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"Pair of interiors" (2018) shows a man and a woman having a communications breakdown. Jeff Wall photographed two different couples who resemble each other to imply continuity between the two images. Rumination and risk taking, in equal measure, mark Jeff Wall's spellbinding new exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea. Since the 1970s, the restless "conceptual photographer" has made single, large scale prints using elaborate processes and layered references from other mediums like painting, film and theater. The final image was always recognizably a photograph, even if it seemed to hold the documentary tradition at arm's length. That's not always true in his latest works, which slip the bounds of the single frame and, sometimes, even the photograph's illusionistic space . In its mood, however, this show, Mr. Wall's first at the gallery since ending a 25 year run with the rival dealer Marian Goodman, feels decidedly introspective. Figures alone in contemplative trances, or alienated from their partners in scenes of evident tension, define most of the works. The encyclopedic visual literacy that has long characterized Mr. Wall's pictures (with their compositional echoes of old master paintings) has been pared back, allowing more psychological complexity to emerge. Mr. Wall also delivers moments of uninhibited sentimentality, beauty and transcendence, albeit in unexpected settings like a CrossFit gym. In his previous works, these encounters have usually been laced with social critique (as in his images of homeless people and day laborers) and/or leavened with physical comedy (a spurt of milk, a wind tossed sheaf of papers). The sweeping triptych "I giardini/The Gardens" (2017), which takes up an entire wall of the capacious single room installation, exemplifies all of these shifts. Set in the lush gardens of the Villa Silvio Pellico near Turin, Italy, it's a kind of three act play on the theme of expulsion from paradise in which a man and woman in late middle age inhabit multiple roles (or just multiply themselves, in a confounding doppelganger effect that owes something to digital editing). In the final image they stand knee deep in a neatly pruned hedge labyrinth, reading from a printed script or manifesto. Another eerie doubling occurs in the diptych "Pair of interiors" (2018), which shows a man and woman having some kind of communication breakdown in a drab beige setting that might be a hotel room or a couples' therapist's office. This time, however, Mr. Wall uses two different couples who resemble each other just enough to imply continuity between the two images. In the similarly alone together diptych "Summer Afternoons" (2013), a younger man and woman, naked and indolent, occupy separate shots of a colorful living room one with raking light redolent of Edward Hopper's interiors, and yellow walls and fuchsia velvet upholstery modeled on Mr. Wall's own graduate school housing. Such mirrorings are not unprecedented in Mr. Wall's work; see, for example, his "Picture for Women," inspired by the network of gazes and reflections in Manet's "A Bar at the Folies Bergeres." Here, however, Surrealist film is the point of departure. In the show's catalog, Russell Ferguson traces "Pair of interiors" back to Luis Bunuel's 1977 movie, "That Obscure Object of Desire," in which the director used two actresses for the same role. The theme of self absorption, or the failure to connect, extends to works featuring children in dreamlike states. In "Parent child," a little girl is curled up on a stretch of sidewalk, ignoring her father's pleading stare. Her little act of toddler rebellion brings a strange sense of stasis and endurance to the foreground of the picture, which in the background looks like a typical street photograph with passers by caught in mid stride. This photograph most closely resembles Mr. Wall's earlier pictures made in what he calls the "near documentary" mode, inspired by scenes he may have witnessed but achieved with elaborate setups and rehearsals. As it happens, two other examples of Mr. Wall's previous style (both landscapes, from 2007 and 2011), are also on view. They flank the mural size "Recovery" (2017 18), and have clearly been folded into the show to emphasize this newer work's startling departure. "Recovery" is a photograph, yes, but only a tiny fraction of the image is recognizable as such: the figure of a young man, seated within and merging into a flattened Fauvist landscape a la Matisse's "Joy of Life." Mr. Wall has never been afraid to use digital tools or to punctuate his realism with magical and hallucinatory episodes (see the reanimated soldiers of "Dead Troops Talk," from 1992), but this is something else: a true flight into painterly space, with an escapist bent. It's a bold move, with an uncertain payoff; Instagrammers posing in front of street art may come to mind, along with other forms of "augmented reality" that don't seem worthy of Mr. Wall's subtle pictorial sensibilities. Those put off by "Recovery" may find solace in "Weightlifter" (2015), an unexpectedly classical black and white image of a man straining to raise a barbell in a bare bones gym setting. A kind of ode to the gelatin silver print with luscious grays that differentiate the textures of cinder block, rubber, metal, plywood and sweaty skin it has a sense of gravity befitting the title and finds Mr. Wall still quite attached to, or at least grounded by, photography.
0
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Art & Design
WASHINGTON The prospects for a quick agreement between the Trump administration and congressional Democrats on a new round of aid for the ailing economy faded on Wednesday, as President Trump undercut his own party's efforts to negotiate a deal and a top White House official declared that a lifeline to unemployed workers would run out as scheduled at week's end. With negotiations barely started to find a middle ground between Republicans' 1 trillion plan and Democrats' 3 trillion package, Mr. Trump poured cold water on the entire enterprise, saying that he would prefer a bare bones package that would send "payments to the people" and protect them from being evicted. "The rest of it, we're so far apart, we don't care," Mr. Trump said before leaving the White House for an event in Texas. "We really don't care." The comments stoked questions about whether the president whose re election prospects, and his party's hold on the Senate, could turn on the health of the economy was willing or able to find a compromise to inject one last dose of stimulus before he faced voters in November. "We're nowhere close to a deal," Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, told reporters after leaving talks with top Democrats in the office of Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California. He predicted that a 600 per week enhanced unemployment benefit would lapse as scheduled on July 31 without any action to restore it. Republicans have proposed slashing the payments to 200 per week, while Democrats want to keep it through the end of the year. It was just one of myriad issues dividing the two sides. The breakdown reflects a predicament for Republicans that has placed Mr. Trump in a difficult negotiating position. After the enactment of nearly 3 trillion in pandemic related stimulus in the spring, many Senate Republicans are opposed to additional deficit spending to fuel the economy, meaning that any agreement would need to attract significant support from Democrats to clear Congress. But with the two sides deeply at odds over how to structure the package and how large it should be, the administration's outreach to Democratic leaders has failed to produce progress toward a deal. With time running out, White House officials on Wednesday renewed their calls for a temporary extension of the expiring unemployment insurance benefits and a moratorium on evictions. But Democrats quickly rejected that idea, which they have said would only sap momentum for other critical aid including for states and cities, schools and health care that must be approved quickly as Americans continue to suffer. Senate Republicans did not include an extension of the eviction moratorium in their 1.1 trillion relief package, which Mr. Trump has dismissed as "semi irrelevant," even though it was the product of prolonged negotiations between Republican congressional leaders and his own advisers. But the president signaled that he did not believe they had driven a hard enough bargain with Democrats. "The payments aren't enough," Mr. Trump said on Wednesday, though it was not clear what payments he was referring to. "They're not making them high enough. The Democrats are not taking care of the people." The Democratic measure includes 1,200 direct payments to Americans the same level that Republicans proposed. The jobless benefits Democrats have proposed are three times as large as what Republicans are offering. Mr. Trump also rebuked Republicans for their reluctance to provide 1.75 billion for the construction of a new F.B.I. headquarters in downtown Washington, a longtime priority of his, and one that could potentially increase the value of his own hotel nearby. 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. "Republicans should go back to school and learn," the president said. "They need a new building. It's a bad building." Mr. Trump's insistence on including the money, unrelated to the coronavirus or the recession, in the aid package has rankled Senate Republicans and left many to wonder how serious the administration is about sealing a deal with Democrats. Democrats were equally pessimistic on Wednesday about reaching a compromise, and they placed the blame squarely on Republicans for opting to wait until late July, just as the jobless aid was expiring, to start negotiations on a relief package. "What short term extension?" Ms. Pelosi asked after meeting with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Mr. Meadows and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader. "There is no short term extension. They don't have anything." Several Republicans also appeared reluctant to embrace the prospect when asked on Wednesday. One Republican aide likened the idea of a short term bill to paying a ransom twice. "Our Republican friends don't seem to come close to meeting the moment," Mr. Schumer said. Analysts in Washington said they saw a rising risk that lawmakers might not reach a comprehensive agreement before a scheduled recess early next month. "These negotiations are in a bad, bad place," said Jon Lieber, the managing director for the United States at the Eurasia Group and a former adviser to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader. "There is no progress being made at the moment, which reflects the strong hand the Democrats think they have, the ineptitude of the administration and the lack of consensus within the Senate G.O.P.," Mr. Lieber said. Republican lawmakers acknowledged that the path to agreement appeared daunting, though some insisted that a consensus deal could emerge.
0
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Economy
IT was Mark Antony in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" who said "the evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones." What if the good lived after you in the form of an income producing portfolio for a surviving spouse or partner? That's what Earl Adamy, 71, a retired "serial entrepreneur" from Goodyear, Ariz., was thinking when he set up a survivor portfolio for his wife, Sharon, an artist. Mr. Adamy's idea was to set up a portfolio that would pretty much run on autopilot with minor adjustments so that Sharon wouldn't have to worry about managing the money. For many do it yourself investors, the survivor portfolio could be part of a comprehensive wealth management plan that outlives you, to provide income and appreciation for the surviving spouse or partner, unless financial conditions drastically change. As an active investor for more than 30 years, Mr. Adamy had some specific ideas for the portfolio. Reducing risk and realizing income from stock dividends were two of his main objectives. Instead of creating the portfolio entirely from scratch, though, Mr. Adamy found a template on the portfolio Web site MyPlanIQ.com, which offers myriad portfolios and monitoring functions. Other sites like Motif and Betterment also offer ready to go portfolios. He settled on a "Retirement Income portfolio E.T.F." consisting of exchange traded funds, examining how the portfolio would do in bull and bear markets. He was especially concerned with "drawdown" or the amount an investment could decline from peaks to valleys in market cycles. Mr. Adamy chose his portfolio for the relatively small drawdown, meaning it was unlikely to lose as much as the overall stock market in a major decline. The portfolio is also "tactical," meaning it can adapt to market conditions, although its risk level is moderate. John Zhong, who created the portfolio for the Web site, included E.T.F.'s that focused on dividend growth appreciation, bonds and real estate investment trusts from around the world. "My portfolio sacrificed return for lower drawdown," Mr. Adamy said, adding: "My wife won't have to worry about a thing. I don't want my wife to suffer through gut wrenching portfolio declines during bear markets." In a novel approach to portfolio management, Mr. Adamy needed the services of a "trade administrator" to buy and sell E.T.F.'s. Unlike a conventional broker, the administrator would just transact trades, not offer advice, and be bound by a specific set of instructions to maintain the portfolio. Mr. Adamy is working with Marc Wilborn, a fee based registered investment adviser with Boulder Wealth Management in Overland Park, Kan. As the trade administrator, Mr. Wilborn makes only trades and will work with Sharon Adamy if her husband dies or is incapacitated. Mr. Wilborn does monthly rebalancing by making trades that conform to Adamy's allocation to specific E.T.F.'s. He is paid a flat 250 per quarter for the service. "Marc calculates the number of shares to be bought and sold to effect the rebalance to MyPlanIQ specified percentages, then executes the trades," Mr. Adamy said. Mr. Wilborn said he had no discretion to make trades on his own," but I can provide feedback. I execute strategy." Since Mr. Wilborn isn't on commission, he has no incentive to trade or pitch other financial products in the current relationship, which he calls a "pilot." How would a survivor portfolio work long term? You would need to define what your objectives were and what conditions would trigger changes in the portfolio. You'd also need to know how your chosen portfolio might perform over time in up and down markets. Risk calibration is a must. Most important, you need to document directions on how you want the portfolio managed. Would you need the trade administrator to go into cash if the market declined a certain percentage? What if stocks reached a frothy valuation level? Should your survivor stay in the market? Stephen Horan, managing director and colead of education of the CFA Institute, said it was important that "you leave behind directions and plan for contingencies. You don't want to have everything on autopilot." It also may be a problem if your spouse or partner doesn't want to bother with an intermediary or make portfolio changes after you're gone. In that case, Mr. Horan suggests that life insurance may be a better vehicle to provide for future financial needs. He also recommends that everyone, including third parties, draft an investment policy statement, a document that specifically details investment allocations, risk and other objectives. In any case, because of the complexity of creating and maintaining a portfolio, if you choose this route, it's probably best to use it for relatively small portion of your wealth. It may prove unwieldy for your survivors and executor of your estate. Mr. Adamy, who owns other assets like hedge funds, has only 5 percent of his total assets in the income portfolio. Anyone setting up a survivor portfolio ideally would be someone with well defined investment objectives who understands the various kinds of risk. Having several decades of investing experience in bull and bear markets is also a big plus. This wouldn't work for someone who has jumped in and out of the market, relied exclusively upon brokers for discretionary security selection or doesn't have a specific strategy. What if you're just not a D.I.Y. investor? It still makes sense to come up with some kind of master plan for long term wealth management. Scanning some of the portfolios online could give you some ideas, which you could discuss with someone you trust who has no interest in selling you financial products. It would make sense to work directly with a registered investment adviser, certified financial planner, chartered financial analyst or other fiduciary adviser. You'd also need to confer with an estate planning lawyer to see how your portfolio fits into your overall estate and financial plan.
0
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Your Money
Leon Lederman, whose ingenious experiments with particle accelerators deepened science's understanding of the subatomic world, died early Wednesday in Rexburg, Idaho. He was 96. His wife, Ellen Carr Lederman, confirmed the death, at a care facility. She and Dr. Lederman, who had long directed the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago, had retired to eastern Idaho. Early in his career Dr. Lederman and two colleagues demonstrated that there are at least two kinds of particles called neutrinos (there are now known to be three), a discovery that was honored in 1988 with a Nobel Prize in Physics. He went on to lead a team at the Fermi laboratory, in Batavia, Ill., that found the bottom quark, another fundamental constituent of matter. For those baffled by such esoterica, Dr. Lederman was quick to sympathize. " 'The Two Neutrinos' sounds like an Italian dance team," he remarked in his Nobel banquet speech. But he was determined to spread the word about the importance of the science he loved: "How can we have our colleagues in chemistry, medicine, and especially in literature share with us, not the cleverness of our research, but the beauty of the intellectual edifice, of which our experiment is but one brick?" He used his share of the prize winnings (the physicists Jack Steinberger and Melvin Schwartz were also awarded the Nobel in 1988) to buy a log house in Idaho, in the Teton Valley, where he would later retire. By that time he was known as a pre eminent figure in both discovering new physics and explaining it to the rest of the world. "We're teaching high school science in the wrong order biology, chemistry and then, for 20 percent of the students, eventually physics," he told Claudia Dreifus in an interview with The New York Times in 1998. That, he contended, was upside down. "The subjects are unrelated, to be learned and forgotten in the order taken," Dr. Lederman lamented. Much better, he said, would be to begin with physics, including a basic understanding of atoms. That would lay the groundwork for chemistry, in which atoms join to form molecules, and then biology, where the interaction of molecules gives rise to life. Maybe next could come psychology. A curriculum like that, called Physics First, would reprise the history of the universe, Dr. Lederman said: "Atoms formed molecules, and the molecules formed things that crawled out of the ocean. And here we are, worrying about the whole thing!" Joseph D. Lykken, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab, said he considered Dr. Lederman "the best ambassador of physics to the general public since Einstein." "The publisher wouldn't let us call it the God damn particle," they wrote, noting how successfully the Higgs was eluding capture in particle accelerator experiments. Its existence was not established until 2012. (The Higgs boson, which interacts with other particles to give them mass, was named after the British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs.)" The source of his humor, Dr. Lederman said in the Times interview, came "from a terror of taking myself seriously." Leon Max Lederman was born on July 15, 1922, in Manhattan, where his parents, Morris and Minna (Rosenberg) Lederman, Jewish immigrants from Russia, ran a laundry business. Leon grew up in the Bronx and graduated from James Monroe High School in 1939 and from City College of New York in 1943. His bachelor's degree was in chemistry, but by then he was already finding himself drawn to physics. After serving in France during World War II with the Army Signal Corps, he entered the graduate school of physics at Columbia University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1951. He was soon working at the school's new particle accelerator, just up the Hudson River at the Nevis Laboratories in Irvington, N.Y. It was there in 1957 that he performed his first eye catching experiment. Two theorists, Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang (who shared the Nobel Prize that year), had speculated, amid widespread skepticism, that the weak nuclear force, which is involved in radioactive decay, might violate a law of physics called conservation of parity. This idea is sometimes explained metaphorically with the example of a mechanical clock. Built in its mirror image with the gears turning counterclockwise instead of clockwise and the numerals on the face reversed it would still indicate the proper time. When it comes to left or right and clockwise or counterclockwise, the law of conservation of parity holds that the universe doesn't care one way or the other. Physicists had widely assumed that this equivalence held true for all the forces of nature, whether at the scale of galaxies or on the subatomic realm. During a regular Friday lunch at a Chinese restaurant near Columbia, Dr. Lee told Dr. Lederman and some other associates that the physicist Chien Shiung Wu had just completed an experiment that appeared to show that the weak force, unlike the others, indeed violated parity. During the decay of a nuclear isotope, electrons were more likely to be emitted in one direction than the other. After heading upriver that evening to the Nevis Laboratories, Dr. Lederman and Richard Garwin, along with a graduate student, Marcel Weinrich, worked through the weekend and confirmed Dr. Wu's discovery using a different experimental approach. That clinched the deal, and the violation of parity caused a sensation. An exception had been found to a fundamental physical law. The universe was stranger than it seemed. Dr. Lederman recalled the thrill of finding a new phenomenon in an interview in 1981 with the Times science writer Malcolm W. Browne in Discover magazine. "The best discoveries always seem to be made in the small hours of the morning, when most people are asleep, where there are no disturbances and the mind becomes most contemplative," he said. "You apply some statistical tests and look for errors, but no matter what you do, the spike's still there. It's real. You've found something. There's just no feeling like it in the world." In 1962, his experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island with Dr. Schwartz and Dr. Steinberger demonstrated the existence of two kinds of neutrinos. One is associated with the electron and another with its heavier cousin, the muon. Later on, physicists found an even heftier version of the electron called the tau, which is accompanied by a tau neutrino. These discoveries ultimately helped form the scaffolding for the Standard Model, a crowning achievement of 20th century physics. Everything is made from three families of subatomic particles, each of which also includes a pair of quarks. It was one of these the bottom quark that Dr. Lederman and his Fermilab team, outside Chicago, discovered in 1977. (Quarks called up, down, strange and charm had already been confirmed by other scientists, and in 1995 the top quark was found, also at Fermilab.) After leaving Columbia University, Dr. Lederman became director of Fermilab in 1979. There he oversaw the construction of the Tevatron, the most powerful accelerator of its day, capable of colliding particles at energies up to a trillion electron volts. Probing deeper into the pieces of matter would require even more firepower, and throughout the 1980s Dr. Lederman was an avid promoter of government funding for the Superconducting Super Collider, which would have been the most powerful machine on the planet, to be built in Texas. The dream was dashed when Congress canceled funding in 1993. By then Dr. Lederman had retired from Fermilab to become a professor of physics at the University of Chicago. He also continued to promote science education. In 1992 he served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He and his wife, Ellen, moved to their place in Idaho, in Driggs, just before his 90th birthday. Found to have dementia, he was advised by his doctors to live in peaceful surroundings. In 2015 the couple agreed to let an online auction company sell his Nobel Prize medal. The proceeds, 765,002 before taxes, were set aside for future medical expenses. By then he had forgotten his years as director of Fermilab, or what he had done to win the prize. "I don't have any real stories to tell about it," he told The Associated Press in 2015. "I sit on my deck and look at the mountains." Dr. Lederman's first wife, Florence Gordon Lederman, died in 1990. He married Ellen Carr in 1981. In addition to her, he is survived by three children from his first marriage: two daughters, Rena Lederman, a professor of anthropology at Princeton, and Rachel Lederman, a civil rights lawyer; and a son, Jess, a writer and the creator of a website devoted to the works of the Scottish novelist, poet and minister George MacDonald, as well as five grandchildren. "There's always a place at the edge of our knowledge, where what's beyond is unimaginable, and that edge, of course, moves," Dr. Lederman told The Times in 1998. In the beginning were the laws of physics. But where did the laws come from? At that point, he said, "You're stuck." "I usually say, 'Go across the street to the theology school, and ask those guys, because I don't know.' "
0
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Science
It has been 50 years since the last Studebaker was produced at the automaker's plant in South Bend, Ind., but the marque has made a comeback of sorts in the vintage racing world. The cars have become consistent winners in the Carrera Panamericana in Mexico, a grueling seven day road rally. The winning team this year Erik Comas, the former Formula One driver, and Isabelle de Sadeleer, his co driver won in a heavily modified 1953 Studebaker Commander and was in a tight race with a Studebaker driven by Emilio Velazquez and Javier Marin. That car slipped into a ditch and was unable to finish, but a Studebaker driven by Raphael van der Straten and Mauricio Pimintel Proal finished in the top five. Oddly enough, the winning car has been a Studebaker 20 times since 1993. "It's the best car for competing in the Panamericana because it has great aerodynamics and good weight distribution," Velazquez, who also races in the Mexican rally circuit, said in an email. The Carrera Panamericana, held this year from Oct. 17 23, is a revival of the original race, which was run from 1950 54, just after the Mexican stretch of the Pan American Highway was opened. The race was shut down, reflecting safety concerns about open road races. More that two dozen people died in the race over its five years, and in 1955, the Le Mans disaster, in which 83 spectators and a driver were killed, showed what could happen when things went wrong on a public road.
0
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Automobiles
Join Jaron Lanier, the father of virtual reality, as he contemplates his two obsessions: VR and music. "Musical instruments are the best user interfaces that have ever existed," he says. "The popular ones are designed for behavior modification," he says, wearing his usual black T shirt and black pants. "It's like, why would you go sign up for an evil hypnotist who's explicitly saying that his whole purpose is to get you to do things that people have paid him to get you to do, but he won't tell you who they are?" At this moment when dark clouds loom over Silicon Valley, Mr. Lanier is able to talk about the Lords of the Cloud with affection yet candor, as he worries that these tech gods creating new worlds may be getting "high on their own supply." "This is such a scary time, isn't it?" he says, in his sweet, breathy voice. "I mean, it is for me. I had always feared we would create this social manipulation technology out of computers." In his forthcoming memoir, "Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality," the Microsoft wizard enthuses that VR "weds the nerdy thing with the hippie mystic thing," high tech but like a dream and "an elixir of unbounded experience." But he's well aware of the "Matrix" dangers. He realized early on, he writes, that "it could turn out to be the evilest invention of all time." Mr. Lanier, who discourses eloquently on subjects like limerence and lust in his book, says: "The future I'd prefer to see is one where people use VR together to make really crazy imaginative experiences that might be sexual or might not. Where you turn into fantastical creatures and that sort of thing. Or when your bodies merge in some ways. That to me is so much more interesting than the porn. Porn is a product of the cinema era. It's an old fashioned way of thinking, locked in the 19th century." More and more, we are wondering why, when we know the top Silicon Valley companies are not benevolent, we invite them into the most intimate areas of our lives, as Scott Galloway asks in "The Four," a book about how Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google are refashioning the world. "Are these entities the Four Horsemen of god, love, sex, and consumption?" Mr. Galloway wonders. "Or are they the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse?" Even though he's prone to whimsical, esoteric tangents, I know I can get a straight answer on that from Mr. Lanier. We sit down at his dining room table amid a wild cornucopia of stuff, including a lamp with a hot pink feathered shade and black cats lounging on chairs and hanging, Cirque du Soleil style, from carpeted staircases. There are also musical instruments a golden Wurlitzer pedal harp; a rare pre Depression Mason Hamlin piano that Mr. Lanier says has "a uniquely American sound," a 19th century Chinese opium bed filled with saxophones, flutes, clarinets, lutes and ouds; mandolins covering the walls, and over a thousand more instruments, from a medieval cornetto to a shakuhachi, a Japanese flute all of which Mr. Lanier can play. Like his house, his new book is crammed full of strange and mesmerizing stuff. Right after he was born, his mother, a Marlene Dietrich look alike and Viennese pianist and stock trader who had talked her way out of a concentration camp by passing as Aryan, and his father, whose family had been mostly wiped out in Ukrainian pogroms, took Jaron someplace they thought would be safe: the westernmost corner of Texas. There, he had to confront more than his share of bullies growing up, once by swinging a baritone horn at them. His mother died when he was about 9, when her car flipped over on the freeway as she was coming back from getting her driver's license. His father, who worked for a time as the science editor of "Amazing," "Fantastic" and "Astounding" pulp science fiction magazines, then let his 11 year old son design their new house in New Mexico: a geodesic dome. The design, Mr. Lanier writes, looked "a little like a woman's body. You could see the big dome as a pregnant belly and the two icosahedrons as breasts." He tosses out that his father may have been the one to start the rumor about alligators in the sewers of New York. The wild stories about Mr. Lanier's coming of age come in a rush, from playing piano at the Ear Inn in SoHo and avant garde parties with John Cage and Laurie Anderson, and working for the Ear magazine, where editors would have to go up to the Dakota regularly and beg for cash from John and Yoko; to breaking out Timothy Leary from the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Calif., to a failed first marriage to a beautiful woman who had a roommate who kept tarantula venom in their refrigerator. ("Carved by trauma and tradition, her demons dragged my demons to the courthouse," he writes of their divorce.) After a takeout chicken and macaroni dinner, Mr. Lanier bids a loving good night to his wife, Lena, a child psychologist, and their 11 year old daughter, Lilibell. Then he brings out his Microsoft HoloLens headsets and a big mug of chocolate milk. "I'm more like the child than the parent, I'm afraid," he says. I spend some time wearing the headset painting graffiti in the air with my hand, and Mr. Lanier explains why the brain can see more than the eyes. I ask about social media sites getting hijacked by Russians pushing propaganda aimed at putting Donald Trump in the White House. Vanity Fair has compared this juncture, with anxious lawmakers demanding accountability from the resistant tech companies, to the moment when we all had to start taking off our shoes at airports. Unlike many here, he does not think of humans as ants in his experiments. "Hopefully, in this period, when we're dealing with this really crude and early stuff like Facebook feeds, Instagram, Snapchat," he says, "we'll be able to get the politics straight and find a path for people to have dignity and autonomy before the hard core stuff comes. Unless we all kill ourselves through this other stuff, which is a possibility, too. One of the great joys of the Trump era is having your 11 year old say, 'The former head of NATO said there's a one in 10 chance of nuclear war. Is that right?' And I'm like, 'Oh, great. Thank you, Trump. That's very nice.'" Mr. Lanier believes that Facebook and Google, with their "top down control schemes," should be called "Behavior Modification Empires." "The whole internet thing was supposed to create the world's best information resource in all of history," he says. "Everything would be made visible. And instead we're living in this time of total opacity where you don't know why you see the news you see. You don't know if it's the same news that someone else sees. You don't know who made it be that way. You don't know who's paid to change what you see. Everything is totally obscure in a profound way that it never was before. "And the belief system of Silicon Valley is so thick that my friends at Facebook simply still really believe that the answer to any problem is to do more of what they already did, that they're optimizing the world. "The Facebook business model is mass behavior modification for pay. And for those who are not giving Facebook money, the only and I want to emphasize, the only, underlined and in bold and italics reward they can get or positive feedback is just getting attention. And if you have a system where the only possible prize is getting more attention, then you call that system Christmas for Asses, right? It's a creep amplification device. "Once Facebook becomes ubiquitous, it's a sort of giant protection racket, where, if you don't pay them money, then someone else will pay to modify the behavior to your disadvantage, so everyone has to pay money just to stay at equilibrium where they would have been otherwise," he says. "I mean, there's only one way out for Facebook, which is to change its business model. Unless Facebook changes, we'll just have to trust Facebook for any future election result. Because they do apparently have the ability to change them. Or at least change the close ones." Why would Facebook change its business model when it's raking in billions? "I would appeal to the decency of the people in it," he replies. "And if not to them, then the toughness of the regulators. It's going to be one of the struggles of the century." I point out that after the stunning Trump win, President Obama took Mr. Zuckerberg aside and warned him to take the threat of political disinformation seriously, but the young billionaire dismissed the idea that it was widespread. "Well, no one in Silicon Valley believes that anybody knows more than us," Mr. Lanier says dryly. "Surely not the government." He continues: "I think there are a lot of good people at Facebook, and I don't think they're evil as individuals. Or at least not the ones that I've met. And I know Google a lot better, and I feel pretty certain that they're not evil. But both of these companies have this behavior manipulation business plan, which is just not something the world can sustain at that scale. It just makes everything crazy." "People in the community knew," Mr. Lanier says, adding that he wrote essays and participated in debates in the early 1990s about how easy it would be the create unreality and manipulate society, how you could put out a feed of information that would put people in illusory worlds where they thought they had sought out the information but actually they had been guided "the way a magician forces a card." "So for somebody to say they didn't know the algorithms could do that," Mr. Lanier says in a disbelieving tone. "If somebody didn't know, they should've known." So what happens when fake news marries virtual reality? "It could be much more significant," Mr. Lanier says. "When you look at all the ways of manipulating people that you can do with just a crude thing like a Facebook feed when people are just looking at images and text on their phones and they're not really inside synthetic worlds yet when you can do it with virtual reality, it's like total control of the person. So what I'm hoping is that we're going to figure this stuff out so we don't make ourselves insane before virtual reality becomes mature." He says that Silicon Valley has turned out both better and worse than he expected: "As far as the worse part, creating a global behavior modification empire is worse than I thought. And creating a world that's more opaque instead of less opaque is worse than I thought we should do. It's also a physically uglier place than I thought it would be. It's really a shame. If we're the new Renaissance, why don't we make this amazing Tuscany here? We have these gorgeous orchards. Why don't we do something beautiful here instead of just filling it up with parking lots and horrible buildings?" He says sometimes his peers in the Valley seem perfectly nice but then they will say something "I just can't believe." He cites Eric Schmidt's comment on privacy on CNBC's "Inside the Mind of Google" special in 2009, that "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." "Really?" Mr. Lanier asks. "It does give me this feeling sometimes that something's going wrong with our culture in Silicon Valley and maybe it's just that thing of power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely, just losing perspective. Like Zuckerberg might think, 'Well, I went around to a bunch of states and I ate barbecue and wrestled cattle so I've been around all kinds of people.' But to have people who you respect and listen to have fundamentally different worldviews and question your core logic and think that you may be way off track, that's a much harder thing to do. And there are people who can be very powerful and comfortable with that. I'll mention one, whose name is Barack Obama." I ask Mr. Lanier about the sexual harassment and gender inequity problems roiling the Valley. "Well, sometimes, I think there's a kind of emerging new male jerk persona of the digital age, which would be some kind of a cross between the Uber guy and the pharma bro and maybe Milo Yiannopoulos and maybe Palmer Luckey and maybe Steve Bannon," he says. "Because, there's this sort of smug, superior, 'I've got the levers of power, and I know better than you.' It's sort of this weird combination of a lot of power and a lot of insecurity at the same time." He believes that Gamergate led to the alt right. "It was one of the feeders," he says. He talks about another personality that is emerging from the digital age. "If you're a mark of social media, if you're being manipulated by it, one of the ways to tell is if there's a certain kind of personality quality that overtakes you," he says. "It's been called the snowflake quality. People criticize liberal college kids who have it, but it's exactly the same thing you see in Trump. It's this kind of highly reactive, thin skinned, outraged single mindedness. I think one way to think of Trump, even though he is a con man and he is an actor and he's a master manipulator and all that, in a sense he's also a victim. I've met him a few times over 30 years. And what I think I see is someone who has moved from kind of a New York character who was in on his own joke to somebody who is completely freaked out and outraged and feeling like he is on the verge of a catastrophe every second. And so my theory about that is that he was ruined by social media." Mr. Lanier plays me a song he composed to cheer up his wife when she was going through cancer treatments, a Cuban style charanga flute solo played on a Japanese shakuhachi "which is a crazy hard thing to do and I pulled it off." Then he confides his fear that one of his older cats, Loof, would have been a Trump supporter. "Loof is the sweetest cat in the world but she's really an anti immigrant voter," he says. "She did not like the idea of young cats coming here. She really didn't want the change. She really felt like they ruined everything. And I must point out that the new kittens who came are black kittens. They appear to be Bombay cats. Loof is not in a basket of deplorables. She's just in a basket of blankets."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Style
Like "United 93," "Hotel Mumbai" begins from the uncomfortable premise of turning an actual terrorist incident into material for a dramatized suspense feature. In November 2008, 10 men unleashed gunfire and grenade assaults across Mumbai, killing more than 160 people. The film, inspired by a documentary, "Surviving Mumbai," relays these events from the vantage points of a sprawling international ensemble. The characters, many of them composites, are the guests and staff members of the Taj Mahal Palace Tower Hotel, one of two luxury hotels the terrorists targeted, and where more than 30 died during the siege.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Movies
Long ago you know, like March college football schedules were largely set far in advance. But the coronavirus pandemic has forced the sport's leaders to reshuffle the 2020 season, and whether a season will happen at all is very much in question. Executives are still hammering out details and cautioning that even published plans might change, but here is what we know about the announced schedules for the Power 5 conferences and the College Football Playoff. We'll be updating this as we go. The pandemic led two leading conferences to postpone their football seasons until at least the spring.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Sports
Part of the fun of the annual Oscar nominees' luncheon is seeing who's talking to whom. At one point during Monday's event, Bradley Cooper was huddled in deep conversation with Spike Lee, while across the ballroom at the Beverly Hilton, Glenn Close made a beeline for Sam Elliott, affectionately dubbing him "my husband in another life." And where else but at a gathering of Oscar nominees would you find the Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige, the ballcap clad producer of "Black Panther," flanked on one side by Lady Gaga and on the other by the Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore eda? "This is surreal," said Melissa Berton, surveying the starry scene. Though she was a producer of the Oscar nominated documentary short "Period. End of Sentence," Berton primarily works as a high school English teacher, the sort of vocation that rarely leads to a Beverly Hills ballroom. "I'm used to students and white boards," she said as the "Bohemian Rhapsody" star Rami Malek swanned past us. Though it's been reported that the academy may relegate categories like Berton's to commercial breaks and then edit those winners into a clip package shown later in the Oscar telecast, the nominees' luncheon is more egalitarian.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Movies
Gio Urshela hit a grand slam in the fourth inning of the Yankees' series clinching win over Cleveland on Wednesday. On a wet night in Cleveland filled with what felt like endless twists and turns, the Yankees defeated the Indians, 10 9, in a game to sweep the best of three Wild Card Series and advance to the American League Division Series. The game lasted four hours 50 minutes, a major league record for a nine inning game in either the postseason or the regular season. Trailing by a run in the ninth inning, Yankees catcher Gary Sanchez tied the score with a sacrifice fly off Indians closer Brad Hand. The Yankees then took the lead on infielder D.J. LeMahieu's chopping ground ball that scurried through Hand's legs and past the diving Cleveland middle infielders. It was Hand's first blown save of the year. The Yankees will now face their fierce division rival, the top seeded Tampa Bay Rays, in a best of five series which is slated to begin on Oct. 5 at a neutral site, Petco Park, in San Diego. The Rays, who won the American League East crown this year, and Yankees aren't particularly fond of each other: Their rivalry over the years has been littered with terse words, bench clearing incidents and hit batters. The Yankees Indians game was delayed twice: 43 minutes before first pitch for rain that never came and then 33 minutes during the bottom of the first inning when rain did come. Normally a postseason stalwart, the Yankees' starting pitcher Masahiro Tanaka put his team in a 4 0 deficit in the first inning. But the Yankees' best in the A.L. lineup fought back against the Indians' best in the A.L. pitching staff. With the bases loaded in the fourth inning, Gio Urshela clobbered a go ahead grand slam off the Indians' James Karinchak, one of the best relievers in baseball. After the Indians tied the score at 6 6 in the fifth inning off Chad Green and Tanaka, the Yankees' lineup roared back thanks to an unlikely source. Sanchez, who has struggled throughout the year and didn't start Game 1 on Tuesday, skied a go ahead two run home run that sneaked over the right field fence in the sixth. The lead changes didn't end there. When Yankees relief pitcher Zack Britton got into trouble by walking two in the bottom of the seventh inning, Manager Aaron Boone called upon Jonathan Loaisiga, who surrendered a two run double to the pinch hitter Jordan Luplow that knotted the score at 8 8. When Loaisiga ran into problems of his own in the eighth inning, Boone called upon closer Aroldis Chapman, whose first pitch was blooped into the outfield by second baseman Cesar Hernandez to give the Indians a 9 8 advantage. But like much of the night, the craziness continued into the final frame, during which the Yankees prevailed. Mookie Betts had two hits and an R.B.I., Corey Seager homered and Los Angeles beat Milwaukee, 4 2, in the opener of their wild card series. The Dodgers took a 2 0 lead on a leadoff double by Betts and four walks by left hander Brent Suter in the first, tying for the most walks by a pitcher in a single inning in postseason history. Betts scored when Will Smith drew a four pitch walk with the bases loaded. Seager walked and scored on A.J. Pollock's bases loaded walk. Suter needed 32 pitches to get out of the inning. He gave up three runs and three hits in one and two thirds innings. His five walks were a career high, and he didn't record a strikeout. Chris Taylor doubled leading off the second and scored on Betts' double, making it 3 0. Max Muncy walked with two outs and Ryan Braun caught Smith's drive to right at the wall to end the inning, potentially saving three runs. Braun winced as he hit the wall with his right shoulder. He was replaced by a pinch hitter in the fifth. The Dodgers could have inflicted more damage but were just one for seven with runners in scoring position in the first two innings. The Padres waited 14 years to get back to the postseason, only to face the Cardinals, the playoff regulars who knocked them out in the first round in 1996, 2005 and 2006. The new generation kept the tradition going on Wednesday, with the teams playing to form. None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. It ended with a leaping catch at the wall by Harrison Bader, the Cardinals' fleet center fielder, who stole a long drive by Wil Myers. It looked promising off the bat, but wasn't actually headed over the fence fitting for a game in which the Padres flirted with success, but never quite made a move. It started with a thud, even before the Cardinals' four run first inning. The Padres' top two starters, Dinelson Lamet and Mike Clevinger, were left off the roster with arm injuries that did not heal in time. The Cardinals peppered starter Chris Paddack for eight hits and six runs, chasing him in the third inning. "They came out swinging first pitch; they barreled some balls up," Padres Manager Jayce Tingler said. "He never got the opportunity or the chance to settle in." The six runs were enough for the Cardinals' pitchers, especially the relievers, who twice ended innings by retiring the dangerous Fernando Tatis Jr. with two runners on base. Giovanny Gallegos struck him out in the sixth, and Alex Reyes got him on a grounder in the eighth. The Padres also ran into an out on the bases in both innings but at least they were on base, which Tingler took as reason for optimism. The Tampa Bay Rays won their first multigame postseason series since 2008 on Wednesday, beating the Toronto Blue Jays, 8 2, to complete the two game sweep of their wild card series. They backed up an impressive regular season in which they won 40 games, second only to the Los Angeles Dodgers, and captured the No. 1 seed in the American League with a deep, versatile roster. Next, they will play the winner of the series between the Yankees and the Cleveland Indians, which was scheduled to resume Wednesday night. If the Yankees prevail, the Rays will feel confident, having recorded an 8 2 record against them this season. All the games will be played in San Diego. The Rays had not won a postseason series since they beat the Boston Red Sox in the American League Championship Series in 2008. They fell to the Phillies in the World Series that year, which was the first of five straight series losses for the Rays. Tampa Bay also won two one game wild card playoffs in 2013 and 2019. Bassitt allowed one run, which was scored in the seventh inning after he was already on the bench, and scattered six hits and a walk while striking out five. Including his last four starts in the regular season, Bassitt concluded September with a 4 0 record and only two runs allowed in 33 2/3 innings for a 0.53 earned run average. After a mediocre August, Bassitt traced his September success to a nine day layoff following a rough start in Houston on Aug. 29. He said he was able to throw four bullpen sessions during that span something that rarely happens during a season to work on his windup and delivery. "Everything kind of clicked for me," he said before Wednesday's game. "We took full advantage of it and kind of manipulated some pitches around and we've been on a roll since then." But after he left Game 2, things got dicey for Oakland in the ninth inning. Liam Hendriks, who gave up a two run home run to Yasmani Grandal in the eighth inning after Bassitt surrendered a leadoff single to Tim Anderson, came on in relief and came within an out of finishing off the game. But the White Sox loaded the bases with two outs in the ninth inning, with Grandal coming to the plate again. So Hendriks came out, and in came Jake Diekman, who promptly walked Grandal to force in a run. That brought up the White Sox slugger Jose Abreu, who homered in Game 1. But Diekman got Abreu to ground out, ensuring Bassitt would get another September win, and the A's would stay alive into October. Their long awaited third quest has a long way to go. But it started the right way on Wednesday, with a 5 1 victory over the Chicago Cubs in their playoff opener at Wrigley Field. The Cubs, who hit just .220 as a team in the regular season, managed a homer by Ian Happ and just four other hits. Starter Sandy Alcantara worked six and two thirds innings, and closer Brandon Kintzler who pitched for the Cubs the last two seasons got the last three outs. The Marlins, who had no winning seasons in the 2010s and went 57 105 last season, scored all the runs in the seventh inning, with the big blows coming from veterans acquired as bargain free agents last winter. Corey Dickerson chased starter Kyle Hendricks with a three run homer, and Jesus Aguilar connected for a two run shot off Jeremy Jeffress. The Cubs, who try to thrive on the festive, communal energy for playoff games at Wrigley, noticed the difference with empty stands. "You miss the fans; it isn't the playoff atmosphere you're looking for," Manager David Ross said, adding that he was responding to a question and not raising the issue himself. "This year's unique and I'm not trying to make excuses. That's not a playoff atmosphere, but it's playoff baseball in 2020." To save their season on Thursday, the Cubs will start Yu Darvish against the Marlins' Sixto Sanchez, a rookie right hander from the Dominican Republic. Sanchez has No. 45 tattooed on his neck in honor of his idol, Pedro Martinez, and he'd do well to imitate Martinez's playoff debut. With Boston in 1998, Martinez worked seven innings with eight strikeouts and no walks in an 11 3 romp over Cleveland. On the other side of that ledger are the long championship draughts and epic losing streaks strung together by teams like the old Chicago Cubs and the Cleveland Browns. The Minnesota Twins just added a new one to the list this year, and it will not be broken until at least 2021. The Twins fell to the Houston Astros, 3 1, in Game 2 of their American League wild card series at Target Field in Minneapolis on Wednesday, and Minnesota was eliminated from the postseason just 48 hours after it started. The loss extended the Twins' postseason losing streak to 18 games, extending a record among the four major North American sports. They set that unpleasant record the previous day by losing Game 1 of the series and passing the Chicago Blackhawks hockey team, which lost 16 straight playoff games from 1975 through 1979. The Twins' last postseason victory came in Game 1 of the 2004 division series against the Yankees, and they have not won a postseason series since they beat the A's in the 2002 division series. But this year was supposed to be different, if only because the Twins avoided their perennial nemesis, the Yankees. What's more, the Twins came into the series with the second best record in the American League, and also had the best home record in baseball, going 24 7 at Target Field without losing consecutive games at home all year. Once again, it did them no good in the playoffs. They scored only two runs in the series, with no home runs, and just three hits in Game 2.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Sports
In a flatlining economy, the 399 iPhone that Apple introduced last week might sound attractive. But there's a better gadget deal in the pandemic: the iPad. Remember the iPad? You would be forgiven if you had forgotten. Apple unveiled a new entry level model of the tablet computer last year for 329. Yet it barely got a mention at the company's glitzy product event in September, when Apple highlighted new iPhones that cost 699 to 1,099. The iPad, which always seemed like an optional accessory sitting between your computer and smartphone, has long been treated as that "other" device. Now it's time for us to reconsider the iPad. Last week, I wrote about how the coronavirus had revealed our most essential tech and weeded out the excess. The tech we have turned to over and over boils down to a computing device, communication tools, entertainment and an internet connection. The iPad delivers on all of those needs even better than a smartphone. With a bigger screen than an iPhone, the iPad excels at videoconferencing with apps like FaceTime and Zoom, and it's great for watching movies and programs on Netflix and YouTube. When you attach it to a good keyboard, it becomes an excellent budget computer with a zippy internet connection for browsing the web, writing emails and composing documents. All for half the price of a regular iPhone. "It's really in that sweet spot of being relatively affordable and having everything I think most people will need," said Nick Guy, a writer for Wirecutter, a New York Times publication that tests products. So even though Apple is releasing its new iPhone SE this week, with its sped up internals and a better camera than its predecessor, now may not be the ideal time to buy one. After all, what good is an improved camera if you can't leave the house? It's tough to recommend buying any tech in the coronavirus outbreak, actually. But if your gadgets are failing to fulfill your needs in any of the aforementioned areas and you have the money to spend, an iPad is one of the few products I can endorse for its practicality. (Apple declined to comment on this column.) I picked up an iPad for a 100 discount last Black Friday. Over the past few weeks, it has been my go to device. Here's why I'm naming it the gadget of the pandemic. I've never been much of a video chatterer, but the pandemic has forced just about all of us to use videoconferencing with the people we care about and work with. Initially, I preferred doing video calls on my office provided laptop because the screen angle could be adjusted. But after about a week, I realized that video calls on a laptop were a lousy experience. They are a power sucker; a half hour call on Google Hangouts used 25 percent of my laptop battery. What's more, security researchers have found that Zoom, the most popular video chatting app, has major security vulnerabilities on computers but not on mobile devices like the iPad. That's because mobile apps operate in a more restricted environment with limited access to your data. This made me eventually shift all my video calls to the iPad, which was by far a better experience. The iPad has much longer battery life than a laptop. And compared with a smartphone, the tablet has a big screen for video calls and can easily be propped up with a protective cover. My wife and I recently used an iPad for a two hour FaceTime call with my brother in law while we played a video game together. At the end of the session, the iPad still had more than 70 percent of its battery remaining. After I started doing video calls on the iPad, many of my work tasks also began shifting over to the tablet, including composing email, taking notes and even doing expenses. I appreciated the device's prolonged battery life and preferred the way apps took up the full screen, which helped me concentrate on tasks. Not all credit goes to the iPad alone. The gadget has only a virtual keyboard, and using it to type on a slab of glass is no fun. Fortunately, I had researched several iPad keyboards before the pandemic and settled on the 100 Logitech Slim Folio keyboard, which was simple to attach. Typing on it feels the same as using a normal keyboard, and its case protects the tablet while propping it up. I normally read lots of books, but lately I've been in the mood to shut off my brain by reading comics. The Comixology and Comic Zeal apps on the iPad make digital comics a better experience than reading in print: You can zoom in on individual panels, plus the screen is bright enough that you won't need to turn on a reading lamp. While I prefer watching video on a television screen, it has been nice to have an iPad to stream an HBO show while my wife is using the television to watch "Love Is Blind." I also now spend several hours a day watching YouTube videos about everything from baking to D.I.Y. home improvement. Thanks to this new obsession, I finally optimized homemade pizza dough, learned how to install a part in my motorcycle and even managed to install a bidet for my toilet. The iPad has been a great video playing companion through this journey. So why the iPad and not another tablet computer? After all, many of the same tasks can be done on cheaper tablets, like Amazon's 50 Fire HD 8. Yet those other devices are generally much slower and have inferior screens. The iPad is ultimately the best tablet on the market.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Technology
The artist Jan Rothuizen, who knew Haring, described stopping to see the work's progress and witnessing the American artist struggling in the cold to get the paint to hold to the brick. But he finished it in one long attempt: "It was a rough job, but with his spirit, he did it in a day," Mr. Rothuizen said by telephone. When the museum vacated the warehouse, the building was transformed into a cold storage unit, and aluminum insulation panels covered the mural in 1989. Ms. Middel came across an old photograph of the mural four years ago. "I thought, oh my goodness, what happened to it?" she said in a telephone interview, adding that she had long admired Haring. Haring's work was exhibited in Europe relatively early in his career, and "growing up as a kid in the '70s and as a young teenager in the '80s," Ms. Middel said, "Keith Haring was for me the closest we could get to New York." Exploiting the increased interest in Haring's work in 2017, when the colorful canvas he painted during his 1986 visit went back on view after restoration, Ms. Middel joined with the Haring Foundation, the gallerist Olivier Varossieau and the Stedelijk to organize the removal of the panels. "You can't imagine when the first pieces of cladding came off, and you see the first stripes of Haring's painting appear," she said of the reveal on June 18. "Hey, we have a Haring!"
