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Scientists tracking the spread of the coronavirus reported on Monday that, for every confirmed case, there are most likely another five to 10 people in the community with undetected infections. These often milder cases are, on average, about half as infectious as confirmed ones, but are responsible for nearly 80 percent of new cases, according to the report, which was based on data from China. The researchers modeled the virus's natural spread in China before the government instituted a travel ban and an aggressive testing policy. During that time, from December of last year through late January, about 6 in 7 cases went undetected. That situation is analogous to the current state of affairs in the United States and other Western countries, where tests are not widely available, the researchers said. "If we have 3,500 confirmed cases in the U.S., you might be looking at 35,000 in reality," said Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University and the senior author of the new report, which was posted by the journal Science. The report is among the first to address two of the most pressing questions about the pandemic: How many people are walking around with unrecognized infections, and how infectious are they? As American policymakers have begun taking more aggressive measures to slow transmission, such as canceling events and closing restaurants, access to tests for the virus has been difficult or nonexistent in much of the country.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Four Bedrooms and a Lap Pool in Hout Bay This four bedroom house sits at the foot of the Skoorsteenberg peaks in Hout Bay, a coastal suburb of Cape Town, South Africa, where hikers and mountain climbers flock for views of the valley below and the Atlantic Ocean on the horizon. Completed in 2015, the 4,300 square foot house is set on a 2.7 acre lot blanketed in leafy hillside vegetation and craggy mountain rock. The current owner enlisted a friend to custom design a structure that is enveloped in the surrounding nature, with panoramic views of the topography to be enjoyed from the slatted wood roof, the pool and koi pond, and the floor to ceiling, double glazed windows. "The house is designed in such a way that you never walk into dead space," said Suzette Wrankmore, an agent with Greeff Properties, an affiliate of Christie's International Real Estate, which has the listing. "If you're going down a passage, there isn't anything blocking your view." Most of the living spaces are in an elongated, single story section of the house. A large rock, natural to the site, is embedded between the ground floor and second floor, peeking out of the open air entrance. The mass of the house was built with moon phase harvested local pine, an ancient technique wherein the trees are chopped down during their hibernation period, when sap supply is running low, which removes the need for chemicals to dry the wood and improves durability. Sustainable materials can be found throughout the house. The slatted beam and post structure that covers the wraparound deck was assembled with dark Iroko timber from West Africa. An array of solar panels also lines the roof, used for heating. The eco friendly materials have helped keep the house young, Mrs. Wrankmore said: "It hasn't dated at all." An open plan kitchen, dining table and lounge space take up half of the second floor, with a narrow hall leading to three bedrooms on the other side. The front facing rooms have sliding glass doors that open onto the deck, the 66 foot lap pool and the 269 square foot koi pond. The pool uses biological filtration to clean itself. The main bedroom, at the end of the house, has a bathtub and shower right next to the bed. Another full bathroom is on this level. Upstairs on the third floor, a double height loft with cutouts in the floor offers space for another bed, a study and an entertainment area. Hout Bay, a fishing and surfing village separated from Cape Town by Table Mountain National Park, is a 25 minute drive from Cape Town, the legislative capital of South Africa and home to a bustling summer tourism season. At the base of the Sentinel, a dramatic peak at the western mouth of Hout Bay, is the site of the world famous Dungeons, South Africa's most extreme surfing spot. Cape Town International Airport is a 30 minute drive from the house. When the coronavirus arrived in the spring, South Africa's housing price index had already been falling steadily from a post global recession peak in 2014, due in part to a drought that hobbled the economy for years. The pandemic accelerated that decline, with May's 0.7 percent rate of growth the lowest in a decade, according to a November report from the First National Bank of South Africa. The value of residential buildings fell a staggering 61.8 percent from January to September of 2020 from the same period in 2019, according to South Africa's official statistics office. But the price index has begun to tick upward again, leading the First National Bank to surmise that the pandemic hasn't damaged the housing market as much as initially feared. A dramatic reduction in interest rates and transfer duties has incentivized renters to buy homes, leading to a rise in demand and a better price for sellers. "Application volumes are approximately 9 percent above the same period in 2019," the report notes. "However, approvals lag as lenders apply caution amid an uncertain economic outlook." Domestic buyers who curtailed their usual winter travel plans have been more active in the market in 2020, according to several agents. And the national bank reports that "lower priced properties are performing better" across the country. "Before, people wanted to live in apartment buildings because they are such low maintenance," said Arnold Maritz, an agent with Lew Geffen Sotheby's International Realty. "But now they want free standing homes. You wouldn't have expected to see that in 2020." With the busy summer season approaching when real estate in the Western Cape is typically explored by curious tourists agents seem pleased with the state of prices in the region, but they aren't getting their hopes up about the reality of recovering from a global pandemic. "I'm gently optimistic about next year," said Tim Greeff, a broker at Greeff Christie's International Real Estate. 'I don't think it'll be an incredible year or a complete seller's market." Western Europeans have long been a regular presence in the real estate market in the Western Cape, a province with about 7 million residents in the southwestern corner of the country. British buyers once led the pack, but their numbers have receded since Britain announced its exit from the European Union, said Paul Turner, a license partner and owner at Engel Volkers, in Cape Town. Instead, he's seen an uptick in the number of Germans interested in buying properties in the province. Eastern Europeans, Scandinavians, Italians, French and Spanish buyers also have made inquiries. The biggest sale Mr. Turner has made all year, though, was to an American. Last December, United Airlines began offering direct flights to Cape Town from New York several times a week, boosting interest from the U.S. Mr. Maritz said that at least 40 percent of foreign buyers buy along South Africa's Atlantic coast. "Cape Town is so popular because of the weather and our prices that are dirt cheap compared to our counterparts like Australia," he said. But the pandemic has sapped foreign demand, Mr. Oliveira said. In Hout Bay, around 15 percent of his clients were international buyers. Now it's 5 percent, some of whom have bought sight unseen. There are no restrictions on buying property as a foreigner in South Africa, although nonresident lenders may only borrow up to 50 percent of a home's purchase price from a South African bank. Typically, buyers must put down 10 percent up front, Mr. Turner said, but it can be more.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
For much of music history, songs were accompanied by an instrument that could act as a foil to the human voice. In recent decades electronics have often taken the place of the lute or piano, with dramatic effects. When the taped sounds contains snippets of the voice itself recorded either beforehand or sampled live in performance the distinction between song and accompaniment dissolves. But there's also a risk that this dialogue with technology becomes little more than an echo chamber, too insular and self validating. On Thursday at the DiMenna Center, the New York Festival of Song presented an evening of works for voice and electronics that sometimes felt sterile and self absorbed. The program was designed by the composer and vocalist Kate Soper and opened with her performing her own "The Understanding of All Things." The text is by Kafka and imagines a philosopher who snatches spinning tops from playing children in an attempt to understand reality. Ms. Soper's setting takes a dryly literal approach, with recorded sounds of a spinning top mixing with scrambled phrases and her own live, fragmented, recitation. The attentive sound artist here and throughout the evening was Sam Pluta. Electronics can blur the border between human and machine made sounds in a way that allows artists to play on themes like alienation, objectification and the splintering of the self. The composer Natacha Diels's "Bahnhof" was a twist on the ancient myth of Philomela, the abused woman who, deprived of speech, turns into a nightingale.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Dr. Jane M. Orient, an Arizona internist who will testify before Congress on Tuesday, has raised concerns about the new scientific methods that the drug companies Moderna and Pfizer are using to develop coronavirus vaccines, and about continued calls for widespread vaccination. "It seems to me reckless to be pushing people to take risks when you don't know what the risks are," Dr. Orient said this week in an interview with The New York Times. "People's rights should be respected. Where is 'my body, my choice' when it comes to this?" Pfizer and Moderna are indeed relying on new scientific methods for their vaccines, building them around a molecule called messenger RNA, or mRNA, a natural genetic material that instructs the manufacture of proteins in human cells. But the concerns raised by Dr. Orient, who leads the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and was previously criticized for promoting anti vaccine sentiment, aren't backed by the wealth of scientific evidence to date. Although neither experimental vaccine has yet been given a green light by the Food and Drug Administration for widespread use, both products have been heavily and carefully tested in clinical trials. Early data suggests they are about 95 percent effective at protecting people from developing Covid 19, and neither has shown serious side effects. Both Pfizer and Moderna have applied for emergency use authorization for their vaccines from the F.D.A. On Thursday, the agency will review Pfizer's case, and many experts expect the product to win approval. On Tuesday, the F.D.A. released documents reaffirming the Pfizer vaccine's safety and effectiveness in a wide range of volunteers, across age, weight and race. Emergency authorization for Moderna's vaccine will probably follow next week. The approvals would kick start a series of vaccination campaigns that are expected to stretch far into 2021. Mass vaccination, which will curb the pandemic's death toll and most likely slow the spread of disease, is an important step in the fight against the coronavirus. "Getting vaccinated protects you, but it also protects the people around you," said Padmini Pillai, a vaccine researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "And based on data, the virus kills, but the vaccine doesn't." The mRNA in these vaccines contains the blueprint for a protein found on the surface of the coronavirus. Once produced by cells, this protein acts like a molecular mug shot that teaches the immune system about the coronavirus's most memorable features. This prepares the body to fight the real virus off, should it ever come to call. The process more or less mimics what happens when a virus infects a cell: It, too, must unload its genetic cargo, and force the cell to churn out proteins. But unlike a virus, the mRNA is not infectious and cannot prompt cells to produce active, disease causing viruses. The molecules are also fragile and do not linger long in cells after they are "read" to make proteins. Researchers have no reason to believe they leave a lasting mark on the human body, apart from bolstering its defenses against infection. Pfizer's vaccine has already been granted emergency approval in Britain. It and Moderna's product are on track to be the world's first fully licensed mRNA vaccines, though similar vaccines have been in development for decades. Neither vaccine has caused serious side effects in clinical trial volunteers. While many recipients have experienced mild symptoms after being injected, including headaches, mild fevers, fatigue and aches, "that just means the immune system is working," Dr. Pillai said. "Tens of thousands of people have received the vaccine safely." The F.D.A. and equivalent agencies in other countries take safety seriously when considering whether to give vaccines their stamps of approval. Researchers will also continue to be on the lookout for any unexpected side effects as more people are vaccinated. So far, Dr. Orient's skepticism appears unfounded. Dr. Orient has also attracted criticism for her stalwart defense of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid 19 despite overwhelming evidence that the drug has little benefit and may harm the people who receive it. She will appear on Tuesday before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in a hearing focused on at home treatment for Covid 19. She told The Times this week that doctors were too often sending patients home to ride out their disease.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
In the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the N.F.L., a league that has wrestled with racial issues for years, has shown unusual unity. Players, coaches, league officials and owners have expressed sadness, remorse and a commitment to seek solutions to police violence against African American people and other forms of social injustice. Yet the specter of Colin Kaepernick still looms large over any conversation of football and race. As the league grapples with next steps to take, many players say that the N.F.L. must address Kaepernick, who in 2016 began kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality toward African Americans, if its newfound progressive stance is to be viewed as legitimate. "It's definitely a different social climate now and I'm praying it's not going to be lip service," said Chris Conley, a wide receiver on the Jacksonville Jaguars who helped organize a march of players, coaches, staff and their families from the team's stadium to the Jacksonville Sheriff's office last week. "A lot of balls were dropped in 2016 and people realized things could have been handled better. There's a feeling we didn't do enough last time." Seattle Seahawks running back Carlos Hyde told reporters Monday, "If they sign Kap back, it'll show they are really trying to move in a different direction, because Kap was making a statement four years ago about what's going on in today's world and the N.F.L. didn't bother to listen to him then." Recognizing Kaepernick is seemingly the only concrete action that has widespread agreement among players. With momentum built, less fear of reprisal from owners, the league or fans, and an unusual amount of time away from the field because of stay at home restrictions, players want to get more involved in societal change. The only question is: What's next? Some want to double down on the many initiatives already established. In 2019, the league started a program called Inspire Change that directs millions of dollars in donations to groups focused on "police community relations, criminal justice reform, and education and economic advancement." On Thursday, the N.F.L. said it was nearly tripling the size of its commitment to the program, pledging to spend up to 250 million over 10 years. (The league has already distributed 44 million.) Goodell announced in a memo on Friday that the league would observe Juneteenth, which celebrates the end of slavery in America, this year, closing its offices on June 19. The Players Coalition, which split progressive players when it began in 2017, has drawn widening support for justice reform measures in recent months. Quarterback Tom Brady, who has been friends with Donald Trump for many years, last month added his name to the group's call for Attorney General William P. Barr to investigate the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery. The Players Coalition amassed 1,400 signatures to a letter urging Congress to pass a bill that would end qualified immunity for public officials, including police officers. The signees included quarterback Drew Brees, who last week reversed course on his condemnation of players protesting during the national anthem. Players on other teams have focused on increasing their work on the local level, through their teams' social justice committees. The Minnesota Vikings, for instance, have in the past accompanied students to Washington, D.C., to visit the Holocaust Museum and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and work with All Square, a group in Minneapolis that helps people leaving jail find work. On Wednesday the team announced that it had established a college scholarship in George Floyd's name for African American students, helped clean neighborhoods hit by destructive protests and met with the city's police chief. Ameer Abdullah, a running back on the team, on Wednesday told reporters that he expected players to encourage citizens to vote in the presidential elections in November. Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, who took part in a player led video that pushed the N.F.L. to support their protest and include "Black Lives Matter" messaging in its statement, said he and his teammates would meet next week to come up with ways to increase voter registration. He said they wanted to "get as many people registered to vote so they can go and try to effect change in every way they feel possible." Others players, including some on the Denver Broncos and the Jaguars, have attended protests. Justin Simmons, a safety on the Broncos, encouraged a crowd in downtown Denver on Saturday to discuss the racism African Americans face, no matter how uncomfortable. "We as a black community need our white brothers and sisters to explain to the rest of the white brothers and sisters out there what it means for black lives to matter," Simmons said. "It doesn't matter your platform, your sphere of influence in your life the people around you matter. Those are tough conversations to have, but they need to be had." In some cases, team owners have supported the players and their initiatives. But Devin McCourty said players must find their own solutions and not rely on the N.F.L., which has its own agenda. "I truly believe the N.F.L. is public opinion based and puts out statements to make the public happy," he said. "You didn't see them support the players in 2016 because it wouldn't make someone happy. Now, the question is how involved they are." Jason McCourty, his twin brother and teammate, said the best thing the league could do was not stand in the way of the players. "At the end of the day, allowing players to use their platforms is enough," he said. "When it comes to big businesses, they will do the things that will keep them making money. It comes down to the players."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Then there's the Pegasus Parade (April 30) and Kentucky Oaks, races held on May 1, the day before the Derby. The day is something of a Louisville holiday, Ms. Harlan said; schools are closed, as are many businesses. If you're planning to join, you might want to start shopping for a hat. After all, she said, local residents start discussing their Derby plans and hats as early as January. And we haven't even gotten to Louisville outside the Derby festivities. The city, on the border of the South and the Midwest, is like "the biggest small town you'll ever meet," Ms. Harlan said. "It's big enough that there's a lot going on, but small enough that wherever you go you run into people you know." The Travel section has some recommendations for viewing the race and seeing Louisville, as does Ms. Harlan. Her go to area of town is NuLu (as in New Louisville), a section rich with art galleries, shopping and restaurants where the default is farm to table dining. There's also Garage Bar, an old auto body shop converted into a restaurant (Ms. Harlan recommends the pizza) and bar that rolls open its garage doors when the weather gets warm. Downtown, there is 21c Museum Hotel, which plays the roles of hotel, art museum and restaurant, Proof on Main. Like many restaurants in Louisville, Ms. Harlan said, Proof provides modern takes on classic Southern cuisine. Another, more upscale, option would be 610 Magnolia whose chef, Edward Lee, is a James Beard Foundation Awards finalist and somewhat of a Food Network celebrity. If amid the Derby hoopla you find yourself wanting to escape for a day, Ms. Harlan recommends touring bourbon distilleries, such as Maker's Mark, where visitors can dip their own bottles in wax. In town there are also other attractions outside the horse world, such as the Louisville Slugger Museum, Kentucky Science Center and Frazier History Museum.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Last Friday at the Food Bank for New York on 116th Street, I caught a glimpse of the many shapes of need. With a few hundred dollars, 25 year old Ayesha Depay could afford the lessons she needs to pass her road test and get a driver's license, an indispensable tool for the job she craves leading recreation programs for children. Nadine Robinson, 43, a former receptionist at Sony Music Studios who has been working for 9 an hour as a home health aide, could use the money to get a step ahead of the relentless stream of bills, pay down debts and rebuild her credit. A 53 year old security guard I talked to declined to provide his name, embarrassed perhaps that he was sleeping on friends' couches, working barely enough hours to "keep my head above water." He had so many potential uses for extra cash he couldn't pin any one down. For all their differences, these men and women shared one crucial thing. Despite incomes low enough that if they had been parents they would probably have qualified for substantial government cash assistance, they received little if any support. What drew them here was the chance to participate in an antipoverty experiment started by the city's Center for Economic Opportunity to test what would happen if the government were to help adults without children. To perform the investigation, proposed by the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and supported by his successor, Bill de Blasio, New York City contracted with MDRC, a nonprofit social policy research organization, to track 6,000 low income single adults who do not have direct responsibility over children from never married childless women to divorced fathers who don't have custody of their children but are obligated to pay child support. Half of them will receive a bonus payment every year intended to replicate the main features of the earned income tax credit. The other half will serve as a control group. The hope is that the tax break will do for singles what it has achieved most successfully for single mothers: shoring up workers who suffer a drop in earnings and encouraging work by subsidizing the meager wages that have become the hallmark of the American service economy. The test is one of the first concrete acknowledgments that the longstanding American economic belief that the job market alone can provide for the needs of nearly all workers may no longer be valid. Needy children are innocent, worthy recipients of assistance. And for all practical purposes, that means aiding the parents, often single mothers, who care for them. But childless adults have been historically barred from most government support, from Medicaid to welfare. From the 1930s well into the 1970s, most mothers were eligible for aid to families with dependent children only when the man was out of the home. "People from the welfare office came around looking for evidence of a man," said MDRC's president, Gordon L. Berlin. Today, low income noncustodial fathers who can't afford to pay child support are still not considered deserving of assistance. And they can go to jail for not paying up. But the labor market is not doing its job the way it once did. Earnings of male high school graduates fell by nearly a fifth from 1979 to 2012, after inflation. For men without a high school diploma they declined by almost a third. Women's wages have held up somewhat better, but are also declining for the least educated. Partly as a result, poverty among workers has increased faster over recent years than for working age Americans without a job. The future is not promising. According to projections from the Department of Labor, nine of the 10 occupations that will grow fastest over the next decade pay less than the median wage. Six pay less than is needed to keep a family of four out of poverty. If the taboo against helping the able bodied made sense in an era when a job guaranteed something approaching a reasonable living, its case is far weaker today. Elizabeth Holmes Hones Her Defense in Day 2 of Testimony Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. The earned income tax credit is the largest cash transfer program in the United States, costing some 61 billion in 2010. It provides up to 3,305 a year to low income working families with one child and up to 6,143 for those with three or more. Combined with the much smaller child tax credit, it lifted one of every 15 children out of poverty in 2012, according to an analysis by Kathleen Short from the Census Bureau. Without it, the nation's overall poverty rate would be 19 percent instead of 16 percent, under the Census Bureau's comprehensive Supplemental Poverty Measure. And it has encouraged single mothers to work. After the big expansions of the earned income tax credit in 1990 and 1993, the labor supply of single mothers grew by 16 percentage points, reaching roughly 87 percent in 1999. Like raising the minimum wage, broadening the tax credit could help workers earn their way out of poverty. "This is a promising thing to test," said Lawrence F. Katz, a professor of economics at Harvard who has been collaborating with MDRC on the design and evaluation of the experiment. "It is a pro employment sort of way to make work pay." Proposing more government aid in these bruising political times might seem like a waste of time. The New York program will bump the maximum annual benefit for singles to 2,000 for three years from a maximum under the federal earned income tax credit of 496. And it will phase out much more slowly. Extending New York's credit to some 13 million singles without qualifying children across the country would cost roughly 15 billion a year, according to a calculation by Cynthia Miller, who is head of the project for MDRC. Chances are that wouldn't sit well among congressional Republicans, who have called for cuts to food assistance and are opposed to reinstating the extension of emergency jobless benefits. Still, the earned income credit has proved enormously popular on the left and the right. President Ronald Reagan called it "the best anti poverty, the best pro family, the best job creation measure to come out of Congress." N. Gregory Mankiw, the former chief economic adviser to President George W. Bush, recently recommended the earned income tax credit over a higher minimum wage as the better tool to increase the earnings of the working poor.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
How Much Watching Time Do You Have This Weekend? No matter how much free time you have this weekend, we have TV recommendations for you. Come back every Friday for new suggestions on what to watch. This Weekend I Have ... A Half Hour, And I Have a Dark Side 'Barry' When to watch: Sunday at 10 p.m., on HBO This brutal and hilarious assassin comedy is back for its second season, and it picks up soon after the Season 1 finale, in which Barry killed his mentor's detective girlfriend when she uncovered his criminal connections. Hader won an Emmy for his work last season, and he should probably win another for this go round. There's decency somewhere within Barry's hard and violent self, and Hader never lets the audience lose sight of those tiny flickers of tenderness. 'Veep' When to watch: Sunday at 10:30 p.m., on HBO Time for one last hail to the chief. The seventh and final season of "Veep" arrives Sunday, filthy and festive as ever. Selina is back on the campaign trail, where haplessness and maneuvering abound in equal measure. "Veep" is a show that works moment to moment, scene to scene, so if you don't remember all the schemes and ups and downs from previous seasons, it doesn't really matter the insults and jokes land just fine without remembering the particulars of the Meyer administration. 'Great Performances: Julius Caesar' When to watch: Friday at 9 p.m., on PBS. (Check local listings) This stark interpretation of "Julius Caesar," directed by Phyllida Lloyd, has an all female cast and sets its production within a women's prison, which gives the proceedings an extra dose of fear and tension. Because the production is so bare and the cinematography for this filmed staging similarly stripped down all that's left is a restless rage.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Back in the day, Donald J. Trump was known to study New York's larger than life figures, swashbucklers like George Steinbrenner and Frank Sinatra, to develop the swagger he wanted to have as he rose in prominence. And then there was John Gotti, the crime boss. "I know that they knew each other," said his daughter Victoria Gotti, on a recent evening over home cooked dinner at her mansion in Nassau County, N.Y. Light from a fireplace spilled onto the Tuscan columns and dark wood paneled walls of a rococo den, while a likeness of her father grinned inside the frame of a nearby oil painting. With a dollop of rigatoni in veal Bolognese on her plate, Ms. Gotti, 56, formerly a columnist for The New York Post and David Pecker's Star magazine, recalled a particular churning of the city's tabloid underworld. "I was working at The Post and Trump asked me to do a piece on the Atlantic City fiasco," she said, referring to one of the future president's failed casinos. "He was upset at how The Daily News perceived it and wanted to go on the record, so he called me and I went to his office. I'd seen him in passing and he always was very generous, he'd either pick up a bill or stop at the table. But then he said to me: 'Your dad and I, we've been in each other's company. We know a lot of the same people.'" It isn't hard to imagine that Mr. Trump was influenced by Mr. Gotti: brawler, loving father of five, master media manipulator and glitzy avatar of 1980s New York. The two shared an attorney, Roy Cohn. The president has even imported gangster vernacular like "rat" and "slime ball" into the Oval Office. All the talk of loyalty oaths and "flipping" coming out of the West Wing have led many, including James Comey, the former F.B.I. director who helped bring down the mob, to conclude that the place is being run like the Ravenite Social Club. When Ms. Gotti mentioned Mr. Trump's comments to her father a month later, while visiting him in prison, "he looked very kind of perplexed," she recalled, "like, 'Why would anybody even bring that up,'" and to his daughter of all people. But her famously taciturn father "just kind of brushed over it, he never elaborated." Ms. Gotti found herself revisiting many memories of her father recently while at work on her first screenplay for a movie about her life. Producers assigned a screenwriter to work with her. He seemed right at first. The project was initially called "More Than My Father's Daughter," until the words "More" and "Than" were whacked in later drafts. And that's the way it often goes for John Gotti's daughter. "I know that the world wants to know mostly 'My dad this, my dad that,'" Ms. Gotti said, "but I'm so anti that." Though she has cashed in on her famous and fear inducing last name "mobsploitation," as The New York Times's former critic Alessandra Stanley once put it Ms. Gotti long practiced her own kind of omerta about the family business. Her career as a columnist, author of pulpy whodunits and the star of "Growing Up Gotti," a reality television show that was a primogenitor for "Jersey Shore" and "The Real Housewives," was always detached from and unrelated to "the life," as she refers to it. Not that the temptation to play the mafia princess didn't exist. Publishers were clamoring for a Gotti tell all by the time her father's funeral procession made it through Queens, from Ozone Park to Howard Beach. "I sat across from Harvey Weinstein at Bob De Niro's place in TriBeCa," said Ms. Gotti of a lunch at the Tribeca Grill, a former Miramax haunt. "I can't tell you the millions I was offered. My agent was there, I thought he was going to pass out at the table when I said, 'Absolutely not.' (Through a representative, Mr. Weinstein denied having this meeting.) "It's so boring," she said with some exasperation about the Cosa Nostra related queries that have dogged her through her adult life. She is tired of people asking about money buried in her backyard, and if she never hears the theme music from "The Godfather" again, that would be O.K. But, mostly, she said, "I didn't feel I had the right to tell someone else's story." That changed in 2009 when her younger brother, John A. Gotti (known as Junior), faced a possible sentence of life in prison after charges of conspiracy to commit murder (among other crimes). The son's follow up act as acting boss of the Gambino crime family was bumbling, yet nearly as bloodthirsty as that of Gotti pere. After wiggling out of prosecutors' grip three times, Junior was back in court and the family was falling apart. The Gotti clan decided to mount a charm campaign with Victoria as messenger, in hopes of swaying the minds of jurors and the public. She would tell the bloody Oedipal drama in full. "I wanted to explain everything that had never been explained before," Ms. Gotti said, sweeping her platinum blond mane over black clad shoulders as she cracked open a can of Coke. "I felt like I was doing something to save his life." "This Family of Mine," Ms. Gotti's sympathetic portrait of the Gotti brood in book form, was rushed out on the eve of Junior's trial. It told of Gotti Senior's early life: "the fact that his father threw him out in the street at 12 years old and said, 'Don't come home tonight unless you have something to contribute to the dinner table,'" his daughter said. "And my grandfather meant steal it." In the end Junior walked free. And his sister acquired her own peculiar form of celebrity. Her 2004 star turn in "Growing Up Gotti" was short lived, though the reality show, draped in Rocawear and dripping in hair gel, remains a cult classic. The show's theme song featured Lil' Kim rapping over Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'." It had as much to do with the mob as "The Osbournes" had to with heavy metal. "The only way I would even sign on to the show was I had to have in my contract I would not fool around, and they must have thought I was insane but I would not allow the word 'mob' to even be used in the same premise as my show," Ms. Gotti said. "I never used it, I didn't feel that people should use it to me, or against me." It was a show about a woman raising three rowdy sons after divorcing her offscreen husband, Carmine Agnello, a "made" man who scraped a fortune from scrap metal junkyards and firebombed those who got in his way. Ms. Gateley added: "But underneath she's a mother who cares, a fighter trying to make the best of the cards she was handed." Just as Ms. Gotti may have later inspired "Mob Wives," on VH1, and made cameos on "The Real Housewives of New Jersey," her three sons were exemplars of what came to be known as the "gym, tan, laundry" lifestyle, popularized on "Jersey Shore." "I don't know if I should be thanked for that or scolded beyond belief," Ms. Gotti said, of her place in the pantheon of reality television, "because I know they call it 'ratchet TV.'" Not unrelatedly, MTV's latest teen dream scheme, "Made in Staten Island," a show focused on mafia adjacent youngsters, has incited local rage. That show's executive producer is Karen Gravano, whose father is Salvatore (Sammy the Bull) Gravano, a former Gambino hit man turned government informant and mortal enemy of Gottis everywhere. (Ms. Gravano's daughter is a star of the show.) In 1992 it was Mr. Gravano's nine day testimony as the prosecution's chief witness that secured Mr. Gotti's life sentence. Mr. Gravano detailed Mr. Gotti's role in murders including the assassination of Paul Castellano outside of Sparks Steak House. Contrary to wiseguy lore, Ms. Gotti said she was never close with the man who betrayed her father. She met him only once, at her brother's wedding. "I didn't take to him at all," she said. "My mother always said it to us, 'There was just something about him.' She said she would catch him staring at Dad when he didn't think anybody was looking." Ms. Gotti, who said her primary income these days is from a number of commercial properties she owns in Queens, has plans for some counterprogramming. "We're coming back to TV," she said, refusing to share details other than that one plot point will be her quest to find conjugal bliss with "the next Mr. Gotti." After her divorce from Mr. Agnello, Ms. Gotti said she chose to stay single while raising her sons, who now help manage her real estate. "Young men don't want their mom to date," she said. "It's a hard problem. But it's now my time." In the meantime, channel surfing carries the risk of glimpsing at least one more Gotti family nemesis: Rudolph Giuliani, so effective at flipping mobsters during his time as United States Attorney for the Southern District that his office was nicknamed the "House of Pancakes," is now a regular combatant on cable news, where he says things like "Even if he did do it, it wouldn't be a crime." "It's no secret that Dad wasn't a fan of Giuliani's," Ms. Gotti said. Indeed, when the heads of the five families met in 1987 to vote on whether to murder Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Gotti voted in favor. (Fortunately for Mr. Giuliani, Vincent (the Chin) Gigante, of the Genovese crew, cast the deciding "no" vote.) But were he alive today, Mr. Gotti might not reach for the remote as quickly as one would think. Once, during a prison visit near the end of his life, Ms. Gotti was shocked by something her father told her. It was late 2001 and Mr. Giuliani, despite having withdrawn from his Senate race against Hillary Clinton the year before, was burnishing his national image after his widely applauded handling of 9/11. At that time, chatter about who might become the first African American or female president caused Mr. Gotti to opine that Mr. Giuliani could rightfully become the first "Italian president." "I just thought, Wait, we're not supposed to like him, right?" Ms. Gotti said. "I was a kid, a young adult, when he was prosecuting Dad. I always thought, you know, he's the enemy" (She later added she meant to say "persecuting"). "But then he told us," Ms. Gotti said, "'Hey, if the Italians are known for nothing more, it was always to root for each other.'"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
