Split (2)

train · 585k rows

text stringlengths 1 39.7k	original_task stringclasses 8 values	original_label stringclasses 35 values
O.G. (2019) 10 p.m. on HBO; also on streaming platforms. The director Madeleine Sackler filmed this new drama over five weeks in a maximum security prison in Indiana. It stars Jeffrey Wright ("Westworld") as Louis, an inmate at the end of his 24 year sentence whose path to freedom is disrupted when he gets involved with a younger, newly incarcerated prisoner (Theothus Carter). The cast features guards and inmates at the correctional facility, and, through her research into this feature, Sackler produced an accompanying documentary, "It's a Hard Truth Ain't It?," which airs at 10 p.m. on Monday on HBO. SATURDAY STACK QUEEN 12 p.m. on AXS TV. Rami Malek has collected accolades for his role as Freddie Mercury in "Bohemian Rhapsody," and he may just win his first Oscar for it on Sunday. The movie's scenes of live shows portray Queen's ability to dominate large crowds, but this marathon offers an overview of the real thing. It features concerts and profiles, beginning with a documentary on the band's acclaimed album "A Night at the Opera."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
The editor Fred Hills in the late 1980s. His stable of authors encompassed an eclectic assortment from multiple genres Vladimir Nabokov and Jane Fonda, Raymond Carver and James McGregor Burns, Phil Donahue and David Halberstam. It was 1958, and Fred Hills, a graduate student trying to earn some extra cash, was selling books at the Emporium department store in San Francisco. He picked up a copy of Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita," which had just been published in the United States, and read the opening: "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul." Mr. Hills was so electrified that he paid the full retail price of 5 for the hardback the first he had ever bought, apart from textbooks. He always remembered that first encounter with Nabokov with great fondness and with astonishment that in time he would become Nabokov's editor. He worked with the author on a half dozen books and on a screen adaptation of "Lolita" that Nabokov published in 1974, long after Stanley Kubrick's film version had been released, in 1962. (Nabokov's version had a running time of nine hours; Mr. Hills cut it to two.) In the twilight of Nabokov's career, Mr. Hills traveled to Zermatt, Switzerland, and between editing sessions on his last completed novel, "Look at the Harlequins!" (1974), the two went butterfly hunting together in the foothills of the Matterhorn. (Nabokov was a distinguished lepidopterist.) At the end of his own career, after Mr. Hills had been editor in chief at McGraw Hill and then a senior editor at Simon Schuster for more than a quarter century, after he had helped give birth to the books of several prominent authors, he remained most awed by Nabokov, whom he called a glorious stylist. "Having worked with many other writers," he told the Nabokov Online Journal in 2019, "I still believe that Nabokov was the most dazzling of them all." Mr. Hills died on Nov. 7 at his home in Bronxville, N.Y. He was 85. His wife, Kathleen Matthews, a writer of nonfiction books, said the cause was complications of prostate cancer. During his four decades in publishing, Mr. Hills brought to market both commercial hits and literary prizewinners and edited more than 50 New York Times best sellers. The alphabetized cards in his massive Rolodex showed just how wide ranging his contacts were: After Bruce Lee came Harper Lee. So varied was his work that he likened being an editor to being a hermit crab. "We inhabit an author's shell for a year or two, get the feel of that world, and then scuttle along to the next one," he said. At Simon Schuster, Mr. Hills was believed to have set a record for an editor by producing nine Times hardcover nonfiction best sellers in one 12 month period, from 1990 to 1991. Among those titles were Daniel Yergin's "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power," which won the Pulitzer Prize; Dr. Isadore Rosenfeld's "The Best Treatment," a guide to treating ailments of all sorts; and Christopher Andersen's "Madonna Unauthorized," a biography of the pop star. In Mr. Hills's hands, an author was safe from the scratching of a pointed red pencil and would instead be nudged by gentle persuasion. "He understands that positive comments elicit stronger manuscripts than harsh criticism does," Ann Rule, the true crime writer best known for "The Stranger Beside Me" (1980), about the serial killer Ted Bundy, wrote of Mr. Hills on his retirement from Simon Schuster in 2006. On the same occasion, Mr. Yergin praised Mr. Hills's "inimitable balance between patience and subtle pressure," and said he treasured Mr. Hills's view of the editor author relationship as one of "unindicted co conspirators." Frederic Wheeler Hills Jr. was born on Nov. 26, 1934, in East Orange, N.J., and may have been destined for the literary life at birth: He was delivered by William Carlos Williams, the pediatrician cum poet. His father, Frederic Wheeler Hills, was an engineer, and his mother, Mildred Chambers (Hood) Hills, was a homemaker. Mr. Hills won a scholarship to Columbia College, where his mentors included the literary critics Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling. He earned a bachelor's degree in English in 1956, then went west to Stanford, where he studied with the writer Wallace Stegner and earned his master's in English in 1958. After Stanford, he joined the Army and was stationed at Ford Ord, Calif. His publishing career began with his work on college textbooks at McGraw Hill, where he soon became editor in chief of the college textbook division. Then, two explosive scandals rocked the company: the fake autobiography of the billionaire recluse Howard Hughes written by Clifford Irving, and the discovery that a top editor had taken money from two authors in violation of McGraw Hill policy. In the ensuing managerial shake up, Mr. Hills was named editor in chief of the company's trade book division, where he served for seven years. It was there that he edited Nabokov, and the author's death in 1977 became a turning point for him.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
DAYTON, OHIO You may find yourself in a mall in this medium size Midwestern city. And you may sit in a food court with a few dozen high school students. And you may discuss a song you have written for them. And they may explain how they will throw flags and rifles and sabers. And you may ask yourself: Well, how did I get here? If you are Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig of the indie pop band Lucius, the answer is David Byrne. That former Talking Heads frontman invited the women to Dayton in April to attend the Winter Guard International championships. The synchronized manipulation of flags, rifles and sabers in a kind of dance routine the practice called color guard is known as a complement to marching bands in football halftime shows and parades at high schools and colleges. But after football season, color guard continues through the winter, indoors, performed to a range of recorded music, in organized circuits of judged competitions. Several hundred teams compete over three days at the championships in Dayton, the pinnacle of what organizers call "the Sport of the Arts." Mr. Byrne took Lucius to Ohio, along with the musicians Tom Krell of How to Dress Well and Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, so that they might experience what he considers an underappreciated folk art. His enthusiasm for it is high. At the University of Dayton Arena during the finals, he watched more than five straight hours of competition raptly, expressing his wonderment with laughter and exclamations so barkingly intense that at one point he apologized to the man next to him. Mr. Byrne wants to share that pleasure, and not just with the musicians who made the trip. They were all here to prepare for something unprecedented: an arena spectacle combining color guard teams with live music by artists of Mr. Byrne's choosing. His lineup includes St. Vincent, Ad Rock of the Beastie Boys, Kelis, Nelly Furtado and Devonte Hynes, each matched with a color guard team. The food court meeting between Lucius and Shenendehowa High School of Clifton Park, N.Y., was the start of one of 10 such collaborations. Later this month, the resulting cultural mash up, "Contemporary Color," will play two nights at the Air Canada Center in Toronto as part of the Luminato Festival and then two more at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, in the first production partnership between Barclays and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Mr. Byrne didn't find color guard so much as color guard found him. It was in 2008, he said in a recent interview, that a team from Cambridge, Mass., requested permission to use some of his music. Unfamiliar with color guard, he was intrigued by the choice "The Forest," made for a 1988 Robert Wilson theater work updating "The Epic of Gilgamesh" and asked for a video of the result. The team sent a DVD of the championships, and when Mr. Byrne watched it his jaw dropped. Color guard takes its name from soldiers responsible for guarding a regimental flag, or colors. That military origin accounts for the guards' rifle shaped wooden props and dull edged sabers. But their military counterparts don't toss their weapons high, spinning like jacks, and then catch them behind their backs. And though decades with marching bands and football are evident in the team spirit, some divergent evolution is clear, between tosses, in emotive choreography such as you might find on "So You Think You Can Dance." The dense multiplicity of action in the routines four to five minutes long, during which a team of 20 to 40 people tries to rack up points can be bewildering. The tosses come thick and fast and a knowledgeable audience rewards each catch with an ovation; an inexperienced viewer, with his eyes following one feat, keeps hearing that he's missed the next. The continual charge of risk combines with stabs of irresistible beauty: 20 to 40 bright flags snap in the air like a flock of birds, and time is suspended as they float down. This all mixes oddly with themes that can be bizarre or heavy. This year, Mechanicsburg High School, from Pennsylvania, took on the topic of child abduction. In that routine, reprised for "Contemporary Color," each member is dragged offstage, one by one, until no one is left. Watching the DVD in 2008, Mr. Byrne had an idea. "What if," he recalled thinking, "they had cool bands playing live? Then there would be no ceiling on the excitement." Live music would match the color guard energy and set it in a new context, possibly drawing new audiences. Mr. Byrne's decisions of which teams to invite were guided partly by practicalities (most teams will come from the Northeast) and partly in pursuit of variety. Persuading the teams to try something different with "this 'Psycho Killer' guy," Mr. Byrne said, took some careful effort. His musician picks followed similar rationales: interesting artists he thought would be game including himself. (Ira Glass, the host of radio's "This American Life," is not as random a choice as it may seem: Spoken text is curiously prevalent in winter guard soundtracks.) For the musicians, most of them unfamiliar with color guard, an invitation from Mr. Byrne was sufficient. The pairings of team and musician were largely intuitive. The women of Lucius seemed a good match for the Shenendehowa team, whose 2015 theme was Hitchcock movies. Ventures, one of two Canadian teams, was thrilled enough by the song that Ms. Furtado sent them a track from her coming album to substantially rechoreograph a routine to fit it. Ms. Garbus, working with the Emanon team from New Jersey, treated video footage of its robot routine as a movie to score, mapping out the original structure and following it; the team hasn't had to adjust much. Lucius, big fans of Hitchcock, focused more on the right mood than on the routine's framework. Shenendehowa loved the song but has struggled some to adapt. Mr. Byrne recalled that when he delivered his music to Les Eclipses, from Montreal, "the team was kind of in shock." In place of an instrumental piece with many long silences a color guard convention for demonstrating team synchronization he gave them a continuous song. Mr. Byrne made adjustments, but he credits much of the eventual rapprochement between team and music to Chris Giarmo, an associate producer of "Contemporary Color" whose mixed background in music, avant garde dance theater and the color guard of Paramus High School in New Jersey has helped him translate between factions. Mr. Giarmo said that his most effective tactic for quelling team anxiety was simply to splice the new soundtrack onto footage of the existing routine. This is what Mr. Byrne had first done to show potential presenters how his idea might work: play a music track he liked along with the Dayton DVD. Their minds automatically made connections between sound and image, and he had to keep reminding them that he had added the music, that the routine wasn't designed to go with it. "It's a testament to the amazingness of chance operations," Mr. Giarmo said. Even so, the teams have been working hard to adapt to the challenges. As in an exhibition skate on the ice that follows the awarding of medals, the absence of competition allows the color guards to concentrate more on art than on sport. Ms. Garbus of Tune Yards, who was in tears after seeing her team perform in Dayton, said that "Contemporary Color" offers the musicians opportunities, too. "How do we tap into pop culture without compromising our stuff?" she asked.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
The nation's hospital groups sued the Trump administration on Wednesday over a new federal rule that would require them to disclose the discounted prices they give insurers for all sorts of procedures. The hospitals, in cluding the American Hospital Association, argued in a lawsuit filed in United States District Court in Washington that the new rule "is unlawful, several times over." They argued that the administration exceeded its legal authority in issuing the rule last month as part of its efforts to make the health care system much more transparent to patients. The lawsuit contends the requirement to disclose their private negotiations with insurers violates their First Amendment rights. "We make the case that the burden placed on our members to come up with this information is extensive," Tom Nickels , an executive vice president with the American Hospital Association, said in an interview. The administration wanted the disclosure rule, which would go into effect in 2021, to allow patients to better shop for deals on a range of services, from M.R.I.s to hip replacements. "Hospitals should be ashamed that they aren't willing to provide American patients the cost of a service before they purchase it," Caitlin Oakley , a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said in an emailed statement. "President Trump and Secretary Azar are committed to providing patients the information they need to make their own informed health care decisions and will continue to fight for transparency in America's health care system." While the administration already requires hospitals to post some of their list prices, the public outcry over surprise medical bills and high out of pocket costs led the administration to seek even more detail on the discounted prices that are kept secret between hospitals and insurers. Patients have long complained that they are completely in the dark about what a doctor's visit or surgery will cost until after they receive the bill. Knee surgery, for example, can cost thousands of dollars more at one hospital than at another in the same region. The administration clearly anticipated a legal challenge. In fact, when he announced the hospital price disclosure rule, Alex M. Azar II, the health and human services secretary, was adamant that the rule would withstand a court challenge. "We may face litigation, and we feel we are on a very firm legal footing," he said last month. "H.H.S. has been willing under this administration to test the limits of their authority, that would subject them to more litigation," said Emily J. Cook , a health care lawyer in Los Angeles. While her firm is not representing any of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, one of them is a client, she said. At the heart of the administration's efforts is an attempt to tackle rising hospital costs, which have outpaced the increase in physician prices, according to a recent study by health economists in Health Affairs. The economists estimated that hospital inpatient prices increased 42 percent from 2007 to 2014. In an op ed article published in The Chicago Tribune on Tuesday, Seema Verma, the administrator for the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, promoted the administration's efforts to benefit patients. "The decades long norm of price obscurity is just fine for those who get to set the prices with little accountability and reap the profits, but that stale and broken status quo is bleeding patients dry," she wrote. "The price transparency delivered by these rules will put downward pressure on prices and restore patients to their rightful place at the center of American health care." The hospital groups, which also include the Association of American Medical Colleges , the National Association of Children's Hospitals and the Federation of American Hospitals , which represents for profit hospitals, argued in the lawsuit that the rule would not accomplish the administration's aim of helping consumers avoid surprise bills. Three individual hospitals also joined the case. "America's hospitals and health systems remain committed to providing patients with the information they need to make informed health care decisions," the lawsuit said. It contended that the rule "will generate confusion about patients' financial obligations, not quell it." The lawsuit was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The Trump administration has also proposed a rule requiring insurers to allow patients to get advanced estimates of their out of pocket costs before they see a doctor or go to the hospital. The industry's major trade associations wrote a letter on Tuesday, requesting an additional 90 days to comment on the proposal, pushing the deadline to mid April.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
The choreographer Moriah Evans, whose new work, "Configure," will be at the Kitchen. If it's been a while since you got in touch with your senses, the choreographer Moriah Evans can help: She likes to create experiences not only for her dancers, whose movement jerks and stutters as if an electrical current is passing through their spines, but also for her audiences. "If a physical quest is visceral, it can be felt in others," Ms. Evans said. "Kinesthetic empathy, these things we talk about in what it means to dance and to watch dance, are real. Observing is also contributing to the energy in the room." In "Configure," at the Kitchen beginning on Wednesday, Ms. Evans making a rare appearance as a dancer in her own work and four others work hard to feel the deepest parts of their bodies, parts most of us are unaware of. Ms. Evans offered a hypothetical: "Does your uterus move your pelvis versus your pelvis moving your uterus?" Ms. Evans said. "Of course, you can't do this. It's speculative." But it is an example of the type of sensation Ms. Evans probes in "Configure," in which performers quiver and vibrate, get lost in bouts of laughing and crying, and jump explosively as if on pogo sticks. Lizzie Feidelson, one of the dancers, said that while the movement is extreme, "it's collectively experienced by us, and so that can feel really fun." "I think we've found a way to have that be a trip that we're going on together," she added. Throughout the 75 minute work, Ms. Evans stages what she has termed "mini events"; they create the work's choreographic structure, which changes nightly. "The roles circulate almost like a relay," Ms. Evans said. "The collectivity that is asked of all the performers is important. Everybody is contributing." It's not surprising that Ms. Evans would take such an approach. Dance, to her, isn't an individual pursuit, but one that involves a larger community. In the contemporary dance world, she performs multiple roles beyond choreographer and dancer: She is editor in chief of the Movement Research Performance Journal. And, in 2011, she started the Bureau for the Future of Choreography, an adventurous collective that explores choreographic systems. In her own work, Ms. Evans pushes her investigations to the limit. Proposing movement initiated through internal organs isn't necessarily a radical idea in contemporary dance circles. But for those outside that world the sight of a trembling, undulating torso is a foreign sight and all too easy to make fun of. That was made clear in January when Ms. Evans's "Figuring" was the subject of The New York Times's weekly Instagram series, SpeakingInDance. The one minute video, in which three female dancers performed microscopic movements that caused their bodies to shake and shudder, went viral, producing thousands of comments and memes some gently humorous, some more mocking. ("I can't stop laughing" was a frequent refrain; as were comments about whiteness and the lack of bras.) Snoop Dogg reposted it, as did Desus Mero of "Viceland" (with commentary). Ms. Evans said she was unsettled by the reaction to the video. "I'm all for dance being in the world in a more rigorous way," she said. "I wish everybody learned to dance at school. In theory, I'm interested in exposing these types of more experimental practices to a wider audience. Because there are stereotypes about what dance can be or is." But the experience hasn't caused Ms. Evans to back down from her choreographic convictions. In a recent conversation she talked about her new dance, "Configure"; the viral video; and the existential appeal of dance. Here are edited excerpts. Were you surprised by the reaction to SpeakingInDance? It was a bit surprising because of the scale at which I work. The people that come to see my work are mostly members of the art community. And they know what they're looking at. Did the reaction seem sexist? Yeah, it felt extremely sexist. I was making my big feminist dance and it goes viral in ways that I felt were completely against the intention of the work. There were women dancing in a way that people didn't understand and they couldn't label it. Women's bodies must be controlled. We have to fit you into our image machine; we have to turn you into a facade or a surface onto which we project all of these fantasies and illusions. There's a lot of humor going on with a lot of it, so in a sense you're getting taunted, but it's also inspiring people to dance. And I want to inspire people to dance and to believe in dance. How does the new dance, "Configure," relate to "Figuring"? I'm accessing the body in a similar way in terms of moving from interior points that can be felt or envisioned but cannot be seen. I'm prioritizing the felt sensation of the moving body. And how is "Configure" a departure? The structural proposals are to be built live in a process of shared decision making among the five people onstage. We find ourselves in configurations and we develop them. We have what I call "waste dances" that force the boundaries of the body. Some of the tasks are obvious biological experiences. Like laughing and crying. We are working against the beautiful virtuosity of a dancing body. You are dancing in your piece, which you haven't done in a while. When did you know that you wanted to perform in it? I think some of the tasks that I'm asking people to do, ethically, I should be asking myself to do too. It's a kind of throwing the body into these scenarios and structures and tasks or an emptying of the self. Does 'Configure' feel like a next step for you as a choreographer? It's a next step but I could totally fail. Making dance is hard! All the artists I admire and love you put it all on the line and every dance is almost like a dance with death or something. Laughs. There is something existential in dancing for me and in making dances. I always use that Merce Cunningham quote: "Dance gives you nothing back" except for "that single, fleeting moment when you feel alive." And also I love dance, and you can't protect yourself, if you love something. You have to give yourself over to it. If you're really diving into that and reckoning with all of that, it is existential.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Warren Buffett is taking a victory lap, and on the 50th anniversary of his reign at Berkshire Hathaway he is entitled to it. From a failing New England textile company, Berkshire became the vehicle for one of capitalism's greatest investing feats. Mr. Buffett is one of the world's richest men and he has made his shareholders an astounding amount of money. How much, exactly? He cast a spotlight on that question in his annual letter to shareholders, issued on Feb. 28. In a break with tradition, the letter included a table on its second page that enumerates the market return of Berkshire shares, year by year. Until now, he has favored another method for measuring success: the change in the book value of the shares. That's an accounting metric. It is, basically, net assets, and he has said it is better than Berkshire's transitory market price at tracking the company's true worth. However you analyze it, Berkshire's long term performance has been awesome. Using market value, he says, its shares gained 21.6 percent annually compared with 19.4 percent for book value and 9.9 percent for the Standard Poor's 500 stock index, with dividends. Using market returns, the shares gained a cumulative 1,826,163 percent since he took control. Consider that at the end of 2014, an investment of 100 in the 1965 Berkshire shares would be worth 1,826,163. For the same period, 100 in the index, with dividends, would have grown to 11,196. That's not shabby. But it's a lot less than the Berkshire investment 1,814,967 less. So it may seem churlish to quibble. But it's worth raising some questions, if only because Mr. Buffett has invited them. Performance is critical. He says that if he doesn't outperform the market, investors shouldn't trust him with their money. Until this year, he has invoked book value: Page 2 of his letter would include the book value return, the S. P. return and a third column, "relative results," which showed how he was doing in comparison with the index. Now that comparison is gone. If that column existed in the current report, it would show that he trailed the S. .P. again, using book value. In fact, counting 2014, Mr. Buffett has underperformed the S. P. 500, using book value, in five of the last six years. That hasn't happened before. His 2010 letter to shareholders showed Berkshire's returns over five year rolling periods. In every single such period until then, he had outperformed the S. .P., using book value. By shifting to the market value metric for the first time in 50 years his returns look better. Would he have added a table on his golden anniversary showing market value if it had been a bad year for Berkshire in the stock market, whose judgment he has often disdained? I don't know. Mr. Buffett declined to comment. In the current letter, Mr. Buffett says that book value and intrinsic value his estimate of the true value of the company, which he will not publicly reveal have diverged since Berkshire's early years. (Intrinsic value, which is at the core of his investing, represents "the discounted value of the cash that can be taken out of a business during its remaining life," in his words. That calculation is subjective, depending on judgments about factors like a business's prospects, its management's ability now and in the future, and the likely path of interest rates and the economy.) In that letter, he says: "Our emphasis has shifted in a major way to owning and operating large businesses. Many of these are worth far more than their cost based carrying value. But that amount is never revalued upward no matter how much the value of these companies has increased. Consequently, the gap between Berkshire's intrinsic value and its book value has materially widened." That makes sense. Berkshire's subsidiaries, like See's Candies, Geico, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway and Berkshire Hathaway Energy Company, are being carried on Berkshire's books at a fraction of their real value, he says. On the other hand, retained earnings from those companies, which are reinvested, do, in large part, show up elsewhere in the ledger. That's why, over the long run, he has said, book value is a worthwhile metric. His long term performance is remarkable, using book value, too. He has handily beaten the market over a long career. Still, in a column last year, relying primarily on a rigorous statistical analysis by Salil Mehta, a statistician, author and blogger, I pointed out that Mr. Buffett's market beating heroics had dimmed. Last week Mr. Mehta did preliminary crunching of the new numbers. He still found that Mr. Buffett's performance had declined. "The new numbers don't change my probability analysis," Mr. Mehta said. "Warren Buffett has been an extraordinary investor. But he hasn't been doing as well recently." Mr. Mehta's calculations show that over his first 25 years at Berkshire, Mr. Buffett's average annual return was 24 percent using book value and 30 percent using market value, compared with 10 percent for the S. P. 500. Over his second 25 years, his performance was still outstanding: 15 percent for book value, 14 percent for market value and 10 percent for the index. The last six years reveal a different picture: 13 percent for book value, 15 percent for market value and 17 percent for the index. That's no disaster, but Mr. Buffett didn't meet his own standard: He frequently underperformed the market. There's no shame in that. Virtually everyone underperforms the market sometimes. To outperform it consistently, as Mr. Buffett has done over most of his career, is exceedingly rare. That's worth celebrating, even if it's also worth asking why the recent years haven't been extraordinary.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Nominees have been announced for this year's New York Dance and Performance Awards affectionately known as the Bessies, the dance world's equivalent of the Tonys and Oscars. The awards will be presented on Oct. 9 at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts a change of venue for the itinerant ceremony, which after years at the Apollo Theater moved last year to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. There were 12 nominees for outstanding production, including Taylor Mac's titanic undertaking "A 24 Decade History of Popular Music," which was also nominated for outstanding visual design; Sebastien Ramirez and Honji Wang's "Monchichi," at BAM Fisher, which had its premiere at Jacob's Pillow; and Jessica Lang's "Thousand Yard Stare," at the Joyce last summer. This year's installment of Stephen Petronio's "Bloodlines" project, which featured dances by Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton and Anna Halprin, was among the nominees for outstanding revived work, along with Takao Kawaguchi's "About Kazuo Ohno" and "Variations on Themes From Lost and Found: Scenes From a Life and Other Works by John Bernd," by Ishmael Houston Jones, Miguel Gutierrez, Jennifer Monson and Nick Hallett.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
These married architects are democratizing the 3 D printing process, using materials destined for the trash heap like curry powder and coffee grounds in place of drywall and foam. The Lewis and Clark of the Digital Building Frontier OAKLAND , Calif. On a bone chilling day here with the winter rains pelting down, the architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello retreated to their cozy 3 D printed cabin in the backyard. A wall of moist succulents on the facade was springing to luxuriant life, embedded in rosette patterned tiles 3 D printed from chardonnay grape skins, sawdust and cement. Raindrops pitter pattered across 3 D fabricated ceramic shingles. Inside, a translucent bioplastic wall with cloudlike swirls yes, also 3 D printed changed colors on demand as Mr. Rael, with a clicker, shifted the hues from pink to green to purple, bathing the interior in otherworldly light. It was just another weekend for the couple, 3 D printing pioneers who have developed novel techniques for sustainable building, often using low cost waste materials like mud, dirt, nutshells, coffee grounds, and other discards that are "essentially free," Ms. San Fratello said. Along the way, they have made 3 D printing cheaper and more accessible, often relying on lightweight printers to fabricate architectural components that can be assembled into large structures. These include the "Cabin of Curiosities" prototype in their backyard. Ms. San Fratello and Mr. Rael "create complex and fantastic forms that couldn't happen any other way," said Ellen Lupton, senior curator of contemporary design at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, which included their work last year in its show, "The Senses: Design Beyond Vision," and acquired a "Furry Curry Casserole" 3 D printed from curry powder. "They have the hybrid brain of an architect, an alchemist and a pastry chef," Ms. Lupton added. Their work has been included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as well as the Cooper Hewitt. Though the forms are drawn from indigenous sources, the production of 3 D printed tiles and other components is anything but. Mr. Rael and Ms. San Fratello deploy a variety of printing methods, often using a process invented at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called "binder jetting" that consists of a liquid material being sprayed onto a thin layer of powder hundreds or thousands of times until a hardened object emerges. The two also invented a software application for a 3 D printer that extrudes wet clay, pushing it through a nozzle like a gigantic toothpaste tube. A series of clay vessels called "Bad Ombres " was produced by this extrusion method: the name alludes both to President Trump's comment about Mexicans and a term for the gradual blending of one color into another. Like much of the pair's work, the vessels marry artisanship and geekiness. The clay is built up layer by layer, producing striated patterns and surfaces resembling knitting, complete with knots and loops. Occasionally, the code will tell the printer to drop a stitch, which creates visual drama. As they document in "Printing Architecture: Innovative Recipes for 3D Printing," published last year, mud is dear to their hearts. Mr. Rael grew up in an adobe house built by his great grandfather in a small Hispanic village in the San Luis Valley of Colorado. His youthful playgrounds were adobe dwellings in varying states of decay. "I was fascinated with the cactuses growing on roofs, the rays of light and dust," he said. They met in 1995 on their first day of architecture school at Columbia University, and traveled to Yemen to explore the ancient walled city of Shibam, a dense cluster of ancient mud brick buildings often called "the city of skyscrapers in the desert." Their design for a 3 D printed free standing adobe structure is currently on view in the exhibition "New Cities, Future Ruins at the Border" at the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso (through April 6). It is also the product of an unusual cross border collaboration. Accompanied by their 9 year old son, Mattias , as well as ceramics students, architects, professors and community members, they lead clay scouting expeditions, shovels and buckets at the ready, pinpointing, say, a patch behind a Subway shop in Texas or a Juarez brick factory. For the project "Zoquetes Fronterizos" (Mud Frontiers) the students learned to shovel mud into 3 D printers, building circular adobe structures on a mesa overlooking Juarez. The border has been a recurring theme in their work. Mr. Rael wrote "Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S. Mexico Boundary" (2017) on alternatives to President Trump's wall, most serious but some fanciful. They have created a poster, called "Reunite," about family separations at the border, that has been turned into a billboard at Amsterdam Avenue and 110th Street in Manhattan by For Freedoms, an arts nonprofit. But it is the pair's status as the Lewis and Clark of the digital frontier that has impressed the techno cognoscenti. "Instead of paying 600 for 30 pounds of standard materials that come with printers, we said 'Hey, let's use salt!'" Ms. San Fratello explained. Their spinoff company, Emerging Objects, has recently worked with 3D Potter on a new type of printer to develop low cost housing using adobe. The international roster of designers engaged in the 3 D process, known as "additive manufacturing," is expanding. Among the most high profile is Joris Laarman of the Netherlands, who started his own robotics company and whose swooping, technically complex metal furniture has fetched hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction. The DFAB House in Zurich, a collaboration between the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research and university professors, also pushes the digital building frontier. The architecture was robotically assembled and features a free form 3 D printed "smart slab" ceiling that is half the weight of concrete. Mr. Rael and Ms. San Fratello are committed to democratizing the process for their young acolytes and others, making the point that 3 D printing from "upcycled" materials otherwise destined for the trash heap, and forgoing the purchase of drywall and other construction supplies, is a more sustainable design approach. Ingredients like curry and coffee grounds not only lower the cost, they add a dash of poetry, retaining their aroma long after being transformed. Ms. San Fratello and Mr. Rael have also worked with conservationists on ceramic nesting modules for the stocky seabirds known as Cassin's auklets, off the California coast. (The nests have to accommodate the weight of lolling sea lions, and a private compartment for adults away from their boisterous chicks.) At home, Ms. San Fratello and Mr. Rael keep a 3 D printer on the dining room table and use it to produce the occasional Captain Underpants figurine for Mattias. Their devotion to the 3 D process, they say, is the connection it provides between the designer and the machine, a relationship lost with mass production. Their mission is to create objects and structures that are beautiful and resolutely human. "There is a culture embedded in the materials that surround us," Mr. Rael observed. "We've lost the intimacy with materials, their tactility. How can you be intimate with foam?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
's first novel, "The Storm," is a fascinating, ambitious work, stretching across decades and countries and capturing troubled moments in each: Burma, 1942; India, 1946; Bangladesh, 1970; the United States, 2004. Burma is in the middle of World War II, India in the throes of partition. A major cyclone is about to descend on Bangladesh, and the war on terror continues in the United States, accompanied by a bristling distrust of Muslims and a crackdown on immigration from "dangerous" countries. Anwar has challenged himself by weaving together, in a definite narrative design, characters from these countries who come from very diverse backgrounds. We meet the poor Bangladeshi fisherman Jamir; his wife, Honufa; and their young son; as well as Rahim, a rich Indian Muslim who flees Calcutta with his wife, Zahira, in the aftermath of terrifying religious riots. Then there's Claire, a British doctor stationed in Burma who is treating a captured Japanese pilot, Ichiro, and finally our main character, Shahryar, a Bangladeshi analyst at a Washington think tank who's faced with the dilemma of leaving America and his young daughter, Anna or descending into the murky underworld of the illegal immigrant when his visa expires. Shahryar's ties to the other characters in the novel and the strange ways in which their lives are connected form the central mystery of the book. The segments set in Bangladesh are the most powerfully written, with a clear and definite authority. Anwar, who is himself from the region and has worked there for the nonprofit development organization BRAC, conveys his familiarity with the language, culture and religion with a light touch. We feel the desperation of Honufa and Jamir, who live next door to destitution, but we are also drawn in by the other passions that complicate them: her intelligence, his pride, her dreams, his jealousy, her secrets, his commitment and, ultimately, their love. We enjoy details that bring alive everyday life: dandelion leaves gathered for a midday meal, fish bones saved carefully and given to the family cat, a grave fenced by "bamboo strips that have moldered in the rich sea air."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
NEWBURGH, N.Y. When it comes to assessing the motivations of a motorcycle collector, it is never clear exactly where to draw the line between a hobby and an obsession. But it seems quite likely that Gerald A. Doering has crossed it. Evidence to support that conclusion is spread over the 85,000 square feet of Motorcyclepedia, an expansive museum that Mr. Doering, 84, opened this year with his son, Ted, 62. The eclectic collection, assembled over several decades and comprising more than 400 motorcycles, occupies two floors of a former lumber warehouse and showroom in this careworn Hudson River city 65 miles north of Manhattan. Mr. Doering's interest in two wheel vehicles took off with his first motorcycle, a 1929 Indian Scout that he bought locally in 1947. "Then it's got a little history to it," Mr. Doering said. He was so pleased with the bike, and with motorcycling, that he rode all the way to Miami, seeking a job with a motorcycle dealership that had relocated from Newburgh. "I got down there without incident," Mr. Doering said. But the job didn't work out, and he rode the bike back to Newburgh, where he started an electrical contracting business in the '50s. After that, he was loyal to the Indian brand, buying several more. Indian, which built its first bike in Springfield, Mass., in 1901, went out of business in 1953. The name has been revived several times since; in April the brand was acquired by Polaris, the maker of Victory Motorcycles based in Minnesota. Mr. Doering just kept adding to his collection. "I started buying 10 years apart, and then five years apart, and then filling in," he said. He has Indians from every year but the first, when the company built just three motorcycles. (The display at Motorcyclepedia will eventually include a replica of a 1901 model.) But there's more for visitors to marvel over: board track racers from the 1910s and '20s, custom cruisers bedazzled with lights and motocross machines from the '60s and '70s. One room is filled with a jaw dropping array of bikes on loan from the Antique Motorcycle Club of America. Downstairs are dozens of police and military motorcycles, including a 1964 Harley Davidson that Ted Doering said was in the motorcade in Dallas when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The bike was later used in the 1991 Oliver Stone film "JFK," he added. The interests shared by the father and son reach beyond collecting. In 1971, they started a wholesale parts business, V Twin Manufacturing. The success of the company, which focuses mainly on older Harley Davidson models, helped make it possible for them to expand their motorcycle acquisitions. While Ted Doering's passion for motorcycles followed a considerably different path from his father's pursuits, he has contributed a significant creative influence to the museum. As a young man in the 1960s, he began building custom bikes what would now be called choppers. "I tried enduros and some of that racing," he said, referring to off road competitions, "but I thought building the bikes was more interesting." One of Ted Doering's creations, a 1927 Indian with a sidecar mounted machine gun, is on display at Motorcyclepedia. It was also seen at the 1967 National Hot Rod and Custom Car Show at the New York Coliseum. In an interview with a newspaper reporter, Ted Doering offered this rationale for the customizing craze: "Just to be different." There is far more to be appreciated in the collection. Motorcycle enthusiasts could spend an entire day before visual overload sets in; even visitors with just a casual interest will find plenty to hold their interest for an hour or two. Among the most fascinating items are motorcycles from long forgotten American makers: a 4 cylinder Pierce from 1910, a Cleveland motorcycle adapted for military use and bikes from Monarch, Pope, Ace and Thor. And there are some truly primitive machines as well, including a century old De Dion Bouton 3 wheeler described as the oldest running motorcycle in America. The Doerings bought it in France in 2005, where it had been stored since 1907, for 40,000. The condition of the bikes varies greatly. Some look as if they could easily take you back and forth to Bike Week in Florida, while others seem to have been untouched for decades. The collection also includes machines radically restyled by the legendary customizer Ed Roth, known as Big Daddy rolling fiberglass sculptures of artistic significance. There is a smattering of European and Japanese bikes, mostly serving as the basis for customs, and a couple of the bikes on display are built entirely from replacement parts that the Doerings' V Twin company manufactured. And then there's the Wall of Death, a cylindrical carnival attraction in which daredevils raced faster and faster around a steeply banked track, eventually achieving a horizontal position. In earlier times, such novelties provided a thrilling taste of danger for the crowd watching from above. Along the same lines, there is the Inferno der Motoren, brought from Germany and reassembled on the museum's lower level, complete with a ticket booth that looks as if it has just been plucked off a midway in Dusseldorf. The Motorcyclepedia museum isn't quite a slick commercial enterprise: when I was there I shared the space with just a few other visitors. Some of the displays are works in progress. But the museum, like its contents, is likely to provoke a smile of recognition from anyone who's ever picked up a wrench or twisted a throttle. It is suffused with affection for the machines and a respect for the riders and engineers who built and rode them.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Andrew Thomas's life insurer knows exactly when he arrives at his local gym. The company is notified when he swipes his membership card, and 30 minutes later, it checks that he is still there, tracking his location through his smartphone. The insurance company has a vested interest in keeping Mr. Thomas alive and well. In return for sharing his exercise habits, his cholesterol level and other medical information, Mr. Thomas, a 51 year old medical publisher who lives in Johannesburg, earns points, which translate into premium savings and other perks. By staying in good shape, it is less likely that Discovery, his insurer, will have to pay out his life and disability policies. "Every Saturday morning, just for playing golf, I get points," said Mr. Thomas, who said he received about 9 percent back on his life insurance premiums for each of the last five years. "It is trying to make people live a healthy lifestyle." Now John Hancock will become the first life insurance company to introduce a similar program for American consumers. The program, being announced Wednesday, will apply to both term and universal life insurance policies and is being operated through a partnership with Vitality, a global wellness company that already works with employers and health insurers in the United States. The concept which has been used in South Africa, where Vitality is based, Europe, Singapore and Australia has the potential to transform the way life insurance is priced, at least for consumers who are willing to continually share their health data. But it also raises questions about how that information will be protected and whether it could be used in ways that ultimately work against a consumer's best interests. People who sign up will receive a free Fitbit monitor, which can be set to automatically upload activity levels to the insurer. The most active customers may earn a discount of up to 15 percent on their premiums, in addition to Amazon gift cards, half price stays at Hyatt hotels and other perks. John Hancock, a division of Canadian insurer Manulife Financial, says it hopes the program will help reinvigorate life insurance sales, which have stagnated industrywide for decades. Just 44 percent of households in the United States own individual policies, according to Limra, a trade group, a 50 year low. Any product that reminds consumers of their mortality is hard to get excited about, but industry analysts said that financially strained households, changing demographics and increasingly complex and expensive products have led to the decline in sales. "It has been a slow to no growth industry for a long time," said Michael Doughty, president of John Hancock Insurance, based in Boston. "It is crying out for innovation and for someone to try to reinvent the product to make it more relevant." The new program also upends the traditional approach to life insurance underwriting, which typically bases its pricing on a detailed but static snapshot of a person's medical status. Now, John Hancock's term and universal policies will be priced continuously, at least for consumers who choose the Vitality program. John Hancock and Vitality, which is owned by Discovery, said the information would not be sold and would be shared only with entities that help with the program's administration, though the aggregate data could be used to inform the development of new insurance products. "All of a sudden, everything you do and everything you eat, depending on which bits of the information they collect, is sitting in someone's database," said Anna Slomovic, lead research scientist at the Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute at George Washington University and a former chief privacy officer at Equifax and Revolution Health. Of course, buying any life insurance policy requires customers to share detailed medical histories upfront. But consumers participating in the Vitality program must be comfortable providing enough information continuously to meet certain thresholds that will convert into worthwhile savings. That might include the frequency of workouts, reporting a physical exam or answering sensitive personal questions: During the last 30 days, how often did you feel so nervous that nothing could calm you down? Hopeless? Depressed? "You do not have to send us any data you are not comfortable with," Mr. Doughty said. "The trade off is you won't get points for that." Participants need to amass 3,500 points to achieve silver status, 7,000 to reach gold and 10,000 for platinum. Nonsmokers automatically earn 1,000 points, and people with in range cholesterol, glucose and blood pressure will receive 1,000 points for each. A "verified" standard workout three times a week, or an advanced workout twice a week, provides another 3,120 points over the course of a year. Flu shots, 400 points. The clock is reset each year, though 10 percent of points may carry over. All customers participating in the program will start by paying a premium priced at the gold level. That is a discount of about 9 percent for a 45 year old man who bought a 500,000 term insurance policy that covered a 20 year period: He would pay 750 annually, compared with the 825 it would cost outside of the Vitality program. So what if he does everything right, but breaks his leg? Or worse, gets a serious disease like cancer? While those conditions would not directly affect his rate, if he could not maintain gold status for any reason, he could see premium increases of 1.1 to 1.6 percent each year. But if he reached platinum status, his premiums would fall by about 0.30 percent each year. The program may attract healthier people who have already engaged in these activities on their own. The strategy also tries to tap into the way humans are naturally wired: There is generally no immediate tangible benefit to life insurance, but this program is structured to try to change that. "People respond far more to immediate gratification than delayed gratification," said Dr. Kevin Volpp, director of the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics at the Leonard Davis Institute. (He has performed research sponsored by Vitality.) The number of points assigned to a particular activity is determined by how it will influence a person's longevity, based on Vitality's internal findings and its level of difficulty. "Stopping smoking is more valuable than one session of activity," explained Alan Pollard, chief executive of Vitality. "If something is a complex behavioral change, it will attract more points." Vitality's research has found that Americans are generally five years older than their actual age, after taking into account various health and wellness factors. All participating policyholders will be given a "Vitality age," which will help the program set personal guideposts. "The people who have the time to devote to jumping through all the hoops are likely to be better off than average, and those healthy enough to do wellness activities may be unrepresentative of the chronically ill," said Frank Pasquale, a professor at University of Maryland Carey School of Law. "I believe that is one reason why there is empirical research severely questioning the value of wellness programs." John Hancock, which operates in all 50 states, said the universal life program had been approved by insurance regulators in 30 states, while the term program is available in 20 states; more states are expected to be announced throughout the year. It said no regulators had declined to approve it yet. "It changes the paradigm of life insurance," Dr. Volpp said. "In some sense, it tries to change your insurance into less of a passive vehicle that pays the bills if something happens, into a more active vehicle to get people to lower their risk."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
After becoming a wealthy industrialist in the 1950s, mainly through the success of his tractor company, Ferruccio Lamborghini was indulging his lifelong love of automobiles and buying Italy's best: Alfa Romeo, Lancia, Maserati and, of course, Ferrari. There are two versions of what happened next. One, according to an interview published in 1991 in a British magazine, Thoroughbred and Classic Cars, is that Lamborghini was insulted by Enzo Ferrari after complaining of a weak clutch in a car he'd bought: "Lamborghini, you may be able to drive a tractor, but you will never be able to handle a Ferrari properly." A great story, but there's a better chance this successful entrepreneur saw the high markup on parts that both he and Ferrari were using and decided there were lira to be made in the exotic car business. At least that's the story veterans at the Lamborghini factory often tell journalists. Either way, the reputation of the tractor maker has come a long way since. His Miura sports cars of the 1960s have become prized classics breaking the million dollar mark at auction and the company will be feted on its 50th anniversary at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance this August near Monterey, Calif. By the time his car company was founded in 1963, Lamborghini had wisely dipped into the pool of talented Italians who could quickly create an exotic automobile from the ground up. Giotto Bizzarrini, late of Ferrari's title winning racing team, was commissioned to design a 3.5 liter twin cam V 12. He was followed by Gian Paolo Dallara, whose company builds today's IndyCar chassis, and Paolo Stanzani, who would later engineer the Bugatti EB110. Bob Wallace, a New Zealander, came on staff as test driver. Work began on a factory in Sant'Agata Bolognese, halfway between Bologna and Modena. Lamborghini commissioned a former designer for the Bertone coachbuilding studio, Franco Scaglione, to design the first car, the 350 GTV, a shapely coupe. Making its debut at the 1963 Turin Motor Show, the GTV was without Bizzarrini's V 12, which was on display and said to have 360 horsepower. Workers could not fit the engine under the hood; according to a subsequent owner, the GTV's front compartment was loaded with bricks to get the correct ride height. At the time, Lamborghini told Road Track magazine about plans for touring and competition versions of the 350 GTV, which seems odd now, since the start up automaker never showed a passion for racing his cars. That made it difficult to compete against Ferrari's reputation for performance, and while there was a somewhat successful Formula One engine program from 1989 to 1993 (and limited participation in current sports car championships), racing has not been a Lamborghini priority. The 350 GTV never made it past the prototype stage. The body was reshaped by Touring, a Milan coach builder, to create Lamborghini's first production car, the 1964 350 GT, which had a more realistic 280 horsepower. This was followed in 1966 by the 400 GT, a 2 2 design with a 320 horsepower 3.9 liter V 12. In top condition, both GT models can today bring upward of 300,000 at auction. But for most devoted fans, Lamborghini history really begins with the 1966 Miura. Started as an off hours project by Dallara, Stanzani and Wallace, the Miura one of several Lamborghinis named for fighting bulls was a major departure because its V 12 was mounted transversely at the rear. Credit for the ground scraping exterior styling went to Marcello Gandini at Bertone; the Miura's coming out party was the Geneva Motor Show in early 1966. While the flowing beauty and technical credits of the Miura made it a hit with sports car aficionados, what burned the Lamborghini name into the brains of the public was its successor, the 1974 Countach, another Gandini design. Commenting on the visual changes to racecars that happened in the late '60s, Mr. Gandini said that while the racecars had become more functional, they were "no longer beautiful for the sake of beauty." He continued: "They needed lovely lines less, aerodynamics more." Mr. Gandini's goal in designing the Countach was straightforward: he wanted people "to be astonished when they saw the car." He certainly succeeded. An angular wedge with upward opening scissor doors, showing little restraint in the scoops, ducts and wings that were added over the years, the midengine Countach was powered by a big V 12. The engine layout was unusual, with the rear, or output end, pointing forward and the transmission sticking into the cockpit. There was nothing subtle about the Countach, and it was not an easy automobile to drive. Though Lamborghini is perhaps best known for its most exotic creations, there were also less outrageous models starting in the late '60s. Among them are the front engine Islero, Espada and Jarama; the midengine Urraco, which conformed to the founder's original goal of creating supercars he considered more civilized, came along soon after. Design studies included the Marzal and the Bravo, both created by Carrozzeria Bertone, which was to Lamborghini what Pininfarina was to Ferrari. Ferruccio Lamborghini, who died in 1993, may have entered the car business with all the passion of Enzo Ferrari, but he could not match Ferrari's staying power. His tractor business in trouble, Lamborghini sold 51 percent of the automaker to a friend in 1972. Worse yet, new safety and exhaust emission laws, along with a global oil crisis, hit the makers of exotic cars hard. The rows of big throat Weber carburetors so crucial to Italian V 12 engines visually as well as for their performance were incompatible with pollution controls and good fuel economy. Even Ferrari struggled. Lamborghini went into receivership in 1977 and a pair of Swiss brothers, Jean Claude and Patrick Mimran, became the administrators. They worked hard to resuscitate the automaker but eventually had to find a savior which turned out to be Chrysler. The deal was done in early 1987 at a price said to be 25 million. Recessionary times from 1989 to 1991 made life in the exotic car business difficult, and in 1994 Chrysler sold Lamborghini. Enter Megatech, an Indonesian company with Hutomo Suharto, known as Tommy, a son of the president of Indonesia, as part owner. That arrangement continued until 1998, when the rupiah crisis put Indonesia in financial trouble and President Suharto out of office. In 1998, Audi stepped in and paid a reported 110 million for Lamborghini, finally bringing stability to the automaker. During all this financial uncertainty, new Lamborghinis were being developed. The midengine V 8 Silhouette of 1976 evolved into the Jalpa, but the model perhaps most remembered from that time was the brawny LM002 off roader of 1986. When Chrysler took over, it inherited Project 132, the successor to the decade old Countach. Unimpressed with Mr. Gandini's design for what would become the Diablo, Chrysler had the exterior and interior finished in Detroit. Introduced in 1990, the Diablo was Lamborghini's basic product through the 1990s. Audi's ownership brought Lamborghini the strength it had needed since the late 1960s. The Diablo was replaced by the Murcielago also with a V 12 and then supplemented with a V 10 model, the Gallardo. In contrast to the rounded shapes of Ferraris, modern Lamborghinis are notable for harder lines and squared off shapes. Their general demeanor, ride and handling reflect the same values, Lambos being a bit stiffer and more hard edge than Ferraris neither better nor worse, just different. Lamborghini has carried this theme through the limited production Reventon to the Murcielago's replacement, the Aventador, and another low volume machine, the Sesto Elemento. It is considering a four door model, the Estoque, and last month in Geneva unveiled the Veneno, a flamboyantly styled 4 million supercar.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Nancy and Beth could not wait to go back to Long Island: When the alt cabaret band last played Bay Shore, a fistfight erupted in the audience. "It was wine induced," said Stephanie Hunt, 29, who fronts Nancy and Beth with the "Will Grace" star Megan Mullally. "One of them screamed, 'I'm a married woman!'" Mullally, 60, said the duo was "so excited" backstage after the fracas. "We were like, 'It's official, we're punk.'" She paused, as if struck by inspiration. "I swear to God, I'm thinking of crowd surfing tonight." "Masseuse," Offerman suggested from behind the wheel. With a set list incorporating P.M. Dawn's funky "Shake," Ruth Brown's bawdy "If I Can't Sell It, I'll Keep Sittin' on It" and the classic George Jones weepie "He Stopped Loving Her Today," Nancy and Beth's poker faced, very funny vaudeville the act is choreographed, too bridges the plush cabarets of the traditional American Songbook and a downtown scene where recontextualized interpretations of hits old and new flourish. Reflecting that range, the band has played the Newport Folk Festival, the Grand Ole Opry, "dives that didn't have a bathroom," per Mullally, and the posh New York City boite Cafe Carlyle, where Nancy and Beth return for a two week stint starting Tuesday. Hunt and Mullally met in 2012 on the set of the indie film "Somebody Up There Likes Me," in Hunt's hometown Austin, Tex., and quickly discovered they shared an interest in music. In addition to being a show tune pro whose Broadway credits include "Young Frankenstein," Mullally headed the combo Supreme Music Program, which released three albums between 1999 and 2007. Hunt's bass playing helped her get cast in the "Friday Night Lights" series as Devin Boland, a member of the high school metal act Crucifictorious. As Mullally was about to leave Austin to visit her mother in Oklahoma City, the two women realized one more thing. "Stephanie had brought her ukulele and she told me she wrote songs," Mullally recalled. "I said, 'Let's get in my air conditioned rental car and I want to hear some of your songs.' She said there was this one part I had to sing with her. She taught me the part and the minute we heard our voices together ..." The next thing they knew, they were in a band (which includes neither a Nancy nor a Beth). They released a self titled album two years ago, and have crisscrossed the country, usually backed by a quintet of ace musicians from Los Angeles, Austin and New York that includes the violinist and singer Petra Haden, formerly of the indie rock band That Dog. Unlike many stage duos, which often rely on the contrast between two starkly different performers, the two women sing and move in unison a rare exception is their cover of "No Charge," which George Jones and Tammy Wynette recorded with their daughter Tina in 1975. "That's not a conscious thing but it's magical and represents this idea of the agelessness of music," Hunt said of the harmonizing. "Even though we have a 30 year age difference, we can be so much the same." Mullally said that Hunt cannot be stumped. "If I say something like, 'There's this song from 1952 I really like,' she'll say, 'Oh yeah, my parents have that record.'" Hunt added, "We're not going to judge a song if it's new." Otherwise we would have missed out on, say, Nancy and Beth's suave cover of Gucci Mane's X rated "I Don't Love Her," which underhandedly mocks that 2011 track's sexism. The two singers keep what they call "a freakout list" of material they'd like to cover one day they mentioned the 1981 Laurie Anderson song "From the Air" as a candidate. One consideration is how it would be staged since every number is paired with dance moves (devised by Mullally) that look particularly surreal because the women are mirror images of each other, complete with identical costumes, glasses and hairdos. "When we got the headset mics, all bets were off," Mullally said. "Stephanie went from gamely going along to working very hard to get to a point where we are completely in sync." While the songs themselves are tightly rehearsed and precisely executed, a Nancy and Beth show does have a loose, lackadaisical feel, thanks to dryly casual stage banter. In Bay Shore, Mullally introduced "Harbor Lights," made popular by Dinah Washington, by waxing poetic about Beyonce's "Homecoming" film, then suggesting to the audience that this was a good opportunity to pleasure each other. On this tour, Offerman also steps onstage to introduce the band with custom descriptions that incorporate references to the show's location. At the Boulton, each musician was compared to a specific bagel; for Haden, Offerman concocted a back story involving bad halibut from a Roslyn trattoria. Nancy and Beth followed that up with an Irving Berlin cover, which somehow made total sense at the time. Mullally did not crowd surf that evening. But the Cafe Carlyle crowd may be luckier.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