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Art & Design
For decades, "60 Minutes" has reigned at the top of television news, bringing in hundreds of journalistic awards, not to mention weekly ratings for CBS that are the envy of the industry. The success has allowed "60 Minutes" to operate independently from the larger network news division to which it belongs. But that independence came at a cost: The show proved unable to prevent inappropriate conduct by some of its top executives, according to lawyers hired by the CBS Corporation board of directors to investigate the workplace culture of the program. In a draft of a report for the board, investigators wrote that "the physical, administrative and cultural separation between '60 Minutes' and the rest of CBS News permitted misconduct by some '60 Minutes' employees." The executive producer of "60 Minutes," Jeff Fager, was fired in September after he threatened a CBS News reporter looking into allegations about his behavior. The investigators wrote that the firing was justified, adding that Mr. Fager had "engaged in certain acts of sexual misconduct" with colleagues and failed to stop misbehavior by others. They also said the misdeeds during Mr. Fager's run as executive producer, which began in 2004, were less severe than under his powerful predecessor, Don Hewitt, who died in 2009. Mr. Hewitt, who created the program in 1968 and produced the show for 36 years, is a journalistic legend. But investigators revealed that CBS continues to pay out a settlement to a woman who claimed that Mr. Hewitt sexually assaulted her on repeated occasions and destroyed her career. The settlement, reached in the 1990s, has been amended multiple times, including this year. In total, CBS has agreed to pay the former employee more than 5 million. The investigators' report will be presented to the CBS board next week, during a period of reckoning for the company. CBS forced its longtime chief executive, Leslie Moonves, out of his job in September after he faced numerous allegations of sexual misconduct, which he has denied. The board hired two law firms, Debevoise Plimpton and Covington Burling, to conduct the investigation into the allegations against Mr. Moonves, CBS News and "60 Minutes." They were asked to determine, in part, if Mr. Moonves had violated his employment agreement. That would allow the company to fire him for cause and withhold his 120 million severance. In the draft, the investigators expressed concern that women were not being promoted into key positions at CBS News, and that a more muscular process was needed to protect employees who alleged misbehavior. But they also did not find that there was "a toxic work or 'frat house' environment for women" at the wider news division. CBS declined to comment on the draft report, as did a representative for the board. Since Mr. Fager's dismissal, "60 Minutes" has been operating under a cloud of uncertainty. The show is currently run by Bill Owens, who was second in command to Mr. Fager and is on a short list of candidates to take over the show. The investigators wrote that Mr. Fager had behaved inappropriately with colleagues in several instances. They said they believed that he had "engaged in some type of sexually inappropriate conduct" toward a CBS employee who alleged in 2009 that he had groped her. Another CBS News employee alleged that Mr. Fager had tried to kiss her with an open mouth at a corporate event about six years ago. The report also said a female employee had been instructed to drive him and other producers to a legal brothel while reporting a story in Nevada. 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. "This is the first I am hearing some of these allegations about my personal conduct," Mr. Fager wrote in an email to The Times. "I'm surprised and devastated to hear them from The New York Times since I was not given the opportunity by CBS investigators to respond to their accuracy." Mr. Moonves, during an interview with CBS's outside investigators in September, disclosed that CBS had paid 950,000 to a woman who had made claims of age and sex discrimination and had accused Mr. Fager of sexual misconduct. Investigators were not able to interview the woman, they wrote in the report, and while they could not rule it out, they found "no credible evidence" to confirm her account of misconduct. The investigators found that Mr. Fager had failed to respond appropriately to accusations of bullying against Michael Radutzky, a former senior producer on "60 Minutes," and harassment against Ira Rosen, currently a producer on the show. Mr. Radutzky, they wrote, was "abusive, screamed and threw objects at other '60 Minutes' staff." The lawyers noted that while many people at "60 Minutes" were aware of the conduct, Mr. Fager tolerated it because he viewed Mr. Radutzky as an "extraordinarily talented" producer. In a statement, Mr. Radutzky said: "Some people may have found me difficult, but I was committed not only to getting the story but getting it first and getting it right. In that intense environment, I'm sure I said things that may have been hurtful to my colleagues. Now, with some distance, I regret the toll that it took on all of us." Mr. Rosen, the investigators wrote, "occasionally made inappropriate sexual comments to his female subordinates, such as asking them to twirl and encouraging them to use their sex appeal to secure information from sources." Mr. Fager was aware of these accusations, according to the report, but took no action. Mr. Rosen, who has previously denied the allegations, declined to comment. Investigators added that "in more recent years, the broadcast has promoted more women to producer and to other senior roles, and Mr. Fager demonstrated sensitivity and support for working women." Mr. Fager was a close friend to Charlie Rose, who was ousted from his roles at CBS's morning show and as a "60 Minutes" correspondent after several women accused him of sexual misconduct. The draft report said investigators did not believe Mr. Fager or any current CBS News executive had been "aware of the severity of Mr. Rose's inappropriate conduct." The draft report did say CBS was justified in firing Mr. Fager for sending a threatening text message to a CBS reporter who had asked him for comment after The New Yorker reported allegations of inappropriate behavior against him. Two days after he sent the text, investigators wrote, they asked him about it and he denied sending any message. After Mr. Fager was presented with a printed version of the text, he "admitted sending it and acknowledged that it could be perceived as threatening." They wrote that they believed his lying, too, was grounds for dismissal. In his email, Mr. Fager said: "We built a broadcast made up of fine men and women who do quality work. It hasn't always been perfect and, like anyone who has been in a leadership position, there are things that I would do differently, including the angry text I sent to a CBS reporter. My intent was only to demand fairness in the coverage of a news story, but I regret the manner in which I accomplished that." The investigators recommended that the next executive producer of "60 Minutes" report to the president of CBS News. Mr. Fager reported to Mr. Moonves. "We note that the misconduct of individual '60 Minutes' employees, including Mr. Fager and Mr. Rosen, should not have been tolerated, but we find that it was not as severe as the media accounts or as severe as the sexual misconduct that occurred during the Don Hewitt era at '60 Minutes,'" the investigators wrote. The settlement involving Mr. Hewitt in the 1990s was reached after CBS investigated allegations that he had sexually assaulted a female employee. The alleged abuse had carried on over a period of years, the lawyers wrote in the report, and derailed the woman's career. CBS determined more than 20 years ago that her allegations were credible, and agreed to pay her a 450,000 settlement. Since then, CBS has renegotiated six amendments to her agreement, each time agreeing to pay additional money in exchange for her silence. The settlement has exceeded 5 million in total, plus annual payments of 75,000 for the rest of her life, according to the report.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Media
DARLINGTON, S.C. Live auto racing returned to national television on Sunday, after a 10 week layoff during the coronavirus pandemic, with the running of NASCAR's 400 miler at Darlington Raceway. Kevin Harvick beat a field of 40 competitors in an eerie setting devoid of spectators and all the usual colorful, noisy hoopla. Harvick, the series points leader, finished three seconds ahead of Alex Bowman to win the series's first race back. Kurt Busch, Chase Elliott and Denny Hamlin rounded out the top five. After scoring his 50th career victory, Harvick, a native of Bakersfield, Calif., celebrated by turning scorching tire burnouts in front of the empty grandstands. "It's dead silent out here," Harvick said, shaking his head. "How weird. We really miss the fans." The event provided NASCAR with a rare opportunity to be pretty much alone in the national spotlight (a charity golf exhibition was also televised on Sunday), to showcase its product to a wider audience and to try to quench fans' thirst for a return to live action events. NASCAR racing is a thunderously loud sport perhaps better suited than some others to minimizing the distractions of cheering fans, mascots, cheerleaders and stadium organists. Racing itself is a tightly focused "man against machine" dynamic, as competitors joust with one another on circuits like the diabolical, oblong 1.366 mile track at Darlington Raceway. The so called Track Too Tough to Tame is considered one of the most treacherous on the circuit.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Sports
'HILMA AF KLINT: PAINTINGS FOR THE FUTURE' at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (through April 23). This rapturous exhibition upends Modernism's holiest genesis tale that the male trinity of Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian invented abstract painting starting in 1913. It demonstrates that a female Swedish artist got there first (1906 7), in great style and a radically bold scale with paintings that feel startlingly contemporary. The mother of all revisionist shows regarding Modernism. (Roberta Smith) 212 423 3500, guggenheim.org 'ARMENIA!' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Jan. 13). The first major museum exhibition ever devoted to the art of Armenia officially its "medieval" era, but in fact spanning nearly 1,500 years bulges with weighty stone crosses, intricate altar frontals and flamboyantly illuminated Bibles and Gospel books unlike any manuscripts you've seen from that time. Armenia, in the Caucasus Mountains, was the first country to convert to Christianity, in the fourth century, and the richly painted religious texts here, lettered in the unique Armenian alphabet, are a testament to the centrality of the church in a nation that would soon be plunged into the world of Islam. By the end of the Middle Ages, Armenian artists were working as far afield as Rome, where an Armenian bishop painted this show's most astounding manuscript: a tale of Alexander the Great that features the Macedonian king's ship swallowed by an enormous brown crab, hooking the sails with its pincers as its mouth gapes. (Jason Farago) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI SCULPTURE: THE FILMS' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Feb. 18). This show is built around works by the Romanian modernist (1876 1957) that have been longtime highlights of the museum's own collection. But in 2018, can Brancusi still release our inner poet? The answer may lie in paying less attention to the sculptures themselves and more to Brancusi's little known and quite amazing films, projected at the entrance to the gallery throughout the duration of the exhibition. MoMA borrowed the series of video clips from the Pompidou Center in Paris. They give the feeling that Brancusi was less interested in making fancy museum objects than in putting new kinds of almost living things into the world, and they convey the vital energy his sculptures were meant to capture. (Blake Gopnik) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'CHAGALL, LISSITZKY, MALEVICH: THE RUSSIAN AVANT GARDE IN VITEBSK, 1918 1922' at the Jewish Museum (through Jan. 6). This crisp and enlightening exhibition, slimmed but not diminished from its initial outing at Paris's Centre Pompidou, restages the instruction, debates and utopian dreaming at the most progressive art school in revolutionary Russia. Marc Chagall encouraged stylistic diversity at the short lived People's Art School in his native Vitebsk (today in the republic of Belarus), and while his dreamlike paintings of smiling workers and flying goats had their defenders, the students came to favor the abstract dynamism of two other professors: Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky, whose black and red squares offered a radical new vision for a new society. Both the romantics and the iconoclasts would eventually fall out of favor in the Soviet Union, and the People's Art School would close in just a few years but this exhibition captures the glorious conviction, too rare today, that art must serve the people. (Farago) 212 423 3200, thejewishmuseum.org 'DELACROIX' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Jan. 6). The first full dress retrospective in North America devoted to the enigmatic giant of French Romanticism is a revelation of nearly 150 paintings, drawings and prints. Their staggering range of often traditional themes from crucifixes to historic battles to rearing, almost kitschy stallions and damsels in distress are belied by a radical use of color and paint that inspires artists still. (Smith) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'DOWN THESE MEAN STREETS: COMMUNITY AND PLACE IN URBAN PHOTOGRAPHY' at El Museo del Barrio (through Jan. 6). This show's title comes from the 1967 autobiography of the New York writer Piri Thomas, a community organizer of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent who grew up in what was then called Spanish Harlem. Five of the show's photographers Frank Espada (1930 2014), Perla de Leon, Hiram Maristany, Winston Vargas and Camilo Jose Vergara took as their beat that neighborhood, or Latino sections of Washington Heights, the South Bronx and Brownsville, Brooklyn. Others were working in Los Angeles. The pictures are a blend of documentary and portraiture. They see what's wrong in the world they record the poverty, the crowding but also the creativity encouraged by having to make do, and the warmth generated by bodies living in affectionate proximity. (Holland Cotter) 212 831 7272, elmuseo.org 'EMPRESSES OF CHINA'S FORBIDDEN CITY' at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass. (through Feb. 10). Every emperor of the Qing dynasty had dozens of wives, concubines and serving girls, but only one of them could hold the title of empress. The lives of women at the late imperial court is the subject of this lavish and learned exhibition, which plots the fortunes of these consorts through their bogglingly intricate silk gowns, hairpins detailed with peacock feathers, and killer platform boots. (The Qing elite were Manchus; women did not bind their feet.) Many empresses' lives are lost to history; some, like the Dowager Empress Cixi, became icons in their own right. Most of the 200 odd dresses, jewels, religious artifacts and scroll paintings here are on rare loan from the Palace Museum in Beijing you will not have a chance to see these again without a trip to the People's Republic. (Farago) 978 745 9500, pem.org 'EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED: ART AND CONSPIRACY' at the Met Breuer (through Jan. 6). A dark, fatalistic exhibition of 30 artists, mostly Americans, examines a country that has lost its grip on the truth. The show's hero is Mike Kelley, who died in 2012. His models and prints here evoke hysterical episodes from the late 1980s and '90s when parents across California accused schools of satanic child abuse; a similar gaze on American unreason animates the art of John Miller, Cady Noland, Jim Shaw and Lutz Bacher. You may be put off by this show's equation of real investigations of wrongdoing in Jenny Holzer's LED displays using declassified Iraq documents with outlandish, often crazed conspiracy theories. What Kelley would say, and what this grimly up to the minute show implies, is that when facts lose their purchase in both art and politics, mental breakdown is the logical outcome. (Farago) 212 731 1675, metmuseum.org 'THE JIM HENSON EXHIBITION' at the Museum of the Moving Image. The rainbow connection has been established in Astoria, Queens, where this museum has opened a new permanent wing devoted to the career of America's great puppeteer, who was born in Mississippi in 1936 and died, too young, in 1990. Henson began presenting the short TV program "Sam and Friends" before he was out of his teens; one of its characters, the soft faced Kermit, was fashioned from his mother's old coat and would not mature into a frog for more than a decade. The influence of early variety television, with its succession of skits and songs, runs through "Sesame Street" and "The Muppet Show," though Henson also spent the late 1960s crafting peace and love documentaries and prototyping a psychedelic nightclub. Young visitors will delight in seeing Big Bird, Elmo, Miss Piggy and the Swedish Chef; adults can dig deep into sketches and storyboards and rediscover some old friends. (Farago) 718 784 0077, movingimage.us 'BODYS ISEK KINGELEZ: CITY DREAMS' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Jan. 1). The first comprehensive survey of the Congolese artist is a euphoric exhibition as utopian wonderland, featuring his fantasy architectural models and cities works strong in color, eccentric in shape, loaded with enthralling details and futuristic aura. Kingelez (1948 2015) was convinced that the world had never seen a vision like his, and this beautifully designed show bears him out. (Smith) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'THE LONG RUN' at the Museum of Modern Art. The museum upends its cherished Modern narrative of ceaseless progress by mostly young (white) men. Instead we see works by artists 45 and older who have just kept on keeping on, regardless of attention or reward, sometimes saving the best for last. Art here is an older person's game, a pursuit of a deepening personal vision over innovation. Winding through 17 galleries, the installation is alternatively visually or thematically acute and altogether inspiring. (Smith) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'SARAH LUCAS: AU NATUREL' at the New Museum (through Jan. 20). Lucas emerged in the 1990s with the YBAs (Young British Artists), a group that included Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin and that didn't focus on a particular medium or style. They were postpunk which is to say, more focused on attitude than aptitude with a Generation X nihilism and malaise, as well as the clear message that anything, artistically, could be borrowed, stolen or sampled. Self portraits are among Lucas's weapons. Instead of sexualized, made up or fantastic portraits, hers are plain, androgynous and deadpan. And this exhibition, with its 150 objects many of them sculptures created in plaster or from women's stockings and tights stuffed with fluff is populated with penises and with cigarettes penetrating buttocks, rather than the breasts and vulvas modern artists have used to demonstrate their edginess. At just the right moment the MeToo moment Lucas shows us what it's like to be a strong, self determined woman; to shape and construct your own world; to live beyond other people's constricting terms; to challenge oppression, sexual dominance and abuse. (Martha Schwendener) 212 219 1222, newmuseum.org 'FRANZ MARC AND AUGUST MACKE: 1909 1914' at Neue Galerie (through Jan. 21). Marc and Macke worked at the forefront of German art in the early 1900s, experimenting with audacious simplifications of forms, infusing colors with spiritual meanings and, in Marc's case, specializing in dreamy portraits of otherworldly animals. With the Russian born Wassily Kandinsky, the two friends also helped found a hugely influential circle of Munich painters known as the Blue Rider. But this dizzying, overstuffed exhibit at the Neue Galerie ends abruptly: Both men were killed in combat in World War I, Marc at 36 and Macke at only 27. (Will Heinrich) 212 628 6200, neuegalerie.org 'BRUCE NAUMAN: DISAPPEARING ACTS' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Feb. 18) and MoMA PS1 (through Feb. 25). If art isn't basically about life and death, and the emotions and ethics they inspire, what is it about? Style? Taste? Auction results? The most interesting artists go right for the big, uncool existential stuff, which is what Bruce Nauman does in a transfixing half century retrospective that fills the entire sixth floor of MoMA and much of MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, Queens. The MoMA installation is tightly paced and high decibel; the one at PS1, which includes a trove of works on paper, is comparatively mellow and mournful. Each location offers a rough chronological overview of his career, but catching both parts of the show is imperative. Nauman has changed the way we define what art is and what is art, and made work prescient of the morally wrenching American moment we're in. He deserves to be seen in full. (Cotter) 212 708 9400, moma.org 718 784 2084, momaps1.org 'LILIANA PORTER: OTHER SITUATIONS' at El Museo del Barrio (through Jan. 27). This exquisite survey of 35 objects, installations and video by this Argentinian born American artist covers nearly half a century, but feels unanchored by time and gravity. In pieces from the early 1970s, Porter adds spare pencil lines to a photographs of her own face as if to challenge optical perception: Which is more real, the artist or the artist's mark? Later, she began assembling and photographing groups of toys and figurines found in flea markets and antique shops to tease out political puzzles. And despite a witty use of miniaturist scale, cruelty and loss run through the work. In the 2009 video "Matinee," tabletop statuettes live tragic lives: A ceramic child is suddenly beheaded by a hammer. (Cotter) 212 831 7272, elmuseo.org 'POSING MODERNITY: THE BLACK MODEL FROM MANET AND MATISSE TO TODAY' at Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University (through Feb. 10). This landmark show uses a new lens on 19th century French art history. Progressiveness both artistic and social is measured by the way black women are depicted in the paintings of the period; this yardstick is also applied to subsequent generations of European, American and African artists. A revelatory thesis, brilliantly executed. (Smith) 212 854 6800, wallach.columbia.edu 'THE PROGRESSIVE REVOLUTION: MODERN ART FOR A NEW INDIA' at Asia Society (through Jan. 20). The first show in the United States in decades devoted to postwar Indian painting continues a welcome, belated effort in Western museums to globalize art history after 1945. The Progressive Artists' Group, founded in Bombay (now Mumbai) in the afterglow of independence, sought a new painterly language for a new India, making use of hot color and melding folk traditions with high art. These painters were Hindus, Muslims and Catholics, and they drew freely from Picasso and Klee, Rajasthani architecture and Zen ink painting, in their efforts to forge art for a secular, pluralist republic. Looking at them 70 years on, as India joins so many other countries taking a nativist turn, they offer a lovely, regret tinged view of a lost horizon. (Farago) 212 288 6400, asiasociety.org/new york 'SCENES FROM THE COLLECTION' at the Jewish Museum. After a surgical renovation to its grand pile on Fifth Avenue, the Jewish Museum has reopened its third floor galleries with a rethought, refreshed display of its permanent collection, which intermingles 4,000 years of Judaica with modern and contemporary art by Jews and gentiles alike Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman and the excellent young Nigerian draftswoman Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze. The works are shown in a nimble, nonchronological suite of galleries, and some of its century spanning juxtapositions are bracing; others feel reductive, even dilettantish. But always, the Jewish Museum conceives of art and religion as interlocking elements of a story of civilization, commendably open to new influences and new interpretations. (Farago) 212 423 3200, thejewishmuseum.org 'SOUL OF A NATION: ART IN THE AGE OF BLACK POWER' at the Brooklyn Museum (through Feb. 3). It will be a happy day when racial harmony rules in the land. But that day's not arriving any time soon. Who could have guessed in the 1960s when civil rights became law that a new century would bring white supremacy tiki torching out of the closet and turn the idea that black lives matter, so beyond obvious, into a battle cry? Actually, African Americans were able to see such things coming. No citizens know the national narrative, and its implacable racism, better. And no artists have responded to that history that won't go away more powerfully than black artists have. More than 60 of them appear in this big, beautiful, passionate show of art that functioned as seismic detector, political persuader and defensive weapon. (Cotter) 718 638 8000, brooklynmuseum.org 'THROUGH A DIFFERENT LENS: STANLEY KUBRICK PHOTOGRAPHS' at the Museum of the City of New York (through Jan. 6). This exhibition of the great director's photography is essentially Kubrick before he became Kubrick. Starting in 1945, when he was 17 and living in the Bronx, he worked as a photographer for Look magazine, and the topics he explored are chestnuts so old that they smell a little moldy: lovers embracing on a park bench as their neighbors gaze ostentatiously elsewhere, patients anxiously awaiting their doctor's appointments, boxing hopefuls in the ring, celebrities at home, pampered dogs in the city. It probably helped that Kubrick was just a kid, so instead of inducing yawns, these magazine perennials struck him as novelties, and he in turn brought something fresh to them. Photographs that emphasize the mise en scene could be movie stills: a shouting circus executive who takes up the right side of the foreground while aerialists rehearse in the middle distance, a boy climbing to a roof with the city tenements surrounding him, a subway car filled with sleeping passengers. Looking at these pictures, you want to know what comes next. (Arthur Lubow) 212 534 1672, mcny.org 'TOWARD A CONCRETE UTOPIA: ARCHITECTURE IN YUGOSLAVIA, 1948 1980' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Jan. 13). This nimble, continuously surprising show tells one of the most underappreciated stories of postwar architecture: the rise of avant garde government buildings, pie in the sky apartment blocks, mod beachfront resorts and even whole new cities in the southeast corner of Europe. Tito's Yugoslavia rejected both Stalinism and liberal democracy, and its neither nor political position was reflected in architecture of stunning individuality, even as it embodied collective ambitions that Yugoslavs called the "social standard." From Slovenia, where elegant office buildings drew on the tradition of Viennese modernism, to Kosovo, whose dome topped national library appears as a Buckminster Fuller fever dream, these impassioned buildings defy all our Cold War vintage stereotypes of Eastern Europe. Sure, in places the show dips too far into Socialist chic. But this is exactly how MoMA should be thinking as it rethinks its old narratives for its new home next year. (Farago) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'ANDY WARHOL FROM A TO B AND BACK AGAIN' at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through March 31) and 'SHADOWS' at Calvin Klein Headquarters, 205 W. 39th Street (through Dec. 15). Although this is the artist's first full American retrospective in 31 years, he's been so much with us in museums, galleries, auctions as to make him, like wallpaper, like the atmosphere, only half noticed. The Whitney show restores him to a full, commanding view, but does so in a carefully shaped and edited way, with an emphasis on very early and late work. Despite the show's monumentalizing size, supplemented by an off site display of the enormous multipanel painting called "Shadows," it's a human scale Warhol we see. Largely absent is the artist entrepreneur who is taken as a prophet of our market addled present. What we have instead is Warhol for whom art, whatever else it was, was an expression of personal hopes and fears. (Cotter) 212 570 3600, whitney.orgdiaart.org 'CHARLES WHITE: A RETROSPECTIVE' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Jan. 13). What a beautiful artist White was. Hand of an angel, eye of a sage. Although White, who died in 1979, is often mentioned today as a teacher and mentor of luminaries like David Hammons and Kerry James Marshall, his is no case of reflected glory. In this career survey, he shines, from a 1939 mural called "Five Great American Negroes" to his astonishing late masterpiece "Black Pope (Sandwich Board Man)." (Cotter) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'DIANE ARBUS, UNTITLED' at David Zwirner (through Dec. 15). Departing significantly from the work that built Arbus's reputation, the photographs in this series, taken at an all female institution in Vineland, N.J., include some of the most mysterious, haunting pictures of her 15 year artistic career. Arbus arrived at two great insights. The first was that it would be more poignant to show her subjects happy. Her second brilliant stroke was to photograph outdoors, amid trees and fields, scrubbing off the institutional settings and entering the realm of dream and myth. One of Arbus's lifetime quests was to expose what she called the "flaw," a telltale detail that reveals the crack between the way people wish to present themselves and how they actually are seen. In the "Untitled" series, she was dealing with subjects devoid of guile. For an artist who had deployed a battery of strategies to coax sitters into dropping their masks, it was novel to photograph people who revealed their unguarded selves. One of the towering achievements of American art, this series reminds us that nothing can surpass the strange beauty of reality if a photographer knows where to look. And how to look. (Lubow) 212 727 2070, davidzwirner.com 'CROWNS OF THE VAJRA MASTERS: RITUAL ART OF NEPAL' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Dec. 16). Up a narrow staircase, above the Met's galleries of South and Southeast Asian art, are three small rooms of art from the Himalayas. The space, a bit like a treehouse, is a capsule of spiritual energy, which is especially potent these days thanks to this exhibition. The crowns of the title look like antique versions of astronaut headgear: gilded copper helmets, studded with gems, encrusted with repousse plaques and topped by five pronged antennas the vajra, or thunderbolt of wisdom. Such crowns were believed to turn their wearers into perfected beings who are willing and able to bestow blessings on the world. This show is the first to focus on these crowns, and it does so with a wealth of compressed historical information, as well as several resplendent related sculptures and paintings from Nepal and Tibet. But it's the crowns themselves, the real ones, the wisdom generators, set in mandala formation in the center of the gallery, that are the fascinators. (Cotter) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'RICHARD PRINCE: HIGH TIMES' at the Gagosian Gallery (through Dec. 19). A leading member of the 1980s Pictures Generation and the founder of photo based appropriation art takes a hard right toward the genre's enemy: Neo Expressionist painting. He appropriates from himself for a change, making canvases that are partly painted, partly photo based and all collage. The result is an unusually self revealing show, especially when you factor in the 16 de Kooning catalogs vandalized into hybrid collaborations; the fictive, mad bibliophile library; and a catalog to die for. (Smith) 212 741 1717, gagosian.com
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Art & Design
Anna Haight Grummon and Hunt Volney Allcott were married Aug. 18 at Pinecrest Chalet, a resort in Pinecrest, Calif. Elizabeth Allcott St. Clair, the groom's sister, officiated, having become a Universal Life minister for the occasion. Ms. Grummon, 29, is a doctoral candidate in health behavior at the University of North Carolina's Gillings School of Global Public Health, in Chapel Hill. She studies nutrition policy, including how policies such as soda taxes, food warning labels and nutrition assistance programs affect diets and health. She graduated with distinction from Stanford. She is a daughter of Phyllis T. H. Grummon and David S. Grummon of East Lansing, Mich. The bride's father retired as a professor of materials science at Michigan State University and is now a metallurgical consultant. Her mother retired as the director for planning and education at the Society for College and University Planning in Ann Arbor, Mich. In 2001, the bride's mother was one of 12 women who skied 60 miles from what was then the Barneo Ice Station to the North Pole as part of the WomenQuest Polar Trek. Dr. Allcott, 37, is an associate professor of economics at N.Y.U. and is working as a principal researcher, in Cambridge, Mass., for the research division of Microsoft, the software company. He studies how psychological factors affect human behavior, and what this means for business and public policy. He also graduated from Stanford, and received a doctoral degree in public policy from Harvard. He is the son of Elizabeth Hunt Allcott and Dr. John V. Allcott III of Eugene, Ore. The groom's mother retired as a psychologist in private practice in Eugene, and was also a psychotherapist in Eugene for Amigos de los Sobrevivientes, which provides support to Latin American immigrants. His father is a primary care physician in private practice in Eugene, and was a recipient in 2017 of the Nobel Peace Laureate Project's "Inspirer of Peace" award for his dedication to peaceful community education. The couple met in August 2013, shortly after Mr. Allcott moved to Berkeley, Calif., and joined a track practice of the San Francisco Road Runners Club. Ms. Grummon was also at the workout, and the two soon found themselves talking. "We had a funny six week period where we would get dinner afterward," Ms. Grummon said. "It would always be casual. He'd say, 'Who's hungry?' But only the two of us would go."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Fashion & Style
The choreographer Alexei Ratmansky is 45. It's safe to say that no choreographer in history at that age has made such pervasive inroads into the international ballet repertory. He has now created ballets for the leading companies of America, Australia, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands and his native Russia. Most of those troupes, shopping around in the global supermarket of dance today, have also acquired other works of his. In 2013, he had no fewer than seven world premieres in five cities on three continents. It becomes increasingly evident that he is the most prolific choreographer alive, the most travel hungry and the most historically conscious. It's over five years since he moved to the West. In 2008, he left his post as artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet of Moscow and signed up as artist in residence at American Ballet Theater. While pursuing his phenomenal freelance career around the world from 2009 to 2013, he created 10 works for Ballet Theater; at least six of them have been acquired by other companies. Yet he has grown only harder to assess; and some of his recent works, though skillful, have looked peculiarly anonymous, as if inhibited by an anxiety to conform to older ballet archetypes. And what's oddest is how often he is drawn to choreographic genres that are old fashioned or unfashionable or just ill advised. The rhythms of Shostakovich's music don't easily lend themselves to dance continuity; the critic Arlene Croce wrote in 1966 that "every ballet I have seen to a Shostakovich score has been bad." Mr. Ratmansky, however, has returned to Shostakovich again and again, in some cases achieving his greatest successes notably "The Bright Stream" (2003), "Concerto DSCH" (2008) and the "Shostakovich Trilogy" (2012 13). "The Bright Stream" is also an example of a more awkward genre: the Soviet agitprop ballet, which celebrates the supposed idyll of the collective farm. Though Mr. Ratmansky's "Shostakovich Trilogy" contains a wealth of dance, it doesn't respond to its three concert hall scores in the dance led way many ballets have since the breakthrough 1940s symphonic ballets of George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton. Instead, with its strong suggestions of an expressionistic scenario, it's a throwback to another genre the symbolic symphonic 1930s ballets of Leonide Massine, once world conquering but now bombastic and outmoded. Balanchine and Ashton, though each made a few pieces based on novels or plays, in general worked hard against "the literary ballet": the genre that gave you, in dance terms, the outlines of great books or plays while omitting the elements that made the originals great (and also omitted dancing all too often). Mr. Ratmansky, however, plunges ardently into this awkward genre in his "Anna Karenina" (2010) and "The Tempest" (2013). I can say his versions of these literary works are way superior to any others of my experience, but that's not saying much. I'd still rather not have seen any of them. (Remember Anne Bancroft's "Anna Karenina" solo in the film "The Turning Point"?) Currently, the Ratmansky ballet that's going around in my head is his "Nutcracker" (2010); Ballet Theater ended its 2013 calendar with 12 performances of this at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It was the production's fourth consecutive year there, and the one in which it finally claimed an enthusiastic audience; waves of applause often burst through the music (not just during the engaging but too showy pas de deux). Here he takes an approach to "Nutcracker" I don't care for the child heroine becomes the ballerina of the Sugar Plum pas de deux but makes it imaginative and touching. The production also shows how subtly Mr. Ratmansky builds on the achievements of past masters. The notorious virtuoso step of the late 19th century was the fouette turn, often performed 32 times on one leg. In "La Fille Mal Gardee" (1960), Ashton made his heroine do a trickier version, turning on alternating legs fouette en dehors on the left leg, fouette en dedans on the right leg. (It's the lower body equivalent of a tongue twister like "She sells seashells on the seashore.") Well, the coda of the Ratmansky "Nutcracker" has five women (the Nutcracker's sisters) doing these alternating turns in unison. They execute each pair of turns facing in a new direction (downstage, left, upstage, right, downstage again). This connection to history pervades Mr. Ratmansky's work, in ways good and bad. Though his "24 Preludes," set to Chopin pieces arranged for orchestra by Jean Francaix, was the first piece he'd created for the Royal Ballet, its use of rich upper body elasticity and crisp footwork showed a stronger stylistic connection to the work of Ashton, the company's founder choreographer, than any choreography of the past 30 years. A problem, however, was how the piece's structure and tone also looked deliberately derivative of Jerome Robbins's Chopin ballets. In this first Ratmansky creation for the Royal, there was far less sign of originality than of his uncanny ability to clone his forebears. Even so, the sheer danciness of his best items stays irresistible. In his "Nutcracker," you can't miss the pouncing assemble jumps (knees bent) that are the ballet's chief motif; they're especially memorable in the Snowflake scene. In the work's Arabian dance, I love the soft retreat by the four harem wives, with a phrase of several steps on point alternating with several on flat foot. In the Waltz of the Flowers, the 16 floral women respond to the four male bees with a delicious phrase of three different ports de bras that suggests sensuous infatuation. His "Romeo and Juliet" for the National Ballet of Canada is patchy, but the steps he gives the men are intoxicating. Two ingredients in his stage worlds are charm and humanity. While he creates marvelous roles for women and vividly affecting male female pas de deux, he avoids the sublime ballerina type known from Marius Petipa and Balanchine. His characters, closer to those of Ashton and Robbins, are often like people we know: vulnerable, fallible, funny, self contradictory. Other "Nutcrackers" have shown the heroine turn into a mature ballerina, but only he reveals the self amazed girl within the splendid princess, or the Nutcracker doll still within the ardent hero. For all the cultural and stylistic complexity that underlies his pieces, the best features of Mr. Ratmansky's works are beautifully simple: His ballets create persuasive stage worlds, and he can be as "The Little Humpbacked Horse" proved when the Mariinsky Ballet danced it in New York in 2011 the most enchanting storyteller in dance today. The most original parts of his "Nutcracker" and "Firebird" for Ballet Theater belong with the best children's fiction of this century. Both works are psychological and phantasmagoric journeys. In the many ballets he has made to Russian music from Tchaikovsky to Leonid Desyatnikov, but especially in his response to scores by Prokofiev and Shostakovich, Mr. Ratmansky's abiding subject often seems to be a Russia of the imagination. "The Bright Stream," "Concerto DSCH," "On the Dnieper" and the "Shostakovich Trilogy" all recreate aspects of this other Russia the country that 20th century Russian artists constructed either because they were in exile in the West, or because the Stalinist regime turned real life there into an affair of drastic cultural repression. Meanwhile, the schedules of Russia's two foremost ballet troupes make it look as if he's never left his native land. In January, the Mariinsky Ballet in St. Petersburg dances "Concerto DSCH" and three full length ballets he has created for the company: "Cinderella," "Humpbacked Horse" and "Anna Karenina." For a week, through Friday, the Bolshoi shows his "Lost Illusions" (an adaptation of Balzac's novel with a commissioned score by Mr. Desyatnikov) at the Paris Opera; then it performs it back in Moscow in repertory with "The Bright Stream" and, again, "Concerto." In February, it revives his full length "Flames of Paris." On Feb. 2, it presents a performance of "Lost Illusions" as a live HD broadcast. Who can keep track of this one man global industry? The British use the expression "a curate's egg"; when the proverbial curate was asked his opinion of the egg he was eating, he replied "good in parts." Alas, almost every Ratmansky ballet is a curate's egg. In "Anna Karenina" and "The Tempest," the good parts are too few and too peripheral. In "The Bright Stream," "Russian Seasons," "Humpbacked Horse," "The Nutcracker," "Dumbarton" and "Symphony 9," the weak aspects are merely regrettable blips. The sums of the parts of "Namouna, a Grand Divertissement," "Chamber Symphony" and "Piano Concerto 1" each add up differently with different casts and viewings. Only "Concerto DSCH" seems flawless. Like every choreographer of note, he's learned from Balanchine; but it's impressive that, with all his capacity for historical mimicry, he never clones him. You can feel him invoking ballet styles from elsewhere; and in an era when Balanchine has become more influential than he was during his lifetime, this itself enriches the scene. Perhaps the best Ratmansky news is that he seems to have no premiere lined up for several months. It's impossible not to wish this busy artist more time than he gives himself. Yet I find myself impatient to know what premieres he will next give New York. His flaws I have not named them all remain vexing; but he has rejuvenated, enriched and enlarged the ballet world, not least in America. We're lucky to have an artist so diverse and so abundant.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Dance
new video loaded: Ride a Weather Balloon Into (Near) Space
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Science
In a move that may enrage those who enjoy a cigarette on their couch after work, but delight air freshener wielding neighbors, a major landlord has banned smoking in all of its apartments across the country. As of this month, the Related Companies has decided that tenants can no longer light up in the 40,000 rental units it owns or manages. The edict, which builds on an effort that began for Related with a handful of its New York buildings in 2009, is meant to create healthier living conditions, company officials said. Although the program will roll out gradually, it appears to be the first of this scale by a national property owner. It also seems likely to create controversy. Where past efforts against smoking have focused on public gathering places like bars, stadiums and courthouses Related is now trying to prohibit legal private behavior. Not that smokers will get kicked to the curb right away. New tenants must sign a contract promising not to smoke anywhere in the building, including their private terraces or balconies. If they break the rules, they can be evicted. But those already renting will not face the same fate until after they renew their leases and sign the no smoking contract. With a turnover rate of 10,000 a year, Related's apartments could conceivably be smoke free in a few years' time. Critics point out that tenants could always lie about their habit, and hide it successfully. Also, it can be very difficult to evict tenants especially those whose rents are regulated, as they have strong protections and guaranteed lease renewals. But some smokers and even nonsmokers worry about privacy infringement and say Related is overreaching. "It's just mean," said Polina Skoch, a resident of Related's One Union Square South, who smokes half a pack of Marlboros a day. Even though she signed her lease earlier and is out of the immediate line of fire, Ms. Skoch said she worried about the "Big Brother" vibe that the changes could facilitate, because Related will mostly rely on neighbors to report on neighbors. "I thought it couldn't get any worse when the city banned smoking in parks," she added. But Jeffrey I. Brodsky, the president of Related Management, says people can't expect such freedoms in an apartment building, where resources are shared. "It's not unlike somebody playing their tuba at two in the morning and compromising their neighbors' efforts to enjoy their apartments," he said. "There's an expectation of certain behavior." As for the increasingly trendy smokeless cigarettes, Related says that because they don't emit plumes, they aren't banned although "we reserve our right to adjust our program if they become known as hazardous to others," a spokeswoman wrote in an e mail. Related's condominiums won't be affected. Many studies have proved that secondhand smoke, which is cited as the reason for most smoking bans, is a health hazard. What's less obvious is how much smoke actually seeps from one apartment to the next. In New York last year, for instance, the 311 complaint line received 1,340 calls about smoke from other apartments. To put that in perspective, calls to 311 last year totaled 19.4 million, and 127,607 of them were complaints about noise from neighbors, officials said. At the same time, fewer adults are smoking in New York. In 2002, according to the city health department, the rate was 22 percent; in 2011 it was 15 percent. Whether the cause of that decline or just a coincidence, a raft of policies in the last decade have greatly limited where people can smoke. In New York, smoking was snuffed out in restaurants in 2002 and on beaches and in city parks in 2011; last year, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said he wanted every building, including co ops and condos, to draft a smoking policy, whether pro or con, which some saw as encouraging bans on apartment smoking. The mayor also hopes to set limits on who can smoke: in April, officials unveiled a plan to raise the age limit for cigarette purchases to 21 from 18. On some of its tactics, New York City has company. In recent years several cities and towns in California have banned smoking in apartments; San Rafael did so last fall. And in Sacramento this spring, a bill was introduced to ban smoking in multifamily housing statewide although it was scuttled by concerns about the feasibility of enforcement. But the fact remains that not everybody is convinced the only way to deal with smoking complaints is to ban smoking. Donald Erwin, a principal of Erwin Bielinski, an architecture and engineering firm, said a minor renovation might be enough to remedy secondhand smoke. Some property managers, too, favor a less extreme approach than bans, like air purification systems, said Enid Hamelin, a spokeswoman for Lawrence Properties, which manages 65 buildings in New York. "Whether it's ethnic cooking, candles or incense," Ms. Hamelin said, "we handle it the same way. You try very hard to avoid people getting emotional, try to handle it as Solomon esque as you can." Since 2009, when Related began its antismoking program at TriBeCa Green in Battery Park City and the Sierra in Chelsea, courts have generally supported the legality of smoking bans in apartment buildings, lawyers say. With market rate units, landlords can kick smokers out simply by deciding not to renew leases. But Related's buildings have many rent regulated units, including more than 4,000 in New York. Lawyers said protections like guaranteed lease renewals would make it difficult to evict smokers from these kinds of affordable apartments. So far, at least, bans have rarely led to evictions. There haven't been any in the dozens of buildings managed by Pan Am Equities since it imposed a smoking ban in 2008, said David Iwanier, a vice president of the company. Only a single person has left 1510 Lexington Avenue, owned by Kenbar Management in East Harlem, where smoking is banned not only in the apartments but also on adjacent sidewalks, said Kinne Yon, a Kenbar principal. But that person, a cigar smoker, moved out voluntarily after just a few days, and got his security deposit back, Ms. Yon said. Both Mr. Iwanier and Ms. Yon acknowledged, however, that smokers may avoid their buildings in the first place. Co ops are like rentals, in that rules can be passed by a majority of the co op board, although a ban attempted by Lincoln Towers, the 452 unit Upper West Side complex, failed in 2002. Condos are trickier, because bans usually require a change in bylaws, which means two thirds of residents need to approve them. "And good luck getting a group of New Yorkers to agree on anything," said Adam Leitman Bailey, a real estate lawyer who has handled several smoking cases. He added that if a building has unsold units controlled by the developer, who gets a vote for each one of them, the developer may decide to vote against a ban, so as not to limit the buyer pool. Still, the 32 story Ariel West, a condo on the Upper West Side, banned smoking in 2011. Fines are 150 for the first offense and go up by 150 for each one that follows. And last winter, the 98 unit One Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn banned smoking in all spaces except for private terraces and its roof. This spring, after a few years of deliberation, Zeckendorf Towers, a 670 unit full block development at Union Square, also put a ban in place, staking a claim as the largest apartment complex in the country to do so. And with that kind of momentum on its side, Related is also acting in a favorable economic climate. Vacancy rates are low in many cities, which means that even limiting the applicant pool should not hurt the company's ability to fill up its buildings. During the recession, demand slackened everywhere, which delayed rollout of the initial ban. "There were a lot of other exigencies in the marketplace for a while," Mr. Brodsky said. Under the plan, Related will also ban smoking in its new rental buildings; one of them, 500 West 30th Street at 10th Avenue, a 386 unit rental, is to open next year in the Hudson Yards neighborhood. Outside New York, soon to be completed projects include Ocean Avenue South in Santa Monica, Calif.; 111 West Wacker Drive in Chicago; and 100 Arlington Street in Boston. Whether smokers will decide to quit in order to live in a Related building, or simply go somewhere else, remains to be seen. But Mark Panzarino, an artist who also lives at One Union Square South, strongly supports what his landlord is doing. "Coming here and wanting to smoke would be like asking for meat at a vegetarian restaurant," he said. "It's just something you're not allowed to do."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Real Estate
Carlo Levi's memoir, "Christ Stopped at Eboli," was a literary sensation in post Fascist Italy. First published in 1945, the book is Levi's memorable account of life among impoverished Italian villagers in the 1930s. Three decades later, an immersive and engaging film adaptation directed by Francesco Rosi enshrined the book's underlying neorealist credo giving voice to the voiceless. Originally made for Italian television as a 220 minute mini series, Rosi's "Christ Stopped at Eboli" was shown in the United States in 1980 at approximately half its length and under the title "Eboli." Considering the significance of the book and the stature of the director, the American theatrical premiere of the full version, now at Film Forum, is an event. Levi, a painter, doctor and man of letters in his native Turin, was forced into exile in the southern hinterlands as a punishment for his anti Fascist activities. In the mid 1930s, as Italy prepared to invade Ethiopia, he was sent to a small town he calls Gagliano; his account of his yearlong stay there was written years later, in Florence, while he was hiding from the Gestapo. The book's title comes from a local saying about Gagliano's isolation: Eboli is the last station on the train from the north; not even Christ cared to venture this far south. "Christ Stopped at Eboli" was published the year World War II ended. At the same time, Roberto Rossellini's "Rome, Open City" heralded a new naturalistic Italian cinema, and like that movie, Levi's memoir was an international success. A front page essay in The New York Times Book Review described it as sui generis, by turns "a diary, an album of sketches, a novelette, a sociological study and a political essay." Rosi gives "Eboli" a more straightforward narrative, juxtaposing everyday fascism with Gagliano's archaic ways, a populist historical pageant where modernity meets the medieval ages.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Movies
You know that classic high school movie scene in which the cafeteria is broken down into cliques? The jocks, the nerds, the goths, the band geeks? I can't speak to the other cliques, but within marching band there are further distinctions. Each section has a reputation based loosely on the personality types drawn to certain instruments and the parts they play on the field. Trumpets generally own the melody, so the section attracts people who want to be the center of attention, at least musically. The perfectionist woodwinds piccolos, flutes, clarinets and saxophones are invariably drowned out by the brass section, meaning their dedication to musicianship doesn't rely on recognition. (They also might be the most likely to disagree with these categorizations, but blanket stereotypes are never quite accurate in the movies either.) Color guard is flashy, and the drum line is most apt to steal the show with solos. Both groups count as the " cool kids," to the extent that anyone in marching band can be cool. (The 2002 classic "Drumline," starring Nick Cannon, and thousands of TikTok videos testify to this.) Then there are the tubas. Tubas play the bass line. They're essential but usually relegated to the background. They tend to be pretty chill, maybe because no one really chooses to play tuba; it's a heavy instrument that sounds weird and looks goofy. Circumstance is what makes a tubist. At least that's how I, one of 4,735 freshmen who enrolled at U.C.L.A. in the fall of 2008, became a tuba player. From the day I started playing euphonium in 5th grade through my senior year of high school, music and band had been the foundation of my social life. Still, I wasn't sure if that would be the best way to transition from a small, Catholic all girls school to U.C.L.A. which, by comparison, has tens of thousands of students. I didn't formally decide to join until the tail end of the summer before my freshman year, when I received a recruitment postcard written by a Tuba Girl. There were 26 tubas while I was in band. But the Tuba Girls, a foursome who were two years ahead of me, were a fierce unit who had created a mini sisterhood within a fairly masculine section. Because of them I joined the marching band sorority (yes, it's a thing) and because of them I stuck with band when I got discouraged. Because of them I met the people who've remained my closest friends. And before all that, they were the ones who welcomed me to band camp my freshman year, and who helped teach me how to march carrying 40 pounds of metal. They were saints about it too because, and I cannot stress this enough, I wasn't very good at it. While I'd been playing brass instruments for years, tuba parts are written in bass clef; I'd only ever read treble clef. Worse, I was a horrible marcher. I have bad depth perception, a distinct lack of coordination and an inability to multitask a disastrous combination when you need to remember dozens of series of movements (16 steps backward, 12 across, four giant steps forward) while playing music, avoiding other people in your path and not being distracted by a crowd. I very quickly became an alternate my first year, and again my second year. The days could be long. There was always a lot of yelling. Mistakes during shows weren't brushed off; they were outlined in detail over a loud speaker at the next rehearsal. Somewhere on the internet there's a video of the top half of my tuba falling onto my face during a performance, and I'll always be grateful to the section leader who shielded me from a public roasting by our band director. But I was also exposed to many new things through band, including a lot of music I'd never heard before. There was the '60s themed halftime show where we all dressed up in tie dye shirts and played "Age of Aquarius" by The Fifth Dimension, "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane, "Hello, I Love You" by The Doors and "Pinball Wizard" by The Who. We did a jazz themed show, a "West Side Story" show, a funk show and plenty that weren't as memorable. My favorite, hands down, was the Muse show. (Yeah, football is cool, but have you ever rocked out to "Knights of Cydonia" in the Rose Bowl?) These days, my actual connection to marching band is limited. I don't play tuba anymore, and I haven't been to a college football game in nearly a decade. Even my deep, personal investment in U.C.L.A.'s rivalry with the University of Southern California has settled down. Earlier this summer, I spent some time on enemy territory, at the U.S.C. campus, talking to the marching band students during band camp and hanging out with them during a game at the Coliseum. It was very familiar, though the color scheme was different. Marching band lives on in my life through the people I met along the way. In every city I've lived in since graduating from college, marching band people have been the core of my friend group. They've been my international travel partners, my roommates and the main reason for the bulk of my wedding travel. When you're playing in the band at a big game, some part of you knows, logically, that no one is there to see you. Yes, the band has fans, but it generally performs during breaks from the main sporting attraction. We play for drunk tailgaters while they eat lunch. We perform the pregame show while sports fans make their way to their seats. The half time show happens when the TV networks cut to analysis and fans wait in food and restroom lines. Most people don't stick around for the postgame show. But that's O.K. The football part never mattered much to me, anyway.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Style
