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Diana Athill spent most of her life as an editor, working with titans of literary history. They were mostly male most anointed titans are and the challenge of this job was immense enough to warrant a thick memoir, "Stet: An Editor's Life." Remarkably, Athill didn't use the pages to complain, an instinct that would have been easy to understand, but instead to sing the praises of the written word and the people who make it their mission to tell stories. What she less overtly advertised, though, was her fiercely independent life. Athill died last week at the age of 101, and her words, at several critical points in this reader's life, provided a lifeline. Perhaps her greatest legacy was her refusal to cede to societal expectations as she carved out a persistently unusual world for herself in which the demands of femininity marriage and children, specifically were rethought and redefined. I was introduced to Athill through her memoir "Somewhere Towards the End." Published when she was 91, it was a meditation on the mixed bag that is aging. While Athill was quick to point out the injustices of growing older, chief among them giving up sex (Athill loved sex in her very British way, decreeing that every woman should have a few good love affairs), her tone was almost defiantly peppy never saccharine, but refusing to give in to the weighty fear with which we tend to face the great unknown. I had my first existential crisis (that's putting it generously) at age 13, and sat with the pain for years afterward. My primary literary bedfellows in the ensuing years were death obsessives like Philip Roth and Robert Lowell, or poets who were far too successful in its pursuit (Sylvia Plath, who was less enthusiastic about her life in the London literary scene than Athill, her counterpart who was born more than a decade before her and survived her by more than 50 years). I figured if I couldn't solve the mystery around mortality then I could at least wallow with some of the greats. I was on year 15 of this strategy when I found myself in possession of Athill's slim book in consideration of the topic. The simplicity of her prose belies a complexity of thought that would have been necessary to edit V. S. Naipaul (or survive a dinner with Jean Rhys); though Athill may not have been afraid of death, she didn't think it was simple, either. She just didn't dwell on its complexities. I swallowed her words like barbiturates and they killed the fear. "I think that underneath, or alongside, a reader's conscious response to a text," Athill writes, "whatever is needy in him is taking in whatever the text offers to assuage that need." Guilty as charged. In the same book Athill reflects on how her relationship to sex had "gone through several stages and had not always been a happy one, but that had always seemed central to my existence." Sex, she explains, "obliterates the individuality of young women more often than it does that of young men, because so much more of a woman than a man is used by sex." And her individuality appears to be the quality Athill valued most as she made decisions that were unorthodox, and geared to maximize joy and minimize obligation. She wasn't the workaholic we expect passionately single women to be (in the movies, it seems everyone who's unmarried by choice wears a blazer and wields a Blackberry), proclaiming in "Stet," "I was not ashamed of valuing my private life more highly than my work; that, to my mind, is what everyone ought to do." But here she must have been underplaying her ambition, so spectacular was the second act that followed (achieved at fourth act age). Athill was under no illusion that she would be celebrated for her work as an editor: "We must always remember that we are only midwives if we want praise for progeny we must give birth to our own." And so she did, writing novels, essays and nonfiction with the kind of 9 to 5 work ethic she'd once shown in the office of the publisher Andre Deutsch. She quickly found her subject: romance in its many forms. In "Stet," it was a romance with words. In "Yesterday Morning," with memories of childhood. In "After a Funeral," it was a love lost to depression, her partner ending his life violently in Athill's home, an act she treated with her signature lack of fanfare. She used "A Florence Diary" to describe every inch of the Italian city as happily as a tween with a thesaurus. She made peace with love's dark demise in "Instead of a Letter," in which she admits frankly that an early broken engagement has left her with a fear of lasting intimacy. She had love affair after love affair, including a brief but soul expanding dalliance with the Black Panther Hakim Jamal (a man who'd also had a high profile relationship with the actress Jean Seberg before the murder of his next girlfriend by his fellow Panthers, and who later was murdered himself). Athill lived with the Jamaican playwright Barry Reckord for nearly 40 years, though she was his lover for fewer than 10.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Lynda Cartwright and Fred Nelson III, Aretha Franklin's longtime musical conductor, were married Dec. 24 at the New Faith Baptist Church in Matteson, Ill., where Mr. Nelson serves as the musical director and Ms. Cartwright sings in the choir. The weekend leading to the marriage of Fred Nelson III and Lynda Cartwright on Christmas Eve was frantic with mad dash details amid holiday hoopla, but it could have been worse. Credit Aretha Franklin for lowering the stress level. Mr. Nelson, Ms. Franklin's musical conductor since 2011, had expected to be dispatched to Detroit from his hometown, Chicago, just before Christmas to handle the music for her annual holiday party, a lavish event that included a performance by the Four Tops. Winter weather in Detroit and Chicago made the prospect of flying so close to his wedding day risky. But Mr. Nelson, 58, wouldn't have missed it if Ms. Franklin had insisted he be there. (She didn't.) "To me, Aretha Franklin is the creme de la creme," said Mr. Nelson, who has worked as producer, conductor, arranger or pianist for many big name singers, including Jennifer Hudson, Gladys Knight and Patti LaBelle. "They don't make many like her. So when you get the call to work with her you feel like, 'Wow, I must have done something right.'" Though the Nelson name was prominent in Chicago music circles he started performing at age 6, playing piano as an opener for Ray Charles, and his father, Fred Nelson Jr., helped shape the city's gospel sound in the 1950s, '60s and '70s as the organist at First Church of Deliverance she knew nothing of Mr. Nelson's background. Still, she felt intimidated by his job at the church because of its importance. New Faith, which seats 2,500, is home to six choirs. "One day I saw him walking down the hall, and I was going back and forth in my mind," she said. "'Should I tell him about the piano?'" If there was anyone who might know of a buyer, she thought, it would be Mr. Nelson. "I finally got the nerve to ask him directly." She had a picture of the piano, bought for the eldest of her two sons, Dionte Cartwright, now the youth music conductor at New Faith. But Mr. Nelson wanted to see the Yamaha Grand Disklavier in person. They made loose plans to meet at her house in the Chicago suburb Homewood, at a time when Mr. Nelson's chaotic schedule allowed. (In addition to his work with Ms. Franklin and at the church, he is an artistic director at the City of Matteson School District; music minister at First Church of Deliverance, where his father had played organ; and an independent producer, performer and arranger.) Ms. Cartwright got word one day while she was driving her son Kyle Hinton, then 16, to the orthodontist that Mr. Nelson would be at her house in 20 minutes. "I raced to get home I barely made it and I was trying to act normal," said Ms. Cartwright, who is curvy and petite. Mr. Nelson, 6 feet tall, barrel chested and quick to laugh, put her at ease. "He was looking at the piano, and then we started talking about his daughter, who was having an H.R. problem at her job." "I had also just lost 30 pounds, and I was in my exercise clothes," she said. "He said he was diabetic, and I told him diabetes runs in my family, which was why I was exercising. He said he wanted to lose weight." Once Mr. Nelson left Homewood with a promise to be back in touch about the piano, Ms. Cartwright got curious: Did the turns their conversation had taken signal romantic interest? "Next time I went to the gym, where I have this crew of workout friends, I was like, 'It seems like he's trying to get a little more information.' They were like, 'He's trying to ask you out!' So next time I talked to him I said, 'You need to find a workout partner,'" she said. "Fred said, 'What about you? Will you be my life coach?'" It had been a while since Mr. Nelson, who was widowed in 2007, met someone he warmed to that quickly. His wife, Cynthia, had inflammatory breast cancer, a rare, aggressive form of the disease. They met as teenagers and had been married 22 years when she died. The couple's only daughter, Paige Nelson, now 29, was finishing her freshman year in college. "That was a crazy time," Mr. Nelson said. "She was pure," he said, meaning she was unfamiliar with, and not much interested in, many of the music industry figures with whom Mr. Nelson rubs elbows. Valencia Edwards, a friend Ms. Cartwright met on the job at a Chicago pharmaceutical company years ago, recalled Ms. Cartwright asking her who Clive Davis was after she met the music producer at an event with Mr. Nelson. "She asked me if I had ever heard of this 'Cleeve Davis' everyone was making such a fuss over," Ms. Edwards said, laughing. Mr. McKenzie confirmed that Ms. Cartwright's anti diva attitude won his friend's heart. The day the couple first met, "Fred called me as soon as he got in the car. He said, 'I just met the sweetest girl,'" Mr. McKenzie said. "The thing about Lynda was, she's grounded. She didn't want anything from him. He said, 'I think this girl is my friend.' And I knew that was it. You have to be friends before you can be lovers." The couple had their first date on June 13, 2015. Mr. Nelson picked her up and took her to his favorite Chicago restaurant, Tavern on Rush, and she gave up her diet. "We had three appetizers and two entrees that night, and I loved it," she said. "When I met Fred, my youngest son still had two years to go in high school," Ms. Cartwright said. "I said, 'I'm not going to date. I'll wait.' Because I wanted a storybook love affair." But after she and Mr. Nelson had gone on four dates, "he asked me if we could have a committed relationship," she said. "I had read all these books about how to have a relationship, and there's a process. I didn't want it to happen so fast." Still, there was no denying she was falling in love. Ms. Edwards, her friend, picked up on it immediately. "I went out with them several times, and every time she talked to Fred she would use her LaToya Jackson whisper voice," she said. "It was all baby sweetie. They took off so fast." Within months of their first date, Mr. Nelson was bringing Ms. Cartwright to concerts he conducted for Ms. Franklin in cities including Indianapolis and Detroit, and Ms. Cartwright was thinking long term. "I said, 'I'll give him two years to give me a ring," she said. "I was praying to God. I wanted us to be empty nesters together." After a year she grew impatient: "He told me several times he wanted to marry me. I never said it to him, but I started thinking, Why doesn't he put his money where his mouth is?" On Dec. 24, 2016, a year before their wedding day, he did. Between gigs in the waning months of 2016, Mr. Nelson and Mr. McKenzie had gone ring shopping in Chicago. As Ms. Cartwright ordered her second chocolate martini that night at Joe's Seafood, Prime Steak and Stone Crab, Mr. Nelson excused himself and went to his car, where he had left the princess cut diamond solitaire ring that he and Mr. McKenzie had picked out. Mr. Nelson said, "I could tell she was getting tipsy, and I thought, Oh, God," but by the time he returned she had taken only a sip. He asked her to marry him from across the table. Ms. Cartwright, reserved even under the spell of a martini, quietly said yes. A flurry of waiters clapped, and they were engaged. The couple chose to get married in a simple ceremony just after regular Sunday morning services. Of the more than 1,000 congregants who filled New Faith's pews that snowy day, around 150 people some who knew about the wedding in advance and some who didn't stayed behind. Dionte Cartwright walked his mother down the aisle to a church stage set with Christmas poinsettias while a full band performed the "Dreamgirls" song "When I First Saw You." Mr. Nelson, in a black tuxedo with a gold bow tie, was waiting with Kyle Hinton, the ring bearer. Before Dr. Felder, the officiant, completed a short, traditional marriage ceremony, there was a musical interlude: the platinum selling gospel artist Percy Bady, who has known Mr. Nelson for more than 20 years, performed an original composition, "Love Never Dies," on keyboard. Tears flowed. After the final "I do," another R B and gospel star, Terisa Griffin, followed Mr. Bady's performance with a burn the house down rendition of "I Hope You Dance." The country artist Lee Ann Womack made the song a hit, but Mr. Nelson had his own ideas about how he wanted Ms. Griffin to sing it. "He called me and said, 'I want you to do this song at my wedding. Make it the Gladys version,'" she said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
LONDON Three weeks after naming the 17 year old makeup artist James Charles its first cover boy, CoverGirl, one of the largest cosmetics companies in the United States, has announced another first: its debut CoverGirl in a hijab. Nura Afia, 24, a Colorado native, first started watching online beauty tutorials in 2011 while breast feeding her baby daughter, Laila. Married at 18 and caring for a child by 19, Ms. Afia spent a great deal of time at home. It was then that she started looking on the internet for new and exciting ways to experiment with makeup. She soon saw what she felt was a gap in the market and began creating YouTube tutorials of her own. "While there was a lot of content focused around fashion and how to dress, there were still very few videos out there for the massive audience of observant Muslim girls who love beauty and are constantly on the hunt for cosmetics," Ms. Afia recalled during a telephone interview this week. "I just felt there was a real void especially in videos produced by Muslims living in the United States, and because the dramatic looks many women who wear hijab choose to wear can take real practice. So I decided to have a go at creating videos myself." "When I first saw the email from CoverGirl earlier this year, I just couldn't believe it," said Ms. Afia, who has more than 215,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel and 13 million views of her video tutorials and who has previously teamed up with Revlon. "I actually took two or three days to reply because I thought it must be fake. "I felt it had to be some sort of joke given they had never had an observant Muslim campaign face before." That may be true. But after decades of narrow definitions of what can constitute mainstream beauty, the appointment of Ms. Afia comes as more and more consumer brands feature a range of faces, faiths, races and lifestyle choices in advertising campaigns. And according to Ogilvy Noor, the Islamic branding agency, the Muslim personal cosmetics and care market is now worth more than 54 billion, a figure that is expected to reach 80 billion by 2020. Shelina Janmohamed, the group's vice president and author of "Generation M: Young Muslims Changing the World," said this week that faces like Ms. Afia and the British blogger Amena Khan, who was signed this summer by L'Oreal, indicated a sea change in the personal care industry. "These appointments are part of a growing recognition that the female Muslim community has a significant role in the development of this market," she said, "and that consumers increasingly want to see their versions of themselves and their lifestyles reflected back to them by the beauty industry. "There are millions of Muslim women who are very keen to both express their faith and also appear fashion forward. Self presentation using makeup particularly if they choose to wear a head scarf is key to how they feel they can fit into wider society." Ms. Afia agreed, saying that growing up she had felt uncomfortable wearing her hijab in high school and that she had received thousands of comments from fans applauding her for helping them find ways to express themselves using her cosmetics techniques. (She also noted, though, that she received plenty of negative messages from Muslims who felt she was a hypocrite for both trying to cover herself and wearing attention seeking makeup). "Frankly, I feel proud to be part of a movement that is showing the hijab in a positive light for once. The more of us who can wear them as representatives of these big household names on TV or billboards the better," she said. "It is a reminder that the hijab can take us to amazing places, and not hold us back from achieving our wildest dreams like some people say it will. "These brands aren't exploiting us. It's more about including us and making us feel like we matter. It's about them finally showing us that they know we are beautiful, too."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Would Having the Tokyo Games Even Be Fair to the Athletes? Gregorio Paltrinieri of Italy stood on the starting blocks, took his mark and knifed into the pool. Three times he hit the water, racing the 400 meter, 800 meter and 1,500 meter freestyles. But the scene at his 25 meter training facility last week in Ostia, a coastal suburb of Rome, proved a poor substitute for what he would have experienced if the Italian Olympic trials had been held, as planned, in a 50 meter facility in Riccione. "There was nobody else in the pool," Paltrinieri said. "No crowd. No timekeepers. It was just me and the water." He added: "The races went really bad. My preparation was not complete." In Italy, Paltrinieri said, he is one of the few Italian national team members with access to a training pool. It is the same in the United States, where prospective Olympians in Arizona continue training, albeit with restrictions. Stricter rules have closed pools used by clubs in California, leaving Olympians there high and dry. It's a climate that rewards resourcefulness makeshift backyard conditioning setups and ocean training in wet suits in lieu of the usual rigors of regimen. "I'm lucky right now," Paltrinieri said. "I'm still swimming." But he has spoken to competitors from Spain, France, Germany and Ukraine who are not. "I don't think it's fair to compete in an Olympics where 90 percent of the guys are losing two, three weeks and probably way more to training," he said. For anyone losing a considerable amount of time to training, "you can't even imagine competing in August at the Olympics," Paltrinieri added. On Sunday, the swimmer Michael Gross of Germany, a six time Olympic medalist in the 1980s, added his voice to the growing chorus when he appealed to the International Olympic Committee president, Thomas Bach, to postpone the Summer Olympics. "Now, 2020, would be unfair," he wrote in an open letter to Bach, who is also from Germany. In an emergency meeting of the executive board, the I.O.C. on Sunday essentially established a four week window to determine, in concert with Japan's Olympic officials, whether to postpone the Games or hold a scaled down version. That latest I.O.C. statement failed to address the situation of the athletes, who are facing another month of upheaval and uncertainty in their preparation for the Olympics or for the selection process. But later Sunday, Bach, a 1976 Olympic fencer, released an open letter to the athletes in which he acknowledged the havoc the situation has wreaked on athletes' preparation. "The uncertainty rocks our nerves and raises or strengthens doubts about a positive future," he wrote. Bach added that the ability to adapt, and to never give up even if the chance to succeed "appears to be very small," is the hallmark of successful athletes and the basis for the I.O.C.'s determination to avoid making any hasty decisions about the Games. Asked for his reaction to the I.O.C.'s statement, Paltrinieri said on Sunday, "A month is a lot." He added, "For now, I'll just keep training as if I'll be racing in August. Then we'll see." It could be argued that the playing field is never truly level, as some countries enjoy access to better resources, like state of the art pools and cutting edge coaching and science. It can be argued that the playing field is never truly level as long as some countries find new and inventive ways to flout antidoping policies, a cat and mouse game that particularly favors cheaters as testing, because of border closures and travel restrictions, is uneven at best. But the coronavirus outbreak has also created injustices within countries, producing a situation, Paltrinieri said, where "nobody is ready or in the mind set of competing." In the United States, Katie Ledecky and Simone Manuel, with 10 Olympic medals between them, scrambled to find training waters after the Stanford facilities were shut down. Allison Schmitt, an eight time Olympic medalist, was able to continue to use Arizona State's pools for two hours a day. So fluid are the circumstances that five hours after Schmitt spoke on Saturday about having pool access, she texted to say she was hearing the Arizona State facilities might be "shut down completely" this week. "All you can do is take it day to day," said Schmitt, who created a makeshift strength circuit in her backyard, anchored by a TRX strength band, after the on campus weight room was shut down. The U.S. swimming Olympic trials are scheduled for June 21 to 28 in Omaha. So upside down are the circumstances that Paltrinieri, who also competes in open water events, cannot train in the sea because Italy's beaches, he said, have been closed. Meanwhile, the American swimmer Michael Andrew is training in the Pacific Ocean because his San Diego area pool was shut down. So topsy turvy are these times that the father, and coach, of the three time British Olympian Hannah Miley of Scotland asked her to appeal to her swimsuit sponsor, Arena, for wet suits so she and her Aberdeen teammates would be able to continue to train in the River Don or the River Dee. Miley was one of a handful of British Olympians who competed last weekend at the Edinburgh International at the Royal Commonwealth Pool even as soccer matches and other sporting events across Britain were canceled or postponed (as were the British Olympic trials, scheduled for April in London, shortly after the meet's conclusion). During the Saturday finals session, a body pump class featuring rubber barbell weight sets took place in one of the upstairs studios, behind a set of bleachers where two teenage swimmers debated whether the swim meet constituted a gathering of 500 people, which was the cutoff proposed by Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland's leader, for the cancellation of an event. From Italy, Paltrinieri followed the Edinburgh results with confusion. How was it that his British competitors were free to gather and race when the virus that had effectively shut down Italy had spread across Britain? "I don't really understand what's happening in other countries like France and Great Britain," Paltrinieri said. "They keep doing their things knowing that we had the same problem and our situation is getting worse every day." For Paltrinieri, who last raced in mid December, the situation struck him as another ripple in a sea of inequities. "I'll not have raced for seven, eight months when I go to the Olympics, so I don't know," he said. "I think it's crazy to just think about competing in the Olympics right now."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
"It's Danish Christmas in a sandwich," said Mads Ravn, a Danish archaeologist, about the flaeskesteg sandwiches we were devouring. Flaeskesteg, the Christmas dinner of Denmark, is pork with a rind that's been roasted to a crispy crackling. At Stegen Dellen, a vendor at the new Street Food Market in Aarhus, it's served year round on a pillowy brioche bun slathered in mayonnaise and topped with bracing red kraut and long curls of pickled cucumber, wrapped in butcher paper (and, in this case, washed down with a Midtfyns Stout from a neighboring vendor, Olfred). The permanent street food market opened in August with 14 vendors and five bars, housed in shipping containers scattered across a former bus garage. (Twelve additional vendors are to open in the coming months.) "The idea came three years ago when my husband, our three boys and I were visiting London's Borough Market," said Britt Vorre, the market's founder. "Afterward, we began planning a market with the same vibe, but in a Danish style. We visited more markets to gather ideas." During my second visit a few nights later, I made the grazing rounds, working the garage's perimeter. The fragrant pulled duck at Duck It came in a soft sesame bun with a slice of Danish Cheddar. The guys at Grilled Cheese tempted me with samples of a truffled mozzarella and Vesterhavsost, a Danish Gouda of sorts, but I stayed on course for a slice of broccoli and bacon pizza at La Rossa, followed by a fortifying glass of tempranillo at Vinos.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
ALBANY To protest the absence of his star player Napheesa Collier from the recent list of finalists for the Naismith Trophy awarded annually to the country's best college basketball player the UConn women's coach Geno Auriemma invoked ... James Naismith himself. "Dr. Naismith is rolling over in his grave," Auriemma said this week. "He is. He never envisioned that somebody that good would be left off his list. "I feel bad for her," he said of Collier. "If she played at any other school, she'd be the front runner with the numbers she puts up. But she plays at Connecticut, so what are you going to do?" Auriemma's theory, that Collier's omission is part of a backlash to a generation of UConn dominance in women's basketball, is bolstered by a series of decisions made this month. The Huskies, despite a 31 2 regular season record and a win over the defending national champion, Notre Dame, received a No. 2 seed in this year's N.C.A.A. tournament. It was the first time since 2006 the Huskies were not a top seed in a region. Rebecca Lobo, the former UConn star and current ESPN commentator, is a past winner of both awards. She is also a Naismith voter, and said she had Collier on her ballot. When asked whom she considered the best player in the country to be, Lobo said: "Gustafson has had the best season, I think. But that doesn't make her the best in the country." By virtually every measure imaginable, a case can be made that that honor belongs to Collier, a senior from O'Fallon, Mo. In win shares, for instance the advanced metric that seeks to quantify the number of wins a player produces for her team Collier ranks just ahead of Gustafson for the most valuable player in the country this season. It is this kind of catchall statistic, Collier's defenders argue, that best expresses her value. Because while her UConn statistics are impressive 21.1 points and 10.7 rebounds a game she does not lead the nation in any individual category. Indeed, it could be that Collier's versatility hurt her with some voters, even though it makes her so important to Connecticut (34 2), which faces Louisville (32 3), a No. 1 seed, in the N.C.A.A. tournament's Albany Region final on Sunday. As one W.N.B.A. general manager put it, Collier is "the most turnkey" of the top prospects in the 2019 draft, which will be held on April 10. Gustafson is the old school post scorer. Ionescu is the playmaking point guard. Durr and Ogunbowale are the two way shooting guards. Collier? She does everything. She's 6 foot 1, and Auriemma uses her to guard opposing centers at times, sends her out to face guard wings and even some guards. Despite this steady diet of the best that opponents can throw at UConn, she ranks 92nd out of 733 qualified players in defensive points per possession allowed, at 0.665, ahead of every player on the Naismith and Wade award lists. She has posted a steal percentage above two and a block rate of nearly 5 percent. And she has done all this at the defensive end while ranking second in the country to Gustafson in offensive points per possession, with an assist percentage (21.5) more befitting a point guard, a rebound rate 120th in the country among 3,393 Division I players and a turnover percentage of only 11 percent, reflecting a decision making process that has W.N.B.A. teams salivating over the chance to add her. One front office executive labeled her the "best bigger player in the draft." Collier did not hide her surprise over the snubs, but said she would continue to strive to achieve goals that are measurable and within her control. "Yeah, I thought it was crazy, but I don't need people voting to tell me I'm the best," Collier said. "I know I am. Kobe Bryant only won one M.V.P., so that shows the best player doesn't always win. And to be honest, right now I'm focused on something they can't vote on, which is winning a national championship." Louisville Coach Jeff Walz echoed his friend Auriemma's incredulity at the lack of respect for Collier.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
For cable television stalwarts like TBS, ESPN, Discovery and Univision, 2016 was not a great year. Cord cutting remained a threat as viewership totals declined by double digits on a percentage basis, and the ratings for programs, including scripted dramas and sports, on cable and broadcast TV proved, yet again, that fewer people are watching live. But for cable news, it was a banner year. The presidential primaries, the general election and Donald J. Trump's victory proved to be a huge boon for the networks. Fox News, which was rocked by a sexual harassment scandal that forced the ouster of Roger Ailes, its longtime chairman, had its highest rated year. CNN had one of its best years, narrowing the gap with Fox. And even once lowly MSNBC had an enormous leap from where it was a year ago, seeing the highest percentage gains of the three news networks. Just two years ago, cable news channels looked as if they were beginning to fade. Ratings were down significantly from the high water mark of the 2008 presidential election.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Stella McCartney is celebrating her new fragrance, POP, with a capsule collection of classic designs like the chain hardware Falabella bag ( 845) and Elyse lace up platform shoes ( 1,100) in vivid pink tones. At 112 Greene Street. Just in time for Mother's Day, the Brooklyn based jeweler Lady Grey is offering custom gold and silver plated brooches filled with fresh blooms including gloriosa lilies, chinch and oncidium orchids by the floral design studio Fox Fodder Farm ( 150). At ladygreyjewelry.com. On Friday and Saturday, the Jonathan Adler annual warehouse sale in an actual warehouse promises discounts up to 70 percent on hundreds of whimsical pieces of furniture, lighting, decorative accessories, bedding and rugs, including a lacquer console ( 300, originally 995) and a reversible letter pillow ( 25, originally 145). At 885 East 138th Street, the Bronx. The Sandro and Maje sale offering up to 80 percent off spring styles like a Sandro multicolor wrap skirt ( 85, originally 355) and a Maje dot print open back dress ( 105, originally 480) starts Tuesday. At 260 Fifth Avenue.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Ballet is extreme. That's exactly why the choreographer Katy Pyle loves it. But Ms. Pyle has invented something new: ballez. It sums up her company, her movement practice, her teaching and the way she envisions the future of ballet. She is showcasing stories of, as she puts it, lesbian, queer and transgender people in the unlikely world of tutus and tiaras. Ballet is exclusive; ballez, made up of dancers who identify in myriad ways, is not. "I just don't believe in neutral," Ms. Pyle said in an interview after a recent rehearsal. "I want to use this form to show that people are still carrying these subconscious judgments and ideas about how we should behave in relation to each other, how we should look and move, and what's possible and what's allowed." Ballez, which is also the name of her company, aims to nurture as well as empower. A typical ballez class includes the usual exercises and combinations but begins with students sharing their names and a preferred gender pronoun; ballet barres are placed in a triangle so the students are closer to one another. And there are no mirrors. "The emphasis isn't on technical perfection," said Madison Krekel, a member of the company, which has some dozen dancers. "It's about using what you have and, most important, using it to see each other in the room and to really receive each other." As the director, Ms. Pyle may be in charge, but she's not interested in hierarchy. Her own history has led her to this point. Persuaded to quit ballet as a teenager she was repeatedly told that she was too big and too strong she has reimagined it on her own terms. In Ms. Pyle's works, female heroines may fall in love, but they're not weak, timid or virginal; they stand up for themselves. They're fighters. And they can love whomever they want. "I have been really angry about not being allowed into this world that I deeply committed myself to as a young person," she said. "It's been this knot inside of me. But because ballet was cut off from me as a really young person, it's still a playful space in my memory." Transgenderism may be in the public eye right now, but Ms. Pyle has been focused on the subject for some time. Her new "Sleeping Beauty the Beast" is to have its debut on Friday, April 29, in the La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival. Three years in the making, the production is Ms. Pyle's second reimagining of a classical ballet; her first was "The Firebird, a Ballez" in 2013. Nicky Paraiso, who programs the La MaMa festival, recalled being impressed that Ms. Pyle had found a way "to tackle the ballet form with dancers of different shapes and sizes and sexualities," he said. "It was completely beautiful." For Ms. Pyle, who is 35 and a lesbian, 1993 was an important year for lesbians in the news media. Cindy Crawford shaved K. D. Lang's face on the cover of "Vanity Fair"; Melissa Etheridge had a hit record, "Yes I Am." "It was the very fluffy stuff that's what I was aware of as a 13 year old in Texas," she said. "It was this moment of, 'Oh this reality exists.' I had no idea. I remember asking my mom what a lesbian was and not getting an answer. She's cool now." In the classic ballet "Sleeping Beauty," the baby princess Aurora is placed under a curse by the evil fairy Carabosse: When she pricks her finger with a needle, she'll die. But the Lilac Fairy changes the spell so that Aurora will only fall asleep. A hundred years later, a prince awakens her with a kiss. In Ms. Pyle's version, Aurora's father owns a Lower East Side garment factory, and the three fairies Violet, Scarlet and Azure are played by men and are the factory's designers. The second act, in 1993, takes place in a lesbian club. As Ms. Pyle said, it was time when "activism and sex and death and club culture were also overlapping." Ms. Krekel, who plays Aurora, said the dancers in Ms. Pyle's group connect as "the misfits of ballet." When she was growing up, she said, she was the only black girl in her class. "We've been in love with the form in some way, but never fit into that classical trajectory." She added that her Aurora reminds her of how she was as a teenager. "Angsty, questioning her parents, her desires, trying so hard to find her truth in whatever way she can," Ms. Krekel explained. "Katy always says in rehearsal, 'I don't want you guys to ever feel like you need to embody this way of dancing like a ballet dancer.' She is always trying to make sure that we're highlighting our personalities and what lives inside of us." Then there is the Beast, played by Jules Skloot, a union organizer in the first act and the Beast in the second. Loosely based on Leslie Feinberg, the American transgender activist and writer, the Beast is Aurora's prince. But the character also refers to some of what Ballez stands for: shining a spotlight on society's outcasts.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Dance is the art of transition. At New York City Ballet, however, it's remarkable how many kinds of transition are happening simultaneously. The company and its followers must continue to assess the complex legacy of Peter Martins, who resigned as ballet master in chief on Jan. 1. As the company searches for its next artistic director, the interregnum of the interim leadership team has been alarmingly prolonged. A lawsuit, filed in September, charging the company and others with serial instances of condoning the mistreatment of women, continues. And the company is dancing, dancing, dancing. Its fall season has already delivered many performances that raised the barometer and given cause for congratulations. Into this multilayered situation has arrived the fresh and vital agenda set by Teresa Reichlen's speech, delivered at the fall fashion gala on Sept. 27. "We will not put art before common decency or allow talent to sway our moral compass," she said, with the entire company onstage beside her. "With the world changing and our beloved institution in the spotlight we continue to hold ourselves to the high moral standards that were instilled in us when we decided to become professional dancers." No routine denial will do. True leadership is needed; only with Ms. Reichlen's affirmation of sheer moral principles has this been established. The spirit in her words has been made flesh by the whole company in its dancing this season. Three ballerinas Maria Kowroski, Sara Mearns, Ms. Reichlen, wonderfully unalike have given peak performances this fall of Balanchine's "Diamonds." The scintillating, blithely daredevil "Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux" danced by Tiler Peck and Joaquin de Luz was a thrill even to those who remember it in Balanchine's day. It's been a long while since a dancer threw herself into those fish catches with the headlong abandon that Ms. Peck showed here. In the "Concerto Barocco" that preceded it, Ms. Reichlen exemplified cool as a mountain stream sweep and purity. Modernism and classicism meet in "Barocco"; Ms. Reichlen makes Balanchine's choreography count as sculpture, architecture, music and feminism. The quietly fearless Sterling Hyltin's interpretation of the title role of "La Sylphide" (a Peter Martins staging) has become a classic account. This is the archetype of Romantic ballets, opening with the image of the title sylph kneeling as she contemplates the Scots farmer James asleep in his armchair. I love the way Ms. Hyltin sways from deep in the waist, as if moved by poignant desire for this man; I'm enchanted by the seamless transitions she later makes between grief and humor in addressing him. It's touching just to watch her step lightly onto point, as if recapturing pointwork in its early Romantic innocence. Debuts, especially by junior members of the company, have always been part of the drama of any City Ballet season. Just now, with three male principals recently fired, a fourth retiring on Oct. 14, and a fifth injured last week, the shortage of male dancers is a pressing issue. A fresh supply of male dancers is needed and has been materializing. Roman Mejia now in his second year in the company is just 18 years old. On Sept. 29, he danced Balanchine's "Allegro Brillante" with Ms. Peck as if bringing it fresh from the mint, with terrific brio. Changes of direction and focus were keenly vivid (how well he always uses his eyes and head to open up paths in space); and the elan he showed in jumps and turns was a true thrill. He and Ms. Peck, who have danced together in Vail, could become a superb virtuoso partnership: They even have the same dimples, dark glinting eyes and a quality of joyous laughter amid sweeping action. Joseph Gordon is a mysterious Adonis whose classicism is made of air; Sebastian Villarini Velez is a young Mars, fiery and burning. On Sept. 21, the two men made gorgeous debuts in the first and third movements of Balanchine's "Symphony in C," as did the sparkling Indiana Woodward beside Mr. Villarini Velez and the valiant Troy Schumacher in the fourth movement all excellent. Mr. Gordon had already made his debut in "Diamonds," partnering with the mighty Ms. Mearns. Although theirs isn't yet a convincing partnership, you could see how both learned from it, he growing in heroism, she tempering her characteristic bravado with newly dulcet strokes. Unity Phelan, the most elegantly and glamorously poetic of the young generation now ascending to ballerina roles, danced the second ballerina in "Emeralds" for the first time in a dreamy, rapt murmur on Sept. 19. As other "Emeralds" debuts demonstrated notably Taylor Stanley and Daniel Applebaum in the lead male role this elusive ballet is being finely guarded. Claire Kretzschmar's debut as the tall soloist in "Rubies" showed all her audacious glee.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Eric Engberg, a former CBS News correspondent who hosted the "CBS Evening News" segment "Reality Check," which was aimed at keeping politicians honest, died last Sunday at his home in Palmetto, Fla. He was 74. His son Jason said the cause had not been determined. Mr. Engberg spent 27 years with CBS, mostly in the Washington bureau. He covered five presidential campaigns as well as international events, including the fall of the Berlin Wall. "Reality Check" began during the 1992 presidential campaign as a way to verify candidates' statements, a precursor to websites like Politifact.com and Factcheck.org. The segment also had an investigative function, in one case shedding light on a little examined law change that allowed members of Congress to use taxpayer funds for radio advertisements. The segment also took on less serious matters, like whether letters to Santa Claus made it to the North Pole. Mr. Engberg won an Alfred I. duPont Columbia University Silver Baton Award for an investigative report in 1998 that helped identify the body of a Vietnam War veteran (that of Air Force First Lt. Michael Blassie) buried at the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
During one of many harrowing moments in 's new novel, "American Dirt," the protagonist, a bookstore owner named Lydia, has a jarring realization. Lydia and her 8 year old son, Luca, are fleeing from their home in Acapulco, Mexico, after hit men from a drug cartel killed 16 members of their family. Traumatized and desperate, Lydia hatches a risky escape plan: She and Luca will disguise themselves as migrants and attempt to cross the border into Arizona. As she researches what they will need to survive the journey, it dawns on Lydia that she and Luca aren't pretending. They "are actual migrants." "All her life she's pitied those poor people," Cummins writes. "She's wondered with the sort of detached fascination of the comfortable elite, how dire the conditions of their lives must be wherever they come from, that this is the better option." The character's insight is a deliberate provocation by the author, who wants readers to reckon with the humanitarian cost of America's broken immigration policies. Whether or not it succeeds in reshaping readers' views, "American Dirt" which chronicles Lydia and Luca's grueling and treacherous journey of more than 1,000 miles seems poised to become one of this year's biggest breakout works of fiction. 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. The novel, which comes out on Jan. 21 with a hefty first printing of half a million copies, set off a bidding war between nine publishers and sold to Flatiron Books in a seven figure deal. It received ecstatic advance reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus, which called it "intensely suspenseful and deeply humane." Blockbuster authors like Stephen King and John Grisham have heaped praise on the book, and Cummins received support from prominent Mexican American and Latina authors, including Erika Sanchez, Reyna Grande and Julia Alvarez, who predicted the book would "change hearts and transform policies." Sandra Cisneros, the author of the best selling novel "The House on Mango Street," said she hoped that "American Dirt" could help highlight the obstacles migrants face, particularly for American readers who might otherwise be indifferent to the subject. "It's written in a form that will engage people, not just the choir, but people who might think differently," Cisneros said. "We're always looking for the great American story, and this is the great story of the Americas, at a time in which borders are blurred." "American Dirt" has also generated criticism. Some authors have questioned whether Cummins, who grew up in Maryland in a working class family and identifies as white and Latina, succeeded in her effort to write from the perspective of Mexican migrants and accurately convey their experiences. In a withering review on the site Tropics of Meta, the poet and writer Myriam Gurba wrote that "American Dirt" was full of cliches and stereotypes about Mexico, depicting it as a lawless, violent country overrun by drug cartels and corruption. "This is like a Trumpian fantasy of what Mexico is, and we don't need any more Trumpian fantasies," Gurba said in an interview. "It's even more noxious because it's masquerading as a piece of progressive literature." The Mexican American writer and translator David Bowles echoed those views and called "American Dirt" "appropriating" and "inaccurate." "At a time when Mexico and the Mexican American community are reviled in this country as they haven't been in decades, to elevate this inauthentic book written by someone outside our community is to slap our collective face," he said in an email. Gurba and other writers of Mexican heritage have also criticized Cummins for drawing on works about Mexico and migrants by other authors, including Sonia Nazario and Luis Alberto Urrea. In a note at the end of "American Dirt," Cummins acknowledges her debt to those writers and others whose work shaped her understanding of Mexico and the issues that migrants face. Cummins researched the novel during trips to Mexico and by conducting interviews on both sides of the border. She spoke with people whose families had been torn apart by deportations, lawyers who work with unaccompanied minors, migrants in shelters in Tijuana and human rights activists documenting abuses. "I don't know if I'm the right person to tell this story," Cummins said during an interview at her home overlooking the Hudson River in Rockland County, N.Y., where she lives with her husband, a flooring contractor, and their two daughters. In her author's note, Cummins, whose paternal grandmother came from Puerto Rico, describes her fear that her "privilege would make me blind to certain truths" and says she wished that someone "slightly browner than me would write it." But she insists that writers from all backgrounds should not shy away from a subject that has become so central, and polarizing, in American politics and culture. "I do think that the conversation about cultural appropriation is incredibly important, but I also think that there is a danger sometimes of going too far toward silencing people," she said. "Everyone should be engaged in telling these stories, with tremendous care and sensitivity." Fiction in particular, Cummins said, has the potential to broaden and deepen readers' understanding of an issue that many Americans are only peripherally engaged with, if at all. "We are telling these stories in our culture very superficially," she said. "There's the narrative from the right, which is that these people are like an invading mob of criminals, and then from the left, the narrative is, 'Oh, these poor people, these impoverished people, they need our help, we must save them.' And there's this huge gap in the middle where their humanity should be." Cummins was born in Rota, Spain, where her father was stationed in the Navy, and grew up in Gaithersburg, Md. She studied English and communications at Towson University, then spent two years in Belfast, Ireland, where she worked as a bartender and wrote "terrible poetry." After moving back to the United States, she found work in the paperback sales department at Penguin. While she was working there, she published her first book, "A Rip in Heaven," about a tragedy that struck her family in 1991, when her brother and two female cousins were attacked on a bridge in St. Louis by a group of men. The men raped her cousins and forced them off the bridge, killing them. Her brother, Tom, was also forced to jump off but survived. Years later, he asked Cummins to write a book with him. He backed out of the project, leaving Cummins, who was 16 when her cousins were killed, as the sole author. Researching and writing about the crimes was daunting, Cummins said "There were a lot of details I didn't want to know" but it brought some relief and helped her learn how to write about trauma in a way that didn't feel gratuitous or sensational. Those themes, and a desire to "take stories away from the perpetrators and give them to the survivors," shaped her next two books, the novels "The Outside Boy" and "The Crooked Branch." She began researching a novel about immigration seven years ago, envisioning it with a diverse cast of characters: border patrol agents, American citizens living near the southern border, families that had been separated by deportation and undocumented migrants. But the narrative never cohered, and Cummins couldn't escape the feeling that she was avoiding the crux of the story. Then, shortly before the 2016 presidential election, she experienced another family tragedy when her father died suddenly from a heart attack. She spent months in mourning, unable to write. One day, she pulled out her laptop and wrote the opening of "American Dirt," a scene where Luca and Lydia narrowly survive the gunfire that kills Luca's father, a journalist who wrote about drug cartels, and 15 other relatives. She finished a draft in less than a year, and sold the novel in the spring of 2018. In the time Cummins spent researching and writing, the humanitarian crisis on the southern border only grew more dire, and the political debate became even more charged. As she prepares to promote "American Dirt" on a cross country book tour, with appearances in 40 cities in 26 states, Cummins is trying to avoid talking about the story in ways that might seem partisan, and to steer clear of terms like "illegal" and "undocumented." "All fiction, all good fiction, can potentially dismantle some of the problematic language that serves often as barriers to meaningful conversation," she said. "We don't have to choose a label for Lydia and Luca. They're people." Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