The Buyer Brett Masterson on site with his fiancee, Amaranta Medina Seabright, and Nina. Five years ago, with the help of his parents, Brett Masterson bought a fixer upper in Roxbury, Mass. The price was in the high 300,000s. The gut renovation of two three bedroom duplexes in a brick semiattached house took more than a year. Mr. Masterson and his fiancee, Amaranta Medina Seabright, lived there during that time. They had a blast. "Oh, man, it was great," said Mr. Masterson, who is 28. "I went to architecture school and learned more about building construction in the year I spent renovating than I did in all of my structures classes combined." Nearly two years ago, the couple rented out the duplex and moved to New York so Ms. Medina Seabright could pursue a graduate degree in art therapy at Pratt Institute. They rented a ground floor one bedroom in Bedford Stuyvesant with a big yard for Nina, their poodle. The rent, starting at 1,500 a month, rose to 1,600. "I wanted to get out of the rental scenario as soon as possible," said Mr. Masterson, who is now a project manager at Hecho, a design and construction company. His preference was to buy a two or three family fixer upper brownstone in the 400,000s in Bed Stuy and rent out a unit or two. But the couple, uncertain that the right house would appear, also hunted for a one bedroom apartment. For this the budget was less, up to 350,000, because there would not be rental income. A year ago, they visited a bright one bedroom co op in a gorgeous Art Deco building a bit farther afield, in Kensington. The listing price was 270,000; monthly maintenance was about 700. Mr. Masterson offered 240,000, but found out he didn't meet the lender's requirement for a minimum down payment because the building was not quite 50 percent owner occupied. The brownstone market was becoming ever more competitive. In a pretty house on MacDonough Street in Bed Stuy, Mr. Masterson peeled back the wall to wall carpeting, finding beautiful mahogany floors. The asking price was 450,000. He offered 400,000, but another party matched that in cash. The couple went to see a two family house that was home to members of an extended family on Decatur Street in Bed Stuy. "You could tell it was a tight knit family because they had only one kitchen," Mr. Masterson said. "They didn't even bother using the top kitchen" empty of appliances "because they had family meals every night." His offer of 435,000 was accepted. But the sellers wanted to find a new place before they sold, and they didn't. Mr. Masterson went to a "Buying Into Brooklyn" talk sponsored by Brooklyn Based at the Brooklyn Brewery, where he met Tina Fallon of Realty Collective. He contacted her the next day. "He was looking for what so many other buyers were looking for a fixer upper," Ms. Fallon said. "Their relationship had already survived a renovation. Some young couples are advised against the process, because it can be so difficult." A possibility arose on Lexington Avenue in Bed Stuy: a three story house, listed at 479,000, with two giant evergreens in front. "It felt like somebody forgot to garden for a couple years and it was overgrown, which was kind of charming," Mr. Masterson said. But it was for a single family, and "had some quirky things, not in a good way, that would have made it difficult to split it up into two separate units." They saw photos of a postwar co op near Pratt in Clinton Hill; drawn by its vistas of Manhattan, they attended an open house. A view was something they hadn't considered. "I never put that in my search criteria," Mr. Masterson said, "and when I first saw it, it was such a valuable component to the apartment." The price was 289,000, maintenance around 700. The unit had only 560 square feet, "but the view made it so much bigger," he said. Mr. Masterson offered 275,000. Then the appraisal came in low, at 250,000. So the price was renegotiated to 255,000. The deal closed in the spring. The board approved the couple's renovation plans, and a demolition crew went in the next day. "Because it is so small," Ms. Medina Seabright said, "we can do a nicer renovation than we could afford to do if we had bought a house." The walls turned out to be solid plaster, "and not timber frame construction like the brownstones are," Mr. Masterson said. Some columns were exposed so he changed the plans to better show them off. "It will be a Swiss Army Knife of an apartment," he said. He'll employ plenty of casters, so "if we don't want the kitchen island to be there, we can push it over to the side. That is one of the exciting things about the apartment to me. It has really been a game of spatial Tetris, and we are trying to find ways to maximize the function." Mr. Masterson bicycles to work, and stops by the new place every morning and evening. It is scheduled to be finished by month's end. "Brett lives for this," Ms. Medina Seabright said. "I enjoy it, too, and we are excited to live in Clinton Hill. This is probably the only way we could afford to buy in that neighborhood."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
The list of nominees is dominated by novels inspired by political crises, such as John Lanchester's "The Wall," set on an island surrounded by a concrete barrier to keep rising seas and immigrants out. The Mexican author Valeria Luiselli's "Lost Children Archive," about child migrants, has also made the cut. "The brilliance of the writing stirs rage and pity," wrote Gaiutra Bahadur, in a review of the book for The New York Times. The nominated books "imagine our world, familiar from news cycle disaster and grievance, with wild humor, deep insight and a keen humanity," said Peter Florence, the chair of the judges, in a statement. "These writers offer joy and hope." Other books on the list are less political, such as Oyinkan Braithwaite's comic thriller, "My Sister, The Serial Killer," about two siblings in Lagos, one of whom has a habit of murdering her boyfriends. It is "a bombshell of a book sharp, explosive, hilarious," wrote Fiammetta Rocco in The New York Times. "Only after you turn the last page do you realize that, as with many brilliant comic writers before her, laughter for Braithwaite is as good for covering up pain as bleach is for masking the smell of blood." From its inception in 1969 until 2014, the Booker prize was limited to books by writers from Britain, Ireland and Commonwealth countries (plus South Africa and, later, Zimbabwe) , but that changed in 2014, when it was opened to works by anyone writing in English. That led to fears it would be dominated by Americans. In 2016, Paul Beatty's "The Sellout" took the prize, and, the following year, "Lincoln in the Bardo," by George Saunders, won. Both writers are American. After that, criticism of the rule change grew, and non American authors complained they were being crowded out. In 2018, a literary society that counts Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan and Zadie Smith among its members demanded the rule be reversed.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
U.S. Looks to an Italian to Put Biathletes on the Olympic Podium Some of the world's top biathletes descended this weekend on Utah for the first time in 17 years. The return for a World Cup event comes as Salt Lake City promotes its bid to host the 2030 Olympics. For Armin Auchentaller, the Italian national who began overseeing the United States women's team last spring, the needs are more immediate. Biathlon, which combines Nordic skiing and target shooting, is the only Winter Olympic sport in which Team USA has never won a medal. Auchentaller's job is to change that. In a recent phone interview from Utah, where the team was preparing for competitions at Soldier Hollow, Auchentaller cited his experience coaching the Swiss biathlon team, which, like the United States, is not considered at the pinnacle of the sport. He said it had helped him understand how to take a team from nowhere to a place where where landing on an Olympic podium is possible, as the Swiss did in 2014. Here are edited excerpts from the interview with Auchentaller. You want to put an American on an Olympic podium. Were you an Olympian? I was good skier and good biathlete, but not good enough. But I was coaching with Switzerland from 2014 to 2018, and we had good results. I built up the team there, because there wasn't really much of a women's team when I arrived. But by the end, we were able to get some results in the top 10. What is the most important factor in creating a successful team here? It's not the successful sport here that it is in the European countries. We have just a few athletes, but those athletes we have, they are so committed and they have great personalities. The important thing is to work with them and get them better every single day. Did the top biathletes here grow up with the sport? Many of them were college cross country skiers, and after they received their degree, they switched. So it's very challenging to learn to shoot, to learn the game what they can do, what they cannot do during a competition. You could train me forever, and I would never be able to dunk a basketball or hit a 90 mile per hour fastball. Can you teach someone to be a great shot? Everybody should have a little bit of talent to start. But it's important to remember some of the great champions were not great shooters when they were young. I am convinced I can teach you shooting. What is the hardest thing about shooting? The most tricky thing is not technical, it's the mental part, the emotional part, especially when it comes down to hit the last chart target . Even the best biathletes, they have the technical qualities and skills, but the last shot is the hardest. What Americans have the best chance to get to a podium? Sean Doherty on the men's side. For the women, it's Susan Dunklee and Clare Egan. What is the key to their progress? The main thing is try to be as consistent as possible. If you have too many ups and downs, the chances may be not as high, but if you are consistent, at some point you will get there. Remember, in our sport, you can be in the lead, and if you miss on the last chart, instead of being on the podium, you can be 30th. Do U.S. biathletes have enough support? We need even more private sponsors for the athletes to be able to pay their flights and other costs. The U.S.O.C. is our biggest sponsor, and we do have two or three minor sponsors, but we need the big ones especially to be able to develop the young athletes. Guns are very controversial in the United States, but they are popular with a large segment of the population. Is that an advantage? I definitely see it as an advantage. In the U.S., it can seem like everyone has a gun. We should use this, the popularity of these sport guns. How is the fan support in the United States? I wish it would it would be more popular in the U.S. If people get to know this sport, I know it will be very popular.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
"I think I'm the most like my grandfather the way I play," Arch Manning said, referring to Archie Manning, the New Orleans Saints quarterback throughout the 1970s. "He could scramble around, stretch the field." Last summer, while reading a list of Louisiana's top college football recruiting prospects, Archie Manning noticed that only one of the high school players did not have a Twitter account. It happened to be his grandson and namesake Arch, a nephew of Peyton and Eli. "I was kind of proud of that," the elder Manning said in a telephone interview. At 16, Archibald Charles Manning is a 6 foot 3 1/2 inch, 198 pound sophomore at the Isidore Newman School in New Orleans, the latest flowering branch on the family quarterback tree and potentially the third generation of the Manning family to play in the N.F.L. As such, he is being nurtured and protected by relatives who fully understand and have the experience and the means to address the possibilities and hazards of fame and expectation. In a rapacious social media age and a hothouse recruiting era when players are sometimes offered college scholarships in the eighth grade, Cooper Manning, Arch's father and Peyton's and Eli's older brother, said, "I'm doing my best to keep it all in check and let him be a normal kid." A season ago, when Arch became Newman's starting quarterback as a freshman something neither of his uncles had done he was named by MaxPreps, a leading high school sports website, as the national freshman of the year after completing 65.5 percent of his passes for 2,408 yards and 34 touchdowns with only six interceptions. He is ranked as the top quarterback for the 2023 recruiting class. On Nov. 13, Manning threw five touchdown passes in the first quarter of a homecoming rout. But he is still learning to navigate the intense anticipation of stardom and scrutiny of his performance fostered by his family name. After throwing three interceptions in last week's regular season finale, he seemed downcast even though his team won, 31 8, and remained undefeated. Despite that disappointment, Newman (8 0) prepares to enter Louisiana's playoffs next week as the No. 1 seed in its division. Manning will attempt to lead the Greenies to their first state football championship at the Superdome, the building where his grandfather threw touchdown passes for the New Orleans Saints 40 years ago. "He's worth the price of admission," said Lyle Fitte, the coach at South Plaquemines High School in Buras, La., Newman's final regular season opponent. "He displays the characteristics of a college quarterback now. Pocket presence, keeping his eyes downfield, going through his reads, even keeled. He's very mobile, can throw on the run. I think he's better than his uncles were at this point. He's learned from the best, for sure." The curly haired Arch also seems to possess the family's easy humor. Last summer, he told a television reporter that, with his uncles retired, he gives as good as he gets as far as needling. When they call him skinny and ask how much he can bench press, he asks how fast they can run the 40 yard dash. "They won't talk," he said, laughing. Arch fully understands the recruiting process and his standing in it, his grandfather said. But the Mannings have pumped the brakes on comparisons to his Hall of Fame caliber family members. And they have been cautious in keeping their emerging star from racing full speed into the world of sports celebrity and breathless recruiting speculation. None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. As a freshman, Arch did not give interviews and avoided social media. The family declined all scholarship offers. This year, Arch has spoken with college coaches, but the N.C.A.A.'s coronavirus restrictions have prohibited them from Isidore Newman's campus and games. In mid October, he completed 21 of 26 passes for one touchdown, and rushed for two more, in a game before a national TV audience. A YouTube highlight video titled "The Next Manning" had been viewed nearly three million times through late November. A filmmaker has documented his career since he was in the seventh grade. Arch has usually accommodated local reporters after games this season but was not made available by his father over the phone for this article. Arch unfailingly credits his teammates in interviews, though he is said to find the ceaseless spotlight a bit silly. And he still scrambles away from social media. "People are too early to crown you and condemn you," his father Cooper, a real estate executive, said. Cooper Manning, 46, started on a state championship basketball team at Newman and was an all state receiver whose football career ended at the University of Mississippi just as it began. In 1992, he was diagnosed with spinal stenosis, a narrowing of the spinal canal that can cause numbness and muscle weakness. He is happy to talk about his daughter, May, 17, who was recently named the most valuable player as her team won a state volleyball championship at the Academy of the Sacred Heart in New Orleans. And how his wife, Ellen, achieved similar acclaim when she attended Sacred Heart. And how his youngest son, Heid, a freshman at Newman, soon to be 15, could become the Greenies' starting center next season, snapping the ball to his brother. But he is reluctant to say much about Arch, not wanting his eldest son to be swamped in a tidal wave of attention and the ruthless, scraping undertow of Twitter and Instagram. "It's supposed to be fun," he said. Given familial and geographic connections to the Mannings, colleges including Mississippi (Archie, Cooper and Eli's alma mater), Tennessee (Peyton's), Duke (where David Cutcliffe, who coached Peyton and Eli in college, runs the program), and Louisiana State, Alabama, Georgia and Texas have been speculated as potential landing spots for Arch. "I don't think M.I.T. is calling anytime soon," his father said in a radio interview last summer, swiping at the panting conjecture that accompanies football recruiting in the South. "The Manning way is to empower the young man to figure out what's important to him and let him make his own decision," Cutcliffe said. For Archie Manning, a cautionary moment occurred in 2014, when L.S.U. received a scholarship commitment from an eighth grade quarterback from Texas named Zadock Dinkelmann. Like Arch Manning, Dinkelmann has two uncles who played in the N.F.L. Ty Detmer, the 1990 Heisman Trophy winner from Brigham Young, and his brother Koy. But it is impossible to know whether an eighth grader will bloom into a college star. For Arch Manning, his grandfather said, seriously contemplating early scholarship offers is "not part of the process right now." Dinkelmann entered a junior college, not L.S.U., after high school. His planned college path detoured several times because of head coach firings. He is now at Texas A M Kingsville, hoping to take his first snap at the Division II school in March after its fall season was scrubbed by the pandemic. Dinkelmann, 21, said he had enjoyed the recruiting process and offered Arch Manning the same advice that his father and uncles offered him: Be a high school athlete first. Take your time. Have fun visiting stadiums, meeting coaches. The right decision will become obvious. "Don't worry about them liking you; it's about you liking them," Dinkelmann said. Since he was in junior high school, Arch Manning has worked at times with a quarterback coach named David Morris, who was Eli's backup at Ole Miss. And when Arch's uncles visit New Orleans or gather at the annual Manning Passing Academy in Thibodaux, La., they also offer advice. Each was a first overall pick in the N.F.L. draft and won two Super Bowls. Each has helped Arch with his footwork and drop back technique and his polished release. Peyton has infused him with the importance of a commanding presence. But they are his uncles, not his coaches. "They don't try to be his mentor; they don't grade his film," Archie Manning said. Like his father and his uncles, Arch skipped Pop Warner football. ("I don't think it's necessary to put shoulder pads and helmets on a fourth grader or fifth grader," Archie Manning said.) Instead, Arch played flag football until the sixth grade. It shows in the way he darts and changes direction and throws across his body, extending plays as his grandfather once did running in beautiful escape at Ole Miss, running for his life with the Saints. Arch has completed 72 percent of his passes and thrown for 19 touchdowns this season, while also leading Newman with eight rushing touchdowns. "I see little sprinkles of everybody in the family, but he's his own entity," said Nelson Stewart, Newman's football coach and a former teammate of Peyton's and Cooper's at the school. "I focus on the Arch, not the Manning." Still, some Manning traits, especially meticulousness, apply to all of them. Arch collaborates with his coach in scripting the opening plays for each game. When the pandemic limited school workouts for months, Stewart and Arch reviewed every play from his freshman season on video conference calls. Some lasted an hour and a half. "At the end," Stewart said, "he was almost completing my sentences."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
LOS ANGELES Even to intro duce a stage show in which he does not appear, Mr. Dan sure knows how to make an entrance. Not long ago, to the sounds of "Fat Bottomed Girls," by Queen, he hustled out from behind a tattered curtain onto a makeshift set made to look like the Miami living room of "The Golden Girls." He played air guitar, strutted and finally twerked: leaning on the coffee table, his man caboose high in the air, like a middle aged exotic dancer unleashed upon thrift shop rattan. It was a lot to take in on a Thursday night in the basement of a Mexican restaurant. But at the Cavern Club Celebrity Theater in eastern Los Angeles, a hotbed of drag performance that is actually as well as figuratively underground, it was just business as usual. Week in and week out, Mr. Dan is the well rehearsed host and Svengali of this speakeasy in Silver Lake. "Am I the producer? Am I the director? Am I the ingenue?" he wondered rhetorically in an interview . Officially, he is the artistic director, and this month is his 25th year in a position that sometimes has required him to be all three. His last name (Der Kacz) long ago put in mothballs along with his drag alter ego, Gina Lotriman, and the desire to star in shows himself Mr. Dan, 59, spends his time programming, sometimes nurturing, and always introducing his theater's productions. On this night, he was presenting "The Golden Girlz," a sitcom spoof starring the top shelf drag stalwarts Jackie Beat and Sherry Vine, and the frequently cross dressing character actors Drew Droege and Sam Pancake. Admission was 35. "If there were an earthquake, you would die under a pile of old Spanish style wooden chairs and tortilla chips from upstairs," Ms. Beat said. Despite that dire prediction, when Mr. Dan speaks of that sturdy post, he could just as easily be talking about himself. Since 1994, he has held up the 55 seat theater, one flight below Casita del Campo, a family owned Mexican restaurant and, in so doing, become practically as popular as his roster of stage performers. "He's an appealing, jovial host, and he has dirty jokes that he's told for years," said Lady Bunny, the veteran New York drag star, in a phone interview. "Performing at the Cavern Club just feels like home." Loyal crowds, sometimes peppered with such megawatt celebrities as Bette Midler, Liza Minnelli and Katy Perry, tend to agree. Ms. Midler, for instance, was observed taking in, and complimenting, the appealingly tragic stylings of the Seattle based chanteuse Dina Martina. "We've always tried to cultivate an audience that would appreciate our weird brand of drag," Mr. Dan said. The acts he chooses to showcase are not generally the glamour girls of "RuPaul's Drag Race," although Alaska 5000, who won "Drag Race All Stars," did guest star in an installment of "The Golden Girlz." Instead, his headliners tend to be more outre artists like Ms. Pak Man, who is a gonzo gamer queen, or the lovely Kay Sedia, who recently appeared in a "Juan woman cho," as she spelled it. The wackiness of the performers withstands the noise from above. "It's like a gay Chuck E. Cheese upstairs," he said. "You get 'Happy Birthday' and banging on seats. You don't want to be in the middle of 'Hedda Gabler' with that going on. It's got to be gay and campy." His first hit was an improvised soap opera parody set in a Hollywood trailer park, called "The Plush Life," which ran for much of the '90s. "We were sold out every Saturday night," said Jeffrey Wylie, an actor and director who played Skip Tumehlou in that fondly remembered sudser. "There were people who came to the show every week for the entire 10 years." Since that initial success, Mr. Dan has presented such popular shows as "Chico's Angels," a series of jiggly cop satires that recently celebrated its quinceanera, and "Fruitcake Follies," a holiday show that, every Christmas, packs in rum soaked revelers like so many sugarplums. Tom Lenk, a "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" alum and Instagram fashion sensation, brought "Tilda Swinton Answers an Ad on Craigslist," a smash at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, there in May. "It's silly stuff, underground and subversive," said John Cantwell, the man better known as Love, Connie. "Mr. Dan has his eye on entertainment." Mr. Dan and Mr. Vitagliano together began hosting club nights in Los Angeles that celebrated their fascination with both the cornball and the cool. These early parties, like a TV themed night called "Mystery Date," offered punky queer people an alternative to more typical L.G.B.T. bar fare. Their ideas were fun, but drawing a crowd wasn't easy. In January 1993, though, the two began throwing raucous, themed shindigs at Rudolpho's, a Mexican restaurant owned by the same family that owns Casita del Campo. Called Dragstrip 66, the parties were costume heavy club nights that offered drag fans a place to let down their Dynel. The Los Angeles Times described the monthly festivities there as falling "somewhere between a John Waters film, a Bob Mackie fashion show, and a drunken punk dance party." With that irresistible mix, Dragstrip soon became the place to be. Fuzzy, full bodied "bears" in "hag drag" would find themselves rubbing over the elbow gloves with celebrities like Traci Lords, Marilyn Manson, RuPaul, Adam Lambert and Alan Cumming. One frequent attendee, James Boulet, now a drag party promoter in Los Angeles himself, likened it to a clown car: "packed and fun as hell." Dragstrip 66 ran for almost 20 years. Mr. Vitagliano, now a blogger writing about L.G.B.T.Q. issues and editor of "Born This Way," a 2012 compendium of coming out essays, is at work on a documentary film a "frockumentary," he called it to chronicle its history. Dragstrip lay the foundation for the goings on at the Cavern Club. "We welcomed outsiders, but only if they heard about it from insiders," Mr. Vitagliano said. "We never wanted every person we wanted the right person to come." Today, Mr. Dan's theater doesn't do much advertising, save for social media posts by the performers appearing there. "Staying under the radar gives the audience a sense of danger," Mr. Vitagliano said. "People love that they're experiencing what feels like their little secret." The popularity of the downstairs showroom has been a boon for the restaurant above, of course. Many audience members arrive for dinner or a round of margaritas at Casita well before curtain time at the Cavern Club. The synergy, said Robert del Campo, the second generation owner of the place, "has been an amazing experience. Everybody is having a great time, so the energy is always happy in this place. There's so much laughter all the time." And in a town where fame sometimes seems to be the universal goal, Mr. Dan is pleased that he has made his mark, if not in all of Los Angeles, then at least one corner of it. "People have referred to me as the gay Barnum of Silver Lake," he said. "But I'm just leading a quiet life booking one tiny theater the best way I know how, trying to make it a success every night we're open." Still, after 25 years, Mr. Dan remains committed to keeping the Cavern Club on the artistic down low. He is not programming for the mainstream, not even for those who prefer their drag of the VH1 variety, but for his own bewigged tribe of fringe loving (and sometimes fringe wearing) misfits. "Everyone's welcome," he said. "But really this is just for us."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Workers at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum voted Thursday night to join Local 30 of the International Union of Operating Engineers, which will be the first organized bargaining unit at the institution. The new union, which was approved by a vote of 57 20, will represent about 140 employees at the museum, including full time engineers and maintenance mechanics who operate the Guggenheim's heating and air conditioning systems, as well as full time and temporary employees with titles like art handler, cabinetmaker and fabricator, who install and take down exhibits. Guggenheim officials had hoped to dissuade workers from joining the union. Local 30 officials said Richard Armstrong, the museum's director, sent workers an email earlier this week in which he said he believed a union would inject divisiveness "on a daily basis" into the institution. The formation of a Guggenheim union comes as increasing attention is being focused on the pay scales of workers at prestigious cultural institutions. Some staff members at the Museum of Modern Art walked out last summer during labor negotiations that ended with a new contract that included wage increases.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Army's football schedule had been set for years. It took about five weeks of this pandemic stricken summer for it to come apart. Five home games, like a sought after visit from No. 5 Oklahoma that was planned more than a decade ago, vanished. So did four road trips. Less than a month before the season's scheduled start, the Black Knights were down to three games. The greatest rebuilding projects in college football this year had nothing to do with on field performance. Instead, with leagues canceling or limiting games, the most urgent efforts to resurrect football teams centered on a far more fundamental, widely shared conundrum: having games for teams to play at all. "In normal times, it would kind of be a mind melting experience where you start to have little panic attacks here and there," Mike Buddie, West Point's athletic director, said last week. "But with what our planet has been through since March, it was just another you've got to be kidding me event." What emerged throughout college football was an amalgam of urgent unions and stopgap schedules contrived over mere weeks in an industry accustomed to setting matchups a decade or more in advance. Contracts that sometimes take months to negotiate were sometimes signed within days, and even as the season started last week, a handful of programs were still scheduling or seeking games. "When you lose one, it's one thing," said Doug Gillin, the athletic director at Appalachian State, which saw the entirety of its September schedule evaporate before a restructuring. "When you lose two, it's another thing. When you lose numbers three and four, you're like, 'Holy cow, how am I going to put this puzzle back together?'" Gillin's solution was to assemble pieces from similarly smashed up schedules: Since Aug. 12, Appalachian State has announced three games for this month, including Saturday's opener against Charlotte, which also saw its early fall calendar implode. Army has replaced all the games it lost by making moves like scheduling a visit to No. 20 Cincinnati and agreeing to a matchup with Brigham Young, whose cancellations included six games against Power 5 opponents like Michigan State and Stanford. And yet, after all of the horse trading, athletic directors acknowledged that there is no certainty that their revised schedules will hold. "No one knows how many games may have to be moved during the season," said Dave Brown, a former ESPN executive whose scheduling software, Gridiron, was football's equivalent of a defibrillator as teams looked for new matchups this summer. An Atlantic Coast Conference game that was planned for this weekend, North Carolina State at Virginia Tech, was recently moved to Sept. 26 because of a cluster of coronavirus cases in N.C. State's athletic department. Other games, like Friday night's Iron Skillet showdown between Texas Christian and Southern Methodist, have been postponed indefinitely. The first cancellations for major colleges, though, emerged in June, when plans for four games involving historically Black colleges and universities were scratched. More trouble appeared in July as leagues canceled their fall seasons or winnowed them to include fewer, or no, nonconference games. And the turbulence escalated in August as individual universities like Connecticut and Massachusetts which compete as independents said they would not play at all this season. The decisions left many schedules eviscerated. The lifeline, though, was that every one sided cancellation left a team looking for an opponent. Gridiron, which most Division I programs use to help schedule games, recorded 886 logins over four days in July and August, more than double the traffic on similar days in 2019. Administrators across the country were often focused on three objective criteria: availability, proximity and, potentially, an opportunity for a modest payday. But officials also were trying to assess the likelihood that a prospective opponent would ultimately play guesses, at best, rooted in geography, politics, virus trends and the football cultures of campuses and their surrounding communities. To get through this month, Appalachian State ultimately went with games against two in state opponents as well as Marshall, the West Virginia university with which it already had future games scheduled. Worried West Point officials, embracing the kind of assess all options preparation that would delight the Pentagon, developed more than 200 scheduling plans. Army's work began in March, in fact, when football executives picked up on chatter that the pandemic could lead leagues to impose conference only schedules an unnerving possibility for a football independent, but one that West Point leaders said they saw as an opportunity to perhaps burnish their home schedule or add a television date. "We would have to be nimble, we would have to be very flexible and very creative, all traits that the Army embraces," said Bob Beretta, a senior associate athletic director and West Point's football scheduling maven. Army began contacting other independent programs, even floating the notion of playing some teams twice in an effort to fill out a full schedule. The officials wanted to lay the groundwork in case chaos came. Then they waited. On July 8, the Ivy League canceled its fall football season. The Patriot League followed five days later. The schedule kept crumbling, particularly when the Mid American Conference's decision to postpone fall sports stripped the Black Knights of three games. In a matter of weeks, Army's 12 game schedule was down to three opponents: Air Force, Tulane and, of course, Navy. "Once we lost the schedule, we had a lot of lines in the water, but it wasn't like we had this master plan," Beretta said. "It wasn't like we could go ahead and pick from 10 different opponents and plug and play. It was limited inventory." But they soon began to nail down agreements. A game with B.Y.U. was agreed, helped along by a commitment by CBS to air it on network television. New road trips were lined up, and reciprocal games were scheduled into the 2030s. The situation, though, remained so fluid that only hours before Army planned to announce its revised 12 game schedule, one opponent withdrew. Beretta, who once served as West Point's interim softball coach, and Buddie, who pitched for the Yankees' 1998 World Series champions, came to see those weeks as having a similar rhythm to the baseball trading deadline: months of relaxed conversations punctuated by a frenzied run at the end. All the while, football coaches and players were looking toward a season that seemed amorphous. "Our philosophy was to prepare, don't plan," said Jeff Monken, Army's head coach. "We just needed to prepare generally as an offense and a defense and special teams to be able to execute our base schemes against whoever they lined up across from us." The players, Monken said, had not particularly cared about the precise shape their schedule would take. They just wanted games. "Our guys just feel very fortunate to be in the conversation and be playing games," he said. "They get excited about playing football. It doesn't matter who we play."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
This third generation Scirocco is unlikely to come to the United States as a production model, given the technical challenge of bringing it into compliance with American safety and emissions standards. By giving journalists previews of the Scirocco, Volkswagen seems to be gauging American interest in the model. In 2008, when Volkswagen introduced the third generation Scirocco, it did so only in Europe, focusing its efforts in the United States on core models like the Golf, Jetta and Passat. SAN FRANCISCO As corporate entities go, the Volkswagen Group is known for carrying out its affairs with a certain deliberation of setting goals, conducting extensive research and delivering on its objectives. Take two examples from the group's recent history: the Bugatti Veyron and the VW XL1. When details of the projects were released, they sounded slightly preposterous, but when the cars went into production they comfortably met their original targets, establishing records for, respectively, performance and fuel efficiency. One might surmise, then, that when Volkswagen ships a European market 2013 Scirocco R to the West Coast and hands it over to representatives of the press, it is not merely on a lark. Rather, it seems reasonable to conclude that VW is attempting to gauge, and perhaps to stir up, Americans' interest in a high performance front wheel drive hatchback aimed squarely at driving enthusiasts. It is not the first time a Scirocco has visited American shores: VW offered the first generation model in the United States starting in 1975. A small front engine, front drive coupe, its wedge shape body was conceived by Giorgetto Giugiaro, the Italian designer behind the Lotus Esprit and the DeLorean DMC 12, among others. A second generation car with a slightly softer edged body followed for 1982. The Scirocco's American run ended in 1988. In 2008, when Volkswagen introduced the third generation Scirocco, it did so only in Europe, focusing its efforts in the United States on core models like the Golf, Jetta and Passat. But VW seems likely to expand its American model line as it tries to meet its ambitious goal of 10 million annual global sales by 2018. Brett VanSprewenburg, a longtime Scirocco enthusiast who co founded the Web site scirocco.org, notes that VW lacks a more upscale sporty car for owners of GTIs and Golf Rs to move up to. "They love those vehicles," he said. "But fast forward a few years. You've got those guys in a good job. They're making good money now. What are they going to buy? A Porsche?" The Scirocco R's teardrop body has a distinctly kinetic look, from the scowling brows above its standard bixenon headlamps to the broad haunches whose breadth is accentuated by a set of enormous Continental SportContact2 tires. Despite its bulging physique, jacketed in a brilliant shade called Rising Blue, the test car had a rather discreet presence, a result perhaps of its minimal badging: garden variety VW emblems front and rear and two diminutive Rs, one embedded in the narrow slit of a grille, the other affixed at the lower edge of the deck lid. Judging by the two men excitedly snapping away when I returned to the parked Scirocco on separate occasions, enthusiasm for the model runs deep, at least among a certain demographic. Both paparazzi were of middle age and admitted to previous ownership of several VWs I recall one of the men saying he'd owned a dozen and both were eager to know whether the Scirocco was making something more than a cameo appearance. I couldn't relay anything definitive, as VW itself had not. But as Darryll Harrison, a public relations manager, danced around the issue in a phone interview, he provided an inkling. "It's the sports car that most Volkswagen enthusiasts wish we had here," he said. "The reason for bringing it to the States is to let consumers " Mr. Harrison paused momentarily and continued: "Give journos a preview. We're leaving any option open. If the feedback is positive, then maybe it's something..." Another pause, and Mr. Harrison continued: "From our perspective, officially speaking, I would tell you there are no plans." Finally, the public relations representative provided a more succinct summary: "The official word is 'No,' but it's good for product planners to see what how much interest there is." Mr. Harrison conceded that the third generation Scirocco that I tested was unlikely to come to the United States, given the technical challenge of bringing it into compliance with American safety and emissions standards. If the Scirocco does return, he wrote in a subsequent e mail, it will be as a future generation car. In any case, the 2013 Scirocco R which starts at about 39,000 in Germany offers an intriguing glimpse of what could be. On a drive down Highway 1 from San Francisco to Santa Cruz, with the engine in Normal mode and the optional Dynamic Chassis Control set to Comfort, the R comported itself with the grace of a grand tourer, its suspension gently neutralizing the occasional asphalt ripple or pile of rockslide residue. The turbocharged 2 liter 265 horsepower 4 cylinder engine easily dispatched the occasional slowpoke mesmerized by Northern California's splendid crops of brussels sprouts and artichokes. On this fairly leisurely drive the Scirocco averaged 29.6 miles per gallon. Though not a particularly big car, the Scirocco is quite wide, and the interior is spacious side to side. Its back seats, remarkably, are roomy enough for full size adults. A 6 footer can sit comfortably behind a 6 foot driver and enjoy decent leg room, without the driver having to scoot the seat forward. Returning to San Francisco through the Santa Cruz Mountains, with the engine and suspension in Sport mode, the Scirocco exhibited a markedly different character, its exhaust note a stentorian rasp, its 6 speed DSG dual clutch transmission firing off fast shifts with a satisfying "Whapoom!" and enough traction in the curves to lead one to wonder where its limits might be. The latter would remain safely in the realm of speculation, for as the sun sank into the Pacific, the xenon bulbs' white light revealed many glowing orbs, the eyes of deer and raccoons traipsing the roadside. A closer encounter with woodland friends seemed not the best way to end a date with a visitor from Germany.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Toyota is recalling about 130,000 Tundra pickup trucks from the 2014 model year because the air bags may not function properly, the automaker said in a news release Thursday. The action covers the CrewMax and Double Cab models. The automaker said the side curtain air bags, which are installed along the headliner above the side windows, might not deploy properly because a panel on the roof pillar was not installed properly. The air bags are designed to provide head protection in a side impact crash. The problem was detected during crash tests by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in February, John Hanson, a spokesman for Toyota, wrote in an email. The automaker said it wasn't aware of any crashes, injuries or fatalities related to the issue.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
LOS ANGELES The board of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles may have voted unanimously this week to hire Klaus Biesenbach from MoMA PS1 as its new director, replacing Philippe Vergne, who resigned in May. But so far there's been little consensus outside the boardroom about his selection. Mr. Biesenbach's supporters here maintain he has the vision and skill set to help MOCA reinvent yet again to become a more compelling destination backed by more committed donors. The museum, which averted financial collapse a decade ago, currently has a 125 million endowment but no chief curator and a long ineffective board. Just one example of the dysfunction that Mr. Vergne couldn't escape: last year, its board co chair Maurice Marciano started his own competing museum across town. "Maybe Klaus can do for MOCA what Michael Govan did for Lacma," said Nicolas Berggruen, a trustee of that museum, pointing to Mr. Govan's rebuilding of his board and his reinvention of a sleepy campus into a popular destination. Mr. Biesenbach "understands art, artists and cities and he understands museums from both sides, institutional and entrepreneurial. MOCA has a great collection and history but in other ways it is like a new start up." Deborah McLeod, director of the Gagosian Beverly Hills gallery, called the hire "radically good news." Referring to Mr. Biesenbach's experience managing the staff and board at PS1, she added, "MOCA needs this level of organizational leadership and vision. It's really the caliber of appointment we were all hoping for." Well, not everyone. From other corners of the city artists and art professionals have been quick to voice concern that Mr. Biesenbach, who enjoys collaborating with pop culture royalty like Tilda Swinton, Bjork and James Franco, will reprise some of the blunders of Jeffrey Deitch's short lived, celebrity studded (Mr. Franco and Dennis Hopper both had shows) tenure as MOCA director from 2010 to 2013. At a time when leading museums are trying to diversify their staffs and audiences alike, some critics here also noted that Mr. Biesenbach is another white male director in a long line of white men since the museum's founding in 1979. "It's a slap in the face to the L.A. art world: a great disappointment, a missed opportunity of epic scope," Shana Nys Dambrot, the arts editor of LA Weekly, posted on Facebook. "They (the Board) have apparently learned nothing from the sketchy performances of their string of (only) white men (largely) imported from New York, like we need to be saved from ourselves. No qualified LA based professionals? No women, people of color ...? No understanding of this cultural moment, certainly." The artist Max Maslansky, responding to this reporter on Facebook, criticized the hire as the museum again "kowtowing to celebrity culture oriented arts administrators, who still see L.A. as a provincial outpost ripe for international transformation from the outside, as if its native arts culture needs an upgrade." Some critical responses share a nostalgia for MOCA in the days when it functioned as the serious contemporary art museum in town, offering an alternative to slicker forms of Hollywood entertainment. From its founding in 1979 until near the time it hit rock bottom financially, in 2008, having spent its endowment down to under 10 million, MOCA was easily the most ambitious contemporary art museum here. Over that time its curators organized important retrospectives and generation defining shows, ranging from Paul Schimmel's 1992 bad boy artist extravaganza "Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s" to Connie Butler's 2007 feminist survey "WACK!" Mr. Biesenbach, known as an advocate for new ideas and emerging artists, has had a long and largely successful run at MoMA PS1, starting at the smaller institution in 1995, when it was an artistic laboratory called the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center. (It became an affiliate of The Museum of Modern Art in 2000). At MoMA, he organized the landmark show "Pipilotti Rist: Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters)" in 2008 and Marina Abramovic's giant retrospective "The Artist is Present" in 2010, before his Bjork survey in 2015 prompted intense backlash. So did Mr. Biesenbach's comment this week dubbing L.A. "the new Berlin" because so "many artists are moving there," which irritated many artists here. They took to social media to point out that the L.A. art community was already active decades ago, when Berlin still had a wall. "I would think that the new MOCA director of all people should be excited about L.A. for its own sake and not see it through another city," said Micol Hebron, the feminist artist and Chapman University art professor. Reached by phone in New York, Mr. Biesenbach acknowledged that it wasn't a great comparison. "What I wanted to say is that as a curator I follow the artists, and I have the impression that L.A. is the new center for emerging artists because of affordable studios." He also maintained that it was a mistake to think his focus is celebrity or pop culture. "I think my legacy at MoMA has different chapters; I work in series," he said, describing a series on Mexico City, another on large scale video and a recent program on Puerto Rico. Just one of them, he said, was devoted to "people who work between media, like Tilda, Bjork and Antony and the Johnsons. It was an experiment. I'm not planning on repeating exhibitions." Ms. Hebron said that she was an early fan of Mr. Biesenbach's video and performance program at MoMA PS1. "I'm not bothered by his flashiness and think some of his programs have been interesting," she said. But she added, "I am bothered by the profile: MOCA hires middle age white man from New York, again." "It's not about the person only, it's about the program," Mr. Biesenbach responded, ticking off a long list of women and black artists he's championed. "I think diversity is written all over my program." And going forward, at MOCA, would he commit to hiring a chief curator who is not a white male? Mr. Biesenbach said that the chief curator hire would not be his first step. "I'm very mindful of the need for diversity on the staff. The first thing I want to do is to talk to all the staff members there, listen carefully and figure out what they need," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Ms. Mills plays with the idea of perspective, too. "It Only Happens Once ... Yesterday and Tomorrow" is based on a recurring dream, beginning with a man on his back, legs and arms in the air, as another stands over him. As the dancers pull and prod one another, the melodrama, which feels as if it were on a loop, weighs heavily. Mr. James's duet, "Closing the Glass Door," offers more of the same, as Scott Schneider and Nicholas Sciscione take turns rubbing their heads and bodies against each other until, in the end, they come together as one, each chin tenderly resting on the partner's shoulder. Mr. James's dancers perform with a cloying, affected manner tough on the surface, yet vulnerable within that manages to dissipate slightly in Mr. Elkins's good natured but vacuous "Trouble Will Find Me," set to music by Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn. They throw themselves into Mr. Elkins's vigorous blend of salsa, capoeira and hip hop. Even though the knotty partnering was beyond them, and there were stamina issues, on such a prosaic program, "Trouble" was a burst of good cheer.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
The plot is fairly straightforward: After dropping off the hitchhiker, the truck driver (played by an actor also named Jinpa) takes the dead sheep to a monastery to have its soul blessed; he has preoccupied, unsatisfying sex with a lover; and then he searches for his hitchhiking namesake, hoping perhaps to stop him from committing murder. These sequences are padded with droll details and detours. The truck driver, who sports spiky hair, a leather jacket and sunglasses, listens to a Tibetan version of "O Sole Mio" on repeat. Later, in a modest highlight, he indulges in an extended flirtation with a bartender (Sonam Wangmo) whose every word and gesture drips with innuendo. As amusing as these interludes are, they read as attempts to force an exaggerated sense of mystery into an ultimately simple and moralistic tale about the futility of vengeance. The cinematography by Lu Songye compounds this pointless affectation. Shooting from oblique angles in a boxy 4:3 aspect ratio, he deploys light, shadow and careful calibrations of focus to atmospheric effect, but these stylistic flourishes don't communicate much beyond a generic art house sensibility.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
As has been noted in other reviews of his work, the artist Matthew Barney does not make films via Hollywood or its indie arm. The multimedia artist produces them with art world money, and often uses them as portions of larger gallery work. The movies are beautifully made, with high gloss visuals and production values. They're often provocative, with depictions of explicit sex and, in 2015's "River of Fundament," persistent consideration of fecal matter. So one surprise about "Redoubt," shot in the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho, is that it's almost entirely wholesome by conventional standards. Initially part of a larger exhibition that premiered at Yale this spring (which was lavishly praised in The New York Times), "Redoubt" is a myth informed western, an allegorical apologia for artistic practice.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
There are chefs who can fill seats based on reputation alone lead actors whose legion admirers eagerly attend every opening. In Stockholm, that describes Mathias Dahlgren, a founder of the New Nordic Food Manifesto and a Bocuse d'Or winner who has earned a cumulative four Michelin stars at three restaurants to date. His new restaurant, Rutabaga, which opened in February, has garnered particular interest not only for its location in the space occupied for a decade by his two starred dining room, Matsalen, which he closed last December but also for its concept, to which its unusual name nods: 100 percent vegetarian. "After 10 years, I feel like it's time for me to do something new," said Mr. Dahlgren, seated in the renovated dining room, now a bright, welcoming space with cream colored walls and sunlight streaming through large windows.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
A buff and gray stronghold of stone, steel and glass set against Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is designed to shut out pretty much everything the park represents. It's sealed off from weather and seasons, and natural change of any kind. The one part of the museum that's an exception is the Cantor Roof Garden. Open to the elements, it's rain washed and sun washed year round. And while the rest of the museum has been as dark and still as a tomb since the start of the pandemic lockdown, the Roof Garden has percolated with life. Seeds, carried by wind, sprouted in its pavement. Wild ducks nested and raised a family in a planting box. In July, work on a sculptural installation by the Mexico City based artist Hector Zamora, left half finished in March, went back into high gear in time for the Met's reopening to the general public on Aug. 29. (It will be accessible to members on Aug. 27 and 28.) When you first enter the Roof Garden from the elevator, the piece looks the very opposite of open and light. A free standing curved wall of terra cotta bricks, over 100 feet long and 11 feet high, it appears to have a solid surface and to be perversely positioned to obscure a spectacular view of the park and the Manhattan skyline. You get the impression that to take in the open air vista you need to make your way around this forbidding obstacle. But as you approach, the surface slowly reveals itself to have unexpected transparency. The bricks, it turns out, are hollow and form a porous mesh. As you move along the wall, the openwork texture very gradually becomes clear. When you face the wall directly, you have a full, though filtered pixelated view, through it, of the city and park beyond. Also, if you return during the course of a day, you'll see the wall cast changing patterns of shadow and light, most dramatically in early morning and evening (and no doubt on full moon nights). At the same time a wall is, by tradition, a purpose built barrier, one that in this case you can look through but cannot pass through. At its most aggressively political, a wall is an instrument of separation and exclusion, meant to keep "us" away from a despised and feared "them," a dynamic all too familiar to Americans on both sides of our southern border today. Mr. Zamora, whose New York solo debut comes with this commission, has made political commentary through architecture central to his work. In 2004, he built a temporary structure of steel and wood high up on the exterior of the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City and lived in the appended addition for weeks, tapping into the museum's power lines for his electricity. The piece, "Parachutist, Av. Revolucion 1608 Bis," referred both to illegal shelters erected by rural squatters on the city's edges and to the inclusion of the now marketable "outsider" presence in the mainstream art world. In 2009, he installed a work called "Atopic Delirium" in two near identical Modernist high rise buildings on a street in downtown Bogota, Colombia. One housed upscale tenants; the other was falling into decay. He crammed an upper floor apartment in each building with bunches of ripe plantains, so many that the fruit seemed to be pushing, tumorlike, from the windows, and began to rot within a few days. The plantains were a reminder of Colombia's past and present colonialist history, specifically the so called Banana Massacre of 1928, when, apparently under U.S. government pressure, Colombian troops gunned down striking employees of the North American owned United Fruit Company. The political legacy persisted, and, as recently as 2007, Chiquita, the multinational successor to United Fruit, was fined 25 million for having paid protection money to a right wing paramilitary group there in the 1990s. And in a 2014 performance piece, "The Abuse of History," Mr. Zamora had hundreds of potted palm trees tossed from upper windows of the Matarazzo Hospital in Sao Paulo, Brazil, a once vital urban resource left derelict since 1993 and now the site of a planned luxury hotel. The trees were left to lie where they fell on the hospital's deserted courtyards. Before long several began to take root, suggesting that, despite its abuse throughout human history, Nature rules, or can, as it did for a while on the Met's rooftop. (In preparation for the museum's reopening, workers cleared wild vegetation from the roof, and park rangers moved the ducks to a new home.) Plantains and palm trees have, of course, become cliched images of "tropical" life, and Mr. Zamora makes full use of their exoticizing implications, as he does with the building material in "Lattice Detour." The baked clay bricks used are of a type popular throughout the Southern Hemisphere. Called "celosia" in Spanish, they are molded of readily available material, basically the earth underfoot in any given place. Their hollowness makes them easy to transport and arrange, and gives them useful thermal properties. That the bricks used for the Met piece were manufactured in, and brought from, Mexico trucked across the border and driven to New York adds a topical dimension to Mr. Zamora's wall. So does the fact that in building it, he has used the bricks in an unusual way. Ordinarily, they would be stacked upright, with their open ends invisible, to form closed vertical columns. In the Met piece, they're laid out horizontally, so their hollowness, and the geometric design it reveals, becomes functional in a different way, practical but also aesthetic, ornamental. And art historical. The wall's curve, and its play of transparency and bulk, brings to mind another, earlier wall like sculpture, Richard Serra's 1981 "Tilted Arc." The Serra piece was also curved and free standing, but fully, interruptively solid. Twelve feet high and cast in dark Corten steel, it bisected the plaza outside the Federal Building in Lower Manhattan. Office workers who crossed the space daily objected to the work from the start: to its intrusive, path altering mass and to what some saw as its adamant ugliness. In 1989, after heated legal battles, "Tilted Arc" was removed. Mr. Zamora's Met commission serves as both a homage and a critique of "Tilted Arc." In doing so it reasserts the idea that public art and politics should be just are inseparable. And it suggests that in ways the current leaders of our country cannot even begin to imagine, a wall can expand and deepen our love for a world that no politics of aggression or protection can ever keep out. Through Dec. 7 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which reopens Aug. 29. (Member preview days are Aug. 27 and 28.) Visit metmuseum.org for an overview of safety protocols and ticketing information.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
