody particularly associates, say, tigers with the Ohio River Valley or big cats with the Canadian border, but over decades the Bengals have come to represent Cincinnati and the Lions Detroit. "I think there is an inherent connection with football still as kind of a gladiator wild animal spirit that they can't let go of," Verlander said. And rather than teams reflecting some unique aspect of regional culture, the regional culture coalesces around the team that represents it via TV to tens of millions each weekend. "Those N.F.L. team names are so historic that I don't even think about their origin story," Wolff said. "I don't really think about Buccaneers Buccaneering across the sea when I watch Jameis Winston throw interceptions." He referred to the former Tampa Bay quarterback who joined the New Orleans Saints this off season. What makes a good logo or name is not objective, as ultimately it is art. It also isn't static. Winning and losing, controversy and popular culture trends can alter meanings. Washington's N.F.L. team meant something different in the early 1990s, after three Super Bowl wins in a decade, than in 2020, after two decades of mismanagement. Wolff knows that much of the success of his Nigeria jersey design, which sold out in minutes, came from what happened after the garments were made. Nike's brand design team rolled out a clever influencer marketing campaign and used beautiful photographs in ads, just as aspects of Nigerian culture, like film and fashion, were becoming prominent worldwide. "I felt like it was the right piece at the right time," he said. "To be frank, that is kind of dumb luck." It is not clear yet in which direction Washington's unnamed football team will go. In announcing the change, the team said Snyder and Coach Ron Rivera were developing a "new name and design approach that will enhance the standing of our proud, tradition rich franchise." In a previous statement, Rivera said he had "hoped to continue the mission of honoring and supporting Native Americans and our Military." That could prove problematic. In a letter sent to N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell earlier this month, representatives from hundreds of Native American groups demanded the league require Washington cease the use of "imagery of or evocative of Native American culture, traditions and spirituality," as well as change its longtime burgundy and gold color scheme to discourage fans from continuing to wear their old gear. But what Washington's team will be named, and the logos and colors it uses, isn't up to Native American groups, design firms or others.
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LOS ANGELES The television producer Marcy Carsey whose hits include "The Cosby Show," "Roseanne" and "3rd Rock From the Sun" typically directs charitable donations toward causes like affordable education and women's equality. But now she is donating 20 million of her fortune to an art institution. Ms. Carsey's gift to the Hammer Museum, announced Thursday, is the latest in an unexpected series of cultural investments by wealthy Angelenos. Last year, the filmmaker George Lucas said he would fund a 1 billion Museum of Narrative Art, and the music mogul David Geffen pledged 150 million to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Ms. Carsey's donation accompanies a 30 million lead gift to the Hammer's renovation and expansion project from Lynda and Stewart Resnick, the billionaire couple behind POM Wonderful and Fiji Water. Among the factors considered to be driving this philanthropy are institutions with strong leadership and fund raising strategies; an expanding arts scene, with new galleries and museums; and the migration of artists into town. On Thursday, Frieze, the international contemporary art fair in London and New York, said it was adding a fair in Los Angeles in 2019, reflecting the city's position as a global arts capital. Los Angeles has long produced celebrated visual artists Mark Bradford, John Baldessari and Barbara Kruger, to name a few and it has recently increased the number of places to see art, adding the Broad Museum; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Hauser Wirth mega gallery. Now, this energetic scene is helping to spur giving. Even the J. Paul Getty Trust the world's richest art institution, with a 6.9 billion endowment has begun to solicit individual donations from a swelling patron base. "We've never asked for this kind of money before from our donors philanthropy used to be the one element of the ecosystem that was weak but L.A. is a different city now," said Ann Philbin, the Hammer's director. "It still has a long way to go before it is as generous and automatic as it is in New York, but we have moved the ball substantially forward." Art world leaders say Los Angeles is still working to establish a tradition of cultural philanthropy because the city was founded well after its East Coast counterparts and because movies not museums have historically been the dominant creative industry. "We're almost 100 years behind New York we're still young by museum and civic standards," said Michael Govan, the director at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "Philanthropy is growing as institutions are growing." Recent charitable contributions could suggest that a new donor class is emerging. That is important now that the city's leading cultural philanthropist, Eli Broad, has announced his retirement from public life. Mr. Broad said he no longer feels so alone in support of the arts. "You're seeing more and more people getting involved philanthropically," he said. Among the next cadre of patrons are the heiress Wallis Annenberg, president of the Annenberg Foundation; the married media executives Robert Iger and Willow Bay; and the financier Anthony N. Pritzker. Ms. Carsey, unlike most art museum donors, is not a collector, although she has served as the Hammer's chairwoman since 2014. She said she felt inspired by the museum's "programming and its purpose," reflected in its mission statement about "the promise of art and ideas to illuminate our lives and build a more just world." Hammer fans praise the museum's public screenings, readings, lectures and conversations. The collector Susan Bay Nimoy, who donated 7.5 million to support the Hammer's new annex space in honor of her husband, the actor Leonard Nimoy, who died in 2015, said she is at the Hammer "three times a week." Steven P. Song, who recently joined the Hammer's board, serves as chairman of the museum's new Global Council, which aims to expand international giving. "I asked philanthropists in South Korea, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Philippines" to contribute, he said. "We so far have a 100 percent acceptance track record." The three main art museums here are now all run by former New Yorkers Ms. Philbin; Mr. Govan; and Philippe Vergne, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles who have imported East Coast fund raising strategies. Mr. Govan has raised 450 million toward his building's 650 million new permanent collection building, and he has pushed to cultivate Hollywood by making art glamorous namely with the museum's annual art and film gala, whose red carpet last fall included Leonardo DiCaprio, Kerry Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal. (Mr. DiCaprio recently underwrote the cost of 309 LED bulbs for Lacma's outdoor sculpture "Urban Light," by Chris Burden.) "You have to acknowledge that film is art," Mr. Govan said. "You have to make the case, and I'm not sure museums were making the case." Where young artists in Los Angeles used to feel they had to go to New York to pursue careers, many are staying put. The city has also become a magnet for artists in neighborhoods like Eagle Rock, Mount Washington, Highland Park, Silver Lake and Echo Park. California Institute of the Arts, the leading art school, reported that 50 percent of graduates in 2015 stayed in Los Angeles; that figure has increased to nearly 60 percent. "Another few arrive each week," said the dealer Jeffrey Deitch, who served as director of MOCA and still keeps a home in Los Angeles. "The balance has shifted." Paul Mpagi Sepuya, an artist who was born just east of Los Angeles, said he moved back from New York for more affordable studio space and the network that comes with attending art school at the University of California, Los Angeles. "I wouldn't be able to make my practice work or do the work that I'm doing in New York," Mr. Sepuya said. He has also found a community. "Every day you go to an event or an opening or a friend's house for dinner, and you run into another artist who you lost touch with in New York," he said, "and you suddenly realize they're also in L.A." Artists are coming from all over Chris Johanson, a muralist and illustrator, came from Portland; Tala Madani, a painter, from Iran; Oscar Tuazon, known for architectonic sculptures, from Paris; Tacita Dean, a Turner Prize nominee, and Thomas Demand, the photographer, from Berlin. And galleries are opening across the city. Relatively recent arrivals include Spruth Magers, Maccarone and Franklin Parrasch. "I want to be where this energy is," Mr. Parrasch said. "I've been going to L.A. since the late 80s, and I've never seen it like this. I don't think it's going to go away." Prominent artists want local representation. "You have to be here to protect your interests, because the artists are here, and they'll sell with somebody else," Mr. Govan said. With people lining up around the block for the Broad, lounging at Hauser Wirth's hip cafe and trolling exhibitions off the beaten path through last summer's regional art event, Pacific Standard Time, "Los Angeles is getting to be like the art center of the world," said the collector Maurice Marciano of the Guess empire. Mr. Marciano, who recently opened the Marciano Art Foundation in a former Masonic temple, also serves as co chairman of MOCA, which has raised 100 million of a 150 million endowment campaign. Although Ms. Resnick is a lifetime trustee at Lacma, she said she and her husband felt moved to support the expansion of the Hammer, "one of the places that we go to be inspired." The campaign to fund the expansion as well as to build endowment and exhibition funds has raised 132 million. Since Ms. Philbin became director in 1999, the museum's annual operating budget has grown to 22 million, from 5 million, and its staff to over 200, from 35. "It's gathering big crowds," Ms. Carsey said. "This little museum can bring together different people from different sections of town and make it feel like a community."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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An American dentist's recent killing of a lion named Cecil in Zimbabwe sparked public outrage, but it largely obscured the fact that big game hunting is also a big business in which animals are regularly pursued. Several hunting outfits in the United States help organize safari hunts in countries like South Africa and Zimbabwe, where licensed hunting is legal. These safari hunts cater to a small but wealthy clientele of big game hunters, who bring back more than 400 lion trophies heads and furs into the United States each year, according to the Humane Society, a conservation group. More than 750 elephants meet a similar fate. Big game hunters operate in a separate world from weekend deer hunters in the United States. Plane tickets, specialized gear and weapons, safari guides and astronomical hunting fees determined by what kind of animal you want to kill a lion costs more than 50,000, experts say keep the pastime out of reach for most hunters. "Typically they are fairly wealthy individuals," said Steve West, a well known hunting advocate who appears on a reality show on the Outdoor Channel and runs a tourism company that plans hunts. "You're going to get a far more elite kind of person who books the average trip than in the U.S." Mr. West's company is one of many that help American hunters plan trips overseas offering everything from advice on weapons to guidance on what to expect once you're out in the wild. Mr. West has been on "hundreds" of hunts, he said, including more than two dozen trips that have taken him overseas, where he has trekked with the Kalahari bushmen in Namibia and hiked in Argentina. (Mr. West's TV program shows him as he kills an animal and then poses by the corpse.) Big game hunters, he said, whether they kill anything or not, are first and foremost world travelers with a sense of adventure. "Some of the trips that I remember more than any others are the ones where we didn't get anything, but had big adventures," he said. Argentina is a particular favorite. "I just fell in love with their culture," he added. Mr. West sets up as many as 50 overseas hunts a year for well heeled travelers, many of them in Africa. He said that his clients are financially savvy and have a deep commitment to nature and wildlife. "These are salt of the earth people," he said. "They may be wealthy, but people who hunt consider themselves conservationists." Sabrina Corgatelli, an American hunter who was attacked on social media last week after she posted pictures of herself posing with a giraffe, a wildebeest and other animals she shot and killed on a legal hunt in South Africa, echoed that sentiment in an interview on the "Today" show. "Everybody just thinks we're coldhearted killers, and it's not that," she said. "There is a connection with the animal, and just because we hunt them doesn't mean we don't have a respect for them." At the end of the day, Mr. West argues, hunters are realists who understand that an exotic or endangered animal is more likely to be protected from extinction if they are assigned a financial value. African trophy hunting may be an expensive hobby that only a few can afford, but it is true that it is also a big business. In an op ed piece written in 2011 that appeared in The Daily Caller, a conservative website, Larry Rudolph, then president of Safari Club International, and Joseph Hosmer, president of the Safari Club International Foundation, argued that hunting was "good for Africa's lions." And, they said, humans benefited, too. "Revenues from hunting generate 200 million annually in remote rural areas of Africa," they wrote. Much of that money goes to pay for park rangers and other forms of wildlife management that is a boon to the animals, they argued. "This revenue gives wildlife value, and humans protect the revenue by protecting the wildlife." On Friday, the governments of South Africa and Namibia endorsed that view. Both countries condemned the recent decision by Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and other carriers to ban hunting trophies. They said this would hurt the hunting business and deprive their countries of money for wildlife management and community development. That is an argument that opponents of hunting, like the Humane Society, reject. Instead, anti hunting activists argue for the benefits of other forms of tourism. The local economy in rural Namibia, for example, may be better served by busloads of tourists toting cameras instead of rifles. "Tourism based on living animals brings in far more money than hunting does," said Teresa Telecky, a wildlife expert at the Humane Society and a critic of trophy hunting. "There are far more people coming to Africa for tourism than for trophy hunting, and that provides people with real livelihoods working in restaurants, hotels, the tourism industry and that is far more important than this theory that hunting revenue will trickle down to normal people."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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The huge cardboard box had been in my mother's basement for decades until she said, "When are you going to move that crap to your house?" The box sat in my basement for a few more decades, until my wife said, "When are you going to clean out that crap?" Such language, but I got the message. So while I have been trapped at home, I have joined the huddling masses that have decided to try to declutter, starting with my overflowing basement, with plans to tackle my closet next. Throwing stuff out is so liberating. Ancient computer parts, old shoes, cameras, things I clung to for seemingly no reason are now out the door. But I didn't have the emotional heft to tackle the dreaded box, about the size of a window air conditioning unit, because I knew what was inside. A few weeks ago, I finally lugged the box up to my office to start weeding it out. During Google video meetings, while my co workers have tasteful books and art in the background, I have an old box. They are too nice to visibly wrinkle their noses. Inside the box is a record of my past: mementos from high school, from my service in the U.S. Navy and from college. There are term papers (trash), hall passes (oddly, keep), clippings from my track meets (keep, my high school team actually played against Bruce Jenner's) and 50 year old Marvel comic books (keep and cash in some day). From the Navy, in which I served on the U.S.S. Sacramento in the South China Sea off Vietnam, I had plans of the day (keep one), Navy magazines (trash), photos (keep) and a performance evaluation (keep the good one). I don't know why I saved all of this stuff, but in 2020 it has become a wonderful time capsule. There are hundreds of letters from friends who wrote to me while I was overseas Lydia, Nancy, John, Pat, another Pat, Ray, Marilyn, Walter, Trish. And Susan, the high school girlfriend I almost married. Reading the letters, I rediscovered these forgotten friendships, remembered my teenage angst and the loneliness of a sailor far from home. As I read, I realized that I suddenly longed to find these people from half a century ago and see how their lives turned out. Maybe this feeling came from the pandemic. All of us are at least in our 60s and vulnerable to the virus. I didn't want to wait another five decades. So I searched their names on Google. I found several obituaries, nonworking phone numbers and, yikes, a police report or two. I had no luck finding people at first, but when I finally did, it opened doors to others. Pretty soon, I was calling everybody. Am I the only person whose social life has improved during the lockdown? I started having "Do you remember me?" phone calls and catching up on lives. I learned about grandchildren, deaths, many divorces, successful careers and major surgeries. It was as if I had started reading a book at 18 and finished it 50 years later. I found captain's mast punishment papers (Report and Disposition of Offenses) for Mario, a Vietnam buddy who had violated Article 86, unauthorized