This Preacher Would Be Happy to Share Your Bowl of Acai LOS ANGELES On a strip of Wilshire Boulevard, not far from where the rapper Notorious B.I.G. was gunned down in a drive by shooting some 20 years ago, a black plastic pool had been placed on the sidewalk outside the El Rey Theater. It was a balmy December afternoon, and the theater had been transformed into an assembly for Zoe Church, a two and a half year old evangelical congregation that got its start in a nightclub on Sunset Boulevard. Today was Baptism Sunday and nearly a dozen adults signed up, cheered on by a crowd of mostly 20 somethings who were gathered behind a metal barricade. Chad Veach, the 38 year old founder of Zoe, who moved to West Los Angeles from Seattle in 2014, chewed gum as he danced to a pop gospel playlist blaring overhead. "Let's go!" he shouted, clapping. A pair of muscular men dunked a woman in the waist high water. She surfaced, arms pumping the air, as a friend snapped photographs that were later posted on Instagram. One man behind the barricade was so moved that he called for the preacher to purify his soul right then. He slipped a black Zoe T shirt over his jeans, covered his nose and waded into the pool. Afterward, he looked dazed, swaddled in a black towel. Mr. Veach has many neighbors. Hillsong, the Australian granddaddy of them all, arrived in Los Angeles in 2014, taking over a theater downtown. Seattle's Churchome, formerly known as the City Church, has an outpost in Beverly Hills. Mosaic, a homegrown megachurch, has three churches, including in Pasadena and Venice. Zoe resides somewhere in between, within the Miracle Mile, a neighborhood nickname derived from retail that now seems newly apt. Mr. Veach has eagerly embraced his adopted city. Nearly 1,600 people show up for his weekly services. He recently started Zoe TV on a YouTube channel. In 2017, he published, "Faith Forward Future: Moving Past Your Disappointments, Delays and Destructive Thinking," which was promoted on Instagram by the actor Chris Pratt, a Zoe regular. And Mr. Veach is a 24 hour a day presence on Instagram: photographed at the gym or beach, singing car karaoke with the pop star Justin Bieber, watching the Lakers, even waiting for the valet. "Instagram built our church," he said one afternoon at his office here a block from the El Rey Theater. "Isn't that fascinating?" Mr. Veach believes he can save souls by being the hip and happy go lucky preacher, the one you want to share a bowl of acai with at Backyard Bowls on Beverly Boulevard, who declines to publicly discuss politics in the Trump era because it's hard to minister if no one wants to come to church. Jesus is supposed to be fun, right? "I want to be loud and dumb," Mr. Veach said with a wide, toothy grin. "That's my goal. If we aren't making people laugh, what are we doing? What is the point?" The pastor changes his dialect depending on his audience. He sometimes mimics the Texas twang of Joel Osteen, the televangelist and a friend who runs one of the largest megachurches in the country. Recently interviewed by the journalist and activist Maria Shriver, Mr. Veach sounded nearly professorial. Most of the time, though, he uses so called street talk. ("Whaddup dawg!") It is a holdover, he said, from the early 2000s when he was a youth minister in East Los Angeles. (He graduated in 2002 from Bible college in San Dimas.) His father, Dave Veach, an administrator with Foursquare Church in Tacoma, Wash., who oversees more than 200 congregations, has a theory about all this. "A 38 year old pastor," he said, "is four years away from saying, 'I have tried on this person, and this person, and, now, I will find my voice.'" The Veach family lived on Whidbey Island, Wash., about 40 miles from Seattle, where Dave Veach ran a small church and ministered mostly to people who worked at a nearby naval air station. Chad's two siblings are pastors. As a teenager, Chad exhibited easy charm, his father said, but mostly wanted to enjoy himself. "He wasn't solid in his faith at all," Dave said. He said he told his son then, "You are going to take a lot of people to heaven or hell, and you have to decide where you are taking them." In 2004, Chad moved to Puyallup, Wash., where he counseled teens and young adults at the United Generation ministry. He married the former Julia McGregor, who also grew up in a pastor's home, in 2008. In 2013, he began working for Judah Smith, who became well known after taking over the leadership of Churchome in 2009, a megachurch started by Mr. Smith's father, Wendell. Mr. Smith is a spiritual adviser to Mr. Bieber, who credits Christianity with turning around his personal life. Last summer, Mr. Smith and Mr. Veach joined Mr. Bieber for part of his "Purpose" tour. "I think he wanted, ugh, I hate to use this word, but 'positive influences,'" said Julia Veach of Mr. Bieber. Mr. Veach was there when Mr. Bieber performed at the Stade De Suisse Wankdorf in Bern, Switzerland. After the show, they drove a couple of hours to Mr. Bieber's hotel. He posted a video of them singing in his room, while Mr. Smith howled in pain in the background. He was getting a tattoo. This was not a frivolous gesture. The Veaches have four children, and one of them, Georgia (born in 2012), suffers from lissencephaly, called "smooth brain" disorder because the folds of the brain don't develop. (It is the subject of Mr. Veach's 2016 book, "Unreasonable Hope: Finding Faith in the God Who Brings Purpose to Your Pain.") After Mr. Veach got a "G" tattoo in 2013 to honor his daughter, others got a similar marking, including Mr. Bieber and the model Hailey Baldwin. In Bern, Mr. Bieber had scribbled "Better at 70" in big letters on a piece a paper, and he, Mr. Veach and Mr. Smith agreed to tattoo the sentiment about age and wisdom on their thighs. "I'm watching this and I go, 'I don't want that the rest of my life,'" Mr. Veach recalled. When Zoe opened on Aug. 23, 2015, "there was a line down Sunset Boulevard, two blocks," Mr. Veach said. "We had so many people, they couldn't fit everybody in the club. The next day the owner emails me, 'You can never have church here again.' He goes, 'You're too big of a liability.' I go, 'Liability? My crowd is sober.'" The next week the Veaches moved to the El Rey. Eric VanValin, 35, works in television casting at Warner Bros. and attended Zoe's opening. He and his wife moved from Virginia to Los Angeles in September 2014 and began following Mr. Veach on Instagram after a friend told him about the pastor's account. Mr. VanValin attended early meetings at the Veach home. "It gave me and my wife a community," he said. "We immediately had a support system." That is especially true in Los Angeles, he said, which isn't the most welcoming town. "It's such a hustle," he said. "A lot of the time you have to sell yourself, your work. It's a competitive environment." But saving souls is a business like any other. Pastors today who want to start a ministry for those 40 and under follow a well traveled path. First, they lease an old theater or club. Next, they find great singers and backup musicians. A fog machine on stage is nice. A church should also have a catchy logo or catchphrase that can be stamped onto merchandise and branded socks, knit hats, shoes and sweatshirts. (An online pop up shop on Memorial Day sold 10,000 in merchandise its first hour, Mr. Veach said.) And lastly, churches need a money app Zoe uses Pushpay to make it easy for churchgoers to tithe with a swipe on their smartphones. Mr. Veach said he modeled his church after Hillsong, with its vibrant youth community, and Church of the Highlands, whose pastor teaches other pastors how to start churches like his. He spent two days learning the basics at Highlands' headquarters in Birmingham, Ala., before Zoe opened for business. One of the programs he adopted was "Growth Track," a four week intensive study to vet potential volunteers. In Week 3, attendees take a personality questionnaire that breaks down natural abilities ("I can tell when someone is insincere") into "spiritual gifts." Zoe, too, offers a program, "Connect," to find other like minded members. "You are inheriting people," Mr. Veach said. "L.A. is this convergence of people from all over the world. And, so, you've, kind of, got to go, like, 'Hey, this is what we are about. Do you want to join? If not, cool.'" Mr. Veach has read "Death by Meeting" and "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" by Patrick Lencioni, an expert in organizational health. His favorite book is "How to Win Friends and Influence People," the self help classic written by Dale Carnegie in 1936. "One day I want to write my version of that book," Mr. Veach said. TV can reach a wider audience faster, though. Mr. Smith of Churchome recently shot a pilot for a talk show on Amazon. Rich Wilkerson Jr., a friend of Mr. Veach's who is the pastor of Vous Church in Miami (and who was the officiant at the wedding of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian), had a show on Oxygen, "Rich in Faith." (It was canceled.) Mr. Veach would like a talk show like Ellen DeGeneres's. "I watch Ellen and I go, 'Gosh, she's doing it right,'" he said. "She's making people laugh." Asked about abortion rights, Mr. Veach declined to give a specific answer. "At the end of the day I am a Bible guy," he said. Mr. Veach's father shrugged about his son's equivocation. "Last thing you want to do is turn off a whole demographic," he said of today's pastors. "If you draw lines in the sand, people are going to think God hates them." And Mr. Veach wants Zoe to be a refuge for many, against the rhetoric of so many other dogmatic evangelicals. "From the time I've entered, and, maybe, just what we grew up in, it's, like, you don't bring politics into church," he said. "We're here to preach good news. We're here to bring hope to humanity. We're here to talk about God. This is not the place for a political agenda. This is the last place. When I come to church, you know what I need? I need encouragement."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Style
PARIS There has been plenty of glumness this men's fashion week, held at a perilously uncertain moment for the world, and much hand wringing in the stands about what, politically and otherwise, is to come. Designers have responded in their own separate ways: Many have simplified and practicalized their designs; others have sailed blithely on. Only Walter Van Beirendonck, the bearish Belgian designer and head of the fashion department at the Royal Academy in Antwerp, has taken matters into his own hands and set out to banish the dark spirits that have taken up residence on our doorsteps. For his fall 2017 show, held in a drafty garage near the Place d'Iena, Mr. Van Beirendonck booked Seida Pass, a band that looked like a group of metalhead trolls freshly summoned from hell. All wore demon masks, complete with horns. There were some in full body hair suits, and those who sat like sphinxes in what appeared to be huge bales of hay. These guys bashed away at metal gas canisters with a terrific bang; some of their hairy brethren accompanied them on signal horns. A bandleader a Hex, or witch led them in a kind of feral ecstasy.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Fashion & Style
"According to him, incriminating testimony from other witnesses, like Bill Taylor, 'refreshed my recollection about certain conversations.' imitating Sondland Huh, you know what? That testimony I just heard really refreshed the old noodle here. You know, it made me remember one important detail: that I don't want to go to jail for perjury.'" STEPHEN COLBERT "Wow, so this guy is just revising the testimony he gave under oath? We can't even edit our tweets, but this guy is walking into Congress just like, 'Oh, you said "quid pro quo." I thought you said "squid pro quo." "Quid" makes so much more sense. Yeah, we totally did one of those.'" TREVOR NOAH "I'll be honest. I feel bad for Sondland because he was the first to testify, all right? And he probably thought everyone was going to have his back and also say there was no quid pro quo. But then instead everyone snitched on him, and now he's like, 'Yeah, no, no I'm also changing my story.'" TREVOR NOAH "O.K., if that's something you just remembered, just think of all the small stuff you're forgetting. Somewhere, there's a 40 year old man still waiting to be picked up from soccer." SETH MEYERS "It is sort of like when you were a teenager and you tell your friends, 'All right, remember, we tell our parents there was no liquor at the party.' And you tell your parents the story, and they're like, 'Yeah, Trevor brought the liquor.' And you're like, 'Uh, I would like to revise my earlier testimony!'" TREVOR NOAH "Gee, I wonder what jogged his memory? Maybe he started taking those Omega 3 supplements or something. They say those are very effective against perjury." JIMMY KIMMEL "The ambassador has now revised his testimony, while I imagine President Trump is now revising the ambassador's employment status." JAMES CORDEN
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Television
LEIDEN, the Netherlands The imposing red stone edifice rises from an otherwise empty area in this old Dutch city like a mesa in the American West, bound round and round with what looks like a white ribbon. Get closer, though, and you will discover that the ribbon is actually about 3,300 seamless feet of white concrete friezes with fossil like patterns inspired by erosion on the volcanic island of Lanzarote , in the Canaries. It seems an extraordinary accessory for the building, until you learn it was designed by the 35 year old Dutch couturiere Iris van Herpen, for the new addition to the renovated Naturalis Biodiversity Center, the Netherlands' natural history museum. "I don't see a difference between architecture and fashion," Ms. van Herpen said, taking in the finished building for the first time on a sunny July morning. "They can really talk to each other." Ms. van Herpen, however, is not your ordinary designer. Several times she has visited the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle accelerator, at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, near Geneva , and used what she saw and experienced there to inform her work. In 2011, she collaborated with the London based architect Daniel Widrig to create a white 3 D printed bolero in swirling nautilus shapes. In 2012, she was the first (with the help of the American Israeli architect Neri Oxman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab ) to produce a fully flexible 3 D printed dress. And in July , she partnered with Anthony Howe, an American kinetic sculptor , to produce the closing piece of her couture show in Paris: a corset minidress with feather wings that spun as the model walked. "Calling Iris a designer is nomenclature," Mr. Howe said backstage before that show at the Elysee Montmartre . "She's an artist who happens to make things that fit on the human form. Yes, it has everything to have to do with a model, a human form. But what she does is way beyond that. Way beyond." Still, Ms. van Herpen does produce clothes one can wear about 100 pieces a year, each of which cost from 20,000 to more than 100,000, and are purchased and worn by prominent women. Cate Blanchett walked the red carpet last year as jury president of the Cannes Film Festival in a fluttering laser cut and laser bonded van Herpen gown that had been made for her and lent for the occasion. Much of the rest of the designer's work ends up in museum collections, or retrospectives; she has two new exhibitions pending: in 2021 at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, and in 2022 in an undisclosed location. Her existence is monastic: the studio, a rough hewed space in an old warehouse at Amsterdam 's former lumber port, is small, spartan and staffed with a clutch of other millennials mostly women. A former ballerina, Ms. van Herpen is lean, soft spoken and reserved; she dresses in secondhand finds and wears little makeup. Branding and a global retail network are not part of her five year plan. (She probably doesn't have a five year plan.) It is the addition of outside projects, like designing costumes for the Paris Opera Ballet or working on the biodiversity center's renovation, that keep her engaged as well as afloat financially. That's why, when Neutelings Riedijk Architects of Rotterdam won the 2013 competition to renovate the original Fons Verheijen designed museum , as well as to construct a new five story, 400,000 square foot addition, they emailed Ms. van Herpen and she immediately agreed. Michiel Riedijk , the project's lead architect, said, "We wanted to evoke nature in all its elements biodiversity, geology, tectonics and not do so in a straightforward 19th century manner. Her work, he said, embodies "the notion of permanent change," and "the beauty of nature." It has, he added, the same focus as the museum, with its collection of 42 million items (museum officials called it one of the world's largest), from a T Rex skeleton to butterflies. The architects already had decided to clad the building, inside and out, with a rust red travertine from Iran. "They showed me that stone and I fell in love with it," Ms. van Herpen said. "The crystals, and color formations it was beautiful. Then they showed me the skeleton of the facade, with the glass, and I wanted what I did to grow out of that."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Style
Change comes to the streets of the Upper East Side and to the Facebook feeds of residents as well. A private Facebook group intended for New York City mothers has imploded over accusations of racism. UES Mommas, founded in 2011, is one of the largest Facebook groups for New York moms, with nearly 40,000 members. It was created specifically for those living on the largely affluent Upper East Side to discuss local schools and nannies. However, women from all over the five boroughs and the greater New York area have since flocked to the group to talk about child care, breastfeeding, marital problems and more. Pearl Brady, 35, who lives in Queens, used the group to find a night nurse nearly two years ago and has frequently found its forums helpful. Last week, she saw a shift from the usual resource sharing and conversation. In one thread, there was a heated discussion over Amy Cooper, the white woman who called the police on Christian Cooper, a black birder who had asked her to leash her dog in Central Park. Then, members began posting racist comments on another thread about the death of George Floyd. Ms. Brady noticed that often, when black women weighed in on such topics, their comments would quickly disappear. When she brought this up to the group, she saw her comments vanish too. "I commented on a few different posts, 'the silencing of black women is not OK, the admin needs to apologize and stop,'" she said. Shortly after, she was kicked out of the group. (The incident was previously reported by Business Insider and The New York Post.) As Ashley Carman, a reporter at The Verge, recently wrote, Facebook groups of all kinds have faced censorship, infighting, attrition and shutdowns over recent conversations about the Black Lives Matter protests sweeping the nation and the deaths of Mr. Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. Facebook groups operate at the whim of their moderators, and in groups designated for mothers those are often white women who may be uncomfortable with conversations around race, police brutality and privilege. Several Facebook groups for moms in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York have temporarily shuttered following backlash from members over their handling of discussions about race. Groups in the New York area, including those for the Upper West Side, Brooklyn and Jersey City, are struggling to figure out how to make women of color feel welcome. All white moderation teams are facing a public reckoning. These issues rose to the forefront of the UES Mommas group on May 30. After repeated blowback, Addy Spriggle, a 38 year old on the Upper East Side, asked Lindsey Plotnick Berger, the group's administrator, to consider adding a black moderator. UES Mommas had three moderators at the time: Ms. Berger, another white mother and a woman who identifies as Latina. Many black women in the group felt that Ms. Berger had censored their conversations, removing posts about colorism and police brutality. Ms. Berger asked Ms. Spriggle to message her privately, which she did. Ms. Spriggle then received a series of hostile messages from Ms. Berger and was booted from the group after Ms. Berger falsely claimed Ms. Spriggle had "threatened" and "harassed" her. (Ms. Berger later apologized for the claim.) For women of color in the group and their allies, this was the final straw. They piled on Ms. Berger with criticism. "A black woman shouldn't be falsely accused of harassment for assertively (not aggressively) saying they will follow up later on the issue of better representation in a large group. I think you owe her an apology," one mom commented. Ms. Berger responded by deactivating the group. By Thursday of last week, the group was back up and two new moderators had been added: one black woman and one Asian woman. However, any discussion of racism, racial issues, or "controversial" topics like police brutality was discouraged. Members of the group were frustrated and began to leave in droves to join and form splinter groups. "The UES Mommas group has been the worst, but racism and the silencing women of color and their allies is pervasive throughout these mom groups," said Amanda Fialk, 42. Several groups such as UWS People of Color Allies and Anti Racist Parents of NYC have begun recruiting members from UES Mommas and other New York parenting groups. The goal of these groups is to provide a safe space to discuss parenting issues without fear of racist comments or censorship. "A lot of people of color on Facebook have to join groups that are focused on being a parent of color, because we aren't safe posting in groups that are majority white," said Nevette Bailey, 39, who was kicked out of the UES Mommas group for supporting Ms. Spriggle's campaign for a black moderator. "With Black Lives Matter and the stuff I have to talk about with my 6 year old son, there's no way anyone can still question whether this is a parenting issue." Ms. Spriggle said she believed that the current national conversation around race set the conditions for members to lobby for UES Mommas to be more inclusive. "I thought, right now would be the right time to talk about everything," she said, "with George Floyd and the protests happening in our country, now is the time people are listening."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Style
Changes in the way the federal government plans to allocate money to increase and improve literacy pose a severe threat to one of the country's best known nonprofit groups, Reading Is Fundamental. Known commonly as RIF, the organization, which provides free books to needy children and has been promoted in memorable public service announcements by celebrities like Carol Burnett and Shaquille O'Neal, stands to lose all of its federal financing, which accounts for roughly 75 percent of its annual revenues. "We are looking at having to completely reinvent ourselves," said Carol Rasco, chief executive of RIF, which has received an annual grant from the Department of Education for 34 years. Under the federal budget proposed for the 2011 fiscal year, the Department of Education has proposed pooling the money it allocates to RIF, another nonprofit organization, the National Writing Project, and five of its own grant programs, and instead distributing it to state and local governments. Under that plan, RIF and the writing project would have to compete state by state for federal funds. "One of the things that's challenging about this is that the administration keeps talking about how much it wants to support innovation and program and ideas that it can help scale up," said Sharon J. Washington, executive director of the writing project. "But if you are an organization that has already been built with federal investment over time, what do you do?" A similar competitive approach to awarding 4 billion in federal education grants to states has been criticized by some states, which complain that it may not be worth the amount of time and effort needed to apply. David Thomas, a spokesman for the Education Department, in e mailed responses to questions, defended the new method of allocating money for literacy programs, saying it would be "more likely to drive improvements in student achievement." "This proposed approach will give state education agencies and local education agencies greater flexibility to focus on their areas of greatest need and will be more effective than the narrow categorical programs," Mr. Thomas said. He said RIF and the writing project could gain access to federal financing by forming partnerships with those agencies. Ms. Rasco and Ms. Washington said that applying for grants from individual states would add enormously to their administrative costs. "This really means that we would have to hire people to write grant applications tailored to the specific requirements of each state," Ms. Rasco said. "That's money we otherwise would be using to buy books for kids." Clara Miller, chief executive of the Nonprofit Finance Fund, which works to help nonprofit groups obtain and manage finances, said RIF and the writing project would have trouble sustaining their operations if the government's new way of allocating money was implemented. "They don't have a huge amount of cash on hand that would buy them some time to change their business model to get different types of funding," Ms. Miller said. "Switching from a program that is almost fully funded by government to one that is privately funded, or where you would be competing on a state level, that's a new business model, and it will need time and investment in new skills." She said that putting longstanding organizations through such a complete overhaul so abruptly might not make sense from the taxpayer's standpoint either. "The thing that's getting lost here is that the government has already built whole programs in these organizations that it is now throwing out," Ms. Miller said. "That's kind of wasteful, unless they're saying buying kids books is a bad idea." Ms. Washington said that several administrations, including George W. Bush's, had suggested cutting financing to the writing project since it began in 1974, but that Congress had continued to support it. Typically, major foundations planning to end their support of programs provide money known as "tie off grants" over two or three years to allow organizations to find new supporters. Ms. Washington said the way the Obama administration had proposed pooling the money for literacy, rather than reauthorizing specific grants, would make it almost impossible for Congress to simply reauthorize grants to RIF and the writing project. "That's what's quite frightening to us," Ms. Washington said. "If we cease to receive direct funding, it will effectively kill us." The writing project's federal grant in the current fiscal year was about 25 million, which accounted for more than 90 percent of its revenues. Its local branches raise a similar amount from private sources, but that money stays with them. RIF's local affiliates raise about 6 million, Ms. Rasco said, which goes almost entirely to buying more books. The federal grant helps the local organizations with their fund raising, Ms. Rasco and Ms. Washington said. "If the government no longer values our program enough to give us a grant," Ms. Washington said, "other donors are going to ask why they should value us."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Education
LAS VEGAS After Tyson Fury's seven round thrashing of Deontay Wilder in their championship rematch on Saturday, the statistics suggested that a third showdown between these two massive heavyweights might not be necessary. Fury, the 6 foot 9 challenger from Manchester, England, landed 82 total punches, compared with just 34 for Wilder, according to CompuBox. And Wilder, who entered the bout with the World Boxing Council title and a 95.3 percent knockout rate, connected on just 18 power punches, compared with Fury's 58. Fury landed 13 body punches, one of which dropped Wilder in Round 5, and all of which helped drain the energy and punching power of Wilder, a 6 foot 7 boxer from Alabama. By nearly any metric, Fury's win was about as definitive a victory as you are likely to see among evenly matched elites. Unlike the pair's first fight, in December 2018, which ended in a draw, it left few of the unanswered questions that lead to a high stakes rematch. But another set of numbers foreshadows a Wilder Fury trilogy. Saturday night's rematch attracted a capacity crowd of 15,816 to the MGM Grand Garden Arena, and the 16.9 million in ticket revenue was the most for a heavyweight bout in Nevada. Pay per view sales figures might not be public until midweek, but ESPN and Fox combined to promote the fight, and organizers on both sides expected a commercial success. Factor in the fight contract's rematch clause which gives the loser 30 days to force a return bout and we might see Wilder and Fury again. "I can't wait for the next fight," said Fury, now 30 0 1. "The rematch, hopefully. If he wants it." Wilder, managed by Al Haymon, and Fury, who is signed to Bob Arum's Top Rank Boxing, were guaranteed a reported 25 million each for Saturday's fight, plus a portion of pay per view revenue. Those figures illustrate the windfalls possible when rival promoters collaborate, and that message resonated immediately with other deep pocketed boxing businessmen. "No need for a third," Eddie Hearn, head of U.K. based Matchroom Sport, wrote on Twitter. "Let's go straight to it in the summer! Undisputed." Hearn's tweet referred to a potential fight between Fury and Anthony Joshua, who holds the other major heavyweight titles and is signed to Hearn's company. Given that a Fury Joshua showdown could result in a single, universally recognized heavyweight champion, the matchup makes sense. And from the standpoint that two wildly popular English heavyweights could threaten revenue records, a Fury Joshua pairing seems even more appealing. Joshua lost in his United States debut, stopped in seven rounds by Andy Ruiz Jr. at Madison Square Garden last June. But he regained his titles in December, which helped him restore his marketability over all and in England, where all the heavyweight titles now reside and boxing remains a major mainstream sport. Judging by the cheers Fury received during his ring entrance, and the boos that washed over Wilder when he entered the arena, more than half of Saturday's crowd supported Fury. Joshua, meanwhile, drew nearly 80,000 spectators to a rugby stadium in Wales for a 2017 title defense against Carlos Takam. As boxing audiences migrate online both ESPN and Fox offered Saturday's card on those platforms a Fury Joshua pairing could help the upstart streaming service DAZN monetize its own heavy investment in boxing. The company has committed 365 million to the middleweight Canelo Alvarez and another 1 billion over eight years to Hearn's Matchroom Sport. But with his emphatic win on Saturday, Fury and his team earned leverage over nearly every potential future opponent, and it might not be Joshua. Arum said on Saturday night that the question was not for his camp to answer: "The question is directed to Deontay Wilder." Wilder could exercise his rematch clause and return immediately to face a fighter he couldn't solve on Saturday. "I think the public will want it," said Wilder's trainer, Jay Deas. "I think he'll want it." Fury's camp, he added, "will want it." In the week preceding the bout, Fury, 31, promised a bigger, more aggressive version of the tactical boxer who had unified the heavyweight title before retiring in 2016, and who had won 27 straight bouts before his 2018 draw against Wilder. On Friday afternoon, he weighed in at 273 pounds, 16.5 more than in the first Wilder bout and 42 more than Wilder, who scaled a sculpted 231 pounds. On Saturday night, Fury paired his new strength and assertiveness with the impeccable timing that has long made him so difficult to defeat. He controlled distance with a stiff jab, and used it to set up power punches, like the right hand to the ear that dropped Wilder in Round 3 and the left hook to the body that floored him in Round 5. He also used his new weight to lean on Wilder and to grapple with him in clinches. By Round 4, Kenny Bayless, the referee, looked as tired as either fighter, and in Round 5 he deducted a point from Fury for his constant roughhousing. But all those tactics succeeded in sapping Wilder's strength and blunting the punching power that helped him salvage a draw in the first bout. Early in the seventh round, a tired, bruised and bleeding Wilder retreated to a corner and tried to shield himself from another Fury salvo. When a right cross from Fury crashed into the left side of Wilder's swollen face, an assistant trainer, Mark Breland, tossed a white towel into the ring, prompting Bayless to stop the fight. "Everybody knows I'm a master slick boxer, but that didn't work last time," Fury told reporters Saturday night. "We worked our game plan in the ring, and put it into practice in the ring." Afterward, Wilder and Deas said they disagreed with Breland's decision. "I just wish my corner would have let me go out on my shield," Wilder said immediately after the fight. "I'm a warrior. He had a great performance and we will be back stronger." By the time Breland conceded the fight, Wilder trailed, 59 52, on two scorecards and 58 53 on a third. He also struggled to defend himself, and bled from a cut inside his left ear. After the fight, he received stitches in the locker room, and headed to a hospital instead of the postfight news conference. Fury arrived to the news conference with the trainer Javan Hill, the head of Detroit's famed Kronk Gym and architect of Fury's relentlessly effective game plan. He held a ceremonial title belt signifying Fury's status as the lineal heavyweight champion. An assistant trainer, Andy Lee, who is Fury's cousin, carried the W.B.C. belt that Fury had just won from Wilder. And Fury commandeered the microphone and strutted across the makeshift stage like a standup comedian. He later settled into his seat and praised Wilder's toughness. When asked about future matchups, he said he was open to a third fight with Wilder, as well as a long list of other options. "Whoever's next will get the same treatment," he said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Sports
With so many websites vying for the opportunity to book your next trip, TripAdvisor is hoping its recent makeover will help it stand out from the ever expanding crowd. Not that the self described "world's largest travel site" is hurting for attention, with 390 million average unique monthly visitors and over 500 million reviews for hotels, restaurants and other travel destinations. But standing pat is never an option in the highly competitive travel booking industry. Which brings us to TripAdvisor's new look, which comes with additional search features and a more personalized app for iOS and Android devices. With nearly half of TripAdvisor's traffic coming from mobile last year, an increase of 29 percent, according to the company, it's no surprise that the most noticeable changes are seen on its revised smartphone and tablet incarnations. But does new really mean a better experience for prospective travelers? I used the new TripAdvisor to help plan a recent trip to North Adams, Mass., and for the most part, the change was good. On TripAdvisor's new desktop home page, a cleaner design and simpler layout are instantly noticeable, and once you start searching for travel accommodations, you'll encounter a new "Best Value" filter, which is a ranking using TripAdvisor specific data such as its user ratings, prices, popularity, location and your personal user preferences. You can also still sort results based on user reviews, cost and distance alone. Restaurants are now filterable by "Cheap Eats," "Fine Dining," "Mid Range" and a host of other categories. One could quickly find a vegetarian friendly, family friendly restaurant that has free Wi Fi with just a few clicks. You can then reserve that table (if it allows online reservations) without leaving the website, thanks to integration with the restaurant booking service OpenTable. Once you pick a city, you are placed into what is essentially a mini travel guide for that city, with the ability to smoothly switch between filterable results for vacation rentals (which can be booked directly on TripAdvisor), restaurants and things to do. As I was heading to North Adams, I could quickly toggle to see top hotels, like the Porches Inn, restaurants such as Public eat drink, and attractions including MASS MoCA. This seamless search experience cannot be found on some other popular travel sites. The search experience is replicated on the app, which also offers a host of cool features not found on the desktop version or on many other travel apps (though it would be nice if they were available on both desktop and mobile). Restaurants can be filtered by "Cheap Eats," "Fine Dining" and many other categories. One such feature is "My Trips." By creating a trip, which requires only a name and the dates, I was able to bookmark places of interest and schedule them on a trip specific calendar. You can easily share your trip via email or SMS with your traveling partner(s) so they can see what you're interested in and add their own preferences. This may not seem as necessary for couples, but in a large group, the feature would be a great way to keep everyone on track. Once I was in North Adams, I mainly stuck with the app version of TripAdvisor and appreciated that all of my bookmarked attractions and restaurants were easily accessible and placed on a map within the app. For directions between locations, TripAdvisor used Apple Maps on my iPhone, which is not my preferred maps app, but it was better than nothing. The app's standout feature, depending on how paranoid you are, is the "Travel Timeline" option, which will allow you to "check in" at places along your trip (similar to features on Swarm and Facebook), but tracks your journey in timeline form. As with most apps that track location, you must give the app permission to do so, and the app promises the timeline is only visible to you (though you can share portions of it with friends via SMS or email). The travel timeline will ask you if you're at a restaurant or attraction; it will never assume you're anywhere unless you confirm. If you forget to check your app while at a location, it will give you an opportunity to go back and plot previous stops. Should you be taking photos along the way, it will automatically package those near the times and places on your timeline. While my wife was a bit spooked by the timeline tracking our every move, I liked that it was creating a record of where we were. If you're like me and tend to forget the name of that one restaurant while you're attempting to recommend it to a friend, you'll appreciate the timeline. You can also give your mother one less reason to check your Facebook page by easily, and privately, sharing parts of your timeline via SMS or email, photos included. As promising as I found many of these features, some things could be a bit more intuitive. I drove myself slightly crazy trying to turn off the timeline once my trip was over (waiting for the train on the Monday back to work is not a memory I want to retain). The on/off toggle on the timeline page goes away after you turn it on. To turn it off, you have to go to the app's settings. And while the ability to download city guides is great in theory giving you access to information and maps offline when you lose cellular service or just want to save on data I spent several minutes poking around trying to download the North Adams guide, but realized there isn't one for every city. But it would be nice to be able to download maps regardless of whether there is a city guide. If you're able to download one of the over 300 city guides that are available, you will have convenient access to them in an appropriately labeled tab within the app. The average user of the new TripAdvisor should be impressed with its intuitive layout and improved search capability, and the app has enough promising functionality that already distinguishes it from other travel booking apps like Expedia's and Kayak's. TripAdvisor says new features like better mapping technology are coming soon, which should only strengthen its case for being a premier all in one online travel planner.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Travel
TALES about art forgeries are almost always intriguing. Maybe that's because of the big amounts paid by unwitting buyers. Or that the people involved invariably emerge as characters worthy of a thriller. The latest tale is no exception. It involves the Knoedler Gallery, the oldest art gallery in New York, which just closed under the weight of accusations that it had sold forged paintings by modern luminaries like Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning. In retrospect, the details of the sales seemed suspect from the start a little known dealer selling formerly unknown modern masterpieces on behalf of an owner who requested anonymity to a gallery with major connections. I know enough about the art world to know that is a secretive, clubby place with more than its fair share of eccentrics. Still, how does something like this happen and what recourse is there for the owners of forged art? Any serious collectors should know intuitively what to check before buying a piece of art. They need to start by reviewing the painting's history of ownership, known as the provenance. This is particularly important for older works because it allows the buyer to confirm what the seller is claiming, said Katja Zigerlig, vice president of fine arts, wine and jewelry insurance at Chartis Private Client Group. They also need to search the Art Loss Register, an international database of stolen art, to make sure the piece has not been reported missing, and consult with the artist's foundation, if one exists, to check if it has authenticated the piece. Why collectors do not run through this checklist is no different from why hunters miss their shot at a glorious buck: they are so amazed by what they are seeing that they rush the process. While a hunter's shot just whizzes by, a collector could end up handing over millions of dollars for something that is worthless or that might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars more to prove that it is the real thing. Ms. Zigerlig said she received a call in 2009 from a client who wanted to buy a Picasso in a private sale. His concern was getting insurance in place as soon as possible so nothing could derail the deal. She tried to slow him down. "I would ask, 'have you checked provenance, have you gone through the art loss registry, have you asked if this has been authenticated?' " she said. "We stressed best practices." Recently, the ability to do crimelike forensic tests has caught on as a way to check that the art was produced when someone says it was. In the Knoedler case, forensic analysis on one of the so called Pollock paintings showed that two of the yellow paints were invented after he died. But even people who conduct these tests warn that they are only one part of the process. "It concerns me that people think science is the only factor," said Jennifer L. Mass, senior scientist at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware. "We say it's one part of it. We look to add to attribution." This technology is at its best in showing that something is a fake. "It will almost never prove that a work is authentic," said Sharon Flescher, executive director of the International Foundation for Art Research, an educational and research organization that investigates claims of authenticity. "It can prove that a work is inauthentic, but not necessarily. If the materials are of the same period, you won't find anachronisms." In other words, the materials were around when the artist worked, but there is not enough data on most artists to know what materials they worked with. Of course, collectors who buy a fake piece of art are embarrassed. But no amount of shame compares with losing the money they spent on it. Insurance policies do not cover that loss. "The supposition is we, the insurance world, are making a decision if something is real or a forgery," Dorit Straus, worldwide fine art manager at Chubb Group of Insurance Companies, said. I asked Ms. Zigerlig how Chartis would treat a piece of art that had not been authenticated. "If the authentication board declines to comment, but the client still buys the piece for 1 million and the buyer and seller know it's the case, we'd insure it for 1 million," she said. "We know that experts disagree in certain areas. There is just some risk involved in this." But they are not as clear when a work of art is seized from the current owner because it was stolen or believed to be a forgery. If a government takes it, Ms. Zigerlig said, policies will not pay claims. But insurance might cover a claim if, for instance, a painting was sent overseas for authentication and was seized because the group authenticating it declared it a forgery. "In certain cases, it could be considered a covered claim, depending on the facts," Ms. Straus said. "I'm not encouraging people to send works to an authentication committee and have it seized to get it paid out under a policy." The claim might be paid because insurance companies realize that art scholars and committees that authenticate work can disagree. If it later becomes clear, though, that a painting is a forgery, the buyer is out of luck. Forgeries are not the only issue that can affect the value of a piece of art. Authenticity is not limited to whether something has been done by an artist. The issue also comes up when an artist appropriates the work of someone else. Mr. Dowd, who is co chairman of the New York County Lawyers Association's Art Litigation and Disputer Resolution Institute, said this was an issue in works by the artist Richard Prince, who has sold single works at auction for 2.5 million. Mr. Prince, who is known for using imagery created by others, was sued by a French photographer for using the photographer's photos of Rastafarians in Jamaica to create collages and paintings. Last year, a federal judge in the case ruled that Mr. Prince's works violated the photographer's copyrights and had to be destroyed. The case raised a larger question about authenticity: there was no question that Mr. Prince had manipulated the images but the judge essentially declared the works forgeries and erased their value, Mr. Dowd said. Another issue collectors rarely consider is how their collection will hold up, literally. This is an area where, Dr. Mass of the Winterthur said, forensic examinations can be far more useful. "Sometimes a work of art is made with materials that are never meant to last for a long time," she said. "If you're acquiring a collection, you want to make sure it's going to last and also that you're storing it correctly." This is not limited to modern art that is made of plastics or filled with liquids that are inherently unstable. She has studied the works of four great artists Matisse, Van Gogh, Monet and Picasso and found that they used pigments that were not prepared properly and are now losing their color or falling off the canvases. "Matisse used cadmium yellow, and over time it fades to ivory," she said. "One of his paintings of a woman in a yellow dress is no longer yellow. It's really sad, but we can't bring it back." And Ms. Zigerlig says that such a loss is not covered. "If pieces just fall off, it's gradual wear and tear. If someone's elbow goes through it, that's covered." That actually happened about five years ago, when the casino mogul Steve Wynn accidentally poked a silver dollar size hole in a Picasso painting with his elbow as he showed it to guests.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Your Money
Our genomes are riddled with the detritus of ancient viruses. They infected our hominid ancestors tens of millions of years ago, inserting their genes into the DNA of their hosts. Today, we carry about 100,000 genetic remnants of this invasion. So called endogenous retroviruses make up 8 percent of the human genome. Mostly, these genetic fragments are generally nothing more than molecular fossils. Over thousands of generations, they have mutated so much that they cannot replicate in our cells. And our cells keep the viral DNA muzzled to minimize the harm it might cause. But scientists are finding that some endogenous retroviruses do wake up, and at the strangest time. A new study published in the journal Nature on Monday suggests that endogenous retroviruses spring to life in the earliest stages of the development of human embryos. The viruses may even assist in human development by helping guide embryonic development and by defending young cells from infections by other viruses. "The fact that viruses may be playing a vaccine role inside the cell is pretty amazing," said Guillaume Bourque, a genomicist at McGill University who was not involved in the study. When an ordinary retrovirus, like H.I.V., infects a cell, it inserts its genes into the cell's DNA. The cell then makes new retroviruses by making a copy of the virus's genes as RNA molecules. The cell uses some of those RNA molecules to make proteins for the virus. Those proteins form a shell around the other RNA molecules, which become the new virus's genes. In recent years, scientists have discovered that embryonic cells produce RNA molecules from certain endogenous retroviruses lurking in the genome. But scientists have struggled to understand why. Do retroviruses come out of hiding to take advantage of their young hosts when their defenses are weak? Or are these just biochemical accidents embryonic cells mistakenly turning viral genes into RNA, then destroying their molecular mistakes? Joanna Wysocka, a developmental biologist at Stanford University, and her colleagues recently discovered evidence that embryonic cells are not turning to their viral genes by accident. It's an elaborate process that happens at a specific time in the development of an embryo. "It's part of the program," she said. Dr. Wysocka and her colleagues did not actually set out to study viruses when they started their research. Instead, they were investigating how a single fertilized egg turns into the hundreds of different types of cells in the human body. In the early stages of development, an embryo is largely made up of cells that can potentially become any sort of tissue. Over the course of many divisions, the cells continue to hold on to this potential. A crucial reason is a protein called Oct4. It's not entirely clear how Oct4 keeps embryonic cells in their flexible state, but scientists know it works by latching on to DNA in order to turn genes on and off. Dr. Wysocka and her colleagues found that one of Oct4's favorite targets was a kind of endogenous retrovirus called HERV K. Oct4 was not merely grabbing on to HERV K, the scientists eventually learned, but also triggering cells to make RNA from the viral genes. And the story did not stop there. The embryonic cells then used some of the viral RNA to make proteins. The proteins were assembled into particles that bore a striking resemblance to retroviruses; some even budded off the surface of the cells, as viruses do. It could be that these particles are weakened HERV K viruses, faint echoes of an ancient invader. "We showed them to virologists, and they said, 'Yes, this looks like retroviruses to me,' " Dr. Wysocka said. Still, she added, "We don't have any evidence at this point that they're infectious." Embryonic cells make HERV K viruses for only a few days. They stop around the time an embryo implants on the wall of the uterus. During this window, the viruses alter embryonic cells in some potentially important ways. A cell can sense new viral genes floating around its interior. It can respond to this threat by creating immune defenses against more invasions. Dr. Wysocka and her colleagues found that when HERV K reawakens, the embryonic cell builds proteins on its surface that help ward off other viruses that may be trying to get inside. In the lab, the scientists tried infecting these cells with influenza viruses. Those producing HERV K were better able to resist the flu virus than cells that were not. It's possible, in other words, that this endogenous retrovirus protects embryos from other viruses. The retroviral genes may even be guiding the development of embryos. Proteins made from HERV K's genetic instructions ferry some of the cell's own RNA to its protein building factories. Dr. Wysocka speculated that the viruses may be altering the balance of available proteins at a pivotal time during development right when a clump of cells is going to turn into a complex body. Stephen Goff, a microbiologist at Columbia University, said that the new study demonstrates that through evolution, the human genome has domesticated primeval enemies. Our viral antagonists are now "handy tools in our genomic toolbox," he said. Jonathan Stoye, a virologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London, considered the study "thought worthy," but cautioned that Dr. Wysocka and her colleagues had not proved that the retroviral genes are providing clear benefits to human embryos. Endogenous retroviruses might behave "merely as very successful parasites," he said. Dr. Wysocka acknowledged that the evidence she and her colleagues had gathered was only suggestive at this point. But whatever the viruses are up to, Dr. Wysocka argued, they are doing something important during the development of human embryos. "This is a completely new thing that we need to be considering," she said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Science
A Check Into Cash location in Chicago. The company's noncompete agreement applies to any similar business within 15 miles of one of its stores. The clerks at Check Into Cash, a national chain that offers check cashing and payday loans, are paid close to minimum wage to do tasks like enter customers' information into a computer. The job does not require much training. Some employees lack a high school diploma. Nevertheless, many must sign a contract that prohibits them from working at competing companies. Legislation to restrict or ban these so called noncompete agreements has been enacted in several states, but the contracts remain widespread even among low wage workers. Attorneys general are also now getting involved, adding legal muscle to the political and economic debate. On Wednesday, the Illinois attorney general sued Check Into Cash, accusing the company of violating a state law prohibiting noncompete agreements for workers making less than 13 an hour. The lawsuit, the first since the law was passed last year, demands that the company remove the clause. Check Into Cash has about 250 employees in Illinois and about 3,000 nationwide. "I want to ensure that Illinois workers have the freedom to change jobs and seek better wages," said the Illinois attorney general, Lisa Madigan, a Democrat. "And what we have found is that the use of unfair noncompete agreements have scared a lot of low income workers into staying in low paying jobs when they could, based on their experience, get better pay." Check Into Cash did not return several calls seeking comment. Companies have used noncompete agreements for decades, but employment lawyers say that until fairly recently they were limited to executives and professionals like research scientists and engineers. Today they extend up and down the wage ladder: About one in five employees was bound by a noncompete clause in 2014, according to a survey by economists including Evan Starr, a management professor at the University of Maryland. When workers violate one of these agreements, courts can prevent them from taking a new position or remove them from a job they've settled into. Even when that does not happen, the threat creates a chilling effect that makes people skittish about leaving or seeking a raise. Volumes of economic research have identified the proliferation of these agreements as one reason American wages have been stagnant. This has led to a push from state and national politicians to limit where and how they can be used. Last year, the Treasury Department and President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers released papers on the economic harm wrought by noncompetes and other restrictive employment contracts. In 2015, Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, introduced federal legislation to ban noncompetes for workers making less than 15 an hour. The bill never passed, but last year the Illinois legislature passed a law prohibiting noncompetes for employees who make less than 13 an hour. Since then the attorney general has reached settlements with several companies to have the clauses removed, but until Wednesday had not filed a lawsuit. In addition to alleging that Check Into Cash broke Illinois's new noncompete law, the suit takes a page from the economic literature by arguing that noncompetes hurt the state's economy by suppressing wages and preventing workers from leaving for better pay. It also argues that noncompetes make it harder for state employers to find the best people, reducing innovation and limiting the pool of workers that thriving businesses need to grow. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Stocks rise after President Biden says Jerome Powell will stay atop the Fed. "It's clearly a winning issue for attorneys general," said Alan B. Krueger, a Princeton economics professor who was chairman of Mr. Obama's Council of Economic Advisers. In Illinois and elsewhere, much of the recent interest among legislators and attorneys general began a little over three years ago, when the Huffington Post reported that the Jimmy John's sandwich chain required hourly sandwich makers and delivery drivers to sign noncompetes. Illinois sued Jimmy John's last year, arguing that its noncompete agreement violated the state's consumer fraud act the new noncompete law hadn't been passed yet and reached a settlement in which the company agreed to remove the clause. Each time the Jimmy John's case was in the news, the Illinois attorney general's office received a round of calls from workers who felt they had signed an unfair noncompete agreement, including nurses, sales representatives, day care workers and cooks. One complaint came from an undisclosed employee of Check Into Cash. Ms. Madigan said her office was investigating about a dozen companies over the use of noncompete agreements. According to the lawsuit, clerks at Illinois branches of Check Into Cash agree not to work at any employer offering services like check cashing, loans or money transmission for a year after they leave. It applies to employers within 15 miles of any of the company's more than 1,000 locations in the United States. The Illinois attorney general's lawsuit said that because Check Into Cash had 33 locations in the state, its workers were effectively agreeing not to seek employment at competitors across Chicago and its suburbs.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Economy
Dr. William Dement, whose introduction to the mysteries of slumber as a postgraduate student in the 1950s led him to become an eminent researcher of sleep disorders and to preach the benefits of a good night's sleep, died on June 17 in Stanford, Calif. He was 91. His son, Nick, a physician, said the cause was complications of a heart procedure. Dr. Dement spent his working life as a popular professor in the department of psychiatry at Stanford University, where he started what is believed to be the world's first successful sleep disorders clinic. He taught a class on sleep and dreams that drew as many as 1,200 students. When he awakened dozing students with spritzes from a water gun, Dr. Dement gave them extra credit if they recovered and shouted, "Drowsiness is red alert!" his rallying cry to make sleep deprivation a public health priority. Drowsiness was the last step before falling asleep, he often said. Sleep deprivation put people at a higher risk of an accident on the road, diminished their productivity, increased the likelihood of their making mistakes, made them irritable and actually hurt their ability to fall asleep. "Bill Dement was an evangelist about sleep," Dr. Rafael Pelayo, a Stanford psychiatry professor who succeeded Dr. Dement in leading the sleep class, said in a phone interview. "He felt that not enough people knew about sleep disorders, and he thought of his students as multipliers who would tell the world about them." Dr. Dement's expertise led to his appointment as chairman of a federal commission on sleep disorders. The commission reported in 1992 that 40 million Americans had undiagnosed, untreated, mistreated or chronic sleep problems findings that led Congress to establish the National Center on Sleep Disorders Research, within the National Institutes of Health, in 1993. When Dr. Dement testified on Capitol Hill five years later about the sleep center's progress, he said he was pleased with its research but disappointed that the government had not sounded loud enough alarms about the serious, sometimes fatal, consequences of unhealthful sleep. "The lack of awareness is so pervasive that victims don't know what is wrong with them, and doctors don't ask," he told the House Health and Energy Subcommittee. "There are no mechanisms in place to disseminate the messages, no large organizations, no masses of enlightened victims, no faculty positions, no way to break into the medical school curriculum." William Charles Dement was born on July 29, 1928, in Wenatchee, Wash., in the north central part of the state, and grew up further south in Walla Walla. His father, Charles, was a tax agent and bookkeeper, and his mother, Kathryn (Severyns) Dement, was a homemaker. After serving in the Army in postwar Japan, where he edited a regiment newspaper, he earned a bachelor's degree in basic medical science at the University of Washington, Seattle, in 1951. He paid his way by working as a jazz bassist and hosted jam sessions on his houseboat. Dr. Dement's fascination with sleep began in medical school at the University of Chicago. He became intrigued with the work of Nathaniel Kleitman, a physiologist who was credited with doing pioneering research on sleep when the field barely existed. Dr. Kleitman and a graduate student, Eugene Aserinsky, first reported the discovery of rapid eye movement, or REM, during sleep. Dr. Dement's fascination with sleep swelled when Mr. Aserinsky told him what the flickering eye movements meant. Tired of tossing and turning? There are some strategies you could try to improve your hours in bed. None Four out of five people say that they suffer from sleep problems at least once a week and wake up feeling exhausted. Here's a guide to becoming a more successful sleeper. Stretching and meditative movement like yoga before bed can improve the quality of your sleep and the amount you sleep. Try this short and calming routine of 11 stretches and exercises. Nearly 40 percent of people surveyed in a recent study reported having more or much more trouble than usual during the pandemic. Follow these seven simple steps for improving your shut eye. When it comes to gadgets that claim to solve your sleep problems, newer doesn't always mean better. Here are nine tools for better, longer sleep. "'Dr. Kleitman and I think these movements might be related to dreaming,'" Dr. Dement recalled Mr. Aserinsky telling him. "For a student interested in psychiatry, this offhand comment was more stunning than if he had just offered me a winning lottery ticket." After joining Dr. Kleitman's sleep laboratory, Dr. Dement filmed subjects in REM sleep one subject, who was studying at the university, was the future writer, director and actress Elaine May and studied the connection between REM sleep and dreams. In measuring the brain waves and eye movements of nine sleeping subjects in 1956, Dr. Dement and Dr. Kleitman found a high incidence of dream recall when subjects were awakened five to 15 minutes after REM sleep had begun. The rapid eye movements "represented the visual imagery of the dream" in other words, "they corresponded to where and at what the dreamer was looking" the two scientists reported in a paper published the next year in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. Dr. Dement, who had received his medical degree in 1955, earned a Ph.D. in neurophysiology, also at the University of Chicago, two years later. He moved to Manhattan for his medical internship at Mount Sinai Hospital and opened a sleep lab in his apartment. He used himself as a subject for his research, as well as several Radio City Rockettes. Dr. Dement moved to Stanford in 1963. There he studied insomnia and narcolepsy in volunteers and in 1970 opened a sleep clinic with a colleague, Dr. Christian Guilleminault (who died last year), developing increasingly sophisticated ways to measure sleep. "It became more and more obvious that there were a lot of abnormal sleep problems, more than anyone suspected," Dr. Dement said in a video interview for Stanford in 2016. "At the time, most thought it affected more like 2 percent," Dr. Mignot was quoted as saying in a Stanford obituary about Dr. Dement. "I said, 'Don't say this. People will think you're crazy. You'll appear as a lunatic.' He did sometimes appear like a lunatic. But the problem is, he was right." Dr. Dement was the founding president of the Association of Sleep Disorder Centers (now the American Academy of Sleep Medicine) and helped start the Sleep Research Society and the journal Sleep. He wrote several books, including "The Promise of Sleep" (1999) and "The Stanford Sleep Book" (2006), which was rewritten with Dr. Pelayo and reissued in 2017 as "Dement's Sleep Dreams." "I've stalked the sleeping self to understand what happens when we sleep," he wrote in "The Promise of Sleep." "Night after night, I've watched people in our lab and our clinic undergo the commonplace and profound transformation called falling asleep." In addition to his son, Dr. Dement is survived by two daughters, Catherine Roos and Elizabeth Dement, and six grandchildren. His wife, Eleanor (Weber) Dement, died in 2014. Dr. Dement slept well for most of his life, Ms. Roos said in email, going to bed early and rising by 5 a.m. to work without interruption. Several years ago, when he was 84, he described one technique to put himself to sleep: watching something that is not too distracting, like back to back reruns of the sitcom "Everybody Loves Raymond." "I guess reading things you've already read and watching things you've already seen probably helps put you to sleep," he told The New York Times. But, he added, "I haven't actually done a study on that."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Science