"Lady and the Tramp" is the fourth live action remake of an animated Disney hit to come out this year. Unlike "Dumbo," "Aladdin" and "The Lion King," however, this latest offering is going straight to streaming as part of the inaugural slate on the new Disney Plus service. Cynics might assume this means that Charlie Bean's film is the runt of the litter. But the movie is middle of the road rather than bad hard to hate and harder to love. Set in an idyllic, racially integrated version of the 1910s, the new "Lady and the Tramp" stars a couple of real life adoptable dogs, Rose and Monte, in the titular roles of a pampered cocker spaniel and a wily street mutt. They are voiced, in a charmingly understated manner, by Tessa Thompson and Justin Theroux , and given relatively tasteful minimal computer generated expressions except for Lady's huge dark eyes, which look as if they have been digitally enhanced by Margaret Keane (of "Big Eyes" fame).	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Last week on "The Mandalorian," Baby Yoda scarfed down several unfertilized frog creature eggs, sparking arguments across the internet about whether the kid's uncontrollable impulse to have a little snack was funny or appalling. Well, this week Baby Yoda sealed inside his own floating metallic "egg" gets swallowed whole by a sea monster. Could this be some kind of poetic justice? I don't want to dive too deep into the ethics or the entertainment value of the Child's egg eating in last week's chapter of "The Mandalorian." In my review, I called it "hilarious." I stand by that although I do understand why some people might find the joke too shocking to enjoy. But it is worth noting that the "Star Wars" universe is filled with species that eat other species. In "The Mandalorian" Season 2 premiere, a Krayt dragon consumed several Tusken Raiders as well as Mando himself before getting blown to smithereens and having its own meat distributed among the throng. In this week's episode, "The Heiress," our heroes stop at a pub on the watery moon of Trask, where the proprietor serves a chowder (dispensed by what can only be called a soup hose) containing living seafood with flailing tentacles. At one point, one of those beasts leaps out of the bowl and tries to chomp the Child. Later in the episode, the Child slurps down a different one of those squirmy things. So it goes. As we've been moving further into the larger story of "The Mandalorian," it's becoming clear that the series's creator and head writer, Jon Favreau, means to explore the moral gray areas of "Star Wars" by setting his saga at a time when the galaxy's order is very much in flux. It's hard to discern sometimes who the good guys are in this era. Who's the predator and who's the prey? As a case in point, consider the new allies the Mandalorian makes this week. After the Child gets gobbled by the leviathan, Din Djarin dives into the water to save him. Just when he's about to be killed by a gang of squid headed Quarren intending, like so many others, to steal his armor he's saved by three of his fellow Mandalorians. But there's a complication. The posse members immediately remove their helmets after the rescue, ignoring what our Mando believes are ancient, inviolable protocols. Moreover, the squad's leader, Bo Katan Kryze (Katee Sackhoff), then explains that while she was fighting in the battles to liberate Mandalore, Din's order, "the Watch," was arguing against social progress and pushing to reestablish the orthodox religious practices of "the Way." Is it possible that all this time, our Mando has been the wrong kind of Mandalorian? Hearing there might be more than one Mandalorian Way rattles Din, who rockets off with the Child ... only to encounter yet another mob of angry Quarren, necessitating yet another Bo Katan rescue. Finally, Mando agrees to join forces with her as she and her team attempt to reclaim some stolen Mandalorian weapons from an Imperial freighter, guarded by Stormtroopers. Fervent "Star Wars" fans who've watched every movie and TV series and have maybe also read every novel and comic book and played every video game should recognize some of the back story and mythology described in this episode. Bo Katan Kryze herself is a character in the animated series "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" and "Star Wars Rebels." (In both, she is voiced by Sackhoff). Her quest to acquire the powerful and symbolic weapon the Darksaber and then to lead her people to independence is a big part of the franchise's lore. But it's not necessary to know any of that to enjoy "The Heiress," which is just as tied to the already established "Mandalorian" plot. The Darksaber, as you may recall, is currently in the hands of last season's main villain, Moff Gideon (Giancarlo Esposito), who is still using it for his own nefarious purposes in the parts of the galaxy where the Empire still has some sway. Gideon appears briefly in this episode via hologram, advising the Imperial freighter's captain (played by the always terrific Titus Welliver) to do whatever he must to keep the Mandalorian raiders from seizing their weapons cache. What follows is another outstanding "Mandalorian" action sequence as Din and Bo Katan's team fight off the captain's crew in narrow corridors the "Star Wars" set designers do love their narrow corridors and then try to keep the captain from crashing the freighter, killing them all. In addition to being gripping, the big climactic set piece is filled with what makes this franchise fun, including lots of moments when the reliably dim Stormtroopers don't really understand what's going on. The breathless rush of that final battle is also representative of where our Mandalorian finds himself at this point in the story. He's always been a very task oriented bounty hunter, taking one job after another while trying his best to represent the ideals of his order. But while he has been hustling to keep the Child safe, he has also been working alongside whoever can help. Droids, Jedi, rival Mandalorians ... Din Djarin has been learning to trust some folks he might previously have considered his enemies. Sometimes ideals have to bend to circumstance. When Mando lands on Trask's moon at the start of the episode, his craft, the Razor Crest, is sputtering badly, with metal flaking off the hull. When he leaves at the end, the ship has been literally bound together by ropes and wires by the Mon Calamari mechanics he hired. (When Din complains about the staff's shoddy work, the supervisor just quietly hands him an invoice to sign. That's another fine bit of "Mandalorian" silent comedy.) As the Mandalorian and the Child rocket into hyperspace, more Razor Crest chunks go flying. That's because the state of the ship is similar to the state of the galaxy. Everyone is just trying to keep what they have in one piece, however possible, for as long as necessary. Survival first. Moral quandaries later. None This episode was directed by Bryce Dallas Howard, who also directed "Sanctuary," from Season 1. That's the one in which Mando and Cara Dune (Gina Carano) fought Imperial Walkers on a muddy forest planet. Both of Howard's "Mandalorian" episodes so far have balanced thrilling action sequences with quieter character moments. I've started to look forward to seeing her name in the credits. None While Din Djarin is off adventuring on the high seas with the other Mandalorians, he leaves the Child with the Frog Lady and her husband, which seems like a recipe for disaster ... or at least for more outraged tweets from the show's more sensitive fans. Instead, Baby Yoda minds his manners as Mando had urgently requested (before adding, "You know what I'm talking about"). The Child even seems delighted when one of the now fertilized eggs hatches into a tadpole creature. Granted, he probably wanted to eat that, too. But he didn't! That's progress. None The Razor Crest has been fixed sort of. But what about the Child's little vehicle? Will we never again see him floating around so adorably in his egg?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
To describe a bushfire is to describe a monster. We speak of flanks, fingers, tails and tongues, Chloe Hooper observes in "The Arsonist," of a predatory, devouring hunger. On Feb. 7, 2009, a rough beast slouched its way across Victoria, Australia's southernmost mainland state. The conditions were explosive: a dozen years of drought; a breathless, record breaking swelter; and gale force winds. That Saturday later known as Black Saturday 400 separate fires raged, which claimed 173 lives and generated the equivalent heat of 500 atomic bombs. It was a dark herald of the annihilation future fire seasons would bring. The latest book by the Australian writer tells the story of just one of the Black Saturday bushfires, a blaze deliberately lit on the outskirts of Churchill in the Latrobe Valley coal country. Only 1 percent of Australia's bushfire arsonists are ever caught, so when a suspect emerged within days, detectives were wary: "Surely the very first person they were narrowing in on couldn't be the one?" Brendan Sokaluk, whose distinctive, sky blue sedan had been abandoned meters from the ignition point, admitted responsibility, but not intent. The Churchill blaze which left 11 dead had been an accident, he insisted, the result of a wayward cigarette. With propulsive energy, "The Arsonist" follows the case against Sokaluk, a 39 year old former volunteer firefighter, from the arson investigation's first frantic hours to the courtroom verdict. But first, Hooper takes us into the belly of the beast: birds falling from the sky with their wings burning; beehives combusting from the radiant heat; farewell texts escaping from fire ravaged homes ("Dad im dead I love u"). The elemental terror of Black Saturday requires little embellishment, only the quiet dignity of witness. It's this restraint as intelligent as it is compassionate that elevates "The Arsonist" from slick true crime procedural to cultural time capsule.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
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. 'ADRIENNE TRUSCOTT'S (STILL) ASKING FOR IT' at Joe's Pub at the Public Theater (previews start on Sept. 20; opens on Oct. 3). Subtitled "A Stand Up Rape About Comedy" (plus some more words that aren't publishable), this update of the cabaret performer's 2015 show approaches gendered violence and toxic masculinity with savage wit and a surprising number of brassieres. Bring your own rape whistle! Ellie Heyman directs. 212 967 7555, publictheater.org 'DUBLIN CAROL' at the Irish Repertory Theater (previews start on Sept. 20; opens on Oct. 1). Before Conor McPherson's "Girl From the North Country" transfers to Broadway, audiences can catch the Irish Rep's revival of this drama, which made its stateside debut at the Atlantic Theater Company in 2003. Set on Christmas Eve, the spare, talky play stars Jeffrey Bean as an undertaker's assistant muddling through a hangover and an encounter with his estranged daughter (Sarah Street). Ciaran O'Reilly directs. 212 727 2737, irishrep.org 'THE HEIGHT OF THE STORM' at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater (in previews; opens on Sept. 24). Having already introduced New York to "The Mother" and "The Father," the French playwright Florian Zeller brings another familial tempest to Broadway. Jonathan Pryce and Eileen Atkins reprise the roles they played in London, those of a long married couple, one of whom might be dead. Jonathan Kent directs. 212 239 6200, manhattantheatreclub.com 'THE LIGHTNING THIEF' at the Longacre Theater (previews start on Sept. 20; opens on Oct. 16). What do you do when you learn that you're actually the son of a god? Apparently, you go to Broadway. Joe Tracz and Rob Rokicki's 2014 musical, based on Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson novels, about a kid who discovers he has a very fancy family tree, has moved uptown. Stephen Brackett directs. 212 239 6200, lightningthiefmusical.com 'MOTHERS' at the Duke on 42nd Street (in previews; opens on Sept. 25). The mommy wars turn unusually violent in Anna Moench's drama for the Playwrights Realm. The competition among moms (and one nanny and one dad) at a baby meet up is already pretty brutal, but when disaster rolls in, sniping and backbiting give way to real danger. Robert Ross Parker directs. 646 223 3010, playwrightsrealm.org 'OUR DEAR DEAD DRUG LORD' at WP Theater (in previews; opens on Sept. 24). As slumber party games go, making Bloody Mary appear in the mirror is one thing; summoning the spirit of Pablo Escobar is next level. In Alexis Scheer's new play, produced by WP Theater and Second Stage Theater, teenage girls try to invoke their favorite narco terrorist. Whitney White directs. 212 541 4516, wptheater.org Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. 'RUNBOYRUN' AND 'IN OLD AGE' at New York Theater Workshop (in previews; opens on Sept. 23). Having previously presented "Sojourners" and "Her Portmanteau," New York Theater Workshop presents two further plays in Mfoniso Udofia's nine part "The Ufot Cycle," which follows a Nigerian couple across generations and time. Loretta Greco directs "Runboyrun"; Awoye Timpo directs "In Old Age." Chike Johnson and Patrice Johnson Chevannes star. 212 460 5475, nytw.org 'SOFT POWER' at the Public Theater (previews start on Sept. 24; opens on Oct. 15). A metatheatrical exploration of politics and culture and a riff on "The King and I" as seen through a trick mirror, David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori's musical of a sort arrives at the Public. It conjures a world in which a Chinese businessman meets Hillary Clinton at a campaign fund raiser, an experience that inspires a hallucinatory blockbuster show. Leigh Silverman directs. 212 967 7555, publictheater.org 'SUNDAY' at the Atlantic Theater Company at the Linda Gross Theater (in previews; opens on Sept. 23). Having conquered the wizarding world in "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" and having grappled with a giant ape in "King Kong," the playwright Jack Thorne joins a book group. In this new play, directed by Lee Sunday Evans, a group of friends meets to discuss fact and fiction. 866 811 4111, atlantictheater.org 'THE SWIMMER' at the Minetta Lane Theater (Sept. 26 28). The distance swimmer Diana Nyad plunges into the Minetta Lane in Audible's latest theatrical collaboration. In her stage debut, directed by Jane Anderson, Nyad recounts her 111 mile swim, sans shark cage, from Cuba to Florida. Nyad's coach and friend, Bonnie Stoll, also appears. audible.com/ep/minettalane 'WHITE NOISE' at the N.Y.U. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts (Sept. 20 22). With his masterly deconstruction of "Oklahoma!" now serving chili and cornbread to Broadway audiences, the director Daniel Fish turns to another American classic: this novel by the postmodernist Don DeLillo. The actor Bruce McKenzie performs several of the book's obsessive lists, with live accompaniment from the drummer Bobby Previte. nyuskirball.org 'EUREKA DAY' at Walkerspace (closes on Sept. 21). Colt Coeur's production of Jonathan Spector's infectious comedy about a vaccine debate at a private day school ends it run. Ben Brantley wrote that under Adrienne Campbell Holt's direction, the early scenes tend toward an easy satire, but the play as a whole "winds up engaging you on a much deeper, more compassionate level." coltcoeur.org 'MAKE BELIEVE' at the Tony Kiser Theater at Second Stage Theater (closes on Sept. 22). Bess Wohl's mysterious, moving play about four siblings, adrift as children and equally unsettled as adults, puts away childish things. Jesse Green described the two act show, which stars Samantha Mathis, Susannah Flood and Brad Heberlee and is directed by Michael Greif, as "a rich and moving contemporary drama." 212 246 4422, 2st.com 'SEA WALL/A LIFE' at the Hudson Theater (closes on Sept. 29). Make sure you have handkerchiefs at the ready for the final performances of Simon Stephens and Nick Payne's twinned one acts about love and life, which star Tom Sturridge and Jake Gyllenhaal. In an admiring review, Laura Collins Hughes described these plays, directed by Carrie Cracknell, as "the most stripped down storytelling on Broadway right now." 855 801 5876, thehudsonbroadway.com	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
The artist Jeff Koons, with an illustration of "Bouquet of Tulips" in 2016. It may now have a home at the Petit Palais in Paris. PARIS For two years, Jeff Koons sought an appropriate place here for his monumental gift to Paris, "Bouquet of Tulips." In three hours on Thursday, he found a garden, which may provide the end to a saga that has agitated France's cultural circles since November 2016. City officials said on Friday that Mr. Koons had agreed to install his colorful sculpture intended as a tribute to the victims of the 2015 and 2016 terrorist attacks and announced with great fanfare in 2016 in the gardens of the Petit Palais, which is the home of an art museum near the Champs Elysee Mr. Koons only donated the sculpture's concept. A private foundation raised the production and installation costs of 3 million euros (about 3.5 million), which are financed half by French donations, and half by donations by Americans. "It was urgent to find a place after too much political rambling," Christophe Girard, the deputy mayor in charge of cultural affairs, said on Friday, after he visited the new location with Mr. Koons the day earlier. "What's at stake goes beyond arts." The American artist still needs a definitive green light and logistical studies need to be completed, but Mr. Girard said that the location met all the criteria and that the inauguration would likely take place in 2019. Mr. Koons, whose sculpture was inspired by the Statue of Liberty, said in 2016 that he wanted the work, a hand holding a fistful of balloon flowers, to "communicate a sense of future, of optimism, the joy of offering." He described it as a proof of the longstanding French American friendship in troubled times. Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, has called it "a diplomatic gift as much as an artistic one." The piece, which is made of bronze, aluminum and stainless steel, is one of the artist's largest it is 34 feet high, 27 feet wide and 32 feet deep. But what was supposed to be a buoyant present has morphed into a heavy burden. Mr. Koons and city officials had first agreed that the "Bouquet" would be installed in the plaza in front of the Palais de Tokyo, an area popular with tourists located across the Seine, with a view of the Eiffel Tower. Yet as the plan lingered for months, general discontent over the artist's intentions started to dovetail with technical challenges over the feasibility of the project. In January, French artists, politicians and cultural figures asked for the plan to be abandoned, writing in a letter published by the newspaper Liberation that the apparent donation "would amount to advertising or product placement." The letter, which included signatures from the artist Christian Boltanski and a former culture minister, Frederic Mitterrand, said Mr. Koons's work symbolized "a type of industrial, spectacular and speculative art." "We appreciate gifts," the letter said, but ones that are "free, unconditional and without ulterior motives." A few months later, the Culture Minister Francoise Nyssen dropped the initial plans, arguing that the sculpture was too heavy for the plaza's pavement and that it should stand somewhere "popular, visible and shared by everyone." As the project dragged on, the sculpture was sitting in a German warehouse. There was an uproar from critics who argued that the gesture was clumsy and opportunistic, if not cynical, as Mr. Koons didn't have a direct connection to the terrorist attacks.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Travelers who aren't tied to a family turkey dinner this Thanksgiving may want to consider trips abroad. Some packages even include a traditional Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings. Here are a few options. At Renaissance Tuscany Il Ciocco Resort and Spa, in the peaceful Serchio Valley of Italy's Tuscany region, a Thanksgiving package includes a room with a view, daily breakfast and dinner for two for EUR210 per night (about 250; compared to EUR230 per night, without meals). A three course Thanksgiving feast is included, with a menu of roasted turkey, cranberry sauce and mashed sweet potatoes. Grace Cafayate, a hotel and estancia in Argentina's Calchaqui Valley, is offering a local twist on a typical Thanksgiving celebration. A traditional Argentine asado has been reimagined as a Thanksgiving barbecue under the stars, with clay oven baked turkey, vegetables off the parrilla, mashed potatoes and classic apple pie, all paired with local wine. The barbecue can be served on the patio of guests' private villa or in an outdoor dining area overlooking the hotel's vineyards. This villa package includes buffet breakfast, Thanksgiving dinner for two, and access to the hotel spa for 330, with additional nights available from 210 per night (compared to 245 per night without meals). At Canopy by Hilton Reykjavik City Center, in Iceland, a Northern Lights package includes a 20 percent discount coupon to a Northern Lights Tour, complimentary admission to Aurora Reykjavik Northern Lights Center and scenic rooftop tastings with alcoholic drinks and light bites. Over the Thanksgiving weekend, king premium rooms are available for 479 per night.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Jason Richards is known as Seinfeld2000 on Twitter, where he explains what the world would be like if "Seinfeld" were on TV today. He messaged me recently to explain that he was incensed by the misuse of a meme that he says he popularized three years ago. This meme consists of adding the theme music from "Curb Your Enthusiasm" to an unrelated video clip, often zooming in on someone who is visibly trapped in an awkward situation and thereby making light of the person. In 2019, he said, he is looking to help end the meme. I invited him to tell me more, so he did. (This interview was stitched together from many, many direct messages, and a telephone conversation, and edited for clarity, coherence and grammar.) JONAH ENGEL BROMWICH Jason Richards: Thank you. Before we get into it, I just want to preface this by saying I'm glad you're taking some time to discuss this serious subject. I understand that this is a confusing time for digital media. Instagram keeps adding widgets and baubles nobody wants in an effort to make us spend more time staring into Kylie Jenner's vacant eyes. Most of Facebook's users are dead. News publishing start ups are struggling, with companies like Mic being sold because they spent their funding on a gold foosball table that says WOKE on it that doesn't work because every player is a replica of Colin Kaepernick taking a knee. These days the desire to create shareable content is stronger than Stephen Miller's desire for hair that looks as real as it does on the outside of the can. First of all it's a vertical video. You know, let's have the wherewithal to record horizontally here, this isn't Aunt Linda using her Android for the first time. Let's rein it in, let's be calm enough to hold the phone in the correct position, first of all. We're recording a flat screen and not even facing the TV at the correct angle; it's off to the side. This is so haphazard. We see someone's disgusting cupboard above the television. Now we're zooming in manually. This is pathetic. And also ... this is funny on its own. One thing I make sure of is the person we're zeroing in on has some philosophical situational kinship to Larry David. This guy is trolling Trump. He's not in an uncomfortable situation; he holds the power here. I can't really think of an episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" where Larry David emerges victorious and is getting his reward as the camera swoops in on him. It's a complete inversion of the "Curb" formula. It's just fundamentally wrong. This meme isn't about just identifying anything, isolating it and putting in the music. Jaden Smith? I would expect this type of online self indulgence from Will, Jada, Willow or even Trey, but I thought you had more integrity than this. I guess I was wrong. Why do so many of these include the president? The not very funny answer is that Trump is such a dominant figure across all media. And a lot of people on Twitter want to see him look like a loser. How can you get mad at people for ripping you off when the meme is taken from somewhere else? I've sort of appointed myself the social media guardian of Larry David and HBO slash Warner Media's intellectual property. I justify that by being something of an originator, I might go as far to call myself a pioneer of this meme, much like Marie Curie or Alexander Graham Bell, spreading knowledge of a pre existing truth. I suppose maybe the best way to say this is that within the territory of Twitter, I am the gatekeeper of this meme, this particular way of using this content. Larry David has no social presence. In a way, I'm his unintentional surrogate and I like to think that he would absolutely agree. In fact, if you happen to reach out to Larry David for this article and he declines to comment or doesn't respond, that silence would qualify as absolute consent and complete agreement with me. Mr. David did, in fact, respond, when asked to comment on the phenomenon. "I don't know anything about this," he said in an email. "Every now and then someone will send me something with 'Curb' music at the end. Some of them I find mildly amusing, some not. Have never really given it any thought except for wondering why anyone would do it." I wonder if you can retire a meme. It kind of reminds me of the cartoonist who drew Pepe. (Matt Furie's creation, Pepe the frog, was appropriated by white supremacists, leading him, in one memorable phrase, to go "legally nuclear.") Oh yeah Matt Furie ... but I think that kind of worked in the long run! I am retiring the "Curb Your Enthusiasm" meme on Jan. 1, 2019. Beginning next year, no one will be allowed to make a video where they zoom in on an uncomfortable moment and add the "Curb Your Enthusiasm" theme song to it capped with an abrupt end credit. And you might say: Seinfeld2000, how ever will you enforce this ban? As usual, I'm already 100 steps ahead of you. I'm working with disgraced Twitter C.E.O. Jack Dorsey to ensure that anyone who attempts to post one of these memes will be immediately exiled from the platform. Just to give you an update on this plan, so far, I have DM'ed Jack with the proposal and I am awaiting a response. As soon as he reads my DM, I'm sure he'll make this initiative his top priority, over adding an edit button or banning Nazis, people who send death threats, and worse, people who link to their SoundCloud accounts the moment a tweet gets over 500 RTs. If this plan doesn't work for WHATEVER reason, here are three tips for when you're attempting to make your own Curb Your Enthusiasm meme, which will never be as good as mine, to seem less pathetic: None Choose good moments. In today's always on culture, cringe worthy events happen all the time. Be a good editor and pick only the moments that will work best. Usually these will have to be drawn out and painful enough to accommodate the first 12 seconds of the "Curb Your Enthusiasm" theme and have a character suffering in the center of it all. Have you found a moment where an athlete laughs awkwardly for a moment? That's not quite right. I know, but everyone on Twitter is laughing about it. Still, be strong. A better moment will come along soon. Let the hacks take this one on. None No sloppy iPhone screen records. Download the video and open it in iMovie and use the Ken Burns effect, just like the professionals do. This is the Curb Your Enthusiasm meme, not amateur hour at Captain Johnny's Two Cent Peanut Circus . Have some respect. None Stay true to "Curb Your Enthusiasm." No juxtaposing credits over the video or cutting the shape of the video square. Is that what the show is like? No. Do you even watch the show? Lastly, I just want to leave you with a thought. One thing I've always tried to promote on my Twitter account is the idea of imagination. I ask what "Seinfeld" would be like today and like to make my own suggestions, but there's really no wrong answer. The only real answer is: "Seinfeld" today is whatever you want it to be. Is it imaginative to just use the "Curb Your Enthusiasm" meme anytime something slightly weird happens on TV or social media? That's a rhetorical question, and so I'm not obligated to answer, and yet I will: It simply is not. And so that's why I am leaving this tired meme, which I am largely responsible for, in 2018, which is almost over.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
As part of the ongoing 8 billion transformation of New York's La Guardia Airport, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has announced a partnership with the Public Art Fund for permanent site specific installations by leading contemporary artists to help reimagine this gateway to the city. Four internationally recognized artists Jeppe Hein, Sabine Hornig, Laura Owens and Sarah Sze have been commissioned by LaGuardia Gateway Partners, together with the New York based nonprofit for public art, to execute large scale projects integrated throughout the architecture of the arrivals and departures hall of the new Terminal B, expected to open later this year. The budget for the art program is close to 10 million. "To say, 'That looks like airport art' wouldn't be a compliment," said Nicholas Baume, director and chief curator of the Public Art Fund, of the kind of generic, corporate looking artworks often found in airports. "We're really trying to turn that on its head. It's very seldom that you see something that's conceived for the site by a major artist." Mr. Hein, a Danish artist based in Berlin, makes playful sculptures that promote social interaction between strangers. Ms. Hornig, also from Berlin, does architectural interventions on windows and facades that challenge the way viewers understand their surroundings. Ms. Owens, a Los Angeles based artist known for her eclectic and experimental approach to painting, was celebrated in a survey exhibition at the Whitney Museum. And the installation artist Ms. Sze, a resident of New York, has already made a permanent civic imprint with her 2017 commission for the 96th Street Station of the Second Avenue subway line.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
In the newest episode of "Star Trek: Discovery," directed by T.J. Scott, we return to Talos IV, where the initial unaired pilot of the original series took place. You might remember, it was called "The Cage," and featured Pike as the centerpiece of the crew, rather than Kirk, whom we all came to know and love. The episode, shot in the 1960s, was scrapped (although it is now available on Netflix), because it didn't impress NBC executives at the time. It also was very sexist! At one point, Pike expresses his displeasure with having a woman on the bridge. The original series did return to Talos IV, in a classic two parter of the original series called "The Menagerie." In that episode, Spock runs afoul of Starfleet and steals the Enterprise to send it to the forbidden planet. In "Discovery," Starfleet is on the hunt for Spock again, although for different reasons. "If Memory Serves," which is a convoluted but absolutely delightful episode, has several bits of catnip for Trek aficionados. The one that I appreciated most was near the end of the episode, when Pike says to Spock, "Is that a smile I see on your face?" In "The Cage," the original pilot, the episode's tone was much different and Leonard Nimoy's Spock is seen smiling, something we rarely, if ever, see again. In "Discovery," Ethan Peck's Spock has guided Burnham to Talos IV because the Talosians, a race that can converse telepathically and project images over long distances, can help Spock make sense of what is happening in his mind. Namely, he is experiencing time in a "fluid, rather than a linear construct." He must free himself from "conventional logic." I'll note: the Talosians are a bit more benevolent in this edition of "Star Trek" than the original series, and help the Discovery crew elude Section 31. Vina, the woman who crash landed on Talos IV and developed a deep affection for Pike in "The Cage," plays a crucial part in reconnecting Burnham and Spock to Pike. Anson Mount does excellent work here when he is startled by seeing Vina again. He has filled the Lorca role of the charismatic captain quite well this season. This is the first episode in which we really see what kind of Spock we are going to see in "Discovery." Peck's Spock is clearly bitter toward Burnham and not afraid to flash anger, certainly more so than the adult versions of Spock we have become used to. It's revealed that Spock's anger toward Burnham is a result of Burnham telling him, as a child, that he is a "half breed" and mocking his ancestry, in a misguided attempt to escape home to keep the family safe from Vulcan extremists. It seems like an odd reason for them to have fallen out for all these years, especially given that they both end up in Starfleet. Also, Spock didn't murder anyone from Starfleet. He neck pinched a doctor and knocked out a couple security guards. So Starfleet is engaged in a cover up of a decorated officer, as Spock shows in a flashback. The most concrete knowledge we have of the Red Angel, at this point, also comes from Spock: He or she is a human intent on changing the timeline we are all living in, which ends with the destruction of all sentient beings. No biggie! By the end of the episode, the Discovery, as Saru puts it, is "the most wanted ship in the galaxy." So now, the rogue ship will go on the run, promising no shortage of unusual hijinx for the rest of this season. I had a bit of trouble following the episode, mostly because I don't understand why Starfleet sees Spock as such a threat. One unidentified member of the brass says at the beginning of the episode that "Spock's foreknowledge of these signals appearing around the galaxy and his interactions with the Red Angel constitute vital intelligence." O.K., so why treat him as a murder suspect? Why not work with him to learn more? I won't delve too much into the B storyline of the episode: Namely, sulking Hugh Culber. The former ship's doctor is angry at the world, and particularly angry at Stamets, although he doesn't really know why. This plotline felt distracting. I was especially baffled when no one stepped in to break up the fight between Culber and Tyler, but I couldn't get too angry about it the "Discovery" writers don't seem to know what to do with either character. The members of the Discovery bridge crew grow unusually antagonistic to Tyler, eventually confining him to quarters, accusing him of sabotage. Tyler's presence on the ship has been strange and toothless to me from the start, so again, this was a plotline I couldn't get invested in. But overall, now that we're finally moving forward with the season's central mystery, the episode worked for me. Peck is acquitting himself just fine as Spock. It's clear that the Vulcan loses faith in the human side of himself as he gets older, and the underlying anger in Peck's portrayal is subtle but clear.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Scientists for the first time have successfully edited genes in human embryos to repair a common and serious disease causing mutation, producing apparently healthy embryos, according to a study published on Wednesday. The research marks a major milestone and, while a long way from clinical use, it raises the prospect that gene editing may one day protect babies from a variety of hereditary conditions. But the achievement is also an example of human genetic engineering, once feared and unthinkable, and is sure to renew ethical concerns that some might try to design babies with certain traits, like greater intelligence or athleticism. Scientists have long feared the unforeseen medical consequences of making inherited changes to human DNA. The cultural implications may be just as disturbing: Some experts have warned that unregulated genetic engineering may lead to a new form of eugenics, in which people with means pay to have children with enhanced traits even as those with disabilities are devalued. The study, published in the journal Nature, comes just months after a national scientific committee recommended new guidelines for modifying embryos, easing blanket proscriptions but urging the technique be used only for dire medical problems. "We've always said in the past gene editing shouldn't be done, mostly because it couldn't be done safely," said Richard Hynes, a cancer researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who co led the committee. "That's still true, but now it looks like it's going to be done safely soon," he said, adding that the research is "a big breakthrough." "What our report said was, once the technical hurdles are cleared, then there will be societal issues that have to be considered and discussions that are going to have to happen. Now's the time." Scientists at Oregon Health and Science University, with colleagues in California, China and South Korea, reported that they repaired dozens of embryos, fixing a mutation that causes a common heart condition that can lead to sudden death later in life. The researchers averted two important safety problems: They produced embryos in which all cells not just some were mutation free, and they avoided creating unwanted extra mutations. "It feels a bit like a 'one small step for (hu)mans, one giant leap for (hu)mankind' moment," Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist who helped discover the gene editing method used, called CRISPR Cas9, said in an email. "I expect these results will be encouraging to those who hope to use human embryo editing for either research or eventual clinical purposes," said Dr. Doudna, who was not involved in the study. Much more research is needed before the method could be tested in clinical trials, currently impermissible under federal law. But if the technique is found to work safely with this and other mutations, it might help some couples who could not otherwise have healthy children. Potentially, it could apply to any of more than 10,000 conditions caused by specific inherited mutations. Researchers and experts said those might include breast and ovarian cancer linked to BRCA mutations, as well as diseases like Huntington's, Tay Sachs, beta thalassemia, and even sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis or some cases of early onset Alzheimer's. "You could certainly help families who have been blighted by a horrible genetic disease," said Robin Lovell Badge, a professor of genetics and embryology at the Francis Crick Institute in London, who was not involved in the study. In other cells in the body, the editing process is carried out by genes that copy a DNA template introduced by scientists. In these embryos, the sperm cell's mutant gene ignored that template and instead copied the healthy DNA sequence from the egg cell. "We were so surprised that we just couldn't get this template that we made to be used," said Shoukhrat Mitalipov, director of the Center for Embryonic Cell and Gene Therapy at Oregon Health and Science University and senior author of the study. "It was very new and unusual." The research significantly improves upon previous efforts. In three sets of experiments in China since 2015, researchers seldom managed to get the intended change into embryonic genes. And some embryos had cells that did not get repaired a phenomenon called mosaicism that could result in the mutation being passed on as well as unplanned mutations that could cause other health problems. In February, a National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine committee endorsed modifying embryos, but only to correct mutations that cause "a serious disease or condition" and when no "reasonable alternatives" exist. Sheldon Krimsky, a bioethicist at Tufts University, said the main uncertainty about the new technique was whether "reasonable alternatives" to gene editing already exist. As the authors themselves noted, many couples use pre implantation genetic diagnosis to screen embryos at fertility clinics, allowing only healthy ones to be implanted. For these parents, gene editing could help by repairing mutant embryos so that more disease free embryos would be available for implantation. Hank Greely, director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford, said creating fewer defective embryos also would reduce the number discarded by fertility clinics, which some people oppose. The larger issue is so called germline engineering, which refers to changes made to embryo that are inheritable. For now, the fight is theoretical. Congress has barred the Food and Drug Administration from considering clinical trials involving germline engineering. And the National Institutes of Health is prohibited from funding gene editing research in human embryos. (The new study was funded by Oregon Health and Science University, the Institute for Basic Science in South Korea, and several foundations.) The authors say they hope that once the method is optimized and studied with other mutations, officials in the United States or another country will allow regulated clinical trials. "I think it could be widely used, if it's proven safe," said Dr. Paula Amato, a co author of the study and reproductive endocrinologist at O.H.S.U. Besides creating more healthy embryos for in vitro fertilization, she said, it could be used when screening embryos is not an option or to reduce arduous IVF cycles for women. Dr. Mitalipov has pushed the scientific envelope before, generating ethical controversy with a so called three parent baby procedure that would place the nucleus of the egg of a woman with defective cellular mitochondria into the egg from a healthy woman. The F.D.A. has not approved trials of the method, but Britain may begin one soon. The new study involves hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a disease affecting about one in 500 people, which can cause sudden heart failure, often in young athletes. It is caused by a mutation in a gene called MYBPC3. If one parent has a mutated copy, there is a 50 percent chance of passing the disease to children. Using sperm from a man with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and eggs from 12 healthy women, the researchers created fertilized eggs. Injecting CRISPR Cas9, which works as a genetic scissors, they snipped out the mutated DNA sequence on the male MYBPC3 gene. The method was not perfect. The remaining 16 embryos had unwanted additions or deletions of DNA. Dr. Mitalipov said he believed fine tuning the process would make at least 90 percent of embryos mutation free. And for disease causing mutations on maternal genes, the same process should occur, with the father's healthy genetic sequence being copied, he said. But the technique will not work if both parents have two defective copies. Then, scientists would have to determine how to coax one gene to copy a synthetic DNA sequence, Dr. Mitalipov said. Otherwise, he said, it should work with many diseases, "a variety of different heritable mutations." R. Alta Charo, a bioethicist at University of Wisconsin at Madison, who led the committee with Dr. Hynes, said the new discovery could also yield more information about causes of infertility and miscarriages. She doubts a flood of couples will have "edited children." "Nobody's going to do this for trivial reasons," Dr. Charo said. "Sex is cheaper and it's more fun than IVF, so unless you've got a real need, you're not going to use it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Man travels to Paris. Man falls in love with a woman at a furniture store he's adored since he pored over its catalog as a child. Man promises to meet the woman at the Eiffel Tower. Man fails to keep his promise because the armoire he's sleeping in gets shipped to Britain overnight, entwining his fate with those of migrants across Europe. That's the premise of "The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir," a picaresque chronicle of a poor Indian magician, Aja (Dhanush), that dispenses whimsy in epic proportions. Aja's story unfolds in flashback as he tells it to a group of boys who are preparing to go to prison. The tale is, if nothing else, inspirational.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
DETROIT Lindsey Simon is a truck lover, so checking out the redesigned Ford F 150 will be one of the first things she does when she visits the North American International Auto Show. But not the very first thing that will be to make a beeline for the Michigan Hall in Cobo Center, where her grand prize winning poster will be displayed when the show opens to the public on Jan. 18. Ms. Simon, a senior at the Romeo Engineering and Technology Center about 45 miles northeast of Detroit, beat 988 entries, a record, from 73 Michigan high schools in the 26th annual contest. The poster also appears in the Detroit auto show program and on other promotional material. "I'm really, really excited to go and experience that," she said, adding that she planned to take her boyfriend and other pals. The poster features a white outlined red car of her own design. "I went back and looked at previous winners to try to find out what direction I wanted to go in," Ms. Simon, 17, said in a telephone interview. "I wanted something retro, but with a modern twist. Sleek, but simple. And I wanted the car to be the focus." Her advanced graphics design teacher had made the contest a class design project. "Originally we all just thought of it as just another class assignment, not looking at it like it could take us somewhere in the future," Ms. Simon said. "Then we got excited."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
THE odyssey of Hilda Segovia offers a vivid illustration of why Hispanic students are often less prepared to weather the adventure of college and more vulnerable to giving up once they begin. Slender, pale and bashful, Ms. Segovia is a 25 year old woman who came to New York from Ecuador illegally six years ago. After working several low wage jobs like running food to the tables at a French restaurant, she decided to improve her English so she might get a job as a waitress. She enrolled in a free English as a second language class at LaGuardia Community College's continuing education program, located in an industrial warren of western Queens. There, a teacher set her off on her elusive quest. "He told me I could make something more of myself besides just learning English, have a degree in something," she said. But she soon found out how little equipped she was for college study. Not only was Ms. Segovia's English rocky, but she had only the mistiest notions of what college was all about. "I didn't know what a credit was," she said. "I felt ashamed to ask other students." She had to learn the ropes on her own. Her parents couldn't help. They had stopped their education back in Ecuador at the end of the primary grades, so for them college might as well have been an ungraspable mirage. Once Ms. Segovia made the plunge, she quickly learned that as an illegal immigrant she could not qualify for government aid (though no federal law prohibits illegal immigrants from attending college). After one year in the college's noncredit language immersion program and a second year taking two courses, she has earned a 3.78 grade point average. She wonders whether she will be able to stay the course and graduate with an associate degree. Her husband, an electrical worker, has supported her studies, but she has already spent 6,000 and will soon exhaust their savings. Ms. Segovia is unable to work full time to help defray costs because she has a 4 year old son. "Even if I get a degree, I will still be illegal," she said dejectedly. "I hope my luck changes." Ms. Segovia's story is the kind that offers valuable if humbling lessons to policy makers as they wrestle with what to do about an achievement gap that is often neglected in the public debates about education. Among the major ethnic groups, Hispanics appear to have the weakest rates for going to college and actually attaining a degree once there. Only 13 percent of Hispanic adults have received at least a bachelor's degree, compared with 31 percent of non Hispanic whites, 18 percent of blacks and 50 percent of Asians, Census studies show. The proportion of 16 to 19 year old Latinos who have dropped out of high school 9 percent is more than twice as high as that for whites, four times as high as Asians, and higher than the rate for blacks, which is 7 percent, according to an analysis of 2008 Census data by the Pew Hispanic Center. And only 28 percent of college age Latinos are enrolled in college, compared with 45 percent of whites, 64 percent of Asians and 34 percent of blacks. 'In Ecuador, 40 years ago, the education wasn't important. My grandmother doesn't know how to write. She never went to school. She asks people to read to her and explain what is written there. I was the first in my family to go to college.' HILDA SEGOVIA The data are partly a statistical fallacy because a majority of the Latinos counted are immigrants, many with weak English skills. When only native born Hispanics are counted, the gaps narrow; dropout and college endurance statistics roughly match those of blacks. Still, there remains a large gap with Asians and whites. Such gaps are sure to get more attention as Hispanics become a larger share of the population. In a decade, Latinos are expected to make up 20 percent of the college age population. Their performance could turn out to be a critical issue for President Obama, who last year challenged the country to lead the world by 2020 in students completing college. The United States ranks seventh in the proportion of adults enrolled in college, at 34 percent, compared with top ranked South Korea at 53 percent. Experts say they doubt that Mr. Obama's goal will be met unless a significantly larger proportion of Latinos graduate. They express concern that an increasingly vocal strain of anti immigrant sentiment demonstrated in the Arizona law passed this year that grants local police greater authority to check the legal status of people they stop would discourage Latinos from pursuing college studies. Why there is a lag in Hispanic educational achievement continues to frustrate educators and experts, and a whole range of causes are cited. The Pew Hispanic Center has surveyed the Latino population and, according to Mark Hugo Lopez, the associate director, the reasons are both economic and cultural. Pew surveys show that Latino parents say they value education as much as any other group. But when Pew interviewed 16 to 25 year olds who cut their education short during or right after high school, it found that nearly three quarters said they did so because they had to help their family, Mr. Lopez said. Four in 10 said they didn't need more education for the occupations they were pursuing. In addition, young Latinas are more likely to be teenage mothers whose need to care for infants makes attending college difficult. To Deborah Santiago, vice president for policy and research at Excelencia in Education, a Washington based advocacy group for Hispanic students, "the challenge is to link aspiration, which is high, with actualization, which is low." She added: "If you are not working, and paying a school to take classes, those are economic costs for a family, and low income families in every ethnic group face that economic challenge continually." Also, many immigrant parents were not well educated in their home countries; 34 percent of foreign born Hispanic adults have less than a ninth grade education, according to Census data. "One of the biggest predictors of educational attainment is the mother's education level," Ms. Santiago said. "If the mother doesn't have a good education, than the child is not going to have a good education." That means that college ambitions will not be on an immigrant family's front burner and, even if they are, parents may not understand the options available like the ability of high performing students to apply to selective out of town colleges or exploit scholarship programs. Ms. Santiago, 41, the daughter of Puerto Rican migrants who settled in the Washington, D.C., area, recalled that "my parents didn't know what it would take to get to college," and in 1986 she chose the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va., then a small liberal arts college, because a third cousin had attended. 'I came here in 2005 from Ecuador. I took free English classes and then I went into the immersion program. I learned all the English I know now. Even though I don't have papers, I think I can finish a degree.' XIMENA SANTOS "I figured it out on my own," she said. She counts herself lucky that she went to a small school even if it only had 17 Latinos at the time because professors gave her more attention, she says, and financial aid counselors told her about scholarships no one else had applied for. Once in college, Latino students often find it harder than students from other ethnic groups to navigate the system. They are more likely to find themselves bogged down in remedial and E.S.L. courses for no credit and see the hurdles to college completion growing more difficult rather than easier. In public colleges particularly, there might not be enough guidance counselors to goad, console or advise them. Ximena Santos, 22, an Ecuadorian immigrant, said that until she started LaGuardia's English immersion program, she didn't know what an essay was. In her high school, brief answers were the norm. Because she, too, is undocumented and cannot qualify for government aid, she has supported her studies by working as a waitress or in Long Island City's jewelry factories and with help from her mother, a restaurant cook. To remedy ignorance of college logistics, Excelencia and other advocates recommend the kind of learning communities that can be found at LaGuardia, a branch of the City University of New York, or at the University of Texas, El Paso, or El Camino College in Torrance, Calif. All are regarded under federal guidelines as Hispanic serving colleges, meaning more than 25 percent of students are Hispanic. About 200 institutions across the country the highest concentrations being in California, New Mexico, Texas and New York meet the designation, which makes them eligible for special funds. The concept of learning communities is that groups of students who stick together through much of their daily coursework can help one another when stumped, or inform one another about tactical matters. "Because we're a commuter school, students take classes and leave campus, and it's hard to build relationships with other students," said Marian Blaber, who directs LaGuardia's language immersion program and administers a 50,000 Excelencia grant to provide and train counselors who, among other things, help students balance their array of courses and find tutors for difficult subjects like chemistry. The grant is called Semillas, Spanish for seeds. Excelencia doles out 1 million in such grants each year around the country to help students segue into college, with funds provided by philanthropies like the Wal Mart Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Caroline Zapata, the 21 year old daughter of a Midtown Manhattan maintenance man from Colombia, says that her fellow classmates help her with pronunciation and can explain enigmatic concepts. "Sometimes the professor speaks very fast and I'm confused and I don't want to interrupt the class and ask the professor, so the other students explain it to me afterward," she said in still halting English. "I also feel like I'm not the only one in class so I feel encouraged to study again and again. And I see people who are similar to me who are doing even worse." Preparation in high school is crucial, educators say. There are high schools with Hispanic majorities that strategically encourage students to focus on getting into college starting in the 10th grade. At the Bronx High School of Medical Science, a small school of 400 students in the former Taft High School building, all but one or two of its graduates go on to college. 'My father wants me to keep studying. He's very strict. He tells me, 'Keep studying and never leave college.' He works as a maintenance man in a building in Times Square. We came over from Colombia three years ago.' CAROLINE ZAPATA The school has teachers like Edwin Calderon, a math instructor who himself had been an example of the problem and is now part of the solution. When he was a teenager in the early 1980s, he, like too many Latino youngsters, felt that graduating from high school was achievement enough. "My mom graduated fourth grade, so that was a big accomplishment," he said. Rather than toil through four years of college, he was set on joining the blue collar workforce. Luckily, a math teacher, impressed by his gift for deciphering the labyrinthine pathways of numbers, insisted he go to college and helped him sign up for the SAT and fill out undergraduate applications. That encounter led to his admission to the State University of New York at Stony Brook. After graduation, he became a financial analyst, then switched to teaching math and found his way to the Medical Science high school, near the Grand Concourse, not far from where he grew up. It is one of six compact high schools on Taft's campus, and 70 percent of its students are Hispanic. It is also one of 12 Bronx high schools that receive enrichment through Lehman College to prepare 11th graders for college level math courses. The Bronx Center for Teaching Innovations at Lehman provides tutors for students and trains teachers and furnishes them with educational technology and teaching guides a treasure chest of, for example, mathematical mind benders. The other day, Mr. Calderon departed from the calculus and precalculus instruction in his 11th grade math class and added an offbeat algebraic problem. What if a math teacher gave half the coins in his pocket, plus one, to a student and continued to divvy coins up this way to three other students until he had none left. "How many coins did he have at the beginning?" Mr. Calderon asked. Three students went up to the board and using different approaches two starting from the teacher's first gift of coins, the others working backward from the last gift came up with the answer of 30. That delighted Mr. Calderon because the students had sliced through a problem using their own "out of the box" conceptions and had not resorted to a single formula. That analytical talent will help them in college, he said. "Kids need the realization that you approach problems different ways," he said. Mr. Calderon, a sturdily built and self assured man who has boxed professionally, talked later of several students who did not believe they had the ability to handle college, or whose parents had told them to stay home and have babies, and how they had gained confidence by solving problems in his class. Yet, from his own upbringing as one of six children, he says he knows how chancy the odds can be for students raised in poor, single parent families. One of Mr. Calderon's siblings did become a psychiatrist, and another an assistant principal, but three others, he says, had their prospects cut short by drugs and crime. At Bronx Medical Science, the odds of making it all the way to a college diploma are also not that good. Students have been admitted to, and gotten through, selective colleges like Columbia and Brandeis. But administrators say they worry about those who attend CUNY. Of the 24 Medical Science students who started CUNY's community or senior colleges in fall 2007, fewer than half were enrolled by the spring of 2009. William Quintana, the school's exuberant principal, does not blame the colleges alone. Too many families, he said, take trips to their home countries when their jobs permit, pulling their children out of school during an important time for learning or tests. Older children in single parent homes must drop off younger siblings at other schools, even if it means missing class. "Families need to change their perspectives about education," he said. "They must make education a priority." 'I was in school every day at 10 a.m. until they kicked me out of the building. I work harder, I'm a little more desperate. I've been living by myself since I was 18 years old. I got to pay my rent, buy my food.' CAROL DIAZ Mr. Quintana worked the night shift as an Upper East Side doorman after he emigrated from Colombia in the 1980s while taking courses in teaching. He encourages his students to take college credit courses through CUNY's free College Now program, at Lehman, Hostos Community College and Bronx Community College. Half his students do. When parents feel their children are being burdened, he tells them epigrammatically: "All of those dropping this course will end up working for those that remain." "Hard work will always result in a higher position," he said. But he and other educators concede that taking such courses is not a simple matter. Kasmira Torres, a junior at Lehman who tutors Medical Science students, told of working with some who juggle two jobs to support their parents, and others who dash home after school to baby sit younger siblings. Anne Walsh, head of the Bronx Center for Teaching Innovations, said she still doesn't know whether the enrichment program, which started last September, will succeed. Some teachers, she said, "have embraced the program more than others." The laggers, she said, seem to find it hard to squeeze enrichment activities into lessons because the high school curriculum is so packed and needs to be completed in time for the Regents exams. The LaGuardia learning communities for accelerated students part of a 6.5 million, three year program that offers free tuition, stipends for books and free subway and bus passes has seen more encouraging results. More than a third of the first cohort of 1,132 students was Hispanic. Donna Linderman, director of the program, which is CUNY wide, said that Hispanic students who started in fall 2007 had more than twice the two year and three year graduation rates 27 percent and 57 percent respectively of a comparison group. The road to a degree for many must begin with language immersion. Carol Diaz, a cheerful 21 year old from the Dominican Republic, said that a counselor in the program had helped her select college credit courses that would not set her up for failure and coached her with tips for success for example, that sitting in the front of her class would force her to pay better attention. Such advice was important for Ms. Diaz, the daughter of estranged parents who has been living on her own practically since she came here at age 18, paying her own rent and food bills. She continues to work 12 hours every weekend as a dental assistant. "My parents didn't go to college and they don't believe in that," she said with a flash of anger. "They don't care about my education." She wants to be an occupational therapist and so far has successfully completed three courses in biology, community health and English and has gotten good grades by spending long hours reviewing the content in a language she still is not completely comfortable with. "I was in school every day at 10 a.m. until they kicked me out of the building," she said. "People don't know how high they can reach. They feel they can make enough money cleaning house." She is already talking about staying on track all the way to a doctorate so she can open her own occupational therapy clinic. A goal like that may just propel her all the way through to a college degree.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