absence. Twice. "I had forgotten what a troublemaker you were," I said, laughing, when I reached him. He married a nurse, who changes her clothes in the garage when she comes home from work because of Covid 19. They have two children, neither a troublemaker. I caught up with Chuck, the highly educated Navy pal who badgered me into going to college after my discharge. My debt to him is enormous. I tried to reach our former lieutenant, Alex, but he never picked up. Trish and Walt's letter in 1972 was about their upcoming wedding. "The bridesmaids' gowns are going to be brown and white, so you guys will be wearing brown tuxes," she wrote. They divorced a few years later. I found her through her mother's obit, sadly, and Trish told me she had remarried, but divorced after 30 years and four children. There was a letter from my mother, although it could have been from any of our mothers, written just 24 hours after I left for boot camp in 1970. She bizarrely wondered why she had not received a letter from me and asked me to call, writing down our phone number as if this teenager who had lived on the phone had actually forgotten it. My departure was also her chance to declutter, but she found straightening my room too sad. "I have tried to clean out your clothes," she wrote, "but find it extremely difficult. You will be happy to know that the dirt you accumulated, that I could not wait to clean up, is still there." As I read the letter now as a parent, the pain over her youngest leaving home breaks my heart. I found tons of letters from Susan. She had been impossible to locate until I found Ray's letter, in which he offered to pick me up at the airport when I came home on leave in 1971. I got home some other way, but considering that he ended up as her boyfriend for a while, I wonder what he would have wanted to talk about had I taken his ride. He still lives in my hometown and was easy to find. Not surprisingly, he had Susan's phone number. She was shocked to hear from me ("OMG! Jim?"). She had promised to wait for me during my four year enlistment, but smartly bailed. She went from "My ideas on what I want after high school may have changed, but not my love for you," in one of her first letters, to "I have lost the love and respect I once held for you" exactly a year later. ("My mother helped me write that," she told me, sounding apologetic, when I called her.) Then she spoke the words every dumped guy wants to hear: "I never should have broken up with you." So much soap opera. You can't dig through the past without tears. Mine came when I found the letter from John. He and I were such good friends in high school that, with the Vietnam War still raging, he crazily joined the Navy with me on the buddy system. We went through boot camp together, and I still have the photo of us in dress whites when we graduated. His letter was full of plans for the future. He was a wonderful writer, and the Navy was considering sending him to journalism school. "Take it easy, ace," he wrote, signing off. "Things will get better." His wife was pregnant with a girl the last time I saw him in the 1970s. He never did go to that school. And life doesn't seem to have gotten better for John. He and his wife divorced, and I have been told that he has had serious health issues. John is totally unreachable, but I thrillingly found his daughter on LinkedIn. I considered reaching out to her to help me find her dad, but hesitated. I had choked up as I read John's letter, and I suspected she would, too. Would she want a glimpse of her dad as a hopeful young man or would it knock her down as it did me? "Who are you again, and why are you making me cry?" I can hear her asking. The past is tricky and can be fat with regrets. I didn't marry Susan, but I did marry my sweetheart. I became the journalist that John didn't. Both of our daughters are on the West Coast. I wish I could share that with him. But with the present so deadly and the future uncertain, I decided to let John remain unfound, and put his letter back in the box.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Keith Olsen, a record producer whose slew of hits included the first Fleetwood Mac album with Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, whom he helped bring into the band, died on Monday at his home in Genoa, Nev. He was 74. His daughter Kelly Castady said the cause was cardiac arrest. Mr. Olsen worked with a roster of successful artists that ran rock's gamut, including the Grateful Dead, Santana, Pat Benatar, Whitesnake and Scorpions. Early in his career he produced "Buckingham Nicks" (1973), a folk rock album by the then little known Ms. Nicks and Mr. Buckingham. The album, on which Ms. Nicks sang and Mr. Buckingham sang and played guitar, flopped, but, as many accounts have it, Mr. Olsen played one of the songs for Mick Fleetwood, Fleetwood Mac's drummer. Fleetwood Mac, which began in the late 1960s in England as a psychedelic blues rock combo, had undergone many lineup changes in the years since their guitarist and frontman Peter Green left in 1970. After Bob Welch left the band in 1974, Mr. Fleetwood was looking for a new guitarist, and thought he might have found him after hearing "Buckingham Nicks."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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MANALI, India To John Sims, the Himalayas, with some of the finest mountain slopes in the world, seemed like the perfect place to build India's first Western style ski resort. But he got his first clue about the uphill challenge he faced when the local gods or at least the holy men who claimed to speak for them came out against his project here. In the seven years since, Mr. Sims, an American hotel developer with years of experience working in India, has encountered seemingly endless setbacks. Some opponents claimed falsely that the 115 acre project would take over the entire valley. Others complained that the developers had underpaid landowners for their property. The state of Himachal Pradesh, which had once championed the 500 million proposal, moved to scrap it after a different political party took over. Now, a court has allowed it to go forward but has given the developers just six months to secure environmental permits from a government that has repeatedly stalled the project. "My fundamental complaint is only this: Why did you invite us?" Mr. Sims said. "Why did you take our deposit? Why did you encourage us to spend money and then make a 180 degree turn?" It is not easy for any company to do business in India, with its mercurial and ponderous decision making, creaky court system and woeful infrastructure. Witness the immense blackouts of late July, in which the electric grids serving half of the country's population collapsed under the strain of the hot summer and too few power plants. The World Bank ranks India 166th out of 183 economies in the ease of starting a business. But the story of the Himalayan Ski Village shows the particular difficulties faced by foreign companies. Indians have a deep seated distrust of overseas businesses, rooted in more than two centuries of exploitation by the British. For many years after gaining independence in 1947, India restricted trade and foreign investment, nationalized industries like banking and gave licenses to favored domestic conglomerates. In the 1970s, socialist leaders pushed companies like Coca Cola and I.B.M. out of the country. After the government began loosening restrictions two decades ago, foreign firms piled into India, and many had great success. The Japanese company Suzuki, for instance, controls nearly half of the domestic car market. But India remains an unpredictable, even hostile, place for many foreign companies. Parliament passed a retroactive capital gains tax this year on offshore transactions involving Indian assets, overriding a Supreme Court ruling favoring foreign firms. And last year, policy makers deferred a decision to allow foreign mass retailers like Walmart into the country after opposition politicians and shopkeepers protested, even though Indian companies are allowed to build similar stores. Foreign direct investment was strong last year. But in the first six months of this year, it fell to 16.5 billion, down 18 percent compared to the same period in 2011, according to the Reserve Bank of India. Some multinational companies have lost patience. Etisalat, a telecom company based in the United Arab Emirates; Eni, the Italian energy giant; and Fraport, a German airport developer, are either withdrawing from India or are said to be considering such a move because of delays and erratic policy changes. "For foreign investors, a stable and predictable policy environment, along with dependable legal and political institutions, are key considerations in addition to market size and growth potential," said Eswar S. Prasad, an economist at Cornell University and the Brookings Institution who has advised the Indian government. "Policy reversals and domestic power plays that turn foreign financed projects into political footballs are likely to further dampen confidence among foreign investors." 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. India's economy is slowing sharply and becoming even more reliant on foreign capital. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has become concerned enough about the disaffection that he has pledged more friendly policies. About a decade ago, with the backing of investors like Alfred Ford, a great grandson of Henry Ford, Mr. Sims set his sights on building a ski resort like Vail or Davos. The handful of existing resorts in India were hard to reach and had few amenities, so there was little competition. Manali has long been a tourist destination for Indians, but most of the foreigners it draws are backpackers. There are no five star hotels, and the roads are lined with small shops that sell tea and rent out winter coats. The resort investors found a seemingly ideal site: a hilltop studded with fir trees, accessible only by a steep, winding path. Though nobody lives on the spot year round, villagers grow kidney beans and potatoes and graze their cows there. From three sides, there is a breathtaking view of the Kullu Valley, and the fourth side backs up to a mountain on which Mr. Sims planned to build a ski lift that would climb to 14,000 feet. "It's just about as spectacular as you can get," he said after an hourlong hike to the hilltop. Though the location is a 10 hour drive from the nearest major airport, Mr. Sims was optimistic about creating a winter wonderland. After a gondola ride up to the car free village, visitors would find luxury hotels, a crafts bazaar, an ice rink and the ski lift. Himachal Pradesh, then governed by the Indian National Congress party, supported the project at first, agreeing to lease Mr. Sims forest land for skiing and to exempt him from a law that restricts land ownership. The Ski Village would create 4,000 jobs, Mr. Sims said, and bring hotels like the luxurious Six Senses Resorts and Spas to the valley. Many local residents, especially those involved in skiing, river rafting and other sports, supported the project. But other residents were apprehensive. Some said lewd, loud Westerners would defile the area, known as "the valley of the gods" because many Hindu deities are said to reside here. The main opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, argued that the Indian National Congress had not paid enough attention to local concerns. One B.J.P. politician organized a meeting of the holy men, who said the deities opposed the project. "We are not against development," said Govind Singh Thakur, a B.J.P. leader who represents the area in the state legislature. "As long as the people's issues are sorted out, they are welcome to come here." One landowner, Geeta Devi Katoch, said many people were angry when they learned that the developers had quietly bought some early parcels of land for one third the price that prevailed once people learned of the project. She said her family, which grazes cows on the hilltop, would not sell. "This land is all we have," she said. "What will we do if we sell?" Mr. Sims and his partners acknowledged that some land deals were struck at lower prices something they now say could have been handled better but said that those prices were reached through negotiations. They added that they offered local residents training and jobs, and even sent 60 young people to Finland for skiing lessons. Once the B.J.P. came to power, the state appointed a committee to review the proposal. But before the committee made a recommendation, court documents show, the state moved to cancel its agreements with the Ski Village, arguing that the company had not moved fast enough to start the project. In June, the Himachal Pradesh High Court ruled that the project could go forward and gave Mr. Sims six months to obtain environmental approvals. But the environmental agencies are not obligated to review his application quickly, and the state has vowed to appeal the court decision. The political situation might also change later this year, when state voters go to the polls. Mr. Sims said he was no longer hopeful and felt that the odds were stacked against outsiders. "People who do love India or who could easily love India would be very happy to contribute their talents and money," he said. But "it's the robber baron era only those strong Indian businessmen who know how to play the game can succeed."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Global Business
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The Best Way to Pick an Apartment? Try a Decision Matrix When Terese Lawry and Jacob Falkovich suddenly found out they had to move in August a miscommunication between Ms. Lawry, a doctoral student in biology at Columbia University, and the housing office resulted in their Morningside Heights apartment being assigned to someone else Mr. Falkovich suggested they turn to a time honored method for making hard choices: a decision matrix. "You start with, 'What do I like about apartments why do I even have one?' Once you've written out some of those things, what else?" said Mr. Falkovich, 32, who works for a financial software company and described himself as a "generalized math nerd." "We have a lot of the scientific approach in our lives," Ms. Lawry, 30, said. The couple identified 22 factors to consider in selecting an apartment and, after much discussion and a few compromises, assigned each one a different weight. "Without weighting criteria, people just start being like, 'I refuse to live without a dishwasher.' How much is it worth for you 100 a month, 200 a month?" Mr. Falkovich said. Occupations: Ms. Lawry is a doctoral student in biology, with a specialty in neurobiology, at Columbia University; Mr. Falkovich is a product manager for a financial software company. Spreadsheets: weren't used just to select the apartment, but also to furnish it. "It's about letting the scientific method determine how to get the living room with the aesthetic you want," Mr. Falkovich said. It worked: "very well, but sometimes we forgot to walk around with the measuring tape," said Ms. Lawry, who selected a dining table that was much too narrow. As Mr. Falkovich put it, "Terese really narrowed down the dining tables." Their neighborhood choice: Prospect Heights was a longer commute for Ms. Lawry than some of the other places they saw, but proximity to friends, the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and Prospect Park and being able to walk to other neighborhoods helped boost its score. Their matrix featured basics, like cost they considered only apartments available for 3,500 or less as well as size and layout. It also included subletting and pet policies, lease duration and renewal terms, physical elements like windows, lighting, water pressure, outdoor space, air conditioning and whether the building had an elevator or amenities like a doorman or a gym. Sometimes they disagreed. Mr. Falkovich didn't mind walking up three flights of stairs, but Ms. Lawry pressed him: What about when they had children? They agreed to assign an elevator a weight of 4; the size of the apartment, by comparison, was weighted as a 10, while laundry was given a 1. For location, they calculated the score based on the mean duration of 10 weekly work commutes. They also included neighborhood features like proximity to grocery stores and parks, as well as aesthetics what were the buildings and trees like? Was it pleasant to walk around? After they set their parameters, they created a spreadsheet and plugged in information from StreetEasy, updating it with additional details after they saw each apartment, to calculate an overall score. On the matrix, the 600 square foot Columbia apartment they were leaving scored 209. Given their tight deadline, they sometimes split up for showings so they could cover more ground, ultimately seeing more than 20 apartments. "With the matrix, we could trust each other more," Mr. Falkovich said. "Rather than one of us seeing an apartment and saying, 'It was pretty nice,' we could see what the other person rated each of the factors." It also helped them move quickly and decisively. When an open house overrun with "hip yuppies" stirred their competitive spirit if all those people wanted the place, shouldn't they try to snag it? they plugged the numbers into the matrix and felt confident walking away. And when they toured their current apartment, a two bedroom, two bathroom duplex in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, that rents for 3,300 a month, it scored so high that they begged the broker to cancel the next showing she had scheduled while the landlord reviewed their application. "We knew we had to act fast. It scored a 238 that's two deviations up" from the other listings, which ranged from 180 to 215, Mr. Falkovich said. "If we took the math seriously, we knew we might not see another place like this." Among the apartment's attractions: It was in a building with a doorman and an elevator. Also, they were told, it was 1,400 square feet. They have come to suspect, however, that the square footage they were given includes a rickety outdoor terrace they're barred from using unless they pay to have it fixed. But they do have an extra bedroom, which makes it easy to entertain out of town guests. "It's a huge service to people we know, friends or friends of friends coming through New York, who would otherwise have to pay 200 a night for an Airbnb," Mr. Falkovich said. "And we get to hang out with cool people." They arrived in September, offloading the majority of their old Ikea furniture to incoming students, who were happy to take it off their hands. To furnish the new apartment, they divvied up items to research, then brought each other lists with the top contenders and the pros and cons for each. The apartment does have a few drawbacks. It scored low on lighting, because some rooms don't have ceiling lights. And there is a no pet policy, but they make do with a stuffed octopus and animal themed art. Overall, however, they are convinced that using a decision matrix served them well, allowing them to see the best option clearly, without getting hung up on minor details. "It was really much nicer than the other places we saw," Ms. Lawry of their new apartment. "When I tell people about the matrix, their intuition is that I'm outsourcing my heart," Mr. Falkovich said. "But my heart is confused. I need to put my desires in a more organized structure. Goal factoring and decision matrices help you realize what's missing and what you care about."