JoJo Shaw, center, 34, of Tampa, Fla., bowed her head in a backstage prayer. Leading the prayer, Mayra Gomez, a founder of Christian Fashion Week, asked for everyone on the runway to be safe and for God to allow everyone in the audience to be open minded about what Christian fashion is all about. TAMPA, Fla. As Tom Ford presented his fall 2015 collection in the modern Sodom of Los Angeles, and Marc Jacobs tended his "garden in hell" in Gotham Gomorrah, around 300 Christians were gathering here for a fashion extravaganza of their own. There were no buyers from Bergdorf Goodman, or celebrities moving in slow security phalanxes. But Jayson and Silva Emerian, a Presbyterian couple from Fresno, Calif., were among the spectators Feb. 20 at the Vault, a bank turned party space downtown. "I'm just here to support my wife," said Mr. Emerian, a general contractor. Mrs. Emerian was gathering material for her blog, On My Shoebox. "Who isn't?" said Mrs. Emerian, nudging him playfully before turning serious. "I think fashion is so important because it really represents yourself how you see yourself, how you want others to see you. I want to show the young girls in our church that you can be stylish and still have a strong faith." Or, as Mr. Emerian said, "You don't have to look like a slut." The models who would come down the runway shortly thereafter, however, were hardly dressed like nuns. Though none of the 11 designers scheduled for the hourlong presentation showed anything as outre as the utterly transparent dress Mr. Jacobs had offered, or Mr. Ford's top cut to the solar plexus, there were plenty of skintight leggings, thigh grazing miniskirts and clingy T shirts among the women, even as many of the men donned monastic hoods. Ah, well, as the old throw pillow goes, "The higher the heel, the closer to heaven." The issue of feminine modesty has bedeviled Christian Fashion Week, as it is known, though this year the runway show was confined to one evening. The rest is a series of parties, panels and prayer circles, founded three years ago by two other married couples: Jose Gomez, an entrepreneur who, among many other projects, helps churches amp up their Web presence; Mayra Gomez, a former model who once appeared on Janice Dickinson's reality show and now runs TruModel, a mentoring program for young women; Tamy Lugo, a stylist; and Wil Lugo, a graphic designer. In their objective to remake the cold and cruel fashion world with love, sweet love, they summon to mind the Paul Mazursky movie "Bob Carol Ted Alice," minus the infidelity and wife swapping. Mr. Gomez, who has a goatee and kindly manner, and is also an ordained minister, is the obvious leader of the group. The night before the fashion show, he huddled on a stiff modernist couch in the lobby of the Aloft hotel at a "V.I.P. Rendezvous" attended by models, stylists and audience members paying up to 50 for admission, and explained how his creation has evolved from a simple showcase for designers who happened to be Christian. "Really quickly we found out how hard that was," he said. "The designers that wear Christianity on their sleeve are not that good, and the ones that are really good don't wear it on their sleeves." (Indeed, only one of this year's designers, Jean Huni of London, had an overt religious reference in her brand, Messiah Couture, which offered gowns to rival Badgley Mischka's. Another, Constance Franklin, with a trousseau inspired collection that included high waist red pants and a big white hat, said she had been inspired by the futuristic, geometric buildings she saw on trips to Abu Dhabi and Dubai.) The four then decided to challenge designers, secular ones as well, to make conservative clothes "for that modest, covered Christian woman," Mr. Gomez said. "We're not talking about Muslim Fashion Week." (And yes, Virginia, there is such a thing.) "Just a little more conservative." But policing hems and necklines proved "highly subjective and culturally relative," as another Christian fashion blogger, Whitney Bauck of Unwrinkling, posted after the shows in 2014. Online critiques like this, some rather more fiery, drove the Gomezes and Lugos back to their Bibles. "What we found was that what we were promoting and advocating was very weakly enforced in Scripture," Mr. Gomez said. "There's not really a lot about covering up. It's mostly about not acting gaudy." "Those things are much closer to the heart of God than cleavage is," Mr. Gomez said firmly. Still, the organization has struggled to find sufficient funds; its leaders would like to attract a major Christian corporate sponsor, as Mercedes Benz has been to fashion weeks in New York, London and other cities. "We probably don't want a Chick fil A," Mr. Gomez said, "but maybe a Forever 21." (Or maybe not, given Forever 21's repeated citations for workplace safety violations from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration.) In mid December, forced to trim a marketing, venue and production budget of 30,000, Christian Fashion Week issued a dramatic pronouncement that this season would be its last. "But this is Christian Fashion Week," Mr. Gomez said at Aloft with a practiced twinkle, "and so there could be a resurrection." The coffers may not be overflowing, but there was contextual modesty in abundance the next afternoon at the Vault, where vendor tables bore pink and purple bottles of Sexiest Fantasies Body Mist, large containers of protein powder for bodybuilders, lacy lingerie and samples of a makeup line called Divine Image Cosmetics ("Get the Look of an Angel"). Upstairs, models were staring into the eternal glow of their smartphones, waiting to have their hair scraped into buns and braids and their faces painted. In the hallway, Olivia Pollard, 19, a nursing student modeling as a hobby and about to embark on her maiden voyage down the runway, was slurping a slushy pink drink through a straw so as not to disturb her lipstick. "I'm really nervous, but I'm excited," she said. "I like the Christian background, because I'm a Christian nondenominational. It's nice that you have designers that cover you up." Zoe Thomas, a sloe eyed high school student who wants to be an actress, agreed. When it comes to the fashion mainstream, she prefers Tory Burch, Vera Wang "and Michael Kors, of course," she said, but "I wouldn't wear anything that is showing my butt, or a really low V neck or anything." Ms. Gomez was vigorously shepherding these young charges, though a broken right foot had deterred her own plans for a lap around the catwalk. "You need more lips! You need more lips!" she hollered at one colleen whose chin was trembling with anticipatory anxiety. "Tell them to deepen your lips. You need to tell her to shine you up. Shine you up!" Working behind a curtain from her "graveyard," a large box of pigments and unguents, was the hair and makeup coordinator of Christian Fashion Week, Neva Durham, a.k.a. Neva the Diva. Ms. Durham, of Lakeland, Fla., said that she had trained herself on YouTube and specialized in body painting, but was focusing here on muted versions of cosmetics' current greatest hits, assisted by about 15 people. "I have an eye to be able to create on demand with the gift that God has given me," she said. "You can have a dramatic eye and not look like a drag queen, you know what I mean? You can have a smoky eye and look nice and elegant." Downstairs again, Ms. Gomez barked: "This will start on time. I am not the kind of person who will start a 7 o'clock show at 7:45 oh hell no!" But first she led a short prayer session, asking God for the safety of everyone on the runway and for the audience to be open minded about what constituted Christian fashion. When it came to the latter matter, Ms. Gomez would have her work cut out for her. "What does not appeal to me is this trend of less and less and less material for women's clothing," said Kim Albritton, an interior decorator from Lithia, Fla., who was sitting in the middle of the front row, as glamorous as Anna Wintour with her brunette bob, black and white jacket and coppery necklaces. "I have two daughters, and I cannot tell you how many times I said to them: 'Absolutely not. You will not be getting booty shorts!' " Decrying "50 Shades of Grey" and the Kardashian circus, Mrs. Albritton said she teaches Bible study to high school girls and regularly lectures them on the shortness of their skirts. "Those goodies that God gave you are supposed to be saved for your husband, so you need to put things away and leave some mystery in there," she said. "I don't care anything about seeing a woman with everything she has showing through her shirt on the runway. I don't have any desire. That's not fashion to me." In fact, in the show's finale, a model did come down the runway with her bra showing through her lace capelet.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Style
"Dumbo" was no runt but it was no mammoth hit, either. Nearly eight decades after the 1941 original, Disney's live action "Dumbo" arrived in theaters this weekend to 45 million in ticket sales, topping the domestic box office. But that figure fell slightly below analysts' expectations of around 50 million, and overall made for a moderately disappointing opening for the Tim Burton film, which reportedly had a production budget of 170 million. An additional 71 million in overseas sales brings its global weekend total to 116 million. Like the animated original, Burton's "Dumbo" follows the trials and eventual triumph of an elephant outcast. Unlike the original, the new film is led by famous flesh and blood actors: Danny DeVito, Colin Farrell, Eva Green and Michael Keaton. It's a darker (if PG rated) take on the story, with DeVito playing the owner of a scrappy circus that gets bought by a powerful big city entrepreneur and amusement park owner (Keaton), who intends to exploit the circus's discovery of Dumbo, the flying elephant. "Dumbo" is the latest in a string of live action, C.G.I. buttressed Disney remakes. Its slight underperformance may be due in part to the unenthusiastic reception it received from most critics it currently holds a 50 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. By comparison, last year's Winnie the Pooh tale from Disney, "Christopher Robin," received 72 percent positive reviews, and 2017's live action "Beauty and the Beast" holds 71 percent. Remakes of "Aladdin" and "The Lion King" are slated for release later this year. There probably wasn't much competition between "Dumbo" and this weekend's other big movie. Universal's "Us," Jordan's Peele's family unfriendly follow up to his landmark 2017 feature debut, "Get Out," easily landed in second place, selling 33.6 million in tickets according to Comscore, which compiles box office data. That's more than enough to send its cumulative sales past the 100 million mark: after two weekends, the film has now made about 128.2 million domestically.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Movies
The Philadelphia Museum of Art has acquired two recent video works by Bruce Nauman, after an exhibition of his "Contrapposto Studies, I through VII" (2015/2016) there last September represented a major return for the artist. Francois Pinault and his Pinault Collection in Venice and Paris jointly acquired "Contrapposto Studies" with the museum, as well as the 2015 video work "Walks In Walks Out." "Contrapposto Studies" was Mr. Nauman's first major work to be exhibited since he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2009. In a series of large scale video projections that recall his "Walk With Contrapposto" (1968), he is shown in the classic pose rendered in both positive and negative, and at times digitally reproduced, broken up and stacked.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Art & Design
A show of hands, please, the audience at Gob Squad's "War and Peace" was asked: How many people here have read Tolstoy's mammoth novel? On Thursday night at the N.Y.U. Skirball Center, a smattering of hands went up, drastically reduced a moment later in response to the follow up: How many have read the book to the end? Fear not: Familiarity with the novel is no prerequisite for enjoying this antic show, a madcap mash up of live performance, prominent video and much audience participation. But, as the members of this experimental company are happy to tell you, their 105 minute devised performance is no substitute for the 1,200 page literary experience. You may have left Dave Malloy's wild and wonderful Broadway musical "Natasha, Pierre the Great Comet of 1812" knowing more about Tolstoy's "War and Peace" than when you walked in. Gob Squad ("Western Society") has other goals in mind.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Theater
The brides were everywhere they floated like flower petals on the constant wind that wafted across the isle of Aero in Denmark. White dresses billowing, they ran into the red brick building of the municipal registry in Aeroskobing; they alighted before the landmark Old Merchant's Court, one of Aero's historic attractions. Look closely at any location, sea or beachscape, and a wedding couple will pop up brides and bridegrooms in mixed and matched pairs: opposite sex, same sex, varied races and nationalities. Nuptials are held all over the island, airborne in helicopters, or afloat, on the ferries that import the marriage bound. Why has this island in the Baltic Sea's South Funen Archipelago lured the hugging masses, yearning to be wed? Weddings of foreigners on Aero have increased more than tenfold in the last seven years, from 236 in 2008 to 2,832 in 2015, according to Aero government figures, and now outnumber those of locals. "Last year, only 50 weddings were of Danes," said Joan Lykke Ammersboll, a registrar at the Aero Kommune, the government agency where wedding applications are filed and approved and where registry weddings are held. Indeed, for the last three years, the number of marriages of foreigners registered at the Town Hall outnumbers the population of the main town, Aeroskobing (937). Nuptials on Aero have all the advantages of the quickie Las Vegas marriage mill fast service and little bureaucracy yet are stylistically the opposite, set in this charming 17th century village, whose cobblestone streets are lined with marzipan colored tiny houses on an island with stunning beaches. Aeroskobing was given the prestigious Europa Nostra Award for its outstanding state of preservation. There are two types of wedding services available on Aero: the Town Hall ceremonies, which cost 500 Danish krone ( 75), and the more costly, personalized weddings provided by private agencies. There are four such agencies on the island, and five more in Germany that funnel couples over to the ferry at Svendborg, the most popular departure point. Danish Island Weddings (getmarriedindenmark.com), a family operated agency, pioneered the wedding business on Aero and has the highest profile, offering full out frills for fees starting at 990 euros ( 1,094). John Moloney, a former British air force pilot who runs Danish Island Weddings with his wife, Louise, an Aero native, said the spirit of love and celebration never fails to boost his spirits. "We see people at the happiest moments of their lives." At Aeroskobing's Aero Kommune Municipal Hall (aeroekommune.dk) where the registry marriage ceremonies are performed, couples recite their vows at a dizzying rate. Often, registrars conduct over 40 ceremonies a day. To keep up with the hectic pace in recent years, the office increased its staff to the current five registrars. Even the civil ceremony features candlelight and a toast of muscat wine, and the registrars have performed special marriage services when emergency strikes: "When one man's mother died and he had to leave, we rushed to the ferry and married him there," said Ms. Ammersboll. Mr. Moloney of Danish Island Weddings said his wife even comforted a jittery bride who almost backed out. Their service provides custom cakes, professional hair styling, horse drawn buggies and vintage cars. Most accommodations and facilities for weddings are within walking distance. The fact that the idyllic island offers a legal solution for couples from countries with problematic document issues is a big lure when obstacles seem insurmountable. "Throughout Europe, Asia and Africa, different countries require different documents and types of notarization, often of original birth and citizenship certificates, and waiting periods to qualify for a legal wedding," Mr. Moloney explained. "This can stall or even stop a marriage from taking place. Germany has some of the most restrictive rules: The couples must meet not only German laws but also follow the other partner's native country's rules." It is possible for prospective spouses to apply directly to AeroKommune.com to complete applications by email and mail and receive an approval within six months, generally, if their documents are in order. Even so, many foreigners, wishing to avoid any mishaps or language barriers, choose private agencies to navigate approval of their paperwork even before they arrive on the island. The agencies can often expedite the process and get the approval in 24 hours if documents are in order, sometimes achieving an exceptionally fast 36 hour turnaround from first phone call to ceremony. The residency requirement is only 24 hours before a couple can marry. The hope is, of course, that the nuptial bliss found on Aero will never fade. For one pair of newlyweds, the honeymoon lives on in Aero. They just bought a house there.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Travel
It was an entirely different time in life when there was very, very little to do. I was a middle schooler during the first half of the '90s the age of devil sticks, hair wraps, the Delia's catalog and my burning aspiration to morph into Angela Chase. While you may have hit junior high in an entirely different era, all tween age years have a few things in common: You're too young to drive, too young to have a real job and a little too old for cartoons. That meant that on certain long summer days, with nowhere important to go, I was couch bound much as many of us are this summer amid an unnerving Covid spike. When you're a kid, there's something oddly exciting about getting to watch daytime TV during the summer. It feels as if you're peeking behind the curtain at all sorts of goodies that you're typically restricted from seeing while locked away at school. So even what some might consider the corniest shows feel suddenly like a real treat, which may be exactly why I fell in love with the likes of "Family Feud," "The Price Is Right," "Classic Concentration" and the crown jewel: "Supermarket Sweep." (Amazon Prime Video is currently streaming what it calls the "Season 1991" and "Season 2000," and Netflix is streaming a season that aired in 1993.) Contestants in teams of two spent the first half of the show answering questions posed by David Ruprecht a gem of a host who oozed Midwestern uncle vibes and sported an impressive collection of snazzy sweaters about everyday grocery items. Correct answers built up time for their "sweep," which sent contestants ripping through the aisles, slamming hams, diapers and oversized bags of dog food into shopping carts in an effort to "spend" (and then win) the most money. I'm clearly not the only weirdo who enjoyed this. Whenever the show comes up in conversation and it does, if you're talking to me eyes light up. "Supermarket Sweep" debuted back in the 1960s, peppered the '90s and 2000s and is being revamped soon on ABC with Leslie Jones as the host, which speaks to its generational appeal and enduring popularity. So does a sudden surge of online articles since Netflix started streaming it, with headlines like "Help, I've Started Watching 'Supermarket Sweep' and I Can't Stop, Please Kill Me." But I'm all too happy to re immerse myself in the old episodes and let the throwback thrill wash over me once again. Here are three reasons you'll get swept away, too. All the quiz questions that take up the first half of the show are based on popular products from the '80s and '90s (or the early 2000s, depending on which season you're watching), and they conjure up long forgotten jingles and tag lines in the most delightful way. Remember Slice soda? And Prell shampoo? How about "Oh Henry! This stuff is intense!" How about Lava Soap and Budget Gourmet? And Total cereal, which at the time seemed like the solution for good health? Remember when all laundry detergent came in powder form? Remember margarine? Some of this stuff isn't around anymore, and some of it has endured. (Total is still a thing! Margarine is now called plant based butter!) But many brands and products of that moment have fallen out of our collective consciousness. Being suddenly hit with them again, I am instantly reminded of their old commercials of course I can still sing the jingles which everyone was forced to watch ad nauseam before DVRs became common. Seeing them today gives me that certain cozy feeling only relics from a simpler time of my life can conjure. Who doesn't get a buzz from the thought of running through a store, grabbing anything you want and trying to spend as much money as possible? While grocery shopping in real life takes diligence shopping lists, budgets, coupons, meal plans this was a free for all. No one needs five whole turkeys unless it's the night before Thanksgiving and you have a polygamist family to feed, but in this age of toilet paper hoarding and plexiglass shields, watching contestants living it up in the cheese aisle is especially gratifying. 3. The absolutely meaningless but intense debate it sparks Watch a few episodes of "Supermarket Sweep" with a partner or pal, and you'll find you each have some very strong opinions about strategy. Should you or shouldn't you grind the coffee for a 100 bonus? Is it worth the time? Should you actually bother trying to find the three shopping list items? Or should you spend more effort heaving forearm length provolone logs into your cart? Is it smarter to ransack the meat section or clean out the medicine aisle? Does the team that adds more than 300 in bonus cash to its sweep total have an unfair, insurmountable advantage? And do we really need to talk that through into the wee hours? Turns out we do. Years ago, I binged bowl after bowl of cereal while getting a midmorning fix of "Supermarket Sweep." These days, something feels right about watching it at night, when I can kick back with a wine spritzer or two after another long day in this particularly cruel summer. A dose of "Supermarket Sweep" still brings that much needed wholesome, simple thrill."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Television
Nathan Olivarez Giles of The Wall Street Journal said that "the Switch's versatility will make it a must have console like the legendary original Wii" if it can deliver exciting games. But for now, it's too early to tell. As incredibly versatile as the Switch's hardware and technical capabilities are, the console feels incomplete at launch without a strong lineup of games, access to Nintendo's rich back catalog of iconic titles and really any online services to speak of. The Switch has the potential to be a console for everybody. But most everyone but die hard Nintendo well, Legend of Zelda fans should wait to see if it shapes up. On The Verge, Ross Miller said that the "Switch has all the makings of something truly great" and that Nintendo "has innovated upon some of its best ideas," but that the company would still have to prove it would support the console. The most shocking thing about the Switch might be how many obvious pitfalls Nintendo has managed to elegantly avoid. Going from playing on the tablet to the TV is completely effortless, and there's no sense of compromise whichever way you choose to play. Once you hold and use the Switch, it just makes sense. Does it truly work as a hybrid gaming system? The staff at Polygon said it meets its basic promise "of a platform that will move without fanfare or effort across the hand held and home console spaces." There is something remarkable about seeing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild running in portable mode, followed by that "wow" moment of docking the console and continuing on a television. It's hard not to wonder if we're staring at the future of portable gaming, with Nintendo and the Switch promising to bridge the gap between mobile and console. At TechCrunch, Devin Coldewey said the Switch "almost immediately felt like something that was missing until now something midway between a 'real' console and a 'real' hand held." It was "something I didn't even know I'd wanted," he said. It was a small but substantial "Eureka" moment: I'd been playing Zelda for a couple hours like I'd play a normal console game, and I was vacillating between going to bed and finishing whatever task I was occupied with in the game. "Wait," I thought. "I can do both!" Without trying, I'd stumbled upon one of the many situations where you'd like to play a game but don't feel like sitting down in the same spot staring at your TV. At Ars Technica, Kyle Orland said the system "seems to pull portable gaming upward more than it drags home console gaming downward." Though Nintendo marketing seems intent on describing the Switch as a home console that it just so happens you can take with you, I've found myself using the system as a portable much more often than on the TV. In the week I've spent with the Switch, the system has replaced my iPhone as the source for flexible gaming when I have a few minutes to spare regardless of location. Vince Ingenito at IGN said the Switch was "an attractive and powerful but oversized portable gaming system that struggles to be a convincing or reliable home console." As a hand held, the Switch is a powerful piece of hardware with a gorgeous screen, but it's too large and power hungry to feel like you can really take it anywhere. As a console, it's underpowered, unreliable and lacking basic features and conveniences that all of its competitors offer. It's nicely built and cleverly designed to be used in a variety of ways, but the bottom line is that the Switch doesn't do any one of the many things it can do without some sort of significant compromise. Rebekah Valentine of AppTrigger said the system was lacking too many features that had become standard in gaming consoles. Reviewers were split on the Joy Cons, the new multiuse controllers. Several said the left Joy Con became unresponsive during play; Nintendo has not indicated whether the problem will be fixed in the wider release. Chris Kohler of Wired said the Joy Cons "are quite simply the most versatile and clever controllers that it has ever shipped with a machine." Kirk Hamilton of Kotaku said that they were "a nifty idea," but were uncomfortable, and that they "don't always work as well as I would've hoped."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Technology
TOKYO Utility experts and economists say it will take many months, possibly into next year, to get anywhere close to restoring full power. The places most affected are not only in the earthquake ravaged area but also in the economically crucial region closer to Tokyo, which is having to ration power because of the big chunk of the nation's electrical generating capacity that was knocked out by the quake or washed away by the tsunami. Besides the dangerously disabled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, three other nuclear plants, six coal fired plants and 11 oil fired power plants were initially shut down, according to PFC Energy, an international consulting firm. By some measures, as much as 20 percent of the total generating capacity of the region's dominant utility, the Tokyo Electric Power Company or an estimated 11 percent of Japan's total power is out of service. Until all the lost or suspended generating capacity is replaced, economists say, factories will operate at reduced levels, untold numbers of cars and other products will go unbuilt and legions of shoppers will cut back their buying all taking a big toll on Japan's economy. The greater Tokyo region represents one third of the nation's economic output. Masaaki Kanno, chief economist at JPMorgan Securities Japan, estimates that the country's gross domestic product will shrink in the second quarter by about 3 percent on an annualized basis, with about half of that decline resulting from the power shortage. A recovery will gradually begin to take hold in the third quarter, he said, as the need to rebuild the northeast portion of Japan's main island, Honshu, acts as a major economic stimulus. But the power shortage will be a drag on economic growth for some time to come. "We hadn't initially expected the quake to impact the national economy to this degree," Mr. Kanno said. But the lingering power shortages will be widespread, he said. Besides the direct effects on businesses, consumers "won't go out as much and they'll have to get home earlier," he said, meaning they will not spend as much. Tokyo Electric has been using rolling blackouts of up to three hours in designated zones to balance demand and supply. The cuts have at times been poorly communicated, further disrupting businesses already reeling from logistical problems and damage to factories in the north. And Tokyo, more than most places in Japan, is highly dependent on electric trains and subways for commuting, so when there are blackouts, lots of people cannot get to work or easily organize their days. "In the short term, it will be very difficult to make up the loss of power from the Daiichi plant," Masakazu Toyoda, chairman of the Institute of Energy Economics, a research organization affiliated with the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, said. "At the summer peak, the shortfall will be in the 10 percent to 20 percent range." Tokyo Electric now has an operating capacity of 37 gigawatts and expects to be back up to about 54 gigawatts by summer, according to PFC Energy. (Each gigawatt is sufficient to power about 250,000 Japanese households.) But Tokyo Electric's peak summer demand is usually 60 gigawatts, according to PFC, meaning at least a 10 percent shortfall. Some economists say privately that the shortfall could turn out to be more than twice that large. Tokyo Electric is trying to make up the lost generating capacity by restarting shuttered plants, repairing the damaged ones, tapping hydropower reserves and temporarily operating gas turbines. But summer blackouts are inevitable, with plans for many areas to go without electricity for an hour or two at the hottest part of the day. In theory, the Tokyo area could import electricity from the south. But a historical rivalry between Tokyo and the city of Osaka led the two areas to develop grids using different frequencies Osaka's is 60 cycles and Tokyo's is 50 cycles so sharing is inefficient. There are transfer stations, but they have limited capacity. And the hand off is comparable to two railroads that use different gauge tracks and have to unload cargo from one train and reload it onto another at the place the tracks meet. "The simplest way to solve the problem is through conservation," Mr. Toyoda said, "so the question of how to encourage that with the least impact is on the government's agenda." Ultimately, the need to conserve energy could force Japanese companies already among the most efficient in the world to emerge even leaner and more competitive. But that is little consolation now. Mr. Toyoda said policy makers would aim most conservation measures at consumers, rather than businesses, because households' share of electricity consumption has been rising for decades. "In 1973, the ratio of electricity used by industry was 50 percent," he said. "Now it's just over 30 percent." The energy crisis has even led officials to consider the unthinkable: instituting daylight saving time, something they have previously declined to adopt because it might cause confusion.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Global Business
Picking up factory workers at the gate of the Phnom Penh Special Economic Zone. Minebea is trying to attract workers by building a modern, four story dormitory. Workers, many of whom come from surrounding provinces, enter the main gate of the Phnom Penh Special Economic Zone. Workers, many of whom come from surrounding provinces, enter the main gate of the Phnom Penh Special Economic Zone. PHNOM PENH, Cambodia Tiffany Company is quietly building a diamond polishing factory in Cambodia, a country popularly associated more with killing fields and land mines than baubles. Some of Japan's biggest manufacturers are also rushing to set up operations in Phnom Penh to make wiring harnesses for cars and touch screens and vibration motors for cellphones. European companies are not far behind, making dance shoes and microfiber sleeves for sunglasses. Foreign companies are flocking to Cambodia for a simple reason. They want to limit their overwhelming reliance on factories in China. Problems are multiplying fast for foreign investors in China. Blue collar wages have surged, quadrupling in the last decade as a factory construction boom has coincided with waning numbers of young people interested in factory jobs. Starting last year, the labor force has actually begun shrinking because of the "one child" policy and an aging population. "Every couple days, I'm getting calls from manufacturers who want to move their businesses here from China," said Bradley Gordon, an American lawyer in Phnom Penh. But multinational companies are finding that they can run from China's rising wages but cannot truly hide. The populations, economies and even electricity output of most Southeast Asian countries are smaller than in many Chinese provinces, and sometimes smaller than a single Chinese city. As companies shift south, they quickly use up local labor supplies and push wages up sharply. While wages and benefits often remain below levels needed to provide proper housing and balanced diets, the manufacturing investment foreign direct investment in Cambodia rose 70 percent last year from 2011 is starting to raise millions of people out of destitution. "People along the Mekong River are being lifted out of poverty by foreign investment inflows driven by higher Chinese wages," said Peter Brimble, the senior economist for Cambodia at the Asian Development Bank. Only a smattering of companies, mostly in low tech sectors like garment and shoe manufacturing, are seeking to leave China entirely. Many more companies are building new factories in Southeast Asia to supplement operations in China. China's fast growing domestic market, large population and huge industrial base still make it attractive for many companies, while productivity in China is rising almost as fast as wages in many industries. Foreign investment in China nonetheless slipped 3.5 percent last year, after rising every year since 1980 except 1999, during the Asian financial crisis, and 2009, during the global financial crisis. Still, at 119.7 billion, foreign investment in China continues to dwarf investment elsewhere. By comparison, investment in Cambodia rose to 1.5 billion. But last year was the first time since comparable recordkeeping began in the 1970s that Cambodia received more foreign investment per person than China. "People are not looking for exit strategies from China, they're looking to set up parallel operations to hedge their bets," said Bretton Sciaroni, another American lawyer here. Among Japanese makers, Sumitomo is making wiring harnesses for cars, Minebea is assembling parts for cellphones and Denso is about to start production of motorcycle ignition components. Foreign investment also jumped last year in Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar and the Philippines. As companies compete for employees, working conditions in the region are improving. Pactics, a Belgian run company that is the world's largest maker of microfiber sleeves for luxury sunglasses, has introduced employee benefits that were previously rare in Cambodia, like medical insurance, accident insurance, education allowances and free lunches. Because costs are extremely low in Cambodia, where a visit to the doctor may cost only a couple of dollars, overall compensation for each worker is still less than 130 a month. At the company's factory on the outskirts of Shanghai, workers doing the same tasks earn 560 to 640 a month, including government mandated allowances, said Piet Holten, the company's president. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. Cambodian workers sew 15 to 30 percent fewer sleeves per day than their Shanghai counterparts, but productivity in Cambodia has been catching up. "I will never get it up to China, but the cost is less than a third of China's, and China only gets more expensive," Mr. Holten said. Overall monthly compensation for industrial workers has increased as much as 65 percent in the last five years in Cambodia, although from such a low base that workers here remain among the poorest in Asia. A decade ago, workers flocked to newly opened factories in Phnom Penh that posted hiring notices, but "today, you put a notice on a factory and you don't have anybody come," said Sandra D'Amico, the managing director of HR Inc. Cambodia, a human resources company. Strikes this winter temporarily crippled numerous Taiwanese owned garment factories in eastern Cambodia producing simple garments like bathing suits after Japanese factories moved in to make more sophisticated products like business suits and gloves and offered higher pay and benefits. At the Phnom Penh Special Economic Zone here in central Cambodia, Minebea is trying to attract workers by building a modern, four story dormitory for 2,000 people with six beds to a room and a large recreation hall a big change from the plywood houses with thatched roofs in which millions of Cambodians still live. The Laurelton Diamonds unit of Tiffany has already driven pilings for a modern, 95,000 square foot factory across the street to polish small diamonds, and is seeking international "green building" accreditation for the project. Employment at the zone is doubling this year, to 20,000 workers, and is projected to redouble to 40,000 in the next several years, said Hiroshi Uematsu, the zone's managing director. Skeptics like David J. Welsh, the Cambodia representative of the A.F.L. C.I.O.'s Solidarity Center, say that rising food and housing costs prevent many workers from fully benefiting from rising wages. Ken Loo, secretary general of the Garment Manufacturers Association in Cambodia, said that his industry needed to resist workers' demands for further pay increases to preserve international competitiveness. Tatiana Olchanetzky, a manufacturing consultant to companies in the handbag and luggage industry, said that she had analyzed the costs in her industry of moving operations from China to the Philippines, Cambodia, Vietnam and Indonesia. She found that any savings were very small because China produces most of the fabrics, clasps, wheels and other materials required for the bag trade, and these would have to be shipped to other countries if final assembly moved there. But some factories have moved anyway, at the request of Western buyers who fear depending exclusively on a single country. While moving to a new country with an unproved supply chain is a risk, Ms. Olchanetzky said, "They think there's a risk in staying in China, too."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Global Business
When Grace Jones was strutting around Studio 54 and Donna Summer records were playing at New York clubs, Empire Rollerdrome was hitting its stride in Brooklyn. It was the end of the 1970s, disco fever was in full swing, and crowds of predominantly Black and gay Brooklynites had spent the decade dancing and skating at Empire. Unlike some of the elite discotheques in Manhattan, the rink was a welcoming space, with no velvet ropes or fickle doormen. Anyone with a few dollars could get in. As it became a hot spot for nightlife, skaters and celebrities from different parts of the city traveled to Empire to experience its "miracle maple" floor, where the Detroit Stride met the Cincinnati Style and the Brooklyn Bounce. Cher threw parties there. Ben Vereen and John F. Kennedy Jr. glided across its rink. "He would do all these things that just looked impossible spins and dips, and changing direction on a dime," said Elin Schoen Brockman, who profiled him at the time for New York Magazine. "It was like watching a whirling dervish." Mr. Butler's style of skating, jammin' which is built around rhythmic dips, spins, crisscrosses and turns is now seen by fellow skaters as the beginnings of roller disco. When he started going to Empire in the 1950s, Mr. Butler simply wanted to skate. "I didn't know anything about Empire," Mr. Butler, now 87, said in a video interview from his home in Atlanta. "I didn't know I was going to wreck the place." From the beginning, Mr. Butler pushed for new sounds. Traditionally, rinks hired live musicians to play rhythmic music on organs, often purchased secondhand from churches and theaters. Or they had D.J.s who spun music with predictable tempos that allowed skaters to match the beat. By the mid 60s, he had sweet talked Gloria McCarthy, the daughter of an owner at Empire, into changing the music. Fridays became "Bounce Night," when popular music jazz, R B, funk and then disco blared from the speakers. In the early '70s, Empire replaced its live organist with a D.J. And in 1980, the club sound designer Richard Long who had created sound systems for places like Studio 54 and Paradise Garage revamped the rink, newly renamed Empire Roller Disco, with a 20,000 watt stereo system. This was Empire at its height. It "was like a Mecca," said Robert Clayton, who worked there as DJ Big Bob for more than 20 years. "You didn't skate unless you came to Empire." The skater many people came to see was Mr. Butler, whose flashy moves drew admirers and brought him students. Cher even hired him as her skating date for a night at Empire soon after the release of her roller disco inspired song "Hell on Wheels." Mr. Butler, who grew up in Detroit, learned to skate there in the 1940s, getting his start at Arcadia Roller Rink on Woodward Avenue. Black skaters were allowed at Arcadia just one night a week, and on those evenings, instead of a traditional organist, the rink would hire a D.J. to play soul and R B. "We used to call it roller rocking," Mr. Butler told Rolling Stone in 1979. "All they've done is change the names around. Black people have been jammin' on skates for as long as I can remember. But the terms aren't important it's the skating. It's the way of moving your body." At Arcadia, the 10 year old Bill noticed how a skater named Archie moved his body, stunning the crowd by sliding backward with his hair slicked back and his boots unlaced. "He was skating clockwise while the rest of us were skating counterclockwise, and that already got me crazy," Mr. Butler said. After that, Mr. Butler used the money he had earned delivering groceries to buy his own skates for the then whopping sum of 23. But he wasn't ready to skate, he said, until he could command the rink like Archie. So he practiced in his family's basement, skidding into the hot water boiler and the coal bin as he attempted to perfect his stride. No one knew that he was skating, he said; he was a loner taking the bus to and from the rink by himself. Even after he enlisted in the Air Force and began traveling, he would slip away from the base by himself to check out the local rinks. When he moved to Brooklyn in 1957, he brought with him his music and a hodgepodge of moves he'd picked up from skating all over. Soon, he said, he was spending most of his nights at Empire, where he began giving lessons to those interested in his style. He called himself a jamma, a term he borrowed from both jazz and roller derby. (In roller derby it refers to the team member who tries to pull ahead of the pack and, ideally, lap the group.) Jammas, Mr. Butler said, build their movements by focusing on the skate's leverage points. Rooting their movements in different parts of the inside or outside edge of the boot allows skaters to grip the floor properly and push off with intention and power. "If you've got the technique, the improvisational part comes no sweat," he said. "You have the sophistication to be an improvisationalist a person who can skate syncopated rhythm." This is what he taught generations of skaters, and what he brought to the movies. He worked as skating director on films including "The Warriors" (1979), "Xanadu" (1980) and later "Roll Bounce" (2005), which helped inject the funky, dazzling world of skating into pop culture's mainstream. Mr. Butler also opened a skating school on Long Island, where he was living. By the late 1970s, he was recruiting new students and commuting to Brooklyn regularly to continue teaching at Empire. One of his former students, Denise Speetzen, was 11 when she began training with Mr. Butler in the 1980s. As she grew older and met skaters from all over, she discovered a common thread. "They'd say, 'Oh, we always skated this way because this is the kind of music that we liked, so we have this different kind of sway or swagger,'" she said. "But if you talk to them longer and longer and trace back who taught each person it's kind of like doing a family tree." "Eventually, you can trace it all back," she continued, "and it'll come back to Bill." Mr. Clayton, who traveled to rinks around the world as a guest D.J., also recognized Mr. Butler's signatures. "All of that came out of Detroit," Mr. Clayton said, referring to popular moves like skate trains and tension drops, "but he refined it and made it better."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Dance
The eight N.B.A. teams that did not qualify for the season's restart at Walt Disney World in Florida can create bubbles and hold voluntary group workouts at their team facilities beginning in mid September, the league and its players' union announced on Tuesday. The provision applies to teams like the Knicks and the Golden State Warriors, who were no longer in contention for the playoffs when the N.B.A. suspended its season on March 11 because of the coronavirus pandemic. The league resumed play in July with 22 teams in an isolated campus at Disney World near Orlando, Fla., that has thus far not yielded any positive coronavirus tests after players and staff left quarantine. The announcement by the league is an indication that the N.B.A. has faith in its approach and feels comfortable expanding it, even as the pandemic continues to affect lives daily in the United States. Like the Florida restart, this plan would be implemented in phases, including a quarantine period before workouts. It would require players and staff to stay "in a campuslike environment under controlled conditions," according to the statement released by the N.B.A., and to undergo daily testing for the coronavirus. The eight teams affected are the Knicks, Warriors, Minnesota Timberwolves, Cleveland Cavaliers, Atlanta Hawks, Detroit Pistons, Chicago Bulls and the Charlotte Hornets. The league said that all eight teams could also invite up to five players who currently are not signed to a league contract but were assigned to the team's G League affiliate.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Sports
SAN JUAN, P.R. For many years I've avoided writing about "West Side Story." As a Puerto Rican critic, I resent the expectation that I have something to say about a musty old musical from 1957. Just as the U.S. government bestowed second class American citizenship upon islanders in 1917 without popular consent, "West Side Story" continues to recruit us as extras even when we never intended to audition for the show. The Puerto Rican writer Nelson Rivera once recalled studying abroad in Paris, where he was greeted by "Oui, 'West Side Story'!" at every turn, as if collecting stamps in the passport of an imaginary nation everyone else thought was real. But the show remains one of the most enduring representations of Puerto Rican life in American pop culture, and the entertainment industry won't leave it alone. A new movie adaptation from Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner is coming to theaters this year, and a modernized production by the Belgian director Ivo van Hove is the latest Broadway revival. So when my literary agent reached out with free tickets for a dress rehearsal in December the show officially opened on Thursday it felt like my long delayed civic responsibility to bear witness. I clipped on my gold hoops and painted my lips red, as if for battle, tweeting a selfie before I left for the theater: "Always Anita, never Maria." My mother taught me to resist the cartoonish stereotypes of macho teenage gangsters and hysterical lovers in "West Side Story." But I also know that when the 1961 movie version came out, she and her friends went to see it twice at the local theater in Washington Heights and cheered when the Sharks came onscreen. If this musical is still our narrative ghetto, then the least we can do is make noise about what it feels like to live in it. There's no doubt that "West Side Story" has long functioned as a vehicle for great performances by Latinx artists, despite the fact that the lead Puerto Rican roles of Maria and Bernardo in major productions have most often gone to white actors in brownface. Rita Moreno's best supporting actress Oscar for her brilliant turn as Anita in the 1961 film remains, to this day, one of only two Latinas to win an Oscar for acting. Though this distinction has grown bitter with time, it's still a thrill to watch her "sing of assimilation while dancing its undoing," in the words of the performance studies scholar Deborah Paredez. But whatever pleasure and power Puerto Ricans have extracted from "West Side Story" have been extracted against the odds. The show's creators didn't know, or didn't seem to care to know, much about their own material. The lyricist Stephen Sondheim at first expressed doubts about his fitness for the project: "I've never been that poor and I've never even met a Puerto Rican." The initial concept, an adaptation of "Romeo and Juliet" recast with teenage street gangs, didn't involve Puerto Ricans at all. The artists toyed with a number of ethnic possibilities Jewish people? Mexicans? before settling on the version we know now. In the words of Leonard Bernstein, the show's composer, "the Puerto Rican thing had just begun to explode." For Mr. Bernstein, that "thing" was a fortuitous coincidence for his formal experiment, but in the real world, it was an enormous postwar migration from the island that had "nearly doubled" New York City's Puerto Rican population in just two years, as the scholar Lorrin Thomas notes in her book "Puerto Rican Citizen." Right from the beginning, these recent arrivals didn't like what they saw on Broadway. New York's most widely circulated Spanish language newspaper at the time, La Prensa, called for a picket at the premiere, and the Puerto Rican journalist and labor organizer Jesus Colon lamented that the show was "superficial and sentimental" and "always out of context with the real history, culture, and traditions of my people." In subsequent decades, this tradition of protest and critique has only grown richer and more collectively exasperated. Mr. Bernstein's music and Jerome Robbins's choreography are often cited as the musical's redeeming features by its liberal defenders; a critical Los Angeles Times review of the 2009 Broadway revival nonetheless praised the "extraordinary variety and operatic fullness" of the score and the "ecstasy" of the dance numbers. But I've always been baffled by how the musical's creators squandered the opportunity to engage the genius of Afro Caribbean polyrhythms. The gym scene "mambo" is not, rhythmically, a mambo, and the famous rooftop number "America" has the Sharks dancing a Spanish from Spain paso doble mishmashed with whitewashed showbiz jazz. When performers like Ms. Moreno succeed in conveying distinctively Nuyorican ways of moving, they seem to strain to do so under inhospitable conditions. In theory, "West Side Story" should have something to say about the experience of assimilation. But in practice, the musical demands assimilation from its Puerto Rican performers, then capitalizes on the glorious virtuosity of their capacity to resist it. Directors of more recent productions have made an effort to adapt "West Side Story" into something culturally relevant and a bit more politically correct. The 1980 revival was the first to cast a Puerto Rican performer as Maria, and the 2009 revival enlisted Lin Manuel Miranda to render some of the dialogue bilingually. In the latest Broadway staging, Mr. van Hove dutifully follows their lead: The Sharks are played by Latinx performers, and there are snatches of urban Spanish patter between songs. The bodega looks like a real bodega. And notably, the choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker leaves behind the soaring lines of Jerome Robbins's original numbers in favor of loose, feral syncopations developed in collaboration with the dancers themselves. Of course, there's only so much Latin rhythm they can bring to the musical while maintaining a working relationship with Leonard Bernstein's score perhaps an object lesson in the limits of reform, whether aesthetic or political. Where Mr. van Hove diverges from previous stagings is in doubling down on the plot's brutality. I still can't shake the chill I felt watching the Jets attempt to gang rape Anita in the show's third act. It's magnified on a giant screen onstage, captured by one of the Jets on his cellphone camera. The omnipresence of screens in this production should remind us how easy it has always been to reproduce, revive and restage scenes of spectacular violence. Yet I'm not sure how deeply Mr. van Hove understands the implications of his own choices here. According to Scott Rudin, one of the show's producers, Mr. van Hove "doesn't direct revivals like they're revivals, because to him, they're not." Mr. van Hove may have "no iconic relationship" to "West Side Story," so he may not feel the oppressive repetitions of the history of violence against brown women bearing down on his body. But for many of us, it's the umpteenth time we've seen Anita assaulted for dramatic effect, each time under the guise of greater authenticity. This production also renders the Jets as a multiracial gang, concocting a fantasy world in which bigoted whites form an alliance with African Americans against Puerto Rican migrants a bid, in Ms. De Keersmaeker's words, "for inclusion of the American population today." But it's unlikely black New Yorkers would seek (or find) security among white Americans rather than among their Caribbean, Middle Eastern and Central American neighbors. Mr. van Hove's casting misrepresents the real solidarities that form at the margins of U.S. citizenship and perhaps more dangerously, shifts our focus away from the enduring problem of white supremacist violence. "Inclusion" here is code for willful colorblindness. Mr. van Hove and Ms. De Keersmaeker are Belgian; we'll give them that excuse. But in 2020, most Americans and certainly all New Yorkers in the audience have "met a Puerto Rican" and should theoretically know more about our relationship to one another than "West Side Story" can reveal. The United States has a compulsion when it comes to "West Side Story," restaging, again and again, the primal scene of the colony's incursion into American consciousness, the midcentury's "gran migracion" of Puerto Ricans to New York City. Never mind all that has transpired since then: salsa, hip hop, the Young Lords, the movement to demilitarize Vieques, Hurricane Maria, RickyRenuncia, the new "gran migracion" not to New York but to points south especially Orlando, Fla., where the Pulse club massacre happened on Latin Night. Mr. Bernstein's daughter, Jamie, celebrated this latest Broadway revival as "more timely now than ever" given "the story line involving the mistreatment" of Puerto Rican migrants. But the numbing persistence of such "mistreatment" which has as much to do with colonial geopolitics as with garden variety anti black and anti immigrant racism is not necessarily a testament to the musical's insight. And these continuous revivals reinforce America's colonizing power to determine who Puerto Ricans get to be. It might be nice for some to think that culture is not a zero sum game, that we can sustain an outdated musical as a nostalgic artifact without precluding new narratives, which ultimately require new distributions of power. In a feature for The New York Times Magazine, Sasha Weiss wondered whether this current generation of Latinx dancers "will one day insist on staging 'West Side Story' for themselves." I think of them when I go to my dance class at La Goyco, a school in Santurce, San Juan, that was abandoned because of recent austerity cuts but reclaimed by activists as a community center the only place I could charge my laptop to write this Op Ed in the blackouts after the island's recent earthquakes. In the Afro Puerto Rican musical tradition known as bomba, the dancers are the ones who tell the drum what to do. They are the directors of their own performance. Maybe the next generation of dancers won't want to adapt "West Side Story" anymore. Maybe what we want is independence, to shine within a tradition we've authored ourselves. I'm not above quoting Anita in my advice to the American entertainment industry and its many captive audiences: "Forget that boy, and find another."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Opinion
MILAN The Moncler Genius 2020 presentation could be seen and heard blocks away, all thumping music and strobing lights. A crowd hovered around the exterior gate, a sea of craned necks trying to catch a glimpse of whatever was unfolding inside the warehouse occasionally parting to make way for a stream of invited guests: the editors, influencers, buyers and executives known in this particular part of the world at this particular time of year as "fashion week people." Parked outside, cradled in smoke machine fog, was a black matte minimalist tour bus made in collaboration with Rick Owens.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Style