LONDON Emma Rice, whose short stint as the artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe ended with a spat with the board and a sudden departure from the role, wrote a spirited letter to her successor that was posted to the theater's website this week. In the letter, addressed to the as yet unnamed "future artistic director" of the theater, Ms. Rice described the position as the "most precious of jobs," and suggested that her decision to leave resulted from disagreements with the theater's board. "As important and beloved as the Globe is to me, the Board did not love and respect me back," she wrote, adding: "They began to talk of a new set of rules that I did not sign up to and could not stand by. Nothing is worth giving away my artistic freedom for it has been too hard fought for." Ms. Rice, who came to the Globe from the immersive theater company Kneehigh, swan dived into her role in the spring of 2016, programming several tweaked updates of Shakespeare's plays, including "Imogen," a version of "Cymbeline" that reimagined the work as a female driven play; and a production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," starring the cabaret star Meow Meow. Before she took the job at the Globe, Ms. Rice had drawn headlines for comments including an oft circulated statement that she became "very sleepy" when trying to read Shakespeare's plays.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Kathleen Romano and Allyson Howard arrived well before daylight at Brooklyn's Coney Island Beach on July 27. Walking hand in hand in the cool, early morning darkness to a familiar soundtrack of crashing waves, they noticed flickering lights in the distance, and immediately stepped off the boardwalk to investigate. They soon discovered two long rows of candles placed parallel in the sand to form an aisle leading to a designated area along the shore where a ceremony would take place, a reminder to Dr. Romano, an open water swimmer, and Ms. Howard, a member of the Coney Island Polar Bear Club, that this was not just another day at the beach. Ms. Howard, a 59 year old legal assistant at a Manhattan law firm, also made the case that the beach, even in the thick of winter, has been her own house of worship. "It's the place where my prayers for finding the perfect soul mate were answered," she said, smiling at Dr. Romano as she spoke. Ms. Howard, a mother of two, was referring to a stretch of steamy days on nearby Brighton Beach in May 2017, when she first laid eyes on Dr. Romano, who lives and works in Washington Heights. (Dr. Romano is also a member of the Coney Island Brighton Beach Open Water Swimmers, or Cibbows). "I usually have the gift of gab," she said, "but I was so nervous whenever I tried making conversation with her that I couldn't string together a single sentence." Ms. Howard, one of the few Polar Bears still wandering the beach in May the Polar Bear season runs from November to April broke the ice by handing Dr. Romano her business card. This led to a series of small talks in the ensuing days that were made larger by Dr. Romano, a communication expert by trade. "I'm a therapist," she said. "I teach people to talk to each other, so there was no problem with the two of us chatting." During those chats, each revealed that they had not dated for years following the end of long term relationships. Dr. Romano had been single for 18 years upon the conclusion of a 15 year relationship, and Ms. Howard, a breast cancer survivor, had been unattached for 11 years after spending the previous 22 with the woman who helped raise their children. Dr. Romano was born in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, just three blocks from where Ms. Howard had raised her family. When she turned 18, she joined the Navy, serving three and a half years during the Vietnam era before embarking on an academic career in which she received four degrees: an associate of arts at Suffolk County Community College; a bachelor of arts in psychology at the University of Albany; a master's degree in psychology at Boston University, and a Ph.D. in counseling psychology at N.Y.U. They continued frolicking together at both beaches, albeit platonically, until early November 2017, when Ms. Howard sent Dr. Romano a text telling her that she had recently attended a photo exhibit in the Inwood section of Manhattan. "Isn't that up in your neck of the woods?" asked Ms. Howard, who holds a bachelor of fine arts in illustration from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, and is also a freelance wedding photographer. "I always travel to Midtown to meet friends because I live too far uptown for anyone to want to visit me," Dr. Romano said. "I thought that since she knew the area, it would be a nice change to stay home and host a dinner." While Ms. Howard thought it was a date, Dr. Romano, who was "clueless" as she put it, said simply, "I just thought I was inviting this nice straight lady to have dinner with me." Ms. Howard was not surprised. "I have two children and I wear very girlie bathing suits," she said. "I could see why anyone would think I was straight." But during their dinner conversation, Dr. Romano said she "began to realize," that she "had it all wrong." Indeed, there was nary a doubt left in her psychotherapeutic mind when she walked Ms. Howard back to the train station and received the kind of thank you kiss that Dr. Romano said "immediately turned on the light bulb in my head." "This is awesome," said Megan Druss, Ms. Howard's 24 year old daughter, standing next to her 19 year old brother, Jackson Druss, as she spoke. "Nothing about my mom is regular, so nothing about this wedding was going to be regular." They gathered and waited and chatted at the spot where Dr. Romano and Ms. Howard were soon to be married by Noelle Elia, a Universal Life minister and friend of the couple. "I saw the sparkle in Kathleen's eye when she first met Allyson," said Capri Djatiasmoro, a mutual friend who is both a Polar Bear and a Cibbow. "They say opposites attract, and that it is so true with Kathleen, who is very focused and determined, and Allyson, who is more free spirited and fun loving." Within minutes, all eyes turned back toward the boardwalk, where Dr. Romano, Ms. Howard and her children and two of the couples' best friends stood side by side, their hands joined in a horizontal love chain. They began moving forward in unison, or "Polar Bear style," as Ms. Howard put it. The guests began buzzing as the wedding group made their way down the beach, through the candlelit aisle, and back to the spot on the shore where the couple would exchange vows in a ceremony that included Jewish wedding traditions. "Now you will feel no rain, for each of you will be shelter to the other," said Ms. Elia, reading the first words of the "Apache Wedding Blessing." "Now you will feel no cold, for each of you will be warmth to the other." "What I really want to say is this," Ms. Howard, dressed in a white Lands' End cover up, said in the last half of her vows. "I promise to always be supportive, I promise to cherish you and the life we are building together, I promise I will love you forever, and I pray that forever will be long enough." After an exchange of rings, Dr. Romano and Ms. Howard were pronounced married, setting off a loud applause in their house of worship. The newly married couple then slipped out of their clothes their bathing suits were underneath and made their way through the crashing waves, now chilled and sudsy white beneath an overcast sky, as many of their guests dived in behind them. "This is the happiest I've ever seen my mom," Ms. Druss said. "She and Kathleen share a love for Coney Island, a love for all things different and a deep love for each other." Regina Kirk, a friend of Dr. Romano who was a classmate a half century ago at Suffolk County Community College, made the trip from Charlottesville, Va., to be at the wedding, as did many others from around the country. "I think their story is great," said Ms. Kirk, who has known Dr. Romano since 1968. "Allyson is marrying someone in Kathleen who is vivacious, outgoing, kind, generous and very smart." After the swim, the couple and their guests retreated to a reception held beneath three large tents behind the boardwalk. "The amount of friends and family that made it here today at such an early hour tells you all there is to know about how much love we have for Kathleen and Allyson," Ms. Djatiasmoro said. "This is truly a great tribute." Ms. Howard, who did most of the planning, agreed: "We wanted to make as big a splash as we could on our wedding day."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
DALLAS After making dances for half a century, Twyla Tharp could have celebrated with a victory lap, assembling an elite crew of dancers to tour a greatest hits program sampling some of the dazzling works that long ago earned her a ranking among the greatest and most influential of American choreographers. Instead, for the 50th anniversary tour that opened at the Winspear Opera House here on Friday and will conclude in New York in November, Ms. Tharp has fashioned a pair of new pieces: "Preludes and Fugues" and "Yowzie." These are unmistakably the work of a master. There is so much in them: so much variety, so much life. But not, truly, so much that is new. Individually and together, the works come across as summations, compendiums of what Ms. Tharp has learned and discovered over the decades about dance and making dances. "Preludes and Fugues" is set to Bach's encyclopedic "Well Tempered Clavier," and although Ms. Tharp doesn't include a prelude and fugue from every key, as Bach did, her choreography does encompass heavy slowness and floor skimming speed, the simple and the complex, foreground and background, comedy and despair, flirtatious sparring and romantic surrender, moves from ballet and moves from sports, in sequence and at the same time. She has written about how several sections of "Preludes and Fugues" include tributes to choreographers who influenced her early on: Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, Jerome Robbins and George Balanchine. But these tributes aren't quotes or even pastiche, and they aren't confined to the sections she's mentioned. Ms. Tharp is an artist of synthesis, and the influences (including that of the rarely mentioned precursor, Paul Taylor, in whose company Ms. Tharp briefly danced) were absorbed decades ago. There's nothing in the piece that you couldn't call Tharpian. It begins with a man and a woman (John Selya and Savannah Lowery) in a ballroom embrace, swaying to the arpeggios of the Prelude No. 1 in C as if in one of Ms. Tharp's dances to Sinatra songs. The mixing of Bach and ballroom is very Tharp. It's not ironic; it's assimilative, it's let's have it all. She claims Bach as she claims ballet. She understands the logic of a fugue, so she can have her 12 dancers match the music exactly or play cat and mouse games with it, respect its decorum or ruffle it. The music for "Yowzie" is New Orleans jazz, mainly old Jelly Roll Morton songs recently recorded by Henry Butler with Steven Bernstein and the Hot 9. Here, Ms. Tharp quotes herself, including phrases from her "Eight Jelly Rolls," the 1971 work that showed how well she could absorb jazz and its humor. "Eight Jelly Rolls" contained a great drunk dance. "Yowzie" could be about drunks on Bourbon Street. It's a comedy that sustains multiple story lines with a freewheeling momentum. Amid expertly placed vaudeville gags, there's a sense of where did that come from wildness. The 45 year old Mr. Selya, who for years has embodied Ms. Tharp's vision of a regular guy, minces on his tiptoes. That's new. What isn't new is Ms. Tharp's galvanizing effect on dancers. Unlike other choreographers who have reached the 50 year mark (Cunningham, Taylor), Ms. Tharp hasn't maintained a company. Some of the 12 here, like Mr. Selya, Matthew Dibble and Rika Okamoto (who sometimes resembles a Tharp clone), have joined her in project after project. Some, like Ms. Lowery, taking a break from New York City Ballet, are new to her. But they are all the kind of dancer whom Ms. Tharp invented, casual virtuosos comfortable with her ecumenical style. And though she has been known to push performers into exaggeration, on Friday all of these charmers looked relaxed and unforced. The effect Ms. Tharp had on American dance in the 1970s was revolutionary, yet she was never really about the new. "Deuce Coupe," her 1973 work for the Joffrey Ballet that allowed modern dance to mingle with classical ballet as never before, was set to Beach Boys songs already years old. It incorporated the past of her childhood and of her parents into the past of ballet. Its vernacular steps and attitudes came from the 1950s and '60s. "Movin' Out," her 2002 Broadway musical to Billy Joel songs, was about the '60s, too. Nothing in "Preludes and Fugues" or "Yowzie" is any more up to date. The pairing of Bach and jazz, like the pairing of ragtime and Haydn in her 1976 "Push Comes to Shove," is classic Tharp. In a program note, she characterizes "Preludes and Fugues" as "the world as it ought to be" and "Yowzie" as the world "as it is." But that dichotomy is neater than her art, which is never satisfied with one thing or the other. "Preludes" resolves where it began, in a circle that has widened to include the whole cast, whereas "Yowzie" ends in arrested motion, with the dancers coming straight at us. But both works are about the world as it is, the world as she made it, retrospective after all. As Ms. Tharp said in a post show Q. and A.: "There's no getting away from the past, folks. I've tried."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Officially, "Respect" is a relationship song. That's how Otis Redding wrote it. But love wasn't what Aretha Franklin was interested in. The opening line is "What you want, baby, I got it." But her "what" is a punch in the face. So Ms. Franklin's rearrangement was about power. She had the right to be respected by some dude, perhaps by her country. Just a little bit. What did love have to do with that? Depending on the house you grew up in and how old you are, "Respect" is probably a song you learned early. The spelling lesson toward the end helps. So do the turret blasts of "sock it to me" that show up here and there. But, really, the reason you learn "Respect" is the way "Respect" is sung. Redding made it a burning plea. Ms. Franklin turned the plea into the most empowering popular recording ever made. Ms. Franklin died on Thursday, at 76, which means "Respect" is going to be an even more prominent part of your life than usual. The next time you hear it, notice what you do with your hands. They're going to point at a person, a car or a carrot. They'll rest on your hips. Your neck might roll. Your waist will do a thing. You'll snarl. Odds are high that you'll feel better than great. You're guaranteed to feel indestructible. That self confidence wasn't evident only in the purses and perms and headdresses and floor length furs; the buckets and buckets of great recordings; the famous demand that she always be paid before a show, in cash; or the Queen of Soul business the stuff that keeps her monotonously synonymous with "diva." It was there in whatever kept her from stopping and continuing to knock us dead. To paraphrase one of Ms. Franklin's many (many) musical progeny: She slayed. "Respect" became an anthem for us, because it seemed like an anthem for her. Never miss a pop music story: Sign up for our weekly newsletter, Louder. The song owned the summer of 1967. It arrived amid what must have seemed like never ending turmoil race riots, political assassinations, the Vietnam draft. Muhammad Ali had been stripped of his championship title for refusing to serve in the war. So amid all this upheaval comes a singer from Detroit who'd been around most of the decade doing solid gospel R B work. But there was something about this black woman's asserting herself that seemed like a call to national arms. It wasn't a polite song. It was hard. It was deliberate. It was sure. And that all came from Ms. Franklin her rumbling, twanging, compartmentalized arrangement. It came, of course, from her singing. Because lots of major pop stars now have great, big voices, maybe it's easy to forget that most Americans had never heard anything quite as dependably great and shockingly big as Ms. Franklin's. The reason we have watched "Showtime at the Apollo" or "American Idol" or "The Voice" is out of some desperate hope that somebody walks out there and sounds like Aretha. She established a standard for artistic vocal excellence, and it will outlast us all. She, along with Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Otis Redding, Tina Turner and Patti LaBelle, changed where the stress fell in popular singing. Now you could glean a story from lyrics but also hear it in the tone of the singer's voice agony, ecstasy and everything beyond and in between. Roots, soil, pavement on one hand, the stratosphere on the other. I know. That does just sound like the art of singing. But when gospel left the church and entered the body the black body we called that soul. And a good soul artist could make singing for sex sound like she was singing for God. They call that secular music. But it just repositioned what else could be holy. Almost nobody and even then, maybe just Ray Charles did as much toggling between and conflating of the religious and the randy with as much sincere athletic imagination and humor and swagger as Ms. Franklin. "Dr. Feelgood (Love Is a Serious Business)," the hit from 1967 that she co wrote, never fails to chill, arouse and amuse. Ms. Franklin performs it with a mix of exasperation and smoldering anticipation. That song's never sounded better or more theatrical than it does on "Aretha Live at Fillmore West," from 1971. Its structural brilliance is that there's no robust chorus or melody, just Ms. Franklin, her piano, a blues groove and her mood. She wants a friend to get going so she can have sex with her man. But who's been shown the door with this much flair? The song starts, "I don't want nobody always sitting around me and my man." You could bake a pie in the pause between "nobody" and "always." And when she gets to "sitting," she takes a deep, five second drag on the "s" so that it sounds less like a consonant and more like a lit fuse. The remaining six and a half minutes put you in exhilarated suspense over when her top's gonna blow. There are so many things to love about this performance: its sexiness, its playfulness, its resolve, all the space in the arrangement for Ms. Franklin's singing to stay low until it takes off high, the way that once she finally connects with Dr. Feelgood himself, the crowd audibly connects with the song or, really, just more deeply connects, since people had been shouting stuff like, "Sing it, Aretha!" between her pauses. You can feel in that moment the hold Ms. Franklin had over anybody who ever saw or heard her sing. She worked with bottomless reserves of swagger. We tend not to think of Ms. Franklin that way as an artist of bravado and nerve and daring, as a woman with swagger. We tend not to think of her this way even though nearly every song she sang brimmed over with it. (She sang about taking care of business the old "tcb" and, consequently, having her business taken care of, as much as she sang about respect.) Swagger we left to the Elvis Presleys and James Browns and Mick Jaggers. But "swagger" is the only word for, say, her approach to the music of other artists. It didn't matter whether it was a Negro spiritual or something by the Beatles. It was all wet clay to her. The Supremes, Frank Sinatra, Leonard Cohen, Adele, Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, ? and the Mysterians, C C Music Factory: She oversaw more gut renovations than a general contractor. In 1979, she took the occasion of B.B. King's "The Thrill Is Gone" to allow her backing singer to exclaim that she (and they) were "free at last." Toward the end of her funked up, very fun version of Sam Dave's "Hold On, I'm Comin'," from the 1981 album "Love All the Hurt Away," she tossed in some "beep beeps" and a couple of lines from "Little Jack Horner" because she knew she could make it work. If good soul music is like good barbecue slow cooked, falls off the bone by the 1980s, she'd become a pit master, yelping and barking and wailing, but also talking in songs, sermonizing. You know the char and gristle, the bits of sugar and salt and fat on, say, a perfectly done slab of ribs? Most of this woman's songs were blackened that way. Yet if Ms. Franklin told you she was going to take a classic R B song and throw in a little nursery rhyme, you'd be nervous. Did 1986 really need a cover of "Jumpin' Jack Flash?" Probably not. But she did it anyway and robustly and threw in a "hallelujah" while she was at it. But, by that point, Ms. Franklin seemed well on her way to becoming somebody who might have relished the culture's doubt. She loved music too much to be vestigial or nostalgic or relegated. She wanted you know, what she wanted. And eventually respect was tricky to come by. I, at least, remember sitting on my bed watching the 1998 Grammys and hearing that she'd be filling in for Luciano Pavarotti and rolling my eyes. Ms. Franklin knew. She went out there, sang some Puccini, and left the nation in shock. The Queen of Opera, too? Is it possible that despite the milestones and piles of Grammys (the now defunct female R B vocal performance category seemed invented just for her; she won the first eight), despite famously having been crowned the greatest singer of all time in a vast Rolling Stone survey, despite being Aretha Franklin, the Greatest was also rather underrated as a piano player, as an arranger (who had a greater imagination when it came to coloring a song with backing singers), as an album artist? Despite the world's bereavement over her death, despite her having been less a household name and more a spiritual resident of our actual home, despite giving us soundtracks for loneliness, for lovemaking, for joy, for church, cookouts and bars, despite the induction ceremonies, medals and honorary degrees, despite her having been the only Aretha most of us have ever heard of, is it possible that we've taken her for granted, that in failing to make her president, a saint or her own country, we still might not have paid her enough respect? Just a little bit.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
"The Nun" runs on HBO. And Christina Applegate stars in "Dead to Me," a dark comedy on Netflix. THE NUN (2018) 8 p.m. on HBO. In an interview with The New York Times last year, the director Corin Hardy described the concept behind a particularly memorable scene in this horror movie. "I wanted to use this scene to maximize and amplify the tension around the concept of being buried alive in a coffin," Hardy said. Those are the kinds of tense thrills found in this spinoff of "The Conjuring," which centers on Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga), a young nun assigned by the Vatican to aid in an investigation of mysterious matters. Spearheading that investigation is Father Burke (Demian Bichir), whose wheelhouse includes potentially paranormal activities. "The franchise has proved to be a reliable if variably elegant 'boo' machine," Ben Kenigsberg wrote in his review for The New York Times. "The same applies here." DATELINE 9 p.m. on NBC. The reporter Dennis Murphy hosts this episode of NBC's long running show, which this week focuses on a bank heist with unexpected ties to social media. DEAD TO ME Stream on Netflix. In this dark comedy, Christina Applegate stars as a comically cynical real estate agent who says things like, "I'm not defensive, O.K.?" She is also a victim of tragedy. Applegate's character, Jen, was recently widowed by an unsolved hit and run, so she sets out to solve it. Meanwhile, at a support group, she meets the idiosyncratic, freewheeling Judy (Linda Cardellini), who rapidly becomes her close friend and who has something to hide. The show was created by Liz Feldman, who also created the short lived NBC sitcom "One Big Happy."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
In New York, where apartments tend to be small and good ones hard to come by, real estate often plays an outsize role in romance, speeding along some relationships and straining others as couples juggle the stages of courtship with lease terms and the lure of cheaper rent. At least, it did for Helga Traxler and Joachim Hackl, who now live in their third apartment together a spacious and meticulously designed one bedroom. It's the first place they've shared that wasn't something of a relationship test. The couple met as roommates in a Williamsburg share in 2014, after a mutual friend unintentionally played Cupid by offering Mr. Hackl his recently vacated room in the four bedroom apartment where Ms. Traxler lived. But within a few months, Ms. Traxler, a freelance photographer, and Mr. Hackl, who was doing a fellowship at a small architecture firm at the time, had started dating. "All the other roommates were away for Thanksgiving," said Ms. Traxler who, like Mr. Hackl, is Austrian. "We took the chance." A relatively short time later, they once again found themselves facing a relationship decision when Mr. Hackl was accepted to a master's program in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture at Columbia University, which came with a tempting offer of student housing. The apartment was a tiny one bedroom on 112th Street in Morningside Heights for 1,500 a month. After talking, they agreed that, rather than make theirs a cross borough affair, they'd move into the apartment together. Since they were both in the country on visas, they didn't know whether they'd get another chance to live in Manhattan. And, having lived together as roommates for about a year before moving to Manhattan, there weren't many surprises. "You've already seen how the other person acts in their natural habitat," said Mr. Hackl. Still, the apartment was only about 360 square feet, with a big bedroom and hardly any living space, which presented an issue as they were both, essentially, working from home during that period. "Looking back, I'm very surprised it worked out so well," said Ms. Traxler, who credited differing schedules and having a gym nearby to get their aggression out with keeping them sane. Occupation: Ms. Traxler is a photographer and Mr. Hackl is an exhibition designer at the Brooklyn Museum. Having a landlord who is an architect: They both appreciate how thoughtfully designed the apartment is. Almost everyone they know lives in Brooklyn: ""We love to have people over," said Ms. Traxler. "It was really hard to get people to come up to Morningside Heights. I knew I had to put the effort in or I'd never see my friends." The difference between Manhattan and Brooklyn: "We talked to our old neighbors a little, but here our neighbors really care for each other," said Mr. Hackl. "They're really friendly. It's been fun to get to know people." When Mr. Hackl finished his two year program, they had to give up the apartment. Ms. Traxler had grown to love the convenience of the neighborhood a one minute walk to the subway, a 20 minute train ride to Midtown, and a 24 hour grocery store nearby. But with a budget of 2,000 a month, they knew they couldn't afford to stay in the area. As they started looking in Brooklyn, they realized how difficult it was to get a lease in New York as foreigners with limited credit history. A promising lead their friends, who were leaving a two bedroom, recommended the couple to their landlord evaporated after the landlord decided to turn the listing over to a broker rather than take them. They were at a friend's birthday party, talking about losing the apartment, when a couple who owned a brownstone in Bedford Stuyvesant overheard them. The tenants in their garden apartment were leaving and the space was available. "It was a great coincidence," said Mr. Hackl. The apartment was 1,887 a month and much nicer than anything else they'd seen. The landlords, a German artist with an architectural background and her husband, whom they knew a little socially before moving in, had renovated it to a very high standard, including installing triple paned windows that, when closed, eliminate all outside noise. (The brownstone is renovated to passive house standards, which also means it stays cool in the summer.) Their apartment also has access to a huge shared backyard their landlords and the owners of three adjacent houses agreed to take down the fences between their spaces. They moved in two years ago, installing twin desks in the living room, though Ms. Traxler works all over the apartment and Mr. Hackl now has a full time job as an exhibition designer at the Brooklyn Museum. "You work everywhere you can put your laptop," he said to her. "I nap everywhere I can put my butt." Ms. Traxler noted that it was nice to have enough space that they can both hang out or work in the apartment without having to be in the same room. "And if we need some time for ourselves, there's a door that can be closed." Since moving in, they've filled the space with art from friends, plants, a sofa (their last place was too small for one), and many books which, for a couple who has to reapply for visas every few years, is the riskiest element of their living situation. "When we met, we were both like, 'If you see a good book, you buy it," said Mr. Hackl. "So we have a lot of books. Friends come over and ask, 'Are these all your books?' " "But that's what makes it home," said Ms. Traxler. "You want to be comfortable. You don't want to think, 'What if I ever move?' "	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Jovan Adepo, 30, is on the verge of a breakout. Already known for his supporting roles in the film "Fences" and the TV show "The Leftovers," Mr. Adepo can be seen this fall as the lead actor in the horror mystery film "Overlord, and the Facebook Watch series "Sorry for Your Loss." He also has a supporting role in Season 2 of "Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan." Here's his training routine and how he deals with the pressures of being a rising star. When I'm in the middle of filming, I try to get up an hour before my call time. I work out to catch my rhythm and to get my blood pumping. I usually don't do more than a half hour. I played football in college, and I'm already really familiar with a lot of the training exercises. But if I want to pinpoint a specific muscle area, I'll ask a trainer or take a few trainer lessons. I take a lot of advice from my peers. I spoke to John Krasinski a lot. He has a gym you can take with you anywhere with a yellow rope. The workout is all about body weight, and it's a good way to maintain on set. Or Michael Kelly. He's doing push ups between takes. On set, you're waiting around a lot. You can be first up on the shoot list and you can still be waiting an hour and a half before you're on. It can lead to snacking. The craft foods area is a black hole. At the moment, my diet is super heavy on protein and vegetables. If I try to stick to a particular diet, I probably won't follow it. I just try to avoid carbs after noon. Before that I can have toast and all the things in the wonderful world of carbs. The body is a tool of the job. If I have a role to prepare for, I'm a perfectionist in almost every aspect of life and it's my choice to put a lot of stress on it. On "The Leftovers," I just to had to be in normal person shape. But then I played a Navy SEAL and you have to look the part. I tend to be very hands on with my grooming. I try to come to the set halfway prepared. I like to have my hair already prepared and my beard shaved. The character I'm currently playing, he would be doing his own grooming. That's how I think about it. Then I get onto set and the hair and makeup team cleans it up. I'm an oil guy. I use argan oil or Moroccan oil on my hair and as my facial oil. I put castor oil on my beard. I also use a lot of Shea Moisture products, and I've dabbled into Kiehl's. I got a gift bag at a party full of Kiehl's, and I started buying it because I liked some of it. When you're on set, you're surrounded by people constantly. If you go to your trailer, somebody will come to look for you. Elizabeth Olsen, she is the best at finding these holes between sets, where she can hide out. It's nice to know that I'm not the only one. Sometimes you just need a moment of peace. If I'm waiting around on set, I'm really big on listening to music. I try to listen to a bit of everything I love hip hop, rock music and I've dabbled into classical. My career is just beginning. This past year has really shown me the power of rest. You can literally run yourself into the ground. If I'm off, I'm a homebody. I spend the majority of my time in the house. I do like to play intramural soccer. There's an app called Meetup and I'll play soccer maybe two to three times a week. Otherwise, I'm reading or playing PlayStation. I love video games.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
26 Vandam Street (between Avenue of the Americas and Varick Street) A private investor has bought this five story, 12,349 square foot apartment building in the Hudson Square neighborhood. There are 19 apartments: nine two bedrooms, eight one bedrooms, one four bedroom and one five bedroom. Five are rent stabilized, two are rent controlled, and a dozen are renovated market rate apartments with new hardwood floors, open space kitchens and exposed brick walls. The cap rate is 4.33 percent. The building has no air rights since the previous owner, Stellar Management, which bought the building for 6.1 million at the end of 2012, applied them toward the addition of a penthouse to its One SoHo Square office project, which combined 161 Avenue of the Americas and 233 Spring Street. 309 East 60th Street (between First and Second Avenues) This four story, mixed use walk up, with a 1,000 square foot rear yard, is available in the Lenox Hill area on the Upper East Side. The 5,740 square foot building's six one bedroom apartments include five that are rent stabilized. The one market rate apartment, which was created when two studios were recently combined, features two bathrooms, a new kitchen and bamboo floors. Rents average 1,139 a month. A vacant 1,200 square foot space on the ground floor, previously Hookah Cafe, offers 25 feet of frontage and a 500 square foot storage basement. The white masonry building, which comes with 6,800 square feet of air rights, is down the street from the Roosevelt Island Tram and alongside the access road of the Queensboro Bridge. 239 East 58th Street (between Second and Third Avenues) Decorative Arts Guild and Showroom, an advocacy group for artisans and a showcase for their crafts, like masonry and furniture restoration, has signed a 10 year lease for a two level store in this 1904 five story walk up in Midtown East. The space, with 1,417 square feet on the ground floor and 883 square feet on the lower level, was home to Urban Archaeology, which sells recycled building artifacts and creates home products inspired by them and still has a showroom downtown at 158 Franklin Street.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Mr. Kotlikoff is a professor of economics at Boston University and Dr. Mina is an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Simple at home tests for the coronavirus, some that involve spitting into a small tube of solution, could be the key to expanding testing and impeding the spread of the pandemic. The Food and Drug Administration should encourage their development and then fast track approval. One variety, paper strip tests, are inexpensive and easy enough to make that Americans could test themselves every day. You would simply spit into a tube of saline solution and insert a small piece of paper embedded with a strip of protein. If you are infected with enough of the virus, the strip will change color within 15 minutes. Your next step would be to self quarantine, notify your doctor and confirm the result with a standard swab test the polymerase chain reaction nasal swab. Confirmation would give public health officials key information on the virus's spread and confirm that you should remain in quarantine until your daily test turned negative. E25Bio, Sherlock Biosciences, Mammoth Biosciences, and an increasing number of academic research laboratories are in the late stages of developing paper strip and other simple, daily Covid 19 tests. Some of the daily tests are in trials and proving highly effective. The strips could be mass produced in a matter of weeks and freely supplied by the government to everyone in the country. The price per person would be from 1 to 5 a day, a considerable sum for the entire population, but remarkably cost effective. Screening the population for infection, however, is different from determining whether someone is infected. The Food and Drug Administration has recently approved group P.C.R. testing to screen large numbers of people. (Group testing, which is used in other countries, assays multiple swab samples at once and if the virus is found, individuals are tested.) So there is reason to hope that the F.D.A. will also approve paper strip tests as a way to find out where the virus has spread. Hope needs to be replaced with surety. Biotech companies are reluctant to take these tests to market for fear that the F.D.A. will disparage them for being less sensitive than the nasal swab tests. The nasal swab test can detect extremely small quantities of viral particles. But the problem with the nasal swab tests is their cost, which ranges from 50 to 150. They also require laboratory assessment, which can take days. That is why, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports, nine of 10 infected Americans never get tested. It's also why those who do get tested, generally are tested only once. Clearly, if you're infected and never tested, you can unwittingly spread the virus. And if you are tested, but just once, and the test comes back negative, you may still later become infectious. Finally, if your polymerase chain reaction swab is positive, but it takes five days to learn the result, you may spend those days transmitting the disease. Group testing can dramatically lower nasal swab testing costs for universities and large companies. But absent federal coordination, it can't be used routinely to test all Americans. We need the best means of detecting and containing the virus, not a perfect test that no one can use. That is where paper strip testing would have the advantage. Their ability to be used more frequently would trump the nasal swab test's higher sensitivity. Paper strip testing would also sharply improve diagnosis as those with a positive paper strip test would still be given a nasal swab test. Would everyone take a paper strip test every day? Here market incentives will surely help. Once they are provided to all, employers would likely require their workers to take time dated pictures of their negative test results before coming to work. Colleges would require students to do the same before coming to class. Restaurants could accept reservations only if accompanied by negative test pictures. In short, everyone will have an incentive to test themselves daily to participate fully in the economy and return to normal life. Once paper strips' efficacy is definitively proved and they are cleared by the F.D.A., Congress can quickly authorize the production and distribution, for free, of a year's supply to all Americans. Then we'll have not only a true day to day sense of Covid 19's path. We'll also have a far better means to quickly contain and end this terrible plague. Laurence Kotlikoff is a professor of economics at Boston University, and Michael Mina is an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
About a month after making his final bow in the Metropolitan Opera's "Akhnaten" in December, the star countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo will take the stage at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. A cabaret show of his will have its New York debut as part of the Guggenheim's 2020 Works Process spring series , which was announced on Monda y. Works Process is known for giving audiences an inside look at a variety of performing arts disciplines. The season will begin on Jan. 6, with Mr. Costanzo's show, which is described as a reflective look back at his childhood. Other notable events for the season, which runs through June 14, include conversations with the artists behind two much anticipated Broadway revivals: On Jan. 27, the Guggenheim will host a conversation with the Belgian director Ivo Van Hove and the choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, who will discuss their coming Broadway revival of "West Side Story" ahead of its Feb. 6 opening. And on Feb. 3, the British director Marianne Elliott will be at the museum to discuss her revival of "Company," which debuted in London's West End last year and will open on Broadway in March. The season includes new dance works, too. Ephrat Asherie Dance and Les Ballet Afrik with Omari Wiles will on Jan. 13 and 14 perform excerpts from two new pieces, commissioned by the Works Process series. (The full pieces will debut later in the year.) The series will also host previews from the Pennsylvania Ballet (on Feb. 23) and the Philadelphia company BalletX (on June 14).	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
A roundup of motoring news from the web: Ford introduced its aluminum body F 150 pickup truck at the Detroit auto show last month, and now General Motors is on track to build its own aluminum body pickup by 2018, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. The article said that G.M. had secured contracts with Novelis and Alcoa, both aluminum suppliers. Mark Reuss, G.M.'s vice president for product development, said after the release of the F 150 that he was interested in seeing how the new trucks were built. (Automotive News, subscription required) Toyota says it is testing a wireless charging system for electric and plug in hybrid vehicles. The technology would allow E.V.s to charge, without being plugged in, while parked over a magnetic resonance coil. Vehicles would be fitted with a receiver coil to pick up the electrical signal from the charger coil. (Market Watch) With new car sales on a two decade decline in Germany, more people there are turning to car sharing to get around when public transportation is not available more than half of the 8.5 million one way car sharing trips booked worldwide last year were in Germany. The average age of new car buyers rose above 52 as new car registrations dropped below the three million mark in Germany last year. German automakers are entering the car sharing business as the new reality takes hold. (ABC News) For a photo shoot called "Beyond the Swimsuit," Maserati and the 50th Anniversary Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue teamed up to feature Heidi Klum with the Maserati Ghibli, Quattroporte and GranTurismo. Shot by Francesco Carrozzini, an Italian photographer, the supermodel and the Italian cars will grace a seven page spread. (Autoweek)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
It is the picture of the tie, like the echo of the words, that lingers. The tie no longer secured in its big, boastful knot, but rather hanging limply around the neck, like a boxer on the ropes. The tie, that has been as close to a sartorial spirit animal as President Trump has had, along with his red MAGA hat and his elaborately constructed hair, completely untied. The tie as it was in the small hours of Sunday morning as the president arrived at Andrews military base from his ill fated campaign rally in Tulsa, Okla., later landing by helicopter at the White House and striding across the South Lawn, MAGA cap crushed in one hand. The tie as most observers could never remember seeing it before, at least around the neck of this president. Together, the two accessories created an image as striking as those of the sparsely populated rows in Tulsa, and the empty overflow area outside. And as potentially symbolic, though probably not in the way Mr. Trump would like. After all, this is not a president who ascribes to the shirt sleeves photo op. Not someone who invites his electorate in to see him, jacket tossed aside, elbows deep in work at his desk. Not someone interested, like President Barack Obama and former Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain or even former Vice President Joe Biden, who seems equally comfortable with or without a tie, in announcing his sensitivity to the younger generation and their value system by willingly rejecting the suit. He is, rather someone who believes deeply in the pageantry of his office, of airbrushed calculation (see: Ivanka, Melania, even Jared), branding, and the power of costume. Be that pageantry in the generals whom he famously once lauded as "straight from central casting" or his disastrously staged march across Lafayette Park to St. John's Church in response to the protests in Washington D.C. It's a tenet that was clearly on display in Tulsa not just in his own uniform the flag reflecting blue suit, white shirt, red tie but in supporting acts that included Lara Trump, son Eric's wife and a Trump campaign adviser, in a white wrap dress; Kimberly Guilfoyle, son Don Jr.'s girlfriend and chairwoman of the Trump Victory Finance Committee, in a bright blue wrap dress; and Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, in red, like a matching patriotic array. And when it comes to Mr. Trump's costume, the tie matters. Especially the bright red tie, which he made his doppelganger during the 2016 campaign, glowing in all its Republican glory; subliminally reminding everyone of the party's Reagan heyday; of the good old times when everyone dressed according to establishment role; representing, in all its ridiculous, below the belt length well, who knows? Something! Manhood or power or Mr. Trump's willingness to stretch the rules (he also Scotch taped the back, remember?). The psychological speculation has been endless, and varied. The problem is, when the tie becomes a sign of victory, it can also be a sign of defeat. So it looked Sunday morning. Sure, it was very early. You can understand why a tie might be undone. But Mr. Trump understands as well as anyone that he is always on display, always playing his part. There isn't really a backstage in his job, especially during his entrance and exit moments. Add to that the cap in hand, and the symbolism gets pretty loaded. As one observer tweeted, "I mean, when does a baseball coach scrunch up their team cap it ain't when they're winning, is it?" Nope. It's usually when they are about to throw it on the ground and jump up and down on it in frustration and disgust, because nothing is going according to plan. At least in the movies, from which Mr. Trump does seem to derive most of his cues. Which is why, through all the bombast and brouhaha, the denialism and accusations, that both characterized the flop in Oklahoma and followed it, the unplanned photo op stood out as a rare moment of truth, caught on camera. It was real Reality TV. The campaign rally was supposed to be the start of a new stage (pun intended). Maybe it actually will be.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Drug overdoses are driving up the death rate of young white adults in the United States to levels not seen since the end of the AIDS epidemic more than two decades ago a turn of fortune that stands in sharp contrast to falling death rates for young blacks, a New York Times analysis of death certificates has found. The rising death rates for those young white adults, ages 25 to 34, make them the first generation since the Vietnam War years of the mid 1960s to experience higher death rates in early adulthood than the generation that preceded it. The Times analyzed nearly 60 million death certificates collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 1990 to 2014. It found death rates for non Hispanic whites either rising or flattening for all the adult age groups under 65 a trend that was particularly pronounced in women even as medical advances sharply reduce deaths from traditional killers like heart disease. Death rates for blacks and most Hispanic groups continued to fall. The analysis shows that the rise in white mortality extends well beyond the 45 to 54 year old age group documented by a pair of Princeton economists in a research paper that startled policy makers and politicians two months ago. While the death rate among young whites rose for every age group over the five years before 2014, it rose faster by any measure for the less educated, by 23 percent for those without a high school education, compared with only 4 percent for those with a college degree or more. The drug overdose numbers were stark. In 2014, the overdose death rate for whites ages 25 to 34 was five times its level in 1999, and the rate for 35 to 44 year old whites tripled during that period. The numbers cover both illegal and prescription drugs. "That is startling," said Dr. Wilson Compton, the deputy director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. "Those are tremendous increases." Rising rates of overdose deaths and suicide appear to have erased the benefits from advances in medical treatment for most age groups of whites. Death rates for drug overdoses and suicides "are running counter to those of chronic diseases," like heart disease, said Ian Rockett, an epidemiologist at West Virginia University. Yet overdose deaths for young adult blacks have edged up only slightly. Over all, the death rate for blacks has been steadily falling, largely driven by a decline in deaths from AIDS. The result is that a once yawning gap between death rates for blacks and whites has shrunk by two thirds. "This is the smallest proportional and absolute gap in mortality between blacks and whites at these ages for more than a century," Dr. Skinner said. If the past decade's trends continue, even without any further progress in AIDS mortality, rates for blacks and whites will be equal in nine years, he said. There is a reason that blacks appear to have been spared the worst of the narcotic epidemic, said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, a drug abuse expert. Studies have found that doctors are much more reluctant to prescribe painkillers to minority patients, worrying that they might sell them or become addicted. "The answer is that racial stereotypes are protecting these patients from the addiction epidemic," said Dr. Kolodny, a senior scientist at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University and chief medical officer for Phoenix House Foundation, a national drug and alcohol treatment company. Not many young people die of any cause. In 2014, there were about 29,000 deaths out of a population of about 25 million whites in the 25 to 34 age group. That number had steadily increased since 2004, rising by about 5,500 about 24 percent while the population of the group as a whole rose only 5 percent. In 2004, there were 2,888 deaths from overdoses in that group; in 2014, the number totaled 7,558. Mortality rates, said Mark D. Hayward, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, are one of the most sensitive measures of quality of life. By that measure, said Anne Case, a Princeton economist, "there's a real rumbling that bad things are coming down the pike." Dr. Case made the original observation with her husband, the Nobel laureate Angus Deaton, in a published paper that showed death rates for middle aged whites rising in contrast to those in every other rich country. For young non Hispanic whites, the death rate from accidental poisoning which is mostly drug overdoses rose to 30 per 100,000 from six over the years 1999 to 2014, and the suicide rate rose to 19.5 per 100,000 from 15, the Times analysis found. For non Hispanic whites ages 35 to 44, the accidental poisoning rate rose to 29.9 from 9.6 in that period. And for non Hispanic whites ages 45 to 54 the group studied by Dr. Case and Dr. Deaton the poisoning rate rose to 29.9 per 100,000 from 6.7 and the suicide rate rose to 26 per 100,000 from 16, the Times analysis found But deaths from the traditional killers for which treatment has greatly improved over the past decade heart disease, H.I.V. and cancer went down. Drug abuse, of both illegal drugs like heroin and prescription painkillers, has become a part of the American political discourse as never before in this country, with some presidential candidates, including Jeb Bush and Carly Fiorina, telling stories of addiction in their own families. Maline Hairup died of a heroin overdose on Aug. 24, 2014. She was 38 and a Mormon, engaged to be married in the Salt Lake City Temple, near her home. Her religion taught her to spurn addictive substances no alcohol, no caffeine. But that night, after years of taking prescription narcotics for chronic pain complicated by mental illness, she tried heroin, her sister Mindy Vincent said. Ms. Vincent believes it was the only time her sister used that drug.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Depression era mothers. Blue collar fathers. Disapproving elders. Parents who warn about regrets. Others whose financial limits were a statement of their values. A week ago, I asked you to send me the best questions you've ever asked, or answered, about money, and published seven queries to start the conversation. Of the five best new ones that arrived in the last week, every one came with a story about a parent like the ones described above. This shouldn't come as an enormous surprise. After all, what we spend, save and give says a lot about who we are. Value and values are just a letter apart, and given how much influence our parents often have on the latter, it makes perfect sense that we think of them when we ponder our financial situations as well. So consider the following five questions, or adapt them to your own financial forks in the road as needed. And if your parents are alive, ask them, too, though you may already know what they will say. Where are we staying in Florida? When Jan Even was in second grade in River Forest, Ill., many of her classmates discussed their pending spring break plans. Some were going to Fort Lauderdale. Others were headed to Sarasota. "I just kind of thought that we were going, too, and that my parents hadn't told me yet," she recalled. But they weren't going, and when she asked about the family's destination, here's how her mother replied: It's more important for you to be able to go to college at age 18 than it is for us to go to Florida now. Ms. Even's family had enough money that this wasn't a trade off so much as a conscious choice. Both her parents grew up during the Depression, and her mother told stories of people coming to the back door of their farmhouse looking for food and Ms. Even's grandmother feeding them dinner. Children make many assumptions about their lives and the lives of others based on where we choose to raise them. So you can't fault Ms. Even, who is now 66 and lives in Redmond, Ore., for wondering aloud when she was young. Nor can you fault her parents for enforcing a bit of artificial deprivation. "Maybe they really were concerned about the money, but I think it was more an expression of their values," she said. They did eventually take her to Florida but not until senior year in high school, when the college fund was safe and she was six months away from starting at Northwestern University. Can you accept the fact that we can't live the same life that you do? Plenty of parents hope that their children will climb at least one rung up the social class ladder once they are adults, and many more will fight hard to keep their children from slipping even a bit. So it can be jarring for parents when their adult children don't strive for the same things they do. A reader in Baton Rouge, La., who did not want to use her name because she didn't think her relatives would appreciate her sharing the story publicly, wrote in to describe the pressure she and her husband once felt to buy and spend and own and live the way that other, more established family members did. They ran up credit card debt before realizing they couldn't keep up and didn't really want to, either. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' Then, they had to gently explain to their family how they felt. "Sometimes, I think it's easier to talk about sex with your parents than money," she told me via email. "We choose a simple life. Experiences over possessions." Her note reminded me of one of the most haunting things I've ever read about families and money. In her book "A Wealth of Possibilities," Ellen Miley Perry described the "centrifugal force" of abundance that swirls around financially successful families. And she described an acquaintance who summed up her relationship with her father this way: "He can't accept the smallness of my dreams." What would you do if you weren't afraid? In 2001, Daniel L. Anderson and his family were living in Reno, Nev., and loving the easy access to the outdoors, the low cost of living and the good schools. But he was slowly growing bored with his real estate job. He posted his resume online and soon had a promising job offer in Houston. He also sought advice from his old mentor, who eventually offered him a different job in San Francisco, and then put that pointed question to Mr. Anderson when he wavered. The Houston company had a reputation as a terrific place to work. The word on the San Francisco employer was much more mixed. "His question caused me to re examine my situation to make sure I wasn't doing what was easy and comfortable," Mr. Anderson recalled, adding that he had to get over a bit of macho denial about his own fear before he could really think it through. There were also the stories his mother told him about all of her retired friends who talked about their regrets over the roads not taken. "I did not want to be that person," he said. Which is how he ended up moving to Walnut Creek, Calif., where his family thrived. And how he turned down the attractive offer from a company called Enron. What good is having a lot in the bank if you've never let yourself live? Lisa and Janice Woolery both grew up in blue collar families that didn't have much money, and in their life together as a couple, they have been fairly careful. There is no mortgage on their home in Des Moines, and they've saved money for retirement. "But when you do some of those rather extensive retirement planning programs online, you just feel defeated," Lisa said. "You start saying, 'I'm going to die someday, and I want to live in a way that lets me do things that I have been putting off.'" For the two of them, both 55, that means travel of the sort that might have felt fiscally irresponsible in previous years. New Zealand is high on their list. In an interview this week, I asked Lisa whether they'd been able to answer their big question in a way that had allowed them to put a trip like that on the calendar. "Not in the next year or two, yet," she said. "The safe answer is the answer I know to use," she said finally. "Low to no risk. But at what point do you say that low to no risk isn't living?" As I was writing this column, she followed up with an email. They'd booked a couples getaway to San Francisco, a place that holds fond memories for them from travel earlier in their relationship. It's a good start. What is the most satisfying thing you've spent money on? By the time she'd scraped her way through college and graduate school, Trudelle Thomas recognized that she had inherited some heavy generational baggage from the Great Depression. So Ms. Thomas, an English professor at Xavier University, went to work on herself to see if she could derive more joy from the money that she chose to spend. When she finally persuaded herself to buy a new car, she didn't draw much additional satisfaction from it. Nice meals out were often unhealthy and expensive. What she enjoyed much more, however, was the money she spent on and with others. She tithes and has contributed to the National Alliance on Mental Illness for a long enough period to feel as if she has been part of important policy changes. Another regular habit: taking her students, many of whom could not afford it, out for lunch in the campus cafeteria. And a few years ago, she took a niece, who otherwise might not have been able to travel, on a trip to California. She liked to dote on people, as she put it, and she reminded me that "thrive" is the root word of thrift. "My niece could think of me as her rich aunt," she said. "But I want her to think of me as her thrifty aunt who splurges on her."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