In the largest study of its kind, researchers have found that traumatic brain injury is associated with an increased risk of dementia. The risk of dementia was highest among people who had suffered multiple T.B.I.s. But even a single mild T.B.I. was tied to an increased risk of dementia. T.B.I. has a wide range of severity. It extends from a mild sports concussion an elbow to the head in a basketball game, for example that results in very brief or no unconsciousness and no structural harm to the brain, to the most severe brain injuries that can cause extended unconsciousness, coma or even prove fatal. The study, in Lancet Psychiatry, used Danish health databases that included all residents as of Jan. 1, 1995, who were at least 50 years old at some time during the 36 year follow up, from 1977 to 2013. Among 2,794,852 people, they found 132,093 who had had at least one T.B.I. After adjusting for medical, neurological and psychiatric illnesses, they found that compared with people who had never had a T.B.I., those who had had any were at a 24 percent increased risk for dementia, and those who had had five or more had nearly triple the risk. Even a single mild T.B.I. increased the risk by 17 percent. For their first T.B.I. diagnosis, 85 percent were this mild type.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
The bridge where Emmett Till was shot and from which his body, tied to a cotton gin fan, was dumped into the water.Credit...Robert Rausch for The New York Times The bridge where Emmett Till was shot and from which his body, tied to a cotton gin fan, was dumped into the water. A lot of people could have said "The past is never dead it's not even past," but it was Faulkner who actually said it, which makes sense when you consider that Faulkner was from Mississippi, and in no place is the past less dead than Mississippi. I've never seen as many roadside historical markers anywhere as I have there, and I live in New England. Mississippi still celebrates Confederate Heritage Month and Confederate Memorial Day, and retains the Stars and Bars in its state flag, but in recent years it has taken care to celebrate other parts of its history, as well. In the past, all those roadside markers were put up by the state, and terse; but lately other groups and organizations have undertaken their own projects, like the Mississippi Country Music Trail and the nascent Mississippi Writers Trail, that feature information rich markers with text covering both sides, and even photographs. The most expansive is the Mississippi Blues Trail, which erected its first marker in 2006 and now has 200 of them, some of which can be found in other states and even countries. Those markers tell of musicians and sites that are significant to the development and dissemination of Mississippi's greatest contribution to the arts (sorry, Faulkner), but they testify, less directly, to the suffering and resilience of its sizable African American population. If "less directly" doesn't seem quite enough, another Mississippi trail tells the same story much more explicitly. At present, it has fewer than 30 markers; it's easier, I suppose, to celebrate the music that originated with sharecroppers and field hands chopping cotton in the hot Mississippi Delta sun than it is to contemplate the oppression and precarious daily existence that characterized their lives. The Blues Trail tells of how some of them coped with the burdens of perpetual injustice; the Freedom Trail tells of those who got tired of coping and somehow summoned the courage to try to free themselves from those burdens. "It was clear," he said, "that the Emmett Till marker would be No. 1." It stands in the small Delta town of Money, Miss. There doesn't seem to be much money, or anything else, in Money; today it's just a handful of modest homes and two commercial structures, both of which are empty: a filling station, and a two story brick building that's missing its roof and parts of its walls and looks like it's been in ruins since Sherman marched through. (He didn't.) Just 30 years ago, though, when I lived and worked in the Delta, it was still a going concern, a small grocery; I bought my first (and only) can of Vienna sausage there. With its dusty shelves and dim lighting and sagging floor, it was easy for me then to picture what it would have looked like 33 years earlier, in August 1955, when a black 14 year old from Chicago, down visiting his mother's kin, walked into it and supposedly whistled at, or said something fresh to, or pawed the white woman working behind the counter. Three nights later, the woman's husband and his brother snatched young Till out of bed, carried him off into the darkness and lynched him. Back in Chicago, the boy's mother insisted her son be given an open casket funeral, "so the world can see what they did to my boy." Photos of his gruesomely disfigured corpse were published in Jet magazine and from there raced around the world, sparking sensational outrage . The killers were arrested; reporters came from all over the country, and even from overseas, to cover the trial. The jury hastily acquitted the brothers, but it was too late: The story of Emmett Till had already shown the world that the ugliness of Jim Crow went much deeper than segregated schools and separate water fountains. Dr. McLemore said everyone agreed that the Freedom Trail marker should go outside the grocery. There are other sites, though, that are just as significant to the story, like the Tallahatchie County Courthouse in Sumner, Miss., where Till's killers, brothers Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, were tried and acquitted in September 1955. Sumner is about 30 miles from Money; the trip takes you along a stretch of Highway 49E that has been renamed the Emmett Till Memorial Highway, past the Emmett Till Multipurpose Complex a low brick building that looks like a school or maybe a modern armory behind which you will find the Emmett Till Memorial Walking Trail. The courthouse was built in 1904; 110 years later, its courtroom underwent a restoration, undoing a 1970s renovation that some say was intended to plaster over history. Today it looks a lot more like it did in countless photographs that were circulated worldwide in 1955. Like many Southern county courthouses, the one in Sumner sits in the middle of a picturesque square. Off to one side is a small one story brick office building with "Breland Whitten Lawyers" still painted on a couple of windows: J.J. Breland and John Whitten were two of the brothers' five attorneys. Nearby, in a storefront, is the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, which has some exhibits on the walls and a typewriter belonging to J.W. Kellum, another member of the killers' legal team. (Forty years after the trial, I interviewed Kellum, Whitten and the two surviving jurors.) The most striking artifact, though, is fairly new: a marker, leaning up against a wall, that the center originally put up in 2007 near the site where Till's lifeless body was pulled from the water three days after he was carried off to his doom. It's purple, and powerful, and pocked with bullet holes. An identical replacement was recently shot up after just five weeks . The one in Money has been vandalized, too. There is no marker indicating the site outside the town of Drew, about 20 miles from Sumner. Set back about a hundred yards from a dirt road is a lovely white farmhouse and, nearby, a weathered brown barn; they look like something you might see in a Wyeth painting. The owner had granted me permission to come by whenever, but he wasn't home when I did, so I walked around the property by myself specifically, around the barn, which, I was told, the owner used these days mostly for storage. At one end, behind a chain link gate, sat a dog who just stared at me glumly as I circled by again and again. The Delta is extremely flat, but the house and barn sit on a modest rise that affords a visitor a view of the surrounding farmland that just about anyone would find serene. I know I did, so much so that for a few moments I forgot that, before dawn on August 28, 1955, Milam and Bryant drove the 14 year old Till to this barn the farm was then managed by another Milam brother took him inside, and there beat him so savagely that by the time they loaded him back in the truck, the eighth grader was nearly dead. Some say he already was. Fifty miles south of that bridge, near the corner of Church and First Streets in Belzoni, Miss., you'll find another Freedom Trail marker, this one commemorating the Rev. George Lee. Like most Delta towns, Belzoni still looks very much like it did in the 1950s, when Reverend Lee preached the gospel here. His marker stands outside the Green Grove Baptist Church, though his pulpit was actually at another Baptist church in town, White Star. For most of his 51 years, George Lee kept a low profile outside church; he is believed to have sat for only one photograph in his lifetime. But sometime in the early 1950s, he decided to register to vote no small undertaking for a black man in the South back then, especially in the Delta. Somehow, he succeeded; then he managed to get his wife, Rosebud, registered. And then he went out and got other African Americans in Belzoni and Humphreys County registered, too nearly 100 of them. "He was actually out there before Brown v. Board of Education," noted Helen Sims, the director of Belzoni's Rev. George Lee Museum, which was closed because of storm damage when I visited town. Lee, she said, also co founded the local chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. and served as vice president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership. In April 1955, he spoke before a crowd of thousands at the council's annual meeting, urging everyone present to register and vote. The crowd, Jet magazine reported, was "electrified." Local whites were, too, though not in a good way. According to Ms. Sims, "the white leadership in the town and county" converged upon Reverend Lee's house twice. "They basically said, 'stop trying to register people to vote, and we'll leave you and your wife alone,'" Ms. Sims explained. "He didn't go for the deal." On May 7, 1955, as Lee was driving home on Church Street, just a block from Green Grove, a car pulled up alongside his; someone fired several shots, one at the minister's tires and the rest at his head, blasting away his jawbone and part of his face. Mortally wounded, he crashed his car into a house. There were eyewitnesses, but the white sheriff refused to investigate, much less arrest anyone, calling it a car accident and going so far as to declare that the lead pellets extracted from the victim's head were actually dental fillings that had gotten knocked loose in the crash. According to Jet, in an attempt to keep news of the slaying contained, "Belzoni telephone operators refused to take long distance calls from Negroes." It didn't work. Word spread; more than 2,000 people showed up for Rev erend Lee's funeral, which was held at Green Grove because White Star was too small to accommodate them. Rosebud Lee insisted her husband have an open casket. "She wanted people to see," Ms Sims explained, "what they had done to her husband." Jet published a photo of it three months before Emmett Till was murdered. Today, there's one street in Belzoni named for the Rev . George Lee, but pieces of his story are everywhere, starting with the Freedom Trail marker and the church that stands next to it; if you're diligent enough, you can find his tombstone in its graveyard. Right behind the cemetery, on Hayden Street, is the house where Reverend Lee was living when he was killed. It's a three minute walk from there to the block where he was shot. Ms. Sims couldn't tell me exactly which house there he had driven into, but as I inspected a row of six, knowing it must be one of them, I spotted a man standing outside a shoe repair shop across the street and asked him if he knew. "That one there," he said, pointing at the one on the far left. "You can see the porch doesn't look right." "It was an old lady, name of Katherine Blair." "Do you remember when it happened?" I asked him. "I was six years old," he replied. "But I remember people talking about it." His name, he said, was Percy Gordon. A half mile away, at the Humphreys County Courthouse (erected 1921), I knocked on an old white wooden door. The words "Circuit Clerk" were flaking off its transom; they were, I'm guessing, painted on there well before 1955. The three women inside smiled at me. "Is this where people register to vote?" I asked. "Yes," said the one with the biggest smile. She was wearing a bright red Delta Sigma Theta sweater. "Is this where they would have registered in the early '50s?" "Did it look like this then?" "Just like this," she said, sweeping an arm around the room. When I told her I was interested in George Lee, her face lit up even more. "You're welcome to look around. Feel free to check out the vault, too," she said, gesturing to a chamber behind a thick black metal door. "Stay as long as you like." The vault is stacked, floor to ceiling, with enormous leather bound volumes that stretch back to the establishment of the county a century ago: Criminal Docket; Civil Docket; Marriage Record; Marriage Record Colored; Registration. The clerk, Timaka James Jones, told me I could examine whatever I liked; if I hadn't had a return flight booked already, I would still be there perusing right now. The most fascinating were the ones stamped Poll Tax Receipts. It is said that Mrs. James Jones' predecessor, six decades back, tried to turn Reverend Lee away when he first went to pay his. "Have you found his name in any of these?" I asked her. "You know, when I started here, in 2003, the first thing I looked up was my marriage license. The second thing I looked for was his name," she told me. "I'm still looking for it." Following the Freedom Trail and reading its markers can evoke, in a contemplative mind, two notions: That things have changed a great deal in this country over the past six or seven decades, and that they haven't changed much at all. I say "and" instead of "or" because it's possible to think both at once and not be wrong; but, as regards the latter, I will tell of just one more thing I saw in Belzoni, as I made my way to the Humphreys County Library, which shares a parking lot with the Humphreys County Sheriff's Department next door. There was only one space available, and it was marked "Authorized Vehicles Only." Anxious you don't want to have to bail your rental out of a tow pound in Belzoni, Miss. I looked around and spotted the sheriff escorting a handcuffed prisoner in an orange jumpsuit through the parking lot. They chatted amiably; the sheriff was black, the prisoner white. Richard Rubin is the author of "The Last of the Doughboys" and "Back Over There ," as well as a book about Mississippi, "Confederacy of Silence."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Rihanna received the Shoe of the Year award Tuesday for her collaborative project with Puma, the Creeper In today's politically charged climate, even shoes can be contentious. At the 30th annual Footwear News Achievement Awards, held on Tuesday evening at the IAC building in Manhattan, Ronnie Fieg of the label Kith offered a "no comment" when asked about his collaboration with New Balance, a brand that found itself in cross hairs this month after one of its senior representatives voiced support for President elect Donald J. Trump. "I'm not going to speak on that," said Mr. Fieg, who had won Retailer of the Year. "I don't get political." He wasn't the only one asked about something besides the accouterments on his feet. Ansel Elgort, the actor and son of the photographer Arthur Elgort, who was there to present the Designer of the Year award to Paul Andrew, reflected on the protests over the Dakota Access Pipeline. "It shows how disappointing our country can be in regards to many things," he said. Regarding some things, however like Rihanna disappointment is not a factor. The singer was on hand to receive the Shoe of the Year award for her collaborative project with Puma, the Creeper, making her the first woman to receive such recognition. Rihanna wore a long sleeved black top and baseball cap from Vetements with the word "Securite" printed across both, a Vetements x Juicy Couture maxi dress beneath, and the shoe of the hour: a platform sneaker with a black suede top. She swept in just as the ceremony was about to begin, causing a commotion and drawing the attention of guests like Mark King, president of Adidas, and Dick Johnson, chief executive of Foot Locker; the designers Alexandre Birman and John Varvatos; and other celebrities (Dascha Polanco of "Orange Is the New Black" and the model Christie Brinkley). As Rihanna moved toward her table, the speakers pumped "This Is What You Came For," her song with Calvin Harris, and the crowd turned into a Rihanna worshipping, bubbly sipping stampede. On her way, she was stopped by Cuba Gooding Jr., who recently played O. J. Simpson in "The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story," and who wanted to pay his respects. Given that the shoe of the year was a sneaker, Mr. Gooding was asked whether he's a sneaker man. "No, but I used to be," he said. "I used to be a breakdancer back in the '80s, and you weren't worth your weight unless you wore Converse high tops." Now, however, he's all about the work boot. "I live in my Blundstones," he said. "I have eight pairs. They're all black." Though Rihanna refused interviews, Adam Petrick, Puma's director of brand and marketing, offered glowing reviews of the singer cum designer, noting that the partnership had cast the brand in a new light. "A lot of streetwear retailers opened their minds to 'Puma isn't just a classic, casual comfort shoe, but maybe Puma has an interesting design aesthetic,'" he said. "It helped us with getting a second look from retailers who hadn't been considering us."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
The documentary "We Are the Dream" follows competitors in the Oakland MLK Oratorical Fest, like Gregory Payton, above. At the Oscars earlier this month, the two time winner Mahershala Ali ("Moonlight," "Green Book") presented the best supporting actress statue in front of his Hollywood peers and millions of people watching live on television. But the next morning, he was more interested in discussing a humbler but no less momentous occasion: the first time he had ever spoken before an audience. He was 9, at bible camp, and he had written a poem. "I ended up performing it in front of the whole church," he recalled during a phone interview earlier this month. "The courage that it took to go up there and share it, and see how people were impacted by it, was really empowering." Ali sees a bit of himself in the young orators captured in the documentary "We Are the Dream: The Kids of the Oakland MLK Oratorical Fest," which premiered this week on HBO. Directed by the Emmy winning filmmaker Amy Schatz ("Song of Parkland," "In the Shadow of the Towers"), the film follows several Oakland students during the lead up to last year's installment of the annual festival, its 40th, which was founded as a platform for students to shine and connect with Martin Luther King Jr.'s life and words. With its focus on young orators as they refine their speeches with their coaches, teachers and families, the film is a hopeful counterpoint to the spate of murder and true crime docs on cable and streaming TV, shining a light on "this little outlet and platform of self esteem," Ali said. In addition to appearing on HBO's usual linear and on demand platforms, the film was made available to nonsubscribers for a month on the network's website. Ali, who was born in Oakland and grew up nearby, joined the film after it had been shot he was asked to executive produce through his Know Wonder production company, which has a partnership with HBO. "I think they felt like it was a nice fit," said Ali, who was happy to use his connections and Bay Area roots to "raise awareness about the children, teachers, their families." The other executive producers include the actor's wife, Amatus Sami Karim, as well as Mimi Valdes ("Hidden Figures") and Julie Anderson ("God Is the Bigger Elvis"). The book included a story about King, as a high school student, entering (and winning) a student oratory competition about 90 miles outside Atlanta in 1944. On their bus ride home afterward, King and his teacher were ordered to give up their seats to white passengers the young King wanted to resist, but his teacher convinced him not to escalate the situation. So they stood in the aisle all the way back to Atlanta. (When Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger 11 years later in Montgomery, Ala., it sparked the boycott that brought King to the forefront of the Civil Rights movement.) "I just thought about the contrast of what that would look like," Anderson said. "This young kid who made an oratory competition. He talks about Lincoln; he talks about equality; he talks about justice; and then he gets on a bus and faces the height of injustice." Anderson and the producer Diane Kolyer spent time on YouTube watching speech videos from other King themed student oratory contests in states like Texas, Ohio and Virginia. Kolyer proposed the Oakland Unified School District because of the diversity of the student body and contest's longstanding importance in the community. In the Oakland event, competing students can perform their own original poems, monologues and scenes in addition to well known speeches by King and others. The festival is less about competition than about encouraging the students to "bridge the past and the present as we are thinking about their futures," said Awele Makeba, an educator and professional storyteller who produces the contest and appears in "We Are the Dream." It's about "the possibility of who they want to become," Makeba added, "and the world they want to create." Schatz, known for her documentaries and series about children confronting what she called "life's big subjects," like climate change and gun violence, originally thought "We Are the Dream" would be about the contest itself and largely consist of profiles of the winners. But after spending time with the student orators, she decided the story should be more about "these issues that the kids were grappling with and the subjects that they cover, like race, social justice, gentrification, immigration," she said. "And then also ideas about kindness or what it means to do the right thing." For example, Karunyan Kamalraj, a 9 year old boy from Sri Lanka, had never heard of King before getting involved in the contest. But as viewers see in the film, Kamalraj learns to draws connections between King's nonviolent movement and his own family's past struggles as part of the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka. "I realized through this boy Karunyan that it was about what Martin Luther King contributed to the world," Schatz said. These moments of development and discovery give "We Are the Dream" its most poignant scenes. A poem by Lamiya Mohammed, 12, written to be performed as a duet with her 6 year old sister, Abrar, was inspired by an incident in which a random passer by called their mother a terrorist. In the poem, Mohammed imagines an America where Muslim children and their families are welcomed and can wear their "scarves" (hijabs) freely without rebuke. As Gregory Payton, the 9 year old grandson of a Baptist minister, practices an address interweaving King's "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech with the 23rd Psalm, viewers see him starting to master the crescendos and flourishes of the African American rhetorical traditions of his grandfather and King.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
As if illegal mining, logging and poaching weren't bad enough, Africa's national parks face another dire threat: They're vastly underfunded. According the most comprehensive analysis of conservation funding to date, 90 percent of nearly 300 protected areas on the continent face funding shortfalls. Together, the deficits total at least a billion dollars. Failing to address this deficit will result in severe and ongoing declines of such iconic species as lions, researchers warned on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Some parks will likely disappear altogether. "The assumption is that parks are just fine because they're designated as protected," said Jennifer Miller, a senior scientist at Defenders of Wildlife, a conservation group, and co author of the report. "But in many cases, they don't have the resources to do conservation. They're just paper parks." That the parks are operating on a shoestring comes as no surprise to those working to preserve Africa's wilderness, said Peter Fearnhead, chief executive officer and co founder of African Parks, a nonprofit that manages 15 protected areas on the continent. "What's very helpful about this paper is that it actually puts a number to the problem," said Mr. Fearnhead, who was not involved in the study. In the new analysis, the authors used wild lions as a proxy for how Africa's national parks are faring. Because of their place at the top of the food chain, lions are considered an umbrella species a bellwether of an ecosystem's health. "If lions are doing well, everything else with the exception of rhinos is also doing well," said Peter Lindsey, director of the lion recovery fund at the Wildlife Conservation Network and co author of the new paper. (Rhinos are an exception because of poaching to meet the extreme demand for rhino horn.) Throughout much of Africa, lions are not doing well. Their numbers have dropped 43 percent over the past two decades to as few as 20,000 in the wild. They now occupy just 8 percent of their historic habitat. A growing proportion of their range is found in national parks and reserves. But according to Dr. Lindsey's and Dr. Miller's research which they undertook while working at Panthera, a group dedicated to conserving wild cats most protected areas are not realizing their potential as safe havens for lions. Over two thirds of the state owned parks the team surveyed hold lion populations that are less than half of what they could be, based on the prey those habitats could support, the researchers said . If properly managed, those parks could quadruple the population of wild lions in Africa. To estimate the amount of funding needed to boost populations by at least 50 percent, the researchers relied on three different financial models. Then, following a review of state wildlife and donor funding, as well as interviews with park managers and officials, the team totaled the dollars available for protected areas in the 23 countries included in their study. They found that 88 percent to 94 percent of parks operate on budgets that are less than 20 percent of that required to perform effective conservation. Parks need to invest 377 to 783 per square mile, the researchers concluded. On average, parks spend just 77 per square mile. The grand total to renew Africa's parks: 1.2 billion to 2.4 billion each year. If the funding deficits are not addressed, lions and other wildlife in affected areas will likely experience catastrophic declines, the authors warn. Protected areas that are not adequately managed inevitably succumb to poaching, illegal livestock incursions, land grabs and illegal mining and logging. Wildlife is already quickly declining across many parks in Africa, and "there's no reason that won't continue unless the situation changes," said Tim Tear, executive director of the Africa program at the Wildlife Conservation Society, who was not involved in the study. "If we want to see many of Africa's iconic species now and into the future, then this paper calls out pretty starkly that we're going to have to change the way we continue to invest." Should business continue as usual, people also stand to lose, Dr. Lindsey said. Healthy ecosystems provide many benefits, from watershed protection to carbon storage. In many places in Africa, parks also contribute to job creation, economic growth and rural development through tourism a 34 billion industry on the continent, the majority of which is tied to wildlife. Some countries already reap many of these benefits. Recognizing that they derive a significant portion of their national incomes from nature related tourism, South Africa and Kenya invest more heavily than most other countries in protected areas, and relatively few of their parks face deficits. Other nations, on the other hand, such as Mozambique, have many lions and stunning landscapes, but have yet to profit from those assets because their tourism industries are underdeveloped. "That's an important piece of the puzzle," Dr. Tear said. "If we don't invest more in the near future, then African countries may lose the opportunity to benefit from these species in years to come." Africa currently receives around 51 billion in annual development aid about 200 times more than it does for supporting its protected areas. Reallocating just 2 percent of those funds toward conservation, Dr. Lindsey and his colleagues write, could stem much of the impending crisis. "We have reached a fork in the road," Dr. Lindsey said. "It is time for the world to decide if Africa's iconic parks and reserves are worth fighting for."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
And Henry VI himself? An infant when he inherits the crown, this king (Jon Norman Schneider in a lovely, understated performance) grows into a placid, passive, pious man reasonably decent, albeit comically effete in the manner of those pampered from birth. Intelligent yet callow, he is dependent on the wisdom of the Duke of Gloucester, protector of the realm before Henry comes of age. The redoubtable Mia Katigbak plays Gloucester, and one of the rewards of this production is watching the battle for influence between Gloucester and the Bishop of Winchester, played by Wai Ching Ho (Madame Gao in the Marvel/Netflix television universe) just two of the standout women in an impressive 16 member cast that does a lot of doubling. When Gloucester's fortunes fall, sunk in part by his own imperious wife (the excellent Sophia Skiles), Ms. Katigbak imbues him with a desolate poignancy. Power is the shiny object nearly all of these characters are grasping for, whether to attain what they don't have or to cling fiercely to what they do. And so to war, first with France and a fantastically lively Joan of Arc or Joan la Pucelle (Kim Wong), as she's known here. There's also a popular uprising to quash ("The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers," one rebel says), and the War of the Roses to wage, with the Duke of York (Rajesh Bose) pitted firmly against Henry. His vengeful son Richard (David Huynh) will carry on that enmity, determined to seize the throne. To the factions in "Henry VI," no assault on human life is too barbaric if it will feed their craving for dominance. That's as true of the rabid mob in the populist rebellion as it is of the combatants in the War of the Roses, better heeled but just as greedy and as cruel. So much slogging through battle might make heavy going if not for Queen Margaret, Henry's wife, one of Shakespeare's most riveting characters. She's the royal you love to hate: duplicitous and nakedly ambitious from the get go, but a savvy tactician and as ferociously brave as she is vicious. It's a magnificent role, and Mahira Kakkar gives a smart, muscular performance flecked with humor.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Rural America, already struggling to recover from the recession and the flight of its young people, is about to take another blow: the loss of its airline service. That was underscored last week when Delta Air Lines announced that it "can no longer afford" to continue service at 24 small airports. The carrier says it is losing a total of 14 million a year on flights from places like Thief River Falls, a city of 8,600 in northwest Minnesota that fills only 12 percent of the seats, or Pierre, the capital of South Dakota, where Delta's two daily flights are on average less than half full. Nationally, all major airlines have been reducing and sometimes eliminating flights altogether in small cities, as the industry concentrates much of its service in 29 major hubs, which now account for 70 percent of all passenger traffic, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Delta's announcement was especially acute because the airline operates in most of the small airports that receive a total of almost 200 million in federal subsidies to maintain air service under the Essential Air Service program. The subsidies are scheduled to expire in 2013 unless revived by Congress. Delta acquired many of those small city markets in the Midwest when it merged with Northwest Airlines. Airlines say that simple economics are driving them out of small town America. With fuel prices high, carriers have been reducing domestic routes and seating capacity to focus on the flights that bring in the most revenue per plane typically those in larger cities, especially major hubs. At the same time, airlines are removing less fuel efficient aircraft from their fleets, including the 50 seat regional jets that have been the backbone of air service in small and midsize markets. "We just don't have airplanes that can serve small communities economically anymore," said Michael Boyd, the president of the air service consulting firm Boyd Group International. "And unless somebody wants to pay a whole lot of money to carry a few people out of the airport at Thief River Falls, it just ain't going to happen anymore for a lot of those places." One of those places, it appears, is Muscle Shoals, a town of about 13,000 along the Tennessee River in northwest Alabama. About 1.7 million a year in federal subsidies maintains two Delta flights a day from Northwest Alabama Regional Airport in Muscle Shoals, one of the 24 airports Delta wants to stop serving unless it can receive larger subsidies. Those flights are operated under the Delta name on Saab A340 turboprops flown by Mesaba Airlines, a Delta subcontractor. Barry Auchly, of the Shoals Chamber of Commerce, said that the airport has enough market vitality to justify keeping commercial service. However, he said, passengers have fallen off since Delta decided this summer to redirect its two daily departures to Memphis, rather than to Delta's global hub in Atlanta where the flights went last year. Delta says its flights from the airport are an average of 35.7 percent full, which compares with the national average on Delta's domestic flights of 81.9 percent in June. "Last year, the first year with the Atlanta service, we exceeded 8,500 passengers and were well on our way to 10,000," said Mr. Auchly. That growth proved, he said, that the local airport could eventually operate without federal air service subsidies. He said Delta told him the destinations were switched because Memphis, though far less in demand, had more efficient turboprop service facilities than Atlanta. "We want to be a self sustaining airport," Mr. Auchly said. "We think we have the demand; we just need to be able to depend on consistent service." Delta would like to continue flying from some of the 24 airports it designated last Friday as "underperforming" but only if the federal subsidies were increased to cover the additional costs of serving them with regional jets. Meanwhile, Delta said it plans to abandon other airports where load factors were deemed too low, and assist those airports in finding replacement carriers. Replacing a 34 seat turboprop plane with a 50 seat regional jet would seem to be counterintuitive in markets where the problem is too few passengers. Kristin Baur, a Delta spokeswoman, acknowledged that 50 seat regional jets, besides having 16 more seats, also are less fuel efficient. However, she said, regional jets are more popular with passengers, and can increase overall bookings in some markets where people will drive to more distant airports rather than fly a turboprop from the local airport. Officials at some of the 24 small airports slated to lose Delta service said the airline has not flatly told them when it is stopping the flights, though at subsidized airports Delta said it would withdraw when the current contracts expired. In some markets, depending on load factors, Delta would like to either receive new Essential Air Service contracts or get more money for the ones it currently has. Slightly more than a third of the airports Delta identified on its list would be in that group, it said. Pierre, a scrappy city of 14,000 that sits smack in the rural center of South Dakota, got the news that it might lose Delta service just as weary residents were hauling away the last soggy sandbags as they recovered from major flooding of the Missouri River in May. After years of receiving federal air service subsidies, the airport now has four unsubsidized departures a day two by the Delta subcontractor Mesaba and two by the regional carrier Great Lakes Airlines. The city was recently so optimistic about its prospects that it began construction on a 12 million passenger terminal at Pierre Regional Airport. "We're rural America," said Laurie Gill, the mayor. "It's hard for me to understand a business decision to eliminate commercial air service based on the growth that we've seen here." Delta flew 4,840 of the total 6,833 passengers who boarded flights at Pierre this year through June, and Delta's planes left with 47.4 percent of the seats filled on average. If Delta leaves and no other airline comes in, most travelers from the South Dakota capital would have to drive to the closest bigger airport in Rapid City, 140 miles away. Time constrained corporate and government travelers dislike that idea, Ms. Gill said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Uranus is unquestionably weird. Swirling with mostly water, methane and ammonia, the solar system's seventh planet is tipped over at 98 degrees, so its magnetic poles take turns directly facing the sun. And its magnetic field is strangely misaligned with the planet's rotation, causing it to wildly lurch about. Back in 1986, the ice giant world got what remains its only visitor from Earth Voyager 2, which is now more than 11 billion miles from Earth, but at that time flew a mere 50,600 miles above Uranus's cloudy skies. As it passed, Voyager 2 heard an odd magnetic whisper, a signal so ephemeral that it went unnoticed. More than three decades later, scientists were taking a deep dive into the venerable spacecraft's data pool, hoping to find scientific mysteries that could help support a return mission to Uranus and its ice giant sibling, Neptune. They unearthed that magnetic hiccup, and realized it represented the detection of a mass of electrically excited gas with a width 10 times Earth's circumference. This ginormous bubble was a jettisoned part of Uranus's atmosphere. Although only one was spotted, other gassy missiles may also be launched every 17 hours, the time it takes Uranus to complete one rotation.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Motoko Rich, The Times's Tokyo bureau chief, discussed the tech she's using. What kind of tech tools do you use to cover news in Japan? Probably the most important piece of hardware I regularly use aside from my laptop and cellphone is a backup battery to recharge my phone and power my laptop on the road. North Korean missile tests have disproportionately occurred while I have been out of the office reporting on another story or attending a school event for my children, or over the weekend. So if I have to set up on the side of a soccer field or on a bus, I just plug my phone and laptop into a Mophie Powerstation XXL, a battery the size of a mass market paperback (although considerably heavier). I also have a much smaller battery that I can use to juice up my phone when it starts to die from too much live tweeting, but the XXL comes in handy if I actually have to report and write a whole story away from the office or my home or a hotel room. In such a situation, I will use either a portable Wi Fi or the personal hot spot on my cellphone to get online. Twitter is very popular in Japan, so if we want to get a sense of the mood about a particular breaking news story much as we do in the United States my researchers will scan Twitter or Facebook to get a sense of how people are reacting to news. Occasionally a tweet can be the seed of a feature story. Earthquake apps like QuakeFeed are also helpful in quake prone Japan, not to mention as early indicators of nuclear tests in North Korea. Since I make a lot of calls to analysts and government officials in the United States either very early in the morning or late at night (Tokyo is 13 hours ahead of New York and Washington), I try to use WhatsApp or Skype to call people abroad since my Japanese cell plan charges extra for overseas calls. My small beef with the academics who specialize in Japan and the Korean Peninsula is that so many of them seem incapable or unwilling to use internet based calling apps. What interesting tech trends do you see emerging in Japan that haven't yet reached the United States? Robots! I frequently run into a version of Pepper, a child size cartoonish robot made by SoftBank, the Japanese conglomerate. Its founder, Masayoshi Son, has recently talked about the coming "Singularity," in which artificial intelligence outstrips humans. I encountered an android tourist greeter at a mall, and television news programs frequently feature some new application of robotic technology, from restaurant servers to nursing home caregivers. For personal texting, Line, a communications app that started after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, is extremely popular. So I communicate with friends, my staff and even the woman who cuts my hair using Line. Part of the reason it's so popular here is its wide variety of emoticons and digital stickers. How do you use tech differently in Japan than you did in the United States? The weird thing about Japan is that although it seems technologically advanced, it is still behind the times in many ways. As The Times has written before, the fax machine is still a cherished piece of technology in Japan. Many sources demand that we send requests for interviews and sample questions via fax and will simply not accept an email. I can't remember the last time I sent or received a fax in the United States. My 11 year old son has a small "keitai," or kids' cellphone, that is programmed so he can only call or receive calls from me, my husband or his sister. By the time we left Brooklyn in 2016, it seemed like most kids his age either didn't have a phone at all, or had a smartphone. A lot of Japanese children, as young as age 6, have such keitais, which enable them to independently travel on subways and walk to and from school on their own while still being reachable. We often run into very small children on their own on the subway platform, the small phones dangling from their backpacks. Mobile payment systems have been slow to gain traction in America. How about in Japan? Unlike China, where people pay for almost everything with smartphones, Japan is resolutely a cash based society. There are many restaurants that will not accept credit cards, much less mobile payments. Japan has a prepaid card, known as Suica, that is mostly used to pay for train fares but can also be used to pay for items from vending machines or convenience stores as well as taxi rides. Mobile payments via Suica have been available on mobile phones in Japan since 2006. Although these systems have been around for years, this technology hasn't spread to popular devices like the iPhone until recently. Beyond your job, what tech product are you currently obsessed with using in your daily life? FaceTime, Skype and WhatsApp are lifelines for staying in touch with friends and family back home. My 13 year old daughter regularly talks to her best friends in Brooklyn and in England on FaceTime, and the other day I Skyped into a meeting of my Brooklyn book group. I really only began posting regularly to Instagram once I moved to Japan, because I want everyone at home to be able to see what I'm seeing every day, here and in South Korea, where I travel regularly to report. Japan and Korea are visually sumptuous places, and, yes, I am one of those cliched people who post photos of their lunches. My daughter is obsessed with Snapchat and streaks, an activity whose point I have yet to grasp. But I have been surprised by the number of times she'll tell me that she has seen some news item on Instagram or Snapchat, an activity whose point I wholeheartedly endorse. Not long after we moved here, we caved and bought AppleTV and subscribed to a VPN so that we could keep up with our favorite American TV shows and movies. Much as I think it is important to experience as much of the local culture as possible, I know that keeping on top of the popular culture from home is a way of staying connected to friends and family, too. Streaming, though, is often sluggish, and the screen will freeze in the middle of a show while we stare balefully at the loading spinner. The robotics industry is important to Japan. Meanwhile, personal digital assistants like Siri and Google Assistant are trendy in the United States. Where do you think this is all taking us? Unlike in the United States, where workers fear automation taking over their jobs, robotics are embraced here in Japan by the government, corporate sector and broader society. The government is anti immigration, so one of its oft cited solutions to a declining population and shrinking labor force is to rely increasingly on artificial intelligence. Whether robots can actually accomplish all the tasks they are being promoted for is an open question. I wonder whether something as personal as nursing home care can really be outsourced to robots. As a parent, I would hate the thought that robots would be used in day care facilities, unless it was just for food preparation or cleanup.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