Our columnist, Sebastian Modak, is visiting each destination on our 52 Places to Go in 2019 list. His stops in Australia were his 45th and 46th locations, following a visit to Danang, in Vietnam. On a Sunday afternoon, at least 100 people were at Scarborough Beach, 20 minutes from downtown Perth, for the same reason: to dance. As the sun began to set behind a dense layer of clouds, turning the sky a pale lavender, salsa and bachata blared. With the free salsa lessons just ended, the party, put on by a group called WAZouk, began, and people from across ages and ethnicities paired up and twirled. Far from just about everything and fine with it. Perth stands out for its newness. The city seems to glisten, with shiny glass buildings lining clean streets and a waterfront that looks like it opened yesterday. This struck me all the more because the last time I was in Perth as a teenager on a family trip from our home in Indonesia I remember thinking how forgotten it seemed: You could walk down the middle of a road at 10 p.m. and not worry about being hit. Perth, tied as it is to the mining industry that dominates Western Australia, has lived through a constant cycle of booms and busts. One of the more recent booms was in the mid aughts and many of the city's big new projects were conceived then. Many of these developments put the city on this year's 52 Places list. While Sydney and Melbourne compete for cool points, Perth has risen above the fray to find contentment with what it has. Take the 990 acre Kings Park, for example, which spreads across the city's Mount Eliza like an emerald crown. Bigger than Central Park, it extends seemingly forever and much of it is wild bushland. The park transitions seamlessly into a botanic garden, where bridges stretch over ravines and you can go on a self guided walking tour of Western Australia's surprisingly varied flora in just over an hour. Walking through the park on a weekday, crowds were thin but I encountered a couple surreptitiously sharing a bottle of wine while looking out over the city's skyline. "Where are you from?" I asked, assuming they were tourists. "Here," the man replied. "But it's such a beautiful day out, why go to work?" That utter embrace of all things summer extended into after hours, too. While Sydney's lockout laws, an attempt to curb drunken violence, have all but killed the city's famous night life, in Perth, bar culture is thriving. A recent change to the law lets establishments serve alcohol without food, and casual bars have popped up everywhere as a result. There's plenty of messiness if that's what you're after, but I also had a quiet and world class Negroni at Ezra Pound, and caught up with old friends in the giant backyard of Picabar, housed in a corner of the red brick Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. The Indian Ocean radiated in multiple shades of blue, extending out into the horizon. I stepped onto a stretch of sand that looked like flour. I cooled off as other bathers took underwater selfies. I stepped over a quokka and got back on my bike. The beaches got emptier as I skirted the north coast of the island, away from the ferry terminal. I spent most of the afternoon down a steep hill at a beach called City of York, named after a ship that hit Rottnest's perilous reef and sunk in 1899. I dozed off in the shade of an overhang, watching a leathery skink scuttle between the rocks. Throughout my stay in Perth, I had the benefit of a guide a childhood friend who has settled down in the city. Just before she dropped me off at the airport, as we had lunch at one of the countless Indonesian restaurants in the city, she thanked me when I should have been doing the thanking. "You coming here has actually made me see how great this city really is," she said. I understood what she meant: when life is good, it's easy to take it for granted. If summer came early to Australia, bringing long days of hot beaches and cold beer, it also brought some less desirable phenomena. Bushfires, a regular summer occurrence in Australia's dry eastern forests, are happening with greater frequency, intensity and reach. A three year drought and above average temperatures have turned entire stretches of the east coast into a tinderbox. Some of the worst affected areas are right on the border between New South Wales and Queensland precisely where I was headed next. Northern Rivers is the name given to the northeast corner of New South Wales, where lush valleys spread out between three rivers and hug a sparkling coastline of white sand beaches. Bohemian towns are spread across the region, where weekenders ride barefoot on bicycles turned rusty with salty air between throwback motels and beachside bars. It was strange then to drive south from Brisbane into this vacationers' playground armed with an app that tracks fires. After a fire free drive, I arrived at Brunswick Heads, a quiet town where the Brunswick River empties into the Pacific Ocean. Families kayaked down the river and barbecued sausages in the park and the sky was blue. The only sign of something amiss was the haze that settled over the sun once it began to set. Driving through the region, hopping between farmers' markets and viewpoints, it was impossible to forget the tragic backdrop to my visit. I passed groves of hulking macadamia and pecan trees and ate lunch in the embrace of a cool breeze at The Farm, a farmers' collective just outside of Byron Bay. But I also passed makeshift road signs advertising koala rescue hotlines and more than once hit dead ends, where volunteer firefighters asked me to turn around. I found Killen Falls, but it had slowed to a trickle from years of drought. Eventually, I looped back to the coast, where I walked the giant strip of sand that wraps around Cape Byron. When I got too hot, I hid my backpack in the underbrush that abuts the sand and went for a swim. Eventually I turned from the beach into the bush and followed the trail up to the Cape Byron Lighthouse where crowds were already staking out their spots for sunset while pulling six packs and portable speakers from their backpacks. After the sky turned orange and then to black, I made my way back to Byron Bay and was confronted by the first major crowds I'd encountered in this part of the country. None While most international tourists make a beeline to Byron Bay, I noticed Australians preferred rented apartments in the quieter towns of Northern Rivers. I stayed at The Brunswick (formerly the Brunswick Heads Motel), where new management has given a comfortable, if basic, motel a classy face lift. None If you're traveling to eastern Australia now, download the Fires Near Me app, which crowdsources data from firefighting departments across the country to create a live map of bushfires. Most times, thankfully, you won't be able to just stumble upon one as roads are closed in a wide radius from the worst conflagrations, but it's better to be safe. None Apart from the monthly Bangalow Market, the Mullumbimby Farmers' Market every Friday morning is worth checking out. Come hungry for breakfast and chat with the local farmers for a slice of life in Northern Rivers. Despite it being an early meal, all my plans for the rest of the day were scuttled and after a nightcap with my new honeymooning friends, I stumbled straight into bed. On my last morning, I started early with a wide, aimless lap of the region. I drove up until I had a good viewpoint over the valley below. I could see a single plume of thick white smoke coming from a few miles away. I watched it for a few minutes and started a circuitous route back to the highway that would take me to Brisbane. Having not encountered a car for a good 30 minutes, I was startled by the sound of a honk behind me, as I made my way down a narrow country lane. A beat up sedan came careening around me. Just as it overtook, the passenger a shirtless, sunburned teenager stuck two fingers out the window (not a peace sign) and yelled a racial slur at me. Momentarily shaken, I pulled over. Stepping out of the car, I found myself face to face with one of the most beautiful trees I've ever seen. Perfectly symmetrical and the size of a townhouse, the tree's roots extended above ground as far as its branches. My anxiety melted away. Everything seems so in your face these days. Racism no longer hides. Climate change has caught up with us and its effects are plain to see. Is travel, carrying a sizable carbon footprint of its own, the ultimate escape that we need to stay sane or an opportunity to confront our failings head on? After almost a year of travel, I still have more questions than answers.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Travel
Janet L. Yellen, the chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, testified before the Congressional Joint Economic Committee that she expects the economy to expand at a faster pace than it did last year. WASHINGTON Janet L. Yellen, the Federal Reserve chairwoman, told Congress on Wednesday that the economy was growing at a decent rate and that the Fed intended to continue the stimulus campaign that it considered at least partly responsible. Central bankers are paid to worry, and Ms. Yellen also delivered a laundry list of things that could go wrong: The housing recovery has stalled, geopolitical tensions are rising, some asset prices are perhaps a little too high. But the overall tenor of her testimony was upbeat. The economy, she said, is shaking off a grim winter. The labor market is slowly improving. "With the harsh winter behind us, many recent indicators suggest that a rebound in spending and production is already underway, putting the overall economy on track for solid growth in the current quarter," Ms. Yellen told the Joint Economic Committee. She will testify before the Senate Budget Committee on Thursday. The Fed is steadily cutting its monthly purchases of Treasury and mortgage backed securities, now at 45 billion a month, and Ms. Yellen affirmed that it planned to end those purchases in the fall. The bank must then decide when to start raising short term interest rates, which it has held near zero since December 2008. But Ms. Yellen, who suggested at a March news conference that the Fed might start raising rates about six months after it ended bond purchases, carefully avoided affirming those comments on Wednesday. Investors generally expect the Fed to start raising rates around the middle of 2015. Ms. Yellen said only that the timing would be determined by the progress of the economic recovery. And she made clear that even after the Fed began raising borrowing costs, the central bank did not plan to return interest rates to normal levels, which she defined as around 4 percent, until it was sure the recovery was complete. The hearing reflected the complexity of partisan divisions over the economy. Democrats generally praised the progress of the recovery while pressing for new actions to address unemployment and inequality. Republicans, conversely, highlighted the weakness of recent growth while pressing for the Fed to curtail its efforts and questioning whether the Fed was flirting with inflation. Representative Kevin Brady, the Texas Republican who is chairman of the committee, said the Fed's enormous stimulus campaign could lead to higher inflation, particularly if the central bank did not pull back quickly as the economy recovered. Mr. Brady decided to try a new approach. "If I were to say you'll begin normalizing interest rates in 2015," he asked, "would I be wrong?" The Fed has "no mechanical formula or timetable," Ms. Yellen said. Mr. Brady: "If I were to say this will begin normalizing in 2016, would I be wrong?" Ms. Yellen: "There is no specific timeline for doing that." Mr. Brady tried one more line of questioning, asking when rates would reach 2 percent about half the historically normal level then closed with a parting shot. "It strikes me, over time, this 'don't worry be happy' monetary message isn't working," he said. "I believe we need more specifics and a clear timetable on the comprehensive exit strategy." The exchange typified the caution that Ms. Yellen has demonstrated in her first few appearances before Congress. Where her predecessor, Ben S. Bernanke, sometimes sought to educate his interlocutors, and the broader audience attending to the hearings, Ms. Yellen mostly has tried to avoid surprises. Michael Feroli, chief United States economist at JPMorgan Chase, labeled Ms. Yellen, who grew up in Bay Ridge, a "Brooklyn Dodger" in a note emailed to clients after the hearing. "Yellen successfully dodged any attempts to attach more specific guidance on the timing of the first rate hike," he wrote. "She did not say anything that sent a novel signal about the Fed's reading of the economy or the outlook for policy." Ms. Yellen, in a similar exchange with Representative Richard Hanna, a New York Republican, strongly defended the Fed's commitment to control inflation. She said the high inflation of the 1970s had been a formative experience for the entirety of the Fed's leadership, and they were determined to keep inflation below the 2 percent annual pace the Fed has described as its target. "I do believe that we have the tools and absolutely the will and the determination to remove monetary accommodation at an appropriate time to avoid overshooting our inflation objective," Ms. Yellen said. "The lessons from that period are very real for all of us and none of us want to make that mistake again." Inflation, however, is not the Fed's primary worry. Prices rose just 1.1 percent over the 12 months ending in March, and Ms. Yellen emphasized that the Fed was focused on the labor market. While the unemployment rate has declined, she noted that other measures continued to reflect that many people could not find full time work. The government estimated last week that the economy grew at an annual pace of just 0.1 percent in the first quarter of 2014, and some economists expect the government will eventually conclude that the economy actually shrank. Ms. Yellen said on Wednesday that growth had "paused" during the winter months, but she said the Fed already saw evidence that activity was rebounding as the weather turned warmer. "Recent data is certainly much more encouraging on a wide range of fronts from car sales, retail sales, industrial production," she said. She added a new note of caution, however, saying the housing recovery had stalled. "The recent flattening out in housing activity could prove more protracted than currently expected rather than resuming its earlier pace of recovery," she said. Ms. Yellen also devoted a considerable section of her prepared remarks to the risk that the Fed's stimulus campaign would destabilize financial markets. She said that the Fed was watching closely for signs of excessive speculation, and that "some reach for yield behavior may be evident." But she said such signs were limited to small pockets of the markets, and the Fed did not see broad reasons for concern.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Economy
A plane crash may seem like unusual fodder for a story ballet, though the longer you spend with Matthew Neenan's "Sunset, o639 Hours," the more related ballet and aviation appear to be: twin forms of flight and propulsion through space. This two act work for Philadelphia's terrific BalletX, presented as part of the Joyce Theater's Ballet Festival on Tuesday, revolves around the American pilot Edwin Musick, who in 1938 manned the first airmail flight from New Zealand to Hawaii. The Samoan Clipper, as his aircraft was known, went down on its return trip, just off the Samoan coast. It's a specific, logistics laden story and one that only periodically translates into an urgent narrative onstage, despite Mr. Neenan's breezily inventive choreography and Rosie Langabeer's evocative music. While you can imagine flight's significance at a time when crossing 4,000 miles of open sea, by air, was not to be taken for granted, the ballet imparts little sense of danger or risk. Its main character danced by the strapping, goateed Zachary Kapeluck remains thinly sketched. It is, however, pleasing to look at and listen to. Mr. Neenan and Ms. Langabeer shrewdly integrate the 10 dancers with a band of four multi instrumentalists. The music ranges from '30s swing for a New Year's Eve scene in Auckland ("This one goes out to the Captain," Ms. Langabeer croons) to a woozy soundscape during an Act II layover in Pago Pago. Letters, read aloud, thread through the score, a reminder of the Captain's cargo. The stage bristles with the energy of a busy transit hub, and Maiko Matsushima's decor four warped, suspended panels ascending on a diagonal suggest both a steady takeoff and scattered debris. As for the Clipper itself, the dancers take care of that, tilting and churning like parts of a plane wings, gears, propellers a concept that looks less hokey than it sounds. When not involved in those machinations, they populate whatever island the story has landed on, both as people and as tropical birds. Assured, relaxed and genuine, they're a true ensemble.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Dance
Usually when I see an awful show I try to understand what happened. What were the authors trying to accomplish? What experience did they mean to impart, what feelings did they hope to arouse ? I mean beyond those I scrawled in my notebook during "Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise," which opened at the Shed on Thursday: experiences like "Huh?" and feelings like "Get me out of here." "Here" was the McCourt, the spectacular if poorly ventilated new performance space created when the Shed's 120 foot tall puckered carapace is rolled eastward from the main building to cover some of the few square feet of Hudson Yards not colonized by commerce. But the McCourt might as well be a Lululemon as long as it's housing "Dragon Spring": a product involving acres of spandex and designed to be internationally inoffensive. The show's mismatched creators apparently assembled by random spins of a Rolodex call the result a kung fu musical. I can report that what the director Chen Shi Zheng and the "Kung Fu Panda" writing team of Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger have come up with does involve martial arts and tonal sounds. But to the extent kung fu usually provides thrills, and musicals usually tell stories through song, the new genre is a misnomer if not an outright lie. For one thing, there are only (by my count) three songs, by which I mean words sung by characters in a story. (These wisps of tune, wanly sung and with lyrics that sound mistranslated from Klingon, are credited to the pop musician Sia and others.) Most of the show's music is disembodied and ambient, whether live or prerecorded I could not tell. In any case, none of it furthers the plot. I'm not sure that a bulldozer could further the plot, which basically involves a secret clan of kung fu fighters in who knew? that hotbed neighborhood of Flushing. Naturally, they are engaged in a multigenerational rumble with other kung fu fighters. Lone Peak (David Patrick Kelly) is the old grandmaster of the House of Dragon; when Little Lotus, his daughter, takes up with Doug Pince, representing a breakaway sect , it's "Queens Side Story." If only! But actually no such clarity as to the differing values or territories of the two gangs exists. Montana Levi Blanco's chic but interchangeable costumes, all torn black undergear with futuristic cuts, make the ensemble look like an intergalactic touring company of "Chicago." In Act Two the turgid pace of Mr. Chen's direction stretches the evening to nearly two hours it will fall to those light bulbs, now young adults, to restore peace through joint parricide and quasi incest. These mindless stabs at narrative make a bizarre basis for what is evidently meant to be cutting edge stagecraft. Seats for 1,200 patrons are arranged on three sides of a playing space crowned by panels of sheer fabric wafting above the action like jellyfish. (The set is by Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams.) Fire is involved, as is a modest amount of aerialism. There's also a pretty moment when Little Lotus somehow gets hooked up like a hose to become a fountain, flooding (or rather empuddling ) the stage. None of this will raise the heartbeat of anyone who's seen a Cirque du Soleil show. The mostly purple and green lighting, however, by Tobias G. Rylander, includes strobe effects that could induce a stroke in someone who has already died of a stroke. By default, it seems that the engine of "Dragon Spring" is meant to be its martial arts exhibitions, staged by Zhang Jun, but they too are a problem. Because the performers cannot connect with their opponents while executing their elaborate kicks and hand chops, the visceral thrill of whoosh and thwack is missing, replaced mostly by compensatory grunts and obvious inches of empty air. Real moves, no contact. Nor can these movements, in themselves, create narrative as the Cirque team discovered when trying to make acrobatics tell stories in hybrid musical disasters like "Paramour." So while there is some excitement here, especially in fights that involve clanging sticks and blades, it is the excitement of mere exertion, detached from story value or emotional engagement.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Theater
Los Angeles may feature an abundance of holistic arts, yoga and macrobiotic diets, but it's probably not the first city that comes to mind when you hear the term "eco friendly." You can largely thank the 900 miles of freeways and highways in Los Angeles County for that. Few would dispute that the city's culture is a car dominated one, with an obsessive focus on driving routes, smog alerts and the best times of day to avoid traffic. It's an obsession that has been mocked on "Saturday Night Live," captured in pop songs and recorded in academic essays. It's possible, though, to escape the routines of the typical visitor in the name of environmental friendliness. I set out to marry the city's organic cuisine and healthy, active lifestyle with something that it isn't widely associated with leaving a small carbon footprint by ditching the car and creature comforts of regular hotels. I discovered that it's possible to rely on the Metro, Los Angeles's imperfect but quite functional public transportation system, which includes buses, a light rail system and, yes, even a subway. I was able to find a comfortable yurt that's right, the traditional Central Asian round tent in a quiet, wooded part of the city accessible by light rail and just minutes from downtown. And all while saving some money in the process. My girlfriend, Brette, and I rode the long escalator into the bowels of the subway station at Santa Monica Boulevard and Vermont Avenue. "Wow," she said, "I can't believe this exists." It does feel strange to ride the subway in Los Angeles because it dispels the one huge stereotype nearly everyone subscribes to: that you need a car to get around. "And it's so quiet and clean," she said, touching her Metro Tap card to the turnstile (subtracting the 1.75 fare) and going through. The platform was mostly empty. The limitations of the subway quickly become apparent in that there are only two lines, purple and red, which basically cover the same route. The red line goes from downtown through Koreatown, into Hollywood, before terminating in North Hollywood. If you happen to live within walking distance of one of the 14 stations on the line, and your destination is also on that line, then the subway is supremely useful. But most of the approximately 500 square miles of the city remain unserved by the lines. Bus and light rail lines are more comprehensive and help pick up the slack. Pershing Square, in the heart of downtown, is, however, one of the subway stops, and it deposits you just a block or so from one of the city's major culinary destinations: Grand Central Market. It was founded as a large open air arcade in 1917, and can still feel like a market at businesses like Torres Produce and Chiles Secos. But in recent years it's morphed into its current incarnation: a big, vibrant food hall peppered with a selection of popular restaurants. Opening a place or holding an event at Grand Central is an immediate notch in the belt of any Los Angeles chef. Food prices have naturally skyrocketed, but some good deals can be found. One of the best is the Fast Burger from Belcampo ( 5), built in the In N Out style: American cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion and a Thousand Island style sauce. The quality of the grass fed beef is what makes this burger a bargain; natural juices run immodestly from the freshly ground patty, perfectly complementing the vegetables. The feel of downtown Los Angeles is unflinchingly urban mere miles away, though, lies an entirely different world. We made our way to Union Station, the city's rail hub and the largest railroad terminal in the Western United States. A gorgeous, soaring structure erected in the 1930s, its architecture mixes bits and pieces of Art Deco and Mission Revival styles. We found the Metro Gold Line (also 1.75 on the same Tap card), one of the city's four light rail lines. It was uncharacteristically drizzly, and those of us waiting for the Azusa bound line squeezed under the shelter on the outdoor platform. The announcement board said the train would be arriving in four minutes. Four minutes passed, then another four. Then another four. The platform was becoming crowded. Finally, it arrived. About 15 minutes later, we stepped out in the Mount Washington neighborhood and began the 10 minute walk to our lodgings. I found our yurt on Airbnb for 98 a night. It's essentially a big, round tent with a front and back door; a latticelike structure braces the frame. Wooden ribs support the dome, and at the top is a covered translucent wheel, or crown, that acts like a circular skylight. It's quite beautiful, and the luxuries a proper queen size bed, for example, as well as electricity give the illusion of camping without any of the real down and dirty stuff. It turns out that while I find saying the word "glamping" to be slightly nauseating, the actual act is very pleasant. The yurt is set on a raised platform in a quiet, hilly section of Mount Washington, a neighborhood in northeast Los Angeles known for its steep and winding streets. The owners left the keys and some lovely touches: tea and coffee, an electric kettle, a French press, even a bottle of inexpensive wine. There were travel books in the night stand, as well as a small portable heater. The back door led to the outdoor bathroom and shower area, with a dry composting toilet (and instructions for how to use it) as well as a sink and shower with a "gray water" system (it runs off and feeds the plants in the garden; the hosts provide all natural soap). Using the outdoor shower was one of the highlights of the stay: I was expecting to take a quick, freezing shower and immediately towel off and run back inside. But the water heater worked well, and I was able to take a relaxing, warm shower in the drizzly, 50 degree weather, right next to an enormous prickly pear cactus on the hillside. While the city's public transit system proved mostly reliable, I decided to try other transportation options. CicLAvia is an initiative that creates daylong open streets events for biking, skating and walking. The aim is to get people to explore their neighborhoods by means other than cars by creating large, open public spaces out of Los Angeles's streets. "L.A. is mostly known for destination points you go from point A to point B," said Romel Pascual, executive director of CicLAvia. "You do that in a car and you miss everything in between. This makes you slow down and appreciate the in between moments." My brother, Loren, in town for a visit, and I decided we would rent bikes and participate in the San Fernando Valley edition of CicLAvia. We met at Retro Xpress Bicycles on Victory Boulevard and asked for two day rentals. "Well," the man behind the counter said, pursing his lips, "we don't have many bikes left." He stopped and pointed at two pink girls' bikes that were way too small. "This is all we got left." I couldn't tell if he was just trolling me or if he was serious. He was serious. We walked out with the two bright pink bikes and two helmets for 19.95 apiece. The ride up to the corner of Van Nuys and Roscoe, where the event began, was mostly uneventful we did get a few honks, hoots and hollers from passing cars. Once we were in the confines of the four mile stretch of CicLAvia, no one cared. The entire boulevard was closed to traffic, and tents and food trucks were set up along the sidewalks. It was a giant street fair; there were lots of pets, children and residents of all ages. Many were biking, others conversing and getting to know one another. Mr. Pascual was right it was enlightening to slow down and get an up close perspective on the neighborhood, all while strengthening a sense of community. I had covered four of the five major alternatives to cars in Los Angeles: foot, bike, subway, light rail. That left the bus. Brette and I embarked on an epic trip (Line 733) from downtown to Venice one afternoon it was a good 80 to 90 minutes to make the 14.5 mile haul and reach the big roundabout near Main Street and Venice Way, just steps from the Venice Boardwalk.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Travel
Not long ago, Allen Washington was a busy executive who traveled the country on business trips while trying to stay healthy and active, walking up to two miles a day for exercise. But that came to an end when he developed Covid 19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, in June. Mr. Washington spent three weeks lying in a hospital bed in a medically induced coma. When he woke up, he discovered his body had deteriorated. He had bedsores and was too weak to walk or stand. He had nerve damage in his legs, neck and shoulders. He suffered from memory loss and kidney failure. While he survived Covid 19, Mr. Washington, 60, is now grappling with the aftermath of the disease. To regain his strength and motor skills, he undergoes physical and occupational therapy at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in Chicago, which specializes in helping people who have been debilitated by Covid 19 and other illnesses. Since leaving the hospital, he has had to relearn simple tasks that became too difficult because of his memory loss and muscle weakness, like walking up stairs, tying his shoes and getting dressed in the morning. "I came back from death's door, and now I have a lot of work to do to get better," he said. Even after surviving Covid 19, many patients who were critically ill face long and arduous recoveries, often requiring extensive physical rehabilitation. The problems they encounter are wide ranging. Some patients suffer muscle atrophy, kidney damage or reduced lung capacity, making it difficult for them to leave their homes or get out of bed. Many struggle with cognitive and psychological issues like memory loss, depression and anxiety. Among the most common problems they face are shortness of breath, fatigue, confusion and body aches. Doctors have known for some time that survivors of critical illness can develop long term physical, cognitive and mental health problems, which can persist for years after they leave intensive care units. The phenomenon is known as post intensive care syndrome, or PICS, and the risk factors for it are especially common among patients hospitalized with Covid 19: prolonged periods of time on a ventilator, heavy sedation, organ failure and acute respiratory distress syndrome, in which fluid builds up in the lungs, causing low blood oxygen levels. The scale of the coronavirus pandemic, with more than seven million people in the United States infected so far, suggests that a significant number of patients who survive Covid 19 will go on to develop post intensive care syndrome, said Dr. Michelle Biehl, a pulmonary and critical care specialist at the Cleveland Clinic. A recent report by public health experts at Harvard estimated that millions of Americans could require intensive care by the time the pandemic is over. Another report in the medical journal Heart Lung suggested that the number of Covid patients needing rehabilitation could become another public health crisis. "A lot of us are still dealing with the initial crisis the patients in the hospital and the I.C.U.," Dr. Biehl said. "But as a health care system we need to get better prepared and organized for what is coming, which is going to be a lot of patients needing specialty care." While rigorous data is scarce, a study in Italy found that 87 percent of people who were hospitalized with Covid 19 had at least one persistent health problem, such as joint pain, fatigue or labored breathing, two months after they fell sick. About 44 percent of the patients in the study, which was published in JAMA, reported a worsened quality of life. Another study at New York University medical school found that 74 percent of Covid patients continued having shortness of breath a month after they left the hospital, and many reported worsened physical and mental health. For some patients, like Mr. Washington, lifelong nerve damage can be a particularly devastating consequence of Covid 19. A study published in the British Journal of Anaesthesia this month found that nerve injuries were common among patients on ventilators because they are frequently placed face down in their hospital beds. This practice, called "proning," improves their breathing and can be lifesaving. But it can also compress nerves in the shoulders, legs and other limbs, increasing the odds of a disability. "It's one of the more severe and substantial neurological problems that people can experience from Covid 19," said the lead author of the study, Dr. Colin Franz, a doctor and scientist at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. Across the country, dozens of hospitals have begun catering to recovering patients with specialized clinics for post Covid care, which connect them to physical therapists, pulmonologists, psychologists and other specialists. In San Francisco, for example, patients who are discharged from UCSF Health are referred to the hospital's specialized post Covid Optimal Clinic, where they undergo an hourlong evaluation done virtually of their lung health, physical abilities and cognitive and mental health. Then they undergo what the clinic's founder, Dr. Lekshmi Santhosh, calls a "brain wellness check" to look for signs of psychological distress. For many critically ill Covid patients, the hospital experience being isolated from family and friends, heavily sedated and hooked up to a ventilator can be traumatizing, leading to delirium, depression or worse. Dr. Santhosh and her colleagues then explore whether patients are experiencing other consequences as a result of their illness, such as job loss, shame and loneliness. "The benefit of clinics like this is that we have the luxury of time and connections that we can point people to so we can get them help," said Dr. Santhosh, who specializes in pulmonary and critical care medicine. "A 15 minute visit with your primary care doctor is probably not enough time to delve into all of these different domains that are affected." It is not just the older and more vulnerable patients that become debilitated, said Dr. Justin Seashore, a pulmonary and critical care doctor and director of the Post Covid Recovery Clinic at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. "I have patients that were young and healthy people people who say that before Covid 19 they could run a 5K and now they can't run at all," he said. "These are people that were normally very active." Since opening the clinic in July, Dr. Seashore and his colleagues have treated more than 70 patients, about half of whom were never hospitalized but have lingering health issues stemming from Covid. The clinic has a waiting list of over 200 people seeking care. Dr. Seashore said his patients seem to benefit in particular from pulmonary rehabilitation, which incorporates exercise training and breathing techniques to help them manage their chronic lung issues, as well as physical therapy, which helps them with daily activities like going to the store or walking down their driveway. While it is still very early, researchers have found that the sooner Covid patients begin pulmonary rehabilitation after leaving the I.C.U., the faster their improvements in walking speed, breathing capacity and muscle gain and the better their overall recovery. At Penn Medicine's Post Covid Assessment and Recovery Clinic in Philadelphia, many patients experience anxiety caused by their persistent shortness of breath. For some, the anxiety can be so crippling that they are afraid to leave their homes, said Dr. Benjamin Abramoff, a co founder of the clinic and assistant professor of clinical physical medicine and rehabilitation. Dr. Abramoff said patients are screened for a wide range of health issues and then enrolled in a program that incorporates physical and pulmonary therapy to build up their strength and endurance. They also learn techniques to manage their breathing and anxiety. Dr. Abramoff said there has been a lot of focus on "acute" treatments for patients in the hospital, but not enough attention on treating patients over the long term. "Part of it is that we don't know what the long term looks like at this point," said Dr. Abramoff. "But as a medical community we need to be thinking about this and paying attention to these long term effects. They are going to be common and impacting people's lives in significant ways."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Well
New work by Steve McQueen, Chloe Zhao and Azazel Jacobs are among the highlights of the main slate of the 58th New York Film Festival, organizers announced Thursday. Some of the selections will also play the Toronto and Venice festivals; the organizers of all three big fall events are cooperating because there are fewer titles to choose from amid the pandemic. The New York festival was already making changes when the crisis hit. Last September, Kent Jones, the event's director, announced he would be stepping down. Eugene Hernandez took his place, and Dennis Lim was named director of festival programming. Further changes are in store for the event, which is put on by Film at Lincoln Center: it will begin a week earlier, running Sept. 17 to Oct. 11, and most of the screenings will be held either virtually or at drive ins in place of traditional theaters, which are currently off limits. "This is a big change for us, but it also creates an opportunity for the festival to engage with our city and its moviegoers in new ways," Hernandez said in a statement. "We're also continuing to explore additional options for our audiences as possible and directed by state and health officials." The opening night selection, "Lovers Rock," is part of McQueen's "Small Axe" TV anthology about West Indians in London. "Lovers Rock" is set in the 1980s, and two other entries in the five part series from the director of "12 Years a Slave" are in the lineup as well: "Red, White and Blue," also set in the '80s, and "Mangrove," which takes place in the late '60s.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Movies
Most mammals that live in social groups avoid inbreeding in a simple way: They don't mate with others in their group. Banded mongooses, however, rarely leave their social groups. Still, they mostly manage to avoid mating with their nearest relatives. Jenni Sanderson, an ecologist at the University of Exeter in England, and her colleagues tracked the mating behavior of more than 100 mongooses in about 10 different social groups in western Uganda for 16 years. The researchers shaved a unique pattern into the fur of each mongoose for identification purposes. Only on rare occasions did Dr. Sanderson and her colleagues observe close inbreeding, like a father mating with a daughter. The findings appear in Molecular Ecology.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Science
ROME The political gridlock in Italy revives a question that hasn't been heard lately: Is the euro zone crisis really over? Judging by the panic that seized financial markets on Monday and carried over into European stock and bond trading on Tuesday, the answer seems to be no. After months of calm, investors are nervous, and not only because Italy again seems to have become ungovernable after an inconclusive political election. They are also worried because voters in Italy, the euro zone's third largest economy after Germany and France, soundly repudiated government austerity policies that the region's leaders have long embraced but that have hampered growth in Italy and elsewhere in the euro currency union. By supporting a protest vote candidate, the comedian Beppe Grillo, and backing the return of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who has vowed to reject austerity, Italians appear to be embracing a return to nationalism, experts say. Swept aside by the Italian elections was the technocratic government led for the last 13 months by Mario Monti, who has been crucial to an unwritten accord: the European Central Bank promised to help contain the financial contagion that was threatening the euro zone as long as political leaders like him made headway in improving their economies. The upheaval in Italy means that other euro zone leaders may no longer have a reliable partner in the drive to create a more durable currency union and that Rome's voice in making European policy will be diminished, for now at least. "This brings back all the political risk issues" that had seemed to fade from the euro zone, said Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. On Tuesday, stocks fell across Europe, with the Euro Stoxx 50 index, a barometer of euro zone blue chips, down 3.1 percent. Investors also continued to dump Italian debt, pushing up the yield on the 10 year sovereign bond 40 basis points to almost 4.9 percent. Portuguese, Spanish and Greek bond prices also fell. Perhaps most significant is the role of the European Central Bank in this period of renewed euro zone uncertainty. The bank rode in as a white knight in September by agreeing to buy large amounts of bonds from countries with shaky finances, including Italy, to calm a contagion of fear then sweeping the euro zone. The bank, run by Italy's former central banker, Mario Draghi, vowed to do "whatever it takes" to hold the euro union together. The issue now, experts say, is that Mr. Draghi's promise was based on an implicit trade off with euro zone governments. If countries agreed to conditions intended to make their economies perform better, the central bank would buy their bonds to hold down market interest rates. So far, the bank has not bought any bonds. The mere commitment to do so has been enough to reassure international markets. But Italy's new political turmoil might prompt investors to test the central bank's resolve. If so, many experts doubt that the bond buying program is workable for Italy, at least. "Without a stable government, it will be hard to qualify" for the program, said Lucrezia Reichlin, a former director of research at the bank who is now a professor at the London Business School. "Draghi has to have somebody to talk to." Europe's debt crisis is not nearly as dire as it once was. Although Italy's borrowing costs, as measured by its 10 year bond yield, hit a three month high on Tuesday of nearly 4.9 percent, that is still nowhere near the 6.5 percent danger zone of last summer. And despite renewed fears of instability, no one is talking about a breakup of the euro zone as might have happened last year if such political uncertainty had troubled one of Europe's most crucial economies. A shift in sentiment took hold last autumn after Mr. Draghi and European politicians, led by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, made clear that the euro union was here to stay no matter what. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. But experts said the Italian vote served as a warning shot that a new round of political instability could be coming in the neighboring large economies of Spain and France. Their leaders have also adopted austerity programs to keep the euro debt crisis from engulfing their economies, despite concerns that the programs are impeding the economic rebound that might help them grow their way out of financial distress. With Italy sidelined and France and Spain weakened, Germany will very likely be even more dominant in European policy forums. Ms. Merkel may be tempted to talk even tougher with weaker euro zone members. And facing elections herself in the fall, she may be less willing to commit German taxpayer money to holding together the currency union. "We are going to have six or nine months of Italy being absent, which leaves Germany as dominant as ever," Mr. Kirkegaard said. For the rest of the year, Germany is the first among equals, he said. Few experts anticipated the depth of anger displayed by Italian voters over the austerity that Mr. Monti, the technocrat beloved by other European leaders but resented at home for pushing tax increases and spending cuts, represented. The electorate chose two men convicted of crimes Mr. Berlusconi and Mr. Grillo over the one Italian leader in whom the rest of Europe had put great faith. Mr. Monti initially resisted Ms. Merkel's harsh austerity prescription, warning that it would stifle growth. But he nonetheless pushed a number of measures that reflected the Merkelian view that prudent finances were the fastest way to reduce Italy's staggering debt and restore its reputation with international investors. In the end, Ms. Merkel's embrace played a big part in Mr. Monti's undoing. "The fact that Merkel was so involved and interested in our elections her support was very negative for Monti's fate," said Tito Boeri, an economist at Bocconi University. "There is no doubt that in the Italian campaigns and vote there was a clear message against Europe." Since the euro zone crisis began in 2010, European voters have generally shown remarkable forbearance in the face of recession, soaring unemployment, tax increases and cutbacks in government services. Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands, Greece and, last week, Cyprus chose centrist governments that offered the best chance of staying in the euro zone. Italy may just be being Italy. But this latest vote may be a sign that Europeans are reaching the limit of their patience. Experts said the developments here served as a warning that a new round of economically driven political turmoil could confront the Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, and France's president, Francois Hollande. Both have grudgingly adopted austerity to keep the euro crisis at bay, despite recessions and rising unemployment. Italy, for its part, is mired in a recession that so far has lasted a year and a half. The economy is expected to contract further before improving largely, many Italians say, because of a host of tax increases and spending cuts that Mr. Monti put in place.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Global Business
A 17th Century Chateau in the South of France This 17th century chateau is in Saint Victor des Oules, a hilltop village in the south of France just outside the historic town of Uzes, about 90 miles northwest of Marseille and the Mediterranean Coast. The 18 bedroom home anchors two landscaped acres, with two guest pavilions, a caretaker's unit, swimming pool, tennis court and lily pond. The property has served as a hotel and restaurant in recent years, and is currently used as a private home. Since 2014, the 9,000 square foot house has undergone extensive renovations, including improvements to its slate tiled towers, which were added in the 19th century , and the lime rendering on the stone facade. It was also redecorated, said Tanya Cave Darbey, an agent with Prestige Chateaux, which has the listing. A long, tree lined drive leads to the front door. Inside, the airy foyer has an original stained glass window and a chandelier, with a 17th century carved stone staircase ascending through an archway. The ceilings have aged wood beams, and the newly laid floors are marble tile. Contemporary frescos inspired by motifs of Louis XV and Italian frescos adorn the walls. There are six bedrooms on the second floor, with 13 foot ceilings and wood or tile floors; some have access to the stone terrace that runs along the exterior of the house. There are 12 more bedrooms on the third floor. Sixteen of the bedrooms have en suite bathrooms, renovated in the 1990s and mostly done in marble, Ms. Cave Darbey said, and many of the bedroom floors are covered in ornate 19th century tile. (The house's furniture is included in the asking price, she said.) Glass doors open to a patio with eating and lounging areas. The grounds are landscaped with mature plane trees, lime and cypress trees, and a rose garden. The 59 by 26 foot swimming pool is heated. One pavilion, which includes an Italian style shower room, has a tile roof and walls decorated with traditional Czech designs. Saint Victor des Oules and Uzes are in the administrative region of Occitanie, which was created in 2016 from the former regions of Languedoc Roussillon (where this property is) and Midi Pyrenees. But the area may be closest in spirit to Provence, which abuts Occitanie to the east, Ms. Cave Darbey said: "For the French, Uzes is still in Provence, and the joys of Provence are the beauty of the countryside, the charm of the little villages and the abundance of fresh food, olives, cheese and wine in the local markets." Saint Victor des Oules is 10 minutes outside Uzes, which has a population of about 10,000 and is filled with medieval and Renaissance architecture, as well as shops, restaurants and museums. A well known landmark, the Fenestrelle Tower, is France's only cylindrical bell tower. The Provencal cities of Avignon and Arles are within an hour's drive. Montpellier, 60 miles to the southwest, offers the closest Mediterranean beaches and a small international airport. The housing market in Occitanie, a large and varied region that shares a long border with Spain, has followed the general trend of French residential real estate over the past decade, with sales increasing and home prices growing roughly 3 to 4 percent annually, said Stuart Baldock, a consultant with Hindle Baldock, a British company representing home buyers in France. While there has historically been some rivalry between the residents of the former Languedoc and Provence, with Languedoc regarded by some as Provence's poor relative, "Occitanie its new name shouldn't be underestimated," said Nicola Christinger, a client relations manager with Home Hunts, an agency representing buyers in the south of France. Most vacation homes in Occitanie start at about 500,000 euros ( 558,000), with seaside properties going for about 1 million euros ( 1.1 million), said Eric Perenchio, a consultant at Barnes International Realty, in the Occitanie city of Montpellier. Castles within an hour of the Mediterranean coast can sell for as much as 4 million euros ( 4.5 million), he said. But unlike in neighboring Provence, "transactions above 4 million euros are rare," he added, "though two wine properties have recently sold for nearly 10 million euros," or 11.2 million, each. In Occitanie, he said, "you get more for your money, but you very much get what you pay for." A village house, for example, can be bought for 150,000 euros (or about 167,000), but "when you live there, you're not going to get the bright lights and the bling, the nightclubs for your teenage children, and you're not going to get masses of Michelin star restaurants." In the past few years, foreign buyers have showed growing interest in the region, Ms. Christinger said. "Properties that can generate income are currently very attractive to buyers," she said. "I think they choose Languedoc because of its broad based appeal in terms of scenery, including beautiful mountains, some stunning beaches and quaint villages." Mr. Perenchio said he has foreign clients looking for seaside homes in Occitanie, as well as wealthy clients looking for castles and wineries: "The region is more and more popular with foreigners, because they can invest for much lower prices than the French Riviera and Provence, while enjoying so much sunshine." Ms. Cave Darbey said she has many European buyers in the Uzes area, as well as clients from Scandinavia, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. British buyers have traditionally been the largest group of foreign buyers, but they've thinned out since the 2016 Brexit vote, Mr. Baldock said: "The local French market is by far the biggest, with some Parisian buyers." There are no restrictions on foreign buyers in France, brokers said. Notaries working on behalf of the government handle transactions for both the seller and the buyer, and the fee is paid by the buyer. The seller typically pays the listing agent's fee, which is about 6 percent, Ms. Christinger said. As a buyer's agent, Hindle Baldock charges a 2.5 percent commission, Mr. Baldock said. There are specialist companies that can assist in finding mortgages for foreign buyers, Ms. Christinger said. The annual taxes on this property are about 8,300 euros ( 9,300), Ms. Cave Darbey said. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Real Estate
Gary Duncan, an original member of the San Francisco band Quicksilver Messenger Service, in about 1972. He periodically set music aside after Quicksilver's heyday. "With him it was like love hate with the music business," his wife said. Gary Duncan, a guitarist, singer and songwriter best known for his work with Quicksilver Messenger Service, one of the leading bands in San Francisco's psychedelic heyday, died on Saturday in a hospital in Woodland, Calif. He was 72. His wife, Dara Love Duncan, confirmed the death. She said that he fell on June 19, suffered a seizure and multiple cardiac arrests and never regained consciousness. Mr. Duncan's jazz rooted improvisations and his intricate interplay with the guitarist John Cipollina were crucial elements in Quicksilver Messenger Service's eclectic chemistry. Although Mr. Cipollina, who died in 1989, was nominally the lead guitarist and Mr. Duncan played rhythm, they constantly traded and blurred those roles. "He was what was holding the band together," Mr. Freiberg said in an interview. "If he was there, it would work. If he wasn't, it wouldn't." The Quicksilver Messenger Service album "Happy Trails" (1969), largely recorded onstage, is a quintessential acid rock artifact. The band starts out playing Bo Diddley's "Who Do You Love" and jams its way far afield, through modal vamps, guitar dialogues, feedback, call and response audience screams and more. "In Quicksilver we played a lot of old blues and folk tunes and improvised," Mr. Duncan told the ethnomusicologist Craig Morrison in 2001. "We had our own arrangements and had open places where we would just wail. 'Cause we were so stoned all the time anyway, on acid and everything else, that sitting down and just playing one tune for three or four hours was nothin'." Mr. Duncan was born on Sept. 4, 1946, in San Diego. In a 2007 interview, he said that he was originally named Eugene Duncan Jr., after his half Cherokee, half Scottish father, and that his mother, Jeraline Smith, was a Pawnee. He was adopted at birth by a Cherokee family: Kermit Grubb, who ran a secondhand store, and his wife, Pauline (Weaver) Grubb, a homemaker. They named him Gary Ray Grubb. He played guitar as a teenager in rock and R B bands in Northern California. He called himself Gary Duncan when he and the drummer Greg Elmore agreed to join a band in 1965 that Mr. Cipollina intended to form with the singer and songwriter Chet Powers, then going by the name Dino Valenti. The new group took on the name Quicksilver Messenger Service, which was derived from astrology. Four members were born under signs ruled by the planet Mercury, the ancient Roman messenger god. The element mercury is the liquid metal also known as quicksilver. And selfless service is an attribute ascribed to Virgo, one member's sign. Quicksilver soon gathered a following in San Francisco playing on weekends at the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore alongside Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. In 1965, Mr. Duncan married Shelley Eidson, who later (as Shelley Duncan) wrote a book, "My Husband the Rock Star," about their 10 years together. They had two children, Jesse and Heather, before divorcing. They survive him, as do Dara Duncan and their three sons, Miles, Michael and Thomas; five grandchildren; and a great granddaughter. After performing at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, Quicksilver was signed by Capitol Records, which the next year released its debut album, named after the band. The group began touring nationally. For most of 1969 the keyboardist Nicky Hopkins replaced Mr. Duncan, and the band recorded the album "Shady Grove" without him. Quicksilver was a transformed band when Mr. Duncan rejoined it to make the 1970 album "Just for Love." Mr. Valenti took over as songwriter and lead singer, with more pop soul flavored songs. Under the pseudonym Jesse Oris Farrow, he wrote Quicksilver's most widely heard songs, "Fresh Air" and "What About Me," both released in 1970. Quicksilver's lineup went through multiple changes before a final 1970s album, "Solid Silver," in 1975. Quicksilver dissolved as the 1970s ended, and Mr. Duncan went to work as a longshoreman. "With him it was like love hate with the music business," Dara Duncan said. "Sometimes he'd take a sabbatical." In the early 1980s, he built his own recording studio. He reclaimed the Quicksilver name in 1986 to release an album of synthesizer driven 1980s style pop, "Peace by Piece." During the 1980s and '90s he made extensive studio recordings, which the Global Recording Artists label has been compiling into albums. A new one, "Anima Mundi," is forthcoming, said Karl Anderson, the label owner. Mr. Duncan also toured and recorded with bands billed as Gary Duncan's Quicksilver, but turned away from music again in 2001. In 2004, Crawfish of Love, a jam band from Jacksonville, Fla., contacted Mr. Duncan online and made an album with him, "Snake Language." Interest in early Quicksilver was rekindled by a flood of live recordings of the original band. In 2006, Mr. Freiberg persuaded Mr. Duncan to join him on tour with Mr. Freiberg's other band, Jefferson Starship. Performing together again as Quicksilver Messenger Service, Mr. Duncan and Mr. Freiberg shared concert bills with Jefferson Starship through the late 2000s. Mr. Duncan retired after those tours. "He told me," Mr. Anderson said, " 'I put it all down on tape. I did it all.' "
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Music
MONTCLAIR, N.J. The British company Gandini Juggling has been combining its art with others' for decades. Only recently, though, have those combinations received much attention on this side of the Atlantic, particularly through the group's contributions to the production of Philip Glass's opera "Akhnaten" at the Metropolitan Opera this season. In Gandini's "Spring," which had its American premiere on Thursday in the Peak Performances series here at Montclair State University, juggling is crossed with contemporary dance. The problem is pretty simple: The juggling is good, and the dancing isn't. The six jugglers are experts of timing and force, doing math with their bodies to keep balls in the air, sometimes shifting trajectories and catches with a magician's sleight of hand. At several points, they wield Frisbee size rings, each tinted white on one side and a different color (red, yellow, green) on the other. As they juggle four or five rings, which bubble up like a fountain, they alter the pattern to flash different hues. To see one person doing this is a delight; to see many is even more delightful. That kind of ensemble work is the group's specialty, but there's individual prowess here, too. Wes Peden is a wonder able not just to keep seven clubs aloft but also to bounce juggled objects off his forearms and slide them across his shoulders as he spins. He piles on the complications and changes up the rhythm with the calm absorption of a master.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Dance
The predicament was dire. Otherwise, they never would have called in the women. Fighting in France in World War I, the United States Army was having trouble with the phones. With speed essential in the dispatch of information, calls weren't getting through fast enough. Phone calls back then were patched from one operator to the next, so it was a problem if the soldiers at the switchboards couldn't speak French and communicate with the local operators. Worse, though, was the men's clumsiness at a critical task that, in the civilian world, was largely women's work. Bowing to common sense in the interest of victory, Gen. John Pershing recruited women to the Signal Corps to do the job. At a time when women weren't even trusted to vote, off they went to Europe, at last with a use for their ladylike fluency in French. If you're familiar with this obscure story, the subject of the new musical "The Hello Girls," you probably also know its ugly epilogue: After the women shipped home, the military spent six decades denying them veterans benefits, insisting that they'd never served. By the time President Jimmy Carter made it right, most of the 223 operators had died.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Theater
Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater. 'THE AMATEURS' at the Vineyard Theater (in previews; opens on Feb. 27). Jordan Harrison's new play is a comedy about a group of actors who wander medieval Europe performing cycle plays. It's also a serious minded exploration about what art can and should do in times of plague. In the Vineyard's production, directed by Oliver Butler, Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Thomas Jay Ryan and Michael Cyril Creighton star as the players. 212 353 0303, vineyardtheatre.org 'AMY AND THE ORPHANS' at the Laura Pels Theater at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater (in previews; opens on March 1). In this new play from Lindsey Ferrentino ("Ugly Lies the Bone"), a father dies and two adult siblings (Debra Monk and Mark Blum) set out to inform their sister, a woman with Down syndrome. For Roundabout Theater Company, Scott Ellis directs the road trip, which stars Jamie Brewer of "American Horror Story." 212 719 1300, roundabouttheatre.org 'ANGELS IN AMERICA' at the Neil Simon Theater (previews start on Feb. 23; opens on March 25). The great work begins. Again. The National Theater's production of Tony Kushner's "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes" arrives on Broadway, starring Andrew Garfield, Lee Pace, Denise Gough and Nathan Lane as the crooked lawyer Roy Cohn. Reviewing the two part work in London, Ben Brantley wrote that the director Marianne Elliott's production confirms the play's place "in the pantheon of dramas that stretch toward the heavens." 800 745 3000, angelsbroadway.com
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Theater