WASHINGTON The burdensome costs of medical care, prescription drugs and health insurance have become dominant issues in the 2020 presidential campaign. But a new report from the Department of Health and Human Services shows the nation remains in a period of relatively slow growth in health spending. Health spending in the United States rose by 4.6 percent to 3.6 trillion in 2018 accounting for 17.7 percent of the economy compared to a growth rate of 4.2 percent in 2017. Federal officials said the slight acceleration was largely the result of reinstating a tax on health insurers that the Affordable Care Act imposed but Congress had suspended for a year in 2017. Faster growth in medical prices and prescription drug spending were also factors, they said, but comparatively minor. For decades, national health spending galloped ahead of spending in the overall economy, lowering wages and stressing household budgets. But over the last decade, the pattern has shifted somewhat. Although the country consistently spends more on health care each year than it did the year before, the overall rate of growth has stayed below historical averages. In 2018, health spending grew more slowly than the economy overall, a rare occurrence. The factors leading to the slowdown are not fully understood. For years, economists thought they were the result of lagging effects of the recession. But as the pattern has continued far into the economic recovery, they increasingly point to changes in the delivery of health care itself. "Spending has to slow down when it gets so big," said Paul Hughes Cromwick, the co director of sustainable health spending strategies at the research group Altarum. "There's no question that there are efforts all across the environment to try to control this beast. There's no question about that, and some of them are working." The slower growth may feel at odds with the experience of many Americans, who increasingly report financial duress from health costs. A recent study from the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit health research organization, found that from 2009 through 2018 individuals who got insurance through their employers have been asked to shoulder an ever higher share of their health bills through premium payments and rising deductibles. A typical employer plan for an individual now comes with a 1,400 deductible, up 900 from 2009. The new report found that overall growth in household health care spending, including out of pocket expenses, premium payments and contributions to Medicare through payroll taxes, remained flat, at 4.4 percent. Public opinion surveys show that health care particularly the cost of it remains a top voter concern, reflected by the Democratic presidential candidates' focus on Medicare for all and other proposals for expanding coverage to more people with a promise of lower direct costs. Congress is considering bills to help lower prescription drug costs and to eliminate the practice of surprise medical billing, though it is unclear whether either will pass this year. The Trump administration is pursuing regulatory actions aimed at lowering health costs, including an ambitious rule that would require insurers and health care providers to disclose the prices they negotiate for a wide range of medical procedures and services. That rule, finalized last month, is being challenged in court by hospitals. In the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, some candidates have been pushing far broader plans to tackle the issue. Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts have proposed establishing a single payer health care system, where the government would provide generous taxpayer funded insurance coverage for every American. Others, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden and Mayor Pete Buttigieg, of South Bend, Ind., want to offer an optional government plan and more generous government subsidies for Americans who buy their own insurance. Covid's impact on the supply chain continues. The pandemic has disrupted nearly every aspect of the global supply chain and made all kinds of products harder to find. In turn, scarcity has caused the prices of many things to go higher as inflation remains stubbornly high. Almost anything manufactured is in short supply. That includes everything from toilet paper to new cars. The disruptions go back to the beginning of the pandemic, when factories in Asia and Europe were forced to shut down and shipping companies cut their schedules. First, demand for home goods spiked. Money that Americans once spent on experiences were redirected to things for their homes. The surge clogged the system for transporting goods to the factories that needed them and finished products piled up because of a shortage of shipping containers. Now, ports are struggling to keep up. In North America and Europe, where containers are arriving, the heavy influx of ships is overwhelming ports. With warehouses full, containers are piling up. The chaos in global shipping is likely to persist as a result of the massive traffic jam. No one really knows when the crisis will end. Shortages and delays are likely to affect this year's Christmas and holiday shopping season, but what happens after that is unclear. Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said he expects supply chain problems to persist "likely well into next year." However modestly it is growing, health spending in the United States is far higher than most other countries. The 2018 estimate of 3.6 trillion comes to more than 11,000 for every person in the country, with 33 percent going to hospital care, 20 percent to doctors and clinical services and 9 percent to retail prescription drugs. Measured as a percentage of gross domestic product, it is nearly double the average of health spending in other developed countries, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Most of those countries achieve lower health costs with universal coverage. In the United States, an estimated 28 million people are uninsured. Given the public outrage over prescription drug prices, many people may be surprised to find that prices of prescription drugs bought at a pharmacy actually fell by one percent in 2018 for the first time since 1973, economists with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said in a telephone briefing about the new report. President Trump has seized on the slight drop, mentioning it in his rallies and speeches, although some experts warn the method the federal government uses for tracking drug price trends is imperfect. Overall averages obscure a volatile mix of prices, with some drugs commanding escalating price tags, even as more common generic medications became less expensive. The report also found that the share of the American population with health insurance fell for a second consecutive year in 2018, with most of the enrollment decline 1.3 million people coming in private coverage purchased directly, instead of through a job or the Affordable Care Act marketplace. The Trump administration has repeatedly highlighted this population as victims of rising premium costs under the Affordable Care Act; they generally earn too much to qualify for its premium subsidies. There was also a slight drop in the number of people with employer sponsored insurance and slower growth in Medicaid enrollment, although growth in Medicare enrollment remained steady. Spending for people with private health insurance was 6,199 a person, an increase of 6.7 percent over 2017, the highest per person growth rate since 2004. That number does not include out of pocket costs.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
The FaceTime flaw, dubbed FacePalm, was inadvertently discovered by Grant Thompson, 14, and reported by his mother. Apple didn't react until an article about it on a fan site went viral. SAN FRANCISCO On Jan. 19, Grant Thompson, a 14 year old in Arizona, made an unexpected discovery: Using FaceTime, Apple's video chatting software, he could eavesdrop on his friend's phone before his friend had even answered the call. His mother, Michele Thompson, sent a video of the hack to Apple the next day, warning the company of a "major security flaw" that exposed millions of iPhone users to eavesdropping. When she didn't hear from Apple Support, she exhausted every other avenue she could, including emailing and faxing Apple's security team, and posting to Twitter and Facebook. On Friday, Apple's product security team encouraged Ms. Thompson, a lawyer, to set up a developer account to send a formal bug report. But it wasn't until Monday, more than a week after Ms. Thompson first notified Apple of the problem, that Apple raced to disable Group FaceTime and said it was working on a fix. The company reacted after a separate developer reported the FaceTime flaw and it was written about on 9to5mac.com, a news site for Apple fans, in an article that went viral. The bug, and Apple's slow response to patching it, have renewed concerns about the company's commitment to security, even though it regularly advertises its bug reward program and boasts about the safety of its products. Hours before Apple's statement addressing the bug Monday, Tim Cook, the company's chief executive, tweeted that "we all must insist on action and reform for vital privacy protections." The FaceTime problem has already been branded "FacePalm" by security researchers, who say Apple's security team should have known better. Rarely is there a software flaw that grants such high level remote access and is so easy to manipulate: By adding a second person to a group FaceTime call, you can capture the audio and video of the first person called before that person answers the phone, or even if the person never answers. "If these kinds of bugs are slipping through," said Patrick Wardle, the co founder of Digita Security, which focuses on Apple related security, "you have to wonder if there are other problematic bugs that other hackers are exploiting that should have been caught." Read how to disable FaceTime to avoid the eavesdropping bug. On Monday, Apple said it was aware of the issue and had "identified a fix that will be released in a software update later this week." But the company has not addressed how the flaw passed through quality assurance, why it was so slow to respond to Ms. Thompson's urgent warnings, or whether it intends to reward the teenager whose mother raced to alert the company to the bug in the first place. A bug this easy to exploit is every company's worst security nightmare and every spy agency, cybercriminal and stalker's dream. In emails to Apple's product security team, Ms. Thompson noted that she and her son were just everyday citizens who believed they had uncovered a flaw that could undermine national security. Unknown to Ms. Thompson, there is a healthy market for bugs and the code to weaponize them, which allow governments, defense contractors and cybercriminals to invisibly spy on people's devices without their knowledge, capturing everything from their locations to information caught on their microphones and cameras. The FaceTime flaw, and other Apple bugs, can fetch tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, from dozens of brokers. Those brokers then sell those bugs for ever higher sums to governments and intelligence and law enforcement agencies around the world. On the seedier side of the spectrum are brokers who will sell these tools on the dark web to the highest bidder. The only catch is that hackers must promise never to disclose the flaw to the vendor for patching, so that buyers can keep their access. The market for Apple flaws has soared in the post Edward Snowden era as technology makers include more security, like end to end encryption, to thwart would be spies. This month, Zerodium, a well known broker and security firm, raised its reward for an Apple iOS bug to 2 million. In part to compete in that market, and reward those who do right by the company by notifying it of potentially lucrative bugs, Apple announced its own bounty program in 2016 the last of the Silicon Valley companies to do so. At a hacker conference that year in Las Vegas, Apple made a surprise announcement: It said it would start paying rewards as high as 200,000 to hackers who responsibly turned over crucial flaws in its products. But the bounty program has been slow going, in part, hackers say, because they can make multiples of that bounty on the black market, and because Apple has taken its time rewarding them for reporting problems.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
At the Former Home to Borders Books, a Tech Hub Now Sprouts ANN ARBOR, Mich. A patch of sidewalk on the south side of East Liberty Street, four blocks from the main University of Michigan campus, has returned from the dead with remarkable speed. At almost any hour of day, and especially at mealtimes, a mix of bargain seeking undergraduates, white collar tech workers and middle class townies weave in and out of the restaurants, coffee shop and bank that now line the corridor. The foot traffic is almost enough to make many in this city feel lucky that the single previous occupant of this red brick low rise building on the 600 block went bankrupt five years ago. Almost, that is, because that previous tenant was the flagship Borders store. "In some ways, the neighborhood is stronger and more interesting and more vibrant than it was when Borders was here," said Susan Pollay, executive director of the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority. "As much as I loved Borders and I mean, I loved it in the evolution of this building, it's better than it was." Such talk is probably still sacrilege for some local nostalgics, who remember that the store was started by a pair of brothers and Michigan graduates before it turned into an international book chain, but it is difficult to argue on a dollars and cents basis with the transformation. For more than 70 years, the site in this pivotal city block was occupied by a single business anchor, first a regional department store, Jacobson's, and then, for decades, Borders. The chain's bankruptcy which, by 2011, was almost overdue as customers had long since turned en masse to the internet to buy books created a once in a generation release of a large piece of real estate. Suddenly available: a 50,000 square foot former bookstore that fronts a full block of busy Liberty Street and a 45,000 square foot adjacent building that previously housed Borders' corporate headquarters. The former Borders at Liberty and Maynard in downtown Ann Arbor. Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times There were many ideas about how to use all that space, but one option was immediately taken off the table: installing another anchor tenant. "We wanted, on purpose, to have a multipurpose building," said Ron Hughes of Hughes Properties. "I think it's better for the city as well." In early 2012, Hughes Properties acquired the long term lease rights to the bookstore building that fronts Liberty Street and engaged the commercial broker Jim Chaconas of Colliers International to populate it. Today, commercial office space inventory in Ann Arbor is at a low. Google's decision to leave a high rise three blocks from the former Borders and move its 400 person, four floor customer service operations to a suburban office park by next year is seen as an opportunity, rather than worrisome. Ms. Pollay, in fact, does not mind that shift because Google employees do not fan out in the neighborhood for meals, as they have on site food service. "They hermetically seal themselves off," she said. "Hopefully the next tenants there won't." Even before Mr. Hughes and Mr. Chaconas began deciding the fate of the main Borders building, the three story former corporate office building was fully leased by Barracuda Networks. Barracuda, a computer storage and security company based in Campbell, Calif., had been expanding its presence in Ann Arbor since 2007 to tap fresh engineering recruits. The company moved in with 230 employees, making it the largest private employer in downtown behind Google. Mr. Hughes and Mr. Chaconas figured they would populate the second floor of the old bookstore with multiple office tenants after leasing the ground floor to a retail mix. Yet before Mr. Chaconas got far, the business and media analytics firm Prime Research made an aggressive play to secure 16,000 square feet at 24 a square foot with a call from a vice president, Julie Myers Beach. "I wasn't planning on touching the second floor until I was done with the first floor, but the day the sign went up for leasing the building, Julie from Prime called me up and said, 'I want it,'" Mr. Chaconas said. "I told her, 'I'm not ready.' She said, 'I don't care.'" With Prime and Barracuda side by side, the Borders spaces suddenly became the workplace for more than 300 young computer programmers with disposable incomes, Ms. Pollay said. Combined with the Google employees two blocks away, the area suddenly took on a tech hub vibe, whereas for decades it had primarily focused on serving the university community. Since then, other start ups and branches of tech companies have alighted in Ann Arbor's downtown core. More than 60 companies took part in a recent job fair put on by the city's small business incubator, Spark. "A larger tech company can be a real asset in the sense that it creates a talent pool that is now spawning a continuous labor pool for the entire market," said Spark's chief executive, Paul Krutko. He noted that Barracuda had not set up an internal food service, which encouraged employees to venture into downtown. That is the clientele Mr. Chaconas aimed to cater to while keeping the offerings local. Just as Borders was deeply rooted in the community, so are two current tenants, Knight's Steakhouse and Sweetwaters Coffee and Tea, both locally owned chains. A third, the HopCat brew pub, is part of a small chain that started in Grand Rapids. Mr. Chaconas and Mr. Hughes assert that their approach is far healthier for both their bottom line and the city's welfare than reliance on one tenant, as one early notion to lease the whole former bookstore space to something like a Dave Buster's would have. The subdivision of the Borders space is likely to become an example for future turnover, Mr. Chaconas said. The Urban Outfitters store across the street is, at about 10,000 square feet, one of the largest nonfood retailers in the area, which is worrisome. "I lose that tenant, I lose 100 percent of that income," he said. "If they leave I may put two tenants in there, so I only lose half the income. That is a perfect example, because nobody is that big anymore."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
What keeps venerable old families together? They are, after all, only as strong as the roots that bind them. Most of us know our relatives back to our grandparents. Counting our own children, we might have to contend with four generations. But there are families who can trace their history back centuries. Sylvia Brown, for instance, is the 11th generation of the family whose name adorns Brown University. And Alessia Antinori is the 26th generation of the Italian winemaking family whose company bears her surname. For families like these, their strength often lies in their hereditary wealth, in its varied forms of businesses, partnerships and foundations. But the strategies they use to stay together can be adopted by any family, whether or not money is at stake. One thing prosperous families have in common is a sense of ownership of their wealth, through either a business or a foundation. "Owning something seems to be the most important factor because you have a responsibility to it," said John A. Davis, chairman of the Cambridge Family Enterprise Group and a former Harvard Business School professor. "Your responsibility to it influences what you get from it, both financially and in terms of pride." A family business is often both the repository and generator of a family's prosperity, which can make decisions about the business more difficult. "I often ask my wealthy families: 'What would this decision be like if there wasn't any shared wealth? Would this be different if you were poor?'" said Jeff Savlov, founder of Blum Savlov, a family wealth consultancy. "A lot of what makes these families successful is family first." And that is where these families even those linked by finances need stories, context and shared memories to continue to prosper. "What keeps these families motivated besides wealth is a sense of mission for the family," Mr. Davis said. "What is this family trying to do? The second part is, 'How can I contribute to the mission?'" Ms. Brown said she had been motivated to delve into her family's past after hearing a lecture at Brown University that focused on her family's connection to slavery. She realized she could not rebut what seemed untrue to her because she did not know her family's history well enough. "We didn't sit around the table discussing our ancestors," she said. So she called her father and aunt to find out if what she had heard was true. "Their attitude was, there is very little we can do. Our ancestors were successful merchants in the 18th century when the Atlantic economy was dominated by slave trading. They dabbled in it. But my direct ancestors were antislavery." Unlike others who might leave it there, she dove into the family archives and wrote "Grappling With Legacy: Rhode Island's Brown Family and the American Philanthropic Impulse" (Archway, 2017). She said in the book that she wanted to come to terms with "two seminal events which may seem diametrically opposed: my father's decision to give his inheritance (and mine) to Brown University, and the transformation of the Brown family into the poster child for the evils of the slave trade." In addition to exploring her family history, she also hoped the book would draw her family, which has only eight direct descendants in her generation, closer together. The Antinori family, which traces its lineage back to the year 1000 and its entry into the wine business to 1385, is still linked by its vineyards and grand homes. It produces two of the country's best wines, Tignanello and Solaia, as well as a Chianti Classico. "When you grow up surrounded by art, beauty, traditions, when you are little, you don't really feel the difference" between a multigenerational family and a smaller one, said Ms. Antinori, who runs the family business with her two older sisters. "Slowly, you come to understand the difference." Her connection to her family's business came from the work she, like her sisters, did with their father when they were young: marketing the wine and scouting for vineyards abroad. "We were never obligated to work in the business," she said. Family heritage is not always enough. People move away from their childhood homes and do not always return as adults. Communication becomes vital. Newsletters are an easy way for families to keep in touch. But they require someone to take the lead and appoint a successor. Mitzi Perdue, heiress to the Sheraton Hotel fortune and the last wife of the chicken magnate Frank Perdue, asks each family member to write an essay about what it means to be part of the family. They're collected and bound in a book. "We get to know everyone, and everyone has a different view of what it means to be us," Mrs. Perdue said. Ms. Brown's family has supported causes in Rhode Island for some 250 years. But that philanthropic tradition and what some family members felt was mistreatment by the university that bears their name has some descendants looking to make their mark elsewhere. Ms. Brown said only she and a cousin live in Providence; the six other descendants in her generation live farther away. When it comes to the family foundation, those relatives' interests are not as focused on the organizations the family has traditionally supported. Mr. Davis, the consultant, said that philanthropy was often the key to a successful family and a way for descendants to be reminded of the wealth they take for granted. "People need to ask, What is the purpose of doing it?" he said, and more broadly: "What's the purpose of our family?" To answer these big questions, there is little substitute for time spent together. Ms. Brown said her generation returns to Providence or Newport once a year, though not at the same time. They do have family meetings, but people often call in rather than appear in person. Mrs. Perdue said the Henderson side of her family, to which the Sheraton wealth accrued, has an annual vacation at a family home complete with ballroom in Dublin, N.H. Similarly, she said, Frank Perdue left an endowment for family vacations, and every 18 months, up to 60 Perdues travel somewhere together. The Antinoris have found a way to spend most weekends together on their land in Bolgheri, near the coast in Italy. "We've spent a lot of time together in the past," Ms. Antinori said. "The important thing is for the future generation to spend time with my father because he has the history and knowledge." That time together helps make the family stronger. "We don't agree on a few things, but the important thing is, we share the same values respect, passion, the concept that you want the business to stay in the family," Ms. Antinori said. No matter how well siblings and cousins get along, families are not closed systems. Spouses bring with them another family's traditions. Finding a way to welcome them can be tricky. Mr. Savlov said the blending of families must be handled delicately so that it did not seem like spouses were leaving their old families behind. The receiving family also must be mindful that a new member may not want to be part of everything all at once. Mrs. Perdue said that she interviewed people who married into the Henderson family about their lives and wrote biographies about them for other family members to read. The new spouses are given the essays on what it means to be a Henderson. "If you jump into a large family and you meet 60 people, that's going to be intimidating and overwhelming," she said. "But if you've seen their pictures and know their interests ahead of time, that makes it easier." That transparency can help families look honestly at their past and move forward together. As Ms. Brown said, "When you're in the 11th generation and the family keeps meticulous records, there are going to be skeletons in your closet."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
WASHINGTON Jeff Bezos, the billionaire chief executive of Amazon, founded a rocket company as a hobby 16 years ago. Now that company, Blue Origin, finally has its first paying customer as it ramps up to become a full fledged business. Mr. Bezos announced that customer, the satellite television provider Eutelsat, on Tuesday. In about five years, Eutelsat, which is based in Paris, will strap one of its satellites to a new Blue Origin rocket to be delivered to space, a process it has done dozens of times with other space partners. For Blue Origin, the relationship represents its evolution from an engineering obsessed company into one that also seeks to make a profit eventually. That goal may be a moon shot, with high risks, high costs and no guarantee that enough customers need transportation beyond Earth. Blue Origin, based in Kent, Wash., has launched only its New Shepard rocket to the edge of space, 62 miles up, before returning to Earth. The commercial partnership brings Blue Origin closer in line with SpaceX, created by Elon Musk, which has been launching satellites and taking NASA cargo to the International Space Station for several years. Last week, SpaceX announced that two space tourists would pay to fly on a weeklong trip around the moon. The companies are part of a private sector space boom that has restored the United States' position in aerospace technology and exploration. Boeing, Lockheed Martin and other international commercial space companies are also competing with the tech entrepreneurs for business and government customers. Mr. Bezos, true to his approach in business ventures, is looking far into the future. "The long term vision is millions of people living and working in space," he said Tuesday during a speech at the Satellite 2017 conference in Washington. To make that happen, Blue Origin must take several intermediate steps, he said. It also needs to lower costs for launches by reusing rockets and other equipment, he added. We "need to get to a place ultimately where it is much more like commercial airlines," Mr. Bezos said. New applications for satellites, including broadband internet, mapping and other services, have fueled more demand. Analysts said private rocket companies would fill a need to get those satellites into orbit in coming years. Blue Origin's deal with Eutelsat is a "definite statement to the industry that Blue Origin will be a viable commercial launch vehicle," said Carissa Bryce Christensen, the chief executive of Bryce Space and Technology, a consulting firm. The large crowd to hear Mr. Bezos speak at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center on Tuesday illustrated renewed enthusiasm about the commercial space industry. Space has long been a pursuit of wealthy investors, and Mr. Bezos and Mr. Musk have captured the most public attention in recent years for their audacious visions. SpaceX is focused on reaching and inhabiting Mars. Blue Origin may be building a fleet of rockets to make deliveries to the moon and beyond. Mr. Bezos "is investing because he wants to transform people's lives with space capabilities, but the expectation has always been that this will be a successful business," Ms. Christensen said. "You wouldn't get anything done without getting the dreamers out there, but how do you translate those dreams into a profitable business? That's very tricky," said Henry Hertzfeld, a research professor at the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. Blue Origin, which has more than 1,000 employees, has improved its technology to carry bigger payloads. A few months ago, the company began to court customers, and Eutelsat emerged as an ideal partner because it had experience working with first time launch vehicles, Mr. Bezos said. Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket, named after the astronaut John Glenn, will be manufactured and launched at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It is expected to be completed in 2020 and will be used to carry one of Eutelsat's geostationary satellites. No financial details of the partnership with Eutelsat were disclosed. In a video, Mr. Bezos revealed details about the rocket's BE 4 engine and showed how it could carry 50 tons of payload and land on a moving sea barge. "Their solid engineering approach, and their policy to develop technologies that will form the base of a broad generation of launchers, corresponds to what we expect from our industrial partners," Rodolphe Belmer, Eutelsat's chief executive, said in a statement. Mr. Bezos said he was approaching his space project with an abundance of patience. "I like to do things incrementally," he said, noting that Blue Origin's mascot is a tortoise. With such high costs and risks with each rocket launch, it is important not to skip steps, he said. "Slow is smooth and smooth is fast," said Mr. Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post and a clock that will keep time for 10,000 years. "I've seen this in every endeavor I've been in."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Over the last few years, the expansion of reggaeton and the rise of Latin trap have been two of the most significant evolutions in global pop music. Stars like Bad Bunny, Ozuna, Maluma, J Balvin, Nicky Jam and others have upended Spanish language pop with sounds that are utterly modern and outrageously popular. So when the nominations for the 20th annual Latin Grammy Awards were announced in September, the slight was very clear: No reggaeton or Latin trap artists were up for the biggest categories, which were largely given over to longtime favorites making more traditional, staid music. Many of the reggaeton community's biggest figures including J Balvin and Daddy Yankee, a star of an earlier generation spoke out against what they perceived as a sign of systematic disrespect to their sound. Like the Grammys, the Latin Grammys have a clear generational problem, and also a genre problem, the byproduct of a voting body that evolves far more slowly than the music world itself does. And so the efforts toward demonstrating balance were strenuous at this year's Latin Grammys ceremony, which was held Thursday night at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, and broadcast on Univision. Though several reggaeton stars chose not to attend, others used the opportunity to advocate for their scene.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Cardi B shows off her flexibility and range on "Invasion of Privacy," taking and doling out punches on one track while rapping about her fragile heart on the next. Cardi B's two breakthrough singles "Bodak Yellow," which went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 last year, and "Bartier Cardi" posited the Bronx social media savant turned reality TV scene stealer turned rapper as a pugilist preaching the virtues of triumphing over difficult circumstances, the power of sexual agency and the satisfying payoff of hard work. She sounded ecstatic, and also ready for a rumble at any turn. And so "Be Careful," the third single from her major label debut album, "Invasion of Privacy," was a heady swerve. The beat is a tinkle, not a gloomy horror soundtrack, and even though Cardi is rapping with ferocity, she's also stepping gingerly; the subject is her heart, and she doesn't want to fracture it. At the bridge, she interpolates Lauryn Hill's "Ex Factor," and she sings the hook with an enchanting rawness. That she's not a trained singer is the thing she's most effective at her most unvarnished. Cardi B moves seamlessly between these modes taking a gut punch one moment, delivering one the next. She is more versatile than most rappers or pop stars of any stripe. And what's most promising about the exuberant and impressive "Invasion of Privacy" an album full of thoughtful gestures, few of them wasteful is that it's a catalog of directions Cardi, 25, might go in, slots she might fill, or even invent. Never miss a pop music story: Sign up for our weekly newsletter, Louder. Much as Cardi B's ascent to music stardom has been unconventional, so is her approach to maintaining her place there. The Cardi of this concise and purposeful album is as confident on the breezy trap anthem "Drip" (featuring Migos, which includes her fiance, Offset) as on the power of positive thinking sermon "Best Life," featuring sermonizer Chance the Rapper. "I Like It," featuring the Puerto Rican rapper singer Bad Bunny and the Colombian lite reggaeton star J Balvin, is undeniable, both for its smoothness and also its revising of "I Like It Like That," the boogaloo classic by Pete Rodriguez. Here alone are three possible Cardis: switchblade Cardi, empowerment seminar Cardi, pan Latin unifier Cardi. And those aren't even all of them. On "She Bad" and "I Do," she raps about sex with the assertiveness and raw detail of Lil' Kim or Too Short. And on "Thru Your Phone," she's convincingly broken by an untrustworthy partner: "I might just cut all the tongues out your sneakers/Smash your TV from Best Buy/You gon' turn me into Left Eye." "Invasion of Privacy" is also, notably, a hip hop album that doesn't sound like any of its temporal peers: It is not a samey post trap longread designed for zoned out maximal streaming, nor does it flirt with the sonic and thematic excesses of the SoundCloud generation. In fact, it's more reminiscent of the late 1990s and early 2000s, when New York rap was beginning to test its pop edges. And though it's a debut album, it's by no means a debut: Cardi B has been famous for years already, first as a libertine social media slice of life comic, and later as an effervescently campy reality television standout. Both of those sorts of fame are relatively young, though. Succeeding in music has generally been thought to require something more than the natural vim and charm that she's deployed to this point. And yet, that is partly a hip hop myth deployed by gatekeepers. Cardi proves it's a lie: The skills she has been deploying to hilarious effect in her other careers are exactly the ones that make her music so invigorating. Few artists of any kind are so visibly and infectiously enthused. As a result, the appetite for her is insatiable, and the career milestones are coming fast and furious: co hosting "The Tonight Show" alongside Jimmy Fallon, appearing on the covers of various magazines, announcing her pregnancy during a performance on "Saturday Night Live." She has also been the most reliable hip hop guest star of the last 12 months, with appearances on G Eazy's "No Limit," Migos's "MotorSport," Ozuna's "La Modelo" and the remix of Bruno Mars's "Finesse" she has yet to release a dud. For someone who only started rapping a few years ago, that stylistic versatility is striking it shows Cardi to be a quick study. And indeed, in a recent interview with Ebro Darden for Apple's Beats 1, she spoke openly about wanting to improve as a rapper and working with a more experienced rapper and songwriter, Pardison Fontaine, to improve her technical skills. "I needed a little bit of help from breaking out of my box," she said. "I need to learn how to flow a little bit easier and cleaner." (There was some consternation online after an old video of Mr. Fontaine performing part of "Be Careful" recently resurfaced online. Atlantic Records did not make songwriting credits for "Invasion of Privacy" available.) The hard work shows, especially in terms of her cadences, and her ease in adapting to various production styles. Her quick jab rhymes aren't particularly complex, but occasionally she gets off a delicious turn of phrase, like this one, from "Money Bag": "These bitches salty, they sodium, they jelly, petroleum/Always talking in the background, don't never come to the podium." The work of becoming a great rapper is something that's rarely spoken about, but Cardi has been open about her education process, an implicit acknowledgment that her path to success has been unusual. It is one way rap stars are made today, and may be for the foreseeable future not by triumphing over other rhymeslingers in Darwinian fashion, but by arriving to the genre as a fully formed personality, and then learning how to shrink wrap that personality around beats. This is a new paradigm, one that puts charm before bona fides. It is what happens when a genre is exposed to sunlight and expands beyond the internal logic that once drove it. But it's not enough for Cardi to win on those terms she wants to succeed on the old ones, too.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
The florist Lewis Miller and his team set up a "flower flash" installation near Barclays Center in Brooklyn. It was 3:37 a.m. on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn when Lewis Miller let out a sigh of relief. "Right here is my happy place," the 46 year old florist and guerrilla artist said. After zhushing a coral peony and throwing in a few gerbera daisies, he stood back to consider the framing of his six by four foot orange hued flower heart: black pavement, white crosswalk lines, a "No Turns" sign, the marquee of Barclays Center casting a quote from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. "The time is always right to do what is right" into the early morning dark. The heart was one of four "flower flashes" Lewis Miller Design's signature that New Yorkers would wake up to on June 16. Though he has surreptitiously placed these elaborate arrangements for years, Mr. Miller's pandemic era flashes, around a hospital lamppost or in a midtown garbage can, have been met with particular enthusiasm. Social media viewers from around the world have sent him hundreds of heartfelt letters and fan art. Bette Midler raves about his work on Instagram. "During good times, flowers are awesome, we all know that," Mr. Miller said. "But now more than ever we need flowers in the city. Who isn't looking for a little joy?" Irini Arakas Greenbaum, whose job includes scouting locations for Mr. Miller ("I'm always on the hunt for the Kate Moss of garbage cans," she said), offered him a free spirit rose. "Nah," he said. "I'm so super pretty already." She insisted. "OK," he said. "I'm gonna see a homeless girl and give it to her. Spread the love!" Mr. Miller told the man to stay safe. Then he jumped into a large white van carrying some 12,000 flowers in the back. "It's like driving around a hundred wedding cakes," said Manny Mejia from behind the wheel. Despite a few potholes, the daisy mums and stardust roses emerged unscathed at the second installation site, in Fort Greene. Mr. Miller zip tied the heart onto a green C train entrance under the eye of "Comandante Biggie," a mural of the Notorious B.I.G. flanked by white doves. As Tawana Schlegel, a florist with the company, softened the heart's curves with lilies placed in messy perfection, Mr. Miller noticed a Cellino Barnes ad above the subway entrance. "Is that even a real phone number?" he asked no one in particular about all those eights, while sweeping up fallen petals and a bonus used Q tip. Before bolting he grabbed a mister of Crowning Glory from the van to give the arrangement a spritz, because like so many New Yorkers, lilies need extra hydration. Crossing the illuminated Manhattan Bridge to the third site, in SoHo, Mr. Miller pondered the future. "What's our city going to look like in three months?" he said. Almost all of this year's gigs were canceled, and early 2021 events were already being postponed. Though Mr. Miller has paid for past flashes himself, he accepted 1,200 roses donated from a fan with a farm in Ecuador for this one, as well as some funding from L.E.A.F., an organization that puts on flower festivals. "I'm not opposed to taking money," he said, noting his installations for Equinox, Old Navy and one businessman who requested a custom flash for his wife as a lunch break surprise. "But for these there needs to be integrity or my joy is dead." By 4:47 a.m. on Spring Street, the deep hum of garbage trucks was serenading Mr. Miller's crew as they placed a purple heart against a blood red wall of graffiti: "We may be alone but together we'll conquer." Mr. Miller rounded out the design with rhododendron while Ms. Schlegel threw in an extra allium, the onion family flower that could double as a Willy Wonka lollipop. "We always joke about how a good flash is both confident and cavalier, but the true secret sauce is the city," Mr. Miller said. "I've seen street art everywhere from Nashville to L.A., and it's just not the same. There are certain things that just work best in New York." But street art doesn't always cooperate. Dismayed by a dark patch of wall not providing adequate color contrast, Ms. Arakas Greenbaum pulled Mr. Miller aside to discuss options. Move the heart? White spray paint? Mr. Miller came up with another solution involving what some consider to be the floral equivalent to a vending machine hamburger. "Carnations have gotten a bad rap," he said, after adding a few white and purple tipped ones he had on hand. "They're beautiful flowers that smell like nutmeg and have a high petal count." (If any stem snobs are wondering, Mr. Miller would take a carnation any day over a moth orchid or even, he whispered, the "overrated" calla lily.) The cobblestone plaza on Gansevoort Street was the final stop, empty at 5:21 a.m. The team lay down giant cardboard stencils of Milton Glaser's "I NY" logo on the street and replaced them with bold blooms. Mr. Miller poked and prodded the red heart, yanking out a rose here, situating a caladium leaf there. Ms. Arakas Greenbaum climbed to a fifth floor walk up's fire escape to get the aerial view as four pigeons wandered by. "I wish it looked like St. Mark's Square," Mr. Miller said, sprinkling his breakfast granola bar over the work. By 6:27 a.m., the morning flocks, avian and human, were milling.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
HELSINKI, Finland A small electric bus chugged along at a slow but steady seven miles per hour when a white van, entering the street from the side, cut in front of it. The bus slowed, as if its driver had hit the brakes, and got back up to speed after the van moved out of the way. But this bus has no brake or accelerator pedal. It has no steering wheel, either. In fact, it doesn't have a driver it operates using sensors and software, although for now, a person is stationed on board ready to hit a red "stop" button in an emergency. At a time when self driving cars are beginning to make progress most notably with a trial program that the ride service Uber began in Pittsburgh this fall the bus represents a different approach to technologically advanced transportation. A driverless car, after all, is still a car, carrying at best a few people. By transporting many passengers on what could be very flexible routes, driverless buses could help reduce the number of cars clogging city streets. Driverless buses like this one are being used in private, controlled settings, for example to shuttle students around a campus or employees on the grounds of an industrial plant. Helsinki is one of the first cities to run so called autonomous buses on public roads in traffic; another project, in Sion, Switzerland, has been operating for several months, although the service was suspended in September for two weeks after a minor accident. The Helsinki bus is a project of several universities with cooperation and money from government agencies and the European Union. The two year, 1.2 million project, called Sohjoa, is just one manifestation of a movement to reduce the use of cars, and the traffic jams and greenhouse gases that come with them. "A good possible outcome is that less and less people will own personal vehicles in the cities because they really don't need them anymore," said Harri Santamala, who coordinates the project and directs a "smart mobility" program at Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Sciences. In September, a Sohjoa bus, which can accommodate up to 12 passengers sitting and standing, made its debut on a straight, quarter mile route in the city's Hernesaari district, turning 180 degrees at both ends. The trip connected a popular sauna and restaurant at one end with several restaurants at the other, and attracted a small stream of curious riders. "We chose this as a first route because we can study a huge amount of different traffic issues depending on the time of day," Mr. Santamala said. The buses are not as sophisticated as Uber's self driving cars, or those being developed by Google and other companies. Those are essentially "free range" vehicles, able to travel just about anywhere by comparing what their sensors detect about roads and surroundings with a database that has been compiled by the cars over time. (Before Uber began offering rides in Pittsburgh, for example, employees drove its cars around the city for months, collecting data.) The buses, made by a French company, are "taught" a route by having operators drive them using steering and acceleration controls on a small box. The route is then fine tuned with software. In operation, the buses have laser sensors and GPS to keep them on the route, and can deviate only if alternate routes have been "learned" as well. While the buses are designed to travel at about 15 m.p.h., or 25 kilometers pe hour, they are running at half that for the Helsinki trials. Lateral movement is also restricted; if a car is double parked along the route, for instance, the bus must wait until the car moves or the bus operator steers around it using the control box. "We have to be very keen about safety," Mr. Santamala said. Those restrictions provide an underwhelming experience for now. The most excitement occurs when a vehicle like the white van crosses too closely, or when a motorist approaches from the rear and, impatient with the bus's tortoiselike pace, swerves around it. Mr. Santamala said the project aimed to establish a real bus route probably a seasonal one in the next two years. And there's no reason self driving technology could not be applied to bigger buses eventually. For now, the project is focusing on so called last mile service taking riders from a stop on a more conventional bus line to a point closer to their homes, shops, offices or schools. An autonomous bus, presumably going faster, could be useful, especially because of a quirk in Finland's motor vehicle laws. "It doesn't state anywhere that we need to have a driver holding the steering wheel or even inside the vehicle," Mr. Santamala said. "A legal driver can be observing the operation through a computer." That means a number of buses could run autonomously, with one operator in a central office intervening remotely as needed. Reducing the number of operators could make it financially feasible to run routes that serve only a few customers, or to vary routes throughout the day based on ridership. Helsinki has already seen several efforts to use technology to change public transportation. One was an on demand minibus service, Kutsuplus, that was operated by the regional transport agency for four years. Using a smartphone, customers could choose pickup and drop off locations. The service's software then combined requests from several customers and calculated an optimal route for one of its 15 minibuses. "It was a good experiment," said Sami Sahala, who advises the city on "intelligent transportation" issues. "But it was a little bit ahead of its time." Kutsuplus was heavily subsidized by the city, and although the service was popular and gaining riders, it was doomed by budget cuts at the end of last year. A spinoff company, Split, ran an on demand service in Washington that was discontinued last month, and Uber and its ride service rival, Lyft, have developed similar ride share services that use the companies' drivers and their private cars. Other efforts to remake transportation continue in Helsinki. The most ambitious is a service introduced this fall by a Finnish company, MaaS Global, that offers all inclusive transit services for a monthly fee. The concept, called "mobility as a service," takes its inspiration from the changes that have occurred in the telecommunications industry over the past several decades, Mr. Sahala said. "You used to pay for all the calls you made," he said. "But with the advent of mobile phones, the business model started to change. Now you pay a fixed price, and everything is included." Cars are expensive, and studies have shown that most urban car owners rarely use them, so there's a potential market in people who give up their cars and spend some of the savings on a service like Whim. Self driving cars and buses may eventually help to make services like MaaS Global's widely affordable, Mr. Hietanen said. For now, the bus trials continue. Last month, the project moved to a more complex route in Espoo, on Helsinki's outskirts, and is now operating in Tampere, 111 miles (179 kilometers) to the north. Mr. Santamala and his colleagues analyze each trip to learn how a self driving bus differs from one operated by a human, and how motorists and pedestrians interact with it. One difference was apparent to everyone aboard the bus after the white van cut in front of it: There was no driver to yell at the driver of the van, which had pulled into a nearby parking space. So Helena Bensky, a Helsinki resident who was giving the bus a try, offered to fill in. "Should I go give that guy a telling off?" she asked.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Our weekday morning digest that includes information about cruises, resorts and theme parks, with deals, tips and anything else that travelers may want to know. Peru is getting worldwide attention for its growing roster of talented chefs. A dinner at the New York City Wine and Food Festival, held Oct. 15 to 18, offers a rare chance to try the cooking of one of the country's top stars. Virgilio Martinez, the executive chef of the acclaimed restaurant Central in Lima, who is known for his modernist cuisine using indigenous ingredients, will prepare a multicourse meal at the Park Lane Hotel in Manhattan along with Matthew Lightner, the former executive chef of the two Michelin starred Atera, also in Manhattan. It is the first time that Mr. Martinez cooks at a food festival in the United States, and the sit down event has dishes prepared by each chef. Mr. Martinez will turn out plates such as razor clams with avocado cream and scallops with tiger's milk and seaweed, while Mr. Lightner plans on serving a sprouted grain tart with smoked clams and barbecued lamb with beets and rose petals. The dinner takes place Saturday Oct. 17. Tickets are 250 a person. August is the time to celebrate Giacomo Puccini in Tuscany. The village of Torre del Lago, in the region of Lucca, is home to the Puccini Festival, which started in 1930. Puccini made it his home and composed many of his operas there, including "Tosca" and "Madama Butterfly." The house where he lived is near the open air theater where the performances are held; it can hold up to 3,400 spectators, and has the picturesque Massaciuccoli Lake as backdrop. The lineup this year includes "Tosca," "Turandot," "Il Trittico" and "Madama Butterfly." Tickets can be purchased through the festival's website. Prices from 15 euros ( 16).	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Mr. Kabaservice is the author of "Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party." President Trump has flirted with the convoluted QAnon conspiracy theory for months. Last week, he gave a full embrace to its followers, telling reporters that its believers are patriots "who love our country." Over 70 QAnon supporters have run for Congress as Republicans this year. At least one of them, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, will probably join the House next year. Despite her QAnon advocacy and a history of racist and Islamophobic rants on social media, Mr. Trump hailed her as a "future Republican star." Most people refer to QAnon as a fringe movement. But that no longer makes sense: Under Mr. Trump, it has become part of the Republican mainstream and that has troubling implications for the party's future. The QAnon movement routinely deploys racist and anti Semitic tropes; it has even been identified as a potential domestic terrorism threat by the F.B.I. Yet a majority of Republican leaders have refrained from criticizing the president for legitimizing it. They do not seem bothered that the conspiracists, without a shred of proof, declare Democrats to be part of a "deep state" cabal of satanic, child molesting cannibals and call for the president to imprison and execute them. A handful of the least Trump dependent Republicans have pushed back. Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming called QAnon "dangerous lunacy that should have no place in American politics." Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois termed it "a fabrication." (For that, a Trump campaign official actually attacked him.) The conservative movement that now dominates the party always had a dark side, but its leaders understood that conspiracy cults are lethal to the social trust on which democracy depends. They also realized it was in the best interest of their movement to marginalize its cranks and kooks. QAnon presents the same kind of threat to the Republican Party that the far right John Birch Society did in the late 1950s and '60s. The Birchers trafficked in similar concepts of an evil elite corrupting and betraying the country. The society's founder, the retired candy maker Robert Welch, considered even President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, to be "a conscious, dedicated" Communist agent. Birchers were never more than a small fraction of Republicans. But in some key states like California, they made up a sizable share of the party's primary voters, donors and activists what we now would call "the base." Barry Goldwater became the 1964 Republican presidential nominee in part thanks to their efforts. Even so, many Republican officials were willing to condemn the Birch Society, particularly after public revulsion over right wing extremism (among other factors) contributed to the party's catastrophic losses in the 1964 elections. Robert Taft Jr., the son and grandson of famous conservative politicians, emphasized that extremism was alien to Republican philosophy and that the party should not be "a home for the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, or any similar group." Ray Bliss, who became chairman of the Republican National Committee after Goldwater's defeat, called upon Republicans to reject membership in any organization that "attempts to use the Republican Party for its own ends." He singled out "irresponsible radicals such as Robert Welch." Mr. Bliss repressed primary challenges from the right, worked to exclude Birchers from positions of power within the party and cooperated with moderate and conservative activists to prevent Phyllis Schlafly from winning the presidency of the National Federation of Republican Women. William F. Buckley Jr., the pre eminent conservative leader of the 1960s, tried to read the Birch Society out of his movement. He felt that the Birchers' conspiracies discredited conservatism by making it seem "ridiculous and pathological." The absurd claims also turned off a young generation who laughed along with Bob Dylan's derisive "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues." Mr. Buckley insisted to a conservative critic that to govern and expand, the movement had to hold on to "moderate, wishy washy conservatives" who made up a majority of Republicans. "If they think they are being asked to join a movement whose leadership believes the drivel of Robert Welch," he warned, "they will pass by Crackpot Alley, and will not pause until they feel the embrace of those way over on the other side, the Liberals." Some historians consider Mr. Buckley's efforts to purge the Birch Society to have been too little, too late, and the Republican Party undeniably played on social division and white backlash as it moved to the political right from the 1970s onward. But extremist groups like the Birchers were mostly relegated to the fringes for many years. That was the foundation for Republican presidential victories under Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes. Today there are no gatekeepers of similar stature on the political right, partly because of structural factors that have undercut the power of parties. These include the decline of establishment dominated conventions and the rise of primaries, the growth of outside spending groups and the proliferation of conservative media programming from the likes of Fox News and Sinclair. It's also because of the unwillingness of Republican and conservative leaders, over at least the past two decades, to call out and challenge the growing extremism in their base. There have been isolated exceptions. The party publicly condemned the former Klan wizard David Duke when he ran as a Republican in Louisiana. John McCain, as the Republican presidential nominee in 2008, rejected the birther conspiracy theorists (including Mr. Trump). Last year, after Steve King of Iowa defended white supremacy, the House Republican Caucus stripped him of his committee memberships. But so long as Mr. Trump remains president, there will be no such actions against QAnon conspirators, no matter how extreme. Mr. Trump has done nothing to broaden the Republican Party's appeal. His re election strategy rests entirely on stoking his followers' resentments and Q believers who consider Democrats to be evil incarnate are integral to his hopes for success. Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, another Republican who has displayed sporadic independence from Mr. Trump, called QAnon "nuts" and warned that if the Democrats retake control of the Senate, "garbage like this will be a big part of why they won." Republicans lost their House majority in 2018 in part because college educated suburbanites, who once reliably voted Republican, rejected Mr. Trump's elevation of anger and division over competent government. If QAnon comes to define the Republican brand in the public mind, the party may never regain its lost swing voters. If Mr. Trump loses in November and takes Republican control of the Senate down with him, the party's leaders may rethink the path that led them to defeat. Perhaps they will remember the broad popularity the party enjoyed for decades after it resisted earlier versions of QAnon extremism and the ways in which that legacy has been squandered. Geoffrey Kabaservice ( ruleandruin) is director of political studies at the Niskanen Center and the author of "Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