A rising number of indigenous crafts worldwide are now in danger of becoming extinct or endangered, largely as a result of their time consuming nature, and fewer craftspeople who possess these specialized skills. In Britain, a Red List issued by the Heritage Crafts Association notes the number of critically endangered crafts there biannually, from scissor making in Sheffield to watchmaking in London. The number has more than doubled since 2007. But efforts to promote these disappearing crafts as hobbies or souvenirs are underway in some destinations, particularly by areas with specific historical ties to specific traditions. Geetika Agrawal started Vacation with An Artist to provide a platform for travelers to book mini apprenticeships with master craftspeople around the world, to help "crafts under threat." "We've all heard of endangered species and forests now imagine global crafts at risk of going extinct," wrote Ms. Agrawal in an email. Aging populations are not able to pass the traditional skills down, she said, as younger generations are now pursuing other professions. "We are at risk of losing important global heritage, culture and wisdom." Here are four endangered crafts, and the destinations that are keeping them alive. The Traditional Spanish Market in Santa Fe, N.M., is the largest and oldest juried traditional Hispanic arts show in the world. In 1925, the Spanish Colonial Arts Society was established to promote and preserve crafts, including Colcha embroidery (using naturally dyed yarn), handmade copper engravings, gesso and painted reliefs, retablos (devotional paintings) and straw applique. The annual market held in the summer attracts more than 70,000 people; there's also a Winter Spanish Market in Albuquerque. The earliest Hispanic crafts were those in the religious arts, like santos (wooden saints) and leather altars with damask silk interiors. "We had only one traditional basket weaver and she dropped out," lamented David Rasch, the Spanish Market director. Hispanic pottery is more popular, made with micaceous clay and traditionally used for cooking vegetables like beans. "If an artist wants to create a new craft category, he or she has to provide research to the standards committee including historic references," said Mr. Rasch. In 1981, the society started a youth market, for ages 7 to 17, so the younger generation can practice and preserve these crafts. In the United States, contemporary silver buying has decreased, even across the auction market, and hand wrought, forged silver is not in as much demand as in Britain. But some places, primarily in Virginia and New England, still preserve these traditions. "Silver is such a great part of America's history," said Jeffrey Herman, the founder of the Society of American Silversmiths. "We make only around 300 sets a year and constantly have visitors in the showroom, especially during the summer," said Charlene Morin, an employee. The master silversmith George Cloyed helps to preserve the 18th century period trade in Williamsburg, Va. He has practiced the craft for 44 years and trains apprentices for about seven years. His silver smithing store alone which educates visitors on how valuable the metal was for both coinage and assets attracts around 330,000 visitors annually. Sai Kiran Dhanalakota, one of the youngest members practicing this art form, said visitors have increased weekly to his village because of his family and government efforts. Cheriyal scrolls painted on traditional khadi cloth formed colorful backdrops for storytellers whose narrative occupation gradually vanished as movie theaters and televisions crept in. Known as Nakashi paintings, they use natural pigments from red stones, indigo plants, crushed seashells and soot from kerosene lamps. The artwork, based on Indian epics such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata, can take six months to a year to complete and can be 65 feet wide. "If I don't continue this art form, it will die with my parents," he said. His grandfather received an award from the president of India in 1983 for his work. Cheriyal masks, made from tamarind paste and sawdust, are used at festivals by actors to amuse the crowd. "In terms of traditional Amish crafts, quilts are a huge draw to the area," said the Pennsylvania Dutch County communications manager, Joel Cliff, who says nearly 9 million people come to Lancaster, Pa., annually, in large part because of the crafting traditions; there are around 22 quilting stores. "Quilting is part of the people's imagery of Amish country." Dolores Yoder, who designs and now sells quilts online, says what while there's not nearly the same demand as she saw in the 1980s and early 90s, she still sells hand stitched quilts; some go for nearly 7,000. A few festivals, like the Ohio Amish Country Quilt Festival, which is entering its third year, have helped raise awareness of the craft through classes, speakers, sewing sessions and trunk shows. "We had around 1,400 people in our first year, and this year the festival pulled in nearly 1,800," said the organization's secretary Naomi Miller, who has seen more young quilters interested in the craft.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
KUROWKO, Poland The Polish artist Daniel Rycharski sat in his childhood home recently and considered the idea of fitting in. In many ways, Poland is a highly polarized country. On one side is the right wing populist government of the Law and Justice party, with its many rural supporters, which purports to stand for "family values" and the traditions of the Roman Catholic Church; on the other is a more liberal opposition, which finds most of its backers in the country's cosmopolitan cities. "I'm stuck in the middle," Mr. Rycharski said, sounding resigned. "I don't have a place, really." Nonetheless, his work is the focus of a major exhibition running through April 22 at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. "Maybe the biggest and best art institution in Poland is making an exhibition of me right now, but I don't feel part of the art community," he said. "And the conservatives, they don't attack me, but ..." Mr. Rycharski, 33, makes large sculptural installations filled with religious and rural symbolism. His family and a handful of neighbors in Kurowko, in central Poland, take part in creating them, and most are displayed around the village before they are shown anywhere else. "Strachy," for instance, a large scale installation, was made with his grandmother and features dozens of colorful crosses with items of clothing sewn around them, then wrapped in barbed wire. The show at the Warsaw museum, which includes "Strachy," has been acclaimed by Polish critics. "It's been a long time since such a multifaceted exhibition was shown," Karol Sienkiewicz wrote in Gazeta Wyborcza, a liberal daily. With it, the museum had "hit the bull's eye," he added. But Mr. Rycharski said that, despite the positive reviews, he felt lonely. His art's focus on religion and the countryside means that he is unfashionable in liberal art circles. The fact that he is gay and that much of his art is about his sexuality means he does not sit well with Poland's conservatives either. "Sometimes, I think the only place for me is this village," Mr. Rycharski said. Poland has a long tradition of "conservative avant garde" artists who take a positive view of the church and of folk life, said Szymon Maliborski, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. They include performance artists such as Zbigniew Warpechowski, who once stuffed pages of the Bible into condoms to make a statement about society's resistance to church teachings; and Teresa Murak, whose ritual processions in plant covered clothing reflected an interest in the rhythms of nature. But Mr. Rycharski's art is different, Mr. Maliborski said, noting that it was not simply praising the church or Poland's countryside it was trying to change them. Mr. Maliborski cited "Strachy" as an example. It was first installed in fields around Kurowko, the crosses meant to keep birds away, like scarecrows. But the artist collected the clothes sewn on the crosses from lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in Poland, and many of the garments had stories of struggle behind them. "Strachy," which means "Scares" or "Fears," could be read as a comment on the church's lack of openness to those groups, Mr. Maliborski said. "Daniel's more interesting, and braver, than other artists," he said. "It's not so easy to work with such topics in the countryside." Mr. Rycharski does not hide his sexuality, even though he says it is a factor in his feelings of loneliness. For his interview in Kurowko, he wore a tracksuit modified to have rainbow stripes running down the legs. But Mr. Rycharski did not feel at home there. "When I was living in Krakow," he said, "there was too much of everything: too many artists, too many buildings, too many monuments. When I came back here, there was nothing, so I can build everything in my head." His time in Krakow also made him realize the indifference of Poland's art to the countryside. "Everyone thinks people in the village are stupid, dirty, angry and they have no culture," he said. "I knew it was wrong." He wanted to make art that would change perceptions but that would also refresh a sense of community in the village, he said. One of his most successful pieces was "Monument to a Peasant," a sculpture dedicated to Poland's small scale farmers. It featured a trailer, with farming tools attached to it, painted black to represent the dismal mood of agrarian workers facing a host of financial struggles. The mobile artwork has traveled around Poland and struck a chord in many places, particularly in rural areas. The popularity of works like "Monument to a Peasant" gave Mr. Rycharski the confidence to explore his gay identity in art, with crusading works that put the church's rejection of gay Catholics in the spotlight. For one piece, he took a quotation from the catechism that says gay people should be "accepted with respect," and made it into a metal plaque. He asked several liberal churches to display it. When they refused, he stood outside one for 10 hours holding it. Mr. Rycharski faces a struggle to change attitudes in Poland. The populist agenda of the governing Law and Justice party has made gay rights a central issue before elections later this year. In March, the party's co founder, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, spoke out harshly against same sex marriage. Homophobic attitudes tend to be widespread in Poland, though the country's first openly gay politician, Robert Biedron, started a new opposition party in February and has gained some traction and attention. Wojciech Adamski, an amateur artist and firefighter from Sierpc, the nearest town to Kurowko, who has worked with Mr. Rycharski on several projects, said the focus on gay rights was important. "Daniel's activities here can help other people who belong to the L.G.B.T. community, whom we don't know about, find themselves, to feel they are accepted," he said. Mr. Rycharski said he had no intention of changing his approach, whatever problems it caused him. "If I can change Kurowko, Poland can change," he said. After the interview, Mr. Rycharski went for a walk along Kurowko's one main road. As dogs barked, and someone burned garbage in a field, he talked about a future project. He wanted to buy a house in the village and make it into a community space for lesbian, gay and transgender Christians, he said. "I'm not sure it's going to happen," he said. "People might not be ready for it yet."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
When authorities arrested Graham Ivan Clark, who they said was the "mastermind" of the recent Twitter hack that ensnared Kanye West, Bill Gates and others, one detail that stood out was his age: He was only 17. Now authorities have homed in on another person who appears to have played an equal, if not more significant, role in the July 15 attack, according to four people involved in the investigation who declined to be identified because the inquiry was ongoing. They said the person was at least partly responsible for planning the breach and carrying out some of its most sensitive and complicated elements. On Tuesday, federal agents served the teenager with a search warrant and scoured the Massachusetts home where he lives with his parents, said one of the people involved in the operation. A spokesman for the F.B.I. confirmed a search warrant had been executed at the address. The search warrant and other documents in the case are under seal, and federal agents may decide not to charge the youth with a crime. If he is ultimately arrested, the case is likely to be handed over to Massachusetts authorities, who have more leverage than federal prosecutors in charging minors as adults. (The New York Times is not naming the teenager at this point because of his age and because he has not been charged.) Rarely have federal agents gone after someone so young in a hacking case, especially given the apparent sophistication of the attack. During the hack, much of Twitter including President Trump's unfiltered communications on the service was largely immobilized. The attackers gained control of the social network's systems and compromised the accounts of Barack Obama, Joseph R. Biden Jr., Jeff Bezos and many other prominent people, exposing just how vulnerable Twitter could be. Graham Ivan Clark, 17, was accused by Florida prosecutors of being the "mastermind" of the attack. Authorities have already charged three other people in the hack. They include Mr. Clark, who Florida prosecutors charged in late July as an adult with 30 felonies. He has pleaded not guilty and has not made the bail payment to get out of jail. The other two people are Mason John Sheppard, 19, of the United Kingdom, and Nima Fazeli, 22, of Orlando, Fla., who were charged by federal prosecutors. The Massachusetts teenager appeared to get involved in planning the Twitter attack with Mr. Clark in May, according to investigators. While Mr. Clark and some of his accomplices talked with one another on the messaging board Discord, the youth restricted himself to using encrypted messaging systems like Signal and Wire, several hackers who saw the messages said. "He was smarter than the rest," Joseph O'Connor, a hacker known as PlugWalkJoe, said of the teenager. Mr. O'Connor said he talked with some of the people involved in the hack on the day of the Twitter attack and was aware of the teenager's role in the scheme. The teenager was known for calling employees of companies, such as Twitter, according to investigators and other hackers. He often posed as a contractor or employee to convince employees to enter their login credentials into fraudulent websites where the credentials could be captured, a method known as voice phishing or vishing. The login credentials made it possible for the hackers to then access the inner workings of the companies' systems. After the Twitter hack, the boy became a focus of investigators because he continued to be involved in voice phishing attacks, people involved in the probe said. "Using vished credentials, cybercriminals mined the victim company databases for their customers' personal information to leverage in other attacks," federal authorities said in a warning about the ongoing scheme issued in August. According to online forensic research and social media posts, the teenager lives in a modest two story house in a coastal Massachusetts city where he attended a nearby private school. Facebook posts showed him with floppy hair when going for his black belt in martial arts at age 11. His parents filed for divorce two years ago and appeared to struggle with money. His mother, a wellness instructor, reportedly lost her job after lying about her credentials, according to local newspapers. His father was foreclosed on four times and declared bankruptcy twice, according to public records. Around age 13, the boy bought a series of websites with pornographic names and tried to resell them using his personal address and email, according to domain records. Around the same time, online forum accounts tied to his email address and home internet protocol address showed up on the website OGusers.com, a site that was the home for the others involved in the Twitter attack, according to two online forensic firms. The site provides a place for hackers to buy and sell coveted "original gangster" user names on social media sites, such as single letter accounts like a or 6. The teenager rotated among several aliases tied to his various online accounts, according to intelligence analysis done by the firm Intel471. The messages from the accounts included profanities, anti Semitic remarks and homophobic comments. At one point, the teenager complained about losing around 200,000 on a Bitcoin gambling site. He also offered to sell a user name for 3,000 in Bitcoin, according to messages from the forum that were later leaked. "IF your broke and can't afford or dont think thats a good price JUST DONT EVEN MESSAGE ME!" he wrote in late 2018. He later linked up with Mr. Clark online and they began working together, people involved in the investigation said. Their early work, hackers said and investigators confirmed, was on so called SIM swaps, a hacking method that is often used to steal social media accounts and cryptocurrency. Late last year and early this year, hackers and investigators said, the teenager was part of a group that got inside the site GoDaddy, a company that sells and secures website names. The hackers were able to access and change customer records. GoDaddy confirmed the hack in a letter to customers. In May, the Massachusetts teenager and Mr. Clark began tricking Twitter employees to give up their logins, leading to the July 15 hack. The boys, using the alias Kirk, began selling valuable Twitter user names to customers.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Scientists have discovered three new species of salamanders, and it's no wonder no one ever noticed them before: The salamanders are about two inches long, live deep in the Mexican forest and are nearly extinct. All three belong to the genus Thorius, perhaps the most endangered genus of amphibians in the world. The scientists distinguished the three new species by differences in their skeletons and by DNA sequencing. They have been named T. pinicola (it lives in pine forests), T. longicaudus (for its tail, which is longer than its body), and T. tlaxiacus (from Heroica Ciudad de Tlaxiaco, the city nearest where it was found). "In some respects, amphibians are the canary in the coal mine," said James Hanken, the director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, who reported the discovery in PeerJ.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Do studies show that soft drinks promote obesity and Type 2 diabetes? It depends on who paid for the study. Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, looked at studies of soft drink consumption and its relationship to obesity and diabetes published between 2001 and 2016. They found about 60 studies that were fairly rigorous in their methodology. When the studies were led by independent researchers, they showed a clear link between soda consumption and obesity or metabolic disease. But notably, 26 of the studies reported no link between sugary soft drinks and poor health. What was different about the studies that found no connection to health problems? They were all carried out by researchers with financial ties to the beverage industry. The findings were published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine. "If you look at just the independent studies, it becomes exceedingly clear that these drinks are associated with diabetes and obesity," said Dean Schillinger, the lead author of the report and chief of the University of California, San Francisco, division of general internal medicine at San Francisco General Hospital. "Yet there are pockets of society that believe that they don't cause these diseases because of the controversy that industry has created." The notion that sugary drinks play a major role in the spread of obesity has prompted authorities and health officials to increasingly call for soda taxes and similar measures aimed at curbing their consumption. But the industry has pushed back, calling soda taxes discriminatory and arguing that there is no proof that sugary drinks have played a disproportionate role in the obesity epidemic. The U.C.S.F. findings are the latest evidence that the beverage industry has supported research to downplay the health hazards of sugary drinks. Nutrition experts say the industy funded science has been used to influence public policy and nutrition recommendations. Last year, an article in The New York Times reported that Coca Cola was providing millions in funding to scientists who sought to downplay the link between sugary drinks and obesity. Other reports revealed that the beverage industry was paying dietitians and health experts to write social media posts opposing soda taxes and encouraging consumers to drink soda as a healthy snack. As a result of those reports, Coca Cola, the world's largest sugary drink producer, announced that it would pull back from its funding of health experts and obesity research as part of an effort to be more transparent. The new study came about as a result of a legal dispute between the beverage industry and the city of San Francisco. In 2015, city officials issued an ordinance requiring that billboards and other advertisements for sugary drinks carry a warning like that required for tobacco stating that the beverages contribute to obesity, tooth decay and diabetes. The beverage industry sued, calling the warnings about health hazards "misleading" and a violation of free speech. During the case, the city hired Dr. Schillinger to compile a report assessing the scientific data on sugary drinks and health problems. While reviewing the literature, Dr. Schillinger said he noticed that industry supported studies and independent studies tended to draw very different conclusions. He and several colleagues at U.C.S.F. launched an analysis to study the link between funding sources and outcomes in soft drink research. He concluded "they far exceed other industries as far as the degree to which they appear to be influencing the scientific process." In a statement, the American Beverage Association, the trade group that represents Coke, PepsiCo and other beverage makers, said that its studies help to inform consumers and regulatory agencies. "We have a right and a responsibility to engage in scientific research," the association said. "The research we fund adheres to the highest standards of integrity for scientific inquiry based on recognized standards by prominent research institutions." The beverage association added that the new report itself was biased because its lead author, Dr. Schillinger, had been a "paid expert" for the City of San Francisco in the lawsuit over its soda warning labels. And it questioned the timing of the new report, saying its release a week before Election Day was an attempt to influence voters in California and Colorado, which have soda tax referendums on the ballot. "This paper is the latest in a trend of pro tax forces writing speculative opinion papers to influence voters a week before a vote on several ballot initiatives to tax beverages," the association said. "Clearly pro tax forces are worried that the voters are skeptical of their demands for regressive and discriminatory taxes."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
Frances Sayle Milne and Heather Jodi Daley were married April 16 at the Avalon Yacht Club in Avalon, N.J. Lea Richmond IV, Ms. Milne's brother, who became a Universal Life minister for the occasion, officiated. Ms. Milne (left), 37, who goes by Sayle, gives classes about wine appreciation to individuals, groups and corporations in New York. She graduated from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn. She is the daughter of Nancy Owens Milne and John Milne Jr. of Cleveland, Tenn. Her father retired from Brown Stove Works, a manufacturer of ovens and ranges there. Ms. Daley, 58, who goes by Jodi, owns West End Productions, a multimedia and executive training company in New York. She graduated from West Chester State College in West Chester, Pa., and received a master's degree in radio, television and film from Temple.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
For years, the music industry's lobbying efforts have been hampered by factionalism, as different sides of the business competed to influence lawmakers. Now, with copyright and royalties issues taking center stage in the music world, the organization behind the Grammy Awards wants to unite the industry's voice in Washington. The organization, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, is creating a political action committee, the Grammy Fund for Music Creators, that will raise money from its thousands of members among them performers, songwriters and producers and funnel it to congressional candidates deemed sympathetic to their causes. The Grammys' fund will face no shortage of competition for dollars in Washington, as music organizations like the Recording Industry Association of America and the performing rights group Ascap have associated political action committees, or PACs, and have been lobbying on behalf of their members for decades. Among its likely opponents are technology companies like Pandora and the powerful National Association of Broadcasters, which for decades has opposed the music world's efforts to expand radio royalties. The Grammy Fund, which the recording academy plans to establish through a filing on Tuesday with the Federal Election Commission, will have a first year fund raising goal of 100,000, according to Daryl P. Friedman, the academy's top official in Washington. That amount is roughly comparable to those of the PACs for music organizations like the Recording Industry Association, but far less than that of the broadcasters' group, which last year raised almost 1.2 million, according to the Federal Election Commission.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
For all the comedians and actors who have come and gone from "Saturday Night Live" in its four decades, there has been a near complete absence of Asian performers onscreen. The NBC show is taking a step toward rectifying that. Bowen Yang the son of Chinese immigrants and an "S.N.L." writer will be one of three new cast members for the 45th season, which begins this month, the show announced on Thursday. Yang's admission to the cast was a breakthrough he will be the show's first Chinese American regular performer but just hours later, the show was confronted with the embarrassing revelation that another new cast member, Shane Gillis, had made racist jokes about Chinese people in a podcast. Representatives of the show and Gillis did not immediately respond to requests for comment. "S.N.L." has had little representation from Asian actors, as cast members or hosts, in the past. Fred Armisen, who appeared on the show from 2002 through 2013, is of Asian descent; another former star, Rob Schneider, is one quarter Filipino; and Nasim Pedrad, who was in the cast from 2009 to 2014, was born in Iran.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
THE L WORD: GENERATION Q 10 p.m. on Showtime. This reboot of the "The L Word," the pioneering series about lesbian life in Los Angeles, wraps up its first season. The mayoral candidate Bette (Jennifer Beals) is on the edge of her seat, waiting for the results on election night. While Shane (Katherine Moennig) and Quiara (Lex Scott Davis) face another bump in the road, Alice (Leisha Hailey) takes a risk with her show after a devastating drop in ratings. In her review for The New York Times, Elisabeth Vincentelli wrote that while "The L Word" "now better reflects Los Angeles's ethnic and gender diversity," it still needs some fine tuning. The original series "always stood on shaky, uncritical ground when it came to money and class, and 'Generation Q' offers little progress in that regard." Fans who welcomed this sequel can breathe a sigh of relief: Showtime recently renewed it for a second season. THE 62ND ANNUAL GRAMMY AWARDS 8 p.m. on CBS. A dark cloud hangs over Sunday night's ceremony: Deborah Dugan, the suspended chief executive of the Recording Academy, was recently placed on leave over accusations of bullying behavior and a request for a multimillion dollar payout. Dugan has denied the charges and responded with her own allegations, saying the academy was punishing her for unveiling misconduct. As the intense showdown plays out behind the scenes, several of this year's nominees will take the stage for performances. Among them are Lizzo (with eight nominations), Billie Eilish (six) and Lil Nas X (also six).	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
There's a sense in which this Russian film, a raucous, violent comedy of vengeance written and directed by Kirill Sokolov, may immediately feel familiar at least if you're a genre film aficionado. Its early shots show our hero, so to speak Matvey (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), a young fellow with an unusually shaped nose wearing a sweatshirt with a Batman symbol on it standing outside of an apartment, slightly nervous, and not without reason. He's holding a new looking steel hammer behind his back. Matvey gathers the nerve to ring the bell, and it's answered by the bullet headed middle aged detective Andrei (Vitaly Khaev), a stocky man with a shaved dome and an irascible demeanor. And he only gets more annoyed once he learns Matvey's hammer is meant for his skull. As the film's title indicates, things don't go as planned. Sokolov's debut feature is a clever, bloody as hell, often hilarious virtuoso exercise in excruciating harm doing among mendacious people. Andrei has never met Matvey, but Matvey loves Olya (Evgeniya Kregzhde), Andrei's daughter; as a flashback reveals, Olya has pushed the wide eyed and credulous Matvey to kill her father with a tale of childhood rape.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
"I don't have a quilt that gives me more pleasure than this one," the filmmaker Ken Burns said of the "Circular Wreath" quilt that hangs above his bed in his Manhattan apartment. An exhibition of his quilt collection opens this week at the International Quilt Study Center Museum in Lincoln, Neb. This week, the International Quilt Study Center Museum in Lincoln, Neb., will reveal a surprising side of the prolific filmmaker Ken Burns: He collects quilts. The exhibition "Uncovered: The Ken Burns Collection" will display 28 of them for the first time. Mr. Burns has been buying American quilts since the mid 1970s, often on prowls through antique stores on the back roads of New England; before too long, dealers began coming to him. He now owns about 75 quilts, split among his home, office, barn and lake house in New Hampshire. He also keeps three in his Manhattan apartment, including his favorite, the "Circular Wreath" quilt, which hangs above his bed. He did not tell the International Quilt Study Center about it, he admitted. "I don't have a quilt that gives me more pleasure than this one." He warmed to his subject. "First of all, you're faced with a loud but controlled design of these circles and these spots and these dots and the borders. And then," he said, pointing at the white background, "you go in and you cannot believe the extent of the quilting. There's some mirrored or deeper round circular things that aren't in any way what the circles are, and there's combinations. One may be a pinwheel, followed by something that is more like a traditional flower, with blossoms, and then lots of leaves in between. If you consider the thousands of woman hours that went into this, it's just an extraordinary thing." "I would not trade it for a 25 million painting by you name the artist," he added. Giving a tour of his Manhattan home, he noted that although about a quarter of his quilts are in storage, he still misses those sent to Nebraska: "I can feel the emptiness of the spots where they were." Here are edited excerpts from the conversation. What draws you to quilts? A quilt greets you on many levels. It has its stunning initial design, and that draws you into it established patterns like a crazy quilt or a log cabin quilt. I'm less interested in that than in just how beautifully they've realized that. Then others seem to have sprung from the imagination of the creators, or they are riffing on a design and have gone so far away that they've just added something new. And then, once you've accepted the symmetry or the asymmetry, the colors and the patterns, then you go in to see the minute quilting itself. How do you decide which quilts to buy? It's completely visceral. I can tell in a nanosecond whether I want to put it into the maybe pile or the yes pile or the no pile; and then the maybes, it takes me only a few more seconds of reconsideration to say yes or no to them. The center says that quilt collecting is an extension of your "passion for storytelling." How? They're an essential building block of the culture that's making them. Women working with fabrics produce something reflective of it. I collect American quilts and they tell me a lot about the country. Sometimes these are collective affairs, and that's a wonderful thing, because the story of us, both the pronoun and U.S. "us," is a tension between individual and collective freedom what I want and what we need. It's the essential conflict, and to me quilts reconcile that. What stories do quilts tell? We see quilts in an anachronistic fashion they are quaint. They're of a different era. And yet I possess, and the Nebraska show is exhibiting, a quilt by the Amish that we estimate comes from the 1830s, which is 100 years in advance of some of the modernist geometric designs of Piet Mondrian, who we think of as the epitome of modernism. Here these Amish women in central Pennsylvania were doing something 100 years before Mondrian. I like that it's not so much a story as a question. Who are these people? Who made this? Tell me about this "Star of Stars" quilt. It's so wonderful and so different from any other quilt I have. It's a star made up of stars. There's the implication that it has an American theme because it's red, white and blue. Then you get in closer, and you find there's quilting of dozens of other stars that's just in the red background. It feels modern, but I don't think it is modern. I think it may be at least 75 or 100 years old. Is a documentary on quilts in the offing? These quilts have their own secrets, and I'm not sure how you can join them together. Sometimes the subject is best left alone.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
"I had the feeling my story, and my family's story, is not something to write books about," said Patrik Svensson, who connected with his father, a road paver, during childhood fishing trips. "The eels gave me something to hide behind." MALMO, Sweden In the 1980s, American scientists devised an experiment that they were convinced would solve the mystery of how eels reproduce. They took 100 females, injected them with hormones to induce sexual maturity, and prepared to bring them to the Sargasso Sea, that evocative patch of the Atlantic Ocean that begins some 300 miles off the eastern coast of the U.S. and is known to be where European and American eels go to spawn. There, the scientists planned to set the females in cages attached to buoys intended to function as lures that would, essentially, bring all the boys to the yard. Yet 95 of the eels died before they reached the sea. The remaining five, put in cages and attached to buoys as planned, disappeared along with the contraptions that housed them. "He takes scientific mysteries and makes them part of a lived experience; a story between father and son that people can relate to," Emi Simone Zawall, a book critic for the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet and a former juror for the August Prize, said in a phone interview. "But I think the reason for the book's success is that he combines them with a level of literary craftsmanship that is quite rare." No one is more surprised by that success than its author. "It's a very strange and nerdy book," Svensson said in an interview this month in Malmo. A culture reporter who reviews books and films, he grew up in a rural area north of the city where his decision to go to university to say nothing of his interest in the arts was difficult for his father, who worked as a road paver, to understand. But father and son connected over eels, and it was from his dad's stories that the younger Svensson became fascinated by the animal. The eel's biology has captivated and baffled some of the West's greatest minds, from Aristotle to Freud (who spent a postgraduate research gig in a futile quest to locate the fish's testes, a failure that, as Svensson suggests, may have given the future father of psychoanalysis some ideas about genital absence). The Danish marine biologist Johanne Schmidt, who was obsessed with the eel, spent 20 years establishing its origins in the Sargasso. It wasn't until his father's death from cancer, however, that Svensson decided to try his own hand at researching the creature. "I wouldn't have written the book if my father hadn't died," he said. "Yes, it is a book about science and science history. But it's also a way for me to try to write my way back to my origin, to my own Sargasso Sea." In "The Book of Eels," the younger Svensson's memories of their nighttime fishing trips the moonlit stillness giving way to a sudden thrash of slime are lyrically recalled, and alternate with the natural history chapters. Svensson's insecurities surrounding his working class background evident, for example, in a passage in which he describes his boyhood envy for the superior fishing grounds of a local fishing club, "with their expensive fly fishing rods and their ridiculous little hats" partly explain why he twined his past with the eel's. "I had the feeling my story, and my family's story, is not something to write books about," he said. "The eels gave me something to hide behind." It helped that the eels themselves have kept so much hidden. As he wrote, Svensson found his book's two stories coming together in strange ways. He would recall a willow that grew the bank of the stream where he and his father fished, for example, then discover that scientists describe the eel larva as shaped like a willow leaf. And much like an eel, his father turned out to have some ancestral secrets of his own. In recent years, eels have become a flash point in southern Sweden. Although there is a long tradition of fishing them, the catch is strictly regulated, and the species, now endangered, has become a focus for environmental activists. With the exception of one his mother won in a Christmas lottery a few years back, Svensson no longer eats the fish as a matter of principle. But it is a tribute to the sensitivity with which he presents both the local culture and the eels' plight that both fishermen and conservationists have praised the book. In his quiet, studied way, Svensson is thrilled that readers have embraced his efforts to blend popular science with literary memoir. But more than anything, he believes they are responding to the eels' own unknowable nature. "We need enigmas," he said. "We need questions that aren't answered yet. Eels argue with our confidence that the world is explained." Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Abhaya Yoga, a yoga and Pilates studio, is to open in August in a 5,300 square foot space with exposed brick walls and 14 foot ceilings in this single story warehouse. The studio has taken a five year lease, with three months rent free for its build out and expects to eventually open a coffee shop there. A 10 year lease is available, starting in June, for a 5,175 square foot recently renovated restaurant space, which had been home to White Street Restaurant, in this 1918 six story mixed use loft building in the TriBeCa East Historic District. The ground floor space, with 13 and a half foot ceilings, can seat up to 215 people, and has a liquor license. Its 5,000 square foot usable lower level has a prep kitchen, office space and a private dining area. Its frontage totals 90 feet on White and West Broadway.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
It took only a couple of minutes of Strauss's "Der Rosenkavalier" for the conductor Kirill Petrenko and the Bavarian State Orchestra to claim this score as their own on Thursday at Carnegie Hall. In the introduction to the opening act, the orchestra plays the rising, athletic motif of young Count Octavian, then the gentle, falling, noble theme of the Marschallin. This introduction is like a compressed tone poem depicting their lovemaking. Many conductors pump the music for every bit of roiling, erotic excess. Mr. Petrenko and his players conveyed the graphic passion in the music, but also its giddiness, humor and, most important, its intricacy. I've seldom heard the passage performed with more transparency and color. Right after some raucous horn blasts suggest Octavian in his moment of, ahem, climax, Mr. Petrenko followed Strauss's instruction in the score to play "in strict time," bringing exact rhythmic articulation to the series of syncopated chords. It made the ecstasy of the moment even more ecstatic. This ensemble is the pit band of the Bavarian State Opera, where Mr. Petrenko has been music director since 2013. Right at the start of this concert performance it was clear that the audience was in experienced hands. This long opera has profoundly moving scenes, especially the great final trio for the three lead women, performed rapturously here. There are also stretches of galumphing humor that go on too long. The triumph of this performance was that Mr. Petrenko shaped the beautiful passages with tenderness and slightly cool restraint, while also drawing out the complexities of the comedic episodes. Hearing an orchestra as excellent as this one play the music on Carnegie's stage, instead of from a pit, certainly enhanced the clarity. But the mix of lucidity and nuance, of natural flow and urgency, surely came from complete trust between conductor and players. Would the singers rise to the same heights? Absolutely, as was clear from the first morning after exchanges between the lovers. The mezzo soprano Angela Brower sang Octavian with plush, full sound, yet also youthful brightness and flashes of cocky energy. And the soprano Adrianne Pieczonka was an affecting and worldly Marschallin. During romantic moments she brought melting radiance to the music, but could also summon a weightier sound with just a glint of steel. Late in Act I, when the Marschallin gently tells Octavian that sooner or later he will leave her for a younger woman, Ms. Pieczonka, in sync with Mr. Petrenko's approach, sang wistfully, but never wallowed in sentimentality. Yet when Octavian leaves the room before she gives him a goodbye kiss, this Marschallin went into panic mode, sounding desperate. Mr. Petrenko drew out the frenzied, clashing intensity of the music. For a moment "Rosenkavalier" had echoes of "Elektra." The robust bass Peter Rose played Baron Ochs in the typical way, as an oafish character convinced that his aristocratic pedigree entitles him to act crudely. The young soprano Hanna Elisabeth Muller was wonderful as Sophie, who is pledged to Ochs but falls in love with Octavian. There was rosy bloom but also coursing intensity in her singing. On Wednesday, for the orchestra's first program at Carnegie, Mr. Petrenko led a stirring account of Brahms's Concerto for Violin and Cello, with the brilliant violinist Julia Fischer and the commanding cellist Daniel Muller Schott as soloists. After intermission came Tchaikovsky's "Manfred" Symphony, a nearly hourlong hybrid of symphony and tone poem. Mr. Petrenko found the coherence that lies below the teeming surface of this music. (A recording of the concert is archived on the website of the radio station WQXR.) Given Mr. Petrenko's stature in 2019 he becomes the chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, one of the classical world's storied positions it was incredible that this was his Carnegie Hall debut. It was long overdue.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Anyone who has looked askance at a coughing neighbor or a maskless jogger in recent weeks understands how anxiety and suspicion can take hold when a virulent infectious disease assaults a crowded city. In New York, the ugly apogee of disease related Nimby ism came in September of 1858, when a well organized mob of Staten Island residents, inflamed by xenophobia and fear of deadly yellow fever, stormed a 30 acre quarantine hospital in the area now known as St. George and set the place ablaze. In the aftermath of this violence, which stemmed from the location of an infectious disease facility within a population center, The New York Times noted with grim irony that "the great problem of the age seems to be, to establish a Quarantine without having it located anywhere." Though finding such a paradoxical site may seem impossible, public health officials found a creative way to pull it off: they built a quarantine on a somewhere that hadn't previously existed anywhere. Hoffman Island, at 11 acres the larger of the two, was built between Coney Island and Staten Island's South Beach, south of the slender waterway known as the Narrows; it was equipped with three brick buildings and later expanded. Four acre Dix Island, a wind whipped speck of land, was created about three quarters of a mile farther south and outfitted with a row of long white hospital wards. It was later renamed Swinburne Island. An 1879 report of the New York State Commissioners of Quarantine described the inspection process for arriving ships. The boarding officer would then visit the ship on a small boat. If he discovered anyone onboard suffering from cholera or yellow fever, a quarantine steamer was summoned and the sufferers were lowered into it strapped into special chairs if the weather was surly and ferried to Swinburne Island for treatment and isolation. During the cholera scare of the 1880s, "the lower bay was crowded with ocean liners in quarantine," The Times reported, with infected migrants treated on Swinburne while their fellow travelers were quarantined on Hoffman for observation. In 1890, as European emigration surged, the huddled masses examined by New York's quarantine service included 370,000 steerage passengers. More than 1,500 were removed from eight steamships and transferred to Hoffman. In a small tower, a telegraph operator received reports from Fire Island and Sandy Hook on approaching ships. As a vessel drew near, the operator poked his telescope out one of several narrow second floor windows to confirm the ship's name and other details. Down below, a bell on a forked pole was tolled, summoning, from one of the houses on the hill, a blue uniformed doctor who was to be transported by tugboat to examine the vessel's travelers. Those suffering from smallpox were sent to North Brother Island, on Long Island Sound. Fellow travelers who had not been vaccinated received inoculations and were sent to Hoffman for observation, where they remained for as long as two weeks. Hoffman's New Administration Building contained a big kitchen and dining room, with the bottom five feet or so of the interior walls lined with white enameled bricks to allow for easy cleaning. The building also housed the disinfecting chamber, which was largely made of iron. Here were arrayed sliding frames, each containing three wire baskets, into which inmates' clothes were placed. According to Frank Leslie's magazine, the room contained 9,000 feet of coiled piping, from which "superheated steam is let in under high pressure." By the early 1890s, Swinburne's facilities had been expanded to include 10 airy, pitched roof hospital wards made of wood, where cholera and yellow fever patients were treated. At the end of one of the rows of wards stood the brick mortuary and crematorium buildings, the latter distinguished by its bleak, telltale chimney. On Staten Island, just up the road from quarantine headquarters, stood Clear Comfort, the Victorian Gothic home of Alice Austen, one of the first women photographers in America to work outside a studio. From the doorway of her house, which today is a museum, Austen could see and photograph steamships anchored in quarantine. In the early 1890s, she was commissioned by her neighbor, Dr. Alvah H. Doty, the quarantine's health officer, to document conditions on Swinburne and Hoffman Islands. "For a Victorian woman, she was breaking all the rules, taking more than 50 pounds of photographic equipment with her," said Victoria Munro, executive director of the Alice Austen House. "It was very brave for anyone, but especially a young woman to do this at that time." Fascinated by both technology and immigrants, Austen continued to photograph the quarantine islands for more than a decade after her one year commission ended, compiling a vivid record of the sanitation procedures and lives of the patients and workers. Her oeuvre includes an image of a mattress decontamination chamber, which was displayed last year in a Museum of the City of New York exhibit called "Germ City." Another Austen photograph depicts forlorn immigrants penned behind a fence on Hoffman Island. "Obviously they had endured terribly harsh conditions in their own countries, and then survived the difficult trip across the sea," Ms. Munro said. "Whether they managed to survive quarantine was another story." During World War II, Hoffman was home to a training school for merchant seamen, equipped, according to Popular Mechanics magazine, with "docks, slips, towers, masts, guns, cargo booms, offices, school buildings and red brick barracks." The island also housed an anchorage for an anti submarine net that extended across the entrance to New York Harbor. Both Hoffman and Swinburne became part of the National Park Service in 1972, but they are off limits to the public. Paradoxically, then, though the islands belong to the Gateway National Recreation Area, the only recreation permitted is practiced by visitors of the feathered and aquatic persuasions. Hoffman is now fringed by the skeletons of derelict docks, its overgrown interior marked by the foundations of razed buildings. On Swinburne, ruins of five sizable structures can be seen, including a brick chimney that probably belonged to the crematorium. Hoffman is a nesting site for five species of long legged wading birds, according to George Frame, a park service biologist. And both islands are frequented by corpulent, bewhiskered seals, who bask seasonally on their rocky shores, happily disregarding all governmental urgings to maintain social distancing.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