John Rothman, who in an era before Google conceived and helped develop The New York Times Information Bank, a revolutionary system that let computer users easily find journalism by The Times and dozens of other publications, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 95. His son, Andrew, said the cause was a stroke. Introduced in 1972, the Information Bank was an electronic retrieval system that gave subscribers computer access, through telephone lines, to long abstracts of articles from The Times and other newspapers, including The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, as well as from magazines like Newsweek, Time and Business Week. Mr. Rothman was a fitting leader for the Information Bank. He had, since 1946, worked for The New York Times Index , the invaluable monthly, quarterly and annual publications that offered summaries of articles from as far back as 1913, guiding students and researchers to find the full ones on microfilm. "Indexing is a giant guessing game," Mr. Rothman wrote in Saturday Review magazine in 1965, when he was the index's editor. "Indexers must assess in advance what information a user is likely to seek, where he is likely to look for it and how much detail the abstract (or entry) should include to possibly spare him a trip to the original item in the newspapers." "The Times was interested in computers for typesetting and printing the newspaper," Mr. Rothman said in 2013 in an interview with the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he was a volunteer archivist after retiring from The Times in 1990. "And of course they were blocked by the unions. They were interested in having me pursue this because they thought it would give them a chance to get their feet wet with computers." In 1972, Times staff members began testing the Information Bank as a research tool. It would soon augment the paper's archives, known as the morgue, where file cabinets are packed with clippings dating to the 19th century. In Times Talk, the paper's in house newsletter, Mr. Rothman assured colleagues that "once the basic methods" of searching the Information Bank were mastered, "retrieving the information is quite simple." In late 1972, the first installation of the Information Bank outside The New York Times was made at the University of Pittsburgh's Hillman Library. Within six months, its 14 customers included NBC, The Associated Press, the State Department, the C.I.A., the Library of Congress, Exxon and the Chase Manhattan Bank . At its inception, the Information Bank's retrieval capability went back three years. Users at The Times and elsewhere were able to get full articles through microfiche cards, which were part of an institution's Information Bank subscription. The Times was not alone in recognizing the promise of electronic data retrieval. Mead Data Central started its Lexis legal information service in 1973; its Nexis news and information service began six years later. The Information Bank was a pioneering venture. But financially speaking, Mr. Rothman told the Graduate Center, "it wasn't a rousing success." In 1983, The Times made a deal for Mead to exclusively license and distribute the Information Bank. The company shut the Information Bank's computer facilities and let Mead handle the transmission and dissemination of the Times's data as part of Nexis. Hans Rothmann was born on April 21, 1924, in Berlin. He and his parents who were Jewish and designated by the Nazis as resident aliens because his grandfather was a Polish immigrant had their property and possessions seized and were expelled in 1939. They fled to Brooklyn, where his father, Max, sold refrigeration equipment to restaurants, and his mother, Johanna (Marcuse) Rothmann, known as Hennie , was a homemaker. Hans learned English by working at a movie theater and attended Queens College before enlisting in the Army. (At 19, he changed his name to John Rothman, which he felt sounded more American.) While serving in military intelligence for the Fourth Armored Division in Europe, he used his native language to interrogate German prisoners of war and civilians. After his discharge, Mr. Rothman went back to Queens College to finish his bachelor's degree , in English and comparative literature. He then sought a job at The Times. He wanted to be a theater critic he would earn a master's degree in 1949 at New York University for a thesis about drama criticism at The Times but was offered a job as an indexer. Within a few years, he was assistant editor of The Times Index.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Media
LONDON In his award winning biography, "The Hare With Amber Eyes," the British ceramic artist Edmund de Waal tells the story of his family through its collection of Japanese netsuke carvings. Netsuke are ornamental toggles made mainly out of ivory or wood and used to fasten things to the sash of a kimono. Each one is "a small, tough explosion of exactitude," as Mr. de Waal memorably wrote. Charles Ephrussi, a cousin of the author's great grandfather, bought a complete collection of 264 of these carvings from a Paris dealer in the late 19th century. Among them was an ivory netsuke of a trembling hare with amber inlaid eyes. Extraordinarily, the entire collection has remained intact, surviving World War II in Vienna, hidden in the mattress of a family servant. It spent further years in the apartment of an uncle in Tokyo, before being bequeathed to Mr. de Waal, who keeps it in his London home. He writes in his book how a disapproving neighbor, surprised by the sight of such precious objects in a private house, suggested that the netsuke should be returned to Japan. "No," replied Mr. de Waal. "Objects have always been carried, sold, bartered, stolen, retrieved and lost," he said. "It is how you tell the stories that matters." Such stories of lives lived through material culture could be severely curtailed here in Britain, following the government's announcement earlier this month that it would be banning the sale of items made with ivory. The measure is designed to protect elephants, the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said in a statement. A spokesman would not say when legislation would be brought before Parliament. The department said that 20,000 elephants were killed for their ivory in 2017. Last year, China pledged to shut down its commercial trade in the material. Like the United States, which in 2016 announced a near total ban on the trade of African elephant ivory, Britain will have some exemptions. These will require permits, available for a fee from the government's Animal and Plant Health Agency. It will be possible to trade items containing less than 10 percent ivory, provided they were made before 1947. The same applies to musical instruments with less than 20 percent ivory, made before 1975, and to portrait miniatures on ivory more than 100 years old. Exemptions will also apply and this is the proposed legislation's grayest area to the "rarest and most important items of their type," if they are at least 100 years old. Again, these items will have to be registered with the Animal and Plant Health Agency, which will then seek advice from a museum on whether to issue a permit for sale. After consultation, the Conservative government has modified its 2015 pre election pledge to implement a total ban on ivory sales. The proposed legislation has, nonetheless, thrown the British antiques industry into a spin. "We can trade at the top end, but for someone starting out or people in the middle market, this is a total disaster," said Jan Finch, partner at Finch Co., a London based dealership specializing in unusual objects from around the world. Ivory pieces frequently appear in its stock. Like many in the British art and antiques trade, Ms. Finch thinks the 10 percent maximum for ivory decorated antiques is too low and would like to know how the criterion "rarest and most important" will, in practice, be applied. "A whole load of stuff will be illegal," Ms. Finch added, referring to everyday items such as boxes and chess sets that will soon be unsellable and unexportable. But where, exactly, will the "top end" of the remaining trade in antique ivory be pitched? How many of those relatively humble Japanese netsuke carvings, for example, will pass the "rarest and most important" test? The Animal and Plant Health Agency "could decide to establish a bar that's too high," said Max Rutherston, a leading specialist dealer in netsuke, based in London. "If I'm offered a great piece, how do I know it's going to get a sales permit?" Mr. Rutherston currently has 155 ivory netsukes in stock, 130 of which are being offered on behalf of clients. Prices range from about 250 pounds, or about 350, to PS45,000, the level at which he currently values Mr. de Waal's "Hare With Amber Eyes." Uncertain of how much of his stock will be eligible for government issued sales permits, Mr. Rutherston said he is considering relocating his business to continental Europe, perhaps to the Netherlands. A mid 19th century Japanese ivory netsuke showing two legendary figures grappling with an octopus, signed Ikkosai. But dealers in the European Union, who can trade in worked ivory dating from before 1947, courtesy of an exemption in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, also have problems with this controversial stock in trade. "It's much more difficult to sell ivory," said Florian Eitle Bohler, director of the old master sculpture dealers Julius Bohler Kunsthandlung, based in Starnberg, Germany. "I've reduced prices by about 50 percent in the last five years," said Mr. Eitle Bohler, who exhibited an exceptional pair of 17th century ivory reliefs, "Bathsheba at her Bath" and "Lot and his Daughters," attributed to Francis van Bossuit, at last month's Tefaf fair in Maastricht, priced at 250,000 euros, or around 310,000. He said his gallery did not sell any ivory pieces at the fair. Mr. Eitle Bohler, echoing other British and European dealers, said one of the main problems was the ending of the trans Atlantic trade in ivory. "You can't sell to America," he said. "You commit a felony. It gets destroyed." But New York's status as a no go zone for trading in antique ivory is being challenged by dealers in the United States. In a complaint filed on April 5 to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, the Art and Antique Dealers League of America and the National Art and Antiques Dealers Association of America are contesting the New York state law passed in 2014 banning the sale of antique ivory. The plaintiffs contest that this state legislation conflicts with exemptions for antiques included in prevailing federal ban on the ivory trade. Back here in Britain, the window for buying and selling antique ivory is closing. "We are turning things away," said Lee Young, managing director of Duke's, an auction house in Dorchester, England. "We're not going to be able sell something that could be worthless in six months' time." Mr. Young, a specialist in Asian art, said there could well come a point when Duke's, along with other British based auction houses, would no longer sell ivory. "The trade will die because people will be too embarrassed to own these things," Mr. Young said. But what will happen to the mountain of unsellable, unexportable ivory antiques that will then accumulate in Britain? "You'll only be able to pass it down the generations, and they won't want it," he added. The "Hare With Amber Eyes," a signed piece by the Osaka carver Masatoshi, dating from around 1880, would doubtless pass the "rarest and most important" test, thanks to the popular success of Mr. de Waal's book. But what about all the other, less exceptional ivory netsuke in this family collection? When Britain's ban on its ivory trade becomes law, these too could become unsellable and, in a sense, worthless. Mr. de Waal declined a request from The New York Times for comment. If and in dealers' minds, this remains a huge "if" elephants can be saved by banning the trade in antique ivory, this would be a story with a happy ending. But a lot of other stories will be lost along the way.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Art & Design
Can Israelis Put Two Landers on the Moon at Once? Although the Beresheet lunar landing ended in a crash last year, SpaceIL wants to try again with a more complex mission by 2024. None An Israeli nonprofit will try again to land a robotic spacecraft on the moon after its first attempt ended in a crash last year. The spacecraft, named Beresheet, made it to lunar orbit in April 2019, but plummeted to the surface during its final descent. On Wednesday, SpaceIL, the nonprofit, announced Beresheet 2, a follow up that is to be more complex two landers as well as an orbiter although the organization says it will fit into roughly the same budget as the first mission: about 100 million. Beresheet 2 is to launch in the first half of 2024. Beresheet means "Genesis" or "in the beginning" in Hebrew. In an interview, Kfir Damari and Yonatan Winetraub, two of the founders of SpaceIL, said they did not want to simply build and launch a carbon copy of the first attempt. "We're looking to do something that will be unique, something that was never done before," Mr. Damari said. "Not just, you know, repeat the same mission and just change the ending. We're looking to do something that will be meaningful." The two landers would be much smaller than the first spacecraft about 260 pounds each, fully fueled, compared with a bit less than 1,300 pounds for Beresheet and they would land on different parts of the moon. The orbiter would circle the moon for at least a couple of years. The three spacecraft of Beresheet 2 would together weigh about 1,400 pounds. Even though the designs would be new, they would reuse many aspects of Beresheet, and the founders said they had learned lessons that would increase the chances of success for the second attempt. SpaceIL will again collaborate with Israel Aerospace Industries, a large satellite manufacturer. The Beresheet impact site, before and after impact. An investigation revealed that a component tracking the lander's orientation failed, and as mission controllers tried to reset that, they inadvertently shut down the engine, and the spacecraft fell to its destruction. In May last year, NASA released a photograph taken by its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft that showed the scar that Beresheet made on the moon. SpaceIL hopes that international partnerships will pay for half of the cost of Beresheet 2. Mr. Damari said the United Arab Emirates, a small but wealthy country in the Persian Gulf that has set up an ambitious space program in recent years, was one of seven nations interested in taking part. He declined to name the other six. "We're going to do something that will have a global impact," he said. The Israel Space Agency is likely to provide some financing. SpaceIL will have to raise the rest from private donors. Two of the biggest benefactors of the original Beresheet mission Morris Kahn, a South African Israeli billionaire who served as SpaceIL's chairman, and Sheldon G. Adelson, a Las Vegas casino magnate are not currently involved with Beresheet 2. Mr. Kahn initially said he would contribute to a second SpaceIL moonshot. SpaceIL started as one of the competitors in the Google Lunar X Prize competition, which offered 20 million for the first private entity to softly land a spacecraft on the moon. That endeavor turned out to be harder than many expected, and none of the teams, including SpaceIL, were able to do so before the prize expired at the end of 2018. Even without the potential financial reward, SpaceIL pressed on, hoping that it would inspire younger Israelis to pursue careers in science and engineering. The moon was the focus of the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s but then was largely ignored until recent years. China has successfully landed three spacecraft there since 2013, including a mission this month to bring back rocks from the moon for the first time since the Soviet Union's Luna robotic probe in 1976. NASA is also looking to send robotic missions to the moon, hiring private companies to take payloads. That first commercial mission may launch as soon as next year.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Science
Elizabeth Gilbert, whose best selling 2006 memoir, "Eat Pray Love," traced a journey of self discovery around the world that continues to resonate with fans, announced a new chapter on Friday. Or is it a new ending? Ms. Gilbert, speaking directly to her readers in a Facebook post, said that after 12 years she was separating from Jose Nunes, the Brazilian importer whom she met during her travels and later married, and who was a central character in the book. "I am separating from the man whom many of you know as 'Felipe,' " she wrote of her husband, referring to his pseudonym in the book. "Our split is very amicable. Our reasons are very personal." She also asked for privacy, saying she would be "a bit absent from social media during this sensitive moment." "Eat Pray Love," a sumptuous tale of escape, self discovery and romance, quickly became a cultural phenomenon, though not one without criticism, with some noting that not every woman who wished to escape would have the privilege to live as sumptuously as Ms. Gilbert did on her sojourn through India, Italy and Bali.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Style
Ryan Currie and Kailey Gonzalez are both commercial airline pilots. They decided to live in LeFrak City because it's so close to La Guardia Airport Ryan Currie and Kailey Gonzalez don't just travel for work, travel is their work. When the couple, both commercial airline pilots from Phoenix, Ariz. and both 29, accepted jobs with Envoy Air, a regional American Airlines carrier based out of La Guardia Airport, they wanted to minimize the amount of time it would take them to get there. Still, Queens is far from compact, so, 'How fast can you get to LaGuardia?' quickly became more than a casual conversation starter in their queries to brokers and leasing agents. They were happy, then, when they found LeFrak City, a sprawling postwar housing complex in Corona, Queens, that, on a good day, is just a 10 or 15 minute drive from the airport. They moved into the complex last winter, selecting a renovated one bedroom from the options sent over from the complex's leasing agent after an initial tour of the property. He had, at the time, lamented that he wasn't sure how to sell them on a place where they would hardly spend much time. Between their flight schedules and personal trips one of the main perks of being a pilot is the free flights they sometimes spend only 12 days a month in the apartment. "Basically, this is an expensive storage unit," Ms. Gonzalez said. Nonetheless, they wanted a place that felt like home when they did stay there. A studio apartment they had seen in Astoria, for example, was beautiful, but they were both opposed to living in a studio. "We're in and out of hotels throughout the week and we didn't want to come home to something that felt like a hotel," she said. The couple pays 1,900 a month. Coming from Phoenix "that seemed like a lot," Mr. Currie said. But the apartment was no fee and they had the option of renting a cheaper, unrenovated unit for a few hundred dollars less. They decided, however, that they were O.K. with paying a little more for hardwood rather than linoleum floors, new stainless steel appliances, and a bathroom redone with subway tiles. "The higher up, the better," said Mr. Currie. "I like having views." And though the view from their apartment might seem unexceptional to almost anyone else, shortly after moving in they were delighted to discover that their large windows offer an ideal vantage for watching planes coming and going from LaGuardia. "There's a flight approach it's called the expressway visual and the planes go right over us. That was another appeal," said Ms. Gonzalez, who once filmed Mr. Currie's plane as it was coming in to land. Ms. Gonzalez and Mr. Currie, who are engaged to be married next winter, met in Houston, Tex., where Mr. Currie was working as a flight instructor a common position for recent flight school graduates, who must accrue 1,500 hours of flight time to work as a pilot for a commercial airline. Ms. Gonzalez was slated to replace Mr. Currie at the school so he could take a job in Phoenix. "But after we met, I ended up staying for another six months," Mr. Currie said. It's nice, both of us being in the industry," he continued. "There are a lot of strained marriages spouses don't always understand why someone can't come home when they're supposed to." Another advantage, Ms. Gonzalez pointed out, is that Mr. Currie doesn't get sick of all her plane paraphernalia, like the model of a large C 17 in the middle of their coffee table or the propeller mounted on the wall above the TV. In fact, several of the model planes in the apartment belong to him.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Real Estate
LOS ANGELES Rupert Murdoch sold most of 21st Century Fox to Disney in December for 52.4 billion, spurning a proposal from Comcast that was 16 percent higher on a per share basis, in part because Comcast refused to offer protections in the event of regulatory rejection. Although Comcast's interest in 21st Century Fox was previously known, details of Comcast's proposal and Fox's reasoning for rebuffing it were disclosed for the first time on Wednesday as part of a 456 page filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The paperwork, required under securities law, also disclosed that senior Fox executives, including Mr. Murdoch and his two sons, James and Lachlan, are eligible for tens of millions of dollars in "golden parachute" payments. Disney's all stock deal with 21st Century Fox, announced on Dec. 14, valued Mr. Murdoch's company at 29.54 a share. Among other assets, Disney bought the 20th Century Fox studio, Hulu, the FX cable network, and stakes in two overseas television service providers, Sky of Britain and Star of India. Disney did not buy Fox News or the Fox broadcast network. Comcast, identified in the filing as Party B, made an all stock proposal worth 34.41 per share in November. The filing portrays Mr. Murdoch and the Fox board as taking Comcast's interest seriously until Comcast repeatedly refused to agree to a breakup fee in case Department of Justice regulators rejected the deal. Disney, perhaps showing more confidence in its chances with regulators, had offered a 2.5 billion fee.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Media
Dr. Yehuda Nir, a psychiatrist whose childhood was shaped by having to masquerade as a Roman Catholic in German occupied Poland to escape Nazi persecution, an ordeal that he turned into a well received memoir and that guided him in treating victims of trauma, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 84. His death was announced by his daughter, Sarah Maslin Nir. Dr. Nir emerged from World War II with a deep sense of the injustice that had been done to his family and a mission to heal the impact of calamity in others what is known today as post traumatic stress disorder. He did groundbreaking work in the psychological treatment of terminally ill children and also studied how the suffering of parents is transmitted to their children. Many of his patients in private practice were Holocaust survivors or the children of survivors. His approach to treatment often had its roots in his almost daily wartime terror. As he chronicled in his 1989 memoir, "The Lost Childhood: The Complete Memoir," he had to deny who he was in order to survive. He learned to recite Catholic prayers, genuflected every time he passed a church and even won an audition to serve as an altar boy. His father was murdered with other Jews in the first week the Germans occupied the Polish city of Lvov. More than once he suffered agonizing hunger. At one point, while working for a German dentist, he asked a colleague what day Christmas would be that year. She inferred that he was not Catholic and threatened to expose him. Desperate, he warned he would reveal her affair with the dentist something he thought he was inventing. It turned out that the woman was indeed having an affair, and she never revealed that he was a Jew.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Health
If this is a Monday night, it's hard to imagine what Friday looks like. About 300 people are spilling out of a club onto Avenida Eduardo Conde in the Santurce district of San Juan. The space I'm in has limited seating, but the stools are empty anyway because everyone is standing. One window sells fluffy, fist sized empanadillas and stacks of lightly salted tostones while another one hands over cans of Medalla beer at a furious pace. Everyone is here for bomba and plena, two distinct but closely linked Puerto Rican musical traditions that can trace their roots to the African slaves brought to the island starting in the 17th century. The first set is all plena: A dozen men fill the stage, their fingers ricocheting off circular pandereta drums, providing a bedrock for the call and response vocal lines. The lyrics are largely improvised and often lewd and full of thinly veiled social and political commentary. There are repeated mentions of the venue we're in, La Terraza de Bonanza, and calls to dance "la plena" and love "la isla." Judging by the expressions on the faces of the people around me, the lyrics hold several inside jokes that fly right over my head . After about an hour, there's a 10 minute break and the set changes to bomba, an even older musical tradition (and a kind of cultural parent to plena) anchored by barrel like drums. Women take center stage. A trio of vocalists face the drummers and a revolving cast of dancers leap, twirl, grin, shout and have me so transfixed that it's a full 15 minutes before I realize I forgot to hit the record button on my camera. I came to Puerto Rico, my first stop as this year's 52 Places Traveler, hoping to see an island well on its way to recovery, a year and a half after Hurricane Maria. I knew I would see progress, especially when compared to the fresh devastation that my predecessor Jada Yuan saw just five months after the hurricane when she visited the island. What I didn't expect to see were the omnipresent smiles, the sense of optimism shared by so many people I met, from pig roasters to young entrepreneurs, and from the meticulously manicured cobblestoned streets of Old San Juan to the roller coaster hills in the center of the island. La Terraza de Bonanza was the first stop in my mission to explore the island of Puerto Rico beyond the regular tourism routes. I didn't make it to a beach until my last full day. I never made it El Yunque, the giant National Forest that attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. I didn't have time to hop over to Vieques, the speck of land that sits off the main island's east coast like a sideways teardrop. That's not to say these aren't attractions for good reasons, but I came wanting to see other parts of the island to see if those places had rebounded in the same way as the cruise ship ports and tour bus destinations. So I put the little time I had on the island largely into the hands of some young, energetic Puerto Ricans I met one introducing me to another. Loreana Gonzalez Lazzarini, 34, is from Isabela, a town on the island's northwestern coast. One day, she mapped out a trail of chinchorros (rural roadside restaurants) for me, stretching from the outskirts of San Juan to Orocovis, in the island's center. The night before my road trip, speaking of the need for tourists to see the island beyond San Juan, Ms. Gonzalez Lazzarini told me, "I want tourists to experience the people of Puerto Rico. Puerto Ricans' main concern is always, 'Are you having a good time?'" It took me a few days to realize it, but Ms. Gonzalez Lazzarini's own story is one that I heard, in some form or another, again and again during my time in Puerto Rico. "I can't think of my life without thinking of Hurricane Maria it changed me," she said. "Instead of B.C. and A.D., here it's Before Maria and After Maria. B.M. and A.M." In Ms. Gonzalez Lazzarini's case, B.M. meant working at a major consulting firm in New York and then as a private consultant in Puerto Rico. A.M., her clients could not pay for consulting fees. Ms. Gonzalez Lazzarini instead worked with a local nonprofit to distribute generators to businesses on Calle Loiza, a rapidly up and coming strip of bars and restaurants in Santurce. Then, she took a position with the recently established COR3, a local government agency working on reconstruction, recovery and resilience following the hurricane. "The hurricane took so much away from us, but it gave us something too," Ms. Gonzalez Lazzarini said. "It showed us how we can come together and organize as a people on our own." None Driving in the countryside is not as much of a white knuckle experience as I had been led to believe. Still, you will find roads that are temporarily one lane, traffic lights that are out, and trucks in a rush. I found driving on the conservative side got me farther than trying to match the speed and daring of those who knew where they were going better than I did. None Power outages can still happen and they can be unpredictable. My Airbnb, along with the rest of the neighborhood in Isla Verde, lost power for about six hours on one of the days I was there. Luckily, both power banks I'm traveling with were fully charged, so I could venture out for the duration, with full juice on my phone. None Uber is easy, affordable, and the best way to get around if you want to leave the rental car at the hotel. I often left mine behind when I was going into San Juan, or when I was going out at night to avoid parking headaches and driving at night. For Xavier Pacheco, 40, a globally recognized chef, A.M. was about finally making the leap to what he considers his life's work: a farm to table operation he's starting with two chef partners that will be, in his words, "our farm, with our animals, and a menu that comes from what we harvest." He feels a magnetic tug away from the more established centers of tourism, on which he has relied. (He estimates that in his previous venture, the wildly successful Jaquita Baya, 70 percent of his customers were tourists). "I'm refocusing on taking my product out of San Juan," he told me, as I rode shotgun in his pickup truck past the Carraizo Dam, about 15 miles from Old San Juan. "The San Juan metro area is so saturated. There are a lot of places outside that area that are really cool tourists should understand how much there is to see." Put another way? "You have these people going to Senor Frogs and it's like, 'What's the point?' As a tourist, you could close your eyes in there and know your way to the bathroom." On my first day with Mr. Pacheco, I had one of two lunches at one of the "really cool" places he mentioned. I was hungry for lechon, the whole slow roasted pig that is famous in the island's interior, so we stopped at Lechonera Angelito's Place. It is part of a strip that Mr. Pacheco calls "a mini Guavate," referring to the section of the town of Cayey that's become famous for the density of its lechoneras. This place is better, Mr. Pacheco promised. I can't say how it compares with every other pig roast on the island, but it is hard to imagine anything more decadent than those chunks of meat, slick with melted fat, and layers of thick pig skin roasted to the consistency of hard candy. After our meal, Mr. Pacheco introduced me to Junior Rivera, who has been running Angelito's for 29 years. Mr. Rivera told me that he starts the roasting process at 1:30 a.m. every day and is in bed by 10 p.m. and that his recipe is basically a product of discovering what he likes. His A.M. story? "We were closed for two days. The day of the hurricane and the day after it, when the roads were closed," he said. On my second day with Mr. Pacheco, my last on the island, he took me to the northern central town of Manati. On the way, we stopped for a breakfast of what else? more lechon, this time at the famous Rancho de Apa in Guaynabo. In Manati we met with Efren Robles who, with his wife, Angelie Martinez, run Los Frutos del Guacabo, an organic farm that runs on an on demand model in collaboration with local chefs. Need more arugula? The farm will up production. Looking for grass fed goat? Mr. Robles is in the middle of an experimentation with cross breeding to find the perfect balance between the longevity of the animal and the quality of meat. As we walked, Mr. Robles picked soon to be garnishes the color of lipstick that tasted like black pepper and bright yellow bulbs that left a tingling sensation on my tongue. After the hurricane flattened the farm, it took Mr. Robles 177 days to get back on his feet, with some help from Jose Andres's World Central Kitchen. Now, he's hoping to expand, potentially even into hospitality. When asked if, after the hurricane, he had ever considered taking his business or his expertise elsewhere it's a quick "No." Tourist numbers are slowly creeping back to their pre hurricane levels in Puerto Rico, even if most of those people are sticking to the same spots. But there's at least one place that's received a flood of newcomers: El Centro de Bellas Artes Luis A. Ferre. That's because for three weeks in January, the fine arts complex was playing host to "Hamilton," with Lin Manuel Miranda reprising his role as the title character for the first time in two and a half years. I went on a Thursday night during the last week of the show's run. The crowd was electric even before the performance began, a steady din of excited whispers filling the space. When Mr. Miranda stepped into the spotlight to the words "Alexander Hamilton," the ensemble had to pause for a full two minutes to allow the standing ovation to pass. Every major number ended with raucous cheering. But a different energy settled on the theater in the opening moments of "Hurricane," in which Mr. Miranda sings, "In the eye of a hurricane, everything is quiet." And it was. Even the applause at the end of the song seemed more subdued, more somber. By the end of the next number though, the crowd was smiling, whooping and loudly cheering once again.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Travel
Will the last one to leave turn out the lights? The departures from G/O Media kept coming Tuesday, with the resignation of the digital publishing group's editorial director, Paul Maidment, who had been with the company since June. He told the staff he was out, effective immediately, in an email. His departure followed a week of chaos during which the entire editorial team resigned from Deadspin, a sports website operated by G/O Media. "It is the right moment for me to leave to pursue an entrepreneurial opportunity," Mr. Maidment said in the email. "I admire the journalism that you produce and the unique voice that is otherwise missing from mainstream media."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Media
After James Franco wore a Time's Up pin to the Golden Globe Awards in 2018, several women publicly accused him of misconduct. The women came to the acting school with hopes of developing their skills, furthering their careers and working with its celebrity founder, James Franco, the film and television star. Instead, these women say, Mr. Franco and his partners subjected them to sexually exploitative auditions and film shoots, all while promising them roles in movies that never materialized or were never released. In a lawsuit filed on Thursday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, two former students of an acting school that Mr. Franco helped create say that the now defunct program was little more than a scheme to provide him and his male collaborators with a pool of young female performers that they could take advantage of. The two women, Sarah Tither Kaplan and Toni Gaal, say in the lawsuit that Mr. Franco and his partners "engaged in widespread inappropriate and sexually charged behavior towards female students by sexualizing their power as a teacher and an employer by dangling the opportunity for roles in their projects." These actions, the suit says, "led to an environment of harassment and sexual exploitation both in and out of the class." In a statement, Mr. Franco's lawyer Michael Plonsker denied the accusations and called the lawsuit "ill informed." "James will not only fully defend himself, but will also seek damages from the plaintiffs and their attorneys for filing this scurrilous publicity seeking lawsuit," Mr. Plonsker said. In 2014, Mr. Franco, a star of the HBO series "The Deuce" and films including "127 Hours" and "The Disaster Artist," opened a film and acting school called Studio 4. He owned the school, which had branches in Los Angeles and New York, with a business partner, Vince Jolivette. Mr. Franco and Mr. Jolivette are named as defendants in the lawsuit, as is their Rabbit Bandini production company and its general manager, Jay Davis. Ms. Tither Kaplan and Ms. Gaal joined the Los Angeles branch of the Studio 4 school in 2014, where they each paid a monthly tuition of about 300. They said they and other students were promised opportunities to audition for independent films that Franco directed and produced auditions that were supposed to be exclusive to Studio 4 students, but which they said were open to other actors as well. The women said the school also offered additional master classes, which could cost as much as 2,000 each, including a 750 master class for sex scenes. According to the lawsuit, prospective students for the sex scenes class had to audition on videotape so that Franco could later review the material, they were told and sign away their rights to these recordings. In auditions and classes, the women said they were encouraged to push beyond their comfort zones while they were denied the protections of nudity riders and other film industry guidelines that govern how actors can be portrayed and treated in nude scenes. Their lawsuit says the class preyed upon "often young and inexperienced females" who "were routinely pressured to engage in simulated sex acts that went far beyond the standards in the industry." Ms. Gaal said she recorded an audition for the sex scenes master class and participated in a callback, but was ultimately not accepted into the class after she voiced her unease about how it was being run. Ms. Tither Kaplan said she went on to take the class, which provided a stepping stone to roles in Mr. Franco's independent films, some of which remain unreleased. In these roles, Ms. Tither Kaplan said, she was often asked to appear in nude scenes or sex scenes. During the making of an orgy scene for one of his films, Mr. Franco removed plastic guards that covered other actresses' vaginas while he simulated oral sex on them, according to the lawsuit. The Studio 4 school was closed in the fall of 2017. The lawsuit seeks monetary damages and the return or destruction of any video recordings of former Studio 4 class members, as well as class action status so other women who may have similar experiences can join. Mr. Franco has previously faced questions about his treatment of women in his work and in his personal life. In 2014, messages that he had exchanged over Instagram with a 17 year old girl were shared online, and Mr. Franco acknowledged that he had tried to pick up the girl. In 2018, The Los Angeles Times published a report in which several women, including Ms. Tither Kaplan, detailed what they said was Mr. Franco's pattern of inappropriate and abusive sexual behavior. That year, at the awards ceremony for the Golden Globes, Mr. Franco wore a pin expressing his support for Time's Up, a movement started by prominent figures in the entertainment industry to combat sexual misconduct. At the time, he was roundly criticized on social media by Ms. Tither Kaplan and other viewers who noticed this. In other appearances at awards shows and on talk shows, Mr. Franco said that he supported the rights of women to call attention to acts of sexual misconduct, while contending that his own accusers had made inaccurate claims about him.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Movies
The episodes, which proceed out of chronological order, are interwoven rather than told in a straight progression . One segment in which a scared family takes a road trip to grandma's pops up like commercial breaks between the other sections, for instance. An expository prologue returns as an epilogue during the closing credits, at a point past when understandably impatient viewers will have left. Signs of intelligent life occasionally surface. "Call Center," directed by Eduardo Sanchez ("The Blair Witch Project") and Gregg Hale , is set among 911 operators during the early stages of the panic, a promising idea without a payoff. "Sarah," set three minutes before the blackout in an anonymous parking garage in Jakarta, takes advantage of the potential that the world going mad scenario affords for long camera movements although the director, Timo Tjahjanto , looks to have been more concerned with hitting his marks than with the quality of the acting.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Movies
Where Will Measles Break Out Next? Chicago, Los Angeles or Miami, Scientists Predict Chicago, Los Angeles and Miami are the cities most likely to see the next measles outbreaks, according to an unusual new study. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and Johns Hopkins University mapped the 25 American counties most at risk of measles because of their vaccine exemption rates and proximity to airports. A similar map published last year proved surprisingly accurate at forecasting many of this year's cases. But both groups of scientists failed to predict the measles outbreak that began in Brooklyn, currently the nation's largest. The study, published this week in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, found that Cook County, which includes Chicago, was likeliest to experience a measles outbreak. Los Angeles and Miami Dade counties were next, followed by New York's Queens County and the counties that include the cities of Seattle, Phoenix, Fort Lauderdale, Las Vegas, Houston and Honolulu. To assess risk, the researchers looked at how many children in counties across the country had nonmedical vaccination exemptions which include "religious," "philosophical" or "personal belief" exemptions, depending on state law. The team then focused on counties with international airports, because every American outbreak since 2000 has begun with a case imported from overseas. They gave greater weight to airports with many passengers arriving from countries with thousands of measles cases, including India, China, Mexico, Japan, Ukraine, the Philippines and Thailand. However, both studies failed to foresee what is now the country's largest outbreak the one among Orthodox Jews in the Williamsburg neighborhood of New York which is in Brooklyn, not Queens. In September last year, the virus spread from Ukraine to Orthodox Jewish communities in Israel. One month later, Orthodox Jews from New York carried measles almost simultaneously to Brooklyn and to suburban Rockland County, N.Y. The outbreak spread from New York to Orthodox communities in Michigan. "What we did not calculate at all was that it would come from Israel," said Sahotra Sarkar, a professor of philosophy and integrative biology at the University of Texas at Austin and a co author of the new study. A similar study published last June in PLOS Medicine ranked the risk of measles outbreaks in 18 states with philosophical or personal belief exemptions to vaccination. The research was prescient: almost half the "hotspot" metropolitan areas the scientists noted particularly Washington State, Texas and Michigan saw outbreaks this year. "In the major leagues, that's an all star batting average," said Dr. Peter J. Hotez, a director of the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and a co author of the PLOS Medicine study. Dr. Hotez and his colleagues did not look at New York State because it does not have "philosophical" exemptions to vaccination, although the state permits religious ones a loophole that the legislature is considering eliminating.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Health
A plan is under development in about a dozen Northeast and Mid Atlantic States to tackle the country's biggest source of greenhouse emissions, cut road congestion, clean up the air, improve public transit and ramp up electric cars. Improbably, a Republican governor is helping to lead the way among his mostly Democratic regional neighbors. But despite this alliance, the politics are tricky. The plan would cost money, and to pay for it, the price of gasoline at the pump would rise in participating states. The financing measure is not a gas tax, strictly speaking, but it would have a similar effect, increasing prices perhaps 8 or 9 cents a gallon. The governors may be casting a wary eye across the Atlantic. In France, President Emmanuel Macron's plan to place a green tax on fuel in 2018 set off the Yellow Vest movement, which quickly turned into a broad protest against inequality. The fee under consideration by the governors would be much smaller, but sensible politicians certainly need to be careful about new measures that burden working people. In this case, the payoff investments in modernizing transportation would be enormous. Many citizens who care about the environment seem not to have heard of this plan. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the climate disinformation network founded by Charles Koch and his brother David, who died last year. That network and allied groups are working to kill the measure, with at least 18 right leaning organizations in the region some of them merely Koch front groups blitzing newspapers with letters and cajoling motorists to badger politicians to stop the effort. That alone ought to tell you it is a good idea. To get it across the finish line, urgent efforts are needed from governors, legislators, environmental groups and especially from citizens. Despite the paralysis in Washington on measures to safeguard the climate, the country has made some headway, cutting greenhouse gas emissions about 12 percent since 2005. But nearly all that progress has come in one segment of the economy: the generation of electric power, as natural gas, wind turbines and solar panels displace coal burning power plants. In most other economic sectors, emissions are flat or rising. The country is far off track to meet the cuts it pledged to other nations at big climate meetings, in Copenhagen in 2009 and in Paris in 2015. The Trump administration does not care, and indeed is actively working to undermine clean energy in favor of fossil fuels. Cars and trucks are especially vexing, with Americans not only driving more, but increasingly buying gas hogs like sport utility vehicles. Even in California, the state trying hardest to fight climate change, transportation is the largest source of emissions 40 percent of the total and they have only just begun to fall. In the Northeast, a coalition of state leaders has been working for several years to figure out a way to turn the corner and begin cutting transport emissions. The idea is to mandate that fuel wholesalers buy permits for the emissions that their products create, then establish a marketplace where those permits can be bought and sold. That market would set the price of permits, and the wholesalers would then have to decide how much of the increased cost of their operations to pass along at the pump. The climate, and the world, are changing. What challenges will the future bring, and how should we respond to them? What should our leaders be doing? Al Gore, the 45th vice president of the United States, finds reasons for optimism in the Biden presidency. What are the worst climate risks in your country? Select a country, and we'll break down the climate hazards it faces. Where are Americans suffering most? Our maps, developed with experts, show where extreme heat is causing the most deaths in the U.S. What does climate devastation look like? In Sept. 2020, Michael Benson studied detailed satellite imagery. Here's the earth that he saw and the one he wants to see. The gasoline price increase would depend on how ambitious the states decide to be with their emissions cuts, which is one aspect of the plan that has not been fully decided. But the likelihood is that they will start modestly, leading to a price increase of below 10 cents a gallon, less than gas prices typically vary over the course of a year. Americans burn so much gasoline that even a pass along price increase that small would raise billions of dollars a year in the Northeast. It would likely give many of the states five times as much money as they have now to spend on clean transportation. The money would go to measures that directly cut emissions. Improvements in mass transit systems, to lure people out of their cars, would be a major goal. Another would be helping people who must drive switch to electric cars, through rebates and the installation of chargers along the highways. Some states even intend to invest in fast internet access for rural areas, on the logic that people could work from home some days, as many city dwellers already do, and stay off the roads. By design, the plan resembles a similar approach the Northeastern states took to cutting emissions from power plants. That plan, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, has been a big success. The new one, the Transportation and Climate Initiative, is meant to test whether this approach will work with vehicle emissions. In most states, legislatures would have to approve the proposal. The Koch network's disinformation campaign has already claimed one victory. New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican with a poor record on climate initiatives, pulled his state out of the discussions, declaring as he did so: "I will not force Granite Staters to pay more for their gas just to subsidize other states' crumbling infrastructure." The premise of that statement is a lie. The governor surely knows that a core feature of the plan is that each state would get to keep the money it raises, deciding its own investment priorities. Will other governors reject this kind of demagogy to embrace a good sense plan? You might imagine this argument is playing out along party lines, but it is not. Republican Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts has been one of the leaders driving the plan forward, and at least one other Republican, Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, is considering it. Most of the governors in the region are Democrats and they remain at the table, with Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo in the vanguard. Unfortunately, one or two governors may be wavering under the Koch assault. Whether the governors, as a group, are putting enough energy into dragging this plan across the finish line is another question. Especially curious is the case of New York State. It has participated in the discussions, but Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has been silent regarding his intentions. This is worrisome, given that New York, with 20 million people, is the most populous state in the region by far. Will he or won't he go for it? Mr. Cuomo is under intense political pressure to repair New York City's ailing subway system, and this small gasoline fee would be a large source of money to help with that problem. Low wage workers in particular would stand to benefit directly from new investments in mass transportation. But Mr. Cuomo knows it is not going to be popular in upstate New York, where many people both resent New York City and depend on cars. Perhaps he could offer a specific pledge to upstate voters about more broadband internet and other investments? For Mr. Cuomo, this situation is an opportunity. He is already an environmental champion, recently committing New York to a broad suite of climate policies. But the state still needs practical measures to turn those goals into reality, and the transport plan is a prime candidate. It is astonishing that even at this late date, with devastating fires and heat waves spreading around the world, the Koch empire continues to put short term profits over the livability of the planet. Our environmental groups, as well as ordinary citizens, need to let Mr. Cuomo and the other governors in the region know they support this plan. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Opinion
VENICE Concerns grew on Monday that Italy could be the next victim of Europe's financial infection, leading nervous investors to sell Italian stocks and bonds and damping euphoria over a weekend deal to bail out Spain's banks. Italian officials privately expressed concern that the 100 billion euros, or 125 billion, that Europe pledged to Spanish banks might not stop the troubles from spreading. Italy's main stock index was Europe's worst performer on Monday, a day when United States stocks were also dragged down and investors flocked yet again to the safe harbor of American and German government bonds. Even the Italian prime minister, Mario Monti, a European technocrat who came to office after the euro crisis forced out Silvio Berlusconi last November, has begun to acknowledge the dangers posed to his country's 1.56 trillion euro economy ( 1.95 trillion). The main fear is that Italy cannot grow its way out of a recession fast enough to pay a mountainous national debt. Other concerns include the fact that Italy, with the third largest euro zone economy after those of Germany and France, will have to shoulder a large portion of the bailout bill even as it grapples with its own sharp economic downturn. Because Italy does not have enough economic growth to generate the money itself, the government will probably have to borrow it at high interest rates, adding to an already heavy debt load. "There is a permanent risk of contagion," Mr. Monti told an economics conference near Venice over the weekend, speaking by telephone. "That is why strengthening the euro zone is of collective interest." Prices of Italy's government bonds reached their lowest level in months. Investors apparently found little assurance that the euro currency union was any closer to solving its underlying problems not with parliamentary elections in Greece this weekend that could determine whether the currency union is strong enough to retain its weakest members. Investor euphoria in Europe over the Spanish bailout deal Monday morning was short lived, giving way to an essentially flat day on many European stock markets. But Italy's benchmark index was the Continent's worst performer, ending down 2.8 percent. Italian 10 year government bonds dropped in value for a fourth consecutive trading session. The yield a measure of the government's borrowing costs and of investors' perception of risk climbed 0.26 of a percentage point Monday to just over 6 percent. That is the highest level since January and a level that Italy could not afford for long. The Spanish government's 10 year bond yield also rose, closing up 0.30 of a percentage point, to 6.466 percent. "There's no doubt contagion will come to Italy," Daniele Sottile, a managing partner at the financial advisers Vitale Associati in Milan, said at the same conference, which was convened by the Council for the United States and Italy on an island near Venice. "It's proof that the European mechanisms designed to stop the crisis are not working." Sergio Marchionne, the chief executive of both Fiat and Chrysler, was more blunt at the conference. "Somebody better do something before we get to the point of no return," he said. Although Mr. Monti, a former European commissioner, has a reputation as a skilled leader trusted by international officials, he faces a host of problems at home. Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. Few question Mr. Monti's competence: Within the first six weeks of coming to power, he managed to pass more economic measures than Italy had in a decade, including increasing the retirement age, raising property taxes, simplifying the operation of government agencies and going after tax evaders. Still pending are economic changes meant to spur growth, including an effort to overhaul Italy's inflexible labor rules. But Mr. Monti's government is also shackled by a legacy of political unwillingness to make painful changes. As a result, "market attention looks set to shift to Italy," Commerzbank analysts wrote Monday in a note to clients. Combined with weak growth, they said, the difficulties Mr. Monti faces in getting lawmakers to make economic changes mean "it may be just a matter of time before Italy also seeks help." Italy's dominant political parties, the center right People of Liberty and the center left Democratic Party, are participating in Mr. Monti's government but are averse to being too closely associated with the tough measures he has already put in place and the others he is still pushing for. Some opposition parties have been pressing for new elections to be held before Mr. Monti's term ends in 2013. Since Mr. Monti came to power, the Italian economy like most of those in Europe has grown weaker. It is expected to contract 1.5 percent this year and increase just 0.5 percent in 2013. Italian banks have sharply curtailed lending, pushing thousands of small and midsize Italian businesses into bankruptcy. Italy's unemployment rate has marched above 10 percent, well above Germany's 5.4 percent, according to Eurostat, the European Union's statistical agency. Its government debt, already at 120 percent of gross domestic product, will almost certainly continue to rise, especially if Italy must pay a larger portion of the bill for shoring up the monetary union. In many respects, Italy is still better off than Spain and the three other bailout recipients Greece, Ireland and Portugal. Its annual budget deficit has shrunk to 2.8 percent of G.D.P., which is down from 4.2 percent a year earlier and below the 3 percent level required by the euro union. Italy has Europe's second largest manufacturing and industrial base, after Germany's, and is one of the biggest export oriented economies in the euro zone. "Made in Italy" is still a valuable brand the world over, led by icons like Ferrari cars, Gucci handbags and Ducati motorcycles. The country is also filled with state owned assets like power companies and the national postal service that could bring in billions of euros should the government manage to privatize them. Despite recent downgrades by the ratings agency Moody's Investors Service, Italian banks are relatively sound at least compared with Spain's because they are not saddled with bad debts from a real estate bubble. And even though the Italian government issues more bonds than any other euro zone country, the Italian public owns about half that debt, meaning banks are less vulnerable to fluctuations in the bonds' value than banks in Spain, which are heavily invested in their government's risky bonds. Even so, deposits have been fleeing Italian banks for havens in Switzerland, according to several bankers at the weekend conference, on concern that Mr. Monti will raise taxes for the wealthy and as a hedge if the euro zone economy takes a turn for the worst.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Global Business