LONDON The Queen Victoria Memorial, centerpiece of the plaza that fronts Buckingham Palace, is possibly the most bombastic of this city's monuments to British grandeur. Beside Victoria, queen and empress, glowering toward the Mall, is a cascade of allegorical statuary representing Courage and Constancy, Truth and Justice, Manufacture and Agriculture, Peace and Progress, and Motherhood. Ship's prows jut from the corners. Bas relief mermaids and mermen watch over its fountain pool. Dedicated in 1911, the edifice projects the historical certainty and moral satisfaction of the Britannia that ruled the waves. Kara Walker was on her way to Heathrow Airport from her initial site visit to the Tate Modern, after being selected for the museum's annual Turbine Hall commission, when she saw the memorial from her taxi. "I hadn't even seen it before," Ms. Walker recalled recently at her Brooklyn studio. "I took a bunch of pictures out the window, because I was like this is so totally my thing." In response, Ms. Walker presents her countermemorial, titled "Fons Americanus" the Fountain of America as an offering from a colonial subject: "A Gift and Talisman," reads the text stenciled on the gallery wall, for "the Citizens of the Old World (Our Captors, Saviours, and Intimate Family)," from "That Celebrated Negress of the New World, Madame Kara E. Walker." In its manner and themes, the work flows coherently from Ms. Walker's well known genus of drawings, silhouette cutouts, films and sculptures that explore domination and resistance, particularly in the antebellum, plantation context, with unflinching attention too much, for some viewers to its moral and physical perversions. It has made her, deservedly, one of the fundamental contemporary investigators of the American psyche, and of the racial anxieties that the United States has yet to purge. But her projects overflow national boundaries and respond to history that began well before the arrival of enslaved Africans in what is now the United States in 1619. "It does drive me a little bit crazy when I see references to my work that say 'slavery in America,'" she said. "I'm talking about power dynamics, kind of universally, and also in the New World, or in the world that was created by the imperial project." Ms. Walker's first large public commission, in 2014, the spectacular "A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby" in the predemolition Domino factory in Brooklyn, began to make this perspective explicit. The site was where, for decades, most of the raw sugar for the East Coast market arrived from the Caribbean, the product of centuries of slavery and colonial exploitation. Turbine Hall hosts prestige commissions past artists include Olafur Eliasson, Ai Weiwei, and last year, Tania Bruguera but the space is awkward. The hall is soaring, like a cathedral, with museum galleries rising in wings on either side. It is a place of passage and gathering. "It's parklike, in a weird way," Ms. Walker said. "I've heard that babies take their first steps in there. I've been there when it's empty, people sit on the floor. There's something blank slatey about it, for the general population, and I find that fascinating." Matching her ideas to the space took time , she said, with months "going down paths that felt wrong, wrong, wrong," feeling pressure from the timeline . Seeking fresh inspiration by drawing, she found herself fixating on water, then fountains, and remembered her photos of the memorial. "And it was waiting for me," she said. "It was a little too removed from my hand," she said. On shelves in her studio, she showed clay models she had made for her figures, along with rejects and outtakes. She had not worked with clay since she was a child, but she said the figures "just appeared" as she handled it. "As people who work with clay sometimes will tell you, the form was just in there, screaming to get out." With Millimetre, a fabrication company in Brighton, she found a process to preserve the handmade feel in the final pieces. Her tabletop versions were molded and coded, then fed through Powermill, a digital milling program, to a robot that reproduced the shapes from bricks of Portuguese cork. (The material was chosen for its environmental sustainability). Artisans coated the pieces with layers of Jesmonite, a plaster and resin composite, selected to take the color of Portland stone, common in London buildings, and carefully reproduced the details of Ms. Walker's touch by knife before it set. The irregular finish of the statues contrasts with the smooth sheen of the central pedestal and the lip of the fountain, suggesting a story in motion, said Clara Kim, the Tate curator who worked on the project. "Her intention was that it is a memorial that is in the process of being formed," Ms. Kim said. "As if emerging from the ground, from the depths of history." Visitors unaccustomed to a Kara Walker project may find some of the specific histories in "Fons Americanus" difficult or perhaps shocking. Placed about the basin, some partially submerged, are scenes that allude to artworks that treat the dread of the Middle Passage, such as Turner's "Slave Ship," depicting slaves thrown overboard in a storm so the captain could collect insurance money. A researcher by instinct, Ms. Walker shares reference images in the catalog. They range from Delacroix and Matisse to the photograph of a pit, in a port in Sierra Leone, where those who refused to board the slave ship were tortured and killed. A smaller sculpture that refers to this horror greets visitors as they enter the hall: water streams from a fountain through the eyes of a severed head. In another hard moment, Ms. Walker has sculpted a Pieta scene in which a male figure lifts a body whose mangled face clearly makes reference to the murdered Emmett Till and with it, the 2017 controversy over "Open Casket," the Dana Schutz painting in the Whitney Biennial. (Ms. Walker obliquely defended the work, lauding the value of even violent depictions in art as a "site of potentiality, of query.") Is London ready? Ms. Kim, the curator who is American, and previously worked at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and other institutions said it should be. "We didn't know when we invited her that she was going to do something on monuments," she said. "But it's such an apropos subject given the discourses that are happening now around re evaluating monuments, certainly in the context of the U.S. It's important that those conversations happen here as well." Ms. Walker said she learned from "Sugar Baby" that everyone will have a different reaction, and that she welcomed that. "As long as it's lively," she said. (A show of her video pieces over the years, curated by Hilton Als, is opening this week at Spruth Magers gallery in London.) Making work in Britain, she said, forced her to "get over whatever the weird prejudices were" that she felt about the place, mixed with knowledge of her ancestry a great great great grandfather, Abraham Thorpe, was a white man from Derbyshire whose grandson had a black child in South Carolina. She envisioned the work as being for the British public caught up, like the American public, in the fraught ongoing project of building a pluralistic society. "I think of it in terms of people," she said of her monument. "A gift toward some democratic ideal."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
The raunchy cabaret star visits her costume designer's studio in the East Village, otherwise known as the House of Larreon. "I don't think there's anything that's too much," said Bridget Everett, his model, muse and client extraordinaire. On a recent sunny afternoon, they were standing in Mr. Krone's kitsch crammed studio in the East Village of Manhattan, which doubles as the headquarters of his label, House of Larreon. Mr. Krone was fitting Ms. Everett, the actress, comedian and off color cabaret sensation, for one of her December engagements at Joe's Pub with her band, the Tender Moments. The dress was a red sequined tribute to the Bob Mackie flame gown that Tina Turner wore in the 1970s. Mr. Krone and Ms. Everett like to name their looks, and this one was a lewd riff on "River Deep, Mountain High." Ms. Everett had arrived at the studio, a riot of street furniture finds, vintage glassware and gaudy fabrics, looking somewhat less glamorous. Beneath a puffy winter jacket, she wore a pink tank top and sweatpants. She abstains from bras onstage, but this afternoon she wore a sensible black one. Bras, it turns out, are part of her daytime look. "That tank top would be kind of vulgar without one," Mr. Krone said. "That's not a problem for me," she said. Her entourage consisted of a gray and white Pomeranian, Poppy Louise Mandrell Everett, who sat queenlike in her pet carrier and occasionally deigned to lap water from a goblet. "You're the good girl, Poppy," Ms. Everett said. For this fitting, Mr. Krone had provided a spread of Fritos, crudites, M M's and artichoke dip, which Ms. Everett nibbled sparingly. She chugs chardonnay during her cabaret act, but here she stuck to seltzer and coffee. Ms. Everett was going to promote "Camping," the HBO cringe comedy, in which she plays Harry, the owner of a campsite. "Harry's like the opposite of me," she said. "She's a gun loving lesbian who says whatever is on her mind. But we found a middle ground, because Harry also doesn't like to wear a bra." Would Ms. Everett be wearing one of Mr. Krone's designs to "The Tonight Show"? "I'm wearing an off the rack, lowbrow look," she said. "She has to relate to the people," Mr. Krone added, sighing. House of Larreon glitzy, gleeful, sexy and sleazy is not so relatable, which is how Ms. Everett likes it. She and Mr. Krone met in 2004 on the outer fringes of the cabaret scene. Mr. Krone made his own outfits, and in 2010 Ms. Everett asked if he would make one for her, too. He agreed. "I definitely was inspired by Bridget," he said. "I also definitely felt like her looks could use some improvement." At the time, Ms. Everett was wearing a lot of outfits by House of Dereon, the line started by Beyonce and her mother, Tina Knowles, in 2004. "House of Larreon," a wordplay on Mr. Krone's given name, was a joke that stuck. In the early days, Mr. Krone would shape the dresses while he and Ms. Everett were drinking and hanging out. The process now is a little more sober. Also, she pays him in cash instead of beer. After coffee and some chitchat, Mr. Krone removed the gown from the dress form, which had been altered to mimic Ms. Everett's bust. Ms. Everett took the dress, sequins susurrating, and slipped behind a corner to try it on. "Ooh, that's too short," Mr. Krone said when she returned. An inch or two higher and her Jaclyn Smith briefs would have been on full display. "I'm glad I wore a full underpant," Ms. Everett said. Also, the sleeves needed more shredding and the neckline didn't plunge low enough. Ms. Everett is a celebrant of the female form. She has a song that is to breasts what James Audubon's paintings were to birds. For her look, plunge is key. Ms. Everett slipped back into her tank top, and Mr. Krone went to work, attacking the dress with a seam ripper and then with his bare hands. "I'm just tearing it," he said. Sequins littered the floor like so much sparkly blood. "This will look much better from a distance," he said. He made another cut and said, while cackling, "This is going be good." Mr. Krone mentioned other clients, including Kathleen Hanna and Dawn Landes, who are musicians, and Neal Medlyn, a cabaret performer. "But would you say you have a muse?" Ms. Everett said mischievously. "Actually, I don't," Mr. Krone said with a tease. Then he relented. "Bridget has made me realize what a muse actually is. These designs would not exist without her. They just happen when we get together." After Mr. Krone relaxed the seams and added mesh inserts, Ms. Everett tried the dress on again. The sleeves swirled, the sequins shivered, the skirt had a little more give. "Oh yeah!" she said. "I'm liking this. I feel messy!" Despite "a little action here and there," she said she is single. "If somebody's looking for a six foot tall cabaret wildebeest with trim ankles, your dreams are about to come true," she said. Mr. Krone, who had been adjusting the dress's neckline, presented it to her for a final fitting. Ms. Everett returned and struck a pose. "I like the drama," she said. The dress was a touch clingy and the fringed pieces caught the light, churning like an elegant carwash. She turned to her fashion arbiter. "Do you like it, Poppy?" Poppy stuck her head out of the carrier and nodded enthusiastically.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
If you're going to fly for nearly 20 hours through multiple time zones dressed in a pair of kangaroo themed pajamas, jolting in and out of sleep in contravention of your normal circadian rhythm, you should take it easy on the medication. No one wants to go crazy in a metal tube 40,000 feet above the Pacific. On the other hand, suspecting that you have fallen into a rift in the space time continuum itself is perhaps as reasonable a response as any to the longest (so far) commercial flight in the world. So there I was last month, six or so hours into Qantas's first ever nonstop flight from New York City to Sydney. It was 3 a.m. New York time, which made it No O'clock in the tiny upscale refugee camp created by the airline. I had been suffering from congestion, the kind that migrates around your sinuses and then becomes an infection in your ear. While I was no longer contagious, there was some issue about the future of my ability to hear. The internet did not have good news. "Flying with an ear infection doesn't always result in a ruptured eardrum," one website said. Basically, I had been taking decongestants since midafternoon. I felt like a junkie in a gritty TV show about Times Square in the 1970s, nervous and sweaty and incoherent even as I was beset by an achy, leaden inertia. Soon the lights would go down, part of the airline's next planned group activity (sleeping) and I would make perhaps the gravest pharmaceutical error of my adult life. But that was still in the future. And now along comes Qantas, with its plan to offer direct, nonstop flights between Sydney and New York, flights that will take nearly 20 hours longer even than the current longest haul flight on the books, Singapore Airlines's just under 19 hours trip between Singapore and Newark. For Qantas, the new route will shave some three hours off the regular New York Sydney route and eliminate the need to change planes in the hellhole that is Los Angeles International Airport. That in itself is cause for celebration. In the words of Alan Joyce, Qantas's chief executive: "Those who come through L.A. know how much of a pain it is." The airline hopes to offer the flights commercially in the next few years, but so far they are still in their experimental stages. The first of three research flights took off on Oct. 18, carrying 49 people in all some Qantas employees, six frequent fliers and a gaggle of reporters. Our carbon would be offset, Qantas promised, and the flight would actually use less fuel than the flights that stop midroute. "This is a historic moment for Qantas, for Australian aviation, and for world aviation," the chief pilot on the plane, Sean Golding, declared. I happen to love long trips. I love Australia. No one could be more excited than I am about the chance to sit for an extended stretch of time, Wi Fi less, in business class with access to dozens of movies and TV shows that you would never pay to watch at home. I am impervious to jet lag! Sleep is for losers. Still, the notion of a "research flight" was troubling from the perspective of participatory journalism. What if the result of the research was that the plane failed to reach its destination? I am not that devoted to the future of air travel. But the issue was not the plane a brand new Boeing 787 9 Dreamliner, fresh off the Seattle assembly line, still rocking that new plane smell, with seats no one had ever sat in before it was the passengers. How would such a ridiculously long flight affect our sleep, our moods, our digestion, and our hormone and melatonin levels? Researchers planned to use mental acuity and physical data collected from the frequent fliers and the flight crew to help make life easier for travelers on future flights. We also had a bracing talking to from Prof. Marie Carroll, a cognitive psychologist who is director of educational development at the University of Sydney's Charles Perkins Centre and served as the flight's onboard jet lag consultant. Reset your watch to Sydney time as soon as you get on the plane! Avoid alcohol. Move about. Stay up as long as possible, and then do not mess around. Turn off your screens. Put in your earplugs; use your eye masks. No more TV! Go to sleep. It always works for her, she said. "I expect to be fully awake the whole day tomorrow," she said. Do not try this at home Professor Carroll's advice assumed a degree of baseline mental calmness. But preparing for an overseas flight is never easy. You cram a week's worth of deadlines into two days; you stay up late packing; you obsess about every red light and every nuance of bad traffic en route to the airport. Even the most blameless traveler worries that she will get busted by the T.S.A. for random crimes against security. There's a special kind of exhaustion that comes from hauling carry on luggage through the anxiety suffused corridors of an airport at night. We had an unusually easy time at Kennedy International Airport, with our separate check in desk and cordoned off section of the departure lounge, but I already felt pretty ropy. By the time boarding began, at 8:30 p.m. or so, I had already taken three different prescription medications, plus an allergy tablet, plus a Sudafed. Right before takeoff I squirted a massive dose of Afrin up my nose. I might as well have shot amphetamines directly into my veins. My head felt like a beehive at honey making time. Most airlines feed the passengers immediately on overnight flights and then cut the lights, but the idea this time was to keep us up for more than six hours until the middle of the night, New York time by, among other things, feeding us spicy dinners that would serve as "a wake up slap in the face," Professor Carroll said. I had saffrony tomato soup and a lively tasting sea bass, followed by caffeine infused dark chocolate and tea. Womp. The lights were also cranked up, as bright as interrogation lamps, part of the plan to trick our bodies into thinking they were already in Sydney, 14 hours ahead. I watched multiple episodes of "Barry," about a hit man who joins a Los Angeles acting class led by Henry Winkler. The crew handed out pajamas with kangaroos on the front, instilling a pleasant sense of group infantilization, as if we were participants in an adult slumber party. From the seat in front of me, David Koch, co presenter of the Australian morning show "Sunrise," told me that it was important to understand the psychological ramifications of the sartorial transition. "It's a sleep cue," he said, of the pajamas. "Don't put them on until you are ready to go to sleep." I said that I already felt jet lagged, even though the monitor on my screen indicated that there were more than 16 hours to go. As an Australian, he replied, he prides himself on his travel related stoicism, particularly since, to be honest, he always travels in business class. "You know it will take you at least seven hours to get anywhere," he said. "The feeling is, 'Toughen up, princess, you're at the front of the plane, so stop whining.'" My brain would not shut up; my body wanted to crawl into a coffin and remain there forever. Some of the frequent fliers had glasses of wine, even though they weren't supposed to, and then fell asleep. A few rows ahead, Mr. Joyce began watching "Fleabag," which he had not seen before, and found the opening scene, in which Phoebe Waller Bridge narrates her sexual encounter in medias res, unexpectedly racy. At one point, Professor Carroll led a group through a set of calisthenics in the back of the plane, encouraging us to use the oven handles as makeshift barres. We finished with an enthusiastic, if sloppy, mass performance of the "Macarena." Do not try this on a plane either Back in my seat, I tried to do some work but could not focus. It was already something o'clock in Sydney, though it was 1 a.m. on the plane. Following Professor Carroll's advice, I took two milligrams of melatonin as a body clock resetting measure. On my video monitor, George Clooney had unwisely boarded a creepy space station where, whenever he dozed off, he encountered either his dead wife or a malign specter conjured from the dark recesses of his imagination, it was hard to tell the difference. I could respect his dilemma. "How long can you go without sleep?" a character in the movie asked. The crew handed out our second meal, a soporific melange of sweet potato soup, sandwiches and a panna cotta trifle. The idea was to fill us with carbohydrates and milky foods to help us sleep. By now, it was something like 3 a.m. and all these things were clashing in my stomach. I thought with fondness of my bed at home. After dinner, the mood rapidly downshifted. Whoosh, the lights went out. The effect was of being in a birdcage over which your owner has abruptly dropped a blackout cloth. Everyone lay down and (it seemed) fell asleep on the spot. Alone with my obsessions, I kept remembering "Lost in Translation," the 2003 film in which a dazed and alienated Bill Murray wanders around Tokyo for days on end, wacked out from insomnia. Against Professor Carroll's judgment, I took an Ambien and then, when it did not seem to work, took another one. I do not know what happened next. Nor do I know what time it was when the lights surged back on, because I cannot read what I wrote in that particular section of my notebook. But we were much closer to Australia. The passengers were in various states of bedragglement; the crew members, who had slept in shifts, looked fresh and perky. Breakfast came, an energizing egg white omelet with balsamic herb potatoes, sauteed kale, spinach and mushrooms. I was so happy to have such a nice meal. I knocked back several lattes and a glass of "wake up juice." Nutrition coursed through my body. Knowing that, when it comes to sinuses, landing is far worse than taking off, I took another decongestant, an allergy pill, an antibiotic and a couple more squirts of Afrin. Across the aisle, Billy Foster, a cameraman for Sunrise, Mr. Koch's program, said he normally wakes up for work at 3 a.m., but had been traveling so much that he had lost track of what day it was. He had already had four double shots of espresso. "I reckon I got two or three hours of sleep," he said. "I feel like I've been hit by a train." On the other hand, David Speck, the onboard chef, was doing much better. He had followed his own nutritional program. "I had a big bowl of soup and thought, 'I'll just sit down and watch a movie,'" he said. "I started watching a Johnny Depp movie, what was it called? I lasted about five minutes. Five hours later, the guys took about five minutes to wake me up. It's probably the best sleep I've ever had on a plane." Back in our adult clothes, we were sent away with gifts of commemorative stuffed kookaburras. I was not doing so well, but most of the passengers seemed fine better than you would expect after nearly a day in the air. Their conversation was coherent. They did not feel the need to immediately put on their sunglasses when we disembarked onto the tarmac. And so let us be clear: What happened next was my own fault. I am aware that no one wants to hear how a person lucky enough to be an aviation pioneer traveling in the lap of luxury on a historic flight in a brand new airplane to a continent halfway around the world at no personal financial cost can, in the end, barely make it out in one piece. No one wants to hear how I lost first my kookaburra, and then my breakfast. (Qantas rescued the kookaburra.) We had been told that to combat jet lag when you arrive at your destination, you should go outside and walk around. Let that light sweep over you. So I did. Sydney is so beautiful. After dropping off my bags at my hotel, I staggered into the great Australian sunshine, past the majestic opera house and through the botanical gardens. I found a nice spot near some fetching white ibises, birds that I later learned are considered the "bin chickens" or "trash turkeys" of Australia. Here's one way of coping with acute Australian post flight nausea. Lie down on the grass. Arrange yourself into a fetal position. Use your handbag as a pillow and, if you are worried about the concerned expressions of passers by who suspect you are dead, cover your face with your hat. Remain there for several hours, moving as little as possible so as not disturb your stomach's uneasy equilibrium. Your body is right there next to one of the world's most spectacular harbors, even if your mind has slipped into the Twilight Zone. You have traversed half the world in less than a day. You have left one place on Friday and successfully arrived in another place on Sunday. It is hard to comprehend that concept, how carelessly we skip over time and space, how casually we lose entire days. What happened to Saturday? Try as you might, you realize, you'll never figure it out.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Lily Burana in 2002, in photo from her personal portfolio. She was part of a 1996 feature in Playboy called "Women of the Internet." The makeup artist spends two hours perfecting your makeup MAC's Blankety and Faux lipstick over Spice lip liner, the 1990s nude lip bombshell trifecta, then tops it all with shimmering crystal gloss. The hairstylist spends an hour fussing over your coiffure foaming mousse squirted at the roots, then hot rollers, then merciless teasing to wrest a cream puff bouffant from your brittle, bleached "kinderwhore" hair. You are costumed fishnet shrug, platform heels, rhinestone belt slung about your hips, and nothing else then led onto set. You stretch, twist and wrap yourself around a silver pole mounted on a riser to recall a strip club stage. All the while, Madonna's "Erotica" plays over and over through the studio speakers as the photographer calls commands to elicit the best pose lengthen, hips forward, pull up and in drubbing the sounds so deeply into your muscle memory that every time you hear the song in the future, you will suck in your stomach, involuntarily. Your cheeks ache from smiling. All this work to present the simulacrum of so called effortless sexuality as a Playboy pinup. Last week, seemingly lost amid the new coronavirus news, Playboy announced that the company will stop publishing a print edition. The spring 2020 issue is the last. A quiet exit for a magazine that liked to make noise, beginning with its splashy debut 67 years ago, when Hugh Hefner put Marilyn Monroe on the cover. Ben Kohn, the chief executive of Playboy, said in a news release that the worsening pandemic had disrupted "content production and the supply chain." The brand will live on through licensing and the website, but the print edition, signature centerfold and all, is bound for history. I was invited to model for Playboy in 1996, for what was surely the nerdiest feature after "Women of MENSA" ran 11 years earlier. "The Women of the Internet" is a howler of a theme now (not to mention it was a joke on "The Simpsons"), but back then, the internet was not yet a mainstay, so my role as a conference host on the Well, an online community, was enough to secure my bona fides. I came of age under the shadow of AIDS and then lived among the ACT UP activists, leather women and renegade sex workers of San Francisco. I understood that erotic media had meaning as a creative outlet, as a defining force within a subculture, and as a safer means of pursuing pleasure. There's no doubt that the production of pornography can be rife with exploitative practices. To me, though, when it was done thoughtfully, it was not uniformly a social ill. By the time of my involvement with Playboy, I was in my 20s, and the magazine was already regarded as a camp antiquity. I boarded a jet to Los Angeles with my roots touched up and my tongue in cheek. Viewing pinups as part cheesecake tradition, part high femme cosplay, I was happy to put my queer shoulder to the wheel. When the issue was published, everyone I knew rushed to the newsstand for a copy. My friend Mols shelved it next to her Ginger Spice issue. My parents bought a copy but Freud would approve kept it in its plastic wrap. I opened my copy with shaking hands, anxious to see the results. I was half delighted, half incredulous. All that posing, all that preening, all that lip gloss: I'd been turned into someone utterly unrecognizable. My dearest friend, who had known me since our punk days in the East Village, offered an assessment that I still quote: "You look like a Texas oilman's wife named Babs or Linda." I'm not interested in building "a feminist case for Playboy," because my reasons for modeling in the magazine had little to do with a desire to pass any feminist litmus test. (I tell anyone involved in any aspect of erotic entertainment that allowing yourself to be drawn into performative equivocation is not your obligation. What the person challenging you wants, usually, is to argue to the point where you relent, admitting they're right.) I was proud to model for Playboy because ... why? I never could say, precisely. Then I realized that being proud was a singular feature unto itself. I had already been a stripper for years, and knew, to a wounding level, the degree to which typical working conditions in the sex industry were substandard. The facilities were sometimes dangerous and often poorly run, not for lack of means but for lack of care, and the management, at best, treated you like a cog in a thong. This photo opportunity was a chance to work in an atmosphere of utmost courtesy and proficiency. What I had to offer, it suggested, had value, even status. What a shame that Playboy's aesthetic was so absurdly limited, as this is the treatment that every erotic performer, of any size, shape, race, phase of adulthood, gender identity or sexual orientation should have. It's what everyone deserves: a level of professionalism that borders on subversive. It was 2009 by the time I attended a party at the Playboy Mansion. My friend Masuimi was performing, so I rounded up my girl Vee, herself a former stripper, as my date. Dressed in retro pinup attire, we boarded the van that would shuttle us from the parking garage to Mr. Hefner's California estate. Being surrounded by all the hair spray and the skimpy outfits jogged loose memories for us. Vee was reminded of going to a hotel room for a party as a dancer, and she and her bodyguard were held up at knife point by the client. By contrast, the mansion felt like a safe haven security everywhere, lavish buffet, a dance floor, a body painting station. Mostly, Vee and I wandered the grounds checking out the exotic animals and hunting for D list celebrities. Look, by the buffet, David Hasselhoff! Over there by the fountain, Pauly Shore! We found the infamous grotto, but nobody was in it; ditto the spongey floored pool house nook known as the "orgy room." I suspect part of the reason they were empty was because most guests were busy snapping photos and nobody wanted to do anything that would be incriminating if posted on social media later. Mr. Hefner was there, but he was cordoned off behind a velvet rope in a cabana next to the dance floor. He wore his trademark robe and pajamas, his coterie of blond girlfriends flanking him, and partygoers could step up to the velvet rope and snap a photo of him, as if he were a zoo exhibit. By the end of the party, we'd logged enough time in bunny land to last a lifetime. The magic had left the building, and what lingered was a sense that some glorious era had long ago ended: an era that had nothing to do with us, and was instead the ghost of a dream. Mr. Hefner, who died in 2017, was able to transform his own reality, in the way that only a wealthy, able bodied, straight white male could, into a world of Yes. But by merging high low culture and elevating the stature of the models involved in Playboy, he showed more largess in shaping a personalized reality than most iconoclasts. It may seem retrogressive and goofy to feature naked girls next door, or professional women, or internet nerds as sex symbols, but an angle of it remains avant garde that sexual women needn't be shunted to the shadows. In fact, they walk among you, even as the magazine itself became as much a corny mainstay as Wonder bread. (How fitting that in 2016, the mansion was sold to the heir of Hostess, maker of the Twinkie and, yes, Wonder bread.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Latest Project Her next media venture, Joojoo Journal, which she describes as a "multilingual, multimedia publication where diasporic, marginalized and 'subaltern' voices are uplifted," goes live in April. "I want to be able to work directly with people in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Greece who otherwise don't have access to outlets," she said. Next Thing She is starting a co op sewing project in Chicago to help immigrant seamstresses team up with small scale fashion houses. The project's first client will be herself: a unisex clothing brand that she is designing. "We always think of androgyny as masculine, so I want to create androgynous clothing that uses a woman's body as a template," she said. American Woman Ms. Katebi has publicly taken issue with the artist Shepard Fairey's poster of a woman wearing an American flag as a head scarf. "The only time you see a Muslim woman's face everywhere is when it is created by a white American man," she said. "We as Muslims are constantly trying to prove that we are American enough and that we have to wrap this country's flag around us to be accepted."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Buck Henry, a writer and actor who exerted an often overlooked but potent influence on television and movie comedy creating the loopy prime time spy spoof "Get Smart" with Mel Brooks, writing the script for Mike Nichols's landmark social satire "The Graduate" and teaming up with John Belushi in the famous samurai sketches on "Saturday Night Live" died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 89. His wife, Irene Ramp, said his death, at Cedars Sinai Medical Center, was caused by a heart attack. As a personality and a performer, Mr. Henry had a mild and unassuming aspect that was usually in contrast with the pungently satirical or broadly slapstick material he appeared in and often wrote. Others in the room always seemed to make more noise. Indeed, for almost 50 years he was a Zelig like figure in American comedy, a ubiquitous if underrecognized presence not only in grand successes but also in grand failures. He wrote the screenplays for "Catch 22" (1970), an earnest but unwieldy adaptation, directed by Mr. Nichols, of Joseph Heller's corrosively comic antiwar novel; and for "Candy" (1968), which turned a novel by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg a riotous sendup of "Candide" set during the sexual revolution into a leaden and star studded bomb. (Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Walter Matthau and Ringo Starr all appeared as vamping lechers.) His working partners were among Hollywood's brightest lights, if not when they worked together then later. They included not only Mr. Nichols, Mr. Brooks and Mr. Belushi, but also Warren Beatty, with whom he directed the plaintive drama about mortality "Heaven Can Wait" (1978), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award; and Barbra Streisand, for whom he wrote two cockeyed romantic comedies: "The Owl and the Pussycat" (1970), adapted from a stage play by Bill Manhoff, and "What's Up, Doc?" (1972).(for which Robert Benton and David Newman also received screenplay credit). He wrote "Protocol" (1984), a vehicle for Goldie Hawn, and "To Die For" (1995), a grimly satirical take on the power of celebrity, adapted from a Joyce Maynard novel (itself derived from an actual news story) and directed by Gus Van Sant, which brought out a star making performance by Nicole Kidman as a would be newscaster who brazenly induces three hapless teenagers to murder her husband. He also wrote, anomalously, the screenplay for "The Day of the Dolphin" (1973), a science fiction thriller based on a novel by Robert Merle, also directed by Mr. Nichols. "I can write in anybody's voice," Mr. Henry said in 2009 in an interview for the Archive of American Television, "which is why I am most successful making screenplays from books and plays." Like "To Die For," which predated the era of reality shows but addressed the potentially poisonous allure of fame as only television can confer, "The Graduate" (1967) captured a moment of unease in the American zeitgeist. Set amid the affluence and sunshine of mid 1960s suburban Los Angeles, where drugs, sex, rock 'n' roll and the specter of the Vietnam War had yet to rend the fabric of an older generation's social expectations, the film caught the alienation of the American young who sensed, long before their parents did, that the world they were entering was a whole new place. The film introduced a young actor named Dustin Hoffman as the title character, Benjamin Braddock, whose anxiety and paralysis are dramatized when he has an affair with the wife of his father's business partner, Mrs. Robinson, then falls in love with her daughter, Elaine. Mr. Henry's screenplay, which was nominated for an Oscar, appropriated much of Mr. Webb's dialogue but softened the smug, unpleasant edge evinced by Benjamin in the novel. And it was marked by a number of awkwardly comic exchanges that pointedly illustrated what was then becoming known as the generation gap: "I just want to say one word to you, just one word," a friend of Benjamin's father says to Benjamin, corralling him at his graduation party. Bringing in record breaking young audiences, "The Graduate" was the No. 1 movie in America for months in 1968 it became the third highest grossing movie in history up to that time, behind only "Gone With the Wind" and "The Sound of Music" and helped usher in an era in which Hollywood focused on making movies for people in their teens and 20s. "I think it was a film made by and for a generation that hadn't had films made for it," Mr. Henry said in an interview with the journal Cineaste in 2001. "We were just trying to make a film about something we understood. By we, I mean Mike Nichols; Larry Turman, the producer; and me." Calder Willingham, who wrote an early version of the script, also received screenplay credit, but it was Mr. Henry's that was the basis of the film, though the two shared an Academy Award nomination for best adapted screenplay. "When Nichols asked me to read the book, they'd already thrown away four scripts," Mr. Henry recalled. "Nichols, Turman and I all thought we were Benjamin. That's how the book affected us. Nichols and Turman saw the behavior and events in the film as reflecting what they felt at Benjamin's age. So did I." Buck Henry was born Henry Zuckerman in New York City on Dec. 9, 1930, to Paul and Ruth (Taylor) Zuckerman. His father was a stockbroker and an Army Air Corps pilot; his mother was a Ziegfeld Follies performer and an actress in silent films. He was named for his grandfather, also a stockbroker, acquiring his nickname, Buck, in the process. (In the 2009 archive interview, he said he did not legally change his name to Buck Henry until the 1970s.) Mr. Henry attended private schools in New York and attended Dartmouth, where he joined the theater crowd in campus productions. He recalled in an interview with Dartmouth Alumni Magazine in 2013 that three drama professors were the only ones "I really cared about." After graduating, he was drafted and spent the Korean War years touring Army bases in Germany with an acting company, performing in a musical revue he wrote and directed. When he returned, he lived mostly in New York City, auditioning for acting jobs and sending off writing samples, to little avail. Then, in 1959, he joined forces with a friend, Alan Abel, who had created a hoax organization, the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, which was dedicated to putting pants or at least undershorts on dogs, horses and cows as a response to society's evident moral decline. Read the obituary for Alan Abel here. Mr. Henry became the public face of SINA, as the organization was known, playing the role of its president, G. Clifford Prout, giving interviews to newspapers and magazines and appearing on television, where he would argue that zoos should be closed down until the animals could be properly attired. The hoax wasn't entirely unmasked until 1965, but until then many people millions, perhaps had been hoodwinked. Among them was Walter Cronkite, who featured a segment on SINA in August 1962 on the "CBS Evening News." He never forgave Mr. Henry after learning that it had been a joke. In the early 1960s Mr. Henry performed with the Premise, an Off Broadway improvisational troupe. With Theodore J. Flicker, a fellow troupe member, he wrote his first movie, "The Troublemaker" (1964), a lampoon of city bureaucracy about a man trying to open a coffee house. He also landed a handful of television jobs, writing for Steve Allen and Garry Moore and for the satirical news program "That Was the Week That Was," on which he also appeared. The producer Daniel Melnick put Mr. Henry together with Mr. Brooks to create the spoof of spy movies that became "Get Smart." It was an idea born out of commerce, a high concept melding of big hits "Goldfinger" meets "The Pink Panther." "I go to his office one day, and he says, 'I want to give you guys an idea,'" Mr. Henry recalled of Mr. Melnick. "'Here's the thing. What are the two biggest movies in the world today? James Bond and Inspector Clouseau. Get my point?'" Mr. Henry, who won an Emmy Award with Leonard Stern for outstanding comedy writing on the series, tried to repeat his "Get Smart" triumph, creating two other spoofy sitcoms: "Captain Nice" (1967), starring William Daniels (who played Benjamin Braddock's father in "The Graduate") as a mild mannered reluctant superhero, and "Quark" (1977), a "Star Trek" sendup with Richard Benjamin as the Kirkish captain of an intergalactic garbage scow. Neither lasted beyond its first season, but Mr. Henry more successfully plumbed the television veins of satire and slapstick on "Saturday Night Live," on which he was a guest host 10 times during the show's early years, from 1976 to 1980. Mr. Henry was an eager participant in "Saturday Night Live" sketches. He created the character of Uncle Roy, a comically creepy, lascivious babysitter. And with his preternaturally mild manner, he was the perfect foil for John Belushi's various incarnations as a samurai a samurai deli man, a samurai tailor, a samurai optometrist. In one famous incident during a "samurai stockbroker" sketch, Mr. Belushi accidentally struck Mr. Henry with his sword, taking a chunk out of his forehead. (He was later a regular on "The New Show," a short lived sketch show produced by Lorne Michaels, the creator of "Saturday Night Live," on which his characters included a member of the Frightened family, each of whose members had a hairpiece that flipped up in horror at the most mundane occurrence.) As an actor, Mr. Henry appeared in small, crucial and often exquisitely comic roles in virtually all the films he wrote he was the hotel clerk who provided the room key to Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson in "The Graduate" and many others besides. His movie credits include "Taking Off" (1971), "The Man Who Fell to Earth" (1976), "Eating Raoul" (1982), "Defending Your Life" (1991) and "The Player" (1992), a Hollywood satire in which he played himself pitching a movie idea to a studio executive: "The Graduate: Part 2." Later, Mr. Henry appeared in several television shows, including "30 Rock," in which he played Dick Lemon, the father of Tina Fey's Liz Lemon, and "Hot in Cleveland." His most recent screenwriting credit was for "The Humbling" (2014), which he and Michal Zebede adapted from a novel by Philip Roth. In addition to his wife, Mr. Henry's survivors include a daughter from another relationship. His wife said she did not know the daughter's name. An especially unusual aspect of Mr. Henry's career was that as a screenwriter he would spend time on the set. Even so, he recalled in 2001, the screenwriter's lot is ultimately one of helplessness. "When you are part of the process, what is done all along the way becomes what your concept of the film is," he said. "If it is wildly successful, you are sure it was carried out exactly as you intended. "I have no idea now what I thought 'The Graduate' would look like. I'm not sure I had a strong vision of it to begin with, and if I did, it wasn't anything like what is on the screen. But if you ask me today, I think, 'Yes, that is how I saw it.'"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
A roundup of motoring news from the web: President Obama took the first steps Wednesday toward normalizing diplomatic relations with Cuba, which could have a big impact on the thousands of antique cars still being driven there. But the same kinds of cars that are pampered, sold for staggering prices and revered as classics in the United States provide daily transportation for many Cubans. Low wages and other factors could mean that Cuba's very old, automotive landscape probably won't change for a while. (CBS Local) Honda announced Wednesday that it would reveal a production version of its new Acura NSX supercar at the Detroit auto show next month. The automaker revealed the NSX concept at the 2012 show. It featured a twin turbocharged hybrid electric powertrain, and Honda said it would be designed in America and built at the automaker's plant in Marysville, Ohio. (The Detroit News) According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Mercedes Benz USA may move its headquarters from New Jersey to either North Carolina or Georgia. The automaker's American arm has been headquartered in New Jersey for 40 years and employs about 1,000 people there. (The Wall Street Journal, subscription required) Alfa Romeo is planning to unveil a series of new high performance engines, according to a report from Automotive News Europe. One will be a twin turbocharged 2.9 liter gasoline powered V6 rated at 480 horsepower, and two others will be turbocharged 4 cylinder units capable of various power outputs dependent upon options, the automaker said, adding that they will be introduced with the new Alfa Romeo midsize sedan in June. (Automotive News, subscription required)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
On one level, the dispute between Dish Network and Viacom that brought the companies to the brink of a television blackout on Wednesday resembles others that have become relatively routine in the industry and a common annoyance for customers. While such negotiations between TV companies and their cable and satellite distributors used to take place behind closed doors, they have erupted into messy public battles in recent years as the television industry has come under more pressure. Both sides are trying to secure their positions and profit against the backdrop of a rapidly changing television landscape where ratings are in steep decline and cable and satellite companies are battling against a tide of so called cord cutters. Yet this specific clash is particularly crucial for Viacom. Already, the company is facing significant turbulence. There are major concerns over its leadership, accentuated by a legal battle over the mental competency of its controlling shareholder, Sumner M. Redstone. At the same time, Viacom has reported persistently weak earnings. The threat that Dish could drop Viacom channels from its service has been hanging over Viacom for the last several months. In 2014, more than 60 small cable operators, which account for about two million pay television subscribers in the United States, dropped Viacom's channels, a longtime anchor of cable TV offerings. That stoked fears that larger cable and satellite companies like Dish might follow their lead.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
A 25 foot wide, bow fronted townhouse in the West Village, whose distinctive facade, commodious interior and outdoor garden have made it a sought after locale for filmmakers, sold for 17,000,000, more than 20 percent above its asking price, and was the most expensive sale of the week, according to city records. The annual taxes on the four story house at 66 Morton Street, currently configured with two bedrooms and two and a half baths, are 31,298.60; the original list price from last October was 13,900,000. "There was a bidding war," said Eileen Robert of the Corcoran Group, the listing broker, along with Charlie Miller. "It's the only one of its kind in the West Village, and 25 footers are the rarest of commodities of all townhouses." The house, built in 1852 for the trustees of Trinity Church, according to the listing, had been owned since December 1969 by Mary E. Kaplan, and is "in need of updating," Ms. Robert said. "But they have the best bones to work with." Many of the original details, including the decorative moldings and ornate fireplaces, remain.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Shirley Curry has become a fixture in the global gamer influencer world. "When people say things like, 'You're a legend!' it embarrasses me. Because I'm just a newbie old grandma," she said in a recent interview. Shirley Curry has clocked thousands of hours of gameplay since the 1990s. She's been a gamer longer than many of today's top competitors have been alive. Still, when people rave about her charming walk throughs of the blockbuster role playing game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, she feels their praise is out of place. "When people say things like, 'You're a legend!' it embarrasses me. Because I'm just a newbie old grandma," Ms. Curry, 84, said. "I try to just be honest and be me. I sit here in my apartment and dream up stories. That's all I do." She starts every day at her home in southwestern Ohio perched in front of the computer with her camera on, ready to guide her "grandkids" the term she uses to refer to her more than 900,000 YouTube subscribers on another journey through the 2011 video game. She first got into gaming when her son taught her how to play the 1996 strategy classic Civilization II. "I'd play so much, day and night," she said. "I'd just go out and conquer continent after continent and I loved it." When she was raising her four children, Ms. Curry held several different jobs: She was a secretary, worked in a candy factory and spent several years as an associate in a Kmart women's clothing department. She retired in 1991, at the age of 55. Two decades later, she began a fourth act. She joined YouTube in 2011 to watch some of her favorite gaming channels and uploaded her first Skyrim video in 2015. That clip, in which she does battle with a giant spider, hit 2.1 million views. "Petition for Grandma Shirley to be classified as a national treasure," one of the top comments reads. Now, Ms. Curry is a fixture in the global gamer influencer world. Alongside her hundreds of thousands of YouTube subscribers, she has 75,000 followers on Twitter and an additional 7,000 on Instagram. Bethesda, the studio behind the Elder Scrolls franchise, has promised to include her as a character in the forthcoming sequel to Skyrim. "Everyone at the studio knows who she is. I wanted to do it right. That meant not only capturing her likeness, but also her skin detail and facial expressions," said Rick Vicens, a senior artist at Bethesda. "When we spoke about the process and what it would take, Shirley was completely on board. I'm excited for everyone, and most importantly Shirley, to see the final result." In an influencer ecosystem that tends to favor the young, Ms. Curry found that there was room for at least one grandmother. Consequently, she has had to contend with some of the responsibilities of internet fame, like responding to admiring fans and jockeying reply guys. "I tried so hard to respond to all my comments and emails. I felt like they took the time to watch my video and write something that they deserved an answer. But it got to be too much. I was just sitting there all day long responding to people. Then I went through and just hearted everybody, but I had to stop that too," Ms. Curry said. "So now I just glance down, and see my regulars, and I'll respond to them. All the 'Hello grandma,' 'Good morning grandma,' I can't respond to all that." Ms. Curry said she makes decent money from her YouTube channel, enough at least that she can afford to travel on the gamer convention circuit, where she has met some of her die hard fans. Those tours have been sidelined during the pandemic, but Ms. Curry said that her daily routines haven't changed much in 2020. ("I get my coffee, I sit down at my computer, turn both my screens on, and go through my emails, comments and Twitter," she said.) Earlier in her YouTube career, Ms. Curry said that she typically had her Skyrim entries ready a week ahead of their upload date, but now she often finishes them the same day they hit her channel. "It goes up really high. And when it drops really low I just start passing out. They don't know why it drops so suddenly," she said. "One doctor wouldn't let me leave her office, because she said I could have a stroke any minute." Ms. Curry also said she gets frustrated by certain commenters who try to explain gamer jargon to her. She talked about that issue in a video uploaded on May 25. "I know that I shouldn't let these things stress me out but they do," she said. "I've played Skyrim for years. I know about the HUD, I know about the different mechanics, and I don't have to be reminded and told all the time." The term "burnout" is used frequently among YouTubers to describe the exhaustion creators experience in trying to meet their rigorous upload schedules and appease their fans. Ms. Curry said she feels some of that pressure.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
The architect William Pedersen at the art gallery of the newly completed Shelter Island History Center, a tribute to his summer home and a farewell to his ailing wife, Elizabeth Pedersen. As His Wife Lay Dying, an Architect Brought Her Building to Life SHELTER ISLAND, N.Y. As the founding design partner of Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, William Pedersen is best known for soaring skyscrapers like the World Financial Center in Shanghai or sprawling developments like the recently completed Hudson Yards in New York. But in Mr. Pedersen's more than 60 years of architectural practice, the project that means the most is the modest one he just completed here, where he and his wife, Elizabeth Pedersen, have summered since 1975. "I probably had the most pleasurable professional experience of my life," Mr. Pedersen, still lithe at 81, said during a recent walk through the Shelter Island History Center. The center is the new name for the reconfigured complex run by the Shelter Island Historical Society, custodian of the island's archives and artifacts. Until recently, those treasures were housed in the attic of the historical society's decaying Havens House Museum, built in 1743. Despite a slight update in 1966, the museum was desperately in need of rescue. "It was a tinderbox waiting for a match," said Nanette Lawrenson , the historical society's executive director. Over the last three years, Havens House has been renovated and expanded with a two level addition designed by Mr. Pedersen to create more storage and a proper art gallery. (A barn on the property, built in 1988, has remained intact). The effort was initiated by Ms. Pedersen, who served for eight years as the historical society's president. Four years ago, she received a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, just as the project was gaining steam. Ms. Pedersen continued to be actively involved until her illness made that unfeasible; her husband has finished it for her. "It was through her determination to make this possible that it happened," Mr. Pedersen said. "And once one gets excited about it, it has a momentum of its own." The entire undertaking was very much a product of the Pedersens' personal partnership. Their 50th wedding anniversary gift to each other was a construction assessment of the building. They donated 90 percent of the project's approximately 6 million cost (the rest was raised from more than 400 contributors), and Mr. Pedersen gave his architectural services for free. "You can't imagine how much this meant to us the timing of it, in terms of our own relationship," he said . "It was such a shared thing." Ms. Pedersen was inspired by the example of her father, Hiram E. Essex, the director of physiology at the Mayo Institute of Experimental Medicine. Dr. Essex helped found an art center in Rochester, Minn., and donated his family's 325 acre farm where he raised purebred Holstein Friesian cattle to that city so it could become a public park. "Elizabeth was quite determined to do something like her father did for her community," Mr. Pedersen said. "So, she did." The project proved more challenging than anticipated. To ensure that the addition did not overwhelm or upstage the original Havens House building which over time has served as a home, tavern, school and boardinghouse Mr. Pedersen decided to locate half of the center below ground level. "We did not want to build a structure that was of equivalent size," he said. "We wanted something that was lower and would allow this to always remain the dominant player in the composition." Because of the water level below ground, it was necessary to dig down about 18 feet to achieve a ceiling height in the new building that would be adequate for museum display. "We had to pump water out for three months to make all of this happen," he said, "sort of like building the Brooklyn Bridge." The new building, which doubles the original space to about 4,000 square feet, includes an art gallery, which opened June 23 with a show by Alan Shields, a longtime island resident who died in 2005. Shelter Island has long attracted artists like John Chamberlain, who made his scrap metal sculptures there, and the violinist Itzhak Perlman, who with his wife, Toby, established the Perlman Music Program and the historical society hopes the center will become a cultural destination on Long Island's East End. "It's a place for people to gather and see art and historical exhibits," Ms. Lawrenson said, "a way for people to enjoy a Shelter Island story." Roz Dimon, a Shelter Island artist, created an interactive installation for the center "DIMONscape" which layers 300 years of Havens House's history into a single artwork. The historical society's collection of 100,000 documents and objects including correspondence, news articles, photographs and maps now resides in new climate controlled spaces. The artist Helena Hernmarck has created a tapestry for the new center that is based on one of the society's prized artifacts: a 1652 owners contract for the purchase of Shelter Island between the Manhanset people and English settlers. The building includes a meeting room featuring the original oak beams, which had been covered by plaster and are each marked by Roman numerals that were historically carved in to help with assembly. The courtyard is bordered by Pennsylvania wall stone, where visitors are encouraged to linger. Maxim Velcovsky , a Czech designer, made the glass light fixture in the art gallery; Mr. Pedersen designed the display tables. Understanding the surrounding landscape typically takes time for an architect. But Shelter Island was in Mr. Pedersen's bones, given his many years on the island the salty sea air, the tall beach grass, the sand beneath the osprey nests. He didn't need to be told to redirect the driveway to protect the dawn redwood on the property, for example, one of only three such trees on the island. After renovating two different houses on North Cartwright Road, which now belong to his two grown daughters, Mr. Pedersen designed a contemporary home on Ram Island Drive, where he and his wife have resided for the last decade. With this restraint in mind, Mr. Pedersen said he designed the new history center structure as "a mediating piece" between Havens House and the barn. "The relationship between the two structures had to be one that was totally sympathetic," he said. "This wasn't an issue of me doing an avant garde structure, to proclaim my creativity. The intention was to do something that totally knit this together and, frankly, something that people liked." Unfortunately, Ms. Pedersen never got to see the center open to the public. She died last Thursday , just four days after the historical society's annual "Black and White" fund raiser, held under tents on the property, where she used to preside . Ms. Pedersen left in her will a gift for the center's education program that is to be called the Elizabeth Pedersen Educational Fund. "The percentage of people who make it four years is about 10 percent," Mr. Pedersen said of those with metastasized pancreatic cancer , "and we're very grateful." That said, "it would have been nice if she could have lasted a little longer," he added, surveying the four Chinese Elms that shade the courtyard "to see more of this in action."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