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Bill Macy around 1980. His acting career took off after he turned 40 and peaked with his role on the hit 1970s sitcom "Maude." Bill Macy, an actor best known for his role as Walter Findlay , Bea Arthur's harried husband, on the popular 1970s sitcom "Maude," died on Thursday night at his home in Los Angeles . He was 97 . The death was confirmed by his wife, Samantha Harper Macy . Mr. Macy's acting career took off after he turned 40 and peaked with his role on "Maude." He played Walter for the show's entire run, from 1972 to 1978. "Maude" pushed sitcom boundaries. Its lead character was an outspoken middle aged feminist whose atypical household consisted of her husband, her daughter from an earlier marriage and the daughter's son. The show, seen on CBS, addressed complex social issues like abortion, alcoholism and racial and sexual relations . Some episodes generated thousands of complaints. Mr. Macy's blue collar background he grew up in Brooklyn and had driven a taxi made him a good fit for the character of Walter, the owner of a struggling appliance store who had some memorable clashes with Maude, an idealistic liberal firebrand. More often than not, Maude had the last word. Fans were sometimes taken aback by Walter's subordinate position. "People come up to you in the street and say, 'How can you take that stuff from her?'" Mr. Macy said. The show began as a spinoff of the pioneering producer Norman Lear's breakthrough hit series "All in the Family," in which Ms. Arthur appeared occasionally as a cousin of Edith Bunker's who stood up to Edith's bigoted husband, Archie. Mr. Macy's favorite episode of "Maude," he said, was the one in which he did not appear: "Bea Arthur did a solo, and I was paid without having to go to work that week." Bill Macy was born Wolf Marvin Garber on May 18, 1922, in Revere, Mass., to Mollie and Michael Garber. (His neighbors persuaded his parents to Americanize his first name to William, he said.) When he was 9 months old, the family moved to the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn. His father worked in the garment industry in Brooklyn. After graduating from Samuel J. Tilden High School, Mr. Macy served in the Army from 1942 to 1946 with the 594th Engineer Boat and Shore Regiment, stationed in the Philippines, Japan and New Guinea. After years of working odd jobs and attending acting classes, he enrolled in New York University's School of Education and earned a bachelor's degree in dramatic arts in 1954. While there, he married Sandra Sprinkling. They soon divorced. While driving a taxi, Mr. Macy began booking small parts onstage. He chose the name Bill Macy to distinguish himself from another actor named William Garber. In reviewing an Off Broadway revival of Clifford Odets's "Awake and Sing" in 1970, Walter Kerr wrote in The New York Times that "Bill Macy's Uncle Morty, confident that the system will work just so long as you tip it politely and don't make rude noises, is drawn with a steel nib, fine and hard." Mr. Macy was finally able to give up driving a cab for good in 1966, after landing roles in two of the three one act plays that made up Jean Claude van Itallie's dark Off Broadway satire "America Hurrah." Mr. Macy said that Mr. Lear saw his performance and invited him to California for a brief appearance as a police officer on "All in the Family." He later thought of him while casting "Maude." In 1957, Mr. Macy met Judith Janus, a dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company. They married a few years later and divorced in the 1960s. He met Samantha Harper when she auditioned as a replacement in "Oh! Calcutta!," the erotic revue in which the actors performed nude, in 1969. She passed the audition, and they married in 1975. She is his only survivor. After "Maude," Mr. Macy starred as a university president on Mr. Lear's short lived CBS sitcom "Hanging In." He also appeared on television shows like "The Love Boat," "Murder, She Wrote," "Seinfeld" and "My Name Is Earl," and in movies like "The Producers" (1967), the film adaptation of "Oh! Calcutta!" (1972) and "Analyze This" (1999). He played a small but pivotal part in Carl Reiner's 1979 comedy "The Jerk," Steve Martin's first movie. Mr. Macy's character's glasses keep slipping off his nose, and Mr. Martin's character, working as an enthusiastic gas station attendant, invents a device to keep them in place. Mr. Macy's character markets the device and makes Mr. Martin's character rich. Mr. Macy was an inveterate joker, even when discussing his career. He recalled being approached by a man who said his performance in a Broadway play was the worst he had seen in 20 years. His reply, he said, was "Sir, sir, I'm a terrible actor, but it's the only thing I do well."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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When the Menu Turns Raw, Your Gut Microbes Know What to Do None Karsten Moran for The New York Times It was a challenge unlike any other the chef turned graduate student had faced: Vayu Maini Rekdal had to create a menu where every ingredient could be eaten either raw or cooked. No pickling was allowed, nor fermented toppings like soy sauce or miso. Nothing could be processed in any way, so things like tofu were out. And the more sweet potatoes he could serve up, the better. "It was extremely challenging," said Mr. Rekdal, a chemistry graduate student at Harvard. Rising to the occasion, Mr. Rekdal concocted chia seed breakfast puddings that could be cooked or chilled. He made raw and cooked pea sweet potato tahini patties. And for three days, eight volunteers dined on the unusual menu, providing stool samples to assist in research that could eventually help illuminate the evolution of the human microbiome. The work was led by Rachel Carmody, a professor of human evolution at Harvard, and Peter Turnbaugh, a professor of microbiology at the University of California, San Francisco. They were studying the gut microbiome, the collection of microbes that live in our intestines and influence our immune system and various other parts of our biology, as well as help us digest food. They had discovered that mice, eating a diet of starchy foods like sweet potatoes, developed vastly different microbiomes, depending on whether their food had been cooked or served raw. A switch from one to the other provoked a rapid shift in their guts' microbial inhabitants. Now, they wanted to see if the same was true with humans. The results of the experiment appear in a paper published last month in Nature Microbiology. Although the sample size was small, and the effect was not as strong as in mice, people's microbiomes do seem to shift on a raw diet, and very rapidly. While the human study was very short, it raises intriguing questions about whether starting to eat cooked food, eons ago, shaped the evolution of the organisms that live inside us, and whether our bugs may have helped us survive times of scarcity. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. As a graduate student, Dr. Carmody found that mice fed cooked diets quickly grew plump. Cooking alters the structure of many molecules, making more energy available to the mice. But she was also interested in the microbial community living in the mouse gut, which helps digest food and interacts with its host's biology in a variety of ways. In the new paper, she and her collaborators found that feeding mice meat that was raw or cooked changed little about their microbiomes. But with sweet potatoes, meant to stand in for tubers that early humans might have eaten, it was a different story. Cooking produced significant changes, affecting the kinds of microbes that thrived and which genes they used. The scientists traced the effect to the sweet potato's starches, which are difficult for mammals to digest raw but become more easily digestible once cooked. Depending on which kind of starch molecules arrive in the large intestine, different groups of microbes might take on the disposal job and subsequently surge in numbers. "Like any ecosystem, if you dramatically change foodstuffs coming into it, some species will thrive over others," Dr. Carmody said. What Does Your Microbiome Say About You? There are many, many microbial species living in or on your body. What secrets can they tell? The researchers also found that raw sweet potatoes inflicted an impressive amount of damage on the microbiome of the mouse gut, similar to what occurs in mice fed an antibiotic. That may result from antimicrobial compounds in the sweet potato, which may be inactivated by cooking. If cooking, at least of starches, can alter the ecology of the gut, then have humans been shaping our microbiomes ever since we learned to put prehistoric tubers in the fire? If our ancestors did eat these kinds of foods, and switched to cooking them, it may be that some tasks that used to be handled by gut microbes were no longer necessary, says Stephanie Schnorr, a biological anthropologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who was not involved in the study. As a result, the bacteria might have lost the related genes or gained new roles. The ability of the gut's microbial residents to shift themselves so dramatically even in the short term may have had other benefits for their hosts. If microbiomes can retool themselves on little notice to handle changes in diet, they may have helped early humans cope with lean days where tubers were the only foods or times when only meat was on the menu. "The microbiome could essentially help us, within 24 hours, maximize our ability to digest nutrients even on a low quality diet," Dr. Carmody said. Still, the extent to which humans and their live in digestion engines evolved together is debated. Mice given human microbiomes are generally healthy, suggesting that a host and its microbes don't fit together like a lock and key, honed by eons of mutual evolution. However, in some situations, like when a mouse gets sick, it is more likely to recover when it has its own microbiome. That may imply that there has been some co evolution between the organism and its microbiome, Dr. Carmody said. The interaction between host and microbes is complex, and longer studies with more people eating a raw or cooked diet would be necessary to probe how such a dietary change affects the microbiome and its host in the longer term. People actually did enjoy the menu, by and large, Mr. Rekdal said, which included salads of mushrooms, sweet potato and cauliflower, either roasted or raw, and smoothies of cooked or raw fruit in addition to the puddings and patties. Some of the raw items weren't wildly popular, but he has received many requests for the chia pudding recipe. He sees the study as helping advance our understanding of cooking, a particularly ancient kind of applied chemistry. "It's a form of science," he said, "that humans have been practicing for thousands and thousands of years."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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SAN FRANCISCO California has passed a digital privacy law granting consumers more control over and insight into the spread of their personal information online, creating one of the most significant regulations overseeing the data collection practices of technology companies in the United States. The bill raced through the State Legislature without opposition on Thursday and was signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown, just hours before a deadline to pull from the November ballot an initiative seeking even tougher oversight over technology companies. The new law grants consumers the right to know what information companies are collecting about them, why they are collecting that data and with whom they are sharing it. It gives consumers the right to tell companies to delete their information as well as to not sell or share their data. Businesses must still give consumers who opt out the same quality of service. It also makes it more difficult to share or sell data on children younger than 16. The legislation, which goes into effect in January 2020, makes it easier for consumers to sue companies after a data breach. And it gives the state's attorney general more authority to fine companies that don't adhere to the new regulations. The California law is not as expansive as Europe's General Data Protection Regulation, or G.D.P.R., a new set of laws restricting how tech companies collect, store and use personal data. But Aleecia M. McDonald, an incoming assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University who specializes in privacy policy, said California's privacy measure was one of the most comprehensive in the United States, since most existing laws and there are not many do little to limit what companies can do with consumer information. "It's a step forward, and it should be appreciated as a step forward when it's been a long time since there were any steps," Ms. McDonald said. The legislation is modeled closely on the ballot initiative, which a real estate developer, Alastair Mactaggart, spent 3 million and secured more than 600,000 signatures to get certified. With the ballot proposal hanging over legislators' heads, the push for an alternative gained grudging support. If the bill had failed to pass before the deadline, the proponents of the ballot initiative would have taken their case straight to voters in November, they said. The state's technology and business lobbies were opposed to the measure that was passed on Thursday, but they didn't try to derail it because they thought the ballot initiative was worse. Even legislators who voted for the bill complained that they had little choice because a ballot measure would provide less flexibility to make changes in the future. And some privacy advocates said the bill did not go as far as the ballot initiative in allowing individuals to sue for not complying. Mr. Mactaggart said he wanted a sensible privacy law, whether through a ballot measure or the legislative process. He said that the Legislature was the right place to debate such a policy, but that it had been hard to get legislators to address privacy. "If we didn't have the initiative process in California, we wouldn't be here today," Mr. Mactaggart said in an interview. One of the authors of the new law, Assemblyman Ed Chau, a Democrat, tried last year to pass a bill that would have required internet service providers to seek permission from customers before accessing, selling or sharing their browser activity. The bill never made it out of committee an example of the influence of telecommunications and technology companies in California. But with the ballot measure looming and a growing awareness of how technology companies are gobbling up user information highlighted by revelations that the voter profiling firm Cambridge Analytica gained access to the personal data of millions of Facebook users the legislation went from draft to law in one week. "This is a huge step forward to people all across the country dealing with this very challenging issue," State Senator Bob Hertzberg, a Democrat and a co author of the bill, said at a news conference after it was signed. The ballot initiative, which would have made it easier for private individuals to sue companies for not adhering to its privacy requirements, had drawn vocal opposition from industry groups that worried about the potential liability risk. The measure included a provision that would have required a 70 percent majority in both houses of the Legislature to approve any changes after it became law. Google, Facebook, Verizon, Comcast and AT T each contributed 200,000 to a committee opposing the proposed ballot measure, and lobbyists had estimated that businesses would spend 100 million to campaign against it before the November election. Robert Callahan, a vice president of state government affairs for the Internet Association, an industry group that includes Google, Facebook and Amazon, said in a statement that the new law contained many "problematic provisions." But the group did not try to obstruct it, he added, because "it prevents the even worse ballot initiative from becoming law in California." Mr. Callahan said the group would "work to correct the inevitable, negative policy and compliance ramifications this last minute deal will create." Legislators said they expected to pass "cleanup bills" to make any fixes to the law in the 18 months before it takes effect. Some privacy advocates are worried that lobbyists for business and technology groups will use that time to water it down. Mr. Mactaggart said those concerns are "overblown." "Having gotten this right, it'll be very hard to take it away," he said, noting that the ballot measure had been polling at around 80 percent approval. "They can't rewrite the law."