The Dune Climb is one of the most popular things to do in a remarkably beautiful, off the radar corner of northwest Michigan called Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. Yet it had me suffering like a modern day Sisyphus on a June afternoon. With each oxygen sucking, uphill step, I slipped and slid backward on the sandy slope. My lungs burned, my bad knee ached, I was drenched with sweat and I was only halfway to the top. For locals, the sandy clamber is a childhood rite of passage. "Our mom would take us there to tire us out," a friend told me, "while she lounged in her beach chair and drank Tab." And on this day, kids galloped past me and rolled down the 300 foot dune, their squeals as high pitched as the cries of the herring gulls overhead. For visitors like me, the steep climb was a way to dig into the park's quintessential feature: sand. The park has a plethora of the stuff, from 35 miles of beaches to "perched dunes" towering 450 feet above Lake Michigan part of the state's 275,000 acres of sand dunes, which help make up the largest freshwater dune system in the world. For all the park's odd, otherworldly beauty, it can be reached year round via a short flight from Chicago (In summer, there are direct flights from several major airports). Yet, like many lifelong Midwesterners, I'd never heard of it until a few years back, when it garnered headlines after "Good Morning America" viewers voted it Most Beautiful Place in America. Even as I triumphantly crested the top of the dune, it was difficult to imagine that such an extraordinary place existed here. I was pleased to find the view didn't disappoint. Behind me stretched a forest canopy, rolling wooded hills, farmland and the iridescent waters of sprawling Glen Lake. The following day, ignoring a gray sky, I set out to find my own private stretch of sand. I had arrived at an awkward time, in early June, when the weather can require a tank top one day and a down jacket the next. The actor Tim Allen, who has long summered in this part of northern Michigan, famously compared its climate to "ripe pears really good for a short period of time." Like me, he's among those who think that, on a sunny summer day, the area looks more like the Mediterranean than modest Michigan. "If you get there between the Fourth of July and late August, in a stretch where it's 90 degrees, and you're standing on a white sand beach you'd be hard pressed to tell me where you were, if you didn't know," the actor told Forbes magazine. From there, I drove to nearby Esch Beach, following a gravel road through a pristine woodland, windows open. I could almost hear the ghosts of Aral, a logging boom town here in the late 1800s that all but disappeared once the timber was gone, around 1930. On impulse, I stopped and cut the motor; only the symphony of birdsong filled my ears. Drinking in the fresh air, I felt intoxicated. By the time I got to the nearly deserted beach, I was in full Zen mode. On this day, Lake Michigan was painted in a moody palette of grays and silvers, with a straight dark line at the overcast horizon. With no wind, the water was as smooth as glass and crystal clear, its sandy bottom peppered with stones rounded by endless waves. I crouched by the water's edge and listened to the quiet, which was broken only by the gentle lapping of water on sand, as soothing as any sound machine. Less gentle was the frigid water, which wouldn't warm to swimsuit worthy temperatures until July. I waded in to my knees, feeling my calves turn numb as a pro athlete's in an ice bath. A more appealing way to enjoy the lake appeared when three standup paddle boarders glided by, silent as swans. Surfers, too, can be seen catching waves year round, and you can rent a board or take a lesson through the friendly Sleeping Bear Surf Kayak shop in Empire. I ambled down the beach to where a couple and two young children scavenged for Petoskey stones (Michigan's state stone) fossils beautifully laced with a honeycomb pattern, relics from when warm seas and coral reefs covered this region 350 million years ago. The father shook his head, while his impatient wife a Nebraska native had given up, deeming the treasure "an urban legend," Lake Michigan's version of the Loch Ness monster. (Local stores hawking the stones, polished to a high sheen and often made into jewelry, would disagree.) As a lakeshore overseen at the federal level, with the same protections as a national park, Sleeping Bear Dunes' beaches are blissfully free of snack bars, jungle gyms, life guard chairs and other trappings of civilization. They're in their natural state, these long expanses of sand. And amid the 35 miles of coastline, it's easy enough to find a deserted strand where you're free to do as you please up to a point: A sign along Esch Beach warns sun worshipers to KEEP YOUR SWIMSUIT ON. (A portion of the beach was once popular among nudists.) Curious about Sleeping Bear Dunes' history, I learned that some 14,000 years ago, retreating glaciers carved out Lake Michigan and left behind ridges and glacial moraines (headlands of rock and dirt). Westerly winds blowing across the lake piled sand atop the moraines, creating the spectacularly steep and tall dunes known as perched dunes that define the park. Following the retreat of the glaciers, Anishinabek Indians were active here when Europeans arrived in the mid 1600s, and some of the 100 miles of hiking trails trace well worn paths the Indians followed across the dunes to reach their fishing camps. The park also maintains villages that thrived in the late 19th century: Port Oneida, a lumbering and farming community, and Glen Haven, a port town along an expansive beach where steamers stopped seeking food, lodging and wood for fuel. You can step back a century or so by meandering through their preserved buildings, including a fruit cannery (now a boat museum), general store and blacksmith shop. There's another way to enjoy the coastline and the lake: from up high. The easy, 1.5 mile Empire Bluff Trail led me through a beech maple forest to a lofty bluff above Lake Michigan, where I gaped at one of the prettiest views in all of the park, north along the lake's dune draped shoreline. A more challenging hike took me huffing and puffing to the top of a steep headland known as Pyramid Point (a popular launching point for hang gliders and paragliders). But standing there, nearly straight above the lake, the only airborne things I saw were herring gulls coasting below me on the breeze. Happily, there's a way to see dramatic vistas without a hike that feels like a cardiac stress test: Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive, a seven mile blacktop road that leads cars and cyclists through the wooded hills and towering dunes. (It's an especially lovely route when the leaves turn in fall.) Numbered stops show off spectacular views, and the highlight is Stop 9, which boasts a wooden platform perched precariously atop a fiercely angled dune, some 450 feet above the water. It's surely the most Instagrammed spot in the park and perhaps the best place in the entire Midwest to watch the sunset, slowly melting into Lake Michigan. It's certainly not true that if you've seen one sunset you've seen them all, but I confess I spent as much time on the viewing structure looking down at folks racing to the bottom of the dune, then plodding back up. Those at the water's edge looked like mere specks from my perspective and had clearly ignored the sign that warned: "Running down may sound fun. Trust us: Climbing up 450 feet of hot sand and gravel definitely is not." Some learn the hard way: Last year, park rangers rescued 17 souls too tired, sick or scared to make their way back to the top. Climbing a dune is like walking up a down escalator, as many sand savvy folks have noted, including the Pulitzer Prize winning author Annie Dillard. But Mr. Ulrich, the park's deputy superintendent, appreciates the impulse. "Anyone who visits Sleeping Bear Dunes," he concedes, "should go home with a little sand in their shoes." Back home from my trip a few days later, I readied my hiking socks for the wash and unleashed a small avalanche onto the floor. Lucinda Hahn, a Chicago area native, is a freelance writer who lived on a dune overlooking Lake Michigan for two years while she was the editor of Lake magazine.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Travel
ANGELINA JOLIE'S decision to file for divorce from Brad Pitt was certainly a blow to many fans of the Hollywood couple. But because the couple has six children, homes around the world, assets in the tens of millions of dollars and hard to value royalty income for years to come, their split offers an opportunity to look at how other wealthy couples manage their divorces. Divorce lawyers, financial advisers and mediators say divorces don't have to be the type of acrimonious free for alls that make for riveting movies. Instead, they can be negotiations that provide financially for both parties and leave some semblance of a relationship to allow for joint parenting. "When you look at Brad and Angelina, that's the easiest divorce in the world," said Nancy Chemtob, a family and matrimonial lawyer who founded Chemtob Moss Forman. "You get every house in the world appraised and you look at how much money there is. California is a 50 50 state, so you split it up." The difficult divorces, Ms. Chemtob said, are less straightforward. "When someone has 12 million but 6 million is in real estate and they have three kids in private school and one spouse isn't working, that's a headache," she said. Before the divorce progresses into financial negotiations, advisers say the parties need to step back and consider what kind of divorce they want. "They need to decide what's important," said Katherine Miller, a matrimonial lawyer in New York and New Rochelle who practices collaborative divorce, which is a heightened form of mediation. "Are they going to comport themselves with dignity? Do they want to co parent their children? Is the concern with preserving your assets?" The simplest divorces are the ones where money is involved but no children. Ms. Chemtob said she was working on one now where both people work at investment houses and earn plenty of money. It's just a division of assets. The degrees of messy divorces, at least when it comes to dividing up money, seem infinite. Dana Katz is going through a divorce now. She said she helped her husband build his insurance business by making connections for him in their community on Long Island, N.Y. But now, she regrets not asking him to put her name on the business during their 17 year marriage. While she is receiving money each month for her basic needs, she said it was not enough to preserve the lifestyle she had. "For the time being, my financial situation is precarious," said Ms. Katz, who has two sons. "Our joint assets are joint and you can't touch them. And our cash flow came from this business, so I don't get that." For the most part, the idea of lifelong support what used to be called alimony and is now called maintenance is a thing of the past. And like many things with divorce, the family courts have instituted formulas to simplify and standardize the process. The spouse with less typically receives support for a period of time equal to half the length of the marriage. The amount itself will be determined by looking at spending over some period of time and pulling out nonrecurring expenses, like remodeling a kitchen. Where there is money from trusts, there could be an issue of calculating how much money the spouse benefiting from a trust was spending each year. "I tell people to go back and look at all the records," Ms. Chemtob said. "How much were you spending? How much could you have been spending?" One thing that cannot be counted on is the continued support of someone's in laws in divorce. They could, for instance, decide to stop paying for a grandchild's private school. "It's this onion that needs to be peeled back slowly," she said. "I say to these people, 'I can't do financial planning for you during your divorce that you never did during your marriage.'" When it comes to child support, states generally have formulas, too. In New York, for example, one child receives 17 percent of the salary of the parent who doesn't have custody, two get 25 percent, three 29 percent though wealthier couples can opt out and negotiate separately. The trickier part is when it comes to private school. No judge is going to say private school is a requirement for a child, though there can be exceptions, for example, if the children have been in a school most of their lives and are close to finishing. Even with the standardization of some aspects of divorce, the right strategy matters. Ms. Chemtob said she regularly looks for the most desirable place to file a divorce suit, a process known as forum shopping. "Whether I have the in the money or the out of the money spouse, I'll decide which county to file in," she said. "The Hamptons are horrible for the nonmoney spouse, so I'd file in New York City. If you're seeking distributions of assets or distributions of a business, you want to be in New York City. You don't want to be in Westchester." There are four options in a state like New York for the style of divorce: do it yourself, mediation (where the couple is alone with a mediator), collaboration (where a group of neutral parties help the process along) and traditional litigation that may end in court. Ms. Smith pointed to situations that may require a lawyer with particular expertise. If, for example, a wife helped her husband build the family business but did not go into office each day, she needs a lawyer who can get her the largest share of that business. On the other hand, if a husband benefited throughout his marriage from a trust set up by his family, he will want a lawyer who can try to keep that money outside the divorce negotiations, while the wife will want one who can get that money considered. "It's a fact pattern," Ms. Smith said. "You need to find the right strategists. You don't want to spend 1 million on litigation and you don't have the right strategy for your fact pattern." Ms. Katz said the worst part of her divorce, which has been going on for nine months, is the delays of a month or more between court dates. "You want to get on with your life," she said. "You want to salvage something from the relationship." This type of uncertainty, Ms. Miller said, can make a collaborative divorce a better option for some people. It is like mediation, but instead of the two parties speaking with a mediator, there is a whole support system like lawyers, financial advisers and child specialists working toward a settlement. She said the process works well for complicated assets because the assembled team can take the time to understand and value them. "We're much more flexible in the collaborative process than the litigation process," she said. This process can be expensive, though less than going to court. A collaborative lawyer can cost 30,000 to 40,000 a person, as opposed to more than 100,000 for a divorce lawyer dealing with a similarly complicated case, Ms. Miller said. Above all, advisers counsel people to remember that the process takes time and that it is unlike any other negotiation. "Unlike other lawsuits, there is no clear bright line test of winning and losing," Ms. Smith said. "You can't handle your divorce like any other contract or movie negotiation. You can't walk away from the mother or father of your children and say they're not listening to me and leave the table."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Your Money
Despite days of controversy leading up to it, "Sunday Night With Megyn Kelly," which featured an interview with the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, earned just 3.5 million viewers, the lowest total of its three week run. The show had 1.3 million fewer viewers than a repeat of "60 Minutes" and a slightly smaller audience than ABC's "America's Funniest Home Videos." The show was up against coverage of the final round of the U.S. Open on Fox, which had about six million viewers in its final hour, according to early Nielsen figures. In the 25 to 54 year old demographic important to advertisers, Ms. Kelly's newsmagazine show tied "60 Minutes" with a 0.7 rating. Ms. Kelly and NBC generated a wave of criticism last week for even airing the segment with Mr. Jones, who has called the Sandy Hook school massacre a hoax. She defended the interview as important journalism, citing the growing size of Mr. Jones's audience and his influence with President Trump.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Media
How to Feel Nothing Now, in Order to Feel More Later SAN FRANCISCO Everything was going really well for the men of Tennessee Street. Women wanted to talk to them, investors wanted to invest, their new site got traffic, phones were buzzing, their Magic: The Gathering cards were appreciating. This all was exactly the problem. They tried to tamp the pleasure. They would not eat for days (intermittent fasting). They would eschew screens (digital detox). It was not enough. Life was still so good and pleasurable. And so they came to the root of it: dopamine, a neurotransmitter that is involved in how we feel pleasure. The three of them all in their mid 20s and founders of SleepWell, a sleep analysis start up needed to go on a dopamine fast. There is a growing dopamine avoidance community in town and the concept has quickly captivated the media. Dr. Cameron Sepah is a start up investor, professor at UCSF Medical School and dopamine faster. He uses the fasting as a technique in clinical practice with his clients, especially, he said, tech workers and venture capitalists. The name dopamine fasting is a bit of a misnomer. It's more of a stimulation fast. But the name works well enough, Dr. Sepah said. "Dopamine is just a mechanism that explains how addictions can become reinforced, and makes for a catchy title," he wrote in an email. "The title's not to be taken literally." On a recent cool morning, Mr. Sinka and his start up co founder Andrew Fleischer, both 24 years old, were beginning their fast while Alberto Scicali, 26, another founder, managed the start up from his bedroom. Mr. Sinka, who has a mop of curly hair, was wearing water shoes and a cable knit sweater as he did light morning stretching. Mr. Fleischer was reading a book. A dopamine fast is simple because it is basically a fast of everything. They would not be eating. They would not look at any screens. They would not listen to music. They would not exercise. They would not touch other bodies for any reason, especially not for sex. No work. No eye contact. No talking more than absolutely necessary. A photographer could take their picture, but there could be no flash. The number of things to not do is potentially endless. The ultimate dopamine fast is complete sensory deprivation, like maybe floating in a dark water tank or locking oneself in a closet. But the dopamine fasters of San Francisco do hope to keep existing in the normal world. Mr. Fleischer was looking through a textbook of images of chemical compounds and then writing some of them down in his notebook. "I like to find patterns in chemical compounds, and so I'm going through my books and finding quite a few," he said. Tired of tossing and turning? There are some strategies you could try to improve your hours in bed. None Four out of five people say that they suffer from sleep problems at least once a week and wake up feeling exhausted. Here's a guide to becoming a more successful sleeper. Stretching and meditative movement like yoga before bed can improve the quality of your sleep and the amount you sleep. Try this short and calming routine of 11 stretches and exercises. Nearly 40 percent of people surveyed in a recent study reported having more or much more trouble than usual during the pandemic. Follow these seven simple steps for improving your shut eye. When it comes to gadgets that claim to solve your sleep problems, newer doesn't always mean better. Here are nine tools for better, longer sleep. That is how he would spend his morning. Later he would move outside to sit and feel the air for a while. The three of them graduated recently from the Rochester Institute of Technology, where they met and started working together. Their start up was going through evolutions every few months. It began as a coffee extraction company that turned into a cannabinoid extraction company (much more profitable) that turned into a cannabinoid synthesis for sleep aid that turned into, now, sleep coaching. Their job is to put their clients in various sleep gadgetry the Dreem sleep headset, Oura sleep ring, Withings sleep mat and test interventions. Their apartment is clean and modern with an empty wine fridge and few decorations, save for a "Breaking Bad" poster. Their usual schedule of all day, every day hacking away on different projects was too much. Investors and clients had demands. Their start up iterations had turned into a real job. "I'd never thought about fasting work," Mr. Sinka said. "Once there was pressure around work, though, it became less fun, and I thought maybe we'll try fasting work." Like a weekend? No, he said, they don't have time to not work for that long. But fasting from work got them thinking more about fasting everything. Throughout that day of their dopamine fast, they wandered slowly from room to room. They read. They put on more and more sweaters. The food fasting makes them cold. They went on walks, though these are tricky because they have to avoid needing to ask for anything like water or bathrooms. "Your brain and your biology have become adapted to high levels of stimulus so our project is to reset those receptors so you're satiated again," he said. "Yeah, man, drop down that cortisol," Mr. Scicali said as encouragement. After the fast, Mr. Sinka finds that everyday tasks are more exciting and fun. Work is pleasurable again. Food is more delicious. "Biology can get hijacked," Mr. Sinka said, noting that "early homo sapiens" didn't have much in the way of sweets blueberries and the like. Sometimes it is hard or upsetting for people who encounter the Tennessee Street men while they are fasting. The other day, Mr. Sinka ran into an old friend but had to tell her they could not continue speaking. "I hadn't seen her in six months, and it was extraordinarily exciting, super stimulating, and I could feel how excited I was," he said. "So I had to cut it off and I just said, 'Listen, it's not you, it's me, doing this dopamine fast.'"
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Style
The New York Times on Thursday named Carolyn Ryan, who led its politics coverage during the presidential campaign, to the masthead, the second time in less than two weeks that a woman was brought into the highest leadership ranks of the newsroom. Ms. Ryan will become an assistant editor and will oversee the recruiting of journalists to The Times. The appointment comes as the company looks to fulfill the recommendations outlined in a recent internal report that called for rapid change in the newsroom. The report, known internally as the 2020 Report, recommended hiring journalists with varied skills as part of a broad newsroom transformation. Leaders of The Times have also said repeatedly that the newsroom would be getting smaller, and journalists already at the company are bracing for staff reductions. An announcement about these cuts could come in the next several weeks.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Media
To get to the Clare Island Lighthouse in County Mayo, in the west of Ireland, you climb up to the island's northern cliffs along a road of stones, past damp sheep chewing grass, around the bend through an alley of fuchsia hedges in bloom. Keep walking until you reach the lighthouse and slip your key in the lock, hang your parka by the door and take a seat beside the peat burning fireplace. Someone may be nearby to take your drink order, and the reward for a long walk will be a cold gin and tonic and the soft heat of the fire. Built in 1806, Clare Island Lighthouse sits at the northern edge of the island, 387 feet above the Atlantic Ocean. Until it was decommissioned in 1965 (its clifftop position turned out to be less than ideal during fog), the lighthouse played an important role in maritime safety. Ireland is, after all, an island before the time of GPS, lighthouses were essential in preventing shipwrecks along the rocky coast. The golden age of lighthouse construction in the country was in the mid 19th century; between the 1830s and 1860s alone over 40 lighthouses were built. They thrived for more than a century, but technology changed and automation spread. In 1997, the Baily in Howth Head, in County Dublin, was the final lighthouse to be automated. These historic landmarks are finding new life with the help of the Great Lighthouses of Ireland, a tourism trail introduced in 2015 that highlights 12 exceptional examples. At Wicklow Head, 45 minutes south of Dublin, for example, a two bedroom unit with kitchen is in the lighthouse tower itself (it's 109 steps up to the kitchen). The tower's octagonal rooms have arched windows and sweeping views out to the sea. Or you can rent the former keepers' quarters in Galley Head Lighthouse in County Cork, and you'll not only have a scenic base for beach walks and dolphin watching, but you will also see the vantage point where lightkeepers would have witnessed the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. As a New Yorker married to an Irishman, I travel frequently to Ireland. We have a rule: With every trip to Dublin, we leave the city and visit someplace new. This summer, I dreamed of staying in a lighthouse on each of Ireland's four coasts. I planned too late, and both Wicklow Head and Galley Head were booked (space in lighthouses is limited, so book early). Connections to my Irish family normally provide a reason to visit obscure graveyards and quiet country towns not on most guidebook maps, but for this trip, two lighthouses in County Mayo and County Donegal would guide the way. I hoped to find not just beautiful vistas, but people like Mr. Butler, who could bring this facet of modern Irish history to life. Our introduction to the guesthouse included a tour of the lighthouse tower. We climbed a spiral staircase for 360 degree views of plunging sea cliffs, choppy open water and neighboring Achill Island. Our guide opened a hatch, and we crawled through to a narrow balcony. Before I even stood, I heard the whistling of intense wind; the lighthouse's clifftop position is one of the most exposed on the island. With one hand on the railing and the other holding my hat to my head, I saw sea birds gliding overhead and moody clouds obscuring the island's peaks. With an hour before dinner, we settled in to the Jackie O'Grady room, named after a Clare Island native and the lighthouse's final keeper from 1963 to 1965. The room has a peat burning black box stove that warms fingers and toes after a soppy stroll along the coastal cliffs. That evening, I slept heavily and without interruption, but the next night while my husband slept, I caught a glimpse into the lightkeeper's life with only wind as company. When sleep is disturbed by a storm, there is a lot of time to think about all the different words for wind, to consider how powerless humans are at the whims of the weather when you call the edge of the Atlantic home. Back on the mainland, we headed north toward County Donegal. Along with Fastnet Rock in County Cork, Fanad Head is one of Ireland's most scenic lighthouses (and is situated in Donegal's Gaeltacht, or Irish speaking, region). In April, the lighthouse opened three self catering apartments in former keepers' quarters. Unlike Clare Island, Fanad is operational, lighting up the coast each evening. For this leg of the journey we had a native Irish speaker in tow, my father in law, Gerry. The clouds were so low as the three of us passed through County Sligo that they swallowed Ben Bulben, the storied mountain of Yeats poems, whole. The farther north we traveled, the more road signs were displayed only in Irish. We descended toward an ever narrowing outcrop of rock where the lighthouse sits at the cliff edge. Winding through mossy green farmland flecked with stones, the road seemed as if it could run on straight out to sea, but ended abruptly at the gate to the lighthouse. This is fishing country and also a destination for viewing wildlife orcas have been spotted off the coast. After settling in to our two bedroom cottage with a fireplace and claw foot tub, we walked to the nearby Lighthouse Tavern. Though it was daylight, the kitchen was closed it stays bright long enough during Irish summers that many restaurant kitchens close before dark and the nearest restaurant was miles away. It was beginning to look like Guinness for dinner. But as is common in Ireland, with luck and a bit of patience, the country's famous hospitality prevailed; when the pub owner had a spare moment, she went back into the kitchen to make ham and cheese toasties to go with our pints. While waiting for our sandwiches, I mentioned that I was curious to learn about the lives of lightkeepers. My father in law took out his phone and dialed. A quick conversation later and a hunch was confirmed: Gerry's brother in law was not just the son of a lightkeeper, but in the small world that is Ireland, spent 12 years of his youth at Fanad Head. Michael Boyle, born in 1944, and his five siblings lived at Fanad where his father, also named Michael Boyle, was the lighthouse keeper from 1951 to 1967. All members of the family contributed to the household, with tasks from milking the cow to tending the garden. Michael remembers his father practicing hobbies that kept his hands and mind busy, from making intricate ship replicas to playing chess. "Did I go to work with him?" Michael said with a laugh, repeating my question back to me when we met over tea in Dublin. "I didn't ask to go to work with him, I was told: Go take care of the tower!" The lighthouse gave light for night fishing and checking lobster pots. "The most frightening thing was when the heavy fog came in," Michael said, noting the limitations of even powerful lighthouses. "All you see around you is a big gray wall, and a ship could appear out of it at any second and run you down." I experienced the coastal darkness Michael described when we left the pub to retreat to the lighthouse. As I walked, I couldn't see my feet touching the road. The tower lit the coast for half a second before total darkness took over for two long seconds. I listened to my husband and his father discuss the difficult things in life cancer, aging with the lighthouse periodically illuminating our faces. It was almost as if the lighthouse wanted me to commit the freeze frame to memory, providing a flash as if to say: This moment is one to remember.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Travel
Re "231 Years In, a Need to Redefine 'Present'" (Congressional Memo, May 16): Enter my firm dissent to the idea of the House changing its rules, as it did on Friday, to allow proxy voting now and remote voting in the future without being "present" in the chamber as the Constitution requires. The House Democratic majority leader, Steny Hoyer, is wrong in his judgment that one of the most drastic rules changes in the 231 year history of Congress is not a "revolutionary" change, saying, "This is exactly what the Founders wanted to happen." (!) The House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, is correct in his opposition; the change is a radical one. The shift will dramatically change the look, and the clout, of the legislative branch. From now on, lawmakers will be allowed to cast votes for as many as 10 other House members by proxy. Working from home while not physically present in the Capitol will play into the hands of those promoting autocratic rule from the White House. It concedes the field of action to Donald Trump, who will exploit it for example, by taunting Congress for not being on duty in Washington.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Opinion
It's an offer they can't refuse and Trieu, a trillionaire, doesn't seem like the type to take "no" for an answer. But it also revives and satisfies a wish for a family that went dormant for the Clarks over time. For a baby boy and 5 million for their troubles, they can relocate. What is the value of life? Radically different answers are offered by various characters this episode. For Veidt and Trieu, whose stories are deeply intertwined, an individual life is meaningless, a synthetic chip in the games they've been playing. For the Clarks, a life is so precious that they'll willingly surrender the family farm within about 30 seconds. The distance in wealth and privilege matters here Veidt and Trieu believe themselves to be consequential in ways they can't conceive ordinary people to be but there's a moral component, too, that casts their agendas in a harsh light. By dropping a squid on New York City in the '80s, Veidt already made a decision once to sacrifice millions for the sake of many millions more. Who knows what he's plotting next or what Trieu has planned for the "big clock" that's most assuredly not an unwieldy timepiece. By contrast, Abar's husband, Calvin, views life with neither sentiment nor flippancy. When the Abar children want to know what happened to Uncle Judd after he died, Calvin coolly dispatches the fantasy of a heavenly afterlife: You're born, you live, you die. "Now he's nowhere," he explains firmly, which might sound cold, but also implies that the time you're alive matters. That much is clear when Abar gains access to a new branch on her family tree and discovers the fragile link between herself and her grandfather, Will Reeves, the sole survivor in his immediate family of the Tulsa massacre. She's furious with him for upending the most basic assumptions she had about her boss and her job, but she seems to understand that he is going to realign her mission. The revelation that Reeves is in contact with Trieu hiding away with her, in fact opens up all kinds of speculation about the nature of their arrangement and how much it has to do with a shared interest in racial justice. In the context of this episode, however, it makes sense for Trieu to use "legacy" as leverage to get what she wants out of the Clarks and Reeves. She isn't chucking bodies from a catapult, but there's still a sense that human life is a form of utility or currency, presided over by a fabulously wealthy person who has the privilege to consider the bigger picture. After all, you can't get an omelette without cracking a few eggs. None Fans of the graphic novel will notice a couple of references lately to its own fictional comic book writer, Max Shea. Last week, Laurie was staying at the Black Freighter motel, a callback to Shea's swashbuckling series "Tales of the Black Freighter." This week, Mrs. Clark is shown reading a paperback copy of "Fogdancing," a novel he wrote after leaving comics for good. None "In anticipation of our negotiation, I took the liberty of creating your son." None Slogans are apparently thriving in the alternate world of "Watchmen," from Abar's bakery ("We Let Saigons Be Saigons") to the Greenwood Center for Cultural Heritage ("Where the Answers to Life's Mysteries are Life's Histories"). None Shows like "Watchmen" can be so purposefully elusive that it was nice to see Trieu question Reeves about his passive aggressive strategy of leaving pills in Abar's glovebox. At least then it's not solely about teasing viewers with another mystery for no reason. None One mystery solved, however: Reeves doesn't need the wheelchair, so lynching Crawford is now a more plausible solo job. None Over at Uproxx, Brian Grubb wrote a hilarious list of "relatively straightforward" questions about "Watchmen," nearly all of them beginning with, "Who is this guy? What's his deal?" And so to "Lube Man," we're left once again to circle back to those same questions.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Television
Nicholas Edwards, shown here in a production of "Unmasked," will star as Jesus in the Berkshire Theater Group production of "Godspell." For the first time since the coronavirus pandemic erupted, Actors' Equity is agreeing to allow a few of its members to perform onstage. The union, which represents 51,000 actors and stage managers around the country, said it had given the green light to two summer shows in the Berkshires region of Western Massachusetts: an outdoor production of the musical "Godspell," and an indoor production of the solo show "Harry Clarke." In recent weeks, multiple theaters featuring nonunion actors have begun resuming performances in some cases outdoors, and in almost all cases with social distancing and a group of Equity actors collectively developed an outdoor performance piece in New York's Hudson Valley. And, of course, many actors have been performing online. But "Godspell" and "Harry Clarke," both scheduled to begin in early August in Pittsfield, Mass., are now likely to be the first productions in which union actors will perform in person before paying audiences in the United States since the threat of infection prompted Broadway and the nation's regional theaters to shut down in mid March. Citing safety concerns, Equity had barred its members from in person auditions, rehearsals and performances. "We're not trying to stop people from doing theater, but we are trying to stop people from getting sick and/or dying," said Kate Shindle, the president of Actors' Equity. She called the decision to allow these two productions "very exciting, and also something to watch very closely." "The fact that there is going to be Equity approved theater this summer is something that I really wasn't sure was going to be able to happen," she added. At both productions, performers and stage managers will be regularly tested for the coronavirus, and audience members will have to wear masks. The infection rate in Western Massachusetts is low, and both theaters were willing to accommodate the union's safety requirements. Mary McColl, the union's executive director, said she is in conversation with about 70 producers around the country seeking to resume performances by fall. But, she said, no other approvals are imminent, because "as we've been working through the protocols that would be necessary, everything started to go crazy in a lot of these states. We're not in control of the virus, and neither are these producers." "Godspell," a beloved and oft performed 1971 musical by Stephen Schwartz and John Michael Tebelak, is to be staged by the Berkshire Theater Group for a month beginning Aug. 6. The musical, adapted from the Gospel of Matthew and exploring biblical parables, will have a 10 person cast led by Nicholas Edwards as Jesus; it will be set in 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic. Kate Maguire, the artistic director and chief executive of the Berkshire Theater Group, said the production, directed by Alan Filderman, would be staged in a tent erected in a parking area; she said the tent would have about 100 socially distanced seats, vastly smaller than the 700 seat capacity of her indoor main stage. The cast will isolate together in a house, and will be regularly tested for the coronavirus, she said. And the production, although fully staged with sets and costumes, will include no physical contact between actors there will even be a contactless crucifixion, she said. "We've never done 'Godspell,' but it was the one show I thought could make sense in this world," Maguire said. "I'm kind of dying to hear 'Save the People.'" McColl said the "Godspell" approval was particularly significant because singing is considered a potential source of virus transmission. She said the actors would be distant from one another and would sing past one another during the production. "Harry Clarke," a one man play by David Cale, is about an ingratiating con artist, who will be played at Barrington Stage Company by Mark H. Dold. The play, scheduled to have a two week run starting Aug. 5, will be staged inside a 520 seat theater; to enable social distancing, only 163 people will be allowed to attend each performance, and Dold will perform upstage, far from the audience. The audience will undergo temperature checks, and will have to follow rules about how to enter and exit the theater to reduce crowding. Barrington Stage says it will have an entirely digital experience no physical tickets or programs. The theater has also reconfigured its air conditioning system to increase the circulation of fresh air.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Theater
Despite Big Hiccups and No Fans, the U.S. Open Has Had Some Classics Phase 1 of the weirdest United States Open was full of tennis lessons we never expected we would have to learn. Don't pull a ball out of your pocket and smack it without looking. Don't sign a new protocol and stay in a Long Island hotel. You still might not be allowed to cross a county line to play your match in Queens. Don't argue line calls on the outside courts. With automated calls, there is no one to argue with. But there was another revelation, too. You don't need a crowd to have a classic U.S. Open night match. Until now, the players and the spectators seemed to be essential ingredients: feeding off one another, inspiring one another. But Borna Coric and Stefanos Tsitsipas did it on their own in Louis Armstrong Stadium, forging a mutual masterpiece as they exchanged shouts, dirty looks and all manner of shots: bold, subtle, cocksure and humanizingly shaky in the third round. Tsitsipas, a prodigiously talented Greek full of hunger and swagger, seemed to have the match under control at 5 1 in the fourth set and seemed to have it under lock and key serving at 5 4, 40 0. But Coric, who has a tattoo that reads "There is nothing worse in life than being ordinary," stayed true to his body art. One of the best movers in the men's game, the young, bristle haired Croatian kept grinding and swinging. He saved six match points and leveled the match at two sets apiece as Friday night turned into Saturday. Tsitsipas could have been excused for curling up into a ball on the baseline at that stage. But he stayed upright and even went up a break in the fifth set before Coric leveled. Tsitsipas had four more break point chances down the stretch. But Coric held phenomenally firm and Tsitsipas cracked again, double faulting twice in the fifth set tiebreaker as Coric prevailed 6 7 (2), 6 4, 4 6, 7 5, 7 6 (4). "I have to be honest, and say I was really lucky," said Coric, who went on to lose in the quarterfinals to Alexander Zverev. "In the third and fourth set, he was playing unbelievable tennis, and I felt like I had no chance." It was not the first tennis pandemic epic (a pandepic, perhaps?): Andy Murray and his bionic hip won a five setter of their own in the first round against Yoshihito Nishioka. Earlier on Friday, Denis Shapovalov came back from a break down in the fifth to defeat Taylor Fritz. Although Novak Djokovic's fourth round default was certainly the most dramatic moment of the first week, he and Pablo Carreno Busta did not even finish the first set. For long form quality, relentless intensity and midnight madness timing, there was no topping Coric and Tsitsipas. "This is probably the saddest and funniest at the same time thing that has ever happened in my career," tweeted Tsitsipas, in new generation fashion, just minutes after it happened. It would have been the match of just about any tournament this one, coronavirus willing, still has matches through Sunday and that it could happen in a fan free environment in an individual sport was both reaffirming and unsettling. How much do the roars and the jeers really matter? The thought is, of course, not unique to tennis at the moment. Sport after sport is discovering what it means to play behind closed doors. But there were moments on Friday night when the lack of outside buzz and external distraction actually seemed to elevate the duel, making it possible to hear every sneaker squeak, every grunt and mutter. The court level camera angles helped, too, bringing viewers into the players' space and avoiding the wider shots that would have made clear that hardly anyone was watching in person. It was intimate, even meditative at times, as the two rivals took turns being brilliant under pressure to the sounds of the passing trains and a few shouts from their entourages. "Look, it would have been an amazing atmosphere to have fans in there cheering a guy on as he makes this amazing comeback," said Brad Gilbert, who called the match for ESPN. "But I do think that the players start getting locked in, and that it's just about you and the opponent. I don't think they even were noticing there was no crowd." Call it their own bubble within a bubble. "You could see everything develop with clarity because you had no distractions," Gilbert said. "But listen, I'm just so grateful we have a chance to do the tennis and just see the tennis. Obviously, this model without a crowd is not sustainable for the rest of tennis ever, but for the moment, it's a lot better than no tennis." The problem in New York during Week 1 was that not everyone who crossed the Atlantic to play tennis was allowed to do so, and that in Djokovic's case, the biggest star in the men's game essentially eliminated himself. Staging this tournament at all has been an immense undertaking, and the U.S.T.A. does not have the same financial means as the N.B.A. with its locked down campus at Walt Disney World in Florida. Nor did it have the wherewithal to quarantine an international field of players for two full weeks before the first ball was struck. There were bound to be issues. For now, Paire is the only player known to have tested positive for the coronavirus in the controlled environment set up for the Western Southern Open and the U.S. Open. But the devil has been in the details of the contact tracing, which forced seven players who had been in close contact with Paire to sign a new, more restrictive agreement in order to keep playing. When Nassau County health officials learned that those in contact with Paire were being allowed to compete instead of remaining in full quarantine, they effectively voided the new agreement. On Saturday, the French star Kristina Mladenovic, one of those in contact with Paire, was not permitted to travel to the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center from the player hotel. She and her Hungarian doubles partner, Timea Babos, the No. 1 seeds, were forced to withdraw before their second round match, after Adrian Mannarino of France had been allowed to play singles on Friday after great debate. He ended up losing to Alexander Zverev. This moving of the goal posts is not the way this situation should have been handled. Inconsistency undermines the rules, and that Mannarino was allowed to play because he was not at the hotel in Nassau County when the new edict was issued is not a good enough excuse. Every probable scenario should have been talked through and made clear with all the potentially relevant health authorities before the tournament began. Failing to do so undermines the U.S.T.A.'s remarkable efforts and certainly does not play well internationally. "US Open 2020: un tournoi amateur" (an amateur tournament) wrote L'Equipe in a headline over the weekend, bemoaning the lack of consistency and the lack of agreement among health officials within the same state. "The show has sadly moved outside the tennis courts," L'Equipe wrote. "Even in the midst of a health crisis, that is not worthy of a Grand Slam tournament." Clearly, watching Mannarino play on Friday, it did not have to be like this. But that does not mean the 2020 U.S. Open, even tarnished and having lost its biggest men's star, has not had its shining moments. Most of the players seem to appreciate the opportunity (and the paycheck), and they have paid it back with tennis worthy of the occasion, worthy of a Grand Slam tournament. Coric versus Tsitsipas was only the best of many examples: a late night classic no doubt, even without the customary soundtrack.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Sports
The narwhal is not an aquatic unicorn. It's not magical, or mythical. It's just a whale with two teeth, one of which happens to be really long on males. But it's not just its snaggletooth which can be up to nine feet long that makes this Arctic sea creature unbelievable. The narwhal sees with sound and it's exceptionally good at it too, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One. Like any whale, the narwhal needs to surface to breathe on average, every four to six minutes. But unlike most whales, narwhals spend all of their lives in extreme Arctic conditions, primarily in waters off Eastern Canada and Greenland, where there's more darkness than light, and more ice than open sea. Somehow, this blubbery bundle finds its way to cracks in the ice to breathe. Somehow, it can also hunt for squid and dive down more than a mile into pitch black water to capture fish and other prey. "You don't see open water for miles and miles and suddenly there's a small crack, and you'll see narwhals in it," said Kristin Laidre, an ecologist at the University of Washington who led the study. "I've always wondered how do these animals navigate under that, and how do they find these small openings to breathe?" Wondering how climate change and the prospect of an ice free Arctic might affect narwhal behavior in the future, scientists tracked these whales over the ice in helicopters. Knowing that whales use echolocation sending out clicks of sound that bounce off objects in the environment around them they placed microphones underwater and listened. They found that with clicks of sound, like a flashlight switching on and off, the narwhals scanned their underwater world to receive narrow snapshots and reconstructed them into a larger acoustic picture one with more resolution than any other animal on the planet, with the possible exception of beluga whales. The clicks, produced in organs known as phonic lips at rates of up to 1,000 clicks per second, are inaudible to the human ear, but detectable through special, underwater microphones. They exit through the narwhal's head, which works like a glass lens, bundling the sound together and sending it out in a narrow beam that travels through the water, hitting anything in its path, said Jens Koblitz, a bioacoustician with the BioAcoustics Network in Germany who worked on the study. When echoes bounce back, the animal perceives them with fatty pads in its lower jaw. Dr. Koblitz thinks the narwhal can narrow its beam like an adjustable flashlight on open ice at the sea surface or prey deep in the ocean, and then widen it as it gets closer to track its prey, a skill that has been observed in other echolocating animals like bats. Other scientists who study whales have praised the work for managing tough conditions to reveal the importance of the narwhal's navigation system. "It is not like a singing humpback whale that spreads the sound widely and can be heard over long distances," Mads Peter Heide Jorgensen, an ecologist at the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources who was not involved in the study, wrote in an email. "Narwhals are living a secretive life in the Arctic, but this study has unveiled one of the secrets from the deep waters in the Arctic." Indeed, the narwhal has long evoked mystery since the Vikings brought their tusks back to Europe with stories of unicorns. But there's one thing you should know about the tusks, Dr. Laidre said: Males and tuskless females appear to be equally good echolocators. The tusk is likely just for sexual display, like a peacock's feathers or a lion's mane. So it's highly unlikely to be used as an antenna for sending and receiving.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Science
A detail of a 16th century planetary clock known as the Imser Clock, one of the mechanical wonders in "Making Marvels: Science Splendor at the Courts of Europe" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You could walk through "Making Marvels" the Metropolitan Museum of Art's show of 16th to 18th century mechanical wonders that double as exquisite works of art and miss the news. "Making Marvels" brings together hundreds of elaborately crafted objects, many never seen in the United States: an ornate silver table decorated with sea nymphs, for example, or a clock with Copernicus depicted in gilded brass. Some, like a chariot carrying the wine god Bacchus, are spectacularly inventive Bacchus can raise a toast, roll his eyes and even stick out his tongue. Some, like a charming rhinoceros, a collage created from tortoiseshell, pearls and shells, are merely lovely. So "Making Marvels" is a parade of science and splendor, not always in that order. But the news? Discreetly displayed in the show is one prize jewel that was not stolen in a brazen heist 4,000 miles away. They did not get the mesmerizing 41 carat "Dresden Green," perhaps the world's fanciest hat pin a pear shaped stone in an elaborate setting intended to dangle from a tricorn. Typically kept in another room at the Royal Palace, it was already at the Met, shimmering away in "Making Marvels," which continues through March 1. Dirk Syndram, the director of the Green Vault, said it was "a great relief" that the "Dresden Green" was in New York when the thieves broke in. The Met would not say whether it had stepped up the security for the "Dresden Green." The police in Dresden say they still have no leads. A Berlin newspaper, the Berliner Morgenpost, cited an unnamed source as saying the Dresden theft might be linked to a similar break in at the Bode Museum in 2017. There, thieves hauled away a 221 pound gold coin that was never recovered and is believed to have been melted down. Three suspects are now on trial for the Berlin caper; the police in Dresden have declined to comment on whether they believe there is a connection between the two cases. Wolfram Koeppe, the Met curator who assembled "Making Marvels," remembers seeing the "Dresden Green" as a child in the 1960s, when Dresden was part of East Germany but was opened to travel from West Germany. "I just was fascinated by that color," he said, strolling through the exhibition. "It's not that it was my favorite color." What intrigued him was its rarity, and its very existence: How had the "Dresden Green" been created, deep in the earth, and propelled close enough to the surface to have been found? That fascination with how things came to be permeates "Making Marvels." The exhibition could be simply a display of ornamental wealth for the One Percent of long ago, an abundance of gold and silver that was meant to be shown off in any way possible. But "Making Marvels" is about more than that. Mr. Koeppe asserted, in the lavish book that combines photographs from the exhibition with scholarly essays, that such treasures were essential to governing. Mr. Koeppe said that the "Kunstkammer," or cabinets of curiosities that European nobles maintained as "thoughtfully selected collections of objects and instruments, each more beautiful, ingenious or wondrous than the next," were valued for artistic and technological refinement. The idea was to showcase a sovereign's erudition. In other words, knowledge was power. "The more knowledge that a ruler could collect about the world, the more control he was perceived to have over his realm," Mr. Koeppe wrote. "Princely patrons sought to advertise their advanced learning through their collecting practices." Scientific instruments became status symbols. None was more intricate than the machine at the entrance to "Making Marvels," a planetary clock known as the Imser Clock for Philipp Imser, a 16th century mathematician who was involved in building it. Its wondrously complicated dials were designed to follow the planets' wobbly course, but it is also a conventional clock: The minute hand is a figure of a woman that makes a full circuit every hour. Just beyond the Imser Clock is a riot of silver the Judgment of Paris desk, which Prince Paul Esterhazy I probably acquired from Emperor Leopold I. It shows a mythological scene in which a young prince decides between three goddesses. Nearby are a pair of large silver fountains and basins. They weigh almost as much as 1,900 thalers, the German currency of the time, and that was their value an astonishing amount. By contrast, Mr. Koeppe said, Mozart was paid 225 thalers a year as an organist in Salzburg, while the royal clockmaker in Munich earned only 200 a year. Silver furniture was the most obvious demonstration of wealth, "as not many aristocrats could commission such an extravagance," he said. But there was a catch: "Silver furnishings practically had one foot in the melting pot from the moment of their delivery, for in times of warfare and privation, such objects were the first to be handed over to the mint." "Making Marvels" has silver cups that escaped meltdown. One looks like a gilded fox chewing a goose in its shiny silver fangs. It was intended to be symbolic: A guest invited to take part in a welcoming ritual would drink from a vessel that represented the host in this case, Heinrich von Bobenhausen, leader of the influential Teutonic Order of Knighthood from 1572 to 1590. Tools play a major role in "Making Marvels," because princes competed to own the latest and were expected to know how to use them. Turning at the lathe, for example, "demanded self control and patience," Mr. Koeppe wrote. "Without these traits, a turner could easily damage a piece if his concentration wavered. Such forbearance was thus interpreted as a metaphor for good governance, as a similar slip in attention while ruling could endanger the integrity of one's realm and his people." Another royal device was a wire making bench that is nearly 15 feet long. Its wooden case is "sort of like an illuminated manuscript," Mr. Koeppe said. "You had sections you could explain to your guests in the evening. You have to imagine it being lit by candlelight." The hunting scenes would have appealed to Augustus the Elector, who commissioned the bench. It was installed in his Kunstkammer in Dresden in 1566. That was one kind of machine. Another was a writing device that was presented to Empress Maria Theresa in 1760. It was the work of Friedrich von Knaus, whom Mr. Koeppe credits with inventing the precursor of the first typewriter, and is programmable. Imagine using that word about a device from the 18th century, but Mr. Koeppe does. It can write "any preprogrammed text of up to 107 words," he said. A gilded statuette connected to an intricate arrangement of cams, levers and axles does the writing with a stylus it holds at an uncomfortable looking angle. It is shiny, but nothing sparkles like the "Dresden Green" and Mr. Koeppe knows it. If he walks by and sees a smudge left by a visitor who has somehow touched its tall, clear case, he pulls out a handkerchief. "You have to take care of it," he said. "It's part of being a curator." Making Marvels: Science Splendor at the Courts of Europe Through March 1 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Manhattan; 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Art & Design
Two years ago, Dr. Kelly McGregory opened her own pediatric practice just outside Minneapolis, where she could spend as much time as she wanted with patients and parents could get all of their questions answered. But just as her practice was beginning to thrive, the coronavirus hit the United States and began spreading across the country. "As an independent practice with no real connection to a big health system, it was awful," Dr. McGregory said. At one point, she had only three surgical masks left and worried that she could no longer safely treat patients. Families were also staying away, concerned about catching the virus. "I did some telemedicine, but it wasn't enough volume to really replace what I was doing in the clinic," she said. After her husband found a new job in a different state, Dr. McGregory, 49, made the difficult decision to close her practice in August. "It was devastating," she said. "That was my baby." Many other doctors are also calling it quits. Thousands of medical practices have closed during the pandemic, according to a July survey of 3,500 doctors by the Physicians Foundation, a nonprofit group. About 8 percent of the doctors reported closing their offices in recent months, which the foundation estimated could equal some 16,000 practices. Another 4 percent said they planned to shutter within the next year. Other doctors and nurses are retiring early or leaving their jobs. Some worry about their own health because of age or a medical condition that puts them at high risk. Others stopped practicing during the worst of the outbreaks and don't have the energy to start again. Some simply need a break from the toll that the pandemic has taken among their ranks and their patients. Another analysis, from the Larry A. Green Center with the Primary Care Collaborative, a nonprofit group, found similar patterns. Nearly a fifth of primary care clinicians surveyed in September say someone in their practice plans to retire early or has already retired because of Covid 19, and 15 percent say someone has left or plans to leave the practice. The clinicians also painted a grim picture of their lives, as the pandemic enters a newly robust phase with record case counts in the United States. About half already said their mental exhaustion was at an all time high. Many worried about keeping their doors open: about 7 percent said they were not sure they could remain open past December without financial help. For some, family obligations left them no choice. "Honestly, if it hadn't been for the pandemic, I would have still been working because it was not my plan to retire at that point," said Dr. Joan Benca, 65, who worked as an anesthesiologist in Madison, Wis. But her daughter and son in law hold administrative positions in a hospital intensive care unit, treating the sickest Covid patients, and they have two small children. When cases climbed in the spring, their day care center closed, and Dr. Benca's daughter desperately needed someone she trusted to look after the children. "It wasn't the way I wanted to end my career," Dr. Benca said. "I think for most of us, we would say, you would fall on your sword for your family but not for your job," she said, adding that she knows other female colleagues who have stayed home to care for children or older relatives. Dr. Michael Peck, 66, an anesthesiologist in Rockville, Md., decided to leave after working in April in the hospital's intensive care unit, intubating critically ill patients, and worrying about his own health. "When the day was over, I just said, 'I think I'm done' I want to live my life, and I don't want to get ill," said Dr. Peck, who had already been cutting back his hours. He is now spending a few hours a day as the chief medical officer for a start up. Still, most practices have proved resilient. The Paycheck Protection Program authorized by Congress to help businesses, including medical practices, with the economic fallout of the pandemic helped many doctors remain afloat. That money "kind of made me solid," said Dr. Ripley Hollister, a family physician in Colorado Springs who serves as chairman of the research committee for the Physicians Foundation. The volume now "is really coming back," he said. But, depending on the future course of the pandemic, Dr. Lisa Bielamowicz, a co founder of Gist Healthcare, a consulting firm, predicts "another wave of financial stress hitting practices." Many doctors' groups will seek a buyer, whether a hospital, an insurance company or a private equity firm that plans to roll up practices into a larger business. One doctor, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are confidential, said she and her partner had already been talking with the nearby hospital nearby about buying their pediatric practice before the pandemic arrived in the United States. Although federal aid has helped, patient visits are still 15 percent below normal, she said, and they are continually worried about making payroll and having enough doctors and staff to see patients. As the number of virus cases balloons in the Midwest, her employees must deal with increasingly agitated parents. "They're yelling and cussing at my staff," she said. Working for a telemedicine firm might be an alternative, she added. "It's a hard job to begin with, to own your own business," she said. The coronavirus crisis has amplified problems that doctors were already facing, whether they own their practice or are employed. "A lot of physicians were hanging on by a thread from burnout before the pandemic even started," said Dr. Susan R. Bailey, the president of the American Medical Association. In particular, smaller practices continue to have difficulty finding sufficient personal protective equipment, like gloves and masks. "The big hospitals and health care systems have pretty well established systems of P.P.E.," she said, but smaller outfits might not have a reliable source. "I was literally on eBay looking for masks," she said. The cost of these supplies has also become a significant financial issue for some practices. Doctors are also stressed by the never ending need to keep safe. "There is a hunker down mentality now," Dr. Bailey said. She is concerned that some doctors will develop PTSD from the chronic stress of caring for patients during the pandemic. Even those who are not responsible for running their own practices are leaving. Courtney Barry, 40, a family nurse practitioner at a rural health clinic in Soledad, Calif., watched the cases of coronavirus finally ebb in her area, only to see wildfires break out. Many of her patients are farmworkers and work outside, and they became ill from the smoke. In 14 years as a nurse, Ms. Barry has never experienced anything "like this that is just such a high level of stress and just keeps going," she said, adding, "The other hard part is there's no end in sight." She tried working fewer days but decided eventually that she would stop altogether for several months beginning in early December. Ms. Barry hasn't figured out what's next for her. "My intention is to stay in medicine, although I would not be totally opposed to doing something in a totally different area, which is something that I would not have said in the past," she said. And patients have indeed felt the effects. The pandemic has developed into "a really huge disruption," said Dr. Hollister, the family physician, who thinks closed practices are likely to result in "a significant impairment to patients' access to medical care." In his community, where both specialists and primary care doctors are leaving, he is tending to more patients who no longer have a doctor. It is an issue that Dr. McGregory, who took a job at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison, worries about. There were some families in her practice whom she could not convince to find another pediatrician immediately. She said they "are waiting, which I discouraged, because I think every child should have a medical home."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Health