The United States is engaged in something I call escalation dominance. This means we need to calculate how an adversary is likely to respond to a given action of ours. What are the United States' vulnerabilities? What are theirs? Depending on the adversary's reactions, what is our range of follow up moves? In short, how does the United States increase pain for the Iranians while denying them the opportunity to counter escalate? In the complex context of Iran, this becomes multidimensional chess. We have forces in Iraq and Syria, as well as a military presence throughout the Gulf: in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Oman. These are assets, but they are also potential targets, as are the countries where they are located. We will also have to consult very closely with Israel. Escalation dominance is not a simple measure of raw power. It is about which party is more likely to dominate in a given context, something that is a function of abilities but also determination, prioritization and patience. I learned this the hard way in Beirut in the 1980s, when the young Islamic Republic of Iran was still able to force us out of Lebanon, even while it was engaged in a brutal war of attrition against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. An attempt at escalation dominance by Iran might include threats and actions against our regional allies, sustained attacks on tanker traffic in the Gulf and direct attacks on United States installations in the region. But the options for Iran and its backers are not only kinetic. Even before the Suleimani strike in Baghdad, political parties close to Iran had floated the possibility of legislation in the Iraqi parliament demanding the departure of all United States forces from the country. On Sunday, Iraqi lawmakers passed it, and the prime minister has indicated he will sign it. While we might be in a virtual state of war with Iran, the confrontations are taking place in Iraq, which in many ways is caught in the middle. If our embassy in Baghdad is evacuated and our ability to monitor and influence events on the ground is lost, it will be a victory for Iran. Iraqis remember that the last time United States forces withdrew from their country, the Islamic State moved in.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
We chose the country of Canada as the top place to go this year, partly inspired by international interest in a country that seems devoid of wrenching rifts and partly because of the yearlong celebrations that have been cooked up for the sesquicentennial. Because it's such a vast country, we decided to run a few additional pieces to invite readers to explore America's northern neighbor. Here are five stories meant to inspire journeys to Canada. Jeremy Bittermann for The New York Times As part of a series of articles called "Where I Live," we asked literary fiction and nonfiction writers to capture the places they call home. Timothy Taylor responded with an epic take on the improvised work in progress that is Vancouver. Two lodges used for smoking fish and drying meat were illuminated by the northern lights, near the site of the prophet Eht'se Ayah's home. Christopher Miller for The New York Times Great Bear Lake is the eighth largest lake in the world bigger than Belgium and deeper than Lake Superior. Many have not heard of it but some of the Sahtuto'ine who manage it believe a prophecy that says the lake may become the last refuge for humanity. Our deep exploration of the Underground Railroad includes sites in Canada, the country that people fleeing American slavery considered their salvation. Afua Cooper, a scholar and author, wrote about three museums in Ontario. "I have been visiting these places for more than 20 years," she wrote, "and each time I feel as if I am walking through living history." Kal Penn seems an unlikely source for insider's tips on Toronto, but the actor knows a thing or two about the city. He shot the film "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle" there and returned recently to shoot an ABC series. He shared his favorite neighborhood in Toronto and passed along other recommendations for traveling the world. 5. The 52 Places to Go Canada topped our list of 52 Places to Go this year, and to get readers immersed, we sent a journalist there to shoot 360 degree video. Start in Canada but no need to stop there there are 51 other places to roam.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
IT TAKES TWO Adult friendships are hard. Maintaining adult friendships across forced social distance is harder. But the 10 year bond between Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman has weathered worse. The co hosts of "Call Your Girlfriend" ("a podcast for long distance besties everywhere") have lived on opposite coasts for longer than they lived in the same city. Things once got so bad, they write in their debut book, "Big Friendship" which entered the hardcover nonfiction list last week at No. 11 they went to "couples therapy." It worked, and then the pandemic hit. "Unlike a lot of friendships that are strained in quarantine, ours is more used to the rhythm of being far apart," Sow said over the phone from her home in Brooklyn. "We are practicing what we are preaching when it comes to trying to stay close to each other, but the longer quarantine goes on, the more the anxiety really sets in." "Your friends are your daily emotional support system," Friedman said from L.A., "and now you're unable to see them in person, even if they aren't far away." Writing this book in 2019, they couldn't have imagined the resonance their underlying question would have in 2020: What is the value of having a chosen family, and how do you sustain it over time as each member and the world evolves?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Fredrick Brennan was getting ready for church at his home in the Philippines when the news of a mass shooting in El Paso arrived. His response was immediate and instinctive. "Whenever I hear about a mass shooting, I say, 'All right, we have to research if there's an 8chan connection,'" he said about the online message board he started in 2013. It didn't take him long to find one. Moments before the El Paso shooting on Saturday, a four page message whose author identified himself as the gunman appeared on 8chan. The person who posted the message encouraged his "brothers" on the site to spread the contents far and wide. In recent months, 8chan has become a go to resource for violent extremists. At least three mass shootings this year including the mosque killings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the synagogue shooting in Poway, Calif. have been announced in advance on the site, often accompanied by racist writings that seem engineered to go viral on the internet. Mr. Brennan started the online message board as a free speech utopia. But now, 8chan is known as something else: a megaphone for mass shooters, and a recruiting platform for violent white nationalists. And it has become a focal point for those seeking to disrupt the pathways of online extremism. On Sunday, critics characterized the site as a breeding ground for violence, and lobbied the site's service providers to get it taken down. One of those providers, Cloudflare, a service that protects websites against cyberattacks, said it would stop working with 8chan on Sunday night and the site went dark about 3 a.m. Eastern time. And Mr. Brennan, who stopped working with the site's current owner last year, called for it to be taken offline before it leads to further violence. "Shut the site down," Mr. Brennan said in an interview. "It's not doing the world any good. It's a complete negative to everybody except the users that are there. And you know what? It's a negative to them, too. They just don't realize it." Read our live briefing for the latest updates on the shootings in El Paso and Dayton Mr. Brennan, who has claimed that he got the idea for 8chan while on psychedelic mushrooms, set out to create what he called a free speech alternative to 4chan, a better known online message board. He was upset that 4chan had become too restrictive, and he envisioned a site where any legal speech would be welcome, no matter how toxic. The site remained on the fringes until 2014, when some supporters of GamerGate a loose reactionary collection of anti feminist video gamers flocked to 8chan after being kicked off 4chan. Since GamerGate, 8chan has become a catchall website for internet based communities whose behavior gets them evicted from more mainstream sites. It hosts one of the largest gatherings of supporters of QAnon, who claim that there is an international bureaucracy plotting against the Trump administration. And it has been an online home for "incels," men who lament being "involuntarily celibate," and other fringe movements. "8chan is almost like a bulletin board where the worst offenders go to share their terrible ideas," said Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti Defamation League. "It's become a sounding board where people share ideas, and where these kinds of ideologies are amplified and expanded on, and ultimately, people are radicalized as a result." 8chan has been run out of the Philippines by Jim Watkins, a United States Army veteran, since 2015, when Mr. Brennan gave up control of the site. The site remains nearly completely unmoderated, and its commitment to keeping up even the most violent speech has made it a venue for extremists to test out ideas, share violent literature and cheer on the perpetrators of mass killings. Users on 8chan frequently lionize mass gunmen using jokey internet vernacular, referring to their body counts as "high scores" and creating memes praising the killers. Mr. Brennan, who has a condition known as brittle bone disease and uses a wheelchair, has tried to distance himself from 8chan and its current owners. In a March interview with The Wall Street Journal, he expressed his regrets over his role in the site's creation, and warned that the violent culture that had taken root on 8chan's boards could lead to more mass shootings. After the El Paso shooting, he seemed resigned to the fact that it had. "Another 8chan shooting?" he tweeted on Saturday. "Am I ever going to be able to move on with my life?" Mr. Watkins, who runs 8chan along with his son, Ronald, has remained defiant in the face of criticism, and has resisted calls to moderate or shut down the site. On Sunday, a banner at the top of 8chan's home page read, "Welcome to 8chan, the Darkest Reaches of the Internet." "I've tried to understand so many times why he keeps it going, and I just don't get it," Mr. Brennan said. "After Christchurch, after the Tree of Life shooting, and now after this shooting, they think this is all really funny." Mr. Watkins did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Over the weekend, 8chan's critics tried a different tack to get the site shut down, by pressuring the site's service providers, including its web host, to cut off Mr. Watkins. One of these providers, the security company Cloudflare, initially indicated on Sunday that it would not cut off 8chan's access to its network. But later in the day, Cloudflare said it would ban the site after all, depriving Mr. Watkins of a critical tool for keeping the site online. Matthew Prince, Cloudflare's chief executive, said the decision to shut off 8chan's protections was made after determining that the site had allowed an environment of violent extremism to fester, and that 8chan ignored complaints about violent content in a way that larger platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, have not. "We've seen a pattern where this lawless community has demonstrated its ability to create real harm and real damage," Mr. Prince said of 8chan. "If we see a bad thing in the world and we can help get in front of it, we have some obligation to do that." Another company, Tucows, which controls 8chan's domain name registration, had no plans as of Sunday evening to disable the site's web address. "We have no immediate plans other than to keep discussing internally," said Graeme Bunton, manager of public policy at Tucows. In the early days of 8chan, Mr. Brennan defended the right of 8chan users to post anonymously, without censorship. And he dismissed incidents of harassment or violence by users of the site as the price of being an open forum. "Anonymity should not be taken away from everyone just because of a few bad apples," he told Ars Technica, the technology website, in a 2015 interview. But more recently, Mr. Brennan, who has begun attending a Baptist church, has tried to persuade Mr. Watkins to shut down the site. He and Mr. Watkins live near each other in the Philippines, he said, and he often drives past Mr. Watkins's house on his way to church. Mr. Brennan said that other websites, like Facebook and Twitter, also play a role in spreading the kinds of violent messages that often originate on 8chan. But he said that those sites have been more proactive about removing dangerous content, making them less appealing venues for a would be terrorist. "Shutting it down, having these chan sites pushed underground, it wouldn't totally stop these kinds of things from happening," he said. "But it wouldn't happen every few months." Mr. Brennan said he doubted that Mr. Watkins makes money from 8chan, since it is free to use and costly to maintain, and since its toxic content has made it radioactive to advertisers. (In a 2017 interview, Mr. Watkins said of running 8chan, "It doesn't make money, but it's a lot of fun.") And Mr. Brennan is hopeful that sustained pressure on Mr. Watkins and his son will get them to change their minds eventually, and take down 8chan for good. "How long are they just going to allow this to go on?" he asked.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Broadway people spend most of their lives as people not on Broadway. A minority of actors make it to New York's biggest stage, and a further minority of those who do are there now. One need only to have starred in a Broadway musical a year (or 20 years) ago to be billed as a Broadway star. Shows don't run forever, and musical theater actors are regularly adrift between roles, we say seeking ways to continue to work and spread the faith. "Broadway" is now an idea, a climate, as much as it is a place. Broadway exists on social media. It is on Twitter. It is on Tumblr. Despite more digital access than ever, theater lovers still seek to broaden their experience of Broadway, finding ways to share real face time with actors out of costume, out of character and, as it often happens, out of work. Within one recent month I participated in two such events for die hard theater fans one by land, one by sea: first a convention, then a cruise ship. Three weeks before I set sail, I was invited to teach, sing and sign CDs at a spirited expo in New York called BroadwayCon, a three day event held at the Javits Center which hosted 6,000 visitors a day and offered 200 hours of original programming for a daily admission of 95. More than 1,700 autographs were signed this year in the official area 170 by Chita Rivera alone, according to the BroadwayCon publicist, 171 by Joel Grey. (Perhaps his rep spoke to Chita's.) Some 500 theater professionals appeared on panels and gave performances, interviews and workshops. I led one entitled "The Art of Perseverance." God knows I would have loved this when I was a teenager: I spent portions of my own adolescence pacing the theater district in the 1980s, hoping to catch a stage door glimpse of Jim Dale or Bernadette Peters or Dorothy Loudon. I would have fainted if I merely saw their skin in daylight. The zenith of fan and performer interaction, though, takes place over several days at sea, on a "Broadway on the High Seas" cruise organized by Playbill magazine. I was among several singers who joined one recently, ready to participate in a "luxurious week of sun and songs" and a tour of the Caribbean. I packed my gowns, tried and failed to get spray tanned after four months in an Off Broadway run of "Finian's Rainbow" I was not merely pale but computer screen white, with bluish overtones and took my husband and three young daughters, who had blessedly been invited. Off we went. When we arrived onboard in San Juan, the president of Playbill publishing, Phil Birsh, gathered the artists in the Parisian Lounge for a welcoming speech. There were eight "performers" on this ship, including Brian Stokes Mitchell and Alice Ripley, both Tony Award winners, and another eight "ambassadors," many also Tony winners, there generally to schmooze and enjoy a vacation. Clarifying the rules of engagement, Mr. Birsh assured us that the boat would be occupied by about 250 Broadway fans (each paying between 4,000 and 14,000), but that they were not going to make us uncomfortable in any way. They're not aggressive, he said. They're not stalkers. (This was an oddly unreassuring thing to say.) We were on display there was no doubt about that but then the guests were on display, too. And we were as curious about their motives for wanting to be part of an event marked "Broadway" as they were curious about our careers. For once, artists and audience were really all in the same boat. Our first occasion to meet the other passengers was at the mandatory lifeboat drill. We were taught how to jump overboard: Hold your nose and mouth shut with one hand, then wrap the other arm around your body in an urgent hug designed to keep your life vest from slipping overhead and off. As we practiced, I imagined myself in an ocean billowed ball gown, or floating in the Atlantic in my orange vest, with its water activated light bulb feature, singing Sondheim as I sank, illuminated. I was a performer, and, as it happened, I drew the short (or was it long?) straw: I'd perform our very first night. Assembling a set list for any cabaret performance is one of the arts you have to master in this life, and I had tried to make this one a good mix of familiar but not too familiar numbers. Onstage, though, a show tune singer rarely has to worry about seasickness. Entering by the aisle stairs of the swaying Art Deco theater in my rented Monique Lhuillier, I started to feel my steak and salad coming back to me. How might I feel during the eight minute jazz waltz medley of hits by my heroine Julie Andrews? That I might waltz into the wall, or vomit backstage (please, not onstage, I hoped) started to seem disconcerting. I put my elbows solidly on my stool to steady myself. After the concert, guests seemed to feel they knew me and I got to know them. "It's my 90th birthday," one woman, her husband in tow, told me. "We've been married 67 years, he's 93, and I'm still directing a choir! How about that?" "We are not like those rich people who come from Long Island," the husband in another couple, cruise veterans, confided: "The first one we did was last year everyone that was supposed to show up didn't show up." On something of first name basis with stage talent, he seemed to know just why and didn't seem especially fussed about it: "Stokes got 'Shuffle Along.' Judy Kuhn was still doing 'Fun Home.' Cheyenne went to do a concert." (Playbill makes clear in its advertising that the roster of attendees may change.) Every day at 5:30, Seth Rudetsky (a radio host and the creator and co writer of the Broadway musical "Disaster!" about, yes, a sinking cruise boat) would host an onstage interview with four performers. Audience and actors alike gravitated to stories of failed auditions, mishaps and flops; broken bones, forgotten lyrics, missteps and missed steps; under rehearsed understudies and shows closing before opening. Listening to my friends and colleagues, the boat seemed to float on their humor and resilience. I thought of a snorkeling excursion just hours earlier, when I'd seen a colorful reef that had grown around a shipwreck: The perfect image of an actor's life. In the elevator, I was met with "I am amazed at how friendly and accessible all the actors are," which felt nice, and "What a delight you are, Melissa, I am going to put in a wonderful evaluation on you," which felt nice but reminded me of the actor's reality: We are always up for critical comment. Mostly, I kept busy with daily excursions. On land there was rain forest hiking and ziplining though none of us, fans or performers, were quite prepared for the intimacies that demanded. Some 250 feet above a St. Kitts mountain valley, facing 1,600 feet of wire, our guide taught proper technique for impact: leaning back, chin tucked and "window open, hon" meaning legs bent with thighs wide apart, so knees avoided hitting metal springs. I now saw my audience and they, me from an unexpected angle. In the evenings, actors often sat at the "actors table" in the rear of the fourth floor restaurant. We talked about time and enduring, music and phrasing and failing and getting up. "Frustration is fuel," I said. The whole table liked that. Few of us knew what work would come our way when we got home. In part, this is what makes the cruise despite its brushes with glamour authentic; the fans get an up close sense of the vulnerability of performers. As for us, we were glad to have seven days together out of combat, out of the trenches. A perfect twist on Leonard Bernstein's "On the Town," where sailors land cheerfully in New York, singing and dancing in Times Square, it was a kind of shore leave an actor's shore leave, run in reverse, like so many things in this day for night life.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
For Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater to have lasted 60 years is an unlikely feat. Even more extraordinary: Almost half that span has elapsed since the death of Alvin Ailey. How has the company survived? How has it preserved the spirit of its founder? At the start of its program at New York City Center on Friday, the troupe offered rote answers to those entwined questions in the form of "Becoming Ailey," an anniversary slide show of old photos and footage that tried to bring Ailey into the theater by projecting his image on a scrim. And, at the end of the program, it presented the answer that has sufficed for six decades: Ailey's "Revelations," the masterpiece foundation of the whole enterprise and a visceral reminder of what the company encapsulates and why people keep coming back for it. In between this material, though, came a stranger, riskier engagement with Ailey's legacy: the premiere of "Lazarus" by the esteemed hip hop choreographer Rennie Harris. In this hourlong work, Mr. Harris asks many deep questions, implicitly and explicitly, through voice over text and song lyrics: questions about the "blood memory" that Ailey cited as the source of his choreography; questions about how to be a black man in a white world; questions that feel painfully urgent and personal. A great strength of 'Lazarus,' but also a source of difficulty, is how it evades simple answers. Instead, it just keeps layering on more questions, more information. It is not easy to say, at a basic level, what is happening. There is a central figure, a kind of pilgrim of sorrow (played by Daniel Harder in the first cast) who might represent Ailey or his spirit or even Lazarus of the Bible (at one point, another dancer mimes removing wrappings from Mr. Harder's face). But it's not clear whether Mr. Harder dies and is resurrected or whether he's in his mother's womb, not yet born, listening to her breathing and heartbeat. What much of the dance looks like is African American history as a nightmare from which he is trying to awake. Images of terrible beauty coalesce and disperse. He and others are dragged, as if from a riot. Their hands, clasped in prayer, quake. Dancers around Mr. Harder tilt their heads, as if lynched. Across the stage they run, in slow motion escape or crawl, in mass migration one or another rising in a spurt of anguish. Lying on their backs, they undulate their arms, suggesting a field where black people harvested some bitter crop. They might be holding Mr. Harper up or sucking him down. That last image comes at the end of the first act. After an intermission that isn't really necessary, the image repeats, arranged at a different angle. The first time, it's accompanied by the searing voice of Terence Trent D'Arby in his track "As Yet Untitled" about bloodstained soil and rage, asserting, "This land is still my home." That's one of many brilliant samples in a score by Darrin Ross that is rarely simple. Heartbeats, heavy breathing, gunshots, the barking of dogs, massed whispers, weeping, synthesized strings, fragments of spirituals and gospel moans come up against passages of tortured text by Mr. Harris (some of it sampling Kendrick Lamar). At wide intervals, there's also music for dancing, with an irresistible beat. When that music is going, Mr. Harris gives us something like heaven. The choreography is based on the Philadelphia style called GQ: rhythmically intricate footwork with a laconic upper body; off kilter steps as if on a rolling surface; jumps that twist loosely in the air. The cool confidence of the style has a spiritual force that's uplifting, and the pleasure of it is mixed with a revelation of the past in the present, of black history in the body language. Mr. Harris honors that uplift, the expectations of an audience accustomed to the arc of "Revelations," but he resists it, too. Bits of Nina Simone in the soundtrack announce a new day, a new life, but Mr. Harris ends the dance (after the first bows) with a seriously depressed coda, in which responses Ailey gave in long ago interviews are used to answer the questions Mr. Harris has now. Along with the score's melodramatic strings and high pitched piano notes, Mr. Harris's text is the work's weakest element, not nearly as eloquent and sophisticated as his choreography. But it is this text, in its unguarded searching, that underlines the work's urgency. "Lazarus" brings Ailey back to life by showing why he still matters to a living artist of Mr. Harris's caliber.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Just as there are fusion cuisines and you never know what they're like until you try them so, too, there's fusion dance, in which various styles unite into a new, surprising and, let's hope, choreographically tasty concoction. Dancegoers can sample the fare of a new fusion troupe when FJK Dance offers its first full New York engagement. Founded by Fadi J. Khoury, the Baghdad born son of an Iraqi ballet director, the company gave preview performances in April. Mr. Khoury seeks to mix ballet with ballroom, Middle Eastern and jazz dance, stripping away unnecessary glitter from these forms to emphasize the beauty of movement itself. What's on his choreographic menu? In "Arabesque," he connects ballet and Middle Eastern movement to create illusions of desert mirages. "Tango Unframed," which explores concepts of partnering, shows how Argentine tangos can express both solitude and freedom. (Wednesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m., New York Live Arts, 219 West 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 924 0077, newyorklivearts.org.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
President Trump this month declared the opioid epidemic a national emergency, a move intended to direct more funding and attention toward the crisis. Recent research on hospitalizations related to opioid use depicts a problem of increasing urgency. According to a series of government briefs published this year, nearly 1.3 million hospitalizations involving opioids occurred in the United States in 2014. The figure includes hospitalizations for abuse of both prescription and illegal drugs, including heroin. The numbers reflect a 64 percent increase in inpatient stays and a doubling in emergency room visits related to opioids since 2005. The reports, based on data collected from hospital bills, also analyzed opioid hospitalizations by state, sex, age and characteristics of the communities in which patients lived.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Elisabetta Matsumoto holds a Geared Cuboctahedral Jitterbug that she designed with mathematician Henry Segerman.Credit...Johnathon Kelso for The New York Times 'Knitting Is Coding' and Yarn Is Programmable in This Physics Lab BOSTON On the eve of the American Physical Society's annual March meeting, a Sunday "stitch 'n bitch" session convened during happy hour at a lobby bar of the Westin Boston Waterfront hotel. Karen Daniels, a physicist at North Carolina State University, had tweeted notice of the meet up earlier that day: "Are you a physicist into knitting, crocheting, or other fiber arts?" she asked. "I'll be the one knitting a torus." (A torus is a mathematized doughnut; hers was inspired by a figure in a friend's scientific paper.) At the bar, amid tables cluttered with balls of yarn, Dr. Daniels absorbed design advice from a group of specialized knitters, among them Elisabetta Matsumoto, an applied mathematician and physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a co host of the gathering. For Dr. Matsumoto, knitting is more than a handicraft hobby with health benefits. She is embarking on a five year project, "What a Tangled Web We Weave," funded by the National Science Foundation, to investigate the mathematics and mechanics of "the ancient technology known as knitting." Dr. Matsumoto argues that "knitting is coding" and that yarn is a programmable material. The potential dividends of her research range from wearable electronics to tissue scaffolding. During the happy hour meetup, she knitted a swatch illustrating a plastic surgery technique called Z plasty. The swatch was for a talk she would deliver at 8 a.m. on Wednesday morning called "Twisted Topological Tangles." Scores of physicists turned up, despite a competing parallel session on "The Extreme Mechanics of Balloons." "I've been knitting since I was a kid," Dr. Matsumoto told her (mostly male) audience. "That was the thing I did to get along with my mom when I was a teenager. It's just been a dream to take all of this stuff that I learned and played with as a child and turn it into something scientifically rigorous." As a first step, her team is enumerating all possible knittable stitches: "There's going to be a countably infinite number. How to classify them is what we are working on now." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. The investigation is informed by the mathematical tradition of knot theory. A knot is a tangled circle a circle embedded with crossings that cannot be untangled. (A circle with no crossings is an "unknot.") "The knitted stitch is a whole series of slipknots, one after the other," said Dr. Matsumoto. Rows and columns of slipknots form a lattice pattern so regular that it is analogous to crystal structure and crystalline materials. By way of knot theory, Dr. Matsumoto essentially is developing a knit theory: an alphabet of unit cell stitches, a glossary of stitch combinations, and a grammar governing the knitted geometry and topology the fabric's stretchiness, or its "emergent elasticity." How 'floofy' is it? "Just based on these two stitches, these two fundamental units, we can make a whole series of fabrics, and each of these fabrics has remarkably different elastic properties," Dr. Matsumoto told the audience. She first combined her math y and woolly mind sets as a Ph.D. student, after admiring a friend's crocheted interpretation of the hyperbolic plane (curly kale is a vegetable example) and wondering how to do it differently. "It irritated me that it wasn't isotropic," she recalled on the day before her talk. She could see where the crochet had begun, whereas a true hyperbolic plane should betray no starting point and no direction. Knitting away for two months, Dr. Matsumoto encountered one stitch in the dragon's beard that she had never seen before. "In the pattern for the dragon, there are all these crazy stitches," she said stitches that took up not just a single cell on the pattern grid, but stretched across numerous cells, seeming to follow a horizontal array rather than the usual, vertical orientation. Her team's knit theory will incorporate these and other stitch morphologies, as well as intentional stitch defects and constraints, such as how a yarn bends, twists and compresses; how many plies it has, how thick it is, and how "floofy." Floofiness refers to a yarn's "halo area, where ephemeral fuzzy fibers stick out," Dr. Matsumoto said, and it changes the way two pieces of yarn interact with each other, their friction and energy exchange. "I'd love to write a paper using the word 'floofy' as a technical term." During his introductory remarks, Dr. Reis had a vexing encounter with an intertwined microphone cord. "This is a good example of why we really care about this topic," he said. Dr. Reis grapples with the likes of long overhand shoelace knotting, climbing knots, basket weaving, surgical sutures, and how to pass on the art of surgical knot craftsmanship to robots. During the session, his lab mates described how they had used a CT scan to probe the internal structure of knot filaments and the friction that arises where filaments touch. After the meeting, Dr. Matsumoto sent him home with some of her swatches. Derek Moulton, of the University of Oxford, mentioned variants of sailor's knots, DNA and protein knots, and worms that tie themselves into knots in order to minimize dehydration. He went on discuss "whether a knotted filament with zero points of self contact may be realized physically." That is, can a knot exist wherein none of its crossings touch? (It can; try it at home with a strip of paper, or a cord.) And Thomas Plumb Reyes, an applied physicist at Harvard, presented his research on "Detangling Hair" to a standing room only audience. "What is going on in tangled hair?" he asked. "What is the optimal combing strategy?" Shashank Markande, a Ph.D. student working with Dr. Matsumoto, reported on their stitch classification work so far. Together, they had derived a conjecture: All knittable stitches must be ribbon knots. (A ribbon knot is a very technical tangle.) And they pondered the corollary: Are all ribbon knots knittable? Back in February, Mr. Markande (who started knitting only recently for the sake of science) thought he'd found an example of an unknittable ribbon knot, using a knots and links software program called SnapPy. He sent Dr. Matsumoto a text message with a sketch: "Tell me if this can be knitted?" Dr. Matsumoto was just heading out for a run, and by the time she returned, having manipulated the yarn every which way in her head, she had worked out an answer. "I think that can be knitted," she texted back. When Mr. Markande pressed her on how, she added: "It's knittable by our rules, but it isn't trivial to do with needles." For the Tangled Web project, most of the experimental knitting is produced by a replica of a vintage 1970s knitting machine, the Taitexma Industrial and Home Based Knitting Machine Model TH 860, which is operated by Krishma Singal, a doctoral student. The machine can also be programmed by punched cards as was the Jacquard loom, invented in 1804 by Joseph Marie Jacquard and sometimes called the first digital technology. Dr. Matsumoto's team likes to contemplate how stitch patterns provide code more complex code than the 1s and 0s of binary that creates the program for the elasticity and geometry of knitted fabric. The buzzword is "topological programmable materials," said postdoc Michael Dimitriyev. He is working on a computer simulation of knitted fabric, inputting yarn properties and stitch topology, and outputting the geometry and elasticity of the real life finished object. "I'm the killjoy that brings in elasticity," he likes to say. The team's first paper, currently underway, will verify Dr. Dimitriyev's simulations against Ms. Singal's hard copy swatches. Once the computer simulation is refined, Dr. Matsumoto and her collaborators can pull out equations and algorithms for knitted fabric behavior, which in turn could be put into physics engines for computer game graphics, or movies.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Francoise Brougher, Pinterest's former chief operating officer, said she was fired after speaking up about mistreatment. SAN FRANCISCO In April, Francoise Brougher, the chief operating officer of Pinterest and its top female executive, abruptly left the company with little explanation. In a lawsuit filed on Tuesday, Ms. Brougher accused the 21 billion company, which makes virtual pinboards, of firing her after she complained about sexist treatment. In her suit, which was filed in San Francisco Superior Court, Ms. Brougher said she had been left out of important meetings, was given gendered feedback, was paid less than her male peers when she joined the company, and ultimately was let go for speaking up about it. "Gender discrimination at the C level suite may be a little more subtle, but it's very insidious and real," Ms. Brougher, 54, said in an interview. "When men speak out, they get rewarded. When women speak out, they get fired." Pinterest was reviewing the lawsuit, a company spokeswoman said. "Our employees are incredibly important to us," she said, adding that the company was committed to advancing its culture so "all of our employees feel included and supported." Pinterest is conducting an independent review regarding its culture, policies and practices, she added. Ms. Brougher is one of the most prominent female tech executives to file a gender discrimination suit against her onetime employer since the venture capitalist Ellen Pao sued her firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, in 2012. The new lawsuit suggests that bias against women in Silicon Valley has persisted, even after tech's culture of sexual harassment of female executives and entrepreneurs became part of the MeToo movement. Ms. Brougher's lawsuit follows a gender discrimination lawsuit last month against Carta, a financial technology start up, by its former vice president for marketing, Emily Kramer. Ms. Kramer accused Carta of paying her less than her male peers and said the company retaliated against her for speaking up about gender equality and diversity. A Carta spokeswoman said, "Gender inequality in the workplace is a real and systemic problem, particularly in Silicon Valley, however, the allegations in this case are unfounded." Ms. Brougher's suit adds to the scrutiny of Pinterest, which has a large audience of female users. In recent months, the company, based in San Francisco, has also been criticized by some of its former Black employees over racial discrimination. In June, two of them, Ifeoma Ozoma and Aerica Shimizu Banks, tweeted about racist and sexist comments, pay inequities and retaliation they experienced at the company. They quit in May. Ms. Brougher is well known in Silicon Valley. She previously led the business side of the financial technology company Square and worked in a variety of positions on Google's advertising business. She joined Pinterest in 2018 as chief operating officer and was responsible for the company's revenue, with roughly half of the 2,000 employees reporting to her. When Pinterest filed to go public in 2019, Ms. Brougher learned that she was paid less than her male peers and that her equity grants were "backloaded," meaning most of them vested after several years, while her executive male peers' grants were not, according to the lawsuit. After complaining, her compensation was adjusted. Ms. Brougher said she was not invited on the "road show" to talk to investors for Pinterest's initial public offering. She was also not invited to board meetings after the company went public, though members of her team were sometimes invited to those meetings without her knowledge, the lawsuit said. (She was not a member of the board.) Ms. Brougher described a culture of "constant exclusion," where decisions were frequently made in unofficial capacities, or "the meeting after the meeting." "When you are brought in as a No. 2, you are expected to advise the C.E.O.," she said. "But when you are not in the meeting where the decisions are made and don't have the context, it makes your job harder." Ms. Brougher said Pinterest's chief financial officer, Todd Morgenfeld, asked her at one point, "What is your job anyway?" in front of peers, according to the lawsuit. Mr. Morgenfeld also offered Ms. Brougher formal feedback that she viewed as sexist, according to the lawsuit. When she confronted him about it on a video call, he raised his voice and hung up on her, the suit said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Credit...Albert Gea/Reuters From Ariel Ortega to Lionel Messi, dozens of players have been hailed as the heir to Diego Maradona's famed No. 10. But for one reason or another, the fit was never right. It was nothing more, really, than a ruffle of the hair and a kiss on the cheek. There was no pomp or circumstance that day in 1994, no words of wisdom whispered in the ear or sweeping gesture made for the crowd. Diego Maradona left the field, and Ariel Ortega replaced him on it. But that was all it took. The torch, it was decided, had been passed. Ortega was not the first player to be labeled the new Maradona. That honor, according to common consensus, fell to the former Boca Juniors forward Diego Latorre, and he certainly would not be the last. For a couple of decades, at least, a new pretender came to Maradona's throne seemingly every year. There would be short Maradonas and tall Maradonas, slender ones and squat ones, quick ones and slow ones. Sometimes the parallels were obvious: Pablo Aimar and Juan Roman Riquelme and Andres D'Alessandro played in the same position as him, in the same way as him, on the same team or bearing the same jersey number as him. Often, Maradona himself would anoint his successor, though his favor was uncertain, shifting. For a while, it was Javier Saviola, though it pained Maradona to say it, "because he plays for River Plate," the great rival of Maradona's beloved Boca Juniors. A few years later, Maradona decreed that D'Alessandro was the "only player who amuses me." He cast Carlos Tevez as "an Argentine prophet for the 21st century." Mostly, the new Maradonas were Argentines, though by no means exclusively. There were Maradonas all over the world, on every continent, in every mountain range. There was a Maradona of the Carpathians (Gheorghe Hagi), a Maradona of the Caucasus (Georgi Kinkladze), a Maradona of the Alps (Andi Herzog) and a Maradona of the Andes (Roberto Merino). Some were given an entire country: Krishanu Dey was the Indian Maradona, Ali Karimi the Iranian version. Others had to share their territory. There have been, according to some lists, at least four Maradonas of the Balkans. Some were given a much more precise geographical location. Fabrizio Miccoli was the Maradona of the Salento, the area in the south of Italy from which he hailed. Turkey's Emre Belozoglu was the Maradona of the Bosporus. At one point, there was even a Maradona of Basingstoke, an unremarkable commuter town southwest of London, though that one, at least, was a knowing joke. Some players leaned in to the comparison: Miccoli, a gifted but mercurial forward with Juventus, Fiorentina and Palermo, bought a pair of Maradona's earrings at auction and would later acquire a tattoo of Che Guevara's face, just like the one on his idol's shoulder. Tevez acknowledged that he had based his style of play on his idol; they would go on to become close friends. Others found the pressure implicit in the comparison suffocating. When Saviola signed with Barcelona in 2001, two decades after Maradona had done so, he was asked what he made of the parallels. "As I never tire of saying, there will not be another player like Maradona," Saviola said. He was 19, and he already felt like he was repeating himself. There were some who came close to living up to the name, in the same way as boarding a commercial flight is close, in some respects, to going to the moon. Aimar, Riquelme and Tevez enjoyed long and successful careers in which they played in World Cups, lifted league title trophies and defined their own legacies rather than being condemned to the coda of another player's. Hagi carried Romania to a World Cup quarterfinal and remains a symbol of his country's soccer culture in the same way Maradona, more than anyone, represents Argentina's. Dejan Savicevic, one of Maradona's many Balkan apostles, became one of the finest players in Europe, an inspirational part of the great A.C. Milan teams of the early 1990s. Others never did quite enough to escape Maradona's shadow, Ortega prime among them. Perhaps that was unavoidable: nobody, not even Riquelme and Tevez the two players tasked, willingly or not, with living up to Maradona's name at Boca Juniors felt the white heat of expectation quite so much as the boy who took the field to replace him that day in Salta in 1994. That game a 2 1 win against Morocco had been a warm up for the World Cup set to start a few months later. At Argentina's base that summer in Wellesley, Mass., Ortega shared a room with Maradona, the team captain. When Maradona was thrown out of the tournament after testing positive for ephedrine, Ortega would be tasked with replacing him for Argentina's remaining games. It made sense. Both were stronger than their stature would suggest. Both had a low center of gravity, almost flawless technique and a burst of acceleration that carried them past opponents. They even shared a passing physical resemblance, right down to the shock of raven black hair. Their similarities did not end there. Ortega had a flash of his mentor's temper; one of the things Maradona most admired about him was his defiant, self possessed, renegade streak. Ortega was sent off in a World Cup quarterfinal, and later punished with a worldwide transfer ban after walking out on his contract at the Turkish club Fenerbahce. To an extent, too, his fate and Maradona's were entwined. Ortega struggled with an alcohol addiction Maradona himself would, at one point, advise that his old friend "needed help" that first derailed and then curtailed his career. It is dangerous to psychoanalyze from a distance, but it is hard not to wonder if, perhaps, the torch he was passed that day in Salta was too hot for him, for anyone, to handle. Argentina has not anointed a new Maradona for more than a decade now. The rest of the world has moved on, too. The quest to find an heir had grown too quixotic to be taken seriously by the middle of the last decade. When the tag was bestowed on Lionel Messi sometime around 2005, it no longer felt quite so onerous.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