As the star quarterback at the University of Alabama, Tua Tagovailoa was a marketer's dream: He had charisma, a million social media followers and a championship pedigree he earned as a freshman by throwing the winning touchdown in the national title game. And yet because of longstanding National Collegiate Athletic Association rules, Tagovailoa could not cash in on that fame until he declared in January that he was leaving school for the N.F.L. draft. That restriction may be about to change. The N.C.A.A. Board of Governors, weary from increased attacks in legislatures and courthouses and from the public, announced Wednesday that it would support rule changes allowing athletes to earn money from the use of their names, images and likenesses. But the deals would have to come from third parties so that athletes could not be considered university employees. The board's recommendations will be forwarded to the three N.C.A.A. divisions that govern the levels of competition in college sports. The divisions are expected by January to adopt rules that would take effect at the start of the 2021 22 academic year. While the income potential is likely to be modest for most college athletes, the elite players under the right circumstances could see a windfall. "The right athlete could be making millions," said Leigh Steinberg, the agent who represents Tagovailoa, who was selected by the Miami Dolphins with the fifth overall pick in the N.F.L. draft last week. "But I don't think that's trickling down to the other 100 players in the program. It's a star system." The N.C.A.A. had been under increasing pressure to allow athletes to capitalize on the use of their unique abilities as universities have built sports programs into a billion dollar behemoth without paying players. Students who don't play sports actors, musicians, journalists and others can already cash in if they have exceptional talents. The new N.C.A.A. plan would let athletes make deals as social media influencers, appear in commercials and hold paid autograph sessions, among other opportunities. But the N.C.A.A.'s opening of financial opportunities for athletes included some restrictions. Most significantly, students would not be permitted to be paid directly by universities; the N.C.A.A. plans to ask Congress to support the position of universities that athletes should not be treated as school employees. Additionally, athletes would not be able to use a school or conference logo to tout their affiliation, a move by the N.C.A.A. to distinguish between athletes and employees. Any new rules are most likely to benefit football players and athletes in Olympic sports. Men's basketball players are less likely to be positioned to take advantage of the new rules unless they arrive in college with an ardent following and the N.B.A. may soon render many of those instances moot by encouraging high school players to enter the professional ranks without first playing in college. Female athletes, and those in programs that are not financial cornerstones for their universities, would likely be able to earn based on their own social media following and other moments of public fame. "The role of influencers is growing exponentially," said Allen Adamson, a marketing consultant and a professor at New York University, who estimated that a good social influencer could earn 200,000 300,000 per year. "When people think of endorsements they think of beer and soft drinks, but that's changed. The value to the athlete is mostly driven by an athlete's social media following rather than being on billboards on the side of the road saying, 'Buy this chicken sandwich.'" The thorniest guidelines the board laid out involve recruiting details that could prove difficult to enforce: How can schools or wealthy athletic donors be prevented from using endorsement deals to persuade an athlete to play for one team instead of another? How will agents and other advisers who had largely been prohibited from working with college athletes be regulated? Lawmakers, who have pushed legislation that would have largely granted athletes the rights that the universities are now crafting themselves, were cautiously optimistic about the Wednesday announcement by the N.C.A.A, the governing body for college sports. "This is either the day that a wall of injustice around student athletes started to crumble, or the day the N.C.A.A. used more tactics to bait and switch young men and women from some of our most vulnerable communities," Representative Mark Walker, Republican of North Carolina, said on Twitter. Walker, who introduced a bill last year in Congress to challenge the N.C.A.A.'s tax exempt status if it continued to restrict the ability of students to make money off their fame, later added that an antitrust exemption the N.C.A.A. was seeking to protect itself from lawsuits was not necessary. Walker's bill mirrored others that raced through state legislatures last fall after California's unanimously passed a bill that would allow some endorsements and other deals starting in 2023. Soon, N.C.A.A. executives began complaining that federal legislation would be necessary to put all 50 states under the same rules. "The devil will be in the details," Nancy Skinner, a state senator who co authored the California bill, said in a statement Wednesday. "Yet, no matter how you cut it, this represents a landmark change. A year ago, no one would have expected the N.C.A.A. to move definitely toward giving college athletes their" name, image and likeness rights. Though the N.C.A.A. renewed its call for federal legislation along with antitrust protection Mark Emmert, the N.C.A.A. president, conceded in a conference call with reporters that in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and a presidential election in November, "everybody is realistic about those difficulties" of getting any nationwide law passed related to college sports. In the meantime, the Division I, II and III governing bodies will begin crafting detailed legislation from the guidelines, diving into details that go beyond the difficulties raised by letting athletes have more access to agents and others who would want to influence them in recruiting. For example, what constitutes a fair market price for being a pitchman for a product? And how can a university prevent a booster from making a promise of an endorsement opportunity while an athlete is deciding between scholarship offers? "This is one of the most important points that we still have to iron out," said Val Ackerman, the commissioner of the Big East Conference and the co chair, with Ohio State Athletic Director Gene Smith, of the group that developed the board's proposal. "But the difficulty of it doesn't mean we can't try." Said Smith: "There are some places where everyone in town is a booster." Once the new rules are developed, there is likely to be a need for additional administrative staff members not only compliance officers, who can lay out the N.C.A.A. rules, but also those who can explain tax obligations and whether a bump in income jeopardizes Pell Grants for low income athletes. Still, for those like Steinberg, who has worked more than four decades as a sports agent, it seems like the dawn of a new era. For years, he said, athletes chafed at seeing their jerseys sold in campus bookstores and having to watch other students tool around in fancy cars when some did not have enough to eat. Nearly 25 years ago, Donnie Edwards, a star linebacker at U.C.L.A., was suspended for receiving an impermissible benefit: An agent had dropped off bags of groceries for him. "It feels like a revolutionary event after all these years of resisting this concept," Steinberg said. "It's a major paradigm shift. This is the embryonic first step, but over time we'll see whole new systems develop to support this." In December, Steinberg attended a dinner for the Maxwell Award, which is presented to the top college football player in the country. Also at the dinner was Bryce Young, an incoming freshman at Alabama, where this fall he may take his turn as the school's next telegenic star quarterback. In the past, it would have been too early to make a marketing pitch. In the future, it might be too late. "It's starting to beg the question," said Cameron Weiss, an agent for Dynamic Sports Group. "If we're going to allow this at the college level, what about the high school level?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
LONDON Almost as soon as it was accused of breaking European soccer's cost control rules, Manchester City dug in and began the fight to clear its name. It criticized the hackers who leaked private club documents and the media organizations that reported on them. It railed against the accusations ("entirely false") and the process ("unfair") and, most of all, the punishment: a two year ban from the Champions League. City officials vowed to do "everything that can be done" to fight the ban. Bankrolled by one of the world's richest men, they seemed prepared to spend any sum to prevail. What few knew was that City's salvation was there in plain sight the whole time: a handful of words in a section of the rules of UEFA, European soccer's governing body. Those rules set a five year time limit on the infractions eligible for punishment and, in effect, barred investigators from ruling on some of the most serious accusations against City. They also allowed a three member panel at the Court of Arbitration for Sport to rule Monday to overturn the Champions League ban, imposed last year for what UEFA had called "serious breaches" of cost control regulations. In announcing its decision, the panel cited UEFA's rules, which it said meant many of the most serious findings against City whether true or not were inadmissible. The decision was not only a triumph of a technicality. CAS also found, and UEFA agreed, that there was "insufficient conclusive evidence" to uphold all of the conclusions that had resulted in the Champions League ban. A fine of 30 million euros (about 34 million) was reduced to 10 million ( 11.3 million), an acknowledgment that City had in fact breached some regulations by failing to cooperate with the investigation. But on the most important issues, City's victory was complete. "The club welcomes the implications of today's ruling as a validation of the club's position and the body of evidence that it was able to present," Manchester City said in a brief statement. Manchester City officials had vehemently, and repeatedly, denied any accusations of wrongdoing, and the prospect of being barred from the Champions League risked upending one of the most ambitious projects in global sports. For UEFA, the latest high profile reversal of its effort to uphold its so called financial fair play regulations and the second time its own rules have been at the root of its defeat has created new doubts about the future of its efforts to police overspending by its biggest clubs, and its ability and willingness to police its members' actions. The CAS panel said in a statement posted on the court's website that the most serious breaches found by UEFA were either "not established" or no longer relevant (in the court's words, "time barred"). Manchester City remains in contention to win the Champions League this year; it won the first leg of its round of 16 tie against Real Madrid in March before the coronavirus pandemic forced a temporary halt to the event. UEFA is scheduled to resume the competition this summer. Since being acquired in 2008 by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al Nahyan, the billionaire brother of the ruler of the United Arab Emirates, Manchester City has risen from relative obscurity to become one of soccer's most valuable and successful brands. It fields one of the best teams in the world and is led by Pep Guardiola, the Spanish coach who oversaw its collecting every available trophy in English soccer last season. Monday's ruling means the team will continue to perform on one of sports' biggest stages, and one of its most lucrative. City had stood to lose about 200 million in Champions League payments from a two year ban, but it would also have been costly in terms of damage to City's carefully cultivated reputation and its ability to attract top players and coaches. Now it will remain among the favorites to win the competition year after year. Instead, it will be UEFA that faces new scrutiny. It is the second time UEFA has been judged to have fallen afoul of its own statutes of limitations. In a previous case, involving another wealthy Gulf owned team, Paris St. Germain, CAS agreed with P.S.G. that the adjudicatory arm of UEFA's financial control body had not acted in time. UEFA on Monday acknowledged in a statement that the panel found that many of the breaches attributed to City "were time barred due to the five year time period foreseen in the UEFA regulations," but it appeared eager to put the case behind it. "UEFA will be making no further comments on the matter," it said. But UEFA's ability and willingness to police its regulations sustained a blow. Financial investigators in the City case had sought advice from UEFA's in house legal team before starting work on the case, and had asked about the statute of limitations, according to a person familiar with the organization's discussions. The rules were created in 2009 as several top European clubs teetered on the brink of bankruptcy and have largely proved to be successful, though they have worked against clubs like City, P.S.G. and others as their wealthy owners have sought to supplant more established powers. Lawyers for City and UEFA presented their arguments to the panel during a video hearing in early June. City had said it would spare no resource to defend itself. It contended that the UEFA process was one sided and that an impartial body like CAS would overturn the ruling, which came after damaging leaks in 2018 that suggested the team had engaged in illegal accounting tactics to get around UEFA's cost control rules. Citing internal documents and emails, those reports suggested City had disguised millions of dollars of direct investment by its owner, Sheikh Mansour, as sponsorship income. One document, published by the German weekly Der Spiegel, appeared to show that the team's main sponsor, the Abu Dhabi based Etihad Airways, had paid only a fraction of an 85 million sponsorship agreement.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
WHEN, in the course of discussing the all new Ford Explorer, Ford officials refer to the old one, it sounds like some kind of Blue Oval confessional. Forgive us, consumers. Its fuel economy was poor, its ride and handling weren't great and, while it could handle some basic off road feats, very few of you cared. So while perhaps the old Explorer had been a fine sport utility for the 20th century it was exceedingly popular, after all the arrival of the 21st century came to Ford's attention. The company decided to reinvent the Explorer for a new era ( though it missed the millennium celebrations by about a decade). The results of that reinvention are reaching dealerships this month. What consumers will find is a radically changed Explorer with an emphasis on ride and handling, better fuel economy and some new features that will, Ford says, improve safety. Buyers will also find lower towing limits and less off road ability. The least expensive model, the plain Explorer with front wheel drive, is 28,995. Up a step is the XLT at 31,995 and then the Limited at 37,995. All wheel drive is offered on all trim levels for an additional 2,000. I tested an Explorer Limited with all wheel drive and a sticker price of 44,565, including a 4,810 luxury option package. With an overall length of 197.1 inches, the 2011 Explorer is 3.7 inches longer than the 2010 model; the wheelbase is about an inch shorter. Ford has been trying to make its interiors not just practical but more visually appealing, and it certainly succeeded here. The cabin is relatively quiet and certainly comfortable nothing trucky about it. Three rows of seats are now standard on all Explorers, which can therefore accommodate six or seven people, depending on whether the second row consists of a bench or captain chairs. Ford says there is 2 more cubic feet of cargo space behind the third row. At 15.6 cubic feet, the capacity is about the same as the trunk of a midsize sedan. With the third row folded down there's about 44 cubic feet of space, similar to the old model's capacity. One thing that mystified me was the MyFordTouch system, which is standard on the Limited. It replaces simple knobs (MyFordKnob?) with controls centered on an eight inch screen used along with voice commands for controlling functions like the climate control, navigation system and entertainment options. While I thought it was an overly complicated ergonomic setback, Ford representatives assured me that it was actually easier and simpler to use. They also provided a 52 page instruction book. Even the entry level Explorer comes with all the crucial safety equipment, from air bags for side impact protection to electronic stability control. One interesting safety option available early next year will be inflatable rear safety belts. Compressed air inflates the shoulder belt in a crash so that the forces are distributed over an area five or six times as large as a regular belt, said Srinivasan Sundararajan, the technical leader at Ford Research and Advanced Engineering. Because the belts are already on the occupant's chest, they inflate far more slowly than an air bag. Ford says that should be particularly beneficial for children or the elderly. The cost is expected to be about 195. The Explorer's most radical change is invisible. Gone is the durable truck frame that Ford boasted about for almost two decades; the Explorer now has carlike unibody construction, its underpinnings based on the same architecture used for the Taurus and Flex. Ford came somewhat late to the decision to move away from a body on frame structure. Its main competitors began shifting to car type construction years ago, and the Jeep Grand Cherokee has had a unibody since its introduction in 1992. But the wait was worthwhile. On some challenging two lane roads northwest of Detroit the Explorer handled remarkably well. Ford did a great job of calibrating the new electric power steering, giving it an impressive blend of weight, feel and predictability. The steering is as good as, or better than, the systems on many cars. It syncs up with the independent suspension to give the driver considerable confidence in the ability to not just travel quickly, but to react to surprises. In case of a particularly nasty surprise, the Explorer has what Ford calls Curve Control. Maintaining control of the vehicle used to be a function of the driver, but Ford has properly concluded that some drivers are not altogether proficient at emergency maneuvers, so electronic intervention was warranted. At its core, Curve Control is an advanced version of electronic stability control. Stability control has been used to try to correct a skid if either the front or rear of the vehicle begins to slide out. Ford engineers say they have reworked the algorithm so the system doesn't wait for a significant skid. Instead, if sensors indicate the vehicle is heading in a direction at odds with where the steering wheel is pointed say, going wide on a sharp turn it makes a more subtle adjustment, perhaps by applying a single rear brake, to nudge the vehicle back on course. The Explorer also gets some help on turns by having additional power automatically shifted to the rear wheels. Normally, sensors would direct more power to the rear under hard acceleration. Now the computer also gets information from sensors that detect cornering. That pre emptive shift in power can help the Explorer turn more sharply. It is a feature increasingly used by automakers including BMW and Porsche. Meanwhile, the ride remains comfortable, and body motions are carefully and yet gently controlled. I also drove a 2011 Grand Cherokee on the same roads, and in contrast its ride often felt busy, with a lot of tight, sometimes jiggly movements. One particularly annoying movement on the Jeep was a side to side rocking that was virtually absent in the Explorer. The Explorer's previous engines a 4 liter V 6 and 4.6 liter V 8 are gone. Power now comes from a 3.5 liter V 6 rated at 290 horsepower at 6,500 revolutions per minute and 255 pound feet of torque at 4,000 r.p.m. Ford boasts that the new V 6 almost matches the horsepower of the old V 8, which is true. But the V 8 had more peak torque (315 lb. ft.). Gas mileage is notably better. The highest federal rating for the previous Explorer was 15 miles per gallon in town and 21 on the highway with the V 8 and 2 wheel drive. The new 4 wheel drive models are rated at 17/23 and the 2 wheel drive versions at 17/25. Early next year, Ford says it will offer a 2 liter 4 cylinder EcoBoost engine with direct injection and turbocharging. Assembled in Spain, the engine will be rated at 237 horsepower at 5,500 r.p.m. and 250 lb. ft. of torque from 1,750 to 4,000 r.p.m. Although it will be less powerful, the EcoBoost will be the Explorer's premium engine and will cost extra how much more has not been announced. With either engine, the transmission is a 6 speed automatic, which can be manually shifted. The engine and transmission make a reasonable team, providing adequate acceleration and civility despite an unloaded weight of 4,695 pounds. Maximum towing capacity also dropped, to 5,000 pounds from 7,000. But Mr. Davis, the head of North American product programs, said Ford's research showed that was enough for most owners. The old Explorer also had a moderately serious off road ability. Mr. Davis said Ford had determined that customers might want to be able to reach a campsite, but do not care about extreme activities like rock crawling. This is a convenient discovery, because serious off road rambling is much more of a challenge in a car based crossover like the new Explorer. The ground clearance of the new model with all wheel drive about 8.2 inches has barely changed. The Explorer no longer offers a low range gearbox, useful in off roading, but it does have a system called Terrain Management, which was developed for Land Rover when Ford owned that brand. Using a knob on the console, the driver can switch out of the "normal" setting for hard surfaces and into settings for "snow," "sand" or "mud or ruts." That then changes how the powertrain, the electronic stability control and the traction control react to surface conditions. During a drive in deep sand at Ford's proving grounds in Michigan, the Explorer struggled with the Terrain Management on the "normal" setting. Switched to "sand," the system allowed more wheelspin and the vehicle easily churned through. It may have taken Ford a while to figure out the shifting market and to cross over to a new species of sport wagon. But the new model's excellence on pavement, its safety equipment and its comforts are likely to match the needs of many families most of the time. The new Explorer may well be the new benchmark in its class. INSIDE TRACK: Welcome to the 21st century.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
The last smartphone I reviewed was the original Apple iPhone, which ushered in the mobile revolution back in 2007. At the time, I didn't exactly give the device a rave. Two weeks after waiting in line for hours outside the San Francisco Apple Store and paying 540 for the iPhone, I even returned it and got my money back. It was obvious to me that the iPhone was a powerful thing and everyone from Steve Jobs, Apple's co founder, right down to the people I passed on the street kept telling me how great it was. But it was also an extravagance. The iPhone wouldn't really justify its 500 plus cost for another year. Ten years on, I'm now reviewing the Pixel 2, the new flagship phone from Google that goes on sale Thursday. And my take is pretty much the same: People who want the latest and greatest phones won't be disappointed by the Pixel. But for most of us, this device, with a starting price of 649, is an extravagance. Google has found tremendous success convincing the world that it should prefer smartphones that run Android, its mobile operating system, which dominates global market share over Apple. But Google has had much less success designing and selling its own phones. It is not for a lack of trying. Last fall, the company's campaign reached a new peak with the arrival of the original Pixel. According to reviewers who were hipper, more experienced and less cynical than I, the Pixel was superior to the iPhone a stance that amounts to sacrilege in certain circles. Now comes the Pixel 2. After testing the gadget for nearly a week, I found I prefer it to the iPhone though this is mostly because I have always carried Android phones. Android is what I'm used to, and all my digital data is stored with Google, even though my daughters think I'm silly for not buying an iPhone. Compared with other Android devices, the Pixel 2 XL, the model I tested and the larger of the two versions of the device, was also a big improvement. I own a Samsung Galaxy S7, widely considered the best Android phone on the market a year ago when it went on sale. I liked that the Pixel 2 XL's fingerprint reader, which instantly unlocks the phone, sat on the back of the device, not far from where my finger typically sits. I liked that the phone arrived with only a small number of essential apps, rather than the sea of flotsam that typically ships with Samsung phones. And I liked that, as my 13 year old Snapchat astic daughter said, "the camera is definitely better." Yet is any of this all that different from other top of the line phones? Not really. And Google knows this. Even the steep 849 pricing for the Pixel 2 XL was in line with rivals. In pitching the new Pixel, the company focused on the Google Assistant Android's answer to Siri and other services that lean on what is commonly called artificial intelligence. This included Google Lens, a service that instantly identifies landmarks, books, movies and other stuff you capture in photos, as well as a service that, in similar fashion, automatically identifies songs playing on a nearby radio or television. These were certainly the most impressive parts of the new phone. And they showed how recent advances in machine learning are producing consumer devices, cars and robots that can read, analyze and respond to their environment in ways that were not possible just a few years ago. Drawing on work by DeepMind, an A.I. lab in Britain that Google acquired in 2014, for instance, the Google Assistant now speaks with a voice that's closer to your own. "It sounds more normal," my 13 year old said. Still, she added that the improvement was small. That sums up all these services. Many are technically impressive, and some are useful. But they took the Pixel only so far past the status quo. Google Lens gave my 9 year old several minutes of fun over the weekend. But it's not something she or I would use on a regular basis. (And it mistook a picture in my bedroom of New York's Flatiron Building for the Empire State Building.) The service that identifies songs was even more fun and more useful. But it will never be anything more than a tiny part of our daily lives. And it mistakenly identified the musical score at the end of "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold" as the song "Chained" by the pop group the xx. The Google Assistant was the most adept of all the digital assistants, easily beating Siri and Amazon's Alexa. My younger daughter loved it. (At one point, she said it was more fun than me.) But like those other assistants, it could not deal with more than just a handful of simple tasks, typically delivering web pages or preset answers in response to questions. When I asked the Assistant whether 824 was expensive for a smartphone, it gave me a YouTube video of a guy unboxing some sort of 20,000 monstrosity. In most cases, it can recognize what you say. But it cannot necessarily understand what you say and respond in a completely satisfying way. That is still to come. Google boasts that you can instantly switch the Assistant into a mode that lets you type questions rather than ask them orally. But as my wife said, these assistants are useful only because they let you handle basic tasks like sending a text or setting an alarm without typing. If I wanted to type, I would just visit google.com. Still, after a few days, I was rather attached to the Pixel 2 XL. On the way to dinner on Saturday night, it correctly identified every song that played on the local 1980s station, from "The Warrior" to "Der Kommissar." Even so, I plan to keep the 849 for now. The smaller version of the new Pixel goes for 649, and I might go for that, when I finally need a new phone.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
With measles and Ebola grabbing headlines, it is easy to forget the health panic of 2016, when Zika was linked to severe birth defects in thousands of Brazilian newborns whose mothers were infected while pregnant, striking fear across the country and much of the Americas. As health officials struggled to halt its spread, the virus galloped through Latin America and the Caribbean that spring and summer and eventually reached the United States, sickening more than 200 people in Florida and Texas and prompting countless travelers to cancel vacations in the tropics. Then, seemingly overnight, the epidemic evaporated and public attention moved on. But Zika, it turns out, did not vanish. "Zika has completely fallen off the radar, but the lack of media attention doesn't mean it's disappeared," said Dr. Karin Nielson, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at U.C.L.A. who studies Zika's impact in Brazil. "In some ways, the situation is a bit more dangerous because people aren't aware of it." The virus, which is mostly spread by mosquitoes but also through sex with an infected person, is still circulating in Brazil and other countries that were at the center of the epidemic, and two years ago the same strain from the Americas arrived in continental Africa for the first time. That strain, researchers recently discovered, had been causing birth defects in Asia long before the Zika epidemic of 2016. Another concern is over places where the mosquito that spreads the virus the female Aedes aegypti is endemic but have so far been spared locally transmitted cases of Zika. On Tuesday, the World Health Organization issued a report on Zika that listed 61 such countries, among them densely populated behemoths like China, Egypt and Pakistan as well as much of Africa. Here's what you should know about Zika and travel. Even Brazil remains vulnerable: The 2016 epidemic largely spared the country's south and most notably Sao Paulo, its biggest city. Warming temperatures associated with climate change are expected to expand the range of Aedes, according to a recent study, putting tens of millions more people at risk for Zika and other mosquito borne diseases. "The next outbreak is not a matter of if, but when," said Dr. Ernesto T.A. Marques, a public health researcher at The Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Rio de Janeiro who is also an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh. "It also helps that people in the U.S. tend to live fairly far apart in single family homes," said Dr. Lyle R. Petersen, who oversees vector borne diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "This is a mosquito that doesn't fly very far." While the number of new cases of Zika so far is small last year there were nearly 20,000 infections in Brazil compared to more than 200,000 during the epidemic's peak countries like Angola, Thailand, Vietnam and Cape Verde have reported newborns with Zika related microcephaly, the condition that leaves babies with the misshapen heads and profound neurological damage that stoked global anxiety. Zika has been taking a path similar to other viral infections that offer immunity to those who have fallen ill and recovered. In Brazil, Colombia, Puerto Rico and other places hard hit by the epidemic, so called herd immunity may limit the potential for new outbreaks because the virus cannot gain enough traction to spread among those who have never been infected. But over time, the benefits of herd immunity wane as more children are born, providing fresh tinder for the next epidemiological wildfire. Researchers are also unsure whether those infected with Zika are immune for life, or just for a period of time. Public health officials have been frustrated by haphazard cooperation from countries worried about the stigma associated with Zika as well as those overwhelmed by other health crises. In Angola, the government did not initially report dozens of microcephaly cases that were first discovered by Portuguese researchers. Earlier this year, India protested its inclusion on the C.D.C.'s advisory list for pregnant women during a Zika outbreak in the country's northwest. In April, the C.D.C. modified its warning. Dr. Eve Lackritz, who leads W.H.O.'s Zika Task Force, said one of her main tasks is to keep up the sense of urgency. "My biggest fear is complacency and lack of interest by the global community," she said. In its new report, the W.H.O. conceded that there was no way to know with certainty whether Zika was still circulating in the 87 countries with previously recorded cases of transmission. Its advice for pregnant women seeking to travel reflects that ambiguity: cover up exposed skin with light colored clothing, use insect repellent and "carefully consider the risks." (It also advises men returning from areas with known Zika outbreaks to consider abstaining from sex for at least three months.) The topics new parents are talking about. Evidence based guidance. Personal stories that matter. Sign up for the NYT Parenting newsletter for the info you need about pregnancy and more. Dr. Peterson of the C.D.C. and others who study Zika and closely related viruses, including dengue, yellow fever and chikungunya, say they are worried the world is unprepared for the next outbreak. For one, the underlying conditions that enabled the epidemic crowded urban neighborhoods whose residents are too poor to afford insect repellent or window screens remain a problem in much of the developing world. Aedes has developed a particular fondness for human blood and has adapted so well to urban living that it can quickly breed in overturned bottle caps and other refuse after a rainfall. "Our biggest fear is that we will never get rid of Zika, just like we can't get rid of dengue," said Paolo Zanotto, a molecular virologist at the University of Sao Paulo. Compounding that fear, he said, is the possibility that Zika virus could find a host in animals, especially monkeys, making it even harder to control. Early hopes for a vaccine against Zika have also stumbled. Although a number of potential vaccines are in the pipeline, the ebbing of the epidemic has made it hard to test their efficacy in the field. Arboviruses like dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever provide something of a template for the future of Zika. During the 1940s and 50s, successful eradication campaigns aimed at quelling deadly yellow fever outbreaks vanquished Aedes from Brazil and much of the region. But by the 1970s, as those efforts were abandoned, the mosquito quickly re established itself, leading to increasingly intense outbreaks of dengue and yellow fever, and more recently the emergence of new arboviral pathogens like chikungunya and Zika. These days, dengue infects over 100 million people globally a year, killing 10,000. Until 2015, Zika was an obscure and fairly harmless virus that produced flulike symptoms. First identified in 1947 among monkeys in the Zika forest of Uganda, it later found a foothold in humans and then spread across Africa, Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. The virus is believed to have most likely arrived in Brazil with a traveler attending the World Cup there in the summer of 2014. Scientists are still stumped as to why Zika began causing birth defects. "We thought of Zika as an inconsequential disease, but then it exploded in Brazil with devastating consequences," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. "The larger lesson for us is that we have to always be prepared for the emergence and re emergence of viruses and microbes." Zika has presented health officials with a number of challenges. Tracking its spread has been difficult because many countries, especially those with weak public health systems, lack the ability to identify new cases. Compounding the problem is that the vast majority of people infected experience symptoms so mild they rarely seek medical care. And because Zika, dengue and chikungunya all produce fever, joint pain and rashes, Zika cases are often misdiagnosed. One of the biggest obstacles to better surveillance and to informing pregnant women that they've been infected is the lack of a rapid, inexpensive diagnostic test. "At this point we can only guess the number of new infections," said Dr. Scott C. Weaver, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston who was among the first to predict Zika's arrival in the Americas. As public health experts across the world continue their prevention work, thousands of families here in Brazil are already struggling with Zika's impact. The first Zika babies are turning 3 and 4, and their families, many of them poor, are increasingly overwhelmed, said Dr. Marques, the researcher from Rio de Janeiro. "It's a nightmare for these mothers," he said. "And as the children grow older, it's not going to get any easier."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