BEAULIEU, England When divers searched the wreckage of the S.S. Persia off the coast of Crete in 2003, they found some remarkable cargo: more than 200 gemstones, including rubies, amethysts, moonstones and what are believed to be some of the first mass produced synthetic rubies. This summer, Buckler's Hard Maritime Museum, set in a coastal area of Hampshire, England, introduced a limited edition jewelry line featuring the gems, with proceeds to go to charity. The project was intended to commemorate the ship's sinking in 1915 by a German U boat and to commemorate its 507 crew members and passengers, 343 of whom died in the attack. The gems are believed to have belonged to Maharajah Jagatjit Singh, who was not aboard the P O Line ship, which was traveling to India at the time of the attack. Deep Tek, the Scotland based salvage firm that searched the wreckage, donated the gems to the project.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Fashion & Style
Gene Reynolds, right, on the set of the television series "M A S H" with the cast members Larry Linville, left, and Alan Alda. Mr. Reynolds helped Larry Gelbart develop the show, still considered one of the finest in television history. Gene Reynolds, an Emmy winning producer and director who was a force behind two of the most acclaimed television series of the 1970s and early '80s, "M A S H" and "Lou Grant," died on Monday in Burbank, Calif. He was 96. He wife, Ann Sweeny Reynolds, said the cause was heart failure. Mr. Reynolds started his prolific career on the performing side of the camera, appearing in some 80 films and television shows, beginning when he was a child. He developed an unusual sort of specialty: playing the younger versions of characters played by top film stars of the 1930s. He was the adolescent version of Don Ameche's character in "Sins of Man" (1936), and of Ricardo Cortez's character in "The Californian" (1937), and of Tyrone Powers's character in "In Old Chicago" (1938), among others. A breakthrough was when he played the young version of James Stewart's character in "Of Human Hearts" (1938), an MGM movie that earned him a contract with that studio. Mr. Reynolds racked up dozens more TV and film acting credits, including more than 40 in the 1950s, but by the end of that decade he had shifted his focus to directing and, soon after that, to producing. In the 1960s, he directed numerous episodes of television comedies, including "Hogan's Heroes" and "F Troop," both of which found humor and absurdity in military settings. That experience served him well in 1972, when, at the instigation of the producer William Self, he helped Larry Gelbart develop "M A S H," the sitcom about an Army hospital during the Korean War. (Robert Altman's film, based on Richard Hooker's novel, had come out two years earlier.) The series, addressing serious themes with a mix of slapstick and dark humor, is still considered one of the finest in television history. Its final episode, in 1983, set a ratings record. By then, though, Mr. Reynolds had moved on and already had another acclaimed series to his credit: "Lou Grant," which he helped create in 1977, the year he left "M A S H." The show, about a fictional newspaper, with Ed Asner as the title character, twice won the Emmy Award for outstanding drama series. Mr. Reynolds directed episodes of each of those series (including the first episodes of both), winning two Emmys himself for outstanding direction of a comedy for "M A S H." He won six Emmys in all, including one for "M A S H" for best comedy series and one for an earlier show he developed, "Room 222," which was named outstanding new series of 1969 70. One of the most memorable moments of "M A S H" that he directed was not a specific episode, but the opening sequence, which shows two helicopters landing at the medical unit, presumably with casualties aboard. Mr. Reynolds had wanted a shot of nurses running to help. Several assistant directors tried but failed to get the effect he was after, as the actresses were "just kind of trotting along," as Mr. Reynolds put it in an oral history recorded for the Directors Guild of America (of which he was president from 1993 to 1997). Eugene Reynolds Blumenthal was born on April 4, 1923, in Cleveland and grew up in Detroit. His father, Frank, was a businessman who later went into real estate, and his mother, Maude (Schwab) Blumenthal, was a model before becoming a homemaker. "I was a very energetic child," Mr. Reynolds said in an interview for the book "Growing Up on the Set: Interviews With 39 Former Child Actors of Classic Film and Television" (2002), by Tom Goldrup and Jim Goldrup, "and my mother mistook that for talent." She took him to an acting group for children, and soon he was appearing in radio commercials and amateur plays. After the family moved to California when he was about 11, he began working as an extra in TV shows and movies. One of his first roles was in the 1934 Laurel and Hardy film "Babes in Toyland." He appeared in movies with other child and teenage stars, including Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. He set aside his film career when World War II broke out, enlisting in the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps and serving on ships including the destroyer minesweeper the Zane. "Herman Wouk was the senior watch officer," Mr. Reynolds recalled in "Growing Up on the Set," "and he would get up every morning very early and would write." In 1951, of course, Wouk published his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, "The Caine Mutiny," which drew on his experiences on that ship. After the war ended in 1945 Mr. Reynolds earned a degree in history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and resumed acting. He landed few leading roles, though, and became frustrated with his career progress. Soon he was directing episodes of some of the most popular series of the 1960s, including "Leave It to Beaver," "The Andy Griffith Show" and "My Three Sons." Among his biggest television successes before "M A S H" was "Room 222," a comedy drama about a black teacher, for which Mr. Reynolds served as executive producer. It ran for more than 100 episodes and tackled subjects including prejudice, drugs and dropouts. "It was a tumultuous time, and I think we took advantage of it," he said in an oral history for the Television Academy Foundation, "but unfortunately ABC looked at numbers and said, 'This could be funnier.'" He was shown the door, right when Mr. Self was looking for someone to bring "M A S H" to television. Mr. Reynolds's first marriage, to Bonnie Jones, an actress, ended in divorce. He and his wife, also an actress, married in 1979 and lived in Los Angeles. In addition to her, he is survived by a son, Andrew.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Television
AMSTERDAM At an Amsterdam rehearsal studio one recent afternoon, Thomas Mann, the German author who died in 1955, was speaking with the main character of his novella, "Death in Venice." "I have to get out of here," said Gustav von Aschenbach, collapsing into a chair with his head in his hands. But Mann did not let him leave. Instead, he forced his character to stay in Venice, tormented by his obsession with a 14 year old Polish boy, and to die there. In this new musical production of "Death in Venice," created by the internationally renowned Belgian director Ivo van Hove, the author is present. Mann doesn't only converse with his protagonist, but also with his own wife, Katia, who watches from the sidelines as her husband also becomes increasingly distracted by the sight of the beautiful boy. Premiering April 4, the production is a collaboration between the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam (formerly known as the Toneelgroep Amsterdam), which Mr. van Hove leads, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. They have commissioned music by the American composer Nico Muhly, which will be interspersed between works by Richard Strauss, Anton Webern and Arnold Schoenberg, and conducted by David Robertson. The production will tour Europe from next year, with performances in London, Paris and Zagreb. "We see Mann at home writing this novel, creating von Aschenbach, sending him to Venice, and having him meet a boy," explained Mr. van Hove, in a rehearsal break. "It's to make clear that this wasn't just a story to Thomas Mann: It was something that he lived through." Ramsey Nasr, who adapted the novella for the stage and plays Aschenbach, said in an email exchange that the idea of incorporating the real life story of Thomas and Katia Mann into the drama was a way to explore how artists create fictions from their own lives. Katia described in her 1974 memoir, "Unwritten Memories," how "Death in Venice" was based on a trip the two took to the city in 1911, when they stayed at the Grand Hotel des Bains on the Lido, and encountered many figures whom Mann used as models for his characters. The boy who became Mann's muse was later identified as Wladyslaw Moes, the 10 year old son of an aristocratic Polish family, in the 2001 book "The Real Tadzio," by the Scottish journalist Gilbert Adair. When Mr. Nasr learned about this background to the novel, he said, "It made me wonder: How was it for her to be there and witness it all?" This gave him "all the ingredients for a drama encapsulating the story," he added. Katia, who outlived her husband by 25 years, was almost 90 when she finally revealed publicly how she had dealt with that chapter of their life together. "She didn't talk about it for her whole life, really," said Mr. van Hove. "She accepted that he had this in him but he turned it into novels and he turned it into poetry and into art." "Death in Venice" is one of the most celebrated works of German literature, and it has been adapted as an acclaimed film by Luchino Visconti, in 1971, and as Benjamin Britten's final opera, which premiered in 1973. Mr. Muhly, a composer who has worked with Philip Glass and Bjork, has written new music for the production. In an interview, he said this "Death in Venice" was neither an opera nor a music theater piece, but rather "a play with a lot of room for music." The difficulty of adapting the novella for the stage is that the drama of the story largely takes place in Aschenbach's mind. Visconti reimagined Aschenbach as a composer and conductor (played by Dirk Bogarde) and used music by Mahler on the soundtrack to reflect Aschenbach's anguish. Mr. Muhly said he knew Britten's opera "incredibly well," and that it was a key reference point for his own opera "Two Boys," which was performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 2013. But, he said, he had to "not think about that at all. Instead, I was thinking about the text, I was thinking about the adaptation, and what Ivo's team has done to frame this text and to tell the story in different way." Mr. van Hove has created three productions this season that concern what he called "abusive forbidden relationships": a stage adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara's novel "A Little Life," which tells a story of a victim of pedophilia, and "The Wood," a play adapted from a novel by Jeroen Brouwers, which portrays physical and sexual abuse in a Roman Catholic monastery and boarding school. "It's very current, with what's coming out about the Catholic church and, coincidentally, this whole Michael Jackson thing," he said, referring to the new documentary "Leaving Neverland," about child abuse allegations against the pop musician. "It's really something that people are talking about more and more. Thomas Mann wrote about the subject of desire. You cannot call it abuse; it's in someone's mind, but it's really a fantasy desire." Mr. Robertson, who will lead the Concertgebouw for the production's Amsterdam run, cautioned against thinking of "Death in Venice" as primarily about homoerotic or pedophilic urges. The production was asking bigger questions, he added: "Where does creativity come from? Where does love stem from, and what happens when love and creativity are blended together?" Mr. Robertson said he thought the project was a wholly new take on Mann's story. "This doesn't replace the novella, the film or the opera," he said. "It augments this fantastic creation that Thomas Mann has made."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Theater
Yes, You Can Find a Financial Planner Even if You're Not Rich "Please help me find reasonably priced financial advice from someone who won't rob me blind." Someday, I'll create a keyboard shortcut reply to that email, which I receive nearly every week, that pastes in all of the questions to ask when seeking such a person. But an ugly fact of the financial advice industry has generally been this: There are precious few practitioners who will work with people who are not wealthy, or at least not without pushing questionable, commission laden investments and insurance policies. Often, when people ask me for referrals in New York City, I can barely think of anyone. Many of the best financial planners want to charge you a fee each year based on the assets that they manage for you, say 1 percent every 12 months. But before they will even consider working with you, you generally have to have many hundreds of thousands of dollars. So it was refreshing to find out recently that a fledgling collection of financial planners, the XY Planning Network, had grown to nearly 600 people in just under four years. The key? To be a member, you have to agree to offer clients the option of paying via a recurring fee. Often, it's about the same price that those clients pay for their bundled cable bill. Alan Moore was not the first financial planner to experiment with recurring billing, but he was just stubborn enough, after he was fired from a previous financial planning job at 24, to think he could hang a shingle and make it work. "I had a lot more arrogance and confidence than skills," he said. "And I wasn't going to charge 1 percent of assets for clients my age. One percent of nothing is nothing." On Twitter, he found his way, as most people in financial planning do sooner rather than later, to Michael Kitces. Mr. Kitces, who is 40 years old, is an industry octopus with 29 letters of credentials after his name who speaks at conferences, works as a partner at a financial planning firm, writes and researches in quantity, and starts companies here and there. Together, Mr. Moore and Mr. Kitces cooked up XY (as in Generations) to provide a community and infrastructure including technology tools, investment resources and compliance assistance for other advisers who wanted to work in this way. To get this far, they've sought out financial planners who could be content with a mere low six figure income. If 80 clients pay 150 a month, XY advisers can earn gross revenues of 144,000, though XY charges member financial planners 409 per month. Many traditional brokerage firms would fire people generating that amount of money. "It's literally failure, two or three times the median household income," Mr. Kitces said. "Our income expectations in this industry are completely out of whack, and that was a big part of the opportunity for us." Perhaps the most compelling part of the XY offering is what the founders make the advisers do or promise to customers. Those potential clients are often seeking to check off a number of questions or concerns before they sign up with someone. You must be a fiduciary, which means you have to pledge to act in your clients' best interest at all times. Revenue can come only from client fees, not commissions. You have to be a certified financial planner to be listed in the network's consumer directory and must have no major marks on your disciplinary record. One big fine can mean eviction. There is that requirement to offer a recurring billing option, which can include an upfront charge for getting a new client set up, with no investment minimum. Also, advisers have to be willing to work virtually if clients want to, which allows people with particular niches to find their clients wherever they may live. One member employs Christian principles in his practice, while another specializes in helping women who work in technology companies that have not yet gone public. People find their way to the profession and the network in a variety of ways. Anna Sergunina's family immigrated from Moldova, and her father worked as a truck driver while her mother cut people's hair and did their nails. They wanted her to be a doctor, but she said financial planning gave her the same chance to make a difference in people's lives, especially her peers. "I always thought I'd have to work with older people," said Ms. Sergunina, 34, who is based in Burlingame, Calif. The median age of XY advisers is 38, and it's a refrain that many of them sound, having come from other planning firms or related industries where the easiest way to make a living is to chase older clients with the most money. XY encourages its members to find a niche among their peers instead. Jason Howell, 43, who works in Vienna, Va., considered politicians (he once ran for Congress), children of immigrants (his parents were born outside the United States) and others. He eventually found success helping many couples where one person is a business owner and the other works a 9 to 5 job. Others seek niches in ways of thinking about the world. Inga Chira, 35, who has a doctorate in finance and is an assistant professor at California State University, Northridge, maintains a part time practice with a focus on money and happiness. It is reasonable to wonder if the practitioners are dabblers, as with any fledgling professional network filled with people in the first halves of their careers. Some won't make it in the industry, while others may go upmarket. And while no one has made a claim on XY's errors and omissions insurance yet, at least a bit of scandal tends to eventually find its way into most corners of the financial planning world. Still in a very short time, XY has grown to be more than twice the size of similar networks. Its closest cousin is probably the Garrett Planning Network. Its founder, Sheryl Garrett, is one of the great unsung heroes of American financial services, because she helped persuade many financial planners to charge by the hour. Finding so many new clients for hourly work does require a lot of effort, which doesn't appeal to everyone. "The majority of the financial services industry has always been chasing after customers with the ability to provide advisers with the most income for the least amount of labor," she said. Mr. Kitces and Mr. Moore, who was once a member of the Garrett Network, profess no animus for Ms. Garrett and her member planners. Some, like Ms. Sergunina, belong to both. "I wish there were 5,000 Garrett planners serving a whole bunch of markets that don't get served," said Mr. Kitces, who recently had Ms. Garrett as a guest on his podcast. There are other options, too. Vanguard's Personal Advisor Services offers holistic financial planning for a 0.30 percent annual fee, based on a percentage of your assets. And the so called roboadvisers, which once only ran your investments with their trading and rebalancing software, have added other services. Betterment recently introduced a charitable giving feature, while Wealthfront can now help you plan your housing purchase.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Your Money
He made profound contributions to number theory, coding theory, probability theory, topology, algebra and more and created games from it all. He died of the coronavirus. This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here. John Horton Conway, the English born Princeton mathematician whose body of work ranged from the rigorously highbrow to the frivolously fun, earning him prizes and a reputation as a creative, iconoclastic and even magical genius, died on Saturday in New Brunswick, N.J. He was 82. His wife, Diana Conway, said his death, at a nursing home, was caused by Covid 19. Dr. Conway's boundless curiosity produced profound contributions to number theory, game theory, coding theory, group theory, knot theory, topology, probability theory, algebra, analysis, combinatorics and more. Foremost, he considered himself a classical geometer. "His swath was probably broader than anyone who ever lived," said the mathematician Neil Sloane, a collaborator with Dr. Conway and the founder of the On Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. "I've worked with a lot of people, and he was the fastest at solving a problem and would pursue a topic as far as it would go." (The two were co authors of 50 papers and published the 706 page book "Sphere Packings, Lattices and Groups.") His friend Martin Gardner, the longtime mathematical games columnist for Scientific American, called the Game of Life Dr. Conway's "most famous brainchild." He reckoned that at the game's peak of popularity with users programming it at home and at work one quarter of the world's computers were playing it. "Conway's LIFE changed mine," the musician Brian Eno said in an email. "I think Conway himself thought it rather trivial, but for a nonmathematician like me, it was a shock to the intuition, a shattering revelation to watch glorious complexity emerging from staid simplicity." Dr. Conway was proudest of his discovery of surreal numbers. (The Stanford computer scientist Donald Knuth had come up with the name while writing the novelette "Surreal Numbers: How Two Ex Students Turned on to Pure Mathematics and Found Total Happiness.") Described by Mr. Gardner as "an astonishing feat of legerdemain," the surreals are a super continuum of numbers, including all the old fashioned real ones (integers, fractions and irrationals like pi) as well as those that go above, beyond, below and within, embracing both the infinites and the infinitesimals. Dr. Conway always hoped that surreal numbers might find practical applications, perhaps in helping to illuminate the universe on the cosmic and quantum scales. One of Dr. Conway's favorite accomplishments was the Free Will Theorem, conceptualized casually over the course of a decade with his friend and fellow Princeton mathematician Simon Kochen and first published in 2006 (and later revised). The theorem, simply put, is this: If physicists have free will while performing experiments, then elementary particles possess free will as well. And this, Dr. Conway and Dr. Kochen surmised, probably explains why and how humans have free will in the first place. "In mathematics and physics there are two kinds of geniuses," Dr. Kochen said by phone from his home in Princeton, echoing something once said about the physicist Richard Feynman. "There are the ordinary geniuses they are just like you and me but they are better at it; if we'd worked hard enough, maybe we could get some of the same results. "But then there are the magical geniuses," he added. "Richard Feynman was a magical genius. And the same always struck me about John he was a magical mathematician. He was a magical genius rather than an ordinary genius." Dr. Conway's mother, a great reader, especially of Dickens, had worked from age 11. Family lore has it that she boasted about finding her son at age of 4 reciting the powers of two. At 18, in 1956, John left home for the University of Cambridge, where he earned his Ph.D. His adviser, Harold Davenport, a number theorist, once said that when he would give Dr. Conway a problem to solve, "he would return with a very good solution to another problem." As a student, Dr. Conway cultivated his acknowledged lifelong preference for being lazy, playing games and doing no work. He could be easily distracted by what he called "nerdish delights." He once went on a flexagon binge, courtesy of Mr. Gardner, who described flexagons as "polygons, folded from straight or crooked strips of paper, which have the fascinating property of changing their faces when they are flexed." He built a water powered computer, which he called Winnie (Water Initiated Nonchalantly Numerical Integrating Engine). He read and annotated H.S.M. Coxeter's edition of W.W. Rouse Ball's classic work, "Mathematical Recreations and Essays," and wrote Coxeter a lengthy letter that started a lifelong friendship between these two classical geometers. Hired at Cambridge as an assistant lecturer, Dr. Conway gained a reputation for his high jinks (not to mention his disheveled appearance). Lecturing on symmetry and the Platonic solids, he might bring in a turnip as a prop, carving it one slice at a time into, say, an icosahedron, with its 20 triangular faces, eating the scraps as he went. "He was by far the most charismatic lecturer in the faculty," his Cambridge colleague Peter Swinnerton Dyer once said. Dr. Conway invented a profusion of games like Phutball (short for Philosopher's Football, which is a little like checkers on a Go board) and collected them in the book "Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays," in collaboration with Elwyn Berlekamp and Richard Guy. All the gaming was supported by a loyal following of graduate students, among them Simon Norton, with whom Dr. Conway published the Monstrous Moonshine conjecture, investigating an elusive symmetry group that lives in 196,883 dimensions. (His Ph.D. student Richard Borcherds received the prestigious Fields Medal in 1998 for his proof of the conjecture.) At the University of Cambridge Dr. Conway rose to become a professor in mathematics as well as a supernumerary fellow at Gonville and Caius College, his alma mater there. He was named a fellow of the Royal Society in 1981. In 1985, with four co authors, he published "The ATLAS of Finite Groups," one of the most important books in group theory. That same year, he was invited to give a talk at Princeton, and a job offer followed: In 1987, he took up the position of the John von Neumann professor of applied and computational mathematics. In announcing the hire, Princeton's president called Dr. Conway "one of the most eminent mathematicians of the century." At Princeton Dr. Conway, with his mischievous and seductive aura, drew news media attention. Asked by a reporter for The New York Times about his life of the mind, he replied: "What happens most of the time is nothing. You just can't have ideas often." He became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992. A fellow inductee, the mathematician Robert MacPherson, recalled that at the ceremony Dr. Conway accepted his honor in what appeared to be green running shorts. His first two marriages, to Eileen Howe and Larissa Queen, ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, he is survived by four daughters from his first marriage, Annie, Ellie and Susie Conway and Rosie Wayman; two sons from his second marriage, Oliver and Alex; a son with Ms. Conway, Gareth; three grandchildren; and six great grandchildren. At Princeton he was almost invariably recruited to give the first year course intended to persuade students to become math majors. And he offered extracurricular content, like a campus tour titled "How to Stare at a Brick Wall." He gave over his summers prime research time to teaching at math camps. He was a star attraction, despite the fact that his talks were advertised vaguely as "John Conway Hour, NTBA" (Not to Be Announced). He would take topic requests from students and deliver an extemporaneous lecture. Math, Dr. Conway believed, should be fun. "He often thought that the math we were teaching was too serious," said Mira Bernstein, a mathematician and a former executive director of Canada/USA Mathcamp, an international summer program for high school students. "And he didn't mean that we should be teaching them silly math to him, fun was deep. But he wanted to make sure that the playfulness was always, always there." Dr. Conway persevered in finding the fun through triple bypass surgery, a suicide attempt and a number of strokes. Sometimes he would regale anyone willing to listen on the science of rainbows or on his Doomsday rule for calculating the day of the week for any given date. And there were ever more games of Phutball, which Dr. Conway was not very good at. Sometimes, when all seemed lost when he was almost certainly beaten at his own game, though he might yet magically prevail he'd delight in borrowing from Mark Twain, admonishing his opponents, "Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated!" Siobhan Roberts is the author of "Genius at Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway" (2015).
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Technology
SHOULD you downsize and move to a new neighborhood? Or renovate the family residence to suit your retirement needs and lock in for the long term? It is one of the most vexing questions older people face as they plan the shift from a working life to retirement. Mary and Christopher Anderson, who live on the western edge of Milwaukee, know the situation well. They wrestled for several years with whether to renovate their 1953 ranch house in preparation for retirement, or leave it and move to the suburbs. But every time they tried to buy a house, someone beat them to it. They took that as a sign that they would be better off updating their home of 18 years and staying put. "We might not even get the money out dollar for dollar," said Mrs. Anderson, 54, who is still employed as a special education teacher "We'll get the living out of it. You can't put a price on comfort." The Andersons appear to be in good company. An estimated 36 percent of retirees plan to stay in their homes, according to a Merrill Lynch and Age Wave report released in February. Most said that was because they loved their home and neighborhood or because they valued the ability to remain independent while still having friends and relatives close by. The relationship between financial and emotional value shifts over time, however, according to the report, which is based on a national survey of more than 3,600 people. Between the ages of 55 and 64, half said their home's financial value was more important, while half said its emotional value was. From ages 65 to 74, 56 percent said home's emotional value was more important, compared with 44 percent who said its financial value was. At 75 and older, 63 percent said emotional value while 37 percent said financial value. Furthermore, baby boomers spend more money than any other group on renovations, accounting for 47 percent of the home renovation market and spending 90 billion annually, the report said. Home is not just a building but a place to enjoy life, "to build deeper and more fulfilling connections," said David Tyrie, managing director, head of personal wealth and retirement solutions at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. As people approach the years when Americans typically retire, 55 through 66 or older these days, they also want, and often can afford, more comfort. Although the economic downturn that began in 2008 tempered some renovation spending. Vince Butler, co owner of Butler Brothers Corporation in Clifton, Va., and a member of the National Home Builders Association, said his average project dropped to 70,000 from 130,000. But other remodelers say they are seeing an uptick in business again. In the last 18 to 24 months, "the dam just opened," as people jumped back into the renovation game across the country, said Kevin Anundson, president of the National Association of the Remodeling Industry, who is based in Elm Grove, Wis. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' Yet, "people are still a little more hesitant to spend on a very big project," he said. They just wanted to remodel their bathrooms by gutting them and rearranging them a little bit for 25,000 to 35,000 in his area, he said. "They scaled back what they were going to remodel," he added. "The larger projects did go away." Deciding whether to stay in your home and renovate rather than move to a different home, whatever the size, is complicated. But, after clearing the emotional hurdles, it is important to take a methodical approach to the project. "Write down your wish list," Mr. Anundson said. "Decide how much you want to spend and see how far down you can get" on the list. Allow yourself to dream, as a way to figure out whether and how much you want to change your house. "Pretend like you've got all the money in the world," he said. "How would you change your house? That really frees up the mental limits you put on yourself." Once you've considered all the things you might want to do, consult experts, including remodelers, designers, architects, real estate professionals and financial advisers to figure out how much your dreams will cost, whether the expenditure is appropriate for your neighborhood and how you will pay for the improvements. Will you pay cash, use a home equity line of credit or loan or tap your 401(k) or Individual Retirement Account? Keep the tax implications in mind if you decide to withdraw money from a retirement account, said Jared Snider of Exencial Wealth Advisors in Oklahoma City. Consider whether your assets are better kept in investment vehicles that will yield more than the interest on a home equity line at roughly 5 percent will cost you. If your mortgage is paid off, you might want to use the equity in your home for a home equity line of credit or loan, or, if you have money that is not giving you much of a return, you might want to use it. If you take money from a 401(k) plan or an I.R.A., you will have to pay tax on the income, which might put you into a higher tax bracket, Mr. Snider said. The Andersons decided to use money from her inheritance. It was important to them to create a kitchen and family room space that could accommodate gatherings of their extended family. Mrs. Anderson and her seven brothers and sisters promised her parents "we would continue to get together once a year," she said. They finished the project late last summer. At Christmastime, when the Andersons hosted the family gathering, the group included the three siblings from Illinois, one from Michigan and four from Wisconsin and their families 40 people in all, she said. Robert Tardiff and his wife, Kathleen, made a similar choice. They decided to renovate their Vienna, Va., home in stages, beginning about 10 years ago. "We're really comfortable living in this environment," said Mr. Tardiff, 73, who has a doctorate in toxicology and pharmacology and works part time at Georgetown University. "Our connections are all here," including their three grown children and five grandchildren, who live in Northern Virginia and Washington. He estimates he and his wife spent 150,000 in the last decade to enhance their home. Here are guidelines for remodeling: Gauge how long you plan to stay in your home. Is it five or 10 years, or do you plan to live in your house for as long as you can live there independently? "Spend the money that's comfortable for you and enjoy it," Mr. Anundson said. There is no way to gauge precisely how much you'll get for your house when you or your heirs sell it. Think through all the ramifications of your plan so remodelers or architects can avoid having to "undo" or "redo" parts of previous jobs, Mr. Anundson said. "Tell all up front," in case water and sewer lines, for example, have to be run to turn an attic into an additional bedroom and bathroom, he said. Consult a real estate professional in your market and neighborhood who knows the value of comparable houses and whether they have been renovated. "They are the eyes and ears of what is in demand right now," Mr. Anundson said. "They are hearing why people buy or not buy places all the time."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Your Money
Couture fashion exquisite handmade clothes, meant for the very few is usually displayed in exclusive shows in Paris. Now, because of a coronavirus pandemic and global financial crisis that has stressed the industry to the core, all of us are invited to see digital presentations up close and very personal. Here are some of the shows.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Fashion & Style
The unofficial end of summer is already here so it's time to reminisce. We asked some of our favorite authors what they tried for the first time in summers' past: Francine Prose went on a scary ride at Coney Island. Alexander Chee learned how to take a real vacation. And Joyce Maynard celebrated love and life on the back of a motorcycle. We also asked our readers what they tried for the first time during summer vacation and got hundreds of responses. Here are some edited excerpts.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Travel
LOS ANGELES In the British equivalent of fines levied by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a Disney subsidiary was charged on Thursday with four safety breaches on the Pinewood Studios set of "Star Wars: The Force Awakens." The workplace agency, the Health and Safety Executive, issued the criminal charges against Foodles Productions a name chosen in an effort to hide the filming of "Star Wars" from overzealous fans over an accident in June 2014 when Harrison Ford, reprising his role as Han Solo, was struck by a hydraulic door on the Millennium Falcon spaceship. Mr. Ford's leg was broken, and production was interrupted for two weeks. "By law, employers must take reasonable steps to protect workers this is as true on a film set as a factory floor," the Health and Safety Executive said in a statement. A court hearing was scheduled for May 12 at High Wycombe Magistrates' Court. A Foodles spokesman said in a statement: "Cast and crew safety is always a top priority. We provided full cooperation during H.S.E.'s investigation into the on set accident that occurred in June 2014 and are disappointed in H.S.E.'s decision."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Media
The student had been caught vaping in school three times before he sat in the vice principal's office at Cape Elizabeth High School in Maine this winter and shamefacedly admitted what by then was obvious. So Mr. Carpenter asked the school nurse about getting the teenager nicotine gum or a patch, to help him get through the school day without violating the rules prohibiting vaping. E cigarettes have been touted by their makers and some public health experts as devices to help adult smokers kick the habit. But school officials, struggling to control an explosion of vaping among high school and middle school students across the country, fear that the devices are creating a new generation of nicotine addicts. In his four years at Cape Elizabeth, Mr. Carpenter says he can't recall seeing a single student smoke a cigarette. But vaping is suddenly everywhere. "It's our demon," he said. "It's the one risky thing that you can do in your life with little consequence, in their mind to show that you're a little bit of a rebel." Schools say the problem sneaked up on them last fall, when students arrived with a new generation of easily concealed devices that have a sleek high tech design. The most popular, made by Juul, a San Francisco based company that has received venture capital money, resemble a flash drive and have become so ubiquitous students have turned Juul into a verb. Tasting like fruit or mint, these devices produce little telltale plume, making it possible for some students to vape even in class. "They can pin them on to their shirt collar or bra strap and lean over and take a hit every now and then, and who's to know?" said Howard Colter, the interim superintendent in Cape Elizabeth. E cigarettes are widely considered safer than traditional cigarettes, but they are too new for researchers to understand the long term health effects, making today's youth what public health experts call a "guinea pig generation." "We do not want kids using our products," she said. "Our product is not only not for kids, it's not for non nicotine users." She said schools and the e cigarette industry need to work together to understand why teenagers are vaping, and suggested that stress is a big reason. To that end, she said, Juul has offered schools a curriculum that includes mindfulness exercises for students to keep them away from the devices the company sells. "We saw the same thing from Philip Morris with the We Card program, and the evaluation was that those things don't work," Jennifer Kovarik, who runs tobacco prevention programs for Boulder County, Colo., said of the company's efforts to keep their products away from teenagers. "If they didn't want youth to use it, it would be sold in 18 and over only establishments. It's available at Circle K's across the country." E cigarettes deliver nicotine through a liquid that is heated into vapor and inhaled, cutting out the cancer causing tar of combustible cigarettes. But vaping liquids contain additives such as propylene glycol and glycerol that can form carcinogenic compounds when they are heated. Diacetyl, a chemical used to flavor some vape "juice," has been linked to so called popcorn lung, the scarring and obstruction of the lungs' smallest airways. A study published in the journal Pediatrics in March found substantially increased levels of five carcinogenic compounds in the urine of teenagers who vape. "I'm afraid that we're going to be hooking a new generation of kids on nicotine, with potentially unknown risks," said Dr. Mark L. Rubinstein, the lead author of the study and a professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. "With cigarettes, we've been studying them for many years, we have a pretty good idea of what the risks are. We just don't know what the risks of inhaling all these flavorings and dyes are, and what we do know is already pretty scary." The industry points to a 2016 British study that says that vaping does not lead nonsmokers to become smokers. But the 2016 Monitoring the Future study, sponsored by the federal government's National Institute on Drug Abuse, followed students who in 12th grade had never smoked a cigarette and found that a year later, those who used e cigarettes were about four times as likely to have smoked a cigarette. A study released in January by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine similarly concluded that vaping led students to smoke cigarettes, although it did not determine whether they became habitual smokers or just experimented. Schools and local officials have stiffened penalties for students caught with vaping devices, suspending and even expelling them, and sent home letters pleading with parents to be on the lookout for a waft of fruit smell and, as one superintendent wrote, "'pens' that aren't pens." Several school districts in New Jersey have recently adopted policies requiring any student caught with an e cigarette to be drug tested, because the devices can be used to smoke marijuana. Oak Ridge High School in Placerville, Calif., shut down all but two bathrooms during classes in November and placed monitors at the doors during lunch to make sure not too many students are in the bathroom together. (Juul devices, for example, contain as much nicotine as a pack of cigarettes, so they are easy to share.) New Trier High School in Chicago's northern suburbs is considering installing vaping detectors in bathrooms. With so many students caught multiple times, some schools have moved from punishment to intervention, requiring students caught vaping to receive counseling or substance abuse treatment. "Despite all of the boundaries set by families and parents and the schools, and at risk of even expulsion, students are continuing to use," said Liz Blackwell, a school nurse in the Boulder Valley School District in Colorado. "They don't want to be kicked out of school, they don't want to suffer any punishment or discipline, and they don't want to have a bad relationship with their parents. They continue to use because it's an addiction." Two years ago, Boulder surveyed its students and found that 45 percent of high school students had used e cigarettes, with 30 percent as current users. Officials say they expect the most recent survey, taken last year, to show about 45 percent of middle school students have used e cigarettes. The 2017 Monitoring the Future survey on adolescent drug use found that 11 percent of 12th graders, 8.5 percent of 10th graders and 3.5 percent of 8th graders had vaped nicotine in the previous 30 days. Of those high school seniors, 24 percent reported vaping daily, which the study defined as vaping on 20 or more occasions in the previous 30 days, said Richard A. Miech, a professor at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan and a principal investigator of the study. Nineteen percent reported vaping on 40 or more occasions during that period. Fifty six percent reported vaping only on one to five occasions. Gregory Conley, the president of the American Vaping Association, which supports what he calls "fair and sensible" regulation of e cigarettes, said that number indicated that most students who are vaping are not becoming addicted. "You can't use the definition of dependence and apply it to anyone using only one to five days in the prior month," he said. Schools say that unlike adults, most students who vape are starting out as nonsmokers. "I have the same conversation with every student we catch vaping," said Scott Carpenter, the dean for discipline at Cumberland High School in Rhode Island. "I say, 'If I handed you a cigarette would you smoke it?' And 100 percent of them look at you like you're absolutely crazy for even suggesting that they'd do that." Federal law prohibits the sale of e cigarettes to anyone under 18, and Juul and some other e cigarette companies ask web purchasers to check a box saying that they are 21 or older. But the growing vaping industry has many items and campaigns that seem to appeal specifically to youth. There are vaping cloud contests, a line of hoodies and backpacks called VaprWear that make it easy to conceal the devices, and labels of vape "sauce" that resemble the designs of well known candy wrappers like those of Jolly Ranchers and Blow Pops. In Millburn, N.J., one of the school districts that now require any student caught with a vaping device to be drug tested, teenagers said Juuls began showing up at parties last year, and by fall were at school and football games. Now, students post videos of themselves doing vapor tricks on social media. At a local deli where seniors go for lunch, a dozen students interviewed said it was easy to buy a Juul online or at a gas station or convenience store, and to buy refill pods in the hallway at school. None would publicly admit to owning a device, but all said they had tried vaping. Ryan Wenslau, 18, said he thought vaping started for most students as an occasional diversion, "something to do." A stern talk from his baseball coach had convinced him not to use, he said. But for those students who continue, "I wouldn't necessarily call it an addiction," he said, "but it's habitual." While there might be chemicals in vaping, they argued, there are more in cigarettes. Schools lament that teenagers equate safer with safe. But many say the unfamiliarity of e cigarettes has made it hard to convince parents of the risks as well. "If I had a pack of cigarettes in my room as a kid, that would have been discovered, here we're dealing with, first of all, what's a Juul?" said Michael McAlister, the principal at Northgate High School in Walnut Creek, Calif. The school has about 1,600 students, but parent education nights on the issue have turned out only about 70 people. Yet, out of 53 suspensions last year, 40 were for vaping devices. "We're losing a battle and to me, it's predatory," Mr. McAlister said. "There's no way you're going to suspend your way out of this."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Health
LONDON When "Kingsman: The Secret Service" debuted in 2014, it was accompanied by a men's wear line sold on Mr Porter. Now, as the sequel arrives in movie theaters this week, fragrance has become a focus. Kingsman TGC, the scent's name, refers to both the new movie's subtitle, "The Golden Circle," and the name of its villains organization. "The product was needed for the story as one of the agents, Harry Hart, uses the high tech after shave as a bomb to save his life," said Matthew Vaughn, the movie's director and a co producer and co writer. Although, he hastily added, the bottle works (and looks) like a bomb only when Colin Firth is using it onscreen.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Fashion & Style
All art fairs aren't the same, but they can have a comparable blanketing effect: after hours of walking around a sales floor, the works start to blend together. Was this the clever neon text sculpture you liked, or was it that one? This week, two fairs gamble on unpredictability to help break up the monotony. The more ambitious, Spring/Break Art Show, offers shake it all up collaborations between artists and curators, while Volta is a mixed bag, but with a strong streak of playful abstraction. Although very different from each other, both lack the blue chip sheen of bigger outlets like the Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory. They can't give you a flawless experience but that's OK. They make you put in a little extra legwork to find something you love. Consider the possibilities. What sets Spring/Break apart is its model. Every booth is curated, whether by a commercial art dealer, a nonprofit worker, an independent curator, or an artist. For each edition, the organizers issue a theme and then sort through proposals to pick the best ones. Participants are not charged a fee, which makes the show radically more open than just about any other fair. In fact, most of the time Spring/Break doesn't feel like a fair so much as a crowded, exhilarating, madcap art extravaganza. Fittingly, the 2020 theme is "In Excess." The fair is known for immersive installations, such as a new work by longtime Spring/Break contributor Azikiwe Mohammed, who reimagines the Subway Lounge, a basement club in Jackson, Mississippi's Summers Hotel. Filled with wood board figures sitting around a table and holding neon card sculptures, the meticulously designed room pays homage to the refuges that black people have created for themselves. It resonates with Ali Shrago Spechler's more muted "Eine Friedliche Industrie," a cardboard, papier mache, and concrete reconstruction of a secular Jewish home in 1938 Germany that also meditates on the sanctity of private space. If you're looking for interaction, the artist Z Behl is spending the fair enlisting visitors and collaborators to reshoot her short film "Geppetto," a riff on the story of Pinocchio done in the style of a spaghetti western. If you prefer to watch, go find LJ Roberts, who's on site finishing a massive textile piece seven years in the making; it's an ode to the ways queer and transgender communities have used conversion vans. Some of Spring/Break's most over the top booths star painting, especially the figurative kind that's currently in fashion. Kate Klingbeil's solo presentation is a wonderland of layered landscapes whose miniature, molding paste flora and fauna the artist pipes with pastry bags and sticks onto the surface. David B. Frye's scenes of people worshiping a golden bull a play on the golden calf are set within shaped sculptural frames against a backdrop of imitation red paneling, evoking a rustic barn for mysterious rituals. The body seems to be at the forefront of many minds. Claudia Bitran finds videos of drunk teenagers on the internet and renders them first as small, ghostly paintings, then as animations. Similarly, Faith Holland has taken notorious photographs of male genitalia and turned them into oddly soothing videos. KC Crow Maddux combines photographs of his own trans body with surreal, biomorphic shapes in painted wood to create hybrid objects. Shihui Zhou sews together articles of clothing in droopy, evocative ways that make the absence of a wearer seem almost grotesque. All that is only a fraction of what's on view. You could spend hours here and still not see everything. Volta had a dramatic 2019: Scheduled for Pier 90, the fair was canceled after Armory Show exhibitors displaced from Pier 92 which had been deemed structurally unsound moved to its location. Now the fair is back, with a new director and location, and change in format whereas before it was strictly solo booths, now anything goes. The 53 exhibitors are an undeniably international group, but what they've brought to New York City is decidedly mixed. There is, honestly, plenty of mediocre work to skip, but also enough good stuff to reward a visit. The strongest current at the fair is abstraction, which takes a variety of forms. Mark Hachem Gallery's booth provides a historical anchor with a selection of op and kinetic art, including several small, two plane constructions by Jesus Rafael Soto that seem to shift and vibrate. A striking piece nearby by his fellow Venezuelan artist Dario Perez Flores should literally move the label lists a motor but it was either dead or hadn't been turned on when I saw it. The mysterious forms in Rachel Ostrow's works, shown by Planthouse, seem to be floating too in her case, they look like prismatic particles drifting in outer space. The thick strokes and pointed shapes in Ephraim Urevbu's canvases, with Art Village Gallery, refer to throngs of protesters. Shaped paintings make up a mini trend, appearing in three different booths. Katy Ann Gilmore's acrylic on dibond works at Galerie Wenger suggest warped elements from video games. Jaena Kwon's creations at Space 776 are bright and beguiling; they could be oversized, flattened paper fortune tellers, but they're actually made of hand carved fiberboard. And in the booth of NL US, Jan Maarten Voskuil's modular, curving canvases appear as if they've been cut up and pieced together. I would be remiss if I didn't mention one figurative painter here: Ashley Norwood Cooper, with Zinc gallery. In high key color, Ms. Cooper renders intimate scenes of women who seem immersed in their interior lives and creativity (always with cats at hand). Tender and funny, the works stopped me in my tracks.
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Art & Design
IN the category of "never the twain shall meet," it would be hard to top this pair: fans of American muscle cars and devotees of Asian sport coupes. You might assume there would be some common ground a grudging respect, or even furtive cross shopping between them. After all, a Ford Mustang and a Mitsubishi Eclipse are both built for fun at lower than house payment prices. Instead, there are battle lines defined largely by age and outlook: boomers and Detroit loyalists line up behind V 8 muscle like flag wavers at an Olympic hockey final, while college age buyers want to download turbo juicing software to their high revving tuner cars from across the Pacific. Don't expect to find these enthusiasts playing nicely on the same Web forum. In recent years, Japan's carmakers have mostly quit the game. The Toyota Celica and Supra are long gone, as is the Honda Prelude, and coupes derived from front drive mass market sedans like the Honda Accord and Nissan Altima are more practical than passionate. The Eclipse, once a star, has become as soft bellied and hard to justify as a 40 year old designated hitter. But out of left field, or at least to the left of Japan, a new player has emerged. Even as American car companies crank out a gumball assortment of pony car revivals Mustang, Chevy Camaro and Dodge Challenger a warrior from Korea has entered the no fire zone: the Hyundai Genesis Coupe, the kind of rear drive, road flogging, date snaring car that makes young people want to take a second job, or at least plead with the parents. Starting at 22,750 for the tepid 4 cylinder turbo model, or 25,750 for the more desirable 306 horsepower V 6 version, the Genesis is the only well priced Asian coupe that won't shrivel before the American pony car onslaught. It's also the only Asian coupe that should matter to people who can't drum up 37,000 for the Infiniti G37. As with every Hyundai, including the Genesis luxury sedan on which it is based, the coupe takes its competitive cues from the film "All About Eve." Sidling up to the G37, the Genesis Coupe is the ingenue, its style and performance seemingly no threat to the big name star (the Bette Davis character on screen, for readers under 40). But the Hyundai has been slyly absorbing the star's lessons, including a set of exterior curves that seems clearly inspired by the Infiniti. Especially in lean times, car buyers have been catching on to Hyundai's blossoming talents and wondering why they should spend more for the boldface name that offers no apparent advantage. Yet what works beautifully for Hyundai's affordable sedans and crossovers hasn't always translated to other segments. A weak link has been performance. Fitful attempts at sporty cars, like the Tiburon coupe, betrayed a Korean car culture with precious little experience in manufacturing speed or sex appeal, whether on the street or in motorsports. That's what makes the Genesis Coupe a groundbreaker for Hyundai. It's not as fast as the Infiniti and not at all luxurious, though you'd have no right to expect riches for a price that undercuts the G37 by 11,000. But the Genesis may actually top the Infiniti in pure entertainment value: the Hyundai is younger, louder and more visceral, eager to shake its tail through power slides that the Infiniti would sniff at as immature behavior. The Genesis is also a surprisingly deft handler, powered by a husky voiced 3.8 liter V 6. In short, there's a bona fide rear drive performance car underneath that handsome body. Compared with the boldness of the exterior, the cabin is straightforward. But it's also straitlaced; you might prefer more visual assurance that this is a quick car. The controls are simple and well executed; the front seats are stylish and firmly bolstered (though the leather on one test car was showing wear after 10,000 miles). And plastic trim on the dash and doors has the shiny look and knock knock feel associated with budget cars. Because of the sloping roofline, any rear passenger who's remotely tall will find his head polishing the rear glass. The trunk is more accommodating; despite a slender opening, it can accept weekend luggage or a cartload of groceries. But this isn't a car for fetching a carton of eggs. Instead, the Hyundai's errand is to nip at, reel in and otherwise pester drivers of more expensive cars Infinitis, Nissan Zs, BMWs, you name it. At the underdog game, the Hyundai excels. Or, I should say, the V 6 version excels. The turbocharged 4 cylinder, an engine shared with the Mitsubishi Lancer Ralliart, is tuned more for smoothness and economy than for big boost performance. (The E.P.A. rates the 4 at 21 m.p.g. in town and 30 on the highway with a 6 speed manual.) It produces just 210 horsepower, compared with 237 in the Mitsubishi, running out of breath just when you expect the fun to begin. This shortfall could be overcome by dropping Hyundai's new 274 horse direct injection 4, coming later this year in the Sonata, into the Genesis Coupe. For now, the 3.8 liter V 6, with 306 horsepower and 266 pound feet of torque, is the speedster's choice. On regular grade gas, it is rated at 17 miles per gallon in town (18 with an automatic transmission) and 26 on the highway. In Motor Trend's hands, the Genesis V 6 squirted from 0 to 60 m.p.h. in 5.5 seconds, clipping the quarter mile in 14 seconds at just over 100 m.p.h. That V 6 Track model ( 30,250 with the 6 speed manual; 31,750 with a 6 speed manual shift automatic) adds features including 19 inch alloy wheels and summer tires; Brembo brakes with four piston front and rear calipers; a stiffer suspension; a Torsen limited slip differential; aluminum pedals; and a rear spoiler. The spec obsessed Camaro or Mustang owner might scoff, but in the right hands, the V 6 Genesis will keep pace with Detroit's born again pony cars even the ones with V 8 engines on coiling roads. At just under 3,400 pounds, the Hyundai is nearly 250 pounds lighter than the Infiniti and about 350 pounds less than a Camaro V 6. Compared with the vaguer sensations of the Detroiters, the Hyundai transmits sports car feedback that lets you fling it into curves aggressively. For a rear drive car, the Hyundai is still nose heavy, carrying 55 percent of its weight up front. And the front wheels want to push wide in turns when the tires are near their traction limit. Yet the Hyundai wants to go faster: once you have the Genesis set in a turn, its cornering attitude can be adjusted with a love tap on the brake or throttle. Switch off the stability control system and the Genesis can also be provoked into controllable drifts that will have drivers howling along with the tires. The strangest part of the Hyundai is its engine control computer, which cuts power for a few buzz killing seconds if you accidentally rev the engine to its limiter. The other knock, aside from a bit of notchiness in the manual shifter, is a heavy clutch: I was testing a Camaro SS at the same time as the Genesis, and the Hyundai's pedal felt as tiring in urban stop and go as the Chevy's. But any rough edges in the Genesis test car were smoothed by the price tag 28,250 for a well equipped 3.8 Grand Touring model. That V 6 price splits the difference between the V 6 and V 8 Camaros and Mustangs. Ultimately, it's hard to recall the last all new Asian nameplate that has crammed this much style and performance into such an affordable package. The fact that Asia's best budget coupe now comes from South Korea, not Japan, might embarrass engineers and executives at Honda and Toyota. INSIDE TRACK: Time to make more room in the stable.
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Automobiles