The space was designed by the Snarkitecture firm, and once you're inside (I didn't have to wait, but my editor was confronted with a wraparound), you'll find a tube installation that's like a Yayoi Kusama infinity room, except here the infinite is represented by white plaster casts of Air Jordan 1s. 'Gram gold. The first things that caught my eye were snugly red checkered pieces by Fear of God. A plaid robe looks ready for a family Christmas card ( 1,295). There are cinched sweats to match ( 995). "Just Us" seem to really need comforting. Everything in the store is insanely soft and enticingly droopy (except on the women's floor, where among many things is a selection of thong leotards by Alix for 195). A rack of pieces by Greg Lauren, Ralph Lauren's nephew, are all weathered flannels ( 395), destroyed hoodies ( 1,066) and distressed khaki jackets sewn together into an aesthetic that's essentially Burning Man hygge. The bleach splattered shirts are called "Studio Shirts." The Kith man definitely texts anyone he can: "sorry was in the studio." On the second floor, shoes shelved against the store's enormous windows look like they're floating in the cityscape. There's also an in store ice cream stand, Kith Treats. You're not allowed to carry a cone near the shoes, but the menu offers various mixes of soft serve and cereal designed by the label's most admired figures. They're all men. Dudes like the Viceland TV host Action Bronson, the BMX rider Nigel Sylvester, the football player Victor Cruz and the artist Daniel Arsham have all created their own combinations of Rice Krispies, mini marshmallows and the like. I can't go on without saying that for the first 30 minutes I was in the store, no one spoke to me. I was even wearing Alexander Wang x Adidas cinched sweatpants. My partner and I stood holding a pair of shoes at the shoe wall while a cluster of four salesclerks stood around and, surreally, kept greeting each other. We stood for a chorus of high fives and several rounds of secret handshakes before we gave up. I like to think they're still standing there, a glitch in the Matrix, forever saying hi to one another.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. It's a year of big birthdays at the Glimmerglass Festival, the annual series of operas performed here at the photogenic Otsego Lake. Like virtually everywhere else, the festival, which runs through Aug. 25, is celebrating the centennial of Leonard Bernstein's birth though it is one of the few to do so with a production of his classic musical "West Side Story." And, a century after the end of World War I, Glimmerglass is staging a new take on Kevin Puts's 2011 opera "Silent Night," about a Christmas Eve cease fire in the Belgian trenches. Despite their obvious differences there wouldn't seem to be much common DNA between Bernstein's boisterous boricuas and Mr. Puts's Scottish squaddies Glimmerglass's two productions share, to varying degrees of success, a similar aim: memorializing cross cultural encounters in history through the diverse idioms of music, while indicting the violence that often springs from such encounters. Now considered a staple of the musical theater canon, Bernstein's mambo infused fable about transgressive romance across rival gangs set the template for "triple threat" shows that required virtuoso singing, dancing and acting from all of its performers. Its 1957 premiere on Broadway famously married the talents of Bernstein with those of Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents and Jerome Robbins. They were an ambitious foursome whose nervy vision of adolescence was every bit as high culture as it was keen on bebop accents. But, 60 years later, little of that gleeful sense of innovation remains. At least in the United States, a seeming need to retain the aesthetic of the Robbins original the cirque turned symphonic "Dance at the Gym," with its bungled roulette, and ye olde conspiratorial finger snapping continues to steer most revivals. Francesca Zambello, Glimmerglass's general director, similarly approaches revival with a light touch. The spry cast, led by Joseph Leppek, as Tony, and Vanessa Becerra, as Maria, gamely navigate Bernstein's tri tonal score. Amanda Castro's flinty Anita turns in a suitably atomic "America," with its zestful feud over which island Puerto Rico or Manhattan is best. Yet this production does little to disrupt the iconic choreography by Robbins, whose centennial has also been feted in the last year. (Heretics seeking such reform will have to hold tight for the experimental Broadway reboot by Ivo van Hove or Steven Spielberg's Hollywood remake.) And aside from the vaguely 1990s flavored sets and costumes by Peter J. Davison and Jessica Jahn, the scenery has retained all of its fire escapes. This is a "West Side Story" that honors Bernstein with a mostly facsimile production, one that he and his associates would have recognized as their own. Mark Campbell's libretto, based on the 2005 film "Joyeux Noel," is multilingual to accommodate the different nationalities onstage. So, too, in a sense, is Mr. Puts's Pulitzer Prize winning score, which conjures styles and characteristics of a number of historical eras and genres. Most memorable to me were the interventions of the ensemble: patriotic anthems at first, later surrendering to letter writing fugues and a gossamer chorale about sleep. Tomer Zvulun's brilliant staging for Glimmerglass, elegantly conducted by Nicole Paiement, also features vivid sets by Erhard Rom that divided the action on three floors and suggested the dividing forces of memory. The stage, littered in some battlefield scenes with headstones, is often framed by smoky projections to make action look as if it's taking place in an antique postcard an effective device, especially during ephemeral scenes like the ones at the Kronprinz's chalet. Mr. Puts's opera is about chronicling the intimate relationships we don't often hear about in sweeping narratives of wartime history. We see this in the mannered duets with the German opera singer Nikolaus Sprink (sung by Arnold Livingston Geis, in fine voice) and his wife, Anna Sorensen (Mary Evelyn Hangley): There is a discrepancy between what they are performing onstage and their tense exchanges later in life, once Sprink is conscripted. There are also the tender moments shared by the staunch French Lt. Audebert (Michael Miller, in a spellbinding performance) and his aide de camp Ponchel (an irresistible Conor McDonald). Still, the names of fallen soldiers, projected on a scrim, appear at the beginning and end of the opera, a Maya Lin style reminder of wartime's leveling effects. These heroes are no mere mythical figures, though. "Silent Night" effectively questions whether such men, so eager to lay down their guns and play soccer with the enemy, had ever wanted to sacrifice themselves for country in the first place. "Vixen," with its allegorical pitting of woodland animals against their human oppressors, serves a charming, bestial foil to Mr. Puts's vision of conflict. At the center of the plot, a wily lady fox (played by the appealing soprano Joanna Latini) is captured by the old Forester (Eric Owens, Glimmerglass's artist in residence) but ultimately escapes, only to be felled by a poacher (Wm. Clay Thompson). Touches of untamed brass notwithstanding, the conductor Joseph Colaneri brought great tenderness to Janacek's tuneful score, teasing out the composer's flourishes of Moravian folk music. The costume designer Erik Teague's burlesque inventions hens in gauze capelets, foxes sporting bustiers imbued the forest with visual comedy. In addition to the laughs, Glimmerglass's production doesn't stint on nostalgia. With "Vixen," Janacek crafted a palindromic story, which begins and ends with creatures blithely convening in the woods. The last scene, in which the Forester realizes he's lived to see a whole new generation of animals, features a melody so meaningful to Janacek, he hoped it would be played at his funeral. Not a bad time to revive the melody: This August is that funeral's 90th anniversary.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Jesus Carmona trained in ballet, flamenco, escuela bolera (traditional dances with castanets and fans) and modern dance. He has also studied tap with Jared Grimes. What makes a flamenco star? A driving sense of rhythm. A visceral, almost carnal connection with the musicians onstage. (Flamenco is primarily a musical form, as the pros love to remind us.) And, of course, impressive technique: crisp, blindingly fast footwork, deep backbends, sculptural arms, fluid hands. Jesus Carmona has all of these things. Mr. Carmona, who returns to New York this week for the Flamenco Festival, has another quality as well: charisma. He can hold the audience's attention even when still, or when he moves only his arms or his hands. In short, "es un fenomeno" he's a phenomenon the director of the festival, Miguel Marin, said on a Skype call from Madrid. At the Flamenco Festival, his company, Ballet Flamenco Jesus Carmona, will dance "Impetus" on March 11. This evening length show was choreographed by Mr. Carmona for six dancers (including himself) and five musicians. It's not a traditional flamenco evening; in its purest form, flamenco is improvised. With some exceptions, the music here is original (by the ensemble's guitarists Dani Jurado and Oscar Lago) rather than based on standard flamenco numbers. And the orchestration includes a violin not a traditional flamenco instrument. "The voice of the violin helps me dance," Mr. Carmona said in an interview, describing his affinity with the instrument's weeping tone. "I feel connected to it, like a partner." Purists may moan, but Mr. Carmona, 32, represents the new wave in flamenco and, more widely, Spanish dance. Dogmas about authenticity have given way to independence and experimentation. As flamenco has become increasingly professionalized, the general level of technique has risen. "Under every rock you find an incredible dancer," Mr. Carmona said. Today, most, like Mr. Carmona, have gone through conservatories, receiving training in ballet, flamenco, escuela bolera (highly codified traditional dances with castanets and fans), and modern dance techniques developed by choreographers like Jose Limon and Martha Graham. Mr. Carmona has also studied tap with the New York tapper Jared Grimes. This new influence has expanded the repertory of sounds and dynamics Mr. Carmona can create with his wooden heeled, nail studded flamenco boots, and he has added a few slides as well. During the first week of the festival, which started on Friday, the two dancers shared a program at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Their amicably competitive rapport was one of the highlights of the evening. The new generations of flamenco creators are artistically restless, too. Their shows tend toward the personal, the eclectic, sometimes even the eccentric. "That's why I have my own company," Mr. Carmona explained, with a laugh, "so I have the freedom to do what I want or need to do at any given time." In this vein, "Impetus" is structured like a thoughtful traversal through various dance styles. There is a trio for three women and a giant red manton the traditional fringed shawl set to a lyrical guitar melody; a solo for Mr. Carmona that uses only percussion, with a focus on his upper body and arms; and even a balletic pas de deux, full of small, academic steps like glissades and entrechats. "It's not exactly ballet, and it's not exactly escuela bolera, and it's not flamenco," he said. "It's a hybrid." The high point of "Impetus" is a solo for Mr. Carmona in which he performs with (and for) the singer Jonatan Reyes. The piece is a buleria, a strongly accented, high spirited song form. Again and again, Mr. Carmona charges the singer, snapping his fingers, slapping his thighs and chest, feet pattering out fast rhythms. The two, dancer and singer, are locked in a completely private exchange, seemingly oblivious to the world. "I don't know what he's going to sing, and he doesn't know what I'm going to dance," Mr. Carmona said. "It's that moment of surprise, which is so important in flamenco. Anything can happen." "Impetus" is a quiet, even pensive show for a dancer known for his extroverted, electrifying stage persona. "I'm a very impetuous person, on and offstage," he said. His biography bears that out. He left home at 16 to pursue a professional career, after giving his mother an ultimatum: "I told her, either you let me go, or one day, you'll find a farewell letter on the bed!" he recalled. He joined Nuevo Ballet Espanol and then danced for five years with the Ballet Nacional de Espana, becoming one of its biggest stars. But lately he has been trying to corral his energies, to slow things down and build intensity through containment. "I've been realizing that I'm comfortable with stillness. You listen to the music, the singing, the guitar. It's like a battery, slowly charging, and then, boom." This idea of restraint is also the inspiration behind a new experiment at the Flamenco Festival, a workshop entitled "Exploring Stillness," conceived by Mr. Marin. "For me," Mr. Marin said, "the most powerful moments are when the dancer is still. It can be more exciting than seeing 20 pirouettes." The workshop will involve three dancers from different disciplines: Mr. Carmona, the Madrid born Joaquin De Luz of New York City Ballet, and the American modern dancer choreographer David Neumann. (Mr. Carmona and Mr. De Luz are friends: Mr. Carmona stayed with Mr. De Luz when he came to New York to study tap.) The fourth participant is more of a wild card: Ivan Bavcevic, a Reiki master and meditation coach who runs a "school of awareness" in Spain. After five days of working together, they will present the fruits of the collaboration at an event on Friday at City Center. No matter the results, the workshop points to an essential quality of Mr. Carmona's performance style the contrast between wild, almost anarchic energy, and something more distilled. Not content to be simply a fenomeno, he's exploring new dimensions in his dancing. Or, as he put it, "soy un tio que siempre quiere mas" I always want more.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Some drivers to watch on a track that has been repaved since last year's pothole marred 500: the Hendrick Motorsports quartet of Dale Earnhardt Jr., Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson and Mark Martin; the owner driver Tony Stewart; the brothers Kurt and Kyle Busch; last year's points runnerup, Denny Hamlin; and Kevin Harvick, Jeff Burton and Clint Bowyer, who drive for Richard Childress, Earnhardt's former boss. A driver in a Chevrolet has won seven of the last 10 Daytona 500s. McMurray drove a Chevrolet to victory at Daytona last year, although the two previous Daytona 500s were won by Matt Kenseth in a Ford in 2009 and Ryan Newman in a Dodge in 2008. Lee Petty, Richard's father, won the first Daytona 500 in 1959 in an Oldsmobile. Look for a Chevy out front even before the race starts. For only the fourth time over all, a Camaro will pace the field. The "Victory Red" Camaro 2SS Coupe has a 426 horsepower 6.2 liter V 8 engine. Another Camaro will pace the Indianapolis 500 in May on the 100th anniversary of the first running of that iconic race. Johnson, back in the driver's seat of the formidable blue No. 48 Chevrolet, begins his pursuit of his sixth straight Sprint Cup championship, which would extend his record. Earnhardt and Richard Petty each won seven championships in Nascar's top series, so Johnson, a 35 year old Californian, is venturing into elite territory. Gordon returns for a 19th season after he faded at the end of last season to finish ninth. His No. 24 Chevrolet will look much different than it has during most of his career, when his blue car was primarily sponsored by DuPont. Now primarily sponsored by the AARP Foundation's Drive to End Hunger, his car will be deep red with black highlights. Martin, 52, is often overshadowed by his Hendrick Motorsports teammates, but he is still considered a solid contender. Martin has earned more than 78 million in Nascar's top series, but has never won the Daytona 500 or the series' championship. Earnhardt, the 36 year old son of the legendary driver, earned the pole position for the first time. But a practice crash on Wednesday forced him to his backup car and he will start from the rear. Dale Jr. won the 2004 Daytona 500 in his No. 8 Budweiser Chevrolet and finished second to Jamie McMurray in last year's race. He also won the first race held at Daytona after his father died, the Pepsi 400 in July 2001. Television cameras are all but sure to scan the grandstands on the third of 200 laps in Sunday's race, because speedway officials asked fans last week to hold up three fingers during the lap in memory of Earnhardt, whose black Chevy was adorned with the tilted No. 3. They are also asking for a moment of silence during the lap, but the cars will still run full bore.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
For the second night of its City Center season, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater reprised two premieres from last December and tacked on Ailey's "Revelations" at the end. If all else fails, it's a sure thing. But before we could settle into "Pilgrim of Sorrow," the opening sequence of that 1960 Ailey masterpiece, we saw productions by Wayne McGregor and Bill T. Jones still new for the company though not so for the greater dance world. In "Chroma," created for the Royal Ballet in 2006, Mr. McGregor sets a series of pas de deux to Joby Talbot's original music and orchestrations of songs by Jack White. Mr. McGregor has said that he defines the title as "a freedom from white"; the set, by John Pawson, encases the stage the floor, the walls in a white frame, which, under Lucy Carter's excellent lighting, plays off against the dancer's skin tones. Men and women with dark skin in a white space, performing a ballet? That says something. What doesn't have as much to say is Mr. McGregor's piece and, a year after the Ailey company first performed it, the dancers' approach. The choreographer's proclivity for extreme movement, which incorporates a pliant spine, quick on the trigger flexibility and hyperextension, should have an odd chewiness about it. Here, performed with more aggression than nuance, it's just tough.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Ron Lieber, The Times's Your Money columnist, discussed the tech he's using. You've been writing financial advice in Your Money for many years. What's your most important tech tool for getting work done? Personal finance is indeed deeply personal, and I've found over the years that I learn as much from the people who read my work as I do from sources. To tap into that wisdom, I often open up comments on my column and moderate them myself, replying along the way to questions or particularly provocative statements. But because mine is a weekend column and there are sometimes hundreds of comments to approve by hand, I need to have a laptop with me wherever I go in order to keep up, and the lighter the better. So I lean hard on my MacBook Air (and really abuse the Samsonite Xenon backpack I use to lug it around). What do you like about it, and what could be better? Other than the self loathing I feel about using Apple's products when it cozies up to China, you mean? I wish the Mac was even lighter and that our employer would give me a couple more to stash in various places. A while back, I heard the author Gretchen Rubin say something enlightening about how much happier she was when she realized she could have multiple phone chargers and laptop cords instead of just one. I bought myself a Chromebook to use for office meetings (to go with my desktop machine at work and the Mac at home) so I wasn't lugging the Mac around on the subway even more than I already do. What's your favorite fintech app, and why? I love being able to scan checks and deposit them without doing the whole envelope, stamp, mailbox routine. I haven't maintained checking accounts at banks with branches in over 15 years, and this helps me keep the streak going. I do find it rather curious, however, that Charles Schwab can suck that paper through the air and into my checking account without much delay but still helps itself to a four day hold on transfers from my external savings account. I've also been excited for a while to put some allowance apps through their paces, but my 11 year old is still attached to her Save, Spend and Give jars and the cash and coins that fill them up. You've given savvy advice on buying cars, pouncing on credit card offers, and optimizing retirement savings. What's your advice for the smartest way to buy tech products? I have a saying more like a lament that I repeat so often that I've turned it into a hashtag: Nothing is simple or easy. (Nothing!) Nisoe. Technology has come a long way, but it is almost never as simple as its marketers suggest. My wife and I have rarely managed to touch any aspect of our audiovisual setup in our apartment without needing to pay someone to actually make it work. Now, hiring tech support in this way is reflexive a pre emptive way to buy back time that would surely be lost in figuring the whole thing out and probably failing. So I encourage people to budget for that, whether in hours or dollars. Beyond your job, what tech product are you currently obsessed with using in your daily life, and what do you and your family do with it? The infinite Spotify jukebox still seems like a miracle to me, and I've found it to be a particularly fun way to introduce my toddler to music. When she was smaller and knew no words, I'd improvise playlists over, say, breakfast food related themes: ("Toast and Jelly," "Starfish and Coffee," "Breakfast in America") and then post them on Facebook with a photo to amuse friends and relatives. Now that she's putting words together, we riff off those. She just said "amazing" for the first time, so we tuned into Aerosmith and Luther Vandross singing songs with that word in the title. Also Barack Obama on YouTube singing "Amazing Grace." Why is Spotify better than alternatives like Apple Music? I haven't tried Apple Music, so I'm not sure if it would be any better at this, but it would be neat to be able to post these spontaneous playlists to Facebook with some kind of natural language command so that people could play them with just one click. Why can't I type (or speak) something obviously recognizable, like "take the last six songs I played and post them to my Facebook account" and have it just happen? If you could dream up a gadget or app that has yet to exist, what would it be and how much would you be willing to pay for it? I don't even know where to start here. Let's go from cheap to expensive. A voice (or foot!) operated screen door for when your hands are filled with grilled food or dirty dishes: 10. An app for all kids' first phones that allows them to help when they see someone on the street in need of help. Hit one button, and 1 moves from their allowance app to the nearest homeless shelter or food bank. I'd pay 20 for this, but maybe Apple or Google will figure this out themselves and give it away in their app stores. And how about an app that finally lets me store all of the restaurants I want to try, so I can pull it up whenever I get hungry to remind myself of what is nearby or at the location that I'm heading to? Maybe 25 for this one. Oh, and something that would fill out camp and school health forms automatically: 1 trillion.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. MODERN MATINEES: IRIS BARRY'S HISTORY OF FILM at the Museum of Modern Art (Oct. 21 Dec. 31). There will be no shortage of new films and film installations when MoMA reopens on Monday, but the museum pays tribute to its past with this series drawn from the notes of Barry, who became the film library's first curator in 1935. Accordingly, the lineup consists of milestones from the silent and early sound eras, like D. W. Griffith's "Intolerance" (on Oct. 24) and Josef von Sternberg's "The Last Command" (on Oct. 30) and "Underworld" (on Nov. 7). 212 708 9400, moma.org SHITAMACHI: TALES OF DOWNTOWN TOKYO at Film Forum (Oct. 18 Nov. 7). With a large helping of prints imported from Japan, this retrospective is designed around geography: It focuses on eastern districts of Tokyo that inspired some of the greatest of all Japanese filmmakers, particularly in the postwar period. In Akira Kurosawa's riveting noir "Stray Dog" (on Friday, Saturday, Thursday and Nov. 7), Toshiro Mifune plays a cop who loses his gun; its use in a killing prompts him to search downtrodden parts of the city. Yasujiro Ozu's bittersweet "Record of a Tenement Gentleman" (on Friday, Saturday and Tuesday) follows the fate of a boy watched over by a widow after the war, while Mikio Naruse's "Flowing" (on Oct. 26 and 28) captures the lives of women in a moribund geisha house. 212 727 8110, filmforum.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
With the coronavirus continuing to upend familiar rhythms of life, leaving schools shuttered, millions out of work and billions stuck at home, those looking for ways to pass the time have gotten creative. In the absence of jam packed calendars, people are turning to social media challenges in droves. Some bring together families for choreographed dance routines while others spark the inner artist or unlock hidden engineering skills. All of them hold the promise of warding off boredom and maybe earning users a moment of online celebrity. Here are some of the biggest challenges sweeping the world amid the lockdown. Early last month, the lyrics "I just flipped the switch" from the Drake song "Nonstop" inspired a viral challenge on TikTok that eventually made its way to Instagram. All over, people began swapping clothes, poses and sometimes attitudes when the lights are switched off and then back on. A version featuring Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Kate McKinnon of "Saturday Night Live" went viral, as did a clip of Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
I don't know about you, but I'm feeling more and more as if we're all trapped on the Titanic except that this time around the captain is a madman who insists on steering straight for the iceberg. And his crew is too cowardly to contradict him, let alone mutiny to save the passengers. A month ago it was still possible to hope that the push by Donald Trump and the Trumpist governors of Sunbelt states to relax social distancing and reopen businesses like restaurants and bars even though we met none of the criteria for doing so safely wouldn't have completely catastrophic results. At this point, however, it's clear that everything the experts warned was likely to happen, is happening. Daily new cases of Covid 19 are running two and a half times as high as in early June, and rising fast. Hospitals in early reopening states are under terrible pressure. National death totals are still declining thanks to falling fatalities in the Northeast, but they're rising in the Sunbelt, and the worst is surely yet to come. A normal president and a normal political party would be horrified by this turn of events. They would realize that they made a bad call and that it was time for a major course correction; they would start taking warnings from health experts seriously. But Trump, who began his presidency with a lurid, fact challenged rant about "American carnage," seems completely untroubled by the toll from a pandemic that seems certain to kill more Americans than were murdered over the whole of the past decade. And he's doubling down on his rejection of expertise, this week demanding full reopening of schools in defiance of existing guidelines. Oh, and he still won't call on Americans to protect one another by wearing masks, or set an example by wearing one himself. How can we make sense of Trump's pathologically inept response to the coronavirus? There's an underlying core of utter cynicism: Clearly, Trump and those around him don't care very much how many Americans die or suffer lasting damage from Covid 19, as long as the politics work in their favor. But this cynicism is wrapped in multiple layers of delusion. On one side, it's clear that the Trumpists still can't accept that this is really happening. Until early 2020, Trump led a charmed political life. All his recent predecessors had to deal with some kind of external challenge during their first three years. Barack Obama inherited an economy wracked by a financial crisis. Whatever you think of his response, George W. Bush faced 9/11. Bill Clinton faced stubbornly high unemployment. But Trump inherited a nation at peace and in the middle of a long economic expansion that continued, with no visible change in the trend, after he took office. Then came Covid 19. Another president might have seen the pandemic as a crisis to be dealt with. But that thought never seems to have crossed Trump's mind. Instead, he has spent the past five months trying to will us back to where we were in February, when he was sitting on top of a moving train and pretending that he was driving it. This helps explain his otherwise bizarre aversion to masks: They remind people that we're in the midst of a pandemic, which is something he wants everyone to forget. Unfortunately for him and for the rest of us positive thinking won't make a virus go away. That, however, is where the second layer of delusion comes in. By now it's clear that the cynical decision to sacrifice American lives in pursuit of political advantage is failing even on its own terms. The rush to reopen did produce big job gains in May and early June, but voters were distinctly unimpressed; his polling just kept getting worse. This year, it's not the economy, stupid it's the virus. And now the surge in infections may be causing the economic recovery to stall. In other words, the strategy of "damn the experts, full speed ahead" is looking foolish as well as immoral. But Trump, far from reconsidering, is digging the hole he's in ever deeper much the same way that he keeps turning up the dial on racism despite the fact that it's not working for him politically. Incredibly, even as hospitalizations climb he's still insisting that the rise in reported cases is just an illusion created by more testing. So what can we do? Trump has another six months in office (if he's still there after Jan. 20, God help us all). And it's now clear that he won't change course, no matter how bad the pandemic gets. As I said, we're all passengers at the mercy of a mad captain determined to wreck his ship. It's true that federalism is our friend. Trump doesn't actually have any direct authority over things like school openings. And many though not all states have rational governors who are trying to contain the damage, although it's hard to keep the lid on in New Jersey or Michigan when the coronavirus is running wild in Florida. But a lot more Americans are going to die. And if Joe Biden becomes president, he, like Obama 12 years ago, is going to take the helm of a nation in a deep crisis. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
For nearly a decade, David Kennedy marveled from behind his computer screen at thousands of mysterious stone structures scattered across Saudi Arabia's desert. With Google Earth's satellite imagery at his fingertips, the archaeologist peeked at burial sites and other so called Works of the Old Men, created by nomadic tribes thousands of years ago. But he was unable to secure permission to visit the country to observe up close the ancient designs that he and amateur archaeologists had studied from their desktops. Last month, after announcing he had identified nearly 400 stone "gates," Dr. Kennedy received the invitation of a lifetime from Saudi officials to investigate the hidden structures from a helicopter. "They are absolutely astonishing," said Dr. Kennedy, who recently retired from the University of Western Australia. "From 500 feet, you can see the vital details of structures that are invisible in the fuzzy image on Google Earth." Since 1997, Dr. Kennedy has studied similar structures in neighboring Jordan from the ground and sky. Many of the stone figures in both countries are in basalt fields known as harrats. The fields often feature dried up lava streams that twist and turn like slithering snakes across the dark landscape. In Saudi Arabia, he explored 200 sites from the air across the regions of Harrat Khaybar and Harrat Uwayrid. The structures he observed ranged in shapes and sizes, which he describes as gates, kites, triangles, bull's eyes and keyholes. "We could see immediately they were much more complicated than they appeared on Google Earth," Dr. Kennedy said. They were not simply heaps of stone. Rather, each long bar was actually made up of two parallel lines of flat slabs placed on their edges facing each other with small stones filling the space in between. "They are much more sophisticated than I was prepared for," he said. Some gates were larger than 1,000 feet long and 250 feet wide. He suspected the oldest may be about 9,000 years old. Though he is not sure of their purpose, he speculated they may have been used for farming purposes. Dr. Kennedy also got a closer look at about a dozen of the "kites" that were first discovered in the Middle East by pilots in the 1920s. These are the most famous of the Works of the Old Men, and Dr. Kennedy has identified more than 900 of them in Saudi Arabia's Harrat Khaybar. From above, they typically resemble kites with strings and tails. They are often very large, with many stretching more than a quarter mile. Archaeologists think gazelle were corralled into the head of the kite, where the hunters would come out to kill them. Sometimes multiple kites would overlap, so that if the animals got past one funnel they would get caught in another. The harrats were littered with the smaller structures he has named keyholes, wheels, triangles and bull's eyes. Dr. Kennedy said he was surprised at how straight the lines of the triangles and keyholes were, as if the people who made them had picked out specific flat stones rather than random rocks. Each triangle was isosceles and looked like it was pointing at something. Sometimes they were directed to a bull's eye that was about 15 feet or 150 feet away. There were also several keyhole structures, sometimes lined up together. The heads of the keyholes were almost always near perfect circles, and the walls were about three feet high. These structures may have served some funerary or symbolic purpose. Dr. Kennedy did not date any of the structures he visited with radiocarbon testing, but he said that future groups should perform more thorough analysis. Dr. Kennedy was invited by Amr AlMadani, the chief executive officer of the Royal Commission for Al Ula Province, which was created to safeguard some of the country's geological, historical and archaeological sites. "Dr. Kennedy has spent many years poring over Google Earth images, and we were able to get him much closer to the sites," said Mr. AlMadani, who joined Dr. Kennedy in the helicopter and described the experience as exciting. "Thinking about how life was in the Arabian Peninsula and trying to imagine the way people hunted, lived and buried the dead was very much enriching," he wrote in an email.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
This article has been updated to reflect news developments. In the last six months, cloth face masks have emerged as the simplest, cheapest and most effective weapon that most ordinary Americans can wield against the coronavirus. Public health officials had initially warned the public against using masks they worried that people would buy up medical grade masks, whose supplies were limited. But in April, officials began recommending cloth face masks which could easily be made or purchased and now the nation's medical experts are all but twirling signboards while break dancing in chicken costumes to get you to mask up. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told a Senate panel this month that face masks might offer greater protection against the virus than a vaccine. If just about every American wore a mask over a period of six to 12 weeks, he said, "We'd bring this pandemic under control" repeating a claim he first made in July. In the abstract, then, a federal plan aimed at getting all Americans to wear masks sounds like just the sort of magic fix for the virus that President Trump has been fumbling for from the beginning. Yet the president has refused to impose a national mandate ordering people to wear masks indoors, nor has he proposed any other policy for achieving universal masking. Although he says he is for masks, he has frequently mocked them as wimpy accouterments of politically correct virtue signalers, and suggested that they pose many serious, though vague, dangers. The contradictions have never been more stark than this week. On Tuesday night, at the presidential debate, Trump first said, "I think masks are OK" and then mocked Joe Biden for his diligent mask wearing at events with other people. "He could be speaking 200 feet away from them, and he shows up with the biggest mask I've ever seen." On Friday, Trump revealed that he and the First Lady have tested positive for the coronavirus. Among Trump's various missteps in combating the virus, it is his position on masks that puzzles and infuriates me most. Why hadn't he pushed this one, simple tool to help fix the worst crisis of his presidency? I worked with my Times colleagues to analyze the president's statements on masks over the course of the pandemic. We sought to track how Trump helped to transform masks from objects as culturally benign as hand sanitizer or latex gloves into a flash point in the culture wars. What we've come up with is an illustration of a tremendous missed opportunity a zigzagging map charting not just a profound dereliction of public health, but also one of basic political strategy. The most striking feature of Trump's stance on masks is that it was never consistent. Trump was for masks before he was against masks before he was for them before he was against them. His attitude could best be described as existing in a kind of quantum superposition that covers all possible positions at once. When asked about masks by a voter at an ABC News Town Hall earlier this month, he began by noting that he sometimes wears masks, then criticized Joe Biden (who is not the president) for not issuing a national mask mandate, pointed out that health officials reversed their policy on masks, and finished up with a detour about the problem of masks worn by careless waiters. "The concept of a mask is good," he concluded, "but it also does you're constantly touching it. You're touching your face. You're touching plates. There are people that don't think masks are good." Trump's random walk down the policy spectrum stands in stark contrast to other American leaders and public health organizations. Joe Biden, for instance, has moved straightforwardly: He has gone from neutral to strongly in favor of masks. When I look at Trump's timeline on mask policy, I see only missed opportunity. Early in April, when the C.D.C. and many state health authorities began recommending that people wear masks, the public appeared broadly in favor. At the time, Trump had begun criticizing state lockdowns, but he hadn't said much about masks, except that he probably wouldn't wear one. Then, at the end of April, the White House's tone began to shift. Mike Pence was conspicuously maskless on a visit to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, apparently in violation of the hospital's policy. Mask resistors became violent; in Flint, Mich., a Family Dollar security guard was shot and killed after telling a customer to put a mask on her child the first of many shootings arising out of disputes about masks and other coronavirus restrictions. Trump could have tried to calm tensions. Instead he sniffed the shifting winds and leapt onto the anti mask wagon. His own masklessness seemed to become a point of pride. The White House instituted a mask requirement for all employees except Trump. On a tour of a Ford factory, Trump wore a mask when he was out of view of cameras, but he took it off in public, explaining that he "didn't want to give the press the pleasure of seeing it." He retweeted a post from a Fox News analyst that appeared to mock how Biden looked in a mask. And when a reporter declined to remove his mask when asking a question at a news conference, Trump called the man "politically correct." By late spring, masks had become an irredeemably partisan issue. The primary resistors were Republican men. In a poll conducted in May by the Kaiser Family Foundation, Democrats were almost twice as likely as Republicans to say they wore masks regularly. Only half of Republican men said they wore a mask most of the time they left the house; only 43 percent said Trump should wear a mask. I can't blame Trump alone for this particular descent into the salad spinner of polarization. Robert Kahn, a professor at the University of St. Thomas's law school who has studied the legal and cultural attitudes toward masks, has written that it was probably inevitable that masks would come to be seen as costumes that signify personal qualities rather than as neutral objects, like umbrellas. Face masks, even more than clothing, alter our bodies and our communication in a way that can't be hidden. They are symbols as much as tools, Kahn argues. Still, once Trump staked out an anti mask position, much of right wing media took their cues from him. The mask became a fault line. In The Federalist, David Marcus argued that masks symbolized weakness. If Trump wore a mask in public, it would signal that "the United States is so powerless against this invisible enemy sprung from China that even its president must cower behind a mask." At Trump rallies, people reveled in their masklessness, telling reporters that masks were useless, that the coronavirus was not even a serious threat, and that mask rules were an attempt by "people in power who want to see what people will submit to," as a Trump supporter in Kansas told the BBC. People on the left attached their own meanings to masks. A common argument was that Trump's reluctance to wear a mask was itself a sign of weakness of "fragile masculinity," as the journalist Liz Plank put it. A few Republican leaders tried to shake off all this symbolic weight. Wearing a mask "is not about politics," said Mike DeWine, the Republican governor of Ohio. Doug Burgum, the Republican governor of North Dakota, called the mask debate "a senseless dividing line," adding, "I would ask people to try to dial up your empathy and your understanding." But there was no going back. Masklessness had become part of the Trump lifestyle brand. If you want the full MAGA experience, you wear the hat but not the mask. "I absolutely think Trump made a difference," Kahn told me. If Trump had struck a more positive tone on masks if he hadn't always implied they were unmanly or undignified there might still have been some resistance to wearing masks, Kahn said, "but it would have been much less controversial." Compared to other countries, mask usage in the United States is in the middle of the pack; we are better than Canada, Britain and Scandinavia, but worse than Germany, Italy, Mexico and much of Asia. Usage is rising in a Pew survey taken in August, 85 percent of adults said they regularly wore a mask, compared to 65 percent in June. But that is still short of the threshold officials have been aiming for 95 percent or more. Even if it's quite late, a full throated Trump endorsement of masks could still make a difference.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
There is an animated ad playing in the subway that drives me a little up the wall. It's an anti manspreading spot, in which a seated man with his legs wide open closes them, mostly, allowing a woman to sit beside him. So far, so good until she daintily crosses her ankles to make herself as small as possible. Then she thanks the nice man for, as far as I can tell, no longer taking up way more than his fair share of room. In theater as in life, there is a lot of manspreading: Men get more jobs, more money, more prizes, more stories told about them onstage than women do. The numbers are grim nearly everywhere, but especially on Broadway, where an Actors' Equity study released last month showed female and minority actors and stage managers at a gross disadvantage to white men. A recent tally on HowlRound, a theater industry website, documented the staggering lead men have over women as designers, directors and artistic directors in American regional theaters. Men dominate every area but costume design, where women traditionally hold sway. And now that Lynn Nottage's Pulitzer Prize winning "Sweat" and Lillian Hellman's "The Little Foxes" have closed, Paula Vogel's "Indecent" is the sole play by a woman on Broadway and that only because Daryl Roth, one of the most powerful women in theater, rallied her fellow producers to reverse the plan to close the show in June. Producers, the gatekeepers in commercial theater, are also overwhelmingly male. So the news is not great. Yet I find myself optimistic, unable to shake the sense that something is changing that in a year that began with women's marches erupting around the globe, female theater makers are less willing to tolerate the stubborn status quo. Ms. Vogel, whose show runs through Aug. 6 at the Cort Theater, is declining to exit Broadway with decorous gratitude, insisting instead on talking, in the news media and on Twitter, about what she sees as a system stacked against women. (She includes this newspaper.) Kate Whoriskey, the director of "Sweat," told me this spring that she spent years batting away reporters' questions about the gender gap in directing but now believes that refusing to discuss it is part of the problem. It is awkward, in a field that espouses liberal values, to point out the disparity between women and their male colleagues. But it's pretty glaring. You don't have to squint to see it. Not so different, you might think, from Phyllida Lloyd's ferocious all female Donmar Warehouse production a few years back at St. Ann's Warehouse. Yet in the Pocket Universe version, all of Shakespeare's characters were girls, and the word "girl" replaced "man" throughout the script, a strikingly potent change. "Thou art the ruins of the noblest girl that ever lived in the tide of times," Mark Antony said over the dead body of Caesar, and I thought: When do we ever describe girls as noble? When, in the stories we tell, do we ever take them that seriously? The capacity to take women seriously is at the heart of all of this: the idea that we're not an aberration but half the population, and just as human as the other half. It is ridiculous to me that the need for equal footing even has to be a discussion that the inherent value of a theater that looks and sounds and feels like all of us should require defending. The perception that it does is why activist groups like Parity Productions and the Kilroys exist, applying pressure on behalf of female and transgender artists, and why the predominantly white, male critical establishment came in for an angry hit last month in another piece on HowlRound. Reading up on the playwright Tina Howe, I was struck by an assertion she made several years ago: that male and female playwrights have different notions of what is stageworthy. I believe that's true of critics as well. Doubtless there's a lot of overlap, but sometimes a woman will recognize and be moved by things in a play that a man won't, simply because he has never walked through the world the way she has. That's not sexism; that's having a different frame of reference. The more of those, the better. One of the most stunning theatrical moments I've witnessed this year happened in February at St. Ann's, on the last night of Ms. Lloyd's all female staging of "The Tempest." I had seen the production before, so I knew how its wedding scene usually went, all ethereality and dreamy romance. By that point, deep in the show, the actors' femaleness had ceased to register; the audience had long since accepted them as male characters, from Harriet Walter's Prospero on down. But at that performance, four weeks after the women's marches, with political anger and exuberance still in the air, the women of "The Tempest" played their wedding scene in pink pussy hats handmade closing night gifts from one of the wardrobe people, worn with Ms. Lloyd's O.K. And it was the strangest, most moving thing: The instant the actors donned them, the energy of the room transformed. Femaleness claimed the stage. All of it. This isn't a call for separatism, though. It's a call for a theater that embraces women instead of pushing them to the margins. There's no valid reason that they shouldn't hold half the jobs across the field; earn as much money and wield as much power as the men do; and, being a solid majority of ticket buyers, see lives that look like theirs onstage at least half the time. I keep thinking of a song in Danny Rubin and Tim Minchin's "Groundhog Day," my favorite Broadway musical of the past season. Called "Playing Nancy," it's sung by a woman relegated to a bit part in a man's life. But on a meta level, it's about being an actress trapped in flimsy supporting roles in shows about men, and longing to play something with greater substance. It's a lovely number, one I interpret as a salvo of feminist solidarity by Mr. Minchin in the middle of a show that revolves around a man, just as the original movie does. The actress inside the song wants to be taken seriously, not dismissed as decorative. She wants to grow in her career and be challenged in her work just like the guys are a reasonable desire, and a common one. As long as theater's egregious gender gap remains, though, her male colleagues will have far better odds than she will. By any measure, that is not all right. The manspreading, then? Dude, it needs to stop. There are women with just as much right to that space, and there's plenty of room for you both.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
India, Long the Home of Outsourcing, Now Wants to Make Its Own Chips NEW DELHI The government of India, home to many of the world's leading software outsourcing companies, wants to replicate that success by creating a homegrown industry for computer hardware. But unlike software, which requires little infrastructure, building electronics is a far more demanding business. Chip makers need vast quantities of clean water and reliable electricity. Computer and tablet assemblers depend on economies of scale and easy access to cheap parts, which China has spent many years building up. So the Indian government is trying a new, carrot and stick approach. In October, it quietly began mandating that at least half of all laptops, computers, tablets and dot matrix printers procured by government agencies come from domestic sources, according to Dr. Ajay Kumar, joint secretary of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, which devised the policy. At the same time, it is dangling as much as 2.75 billion in incentives in front of chip makers to entice them to build India's first semiconductor manufacturing plant, an important step in building a domestic hardware industry. But like so much of India's economic policy, it's doubtful that either initiative will have the impact the government is intending. "Nobody disputes India's need to build up manufacturing. Not doing so would be fiscally irresponsible," said Gaurav Verma, who heads the New York office of the U.S. India Business Council. But Mr. Verma said that India's efforts to force international companies to manufacture in the country are futile. "The government needs to not mandate this, but create an ecosystem." The domestic purchasing mandate, known as the "preferential market access" policy, seeks to address a real problem: imports of electronics are growing so fast that by 2020, they are projected to eclipse oil as the developing country's largest import expense. India's import bill for semiconductors alone was 8.2 billion in 2012, according to Gartner, a research firm. And demand is growing at around 20 percent a year, according to the Department of Electronics and Information Technology. For all electronics, India's foreign currency bill is projected to grow from around 70 billion in 2012 to 300 billion by 2020, according to a government task force. "The problem we are facing is that the demand is growing so much that it is reaching nonsustainable levels," said Dr. Ajay Kumar, joint secretary of the agency. Dot matrix printers, outdated in most of the world, are one of the few electronic products that India manufactures. Around 400,000 dot matrix printers were sold in India in the year ended March 31, an increase of 2 percent from the year before, according to the Manufacturers' Association for Information Technology, a computer industry trade group in India. The government accounts for about 40 percent of the country's electronics purchases, according to PVG Menon, president of the Indian Electronics and Semiconductor Manufacturing Association. Officials hope to use that purchasing power to jump start manufacturing of other computer goods. However, the government has adopted a broad definition of what it considers locally made, since so few electronics are currently manufactured here. If at least 30 percent of a computer's components are made in India, then it would qualify. The policy also allows prospective suppliers to show "value addition" in lieu of actually manufacturing the goods in India, said Dr. Kumar. For example, India does not manufacture hard drives, but it assembles and tests them. Under the policy, a hard drive that is assembled in India would be considered to be made there. A computer processor typically accounts for 25 to 35 percent of the total cost of a PC or laptop. India hopes that such a plant, which could cost as much as 5 billion to build, would help spur a bigger high tech manufacturing industry, said Dr. Kumar. According to Indian media reports, two consortiums have been in talks with the government to build microprocessor foundries. The first is led by the Jaypee Group, one of India's largest construction companies, which built the country's Formula One track in Uttar Pradesh. It has partnered with I.B.M., which will provide the technology. The second bid is from the Hindustan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, an American company that, despite its name, does not manufacture any chips. It has partnered with the Geneva based chip maker STMicroelectronics. But Ron Somers, president of the U.S. India Business Council, said he doubted that India could provide a new chip making facility with the basic infrastructure it needed to even keep the lights on. There have been several failed attempts to set up chip plants in the past. The most recent was in 2008 by SemIndia, a United States company run by Indian American entrepreneurs. It ended acrimoniously when a dispute arose over the terms of the agreement between the company and the state of Andhra Pradesh where the plant was to be housed. Critics warn that India's efforts to encourage a high tech revolution may come to naught once again unless it reduces some of the barriers to doing business in the country. In the case of some electronics, the import duty on a finished product is cheaper than on the component parts, said Mr. Menon. Costs are also higher because of a lack of reliable power and the extra time it takes to move goods on the country's poor roads.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