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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We need to talk about overhead instructional videos of people making food. You know the ones I mean. Open up Facebook or Instagram and you'll bump into one or two or a billion of them. Consider "Sliders 4 Ways," in which a disembodied pair of hands moving at bullet speed turns dinner rolls and a variety of meats into a feast fit for a super high king. These numbers aren't a fluke. Other than music videos and actual pornography, P.O.V. style instructional food porn has lately become just about the most popular thing on the internet. No one knows who invented the overhead food video. Like image macro memes or Slender Man, it most likely emerged in some primordial message board swamp. But like everything else online, the format has since been refined, professionalized and monetized, and today most of these clips are produced on media assembly lines in Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo and London by a single entity: Tasty, a division of BuzzFeed that has turned the overhead food video into a hypergrowth business. Tasty is just two years old, but by several measures it is now producing some of the most popular digital content in the world. According to Tubular Labs, a research firm that tracks digital videos, Tasty's videos were seen about 1.1 billion times in June. In some months its viewership has eclipsed three billion views. Tasty, which makes most of its money from sponsored videos that it makes for brands, is profitable, according to a representative, and it is BuzzFeed's fastest growing revenue source. The Tasty One Top, an induction cooktop that connects to a smartphone app. Melissa Lyttle for The New York Times Now Tasty has ambitions to expand beyond overhead food clips. This week, it will begin selling a physical product called the Tasty One Top, an app connected induction cooktop that can perform a wide range of cooking tasks, from searing to simmering to sous vide. The device, which sells for 149, will begin shipping later this year. The One Top follows a made to order cookbook that Tasty released last year; it has already sold more than 150,000 copies. The cooktop and book sketch an emerging road map for the social fueled media company: Tasty and, in a larger sense, BuzzFeed is trying to become something like the Disney of the digital age, an all encompassing lifestyle brand that creates content, experiences and products for an audience hooked on phones. "After the cookbook, I realized that Tasty was neither an experiment nor just a really popular Facebook page with lots of ad revenue," said Ashley McCollum, Tasty's general manager. "Really what we're seeing is how to make a business out of massive intellectual property that was built digital first. It's the same model as old media networks you make a movie that people love, and then you build a theme park and extend that to products and everything else." At BuzzFeed, the overhead video format originated with a team led by Emily Fleischaker, a former food editor at BuzzFeed's New York office; a team of BuzzFeed producers in Los Angeles then began turning the idea into a blockbuster. So last week, I visited Tasty's headquarters in Los Angeles. The ostensible purpose was to see a demo of the cooktop and to get a preview of Tasty's new app, which is also being released this week. The app is meant to address one of Tasty's most obvious shortcomings: Because the videos are so short (usually no more than 90 seconds), it can be a bit of a pain to actually make something from a Tasty clip. The app handily streamlines the process; click on a step in a written recipe and it plays just that step in the video. The cooktop was created by BuzzFeed's Product Lab, a team charged with inventing "social commerce experiences," like candles that smell like your hometown or fidget spinners that double as lip gloss. The device was in an early prototype stage when I saw it, but it was far enough along for Tasty's head chef, Claire King, to cook me a steak and some creme brulee. My review: The One Top seems to work really well. (This is a tough job.) The highlight of the visit, though, was a walk through Tasty's studio. Picture a long, darkened hallway with a half dozen workstations, each outfitted with cameras and a sophisticated lighting rig. There are people everywhere executives, interns and employees' kids, who often take part in the Tasty Junior videos but at Tasty there's one group that matters above all else: the producers. BuzzFeed is obsessive about learning from past successes, and once it finds a theme or format that hits, it tends to repeat it until it's dead. That's why you'll see a lot of videos featuring cheese, steak, bacon and pasta, some of the most popular ingredients. And it's why Tasty videos always feature a money shot. "Cheese pulls and gooey chocolate are so satisfying to watch, and those frames almost make you gasp out loud because they look so good," Ms. King said. "We try to create those moments in every video, whether it's an indulgent ingredient like cheese, or a fun way to use up leftovers, or cooking food in a way you haven't seen." But what's fascinating about Tasty is that it is far less formulaic than it appears at first glance. Producers always lean on past successes, but in each video, they add in one or two different tests to see if something else might work better. Consider "Aquarium Cookies," a video created by the producer Rie Tange McClenny in May, which has been viewed about 16 million times.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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LAS VEGAS The mixed martial arts star Conor McGregor stayed silent on Wednesday when questioned directly about two sexual assault allegations against him in Ireland, his home country. McGregor, the Ultimate Fighting Championship's biggest draw, spoke at a news conference at the Palms Casino Resort ahead of a U.F.C. welterweight fight on Saturday against Donald Cerrone, his first fight in 15 months. When a reporter asked about the status of the two investigations, McGregor's fans, several hundred of whom packed the Pearl Theater at the Palms, booed loudly. Cerrone intervened to tell the reporter to ask only about the fight, and the U.F.C. president, Dana White, maintained that McGregor had already answered questions about the sexual assault allegations during an earlier interview with ESPN. When asked whether the investigations, one of which has been ongoing for more than a year, had ever jeopardized McGregor's ability to compete in Saturday night's bout with Cerrone, White simply replied, "No." In the time since McGregor's loss to Khabib Nurmagomedov in that most recent bout, which ignited a ringside melee, McGregor has been beset by legal problems, including the two investigations of sexual assault allegations and a fine after pleading guilty to punching a man in a pub. At one point, McGregor also announced his retirement from mixed martial arts, only to return months later. It was the second time he had retired and come back. McGregor, 31, has not been charged in either of the sexual assault cases, and the existence of the investigations does not imply that McGregor is guilty of any crime. Through a publicist, McGregor has denied all accusations of sexual assault. The U.F.C. has incorporated some of McGregor's arrests into its marketing strategy for the comeback fight against Cerrone. A preview show that aired before Wednesday's news conference included footage of McGregor punching the bar patron, and of the former champion throwing a dolly through the window of a bus containing Nurmagomedov and other fighters. McGregor pleaded guilty to assault in that incident. At the news conference, McGregor did respond to a general question about his legal issues. "I've done nothing wrong here," he said. On Wednesday, while White and Cerrone addressed the question about the status of the sexual assault allegations, McGregor waited in silence for the news conference to move on to a new topic. Last year, The New York Times reported that a woman had accused McGregor of sexually assaulting her at the Beacon Hotel, located on the edge of Dublin. Ireland's police service, known as the Gardai, arrested McGregor last January, questioned him about the accusation and released him. The Times also reported last fall that another woman had accused McGregor of sexually assaulting her in a vehicle outside a Dublin pub. Under the usual protocol of criminal investigations in Ireland, a formal charge tends not to immediately follow an arrest. Asked recently about the status of the investigations, the Gardai declined to comment, saying it would not comment on "ongoing investigations," without specifically referring to McGregor. A person familiar with the investigations, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the cases, said Wednesday that the cases remained open. The Irish news media have reported on both cases extensively, but without naming McGregor; Irish law restricts the news media from identifying individuals charged with rape unless they are convicted, which has not happened in either instance. Instead, newspapers and broadcasters have linked the two cases and described the suspect as a well known Irish sports star. The arrest last January came three months after McGregor had lost to Nurmagomedov by submission. McGregor has rarely spoken to the news media since then, and when he has, he either has not been asked about the accusations or has addressed them only indirectly.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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'ARTISTIC LICENSE: SIX TAKES ON THE GUGGENHEIM COLLECTION' at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (through Jan. 12). Displays that artists select from a museum's collection are almost inevitably interesting, revealing and valuable. After all, artists can be especially discerning regarding work not their own. Here, six artists Cai Guo Qiang, Paul Chan, Richard Prince, Julie Mehretu, Carrie Mae Weems and Jenny Holzer guided by specific themes, have chosen, which multiplies the impact accordingly. With one per ramp, each selection turns the museum inside out. The combination sustains multiple visits; the concept should be applied regularly. (Roberta Smith) 212 423 3840, guggenheim.org 'AUSCHWITZ. NOT LONG AGO. NOT FAR AWAY' at the Museum of Jewish Heritage (through Aug. 30). Killing as a communal business, made widely lucrative by the Third Reich, permeates this traveling exhibition about the largest German death camp, Auschwitz, whose yawning gatehouse, with its converging rail tracks, has become emblematic of the Holocaust. Well timed, during a worldwide surge of anti Semitism, the harrowing installation strives, successfully, for fresh relevance. The exhibition illuminates the topography of evil, the deliberate designing of a hell on earth by fanatical racists and compliant architects and provisioners, while also highlighting the strenuous struggle for survival in a place where, as Primo Levi learned, "there is no why." (Ralph Blumenthal) 646 437 4202, mjhnyc.org 'PIERRE CARDIN: FUTURE FASHION' at the Brooklyn Museum (through Jan. 5). He was never a great artist like Dior, Balenciaga or Saint Laurent, but Pierre Cardin still at work at 97 pioneered today's approach to the business of fashion: take a loss on haute couture, then make the real money through ready to wear and worldwide licensing deals. He excelled at bold, futuristic day wear: belted unisex jumpsuits, vinyl miniskirts, dresses accessorized with astronaut chic Plexiglas helmets. Other ensembles, especially the tacky evening gowns souped up with metal armature, are best ignored. All told, Cardin comes across as a relentless optimist about humanity's future, which has a certain retro charm. Remember the future? (Jason Farago) 718 638 5000, brooklynmuseum.org 'AGNES DENES: ABSOLUTES AND INTERMEDIATES' at the Shed (through March 22). We'll be lucky this art season if we get another exhibition as tautly beautiful as this long overdue Denes retrospective. Now 87, the artist is best known for her 1982 "Wheatfield: A Confrontation," for which she sowed and harvested two acres of wheat on Hudson River landfill within sight of the World Trade Center and Statue of Liberty. Her later ecology minded work has included creating a hilltop forest of 11,000 trees planted by 11,000 volunteers in Finland (each tree is deeded to the planter), though many of her projects exist only in the form of the exquisite drawings that make up much of this show. (Holland Cotter) 646 455 3494, theshed.org 'RACHEL HARRISON LIFE HACK' at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through Jan. 12). As seen in this excellent midcareer survey, Harrison's assemblage style sculptures suggest serendipitous urban still lives, of the kind you see on New York City sidewalks on trash collection day: bottles, bedding, defunct appliances, outgrown toys, discarded Christmas trees in season and, always, sealed garbage bags filled with you don't want to know what. All of these together translate into information about commerce, class, memory, value, accident, appetite, waste, color, shape, zeitgeist not to mention life and death. But this is an art of questions, not answers. The more you look, the more questions there are. (Cotter) 212 570 3600, whitney.org 'THE JIM HENSON EXHIBITION' at the Museum of the Moving Image (ongoing). The rainbow connection has been established in Astoria, Queens, where this museum has opened a new permanent wing devoted to the career of America's great puppeteer, who was born in Mississippi in 1936 and died, too young, in 1990. Henson began presenting the short TV program "Sam and Friends" before he was out of his teens; one of its characters, the soft faced Kermit, was fashioned from his mother's old coat and would not mature into a frog for more than a decade. The influence of early variety television, with its succession of skits and songs, runs through "Sesame Street" and "The Muppet Show," though Henson also spent the late 1960s crafting peace and love documentaries and prototyping a psychedelic nightclub. Young visitors will delight in seeing Big Bird, Elmo, Miss Piggy and the Swedish Chef; adults can dig deep into sketches and storyboards and rediscover some old friends. (Farago) 718 784 0077, movingimage.us 'ERNST LUDWIG KIRCHNER' at the Neue Galerie (through Jan. 13). You could be forgiven for drawing a connection between Kirchner's shocking color palette and his character. It would be understandable enough, considering his problems with morphine, Veronal and absinthe; the nervous breakdown precipitated by his artillery training in World War I; and his suicide in 1938, at the age of 58, after the Nazis had denounced him as a degenerate. But to linger on Kirchner's lurid biography would be unfair to the mesmerizing technical genius of his style, amply on display in this exhibition. Surrounding more or less sober portrait subjects with backgrounds of flat but brilliant color, as Kirchner did, wasn't just a youthful revolt against the staid academic painting he grew up with. It was also an ingenious way to articulate subjective experience in an increasingly materialist modern world. (Will Heinrich) neuegalerie.org 'THE LAST KNIGHT: THE ART, ARMOR, AND AMBITION OF MAXIMILIAN I' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Jan. 5). Kaiser Max, who ruled the Holy Roman Empire in the years around 1500, anchors the Met's largest show of arms and armor in decades: a gleaming showcase of heavy metal and Hapsburg propaganda. Maximilian I, who ruled a swath of Europe stretching from the Netherlands to Croatia, would have looked resplendent on the battlefield when he wore the tapered suit of ribbed and fluted steel here. What really broadcast his power were public spectacles of chivalric glory, in which he jousted with local noblemen and foreign champions in ritualized mock combat, still dangerous despite the staging. He also embraced the hottest technology of the late 15th century: printmaking, which allowed the emperor to broadcast his military prowess through books and monumental woodcuts. The pen, or at least movable type, was for Maximilian even mightier than the sword. (Farago) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ALVIN BALTROP' at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (through Feb. 9). New York City is a gateway for new talent. It's also an archive of art careers past. Some come to light only after artists have departed, as is the case with Baltrop, an American photographer who was unknown to the mainstream art world when he died in 2004 at 55, and who now has a bright monument of a retrospective at this Bronx museum. That he was black, gay and working class accounts in part for his invisibility, but so does the subject matter he chose: a string of derelict Hudson River shipping piers that, in the 1970s and '80s, became a preserve for gay sex and communion. In assiduously recording both the architecture of the piers and the amorous action they housed, Baltrop created a monument to the city itself at the time when it was both falling apart and radiating liberationist energy. (Cotter) 718 681 6000, bronxmuseum.org 'NATURE: COOPER HEWITT MUSEUM DESIGN TRIENNIAL' at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (through Jan. 20). Plastics transformed the material world after World War II. Today, they pollute our oceans. A better future will be made with ... algae. Or bacteria. That's the dominant theme of this sweeping exhibition. On display here at the Smithsonian's temple to the culture of design are objects you might once have expected only at a science museum: Proteins found in silkworms are repurposed as surgical screws and optical lenses. Electrically active bacteria power a light fixture. The triennial displays some 60 projects and products from around the world that define a reconciliation of biosphere and technosphere, as Koert van Mensvoort, a Dutch artist and philosopher, puts it in the show's excellent catalog. "Nature" provides us with a post consumption future, in which the urgency of restoring ecological function trumps the allure of the latest gadget. (James S. Russell) 212 849 2950, cooperhewitt.org Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. THE NEW MUSEUM OF MODERN ART (ongoing). Of course we've got quibbles about this or that gallery but the new MoMA, a third larger than before, feels fresher and more urgent than at any time since it last closed in 2002. The best news: This is a museum that once again puts its collection first. If you want to see everything, budget a solid four or five hours and you'll still be moving fast past many works. I suggest starting on the east side of the museum. (Look for the suspended helicopter.) Take the escalators or elevators to the fifth floor, where the chronological display of the collection (1880 1940) begins. The galleries are numbered, so you can work counterclockwise, moving from the older building into the new wing and back. If you enjoy a more sequential approach, you can do it again on the fourth floor (for postwar art, 1945 75 or so) and the second floor (for contemporary art, from the late 1970s to the present). But if you're more adventurous, head west from the ticket desk, hit the design gallery and projects gallery, then hop on the new "blade" staircase by Diller Scofidio Renfro/Gensler. This way will plunge you into the middle of the timeline. (Farago) 212 708 9400, moma.org THE NEW MUSEUM OF MODERN ART: THE COLLECTIONS (ongoing). MoMA celebrates its latest expansion by not only extending the permanent collection, but also reshaping its version of modernist art history