An increase in the number of tourists visiting the Galapagos Islands has many experts concerned about the impact on the fragile ecosystem. Visitors to the Galapagos Islands will likely pay an increased park fee starting next year, a decision that reflects growing concerns that skyrocketing tourism on the Ecuadorean archipelago is harming its fragile and unique ecosystem. Visitors currently pay a 100 fee to the Galapagos National Park, with mainland Ecuadoreans paying 6. Last month, Ecuador's ministries of tourism, environment and agriculture proposed doubling costs to 200 for those visiting the islands who also spend at least three nights in mainland Ecuador and quadrupling the fee to 400 to visit Galapagos and spend only one or two nights on the mainland. The exact prices, start date and how authorities confirm itineraries will be decided by December 31, said Daniela Tamayo Cordova, of the Galapagos Government Council, the municipal body that manages the islands. "The entrance fee has not increased in 20 years, and costs in Galapagos and Ecuador have risen over this time," Ms. Cordova said. "The increased income will be used to improve sustainability, tourist experiences, and conservation and management." With wider global awareness than Ecuador's tropical Amazon or mountainous Andes regions, the Galapagos are arguably the nation's crown jewel. But because these islands are hundreds of miles from the mainland, oversight comes from a hodgepodge of governing bodies, and decisions are often made in the capital, Quito. A portion of the fee currently goes to protecting the 97 percent of the uninhabited islands. That will likely continue, but just how much more will go to ecological management remains in flux. The Galapagos are not alone. Many popular areas around the world are restricting tourist traffic or increasing fees. In the United States, the National Park Service raised vehicle entrance fees last year and for more specialized travel, climbing permits to attempt Mount Everest in Nepal were recently raised after concerns of overcrowding. Galapagos tourism has nearly doubled in a decade: About 275,000 people visited the islands last year, according to the Observatorio de Turismo de Galapagos, an increase from 173,419 in 2008. The year round population serving these visitors has increased as well. Unesco lists tourism as a primary threat to existing infrastructure and habitats and a risk to introducing invasive plant and animal species. Many of those invested in the islands, from biologists to travel operators, say the human pressure on the islands' fragile ecosystem is unprecedented. Large scale water filtration, proper trash collection and disposal, and rules on development are considered by many inadequate for the growing number of visitors. Enforcement of rules designed to help the wildlife and its habitat, such as keeping visitors at least six feet from endemic species like nesting blue footed boobies, patrolling adjacent waters to keep out illegal shark poachers, or curbing new hotel development, is spotty. "There's an unsustainable level of growth in the Galapagos," said Jim Lutz, the president of the International Galapagos Tour Operators Association, adding that his group has been pushing for an increase in visitor fees for years. Land based tourism grew more than 90 percent from 2007 to 2016, in part to the proliferation of cheap flights, hostels and a la carte tours that have made these once remote islands more accessible and crowded. There is no cap to the number of visitors traveling by plane, and new cheap routes catering to backpackers have been added. Then there's the sharing economy. "Unfortunately, Airbnb opened the door for pretty much anybody who had an extra bed in their house," said Fernando Diez, the marketing director of Quasar Expeditions, one of the first companies to operate on the islands. The number of hotels increased to more than 300 from 65 in the last 10 years. "People are imagining pina coladas with sea lions and partying all over," Mr. Diez said. "Galapagos is not that." Cruises, a popular way to visit the islands, have been limited in number, at least until recently. There were 70 ships with room for about 1,700 passengers in 2017. Cruise permits were once strict at 16 passengers per ship; at least half a dozen new ships debuted this year including a 100 passenger Celebrity Cruise yacht. The increase may sound minor, but even a handful of shutterbugs landing on a beach and inching close to sensitive wildlife has an impact and this change is a force multiplier. Alex Cox, a native born guide, typifies the push and pull of one earning his keep in a place so sensitive. Fewer visitors "might cause a complicated job situation among people in Galapagos involved in providing tourism services, including myself," he said. But that sacrifice is necessary, he said, a decision many Galapaguenos are willing to endure. "Galapagos is not for mass tourism." Fewer travelers means fewer jobs, and while the price hike could be considered minimal for the wealthy, it could hurt budget travelers, at least international ones. Does this mean the Galapagos will swing back to a haven for haves? "Conservation might require some sacrifice from us in order to partially achieve ecosystems rebound," Mr. Cox said. Compared to most national parks, the fee is low, said Pelayo Salinas, a marine scientist with National Geographic's Pristine Seas project who works in the islands. "The new fee needs to reflect the cost of looking after this place," he said. "Paying more to make sure it's preserved, I don't think anyone is against that." 52 PLACES AND MUCH, MUCH MORE Follow our 52 Places traveler, Sebastian Modak, on Instagram as he travels the world, and discover more Travel coverage by following us on Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter: Each week you'll receive tips on traveling smarter, stories on hot destinations and access to photos from all over the world.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
In a really small room in a really big house, archaeologists found the body of a 40 year old man. They knew he was special. He was buried with a conch shell trumpet and large shells from the Pacific coast, far from this crypt in the 650 room building known as Pueblo Bonito in what is now called Chaco Canyon, in New Mexico. He was adorned with more than 11,000 beads and pendants made of turquoise and more than 3,000 made of shell. But if he was special, he was just the bottom layer. On top of him was a two foot layer of sand, another body, wooden planks and then 12 more bodies, the bones mixed together. They were special, too. Flutes, ceremonial staffs, more turquoise, stores of ceramic vessels, remains of South American parrots and jewelry were found nearby. The elite group of 14 had been buried in the same tiny room over the course of 330 years, starting around the year 800. In a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications, scientists say they were all related to the same female ancestor, which could provide clues to the power structure of the ancient society that lived in Chaco Canyon. Starting in the ninth century, a large, complex society grew in Chaco Canyon, with small scattered settlements, grand apartments, irrigation systems and connecting roads. Since archaeologists stumbled upon these structures in the late 1800s, they've questioned how power was organized in Chacoan society. Was the community totally egalitarian? Did it have a single ruler? Did matrilineal family groups control ritual sources of power? Did associations of unrelated individuals, each led by the most capable, take charge? To find out, authors of the study carbon dated bodies preserved at the American Museum of Natural History and analyzed the DNA preserved to varying degrees within them. They found that the bodies had been buried over the 330 years that spanned the society's beginning to its decline not just at the peak of its influence between the 11th and 12th century, as others had once thought. Moreover, nine bodies shared the exact mitochondrial DNA, which can be passed only through the mother. From the nucleic DNA preserved in six individuals, the researchers also discerned two direct relationships: a mother daughter pair and a grandmother grandson. They believe that power and influence in Chaco Canyon was hierarchical, belonged to this small group of people and was passed down through a female line between 800 and 1130 A.D. "At the center of Chaco is an elite matriline," said Douglas J. Kennett, an archaeologist at Penn State University who was lead author on the paper. Similar to the way Jewish heritage is passed down from a mother to her children in some denominations, power in Chaco was passed down through mothers. "But this doesn't mean that women ruled over Chaco," Dr. Kennett said. Given that the most elaborate burials in this crypt involved males, Dr. Kennett said it was possible that both men and women held powerful positions. This equal leadership is not uncommon among some indigenous people of the Americas, said Rosemary Joyce, an archaeologist interested in inequality at the University of California, Berkeley who was not involved in the study. But other scientists saw limits to the conclusions that can be drawn from the DNA in the bodies in the crypt. "All we really know is that all of these are ultimately offspring of the same woman," said Sarah Nelson, an archaeologist at the University of Denver who was not involved in the research, and who has studied gender and power using human remains found in China and the Korean Peninsula. "Maybe the female is seen as owning the place, or maybe she is in touch with the spirits, and maybe she can only pass that down to her daughter," Dr. Nelson said. More than a dozen large, multistory great houses speckle Chaco Canyon, and it remains unclear how far influence extended for those buried in Pueblo Bonito without examining the remains within each. And some question whether anyone was leading the whole society at all, considering the egalitarian systems of some contemporary Pueblo groups. Criticism aside, Dr. Nelson said the work was exciting: "It does begin to shed some light on the Chaco system," she said. "It's certainly a rare occurrence that you get that kind of opportunity to learn about the relationship of a bunch of people that are spread out through time, but all buried in the same place."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
That had been previously demonstrated in laboratory experiments, but now Chinese scientists studying real world conditions report that they captured tiny droplets containing the genetic markers of the virus from the air in two hospitals in Wuhan, China, where the outbreak started. Their findings were published Monday in the journal Nature. It remains unknown if the virus in the samples they collected was infectious, but droplets that small, which are expelled by breathing and talking, can remain aloft and be inhaled by others. "Those are going to stay in the air floating around for at least two hours," said Linsey Marr, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech who was not involved with the Nature paper. "It strongly suggests that there is potential for airborne transmission." Dr. Marr and many other scientists say evidence is mounting that the coronavirus is being spread by tiny droplets known as aerosols. The World Health Organization has so far downplayed the possibility, saying that the disease is mostly transmitted through larger droplets that do not remain airborne for long, or through the touching of contaminated surfaces. Even with the new findings, the issue is not settled. Although the coronavirus RNA the genetic blueprint of the virus was present in the aerosols, scientists do not know yet whether the viruses remain infectious or whether the tests just detected harmless virus fragments. "The missing piece is viable viral replication," said Harvey V. Fineberg, who leads the Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases and 21st Century Health Threats at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. "Could you culture this virus from the air?" In February and March, scientists collected samples at Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University and at a makeshift temporary medical facility used to quarantine and treat patients with mild symptoms. They also sampled the air in public areas around Wuhan, including a residential building, a supermarket and two department stores. Very little virus was detected in the air of the isolation wards or in the patient rooms of the hospital, which were well ventilated. But elevated concentrations were measured in the small toilet areas, about one square yard in size, which were not ventilated. "It kind of emphasizes the importance of avoiding small confined spaces," Dr. Marr said. The researchers also detected viruses in the air in the locations where staff members took off their protective garments, suggesting that viruses that had settled on clothing could be knocked back into the air. These readings were greatly reduced after the hospitals implemented more rigorous cleaning procedures. The Wuhan data echo findings at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, where other researchers also found coronavirus RNA in the air as well as on surfaces in rooms. That research, still in the process of being reviewed by other scientists before publication in a journal, did not determine the size of the droplets. But the presence of RNA from the virus in out of the way locations, such as under a bed and on window sills, also suggested that small droplets were carried around the rooms by air currents. In their paper, the Nebraska researchers detected the presence of coronavirus RNA, but not whether the viruses were still infectious. In additional experiments, the scientists are trying to grow the virus in cultures to determine if they are capable of sickening people. "We've made a lot of progress the last couple of weeks," said Joshua L. Santarpia, a professor of pathology and microbiology at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. "I really do hope that we'll start being able to say something more definitive in the next week or so." In the Wuhan research, no viruses were detected in most of the public places they studied, including the residential building and the supermarket, although some levels were detected in crowded areas outside of one of the hospitals and in the department stores. Dr. Marr said she calculated it would take about 15 minutes for a person to breathe in one virus particle.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Leslie Yalof Garfield, a professor at Pace Law School, said the training to become a coach "helped me with my teaching and in life." Before Starting as a Coach, It Helps to Go Into Training LESLIE YALOF GARFIELD, 54, a professor at Pace Law School, faced an empty nest as her last child headed off to college. Ilona Shinkar, 42, is a former French teacher living in Larchmont, N.Y., with three children at home. Ms. Shinkar wanted to find a new career. Ms. Garfield wanted to pursue a new challenge. So both decided to become life coaches. Cue eye rolls. The term life coach has evolved over the last few decades from a curiosity to a punch line. Nine years ago on "The Daily Show," Demetri Martin called a life coach "a really expensive friend with limited credentials." And the jokes haven't stopped since. But they also haven't stopped people from becoming coaches. (The word "life" is fading somewhat, as many prefer to identify themselves by specialty executive coach, health coach or leadership coach, for example.) The nonprofit International Coach Federation, which is considered the main accrediting and credentialing body for both training programs and coaches, estimated in its 2012 Global Coaching Study that there were 47,500 coaches worldwide, about a third of those in America. But the numbers have no doubt increased, said Magdalena Mook, executive director of the federation. In the two years since the study, her organization's membership has grown to 25,000 from about 20,500, in 126 countries. (A member of the foundation need not be credentialed; about 15,000 coaches worldwide are credentialed, she said.) "Every year we're looking for signs of leveling, but it keeps growing in different parts of the world," Ms. Mook said. "Asia is booming now." So what if you want to join this expanding group? You can just print up some business cards and call yourself a coach, but if you want training and credentials, how do you find your way through the more than 446 programs (132 in the United States) accredited by the federation, let alone the hundreds of others that may be accredited by other organizations or not at all? To be accredited by the International Coach Federation, a training program must meet a number of criteria. Among them, it must offer a minimum of 125 hours of contact between students and faculty, six hours of observed coaching sessions, 10 hours of mentor coaching and a performance evaluation. "There are hundreds of different coach training schools and certification programs, which ultimately diminishes each certification's credibility," said Molly George, an assistant professor of criminal justice and sociology at California Lutheran University who has written about the professionalization of coaching. After all, such programs can range from weekend courses for a few hundred dollars to yearlong 20,000 plus programs offered at prestigious universities. The first step is to figure out your parameters. What do you want to spend? What, if any, specialized interest do you have in the coaching field? How much time do you have? Do you care if the course is accredited or not? Do you want a marketing component to guide you in setting up a coaching business? Ms. Shinkar knew she wanted "more hands on experience, and a more holistic/mind and body approach," as well as sessions that took place face to face, not online. In the end, she chose Leadership That Works, which offers a "Coaching for Transformation" certificate and is accredited by the International Coach Foundation. The course cost 7,495 and took about nine months. That included six monthly classes that lasted all day Saturday and Sunday, with about 25 to 30 people in her group; weekly 90 minute phone coaching by a mentor with her classmates; 10 mentor hours; and four hours of practice coaching, as well as homework and exams. She also had to submit recordings of part of some of her coaching sessions for evaluation. In addition, she was required to hire a professional coach for an additional six hours of coaching, which costs about 100 an hour and up. It wasn't easy, but she loved the course and graduated at the end of 2013. She now proudly calls herself a certified professional coach on her business website although no client has actually asked her about her credentials. For prospective coaches seeking certification, the process can be complex. Ms. Shinkar is certified by her program but not yet by the International Coach Federation. To receive the foundation's credential, which she is now working toward, she must comply with its criteria, which include logging more coaching hours and passing an assessment. The fees range from 100 to 775, depending on discounts for foundation members and the level of coach (associate to master) being sought. Professor Garfield also found herself struggling to find the right course. "I didn't want to pay 20,000 for a program at a university, especially as I didn't know exactly what I was planning to do with the coaching," she said. She also worried about feeling out of place among younger people who were "just trying to figure out their next move." So through an online search, she narrowed her list to three possibilities, settling on the NeuroLeadership Institute in Manhattan, where the students "were all around my age, and midcareer." In fact, many were already coaches and wanted more training, or were human resources employees sent by their companies, something that is increasingly common. She also wanted a course that offered an overview, not specialization. Her program, which cost 5,000, included a three day session, followed by 16 weekly calls lasting 90 minutes each, coaching sessions and homework. She estimates she did at least 60 hours of research. In the end, though, whether she decides to become a coach or not, "it helped me with my teaching and in life," Ms. Garfield said. "I used to be so impatient and interrupt a lot. I'm more patient now, and listen more." There are also college based programs, like the Organizational Behavior and Executive Coaching program at the University of Texas, Dallas, which costs 10,000 for a year. Unlike many other programs offered by universities, it is completely online, although it takes place in real time with virtual classes where students and teachers interact. "I knew if coaching was going to move from a vocation to a profession, it needed to move onto the college setting in some form, not just for quality, but for legitimacy," said Robert Hicks, a professor of organizational behavior and founding director of the coaching program.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Credit... America's premier canine competition is not just a beauty contest. Supporting elite athletes (and their owners) is a growing pack of massage and sports medicine specialists. At least the athlete was able to walk into the medical tent on his own four legs. Earlier, when he had faced the broad jump during his Masters Obedience Championship trial at the Westminster Dog Show, Finn, a six pound toy poodle, had tried to settle into his normal pre takeoff sit position. But he wriggled uncomfortably, struggling to hold something in. Sensing disaster, his human, Abby Cooper, swooped him up, managing to get him out of the ring just before he vomited and pooped on the sawdust. Off to the veterinarian tent they rushed. Official dog competitions typically include a standby vet. But Westminster, perhaps the premier elite canine event in the country, demands a crack medical squad of another order altogether. Special dogs need special docs. Finn was monitored by Dr. Christopher Frye from the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine, an assistant clinical professor in the new area of sports medicine and rehabilitation. Also on the 15 member team from Ithaca and its satellite specialty office in Stamford, Conn. were a radiologist and a theriogenologist, who specializes in reproduction of keen interest to breeders of show and performance dogs. Throughout Westminster Week, they would be fielding questions from spectators and owners as specific and general as their practices: about breed genetic problems; refractive eye tests (is my Boston terrier nearsighted?), stem cell injections for aching joints; clinical oncology trials; how to care for a first puppy. Westminster is famous as a gathering of spectacular dogs, with all the people and products attendant with canine beauty pageantry: sprays, mousses, gels, conditioners, curlers, straighteners, bows, hair implants (I'm looking at you, Standard Poodles!) and mascara (flutter those lashes much, Papillon?). But in the last few years, Westminster has added competitions in agility and obedience, events that bring in a very different crowd jock dogs and their humans. ("Vanish is not just some Barbie collie," Aaron Kirzner said of his border collie, which is both a breed and agility champion.) Those athletes are attended by a throng of health and wellness specialists, including canine acupuncturists, massage therapists and chiropractors, along with vets like Dr. Frye. Over the last few days, the vets' cases have included: a broken toenail; a sore toe (stuck in the crate during a long car haul); lots of nauseous anxiety (planes, crowds); a flopped ear (inflammation); and rash (the quality of the hotel sheets disagreed with one top show dog). Finn was fine, by the way. Dr. Frye excused him from the show and sent him home. "'Home' is his pillow on my knee," Ms. Cooper said, during a relieved telephone call from her hotel room. The sign was parked before a quiet, curtained corner of the hall: Dog Massage. Marisa Schmidt, a certified canine massage therapist from Hazlet, N.J., had all her agility day slots booked for months. But throughout the day, owners and dogs were lined outside her curtain, pleading to be squeezed into her schedule. Kyan, a border collie, was on the table. "She has some knots," Ms. Schmidt informed Deborah Salerno, Kyan's owner. She leaned into the dog's spine, lifted a hind leg, working an inner thigh muscle. Kyan's eyes rolled blissfully. "These dogs are in incredible shape," Ms. Schmidt said. "Their owners take care of them like any professional athlete. Would you believe this dog is 12 years old?" One challenge, she said, is that dogs can almost love the sport and their commanding owners too much. "Dogs are so resilient that they will run through the pain," she said, "and sometimes we may not know right away that they're injured." For the Masters Agility Championship, 330 invitation only elite athletes raced over a course of jumps, tunnels, seesaws, A frames and weaves. Before each round, the humans were allowed to preview the course once, walking it to memorize the series of hand signals they would give their dogs, which would not be permitted to sample the course. Spitting out rapid fire voice and hand signals for about 30 seconds, the humans would direct their dogs through the course, the two moving as one, a mind meld team. Athletes never compete with cold muscles. Here is the warm up routine for Chelsea, a gleaming, champion six year old black Labrador retriever that, with her teammate Dr. Elizabeth Dole, a veterinarian, has competed for the United States in European agility trials. Walk: three to five minutes. Pee. Trot. Stretches: loosen neck and spine by bringing muzzle to hip, both sides. Play bow. Weave between Dr. Dole's legs. Spins. Back up. Come forward. Work that core! Sit pretty in a begging position, paws up, hold it, hold it. Release. More stretches: Dr. Dole leaned on a table, extending a treat. Chelsea put her paws on the table, head up, legs splayed. Hip flexors, shoulders, laterals, obliques. Dr. Dole pulled out a toy. Tug, release, tug, release. "It's to give her some excitement but also some control," said Dr. Dole, who has worked in agility competition for 18 years. "Some dogs need to be in the optimum arousal state," she said. "But Chelsea is already so eager to play that we want her to be more thoughtful, so when she walks in the ring she's not over the top." Dr. Frye took a break from the vet tent to watch some of the agility trials. He makes canine prosthetics, studies gaits, manages pain. He sees the world of canine sports as vast and varied, having worked with athletes ranging from sled dogs to racers to dock divers. Like any sports fan, he stood in the thick crowd, whooping as the dogs sped in a blur through the obstacles. The crowd racket matched the dogs that barked and yelped as they raced along, in sheer excitement. Unlike the conformation the formal name for the sport of showing purebreds agility and obedience welcome mixed breeds, here simply called All American dogs. That's because these sports are fundamentally a celebration of the human canine bond. On Sunday, Tyson, an eight year old miniature American shepherd from Minnesota, needed to go to the vet tent. Tyson is an obedience champion. He is also an anxious flyer with a sensitive stomach. After arriving in New York, he started vomiting. And kept it up, almost hourly. "I thought, where are we going to find an E.R. vet?" said his owner, Shannon Wacker, who was there with her 17 year old daughter, Mara. "I was heartbroken for my daughter. They had worked so hard to get here." Mother, daughter and dog found the Cornell vet tent, who ministered to all three. "They were a godsend," Mrs. Wacker said. "And they didn't bill me!" By Sunday afternoon, Tyson was good to go. He did not win a ribbon, but Mrs. Wacker and Mara were thrilled. "Considering all that happened with him, we're tickled," Mrs. Wacker said, saying that Tyson had pushed through his misery out of devotion to her daughter. "We just needed to get his nerves untangled," she said. "He's just such a little overachiever!"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers played one night game last season, on a Thursday in Week 2. The limit for prime time appearances per team is six, but with Tom Brady now aboard the Buccaneers' pirate ship maybe they'll let him control the animated parrot resting on its stern? perhaps that number will swell to 16. Brady has upended the N.F.L. landscape by fleeing the most successful franchise of the modern era for one of the least, and injected credibility and visibility into a team that hasn't made the playoffs since the 2007 season. In that span, Tampa Bay has finished as high as second in the N.F.C. South only twice. In 13 of his 18 seasons as New England's starting quarterback, Brady played in the A.F.C. championship game, including a staggering eight straight appearances from 2011 to 2018. Put another way, Brady was more likely to play in that game than to complete a pass. All of those passes were completed for the Patriots, of course. If Brady, a free agent for the first time in his career at 42, wants to experience something completely different from the New England bunker that nurtured him, he has found it with Tampa Bay. The Buccaneers led the N.F.L. in passing last season, though it's unlikely that they will again. To account for Brady's comfort exploiting underneath routes and the middle of the field, Tampa Bay will almost certainly tweak its explosive downfield style that, with Jameis Winston at quarterback, was at once thrilling and reckless. Brady has thrown 36 interceptions over the last five years only six more than Winston did just last season. Brady is entering a favorable situation, surrounded by shrewd coaches, loads of offensive skill, a stout defense (and no state income tax). But he is still venturing into an uncertain stage, with no assurance that he will play well next season, when he will be 43. The Buccaneers' schedule is full of enticing matchups, with Drew Brees, Patrick Mahomes, Aaron Rodgers and Matt Ryan all slated to visit (pencil in at least two of those for Sunday or Monday night). This is all new, with no blueprint for how this next phase of his career unfolds, no analogue for a 42 year old quarterbacking legend who leaves to become another team's starter. Brady grew up in Northern California rooting for the San Francisco 49ers and Joe Montana, who played his final two seasons in Kansas City and revived its fan base, leading the Chiefs to an A.F.C. championship game but not beyond that. From Johnny Unitas to Brett Favre, Joe Namath to Peyton Manning, so many great quarterbacks have finished their careers in unfamiliar uniforms, enjoying varying degrees of success. None were as old as Brady is now. All around Brady, contemporaries are either assessing their football mortality, like Brees and Philip Rivers, or retiring, as did Brady's primary Super Bowl tormentor, Eli Manning. According to Pro Football Reference's play index, only six other quarterbacks have attempted even one pass after turning 42. Combined, those quarterbacks George Blanda, Steve DeBerg, Doug Flutie, Warren Moon, Earl Morrall and Vinny Testaverde threw for 29 touchdown passes at 42 or older. Brady threw 24 last season. Only Moon, in 1998 with Seattle, tossed as many as 11.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
At Some Museums, the Art Is Now on the Outside Pictures of a 5 year old girl from suburban Seattle, dressed up as her heroines Angela Davis, Rosa Parks and other African American women who fought for freedom were shown at the International Center of Photography recently. On Thursday night, they were followed by images of displaced migrants in a Tunisian refugee camp. Where the museum chooses to display these powerful shows on the facade of its Bowery building, from dusk to dawn is a sign of a growing global trend among arts institutions that are trying to make an artistic statement while engaging visitors, both returning and new. Jurien Huggins, a 24 year old graphic designer and photographer who was walking by, praised the museum for bringing "its knowledge out into the world and making something like this more accessible." Joshua Sandoval Garcia, a 22 year old abstract artist who strolled by, was struck by the young girl's face and took his own photos, which he said he would use as a reference "when I have an artist's block." The museum's executive director, Mark Lubell, said the museum began projecting its rotating series of images beginning in March. "It's consistent with our mission," he said, "to conduct a dialogue with the world we live in today." To commemorate this year's Holocaust Remembrance Day, on Monday, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, in Lower Manhattan, has commissioned a series of black and white photographic portraits of some 30 Holocaust survivors, called "Eyewitness," that it is displaying in the ground , second and third floor windows on the facade of its building on Battery Place. The trend dates back centuries: to 18th century "son et lumiere" shows and fireworks spectacles with wall like sets in Europe, according to Erkki Huhtamo, a professor in the department of design media arts at the University of California, Los Angeles. These were followed in the 19th century by outdoor projections done with a magic lantern slide projector. Today's technology includes projection mapping techniques that can display images and animations on a surface that is not flat or white. Michael S. Glickman, the president and chief executive of the Museum of Jewish Heritage whose survivor portraits, by the photographer B. A. Van Sise, have been digitally reproduced on vinyl and measure as much as 5 feet wide and 13 feet high said this series represents the museum's desire "to be a fully accessible site of public testimony, to hear the stories, meet the people, get a more intense, more meaningful, more impactful connection to history." One Holocaust survivor whose portrait is on display, Frederick Terna, a 93 year old Brooklyn artist who spent his childhood in Prague and speaks to groups of teachers at the museum, said, "It is my function to be a communicator about what happened," adding, "If you believe in something, you must act on it." The Vivid Festival in Sydney was established in 2009 to stimulate tourism during a slow winter season; according to Ignatius Jones, its artistic director, visitor numbers have skyrocketed from 165,000 in 2009 to 2.3 million last year, which the founders partly credit to their use of innovative lighting and projections. This year, from late May until mid June, the facade of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, also in Sydney, will be decorated with "Organic Vibrations," a collaboration between the Australian artist Julia Gorman and the Paris collective Danny Rose (which created "The Matter of Painting" in 2016). This October, Cincinnati will host its first Blink festival, an evening art event with large scale media and interactive art that will animate buildings throughout 20 city blocks. Brave Berlin, a local design studio, is overseeing the creation of animated installations for the facades of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center and the Contemporary Arts Center. Raphaela Platow, the director of the Contemporary Arts Center, said she hoped its installation would draw viewers from outside the city and allow the museum's building, by Zaha Hadid, to "be perceived maybe in a different light." She added that "the desire of any institution is to open its doors as wide as possible, to have visitors be challenged, stretched, transformed by art." Not all facade projections are authorized or institutionally approved: In 2014 and 2016, Gulf Ultra Luxury Faction, a group that fights for the rights of workers in Abu Dhabi, where a branch of the Guggenheim Museum is planned, projected messages like "Ultra luxury art, ultra low wages" on the facade of the Guggenheim in New York. Since 2008, the museum itself has projected artworks by Jenny Holzer and Agnieszka Kurant, among others, on the exterior of its Frank Lloyd Wright building.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Any team sport can bring kids into close enough contact for the spread of infectious diseases that travel by respiratory and airborne routes, so athletes must be up to date on all the recommended immunizations. Athletes who travel may have contact with other athletes from other areas, and "increasingly across the country, we know there are underimmunized pockets where you may more readily have transmission of highly infectious agents like measles," Dr. Jackson said. Some kids will play against athletes from other countries, who may not all be immunized to the same standards recommended here. The most infectious of these vaccine preventable diseases include the ones that children should all be immunized against from early childhood, such as measles, chickenpox and whooping cough. Everyone should also get the annual flu shot and the meningitis vaccine, which is recommended at 11 to 12 years of age, with a booster at 16. All of these diseases can spread rapidly in a close team environment. And then there are the sports that bring athletes into closer physical contact with one another, especially wrestling and rugby, but also football, basketball and others. Wrestling and rugby are sufficiently well known for skin to skin transfer that there are herpes virus skin infections actually named for them, Herpes gladiatorum and Herpes rugbiorum (also known as "scrum pox"). "Herpes can shut down a whole team," Dr. Rice said; wrestlers need "regular skin checks before tournaments," looking for herpes, impetigo and ringworm, and treating problems so the athletes can compete. Prophylactic medications can help prevent herpes recurrences. Among bacterial skin infections, community acquired methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, has caused many infections among high school and college athletes. MRSA has been a major issue in professional sports as well, particularly football, with several N.F.L. teams having had to deal with outbreaks. These skin infections can be extremely serious, as can streptococcal skin infections, so identifying and treating the lesions is really important for the individual athlete's health, as well as for containing possible spread. Athletes are also vulnerable to fungal skin infections, like Tinea corporis, or ringworm, not to mention athlete's foot (Tinea pedis) and jock itch (Tinea cruris), two fungal infections whose popular names also reflect their tendency to hang around locker rooms. The fungal pathogens can be transmitted directly, skin to skin, but also by towels and contaminated surfaces. Infection control for athletes goes beyond attention to personal hygiene; the school and the athletic staff have to be scrupulous about cleaning equipment and the locker room and the weight room. In wrestling and gymnastics, it's about cleaning the mats; in football, about clean tackling dummies; and in every sport, it's about clean surfaces in the locker room, from floors to showers. When outbreaks do occur, the close contact of team members means that they have to be addressed as quickly as possible. Dr. Rice recalled an outbreak of scabies on a high school wrestling team. A parent meeting was called immediately, he said, for that very evening, and "we called all the pharmacies and made sure they had adequate medication on hand." They didn't want any delay while each child saw his own doctor, he said, so "I actually wrote prescriptions, I didn't want them to have to wait."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