LOS ANGELES Speeding past Wall Street's expectations, Disney on Tuesday reported a 28 percent increase in quarterly profit, with the "Star Wars" franchise as the primary engine. But instead of reveling in the record results, Robert A. Iger, Disney's chief executive, found himself once again mounting a defense of ESPN on a post earnings conference call with analysts. Since August, when Mr. Iger acknowledged that ESPN had experienced modest subscriber losses, Disney has been dogged by concerns about the long term health of its cable television holdings, which have historically provided the bulk of its annual profit. Mr. Iger has repeatedly rejected the notion, put forward by a few analysts, that ESPN is particularly at risk as some consumers forgo a traditional cable subscription. On Tuesday's call, Mr. Iger again emphasized the strength of ESPN, noting that in recent weeks the sports behemoth had achieved an increase in subscribers, in part from new, slimmed down cable and satellite services like Sling TV that are popular with younger consumers. At one point, in response to an analyst question about the changing way media is consumed, Mr. Iger said it was "just ridiculous" to think that ESPN would not continue to dominate.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
MILAN Despite its reputation for being predictable, safe, conservative, sometimes boring the Philadelphia of fashion Milan still has the power to surprise. Especially during a time when the clothing industry in general is scrambling to adjust to the new exigencies of a fragmented marketplace, the continued decline of bricks and mortar retailing and the insuperable challenges of pinning down the fickle tastes of that generational behemoth called the Millennial, it is worth tuning in to the fashion frequencies transmitted from this northern industrial city. Giorgio Armani showed suits, for instance, proper suits and not just once but twice, first at Emporio Armani and then at the Giorgio Armani show. Those shows bracketed an intensely compressed 72 hour period that now constitutes men's fashion week here. Showing a suit at a men's wear presentation may not seem like a radical proposition until you remember that the suit has become the Uncle Bernie of fashion, a corpse propped up in the back seat of the convertible and driven around town. Mr. Armani seemed this week to be making a bet that there is life left in a uniform that, in its constituent parts, has managed to last at least 300 years. That he chose, in the middle of shows chockablock with perhaps overfamiliar design elements velvet trousers, asymmetrical zippers, cropped knit sports jackets, woven or stamped patterns resembling Hokusai clouds, palettes restricted to muted grays, deep blues and black to present nattily tailored double breasted suits in six buttons (Emporio Armani) and eight buttons (Giorgio Armani) suggests a belief that the long term legacy of casual Fridays may, perversely, turn out to be formal Fridays. The suit is dead. Long live the suit. Other designers here took trips down memory lane. The most pleasurable to see was Miuccia Prada, who recast the black Pocone nylon on which she first made her reputation in the 1980s as big, boxy and covetable outerwear. In those long ago days, carrying a sleek Prada backpack was a surefire tell that the wearer was in the know. Editors actually fought over the bags, which were not, truth to tell, all that much to look at. Donatella Versace also kept her eye on the rearview mirror, mentally rummaging through the motifs of a design house created in the '80s by her brother, looking for elements to recast for a social media age. It made sense because in many ways Versace was the quintessential Instagram label avant la lettre. Here, she invoked the whole canonical Versace shebang as if intentionally for an iPhone cascade. There were neo Roman "Amore e Psiche" and "Sipario" housewares prints. There was the garishly gilded Leonard's of Great Neck palette. There was, as always, exuberant styling, pairing kilts with thigh high boots, adding caterpillar fringe to hoodies, sticking on logo pins, deploying Versace tartans and adding interlocking chains to the soles of a new molded sneaker introduced for an audience that notably included the hip hop artist Tauheed Epps. Mr. Epps is better known as 2 Chainz or Tity Boi, and that he was one of the few celebrities to be spotted here this season suggests either steep reductions in designer budgets or a certain level of fame fatigue. True, there were obligatory Hadid and Jenner sightings on the runway of Dsquared, where Bella Hadid opened and Kendall Jenner closed a show that had a rhinestone cowboy theme that felt somehow halfhearted, lacking the crazed exuberance of the wonderfully gaudy stuff once devised for country music greats like Hank Williams, Johnny Cash and Gene Autry (and Elvis and Cher) by the inimitable Nudie Cohn. In truth, the flesh and blood Ms. Jenner declined to grace the dinner with her attendance, though she had briefly ventured into the mosh pit of a press preview at the Villa Necchi Campiglio, the magnificent modernist villa where Tod's is privileged to stage its presentations. Perhaps, as one American editor somewhat cynically suggested, Ms. Jenner's fee scale for appearances does not include lifting a fork. Or maybe she just doesn't care for baked sea bass with artichokes or cannot afford the calories in il Baretto's famous, and famously fattening, saffron risotto, a large plate of which Mr. Bolle devoured with gusto. "I danced last night, so I'm hungry," said Mr. Bolle, who, the evening before, had starred onstage at La Scala in "La Dame aux Camelias." "There's a lot of lifting," he said. The week here concluded with a different sort of lifting, as the models at the delightful Fendi show grabbed luggage off a baggage carousel specially constructed for a witty set resembling an airport arrivals hall. Like others in Milan, the designer Silvia Venturini Fendi seemed mentally to be straddling two zones, both looking back at the storied heritage of her family company founded in the 1920s in Rome to sell umbrellas and luggage for design elements as traditional as a parasol hat and forward to futuristic technology that allows her now to create fur and rubber garments bonded with no need for stitching. The past is the future, Ms. Fendi said backstage before the show. And, just as it is undoubtedly true that in few other places besides Italy do successive eras remain in such active dialogue, in few other pursuits outside fashion is temporality so intrinsic to the creative process. Consider Rocco Iannone's debut show for Pal Zileri, a respectable midrange Italian label acquired some years back by Mayhoola for Investments with the intention of making it a player on a par with the other companies (Balmain, Valentino) run by an investment arm of the royal family of Qatar. After the departure last year of Mauro Ravizza Krieger, the creative director of Pal Zileri, Mayhoola recruited Mr. Iannone, 33, from the ranks of Giorgio Armani's design team, where he had worked for the last decade, most recently as senior men's wear designer. What he brought to his new job, along with the design chops evident in the exquisitely tailored coats he showed, was a sense, as some press notes made clear, of the "cyclical nature of history" in fashion and just about everything else. Yet, for all that, a bit of unintentional leavening did occur. Placed on each cushioned seat at the show was a pack of cards depicting portraits of male ancients, each associated with some trait characteristic of a true gentleman. It could be that something was lost in translating to English the Italian legends accompanying cards for Precision, Kindness, Gravitas and other traits. Or else this observer had not drunk enough coffee that day. "Ci Sono, dunque" ("I am here, therefore I am"), read one card marked Awareness. On another, signifying Nonchalance, were printed the words "Mi dimentico, mentre lo faccio," which was translated as "I forget about it while I'm doing it." Come to think of it, that one did make a certain kind of sense. Sometimes I forget about it while I'm doing it, too.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Sebastien Buemi took his first victory in the Formula E racing series for electric cars, holding off the spirited challenge of Jean Eric Vergne on Sunday in Punta del Este, Uruguay. Nelson Piquet Jr. claimed second place, however, as Vergne's suspension failed on the penultimate lap, relegating him to a 14th place finish. Third place went to the series points leader, Lucas di Grassi. Vergne had started on the pole, but lost the lead early when he made light contact with a barrier, damaging his car's suspension. He spent the rest of the race trying to make up the time he lost. The event, held in a beach resort community, was the third of nine scheduled in the inaugural season for the international all electric car racing series. The next event is scheduled for Jan. 10 in Buenos Aires. The series, which began in September, concludes in June. David Coulthard, a retired Formula One driver, surprised a diverse field of international drivers and won the finals in the Race of Champions, which was held Sunday in Barbados. The event, which pits 16 drivers in identically prepared racecars, is meant to determine the "Champion of Champions."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Only a handful of contemporary bands have furnished the end credits music to "Game of Thrones" the Hold Steady, for example, covered the Westerosi drinking song "The Bear and the Maiden Fair," and the National covered the foreboding ballad "The Rains of Castamere." In this week's episode, it was Florence and the Machine, the last group who will ever do so, according to HBO. Which was fitting: The band was one of the first that the series's showrunners, David Benioff and Dan Weiss, attempted to recruit. That was for Season 2 an eternity in pop culture time when they had wanted that band's frontwoman, Florence Welch, to sing "The Rains of Castamere." Florence and the Machine turned down the request at the time, but Benioff and Weiss never let go of the idea. "We've always been huge fans of Florence's music," they said in a joint statement. "So the opportunity to hear her otherworldly voice on our show was always at the forefront of our minds. We're still pleasantly shocked that she agreed to sing 'Jenny of Oldstones,' and we're in love with the result." During the episode, Podrick Payne (Daniel Portman) sings a portion of that tragic love ballad over a montage of various pairings Sam and Gilly, Sansa and Theon, Arya and Gendry, Missandei and Grey Worm and finishes as Dany approaches Jon, perhaps as foreshadowing. His version has an air of hopefulness. Welch's, however, seems to capture more of the song's inherent mysteries, even though, as she said in a phone interview, she had no idea while recording what would happen in the episode. Welch took a break from celebrating her grandfather's 80th birthday in Galveston, Tex., to chat about the song and its possible meanings. (She joked that she was calling from Westeros.) Following are edited excerpts from that conversation. "Game of Thrones" licensed one of your songs ("Seven Devils") for a trailer before, but this is the first time you've recorded something specifically for the show. Are you a fan? At what point did you get into "Game of Thrones"? I missed the first two seasons, and then I found it and watched as many as I could, all in one go. Laughs I was a binge watcher. I remember being like, "Oh, this is amazing. How have I not been watching this the whole time?" I'm happy to see them coming together now. All the families will have to stop fighting, because there's something bigger at stake. I think that's really interesting because it's echoing what's actually happening right now with the ecological crisis. I'm really interested to see where that goes. When did Season 2 come out? How many years ago was that? Season 2 was in 2012, so seven years. Wow. And now, watching that trailer now, seven years on, I was like, "Oh my god, that's expletive huge." Especially with how huge the show has gotten. I think a lot of those things that happened early on in my career, I didn't realize how big they were. Any regrets about passing on a previous request from the show to record a version of "The Rains of Castamere"? Oh my god. Expletive Did I? I can't remember. Laughs I think that was during my quote unquote wild years. If I'm being super honest, there are a lot of things that are a bit blurry. I wasn't as ... involved, or, shall we say, as focused as I am now. But even in the blurry years, when there was a lot of chaos, I was still pretty wary about what I said yes to. I tend to be pretty cautious about what songs I sing. So I'm glad that they came back to me. I feel really touched to be on the last season, to be the last singer. And I'm grateful that I get to be a bit more present for it, to celebrate the ending of "Game of Thrones" in a clear place. What kind of direction did they give you with "Jenny of Oldstones"? They just had a simple, stripped back, lilting melody. The notes of it sounded like a Celtic folk song to me. I thought it was really beautiful. I love the idea of dancing with ghosts and never wanting to leave. That totally makes sense to me. I feel like I do that every night on stage. I worked with Thomas Bartlett on "High as Hope," and he's a piano genius. He helped formulate the chords, and then I kind of added my choir, my hellish soprano. We just tried to keep within the "Game of Thrones" world, to retain the ghostliness of it. This is a song that is shrouded in mystery in the books ... Really? There's a kind of sadness to it, and it sounded kind of haunted to me. I'm always really drawn to that kind of thing. What's it about? We don't really know much. Although he wrote more verses, George R.R. Martin included only one lyric in the text so far: "High in the halls of the kings who are gone, Jenny would dance with her ghosts." It's more that we keep hearing about the song, and about Jenny, who might have been a witch, or just friends with a witch or one of the Children of the Forest. A Targaryen prince abdicated his crown to marry Jenny, so it's a love story but also a mysterious tragedy, since her prince died at Summerhall. Fans have various theories that the song is about a prophecy, that it was written by Rhaegar Targaryen. In the show, they've had Jenny claiming to be a descendant of the Children of the Forest herself. So fans have been anticipating this one for a while. Wow! Oh my god, that's perfect! To be honest, they keep such a tight ship on "Game of Thrones," they didn't tell us what the visual would be. We weren't told what's going to happen in the episode. We weren't even told what the episode is called. It was all so top secret, so cloak and dagger! When I heard it, it evoked something quite strongly in me you can kind of feel that there is a presence in that song, like something that had history. So I'm really glad it does have a rich history! It's funny, they didn't tell me any of this inside information. They just sent it to me, and I was like: "O.K.! I can do this." Songs that people can resonate with emotionally, and that make people feel free to cry, I definitely like to make that kind of music, so they were probably like, "O.K., we'll go to Florence." Maybe they just wanted me to have my own take on it? Or maybe it would have been too much pressure, this huge weight of importance? I just hope I don't disappoint the fans looking forward to this song. I'm kind of glad they didn't give me a brief. I would have overthought it. What I wanted to do with this song was keep it as sparse as possible. It does get a bit more rousing at the end, but I really wanted to retain the simplicity of the melody and the lyrics that they sent me, because I found them so moving. If I had known the history of the song, I would have been like, " Expletive , we need fanfares, and you're going to have to get a dragon on here somehow." I might have as I can do sometimes overblown it. So I'm glad I didn't know then, but I'm glad to know now. You want the beauty and the fragility in there as well. I would have made it too big, if I had known just how expletive big it is! There is a fantasy convention about magical songs songs with magical effect. This might be one of them. The act of singing has a kind of magic to me. It's a kind of channeling. When I'm singing, I feel very much at peace, like I'm connected to something bigger than myself. That you can take people to that place with you, that's a kind of physical magic, because you're transcending yourself but you're also bringing everyone with you. One of the most magical things we do as humans is singing, especially singing together. I think that's partly why I was always obsessed with choirs, groups of voices that could reach higher than our physical selves. So it is a kind of alchemy. It's hard to explain, but there's definitely a sort of ritual to it. Have you ever seen some of the suggestions out there that you could play Melisandre? Yes! I'm so on board to be Melisandre. She's scary! I think I sometimes get mistaken for Sansa Stark as well. I thought you were going to go there. But I'll take Melisandre. The witchiness, that's definitely me. Although if I take my jewelry off, I don't turn into an old lady. Or do I?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
With a flick of the web slinging wrist and a shot of teen romance, Sony's "Spider Man: Far From Home" leapt to the top of the box office charts this weekend, dethroning "Toy Story 4" and providing the Marvel universe with its latest success story. The new "Spider Man" movie sold around 93.6 million in domestic tickets Friday through Sunday. That's an especially impressive figure considering that the movie opened earlier in the week, on Tuesday, ahead of the holiday. Tuesday through Sunday, it brought in 185.1 million. "Spider Man: Far From Home" is the second "Spider Man" movie led by the British actor Tom Holland and the sequel to 2017's "Spider Man: Homecoming," which saw Holland playing the hero in rebooted form. (We're now on the second revival of the franchise since the trilogy led by Tobey Maguire in the 2000s Andrew Garfield's short tenure in the role wrapped up in 2014 with "The Amazing Spider Man 2" so Maguire has essentially reached the status of Spider Grandpa .) In the latest series, Spidey's eternal crush, MJ, is played by the actress Zendaya. The new movie was likely bolstered by strong reviews; it currently holds a 91 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
I've been sad ever since "The Americans" ended, and before finding "The Americans," I'd been sad ever since "Mad Men" ended. My friends and family seem unimpressed that I rewatch these shows so often. Can you help? I enjoy "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" and "The Crown," but they're not "The Americans" and "Mad Men." Emily Here's what I think "The Americans" and "Mad Men" have in common (that "Mrs. Maisel" and "The Crown" don't share): a lot of the dialogue has a double meaning because the main characters lead double lives, and all the ways they love and think and behave are refracted through their shattered selfhoods. Layers, baby! Start with "Slings Arrows." It's a Canadian dramedy (currently on Acorn) about a Shakespearean theater festival, which of course does not have the obvious emotional heft of Cold War espionage or the spiritual nothingness of sales as American identity. Except trust me: It does in a bunch of ways. Our hero, Geoffrey (Paul Gross), has returned to direct a new staging of "Hamlet," a play he once starred in to great acclaim. In the interim, he spent a long time in a mental health facility. So the dialogue from the characters covers the real hurt they've all experienced but also their deep desire never to admit that hurt; the conflicted emotions they want to draw on for their performances but also a sense of certainty that they are playing the characters in the best way; and the dissonance of making a performance "real," even though, by nature, it is artifice. Sometimes when I watch a show, I feel like I care more about it than the people who made it I remember more plot lines, wonder about more characters, still care about unresolved B stories. I never felt like that watching "Mad Men" or "The Americans," where every date, song, font or nightie had this rich purpose. The same is true for "Rectify," a much slower and more humid show about a man newly released from death row in Georgia. (It's on Netflix.) Little big, though details abound, from the gruff way someone slams a refrigerator door, or pulls their keys out of a lock and into their palm and briefly relishes hearing them jingle. It's slow and beautiful.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
There has been a fair amount of sloganeering at the start of New York Fashion Week; a fair amount of designers wearing their hearts or their causes not just on their sleeves, but also on their chests. It's a trend that started in February 2017, for reasons that are probably obvious to all, and hasn't really gone away, though the subject matter has expanded far beyond its origin. So there was Jeremy Scott taking a bow after his pop protest parade of perforated motocross leathers and zip me up zip me down overalls, in a T shirt that read "Tell Your Senator No on Kavanaugh," and decorating his sweatshirt minis and army green denims with appliques touting: "riot," "peace," "shock" and "power." The gestures are sincerely meant, though they can read as superficial. But nowhere was a message as elegantly and thoughtfully conveyed at it was at Pyer Moss, where Kerby Jean Raymond is quietly carving out a career as the conscience of the fashion community. He dared to drag his Manhattan centric audience out to Crown Heights, a Brooklyn neighborhood near where he grew up, to the Weeksville Heritage Center, a historic site commemorating one of the first free African American communities of the 19th century. There, he set his runway outside, just beyond a group of the original white frame houses in the center's backyard, where a 40 person gospel choir was arrayed to sing his collection out. "I had 20 people last season, but this I time I saved a bit and stepped it up," Mr. Jean Raymond said. On the fifth anniversary of his label's founding, indeed he did. He did it with collaborations: with FUBU, the "For Us, By Us" street wear label that was a favorite of '90s rappers; and with the artist Derrick Adams, whose exhibition 'Sanctuary" just ended at the Museum of Arts and Design and whose portraits of his family graced jacquard and organza. He did it with meaning, and sophisticated line. The idea, Mr. Jean Raymond said after the show, was to continue his exploration of black American life, but this time to address the "present day moment of people calling the cops on black men having a barbecue" by exploring what "black American leisure looks like." He began with "The Negro Motorist Green Book," a travel guide published from 1936 to 1966 to advise readers on how to navigate the Jim Crow world (and which also inspired Mr. Adams's work), and went from there. And he did it without gussying up his points or banging you over the head with them. Instead he picked his angles, refined them; found the grace in the austerity of a long blue tuxedo shirt atop narrow trousers, in the allure in a flapper tank dress covered in 200,000 Swarovski crystals to create a mosaic portrait of a black father holding his baby, and in the harmony of a carnelian silk wrap skirt quilted like a duvet and paired with a T shirt with the words "Stop calling 911 on the culture" over the breast. Hemlines were fluid, colors bright and volumes controlled. The men's wear was wide at the shoulders and cropped at the waist, trousers languid as sweats. It's already an achievement to make very good clothes, which Mr. Jean Raymond does. And you can appreciate them without knowing anything except how they look. But when you add depth beyond the design, the result has real impact. Mr. Jean Raymond said he approached each collection as if it was an art project, which is the sort of charge that often gets levied at Eckhaus Latta, another resolutely individual brand having something of a breakthrough. In this case, it's mostly because the founders, Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta, describe their work with words like "conceptual" and "homespun," and because they put their friends on the runway and because each collection gets accompanied by a prose poem. And because they get invited to do things like have a small installation at the Whitney Museum, as they do now (it runs until Oct. 8). So maybe, fair enough. There's no question Brandon Maxwell's Marfa inspired ode to the pink and red roses of Texas by way of 1980s glamorama, or Tory Burch's Americanos on the cruise ship caftans and scarf separates, would be easier to slip into a closet. Ditto the collection from Kate Spade New York, on the runway for the first time, where the designer Nicola Glass has wisely moved the house a step further away from the memory of its founder and into 1970s prints and Ali MacGr aw attitude. They make some of the best jeans on the runway (white, straight, hung off the hips and cropped at the ankle, then dip dyed in pastels or splotched with brown like cowhide) and then mix them up with knits defined by negative space, use decomposition as adornment, and reject the notion of gender differentiation. At Monse the designers Laura Kim and Fernando Garcia also dabbled in unisex clothing, putting their women's wear, which is mostly about deconstructed men's wear, on men as well as women. Though not the dresses or even the skirt shorts, which somewhat undermined the point of the whole exercise. In any case, there was also a live performance at Eckhaus Latta, as at Pyer Moss something of a trend these days, like the message tees. Except the Eckhaus performers were small children who had been invited to sit on a mat and bang on upside down plastic buckets, among other percussive opportunities, which was funny and also slyly subversive, like a lot of the clothes. In the middle of the whole thing one little boy took his plastic bucket, inverted it and put it on his head. In the escalating cacophony of fashion week, you kind of knew how he felt.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
"With all seven historic theaters now set up for long term use, this feels like the exact right time for me to pass the baton and watch the organization that has been my professional home for these many years as it grows into its next phase," she added. Ms. Cahan had a career as a dancer before she entered the arts administration world as a co founder and executive director of the Feld Ballet. She caught the eye of New 42nd Street, a nonprofit established by New York State and New York City to revitalize the street, which by the 1990s was filled with boarded up buildings and porn theaters. For her first project, in 1995, she turned the Victory into the nonprofit New Victory, which stages shows for families and children at affordable prices. Other theaters on the street are in commercial use, including the Lyric (now home to "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child") and the Empire (now a movie multiplex). Perhaps her most notable behind the scenes feat was the creation of the New 42nd Street Studios, which she described as an answer to the city's lack of rehearsal spaces for performers. Completed in 2000, the 10 story, 34.7 million office, rehearsal and theater space offers 14 studios where performers from shows including "Hamilton" and "Frozen" practice. Since its creation, 1,500 productions have rehearsed or performed in the space.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
The professional basketball and hockey seasons evaporated in early March. The N.C.A.A. spring tournaments were canceled. Major League Baseball's Opening Day was postponed. The 2020 Masters the first major golf tournament of the year, usually held in April has been moved to November, when the sun will dip below the chilly fairways of Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia around 5 p.m. All of these nullifications have destroyed the sports broadcast calendar. The only newsmaking events on the horizon are those that can be orchestrated digitally drafts, scouting reports, free agency the paperwork we turn into a circus when nothing else is grabbing our attention. I have used sports to cope with every traumatic period in my life, so it feels especially cruel that at this time, a roiling stretch of anxiety with no contextual antecedent in living memory, that the pandemic has taken sports away from us. Daniel L. Wann, a psychology professor at Murray State University in Kentucky, claims in his research that rooting for a local team is good for your mental health. I can attest to his findings. I spent an entire summer in college worrying that I might have cancer after a series of inconclusive ultrasounds. The only palliative relief I could find was in the euphoric monotony of the daily San Diego Padres telecast. My present was suddenly fragile, but baseball is durable and resistant to change. It granted me faith that I would be, too. We don't have that luxury now, but we can remember a time when we did. ESPN, Fox, NBC and others are digging out old games from their vaults, as a way both to fill the huge gaps in the 24/7 television schedule and to invent a stopgap sports culture. These old games have a wonderfully disorienting effect on the brain. On April 2, ESPN aired the 2006 Rose Bowl, between the University of Texas and the University of Southern California, which remains the most beloved national title game in college football history. Enough people watched the rebroadcast for it to trend on Twitter, perhaps because when the game happened the first time, Twitter did not yet exist. We had sports again for a few hours. I have been sucked back into so many of these old games during my weeks of self isolation. I watched Michael Jordan rip the heart out of the Indiana Pacers during the 1998 playoffs on NBA TV. I watched Daniel Bryan defeat the dastardly trio of Randy Orton, Batista and Triple H to win the 2014 WWE heavyweight title on ESPN. This past Sunday, on what should have been the first weekend of the NBA playoffs, the sports viewing public came together to treat a Michael Jordan documentary as the next best thing. I tuned into a random Saints Packers game from 2011 on NBC Sports, which sparked the glint of a memory from when I watched the game the first time, on a brisk patio bar in Austin, Texas, as the sticky summer air slowly ceded into autumn. I was about to start my second year in college, and more important, I was finally assured that I wasn't sick. The giddy sweetness of the flashback poured over me. After another day of the unique blend of chaos and boredom, nothing felt better than sinking back into a predetermined timeline: a game where the outcome isn't in question, while everything else is up in the air. You can enjoy sports media's quarantine length history lesson academically. It was nice to remember how good Vince Young was in college and how quickly the Tennessee Titans muddled his talent during his professional career. ESPN has resuscitated games from deep in the archive, like Game One of the 1988 World Series, between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Oakland Athletics, that serve as an essential addition to any younger sports fan's palate of stats, references and last names. Kirk Gibson, who hit the famous walk off home run to spur the Dodgers toward their most recent championship, was interviewed on ESPN's SportsCenter after the game. The legends live on, as the world remains on pause. Personally, though, I've been drawn to the aesthetics of it all. It has been little more than a month since the N.B.A. suspended the remainder of its season, and America's tide of stay at home orders only swelled in late March. But already, it's become disconcerting to witness 20,000 people in the same arena. There they are, shoulder to shoulder, on a mountain of bleachers that pile to skyscraper heights, completely immune to the fears that have petrified our economy and frozen our social interaction. There is no starker representation of the way we used to live than these sports rebroadcasts. Even the games from recent history, like ESPN's April 1 showing of the Cleveland Cavaliers' immortal performance in the 2016 N.B.A. finals, appear as a relic of a fundamentally different civilization. Look at that crowd; envy their buoyancy, and regret their naivete. How wonderful it was to be unburdened by the unthinkable. Dr. Anthony Fauci recently told The Wall Street Journal that he expects the handshake to die with the pandemic. Slowly but surely, he contended, Americans will interrogate their social habits through the lens of a pandemic and create a new normal. It makes me consider what the fate will be for live sports. The N.B.A. has floated Labor Day as a cutoff point for the 2020 season. If players do go back to work, they will most likely be playing in practice facilities that are closed to the public. The quintessential fan experience will be altered throughout the rest of the year, at least. Beyond that, it's a mystery. When will you and I feel comfortable entering a crowded stadium? How much longer will we fear the strangers sitting next to us? Can the airy euphoria of mass gatherings thrive after we've all been made brutally aware of how fragile our defenses are against a virulent infectious disease? I watch those old broadcasts to witness people who don't yet need to wrestle with those questions, living proof that we once never feared breathing one another's air. Nobody knows what will guide us back to normalcy, but the 2006 Rose Bowl is a good start. Luke Winkie is a writer from San Diego. He has contributed to Vox, The Washington Post and The Atlantic. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
On a rainy day last week, 72 moviegoers visited the Park Plaza Cinema in Hilton Head Island, S.C., to see Liam Neeson in "Honest Thief." It was the largest single day attendance the independently owned five screen theater had seen since reopening in August after a five month shutdown. The feeling of celebration was short lived. The next day, only 22 people showed. Park Plaza, like movie theaters big and small around the country, has been decimated by the pandemic. After its long closure, it has established social distancing protocols and installed new air filtration systems. It has tried initiatives like curbside popcorn sales. But the efforts have not been enough to offset the larger trends upending moviegoing, namely that many people still don't seem inclined to return to theaters in large numbers and that Hollywood, with no audience to speak of, has pushed off most major releases until next year. "We are an industry that is part of the fabric of America, and it's going away," said Lucie Mann, who owns and runs the theater with her husband, Larry. "If we don't get aid soon, it's going to change forever." The pandemic has brought national theater chains like AMC to the brink of bankruptcy. It has been just as unsparing with establishments like the Manns', one of 602 independent owners in the United States with just one or two locations. Although accounting for only 12 percent of the total theaters in the country, these independent operations are often in smaller communities, providing movies to communities sometimes ignored by the major chains. After shutting its doors in March, Park Plaza received a Paycheck Protection Program loan in April for 47,000 to cover labor and overhead costs. That, plus a slew of private events, sustained the Manns through the summer. Still, sales have dropped precipitously, down 88 percent from last year. The Manns thought they had an idea to make up for some of that when they began offering socially distanced special events in June. People could rent out a theater for 100, bring their own DVD and invite a handful of friends. Kris Ruffner, who used to visit the theater once a week before the pandemic, hosted two such events. During one, she invited 20 friends to watch "Bridesmaids." "It was nice," Ms. Ruffner said, especially "at a time when no one could go and do anything. Park Plaza allows the seats to be socially distanced, so none of my friends had any problem with that." But someone complained, and in July the state's department of commerce got in touch, via the sheriff's department, reminding the Manns that any movie operations were considered nonessential. Ms. Mann, 61, is an architect by training and Mr. Mann, 67, a home builder. They bought the theater in 2010, a restart after Ms. Mann's decades long careers in home building dried up because of the recession. (Mr. Mann still does home renovations.) Neither was an avid moviegoer, but they took the leap when the previous owners told them that the business "would run itself," Ms. Mann recalled. It hasn't. The couple have poured copious amounts of time, money and energy into revamping the aged theater. In 2012, they spent 400,000 replacing the old film projectors with digital projection and upgrading the sound. In 2016, they threw out all 650 theater chairs, opting for 250 oversize reclining leather seats that reduced capacity yet helped increase sales because of the higher end experience. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. The Manns, who had no formal kitchen experience, expanded their food and beverage offerings (Ms. Mann's flatbreads are very popular), introduced a sophisticated wine and craft beer menu and even enlisted their pets, Antoinette and Abileene, two hairless Chinese crested dogs, to walk patrons to their seats and perform tricks on command. (Customers are also allowed to bring their own dogs, provided they're less than 20 pounds.) Revenue increased roughly 15 percent year after year. The business was a hit. "Lucie made Park Plaza really cute," said Linda Peterson, a financial analyst who lives on the island and often dons pajamas to attend the late show with her daughter. "And she has wine. My goodness, where else can you drink wine while watching a movie?" Today, not many people are stopping in for an adult beverage and a flick. After the private events were first stopped, Ms. Ruffner started an online fund raiser for the theater and brought in close to 15,000. And Ms. Peterson started a petition, urging South Carolina's governor, Henry McMaster, to reopen Park Plaza, arguing that the boutique theater has limited capacity and all its patrons wear masks while inside. It garnered close to 2,000 signatures and landed the Manns a meeting with the governor. He allowed the theater to open that day. "I was dumbfounded to see the local support," Ms. Mann said. The Manns reopened on Aug. 21 in anticipation of the release of "Tenet" from Warner Bros. But the Christopher Nolan directed movie generated only 3,659 after playing in the theater for six weeks. No other new releases have done much business, either. Since Labor Day, each weekend at the domestic box office has been down 90 percent from a year earlier, according to Franchise Entertainment Research, a box office analyst firm. Now, the studios have retrenched again and shifted the majority of their large releases into 2021. "Wonder Woman 1984," scheduled to come out on Christmas Day, is the only big budget movie still on the 2020 calendar, but the Manns are not optimistic it will open this year. "If all the other big movies have been pushed to April and July, we don't see a big movie standing alone in December with the big chains closed and New York City and California not opening," Ms. Mann said. "Those two control the whole world in our industry." (California has allowed theaters to open in San Francisco and San Diego Counties, though they remain closed in the film capital, Los Angeles.) These days, Ms. Mann has restarted her private events, now charging 250 to rent out a theater. On Saturday night, the local Italian American Club hosted a private party where 10 people stopped in for a screening of "Moonstruck." She tried airing the local high school football game on Saturday afternoon, but no one showed. She was equally unlucky last weekend when she booked Pixar's "Coco" in an attempt to attract families, but the seats remained empty. Mr. Mann spends his days on the phone trying to resurrect a disaster loan from the Small Business Administration that keeps being denied. And he's applying for a newly available grant from the state. Last week, a patron wrote a 15,000 check to the theater, allowing it to remain operational for a few more weeks while the Manns try luring in more customers. If aid doesn't materialize either in the form of federal funding, which looks unlikely given the political climate in Washington, or a decision from Hollywood studios to move some big movies back into 2020, which they said they would consider only if theaters reopened in New York and Los Angeles the Manns figure they will have to shut down by the end of the year. "For a lot of people, Park Plaza is part of their experience when they vacation here," Ms. Ruffner said, adding that should the theater have to close forever, "it would be a devastating loss." Ms. Mann is not afraid of reinventing herself. She did so in 2010 and is now well versed in the vagaries of the movie exhibition business: booking blockbusters for her out of town clientele in the summer and Thanksgiving, and turning her attention to sophisticated art house fare during the off season when locals dominate. "I never knew anything about movie lovers," she said. "But they are really cool people." But now she spends her nights lying awake asking questions she can't answer, from how to persuade non moviegoers to come to the theater to what happens to the fabric of the culture if movie theaters go away. "If people don't have entertainment, how is everyone in the economy supposed to survive when businesses are closing left and right?" Ms. Mann said. "My hunch about the exhibition business being in the middle of a revolution was correct. I just didn't know it was going to be through an event like this."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