to include many more women, artists of color and non Westerners. Some works have been newly conserved (note the brightened colors of Henri Rousseau's "The Sleeping Gypsy"). Others have been put on view for the first time in years. The collection is also less permanent in that one third of its galleries will be installed every six months, starting in February. Adding to the festivities, all other exhibitions at the Modern are drawn from its collection. "Surrounds: 11 Installations" puts on view 11 sprawling, never before exhibited artworks that vary in interest and probably won't be seen again any time soon (to Jan. 4). "Member: Pope.L, 1978 2001" examines the groundbreaking early performances of an interdisciplinary artist whose avant garde street cred remains intact 40 years on (through Feb. 1). "Sur Moderno: Journeys of Abstraction, the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift" presents a selection of South American postwar art so substantial that it could reorient the museum's focus (through March 14). For the latest iteration of MoMA's well known "Artist's Choice" series, the painter Amy Sillman has selected "The Shape of Shape," filling a large gallery with an astounding array of carefully juxtaposed works from across the collection (through April 12). "Taking a Thread for a Walk" (through April 19) looks at the role of weaving in modern art beyond textiles. And don't forget the six artists' commissions. (Smith) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'OCEAN WONDERS: SHARKS!' at the New York Aquarium (ongoing). For years, the aquarium's 14 acre campus hunkered behind a wall, turning its back to the beach. When aquarium officials last year finally got around to completing the long promised building that houses this shark exhibition, maybe the biggest move, architecturally speaking, was breaking through that wall. The overall effect makes the aquarium more of a visible, welcoming presence along the boardwalk. Inside, "Ocean Wonders" features 115 species sharing 784,000 gallons of water. It stresses timely eco consciousness, introducing visitors to shark habitats, explaining how critical sharks are to the ocean's food chains and ecologies, debunking myths about the danger sharks pose to people while documenting the threats people pose to sharks via overfishing and pollution. The narrow, snaking layout suggests an underwater landscape carved by water. Past the exit, an outdoor ramp inclines visitors toward the roof of the building, where the Atlantic Ocean suddenly spreads out below. You can see Luna Park in one direction, Brighton Beach in the other. The architectural point becomes clear: Sharks aren't just movie stars and aquarium attractions. They're also our neighbors as much a part of Coney Island as the roller coasters and summer dreams. (Michael Kimmelman) 718 265 3474, nyaquarium.com 'BETYE SAAR: THE LEGENDS OF "BLACK GIRL'S WINDOW"' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Jan. 4). "Black Girl's Window," which consists of an old window frame that Saar filled with a constellation of images, is the focus of this exhibition, one of several helping to reopen MoMA. Concentrating on Saar's early years as an artist, it tracks the experiments in printmaking and assemblage that led her to arrive at the titular work. Despite the unusual color of the gallery's deep purple walls, the show is relatively modest a scholarly study of a specific period, anchored by MoMA's recent acquisition of a group of 42 of her works on paper. Two pieces from 1972 that represent her shift from the mystical to the political "Black Crows in the White Section Only," which brings together a variety of racist advertisements, and "Let Me Entertain You," which shows a minstrel singer with a guitar transforming into a black liberation fighter with a rifle serve as a kind of coda. Their appearance at the end offers a tantalizing glimpse of the iconoclastic artist Saar was on her way to becoming. (Jillian Steinhauer) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'T. REX: THE ULTIMATE PREDATOR' at the American Museum of Natural History (through Aug. 9). Everyone's favorite 18,000 pound prehistoric killer gets the star treatment in this eye opening exhibition, which presents the latest scientific research on T. rex and also introduces many other tyrannosaurs, some discovered only in this century in China and Mongolia. T. rex evolved mainly during the Cretaceous period to have keen eyes, spindly arms and massive conical teeth, which packed a punch that has never been matched by any other creature; the dinosaur could even swallow whole bones, as affirmed here by a kid friendly display of fossilized excrement. The show mixes 66 million year old teeth with the latest 3 D prints of dino bones, and also presents new models of T. rex as a baby, a juvenile and a full grown annihilator. Turns out this most savage beast was covered with believe it! a soft coat of beige or white feathers. (Farago) 212 769 5100, amnh.org 'VIOLET HOLDINGS: LGBTQ HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE N.Y.U. SPECIAL COLLECTIONS' at Bobst Library (through Dec. 31). With the Stonewall Inn now a National Historic Landmark (and a bar again; it was a bagel shop in the 1980s), nearby New York University has produced a homegrown archival exhibition at Bobst Library, across the park from Grey Art Gallery. Organized by Hugh Ryan, it takes the local history of queer identity back to the 19th century with documents on Elizabeth Robins (1862 1952), an American actor, suffragist and friend of Virginia Woolf, and forward with ephemera related to the musician and drag king Johnny Science (1955 2007) and the African American D.J. Larry Levan (1954 92), who, in the 1980s, presided, godlike, at a gay disco called the Paradise Garage, which was a short walk from the campus. (Cotter) 212 998 2500, library.nyu.edu 'YAYOI KUSAMA: EVERY DAY I PRAY FOR LOVE' at David Zwirner (through Dec. 14). Ignored for decades in New York and Tokyo, this 90 year old artist is enjoying a not unmerited surge in public visibility, but just what do audiences get from taking photographs of their colored reflections in her Infinity Mirror Rooms? Kusama first made a mirror environment in 1965, when she was staging orgiastic happenings that encouraged "self obliteration"; now the self has been subsumed by the social media profile, and our digital narcissism has made the abandonment Kusama once encouraged impossible. If you want to line up for an hour or more for your selfie opportunity, be our guest, but the rest of the show, including some excellent new steel sculptures, requires no wait. (Farago) davidzwirner.com 'NOBODY PROMISED YOU TOMORROW: 50 YEARS AFTER STONEWALL' at the Brooklyn Museum (through Dec. 8). In this large group show, 28 young queer and transgender artists, most born after 1980, carry the buzz of Stonewall resistance into the present. Historical heroes, including Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, are honored (in a film by Sasha Wortzel and Tourmaline). Friends in life, Johnson and Rivera are tutelary spirits of an exhibition in which a trans presence, long marginalized by mainstream gay politics, is pronounced in the work of Juliana Huxtable, Hugo Gyrl, Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski and Elle Perez (whose work also appeared in this year's Whitney Biennial). (Cotter) 718 638 5000, brooklynmuseum.org
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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A new study offers the first physical evidence that the coronavirus was circulating at low levels in New York City as early as the first week of February. The city confirmed its first infection on March 1. Mathematical models have predicted that the virus was making its way through the city weeks before then, but the new report is the first to back the conjecture with testing data. The study found that some New Yorkers had antibodies to the virus as early as the week ending Feb. 23. Given the time needed to produce antibodies, those people were most likely infected with the virus about two weeks earlier. "You're probably talking about very early in February," said Florian Krammer, an immunologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who led the study. "It looks like there was at least low level circulation." The findings were posted online Tuesday and have not yet been vetted by other scientists in a formal review, but several experts said the work was rigorous and credible, if not entirely surprising. Genetic analyses have suggested that the virus entered the city several times early in the year, but most of those introductions died out and did not initiate the city's epidemic. "If I had to put a single date on it, based on current models, we had it as Feb. 19 as the arrival that fueled things," said Trevor Bedford, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. Dr. Krammer's date is only slightly earlier, he noted. The study also confirms estimates by epidemiologists working for New York State that roughly one in five New Yorkers had been exposed to the virus by late April, a figure broadly consistent with data released on Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "I think it's cool that we all have similar numbers," Dr. Krammer said. The similarity is even more striking, experts said, because the three studies all arrived at their estimates differently. Dr. Krammer and his colleagues analyzed plasma samples from nearly 5,500 patients who went to Mount Sinai for routine medical appointments, were seen in its emergency department or were hospitalized from the week ending Feb. 9 through the week ending April 19. The C.D.C. looked at blood samples from people who went in for routine medical exams, but only the week ending April 1 for New York City. The New York State study recruited people at supermarkets from April 19 to April 28. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. "When we have three sources all giving you consistent results, that lends strength to all the findings," said Eli Rosenberg, an epidemiologist at the State University of New York at Albany and lead author of the state study. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. The numbers from all three studies also agree on a crucial point: The vast majority of infections in New York City and elsewhere in the country went undiagnosed. Even in places with large outbreaks, the number of people exposed to the virus is still far from what is needed for herd immunity. The Mount Sinai researchers grouped their samples in different ways and analyzed them using a lab based antibody test that is highly accurate and specific to the new coronavirus. Among people admitted to the emergency room or the hospital during the study period, the prevalence of antibodies rose to nearly 60 percent from 3.2 percent, the researchers found. These numbers are high because they include people who were severely ill with the coronavirus. But among people who gave blood for routine appointments, or were admitted to the hospitals for reasons unrelated to the coronavirus a group that represents the general population fewer than 2 percent of people had antibodies until the week ending March 29. The rate rose exponentially after that, ending at 19.3 percent among patients seen in the week ending April 19. The team broke this latter group down further by the reason for their appointment, and found the increase in prevalence was mostly driven by pregnant women. Nearly one in 10 pregnant women had antibodies to the virus by the week of March 29, and the number rose steadily to nearly 27 percent by the week ending April 19. By comparison, people who came in for appointments related to surgery, cancer or cardiology plateaued at about 9 percent. Subgroup analyses tend not to be reliable because of the smaller sample sizes, but this is a large study and the trends are intriguing, said Taia Wang, an immunologist at Stanford University. "It does suggest the possibility that different groups of patients might have different susceptibility to SARS CoV 2 infection," she said. Experts were also struck by the relatively flat prevalence of coronavirus antibodies in blood samples from the first few weeks. "I would expect during this time period, where people are not modifying their behavior, you'd get much closer to exponential growth," Dr. Bedford said. Other cities, like San Francisco, have similarly shown periods when the virus seemed to percolate until something perhaps a superspreader event triggered an exponential rise in infections.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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That Huge Mediterranean Diet Study Was Flawed. But Was It Wrong? The study was a landmark, one of the few attempts to rigorously evaluate a particular diet. And the results were striking: A Mediterranean diet, with abundant vegetables and fruit, can slash the risk of heart attacks and strokes. But now that trial, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2013 , has come under fire. The authors retracted their original paper on Wednesday and published an unusual "re analysis" of their data in the same journal. Despite serious problems in the way the study was conducted, their conclusions are the same: A Mediterranean diet can cut the risk of heart attacks and strokes by about 30 percent in those at high risk. Not everyone is convinced. "Nothing they have done in this re analyzed paper makes me more confident," said Dr. Barnett Kramer, director of the division of cancer prevention at the National Cancer Institute. For decades, researchers have noted that people living in some Mediterranean countries have lower rates of heart disease and cancer. Scientists have long suspected that the regional diet rich in fruits, vegetables, nuts and olive oil, with moderate levels of fat played a protective role. But the idea has been hard to prove. It is very difficult to test any diet in a clinical trial. Participants may be reluctant to stick to the prescribed meal plan, for instance, and it can be difficult to monitor them over months or years. The original study was conducted in Spain by Dr. Miguel A. Martinez Gonzalez of the University of Navarra and his colleagues. The trial enrolled 7,447 participants aged 55 to 80 who were assigned one of three diets: a Mediterranean diet with at least four tablespoons a day of extra virgin olive oil; the same diet with an ounce of mixed nuts; or a traditional low fat diet. The participants were followed for a median of nearly five years. Dr. Martinez Gonzalez and his colleagues reported that there were fewer cardiovascular events in the groups consuming olive oil and nuts. But last year Dr. Martinez Gonzalez found his study on a list of clinical trials whose data seemed suspect, compiled by Dr. John Carlisle of Torbay Hospital in England. "That was the first hint that there could have been some imperfection," Dr. Martinez Gonzalez said in an interview. A statistician at the New England Journal of Medicine suggested the researchers look at the methods at each center that recruited participants. The idea of a randomized trial is to assign treatments in this case, diets to participants with the statistical equivalent of a coin toss. That way, the groups being compared should be equivalent, with no group healthier or sicker, or older or younger, than another on average. If subjects are not assigned at random, the investigators cannot be sure that the effects they see result from the treatment. And attempts to correct statistically after the fact are fraught with difficulty. On re evaluating their data, the scientists running the Mediterranean diet study soon found what Dr. Martinez Gonzalez said were "small problems affecting 10 percent of participants." Some investigators would assign one person in a household the wife, for example to one arm of the study say, to the group consuming olive oil. Then they would ask other members of the household to share that diet, including them as though they had been randomly assigned to it. "We realized we had never reported that," Dr. Martinez Gonzalez said. An omission like that erodes the randomized nature of the trial. Family members are likely to share more than just a diet: If a husband and wife both dodge heart disease, it's difficult to say that their diet is the only reason. In their re analysis, the investigators statistically adjusted data on 390 people who happened to be household members but whose diets were not randomly assigned. Then the investigators discovered another problem. A researcher at one of the 11 clinical centers in the trial worked in small villages. Participants there complained that some neighbors were receiving free olive oil, while they got only nuts or inexpensive gifts. So the investigator decided to give everyone in each village the same diet. He never told the leaders of the study what he had done. "He did not think it was important," Dr. Martinez Gonzalez said. But the decision meant that participants were not truly randomized and forced Dr. Martinez Gonzalez and his colleagues to make another statistical adjustment to data on 652 people in the trial. The investigators spent a year working on the re analysis in collaboration with Dr. Miguel Hernan of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. In the end, they concluded that the original findings were still accurate. "You cannot imagine what it has been like," Dr. Martinez Gonzalez said, adding that he and his team worked through vacations and weekends and swallowed considerable professional embarrassment.