Michael Solomonov has become an ambassador of sorts for Israeli cuisine. The chef is an owner of five restaurants in Philadelphia, including Zahav, his award winning flagship, and is the co author of "Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking." He is also the host of the documentary "In Search of Israeli Cuisine," directed by Roger Sherman, which just opened in New York and will be shown in many cities in the next few months. Shot in restaurants, home kitchens, farms and markets across the country, the film shows the radical shift in modern Israeli cuisine, as cooks embrace local ingredients and the country's myriad cultures. Moments before we spoke, Mr. Solomonov was named a James Beard award finalist for outstanding chef. The day before, he had returned from a trip to Israel. "It was like it always is there's all these places you want to hit," he said. "Just as many places that you haven't been to that have just opened up. And just as many places that have been there for, like, 300 years that you're just finding out about. I feel like that's the story with Israel." Following are excerpts from an interview with Mr. Solomonov. The most striking thing about the documentary is the dramatic evolution of Israeli cuisine over the last few decades. What's happening is people are realizing the diversity you find over there. That and the physical environment, the amazing agriculture and the fact that it was between the spice and the silk routes, between the mountains and the sea, make it the perfect place. You've got over 100 different cultures that have brought with them or maintained cooking traditions. The Jews that came post diaspora, they brought with them cuisines of the land they lived in temporarily, but through the lens of Jewish cooking. So you have this little country you could fit it in your pocket, and it's got so much. And that is what Israeli cuisine is. I think what's happened, in the last decade or so, is that people have really embraced that. We've got amazing olive oil, amazing lamb, amazing za'atar. I was there a few days ago and we were foraging. The fields, and even the cities, stunk of orange blossom. The Galilee has its own microclimate that you don't find anywhere else. How do you view your interpretations of Israeli cuisine versus what has become modern cuisine in Israel? We are in eastern Pennsylvania. Right now, I'm looking at snow on the ground. Even if we were to import Israeli tomatoes, they wouldn't taste right. So we have to get creative. The tabbouleh, for example, it's winter stuff: kale, that we mince with walnuts and pomegranate and we serve with apples. It's not something you'd necessarily have in Israel, but when you close your eyes and eat it, it transports you there. If you had to send someone to eat in one place in Israel, where would it be? I like the north a lot Caesarea and up along the coast, Zikhron Ya'akov, Kerem Maharal, Ein Hod, Ein Chud it just has it all. You've got a lot of Druze influence and a lot of Arab influence. The things that grow up there are amazing. A lot of wine production. There are some really cool restaurants now in that area that are little holes in the wall. What about tips for traveling in Israel? Things that you need, especially if you're spending a lot of time outside: sunglasses, a hat, tons of water. And breakfasts are awesome, especially in most hotels. Eating chopped Israeli salad three times a day sounds redundant, but it's such a treat and a gift. And you can't swing a cat without hitting something that's 5,000 years old. Or something that represents the birth of monotheism. You know, you can go from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem to the top of Masada the first church and the first synagogue in under two hours.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
WILMINGTON, Del. For decades, many of the nation's biggest companies staked their futures far from the fraying downtowns of aging East Coast and Midwestern cities. One after another, they decamped for sprawling campuses in the suburbs and exurbs. Now, corporate America is moving in the other direction. In June, McDonald's joined a long list of companies that are returning to downtown Chicago from suburbs like Oak Brook, Northfield and Schaumburg. Later this month, the top executive team at General Electric whose 70 acre wooded campus in Fairfield, Conn., has embodied the quintessential suburban corporate office park since it opened in 1974 will move to downtown Boston. When the move is completed in 2018, the renovated red brick warehouses that will form part of G.E.'s new headquarters won't even have a parking lot, let alone a spot reserved for the chief executive. But even as they establish new urban beachheads, business giants like G.E. are also changing the nature of their headquarters, staffing them with a few top white collar employees and a smattering of digital talent, rather than recreating the endless Dilbert like pods they once built in the 'burbs. "Part of it is that cities are more attractive places to live than they were 30 years ago and are more willing to provide tax incentives, and young people want to be there," said David J. Collis, who teaches corporate strategy at Harvard Business School. "But the trend also represents the deconstruction and disaggregation of the traditional corporate headquarters," he explained. "The executive suite might be downtown, but you could have the back office and administrative functions in Colorado, the finance guys in Switzerland and the tax team in the U.K." Reinforcing the trend, Chemours plans to announce on Tuesday that it is staying here in Wilmington after considering suburban locations, most likely in the century old headquarters it inherited from DuPont when the chemical giant spun out Chemours last year. Unlike Chicago and Boston, Wilmington's urban renaissance remains a work in progress, and Chemours was very close to moving to a new home in southern New Jersey or suburban Philadelphia, despite the DuPont family's deep roots in Wilmington and the state of Delaware. But the company's chief executive, Mark Vergnano, ultimately came to the same conclusion that leaders of bigger and better known firms did: To attract younger workers, it helps to be in the city. "We are going through a change in our work force, and we wanted to be where we could attract millennials," Mr. Vergnano said. "This is a group that likes to be in an urban setting, with access to public transportation. They don't want to be confined to a building with a cafeteria or be next door to a shopping center." To be sure, cash from the State of Delaware and other incentives played an important role in the decision as well. In addition to providing Chemours, which produces a range of industrial chemical products, with a 7.9 million package of grants, Delaware overhauled its corporate tax code, sacrificing revenue and easing the company's tax burden as an added lure to stay put. For Wilmington, where the unemployment rate of 5.7 percent is above both the national average and Delaware's overall 4.2 percent level of joblessness, keeping Chemours's 800 headquarters jobs in the city counts as a major win. "In a more perfect world, states would be competing on the quality of schools, infrastructure, work force and so forth," said Gov. Jack A. Markell of Delaware. "We live in a world that's not perfect, so if other states are competing on the basis of these dollar incentives, we need to be in the same arena." In an era of relentless cost cutting, many corporate moves these days coincide with downsizing. Kraft Heinz, for example, had 2,200 workers when the company was based in Northfield; it has 1,500 now in downtown Chicago. The first 175 members of G.E.'s management team, including Jeffrey R. Immelt, the chief executive, will move to Boston's Fort Point section on Aug. 22. Even after the move is completed, about 800 G.E. employees will be based there. Hundreds of other workers in back office functions like human resources, legal and finance will be scattered among G.E's existing locations in Cincinnati, Norwalk, Conn., and Schenectady, N.Y. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. The headquarters of Motorola Solutions will start moving to downtown Chicago on Aug. 15, though more workers will stay in suburban Schaumburg than move to the new offices near Union Station. But for the first time in half a century, top executives from the company will again be in downtown Chicago. "Where you work really matters," said Greg Brown, the chief executive of Motorola Solutions. "No disrespect to Schaumburg, but customers and new hires didn't want to come to the suburbs an hour outside of Chicago. We wanted energy, vibrancy and diversity, and to accelerate a change in our culture by moving downtown." Mr. Brown and most of the executive team will be in the city, along with data scientists and design engineers; workaday functions like procurement, training and supply chain management will stay in Schaumburg. Over all, Motorola Solutions will have 1,100 employees in downtown Chicago, and 1,600 still in Schaumburg. Unlike many other corporate migrants, the company did not receive any financial incentives to move, Mr. Brown said. "This was the right thing in terms of strategy," he said. "Millennials want the access and vibrancy of downtown. When we post jobs downtown, we get four or five times the response." As for G.E., executives were focused on moving to a city from the beginning of its search for a new headquarters, said Ann R. Klee, director of Boston operations and development for the company. Along with eliminating the parking lot (workers are being encouraged to use public transit) G.E. wanted to do away with security gates and the sense of isolation that characterizes many corporate campuses. "This is going to be the exact opposite," Ms. Klee said. "We want it to be open and to bring the public in with a museum and exhibits of technology like 3 D printers." Besides blue chip icons like G.E., McDonald's and Kraft Heinz, venture capital investors and start ups are increasingly looking to urban centers, particularly on the West Coast, said Richard Florida, an urban theorist and professor at the University of Toronto. "The period of companies moving to suburbs and edge cities has ebbed, but I had thought that start ups would continue to locate in so called nerdistans, like office parks," he said. But a recent study by Mr. Florida showed more than half of new venture capital flowing into urban neighborhoods, with two San Francisco ZIP codes garnering more than 1 billion each, he said. The return of a top echelon of executives to American cities reflects and may well reinforce disparities driven by widening inequality, underscoring how jobs are disappearing in other locales. Over all, there has been a slight pickup in employment and population in the central core of big cities, said Joel Kotkin, an author and urban geographer at Chapman University in California. But many close in suburbs and neighborhoods are withering, particularly in the Northeast. More distant suburbs and exurbs are still thriving, especially in the Sun Belt.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Michael Boulware Moore, president of the International African American Museum, at Gadsden's Wharf, where African slaves once arrived. If the remaining funding comes, the museum will be built there. CHARLESTON, S.C. The unmarked property, beside a big, bland postwar apartment building, is now an empty grass lot and de facto park. Cabin cruisers gently bob at a pier. In this part of Charleston, just north of the historic, postcard district, industry has increasingly been giving way to boxy condominium developments with names like The Gadsden, after this city's Revolutionary War era patriot, merchant, and sometime slave trader, Christopher Gadsden. It will house the International African American Museum. A graceful project, long discussed and years overdue, the museum has brought together two very different talents, the veteran architect Harry Cobb, from Pei Cobb Freed Partners, and Walter Hood, the landscape designer from Oakland, Calif. Its louvered windows facing the waterfront will direct views past Fort Sumter toward the Atlantic Ocean and Africa. In and around the plaza created below the lofted building, a memorial garden, planted with native grasses, will lead toward a shallow tidal pool whose stone floor is inscribed with the shapes of bodies crammed together, as slaves were, in the bowels of ships that landed here. Right here. The spot used to be Gadsden's Wharf. Historians estimate nearly half of all African slaves brought to America arrived in Charleston, most of them at Gadsden's Wharf. At 840 feet long, it was, two centuries ago, the largest wharf in America. Thousands of Africans waited in the wharf's warehouses to be auctioned off. Every era erects, removes, amends or ignores monuments. Monuments and historical museums are always mirrors, advertisements, time bombs. Hardly a street or building in Germany today lacks some sign or plaque, redressing the past. It was the proposed removal of a Jim Crow era statue of Robert E. Lee that became the excuse for the neo Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va., last year, where a white nationalist is to go on trial late this year in the murder of a protester at the event. Unlike Virginia, South Carolina hasn't taken down Confederate monuments. Much has changed here but much has not. The state's most recent proposal for social studies standards in public schools doesn't mention the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., or Rosa Parks. The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston where a young white man massacred nine black congregants in 2015 is virtually in the shadow of what's still the city's tallest monument (another Jim Crow relic) of the antebellum vice president and proud white supremacist John C. Calhoun. It has been nearly two decades since Joseph P. Riley Jr., Charleston's mayor at the time, floated the idea of a museum of African American culture and history, on a different site, nearby. A dozen years passed, then more. Mr. Riley retired in 2016, after 40 years in office, having been elected during the 1970s as a racial bridge builder. White racists called him "L'il Black Joe" when he appointed a black police chief in 1975. Charleston prospered over the intervening decades. But gentrification had its effects. Two thirds black in the early 1980s, the population has become 70 percent white. I suggested to Mr. Riley the other day that Charleston can come across to a visitor as Disneyland for the Confederacy, still enthralled by its era of slavery, with a monument on seemingly every downtown corner commemorating some Confederate soldier, plantation aristocrat or antebellum judge who opposed Lincoln. "It's a process," he replied. "We worked hard while I was mayor to avoid alienation, to make this a city where everyone feels welcome. When I was in school, they didn't teach us about slavery. I really only learned the truth about how slaves were treated when I had already been in office for many years. That's when I began to think seriously about the museum." But without enough money or much public enthusiasm, the plan sputtered. Then excavations turned up traces of Gadsden's Wharf in the muck beneath the grassy lot. Through the exhibition designer Ralph Appelbaum, Mr. Riley reached out to Mr. Cobb. Pretty much the architect's first question: Why not build on the location of the wharf? By that point, the city had sold the property to a local restaurateur, unaware of its history. Mr. Riley spent a tidy sum buying the land back. "Sometimes you quick cook something, it's a mistake," rationalized the former mayor, who has taken to calling the museum his "most important work," especially after the church murders. "It turned out to be good that we had a lengthy germination period." Now 91, the soft spoken Mr. Cobb is known for designing the John Hancock Tower in Boston, 7 Bryant Park in New York, and a variety of big, sleek buildings in between, the best of which are geometrically eloquent and deceptively simple. Working here with the structural engineer Guy Nordenson, he describes this project as an "unrhetorical work of architecture." Moody Nolan are the architects of record. Slender brick cladding underscores the pavilion's long horizontal spans and extended cantilevers on either end. Pointed columns are meant to make the structure's mass appear to float. Perching the museum on piers will take account of rising waters. But it's also hard not to see an allusion to a wharf. Inside, galleries will document the many diverse cultures Africans brought to America, and a family center will let visitors trace their roots to Gadsden's Wharf. For his part, Mr. Hood has reimagined a constrained and narrow property, about a football field long. The late, great Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer was an inspiration. Mr. Hood creates a shaded public plaza, in the breezy space underneath the raised structure, where people may congregate around the building's double sided staircase, so the museum can become a gathering spot, not just a pilgrimage site. The memorial garden and tidal pool, at the same time, insure that it's recognized as hallowed ground, a place for contemplation. The budget for building the museum is 75 million. The goal is for bulldozers to start digging later this year and for construction to finish in 2020. But there's a hitch. No shovel will be lifted until all the money is raised. Charleston has committed its 25 million share, along with the land, and private donations are approaching the 25 million goal. But the South Carolina legislature, after an understanding that it would contribute 25 million over five years, allocated 14 million, and now won't promise the remaining 11 million. The clock is ticking. The current legislature remains in session only until the end of May. State Representative Brian White, a Republican who heads South Carolina's House Ways and Means Committee, is one of those holding the money back. The museum "is not a state project and we have a lot of state needs right now that far outweigh a municipality's request," he recently told the Greenville News, citing competing priorities like education. Bobby Hitt, South Carolina's commerce secretary, by contrast, has pointed out that the museum will help attract businesses to the state. It adds a work of architectural dignity. And as for educational value, plainly it fills a gap.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
2017 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; 2017 Successio Miro, via Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, via ADAGP, Paris; Photograph by Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times 2017 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; 2017 Successio Miro, via Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, via ADAGP, Paris; Photograph by Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times Credit... 2017 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; 2017 Successio Miro, via Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, via ADAGP, Paris; Photograph by Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times Alexander Rower, left, a grandson of Alexander Calder, and Joan Punyet Miro, a grandson of Joan Miro, at the Calder Foundation with works by the modern masters. Joan Miro was a small, fastidious, taciturn Catalan. Alexander Calder was a big, rumpled, gregarious American. At first glance, they would appear to hail from distant planets. Yet once they met in Paris in 1928, they enjoyed an unusually close and mutually beneficial friendship that lasted until Calder's death in 1976. With other artistic pairs, like Pissarro and Cezanne or Picasso and Braque, competitiveness ignited and acrimony at times soured the creative ferment. But Miro and Calder unfailingly championed and nourished each other's work. A principle that Calder applied to his art could also describe their relationship: "Disparity in form, color, size, weight, motion, is what makes a composition." Really, though, there is no explanation for what drew the men together, conversing over a lifetime in heavily accented French. "The communion that existed between Calder and Miro was mystical," says Joan Punyet Miro, the artist's grandson. To reunite all 23 of the Miro "Constellations" a series of small paintings on paper, begun in 1939 in Normandy and completed in 1941 would be a particularly dazzling coup. They have been exhibited together as a complete set only once, almost 25 years ago, in the Miro retrospective of 1993 at the Museum of Modern Art. "They are one of his greatest achievements, if not the greatest," said Anne Umland, a curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA. "For concentrated intensity and the essence of Miro's spatial, poetic, cosmic genius, they are as good as it gets." Calder's "Constellations," although not such a career zenith, constitute a significant chapter in his career. Having made his international debut in Paris with the mechanical "Circus" of the mid 1920s and then with his mobiles, Calder became celebrated for kinetic sculptures. Although that was hardly all he did he introduced "stabiles" in 1937, and also made jewelry, paintings and works on paper he nonetheless surprised himself when his "Constellations" opened at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York in 1943. He remarked that "it was a very weird sensation I experienced, looking at a show of mine where nothing moved." Eyes gaze, lips open, cats smile, nude women luxuriate and dancers cavort in these lustrous firmaments. He worked on each for about a month, studying the completed paintings as he composed a new one. He informed his dealer, Matisse, in February 1940 that "even though the formats are small, they give the impression of large frescoes." In May, the Germans began bombing Normandy. As the Miros fled first to Paris, then to Perpignan, Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca and finally to the family farm in Mont roig in Catalonia, Joan's wife, Pilar, took charge of their small daughter, Dolores, while he carried the satchel that held his precious works in progress. As the series advanced, the more menacing forms of the earliest paintings gave way to beatific images. In Palma, where Pilar's parents lived, Miro would spend some mornings listening to organ music and admiring the stained glass windows in the cathedral. "In negating negation, I affirm," he later declared. Miro finished his "Constellations" in Mont roig in September 1941. Not long after, at his studio in Roxbury, Conn., Calder fashioned a collection of sculptures in which hand carved wooden forms, some painted, others not, were held in place by metal spokes. Consulting with Marcel Duchamp and the curator James Johnson Sweeney, Calder called them "Constellationes," adding a mysterious final "e" to create an idiosyncratic coinage. During wartime, milled aluminum, which Calder customarily used, was commandeered for airplane production. Though he had access to metal, Calder chose to go with wood, to signal his support for the troops. (He had tried but failed to enlist in the Marines.) Shown in 1943 at Pierre Matisse, in what would be his last exhibition there, the sculptures in many instances were displayed up high, suspended from the ceiling or attached to a wall. A critic in The New Yorker praised their "truly starry sharpness and clarity." Calder himself said they suggested "some kind of cosmic nuclear gases which I won't try to explain." Trapped in Spain by the war, Miro couldn't see Calder's work. Two years later, MoMA helped him smuggle 22 of the 23 paintings in his "Constellations" series out of wartime Europe in a diplomatic pouch, and the Pierre Matisse Gallery exhibited 16 of the works at a time. Miro wrote that the show "should not be considered as a simple artistic event, but an act of human import," because these paintings were "realized during this terrible time when the fascists wanted to deny all spiritual values and to destroy all that man holds precious and worthy in life." The 1945 exhibition caused a sensation in New York art circles. Indeed, some critics believe that the "all over" style of painting that Jackson Pollock adopted in 1947, extending his forms over the entire canvas without conferring priority to any one area, came in response to seeing the Miros. Even though he used "constellation" in the name of one of the paintings in the series, Miro did not refer to the group that way; but by the late 1950s, the Miros, like the Calders, became known under that rubric. It is natural to think of the two bodies of work, created in the same period, as linked. To display them together, however, posed nearly insuperable challenges. Marc Glimcher, whose family owned Pace Gallery represents the Calder estate, concluded that his firm might be able to round up many of the Calder "Constellations." But only the Acquavella Galleries which, with the backing of Sotheby's, acquired the holdings of the Pierre Matisse Gallery (including 550 Miro oil paintings) after Matisse's death in 1989 could possibly gather the Miro counterparts. Because the Miro and Calder works are fragile, securing the loans was difficult. "There were lots of 'Noes,' and many phone calls," said Arne Glimcher, Marc's father. It became an amicable rivalry between the two galleries. Once Acquavella reported prematurely, as it turned out securing all the Miros, Pace scrambled even harder. It helps that while the galleries are friendly competitors, the two heirs who control the artists' estates are, like their grandfathers, purely friends. They met in 1995, when Mr. Punyet, who was studying at New York University, noticed a letter in a gallery at which he was interning that had arrived from Alexander S. C. Rower, Calder's grandson (who, like the artist, goes by the nickname Sandy). Mr. Punyet photocopied the return address and wrote to him. He didn't know that Mr. Rower had been writing over the years to Dolores Miro in Palma, with no reply. Mr. Rower called Mr. Punyet upon receiving the letter, they met for dinner that night, and they have been close pals ever since. They can empathize with each other's position as few can. "I have so much responsibility leaning on my shoulders," said Mr. Punyet, who is 48. He took on the burden after the deaths of his two older brothers. "I've got so much pressure texts to write and books to publish," he added. "My wife says, 'Joan, you have to pull the hand brake, or you're going to explode.'" Mr. Rower, who is 53, has been coping with such tension since he established the Calder Foundation in 1987. "I felt there was an urgent need to make an archive," he said. He observed that curators were drawing on just a few hundred Calder works when they assembled exhibitions, instead of considering the full 22,000 pieces his grandfather had produced. "It's pretty amazing what they've been able to source, knowing how difficult it is to obtain these loans," said Stephanie Barron, a curator who organized a Calder show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2013. "The Calder 'Constellations' are very approachable works. There's a whimsy to them. They balance, but they don't move. Some of them give the illusion of moving, but they don't. You feel that if you waited long enough, maybe they would." None of the "Constellations" at either gallery are for sale, although such noncommercial megashows have a way of boosting an artist's future prices. Marc Glimcher asserts that in addition to exploring artistic affinities, these two shows demonstrate that despite frequent reports of cutthroat competition in the art world, dealers can still collaborate. "In the old days, there was an amazing fraternity of the people who made their life in art," he said. And sometimes, when the stars align harmoniously, that spirit of camaraderie can return.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Once upon a time a little boy became a literary sensation. A man with a peculiar take on happily ever after, the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen wrote tales that have inspired operas, ballets, a couple of Disney movies. His oversize statue with oversize top hat and oversize cygnet permanently hogs a granite bench in Central Park. Now Andersen arrives at the Duke on 42nd Street, with the Ensemble for the Romantic Century's "Hans Christian Andersen: Tales Real and Imagined." Like all of the Ensemble's shows, "Tales" synthesizes dramatic narrative with chamber music, offering a portrait of an artist through image and sound and here at least, some fantastic puppetry. Eve Wolf's script complicates the sanitized Hans of Andersen's own autobiography and the imagined one of the 1952 Danny Kaye movie, best remembered for Frank Loesser's gentle, irrepressible score. But only up to a point. (It doesn't, like Martin McDonagh's viciously provocative "A Very Very Very Dark Matter," suggest that his stories were actually written by a congolese woman he kept in a cage.) "Hans Christian Andersen" sidesteps and streamlines a lot of what makes Andersen's life and work so discomforting, while also insisting, inflexibly, gawkily, that the life and the work are inextricable. We first meet Hans (Jimmy Ray Bennett) as a lily clutching corpse, though he quickly rises from his bier, saying, "Do not be afraid. I only appear to be dead." (Andersen, whose many phobias included premature burial, used to keep this note by his bed: "I only appear to be sleeping.") After a quick trot through "The Princess and the Pea" a story of another restless sleeper Hans reappears as a teenager, the son of a cobbler and a washerwoman, making his way from sleepy Odense to Copenhagen, begging a place at the Royal Danish Theater. Some of his writings impress the theater's director, Jonas Collin, who sends him to school and encourages his literary career. But as his star rises, his heart breaks. He develops a passion, entirely unrequited, for Edvard (the countertenor Randall Scotting, who alternates in the role with Daniel Moody), Collin's son. Unswervingly straight, Edvard was also such a snob that he wouldn't even condescend to address Andersen, his lifelong correspondent and eventual benefactor, in the familiar "Du" form.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
"Some friends may have thought we were crazy to buy together, but I think they really enjoy the house we've created," said Ben Dixon, right, with Shane Hogan at the house they share in Sag Harbor, N.Y. The two women, who lived in Manhattan, had traveled together frequently and very amiably, and were always looking for places to go on weekends. It was 2008, the stock market had recently crashed, with home prices tanking in tandem, so there were bargains to be had. And at the time, neither woman was in a relationship. "So we thought, 'What are we waiting for? We don't need to have our own families to do this,'" said Ms. D'Urso, who is now 50 and the real estate manager for a family business. For the last decade, she and Ms. Hembree, 52, a speech language pathologist, have jointly owned a Cape Cod style house on six acres in West Stockbridge, Mass., for which they paid 380,000. An Octoberfest, spearheaded by Ms. D'Urso, draws weekend guests to come choose pumpkins. Ms. Hembree's July 6 birthday is part of the Fourth of July celebration at the house. What they grandly and waggishly refer to as the homeowners' association annual meeting convenes in the spring; it basically involves cleaning out the garage. Boyfriends have come and gone, and Ms. D'Urso got married last year, but no one has come between the women and their home away from home. "When we were looking, my mother said, 'You're crazy. You don't go into business with a friend; you'll end up fighting,'" Ms. D'Urso recalled. "And she was so wrong. It's been pretty smooth sailing." There is an understandable appeal to buying a weekend or vacation house with friends (or family members). On a practical level, co owning may be the only feasible path to ownership. And even those who theoretically could go it alone may quickly discover that two checkbooks are better than one. More buying power means more square footage, more acreage and more amenities (a pool! a tennis court! a hot tub!). The arrangement is also a great way to reduce shame and anxiety when owners decide they would rather hunker down for the weekend at their primary residence instead of loading up the car and fighting traffic. "We know people who buy a weekend home and feel guilty over the fact that they don't use it enough," said Mr. D'Urso, 57, who is in the real estate business. "It makes more sense when you only have a share of the house." And how nice to have someone who will shoulder half the costs of pool cleaning, grass cutting and snow removal, share the hosting responsibilities at the annual Labor Day barbecue and take on the job of telling off difficult neighbors. Well, not always ideal. And not always a solution. "Homeownership is so emotional, and it's not easy even when you're sharing the house with your romantic partner," said Diane Saatchi, an associate broker at Saunders Associates, a real estate agency in the Hamptons. "I suspect that some friends who buy together think it's a good idea because they really like the idea of having someone at the house for company or they think they won't be at the house much, so it won't be a problem," continued Ms. Saatchi, who worked with two women in their 40s who were buying a weekend home in Montauk, N.Y. "They were both strong and opinionated and sort of cranky, and neither had lived with anyone for a long time," she said. "They didn't agree on paint colors for the house. They didn't agree about whether they should rent the house out to help cover their costs. They knew they had to have a pool for resale purposes, but they couldn't agree on what kind to have and where to put it. I could see it was going to go sideways very quickly." Five years on, the two women have finally agreed on one thing: selling the house. "But they can't agree on a price," Ms. Saatchi said. "When friends buy together, it's a risky thing," said Edward Burke, a lawyer in Southampton Village. "They come to my office, they're excited and they have stars in their eyes: They're going to be partners!" Mr. Burke usually offers a reality check: "We always tell them to have an exit strategy in case things don't work out." (More about this in a minute.) For eight years, Ben Dixon owned a house in upstate New York with his boyfriend and a friend. The end of Mr. Dixon's relationship also meant the end of the shared house. Even so, the arrangement was so successful that he was eager for a reprise. Two years ago, Mr. Dixon, now 41, a certified public accountant and associate real estate broker for Douglas Elliman, joined forces with his friend Shane Hogan, an insurance broker, to buy a four bedroom Cape Cod style house in Sag Harbor, N.Y. They paid 950,000 for the property, which included a pool, and spent 150,000 on renovations. "There's something comforting about having a co owner," Mr. Dixon said. "If I could afford exactly what I wanted and a manager to manage it all, I would do it on my own. But there's something nice about making the decisions with a friend." So far, he and Mr. Hogan have disagreed only about renting the property to help offset operating costs. "I tend to want to use the house more," Mr. Dixon said. "Shane wants to rent it out for more income." Their 10 page operating agreement comes in handy at times like this. Such a document, referred to by some co owners as a prenup, spells out the terms of engagement. For example: how bills are to be paid, how often friends are permitted to visit, how frequently one owner can have time at the house without the other owner. ("We can ask for 14 days up here alone, but none of those days can be on a holiday," Ms. Hembree said.) And of course, there are the what ifs: what if one party marries, has children, moves, has a reversal of fortune or just wants out. But not every possible sticking point can be dealt with on paper and notarized. Some co owners rely on their long friendship to come more casually to an amicable accord. When, for example, the three owners of the Cold Spring house are contemplating a furniture purchase, "our approach is that two of us have to agree and the third one can't vehemently disagree, or we don't buy it," Ms. Jones said. A decade ago, when David Waymire, Roger Martin and the men's wives bought a condo at Boyne Mountain, a ski area in northern Michigan, scheduling was a problem. "But now we have a rhythm where there is a sit down early in the year, when we work out the weekends we each want to be there," said Mr. Waymire, who owns a public relations firm in Lansing, Mich., with Mr. Martin. "We've been close friends for 30 years, so we know how to deal with conflict." And they know how to deal with code. "There are some weekends that we'll be there together," Mr. Waymire said. "But sometimes Roger will mention something about a family weekend, and I know he means, 'You can come if you want, but I'd rather you didn't.'" There was no operating agreement, no document of any kind when, in 1997, Beth Carter and her then husband bought a weekend home with Ms. Carter's parents almost 90 minutes from their primary residence in Fairfield, Conn. The family had long owned a vacation getaway in Groton Long Point, Conn. But as Ms. Carter and her brother grew up, married and had children of their own, that house couldn't handle the population explosion. Nearby, there was a property on the market that Ms. Carter's mother had always coveted. It had five bedrooms and another room for any overnight spillover, and was near the water. "My parents couldn't afford the house if we didn't share in the expense, and initially I thought it would be wonderful," said Ms. Carter, 56, an executive recruiter and professional coach. "The grandkids could all be together." But her parents quickly began issuing diktats about schedules and everything else, she said: "They acted as if it were their house." Ms. Carter's mother wanted to name the house Fulfilled Dream. Ms. Carter wanted to call it something that can't be printed in a family newspaper. There were arguments about chopping down a tree, about the acquisition of a sofa, about the advisability of getting a television, about window washing, about cigarette smoke wafting in from the porch. Particularly aggravating, Ms. Carter recalled, were the naps her mother took without fail every afternoon from 1:00 to 3:00, forcing the other residents into silence and pantomime. "It was a nightmare," Ms. Carter said. When, after four years of co ownership, flood insurance rates skyrocketed, both parties agreed to sell, "and we did make money," said Ms. Carter, who used part of the proceeds to buy her own small weekend home. There is a lot to be said for doing some version of a trial run. Mr. Hogan and Mr. Dixon, for example, rented a house together first. For four years before the Cold Spring purchase, Mr. D'Urso and Ms. Brolin shared ownership of an old Porsche 911 with Ms. Jones and her boyfriend. "It worked out perfectly," Mr. D'Urso said. "That, in concert with how well things had gone with my sister buying with her friend, made us think, 'Why not look for a house together?'" They settled on a Sears catalog home from 1923: A selling point was the absence of a master bedroom one less thing to adjudicate. The three partners thought they would alternate use of the house as they had done with the car, "but it didn't shape up as we thought," Mr. D'Urso said. "What we discovered is that we really liked the idea of spending time at the house together." And, added Ms. Jones, who works in the media business, it was an automatic play date for her daughter, Sophie, and Mr. D'Urso and Ms. Brolin's son, Ryan. To encourage continued team spirit, a stretch in February was marked on the calendar as partners' week, a time to gather at the property and frolic together. "But it never happened," Mr. Paget said. "People had other vacation homes, and life just got in the way. It was a disappointment then, and it still is." Of course, many co owners look forward to as much "me time" as possible. "Ben and I are very close, but there is a lot of stress," Mr. Hogan said of his Sag Harbor housemate, Mr. Dixon. "I could lose my best friend over too much together time. He's not my boyfriend or my life partner. He wants to have kids one day, and I think it's wonderful, but do I want to have screaming kids around?" It helps that they are both "very reasonable" people, Mr. Hogan added: "Nothing has come up yet that has been a problem. You just have to make sure you're buying with the right person." Ms. D'Urso was sure when she bought. She's still sure. But her husband has been making noises about buying a place at the beach. "I tell him, 'We can't have two houses,'" she said. "'And we're certainly not getting rid of the Berkshires house.'" For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