The ragpicker of Brooklyn works out of a 750 square foot storefront a few blocks east of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, down a mostly residential side street in Williamsburg, where Hasidim and hipsters mix. The ragpicker of Brooklyn sews in the back, behind a makeshift wall sprouting a riot of scraps. Under the pattern cutting table there are bins of scraps of scraps, sorted by color (red and yellow and blue and black), and on one wall are shelves of Mason jars containing gumball size scraps of scraps of scraps; up front are clothing rails, and a dressing room canopied by a lavish waterfall of castoff cuttings that flows down onto the floor like a Gaudi sand castle. The ragpicker of Brooklyn, whose name is Daniel Silverstein and whose nom de style is Zero Waste Daniel, looks like a fashion kid, which he is (or was). He is 30 and tends to dress all in black, with a black knit cap on his head, and went to the Fashion Institute of Technology and interned at Carolina Herrera and even was on a fashion reality TV show. And the ragpicker of Brooklyn would rather not be called that at all. "I prefer to think of it as Rumpelstiltskin, spinning straw into gold," Mr. Silverstein said one day in early November. He was on West 35th Street, in the garment district, with his partner and husband, Mario DeMarco (also all in black). They were hauling home sacks of cuttings from their own production run at HD Fashion, which also makes clothes for Rag Bone and Donna Karan's Urban Zen line. His gold is street wear: sweatshirts and pants and T shirts, the occasional anorak, collaged together from rolls of old fabric, mostly black and gray, often containing brightly colored geometric patchwork inserts of smaller, brighter bits, like an exclamation point, or an Easter egg. Those patchwork inserts have been put together from the castoffs of the bigger pieces, and then the castoffs from the inserts are saved and pieced together into mosaic appliques (the hands from the Sistine Chapel and Earth as seen from above, for example). The appliques can be custom made and attached to any piece. Leftovers, all the way. As fashion comes to grips with its own culpability in the climate crisis, the concept of upcycling, whether remaking old clothes or re engineering used fabric or simply using what would otherwise be tossed into landfill, has begun to trickle out to many layers of the fashion world. That includes the high end, via the work of designers like Marine Serre, Emily Bode and Gabriela Hearst, and brands like Hermes, as well as the outdoor space, with the Patagonia WornWear and Recrafted programs (to name a few). And yet, because there are few economies of scale and even fewer production systems, such clothing remains for many designers an experiment rather than a strategy, and for many consumers, a luxury rather than a choice. Mr. Silverstein, whose clothes range from 25 for a patch to 595 for an anorak made from what was a New York City Sanitation Department tent, and who works only with fabric that would otherwise be thrown away, is one of several new designers trying to change that. How he got there, with lots of false starts and belly flops, is perhaps as representative as anything of the way fashion may be stumbling toward its future. We make too much, and we buy too much, but that doesn't have to mean we waste too much. Welcome to the growing world of trashion. He was sitting in the back of what he calls his "make/shop," which he and Mr. DeMarco renovated in 2017 using materials from Big Reuse, a Brooklyn nonprofit. The make/shop has three sewing machines but no garbage can. Mr. Silverstein was born in Pennsylvania, and when he was 10, his parents moved to New Jersey so their fashion aware son could be closer to New York. Mr. Silverstein's father owned a swimming pool and hot tub supply company, and his mother worked part time in the business. (She is also a therapist.) As a family, they did some recycling but were not particularly attuned to the environment. Mr. Silverstein always knew he wanted to be a designer. When he was 4, he started making clothes for his sister's Barbies out of tissue paper and tinfoil. By the time he was 14, he was taking weekend classes at F.I.T. and making his friends' prom dresses. His Damascene moment was more like a series of cold water splashes. For a senior year competition for the Clinton Global Initiative, he designed a pair of sustainable jeans, which became his first zero waste pattern. He didn't win, but his teacher told him to hold on to the idea. "'You have something there,'" he recalled the teacher saying. After graduating, he found himself working as a temp at Victoria's Secret, making knitwear. He would scroll through style.com looking at recent runway shows, find a sweater he liked, then create a technical design packet for a similar style for VS. One of the patterns involved an asymmetric cut with a long triangular piece in front. Because of the irregular shape, the fabric "had an insanely poor yield," Mr. Silverstein said, meaning that only a portion of every yard was used for the garment; almost half was waste. He did the math and realized, he said, "that if this is yielding only 47 percent per each sweater, and we are cutting 10,000 sweaters, then we are knitting, milling, dying and finishing 5,000 yards of fabric just to throw out." The next day, he said, he left VS to focus on a business he and a friend had started based on his zero waste patterns. They were making classic ready to wear cocktail dresses and suits and such but with no waste left on the cutting room floor. One of their first customers was Jennifer Hudson, who wore a turquoise dress that ended up in the pages of Us Weekly. Stores like Fred Segal in Los Angeles and e tail sites like Master Muse picked up the line, which was called 100% (for the amount of fabric used), and Mr. Silverstein spent a season on the "Fashion Star," ending his tenure as second runner up. "I thought, 'I can't throw this out it's the antithesis of my mission,'" he said. "So I took the afternoon and made myself a shirt and put it on my Instagram. I had maybe 2,000 followers, and probably the most likes I had ever gotten was 95. I posted this dumb selfie of a shirt I'd made out of my own trash because I was too poor to go shopping, and it instantly got 200 likes. It was the most popular thing I'd ever done." It occurred to him this may be a better way to go. He made "a bunch of scrappy shirts" and became Zero Waste Daniel, his Instagram name (which he had chosen because Daniel Silverstein was already taken). He rented a booth at a flea market and sold them all. Johnny Wujek, Katy Perry's stylist, bought one. Chris Anderson, a mentor who ran Dress for Success in Morris County, N.J., where Mr. Silverstein had interned during high school, said she would back him. His father put in some money, too, as did Tuomo Tiisala, a professor at New York University who saw his work at a market. Mr. Silverstein got a small space at Manufacture New York, a group incubator in Sunset Park (it disbanded after a year), and made a deal with a factory that supplied the Marshalls chain to pick up its scraps. Fabric dumping, though less discussed than the clothes consumers throw out, is just as much a byproduct of fashion production, and just as culpable in the landfill crisis. Reverse Resources, a group that has created an online marketplace to connect factories and designers who want to reuse their scraps, released a study in 2016 that estimated that the garment industry creates almost enough leftover textile per year to cover the entire republic of Estonia with waste. That was a best case scenario. Worst case would be enough to cover North Korea. At that stage, Mr. Silverstein was mostly making sweatshirts, piecing them together by hand, but, he said, "people started making little videos about my work and putting up posts, and I started getting more orders than I could keep up with." The hotel sold tickets online, and all of the proceeds went to Fashion Revolution, a nonprofit that advocates industry reform. In September, he did the same at the Ace hotel in Manhattan. Mr. Silverstein is planning a performance for February at Arcadia Earth, the climate installation museum in downtown New York, which also sells some of his work. Last year the Sanitation Department came calling. It had done a collaboration with the designer Heron Preston and was looking for another partner. While Mr. Preston saw the opportunity as a way to elevate the role of the sanitation worker in a one off show, Mr. Silverstein saw it as a great partnership for raw material. The department's dead stock T shirts, tents and tablecloths have proven something of a treasure trove for him. Over Thanksgiving weekend, Mr. Silverstein was one of the star companies in an American Express showcase on Small Business Saturday. He is also teaming up with a former mentor at Swimwear Anywhere for a line of bathing suits made in Taiwan, which will be his first foray into offshore production. (The scraps will be sent back along with the trunks and one pieces, which are made from recycled ocean fishing nets.) The company has been profitable for a year, Mr. Silverstein said, and ships across the United States as well as to Canada, Britain, Brazil and Germany. Now Mr. Silverstein is at another turning point. Does he get bigger? Does he train other ragpickers to do what he does? Does he open another outlet? Does he really get in the game? He is not sure. "I can't clothe the world, and maybe the world doesn't need me to," he said. Maybe the drive to clothe the world is part of what created the problem he is now trying to solve in the first place. "When I think about what I want in terms of brand recognition, I would love to see this brand as a household name. But I think that's very different than dollars. And I don't want to be any bigger than I can guarantee it's a zero waste product or that I feel happy." He was gathering pieces for a Freddie Mercury mosaic. "Right now," he said, surveying his mountain of scraps, "I am so happy."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
So hey, summer's coming. Time for all Americans to get together and plan how to stay apart. And here's a seasonal question: When we get to Labor Day, who do you think will get the award for Worst Political Person of the Summer? Well, yeah, I knew you'd say him. So negative about our president just because he doesn't understand science and recently accused one critic in the media of murder. But Donald Trump can't do everything awful by himself. How about backup nominees? There's Mitch McConnell, of course. And Mike Pompeo, who was slogging through a disastrous year even before Tom Friedman suggested he was the worst secretary of state in all of American history. Among the many Pompeo messes, the most memorable are the allegations that he used a government employee for personal services that included dog walking and picking up the dry cleaning. Hardly the most significant, but an excellent reminder that this administration has perhaps set a record for cabinet members prone to dumb disasters. Remember the E.P.A. head who sent his aide shopping for a mattress at the Trump hotel? I want to put a word in here for Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who is often unfairly overlooked when it comes to counting terrible people in the current government. This is because of her general ineptitude, and you should thank God every day this woman doesn't know how to get things done. DeVos has focused her career on attempts to direct government money to private schools particularly, it seems, bad private schools. Remember when she reformed the whole system in Michigan by making everything worse? Right now, she's battling nefarious attempts to target coronavirus relief funds to the districts that actually need the money most. So many possible Worsts. There's Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex (yes, he's still here) Azar. We've been so busy watching Azar fail to deal with the coronavirus crisis that we totally lost track of the fact that he never did do anything about prescription drug prices. There's Ron DeSantis of Florida, who keeps claiming a Worst Governor award for his out of control policy on beach access. We suspected something like this was coming when he declared professional wrestling was an essential state industry. But it's sort of hard to focus on the supporting cast when the big boss has been so off the wall. Do you think Trump's refusal to wear a mask is an attempt to woo the political right, or deny the reality of our current health crisis? Or just a sign he doesn't think it's attractive? I'd go for the most superficial explanation. The president always prioritizes the way things look, even though he personally winds up making the worst possible choices in everything from tanning makeup to leisure wear. And obviously none of his friends have hinted that those golfing photos aren't all that flattering. What about Joe Biden? He hasn't been the worst at much some Democrats would be happy to see him do anything that aggressive. But he did come up with what may turn out to be the Worst Political Nickname of the Summer, when he announced he'd refer to Donald Trump as "President Tweety." Does that sound like a good plan to you? When I think of "Tweety" I think about that yellow canary in old cartoons who kept saying "I tawt I taw a puddy tat." Not exactly flattering, but a lot less damaging than, say, President Pandemic. Meanwhile, Trump keeps calling Biden "Sleepy Joe." Now this is the election that's going to have you awash in rage and terror for the next five months. But if you think of it as Sleepy Joe versus a canary it sounds pretty darned relaxing. When all else fails, Republicans just claim Biden is best friends with China. Waiting for news on the spaceship launch, the Republican National Committee did manage to send out an attack on Biden for wanting to work with what it called "the United States' greatest space adversary, China." Trump's new press secretary, Kayleigh ("I will never lie to you") McEnany, claimed the administration now has a "relationship of disappointment and frustration" with China that's "put American lives at risk." She's only been on the job a few weeks, but she's definitely a potential contender in Worst contests of the future. The other day she volunteered that Trump was possibly "the best president this country will ever have." Just a quick break here. Do you think historians will rate Donald Trump as better than Abraham Lincoln? Certainly Trump does. He's always suggesting that. ("You know, a poll just came out that I am the most popular person in the history of the Republican Party. ... I beat our Honest Abe.") Of course, in the real world he's way closer to the race for the bottom and he's edging out some tough competition. There was Warren Harding, but Harding was pretty good on social issues like race. Richard Nixon knew a lot about foreign affairs. Franklin Pierce failed to head off the Civil War, but he definitely would have looked better on a golf course. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Sasha Frere Jones, the longtime pop music critic for The New Yorker, has left the magazine to join Genius, a website mounting an ambitious expansion after starting as a forum for annotated rap lyrics online. Mr. Frere Jones will be an executive editor at Genius, two of its founders, Ilan Zechory and Tom Lehman, said in an interview, with a focus on annotations of music lyrics. He will start this week. Genius, which was originally called Rap Genius before changing its name last summer, has received 55 million of venture capital funding and broadened its mission beyond music to include restaurant menus and Shakespeare, among other texts. Mr. Frere Jones, 47, said that he chose to leave The New Yorker after 11 years for a variety of reasons. He originally became a critic, he said, because he was frustrated that so many of those who wrote about music were ignorant of its nuances. Genius's tool addresses that, he said, but unlike crowd sourced information on Twitter or Facebook, which is rapidly superseded, Genius's snippets remain easily visible forever. "And I'll be honest," he said. "I don't want to stay up until 4 a.m. any more at shows, and you can annotate lyrics during the day." The magazine will be hiring a new critic, its editor, David Remnick, said in an email Sunday, though Mr. Frere Jones may contribute occasional articles. Genius has also hired another journalist, Christopher Glazek, to focus on politics and culture annotations, Mr. Zechory, 30, and Mr. Lehman, 31, said. The site will continue to hire people with expertise in particular subject areas, aiming to bring in more users from online communities obsessed with particular topics. What happened on Day 2 of Elizabeth Holmes's testimony. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Genius's expansion marks the latest merger of the tech and media worlds, and helps to fulfill a prediction made by one of the company's funders, Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, that the definition of journalism might broaden to include jobs outside of traditional writing and editing. "My remit is going into the lyrics site and building a team," Mr. Frere Jones said. He added that he planned to initially add three or four people, and that their precise role was hard to describe, though the skills were rooted in journalism. Mr. Frere Jones will use his contacts in the music industry to bring artists and writers into Genius, seeking a critical mass of influential names for "that Twitter moment when suddenly the smart kids stop holding their noses up in the air and they take part, and it just improves." He said he would also be "going on the site and sort of writing some exemplary posts, or saying here's how you might think about annotating, or encouraging other posters." Rap Genius was started in 2009 by Mr. Zechory, Mr. Lehman and a friend from Yale University, Mahbod Moghadam, as a Wikipedia like resource for annotating hip hop lyrics. The site grew steadily until 2012, when a 15 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz, seen as kingmakers in the tech world, made it an instant media curiosity. The site's exegeses even attracted the attention of rappers like Nas, now an investor in the company who added comments on their own songs. Rap Genius's founders, who said they hoped their site and its thousands of users would eventually annotate the world, noted the uploading and dissection of nonrap material like the Declaration of Independence. Last year, Genius attracted a further 40 million in investment, and it now has over 40 million unique users a month. "The site started as rap, expanded beyond rap, and now wherever anyone is experiencing text, the goal is going to be to have it annotated," Mr. Lehman said. But Genius has been mired in several controversies. It has been criticized for impolitic postings Mr. Moghadam made on social media, and as implicitly mocking rap culture by translating it into pseudo academic language. In late 2013, it was slammed by music publishers for using copyrighted lyrics without permission, and eventually signed licensing deals with publishers. Then, last May, Mr. Moghadam wrote a snide annotation of a manifesto left by Elliot O. Rodger, who killed seven people, including himself, near the University of California, Santa Barbara. Swift condemnation led to Mr. Moghadam's resignation. "I didn't meet those people. I didn't see those people," Mr. Frere Jones said of the site's past controversies. "Their plan was just" he used an expletive perhaps appropriate for his new role at the iconoclastic start up "really impressive."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
HIP HOP AWARDS 8 p.m. on BET. The comedian and actor Lil Duval will host BET's Hip Hop Awards, welcoming the genre's biggest names to the Cobb Energy Center in Atlanta. After taking home four awards at last year's ceremony, Cardi B received 10 nominations this year, more than any other artist. The rapper Lil' Kim will be honored with the "I Am Hip Hop Award," and Megan Thee Stallion, Offset and Anderson .Paak will perform. FINDING YOUR ROOTS WITH HENRY LOUIS GATES JR. 8 p.m. on PBS (check your local listings). Henry Louis Gates Jr., a Harvard professor, hosts this genealogical discovery program that uncovers surprising and sometimes uncomfortable family history about its notable guests through rigorous DNA research . On the Season 6 premiere, three actresses born into prominent Hollywood families Isabella Rossellini, Anjelica Huston and Mia Farrow find out more about their ancestors, beyond their famous relatives. FRONTLINE 10 p.m. on PBS (check your local listings). This investigative journalism series will air the documentary "On the President's Orders," which offers an in depth look at President Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs in the Philippines, as told by a family affected by the violence and by police officials implicated in the killings. After his election in 2016, President Duterte encouraged the police and others to kill suspected drug users and dealers. Three years later, the Philippine government maintains it has killed 5,000 people, but human rights groups estimate that number is closer to somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 . The film, which opened in some theaters last Friday , "makes its case that these killings are not the work of isolated individuals, but the product of a top down culture that stems from Duterte's assent," Ben Kenigsberg wrote in his review for The New York Times. DEON COLE: COLE HEARTED Stream on Netflix. This Chicago based comic is known for his writing on Conan O'Brien's late night shows, as a recurring character on "black ish" and "grown ish" and as one of the faces of Old Spice body wash. But in his first Netflix comedy special, he returns to his stand up roots, trying out new jokes and making honest observations about relationships, music and the preservation of comedy. UPGRADE (2018) Stream on HBO platforms; Purchase on Amazon, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube. Thanks to Siri and Amazon's Alexa, pop culture seems to have a renewed fascination with the potential danger digital assistants pose to humanity. But in this film, starring Logan Marshall Green, that idea becomes the basis for a "Terminator" like action flick. When Grey (Marshall Green) wakes up paralyzed in the hospital after an accident that also killed his wife, he receives an implant that helps him regain the use of his limbs and can take control of his body. This new technology proves highly useful in Grey's pursuit of those responsible for his wife's death. Given that the film was written and directed by Leigh Whannell ("Saw"), definitely expect some gore.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
FORT MYERS, Fla. When Ron Roenicke played his final major league game, for the Cincinnati Reds in 1988, his manager was serving a lengthy suspension. Pete Rose had shoved an umpire, forcing the league to take action. History has a way of repeating itself. Roenicke, 63, is the new interim manager of the Boston Red Sox, taking the job less than 24 hours before the team's first workout for pitchers and catchers on Wednesday. Roenicke, who had been the team's bench coach, found his usual locker empty when he arrived at the Red Sox's spring training facility. His clothes had been moved to the old office of his former boss, Alex Cora. Cora was fired and is still facing the prospect of more punishment from M.L.B. for his role in the Houston Astros' sign stealing scheme, which helped them win the World Series in 2017, when he was a coach there. Cora won another title the next season, as Red Sox manager, but Boston fired him on Jan. 14 after Commissioner Rob Manfred cited him as instrumental to the Astros' operation. The scandal cost two other managers their jobs: Houston's A.J. Hinch and the Mets' Carlos Beltran. The Astros hired Dusty Baker and the Mets promoted Luis Rojas to manager, but the Red Sox were the last to fill their vacancy for two reasons: They are also being investigated by M.L.B. over charges of sign stealing in 2018, and they were busy trading their franchise player. This is the situation Roenicke inherited, on the eve of spring training workouts. "I was on the way to the airport going to Arizona to report to spring training and they called me and told me what's happening," Downs said. "It's pretty cool to be a part of something this big, but you've still got to go out and play baseball. I try not to think of it like that big of a deal." It was a big deal, of course, and it will reverberate for years. How will the prospects develop? How will ownership use the financial flexibility they have deemed so essential? The players' impact can at least be quantified, but what will the clubhouse miss about Cora, a young leader who had seemed to fit so well? "Everything," catcher Christian Vazquez said. "He brings a lot of good things to this team in his two years. He's a great person; he's my friend forever. I knew him before Boston, we've got a good relationship. But this is baseball." And these days, baseball is more complicated than ever, with the explosion of data emerging as a force for innovation but also temptation. Roenicke is less known for analytical savvy and more for a breadth of experience few peers can match. Only three major league managers Baker, the Los Angeles Angels' Joe Maddon and the Atlanta Braves' Brian Snitker are older. Roenicke played for two World Series teams managed by Hall of Famers: Tommy Lasorda's 1981 Dodgers and Dick Williams's 1984 San Diego Padres. He coached for the Angels' championship team in 2002 and nearly won a pennant in 2011 with the Milwaukee Brewers, whose cornerstone, Ryan Braun, was later found to have failed a test for performance enhancing drugs. "I really enjoy challenges," Roenicke said. "The experiences make it way easier to get through the challenges. When I was in Milwaukee, going through the Ryan Braun thing with his suspension, that was half a year of basically every day answering questions about it. "Knowing what the players feel like, going through different trials helps me to talk to them. The good thing about the players is, when you're younger, you're pretty resilient and you get through things way easier," he added. "You all know how I feel about Alex and I've said a lot about that, and these players certainly feel the same way. But they'll bounce out of this pretty quickly. They're so focused on what they need to do to get their game right that the outside stuff doesn't worry them." Roenicke, likewise, said he was not concerned about potential club sanctions from M.L.B.'s investigation, and the Red Sox clearly do not expect him to face any personal discipline. The bigger question for Roenicke is how to wring more from a team that won only 84 games last season and then traded away two stars. The Dodgers deal seemed inevitable, in hindsight. Boston's principal owner, John Henry, said publicly that he hoped to reset the team's luxury tax rate, and hired a top lieutenant from the frugal Tampa Bay Rays, Chaim Bloom, to run baseball operations. Roenicke brings continuity from the Cora years, and right field will not be barren without Betts: Verdugo has plenty of talent, and the veteran Kevin Pillar, a star defender, is headed to Boston as a free agent. But almost half of the 2018 World Series roster is gone now, and there is no replacing Betts's talent and soul. Betts now plays at Dodger Stadium, where Vazquez jumped into Chris Sale's arms after the final out in 2018, but his six years in Boston leave a lasting imprint. "He brought a lot of memories to us, all those years," Vazquez said. "He brought a World Series ring. He was a very special player for us. He's going to be a champion for life."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Yes, indeed, it's good to be rich in old age. According to a new study, wealthy men and women don't only live longer, they also get eight to nine more healthy years after 50 than the poorest individuals in the United States and in England. "It was surprising to find that the inequalities are exactly the same," said Paola Zaninotto, a professor of epidemiology and public health at University College London and a lead author of the study. The findings, published on Wednesday in The Journals of Gerontology: Series A, emerged from two primary questions: What role do socioeconomic factors play in how long people live healthy lives? Do older adults in England stay disability free longer than those in the United States? To answer these questions, researchers from University College London, Harvard University and institutions in three other countries turned to two existing data sets containing more than 25,000 people over 50. They then analyzed how well various factors including education, social class and wealth predicted how long a person would live free of conditions that might impair them from activities such as getting out of bed or cooking for themselves the study's definition of "disability free" and "healthy."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
In 1972 the Hungarian artist Tamas Szentjoby placed a chair outside the Intercontinental Hotel in Budapest, bound his mouth with a leather belt, and took a seat. About 20 minutes later the police arrived, as was to be expected in this Eastern bloc country. Mr. Szentjoby called this brief performance piece "Sit Out/Be Forbidden," in homage to the sit ins being staged by protesters in the United States and, specifically, to Bobby Seale, the Black Panther who a few years earlier had been shackled and gagged after making comments to the judge during his trial on charges of inciting violence at the 1968 Democratic Convention. This one man demonstration was relatively tame by Western political standards, as well as by those of the performance art of the day (1972 was the date of Vito Acconci's onanistic "Seedbed," and the year before Chris Burden had engaged a friend to shoot him in the arm). But for an artist working behind the Iron Curtain, in a state that classified artworks as "supported," "tolerated" or "prohibited," it was an act of overt defiance. For Mr. Szentjoby and others in his circle, making art was largely about testing the limits of that middle category, "tolerated" knowing just how far you could go without being interrogated, imprisoned or deported (as Mr. Szentjoby eventually was). As seen in the resonant exhibition "With the Eyes of Others: Hungarian Artists of the Sixties and Seventies," at the Elizabeth Dee gallery in Harlem, this was a special skill practiced not just by performance artists, but also by Conceptualists and abstract painters. This revelatory show, organized with wry commentary by the Budapest born guest curator, author and cultural consultant Andras Szanto, in collaboration with three Budapest galleries (acb, Kisterem and Vintage), would not look out of place at the Museum of Modern Art. It says to scholars and curators that the European avant garde of the 1960s and '70s isn't yet an exhausted field, especially where Eastern Europe is concerned. And to artists in this country, it delivers a somewhat less reassuring message: Take a close look at these strategies for flying just under the radar of a repressive regime you, too, might need them someday.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Eve Ensler's new show "Fruit Trilogy" ends with a woman alone onstage at the Lucille Lortel Theater, jubilant and nearly naked. She is no sylph, no ingenue, yet there she is in nothing but a pair of purple underpants, exulting in her physicality as an audience looks on. It's a feminist tableau, defying body shaming and staking a claim to corporeal pleasure which makes it a politically powerful statement, and the high point of a program of three short plays in which political messaging is paramount. Because the performer, Liz Mikel, is warm and funny and absolutely owns that stage, it's an artistically successful moment as well. But a curious flatness pervades most of "Fruit Trilogy," a two hander directed by Mark Rosenblatt for Abingdon Theater Company. Brimming with outrage at sex trafficking and other forms of violence against women, Ms. Ensler's script requires delicate handling so that the women in these plays come across as people, not social problems cloaked in dramatic form. Mr. Rosenblatt too often goes for bluntness where nuance is needed, which gets in the way of human connection. So does the almost unrelenting tonal darkness of the first two plays, making them seem less like a protest against women's victimization than a fetishization of it. The laughter that is such a subversive part of "The Vagina Monologues," the play that vaulted Ms. Ensler to fame in the 1990s, is largely absent here though there's more of it in the "Fruit Trilogy" script than in the performance.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
For the first time in history, annual deaths around the globe from measles have fallen below 100,000, the World Health Organization announced this year. As recently as the 1980s, measles killed 2.6 million people a year. The decline a public health triumph, as measles has long been a leading killer of malnourished children was accomplished by widespread donor supported vaccination that began in the early 2000s. The estimated number of deaths fell to 89,780 in 2016, but the figure was released by the W.H.O. only in October. Measles vaccines were invented in the 1960s. Since 2000, 5.5 billion doses have been given out, according to Gavi, the Geneva based organization through which most donors support the vaccination effort. The group works with the W.H.O., the United Nations Children's Fund, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Red Cross, the United Nations Foundation and others.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
"Perhaps you recognize me," she said to speed the process. "I'm Madeleine Albright, and I used to be secretary of state." She got a blank stare, until the receptionist said: "Colin Powell is secretary of state." Yes, she explained, she was Powell's predecessor. "So," the receptionist said flatly, "that means you are unemployed." In reality she was overemployed. She started her own consulting firm, one of those peculiar Washington businesses that capitalize on their ability to contact an Egyptian or Chinese minister to cut through a problem, or anticipate a geopolitical crisis. She teaches a popular course on statecraft at Georgetown University, and has organized a group of former foreign ministers, which she informally calls "Madeleine and Her Exes"; they represent an Establishment that hasn't existed since the late 1990s, but still try to exercise some influence at the edges. And she writes books lots of books. There was a memoir of her time in the Clinton administration, "Madam Secretary," and "Prague Winter," the fascinating story of growing up a Czech refugee and ending up in Denver, where her father was a professor (whose star student was Condoleezza Rice, the second woman to serve as secretary of state). More recently, she has written books warning about the revival of fascism, and about her signature pins. And with books, of course, come the vicissitudes of book tours, including the time that a booksellers' convention scheduled her to speak about her memoir about managing the post Soviet world "right after the author of 'Time to Pee!,' a manual on potty training." Going with the theme, she spoke on the similarities of managing allies and adversaries to negotiating with 2 year olds. But there are more telling moments that resonate in the current political moment, including her self doubts as she campaigned in the primaries for Hillary Clinton in 2008, and watched as former colleagues disparaged her candidate in favor of Barack Obama. "Shame on them, I sniffed," she writes, "but then there I was on national television accusing Obama of being naive for advocating direct talks with the leaders of Iran. I had negotiated with North Korea, for Pete's sake." So, of course, did Donald Trump. Neither of them got very far.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
A bespoke suit, custom made, fitted and refitted, was an expensive, essentially conservative proposition, a suit of armor and the bedrock of a gentleman's wardrobe, but distinctly not a fashionable item. A Savile Row suit "rarely looks new in the conventional sense," the Australian journalist Lance Richardson writes in his new history of (and his brother, David), "House of Nutter." Its magic, he goes on, "is that it enhances your real self into heightened fantasy, then presents this fantasy as your real self." Nutter brought a substantial dose of fantasy to the fantasy. He began on Savile Row at the lowest levels, picking up pins at G. Ward Company, where he eventually joined forces with a talented young cutter named Edward Sexton and, with him, opened Nutters in 1969 the first new tailor on Savile Row in more than a century. His investors included Peter Brown, a manager of the Beatles (he stepped in when his friend and former boss Brian Epstein died), and the pop star Cilla Black. Nutter was already a fixture on the London scene, well connected via Brown, his boyfriend for a time. The Nutters suit, unlike others on the Row, was cut for flash: tight waisted and small chested to emphasize the body, with a long jacket and mega lapels. Fabrics and colors were chosen to stand out rather than stand back. Men and women both flocked in: Bianca as well as Mick, Diana Ross, Eric Clapton, Twiggy, Peter Sellers. Elton John, who first came to Nutters in 1971, ordered in bulk. "House of Nutter" traces the ascent and untimely end of , and the parallel history of his brother, David: also gay, also embedded in the world of rock 'n' roll, though as a photographer and confidant. Tommy bloomed out of London's Swinging Sixties and became an internationally recognized designer, a celebrity in his own right. He was as much a character as a person, natty and fabulous in a wild suit "People expect one to turn up looking like a chic Bozo the Clown," he once said a salesman taking his show on the road. (Sexton, mostly back at base on Savile Row, was the better craftsman.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC at the Appel Room (Feb. 10, 7:30 p.m.) and David Geffen Hall (Feb. 13, 7:30 p.m.; through Feb. 18). The Philharmonic's valuable Project 19, which has commissioned 19 women composers in celebration of the centenary of the 19th Amendment, gets fully into its stride with premieres of pieces by Nicole Lizee, Joan La Barbara and Paola Prestini appearing in a Sound ON concert on Monday, and Tania Leon's "Stride" accompanying the Brahms Violin Concerto and the suite from Strauss's "Der Rosenkavalier" in subscription concerts starting later in the coming week. Jaap van Zweden conducts those, with Janine Jansen as the soloist. 212 875 5656, nyphil.org Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. ORPHEUS CHAMBER ORCHESTRA at the 92nd Street Y (Feb. 9, 3 p.m.). Never mind Mendelssohn's Octet, this concert deserves attention for its revival of the Nonet of Louise Farrenc, dating to 1849, a piece that shows the best of its remarkably fine composer, who taught at the Paris Conservatory and whose music is due for a revival. Also at the Y, Alexi Kenney performs a clever program of solo violin works by Bach and composers as diverse as Reich, Kurtag and Saariaho (Friday, 9 p.m.), and Sasha Cooke sings Schumann's "Kerner Lieder" and "Frauenliebe und leben" (Feb. 13, 7:30 p.m.). 212 415 5500, 92y.org STILE ANTICO at Corpus Christi Church (Feb. 9, 4 p.m.). Appearing as part of the Music Before 1800 series, this extraordinarily thoughtful and accomplished British vocal ensemble sings music "by and for Renaissance women," including compositions by Raffaella Aleotti, Leonora d'Este and Maddalena Casulana and works commissioned by female sovereigns such as Queen Mary I and Queen Elizabeth I from Tallis, Sheppard, Byrd and others. 212 666 9266, mb1800.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Internet Archive is ending its program of offering free, unrestricted copies of e books because of a lawsuit from publishers, which said lending out books without compensation for authors or publishing houses was "willful mass copyright infringement." Since March, Internet Archive, a nonprofit, has made more than 1.3 million books available online without restriction, calling them a National Emergency Library. It said the program was in place "to serve the nation's displaced learners" during the coronavirus pandemic, and that it would keep the library open until June 30 or the end of the U.S. national emergency, whichever came later. In a blog post published on Wednesday, however, it said it would close the library next week. It said that the "vast majority" of people used the e books for a very short period of time, so could be served under the organization's normal restrictions, which included limiting checkouts to 14 days. The lawsuit, filed June 1, does not just object to the National Emergency Library but to the way Internet Archive has long operated. Traditional libraries pay publishers licensing fees, and agree to terms that restrict how many times they can lend an e book. Internet Archive, by contrast, takes books that have been donated or purchased, scans them and posts them online.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
New and old episodes of Mr. Seinfeld's show "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" will move to Netflix later this year. The move is a blow to Crackle, Sony's streaming service, which has run the show since its debut in 2012. In addition to "Comedians in Cars," Mr. Seinfeld has also signed a production deal with Netflix, which will include performing two stand up specials, and developing scripted and nonscripted content. In recent months, Netflix has been gobbling up comic talent, including Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle and Amy Schumer, all of whom are performing stand up specials for the service. Netflix has been spending lavishly to bring them on: Mr. Rock's two forthcoming stand up shows cost Netflix a reported 40 million. Terms for Mr. Seinfeld's deal were not disclosed. "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" started on Crackle four and half years ago, and is the highest profile offering on the service. Last year, it was nominated for an Emmy for best variety series. But Mr. Seinfeld grew distant from Crackle after Sony's television chairman, Steve Mosko, left the company last year, and "Comedians in Cars" has been on the market since at least October. Hulu was also involved in negotiations for the show.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Before the coronavirus outbreak, Dr. Lindy Fox, a dermatologist in San Francisco, used to see four or five patients a year with chilblains painful red or purple lesions that typically emerge on fingers or toes in the winter. Over the past few weeks, she has seen dozens. "All of a sudden, we are inundated with toes," said Dr. Fox, who practices at the University of California, San Francisco. "I've got clinics filled with people coming in with new toe lesions. And it's not people who had chilblains before they've never had anything like this." It's also not the time of year for chilblains, which are caused by inflammation in small blood vessels in reaction to cold or damp conditions. "Usually, we see it in the dead of winter," Dr. Fox said. The lesions are emerging as yet another telltale symptom of infection with the new coronavirus. The most prominent signs are a dry cough and shortness of breath, but the virus has been linked to a string of unusual and diverse effects, like mental confusion and a diminished sense of smell. Federal health officials do not include toe lesions in the list of coronavirus symptoms, but some dermatologists are pushing for a change, saying so called Covid toe should be sufficient grounds for testing. (Covid 19 is the name of the illness caused by the coronavirus.) Several medical papers from Spain, Belgium and Italy described a surge in complaints about painful lesions on patients' toes, Achilles' heels and soles of the feet; whether the patients were infected was not always clear, because they were otherwise healthy and testing was limited. Most cases have been reported in children, teens and young adults, and some experts say they may reflect a healthy immune response to the virus. "The most important message to the public is not to panic most of the patients we are seeing with these lesions are doing extremely well," Dr. Freeman said. "They're having what we call a benign clinical course. They're staying home, they're getting better, the toe lesions are going away." Scientists are just beginning to study the phenomenon, but so far chilblain like lesions appear to signal, curiously enough, a mild or even asymptomatic infection. They may also develop several weeks after the acute phase of an infection is over. Patients who develop swollen toes and red and purple lesions should consult their primary care doctor or a dermatologist to rule out other possible causes. But, experts said, they should not run to the emergency room, where they risk being exposed to the coronavirus or exposing others if they are infected. "The good news is that the chilblain like lesions usually mean you're going to be fine," Dr. Fox said. "Usually it's a good sign your body has seen Covid and is making a good immune reaction to it." Patients who get the painful lesions are often alarmed. They appear most frequently on the toes, often affecting several toes on one or both feet, and the sores can be extremely painful, causing a burning or itching sensation. At first, the toes look swollen and take on a reddish tint; sometimes a part of the toe is swollen, and individual lesions or bumps can be seen. Over time, the lesions become purple in color. Hannah Spitzer, 20, a sophomore at Lafayette College who is finishing the academic year remotely at her home in Westchester County, has lesions on all 10 of her toes, so uncomfortable painful during the day, and itchy at night that she can't put anything on her feet, not even socks. The pandemic 'is not yet over': Portugal is set to add further restrictions. Austria braces for violence at mass protests over Covid measures. In Europe, again the pandemic's epicenter, new restrictions provoke resistance. Walking is difficult, and she has trouble sleeping. "At first I thought it was my shoes, but it got worse and worse," Ms. Spitzer said. "Most of my toes are red, swollen, almost shiny. It looks like frostbite." She has used hydrocortisone and Benadryl to alleviate the discomfort, and said ice is also helpful. Doctors say the lesions disappear on their own within a few weeks. Adding to the mystery is that some teens and young adults with the lesions have tested negative for the coronavirus. Dr. Amy Paller, chair of the department of dermatology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said one possible explanation is that these patients had such a mild disease and that viral replication was limited, making the virus undetectable. Another possibility, she said, is that the lesions are what is called an epiphenomenon a symptom may accompany a disease without being causally related. For instance, perhaps more people are developing the lesions because they are staying inside and walking around barefoot more than usual. But she also dismissed that idea as highly unlikely. "I don't think that's it I think it's a mild inflammatory process manifesting in this way," Dr. Paller said. "It's a real phenomenon. We don't really understand it at all." Ms. Spitzer had a test shortly after developing the lesions, and the result was negative, but she is convinced the toe lesions are a delayed response to an earlier infection that was so mild she barely noticed it. "I've never had anything like this," she said. "It's completely new." A recent paper by doctors in Spain, published in the International Journal of Dermatology, described six cases of patients with toe lesions and included pictures of the chilblain like bumps that patients had emailed to their physicians. Most of the patients were teens or young adults, including one 15 year old who found out he had Covid 19 pneumonia when he went to the emergency room seeking medical attention for his toes. Another patient was a 91 year old man who had been hospitalized with the coronavirus three weeks earlier, and had recovered and returned home. While dermatologists say it's not unusual for rashes to appear along with viral infections like measles or chickenpox the toe lesions surprised them. Other problems like hives have also been linked to the coronavirus, but Covid toes have been the most common and striking skin manifestation. Patients with viral infections often get a pink bumpy rash called morbilliform, or hives, Dr. Fox said, but added that the toe lesions were "unexpected." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. The toe cases make up half of all reports filed by skin doctors around the world to a new international registry started by the American Academy of Dermatology, which is tracking the complications. No one knows exactly why the new coronavirus might cause chilblain like lesions. One hypothesis is that they are caused by inflammation, a prominent feature of Covid 19. Inflammation also causes one of the most serious syndromes associated with the coronavirus, acute respiratory distress syndrome. Other hypotheses are that the lesions are caused by inflammation in the walls of blood vessels, or by small micro clots in the blood. (Clotting has been another feature of the disease.) The lesions seen in otherwise healthy people appear to be distinct from those that doctors are seeing in some critically ill Covid 19 patients in intensive care, who are prone to developing blood clots. Some of these clots may be very small and can block the tiny vessels in the extremities, causing rashes on the toes, said Dr. Humberto Choi, a pulmonologist and critical care physician at the Cleveland Clinic. Some experts now believe Covid toe should be recognized as sufficient grounds for testing, even in the absence of other symptoms. "This should be a criteria for testing, just like loss of smell, and shortness of breath and chest pain," Dr. Fox said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Lung and adrenal lesions found in dead bottlenose dolphins stranded along the Gulf of Mexico between June 2010 and December 2012 are consistent with the types of damage that marine mammals sustain from exposure to petroleum products after an oil spill, according to a new study published on Wednesday by researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The findings are the latest results from the Deepwater Horizon National Resource Damage Assessment, an ongoing investigation by NOAA into the spill, the largest offshore oil spill in United States history. Combined with previous studies by the agency, this paper provides additional support to a link between the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 and mass dolphin deaths in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. "The evidence to date indicates that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill caused the adrenal and lung lesions that contributed to the deaths of this unusual mortality event," said Stephanie Venn Watson, a researcher with the National Marine Mammal Foundation who was the lead author of the report. "We reached that conclusion based on the accumulation of our studies including this paper," she added. The researchers analyzed tissue samples collected from 46 dolphins, shortly after they died, in the area affected by the spill. They then compared them with samples from 106 dolphins that had died at different times from the spill and in other regions, including in Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