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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Dr. Rubin is the director of PolicyLab at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Dr. Offit is the director of the Vaccine Education Center there. Ever since a new coronavirus emerged in China late last year, public health experts have debated why it was so dangerous. Now, as we consider how to reopen communities in the United States and across the world, we're learning that the closer people live and work together, the more threatening and deadly the virus can be. Models we created at PolicyLab at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania, tracking and forecasting outbreaks in 211 counties in 46 states, as well as in the District of Columbia, revealed that crowding and population density, whether in densely populated areas in New York City or a meatpacking plant in South Dakota, are the most important factors in determining the havoc the virus can wreak. After we accounted for age distribution and health issues, it was clear that risk not only of infection but of death broke between two groups: those in densely crowded areas, and everyone else. Large, densely populated areas like New York and Chicago had nearly twice the rate of transmission in the first two weeks of their outbreaks than the least densely populated areas we are tracking, like Birmingham, Ala., or the metro area of Portland, Ore. Yes, we did find that warming spring temperatures in some areas are helping to reduce transmission, but that effect is dwarfed by the impact of population density in our largest cities, particularly in the North. Take Philadelphia, for example, which last week was averaging nearly 400 coronavirus cases daily, eclipsing 750 per 100,000 people since their outbreak began. Our models suggest that if we try to reopen this, our home city, in early May, the virus would storm back. In contrast, our less densely populated state capital, Harrisburg, two hours to the west, has had only 492 cases in total. If Harrisburg reopens in May, the virus's spread could fizzle out as soon as June if the community adds workplace safety measures and maintains more moderate social distancing. This means that areas in the country that are less densely populated or are already benefiting from warmer spring temperatures will probably be able to reopen more quickly, as long as the number of cases in their area have sharply reduced we can't give an exact rate and if they maintain workplace safety, moderate distancing, and test to identify and trace outbreaks early. Large, densely populated cities are going to need a more cautious plan. This is not just because more crowded areas increase the risk of spread, but also because we're learning that crowding itself may also affect the death rate. A relationship between the amount of virus to which one is initially exposed and the severity of the illness is found in most infectious diseases. Models assessing outcomes from the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic reveal that the likelihood of death was dependent upon the number of infected individuals with whom that person came into contact. When a family is infected by chickenpox, the second child to contract the virus often becomes more seriously ill, presumably because they have been exposed to more of the virus. Although we are racing to establish the same associations for this coronavirus, there is every reason to believe they are there. Some clinicians have become severely ill in this epidemic, including the more than 100 doctors who have died in Italy. It is likely that their exposure to large quantities of the virus in close quarters, without adequate protection, was unforgiving. The same reasoning could explain why grocery store, restaurant and mass transit workers, whose exposure risks far exceed other professions, have also been disproportionately impacted. The synergy of easier transmission and higher viral load may partly explain why the death rate for those infected with the coronavirus in New York City has been estimated as high as 0.9 percent based on recent serology studies, much higher than estimates in other areas of the country. Now that we understand that crowding is the problem, we can begin to plot a path forward. That journey would acknowledge that while some people can't change their living circumstances, and many workers can't avoid the crowded settings of their jobs, we can accept the importance that distancing can have in breaking the epidemic. For those on a crowded bus in Chicago or in a grocery store in Boston, their protection will be a face mask. The driver of that bus, the clerk at that grocery store, or an employee on a factory floor, even in a more rural area, will need masks and gloves, and clear protocols for hygiene and disinfection. Rotational groups that minimize the number of people working together at once may be needed, even if it reduces productivity in the short term. Restaurants may reopen if they can restrict tables to smaller groups who are served by those wearing masks. Concerts and sporting events will change in scope and size, if they permit fans at all. All of this assumes, of course, that public health departments are prepared and have the testing capacity to monitor for the virus's resurgence as communities reopen. It also assumes that people who develop symptoms remove themselves from settings where they can transmit the virus, to protect those around them. To stay ahead of the virus, we will have to concentrate on the most crowded areas, and mitigate risk with alternative solutions. Some areas will open more quickly than others, but all need to be focused on how to reduce the likelihood of continued transmission or they risk losing control of the epidemic. This will be our new reality until a vaccine is developed that provides immunity to many. If we accept that crowding is the foe, then we can craft a new normal that makes the best of a bad situation. David Rubin is the director of PolicyLab at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Paul A. Offit is the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the Food and Drug Administration's Vaccine Advisory Committee. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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The E! red carpet show at the Academy Awards felt as though it was on the brink of blowing up at a moment's notice, with a sexual harassment claim against the host, Ryan Seacrest, hanging over the festivities. Viewers wondered if a celebrity would turn the questions around on Mr. Seacrest, or if he would willingly address the accusation. But no such confrontation was broadcast, and his interviews with celebrities stuck to the typical fare of fashion and film. There were no immediate indications that celebrities were bypassing him for interviews. Mary J. Blige, Christopher Plummer, Allison Janney and other Oscar nominees talked to him. But as Us Weekly reported, none of the five women up for best actress stopped by. While the Harvey Weinstein accusations made the red carpets at other award shows this year a primary platform for actors to voice support for sexual harassment victims and the fight against gender imbalances, Sunday's preshow event could have fit in any prior year. Mr. Seacrest did not ask any questions about sexual harassment or pay equity. (His co host, Giuliana Rancic, who was stationed at a Los Angeles hotel, did at one point discuss the MeToo movement before the show segued back to Mr. Seacrest.)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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Jonathan Larson wrote "Rent." Lots of people know that. But in the years before that 1996 show and his untimely death, at 35, hours before its first preview he wrote dozens of other songs, most of which have never been heard by the general public. The New York club Feinstein's/54 Below is holding 12 concerts, starting Oct. 9, at which about 30 little known Larson compositions will be performed, some by his collaborators, and some by artists who encountered his work only after his death. The concert is a passion project for Jennifer Ashley Tepper, the club's creative and programming director and a longtime fan of Larson's work her bat mitzvah sign in board depicted her dressed as Mimi, popping out of a pile of "Rent" playbills. She dived into his archives at the Library of Congress, listening to hours of recordings and sifting through boxes of documents to reconstruct his catalog. Larson wrote about 200 songs over 18 years, starting when he was in college. They were for unproduced musicals, workshops and benefits; there were pop songs, political songs, and songs cut from his two posthumously produced musicals, "Rent" and "Tick, Tick ... Boom!" Many are about being a struggling artist in New York. Few of the songs existed in written form, so the producers of the "Jonathan Larson Project," as the 54 Below concerts are being titled, had to transcribe and orchestrate them from recordings; Ms. Tepper is presenting them as a song cycle. The project is being done with the cooperation of Larson's family his sister and his parents, who oversee his work through a company called Skeeziks (that was his father's nickname for him, after a character in "Gasoline Alley"). "It's helpful for young up and coming composers to see that 'Rent' didn't just happen," said his sister, Julie, who recalled hearing some of the songs on cassettes he circulated to family members. "A whole lot of other stuff happened before, leading up to it." Nick Blaemire, one of the singers who will perform at the concerts, said it had been reassuring to realize that Larson (who posthumously won two Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize for "Rent") had grappled with many of the same issues facing today's creative class. "These songs help us as artists feel less alone in the challenge of being an artist," said Mr. Blaemire, who starred in a 2016 revival of "Tick, Tick ... Boom!" "This guy is articulating nuances about what it takes to live in this business." Mr. Larson's handwritten lyrics for "Find the Key," a song cut from one of his shows. Seventeen songs will be performed at each show, with one or two more depending on the guest performer. Here are descriptions of four largely unheard Larson numbers, and why they were chosen. Mr. Larson in 1996, before the final dress rehearsal of "Rent." We all should be drinking To Abraham Lincoln And get stinking drunk in his name It's a good thing he's dead 'Cause he'd cry his eyes red Hang his head If he saw this campaign This song was written in 1989 for a proposed National Lampoon revue, with contributions from multiple writers, about presidential politics. The show was announced with plans for regional theater productions followed by Broadway "It's exciting bringing the National Lampoon to Broadway," the producer Nelle Nugent said at the time but it never got off the ground. "La Di Da Rap" is noteworthy in part because it seems to foreshadow current events it is about campaign strategy, and features the phrase "make America great," which 27 years later appeared as part of Donald J. Trump's campaign slogan. "The song integrates rap in a way that Broadway musicals were not yet doing," Ms. Tepper said, "so in that way, it was certainly a precursor to the way Jonathan integrated so many modern music genres into 'Rent.''' It's just another day In the white male world Let's cut down a jungle Let's go start a war Let's go rape a coed What a lovely thing to do Another eerily prescient song, this 1991 number is Larson's look at what we might now call white male privilege, written for a show called "Skirting the Issues." The show, directed by Maggie Lally and created by a 10 person ensemble with additional music by Larson, had a brief Off Off Broadway run; New York magazine summarized it as "the post Barbie generation takes aim at everything, from A Z." This house is a reflection of me Modern, graceful, easy, simple ... synthetic So free In everything I see my reflection Do I really look so simply pathetic? Larson wrote this song for a proposed but never fully staged 1989 revue called "Sitting on the Edge of the Future," which would have featured various writers creating pieces in response to the 1939 World's Fair, which was full of exhibitions that asked audiences to imagine what the world would be like going forward. "We wanted to make sure some of my family's personal favorites were included, because they're important to us," said Ms. Larson, who plans to attend all of the concerts, joined by a rotating group of family and friends. "They asked some established composers and some young unknown and up and coming composers, and each was given a theme to write about. My brother's was the 1950s housewife." In his whimsical yet sad song, a woman uses a hose to wash a house whose contents are made of plastic. She sings playfully to her furniture, and herself, as she cleans and cooks in anticipation of her husband's return home from work, but she is also besieged by doubts, about her looks and her marriage and her life.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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On July 12, on the same intersection depicted on the cover of the Beastie Boys album "Paul's Boutique," Louis Vuitton arrived on the Lower East Side. "There goes the neighborhood," said a woman standing on the cater corner, as if the Hotel on Rivington hadn't done that a decade and a half ago. No, there's something a little bit trickier happening at this pop up, which continues through July 21, or whenever the store runs dry of product. Since ascending to the post of artistic director of Louis Vuitton's men's wear division last year, Virgil Abloh has used the platform to disentangle luxury from its old connotations, be they cultural, aesthetic or even geographical. And so this is less of a beachhead incursion than a conceptual prompt. The corner store location is painted in a loud neon green. Again, I emphasize: The whole of the exterior and everything on the inside is painted a loud neon green.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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On Saturday, the Seattle Asian Art Museum will reopen after a two year, 56 million restoration and renovation, unveiling new and modern spaces to share its extensive collection. The building is one of three associated with the Seattle Art Museum, and except for some minor additions, has not had a major renovation since its construction in 1933. The local firm LMN Architects was hired for the project, which consisted of modernizing the building and its mechanical systems, expanding gallery and education space and preserving its art deco facade. The new design also added a glass enclosed lobby to the east side of the building, enhancing the connection between the museum and its surroundings in Volunteer Park. Sam Miller, a the partner in charge from LMN, said the firm also made improvements for work that goes on behind the scenes. The firm added a freight elevator and replaced the original skylights with adjustable light fixtures that emulate natural daylight. It also enhanced the museum's climate control systems to better protect its collection. "Ideally if we've done our job correctly, it feels like it always has in many ways," Mr. Miller said in a phone interview. "But it has all new systems, all new lighting, everything has been modernized and yet put in with care and with delicacy, trying to be responsive to the really amazing original architecture." These changes will allow the museum to showcase more of its collection of art from China, Korea, Japan, India, the Himalayas and Southeast Asia. Additionally, its modern lighting and electrical fixtures, new freight elevator and larger gallery space will also give it the flexibility to host temporary traveling exhibitions or larger, contemporary pieces. "It's very much a 21st century museum from a functional standpoint, while trying to preserve the feel of the 1930s building," Mr. Miller said. When the museum reopens on Feb. 8, it will host two new exhibitions: "Boundless: Stories of Asian Art," which organizes pieces from the museum's collection around 13 different themes, including worship, celebrations and identity, and "Be/longing: Contemporary Asian Art," featuring living artists from across Asia and their experiences as both insiders and outsiders.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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It takes a certain amount of gumption for a designer to propose a collection that is "the antidote to the unsustainable cycles of consumption." After all, fashion arguably is responsible for those cycles the constant stoking of desire for the new and the next; the endless influx of stuff thanks to the pre collections and special collections outside of the traditional twice yearly ones; the move to "see now, buy now" created to take advantage of the desire for immediate shopping gratification. And while we are used to designers complaining about the unsustainable demands on creativity such cycles create, it's not so common to hear them complaining about the shopping problem. (Most brands are more than happy about that, since it serves their revenue stream.) Or even admitting that there is a shopping problem. But who among us hasn't looked at the latest order from amazon.com or netaporter.com and thought, "Don't I have enough stuff?" Enter Jeremy Scott, creative director of Moschino, with an answer to this peculiarly modern crisis: Recycle! Or at least look as if you have. "I'm interested in things people don't find beautiful, what they discard," he said backstage before his show, resplendent in a "Couture Is an Attitude" white T shirt. So he found inspiration in a cardboard box, remade not only as his runway, but also as a little camel skirt suit, the seams picked out in transparent tape. Also in brown paper sacks (a literal sack dress) and moving blankets (coats crafted from flannel padding) and Bubble Wrap (cocktail dresses in transparent plastic). In glossy magazine tear sheets that became a riot of prints and duct tape that encircled stiletto boots for shine. And in the detritus of the everyday: leather gloves that formed the fringes on an evening dress; a shower curtain draped into a cascading skirt with a trailing bathmat boa; a tiny metallic strapless sheath made from countless gold watches sourced from thrift shops and flea markets. This isn't a new idea. Maison Martin Margiela did it years ago in their Artisanal collection, which was all about repurposing quotidian objects in the argot of elegance. But it's one worth revisiting. The stumbling block: In doing the above (save for the watch dress et al), Mr. Scott mostly wasn't practicing what he preached. When asked where he got the Persian rug remade for the finale gown, he said, quite cheerfully, "We wove it." It was, in other words, a new dress only made to look like it once lay on the parlor floor. And wither the dress, so the collection. It wasn't providing a solution, it was perpetuating the problem. That it did so with a wink and some wit that it raised the question and made you think does not change the inherent contradiction. Yet the situation isn't that insoluble, when you really think about it. What would stop the endless cycle of consumption (or at least, to be fair, slow it down, as stopping it altogether would be the end of this industry)? Really good clothes, the kind that are satisfying over time. There just aren't enough of them. So designers keep dangling their promise and we keep buying and buying in an endless quest for the perfect dress or suit or what have you. Which was not, in any case, what Massimo Giorgetti offered at Emilio Pucci: a queasy making mix of highlighter green and orange, hot pink and brown in a disco/loungewear fiesta that included, inexplicably, hats with fringe completely obscuring the face and hanging down to the waist in the front. Plus animal print trouser suits in crushed velvet with rhinestone buttons, and a geometric version of the house's swirling signature logo printed on a catsuit and picked out in crystals on a transparent vinyl raincoat. Yes, this is a brand that celebrated color, but once upon a time it did so with joyful sophistication. This was a look at me heave. At least at Emporio Armani, things started off promisingly enough, with a multitude of variations on black tie in training in (yes) black and white and red, polka dots and stripes, all worn with lots of sneakers. But then transparent vinyl came into play (in a tartan print, worn over white tights; in pockets appended atop otherwise tailored trousers) and then multicolored hands and cartoon heads appeared on classic jackets, and violets on velvet. And by the time coats started dripping paillettes over pipe cleaner pants, the recipe was lip bitingly confused. Instead it was at Prada that taste achieved real clarity, amid a set pitched as a series of private bedrooms, differentiated by winding wood partitions, the outer walls plastered with posters advertising "The Demure Defendant," "Some Like It Cool," "The Velvet Knife," The Glass Cage" and so on. Potboilers with a twist, that is to say. Which is not a bad way of describing the show. We were in, said Miuccia Prada backstage later her face lit by the eerie light of multitudinous cellphones recording her every word "The City of Women," but not as Federico Fellini envisioned it in the 1980 film; as she sees it, now. A place that, according to AMO Studio, the Dutch company that made the set, "identifies the intangible centrality of the contemporary female role both at the domestic and public scale." That's a little portentous, but its expression a meditation on the relationship of seduction and smarts in 47 looks was uncomplicatedly compelling. Building on the vocabulary of the femme fatale (fur, beads, feathers and satin sheaths) as well as the homemaker (knits and mohair, "hairy" fabrics), she built from a base of 1970s ERA era corduroy suiting and patchwork snakeskin and leather coats and buckled boots.