As Susan Sontag has written, "to remember is to voice to cast memories into language and is, always, a form of address." This raises an obvious question: To whom is Lin's deracinated narrator addressing his homesick telling and retelling of his family's history? Strikingly, the only character who remains unnamed throughout the novel is Gavin's mother, who represents both his origin and the implied endpoint of his trip down memory lane. Although discomfiting and unreliable, memories promise comfort and self discovery, and it is hardly coincidental that an adult Gavin returns to his birthplace in search of home: "I went to Taiwan, trying to find the village that lived in my memory of my mother's memory." But he comes to realize his relationship to the place is ambiguous, both distinctly of it and separate from it. It is a hard won, elegiac truth about an unsalvageable past, this Sebaldian secondhand memory, the eventual recognition that he cannot step into the same river twice, which he presages at the very beginning of his narrative: "Although we tried, each in our own way, no one was able to go back even one step." Wisdom in hindsight is, after all, one of maturity's age old graces. If the novel seems unrelentingly cheerless at times, its tone reflects Gavin's struggle to come to terms with his family's particular history of displacement and loss. Immigrants, just like Joseph Brodsky's exiled writers, are often "retrospective and retroactive beings." Nevertheless, Gavin's articulation of his family's circumstances bears the inexorable imprint of an American collective memory that is variously functional and symbolic. Punctuating his thoughts are neither contemporary Taiwanese nor Asian cultural references, but rather the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion, Time magazine and the Exxon Valdez oil spill off the Alaskan coast. His mottled identity creates familial strains: Disappointed with his visit to Taiwan, Gavin remonstrates: "It was a kind of violence, what my father had done. He had brought us to a place we didn't belong, and taken us from a place we did. Now we yearned for all places and found peace in none." For all of its pathos, its themes of cross cultural intermingling, its stories of immigrant arrival, marginalization and eventual accommodation, "The Unpassing" is a singularly vast and captivating novel, beautifully written in free flowing prose that quietly disarms with its intermittent moments of poetic idiosyncrasy. But what makes Lin's novel such an important book is the extent to which it probes America's mythmaking about itself, which can just as easily unmake as it can uplift. Before he revisits Taiwan, Gavin heads back to his Alaskan house his father's old dream. "My father ... fancied himself some kind of pioneer," he reflects, but "the expanse made him totally unfettered. The distance stripped his words. There was no self consciousness, only sentiment." If the United States is merely an idea that it forms of itself, then let the nostalgic among us be warned: We may be longing to return to a time that no longer exists or perhaps never did.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
If you are one of the hundreds of New Yorkers who live in a condominium built by the Related Companies, one of New York City's most prolific developers, you might like to know that changes are afoot. That is because the company is making its first foray into offering brokerage services. Related, which is behind some of the city's most high profile projects, including the Time Warner Center and the creation of the 28 acre Hudson Yards neighborhood, is buying a 50 percent stake in CORE, the boutique residential brokerage. "We have built so many for sale buildings, and we still manage every single one of them," said Jeff T. Blau, the chief executive of Related. "But when it comes time for someone to move out, we can't service them. This deal will allow us to keep our relationship with our original customers, many of whom become repeat buyers." So the relationship that begins with a buyer choosing a Related condominium and living in a Related managed building, now can continue even as that buyer decides to move on and can choose to work with Related's new brokerage partner, CORE. Related will continue to handle its rentals through its in house team. According to the terms of the deal, which was finalized Tuesday, Shaun Osher will remain as CORE's chief executive and will collaborate with Related on the development and sales of future Related projects. Mr. Osher founded CORE with the Cayre family, which will continue to have a small stake in the company. Both CORE and Related, which are privately held, declined to disclose the sale price. The deal marries a global developer with a carefully maintained reputation to a brokerage that came on the scene less than a decade ago with a much edgier aesthetic. CORE, after all, was one of the first agencies to sign on to "Selling New York," HGTV's reality series, and has marketed buildings like One Museum Mile on Fifth Avenue and Walker Tower in Chelsea, which last year broke a record for most expensive downtown sale with a penthouse that sold for more than 50 million. The investment is the culmination of a six month negotiation. "At first I wanted to see if we could steal Shaun away and have him come work here," Mr. Blau said. "But he is very committed to his company, and out of those conversations came the idea to make a significant investment in CORE. As the slogan goes, 'I liked it so much I bought the company.' " While the main reason for the investment was Mr. Osher "He is No. 1, 2 and 3," Mr. Blau says another factor is the capacity to build a resale business for Related. The company is also one of the city's largest landlords of luxury rental buildings, and one of its signature features is the ability to be a full service company for its tenants, helping them move within Related properties as they upsize or downsize. The investment in CORE will now allow Related to offer the same full service menu to its condo buyers. CORE has 98 sales agents and three offices in Chelsea, on Madison Avenue and the headquarters in the Flatiron district. Since its founding in 2005, CORE has marketed and sold more than 30 new development projects and generated more than 4 billion in sales. With this influx of new capital, it will continue to expand, opening offices in Brooklyn and the Upper West Side "in short order," Mr. Blau said. Related's size and reach take CORE out of the boutique realm, but Mr. Osher said they would not change the younger, hipper brand that his firm has cultivated. "I worked for almost 10 years to build CORE in the city," he said, adding that Mr. Blau "understands that the CORE brand is an extension of me." Related also liked that CORE could provide real time market insight. "We have 100 agents who have their finger on the pulse of what people want, and because we are small, we can stay close to those who are really out there walking the pavement and getting the market intelligence," Mr. Osher said. Mr. Blau added, "Because Shaun is doing so many deals, he is very informed about the resale market and what people want, and can help make development decisions." Founded in 1972 by Stephen M. Ross, the Related Companies has taken stakes in other businesses that are often popular with Related residents, including the fitness chain Equinox and Union Square Events, which is backed by the restaurateur Danny Meyer. This is the first time it has invested in a brokerage firm. Previously, Related either marketed its projects using an in house team of six agents or formed partnerships with outside brokerage firms. Last November, it announced a deal to partner with the Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group for about 5 billion worth of new developments, including 15 Hudson Yards, 35 Hudson Yards and the Zaha Hadid designed 520 West 28th Street. The deal will continue to be honored, Mr. Blau said. "We will see how it goes," Mr. Blau said. "So far Corcoran Sunshine is doing a great job." Kelly Kennedy Mack, the president of Corcoran Sunshine, said the CORE deal would have "zero impact" on Corcoran Sunshine's agreement with Related. "We have been collaborating with Related on six different properties across the city," she said in a statement. "We're very excited to launch our first property with Related early next year." Mr. Osher said there were still many details to be worked out. "Corcoran Sunshine already formed this partnership, it was pre existing, and it is just on a couple of projects," he said. "Our relationship with Related is forever. They are going to be an equal stake owner of CORE, so that is very significant and a very different type of thing." Related's investment in CORE comes as several new brokerage firms have opened or expanded in New York, including Urban Compass and William Raveis Real Estate, while some developers have begun hiring in house sales teams to market projects, rather than outsourcing the business. "There has been a lot of change in the market, and when there is a lot of flux and disturbance, deals like this seem to bubble up," said Andrew Gerringer, the managing director of Marketing Directors, a development, leasing and marketing company. The way in which Related handles its agreement with Corcoran Sunshine will be closely watched. "There could be some ego issues there," said Mr. Gerringer, who worked with Mr. Osher at Douglas Elliman before he left to start CORE. "If I was Corcoran, I wouldn't want some guy to get involved out of the blue who is eventually going to replace me, but on the other hand, in this business you need to roll with the punches."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Two new, full length pieces by Dimitris Papaioannou and Alan Lucien Oyen, as well as a revival of Pina Bausch's rarely seen "Seven Deadly Sins," are among the works that the Tanztheater Wuppertal will perform in the 2017 18 season, the company has announced. The season is the first to be programmed by Adolphe Binder, the fourth director to run the company, in Germany, since Bausch's sudden death in 2009, and the only one to have no direct relationship with Bausch. The appointment last year of Ms. Binder, formerly the director of the GoteborgsOperan Danskompani, seemed to signal a move away from a company identity linked until now only to Bausch's work. Ms. Binder has confirmed that move by programming work by Mr. Papaioannou, an established Greek choreographer who created the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, and by Mr. Oyen, a Norwegian choreographer. The repertory nonetheless remains strongly focused on Bausch's work, with eight pieces presented over the rest of the season, which opens in September with "Cafe Muller" and "The Rite of Spring" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. The season includes some of Bausch's best known pieces: "Masurca Fogo," "Viktor" and "Nelken (Carnations)," as well as "Seven Deadly Sins," created in 1976 and last seen in 2009. "We wish to create new spaces for interaction and to be a source of inspiration, on both large stages and beyond," Ms. Binder wrote on the company website. "Follow us as we pass on the glowing embers. And the matches!"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
BRUSSELS The president of the European Commission on Monday called on E.U. leaders to stay the course on debt reduction and economic overhauls, as he sought to head off a rancorous debate on those issues when the leaders hold a summit meeting here this week. "Steadfast implementation of reforms is beginning to deliver results in terms of current accounts and regaining competitiveness," the commission president, Jose Manuel Barroso, wrote in a letter to the leaders of the 27 members of the Union. He sent the letter accompanied by charts that showed Ireland and Portugal as having benefited from rigorous turnaround programs, but that also showed countries including France, Italy, Belgium and Hungary as still plagued by high labor costs, compared with their trading partners. He urged the European Union nations to remain wary of uneven economic performances across the bloc, lest the region continue to struggle with the imbalances that have contributed to Europe's debt and economic crisis. "When we look at productivity performance, we see that the very best member states are twice as productive as the lowest performers," wrote Mr. Barroso, who as president of the commission is the top official in the administrative arm of the Union. Mr. Barroso appeared to be delivering leaders a stark reminder that the problems that led to sovereign bailouts for Greece, Portugal and Ireland were still a cause for concern. Mr. Barroso and colleagues like Olli Rehn, the E.U. commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, have been under a blistering assault from critics who say that enforcing strict budgetary targets to pay down debt and preserve the euro is creating a vicious cycle of low or no growth. Mr. Barroso's letter was evidently a response to such critics. He said that structural overhauls were contributing to a rebalancing of the E.U. economy, particularly where governments had undertaken the measures as part of their bailout agreements. Ireland and Portugal had reversed trends in terms of their unit labor costs, which were now more favorable than before compared to their trading partners, according to the charts that accompanied Mr. Barroso's letter. By contrast, according to the charts, unit labor costs in countries like France and Italy still were higher compared to those of their trading partners. He also warned that a number of "states still need to invest more in structural reform to turn around their relative loss of competitiveness over several years." Mr. Barroso did acknowledge that there were deep and painful problems in pockets of the bloc, in particular in countries plagued by youth unemployment, and indicated that he would call for continued financial support to help address joblessness when he addressed E.U. leaders on Thursday evening. The leaders will gather for what is essentially a check in on the tougher budgetary surveillance they agreed upon over the last two years to combat the kinds of extreme debt and deficit problems in many countries that nearly brought down the euro currency union. During the meeting Mr. Barroso is expected to show that the commission is willing to be flexible, by proposing that a number of states be given more time to meet their budgetary targets because of the lingering difficulties in the European economy. Commission officials are prepared to recommend that Portugal, for example, be given one more year to meet its budget targets. And they say deadlines for meeting targets also could be extended in the cases of France and Spain, on condition that their governments could demonstrate progress in adopting fiscal overhauls. 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. The austerity debate could nonetheless produce friction at the summit meeting if, as expected, E.U. officials and Germany continue to emphasize regional financial consolidation, while the French, Italians and Spaniards continue to put far more emphasis on achieving economic growth. "It would not be a surprise if Hollande and Monti look to provoke a discussion on austerity and ask, How do we return the euro zone to the path to growth?" said an E.U. official who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the summit meeting discussions. But with elections due in September in Germany, many analysts now see limited room for Berlin to alter its current course as the bloc's chief financial disciplinarian. Another focal point of the meeting is likely to be Cyprus. On Thursday night, leaders of the 17 euro zone countries are expected to hold a separate meeting to seek ways to unblock an impasse over a bailout for Cyprus. E.U. officials said those finance ministers would be prepared to meet again as soon as Friday to complete a deal for Cyprus. But that would require unusually rapid progress in the talks by the Cypriot authorities with negotiators from the so called troika the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Cyprus needs about EUR17 billion, or 22.1 billion, in aid, of which up to EUR10 billion is needed to shore up the banking sector. That is a small fraction of what has been pledged to Greece, but is a colossal sum for Cyprus, which has a gross domestic product of only about EUR18 billion. The scale of the country's needs has prompted concern about how it could ever pay the money back. There are also acute concerns that Cyprus is a haven for money laundering. Another hugely contentious issue is whether lenders like the I.M.F. will force Cypriot bank depositors to take losses in order to make the country's debt more manageable. The Cypriot authorities have repeatedly pushed back against such terms, saying the primary reason their banking system took a body blow was because they had to write down their holdings of Greek government debt as part of that country's second bailout. Cypriot hostility to a so called haircut for depositors also has prompted speculation that the government in Nicosia is planning to ask the Greek government for EUR2 billion from its EUR48 billion bank recapitalization program to support Cypriot lenders. On Monday, Nicos Anastasiades, the Cypriot president, said at a joint news conference with the Greek prime minister, Antonis Samaras, that Cyprus was seeking closer cooperation with Greece. Mr. Anastasiades was not asked whether his country was looking for financial aid from Greece. But E.U. officials said such an approach would be legally dubious because money loaned to Greece under its bailout programs was given for highly specific purposes. European officials also said it was hard to imagine that cash strapped Greece would be able to make such a large sum available even if it wanted to. In a sign of mounting skepticism in Cyprus about the troika's terms, an outspoken church leader, Archbishop Chrysostomos II, on Sunday urged the new government in Nicosia to stand up to foreign lenders.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
It may be no coincidence that both Yannick Nezet Seguin and Gustavo Dudamel programmed Bruckner for their recent New York appearances. If you're an ambitious conductor and want to prove your mettle while showing off your orchestra as top tier, what project should you take on? Many would say Mahler symphonies, especially since the days when Leonard Bernstein championed these epic works at the New York Philharmonic and, through his impassioned commitment, made them central to the repertory worldwide. But wait. Is Anton Bruckner, an earlier generation Austrian composer who also wound up in Vienna, edging out Mahler as the symphonist with which to show your stuff? One might have thought so from recent programs presented in New York by two of today's most dynamic and acclaimed younger conductors. On Friday, Yannick Nezet Seguin, 44, the music director of the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra, brought the other ensemble he leads, the Orchestre Metropolitain of Montreal, to Carnegie Hall with a program featuring Bruckner's Fourth Symphony ("Romantic"). Then, on Sunday afternoon at David Geffen Hall, Gustavo Dudamel, 38, led the Los Angeles Philharmonic in, as it happens, the same symphony. What gives? Maybe Mahler's symphonies music of extremes, from sublime tenderness to bitter anguish, from childlike evocations of country dancing to harrowing trips into darkness are proving just a tad over the top. And, with conductors everywhere leading these scores so well, it's hard for a performance to stand out. Enter Bruckner. For all the lofty qualities of his searching symphonies, in a good performance the music comes across as speaking in a modest voice, and at a more deliberate pace; there is a spaciousness even in the faster movements of these works. A contemporary of Brahms, Bruckner had a visionary streak, as he attempted to reconcile the Romantic stirrings of his time with a respect for the protocols of classical form, while glimpsing the spiritual realms of the future. Still, these symphonies are sprawling; it's difficult to make them not seem long winded, aimless and even, as some feel, aloof. Conductors seem increasingly up to the challenge. At Carnegie in 2017, Daniel Barenboim led the Staatskapelle Berlin in what was announced as the first complete survey in America of Bruckner's nine symphonies. Mr. Nezet Seguin, long a Bruckner devotee, has actually had less of a profile in Mahler. He recently completed a 10 year project to record a Bruckner cycle with his Montreal orchestra. And in June, he led the Met Orchestra in its first performance of a Bruckner symphony: the Seventh. By choosing Bruckner's Fourth for Friday's program, the second in his Perspectives series at Carnegie, he seemed intent on making a strong artistic statement while also showing off this vibrant, youthful orchestra from his hometown. He began with another Austrian composer, Mozart, offering excerpts from the opera "La Clemenza di Tito" including two arias featuring the mezzo soprano Joyce DiDonato, whose appearance was part her own Perspectives series . She gave radiant, dramatically nuanced and eloquent performances of Sesto's "Parto, parto, ma tu ben mio" and Vitellia's "Non piu di fiori" (adding "Voi che sapete" from "Le Nozze di Figaro" as an encore). Mr. Nezet Seguin's account of the Bruckner stood out for the lighter textures and transparency he drew from the orchestra, the judiciously balanced sonorities and the quicksilver shifts of mood. The slow movement, thought to be a funeral march, here had more of a wistfully Schubertian quality, music that was steady and solemn, yet content and hopeful. His conducting proved especially strong at bringing a sense of direction and thrust to the long finale, which is like a summation that can often seem wayward. A weightier, feistier Bruckner 's Fourth was on display on Sunday in Mr. Dudamel's account with the Los Angeles players. Though he has not been identified with Bruckner, he has made Mahler a specialty, including leading a complete cycle of the symphonies in Los Angeles, For this program, "Cathedral of Sound," part of Lincoln Center's White Light Festival, he chose Bruckner's Fourth as music steeped in spirituality, the festival's running theme. Digging in to convey gravitas, Mr. Dudamel led a teeming, even Mahlerian performance. After composing the piece, Bruckner suggested a scenario for the first movement that is hard to take at face value about gates opening to a medieval city, knights on horses, woodland magic and such . Still, you could imagine that scenario while listening to Mr. Dudamel's tumultuous, colorful performance. Yet, in his enthusiasm, he may have pushed too hard. One slow and steady buildup followed another. The orchestra's sound, especially in the brasses, turned raw and blaring. How many moments of climax can a single symphony have? On Monday, Mr. Dudamel and his players were back, and in their element for a thrilling program of works by Ginastera, John Adams and Stravinsky. Yuja Wang was soloist for the New York premiere of Mr. Adams's piano concerto "Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?," which she and the orchestra introduced earlier this year in Los Angeles. Though written in three sections, this 28 minute piece unfolds almost uninterrupted and with continuous, percolating inventiveness. Mr. Adams is rarely enigmatic; this concerto seems an exception. Episodes have the impish glee of honky tonk with a curious demonic edge. The first movement, marked "Gritty, funky," came off here as both sassy and dangerous. The middle movement was mesmerizing, with pointillist like strands of mingling piano lines against bittersweet orchestra harmonies. Then the devil makes his presence known in the obsessive, ever shifting and fiendishly appealing finale. Ms. Wang played magnificently (though I could have done without the five solo encores she played, including unabashedly virtuosic showpieces like "Flight of the Bumblebee"). Mr. Dudamel and his orchestra gave a blazing and terrifying, yet inexorably paced and at times ravishing account of Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring." This used be the go to work for conductors and orchestras to prove themselves. But today even conservatory orchestras can play the score solidly, if not as commandingly as this impressive ensemble did . Who would have thought that Bruckner would become more of a proving ground ?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
The Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump, has hired a top executive from Breitbart News, Stephen Bannon, as his campaign's chief executive, raising expectations that Mr. Trump will adopt the more aggressive style that the site has championed. So, What Is Breitbart? The Breitbart News Network, usually just called Breitbart, is a conservative leaning news website. It was founded in 2007 by Andrew Breitbart, a former liberal from Los Angeles who became a conservative standard bearer until his death from heart failure at 43 in 2012. The site that bears his name comprises about a dozen different verticals that feature original reporting and commentary, including three of its most prominent sites: Big Government, Big Journalism and Big Hollywood. A fourth "Big" site, BigPeace.com, now redirects to Breitbart's National Security section. According to SimilarWeb, a web analytics platform, Breitbart's traffic is comparable to that of Slate and Gawker, and it has received more visitors than either of those two sites over the past several months. As a blogger in the early 2000s, Mr. Breitbart was taken under the wing of Matt Drudge before setting out on his own. In a column after Mr. Breitbart's death, titled "The Provocateur," David Carr of The New York Times wrote that he "understood in a fundamental way how discourse could be profoundly shaped by the pixels generated far outside the mainstream media he held in such low regard." Ben Shapiro, a conservative commentator who was 17 when he met Mr. Breitbart and who became the editor at large of Breitbart.com in 2012 about three weeks before Mr. Breitbart died, said in an interview Wednesday that Mr. Breitbart was not ideologically driven. "Andrew's whole animating focus was 'I don't like bullies in the political sphere and I'll fight the bullies,' " he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Maggie Haberman lives rent free in Donald Trump's head, all over the front page of The New York Times and also in a brick house in an unglamorous Brooklyn neighborhood out beyond the Citi Bikes and stately brownstones. On election night, as the votes started coming in, she was seated at her dining room table with her husband and one of her three children, drinking from a liter bottle of Foodtown raspberry seltzer, eating leftover Kit Kats from Halloween, typing and texting, and, still, still, working her sources. "We'll see what the late exits look like, but that's not great?" Ms. Haberman began on one call around 6:20 p.m., typing on her laptop as she talked on the big black iPhone held up to her ear. She told another caller, "I have a funny feeling the president's going to do better than people think." That was the beginning of the end of one of the most astonishing runs in the history of American journalism. Ms. Haberman has been, for the last four years, the source of a remarkably large share of what we know about Donald Trump and his White House, from the Mueller investigation to his personal battle with the coronavirus to his refusal to accept defeat. She's done more than a story a day, on average, and stories with her byline have accounted for hundreds of millions of page views this year alone. That's more than anyone else at The Times. She has consistently painted a portrait of a man who is both smarter and less competent than his enemies believe, a portrait vindicated again this past week as the president impotently poisoned politics with lies about election results. She was shocked, but not surprised, when he attacked the election results in a dark Thursday night briefing. But as we sat outside her house waiting for the final call on Saturday morning, she told me she believes he "will continue to say the things he's saying as he walks out the door." Politics used to be covered as a kind of a sport, but it doesn't feel like that anymore. (John King of CNN was jeered for calling vote counting "fun" on election night.) And despite the television glamour and lucrative book contracts that flooded in for reporters in the Trump era, the real work of reporting is painstaking and exhausting: getting people, one by one, to tell you things they should not, and then telling your readers about them. Ms. Haberman was particularly well suited for this journalistic moment because of her sheer relentlessness and hunger, and her lack of smug self satisfaction. She seems to need to prove herself every day. She texts while she drives, talks while she eats, parents while she reports, tweets and regrets it, doomscrolls. She hates Twitter so much she stepped back from the platform in 2018 and wrote an Op Ed about it, and then started tweeting again. (Relatable!) For the last four years, she has been the human incarnation of a nation riveted, like it or not, by Mr. Trump, a reporter driven by a kind of curiosity that feels more like compulsion to find out what is going on and has dragged us all along for the harrowing ride. "She has been the dominant reporter on the Trump White House beat for four years, and it's not really close," said Jonathan Swan of Axios, one of her fiercest competitors for breaking news. He described her as "the bane of my existence for the past four years," adding, "I get high anxiety most days wondering what she will break that I should have had." I know the feeling. I learned to report from Maggie and to fear her in City Hall in New York, where she was a reporter for The New York Post, and where she first covered Donald Trump. When I arrived in 2001, Ms. Haberman cut a striking figure there: She wore a leather jacket and smoked cigarettes on the building's iconic front steps, chatting with the cops. But she did her real work in Room 4a, in the basement, where the junior reporters for the tabloids and assorted other misfits like me were relegated, downstairs from the legendary main press room, Room 9. Room 4a was a cluttered office with mismatched desks and, once, a squirrel. I sat facing her and every morning watched her routine, which was terrifying. First, she picked up the competing newspaper, The Daily News, and leafed through for stories she wished she'd broken, deducing who had been the source of each one. Then, she called the sources she already knew them well, of course and chatted in a friendly way, before telling them she felt genuinely betrayed that they hadn't gone to her, that she was worried she'd be in trouble with her boss for getting beaten and, honestly, that she was incredibly angry at them. These weren't the blithe transactions of a slick journalist. This was how you report when you take your sources and your work dead seriously, and make no real distinction between your reporting and the rest of your life. I learned from her never to treat it as a game. Ms. Haberman and I finally got to work together at Politico, where she threw me a byline on a 2011 story about Mr. Trump, in which she got at what would become a familiar theme: "The widespread assumption that Trump's flirtation with the presidency is a publicity stunt is no doubt at least partly true. But that's merely the point of departure for a man for whom almost every public move over the past 30 years has been a publicity stunt." (We remain friends, as well as colleagues. This is another one of these columns where you have every reason to doubt my neutrality.) She arrived at The Times in February 2015, the sort of midsenior hire who can easily get lost at a big institution, with the nominal mandate of writing a newsletter. She had a scoopy aggression that made her feel a little "scruffy" at the broadsheet. Then, she just started breaking news of a meeting between Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton, of a big endorsement for Jeb Bush. Everyone wanted to cover the likely Republican nominee, Mr. Bush, and journalists at the time had "this impulse to just not cover" Mr. Trump, she recalled, which she thought was a mistake. So she became the Trump reporter more or less by default, and covered both the campaign's rolling leadership crisis and the candidate's divisive words. 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. When Mr. Trump stunned the country by winning, The Times's Washington bureau chief, Elisabeth Bumiller, invited Ms. Haberman and another reporter on the Trump beat, Ashley Parker, to brief the Washington bureau on what was to come. In a meeting that has become Times lore, they told a room full of seasoned journalists what to expect. "Always assume you're being recorded, assume anything you put in an email is going to be tweeted about by him or read aloud, that his aides lie to each other," she recalled saying. Ms. Bumiller and much of her team were skeptical. "I remember thinking that the president elect she was describing impulsive, unaware of the workings of government, with no real ideology was exaggerated, and that the office would change him," Ms. Bumiller said. "I was completely wrong and Maggie was completely right." Ms. Parker, now a White House reporter for The Washington Post, recalled that "Maggie and I were like aliens from another planet describing this Martian king to the people of The New York Times in a way they could not fathom." They didn't have to wait long for Mr. Trump to test the limits of the presidency. In his first month, Mr. Trump carried through on his promise to ban immigration from seven Muslim countries, leading to mass protests in the streets and at airports. The Trump era had begun in earnest, though many journalists had to learn and relearn the lessons about covering his presidency. Ms. Haberman topped out at 599 bylines in 2016 that's both solo bylines and shared ones and she also leads The Times this year. She's often the only one able to reliably confirm facts in Mr. Trump's chaotic and dishonest orbit. She was also under his skin: He attacked her personally on Twitter and sparred with her in person, but kept giving her interviews until last year. This Oct. 19 he tweeted directly to her about his confidence in winning the election and his "BOFFO" rallies. As Ms. Haberman produced scoop after scoop, she became the center of intense attention. Much of that has played out on Twitter which she sees as an "appalling website" that she can't quit. She feels she's never quite found her footing there, she said, and "regrets" tweets that she fears cast a shadow on her reporting. Women in journalism, and high profile women at The Times, in particular, receive unending abuse on the platform. The worst of it has come courtesy of Mr. Trump. "I don't think that people fully understand what it's like when the president of the United States is personally attacking you," she said, noting that while it's simply the way Mr. Trump works, among his supporters "there are enough people who think that's real and who don't get that." But other days, the abuse has come from Mr. Trump's critics, who are sometimes simply shooting the messenger. And there have been times, Ms. Haberman said, that she just sends an off key tweet to her 1.5 million followers and tortures herself for it. "I have never adjusted to the fact that I have so many followers. So I think I continue to treat it as if it's like a small group of people who I know. And then when I get attacked by people who don't know me, I have not quite understood why they're attacking me," she said. "And I think the biggest mistake I have made on Twitter is fighting with people." Her most recent Bad Tweet came on Oct. 14, when she pasted in a quote from a New York Post article on photos and documents the paper said it had taken from the hard drive of a laptop purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden. She'd intended to raise an eyebrow at the mention of F.B.I. involvement suggesting they hadn't found the information serious and, perhaps, a hint as to where Mr. Trump's personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani got the information. Democrats interpreted her tweet as simply promoting a story whose origins were shadowy. "MAGA Haberman" trended. She sent a round of frantic texts to friends asking if she'd screwed up, and ultimately deleted the tweet. Mr. Trump's own Twitter account is mostly hidden behind warnings these days. The president, though, will go. And Ms. Haberman is not going to move to Washington to join the new White House team, she said, but instead anticipates covering some blend of the new administration and the enduring Trump orbit from New York. She hopes that she'll break more news, and worries that she'll lose her touch. "I'm dispensable," she said, an assertion that Times editors would take issue with. After the election was called late Saturday morning, she drove her children to IT'SUGAR and bought some pockys and the game BeanBoozled, then drove without stopping through Grand Army Plaza so they could look out the window at the celebrations of the Biden victory. Then, she drove home, where she taped a valedictory "Daily" podcast episode and filed yet another article. "Nothing about any of this is normal, including, like, how much attention is on me," she told me. "I will not miss that."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
LOS ANGELES Michael Govan stood in a third floor gallery scattered with paintings and crates at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, his arms gesturing at blank white walls, his face furled in thought. Mr. Govan is the director of the museum, but on this bright morning, he was focused on one single project: the installation of an exhibition of paintings by Agnes Martin. No detail was too small for Mr. Govan as he squinted his eyes and directed two workers, hoisting a framed canvas against a wall. "Two inches higher," Mr. Govan said. Still not right. "A little to the left." Finally, Mr. Govan nodded his approval as the work was positioned into place. "Awesome.'' Mr. Govan could not have been more intricately involved in the details of this retrospective, as he is with pretty much everything that happens on the museum campus on Wilshire Boulevard. He knew Ms. Martin before her death in 2004 and has long adored her work. He spent months visiting collectors at their homes, explaining why they should lend their Martins to this public exhibition fixating on such details as his insistence that paintings not be put under glass, which, he is quick to tell you, obscures the fine lines of her art. ("Agnes Martin would be horrified to see her work under glass," he said. "Horrified.") Mr. Govan curated the exhibition, which closed after a successful run in the fall, right down to the last caption and light fixture. The project, a decidedly disruptive and not entirely admired design by the architect Peter Zumthor, is testing all the social, political and fund raising skills that Mr. Govan has acquired after 10 years of maneuvering in a West Coast caldron of art collectors, wealthy patrons, celebrities and government officials. Los Angeles can be a tough place to rally civic and philanthropic support. Walt Disney Concert Hall, the glistening, now acclaimed Frank Gehry building, was almost never built. Mr. Govan was reminded of that when, days before he triumphantly unveiled 75 million in donations to his project last spring, one of this city's most wealthy benefactors, David Geffen, announced he had given 100 million to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. (Mr. Geffen, who has not given any money to Mr. Govan's project, declined a request to comment for this article.) Still, Mr. Govan has gathered about 300 million in commitments, with more on the way. He said he needs to raise another 150 million by the end of 2017 for the project to continue. "It's a big project for L.A., and there's been a little lack of confidence that the money will be raised," Mr. Govan said last month. "But I think just getting close to the halfway point, I've sensed a change in my trustees and supporters. There's this strong sense with them that this is likely to happen." "I will tell you just that it is going to happen," he said. At 53, Mr. Govan is the kind of arts executive who could probably exist only in Los Angeles. He is a celebrity in a world of celebrities, with the looks of a movie star; a regular at the Tower Bar on Sunset Boulevard, its tables crowded with agents and actors; and someone who, naturally enough, was a guest at last year's Academy Awards. Mr. Govan seems as comfortable describing, with the air of a senior faculty member at a fine arts college, the latest catalog of acquisitions before an audience of donors as he is posing for the snap snap snapping paparazzi at Lacma fund raisers attended by Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese and Kanye West. Mr. Govan breaks rules and celebrates the unconventional in a way that, if nothing else, draws attention to the museum and its director. What other museum director would orchestrate the crowd pleasing spectacle of moving a 340 ton boulder through the streets of Los Angeles at night before installing it on the museum grounds as "Levitated Mass," a work by Michael Heizer? He has had exhibitions devoted to Tim Burton, Mr. Gehry and Robert Mapplethorpe. Average attendance has doubled since 2007, to 1.6 million people. Sheila Kuehl, a member of the county Board of Supervisors, said Mr. Govan had changed the way people viewed this museum and the city. "People like to be part of something that looks to be new and the place to be," she said. "And that's what he has done with Lacma and L.A. He brings the way Gustavo Dudamel does excitement with him." Mr. Govan's reputation is such that in the gossipy world of high end museums and galleries, his name circulates as someone who might be summoned back to New York one day, where he served for 11 years as director of the Dia Art Foundation, perhaps to run the Museum of Modern Art, should that position ever open. Mr. Govan scrunched up his face at the suggestion as he sat on a gallery bench last month at the press preview of an exhibition devoted to the works of Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera. "Why would you leave this?" Mr. Govan said, pointing first toward the bustling exhibition and then through glass doors revealing the glorious sunshine and crisp blue skies of a typical December day in Los Angeles. "To go back to Trump Tower traffic? What exactly would be the incentive? The point of this project is to make my successor feel that this is the prestigious job." And there may be no better example of Govan as provocateur than the Zumthor building. Next to the La Brea Tar Pits, it has been likened to a blob, a smoky gray, elevated amoeba like swirl of galleries resting on eight pillars that would cross over Wilshire Boulevard. Joseph Giovannini, an architecture critic, has repeatedly belittled it as Lacma's "folly" in The Los Angeles Review of Books, a barrage of particularly stinging criticism that certainly has not made Mr. Govan's fund raising task any easier. "Why are we even seriously considering this misguided proposition?" Mr. Giovannini demanded in one essay, adding: "This ain't no Rialto Bridge. It's recycled, low grade avant gardism pumped up to monumental scale." It is, as Mr. Govan is quick to acknowledge, a controversial design by Mr. Zumthor, a widely admired architect. It involves tearing down three buildings from the '60s and one from the '80s that critics say could be rehabilitated. Mr. Govan rejects that idea, saying they are beyond repair and exults over the ambition and imagination of the design. Other people are coming around to Mr. Zumthor's vision as it goes through its various iterations. "I didn't like it at first, but it grew on me," said Zev Yaroslavsky, a former member of the Board of Supervisors who was instrumental in getting the county to contribute 125 million to the building. "It's an architectural statement whether he wants it to be or not. There are some people who don't like Zumthor or his design. It's going to be talked about. It's controversial. Most great buildings are controversial." These kinds of ambitious projects, with their attendant fund raising campaigns and architectural debates, may be familiar in more established cities like New York or San Francisco. (The expanded San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which opened last spring, raised 610 million in its capital campaign, easily covering the 305 million cost of its building expansion.) But for all the growing vibrancy of its arts scene, Los Angeles still suffers a bit of a reputation as a place where there is more interest in Hollywood than Hockney, whose wealthy citizens can be stingy, and where great works of art are hidden in mansions in Malibu and Bel Air. For Mr. Govan's project, an environmental quality study is underway, and plans are for demolition to begin at the end of 2018. The new museum would open in 2023, coinciding with the completion of an extension of a subway line that runs under Wilshire Boulevard, which will have a stop for the museum. All that is contingent on fund raising continuing apace. "If we stall next year, and we don't continue to raise money, we would be in bad shape," Mr. Govan said in December. But, he added: "Failure is not an option. The old buildings are literally coming to the end of their natural life." From the start, Mr. Govan has been persistent and uncompromisingly confident. "I can't say it strongly enough: It's not a question of whether there's money in L.A for such a project: There is," Mr. Govan said, sitting in his expansive ground floor office with a view of Wilshire Boulevard, where workers were cutting down palm trees to make way for the subway line. "The question is, will people decide that's what they want to do with it." "If they do this" at this, Mr. Govan paused to amend his remarks "when they do this, not if it will be a new high water mark for collective action, for achievement in the cultural space and in the philanthropic space of Los Angeles. It is not a large goal. We're going to do it. They are going to write the checks. And they are going to be happy to do it." There is a sort of cautious optimism here that Mr. Govan will be able to wrangle his money, all the more so since he announced the latest 75 million, including 50 million from Elaine Wynn, an art collector who is the co chair of the museum, and 25 million from A. Jerrold Perenchio, a former Univision chairman who has bequeathed the bulk of his art estate to the new museum. "I think the old days of the claim that perhaps L.A. was not and more specifically, Lacma was not a target of sustained contribution are increasingly behind us," said Mark Ridley Thomas, a member of the county Board of Supervisors. Mr. Govan is clearly an admirer of Los Angeles, even as he acknowledges its challenges. "When I moved here, people in New York said to me, 'L.A. is self centered and everybody does their own thing; it's not a good place to do a public big museum,'" he said. "There was this rap on L.A. and I think some of this is true that it is a wonderful place to be a creative individual. You have tremendous freedom to work on your own, you can be anonymous, and you can be eccentric. But what L.A. has not done well is the collective of people working together for public goals. The museum world is just a reflection of that. It's mostly been people doing things on their own." Mr. Govan's campaign comes as the Los Angeles art world is churning. The Broad Museum, exhibiting Eli and Edythe Broad's collection of modern art, opened downtown in 2015, and on the other side of the cultural tracks, Hauser Wirth took over a sprawling old flour mill in the Arts District, turning it into a museum scale gallery that is already crowded on weekends. This city is awaiting the April opening of a private art museum from Maurice and Paul Marciano, Guess co founders, in a renovated Masonic Temple in Koreatown. The Santa Monica Museum of Art is moving to the downtown Arts District this fall, with a new name: the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. And George Lucas, the filmmaker, after years of "site wars," recently announced he would bring his Museum of Narrative Art to Exposition Park and fund the project about 1 billion himself. "There's no question that the art scene in Los Angeles has become dramatically elevated on the global stage," said Casey Wasserman, an entertainment executive and museum trustee. "It's our time." Mr. Govan said that Los Angeles stood out today as a city where art is being made as artists flock here to take advantage of the light and the space rather than a place where it is being shared with the public. "You could argue that there is no city that is more vibrant," he said. "You may argue there are cities as vibrant Berlin is very vibrant; New York City outside of Manhattan is very vibrant." But he said that alone does not make Los Angeles the cultural capital it aspires to be. "I say this to my board: 'You can't just be boastful and say L.A. is going to be one of the greatest cultural cities on earth. That's not a forgone conclusion. Even with all the artists. You can't sit back and watch. That's why the museum is important.'" There are few people who would quarrel with his record so far. "His vision has been to turn the Lacma campus into a center for L.A. and it's working," Mr. Yaroslavsky said. "It has indeed become L.A.'s living room, a magnet. And when the Zumthor museum opens, it will exponentially increase the power of that magnet." Mr. Bohnett said that Mr. Govan has "deep and established East Coast roots" but that no matter the temptation of working in a place like New York, he could not see him leaving. "Where is the place he can make his biggest mark?" Mr. Bohnett said. "It's Los Angeles."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Data gathered by NASA's Curiosity rover reported that levels of oxygen varied with the seasons on Mars. There is not much air on Mars the atmospheric pressure there is less than one one hundredth of what we breathe on Earth but what little is there has baffled planetary scientists. Oxygen, which makes up about 0.13 percent of the Martian atmosphere, is the latest puzzler. In a paper published this month in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, scientists working with data gathered by NASA's Curiosity rover reported that levels of oxygen unexpectedly varied with the seasons on Mars, at least in the neighborhood that Curiosity has been driving around since 2012. That follows the rover's reading earlier this year of a large burst of methane, another gas emitted on Earth by living things and which perplexingly disappeared almost immediately. "It's confusing but it's exciting," said Sushil K. Atreya, a professor of climate and space sciences and engineering at the University of Michigan who works on Curiosity's atmospheric measurements. "It keeps us on our toes. Mars is certainly not boring." A Mars year lasts 687 days, so the scientists studying the oxygen variations were able to examine the behavior over almost three Martian years, through December 2017. The level of oxygen "rises relatively higher in the spring," said Melissa G. Trainer, a research space scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and lead author of the new paper, "and then it comes down lower, below what we would expect later in the year." Carbon dioxide is the main ingredient of Martian air, and scientists have understood for decades its ebb and flow. At the poles in winter, it falls out of the air and freezes to ice, then wafts back into the atmosphere as temperatures warm in the spring. High in the Martian atmosphere, ultraviolet light breaks apart carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide and oxygen atoms and then closer to the ground, interactions with water shepherd the oxygen atoms into molecular pairs. Because oxygen molecules should be pretty stable, persisting about a decade, researchers expected that the amount of oxygen molecules would remain almost constant . Curiosity's atmospheric measurements showed exactly that pattern for nitrogen and argon, two other trace gases in the Martian atmosphere. But, for oxygen, the concentrations shot up by a third during spring. "This was a very unexpected result, an unexpected phenomenon," Dr. Trainer said. "There's a lot we don't know about the oxygen cycle on Mars. That's become apparent." Adding to the mystery, the cycle was not the same each year, and the scientists could not find an obvious explanation like temperature, dust storms or ultraviolet radiation for what changed from year to year. On Earth, most oxygen is generated by the photosynthesis of plants. But so far, for the Mars scientists, that is far down on the list of explanations. "You've got to rule out all of the other processes first before you go there," Dr. Atreya said. More likely sources are chemicals like hydrogen peroxide and perchlorates known to exist in the Martian dirt. "It's pretty clear you need a flux from the surface," Dr. Atreya said. "Nothing in the atmosphere is going to create this kind of rise." But how these chemicals might release and absorb enough oxygen to explain the seasonal rise and fall is difficult to figure out, especially as there are only 19 oxygen measurements over five and a half years. An intriguing possibility is that the oxygen mystery might be tied to another trace gas, methane, that is also acting strangely in the Martian atmosphere. Since 2003, several teams of scientists have reported large bursts of methane based on measurements from Earth based telescopes, orbiting spacecraft and the Curiosity rover. Other times, the methane has been largely absent. The presence of methane was a surprise to scientists , because the known processes to create the gas are either biological methane producing microbes or geothermal, which would be a promising environment for life to exist on present day Mars. Now scientists want to know not only how methane is generated on Mars but how it quickly disappears. In June, Curiosity observed a particularly strong burp of methane 21 parts per billion by volume. But when it repeated the experiment a few days later , it came up empty less than 1 part per billion. The European Space Agency's orbiting Mars Express spacecraft passed over Gale Crater, the site of the rover, just about five hours after Curiosity measured the burst and did not detect anything. (The same instrument corroborated a 2013 methane burst observed by Curiosity.) "I would say that it seems this spike measured by Curiosity was very short lived and local," said Marco Giuranna, a scientist at the National Institute for Astrophysics in Italy who is in charge of the Mars Express instrument. Even between bursts, methane on Mars poses a mystery. Curiosity has measured a low but persistent presence of methane, about 410 parts per trillion, which rises and falls with the seasons. But a newer European orbiter, the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, with the ability to measure as little methane as 50 parts per trillion, has yet to see any methane at all since it started taking measurements in April last year.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
PARIS On his eight hour flight to New York from Switzerland last month, Jeff Jarvis, a well known blogger and journalism professor, found himself seated next to a woman eager to discuss the finer points of management theory. "Normally, it would have been fine to chat, but I had work to do," he said. When, after a while, the conversation failed to find a natural end, Mr. Jarvis resorted to the road warrior's tried and true trick: He donned his headphones. Mr. Jarvis, whose book "Public Parts" argues about the virtues of engaging with people online, conceded that such experiences made him wary about doing the same in an airplane setting. "So often we do sit next to utter strangers," he said. "And the lottery does not have great odds." But what if those odds could be improved with access to the information that passengers already share about themselves online? This month, the Dutch carrier KLM began testing a program it calls Meet and Seat, allowing ticket holders to upload details from their Facebook or LinkedIn profiles and use the data to choose seatmates. The concept is a step beyond the not always successful efforts a few years ago by some airlines including Air France, Virgin Atlantic and Lufthansa to build "walled" social networks out of their existing frequent flier memberships. "For at least 10 years, there has been this question about serendipity and whether you could improve the chances of meeting someone interesting onboard," said Erik Varwijk, a managing director in charge of passenger business at KLM. "But the technology just wasn't available." Relative latecomers to the social media party, airlines are quickly becoming sophisticated users of online networks, not only as marketing tools, but as a low cost way to learn more about their customers and their preferences. With Facebook alone claiming nearly 500 million daily active users more than 60 times the eight million people who fly each day KLM and others are betting that many of them would be willing to share their profiles in exchange, say, for a chance to meet someone with a common interest or who might be going to the same event. And airlines are not the only ones betting on the concept. Planely, a Danish start up, allows registered users who submit their itineraries to view the Facebook and LinkedIn profiles of others who will be on flights with them. Since it began in late 2010, Planely has connected more than 1,500 travelers, according to its chief executive, Nick Martin. Satisfly, based in Hong Kong, allows users to submit profile information as well as their flight "moods" whether they would prefer to talk shop or chat casually and other details like languages spoken and preferences about potential seatmates. The information is then shared with its airline partners, which incorporate the data into their own seat assignment platforms. KLM's service is available only to travelers with confirmed reservations who are willing to connect their social profiles to their booking. After selecting the amount of personal information they wish to share, passengers are presented with seat maps that show where others who have also shared their profiles are seated. You can then reserve the seat next to anyone who seems interesting provided it is available and that person will receive a message with your profile details. On a flight from Amsterdam to Sao Paulo this week, for example, you could have chosen the director of a British answering service, who has a passion for reggae and jazz; an Italian chemical engineer fluent in Dutch, English, Spanish and Portuguese; or a Norwegian alternative rock fan en route to visit family in Argentina. While it is not possible to "reject" a person who has chosen to sit with you, you can select another seat as long as two days before the flight. Those feeling awkward about moving can delete their data and select new seats using the standard anonymous online platform. Dan Nainan, a comedian from New York, said he was eager to try it out. "If people are able to choose whom they sit next to, they're more than likely going to be friendly and outgoing and easy to talk to," said Mr. Nainan, 30, who said he had no reservations about making his personal data available to fellow passengers. "I've met some wonderful people on airplanes and made some great connections. I would love to be able to see the selection of people that I could potentially sit next to." But not everyone is enthusiastic. Kaamna Bhojwani Dhawan, the founder of a Web site for parents traveling with young children, said she found the trend "puzzling." "My goal is to get through the flight without losing my mind or either of my children," said Ms. Bhojwani Dhawan, 32, who recently traveled from San Francisco to India and Dubai with her 3 year old son and 6 month old daughter. "I can't imagine being very good company, nor am I particularly interested in sitting next to another mom with kids so that we can compare notes." Analysts conceded that "social seating" was likely to appeal more to business travelers en route to trade shows, or backpackers looking for travel companions although even those situations present potential pitfalls. "Pity the poor venture capitalist who gets seated with the start up guy who talks his ear off for four hours," Mr. Jarvis said. Mr. Varwijk of KLM said his airline was not yet actively promoting the seating program, which is being offered initially only on flights between Amsterdam and New York and San Francisco and Sao Paulo. Only about 200 passengers have participated so far, he said, but barring any major hiccups, the airline hopes to roll out the service which can be arranged from 48 hours to 90 days in advance of a flight on all of its intercontinental flights by the spring. The airline, a member of the SkyTeam alliance, also plans to share feedback from the trial with its partners, which could choose to offer the service as well.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Re "The Age of Coddling Is Over," by David Brooks (column, April 17): Over and over my peers and I are labeled the "snowflake generation." We are called selfish, weak and coddled. What I do not see reported is the intense hardship that my generation has been through. This has always been our reality: a world of uncertainty, from being born at a time of terrorist attacks, to elementary school during an economic collapse, to spending my teenage years advocating for our dying planet. It seems ironically fitting that my senior year what was meant to be a time of prom, graduation and celebration was cut short by a worldwide pandemic. But we are rising to the challenge. My peers are not responding by whining or violating social distancing guidelines. One of my friends had the coronavirus and is now donating plasma in hopes that his antibodies can help someone else recover. A student I followed on Instagram sent me instructions on how to sew my own face mask. I attended a Zoom call with hundreds of young people looking to take remote action on the climate crisis. Still others are keeping their heads down and working hard to take care of themselves, their families and their communities, in a time when our leaders have thrown their hands up and shirked their responsibilities.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