MILAN Milan Day 3 revs into gear promptly at 9.30 a.m. with Diesel Black Gold, followed by a triumvirate of catwalk shows from the secondary lines of big gun Italian brands: Emporio Armani, followed by Sportmax and, lastly, Giamba, the little sister of the Giambattista Valli house. No need or time for that matter to stop for lunch. Etro, at 2 p.m., is beloved by nomadic fashion folk for serving up the best pre show snacks in the business. Next, it's the king of color, Marco de Vincenzo (a man who knows his way around a rainbow). Then, Tod's at 5 p.m., where we have been promised a special live performance from that Kanye West favorite, Vanessa Beecroft. Who knows what lies in store? Thankfully, there will be a three hour break before Versace at 8 p.m., time for an Aperol spritz and snacks before Donatella dishes out her usual dose of barely there va va voom on the starriest supermodels of the moment.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
It Followed Me Home. Can I Keep It? SAN FRANCISCO In April 2010, while reporting on the California Mille, a vintage car rally, I spent a memorable day riding in three Alfa Romeos: a 1928 6C 1500 Sport Zagato, a 1959 Giulietta Sprint Veloce and an innocent looking 1967 Giulia Super sedan. The 6C 1500, driven by the event's founder, Martin Swig, was stunning, an absolute museum piece. But I was smitten by the Giulietta and Giulia, whose suspensions were exquisitely supple on rough pavement, yet unflappable in the curves, and whose engines, spinning repeatedly to the redline, sang in voices at once angelic and satanic. The effect was intoxicating, the hook firmly set. That evening, I vowed that if the stars ever aligned, the next car in my garage would be an Alfa Romeo. There was just one stipulation: my budget was a strict 15,000. I turned first to the Giulietta Sprint, a sleek Bertone bodied coupe introduced at the 1954 Turin auto show. In two years of searching, I found several Sprints under 15,000, all needing enough restoration to obliterate my cash hoard three times over. I was dismayed but not surprised because the Sprint is one of the most coveted Alfas. Just as my enthusiasm started to wane, a twinkle of hope arrived. In January, a friend lent me the "Illustrated Alfa Romeo Buyer's Guide," which included a chapter on several models Alfa Romeo never exported to the United States, among them the Giulia 1300 TI. Inexpensive, and taxed at a low rate because of their small engines, the author wrote, the 1300 Giulias "opened the possibility of Alfa ownership to many who could otherwise not have afforded it." The passage resonated, as did the car's design. Its gracefully boxy shape conveyed utility and style, while subtle creases in the metal above the headlamps suggested raised eyebrows, as if to hint that its 1,290 cc engine, like that of the Giulietta Sprint, was a high revving twin cam. My wife, Belinda, and I were planning to visit Rome in July, so on the off chance that a 1300 TI was hiding out there, I started poking through Italian Web sites. In June, I found an ad for a 1969 1300 TI in the Rome postal code and e mailed the lister. Hours later, I got a reply from Alberto Viglione, an intermediario, or middleman, who described the Giulia, which had recently undergone a complete overhaul, as "bellissima." Its owner, he said, was "meticuloso" and had a diverse collection of vintage cars. Should the Giulia still be available in July, a meeting could be arranged. A month later, my wife and I met Mr. Viglione at the gate of an apartment complex north of Rome's historic center. After an exchange of pleasantries in a makeshift blend of English and Italian, Mr. Viglione said, sotto voce, that the owner was the president of Registro Italiano Alfa Romeo, Italy's official Alfa Romeo registry. As my head started spinning, Mr. Viglione led us into a courtyard and introduced us to Stefano d'Amico. Well dressed and superbly tanned, Mr. d'Amico emerged from a garage that housed a gorgeous silver 1963 Alfa 2600 Touring Superleggera. After listening to me explain the origins of my hunt for a 1300 TI, Mr. d'Amico pointed to a pale gray sedan parked nearby. He had bought it only recently, to drive in a rally organized by the registry to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Giulia's 1962 debut. The car had just two previous owners and had spent its entire life in Florence. Still wearing its original paint, the body was flawless, without a rust bubble in sight. Under the hood, the patina suggested a car that had been well used and well maintained. Mr. d'Amico suggested a drive. As he feathered the car through the neighborhood, I struggled to remain objective, noting that the transmission, and particularly Alfa's famously weak second gear synchronizers, were in good working order. "How much gas does it drink?" I asked. "It's perfect," he insisted, as he steered toward an on ramp for Via Flaminia. "You only need to put gas, water and oil. Nothing else." Merging onto the highway, Mr. d'Amico explained that it paralleled an ancient road of the same name built in the third century B.C., leading from Rome to Ariminum on the Adriatic coast. He then turned his attention to Mr. Viglione. The two spoke excitedly, after which Mr. Viglione said, "And now Stefano is going to give you a present a very big present." Mr. d'Amico took the next exit and pulled into the parking lot of an auto mall. Stepping out of the Giulia, he and Mr. Viglione motioned for us to follow. Beside the parking lot was a trench, spanned by a footbridge with an iron railing. Mr. d'Amico pointed into the trench, at the bottom of which lay a carefully excavated stretch of road fashioned from large cobbles. "That," Mr. d'Amico said, "is the original Via Flaminia." Gesturing to a pattern of ruts worn in the stones, he explained that they had been gouged by chariot wheels. Peering at the ancient road, and through 2,000 years of history, it struck me that those wonderful Alfa Romeo suspensions may owe their suppleness to the fact that many Italian streets are still paved with hand laid cobbles. Returning to the car, Mr. d'Amico drove from the auto mall to a tree lined avenue. We switched seats and I set off. Even loaded with four adults, the Giulia felt ineffably light, its steering effortless and precise. Mr. d'Amico directed me to upshift whenever the tachometer approached 3,000 r.p.m. Easing back onto Via Flaminia, I listened to the barely perceptible whir of the 4 cylinder engine, wondering what beastliness it might produce in the high 5,000s. The whole test drive had a certain surreal quality, but there were no untoward surprises. As Mr. d'Amico promised, the Giulia was "perfetto," and afterward there was little to discuss. I'd think it over and give him an answer soon. "Take your time," he said, "I'm going to Sicily for 20 days. I'm in no hurry." Back at our holiday rental, I requested quotes from several shipping companies in the United States. While the bids trickled in, a colleague suggested checking Italian magazines for local transporters. Wandering later that week near the Ghetto, the city's Jewish quarter, I asked a news vendor what he had in the way of vintage car magazines. "Only this," the vendor said, handing over his last copy of Automobilismo d'Epoca. Leafing through it at a nearby cafe, I caught my breath as I came upon a photograph of 10 Giulia sedans in a sun beaten piazza. The accompanying article described the Giulia's 50th anniversary rally and included a quote from Stefano d'Amico. At that point I understood that my fate, and that of a certain gray sedan, were inextricably connected. It was no longer a matter of whether the car would follow me back to the States, but how. Haggling was minimal: I made an offer; Mr. Viglione suggested raising it; Mr. d'Amico accepted. After returning home, I settled on the Ted L. Rausch Company of Burlingame, Calif., to ship the car. Of the companies I queried, Rausch's quote was the lowest and would get the Alfa to San Francisco on budget. Price wasn't the sole factor in my choice. When I asked Helmut Boeck, the vice president, about the company's experience with vintage cars, he said that it handled them regularly, adding out of the blue that it had only recently shipped a car from Italy for Martin Swig. It seemed a fitting footnote, as Mr. Swig, who died in July, had in no small way instigated this whole expedition. On Sept. 23, the Giulia sailed from the port of Civitavecchia aboard the M.S.C. Octavia. On Oct. 26, the ship's hulking silhouette emerged above a sparkling horizon due west of the Golden Gate. Days later, in a San Francisco warehouse, I looked on with disbelief as the doors of a weathered yellow shipping container swung open to reveal the little gray car within. The Giulia was eased out of the container, its hood was lifted and a battery cable was reconnected. Its Solex carburetor mixed its first breath of California air with a bit of Italian gasoline, and with a few pulses of the starter the engine woke with a soft growl. Like much of the summer's adventure, it felt strangely like a dream. If, however, it proves to be one, I have no intention of waking up.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
A Ophiocordyceps species of fungi that has exploded from the body of a carpenter ant in Japan.Credit...Joao Araujo After This Fungus Turns Ants Into Zombies, Their Bodies Explode A Ophiocordyceps species of fungi that has exploded from the body of a carpenter ant in Japan. Evolutionary biologists retrace the history of life in all its wondrous forms. Some search for the origin of our species. Others hunt for the origin of birds. On Thursday, a team of researchers reported an important new insight into the origin of zombies in this case, ants zombified by a fungus. Here's how it works: Sometimes an ant, marching about its business outdoors, will step on a fungal spore. It sticks to the ant's body and slips a fungal cell inside. The fungus, called Ophiocordyceps, feeds on the ant from within and multiplies into new cells. But you wouldn't know it, because the ant goes on with its life, foraging for food to bring back to the nest. All the while, the fungus keeps growing until it makes up nearly half of the ant's body mass. When Ophiocordyceps is finished feeding on its host, the fungal cells gather inside the ant's body. They form a mat and push needlelike projections into the ant's muscle cells. The fungal cells also send chemical signals to the ant's brain, causing the host to do something strange. The ant departs its nest and climbs a nearby plant. In the tropics, where many species of Ophiocordyceps live, the fungus drives ants upward, to a leaf above the ground. The ant bites down, its jaws locking as it dies. The fungus sends out sticky threads that glue the corpse to the leaf. And now it is ready to take the next step in its life cycle: Out of the ant's head bursts a giant stalk, which showers spores onto the ant trails below. "The ants are walking over a minefield," said David Hughes, an expert on Ophiocordyceps at Pennsylvania State University. Naturalists published their first accounts of Ophiocordyceps well over a century ago. But only in recent years have researchers probed how these fungi go about zombifying ants. As it turns out, it is an exquisitely intricate process that leaves researchers with many questions yet to answer. Scientists don't even know what chemical gets into the host's brain and causes it to leave the nest and climb. "We still haven't found the smoking gun," said Dr. Hughes. In 2010, Dr. Hughes and his colleagues identified a 48 million year old fossil of a zombie ant with a death grip on a leaf. The fossil demonstrated that zombifying fungi have been around a long time. But it didn't offer any hints as to how the fungus evolved from its ordinary ancestors. "You think, where the hell did that come from?" said Dr. Hughes. He suspected that an answer might be lurking in the diversity of living fungi. But before the age of DNA sequencing, researchers struggled to classify Ophiocordyceps. In 2013, one of Dr. Hughes's graduate students, Joao Araujo, began sequencing the DNA of fungi in scientific collections. He also went on expeditions of his own, turning over leaves to find zombified ants. If they were a species he hadn't seen before, Dr. Araujo photographed them and pried off the tiny bodies to bring home. What was once thought to be one species of fungus now turns out to be at least 28. Each zombifies a different species of ants or attacks other insects. These species all belong to a much bigger group of fungi. Many of their relatives feed on dead plants, while some infect insects mostly a group called hemipterans, which includes aphids and cicadas. Dr. Araujo, now a research fellow at University of the Ryukyus in Japan, analyzed the DNA of more than 600 of these related species. Comparing the genetic sequences, he was able to draw a fungal family tree. The tree revealed that all Ophiocordyceps species descend from a common ancestor. But that ancestor did not infect a hemipteran. Instead, the scientists concluded, it started out infecting the larvae of beetles. The beetles infected by the fungi live in rotting logs. When the beetle eggs hatch, the larvae crawl around alone inside the log, chewing on wood. Charissa de Bekker, an integrative biologist at the University of Central Florida who was not involved in the new study, said it was intriguing that Ophiocordyceps's ancestors choose such a host. If a beetle larva makes contact with a spore, it invades the insect's body and feeds on its muscle. The beetle dies without any zombie drama. The fungus grows its stalk and spreads spores around the dead body. Other larvae crawling inside the log are then infected. Dr. Araujo and Dr. Hughes hypothesize that millions of years ago, the fungi sometimes got picked up by ants that also lived in logs. In their new ant hosts, the fungus already had the ability to feed on muscles, grow stalks and spread . But ants also presented the parasite with a major challenge. Unlike solitary beetles, ants live in crowded nests. Diseases can wipe out an entire colony, so the ants ruthlessly attack any individuals that show signs of sickness. "They kick them out of the nest, or they kill them and rip them apart," said Dr. Araujo. As a result, Ophiocordyceps could not spread the way it had in beetles, simply by killing its host and sending out spores. Natural selection must have favored fungi that could keep ant hosts healthy as they were parasitized. When the fungi were ready to leave the ant's body, they had to get it out of the nest alive. It became necessary to zombify the ant, to make it do a few things it wouldn't ordinarily do. By climbing a nearby plant, the dying ants could infect new ants, too. Ophiocordyceps "had to develop a way to make the host leave the nest, but not so far, because they still had to shoot spores and infect new hosts," said Dr. Araujo. The fungi's transition to ants set off an evolutionary explosion. Once Ophiocordyceps had evolved to live in one species of ant, it began hopping to new species. Dr. de Bekker said that knowing the evolution of Ophiocordyceps may help scientists figure out which genes various species use to transform ants into zombies. "The behavior is very complex, so it's not going to be one gene that's responsible," she said. "This study is helping us know what comparison we should be making." The new study also indicates that the fungus jumped into ants in the tropics. Over the course of millions of years, it then spread toward the poles. As the fungus moved to new homes, it faced new challenges. Zombie ants couldn't bite down on leaves anymore, because they fell off in the fall, before the fungi were done spreading to new hosts. Infected ants began hugging twigs instead. Dr. Hughes predicts the first zombified ants lived in decaying wood in small colonies, and the infected ants barely got out of their nests before dying. It's even possible that some fungi belonging to this early lineage are still manipulating ants today. Dr. Hughes and Dr. Araujo suspect there are hundreds of other species of Ophiocordyceps still to be discovered. "Every time I go to the same reserve, I still find new species," said Dr. Araujo. "I think describing new species will be a never ending job for generations."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
The Fyre music festival, planned for last spring, was to be an experience of unparalleled opulence. Held on a private island in the Bahamas, the festival would feature luxury suites, gourmet meals and a series of musical performances headlined by Blink 182. But instead of the extravagant odyssey they had been promised, hundreds of concertgoers were greeted by a disorganized mess. Soggy tents. Cheese sandwiches in foam containers. And not only did Blink 182 never perform; the band's equipment ended up stuck in customs. On Tuesday afternoon the festival's main organizer, William McFarland, pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud related to the festival and to his media company that prosecutors said had cost investors 26 million in losses. He told the judge, Naomi Reice Buchwald, of Federal District Court in Manhattan, that he had begun organizing the festival with good intentions but had "greatly underestimated the resources" it would take.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Merrill Ashley was in her kitchen cooking when she found herself rocking her hips, ever so gently, from side to side. This was in 2001, after the first of two hip replacements. "I burst into tears," she said in an interview at her apartment a few blocks north of Lincoln Center, where she had danced with New York City Ballet for 30 years. "I hadn't been able to do that for years. It was like being reborn." When Ms. Ashley retired from City Ballet as a principal in 1997 at the age of 46, she faced the problem nearly all ballet dancers face: How would she remake her life? That issue is addressed in "The Dance Goodbye," a documentary by Ron Steinman and Eileen Douglas that will be shown this weekend as part of the 44th Dance on Camera Festival. After the screening on Sunday, Ms. Ashley will participate in a discussion about the film and her career. Another celebrated ballerina, Natalia Makarova, will appear on Saturday after a showing of "Body and Soul," the first segment of the four part documentary "Ballerina" (1987). But the festival, presented by Dance Films Association and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, isn't devoted only to ballet. "The Flight Fantastic" explores the world of trapeze and the famed Flying Gaonas, while "Our Last Tango" spotlights the tango dancers Maria Nieves Rego and Juan Carlos Copes. The festival concludes Tuesday with Jack Walsh's "Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer." Ms. Ashley, a ballerina of sparkling musicality and crystalline technique attributes showcased in "Ballo della Regina," a ballet George Balanchine created for her in 1978 held on as a dancer as long as she could but battled injuries for decades. "My whole life was taking care of my body," she said. "The Dance Goodbye" follows Ms. Ashley, now 65, for roughly 10 years after her farewell performance as she deals with innumerable injuries, including one from 1974 that severely affected her left bunion, which would dislocate when she went up and down on point. "My hip surgeon looks at my bunions and says, 'Can't we just cut those off?'" she said. "The foot guy says that's a Pandora's box, and he doesn't want to touch it. And if he's saying that, I think I'd better listen. Surgeons always want to do something, and when they're saying 'No'? Oh my lord. You're in trouble." Her ankles are, in her word, "terrible." And as for her back? "I can't remember how many herniated discs I've got," she said, scrunching her face. "Fourteen? It's a lot." After Ms. Ashley's retirement and a severe ankle sprain, she discovered Igor N. Burdenko, who specializes in rehabilitation in the water. "I put him on the level of Balanchine," she said. "I learned all these exercises in the pool and on land, and that's what I've continued to do." As Ms. Ashley articulate, strong willed, sensitive spoke about her transition away from dancing, she observed how traumatic it is to step away from the stage. "Dance lovers don't really recognize that," she said, acknowledging that she's in a better position than most. "But if you're a corps de ballet dancer," she said, "what are you going to do? How are you going to earn a living? You're in a fantastic but insular world, and to find something else gratifying and financially viable to do with your life is really difficult and scary. You feel like you were accomplished, and now you're nothing." Ms. Ashley spent several years as the teaching associate at City Ballet, where she taught company class and coached dancers until 2008. After that, on a freelance basis from 2009 to 2012, she served as a guest teacher. One takeaway: Teaching company class wasn't for her. "I knew what I wanted to work on, but to find combinations that I liked and thought would be palatable," she said, with a pause. "Some were not so palatable." Her classes, in other words, were rigorous. In her day, she said, "If Balanchine gave it, we did it." But she wasn't Balanchine. "They didn't want to work hard," she added, "and I didn't want to just give them pablum." She left City Ballet, in part, because of family issues. But Ms. Ashley said she also felt she would make a bigger contribution at other companies, coaching principals in Balanchine ballets. She's found her niche. Recently, she worked with dancers at Miami City Ballet in "La Source," and she also has formed steady relationships with the Houston Ballet and Semperoper Ballett in Dresden. "To me, that's what was so fun and so gratifying," she said of finding the nuances of a role. "To take something and polish every little roughness and try and understand the mood and try and solve that technical problem and to bring something of your own personality to it." As blunt as Ms. Ashley can be, she said that giving a dancer criticism could be difficult. At the same time, she added, "it doesn't do any good to pat somebody on the back and say, 'good job' when it wasn't a good job." Finding the right tone can be hard, too. "I don't want to be hurtful," she said. "I know that when my husband would correct me, he would tell me some pretty devastating things, but he always managed to say it in a way that I found acceptable." Her husband, Kibbe Fitzpatrick, formerly a simultaneous interpreter at the United Nations, was a fan of City Ballet and started attending performances in 1972 but knew little about the intricacies of ballet technique. He would tell her things like: "'You look awkward there. You have this frozen expression on your face. Why are you doing that?'" She half laughed and moaned. "He wanted me to look good," she said. "He wanted to sit back and enjoy me, and he wasn't. So I feel when I'm saying critical things to people, I'm trying to make it seem like it's coming from love. I admire them, I appreciate their skills, but this needs fixing."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
National crises are often identified by the media innovations they engender. The Persian Gulf war of 1991 was the turning point for CNN, the 10 year old cable news network that broadcast live the first United States bombs falling in Baghdad. The 2016 presidential contest will forever be remembered as the election when Twitter and other social media platforms became an irresistible force in national politics. Our current public health crisis may well become known as the Skype pandemic. The outbreak of webcam interviews on Skype and FaceTime, as well as other web conferencing apps like Zoom and Cisco Webex has nearly matched the spread of the coronavirus itself. With social distancing a necessity, familiar talking heads political pundits, members of Congress, New York Times reporters who used to show up in well lit studios, dressed in presentable office attire and dabbed with a little makeup, now appear as fuzzy, low resolution images transmitted from their home laptops and iPads. It is, to be sure, a triumph of journalistic improvisation: the media's creative, seat of the pants response to a national crisis that has thrown out all the rules. Yet if the medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan told us, it's time to ask whether all this rough and ready video journalism is affecting how we're viewing the current pandemic. One thing, at least, is hard to dispute: It almost surely contributed to the bump in President Trump's approval ratings late last month. Despite his early dithering on the looming pandemic, Mr. Trump quickly embraced the media advantages offered him. He appears each afternoon at a press briefing in front of live TV cameras well lit, in focus, hair coifed and complexion bronzed to its usual otherworldly glow. (Are his makeup people wearing masks?) He looks, at least superficially, confident, in control, presidential. He gets to interrupt reporters and talk over questions he doesn't like. His TV ratings, as he likes to brag, are excellent. Joe Biden, by contrast, has to sit in a makeshift studio in his Delaware basement, doing remote interviews marred, at least early on, by an annoying time delay that made the presumptive Democratic nominee seem even more tentative and fumbling than usual. Some of the technical problems have been resolved (though not Mr. Biden's meandering responses to questions he should have down pat by now). Still, he's stuck in a medium that makes him look less like a commanding chief executive than a homebound grandpa. Which, of course, he is. Yet Mr. Biden's sessions look polished next to some of the scrappy webcam interviews that are now ubiquitous on cable news: balky, lo fi video; tinny, distorted, often out of sync sound; washed out faces that can make distinguished scientists look like extras in "The Blair Witch Project." And then there's that familiar bane of satellite TV interviews, a time delay that can turn the most sobering conversation into an awkward, overly polite Alphonse and Gaston comedy routine. The profusion of webcam interviews has had a democratizing effect that cuts both ways. On the one hand, the homemade, catch as catch can interviews with doctors, nurses and E.M.S. workers on the front lines help to convey a sense of urgency; it's the sort of gritty video we usually get only from reporters in war zones or families trying to ride out Category 5 hurricanes. On the other hand, in a more subliminal way, the flattening of the journalistic curve may be muddling the message. When every medical expert looks no different from your garden variety conspiracy theorist on the internet (or your Aunt Martha grappling with a FaceTime video call), the voices of authority become a little harder to distinguish, and to heed. Yet to understand how the webcam is affecting our response to the pandemic, it helps to go back to Mr. McLuhan that brilliant, sometimes confounding guru of the media age and his famous distinction between "hot" and "cool" media. A "hot" medium (like movies or radio) delivers a high definition sensory experience, allowing the user to simply sit back and absorb. Television, by contrast, is a "cool" medium; it delivers a comparatively low definition image, and so requires more participation by the viewer to fill in the missing data and complete the picture. It would be interesting to see how Mr. McLuhan would account for the changes in technology since the early 1960s, when he published his seminal work, "Understanding Media." The 19 inch, black and white Sylvania has been replaced by a 58 inch, high definition TV, which now delivers images not that far removed from what we see in the movie theater. The "cool" TV medium has heated up considerably and been succeeded by an even cooler medium, the internet. Yet the Skypeing of TV news is, in terms of the sensory experience, a reversion to the television of an earlier era the days of rabbit ears and fuzzy images, wavering signals and reaching for the vertical hold. And the upshot may be something like what Mr. McLuhan envisioned. "TV will not work as background," he asserted. "It engages you. You have to be with it." We're engaged now, of course, because we're stuck in the house and inundated with scary images of what it means to go outside. But those crude, herky jerky webcam interviews may be having a greater impact simply because they force the viewer to do some work: to complete the image, to decipher the audio, to participate in a way we don't with the normal diet of slick cable news interviews and round tables. The webcam interview isn't only affecting the message; it is demystifying the messenger. Familiar talking heads, forced out of the studio, now sit in their living room or home office (bookshelves usually behind them), blurrier and sounding like they're inside an oil drum but more relatable, like well informed neighbors.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Jerry and the gang spent much of their time at Tom's, known on the show as Monk's Cafe. It's no secret that "Seinfeld," arguably the most "New York" comedy in recent television history, was actually filmed in Los Angeles. But that hasn't stopped tourists from flocking to the Upper West Side of Manhattan to see if they really can order a "big salad" from the "Seinfeld restaurant." With the show making its streaming television debut on Hulu this month, New York food spots like Tom's Restaurant that have become synonymous with "Seinfeld" could see an increase in business from nostalgic fans. Yes, a lot has changed in the 17 years since the series finale was broadcast, but "Seinfeld" reality seekers can still get their fix. Despite sharing nothing more than a neon sign with Monk's Cafe, the gang's favorite hangout from the show, Tom's arguably has become the most recognizable "Seinfeld" related tourist attraction in the city. Mr. Seinfeld and Jason Alexander, who played George Costanza, even revived their old roles there for an episode of Mr. Seinfeld's web series "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee." The food at Monk's was usually secondary to whatever the group was plotting over coffee, and at Tom's, the food, which is no frills diner fare served in large portions, takes a back seat to the "Seinfeld" mythology. Fans will get a kick out of the signed photos and show memorabilia that grace the walls of this Greek American diner and, yes, you can order a big salad. At 17 with grilled chicken, it was big and more than edible, but the food is not necessarily the draw. That said, Tom's is comfortable with friendly enough service and old school charm; it's hard to argue with a bacon cheeseburger deluxe for 9.25, and you will never go wrong with the milkshakes ( 5.75). But, really, cash only? What is the deal? Of the many questions raised on the show during its nine seasons, few captured the essence of the show more than this one: Is soup a meal? It will be debated until the end of time, but it all started at Mendy's, when Kenny Bania, who was owed a free meal by Jerry, opted for soup. "I'll save that meal for another time," Bania says, to a disgusted Jerry. Mendy's is a kosher delicatessen with five locations in the city. The one portrayed on the show, on West 70th Street, is no longer open, so I went to the flagship location on 34th Street, hoping to try what Bania said was the "best swordfish in the city" (I later learned that swordfish is not considered kosher, though it used to be, it's kind of complicated). That was not an option, so I went with the broiled Norwegian salmon ( 24.95), which came with a side of mashed potatoes and grilled veggies. Meh. You're better off ordering half a pastrami sandwich and the split pea soup ( 15.95) to go, especially if you want to avoid the mandatory 18 percent tip for dining in. "Soup and sandwich, that is a meal!" Jerry would later proclaim. I couldn't help but feel a little nervous as I approached the small soup stand on 55th Street. It's not as if I was expecting a confrontation with Al Yeganeh, the man who inspired the gruff character on the show, but I couldn't rule it out. As it turns out, Mr. Yeganeh was not there, and I doubt he spends much time at his original restaurant, which opened in 1984 as Soup Kitchen International and reopened in 2010 as the Original Soup Man. It is now a franchise, with several locations. In his absence I received fast and friendly service, and a lunch that lived up to lofty expectations. All soups, like the excellent and chunky lobster bisque ( 10 for a large), come with a fresh slice of bread, an apple and a piece of chocolate. I think that qualifies as a meal. But if you think you'll still be hungry, add a passable lobster roll for 10. The most frequented restaurant in Jerry's neighborhood was La Boite en Bois. You may remember George's date Karen having a very animated reaction to a risotto dish there. La Boite en Bois is a tiny French restaurant offering traditional bistro fare. Its proximity to Lincoln Center makes it a popular pre theater stop, so get there right when it opens if you're brunching on the weekend. There was no risotto to be found, but the goat cheese salad ( 12.50) was a good enough start, although the lobster bisque ( 9.50) had nothing on Mr. Yeganeh's. For an entree, anyone who shares George's love of cheese will be satisfied with the croque monsieur ( 15).	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Each week, Kevin Roose, technology columnist at The New York Times, discusses developments in the tech industry, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two. Want this newsletter in your inbox? Sign up here. Well, friends, we did it again. We got through another week of wall to wall news about Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg's two day marathon of congressional testimony is over, and if you had better things to do than spend 10 hours watching a group of lawmakers ask an internet billionaire how computers work, you can catch up on our coverage here. (Or here, here, here, here, here, here, here or here. We've been busy.) But as always, there is more to tech news than Facebook. So here are a few other stories that might have escaped your attention this week. Reddit is one of the more interesting tech companies out there. I've written about how it has battled (somewhat successfully) to keep toxic behavior off its site, by shutting down subforums devoted to racist and hateful topics. But some troubles remain. This week, Reddit's chief executive, Steve Huffman, ended up facing questions after revealing that the company had identified 944 Reddit accounts that it suspected of links to Russia's Internet Research Agency. As part of the announcement, Mr. Huffman ended up causing an even bigger stir by answering a question from a user about whether open racism was prohibited on the site under Reddit's rules. "It's not," Mr. Huffman replied, explaining that the company's policies applied to users' behavior, not their beliefs. After users objected, Mr. Huffman had to add a clarification: "To be perfectly clear, while racism itself isn't against the rules, it's not welcome here." In Uber's continuing quest to dominate all non ambulatory modes of transportation, it reached another milestone this week with the acquisition of Jump Bikes, an electric bike sharing start up. The deal, reported by TechCrunch to be for more than 100 million, is the first acquisition made by Dara Khosrowshahi as the company's chief executive, and it follows a successful bike sharing test in San Francisco. Notably, as my colleague Daisuke Wakabayashi pointed out, the Jump Bikes acquisition will be Uber's first experience with actual inventory. In its core car hailing business, drivers own their cars and connect them to Uber's network, but Uber will own the bikes itself, and will need to learn how to manage its own fleet of two wheeled vehicles. My colleague Raymond Zhong had a great story this week about Bytedance, a Chinese internet start up that has "mastered the art of keeping people glued to their smartphones." Bytedance, which operates a collection of apps that connect users with news, viral videos and other forms of entertainment, drew the anger of Chinese internet censors. The agency ordered Bytedance to shut down Neihan Duanzi, an app for silly videos and joke memes that "caused strong dislike among internet users," according to China's State Administration of Radio and Television. At least two other Bytedance apps have also disappeared from app stores. It's a fascinating look at the opposition faced by Chinese tech start ups, which makes Facebook's grilling before Congress look positively mild. And it's a glimpse of the kind of dilemmas that could await Facebook if it ever does fulfill Mr. Zuckerberg's long held goal of getting into China. In devastating news for fans of catchy summer jams, the music video for "Despacito," the Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee song, briefly disappeared from YouTube on Tuesday after hackers broke into the account of Vevo, the company that hosted the video. Other Vevo videos, by artists like Selena Gomez, Drake, Katy Perry and Taylor Swift, were also defaced by hackers calling themselves Prosox and Kuroi'sh. Vevo told The Verge that it was investigating the source of the security breach. Meanwhile, the "Despacito" video, YouTube's all time most viewed video, has been restored. Whew. Kevin Roose writes a column called The Shift and is a writer at large for The New York Times Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter here: kevinroose.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