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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LOS ANGELES Carmen Electra, the Prince protege who fled Paisley Park for Hollywood, married and divorced Dennis Rodman, and launched her acting career in a tiny red "Baywatch" regulation swimsuit, recently did one of the riskiest things she's ever done, professionally speaking. Ms. Electra isn't often scared to try something new. In her impressive entertainment career spanning almost three decades, she's racked up hundreds of IMDb credits and five Playboy covers, sang and danced on a stage in lingerie hundreds of times, launched a wildly successful aerobics video collection, and broadcast her courtship, engagement and wedding to the rock star Dave Navarro on MTV years before that was a thing celebrities were really doing. But her latest professional endeavor a photo shoot with Eli Russell Linnetz, Kanye West's preferred collaborator stripped her down in a new way. He wanted her without shoes. "At the last minute, I almost backed out. I was really nervous because you have to wear something. You know what I mean? Just a little something ," said Ms. Electra. "My publicist said, 'No, you're going to be barefoot.' I go, 'Barefoot and naked? I haven't done that one.'" Clothing can act as a sort of metaphysical armor, and Ms. Electra found out early on you don't need much of it to protect yourself from the world. Describing herself as painfully shy offstage ("I wasn't ever shy to dance, but I wouldn't read a book report in front of the class," Ms. Electra said), she pushed herself to dress with the confidence of, well, a young Carmen Electra, even as she was chickening out of auditions. "I guess I just wanted to seem like I couldn't be hurt, wanted to seem almost like a character, those images of being a fighter," Ms. Electra said, though she often felt defeated looking for ways to break into the industry. "I would literally walk into the auditions and see all these gorgeous, perfect women sitting there, and I'm looking, like, trying to make sure I have my lines, my dialogue memorized, and sometimes I'd just walk out." She was figuring out who she wanted to be after years of being told who she was. It was the artist formerly known as Prince who renamed Ms. Electra, the Ohio native formerly known as Tara Leigh Patrick, after he discovered her in 1991 auditioning for a girl group on his record label. She didn't get the singing gig, but weeks later, he tracked her down to where she was staying at a Holiday Inn in Glendale, Calif., and offered to make her a solo star instead. "Basically he said, 'Well, I want to sign you to Paisley Park Records, but you have to come to Minneapolis. And your flight is leaving at 7 a.m.,'" Ms. Electra said. She got on the plane. "I remember landing in Minneapolis to a purple limousine, and it was just so strange, taking such a chance. It just seemed like a dream or something, like it wasn't real." From Paisley Park, Prince produced her 1993 album, "Carmen Electra," and took her on the road opening for him in Europe on his Diamonds and Pearls tour. He also helped Ms. Electra hone what would become her signature look at the time big, Priscilla Presley inspired eyelashes, a corset and hot pants under a cashmere coat, and heels a mix of athletic street style dressed up under a veil of Hollywood glamour. "I remember him saying, "Are you a blonde or a brunette?" And I was so young that I'm like, 'I'm a brunette,' you know?" said Ms. Electra, who is now blonde. But Prince never sugarcoated things for her, even as he molded her into a star. She played him her first demo recordings for Capitol Records, before he summoned her to Minneapolis. "He said, 'I could use that as a coaster or a Frisbee.'" "He'd call you out if you hit a wrong note he'd bark, 'Arf, arf,' you know? And you're just like, 'Ah, don't make me cry, I'm trying my best,'" Ms. Electra said. "But that was the genius in him. He had that. And I am forever grateful, because honestly, I learned so much from him, and it just gave me a little boost of confidence, to push. And I mean, that was really the beginning of getting over a lot of fears." "I understood where it was coming from. I think some people didn't really understand it. He was a very private person, so I would never tell anything or talk about anything that was deeply private, but in a case where everyone knows he wrote 'Eye Hate U' about me, I'll just say, I was young and naive, and we were together, and I found out some things, but really didn't know how to communicate properly," Ms. Electra said. Prince gave her an ultimatum: stay with him in Minneapolis and live under his rules, or go for it on her own in L.A. She chose L.A., in part because she thought that, "If I can't make it on my own, then I don't deserve it." But Ms. Electra says her choice was also bolstered by the fact that she believes that Prince wasn't all that faithful to her, either. "Now that I think about it, I would've handled it a completely different way. But at that age, I was hurt. It wasn't the right thing to do. But I was naive and hurt, and I just met someone, and kinda, that was it," Ms. Electra said. And that was it, until it wasn't. At one point after Prince, she's said previously, she became homeless, with not much more than a pair of Versace shoes to her name. "I was struggling in Los Angeles, I didn't have a car, I didn't have a credit card. I had 5,000 that I hid, and my boyfriend at the time stole it and gambled it away, so I got to the point where I was counting change, and had a shank in my back pocket, and a pager, because I wasn't living in a good neighborhood and I would have to walk to the pay phone," Ms. Electra said. "I didn't have a penny. I had a beautiful wardrobe and my makeup case, so people didn't really understand or realize my living situation." In those days, Ms. Electra would take out what little cash she had from an A.T.M. on Melrose and have eye popping dresses custom made for events. In a sea of stars in black, she tended to shine regardless of the shock it caused to the sartorial nervous systems of People magazine editors. Not for nothing, the variety of dresses that reliably landed her on the "Worst Dressed" lists have recently been worn to much editorial acclaim by most members of the extended Kardashian Jenner family. Ms. Electra remembers wearing one of those "Melrose outfits," a long, shiny, tight number, to crash a red carpet event with her first publicist. "I wasn't invited, we just went, and literally he said my name, and they started taking photos of me, and so I walked the entire red carpet. And we didn't even have tickets, and we just walked right in," Ms. Electra said. A week later, she saw a picture of herself hanging in a window on Hollywood Boulevard. Her handlers wanted her style to reflect the preferred look for young stars at the time simple, covered up and "blank, like a blank slate." When she landed her first Maxim cover during the "Baywatch" years, she wore leather pants and a crop top because her publicist didn't want her doing swimwear photos. It was in shrugging off those constraints wearing cutouts on the red carpet, posing nude for Playboy, parodying herself in "Scary Movie" that things started to feel authentic for her. Along the way, they started clicking. She spent a couple years in the Pussycat Dolls, singing and dancing and generally elevating the performances of guest stars like Christina Aguilera, Gwen Stefani and Kelly Osbourne. She went from her Melrose outfits to Chanel couture. Roberto Cavalli took her under his wing, for which she says she'll be forever grateful. (She keeps a set of limited edition 2008 glass Coke bottles with Cavalli's designs on display in her foyer, alongside a host of awards, a framed red "Baywatch" swimsuit, two copies of "I'm With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie," a drum set, and a glass walled wine cellar she converted into a shoe closet, stocked with Louboutins of varying vintages.) Once, she stumbled during a rehearsal in front of Gwen Stefani, an idol of hers. "She said, 'Girl, don't worry about it. Mistakes are punk rock,'" Ms. Electra recalled. "I just thought, how cool is that? It really is. We have to make mistakes. If you don't push or try or at least do what you love or wear what you love, then you're kind of getting stuck in a trap of really not being yourself. You can tell a lot about people by their style." But you can never fully inoculate yourself against criticism. Like, for example, in 2005, when Donald Trump told Howard Stern: "I think the boob job is terrible. They look like two light bulbs coming out of a body." "I literally had to call and tell everyone, like, 'He said my breasts look like light bulbs, like do they? Do they? I don't know,'" Ms. Electra said. "It was surreal, because it just came out of the blue. I need to really study a light bulb now, because, I don't know, maybe he's right, maybe ... who knows? It was odd, it came out of left field. And out of all these people, like why me?" Nowadays, when not at home in the Hollywood Hills, she sits front row at New York Fashion Week, cheering on designers she cares about, like Christian Siriano and Naeem Khan. "It's just so creative. I kind of laugh about it, because we spend three hours getting into hair and makeup, and then you go to the show. It's a performance almost," Ms. Electra said. She was at the Harper's Bazaar Icons party this year, where Cardi B threw a shoe at Nicki Minaj, but left before the melee began. She'd rather be at home listening to the motivational speaker Tony Robbins or watching documentaries about nordic aliens than out in the club. And though Ms. Electra might have come to L.A. in the mid 90s, she's only recently started to feel, in the second half of her career, that she's arrived. When her aerobic striptease DVDs became hugely popular in the early aughts, she knew she'd reached a turning point. "I feel like my career has mostly been based off of men, which is great and fine, but that was the first time I really connected with women." She recently debuted a new lingerie line based on the knowledge she gained dancing burlesque all those years, especially during her run at the Crazy Horse Paris revue. ("While I was performing in the show, there were very specific rules. Basically wearing your stockings, not over your knee, but all the way up, and it gives you a little more lift in the butt," Ms. Electra said. She also strongly recommends corsets, especially "when I'm feeling bloated, or, for instance, we just had some cake because it's a friend's birthday you have to live.") She's still acting, and dancing, and hosting, and singing, just now it's on her terms. In 2013, for example, she debuted new music at the Palm Springs White Party before a crowd of 30,000 people, and it ended up doing better on the charts than the singles she cut with Prince. "That was major," Ms. Electra said. "I actually cried at the end, because it was the first time where it wasn't under Prince, and it wasn't the Pussycat Dolls. It was me. It was me."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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Eight of us, including my dad, clung to tangled vines to steady ourselves against the slippery undergrowth along a slope in Rwanda's Volcanoes National Park . We were there to spot gorillas, and the forest was eerily quiet while we waited. Roger Amani, one of our guides, looked at us with a finger to his lips, reminding us that we couldn't make a sound. If we did, we might scare the primates away. We scanned the thick vegetation of African redwood trees. We knew from our trackers that the family we had hiked three hours to see, the Agashyas, were in the vicinity. One of my fellow hikers, an older gentleman from Boston, looked at me and whispered, "You know that movie 'Gorillas in the Mist'? I feel like we're living it." A few minutes later, there he was: the silverback Agashya, the head of the family, sleeping underneath a redwood and surrounded by a half dozen gorillas. I grabbed my dad's hand and squeezed it so hard that his skin turned deep red. This moment was why I had come to Rwanda. Rwanda was a father daughter trip, the first my dad, Vikesh, and I had taken together. I had long wanted to track mountain gorillas, a critically endangered species that lives only in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Rwanda, and my sights were set on Rwanda. My interest was driven by the country's recent news about gorilla tourism: Last May the Rwanda Development Board, a government agency, doubled the price of a daily gorilla tracking permit to 1,500 to generate more revenue for gorilla conservation. The increase received international attention. A month later, Wilderness Safaris opened Bisate Lodge, a six room sustainable property next to Volcanoes National Park. The lodge is the first luxury property in the heart of the gorilla trekking area and the first in a line of high end accommodations coming to the region One Only is scheduled to open a property in 2018 while the upscale safari brand Singita has one in the works for 2019. Dr. Dian Fossey, the American who spent close to 20 years studying Rwanda's gorillas, was a motivation, too. She was murdered in 1985 her death remains unsolved ("Gorillas in the Mist" is about her life). Dr. Fossey's namesake nonprofit operates the Karisoke Research Center, dedicated to gorilla conservation and research (the exhibit there that details her work is worth a visit), and in 2017, the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International celebrated its 50th anniversary. From Kigali to the Northwest Most trips to Rwanda begin in Kigali, the country's capital. We spent two nights there seeing sights like the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center and the NIYO Art Gallery, which shows works by contemporary Rwandan artists. Midmorning on our third day, our driver, Amos Tega, drove us two hours northwest toward Volcanoes National Park, home to five of the eight volcanoes in the thickly forested Virunga Mountains Karisimbi, Bisoke, Muhabura, Gahinga and Sabyinyo. Our plan was to spend two nights at Bisate Lodge followed by two more at Virunga Lodge, a 10 room property that opened in 2004. Bisate was spectacular. Built near an eroded volcanic cone, the lodge has dramatic views of the park's volcanoes and is surrounded by a village with the same name. Wilderness Safaris is reforesting the 103 acre concession in which the property is situated and hopes to plant 10,000 trees a year for the next several years. Guests can get involved Bisate's agronomist, Jean Moise, who is in charge of the reforestation effort, helps them plant a sapling of an indigenous tree such as the African redwood. (Those who participate get the GPS coordinates of their tree so that they can track it from home.) That afternoon, we went on an hourlong walk through the property's nature trail, where we spotted at least six species of birds, including the yellow bellied waxbill and the olive woodpecker. The terrain was relatively flat, and we chatted as we strolled. I was going through a rough patch at home, and it was a relief to be away from the stress. I shared this thought with Dad, and he replied that he understood. "We all need a break from our lives," he said. Such open conversation might be the norm between many fathers and daughters, but for my dad and I, it was a first. In the evening, we had pre dinner drinks by the fireside and then it was onto a delicious dinner. Our server presented us with different menus, each customized for our dietary restrictions I have celiac disease so anything with gluten is off limits, and Dad is allergic to dairy. The care the staff took with our meals was remarkable. I ate a simple mixed salad composed of leaves grown in the property's gardens, beef kebabs and local roasted sweet potatoes, and meringues and creamy milk chocolate from a chocolatier in the nearby city of Musanze. Dad had a dairy free risotto, roasted chicken, dairy free vanilla ice cream and spongecake. Bisate's rates include all meals and drinks so we could eat and imbibe as much as we wanted. We awoke at 5:30 a.m. and ate a hearty breakfast before heading to Volcanoes National Park headquarters to make the 7 a.m. gorilla tracking meeting time. The 40,000 acre national park, established in 1925, is Africa's oldest. Prosper Uwingeli, the chief park warden, told