's debut novel offers many poetic and intimate moments. One of these occurs when a young girl named Marie, who lives on a remote northern island, finds a dead hummingbird wrapped in cloth on another girl's doorstep. Marie knows that the hummingbird has been left there by Tristan, an orphan boy she secretly loves. So she hides the hummingbird in her underwear drawer, and "for the rest of her life," she will "associate the smell of fresh laundry with a little bit of death." This mixture of love and death is everywhere in "Shot Blue." Though there are several main characters, Tristan's story is at the novel's heart. He and his mother, Rachel, had been squatting in a small cabin, where Rachel was sleeping with Marie's father for money. This cabin was soon burned down, and after Rachel dies of exposure, Tristan works for room and board at the lodge that has replaced his home. He is standoffish and strange and terribly alone, and the other children are intrigued by him and often cruel. Slowly, he forms an intense relationship with a 16 year old girl who also works at the lodge. Meanwhile, Marie, another employee, yearns for Tristan's attention, which he never gives. There are many shining depictions in "Shot Blue," as when the memory of Rachel's eyes makes part of Marie go "gently unconscious." Rachel's face had been beautiful but scarred, and so, for Marie, "something amiss would from then on be a requisite for beauty." A quiet and spreading sadness in these pages is conveyed in its softest details, as when a blue door reminds Rachel of forget me nots, "those timid flowers that spread like loneliness and took over everything." Despite these memorable lines, much of Ruddock's prose lacks discipline. Her figurative language often verges on excessive and can get distracting. Her more brilliant comparisons are drowned out by others that are obscure and overextended. In one instance, a woman's thoughts are "biting into her shoulder more sharply than any strap." This metaphor just doesn't resonate: Why would a thought bite into a shoulder? And, in a single passage, paint peeling from houses is first "shed in chunks like receipts"; then it "fell like snow when the wind had fingernails"; and in the sentence after that, "it floated down like leaves and melted on the ground, forming pools of warm blue silver." These images, though lyrical, don't seem real; Ruddock appears to be straining for literary effect, which is entirely unnecessary, because her more straightforward descriptions of the natural world are simply breathtaking.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Last season, American Ballet Theater's opening night of "Swan Lake" took a dramatic turn that had nothing to do with evil sorcerers transforming princesses into swans. Gillian Murphy, the company's resplendent virtuoso, was injured during the second act; Hee Seo took over. On Monday at the Metropolitan Opera House, drama occurred for all the right reasons: A particularly ravishing Ms. Murphy, joined again by Marcelo Gomes as Prince Siegfried, flew through the role of Odette Odile with not only the strength she is known for, but also with wit, amplitude and finespun vulnerability. All the while, this stale 2000 staging by Ballet Theater's artistic director, Kevin McKenzie, is something more to endure than to bask in. Alexei Ratmansky's sparkling new production of "The Sleeping Beauty" has diminished it by proving how vividly a classical ballet can be reborn. But Monday's gleaming performance was packed with highlights, notably a buoyant, musically responsive pas de trois by Sarah Lane, Skylar Brandt and Joseph Gorak, who, as Benno, the Prince's friend, astounds with his lightness and precision. Cory Stearns, portraying the wicked von Rothbart, worked his magic on the princesses with a scary, sexy steeliness. But the pairing of the leads was especially illuminating, partly because of Ms. Murphy's poignant and regal Odette. As she shifted from agitation to trust, her body grew more elongated through her trailing arms, the tautness of her hips and the elasticity of her back. Their white adagio had heat to it: When Ms. Murphy windmilled her arms suddenly like a nervous flapping of wings Mr. Gomes, the epitome of a fervent and attentive prince, backed away, startled, and, for a second, the air between them was charged. As Odile, Ms. Murphy was a blithe daredevil, whipping off double fouette turns with her arms out and held high in a V. (The effect was like that of a lifted wing.) Sneaking glances at Mr. Gomes and smiling gleefully at the audience, she was the ultimate seductress. Together they blew away the melancholy of the company's recent retirements Julie Kent's, above all by showing how much there is to marvel at in the present.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
SAN FRANCISCO For several months, some Uber passengers in Texas have been recorded on video as they have been driven to their destinations. The video has been stored online and could have been reviewed by members of Uber's safety staff if the driver had reported a problem with the passenger. The video recordings are part of a broad initiative at the ride hailing company to capture more objective data about what happens inside vehicles during Uber trips, where disputes between riders and drivers often play out without witnesses. Uber has experienced years of complaints about the safety of its riders and drivers, who are often left to sort out episodes without the help of the company, and it has settled lawsuits claiming that it does not do enough to protect passengers. But as Uber increases the practice of recording drivers and passengers, the company is facing new privacy pressures. "Uber already has this treasure trove of highly personal data about people," said Camille Fischer, a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "When you pair surveillance during those trips, whether it's over the driver or over the passenger, you are getting a more fine tuned snapshot of people's daily lives." Uber began the video recording program in Texas in July, and is conducting smaller tests of the program in Florida and Tennessee. In November, it announced a similar effort in Brazil and Mexico to allow riders and drivers to record audio during a trip. The audio recording feature, first reported by Reuters, is managed by Uber, and begins a recording if either the rider or driver requests it. At the end of the trip, the rider or driver has the option to send the recording to Uber for review, but cannot save it themselves, a safeguard Uber built to prevent riders and drivers from recording each other and posting the clips online, the company said. Uber's video recording feature is a partnership with Nauto, a technology company that uses artificial intelligence to analyze video from vehicles. The company aims to detect potential collisions and warn drivers, and uses facial recognition to detect distracted drivers and remind them to keep their eyes on the road. Under the partnership, Uber issues cameras to Texas drivers who request them at a fee of 5 a month. Footage gathered by the cameras is stored by Nauto but available to Uber if the camera detects a crash, a serious safety incident is reported or a driver requests the footage, according to a frequently asked questions document compiled by Nauto. Passengers' faces are blurred in the footage provided to drivers, but visible to Uber employees who review it during safety incidents. "It is about providing the right tools in the hands of our users. We want them to feel, as they're in the car, that the lights are on," said Sachin Kansal, a director of project management at Uber who oversees the company's safety features. "We want to empower our users to have safer interactions on the platform." The recording features are part of Uber's larger campaign to improve safety, Mr. Kansal said, pointing to recent product changes that have allowed riders to call emergency services from the Uber app and offered them pin numbers to confirm their rides. The effort to record audio of passengers and drivers in Brazil and Mexico will begin next month, Uber said. Drivers and passengers in those areas have been targets of crime, and some have been robbed or killed. The company said it would share the audio recordings with law enforcement authorities if asked to do so. But as Uber experiments with recording riders and passengers in the United States, it will have to confront a thicket of privacy issues. Laws governing whether or not a person can be recorded without their knowledge vary state by state, making it difficult for the company to roll out a recording feature nationwide. "We want to make sure we are following the privacy laws of the land wherever we launch," Mr. Kansal said. "This is a small pilot. We are going to try a few things and see what works." Ms. Fischer, the Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer, said the recordings raised privacy concerns for drivers, who may feel that they have to opt in to video or audio recording in order to remain in good standing with Uber. Some Uber drivers already record their passengers, although the practice has not been sanctioned by the company.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
PARIS "The Nutcracker" isn't obligatory Christmas fare at the Paris Opera Ballet; it hasn't been performed here for five years. But this year, Rudolf Nureyev's production of the ballet is in full swing at the Opera Bastille, although neither the setting nor the ballet feel particularly festive. The Bastille theater is huge, cold and impersonal, Nureyev's "Nutcracker" exactly the same. There is almost nothing that isn't strange about this version, nominally based on the original 1892 ballet, choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov to Tchaikovsky's glorious score for the Mariinsky Ballet. Although Nureyev offers us the traditional party scene, a fight between the Rat King and the Nutcracker, snowflakes and the various national dances that characterize the final act, his production departs from tradition (as well as logic and theatrical sense) in a number of ways. Clara, the ballet's child heroine, is danced by an adult (on Wednesday night Leonore Baulac) , as is her brother Fritz (Adrien Couvez). It is not the Nutcracker doll that is transformed into a prince, but Drosselmeyer (Germain Louvet), in Act 1 a vaguely menacing but strangely insignificant figure. There are snowflakes, but no Kingdom of the Sweets or Sugarplum Fairy. (Her variation is danced by Clara as part of the final grand pas de deux.) The Russian, Arabian, Chinese and "Pastorale" dances of the second act are performed in the living room setting of Act 1; the conceit is that the family and guests from the party now populate Clara's dream imagination. Those concepts might be fine if Nureyev had managed to infuse the production with any coherent theatrical logic. But that's not the case. The adult dancers look unconvincingly childlike. Drosselmeyer, whose gift of the Nutcracker doll sets the plot in motion, has neither mystery nor ambiguity; he is reduced to skulking about in an eye patch and large cloak in Act 1, and loitering on the side of the stage like a minor Dickens character at the end of Act 2. Without reading the program notes, it's virtually impossible to understand that Drosselmeyer is also the Prince, and I can't imagine that many people recognize Clara's family as the leaders of the national dances. (I didn't.) The waltz of the flowers has no flowers and little waltz. Instead we get a stiffly regimented corps de ballet in gold costumes and white wigs. Which brings us to the costumes and decor, by Nicholas Georgiadis. These are at first stultifyingly dull, with the gloomiest brown living room ever for the first act (the Christmas tree, a non event in this version, pushed to the very back of the room) and the party guests in matchingly depressing dark shades. Later, Mr. Georgiadis goes all stiffly opulent in a final scene ballroom setting, complete with candelabra and chandeliers. Neither these settings nor the staging offers the slightest hint of the magical and fantastical; a quality essential to a successful "Nutcracker." And then there is the choreography. Although it is credited to Nureyev "after" (ballet parlance for based upon) Petipa and Ivanov, parts of this version and its general concept come from a 1934 Soviet production by Vassily Vainonen. But Nureyev wasn't inclined to leave well enough alone; he never neglects to provide three steps where one will do. The dancing is difficult and awkward looking in the extreme; strange little beats and accents permeate variations, everything is composed for maximum difficulty; the dancers are frequently late in arriving in poses or on the music because it's so hard to stuff in all the steps. Nureyev's instincts are also extraordinarily unmusical. In the mountingly climactic passage that Balanchine uses in his version for the magical growth of the Christmas tree, we get the mice tossing Clara's doll around for an endless time. For the music during which, in the traditional version, the little prince recounts the story of the battle to the Sugarplum Fairy, Nureyev has cloaked figures with enormous doll heads menace Clara for another prolonged and boring period. There are several moments in the ballet where the ensemble file on in silence and wait for the music to start. It's almost embarrassingly clumsy. Despite all of this, the Paris company looked better as an ensemble than they have for a while. The children of the Paris Opera Ballet School were engagingly immersed in their characters and dancing. The snowflake corps de ballet was alert and attentive, sometimes even dancing slightly ahead of the beat instead of in the slightly posed, correct manner that the company can exhibit. Ms. Baulac and Mr. Louvet could have used some of that musicality in the principal roles. They are both very young, both only promoted 10 days ago from the corps de ballet to the status of soloist ("sujet" in the Paris Opera Ballet hierarchy) and are clearly major talents. Ms. Baulac is blond and sweet faced, with a glorious sweeping line and buoyant jump; the dark haired Mr. Louvet is a danseur noble type, tall and elegant with a lovely refinement to his dancing. They coped with the difficulties of the choreography with admirable finesse and offered a radiant final pas de deux, but neither are as interesting to watch as they might be. Both move with a bland evenness; there is little phrasing or a sense of differentiated dynamics that would bring life and intensity to their dancing. This lack of responsive musicality is a pity, given the technical level of the dancing in this company. The snowflake scene suggests it's an issue that Benjamin Millepied, the new director of dance at the Opera, is addressing. His own programming starts next season: A different "Nutcracker," please.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
A mouse exploring one of the custom hologram generators used in the experiments at Stanford. By stimulating particular neurons, scientists were able to make engineered mice see visual patterns that weren't there. Why Are These Mice Hallucinating? Scientists Are in Their Heads In a laboratory at the Stanford University School of Medicine, the mice are seeing things. And it's not because they've been given drugs. With new laser technology, scientists have triggered specific hallucinations in mice by switching on a few neurons with beams of light. The researchers reported the results on Thursday in the journal Science. The technique promises to provide clues to how the billions of neurons in the brain make sense of the environment. Eventually the research also may lead to new treatments for psychological disorders, including uncontrollable hallucinations. "This is spectacular this is the dream," said Lindsey Glickfeld, a neuroscientist at Duke University, who was not involved in the new study. In the early 2000s, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Stanford, and other scientists engineered neurons in the brains of living mouse mice to switch on when exposed to a flash of light. The technique is known as optogenetics. In the first wave of these experiments, researchers used light to learn how various types of neurons worked. But Dr. Deisseroth wanted to be able to pick out any individual cell in the brain and turn it on and off with light. So he and his colleagues designed a new device: Instead of just bathing a mouse's brain in light, it allowed the researchers to deliver tiny beams of red light that could strike dozens of individual brain neurons at once. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. To try out this new system, Dr. Deisseroth and his colleagues focused on the brain's perception of the visual world. When light enters the eyes of a mouse or a human it triggers nerve endings in the retina that send electrical impulses to the rear of the brain. There, in a region called the visual cortex, neurons quickly detect edges and other patterns, which the brain then assembles into a picture of reality. The scientists inserted two genes into neurons in the visual cortices of mice. One gene made the neurons sensitive to the red laser light. The other caused neurons to produce a green flash when turned on, letting the researchers track their activity in response to stimuli. The engineered mice were shown pictures on a monitor. Some were of vertical stripes, others of horizontal stripes. Sometimes the stripes were bright, sometimes fuzzy. The researchers trained the mice to lick a pipe only if they saw vertical stripes. If they performed the test correctly, they were rewarded with a drop of water. As the mice were shown images, thousands of neurons in their visual cortices flashed green. One population of cells switched on in response to vertical stripes; other neurons flipped on when the mice were shown horizontal ones. The researchers picked a few dozen neurons from each group to target. They again showed the stripes to the mice, and this time they also fired light at the neurons from the corresponding group. Switching on the correct neurons helped the mice do better at recognizing stripes. Then the researchers turned off the monitor, leaving the mice in darkness. Now the scientists switched on the neurons for horizontal and vertical stripes, without anything for the rodents to see. The mice responded by licking the pipe, as if they were actually seeing vertical stripes. "It's not like a creature can tell you, 'Oh, wow, I saw a horizontal bar,'" she said. Dr. Churchland said that it would take more research to better understand why the mice behaved as they did in response to the flashes of red light. Did they see the horizontal stripes more clearly, or were they less distracted by misleading signals? One of the most remarkable results from the study came about when Dr. Deisseroth and his colleagues narrowed their beams of red light to fewer and fewer neurons. They kept getting the mice to lick the pipe as if they were seeing the vertical stripes. In the end, the scientists found they could trigger the hallucinations by stimulating as few as two neurons. Thousands of other neurons in the visual cortex would follow the lead of those two cells, flashing green as they became active. Clusters of neurons in the brain may be tuned so that they're ready to fire at even a slight stimulus, Dr. Deisseroth and his colleagues concluded like a snowbank poised to become an avalanche. But it doesn't take a fancy optogenetic device to make a few neurons fire. Even when they're not receiving a stimulus, neurons sometimes just fire at random. That raises a puzzle: If all it takes is two neurons, why are we not hallucinating all the time? Maybe our brain wiring prevents it, Dr. Deisseroth said. When a neuron randomly fires, others may send signal it to quiet down. Dr. Glickfeld speculated that attention may be crucial to triggering the avalanche of neuronal action only at the right times. "Attention allows you to ignore a lot of the background activity," she said. Dr. Deisseroth hopes to see what other hallucinations he can trigger with light. In other parts of the brain, he might be able to cause mice to perceive more complex images, such as the face of a cat. He might be able to coax neurons to create phantom sounds, or even phantom smells. As a psychiatrist, Dr. Deisseroth has treated patients who have suffered from visual hallucinations. In his role as a neuroscientist, he'd like to find out more about how individual neurons give rise to these images and how to stop them. "Now we know where those cells are, what they look like, what their shape is," he said. "In future work, we can get to know them in much more detail."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
By 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Van Jones of CNN had called the midterm elections "heartbreaking" for liberals, John Dickerson of CBS was opining that "Planet House isn't spinning the way Democrats want it to," and George Stephanopoulos, on ABC, declared that the Democrats were "having a disappointing night." Then blue state redemption arrived from an unlikely source: Fox News. In an aggressive call on a night when many television networks played it safe, Fox News was the first major news organization to project that the Democrats would retake control of the House of Representatives, dealing a blow to the channel's most famous viewer, President Trump. "I know a lot of listeners out there, their heads are exploding," the "Fox News Sunday" anchor Chris Wallace said. "But this is going to be a very different Washington." About 50 minutes after Fox News's call, NBC News followed suit. CNN did not weigh in with a definitive projection on the House until 11 p.m. And while Tuesday was, as the strategist James Carville foretold early on MSNBC, "not going to be a wave election" for Democrats, it caught some in the political class off guard that the good news for Mr. Trump's opponents was first delivered by Mr. Trump's favorite news source. "False flag!!" tweeted Tommy Vietor, the "Pod Save America" host and former aide to Barack Obama, hinting that Fox News's projection was some kind of ploy. Hugh Hewitt, the conservative pundit, wrote on Twitter that it was "pretty early" for the call. Even the Fox News anchor team looked bemused, cutting to a behind the scenes shot of the network's "decision desk" and joking about the statisticians focused on their work. "They're not even looking at us," quipped Bret Baier. Behind the scenes, Fox News was working with a different set of voter data than its rivals, after the channel opted out last year from a longstanding network consortium of exit polls. And Arnon Mishkin, Fox News's polling chief, has made bold moves before: On election night in 2012, he made a memorable on air appearance to reject the doubts raised by Karl Rove, the Fox News analyst, about whether Mr. Obama had really won Ohio. Mr. Mishkin, a cellist who clears his head for election nights by playing classical music, devised a polling operation this year that he said better encompassed Americans who voted early or by absentee ballot. When Mr. Baier, on Tuesday evening, asked Fox News's politics editor, Chris Stirewalt, why the decision desk had made the call, Mr. Stirewalt replied, "We're just that good." "The Fox News voter analysis is humming like it's a Testarossa Ferrari," Mr. Stirewalt said. "We're really proud of the team." Until that point in the night, TV's prognosticators had seemed to be playing it safe. Scarred by the quick change twists of President Trump's victory in 2016 when anchors and pundits looked stunned by the outcome network producers were treading carefully. "I'm going to say this a lot tonight, and forgive me if I'm a broken record," John King, CNN's digital map maestro, said shortly after 6 p.m. "It's early. Let's just strap in for the night." Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. His warning did not stop CNN, home of whooshing graphics and drumbeats, from breathlessly declaring a "KEY RACE ALERT" when all its anchors had to go on was a measly 2 percent of precincts reporting. ("Everybody calm down," Mr. King said at one point, seemingly to his viewers but perhaps to his producers as well.) Sean Hannity, the No. 1 rated Fox News host, did not appear on his network's broadcast, despite an earlier announcement that he would provide commentary. His fellow prime time hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham both spoke on air. Mr. Hannity had drawn criticism after participating in a Trump rally on Monday, which Fox News later deemed "an unfortunate distraction." (On his radio show, Mr. Hannity said he was "always off on election night on Fox News have been for my whole career, thankfully.") Tuesday's coverage was expected to reach millions more viewers than a typical midterm year. ABC, CBS and NBC allotted a supersize block of time three hours in prime time to feed viewers' appetite for political news. Usually, midterms only merit an hour of coverage on the Big Three broadcast stations, usually starting at 10 p.m. Cable news networks, whose ratings now regularly beat rival channels like ESPN, constructed glossy new sets for the occasion; Fox News, for instance, built a hub outside its studio on Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan. With anchors juggling nearly 500 races across the country, the visual breakdown of votes dominated much of the early coverage. For about three hours after the first polls closed at 6 p.m., networks relied heavily on their digital touch screen maps. On CNN, Mr. King's fingers zoomed his screen in and out of Broward County in Florida. On MSNBC, Steve Kornacki, shirt sleeves rolled up, worked himself into a frenzy tracking races across multiple states. At times, it was difficult to discern exactly where the election was turning, especially as pundits zeroed in on two key races in Florida for governor and for Senate that were considered bellwethers. In both cases, the Democrats appeared unable to claim a win, prompting Mr. Jones's onscreen lament. Make sense of the country's political landscape with our newsletter Mr. Kornacki, in an interview last week, said that NBC executives realized there might be interest in granular district races after MSNBC scored huge ratings for a special congressional election in Pennsylvania in April. "In the history of television and cable news, you couldn't go live wall to wall with a special election in a congressional district in the southwest corner of Pennsylvania and expect to get any kind of an audience," Mr. Kornacki said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
A roundup of motoring news from the web: An exhibition opening in May at the Antique Automobile Association of America museum will focus on vehicles from the Far East. The exhibition, "Motoring Mysteries of the Far East: A Curious Collection of Asian Pacific Vehicles," will include influential cars, motorcycles, bicycles and other vehicles from Japan, South Korea, Russia and India. The show will run from May 16 through Sept. 14. (Hemmings Daily) According to projections from Manheim, a company that bills itself as a leading vehicle remarketer, the number about 2.1 million off lease vehicles will return to the market this year, a marked increase over 2013, when 1.7 million off lease vehicles hit the market. Manheim projects that the number will rise to about 2.5 million in 2015, and to more than three million by the next year. (Automotive News, subscription required) The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating Robert Bosch L.L.C., a German automotive parts supplier, over a potential defect on its electric vehicle charger. The owner of a Nissan Leaf reported to the agency that one of the Bosch chargers started smoking while it was plugged into the car. (Automotive News, subscription required) Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla Motors, said the electric car manufacturer would begin building cars in China within the next three to four years. Tesla is on the verge of making its first deliveries in China, and, says Mr. Musk, is making plans to build charging infrastructure there. (Bloomberg)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
A new Nascar season got off to an exciting start over the weekend at Daytona International Speedway in Florida with a demolition derby caliber Sprint Unlimited shootout. Denny Hamlin won the bruising Unlimited after a late race rally, and a Sprint Cup rookie, Austin Dillon, set the fastest qualifying time for the Feb. 23 Daytona 500. The action began Saturday night with the running of the Unlimited, a gimmicky 75 lap nonpoints race divided into three segments, primarily featuring the drivers who were the fastest qualifiers in last season's 36 Sprint Cup races. Hamlin won all three of the segments of the Unlimited, but not before half of the starters were eliminated in a variety of wrecks. The most striking pileup sent Tony Stewart back racing for the first time since breaking his leg last August into the wall nose first. Stewart was checked out at the infield care center and pronounced himself O.K.. But it was an expensive Saturday for his team, as all four of its entries in the Unlimited were wrecked. Earlier in the day, his team also experienced engine failures during practice. On Sunday, during qualifying for the several dozen entries in the Daytona 500, 23 year old Dillon surprised the field with the fastest time, bringing the number 3 last used by Dale Earnhardt Sr., who died in a crash in the 2001 Daytona 500 back into Sprint Cup racing for the first time since Earhardt's death. Martin Truex Jr. qualified for the other front row starting spot in the race. The remainder of the field will be established by a combination of qualifying speeds and finishing positions in a pair of 150 mile qualifying races Thursday.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
MENLO PARK, Calif. It's not easy being the first and only Fox News host in Silicon Valley. But Steve Hilton, a tech entrepreneur who was once chief adviser to former Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, added that role to his resume in June. Now every week, Mr. Hilton flies from the home he shares with his high profile tech executive wife, Rachel Whetstone, in Silicon Valley's billionaire enclave of Atherton, Calif., to Fox's studios in Los Angeles to host "The Next Revolution With Steve Hilton." Fox News markets the Sunday night program as exploring "the impact of the populist movement." All of which makes life complicated for Mr. Hilton in overwhelmingly liberal Silicon Valley, where supporters of President Trump are nearly nonexistent and few think populism would improve their lives. He gets hassled for it. Recently, someone left novelty toilet paper with Mr. Trump's face on it on Mr. Hilton's desk at Crowdpac, the political fund raising start up he helped found in 2013. A vandal also took down the Trump campaign T shirt that had been hanging on the office's "bipartisan wall." Not to mention his friends. "Fox? Thank God it's on Sunday nights," said Gisel Kordestani, a co founder of Crowdpac along with Mr. Hilton. "He just keeps it separate. We all have our things." Mr. Hilton is unfazed. "I certainly have experienced a degree of curiosity, yes," he said. This fish out of water existence is the latest chapter for Mr. Hilton, 47, who was once credited as designing the modernized British Conservative image that helped get Mr. Cameron's party elected in 2010. That was before Mr. Hilton moved to Silicon Valley in 2012, after Ms. Whetstone had taken a top communications job at Google; Mr. Hilton later turned on Mr. Cameron over "Brexit." For the past five years, Mr. Hilton has been quietly building a new life in Atherton, raising his two children with Ms. Whetstone, writing about how he has given up his cellphone, hosting annual Cinco de Mayo parties and tending a large flock of pet chickens (his favorite is a brown hen named Hermione). Last year, he published a United States version of his book, "More Human," about the need for a populist revolution in government and business, and wrote favorably about Mr. Trump's presidential campaign against Hillary Clinton. Now he is Fox News's newest host, representing its first major foray into the tech world, and the network is experimenting with Mr. Hilton's more esoteric take on the brash Fox News style. Can it work? "We're in the process of finding out," Mr. Finley said. "It's definitely something different." On a recent Sunday in Los Angeles, Mr. Hilton arrived for breakfast a little late, wearing a gray T shirt, neon green shorts and flip flops. He is petite but muscular, clean shaven and with bright blue eyes. On his wrists were worn out festival bracelets from Glastonbury and Coachella. He had chosen one of the trendiest places in the city, Rose Cafe (with a menu featuring avocado tartine and lemonade made with tangerine oil and filtered water), to talk populism. Mr. Hilton ordered shakshuka, beet hummus and tea with milk. "What's going on for half the country? Who's lost out? The victims of elitist agenda; standing up for them, being a voice for them," Mr. Hilton said. "That's the idea behind positive populism, that's what drives the content." Mr. Hilton's mission with his Fox News program, he said, is to create a working class coalition uniting supporters of Mr. Trump and Bernie Sanders with the rage that fueled the Brexit movement. But Mr. Hilton insisted he is not one of the elites he targets in his show. Over a subsequent meal in Menlo Park, Calif., he hit the table with his fist as he described how being elite "is about what you believe in those people, I see them as my enemy. They have taken control of the levers of power." Some of that sense of being an outsider may come from his childhood. The son of Hungarian refugees, Mr. Hilton was raised by his stepfather, who was a construction worker, and his mother, a clerk, in the seaside town of Brighton, England. As a child, he won a scholarship to Christ's Hospital School in Horsham, a school for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. "He was a scholarship boy," said Michael Gove, a British Conservative politician. "Sheer talent brought him into that orbit, but he wasn't really cut from the Savile Row cloth. To call him an outsider would be an exaggeration, but he's certainly not an insider." Mr. Hilton does not think his childhood was the factor. "It's no hard luck story," he said. Mr. Hilton attended Oxford University and afterward took a job at the Conservative Central Office in 1990. Mr. Cameron was then head of the political unit, and Ms. Whetstone had joined three months earlier. In 1992, Mr. Hilton coordinated the advertising in a surprise general election in which the Conservatives won. Over time, Mr. Hilton became Mr. Cameron's closest adviser and godfather to his first son. With Mr. Hilton's advice, Mr. Cameron softened his look, ditching his tie and hugging a husky on a trip to highlight global warming. Mr. Hilton soon developed a reputation as the quirky, secretive figure behind a radically conservative agenda and was often featured in the tabloids for his casual clothes, bare feet and sweaty post bike ride look. In 2008, he married Ms. Whetstone. "David Cameron was immensely able and charismatic," Mr. Gove said, "but it was Steve who was the idea dynamo." Yet by 2012, their relationship was fraying. Mr. Hilton thought Mr. Cameron was compromising too much with the European Union and moving too slowly on their vision to cut bureaucracy. The two began to drift apart, and Mr. Hilton moved to California. The fallout was complete when Mr. Hilton returned to Britain last year to campaign against Mr. Cameron in favor of Brexit. The two no longer speak, Mr. Hilton said. When Mr. Hilton landed in Silicon Valley, he was known locally as the eccentric husband of Ms. Whetstone, who later left Google for Uber's top communications and policy job. (She left Uber this year and has joined Facebook.) Mr. Hilton took a teaching job at Stanford's design school. Then he had an idea for a website that makes it easier to find and give to small time political campaigns. With a group including Ms. Kordestani, he formed Crowdpac, whose headquarters are in a large loft in the South Park neighborhood of San Francisco. Crowdpac scrapes publicly available data to show where candidates' funding comes from and to score them on a scale of liberal to conservative. It also has tools for people to set up political campaigns of their own. The goal, Mr. Hilton said, is to lower the barrier to political participation. Crowdpac, which has raised 8.5 million from investors like Index Ventures and SV Angel, has since become part of the tech world's sometimes shaky efforts to engage with politics. "Silicon Valley is reluctantly becoming more engaged in politics," said Reid Hoffman, a Crowdpac investor and a founder of LinkedIn, who recently started his own political initiative called WTF (Win the Future). "Rather than taking the world only as we find it, Steve also imagines the world evolved." For Mr. Hilton, Crowdpac is where his conservative leanings stand out the most. He said the company isn't excited to be part of "this whole thing," referring to his Fox News program. "We're nonpartisan, but most of our employees are very liberal," he said. Although the PayPal co founder Peter Thiel has been Silicon Valley's most famous Trump supporter, Mr. Hilton said he hadn't met him. (According to some reports, Mr. Thiel may not be as ardent a fan of the president as he once was.) In fact, Mr. Hilton said he didn't mingle with any pro Trump people locally. "I literally don't know any others," he said, before clarifying that he doesn't quite identify himself as a supporter of the president but rather of the populist movement that Mr. Trump rode to the White House. Mr. Trump is "just the start," Mr. Hilton said. His friends said they see the fiery conservative as an unusual and fun addition to a typically homogeneous social scene, especially in Silicon Valley. "Steve wants to disrupt the political status quo, and that's what Silicon Valley is good at doing," said Joanna Coles, chief content officer of Hearst Magazines, who is a frequent guest at his dinner parties. She said that she doesn't agree with his politics but that his dinner parties are "fabulous." "You just have to smile," Juliet de Baubigny, a partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, said of Mr. Hilton. "I hope that we'll always have different points of opinion around the table. I hope that we will always have Trump supporters in the mix." Are there a lot of Trump supporters in the mix? "At the moment, sadly, he's the only one," Ms. de Baubigny said. "But I'm grateful for the fact that we have one." Mr. Hilton said the tech industry's lack of interest in politics gives it the potential to be radically conservative. "A lot of the foundational philosophical approaches of tech leaders are actually all about decentralization of power," he said. The knowledge of politics in Silicon Valley is "cursory," Mr. Hilton said, adding that that has been particularly true when it comes to populism. "The last couple years, I've been trying to convey to people what lies behind the phenomenon," he said. "There's a lot of: 'Well, what about Mexicans? What about women?' Well, O.K., but there's a really big issue that life for half the country has gotten increasingly grim." Last year, during his book tour for "More Human," Mr. Hilton began appearing on Fox News programs to talk about Brexit and what it meant for the chances of Mr. Trump, then a candidate. After the election, Fox News offered Mr. Hilton a program. He and the network soon worked out a structure for the program with segments like "Swampwatch" and "Decadent DC." In its first few weeks, Mr. Hilton's guests included the education entrepreneur Salman Khan, the feminist legal scholar Joan C. Williams and some Bernie Sanders supporters who said they had a plan to elect an entirely new Congress. Mr. Hilton makes gestures at traditional Fox News anger, but he often politely softens his attacks. (In a monologue about how the Axios founder Mike Allen of "Decadent DC" doesn't understand Mr. Trump, Mr. Hilton added that Mr. Allen was "wonderful, hard working and courteous.") Mr. Hilton's program has also become a surprising landing spot for liberals. "When I went on the show, a bunch of progressive friends of mine were complaining, like, 'Why would you go on this right winger's show?'" said Zack Exley, a former senior staff member for Mr. Sanders, who appeared on the program last month. "What Fox does all day every day is they point at immigrants, they point at activists, whipping up racism, that's what they do all day long. But Steve for an hour points at corporate power. If we can't engage with somebody who's doing that, that's crazy." Mr. Hilton said he's staying for the long haul. "We didn't move here so I could save American democracy," he said. "But I've embraced it with the zeal of a convert."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
The New York Philharmonic, the only major American orchestra that doesn't permit its female players to wear pants for formal evening performances, makes an exception for the popular concerts in the city's parks. So it appeared that many of the women had jettisoned their usual skirts on Wednesday, when the Philharmonic came to the Great Lawn at Central Park on this year's tour. And it was a lovely evening. Though the forecast had been iffy, the weather was clear and breezy. The parks conservancy estimated the crowd at 28,000. The dynamic conductor James Gaffigan, whose international career is rising, led an appealing program of works by Saint Saens, Bernstein and Rimsky Korsakov all standards of parks concerts. This time, however, the proceedings included results from an educational venture, and a wonderful surprise. Two, actually. Mr. Gaffigan conducted short new pieces, three minutes each, by a pair of participants in the Philharmonic's Very Young Composers initiative. How young? Well, Jordan Millar, a student at Poly Prep Country Day School in Brooklyn, and Camrym Cowan, a student at P.S. 11 in Brooklyn, are both 11.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Every ensemble performing in Carnegie Hall, where audiences and acoustics seem to welcome if not invite blockbuster programs, must be tempted to show off, at least a little. And none have succumbed more readily than the Chicago Symphony Orchestra did in the 1970s and '80s, when it was directed by Georg Solti. It was a paltry New York season then that did not include a Mahler or Bruckner symphony, or even a Wagner opera, from the City of Broad Shoulders. So all the more remarkable were the modest affairs that the conductor Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony brought to Carnegie over the weekend, with no huge statements, no overarching themes. They seemed calculated to demonstrate a malleability and versatility fostered in later years by Daniel Barenboim and honed to a fine touch by Mr. Muti. Especially revealing was Jennifer Higdon's new Low Brass Concerto, commissioned by the orchestra and heard in its New York premiere on Friday evening. But Ms. Higdon was also looking for majesty and grace, she wrote, and she elicited other, individual qualities from the orchestra's three trombonists Jay Friedman, Michael Mulcahy and Charles Vernon and its tuba player, Gene Pokorny. Her melodious concerto, based in smooth but not monolithic chorale textures, opened into shifting, glinting trios, duets and solos that bespoke subtlety, humor, even tenderness at times. Telling along the same lines was a trombone master class at Carnegie on Saturday morning, in which Mr. Friedman advocated compact tone ("try to make the sound smaller than the equipment wants it to be") and differentiated articulation ("contrast is the key to style; evenness is the opposite of style."). All this in good measure, of course, and the concerto soloists and the orchestra's high brasses proved excellent models of moderation in both concerts. Still, accidents happen, and a trombone went momentarily but badly astray in the rising clamor at the end of Brahms's Second Symphony on Saturday evening. That work Brahms's mellowest, least troubled symphony and hardly a blockbuster was the biggest work on either program, and Mr. Muti, not always a convincing Brahmsian in earlier years, seems to have developed a greater affinity for the composer. The Saturday program was filled out by Verdi's "I Vespri Siciliani" Overture and another new work commissioned by the orchestra, Samuel Adams's "many words of love." The Adams work took its inspiration from Schubert's song cycle "Winterreise," specifically a phrase from "Der Lindenbaum" ("The Linden Tree"): "On its bark I carved do many words of love." Not that you'd be likely to notice. Mr. Adams effectively buries the little melodic fragment in an extravagant, churning brew of live and digital sound whose main structural elements are extended, sometimes monumental, stepwise rises and falls. The program notes also mention a concern for "the ailing earth," though here, too, you would not necessarily discover that concern without (even with) reading them. Mr. Adams's own note describes the work's paradoxical qualities: "tonal but noisy, lyrical but austere, Schubert but not at all." No argument here. The other unhackneyed works in the slightly odd mix of Friday's program were Stravinsky's piquant "Scherzo Fantastique," Chausson's vocal orchestral hybrid "Poeme de l'Amour et de la Mer" ("Poem of Love and of the Sea"), and the Four Sea Interludes from Britten's opera "Peter Grimes." The mezzo soprano Clementine Margaine was a superb soloist in the Chausson, richly sonorous and warmly expressive, and the pairing of that work with the Britten was striking. Like the concerts themselves, the encores were anything but show off y: Giuseppe Martucci's "Notturno" (Op. 70, No. 1), a longtime Muti favorite, on Friday and the B flat Intermezzo from Schubert's incidental music for Helmina von Chezy's play "Rosamunde" on Saturday.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Our guide to new art shows and some that will be closing soon. Read our spring gallery guides: Brooklyn Chelsea TriBeCa, SoHo and the West Village Lower East Side Upper East Side and Harlem 'BLACK POWER!' at Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (through Dec. 30). Given the economic, environmental and social policies emanating from the White House, the United States could be headed for its most dynamic era of public resistance since the 1960s. And if you're searching for cultural models from the past, even flawed ones, that effectively brought a message of social change into the street, the schools and the workplace, you'll do well to check out this vivid documentary show about a cultural movement that broadened activist art to embrace public murals, fashion and poetry; and protest demonstrations that had the visual allure, choreographic rigor and emotional weight of theater. (Holland Cotter) 917 275 6975, schomburgcenter.org 'MAUREEN GALLACE: CLEAR DAY' at MoMA PS1 (through Sept. 10). Win big by going small. This unshowy New York painter has spent 30 years refining her visions of rural Connecticut and the coast of New England, and six dozen of her concentrated paintings will force you to slow down, look hard and find the profound in the everyday. Ms. Gallace's best works depict houses, barns or cabanas, often missing their windows and pared down to simple polygons; the landscapes they lie in, by contrast, can be worked so hard they appear almost finger painted. Each one is as sober and strange as a Morandi still life, and an antidote to an art world lately beholden to spectacle. (Jason Farago) 718 784 2084, ps1.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
In the Milhaud, the piano focused arrangement emphasized the score's 1920s affinities with George Gershwin. Mr. Morris's title refers to "cargo cults" of the South Pacific, the ritual response of islanders to Western goods that washed up on their shores. Dancers in their underwear discover a bamboo pole and explore its uses. While the choreography toys with '20s primitivism, it also picks up notes of '20s Expressionism (the mode of George Balanchine's "Prodigal Son") and jazz parties. It's a light, somewhat thin work with a darkly comic ending. With the Bach, hearing the piano four hands arrangement on the same program as the original revealed an unsurprising diminishment of concerto character and tonal color and a surprising retention of compositional integrity. The use of one piano also left the stage free for 16 dancers in loose pastel costumes (by Elizabeth Kurtzman), with enough space for a large group in the center to be framed by smaller peripheral groups crossing through. There's nothing unusual about Mr. Morris's affinity for Baroque dance rhythms. And as his immensely appealing dancers move about in joyful order, you might not ascribe much significance at first to how some of them sink to the ground and have to be helped back up. But at the start of the adagio section, the entire cast is sprawled out dead, sleeping or drugged save for Sam Black, some Orpheus or Ulysses in the Underworld. With his assistance or without, the others might rise to their feet, but only to sink back down, wriggling. At that movement's close, they all stand and run, and the remainder of "The" is light and bright again, with symmetrical trios winding and unwinding, and spins initiated by soft and playful swipes at a partner's face. There's an element of defiance or victory in leaps and raised fists and same sex couples running with clasped hands held high.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
How Much Watching Time Do You Have This Weekend? None No matter how much free time you have this weekend, we have TV recommendations for you. Come back every week for new suggestions on what to watch. This Weekend I Have ... a Half Hour, and I Like 'Drunk History' When to watch: Now, on NBC.com (free). This silly six episode British comedy is set in the 1840s and follows a group of doctors who are passionate about their work but don't yet subscribe to a germ theory of medicine think the old fashioned medical practices of "The Knick" with the satire and goofiness of "Another Period." There's the hotshot surgeon (Rory Kinnear) who does a lot of very fast amputations, the kooky dentist who is attempting to invent anesthesia and the softy psychiatrist with a seriously inconvenient crush. Come for Rupert Everett as the wacky head of the hospital; stay for Andrew Scott of "Fleabag" as a skeezy Charles Dickens in Episode 2. When to watch: Now, on Hulu or Amazon. If you've forgotten the true meaning of Leap Day, it's time to get in touch with your inner Leap Day William and revisit this essential cultural touchstone from 2012. Liz (Tina Fey) feels weirdly left out when everyone else in the office, particularly Kenneth and Jack (Jack McBrayer and Alec Baldwin), celebrates Feb. 29 with a concrete set of traditions she has never heard of. It's a perfect "30 Rock" episode, and if "Parks and Recreation" can accidentally launch Galentine's Day as a "thing," we might as well don the blue and yellow and trade some tears for candy. Real life is for March! ... an Hour, and I Like Projects When to watch: Starting Friday, on Disney Plus. A third season of "Making It" is still a ways away, so in the meantime this kid oriented woodworking show will have to do. Three teams, each consisting of two enthusiastic and unrelated children and an expert adult, compete to build interesting objects. In the first episode, each makes a Little Free Library, but much more exciting than the design phase is the testing phase, when their buildings are subjected to powerful wind from a giant fan and some fake hail. If your family has already watched all of "Mythbusters," try this.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television

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