An installation view of the exhibition "Bodys Isek Kingelez: City Dreams," at the Museum of Modern Art through Jan. 1. This holiday season you may have more time than you usually do to check out art exhibitions. The problem is, so does everybody else. The flood of tourists, visiting family members, school groups and temporarily freed office workers means that a simple visit to a museum can be more of a production than it would normally be. Because navigating long lines and crowded galleries can be quite daunting, it's essential to plan ahead. Early birds will want to make sure they are in line when the doors open at the big four the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The lines will be long, but they move fast and the people in them will soon disperse throughout the museum. On the other hand, it's O.K. to show up late, especially after 3 p.m. With lines regularly forming at the Metropolitan Museum of Art before it opens at 10 a.m., it is advised that visitors dress warmly during the holiday season if they plan to arrive early. If you're willing to forgo a trip up the Met's famous stairs, the lines at the street level entrance at 81st street tend to be shorter. The holidays can be stressful, so if the crowds at the more popular exhibitions and galleries spike your anxiety, the museum recommends visiting the quiet spaces that can be found even during the holiday rush, including the Studiolo from the Ducal Palace in Gubbio (gallery 501), the Buddhist sculpture rooms in the Asian art section (galleries 206, 223 231, 234 240) and the tranquil galleries in the back of the Robert Lehman Wing (galleries 950 960). Remember that the big museums have extended hours on Fridays, Saturdays or both. Most museums are open on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, but closed on Christmas Day and New Year's Day. (It's always good to check websites to be sure, especially for commercial art galleries, many of which close for extended periods during the holiday season.) Here's a small sampling of some of the exhibitions we've raved in recent months. 'BOOM FOR REAL: THE LATE TEENAGE YEARS OF JEAN MICHEL BASQUIAT' As a veteran of the downtown scene in 1980s New York, Sara Driver is well positioned to tell the story of Michel Basquiat in way that hasn't been done before. Here she focuses on Basquiat's life before he was an art world superstar and bohemian idol, when street art and the mundane pressures of everyday life were his focus. Using archival footage and interviews with some of those who knew him, Ms. Driver endeavors to excavate the man from the myth. Available on streaming services, including YouTube and Hulu.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
PHILADELPHIA In a second floor gallery at the Fabric Workshop and Museum here on Saturday, a woman used a dish towel printed with an image of the Confederate battle flag to clean a layer of dust from a section of the Declaration of Independence inscribed on the concrete floor. The artist Sonya Clark repeatedly dipped the cloth in a metal bucket of water before using slow, circular motions to wash away the dust, revealing 111 words from the Declaration's preamble, beginning: "We hold these truths to be self evident." The silent, 20 minute performance accompanied the opening of Ms. Clark's exhibition titled "Monumental Cloth, the Flag We Should Know," in which she highlights the little known Confederate Flag of Truce, a dish towel used by Confederate forces to surrender the Civil War at Appomattox, Virginia, on April 9, 1865. A huge linen replica of the truce flag, measuring 15 feet by 30 feet, or 10 times the size of the original, has been woven by the museum, and sits in a separate gallery on the eighth floor, near 100 smaller versions of the flag, all woven to scale. That the truce flag now housed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. is overshadowed in popular culture by the battle flag is, Ms. Clark argued, a sign that America has yet to erase a racist past that sparked the Civil War. "This country has not reckoned with the fact that the Civil War was lost, that we haven't quite come to terms with when that truce was made," she said in an interview after the performance. "It meant that people put down their arms but they didn't actually attend in full to what the war was being fought about." By giving new prominence to the truce flag through its scale and number at the exhibition, Ms. Clark is hoping that people will accept it as the symbol of reconciliation that it was meant to be, in contrast to the battle flag that opponents see as an emblem of division and defiance. "It's so important right now that sadly, the timing for this show couldn't be better," Ms. Talbott said. Recognition of the Confederacy is widespread. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported in 2019 that 114 Confederate symbols have been removed since the Charleston, S.C., attack and that 1,747 still stand. Many of these monuments are protected by state laws in the former Confederate states. Kate Masur, an associate professor of history at Northwestern University, said that drawing attention to the truce flag has the potential to shift public perceptions about the end of the Civil War that are now dominated by the battle flag. "She's trying to help people imagine what it would have been like if that truce flag had become the flag we all remembered as the Confederate flag," Ms. Masur said. "What would be all of the cascading effects if the main Confederate flag that was passed down to us from history was a white flag of truce or a flag of surrender, maybe our history would have turned out very differently. It's a great idea for an artistic project." The battle flag's associations with white supremacy and no surrender aren't likely to be dislodged among its adherents, Ms. Masur said, but people who attend the exhibition may come away with a new perspective. "Will it make people who engage with her exhibit think differently about American history? It certainly could," she said. The huge truce flag was created in three sections by a commercial weaver in Pennsylvania, and stitched together, Ms. Talbott said. The weaver didn't have the ability to incorporate three red lines from the original flag, so the lines were handwoven by museum staff after researching dyes that would have been available at the end of the Civil War. Ms. Clark, 52, declined to say whether her use of a cloth printed with the battle flag to clean the gallery floor was an act of provocation, simply noting that the cloth was commercially available. "They are everywhere," she said. (The dust on the gallery floor came from two historic Philadelphia sites, Independence Hall, and the Declaration House, where Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence.) "As a woman of color," she said, "I'm embodying the idea of the domestic worker who is a whole living human being." Brittany Webb, a curator at the nearby Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, called Ms. Clark's performance, titled ''Reversals,'' a provocative and patriotic act that sought to highlight divisions between the battle flag and the founding principles of the Declaration. "Somebody is using a battle flag to clear away the historical debris to remind everyone that this is an ideal that is supposed to be important to us all," Ms. Webb said. "There's something heavy about the materiality of watching that dirty flag get squeezed out into the bucket over and over again," she said, "literally wiping away the historical dust off a phrase that is supposed to be fundamental, part of the philosophy of the founding of this nation."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
For the first time since statins have been regularly used, a large study has found that another type of cholesterol lowering drug can protect people from heart attacks and strokes. The finding can help millions at high risk of heart attacks who cannot tolerate statins or do not respond to them sufficiently. And it helps clarify the role of LDL cholesterol, the dangerous form. Some had argued that statins reduced heart attack risk not just by lowering LDL levels but also by reducing inflammation. The new study indicates that the crucial factor is LDL, and the lower the levels, the better. The six year study, reported Monday at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association, involved 18,000 people who had had heart attacks or episodes of chest pain so severe they went to a hospital. They were randomly assigned to take a statin or a combination of a statin and the alternative drug to further reduce LDL levels. Both groups ended up with very low LDL levels those taking the statin, simvastatin, had an average LDL of 69, and those taking simvastatin and the other drug, ezetimibe, or Zetia, in a combination pill sold as Vytorin, had an average LDL of 54. No clinical trial had ever asked what happened when LDL levels get below 70 because, said Dr. Robert Califf, a Duke cardiologist and the study chairman, "many people were nervous about going this low and imagined a lot of possible toxicities." Statins lower LDL by preventing it from being made. Ezetimibe lowers LDL by preventing cholesterol from being absorbed in the gut. The drugs were so effective that there were few cardiac events among the participants, but eventually a difference emerged. There were 6.4 percent fewer cardiac events heart disease deaths, heart attacks, strokes, bypass surgeries, stent insertions and hospitalizations for severe chest pain in those assigned to take Vytorin. The amount corresponded to what was predicted from the extra degree of cholesterol lowering with the combination drug. Those results translate into 2,742 events in those taking simvastatin and 2,572 in those taking the combination drug. That means, said Dr. Christopher Cannon, a principal investigator and cardiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital, that two out of every 100 people who would have had a heart attack or stroke by taking the statin avoided those outcomes by taking the combination drug. And, Dr. Califf said, the study found no side effects from ezetimibe no excess cancer, no muscle aches, no headaches. "It looks like placebo," he said. The study was sponsored by Merck, the maker of Vytorin, but the investigators had the right to publish what they wanted, with final say over what they wrote. "Fantastic," said Dr. Sekar Kathiresan of the Broad Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital who studies the genetics of heart disease but had no part in the study. "A truly spectacular result for patients." Dr. Harlan M. Krumholz, a Yale cardiologist not associated with the study, said he wished there was a peer reviewed journal article instead of a presentation of the results at a meeting the data analysis was completed just last week but, assuming the result holds up, "this is the result we were hoping for." At the same time, and by sheer coincidence, two other groups of researchers reported genetic studies that supported the trial's conclusions. One, led by Dr. Brian A. Ference of Wayne State University School of Medicine found that gene mutations mimicking the effect of ezetimibe and ones mimicking the effect of statins had the same effect on heart disease risk for a given reduction in cholesterol. The implication, he said, is that "lowering cholesterol with ezetimibe, or a statin, or both, should each lower the risk of heart disease by about the same amount." The other, led by Dr. Kathiresan, examined mutations that disabled one copy of the cholesterol absorption gene, producing the same effect as ezetimibe. The result was a 50 percent reduction in cholesterol absorption the same as produced by ezetimibe and an LDL reduction of 12 milligrams per deciliter of blood, also the same amount as produced by ezetimibe. The mutation, which gave people the equivalent of a lifelong exposure to ezetimibe, reduced the heart attack rate by 50 percent. The study's results are making many wonder about the latest cholesterol guidelines, which did not mention any drug other than a statin. And instead of providing goals for cholesterol levels, they simply advised those at high risk to take a statin. "The guidelines didn't say they didn't believe in cholesterol, but they made it clear that the evidence is for a statin, not for any agent that lowers cholesterol," said Dr. Eugene Braunwald, a study chairman who is a cardiologist at Brigham and Women's and a longtime leader in the field. Dr. Neil Stone, the head of the guidelines committee and a cardiologist at Northwestern University, has a more nuanced view of what the guidelines say, but adds that the study result "gives doctors another option if they have a patient who can't tolerate a high intensity statin." The new data are in sharp contrast to what happened in 2006, when ezetimibe seemed useless. The study was small, with just 750 participants, all of whom had very high cholesterol levels. Instead of looking at heart attacks or strokes, the researchers looked at a surrogate, the buildup of plaque in the carotid artery of the neck. That made the study quicker and easier than waiting for people to have heart attacks. But it was not clear whether those carotid plaque measurements really reflected heart attack risk. But ezetimibe had been approved purely on the basis of its ability to lower LDL. With that stunning negative result, the question about LDL's lowering could not be avoided. Perhaps statins, the exemplar for the benefits of lowering LDL levels, were effective for more than just their effects on LDL. "This is as bad a result for the drug as anybody could have feared," said Dr. Steven Nissen, the chairman of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, when the 2006 ezetimibe results came out. The results, he said, were "shocking." The drug, Dr. Nissen noted in a telephone call Friday, had reached 17 percent of market share for cholesterol lowering drugs with no evidence of benefit. "Now we have the result," Dr. Nissen said. "They were successful, and that's great. But at this point, it really doesn't matter. They made their 30 billion." The drug will be available as a generic in 2016, Merck says. That the drug was promoted and sold for so many years without evidence that it helped was inexcusable, Dr. Krumholz said. "The fact that the trial exists says there was uncertainty," he said. "The company and the investigators and the scientific community were uncertain about it. This is a cautionary tale."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
You've probably never noticed the vacant sculpture ready niches flanking the Metropolitan Museum of Art's front doors. The Kenyan born artist Wangechi Mutu hadn't either, until she was invited to be the first to fill them. Inaugurating what will be an annual commission for the Met's facade, Ms. Mutu is placing bronze statues of seated women in four of the niches, from Sept. 9 through Jan. 12. Crowned, blinded and gagged by highly polished discs, and born of traditions both European and African, these graceful, commanding figures will change the face of the museum, literally and figuratively. As a test run suggests, they will sometimes reflect sunlight with spooky intensity, in what Ms. Mutu calls "a stunning message from beyond." It is testament to her belief that, like street theater or religious rituals, art can nudge viewers toward congregation. The facade commission arrives in the run up to the 150th anniversary next year of the Met's founding, and heralds the commitment of Max Hollein, its director, "to expand and amplify dialogues with contemporary artists," as he puts it. Under Mr. Hollein's leadership, the museum is announcing a turn toward the new and the global. Skepticism is not unwarranted, given the museum's history. But the choice of an insistently transnational artist who, while acclaimed, is still not widely popular, and whose work is as dark as it is dazzling, does suggest the museum's antennae are being retuned. As its contemporary art curator Kelly Baum observes, "Had the niches been filled in 1902," when the Richard Morris Hunt building was completed, "the artist would certainly have been male and white." Ms. Mutu, who at 47 is tall and poised, likens her facade sculptures to caryatids. In classical Western architecture, these figures generally support balconies or roofs. (Indeed a contract for the Met's niches had been awarded in 1899 to the Viennese Neoclassicist Karl Bitter, who proposed four caryatids, one each for painting, sculpture, architecture and music. They were executed at full scale in plaster, but a funding shortfall prevented their realization in limestone.) But African examples abound, Ms. Mutu explains, found in "staffs and in beautiful royal stools that are representative of where a king would sit. Essentially they're holding the weight of the king. Or the royalty of that culture." Her caryatids clearly radiate power of their own. Titled "The NewOnes, will free Us," they represent, for Ms. Mutu, "words that we haven't heard, people we haven't noticed. They will be our redemption." Preternaturally serene and imposingly tall roughly seven feet high with sloping eyes and long fingers expressive of exceptional reach, they speak as messengers from an Afrofuturist inflected otherworld that all her work invokes. Among her sources of inspiration is a modest Congolese "prestige stool" in the Met's collection that Ms. Mutu admires for its earthiness the figure's knees are on the ground, rather than a pedestal and for the eroticism of her parted thighs. Generally she favors sensuality in her own work, although for the Met she opted for figures that are resolutely chaste. She is also drawn to a more elaborate Yoruba caryatid in which a standing female is accompanied by two children, a horse and baskets of food. "Given the opportunity, if the king gets off that stool, she's ready to go," Ms. Mutu adds. "The work of these women is immense. The regard for them is not." That complicated social position is reflected in the caryatids' striking discs, which relate back to lip plates and crowns and heavy earrings. Along with filed teeth and scarification, they can cause women substantial pain. The status they confer is costly in more ways than one. KNOWN FOR SPARKLING, LIQUID DRAWINGS and collages on paper and Mylar, Ms. Mutu began her career as a sculptor. After attending high school in Wales, she came to the United States to study art (she holds degrees from Cooper Union and Yale). As early as graduate school she was mingling African and Western idioms. At the current Whitney Biennial, she is showing a haunting pair of standing figures made of wood, concrete and bone. Caryatids were already on Ms. Mutu's mind when the Met approached her just under a year ago a tight schedule for a project of this scope. She created clay like Plasticine models; then, using one of the oldest methods of working clay, she formed the figures' garments in coils, which spill down in great pleated skirts. At a foundry in Walla Walla, Washington, the models were 3 D scanned and scaled up; she visited the foundry to rework the models, and again after they were cast to work on the patinas. Ms. Mutu has a Brooklyn residence where she has worked since 2006, but she traveled to Walla Walla from Nairobi, where she established a second studio ten years later. Asked about her decision to go back home, she emphasizes, "I'm not back, I'm back and forth." A dual citizen, she is married to Mario Lazzaroni, a consultant, who is from Italy. Their daughters, ten and eight, go to school in Nairobi, which is, Ms. Mutu concedes, a commitment to that city. She is nourished by Kenya's material culture, and its landscape. But she describes the art scene in Nairobi as nascent. The art community that matters to her is international. Conflicted identity is Ms. Mutu's birthright. In her Catholic grade school, she says, "We were taught good posture and decorum and how to speak English properly and how to position ourselves as part of the ruling class of Kenya, but also as Anglophile Africans." She describes her father, a businessman, as a self made academic and sometime poet; her mother is a nurse and a midwife. Ms. Mutu (like many of her urban peers) learned about her cultural background by visiting her grandparents upcountry. Her parents speak the language of the largest ethnic group in Kenya, the Bantu Kikuyu language, and they worked to preserve that heritage by conducting interviews with elders in the countryside. "These are oral cultures there isn't a literary record," Ms. Mutu points out. "They say that when an old person dies, a library goes with them." Living under British rule, as the generations preceding Ms. Mutu had, meant "you had to somehow make an agreement with a colonial administrator or convert to Christianity to go to a hospital or wear Western clothing to go to school." And overthrowing that rule was a bloody struggle. The artist's mother witnessed the Mau Mau rebellion in the late 1950s and "remembers as a little girl having to take a secret oath to promise never to be a traitor. There was killing, there was cruelty, and there were foreigners telling your elders what to do, " Ms. Mutu continues. "The one thing that's always missing I think it's part of the trauma is the personal element. My parents don't often talk about their experiences in terms of how it made them feel." It could be said that she has taken up the task but also that she remains true, in her work at the Met in particular, to their emotional reserve. For Seph Rodney, a Jamaican born critic of African descent who is an admirer of Ms. Mutu's work, that's something of a problem. While Dr. Rodney, who has written extensively about institutional efforts to enhance community involvement, is enthusiastic about introducing the facade program with a female artist of color, he notes that her sculptures will be "literally outside the museum that gives me a bit of pause." His wariness reflects, perhaps, the Met's rocky progress toward diversity. While art by indigenous Americans was donated to the museum soon after its 1870 founding, by 1911 it had come to an agreement with the Natural History Museum that "primitive works of art" by "prehistoric peoples" would go across the park; the Met would focus thereafter on the Mediterranean world, Asia and the European tradition. And so things remained until 1969, when the museum began showing art from Africa, Oceania and Native America. This year also marks the 50th anniversary of the exhibition "Harlem on My Mind," criticized in two recent books for treating African Americans as producers of a social culture but not an artistic one. Dr. Rodney, speaking of the show's legacy, said, "I think what matters about 'Harlem on my Mind' is how the Met now approaches the work of people of color." Although these controversies occurred before her time and an ocean away, Ms. Mutu has had to reckon with the dubious judgments museums sometimes make. Questioned about the controversy surrounding the Whitney Biennial, in which several artists threatened to withdraw their work in protest against a board member (now resigned) whose business produces military equipment, Ms. Mutu replies that her preference is to let the art do the job of heightening social awareness; she could not justify withdrawal. Her instructors at Cooper Union included pioneering activists like Hans Haacke, Fred Wilson, Dennis Adams and Faith Wilding. Carrying forward their efforts, she says, is an essential and unending commitment. Ms. Mutu is satisfied that she's challenging the Met (and vice versa). And she has more than race in mind. Always aware of the "where art history has positioned the female body," generally as the passive subject of painting, she notes that "in classical African art, the female body in some instances is the museum she is where the art is placed." That is, women express "wealth, status, family, tribe" through their bearing and ornamentation, which are "all languages definable as art." For the next four months, these languages will be the first ones visitors hear.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Sandra Lee was horrified by the contents of my pantry. "Girl, you're in trouble," she said, after demanding that I send her photos of every shelf. "What I love the most is how many beans you have," she said. (I'm allergic, which is probably why they're still there.) But Ms. Lee, the former Food Network personality and cookbook author, is the queen of making something out of nothing, and assured me she would find a way out of my cupboard quandary. After all, she built a brand on "semi homemade" recipes that rely on affordable, store bought products the same ones we are now dusting off and defrosting in the face of a global pandemic. Ms. Lee, 53, recalled a time when she and her former partner, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, were watching football at their home in Westchester County during a snowstorm. There was nothing in the fridge, so she insisted they go out. "He looked at me and he said, 'You're Sandra Lee. Just go whip something up,'" she said. She made garlic knots. "You know, nobody has a daily routine right now," Ms. Lee said. "I get up and I see what the latest news is. Of course I watch Andrew live" on the governor's daily coronavirus briefings, which have drawn a captive audience "and then share with him my thoughts." She said she and Mr. Cuomo still communicate nearly every day. (The governor was unavailable for comment. In a statement sent through his office shortly after publication, a spokesperson said: "The Governor wishes her well in her next endeavor and we're sure it will be a success.") Ms. Lee's companion at home is a majestic white cockatoo named Phoenix, a gift from Mr. Cuomo when they were still a couple. "He's getting bored," she said of the bird. His main preoccupation these days has been chewing on wooden clothespins. Humans, at least, can cook to pass the time, and Ms. Lee would like to show them how. Her new series is called "Top Shelf," which, to be clear, isn't about fancy ingredients. "Nobody's eating Wagyu," she said. Rather, it's that stuff some Americans may have forgotten about in their pantries, practically unreachable, waiting for the end times that seemed to arrive all at once just weeks ago. In a sense, Ms. Lee is the perfect guide for this moment. She will change the way you think about a package of 2 Peeps (they can be used on cakes, to garnish cocktails or hidden in eggs in the garden), explain that if you separate two ply toilet paper into single ply it lasts twice as long and pour you a heavy vodka and fresh grapefruit when it's all over, which is what she was drinking during one of our calls. Here are more fascinating tales you can't help but read all the way to the end. None Getting Personal With Iman. The supermodel talks about life after David Bowie, their Catskills refuge and the perfume inspired by their love. A Resilient Team for a Broken Nation. With the Taliban in control, what, and whom, is Afghanistan's national soccer team playing for? The Fight of This Old Boxer's Life Was With His Own Family. A battle among Marvin Stein's family over his fortune broke out, and he suddenly found himself powerless to fight for himself. "She loves to problem solve, so she's a great person to call when the stuff hits the fan," her longtime friend Dr. Rosemarie Ingleton, a dermatologist in Manhattan, said over the phone this week. Sandra Lee grew up on food stamps, bouncing between homes after her mother dropped her and a younger sister off at her grandmother's house when Sandra was 2 and didn't return for several years. She learned to be creative with cooking in part to stretch her family's welfare checks and help care for three more siblings who arrived. "We made simple bargain cuisine, not because we wanted to, but because we had to," she wrote in her 2007 memoir, "Made From Scratch." Eventually, Ms. Lee turned that thriftiness into a business: first with a curtain line started in the bedroom of her aunt and uncle's house and later with a QVC show, and eventually, a cooking empire. Her first show on Food Network, "Semi Homemade Cooking," ran for 15 seasons, showcasing recipes that were accessible, attainable and affordable, using 70 percent store bought ingredients and 30 percent homemade. When the recession hit, in 2008, Ms. Lee introduced a second show, "Money Saving Meals," which taught parents how to feed a family of four for 4. (Leftovers were called "round two" recipes.) "I mean, the beautiful thing about being raised Jehovah's Witness is always in the back of your mind, Armageddon is coming," Ms. Lee said of her childhood, in which her mother became a follower of the millenarian Christian movement. "So your pantry's always stocked." "She and Andrew accomplished a lot together," said a sister, Kimber Lee, noting that she had been an advocate for marriage equality and the legalization of medical marijuana. In 2015, Ms. Lee was diagnosed with breast cancer and opted for a double mastectomy. She chronicled the experience in the 2018 documentary "Rx: Early Detection, A Cancer Journey With Sandra Lee," and became an outspoken proponent of early cancer screening. (She said that she remains, thankfully, cancer free.) Ms. Lee and Mr. Cuomo announced their split in September, after 14 years together, but remain close. ("He's still my guy," she said. "Neither one of us, well as far as I know, has had a date.") She has a good relationship with his daughters, and has been directing prospective donors of P.P.E. and hand sanitizer to 25 year old Cara, who is helping her father with relief coordination. "They're my family, and they always will be my family," Ms. Lee said. "We share a home, we share children, we share friendship," she said of Mr. Cuomo. "I will protect him and be there for him until the day I die." Ms. Lee was long Mr. Cuomo's defender when New Yorkers on both sides of the political aisle were critical of his record. But these days, many have warmed to him as a leader, and in sometimes surprising ways. Last week a theory spread across the internet about a photo of the governor in which ... something could be discerned beneath his white polo shirt. "A nipple ring? What did you just say?" Ms. Lee said, eyes wide. Later she appeared in a video on Facebook alluding to "nonsense" online and telling body shamers to "knock it off!" There have, and always will be, Sandra Lee detractors, including those who have scoffed at her use of artificial ingredients as well as her particular combinations of them. "It is difficult to understand how a responsible author could choose a tasteless, industrial cheese like Velveeta to prepare what she calls 'gourmet tasting' food," wrote the former New York Times food writer Amanda Hesser as Ms. Lee prepared to release her second cookbook. Anthony Bourdain famously called her "Kwanzaa cake," which called for angel food cake, vanilla frosting, popcorn and corn nuts, a "crime against humanity." "I'm not sure that some of the food purists are in touch with what really goes on in American households," Ms. Lee told The Times in 2012. These days, Ina Garten is making oversize quarantine cocktails. Food Network is offering quarantine recipes, and Americans are flocking to familiar processed foods, like SpaghettiOs, Spam and Cheetos. Even Mr. Cuomo is delivering lengthy monologues about the comfort of spaghetti and meatballs. "I think there's been an immediate shift for all of us in what we think of as 'enough,'" said Samin Nosrat, the food writer and Netflix host, who recently created a podcast about how to cook with what's in your pantry. Ms. Nosrat, the author of "Salt Fat Acid Heat" (and an occasional New York Times contributor), said she has noticed herself become much more conscientious about rationing, and less snobby about, say, which brand of canned tomatoes she chooses. "I'm first to admit, I always denigrated that style of cooking," she said of Ms. Lee's brand of prepackaged goods. "But I have to say, doing everything from scratch in these circumstances is bananas." Ms. Lee said that, right now, food is about survival, not luxury. "I think you just have to figure out how to do with what you have and how to make it the best you can," she said. "You have to see what's there, not what's not there." In her own home, what's there is cans of cream of celery, cream of mushroom, cream of potato: "great bases for anything you want and they all last forever," she said. There is also popcorn, nuts, stacks on stacks of tomato sauces, a variety of canned soups. "I like chicken noodle soup just because I like it, and I like it with saltines, especially when I don't feel well," she said, pointing to the saltines. There are artichokes. "My favorite, my favorite thing," she said. Pasta, vegetable stock, Bisquick, Red Lobster brand cheddar biscuit mix. "I only have that because my aunt loves it," she said. And she is well stocked for Easter, with chocolate bunnies, toy bunnies, marshmallow bunnies, bunny cookies, jelly beans, licorice, fresh cut lilies, and of course a whole ham, which she plans to roast for dinner. The ham leftovers, she said, she will make into a "decadent, cheesy casserole" a perfect round two recipe.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