In the far reaches of the solar system, beyond Neptune, there is a minor planet orbiting the sun in a sea of icy debris. Humans have known about the reddish, round object for more than a decade. Since 2007, scientists have estimated that it has a diameter of 775 miles about half the size of Pluto and most likely has methane on its surface. But they still don't know what to call it. This week, the astronomers who discovered the minor planet said they wanted the public to weigh in on the chosen name. Offering up three options to choose from, they invited anyone to vote on the name that they will eventually submit to the International Astronomical Union, which must approve the official name. Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. Using data from the union's Minor Planet Center, the astronomers who discovered the minor planet, which is currently referred to as 2007 OR10, estimate that it is the largest unnamed world in our solar system. The group has designated a total of nearly 525,000 minor planets in our solar system.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
9 Plays and Musicals to Go to in N.Y.C. This Weekend 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. 'GRIEF IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS' at St. Ann's Warehouse (in previews; opens on April 28). In Enda Walsh's adaptation of Max Porter's poetic novel, for Wayward Productions and Complicite, a father and two sons grapple with a mother's sudden death. The arrival of a crow effects some healing. The bereaved father and possibly metaphorical bird unite in the agile body of Cillian Murphy. 718 254 8779, stannswarehouse.org 'HAPPY TALK' at the Pershing Square Signature Center (previews start on April 30; opens on May 16). Though the playwright Jesse Eisenberg usually writes about awful people, he's centering his latest New Group play on a less awful one. Under Scott Elliott's direction, Susan Sarandon stars as Lorraine, a woman caring for her addled family, and her mother's home health aide, while rehearsing the role of Bloody Mary in "South Pacific." Will it be some enchanted evening? 212 279 4200, thenewgroup.org 'OCTET' at the Pershing Square Signature Center (previews start on April 30; opens on May 19). Turn off your phones. No, really. In this new musical from the Tony nominated composer and librettist Dave Malloy, the first in his Signature Theater residency, eight strangers gather to discuss their internet addictions, musically. The score is sung a cappella. Annie Tippe directs. 212 244 7529, signaturetheatre.org Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. 'PAUL SWAN IS DEAD AND GONE' at Torn Page (in previews; opens on May 1). Swan, "the most beautiful man in the world," is in residence at a Chelsea townhouse. In this new drama from the Civilians, a quasi documentary troupe, the playwright Claire Kiechel resurrects Swan, an artist, a dancer and her great great uncle. Steve Cosson directs Tony Torn, Robert Johanson, Helen Cespedes and Alexis Scott. 718 230 3330, thecivilians.org 'THE TEMPEST' at the Public Theater (previews start on April 29; opens on May 3). The Public Theater's Mobile Unit, which brings the Swan of Avon to shelters, correctional facilities and various community performance spaces, comes ashore at the Public Theater. Laurie Woolery directs a cast that includes Sam Morales as Miranda and the wonderful Myra Lucretia Taylor as Prospero. 212 967 7555, publictheater.org 'AIN'T NO MO'' at the Public Theater (closes on May 5). Jordan E. Cooper's debut play, a comedy with turbulence, comes in for a landing. A series of vignettes, directed by Stevie Walker Webb and inspired by the idea that African Americans might decide to leave the United States en masse, the play is, as Jesse Green wrote, "thrilling, bewildering, campy, shrewd, mortifying, scary, devastating and deep." 212 967 7555, publictheater.org 'DO YOU FEEL ANGER?' at the Vineyard Theater (closes on April 27). Mara Nelson Greenberg's very dark comedy, about an empathy coach trying to civilize an unwoke collection agency, gives its final notice. Ben Brantley wrote that the play "aspires to more than caricatures of dangerously devolved masculinity," adding that Nelson Greenberg is also "considering the ways in which women unthinkingly absorb a poisoned social system." 212 353 0303, vineyardtheatre.org 'WHITE NOISE' at the Public Theater (closes on May 5). Suzan Lori Parks's exploration of the master slave dynamic, directed by Oskar Eustis and starring Daveed Diggs, comes to an end. Ben Brantley wrote that in this "enthrallingly thought packed" play, "Parks isn't cutting anyone any slack. Herself included." 212 967 7555, publictheater.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
A few pages into Nico Walker's debut novel, "Cherry," the narrator walks into a bank, pulls out a handgun and casually demands money from the teller, reassuring her that "it's nothing personal." Heading back to his car, he hears sirens approaching and feels oddly at peace with the inevitable outcome. Mr. Walker, 33, wrote the novel while serving an 11 year sentence in a federal prison in Kentucky, after pleading guilty in 2012 to robbing 11 banks around Cleveland during a four month spree. His case puzzled prosecutors at the time, because he was such an unlikely criminal. He came from an affluent, supportive family, and was a war veteran who had received seven medals and citations for service in Iraq, where he went on more than 200 combat missions in 2005 and 2006. The strange story of how Mr. Walker a war hero with no criminal history became a serial bank robber who evaded police for months sounds like the plot of a heist movie or thriller. Instead, Mr. Walker wrote an unsettling literary novel. "Cherry" touches on some of the darkest chapters of recent American history: the opioid epidemic, the lingering trauma of war for a generation of young Americans caught up in the endless conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the social and psychological costs of addiction and post traumatic stress disorder. The book, which Knopf will publish this month, has drawn praise from writers like Dan Chaon, Donald Ray Pollock and Thomas McGuane. New York Magazine called it "the first great novel of the opioid epidemic." Tracing the arc of Mr. Walker's descent into addiction and crime, "Cherry" is a raw coming of age story in reverse a young man drops out of college, enlists in the Army and goes to war, but rather than maturing in the crucible of combat, he comes home shattered, unable to function. He becomes addicted to opiates and starts robbing banks almost on a whim. "It seemed to me such a fierce book, so direct and so uncurated in giving voice to his experience," Mr. McGuane said. "The narrative mystery as you read it is to sort of try to find hope in all this bitterness." "Cherry" fits into a growing body of literature by American veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who have turned to fiction to explore the trauma of war and its aftermath. Their ranks include acclaimed writers like Elliot Ackerman, Kevin Powers, Matt Gallagher and Phil Klay, whose story collection, "Redeployment," won the National Book Award in 2014. But "Cherry" adds a dark new chapter to the canon, revealing a young soldier's transformation from hero to antihero, with no sliver of redemption. Before he went to Iraq, Mr. Walker was a fairly typical teenager, a good student who was interested in music and sports. He grew up in a well off family, the younger of two sons, and attended a private high school in Cleveland. His parents, Timothy and Liliana Walker, remember him as a bright, funny kid with a creative streak. He enrolled in a Jesuit university in Ohio but struggled to find a focus. It was a few years after 9/11, and it weighed on him that young men his age were going overseas to fight. "It kind of bothered me, staying in the States and hanging out with my friends and smoking pot and not really doing anything, when these other kids were getting blown up and killed," he said. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. He dropped out of college and enlisted in the Army at age 19, and was certified as a combat medic. In December 2005, he was stationed 30 miles southwest of Baghdad in an area called the Triangle of Death. His infantry company was first tasked with guarding a police station. Later, they went on night patrols, trying to catch insurgents planting roadside bombs. On one mission described in "Cherry," Mr. Walker was on a census patrol with a unit when they heard an explosion and saw smoke rising. They swam across a sewage canal and finally reached a burning Humvee. The charred corpses were almost unrecognizable. When Mr. Walker tried to pick up one of the bodies, it was still so hot his latex gloves melted. The acrid smoke made him reel. "The smell is something you already know," he writes in "Cherry." "It's coded in your blood." Mr. Walker was sure he would die in Iraq. When he didn't, he suffered from survivor's guilt over the lives he failed to save. During a home visit, Mr. Walker seemed like a different person, his parents said. "He said he wasn't sure if he was going to be coming back," Timothy Walker said. "He was dead eyed." When he returned home for good in 2006, Mr. Walker began drinking heavily. He tried to restart his life, enrolled in college and played in a band. But he felt isolated and paranoid. He and his wife, whom he had married shortly before deployment, separated, and over time, he drifted away from his old friends. Crowded places terrified him. He couldn't sleep, and when he did, he had nightmares about killing and being killed. "He came back broken," Liliana Walker said. Sometimes he was overwhelmed by anger, which he directed at himself. He hit himself in the face and stabbed out cigarettes on his arm. He started taking OxyContin and heroin. When he went to the Veteran Affairs office in Cleveland in the summer of 2007, he was prescribed antidepressants and was told he had an anxiety disorder. His parents later found another psychiatrist, who misdiagnosed bipolar disorder. In December 2010, Mr. Walker robbed his first bank. The act was so spontaneous he didn't bother to plan a getaway, much less bring a gun. After the adrenaline rush of demanding money from the teller, he felt strangely peaceful, a sensation he likened to the sense of focus he felt in combat. "I never put any thought into robbing," he said. "It didn't seem like that big of a deal. I was used to that feeling." The morning of his arrest in April 2011, he wore a dark blue hoodie and sunglasses, and carried a dark green handgun, according to the criminal complaint. He showed the bank teller his gun and said, "You know what this is." He put the money in a white plastic bag and drove away in a Ford pickup. The police followed him, and he sped away, crashing in the parking lot of a Burger King and breaking a vertebra in his back. They found 7,426 in his car. It wasn't until after his arrest that a forensic psychiatrist gave him a diagnosis of acute post traumatic stress disorder. "He was one of the most severely impaired trauma victims I've ever seen," said the psychiatrist, Pablo Stewart. "If at any point along the way there had been a proper intervention, this wouldn't have happened. He found his own cure, and it just happened to be robbing banks." At his sentencing hearing, Mr. Walker's lawyers argued that his crimes stemmed from the trauma he had endured. "This kid, every day, saw absolute hell," Angelo Lonardo, one of his attorneys, said in an interview. When the judge asked him what drove him to rob banks, Mr. Walker struggled to explain. "I have been very, I guess, desensitized to things like this, and I am not trying to be insolent at all, but at the time, it just didn't seem like that extraordinary, you know, such a terrible thing to do," he said. "I thought it was, not normal, but not as insane as it looks to me now in retrospect." Mr. Walker never planned to write about his experience, he said. Once in a low security prison, he found ways to occupy himself: he read 19th century Russian literature, studied Spanish, German and Latin, and tutored other inmates who were getting their G.E.D.s. Two and a half years into his sentence, he got a letter from Matthew Johnson, co owner of Tyrant Books. Mr. Johnson had read an article in BuzzFeed about Mr. Walker's crimes and his military service, and began sending him books to read. After they had corresponded for a few months, Mr. Johnson urged him to write a book. Mr. Walker was hesitant, but eventually started writing at night. He mailed pages to Mr. Johnson, and sometimes weeks later, would get edited pages back. He spent nearly four years writing and rewriting. Some of the hardest chapters were the ones that take place in Iraq. He worried that he might offend people who had served or lost loved ones in the war, and that other veterans might think he was cashing in on tragedy. "It was difficult to write about things that were more graphic," he said. "At the end of the day, I thought, it's better to do it like that than to lie about it." Beyond the logistical challenges of writing and editing a book in prison, there were legal concerns. Under the Son of Sam law, convicted criminals are barred from profiting off their crimes through books, movies or other media that describes their criminal exploits, and money made from such works can be seized and given to victims or their families. But some legal experts argue that there is wide protection under the First Amendment for convicts to publish and profit from their work. Mr. Johnson thought the book could benefit from a bigger publisher, and eventually sold the rights to Tim O'Connell at Knopf, an imprint of Penguin Random House. A Knopf lawyer determined there that the novel didn't run afoul of Son of Sam laws. Mr. Walker has used money from his publishing contract to pay off some of the roughly 30,000 in restitution he owes the banks. He expects to pay the remainder by January.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
SINCE the feature first became available five years ago, the ability to deposit a check with a few taps on a smartphone has become one of the most popular features of mobile banking. While the systems generally run smoothly, some possible drawbacks are becoming evident as use of the service grows. Last year, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation reported, about three quarters of the largest banks offered mobile check deposit known as "remote deposit capture" in banking lingo. The service, which lets customers use a mobile app to snap a photo of checks with their phones or tablets and deposit the money in their bank accounts, was used by about 11 percent of consumers a year ago, up from 2 percent in 2011, according to a new report from the Pew Charitable Trusts. As the service catches on, it becomes increasingly important for customers to compare the terms of mobile deposit services that different banks offer but that comparison isn't always easy to do, since disclosures by banks vary and are sometimes vague or incomplete, according to the Pew report. "Consumers can't readily comparison shop based on terms and conditions," said Susan Weinstock, director of Pew's consumer banking project. Some banks, for instance, don't offer immediate availability of funds deposited by smartphone, as a way to control fraud. Banks also impose limits on the amounts that can be deposited using mobile phones, also to protect against fraud. But it can be difficult to find that information; some banks put such information online, rather than within the app that customers use to deposit the checks, Pew found.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
A comprehensive new assessment of the ancient practice of female genital cutting has found a gradual but significant decline in many countries, even in some where it remains deeply entrenched. Teenage girls are now less likely to have been cut than older women in more than half of the 29 countries in Africa and the Middle East where the practice is concentrated, according to the assessment by the United Nations Children's Fund. In Egypt, for example, where more women have been cut than in any other nation, survey data showed that 81 percent of 15 to 19 year olds had undergone the practice, compared with 96 percent of women in their late 40s. The report's authors stress that the tradition still has a tenacious hold in many places, but they say the fledgling declines may foreshadow more generational change. In almost half of the 29 countries, young women were less likely to support the practice than older women. The difference in Egypt was especially stark: only a third of teenage girls who were surveyed thought it should continue, compared with almost two thirds of older women. "The fact that young women are against the practice in places like Egypt gives us hope that they will be able to stop the cutting of their daughters," said Claudia Cappa, lead author of the Unicef report. "We need to create conditions so they can act on their beliefs." Over all, Unicef estimates that more than 125 million girls and women have undergone the practice and that 30 million girls are at risk of it over the coming decade. The report, released Monday, is the first in which Unicef assessed the practice among all age groups based on household survey data from all of the 29 countries. Its last report, issued eight years ago, was based on 30 surveys in 20 of the countries; the new study includes 74 surveys done in 29 countries over two decades. The report depicts progress against female genital cutting as halting and uneven. It also offers a portrait of nations where its prevalence is still stunningly high. In addition to Egypt, where 91 percent of women 15 to 49 have undergone the practice, countries with the highest percentages of women who have been cut include Somalia, at 98 percent; Guinea, at 96 percent; Djibouti, at 93 percent; Eritrea and Mali, at 89 percent; and Sierra Leone and Sudan, at 88 percent. Unicef found that the steepest declines in the prevalence of the practice, also known as female genital mutilation, have occurred in Kenya, one of Africa's most dynamic and developed nations, and most surprisingly in the Central African Republic, one of its poorest and least developed. Researchers now say the prevalence of the practice in these two countries began to fall four or five decades ago. They said the progress made sense in Kenya, where efforts to stop female genital cutting stretch to the early 1900s, but they were at a loss to explain why it had plunged in the Central African Republic, to 24 percent in 2010 from 43 percent in the mid 1990s. "We have no idea, not even a guess," said Bettina Shell Duncan, an anthropology professor at the University of Washington who was a consultant on the report. Professor Shell Duncan said researchers needed to get to the Central African Republic soon to figure out what was happening there. The country has received no significant foreign aid to combat the practice that Unicef researchers knew of, and it has been the subject of no scholarly study that they could find. While experts were amazed about the Central African Republic, they were disappointed that no significant decline had been detected in Senegal between the surveys done in 2005 and 2010 11. Tostan, a human rights group whose name means "breakthrough," has led a much hailed and growing social movement there to stop the practice, with support from Unicef and other donors. Thousands of villages working with the group have declared their intent to abandon genital cutting. Molly Melching, Tostan's executive director, said in an e mail that the momentum in Senegal had accelerated in the past five years and that changes would probably become visible only in 2020, as girls who would otherwise have been cut grow old enough to be interviewed in household surveys. She also noted that the national surveys had not specifically sampled the villages where Tostan worked or evaluated the group's impact. Mrs. Cappa, of Unicef, acknowledged Ms. Melching's points but said "the real surprise for Senegal" was that support for the practice among women and girls had not noticeably declined. The new report is based on data from the Demographic and Health Surveys and the Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys; women ages 15 to 49 were questioned about their own status and that of their daughters. This self reported data should be treated with caution because women may be unwilling to disclose having undergone the procedure because of the sensitivity of the topic or the illegality of the practice. And some women may be unaware that they had been cut or the extent of the cutting, especially if the procedure was done at an early age. Nonetheless, it identifies intriguing trends in who is performing the cutting, its severity and people's attitudes toward it. In most countries, traditional circumcisers still do the cutting. But in Egypt, a troubling shift has occurred as people have become more aware that girls can die from the procedure: the number of girls and young women cut by medical professionals, mostly doctors, has risen to three out of four from just over half in 1995. "Women know more about the harms, but there is still social pressure to conform, and so they medicalize the procedure," said Francesca Moneti, a senior child protection specialist at Unicef. Across all countries, one in five of the women and girls genitally cut has undergone the most severe form, known as infibulation. It usually involves cutting and stitching together the vaginal labia, nearly covering the urethra and the vaginal opening, which must be open later for intercourse and childbirth. But a trend toward less radical forms of genital cutting has taken hold in some countries, including Djibouti, where 83 percent of women in their late 40s report being infibulated sewn closed compared with 42 percent of 15 to 19 year olds. Female genital cutting includes a range of practices from pricking or piercing female genitals to amputating some or all of the external genitalia, including the clitoris. The practice can diminish women's sexual pleasure and increase the risk that they and their babies will die in childbirth. The Unicef report also found that while the practice is sometimes seen as a patriarchal effort to control women's sexuality, it is often women who carry it out, and in a few countries, including Guinea, Sierra Leone and Chad, more men than women support its abandonment. Significant numbers of women also do not know what men think about the practice and often underestimate the proportion of them who want it to end, survey data show.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
JOE COSCARELLI Another year, another set of mostly anticlimactic, head scratching surprises from the Recording Academy. Silly me, but I expected that because of the pandemic, which stifled a lot of releases and made breaking out as a new artist more difficult as well as the Grammys' commitment the last few years to at least nodding toward both diversity and cultural relevance we would see a fairly predictable crop of big names: Taylor Swift and Post Malone, sure, but also the Weeknd, Harry Styles, Pop Smoke, BTS, Lil Baby, Roddy Ricch, Juice WRLD. Maybe Luke Combs, the Chicks and even Bob Dylan. But across the major four categories, we instead got a bizarre hodgepodge of headliners (including Beyonce and Billie Eilish, for off cycle one offs) and then names like ... Black Pumas, Jhene Aiko, Jacob Collier, Coldplay (!) and D Smoke, which I could've sworn was a typo for "Pop Smoke." (Nope, he's from that Netflix hip hop show and he's up for two awards including best new artist.) The Weeknd is by far the biggest snub. I don't know if "After Hours" is his best work critics? but he was everywhere during this coronavirus plagued year, and is headlining the Super Bowl halftime show (also airing on CBS!) the week after the Grammys. "Blinding Lights" was massive and inescapable, and Abel Tesfaye just played the role of Pop Star with such commitment, and the proper blend of art, commerce and costumes. There's plenty of other nit picking to do up top whither Sam Hunt and Halsey, whose biggest Grammys look remains "A Star Is Born"? but this complete "we don't know him" for the Weeknd, resulting in zero nominations, feels loaded to me. (Email me if you Zoomed into one of those secret committee meetings.) JON CARAMANICA The Nashville oversights are baffling, particularly Luke Combs, whose album "What You See Is What You Get" is likely the biggest commercial juggernaut the genre has seen recently. I presume Hunt is passed over for having good taste? And though it's Nashville adjacent, it is striking to see the Chicks all but ignored, given how frequently their prior work was lauded by the Grammys, both pre and post country music banishment. (Their producer Jack Antonoff was nominated for producer of the year, nonclassical.) These choices always draw eye rolls among journalists, who (with good reason) want the Grammys to reflect the pulse of contemporary music. What they really are is an assertion of values by the Grammy deep state, communicating to the rest of the industry that whatever wacky trends may come along, an unchanging bedrock of "classic" songwriting, rooted in the rock, soul and folk of the 1960s and '70s, will always be treasured and rewarded ... at least by the people who hold the keys to the Grammy nomination process. Do they win? Not usually. But they don't need to win to make their point. Had you ever heard of Black Pumas before? Allow me to break the fourth wall for a moment: I understand at least part of my role here is to publicly head scratch about the striking amount of nominations this band has received, given its relatively low commercial profile and its negligible critical profile and perhaps its general lack of popularity, notwithstanding the fact that it was nominated last year for best new artist. And in major categories to boot: album of the year and record of the year. JON PARELES Seems to me like the Grammys just hit the snooze button and rolled over. Back when they started, in 1958, the Grammys did their best to ignore rock 'n' roll. You'd think the boomers and younger members who eventually replaced that initial Grammy "deep state" a great formulation, Ben would have learned from past embarrassments. Apparently not yet. But at least now the timeline is advancing. This year, they can also indulge their nostalgia by embracing the 2019 2020 disco revival with those nominations for Dua Lipa and Doja Cat. Which brings us to ... the late 1970s? COSCARELLI Jacob Collier, it turns out, loves his digital studio tricks and is worth about 35 gecs, by my count, for his version of those Ed Sheeran collaboration projects. He's already won four Grammys for arranging, dating back to 2016, and I think you're seeing some big looks this year for artists that the Grammys invested in early on. You always hear about the Academy Awards liking to anoint young stars and then reward them for life, and I wonder if that explains Collier; Black Pumas (best new artist nominee, 2020); Julia Michaels (song of the year and best new artist, 2018); and H.E.R. (10 nominations over the last two ceremonies). "I Can't Breathe" by H.E.R. and "If the World Was Ending" by Michaels and JP Saxe have topical resonance, but I'm still surprised to see them in the song of the year category. CARAMANICA For what it's worth, I occasionally caught myself derailed by the brutal sincerity of "If the World Was Ending" when it came on the radio in the car. But then, I like Lewis Capaldi. CARAMANICA The truth is that there is a whole level of success for a musician that has little to do with radio play, streaming success, album sales or touring scale. It is about being seen as the sort of musician that other musicians respect. (No idea if this is lucrative!) Black Pumas and Collier fit in here. And D Smoke might seem like a total outlier, but in this context, he's not: His brother is SiR, a singer who's signed to Top Dawg Entertainment, known as the home of Kendrick Lamar. In a(nother) year with no Kendrick album, D Smoke is a familiar alternative, and a reminder of the sorts of music hip hop included that Grammy voters tend to favor: earnest, technique driven, either shopworn or fine tuned depending on your lens. That's made manifest in the best rap album category (D Smoke, Nas, Freddie Gibbs, Jay Electronica and Royce Da 5'9"). If you teleported those albums (many of which I love) back to the mid 1990s and slipped them into the Walkmen of the Carhartt and Timbs wearing fans of that era, they likely wouldn't raise an eyebrow. That said, it is notable that there are no hip hop producers in the producer of the year category, likely because Grammy voters don't bother investigating young producers like Jetsonmade, responsible for so many DaBaby hits and also Jack Harlow's "Whats Poppin," or even give thought to the Alchemist, who has become the go to beatsmith for modern day golden age revivalists, and in the last two years has released strong projects with Freddie Gibbs, Boldy James, Conway the Machine and Action Bronson. COSCARELLI I really did think we were going to see a push for two of the posthumous releases that dominated streaming, "Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon" by Pop Smoke and "Legends Never Die" by Juice WRLD, neither of which was even nominated for best rap album. Pop Smoke, who I naively thought had a shot at best new artist, is represented through a single nomination, best rap performance for "Dior." Lil Baby's "My Turn" and Roddy Ricch's "Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial" were also left out, though each got nominated for songs, with "The Bigger Picture," Lil Baby's Black Lives Matter protest song, earning two nominations and "The Box" getting three. To pull back for a moment, we should issue our usual caveat: These, of course, are just the nominations, so it's possible that Swift, Eilish and Beyonce could sweep most of the major awards and leave this all feeling pretty Grammys typical when all is said and done. SISARIO The Grammys are the only time when you can truly feel sorry for Beyonce. She was already the show's most nominated woman. But with the latest news she has gotten yet another nine nods, bringing her lifetime total to 79. That puts her up there with the most nominated people ever, tying Paul McCartney and just behind Quincy Jones and, um, Jay Z (both with 80). And she might well win a few. But her chances are slim in the major categories, which are the ones that truly matter. In her career so far, Beyonce has won 24 Grammys, taking home the genre trophies but, in almost every case, blanking on the big ones. She has lost album of the year three times ("I Am ... Sasha Fierce," "Beyonce," "Lemonade"), record of the year five times ("Say My Name," "Crazy in Love," "Irreplaceable," "Halo," "Formation") and song of the year twice ("Say My Name," "Formation"). The only time she has won a top award was song of the year, for "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)," on which she was one of four credited songwriters. As much as the Recording Academy now struggles to change their organization and invite new, young and racially diverse voters, legacies like these will be awfully hard to overcome. (Want more examples? Check the track records for Kanye West, Jay Z, Drake and Kendrick Lamar.) Even if by some miracle "Black Parade" does take a big award, it will look less like a victory than a consolation prize.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Caitlin Halla and Sam Thirlwall after their backyard wedding April 30 in Portland, Ore. The groom's daughters joined the couple as they greeted family and friends who watched online. Everything was telling Sam Thirlwall not to take this job. Joining Zapproved, a legal services technology company in Portland, Ore., would mean a pay cut. It also would mean being a manager responsible for a large team, rather than doing what he had done for years, which was building cybersecurity software. Mr. Thirlwall, 36, didn't know much about the company or legal technology. Even the interview process seemed weird. This was early 2018, and he was so tired at that point he needed a drastic change. He had spent several years at a company called Cylance developing a cybersecurity program that had devoured his time and energy. He had two young daughters he was trying to help raise. He was going through a painful divorce. Through the stress of it all, he had put on weight. The new job, at least, would be fewer hours and let him concentrate on his daughters and his own well being. A fresh start. Caitlin Halla, 31, had been a software developer at Zapproved for almost a year and, frankly, was ready to leave. She had just been moved from a shared window office to a shared windowless office to make room for the new engineering director, Mr. Thirlwall. A company email said he enjoyed cooking with his daughters and in his free time wrote software to track the movement of ISIS. That's awfully braggadocious, Ms. Halla had thought. She considered his photo, then turned to a colleague: "Is it weird that I think he's kind of cute?" Hoping to retain Ms. Halla at the company, her supervisor told her about a new team being formed and set up a meeting with Mr. Thirlwall. She put the meeting in her calendar: April 30, 2018, 1 p.m. Mr. Thirlwall had taken a circuitous path to Zapproved, too. He was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, but moved with his family to Cocoa Beach, Fla., as a child. He went to Emerson College in Boston, intending to major in film, but a teacher said he was wasting his time. Film wasn't really his passion; he was writing papers on subjects like genocide during the Boer War. What he should really do, the teacher said, is join the F.B.I. He transferred to the Florida Institute of Technology and became fascinated with cybercrime. He worked in government contracting (and, yes, he did write programs to track terrorists) joining Cylance and moving to Portland with his former wife and their children. He had seen Ms. Halla around the office, but this meeting would be their first real conversation. What was supposed to be a 30 minute one on one meeting about a new position turned into a rambling two hour conversation about work and family, wolves and artificial intelligence, Inuits, dogs and tattoos. As they left the conference room, she turned to him and said, "What just happened? Did I just tell you about my entire childhood?" Indeed she did. Mr. Thirlwall was enthralled. "I walked out of the meeting and my first thought was, 'I'm so glad she's interested in moving to another team,'" he said. He sent her tutorials on machine learning, a subject in which she had expressed interest. (It involves computer algorithms searching for patterns in large amounts of data.) She responded via Slack, and pretty soon the messages were flying. Not sparks, just messages. Neither was quite sure how the other felt, even as the days and weeks progressed. Looking back, Mr. Thirlwall said, "I'm sure it would have been quite obvious to anyone looking on." But at the time, all they knew was that they enjoyed one another's company. "Are we becoming best friends?" Ms. Halla wondered. "Connected in a romantic way? We just didn't know." Their relationship shifted a little when she confessed over Slack that as a software developer, she sometimes felt like an impostor. He wrote back: Would it be weird if I called you? As Ms. Halla recalled it, he told her how capable she was, how valuable her ideas were. There are some loud and insistent voices in the software realm, he explained, but they held no monopoly on answers. She felt instantly at ease, more ready to tackle the next work challenge. "Sam is so very open and welcoming and kind," she said. "It felt like we'd been friends for years." Neither had experienced a connection quite like this before. Slack messages became text messages became long emails, until Mr. Thirlwall suggested they meet for a Sunday lunch; Ms. Halla picked a city park called Colonel Summers. Through the afternoon, they shared more and more with one another, checking off a list of questions that Ms. Halla had prepared in advance something along the lines of the 36 questions for intimacy outlined in Modern Love. Sign up for Love Letter and always get the latest in Modern Love, weddings, and relationships in the news by email. The fact that he was her manager's boss felt strange. She soon transferred to another team. Later, both changed employers. Ms. Halla now works as a software engineer at New Relic and Mr. Thirlwall returned to Cylance. In what can only be described as equal parts sweet and nerdy, Mr. Thirlwall started a Google doc to record milestones in their relationship: first date, first trip, and so on. "This was so special and so different," he said. "I know life gets super busy and chaotic and random things happen like pandemics, apparently and I just didn't want to lose sight of this. I didn't want to look back and wonder, did we...?" They realized they both adored music. (Mr. Thirlwall had a vinyl record pressed with their favorite songs for Ms. Halla as a gift.) They loved reading and cooking. Mr. Thirlwall even joined Ms. Halla in her CrossFit workouts. Last May, he took her back to Colonel Summers Park, got down on one knee, and presented her with a ring in a small wooden box he had made with his daughters. They planned a tiny ceremony. No guests, just them, a witness and an officiant on the Oregon coast at Oswald West State Park, the site of their first hike together. They would walk from the parking lot on a short trail, through the temperate rainforest, until the sound of cars was replaced with a gurgling creek and, eventually, the rumble of the Pacific. To Mr. Thirlwall, the place had the feel of Endor in the "Star Wars" universe. An adventure photography company would document the day. "We wanted to reflect on our journey together and reflect on our love rather than having a performance or showy thing," Ms. Halla said. Both had felt constricted by others at many times in their lives, and struggled with revealing their true selves. Plan B emerged through the social networking app Nextdoor. "Hey neighbors!" Ms. Halla's post on April 24 began, explaining their last minute change to a wedding at their Portland house. "Might anyone have any ideas, D.I.Y. projects, or materials that might be good for sprucing up our backyard space and getting it wedding ready?" They had just moved in and didn't know the neighbors, but the response was overwhelming. One stranger offered to make a bouquet; another made dozens of origami butterflies to hang around the backyard; a third offered decorations they had saved from their own wedding. There were offers of plastic flamingos and glass fishing floats, vases and bubbles and a set of antique teacups to use for a toast. A few days before the ceremony, as Ms. Halla ran around picking everything up, strangers waved from front porches to say how excited they were to be part of the celebration. Returning home and looking through all the bags, she realized one neighbor had tucked in a bottle of wine. Ms. Halla's parents, Ken and Valerie Halla, watched from San Juan Bautista. Mr. Thirlwall's mother and stepfather, Judi and Reg Oswald, watched from Melbourne, Fla., and his father and stepmother, David Thirlwall and Nevi Koscevic, from Montreal. (The groom, who had used the surname Oswald after his mother remarried, took his wedding as an opportunity to legally change it back to Thirlwall.) As the congratulations reached a crescendo, the camera jumped so quickly it was hard to know who was talking. "We're all dressed up!" one woman said. From kitchen tables and living room couches, they clinked beer cans and champagne flutes, and somebody, somewhere shouted out, "It's almost like we were there!" When April 30, 2020, 1 p.m. Two years earlier, on the same day, at the same time, they had their first work meeting and felt an instant connection. Where Portland, Ore., in the couple's backyard. The Rings Ms. Halla's engagement ring features twisting, intertwined stones on slender gold strands representing their circuitous path to each another. Mr. Thirlwall found a jeweler who taught him how to make his own band, and together, the couple took raw gold found around town, pressing it into the concrete to form impressions at all the places they loved. United by the Universe "When you think about all the little things that had to happen for this to fall into place," Ms. Halla said. "We both had to marry the wrong people. Sam had to change his major. I had to go to coding school. He had to hit a low point to change his life. It's mind boggling."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
I'm sorry I never got to ask Christo about Gabrovo, the Bulgarian city where he was born in 1935. He died this weekend, at 84, a dreamer with a cultish following to rival the Grateful Dead's and a legacy that has always seemed a wry, humane retort to the cultural diktats of the Soviet bloc. Back in February 2005, I drove with Christo and Jeanne Claude, his wife and collaborator, at zero hour, when an army of paid helpers wearing matching gray smocks and deployed along 23 miles of footpaths unfurled "The Gates" in Central Park all 7,500 of them, made from 5,390 tons of steel and more than a million square feet of saffron colored vinyl. The operation cost millions of dollars. As with all of their public works, the tab was paid by Christo and Jeanne Claude, including the cost of clearing the park after the gates were removed, leaving the place in pristine shape and providing the park with a hefty donation afterward. It was a frigid, gusty morning. The two of them wore identical parkas. From the car, they inspected their troops, watching as the fabric was unrolled from the tops of the gates, the bright vinyl flapping in the wind, the twisting rows of gates lighting up the gray, somnolent, wintry park like streamers in a fireworks display. Jeanne Claude's hennaed hair was a shade of orange darker than the vinyl. Christo filled the car with nervous, ecstatic chatter and the scent of garlic, which he consumed like vitamins to ward off illness. A running joke on David Letterman, "The Gates" turned out to be a fleeting gift to the city, a joy to millions, a provocation to some, and a tone poem to the genius of the park's architects, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, whose topography it highlighted. It was also a testament to Christo's childlike wonder and sheer, implacable chutzpah. When the Soviets crushed the Hungarian uprising in 1956, Christo fled Prague, where he had gone to study and work in an avant garde theater. He made his way to Vienna, and from there to Paris where he met a French army officer's Moroccan born daughter, Jeanne Claude Denat de Guillebon. He was a charmer, a force of nature. She was brilliant and no less determined. In fact, his art was easy to grasp but hard to categorize. Early on, his penchant for wrapping everyday objects, like paint cans and oil drums, seemed to link him to '60s American Pop artists and French Nouveau Realists. But then he began to wrap whole buildings and to work outdoors on an environmental, megalomaniacal scale that suggested '70s earth artists like Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson and Walter de Maria except that Christo's installations were temporary, sometimes urban, and they embraced, as an essential component of the art, all the tedious paperwork, financial finagling and negotiations with public officials and neighbors that could drag on for decades and occasionally turn nasty. "The Gates" was 26 years in the making. When Christo first floated the idea, New York City officials published a weighty tome counting all the reasons it was "the wrong project in the wrong place at the wrong time." Undaunted, Christo seemed almost pleased by the rejection. "I find it very inspiring in a way that is like abstract poetry," he said. His aesthetics, as he repeatedly defined them, encompassed "everything involved in the process the workers, the politics, the negotiations, the construction difficulty, the dealings with hundreds of people." The actual end product the wrapped bridge or running fence was the culmination of this process and just as ephemeral. With his interest in intangibles and process, Christo was like many other conceptual artists of the '60s and '70s. That his approach involved wrapping things in order to reveal them was itself a familiar conceptualist concept. What set him apart was the fact that his work attracted such large masses of people, global media attention, and generated no small measure of happiness and awe. It riffed on the utopianism of Soviet Socialist Realism, which postured about being an art for Everyman. In lieu of that sham populism, which produced supersized monuments to Marx and Mother Russia public works meant to last for the ages and imposed by the state on a captive populace Christo flipped the script. He trafficked in a passing sort of abstraction whose meanings remained open ended and up for debate. Its creation was a personal obsession requiring public consent dependent on a messy, slow political theater that was the ultimate conceptual point of the art. Which made the wrapped bridge or building the after party, a celebration of hard earned consensus, the affirmation, through art, of an open society. It was also Christo's good humored gift, wrapped in pink or orange vinyl instead of a bow. "I am an educated Marxist," he once said. "I use the capitalist system to the very end." He added that his and Jeanne Claude's projects "exist in their time, impossible to repeat. That is their power, because they cannot be bought, they cannot be possessed." All of which helps explain why, in 2017, after he and Jeanne Claude labored for more than two decades and spent some 15 million of their own money on a project in Colorado a fabric canopy suspended over 42 snaking miles of the Arkansas River Christo suddenly walked away from the work at the 11th hour. The land was federally owned, he pointed out, which made Donald Trump its landlord.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
New York is one of three states on the federal government's watch list because it has not yet complied with the goals it set when applying for financial assistance through the federal Race to the Top program. In a strongly worded statement on Monday, the education secretary, Arne Duncan, said that despite "significant progress," New York had "hit a roadblock" in recent months, failing to put in place a planned database to track student records across school districts and failing to fulfill a promise to adopt a system to evaluate the work of teachers and principals. The state has not fallen as far behind as Hawaii, which was warned last month that it risked losing its federal grant over delays in adopting a teacher evaluation system. But New York's progress, along with that of Florida, has been slow enough to raise concerns. "New York has a chance to be a national leader, or a laggard, and we are only interested in supporting real courage and bold leadership," Mr. Duncan said. "Backtracking on reform commitments could cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars." Through the Race to the Top program, New York has received about 700 million, at least half of which was to go directly to school districts. Keeping track of how the state plans to spend its share of the financing has been a challenge, though. According to the federal government's assessment, the first it has released since New York entered the program in August 2010, the complexities of reviewing and approving budgets and expenditures "presented a formidable task." One of the problems is purely logistical. The state has 713 school districts, regional education consortiums and charter schools that have signed up for the program, and every one of them has to adopt all of the changes promised by the state. The most challenging is the development of the evaluation system, which depends on agreements between individual districts and their teachers' unions. That task has already jeopardized a smaller pot of federal money meant to help struggling schools. The state said it was working to fix the problems. It has grouped districts that serve similar student populations under networks, offering training to help their leaders address specific challenges, and it has rolled out an online help desk of sorts, listing answers for commonly asked questions district officials might have over the many requirements of the program. The state's education commissioner, John B. King Jr., said in a statement that the federal assessment was "disappointing, but not discouraging." "We have to get this done, and we will," Dr. King said. Last week, Dr. King suspended about 100 million in federal grants to failing schools in New York City and in nine other school districts to pressure them to reach an agreement with union officials on an evaluation system that could serve as a model statewide. On Monday, outside a Board of Regents meeting in Albany, protesters convened to criticize Dr. King's decision. The gathering was notable not because of its size about 20 people attended but because it brought together school officials and representatives of teachers' unions, the two sides whose disagreements have been blamed for the suspension of the grants. Richard C. Iannuzzi, the president of the state's teachers' union, got things started by calling Dr. King a "bully." The Albany schools superintendent, Raymond Colucciello, took a more pragmatic approach, warning that 13 teachers would get layoff notices if the grant money did not resume. Negotiations between New York City officials and the United Federation of Teachers collapsed two days before Dec. 31, the deadline for the 10 districts receiving the federal grants to have committed to an evaluation system. The city's schools chancellor, Dennis M. Walcott, said last week that there seemed to be no chance for a resolution. On Monday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo rejected the union's call to intervene. "I'm not going to go between Mayor Bloomberg and the U.F.T.," Mr. Cuomo told the listeners of Talk 1300 AM. He also said he would not play any role in helping broker the compromises needed for the statewide evaluation systems.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
Miami's Jimmy Butler, right, hurt his ankle in Game 1 of the N.B.A finals. With Butler ailing, Anthony Davis dominated for the Los Angeles Lakers. LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. Before it all began to fall apart for the Miami Heat, Erik Spoelstra, the team's coach, reflected on a time before it all came together. About an hour before the Heat faced the Los Angeles Lakers in Game 1 of the N.B.A. finals on Wednesday night, Spoelstra recalled the pledge that he had made to Goran Dragic, the team's starting point guard, when they traded for Dragic in 2015. The pledge was that the Heat would contend for championships. It took a bit longer than either of them had hoped. Chris Bosh, who figured to be a central figure in that title hunt, had his career cut short by blood clots, and Miami scraped by for a few seasons as a middling team. It was not until Wednesday that the Heat, after emerging from the Eastern Conference as the fifth seed, found themselves back on the biggest stage. "I feel like I've been in 50 playoff games with Goran because of all these years where we have been fighting for our lives for six weeks a season to make the playoffs, and you get to know somebody, how they handle those stressful situations," Spoelstra said on Wednesday, adding: "We just never really did our part where the general public could see him in this kind of competitive environment. But I'm just thrilled that he's actually getting this opportunity with this team to do what we have seen behind the scenes now for six years." For Miami, the injury seemed to have the effect of a cloudburst. Jimmy Butler rolled his left ankle late in the first half. Bam Adebayo strained the left side of his neck. The team's three best players all injured, all before the series was a game old. The Lakers led by as many as 32 points in 116 98 win, and now there are questions ahead of Game 2 on Friday night about whether the Heat can summon the resolve against the odds to make the best of seven series competitive. "You have to go through your plan A, plan B, plan C," Spoelstra said. On Thursday, the Heat listed Dragic and Adebayo, their All Star center, as "doubtful" to play in Game 2. Butler, who played through his injury in Game 1, said he was "OK." Butler, after a sleepless night, said he had spoken with Dragic, 34, who had been playing so well for the Heat in the postseason, averaging 20.9 points and 4.7 assists entering the finals. "You can hear that pain in his voice, of him feeling like he may have let us down," said Butler, who had a wrap on his left ankle and a large bandage covering a scrape on his right knee. "But he did not, and I want him to know that. He's carried us to this point, and it's only our duty to pay that back to him right now." It was all the more jarring for the Heat considering how well the game had started for them. They made nine of their first 12 field goal attempts and ran out to a 23 10 lead. But the Lakers found their bearings, remembered that they employed Anthony Davis and proceeded to wallop the Heat. Davis, so dominant for the Lakers throughout their postseason run, finished with 34 points and nine rebounds. Even before Adebayo left the game with his injury, it was clear that Davis would cause huge problems for the Heat: too big, too long, too versatile. And there was LeBron James, who collected 25 points, 13 rebounds and 9 assists to position himself three wins from his fourth championship and his first with the Lakers, whom he joined before the start of last season. You remember last season, right? James injured his groin, and the Lakers missed the playoffs. James spent part of the subsequent summer filming "Space Jam 2," which only played into a popular narrative that James had moved to Los Angeles because he wanted to cultivate his off the court interests. The Lakers' current playoff run one bolstered by the off season addition of Davis has silenced any lingering criticism. The partnership that James and Davis have formed has been enormously successful. "We're not jealous of each other," James said. "We know who we are. We know what we're about. We want the best for one another every single day." Now, facing a hobbled opponent, James did not so much say that he would guard against complacency as suggest that he had banished the concept from his brain entirely. After Game 1, he recalled a formative experience. In 2011, James was playing in the finals for the Heat when teammate Dwyane Wade made a 3 pointer in front of the Dallas Mavericks' bench. The basket gave the Heat a large lead and put them on the cusp of a two games to none lead in the series. But the Mavericks went on a huge run, stole the game and later won the series. It was a sequence of events, James said, that "burns me to this day." "I always talk about the best teacher in life is experience," he said, "and I've experienced a lot." Other players, like Dragic, spend the bulk of their careers working to reach the finals only to have that experience cut short. Nothing is promised. In his own way, deep into his 17th season, James understands that better than most.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
A remarkable range of theater has worked its way into our homes over the past three months, and it has certainly been soothing to enjoy some razzmatazz nothing distracts from reality like a powerhouse belt. But theater can also challenge and probe. And with American venues that push artistic envelopes like the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Wexner Center for the Arts, and REDCAT closing their doors, our pipeline to the weird, the exacting or the plain unclassifiable has moved online. We can even enjoy greater access to international theatrical wonders though it's regrettable that superb French companies like the Comedie Francaise and Ariane Mnouchkine's Theatre du Soleil don't offer English subtitles, thus missing out on expanding their audience. Here is a selection of border and convention busting fare for some head scratching, adventurous viewing. The brilliant German director Thomas Ostermeier may be a regular visitor to our shores those who saw his "Richard III" at BAM are still reeling but he's also very prolific and Americans have missed out on a lot of his output. Luckily, many of his productions have been popping up in the free online offerings of Berlin's Schaubuhne Theater, which Ostermeier runs. Not all have had English subtitles, but his staging of Arthur Schnitzler's medical drama "Professor Bernhardi," does. Set up an alarm to catch the play which tackles anti Semitism in 1900 Vienna on Saturday June 6, the only day it's available. The audacious performance lab known as the Brick is building up quite the online catalog, which is perfect for the many who have not had the opportunity to visit the tiny Williamsburg venue. Start with the wonderfully odd, wonderfully creepy "Sleeping Car Porters," an inventive take on genre tropes in which Billy the Kid and the Zodiac Killer somehow run into each other. The live capture is surprisingly good, too. Dropping June 11 is an upload of "Destructo Snack, USA," written and performed by Sarah Graalman and the Brick's artistic director, Theresa Buchheister. "There will be sweat, there may be tears, there is often blood," a blurb promised when the show premiered in 2011. Sold. This collaborative project, premiering online June 12, involves nine of Europe's top theaters, all members of the Mitos21 network created in 2008 to facilitate creative cooperation across borders. For "Stories from Europe," which was initiated by Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theater, each company commissioned a playwright to script a short video drawing from interviews with front line workers. With contributions from such prestigious institutions as the Berliner Ensemble, Vienna's Burgtheater, Budapest's Katona Jozsef Theater, London's National Theater (Brexit be damned!) and Turin's Teatro Stabile, the project should give an interesting glimpse of a Europe facing the same invisible enemy. Dear God, not another Zoom meeting! If you have the mental bandwidth for just one more, make it this creation from Forced Entertainment. The British company has long explored the nature of theater itself, often through duration and repetition, so it makes perfect sense that its latest project would put a dryly funny twist on the representational awkwardness and occasional drudgery of online gatherings. Over three surprisingly entertaining installments running about 25 minutes each, "End Meeting for All" explores the mayhem that so often wrecks the seemingly neat order of small virtual boxes. The works are free on YouTube until June 30. The Italian director Pippo Delbono's fertile career goes back to the early 1980s, and he is a regular on Europe's most prestigious stages. Yet he is so unknown in the English speaking world that he doesn't have a Wikipedia page in that language. Now, the Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione is offering a crash course in the Delbono oeuvre heady, often provocative nonnarrative collages of movement (he worked with Pina Bausch), text, music and songs, and visually arresting stagings by streaming four of his shows for free. Start with "Vangelo" (about religion in a time of devastation and unrest) which is available only until June 15, but make sure you don't miss "Orchidee" (through June 25), in which Delbono processes his mother's death. Click on the CC button for English subtitles.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
LONDON Sophia Webster, the London based accessories designer best known for her eye for color and playfully eccentric statement footwear, won the 2016 British Fashion Council/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund prize Tuesday night. Ms. Webster, who had been in the running for the prize last year and had won the competition's Emerging Accessories Designer Award in 2013, beat a shortlist that included Prism, Mother of Pearl, Osman and Emilia Wickstead. The fund provides one designer with a PS200,000 grant (about 288,000) and access to 12 months of director level mentoring from some of the biggest editors, buyers and brands in fashion. Established in 2008, it shares hallmarks with the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund prize, which Anna Wintour helped establish in 2003. She is a graduate of the Royal College of Art and shoemaking institution Cordwainers and the second woman to win the prize. The announcement was made at the Bulgari Hotel in London. Ms. Webster said of the award: "For one thing, we are going to be able to get new offices, given we are bursting out of our current ones, and fund our own stand alone store. I am just overwhelmed by what this means, both for me and my team, and so proud of what we have achieved and been rewarded for." Previous winners of the prize include Mary Katrantzou, Christopher Kane, Peter Pilotto and Ms. Webster's onetime mentor, Nicholas Kirkwood, all of whom have gone on to grow their businesses internationally and attract new investment after taking home the award. Caroline Rush, one of the competition's judges and chief executive of the British Fashion Council, said: "It was such a tough decision process. It has been every year, frankly. But ultimately we felt that Sophia, as well as being a fantastic designer, also had such a strong understanding of what the drivers of her business were and how she could grow it in the long term. The judges were confident that she would give us the strongest return on investment on our decision this year." Other members of the committee this year included Alexandra Shulman, editor of British Vogue; the designer Victoria Beckham; Joan Burstein, founder of the London concept boutique Browns; and Samantha Cameron, the British Fashion Council ambassador and the wife of Prime Minister David Cameron. Earlier this month, Ms. Webster unveiled her first full handbag line and her plans to open a boutique on Mayfair's Mount Street. She has consistently turned heads with her kitschy yet chic aesthetic. Entitled '"I Myself, Am Strange and Unusual," her most recent presentation at London Fashion Week, in February, was themed around the 1988 gothic movie "Beetlejuice," and included cutaway satin thigh high boots, rainbow hued stilettos and her signature "speech bubble" clutch, embroidered with the words "Wifey for Lifey" and "To Die For."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style

Subsets and Splits

No community queries yet

The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.