me that it is home to 305 mountain gorillas; there are around 880 of these primates left in the world today the rest live in parks in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In Rwanda, the 1,500 permit per person to track gorillas allows for an hour's interaction with the animals. These permits should be purchased well in advance 96 are available each day, and they sell out, particularly during peak season from June through September. Mr. Uwingeli said that hikers are permitted to track 12 of the 20 gorilla families that inhabit Volcanoes; hikers are divided into groups, limited to eight people, and each group tracks one family. The families live in different areas, and the hikes range from two to eight hours. Hiking groups are classified as easy, medium and difficult, and Mr. Uwingeli told me we could request the level. Always game for a workout, I was keen on a difficult hike. Dad asked for the easy one. We compromised with medium. At the park headquarters, we met our guides, Mr. Amani and Oliver Mutuyimana, and the six other hikers in our group. Mr. Mutuyimana said that we would be tracking the Agashya family, which lives between Mount Sabyinyo and Mount Gahinga. "The family has more than two dozen members, making it one of the largest in the park," he said. He explained that the clan was initially led by a silverback called Nyakarima and had 13 members, but that Agashya had challenged and deposed him in 2003. Once we were informed of gorilla don'ts not touching them or making eye contact was especially important it was time to go. Our warm up was a 30 minute walk through flat maize fields to the park's entrance. From there, we were in the wild. I have hiked all over the world, but this was different because there were no paved trails. All we could see was dense forest, and at many points, Mr. Amani and Mr. Mutuyimana used machetes to clear a semblance of a path. The vegetation zones in Volcanoes change depending on the altitude, and the varying topography an intermingling of lush green, massive redwoods, slender mountain bamboo trees, red mud underfoot and streams made the hike all the more scenic. We followed our guides through the bamboo trees that grow at the park's lowest and highest elevations. A tracker with a rifle in case we encountered forest buffalo or other dangerous wildlife walked ahead. It was November, Rwanda's rainy season, and the ground was muddy. We climbed over uneven rocks, looking for secure spots to place our feet; at an elevation of around 9,000 feet, we hit a vegetation zone replete with African redwoods glorious with their twisted trunks and emerald green, feathery leaves. Some of our fellow hikers were out of breath from the exercise and ever thinner air, but we were holding up. An hour later, Mr. Mutuyimana received a message on his radio from another tracker that the Agashyas were about 20 minutes away. We scrambled over stinging nettle plants that poked through our clothing, and clutched tree trunks to keep going forward. A few times, Dad and I supported each other by holding hands. And then we saw Agashya sleeping, encircled by some members of his clan. Up a slight slope, we could see two gorillas poking their heads above the nettles. "The gorillas won't move until Agashya wakes up," Mr. Amani said. "We have to wait." Ten minutes later, Agashya arose, and we took in his enormity Mr. Uwingeli said that like most silverbacks, he was around six feet tall and weighed between 400 and 500 pounds. I was struck by his face: humanlike, kind. In that moment, I understood what Dr. Fossey meant when she spoke about her first encounter with gorillas: "Immediately I was struck by the physical magnificence of the huge jet black bodies blended against the green palette wash of the thick forest foliage." Our group followed Agashya up a slope to a flat area. Here, just 20 feet from us, two groups of females playfully hit each other, grunting. Two young ones rolled on the forest's floor. Above, another baby swung from a bamboo tree, and several others stomped over scattered leaves, softly hooting. They were a spirited, tight knit bunch, and I was again reminded of Dr. Fossey, who said, "You take these fine, regal animals. How many fathers have the same sense of paternity? How many human mothers are more caring? The family structure is unbelievably strong." I alternated between observing in awe and desperately trying to take pictures on my phone. At one point, a young gorilla got so close that he brushed against my father's leg. And then Agashya, who Mr. Amani had said likes to exert his power, pounded his chest again and again. I felt no fear. Triggered by a deep recognition of our proximity on the evolutionary tree, I simply felt warmth and affection. By the time we walked back through the forest, five hours had passed; scrapes from the nettles and a few bruises from a minor fall or two were evidence of the adventure. The pampering in store for us at Bisate was a welcome way to end the day: massages and a meal of vegetable tarts, fried lake tilapia fillets and chocolate mousse cake, all dairy and gluten free. And there was free flowing wine and scotch. "I think, Dad," I said , as we unwound over our drinks, "today is going to be one of those days that we look back on and can't believe that we actually lived." We continued to talk about the paths our lives had taken. He shared some regrets and a few of the lessons he had learned along the way. I was certain that we had talked more these past few days than we had over the course of my lifetime. We did not make it to the village or the tomb, but with antibiotics I was soon well enough to make our trek to see the park's golden monkeys. They're also an endangered species, and while around 22,000 people a year track the gorillas, Mr. Uwingeli said that just 5,000 track the monkeys. A permit costs 100, and the hike, limited to the low lying bamboo forest, doesn't require the stamina of a gorilla trek. Travelers shouldn't miss the chance to see the photogenic apes with their round faces, long tails and thick, reddish gold furs. Three families, with a total of around 80 monkeys, live in the forest. Although the groups to find them can reach up to 20 people, we had just six others in ours. We spotted our family a half hour into our fast paced walk. Although there was no restriction on how close we could get to the primates, they wouldn't stay still. They jumped from tree to tree and swung on branches. Occasionally, we were lucky enough to glimpse their faces . We didn't have to cling to vines to see them, and it wasn't as dramatic as our encounter with Agashya. But it was a delightful coda. If You Go It's advisable to book a trip to the Volcanoes National Park area through a tour operator that specializes in Rwanda. An operator can arrange accommodations, tours and transfers and secure permits to track gorillas and golden monkeys. We used Travel Beyond, based in Wayzata, Minn., and our agent was Jenny Mikkelson, who is an expert on Africa, including Rwanda. jennym travelbeyond.com or 800 823 6063. Travelers can also apply for gorilla and golden monkey permits through the Rwanda Development Board by emailing reservation rwandatourism.com. Gorilla permits cost 1,500 a day; golden monkey permits are 100 a day. Bisate Lodge Located a 30 minute drive from Volcanoes National Park headquarters, the meeting point for all park activities, including gorilla hikes, this sustainable property has six rooms. A stay can only be booked through a tour operator or travel agent. Nightly rates begin at 2,300 for two people, inclusive of meals, alcohol and several activities like bird watching walks.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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STRATFORD UPON AVON, ENGLAND Visitors to Shakespeare County Raceway during the annual Yanks Weekend could be forgiven for thinking they had stumbled into a regular Sunday meet at a typical American dragstrip were it not for the British accents and license plates, that is, and the track name's incongruous association with the playwright, born a few miles down the road. Among the racecars present last spring were some hallmarks of Americana, including a '71 Chevrolet Camaro called the Bootlegger and a '57 Bel Air with "Honky Tonkin' " lettered on its doors. A Show 'n' Shine event featured dozens more Detroit products, restored to original condition and parked amid tents and campers on the grassy grounds of a former Royal Air Force base in Warwickshire. Even in this setting, which emphatically favored speed over style, Norman Dawood's 1949 Cadillac Series 62 Club Coupe drew a crowd of admirers. "I have other classic cars," said Mr. Dawood, who owns such quintessentially British automobiles as a 1966 Aston Martin DB6 and a 1963 Rolls Royce Silver Cloud III. "But no other car gets anything like the looks that this one gets." When Mr. Dawood, a Londoner who runs a translating and subtitling business, saw the black fastback on eBay, listed by a seller in New Jersey, he bought it without hesitation. With characteristic understatement, Mr. Dawood admitted that the car was "a bit of an impulse purchase." Like many fans of the big American cars that British enthusiasts call Yank Tanks, Mr. Dawood was particularly drawn to Cadillacs from 1949, which was the second model year to feature the auto industry's pioneering foray into tailfins. Discreet compared with the towering appendages that arrived a decade later, the fins had been inspired by a clandestine look at the Lockheed P 38 Lightning, a fighter plane with twin tails, given to General Motors' designers working on the '48 models. It was the '49s, however, that were first to be fitted with a new 331 cubic inch overhead valve V 8, which became a standard bearer for G.M. The engine's considerable power can still be felt on the highway, where Mr. Dawood's car easily keeps up with the flow of modern traffic. Mr. Dawood's Club Coupe, also known as a Sedanette, lacks power steering but has several options, including a Hydra Matic transmission which added 174 to the 1949 sticker price of 2,966 as well as power windows and seats. Befitting a Cadillac, it is fitted with the modern conveniences of its day, including a cigar lighter, multiple ashtrays and enough headroom for a driver to wear his fedora. The window malfunction is emblematic of a series of small problems, some potentially incapacitating, that plague Mr. Dawood's Cadillac, and indeed many of the American classics increasingly bought on the Internet by British collectors. "The American car scene in the U.K. is just growing and growing because of the Internet," said John Pryor, president of the National Association of Street Clubs, a co sponsor of Yanks Weekend. "More people are buying classic American cars now because they can fix them more easily, and we're now seeing dedicated shops opening up here," said Mr. Pryor, who recently traded in his 1959 Vauxhall Victor for a '56 Chevy. While the Cadillac was en route from the United States, Mr. Dawood found a copy of a British magazine, Classic American. "I couldn't believe my eyes," he said. "On the cover was a car identical to the one I'd just bought, belonging to some Scottish earl. The article was about a guy who specialized in restoring American cars, and I thought, 'This is brilliant. How lucky I am to find someone who already knows all about this exact one?' " A few days after Yanks Weekend, typical British spring weather had returned, and Mr. Dawood was doing 65 miles per hour on the M4 highway, a frigid rain blowing in through the open window. He was on his way to see the specialist in the article, Mike Sargeant, 37, the owner of Tornado Automotive in Henley on Thames, about an hour west of London. The cars crammed into the Tornado garage, some of the greatest hits of American automotive design, were in various states of repair. On the lift sat a red 1958 Oldsmobile 88 convertible that Mr. Sargeant said was the first off the production line that year. Underneath it was Mr. Sargeant's 1936 Ford, a decrepit three window coupe that he was rebuilding as a hot rod. A 1965 Ford Mustang, completely disassembled, sat near the shell of a Chevy El Camino. Mr. Sargeant is also restoring a Dodge Charger and a Plymouth Road Runner, both 1968 models, that he said belong to John Crichton Stuart, the 7th Marquess of Bute, a former Formula One driver (known then as Johnny Dumfries) and the owner of the 1949 Cadillac Mr. Dawood saw on the cover of Classic American. "I've got an interest in everything old," Mr. Sargeant said. "I like that '50s American kind of style, I like '50s rock 'n' roll, '50s rockabilly. I love the clothing, everything. I'm quite '50s oriented, really." Mr. Sargeant said he was drawn to American cars by his father, John, who has a black '57 Chevy drag race car that he bought 14 years ago from a seller on an American air base in Britain, once a common source of vintage American cars. John Sargeant, who raced his Chevy at the Yanks Weekend, said the catalyst for his interest in drag racing and American cars was the 1964 British Drag Festival, which featured demonstration runs by the American drag racing star, Don Garlits. "You catch the bug real bad" he said. "I'll be 66 this year, and I'm still going at it." Trifive Chevys the models from 1955, '56 and '57 are perennial favorites in Britain. "They've been coming in for years and years, but now I deal with a lot more late '60s cars and '70s cars than I ever used to," said Mike Sargeant, who favors a slicked back 1950's style haircut and blue coveralls. "The muscle cars have become very popular. People are now looking to the rarer cars, the Road Runners, Challengers, the Barracudas, stuff like that." Cadillacs, however, are still an anomaly in Britain. "They are hard to restore, and parts are hard to find," Mr. Sargeant said as he disassembled the door to reach to the window mechanism of Mr. Dawood's '49. "The body parts are very complicated." For Mr. Sargeant, the Internet has been a blessing and a curse. "It's made things so much easier," he said. "Before, if you had an old car, you either had to repair what you had or you'd go to Hemmings Motor News and search for a part. It was a nightmare, you'd be phoning America, someone would mail you some photos in an envelope and you'd go, 'Yeah, that's the one,' and mail it back." Mr. Sargeant said he often felt like a doctor breaking bad news to a patient when a car arrived with unanticipated problems. "Norman paid a tremendous amount of money for this car, and the first person to see it in the country was me," he said. "He sent me the photos, and it looked stunning, but when I got it off the loader I was shocked. I'd never met Norman before, and I had to break the news to him that the car he bought was a complete mess," he said. The car was running, Mr. Sargeant said, but barely. The wiring harness was a fire hazard and had to be replaced. Mr. Sargeant's shop also rebuilt the brakes, as well as the front and rear suspensions. A "horrible sort of brown finish" on the dashboard and steering column was painted black. And then the problems with the windows started. When the window problem was solved, Mr. Dawood's Cadillac was back on the highway, the blustery weather at bay, again drawing stares and waves from other motorists as the car's modern at the time heater gave the car's cavernous interior the cozy feel of a warm living room on a frosty day.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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RENNIE HARRIS PUREMOVEMENT at the New Victory Theater (June 1, 7 p.m.; June 2, 2 and 7 p.m.; June 3, noon and 5 p.m.; through June 10). The Philadelphia based hip hop choreographer takes on funk music and 1970s street dance in the premiere of "Rennie Harris: Funkedified." Inspired by the political turmoil he experienced during his childhood, he sees funk music as the foundation of hip hop dance and modern culture. Mr. Harris grew up watching Don Campbell on "Soul Train"; in the production, which features video depicting African American communities during the 1970s, he explores Mr. Campbell's locking, popping and waving, as well as breaking and social dances of the time. His group is joined by an onstage band and the Philadelphia dance crew the Hood Lockers, renown for its locking skills. 646 223 3010, newvictory.org 'THE LET GO' at the Park Avenue Armory (June 7 July 1). This large scale, site specific multiweek event is masterminded by the interdisciplinary artist Nick Cave, who transforms the armory into a vivid dance landscape in which spectators are invited to do just what the title says they should: let go. Within this dance hall environment are performances, an installation in the form of a Mylar sculpture, dance based encounters and music provided by D.J.s. For some programs, Mr. Cave works with the choreographer Francesca Harper; for others, there will be dancing by community groups. On June 26, as part of "An Evening of Artistic Responses: The Let Go," the musician Nona Hendryx, the vocalist and artist Helga Davis, Ms. Harper and Reggie (Regg Roc) Gray and his company, D.R.E.A.M. Ring, respond to the installation, which references issues of social justice, with site specific performances. 212 616 3930, armoryonpark.org WYNTON MARSALIS WITH JARED GRIMES at Jazz at Lincoln Center's Rose Theater at Frederick P. Rose Hall (June 7 9, 8 p.m.). Mr. Marsalis works with the tap dancer Mr. Grimes in "(The Ever Fonky Lowdown)," a production featuring three dancers, the 15 piece Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, three guest vocalists and Wendell Pierce as the narrator. The piece comes nearly 25 years after Mr. Marsalis presented the premiere of "Blood on the Fields," which traces a couple's journey from slavery to freedom and earned him the Pulitzer Prize. In the "(The Ever Fonky Lowdown)," he continues his exploration of America's relationship to race. 212 721 6500, jazz.org NEW YORK CITY BALLET at the David H. Koch Theater (through June 3). The company winds down its spring season with performances of "Coppelia," a charmer of a three act ballet, staged by George Balanchine and Alexandra Danilova. Two new casts appear this weekend: Ashley Bouder as Swanilda and Joseph Gordon as Frantz on Friday and Saturday nights, and, in the same roles, Erica Pereira and Anthony Huxley on Saturday afternoon. The Sunday program all Balanchine promises to be a spectacular finish, with "Concerto Barocco," "Agon" and "The Four Temperaments." Plan on applauding extra hard: The performance is the last in New York for Likolani Brown, Cameron Dieck and Savannah Lowery. They are moving on. 212 496 0600, nycballet.com
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