WASHINGTON A federal appeals court upheld on Tuesday the government's repeal of strict regulations for the companies that connect consumers to the internet. But the court also said the Federal Communications Commission had overstepped by broadly stopping state and local governments from writing their own rules. The mixed ruling, by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, ensures that debate about so called net neutrality rules will continue, including in state capitals. But over all, the decision Tuesday was a victory for the Trump administration, which has encouraged deregulation across the government. The F.C.C. chairman, Ajit Pai, who was appointed by President Trump, made the repeal of the rules a top priority, saying it would encourage innovation and help propel the economy. The agency voted to throw out the rules in a 3 to 2 party line vote in 2017, reversing a decision made during the Obama administration. The rules had prohibited broadband internet providers like Comcast and AT T from blocking websites or charging for higher quality service or certain content. The appeals court upheld the F.C.C.'s decision to no longer regulate high speed internet delivery as if it were a utility, or a "common carrier," like phone service. "Regulation of broadband internet has been the subject of protracted litigation, with broadband providers subjected to and then released from common carrier regulation over the previous decade," the court wrote. "We decline to yet again flick the on off switch of common carrier regulation under these circumstances." Mr. Pai said the decision was "a victory for consumers, broadband deployment and the free and open internet." He said the commission looked forward to addressing the "narrow issues" that the court sent back to the commission. "The decision is a victory for U.S. broadband investment and broadband consumers everywhere," David R. McAtee II, AT T's general counsel, said in a statement. But opponents of the repeal said the battle over the rules would continue. Jessica Rosenworcel, one of the two Democrats on the five member F.C.C., wrote on Twitter that the agency's 2017 repeal was "on the wrong side of the American people and the wrong side of history." "Let's keep up the fight," she added. The decision on Tuesday raises the prospect that the long running battle over how best to regulate the infrastructure of the internet will move to statehouses around the country, including in California, which has fought numerous changes by the Trump administration. Supporters of net neutrality rules say that because of the repeal, consumers will have more difficulty getting access to online content and start ups will have to pay to reach consumers. Several legislatures have considered new rules on broadband companies. Last year, California approved a law effectively restoring the Obama era federal rules at the state level. The Justice Department quickly challenged the move, pledging to "protect our constitutional order." California agreed not to enforce the rules while challenges to the F.C.C.'s order went through the courts. Tuesday's ruling may clear a major roadblock to California's enforcement of the law, although it is still likely to face legal challenges. A senior F.C.C. official told reporters during a phone call that the agency was still analyzing how the opinion would affect its ability to block state and local regulations but said the agency believed the court had not curtailed its efforts outright. But State Senator Scott Wiener, a Democrat who helped write California's bill, said the ruling provided an opening. "I think we have a good argument that we can now enforce this law," he said. "This is over all a bad ruling, but the silver lining is that we can act at the state level." The court decision could also complicate the suit challenging the legitimacy of the repeal. Amy Keating, the chief legal officer at the internet company Mozilla, a central player in the suit, said in a statement that her company was "considering our next steps in the litigation."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Peppered moth caterpillars live across the Northern Hemisphere, from the forests of China to the backyards of North America. But if you've never seen one, don't feel bad: They're experts at blending in. Each caterpillar mimics the twig it perches on, straightening its knobbly body into a stick like shape. It also changes its hue to match the twig's color, whether birch white, willow green or dark oak brown. They're so good at this, in fact, that they can do it blindfolded literally. According to a paper published in Communications Biology in early August, the caterpillars sense the color of their surroundings not only with their eyes, but also with their skin. While other animals, including cuttlefish and lizards, have similar abilities, this is "the most complete demonstration so far that color change can be controlled by cells outside the eyes," said Martin Stevens, a professor of sensory and evolutionary ecology at the University of Exeter. Dr. Stevens, who was not involved in the study, added that the exact mechanism remains a mystery. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. The adult peppered moth is famous for a completely different color journey; After soot from the Industrial Revolution darkened tree bark in Britain, peppered moths there evolved to be darker, too.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
But in Targoff's hands the bits of the puzzle fit together beautifully. Here is a woman capable of deep, almost obsessional feeling, with an equal capacity to put those feelings into poetry. Losing herself in "this blind prison of grief," she finds her literary voice, a wondrous alchemy of deep, even suicidal, emotion: Having cut her teeth on earthly love, Colonna then turned her poetic attention to God. An audacious thing for a woman to do, it was made more acceptable by her emphasis on her own unworthiness a tactic used by talented women throughout history, claiming inadequacy while proving the opposite. But while Colonna may have lived among nuns, her lineage gave her standing in the world. She rubbed shoulders with the great and the good of Renaissance Italy, and her sonnets, oscillating between doubt and transcendence, circulated widely among her friends. In 1538, a printing house in Parma published an unauthorized volume of her work. It would be reprinted 12 times in the nine years before her death in 1547, and its success opened the way for other women writers. But it's not just Colonna's poetic voice that this biography brings alive. Targoff proves herself as good a popular historian as she is a literary critic. These were troubled times in Italy, filled with political and religious upheaval, and she is a terrific guide, navigating us smoothly through complexity, aided and enhanced by the starry cast of characters in Colonna's orbit. Colonna corresponded with popes and emperors. The poet Bembo sang her praises. Titian painted a notably erotic Mary Magdalene for her. But it is Michelangelo with whom she had the deepest affinity. Theirs was a passionate, platonic relationship. (The collision of those two adjectives makes perfect sense; he described himself as "overwhelmed with grief" at her death.) She sent him sonnets, he sent her drawings. Together they discussed religion. God was a burning topic in Italy, where a corrupt Roman Catholic Church operated under the storm clouds of the Reformation. In such a volatile climate, being accused of heresy was a constant danger, and Colonna walked a narrow line, communing with men who would later flee or be arrested, her poetry and letters flirting with the language of Calvin and Luther. (As late as the 1980s, a file on her was discovered in the records of Italy's Inquisition.) All of which makes her a surprisingly engaging character. What could have been the story of a religious good girl becomes instead the study of a passionate, complex woman with formidable poetic talents: someone who, while embedded in her own age, emerges as a thinker and seeker in tune with a modern audience. Vittoria Colonna has always deserved to be better known. Ramie Targoff's fine book will surely make that happen.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
THE ASSISTANT (2020) Rent or buy on Amazon or iTunes. In this low key thriller by the filmmaker Kitty Green, Jane (Julia Garner) is an aspiring film producer working as a junior assistant to a major entertainment mogul, who remains unseen but is clearly based on Harvey Weinstein. Jane spends her days doing menial tasks while two other male assistants casually dismiss and disrespect her. The movie slowly simmers with tension as she becomes aware of the abuse and oppression going on in the office and works up the courage to take a stand. Jeannette Catsoulis named the movie a Critic's Pick in her review for The New York Times, describing it as "a painstaking examination of the way individual slights can coalesce into a suffocating miasma of harassment." CORONAVIRUS: EXPLAINED Stream on Netflix. This new limited series, the latest spinoff of the "Explained" documentary programs from Netflix and Vox, charts the spread of the coronavirus pandemic and explores how people can best manage their mental health as the world adjusts to a new normal.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
, the Grammy award winning singer songwriter, has been giving beauty, wellness and self care a lot of thought lately. You could chalk up some of the musings to the pandemic, but Ms. Keys, 39, has also been masterminding a beauty meets self care line called Keys Soulcare, which will debut on Dec. 3. The line, which includes skin care and home scents, is inspired by beauty rituals that make her feel good aptly timed for these stressful days. See what she likes below. I love both routines day and night. Both are really special and important in their own ways. If it's morning, my routine depends on the day. Sometimes I'm super rush y. More mornings are like the rush y ones, but sometimes I have time to luxuriate. I definitely have oily skin, and I've been prone to breakouts. At the beginning of my career, I didn't know what was going on. I was under the camera and under hot lights, and that definitely did not help. I didn't have any skin experience. My mother wasn't a big beauty type of girl. She'd just say, "Here's a wash, here's a lotion, now go about your day." I had to try a lot of different things, from makeup artists and other experts I've met, and it wasn't until my mid 20s that I figured out, "Oh, this is how people do this." There's this brand called Osmosis Beauty. I use their mist, and they have a cleanser that I like a lot. I have this other mist, LIV by Knutek, that is more of an Ayurvedic thing with tea tree oil. For creams, I'm really excited about the Keys Soulcare Transformation Cream because it doesn't clog you up or make you greasy. I'm launching this line because I love the idea of easy and doable rituals that we can bring to our lives. I find that these routines, along with meditation every morning, give me a center and a calm. I also love the Epicuren Propolis Sunscreen. It's quite heavy, though. I recently met Tiffany Masterson, who founded Drunk Elephant. We ended up finding out we have similar thinking and connected over our stories. She's so D.I.Y., which is so awesome. She has a tinted sunscreen that's so lightweight. I really like the Chanel Le Volume waterproof mascara in brown. The color is called 27 Mirage. In general, I like a lot of Chanel makeup products. I'm big, big on scents and I'm big on incense and I'm big on candles. As an artist, I'm always lighting candles and incense in the studio. That's why, as part of the first offering of Keys Soulcare, we have the most gorgeous candle. It's sage and oat milk. There's something about creating the space around you with scent that contributes to the creative process. Scent is deep in the meditation practice as well. If you burn sage, you purify the space. And bringing that into the self care routine is very powerful. When getting ready or unready at night, a great part of that is lighting a candle and setting an intention. When I think about lighting the candle, I think, "I shine at full wattage." That's a big thing I've been thinking about personally not holding back and just being completely bright and brilliant and bold. I love that mantra. I also like scented oils lavender or eucalyptus. If it's for the bath, I'll drop about eight or 10 drops of essential oil in there. If it's on my skin, I'll put a little bit on my finger and just do pulse points. I get mine at Whole Foods, and then there's the Young Living brand. Their oils are really amazing, and I order them online. I go crazy with my bath. I go bananas. There are these amazing bath boxes from Mama Medicine, which we are going to work with for Keys Soulcare. The founder, Deborah Hanekamp, she's a beautiful artisan. She'll fill the box with rose petals and certain crystals and certain oils and different incense. Then she'll give you a menu of what you need to do to release tension, or if you're feeling depleted, how to restore yourself. During this time, with everything feeling so crazy, the bath is such a restorative place. Actually, one of the most beautiful things about this new normal we're living through is that it's obviously not so much about the external. It's so much more about the internal. With my hair, I'm enjoying the simplicity of it all. I've never worn more ponytails in all my life. Also, I definitely wear my hair out and curly and natural a lot. I use a lot of different things. There's a new brand by Gabrielle Union and Larry Sims he's my hairstylist called Flawless. I use their items because they're quite simple and also really good. I also like Ouidad because the products are rich. My hair is very curly, and if I'm wearing it curly, the more hydrated the better. I love a good hair mask I have one by Gotu Kola. Most of the time, I'm lazy and don't dry my hair. If I do use a blow dryer, I use it with a diffuser attachment. I got one of those Theragun massage things. It's partially terrifying. You look at it and it looks like it's going to hurt. It does hurt a little, bit but then doesn't. I love face rollers. I've been doing them for quite a while. Mine is an obsidian stone. It feels so good using stones and crystals in my life. For me, it's a big part of what feels good. I love to call the energy I'm looking for toward me. Lord knows we need good energy. I also have an LED light. It's very portable. It's almost like a book and you open it in front of your face. It's called Dpl II. There are so many accessible online ways to work out now. I enjoy my meditation, but the fitness side of my routine makes me feel clearer and more in my element. Otherwise I might be moody and not want to create.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Installation view of "Rachel Harrison Life Hack," a midcareer survey of the artist's work at the Whitney Museum of American Art.Credit...Charlie Rubin for The New York Times Installation view of "Rachel Harrison Life Hack," a midcareer survey of the artist's work at the Whitney Museum of American Art. On a recent Saturday there was strong foot traffic on the fifth floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art where the New York artist Rachel Harrison's exuberant midcareer survey is installed. And the traffic wasn't moving fast. Visitors were spending time with sculpture that, despite or because of its enigmatic zaniness, inspired a slow look. And people seemed to be having fun looking, even if they weren't exactly sure why. Maybe it was because puzzlement can be fun, and Ms. Harrison has set it as one of the tasks for her work. Many of her assemblage style sculptures suggest the kind of accidental urban still lifes you see on New York City sidewalks on trash collection day: bottles, bedding, defunct appliances, outgrown toys, discarded Christmas trees in season and, always, sealed garbage bags filled with you don't want to know what. All of these together, once you start to look, translate into information about commerce, class, value, accident, appetite, waste, color, shape, zeitgeist even life and death. There's material there for stories, many. But you have to write them. Ms. Harrison has photographed such arrays in the past and inserted the pictures in her sculpture , though the earliest piece in her current exhibition, "Rachel Harrison Life Hack," a career survey covering some 25 years, looks like the unsavory something that the inside of a garbage bag might yield. That piece is titled "Dinner" and is or once was just that. One night in 1991 , the artist ordered a meal in an East Village restaurant downstairs from a gallery where she was in a group show. When her food arrived shish kebab, salad, cheesecake she divided it into Ziploc bags, which she took upstairs and tacked to the gallery wall as her contribution. A few days later she transferred the now rotting food to glass jars , which remain sealed to this day and are displayed on a small shelf just inside the entrance to the Whitney show. You can slot "Dinner" into various categories: as Conceptual art, as a species of organic abstraction, as the souvenir of a career event, or as a relic of a lost place and time. In the end, it can only be securely defined by what it does: It catches your eye, pulls you in close, makes you struggle for meaning, and leaves you not knowing what to think. The same might be said of a room size installation from 1996 with a block of type title that amounts to an object in itself: "Should home windows or shutters b e required to withstand a direct hit from an eight foot long two by four shot from a cannon at 34 miles an hour, without creating a hole big enough to let through a three inch sphere?" In its original form, the work, which has been recreated for the Whitney survey, was set up in a Brooklyn brownstone parlor and made up the entire content of Ms. Harrison's first solo gallery show. There it created a room within the room through artificial, stage flat "walls," a theatrical device Ms. Harrison would repeatedly return to. At the Whitney, where surviving components of the original installation are included in the reconstruction, the layering is not just of space but of time, present and past. So in a sense the work is another reliquary. And even when new the piece had time capsule features. Its title was lifted from a 199 5 New York Times article written in the wake of an apocalypse strength Hurricane Andrew. The "walls" are hung, now as then, with framed photos, taken by the artist, of trash bags waiting for pickup. And here and there we find colorfully labeled cans of supermarket peas (do the brands still exist or are the cans archival?) stacked in corners or perched on shelves made in part from what look like stiffened socks. Faced, without explanation, with such idiosyncratic elements, our organizational instinct, our default to logic, kicks in. We start to construct a narrative. So: flimsy walls, a report of damages from a storm , piled up trash bags, a stash of canned food. Suddenly there's tension, drama, a hint of darkness. But one look at the work's wackier features pulls us in another direction and we're back with bemusement . Again, this push pull is a driving dynamic of this artist's work. It withholds fixed meanings while suggesting that meanings exist. It works hard to elicit reactions, potentially strong ones, without determining what the reactions should be. You feel things will come clear if you hang out and keep looking. And people do. Career surveys are usually arranged chronologically so as to suggest an artist's development. The organizers of this show Elisabeth Sussman, curator of photography at the Whitney; David Joselit , a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; and Kelly Long, a curatorial assistant at the Whitney honor that convention, but only so far: They put early work, from the 1990s, in the opening gallery, but beyond that, mix things up. In general the work tends to grow more "sculptural" in the sense of more concentrated, unitary, handmade as time goes on. One example is "Alexander the Great" ( 2007 ), in which a nude, prepubescent department store mannequin, wearing an Abraham Lincoln mask on the back of its head, stands atop an Abstract Expressionist patterned meteorite. Another is the scary "Brownie" ( 2005 ), a kind of Giacomettian column embedded with life size skulls, drizzled with paint, and topped with a silver wig. The show's inventories of sculptural ingredients can become quite elaborate. "Huffy Howler" ( 2004 ) includes sheepskin, fox tails, brick filled tote bags and a studio shot of Mel Gibson in "Braveheart" attached to the brand name bike of the title. "Nice Rack" (2006 ), with a found Hallmark greeting card rack, brings together costume jewelry, fake fruit, an ergonomic snow shovel and a photographed portrait of an imperious Ronald Reagan. One look at the Reagan image has you scrambling for a political message. As far as I can tell, there's no hard message to be found, but in suggesting there might be, the work has done its job. It has made us look, with a synthesizing eye, at every detail, and then, thwarted but living in hope, look again. Although Ms. Harrison is not credited as a curator, she is largely responsible for the show's distinctive look. It was her idea to have the floor of the big central gallery covered with black painted plywood and marked with maplike lines drawn in chalk. The design was inspired by the minimalist studio set used in Lars von Trier's 200 4 film, "Dogville," and whatever its significance may hold for the artist or for us, it provides a persuasive setting for sculpture, allowing each piece, like a character in a film, to retain its personality while clearly participating in a collective story. And it was her idea, in the show's final gallery, to turn 15 extraordinarily inventive sculptures into a multivocal ensemble by corralling them together within a circle of outward facing metal chairs, on which visitors are invited to sit. It might have made more logical sense, in the interest of contemplative looking, to have had the chairs face inward toward the art. But destabilizing logic is what the show which includes a set of drawings of the singer Amy Winehouse as an avenging angel of art history is ultimately about. (Looking at art is often pitched as a learning experience; Ms. Harrison makes it an unlearning experience.) Oh, and I've learned that "life hack" is internetese for myriad improvised tricks or techniques devised to make the practical crises of daily existence how to remove ketchup stains from a shirt, how to relax with strangers more manageable. No doubt some of these interventions work better than others, but the fact that they're a popular phenomenon, a thing, suggests that a lot of us are looking around and seeing chaos, and trying, with whatever panache we can muster, to make it productive. Ms. Harrison's art is really good at that. Through Jan. 12 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, Manhattan; 212 570 3600, whitney.org.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
WASHINGTON Has any American spent more of her career flinging her arms up in shock and elation than Oprah Winfrey? Maybe maybe certain long suffering and spoiled rotten sports fans. But in 25 years of hosting a daytime talk show five days a week, nine months out of 12, often to gigantic ratings, Ms. Winfrey raised her arms a lot over makeovers and giveaways and celebrity surprises, like that time, in 2011, nearing the final broadcast of "The Oprah Winfrey Show," when she turned around and saw Stevie Wonder, at a piano, rising out of an arena floor. O.K., it was only one arm, but it went up with the force of two. Her reaction was part "buzzer beater," part "pageant win." She and her thousands of hours of TV are now the subjects of a big, fascinating exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture that captures what the show was, did and has meant. And it includes that Stevie Wonder moment, in a short montage focused on the show's leap, in its final years, into lavish, thrill a minute mega production. That bit with Mr. Wonder lasts about 15 seconds in the montage. But it sticks with you. For one thing, it exposes something endearingly normal in a woman, who as a very famous TV host, could presumably have had Mr. Wonder pop out of any floor anytime she wanted. For another, the women in the audience (thousands of them, black and white; I didn't spot a single man) leap and shout and wail, with their arms in the air, in a dozen different ways, from "Lotto win" to "praise Jesus." They're going nuts for Mr. Wonder, obviously. But they might be more ecstatic about the joy he's bringing Ms. Winfrey. This isn't a cult, exactly. It's a living, screaming symbiotic social network. Affirmation and intent became muscular cornerstones of the "Oprah Winfrey" enterprise. When she banged the "like" button, her vast constituency banged on it, too. The show's been off the air for seven years, and we miss it: More than a year before "Watching Oprah," Chicago's WBEZ released the podcast "Making Oprah," a delicious behind the scenes casserole that Jenn White served with a fan's appreciation and a critic's forensic eye. And Ms. Winfrey hasn't disappeared at all. Since "Oprah" went off the air, Winfrey has evolved into an even more instinctive screen actress, for one thing. She's written books; she's vividly alive on Instagram, her cable network and wellness podcast; and she looked supremely tickled to be at Meghan Markle and Prince Harry's wedding last month. And yet, if America can't actually miss Oprah Winfrey, it might miss an idea of her. As "Oprah Winfrey Show" Oprah, a totem of humanity, respect, largess and fun. As a figure of immense, almost assaultive generosity, who could unleash, in us, bombastic yet utterly sincere gratitude. Maybe the chaos extremity of current events has made us wistful for the moral authority of "Oprah Winfrey": school massacres, police shootings of unarmed black people, men chronically mistreating women, the government's separation of children from their migrant parents. Whenever somebody pleads for a national conversation about anything, really what they're saying is, "Where the hell is Oprah?" To the extent that "queen of daytime" is any kind of office, it's one Ms. Winfrey has never abused. She loves people, and she seems to understand the intensity of people's love for her. But people also love power, and Ms. Winfrey's display of it that night (and perhaps a New York Post column she retweeted) sparked pandemonium for her to ride it into Washington. President Oprah was fantasized about as an antidote to a caustic, whimsical president: the woman with the extensive "angel network" taking on a master Twitter troll, one television genius locking horns with another. But the Smithsonian show leaves you thinking that she'd probably expect better fantasies from us. It makes you think she might be too good for whatever a candidate would have to do or say in this political climate to be elected president of anything. BEFORE YOU EXIT "Watching Oprah," you've scrutinized a case full of childhood photos, diary entries, high school letters and a signed copy of Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings." You've soaked up the music, speeches, imagery and writing in a room devoted to the musicians, actors, authors and political movements that helped a young Oprah determine who she wanted to be. You've checked out the amusingly arranged spot devoted to her Oscar losing performance in "The Color Purple" (she had her Oscar luncheon biscuit bronzed, instead) and the space that enumerates her early television news work, including a three minute montage of her in Baltimore and Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s that is one of the most charming pieces of editing you're going to see. At some point, a young Ms. Winfrey, in spandex, has to put her legs up for an aerobics class segment and jestingly complains, "Oh, you're gonna love this shot." You wonder whether the show's integrationist philosophy arises from its host's having been raised, reared and professionally trained in Milwaukee, Mississippi, Tennessee and the broadcast environs of Baltimore and Chicago. Just geographically, Ms. Winfrey is intersectional. But it also explains something like the trip the show took in 1987 to Forsyth County, Ga., after it purged itself of nearly all its black residents. She wanted to know what about black people so scared the white residents, and she keeps having to remind the racists in her audience that the woman interrogating them is also black. Ms. Winfrey contributed more than 20 million to the sponsorship of the museum. So there's an urge to distrust the intent of an exhibition like this, to say that she bought it. But her museum donation doesn't seem at all like vanity. It's "how to use your life," "what do you stand for" money. Across from "A People's Journey" sits the Oprah Winfrey Theater. Maybe she paid for a piece of that. Anyway, our tax dollars are hard at work here, too. So Ms. Winfrey just paid a little more than I did. Nonetheless, "Watching Oprah," in its uncompromised captioning, goes out of its way to remind you about the chronic dissatisfaction, among some black people, with the lack of attention to the crises of black America. The show includes a 1986 letter from a black woman upset that Ms. Winfrey didn't call on her during a broadcast because she didn't "look like an ugly, fat, uneducated, frustrated black woman which is typical of the majority of the women you allow to speak on your show." If that was ever true (suburban white women made up its biggest demographic), it wasn't that way for long. This might be the only show in television history to feature a ferocious four way argument among black women about being a Republican. You watch a moment like that, in the exhibition's "Talk Back TV" montage, and you remember the show's deep roots as a roving dialogue, often through national events, tragedies and disasters, with Ms. Winfrey holding the microphone (several of which are on display). It was a show that, in 1992, devoted a handful of daring episodes to racism, including a couple after the Los Angeles riots and one that featured a panel of American Indians and a white audience actually hearing the panelists' dismay. Even when it was in the mud, "The Oprah Winfrey Show" was determined to make so called rednecks understand the problem with"redskins." ONE PROBLEM WITH being really good at your job is that people won't let you stop doing it. But you watch enough of these montages and realize two things. First, "Watching Oprah" needs a lot more of "Oprah" to watch, more clips, segments, whole episodes, something. Second, Oprah didn't do this work alone. She helped us do it. She was a platform. She was Facebook. Forget the presidency. She was the facilitator in chief. The more she empowered us to speak, the better she got at knowing how her emotional algorithm could supply us with books and feelings and tools for betterment. And she took real risks to better understand this country, too. That Forsyth County episode might have been a stunt, but it's more audacious than Geraldo Rivera's dragging millions of Americans into a bloody brawl with skinheads the following year. "Watching Oprah" doesn't privilege any one episode over any other. So it's hard, at first, to see what exactly it is about the show that matters. But then you think about that massive wall of episode titles and how it's impossible to take it all the way in. And that incomprehensible vastness seems perfectly right, both for the enduring vitality of the show itself and the woman at its center.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. THE COLLECTED POEMS OF BERTOLT BRECHT Translated and edited by Tom Kuhn and David Constantine 1,286 pp. Liveright Publishing. 49.95. Bertolt Brecht spent the summer of 1953 in his holiday home by a lake halfway between Berlin and the Polish border. In this "not unaristocratic" villa with its tea pavilion and private pontoon he worked on poems that would enter his final collection, the "Buckow Elegies." Stalin had died earlier that year. In June an uprising of about one million East Germans had been brutally suppressed by a regime Brecht had fought for, and continued to defend publicly. But the "Buckow Elegies" are needled by Brecht's bad conscience. "Would it not be simpler," he asks in "The solution," if instead of punishing the populace, the government "Dissolved the people and / Elected another one?" In "The Muses" he likens pro Stalin intellectuals to codependent prostitutes adoring their abuser. But where did that leave him? The Roman poet Horace had said that poetry outlives anything cast in bronze. Would his, Brecht wondered in one of his last contributions to the genre? Not even the Deluge Lasted forever. Came a day when its Black waters subsided. True, though, not many Lived to outlast it. For many, the aspects of Brecht (1898 1956) that have outlasted the black waters of time are his plays and his politics. With "The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht," the translators Tom Kuhn and David Constantine invite English speaking readers to discover Brecht the poet. The more than 1,000 entries some published for the first time in English are only about half of Brecht's lyric output. But they give a sense of the fertility of his pristine, unsentimental language and the breadth of subject and form. A collection this size is often said to contain something for everybody. In this one, every reader is sure to find something to take offense at. There's Brecht's politics for starters, the unblinking zeal with which he defended Communist violence and Communist rule. There are pornographic exercises inspired by a procession of women, many of whose brains he exploited along with their bodies. 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. And yet. "Brecht is a great poet," the translators write in their introduction, "one of the three or four best in the whole of German literature." This volume holds enough evidence to support that claim, from the Rabelaisian brilliance of the "Domestic Breviary" (1927) and the bitter clarity of the poems written in exile from the Third Reich to the meditative grace of late poems that is found in between or sometimes within odes to machines and Marxist dialectic. Translating Brecht is no easy task, especially in the early rhyming poems that borrow their form from Dante and Shakespeare. The "Domestic Breviary" is full of ballads that are meant to be read out loud, preferably while smoking, to lute or guitar. The lurid palette of Expressionism colors these works and their obsession with death and decay. A newspaper item inspired "Apfelbock or the lily of the field," about a young man who kills his parents, shoves them into a cupboard and continues to live in the house until the stench forces him to sleep on the balcony. In "The ship," told in the first person, an empty vessel disintegrates and fills with parasitic creatures as it glides "Mute and fat towards the ghastly heavens." In the "Ballad of Mazeppa" a condemned man is tied to the back of his horse with ropes that cut into his flesh with every movement of the fleeing animal. Over the course of 11 stanzas the reader becomes complicit in the sadistic ride, propelled by the lilting meter and roped in, as it were, by the simple rhyme scheme. The translation retains much of that power as well as the archaic boldness of the language. Three days till the ropes that bound him revolted The heavens were green and the grass was dun! Oh the crows and the vultures above his head Were brawling already over this live carrion. The title of the "Domestic Breviary" is borrowed from Lutheran and Catholic manuals, with Brecht's didactic energy turned toward exposing a world in which human suffering is man made and unredeemed. "The Infanticide Marie Farrar" tells the true story of a teenage domestic who had tried to abort her pregnancy "with two injections, allegedly painful," but was forced to carry to term working all the way through her contractions. After Marie has given birth in an outhouse she is "quite at a loss by then and barely / Able to hold him, being half stiff with cold / Because the snow blows in the servants' privy." When the child cries, she beats it to death. In the original German the interlocking rhymes have the simple mnemonic power of devotional verses for the layman; each stanza ends with a rhyming couplet exhorting the reader to compassion. In this translation the rhymes are often approximate and the refrain wan: "I beg of you, contain your wrath for all / God's creatures need the help of all." The translators' work becomes easier after this initial period in Brecht's life. By the time he writes from exile by his own estimate, he changed country more often than shoes during the Nazi years he begins to develop a style devoid, as the Bauhaus aesthetic would have it, of the crime of ornament. "The thought bobbed on the waves" of rhyme and meter, Brecht later said of his early output. Now the thought was the form. Meanwhile the bard became a teacher and guide offering encouragement, advice and warning to fellow political travelers. Poems like "A Lesson in Sabotage" now seem dated. But the prescience of "Questions of a worker who reads," from 1935, is borne out on every college campus: "Who built the seven gates of Thebes? / In books you will read the names of kings. / Was it the kings who dragged the stones into place?" it begins, deflating the historiography of powerful men. Even in Atlantis, he writes, "That night when the ocean engulfed it, the drowning / Roared out for their slaves." For all its dry precision Brecht's language in works like this retains poetic dignity. The poet speaks in unadorned verses like an orator with a soapbox under his feet. These lines demand to be recited slowly, with clear enunciation as in an echoing space.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Need a last minute New Year's Eve look? Head to the Armarium pop up at the Plaza Hotel before the clock strikes 12. There, fashion fairy godmothers (a.k.a. Armarium stylists) have entrance making options like a Sonia Rykiel sequin dress ( 500 rental, 4,050 retail) and a gold Roberto Cavalli gown ( 1,000 rental, 11,000 retail) at the ready. At 768 Fifth Avenue Alison Lou has conversation pieces, like Mr. Potato Head ear, eye, mouth and feet wire rings (starting at 625) from a holiday collaboration with Hasbro, at its new shop. At 20 East 69th Street The Me Ro designer Robin Renzi crafted sterling silver engraved "Joy" ( 105) and heart ( 110) pendants for the Joyful Heart Foundation, with 100 percent of proceeds going to support the organization, which provides support to survivors of sexual assault, domestic violence and child abuse. At 241 Elizabeth Street A KES raw edge slip dress made with recycled silk ( 389), available at an indie designer pop up that also includes selections from M. Patmos and Daryl K, would be perfect if you're going to let your accessories do the talking. At 97 Crosby Street	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Danai Gurira and Andre Holland in a theater at New York University, where they met in the Tisch Graduate Acting Program. Behind every successful person are relationships that helped forge a path. But the stories of these friendships, collaborations, alliances, romances or rivalries often are lost in the glow of achievement. In this new feature, we explore a personal connection that made a difference in the lives of two artists. Andre Holland never thought much about writing his own monologues when he attended the Tisch graduate acting program at New York University. But one day, early in his first semester in 2003, he watched another African American student, Danai Gurira, forgo the usual speeches by white characters and perform her own material instead. Her monologue, about the struggles of black women, had an immediacy and ferocity that led to a bond between them as friends, actors and, eventually, writing partners. Ms. Gurira was working on what would become "In the Continuum," the Obie Award winning play that she co wrote and starred in Off Broadway. Ms. Gurira would go on to write last year's Tony nominated play "Eclipsed" and act on Broadway and television, where she is best known as Michonne on "The Walking Dead." Mr. Holland is starring in August Wilson's "Jitney" on Broadway and as the diner cook Kevin in the film "Moonlight," which is nominated for best picture in this Sunday's Academy Awards. ANDRE HOLLAND After seeing that monologue at N.Y.U., I basically followed Danai around for the whole semester. DANAI GURIRA It was very obvious. HOLLAND I was a first year student. You were a big deal third year. GURIRA laughter Oh, come on. Most of us were up to our eyeballs in student loans. We were all just trying to get by. HOLLAND All the first years had to work on the third years' shows. They were doing an August Wilson play, actually "King Hedley II." I was working backstage, and I was responsible for firing a backup gun in case the one onstage didn't go off. You fired the gun, right, Danai? HOLLAND One night her gun didn't go off. It took me a second to register what happened. Danai acted it very well. GURIRA It's the climax of the play. I had this split second where I thought, "Oh, let me try again." And the guy who was supposed to be shot his face was like: "Was I shot? Was I not shot?" Then Dre fired the backup and saved us. GURIRA We were all very keen to see Dre get a show where he was the clear lead. But it takes awhile. HOLLAND In my third year I got Tartuffe. GURIRA The character is a scoundrel, and we all looked at Andre as this sweet, kind guy. I found myself kind of rooting for Tartuffe because Andre is so likable. HOLLAND N.Y.U. was a magical place for me. I was living out in West New York, N.J., in a 500 a month bedroom and taking the bus in at 6:30 a.m. But then you get to the classroom and it was just constant creativity, working from 9 a.m. to midnight. GURIRA I still go to Tisch to block out a room when I need to work something out quickly. I did that with all my plays. It's about being back in those very humble classrooms. The place kept Dre and I humble. HOLLAND A few years after, we ended up making our Broadway debuts together, in another August Wilson play, "Joe Turner's Come and Gone." GURIRA Our characters never met onstage. But that's when we became good, good friends offstage. HOLLAND It was a highly pressurized situation. Bart Sher was directing. There were a lot of feelings about us having a white director on a Wilson classic like "Joe Turner." And the ending of the play well, we as a cast were struggling to find the right ending. Danai and I talked about it a lot outside of rehearsals. "What are we doing? How do we figure this out?" I was struggling with my character, Jeremy there were things that the play was asking me to do, and other things that the director was asking me to do, and those two things don't always line up. I trusted her implicitly. "Does this make sense?" I'd ask her. "Is this clear?" GURIRA My character, Martha Pentecost, came onstage at the very end of the play. She is facing the husband she left years earlier back in the South. It was tough to figure out how to play the ending. We were taught in our N.Y.U. training that collaboration is not cooperation. You need to leave your ego outside; it's about finding the best work. That was a place that both Andre and I came from. August Wilson is such a deep, spiritual writer. You just can't come at it intellectually; you had to come at it deep. I leaned a lot on Dre. I got to know the poeticness of Dre's Southern background. I needed that for Martha. HOLLAND Mostly, I just sat there listening. Danai had most of the answers about what she needed to do with the character. GURIRA It wasn't that Bart wanted one thing and I wanted another. A lot of it was time pressure it was a three hour play and a huge amount to rehearse. HOLLAND A lot of the time it was just giving each other space to express things that you can't express easily in front of the director and the rehearsal room. We talked about the church a lot, religion a lot. GURIRA Two years later we did "Measure for Measure" in Central Park. We didn't know each other was auditioning. No idea. GURIRA Ridiculous! I literally had no idea you had been cast when I came in. But what was great was that you made it easier for me to find that thing that my character needed. My goal for my character, Isabella, was that she wasn't going to be someone that the audience could judge easily. Isabella has to decide whether to save her brother, who is in prison. She doesn't agree with things he has done, but Dre, as Claudio, made me want to save him. HOLLAND I talk to Danai more than anyone in terms of work. All these plays I've done Danai came to see "Jitney" recently, and she is the only person I talk to about the work. She had a couple good ideas. I'm working hard to put them in. I'll keep the specifics to myself. laughter GURIRA A lot of it is about decision making in our careers. We remind each other of who we are, what we want, where we want to go. We can get caught up in the moment of the thing you are working on. We remind each other of what we said last year, or five years ago, about what we wanted in life. HOLLAND We're working on a screenplay now together. It's based on the book "A Native of Nowhere," and it's a fascinating story about one man's life. It's early going, but I've always been interested in writing. I have stacks of notebooks that I've filled with stories.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
As stay at home orders ease and cities reopen for business, many doctors and hospital administrators are calling for a quick return of health care to pre pandemic levels. For months now, routine care has been postponed. Elective procedures big moneymakers were halted so that hospitals could divert resources to treating Covid 19 patients. Routine clinic visits were canceled or replaced by online sessions. This has resulted in grievous financial losses for hospitals and clinics. Medical practices have closed. Hospitals have been forced to furlough employees or cut pay. Most patients, on the other hand, at least those with stable chronic conditions, seem to have done OK. In a recent survey, only one in 10 respondents said their health or a family member's health had worsened as a result of delayed care. Eighty six percent said their health had stayed about the same. Admittedly, postponing health care had terrible health consequences for some patients with non Covid 19 illnesses, such as those with newly diagnosed cancers that went untreated because outpatient visits were canceled, or because patients avoided going to the hospital out of fear of contracting the coronavirus. The spike in deaths in major cities like New York during the crisis almost certainly includes such patients. Still, a vast majority of patients seem to have fared better than what most doctors expected. It will probably take years to understand why. Perhaps patients mitigated the harm of delayed care by adopting healthful behaviors, such as smoking less and exercising more. Perhaps the huge increases in stress were balanced out by other things, such as spending more time with loved ones. However, there is a more troubling explanation to consider: Perhaps Americans don't require the volume of care that their doctors are used to providing. It is well recognized that a substantial amount of health care in America is wasteful, accounting for hundreds of billions of dollars of the total health care budget. Wasteful care is driven by many forces: "defensive" medicine by doctors trying to avoid lawsuits; a reluctance on the part of doctors and patients to accept diagnostic uncertainty (which leads to more tests); the exorbitant prices that American doctors and hospitals charge, at least compared to what is charged in other countries; a lack of consensus about which treatments are effective; and the pervasive belief that newer, more expensive technology is always better. One of the most significant factors in wasteful health care is having too much supply of health care per capita in certain areas. In specialist heavy Miami Dade County, for example, Medicare spends more than twice per person what it spends in Santa Fe, N.M., largely because there is more per capita utilization of doctors' services. Sadly, more care doesn't always result in better outcomes. If beneficial routine care dropped during the past few months of the pandemic lockdown, so perhaps did its malignant counterpart, unnecessary care. If so, this has implications for how we should reopen our health care system. Doctors and hospitals will want to ramp up care to make up for lost revenue. But this will not serve our patients' needs. The start up should begin with a renewed commitment to promoting beneficial care and eliminating unnecessary care. Most doctors recognize the importance of this distinction, even if we don't always act on it. In a survey a few years ago, two thirds of doctors in the United States admitted that between 15 percent and 30 percent of health care is probably unnecessary. Medical societies already produce lists of procedures that are essential and those that are better avoided. The latter include M.R.I. scans for most lower back pain and nuclear stress tests when there are no signs of heart disease. As hospitals and clinics reopen for non Covid 19 care, such lists should be more widely publicized. Patients have an important role to play, too. Studies suggest that up to 20 percent of surgeries in some specialties are unnecessary. If your surgery was postponed because of the pandemic, it is worth having a conversation with your doctor about whether it is still needed. Despite the complexity of disease today, ailments sometimes do get better by themselves. And in some cases, scheduled surgeries weren't necessary in the first place. Many institutions are using this difficult time in our nation's history to make changes. The health care system should do the same. The pandemic has given us a glimpse of a world in which business as usual in our health care system was upended. It has also provided an opportunity to start up again in a healthier and more financially responsible way. Reflexively returning to the status quo may be good for our bottom line, but it won't serve our patients well. Sandeep Jauhar ( sjauhar) is a cardiologist, a contributing Opinion writer and the author, most recently, of "Heart: A History." 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
THE TERROR 9 p.m. on AMC. In the second season of this anthology series, the horror of Japanese American internment camps in World War II is mixed with a ghost story influenced by the Japanese folkloric tradition of kaidan. Set mostly in an internment camp, the season stars the actor Derek Mio as Chester, an American born California college student who is forced into the camp along with his family. The plot involves a series of mysterious deaths. Among the ensemble is an elder played by George Takei, the "Star Trek" actor who as a child was among the roughly 120,000 West Coast Japanese Americans who were forced into camps as a result of racist anti espionage measures enacted after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. "This project is groundbreaking in that the story of the internment of Japanese Americans is being told on this scale, this scope, for the first time" on TV, Takei recently told The New York Times. "It's massive, 10 hours, 10 episodes and in such depth the characters are examined in depth." OUR BOYS 9 p.m. on HBO. The 2014 killing of the Palestinian teenager Muhammad Abu Khdeir, in the wake of the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teenagers, set off a conflict in Gaza that resulted in many more deaths and hardships. This 10 part series dramatizes the investigation into Khdeir's murder, and explores how a pair of grim events snowballed.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Disneyland is anything but underwhelming. Its deluxe fountains constantly spout, water rides regularly douse patrons, and plush gardens all lead children, and sometimes adults, to both squeal with delight and break down in tears. So you may suspect that a Southern California theme park that relies on evoking a fantastical world of grandeur would view the water restrictions in the wake of the state's drought as onerous. That would be wrong. The drought has already changed the habits of a tourism industry that includes the state's signature theme parks, world renowned golf courses, extensively manicured hotel and spa grounds and the abundance of natural wonders that make up a 57 billion tourism industry and employ nearly 5 percent of the state's workers. But new limitations calling for people, governments and businesses to reduce water use by as much as 36 percent compared with 2013 mean different things to different attractions. The large scale destinations say that they'll continue to cut use, so the restrictions will in some ways mean business as usual. Others, especially those tied to the state's natural wonders, are tightening spigots at the same time they are finding new ways to market peaks with little snow and streams that are slowly drying up. Disneyland, which is in Anaheim, is celebrating 60 years in operation this summer and is showing no signs of slowing down. It is among the most visited theme parks in the world and it appears mostly unfettered by the drought. Attractions at the park that rely upon water Rivers of America, Adventureland, Splash Mountain, Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage, Pirates of the Caribbean and It's a Small World are mostly made possible by recycled water systems, but they still need to be topped off because of evaporation. "Since 1955, water conservation has been one of our key environmental goals," said Suzi Brown, director of media relations and external communications for Disneyland Resort and Disney California Adventure, its nearby theme park. "Walt actually had conservation in mind when he built Disneyland." She pointed out that two thirds of Disneyland's original storm drains flow into interconnected canals that feed Rivers of America, Storybook Land, Castle Moat and Jungle Cruise. The 60,000 lawn and garden sprinklers are managed by a weather based irrigation system, and the park is outfitted, as well, with flow sensors and cutoff valves to detect leaks. And, she said, Disney California Adventure incorporates water conservation design, such as storm water treatment devices which allow for water infiltration into groundwater. "In fact, if you look at our overall water usage since when the drought began," said Ms. Brown, "you'll see we've been able to reduce or maintain that while still increasing attendance, operating hours and also expanding the resort." Disneyland collaborates with the Orange County Water District, which recycles water into a purification system and then into the county's groundwater aquifer. Essentially, then, the water Orange County residents use could be the same water they sailed across on the Mark Twain Riverboat when they last visited Disneyland. Still, the Anaheim water authority must cut the city's use by 20 percent, a tall order. During a recent visit to Disneyland, it was apparent that there are some quick fixes. Although the sensor controlled faucets are low flow, for example, water continues to run regardless of whether you have finished washing your hands. Upper Yosemite Falls, photographed in 2005, may run dry during the summer, a park official said, when river levels diminish. Peter DaSilva for The New York Times Neither Disneyland nor Anaheim Public Utilities would say how much water the park does use and Disney will only say that it plans to comply with restrictions once they're in place. At Pebble Beach golf resort in Northern California, the 454 guest rooms are also equipped with low flow shower heads and guests can choose to have linens changed less often. The links are watered with reclaimed waste water, a 67 million project that the Pebble Beach Company says has also reduced discharge into Carmel Bay. An irrigation system, too, is based on evapotranspiration rates, soil probing, visual inspection and the weather. "A main driver to develop and finance this project in 1994 was that we realized we needed a reliable source of water to irrigate all of the golf courses here because, periodically, California goes through droughts," said David Stivers, executive vice president of the Pebble Beach Company. Mr. Stivers added that these previous moves to conserve water have given Pebble Beach a leg up in facing the coming restrictions. "The State Water Board has imposed an 8 percent cut back on the Monterey Peninsula, much less than the average 25 percent statewide cut back," he said. "They recognize that our community has one of the lowest water usages per capita in the state. We've had conservation plans in place for quite some time, and we'll expand what we are doing to help meet these restrictions." The drought, then, is most acutely felt perhaps by the communities that cater to tourists, like Catalina Island, which is off the coast of Southern California and is part of Los Angeles County. The island's cracked Stage Road, which snakes up into the dusty palisades and away from the idyllic and festive harbor offers heart stopping views of the mainland and also the Pacific Ocean, which is one reason many have come to the island in the last century. But continuing onward and inland, where bison roam the island's rolling prairie, a detour to Thompson Reservoir reveals what few visitors see: depressing, declining waters, with a rickety dock mired in weeds and beached paddle boats. While no water is actually pumped from here to serve the 4,000 island residents (most water comes from a desalinization plant and ground wells), it does function as an indicator, and stark image, of Catalina Island's vanishing supply of groundwater. Last August, eight months before California Gov. Jerry Brown announced water use cutbacks, Southern California Edison, which provides water, gas and electricity to Catalina Island, told residents to restrict their water use by 25 percent. The island economy is nearly entirely dependent upon tourism, making for a sobering dilemma: the source of Catalina's livelihood is also threatening its survival. Amid the deepening drought, four years on and seen by many estimates as California's worst, island residents are facing a 50 percent reduction in water use by October, when statewide water restrictions are expected to take effect. What this means, long term, for tourism on the island is hard to say, but Jim Luttjohann, president of the island's Chamber of Commerce and Visitors Bureau, described local plans for the short term. Scott Moyce, a tour guide and an island resident, on and off, since 1977, likened the current situation to life in the military. "Showering, three minutes, maximum," he said. At another popular tourist destination, away from the coast and into the Sierra Nevada, ski operators around Lake Tahoe are seeking to boost their warm weather attractions on the heels of a weak winter season. According to the California Ski Industry Association, California's resorts, 27 in all, are behind only those in Colorado as a top destination for skiers and snowboarders. Seven resorts in the Lake Tahoe area closed early this season because of limited snow. On the lake's northern and eastern shores, which stretch into Nevada, the surrounding waterways, including the Truckee River, serve resorts around Incline Village and the Stateline casinos, and stem from a high desert climate in Nevada, where the landscape is less dependent on irrigation, said Christopher Baum, president and chief executive of the Reno Sparks Convention and Visitors Authority. "The Truckee River will be down this summer, which may affect rafting and kayaking," Mr. Baum said, but he added that he foresees no water restriction issues along the Nevada portion of Lake Tahoe. And he confidently pointed to the lake's very depths as proof that all's not lost. "We're not in the dire straits California is in," he said. "Plus, Lake Tahoe is 1,600 feet deep. That's enough water to cover the state of California in 15 inches of water. In our lifetime, we're not going to run out of water." Andy Wirth, president and chief executive of Squaw Valley Ski Holdings on Lake Tahoe's north shore, said that although the number of winter visitors the last four years has been between 20 and 25 percent fewer than before the drought, he is cautiously hopeful that other area attractions will draw them. "In summertime, our mountain destination, guests and, in essence, our company are very low consumers of water and we don't anticipate a notable decrease in the number of customers based on the drought conditions nor is there any likelihood of notable drought related increases in costs," he said. "We still offer tram rides, concerts, weddings, conferences, and the past three summers' demand for these has been steadily increasing. However, while encouraging, this is all within the very real backdrop of the volatility of the weather." Meanwhile, hikers in the area this summer could find dry streams and creeks. A teenage hiker had to be rescued from the Pacific Crest Trail near Lake Tahoe on May 3 after he ran out of water and gradually discovered there was none to be had along the route's waterways. D'Artagnan Driscoll of Apache Junction, Ariz., had started his trek near the California Mexico border at the end of April, but when he found no water source in the rugged area, he had to return home. On May 2, he attempted the trail again, starting in Northern California near the town of Sonora, only to find that the water sources there had evaporated as well. "I was using two guidebooks and an app and they all listed about 10 places, with mile markers, where there was supposed to be water," he said. "But there wasn't any." At Yosemite National Park, managers have reduced watering lawns at the park's four lodges to once a week and reclaimed water is sprinkled on the golf course. As a park spokesman, Scott Gediman, pointed out, however, the state's water restrictions don't apply to this federal land, but with the drought so relentless and with fluctuating seasonal temperatures, managers felt compelled to follow suit, instructing their 1,000 employees, the largest number of any national park, to cut down on watering lawns and washing cars. "Tioga Pass opened earlier than usual this year, due to low snowpack," he said. "All of the meadows are green now and Yosemite Falls is going strong, earlier than is normal, but as we get later into the season, the falls may dry up in mid to late June or July and river levels will be lower. Rafting along the Merced River will likely close earlier in the season." But Mr. Gediman is still upbeat about the coming tourist season. "Yosemite is beautiful regardless, even if there are no waterfalls," he said. "There's still great hiking and mild temperatures, and in the fall, the trees changing their colors. Water is a big part of the park, but certainly not the only part of it. I guess you'd say we're taking the glass half full approach."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
The F.D.A.'s New Cigarette Warnings Are Disturbing. See for Yourself. WASHINGTON The corpse is gone. So are the grief stricken woman, the rotting teeth and the man struggling to smoke despite a hole in his windpipe. Nine years after the Food and Drug Administration first proposed graphic images as warnings on cigarette packs but was thwarted by tobacco companies in a successful court battle, the agency announced on Thursday that it is finally issuing a new set. Each of the 13 proposed warnings would cover the top half of a cigarette pack, to be used in rotation by manufacturers along with a variety of updated statements about the health risks of smoking. "When you look at the current warnings on the side of cigarette packs, they are virtually invisible," said Mitchell Zeller, who runs the F.D.A.'s tobacco division, in a call with media on Thursday. "The diseases embedded in these images will improve public understanding of the negative consequences of cigarette smoking." They feature photos involving lung and bladder cancers, diabetes, a chest incision scar from heart surgery, blackened lungs, a bulging tumor on a woman's neck, an underweight infant and a man slumped on a bed who may be dealing with erectile dysfunction. "While most people assume the public knows all they need to understand about the harms of cigarette smoking, there's a surprising number of lesser known risks that both youth and adult smokers and nonsmokers may simply not be aware of," said Dr. Norman Sharpless, the acting F.D.A. commissioner, in a news release. It was initially unclear whether the big tobacco companies would fight the latest proposals. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, which led the earlier court fight, said it was studying the F.D.A.'s suggestions, which will not become final until next year. "We firmly support public awareness of the harms of smoking cigarettes, but the manner in which those messages are delivered to the public cannot run afoul of the First Amendment protections that apply to all speakers, including cigarette manufacturers," said Neassa Hollon, a spokeswoman for the company. In an email, Bonnie Herzog, managing director of equity research with Wells Fargo, said she expected that the industry would eventually challenge the proposals in court. The warnings are required under the Tobacco Control Act, which Congress passed in 2009. The agency unveiled its first choices in 2010, featuring colorful and gruesome pictures to wrap around the top half of cigarette packages and also on 20 percent of the surface area of advertisements. A year later, the F.D.A. whittled its final selection to nine images. Public health advocates loved them, but tobacco companies fiercely objected. A group sued the F.D.A., and in 2012 convinced an appeals court that these specific graphic images violated its First Amendment rights of free speech. Altria, the nation's largest tobacco company, was not part of the lawsuit. The court ordered that the warnings be purely informational, not aimed at scaring smokers, nudging them to quit or imposing an ideology. The ruling was a huge setback for the F.D.A., which has spent the ensuing years trying to devise a set of warning labels that would be a strong deterrent. While the agency lagged in offering alternatives, scores of other nations required extremely graphic images of smoking related damage some that were so grotesque they would failed the standard set by the appeals court in the United States. Eric Lindblom, a former F.D.A. tobacco lawyer, said the agency hadn't tried very hard. "The F.D.A. lawyers, the health and human services lawyers, the Department of Justice lawyers, they are all scared of any F.D.A. issue that raises First Amendment issues because they lost big, and they don't want to lose again," he said. Now a director at Georgetown's O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, Mr. Lindblom praised the agency's new strategy, of creating what he called a safety net with several options in case a few warnings were rejected in court. The United States was the first nation to require warnings on cigarettes, but they have not been updated since 1985. Cigarette companies are permitted to rotate four warnings about lung and heart disease and cancers, and pregnancy complications. One says that cigarette smoke contains carbon monoxide, but does not explain why that is dangerous. The National Academy of Medicine has called the current warnings "woefully deficient." Much has changed since the 1980s, with smoking rates declining significantly. But even though the rate decreased to 13.8 percent last year from 21 percent in 2005, there are still nearly 38 million smokers in the country. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 480,000 people die from smoking related illnesses in the United States each year, and smoking remains the nation's leading cause of preventable death. Secondhand smoke can also be lethal, and is especially dangerous for children. A C.D.C. report this week said that from 2013 through 2016, more than 35 percent of nonsmoking youths aged 3 to 17 were exposed to secondhand tobacco smoke. The 13 new warnings describe in greater detail how smoking damages the body. One notes that smoking causes cataracts, which can lead to blindness. Others note the possibility of getting diabetes or reduced blood flow to the limbs, which can result in amputation. In a 2019 report, the World Health Organization said warning labels "are most effective when they are pictorial, graphic, comprehensive, and strongly worded." More than 91 countries have adopted what the organization considers strong labels, which cover at least half of the package. These include warnings about impotence featuring sad looking couples in bed and magnified images of rotten teeth and cataract covered eyeballs. Another 22 countries require graphic warnings that cover 30 percent of the pack, according to the organization. Several published studies found mixed smoker reactions to the initial nine proposed labels. A February 2016 study published by University of Illinois researchers in the journal Communication Research suggests that graphic images could backfire, with smokers viewing the lurid images as "a threat to their freedom, choice or autonomy." Researchers at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill said in June 2016 that 40 percent of participants in their study said they were more likely to consider quitting after exposure to the graphic images, compared with 34 percent with the text warning. And a study led by Cornell University researchers found that graphic warnings in cigarette advertisements reduced the appeal of cigarette brands among youth relative to social cue advertisements with the Surgeon General's warnings. Neither graphic nor text warnings influenced people's beliefs about the health risks of smoking. But public health organizations still pushed for them. In 2016, a coalition including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Cancer Society, the American Lung Association and others, sued the agency for taking too long to offer revised labels. In March, a federal court ruled in the groups' favor, noting that the F.D.A. had "unlawfully withheld," and "unreasonably delayed" action to require the graphic warnings. Judge Indira Talwani set a deadline of Thursday, Aug. 15 for the agency to issue a draft, and March 15 of next year to finalize them. Dennis Henigan, vice president of legal and regulatory affairs for the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, was part of the coalition urging for updated warnings. "Young people regard themselves as immortal, immune from some of the hazards of life," Mr. Henigan said. "We think that images like these will deepen their understanding that this is not some abstract danger, that if they become addicted to cigarettes, these dire consequences are very likely."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
If a 'Big Whack' Made the Moon, Did it Also Knock the Earth on Its Side? A cataclysmic collision not only created Earth's moon, but may have also knocked Earth over on its side, scientists proposed. In a paper published last week by the journal Nature, the scientists say their numerical simulations indicate that the collision of a Mars size object with the early Earth left our planet tilted at an angle of 60 to 80 degrees and spinning rapidly, once every two and a half hours, or almost 10 times as fast as today. But the simulations also show how the dynamics of the moon and Earth slowed down and straightened up over the next four billion years of the solar system, leaving them where they are today. "For the first time, this paper has a model that says we can start in one place and explain all of that without invoking any other follow on event," said Sarah T. Stewart, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Davis. "And that's new, and that's exciting." Earth's moon, by comparison, is a giant, more than 2,000 miles in diameter. In recent years, the preferred explanation for the origin of the moon has been "the big whack": very soon after the formation of Earth and the rest of the solar system, the Mars size interloper that astronomers have named Theia bumped into Earth. The resulting slosh of debris coalesced into a slightly larger Earth and the moon in orbit around Earth. The hypothesis explains a lot, in particular how to create a big moon. (Others have suggested that the moon formed elsewhere and was then captured by Earth's gravity or that the two formed at the same time, in orbit around each other, but no one could calculate how these could plausibly occur.) But there remained nagging discrepancies between the moon as it exists and the predictions of the big whack model. For one, the composition of the moon is very similar to that of Earth. Planetary scientists would have thought the moon would more closely resemble Theia. In 2012, Dr. Stewart and Matija Cuk, then a postdoctoral researcher, proposed a variation, that Theia slammed into Earth at high speed, scrambling up the materials of the two bodies. The resulting Earth would also have been spinning fast, and they explained how the gravitational interactions with the sun would have then slowed everything. "We changed the impactor," Dr. Stewart said. "We changed the energy. We're changing momentum. We're changing the way the moon forms. We're now changing the whole dynamical sequence. Everything is different except the words, 'giant impact.'" Dr. Stewart and Dr. Cuk said the revised calculations explained most everything about the moon. But there was still a nagging discrepancy a five degree tilt of the moon's orbit compared with the orbits of the planets and most everything else in the solar system. It's what astronomers call the plane of the ecliptic. The motion of moons and planets follow an orderly set of rules, Dr. Stewart said. "It makes very clean predictions, and when something goes against the orderly set of rules, it requires something special happening," she said. "The clean prediction is the moon is in the ecliptic. Period. That's where it should be." At its birth, the moon was quite close to Earth, probably within 20,000 miles. Because of the tidal pulls between Earth and moon, the moon's orbit has been spiraling outward ever since, and as it does, Earth's pull diminishes and the pull of the sun becomes more dominant. By now, with the moon a quarter of a million miles from Earth, the sun's gravity should have tipped the moon's orbit to lie in the same plane as the ecliptic. Last year, two astronomers proposed that planetesimals perhaps as big as the moon itself buzzing through the inner solar system tipped the moon's orbit through repeated close passes. Dr. Cuk, now a scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., came up with an alternate idea: Maybe the moon's orbit is still tilted, because the Earth started off very tilted. The flexing of the Earth and the moon by the gravitational tidal forces dissipates energy, causing the moon to spiral outward. The dynamics can become complicated. "The lunar spin axis does interesting things," said Dr. Cuk, the lead author of the new Nature paper. For example, tidal locking where one side of the moon always faces Earth is lost for a while before locking in again. It is possible that the far side of the moon was originally the near side. Dr. Stewart said some of the transitions in orbits could have heated up the interior of the moon, and signs of that melting might be observable in rocks on the moon. Alessandro Morbidelli, one of the astronomers who proposed the planetesimals hypothesis, said nothing was proved yet, and both models relied on assumptions. "Certainly it is an interesting model and it will trigger a lot of future work," he said of the new paper. "I think that our model cannot be ruled out."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
The need for tighter federal regulation was the dominant message sent on Thursday to the panel established by Congress to examine the causes of the financial crisis. Sheila C. Bair, chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Mary L. Schapiro, chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, agreed on several recommendations for regulatory reform, including regulation of over the counter derivatives. In addition, they said, financial institutions should not reach the point where they are deemed "too big to fail," because a government bailout or a market collapse are the only possible outcomes. "The financial crisis calls into question the fundamental assumptions regarding financial supervision, credit availability and market discipline that have informed our regulatory efforts for decades," Ms. Bair told the 10 member bipartisan panel, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. Ms. Bair, who has been outspoken since assuming her job in 2006, said the crisis was "the culmination of a decades long process by which our national policies have distorted economic activity" away from savings and investment in industry and toward consumer consumption, housing and finance. Ms. Schapiro cited lax regulation of asset backed securities, an excessive reliance on credit rating agencies, executive compensation that encouraged unhealthy risk taking and a failure to oversee hedge funds and private equity funds. She expressed sympathy for the idea of a council of regulators "with the power to evaluate risk across the financial sector," and added, "large, interconnected institutions should be supervised on a consolidated basis." The House last month adopted an overhaul that would give the government new powers to break up huge companies, create a consumer financial protection agency and tighten oversight of derivates trading. The Senate has yet to vote on the measure. The attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., told the commission that the F.B.I. was investigating more than 2,800 mortgage fraud cases, almost five times as many as the 534 inquiries in 2004. Of the cases, 1,842 involved more than 1 million in losses. As of November, federal charges related to mortgage fraud were pending against 826 defendants. Lanny A. Breuer, the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's criminal division, said prosecutors were focused not only on lenders that underwrote risky mortgages, but also on companies that packaged and sold the mortgages to investors. "We absolutely are looking at the conduct of the securitizers themselves, and what did they say to those who purchased the securitizations; and what did they say about the underlying conduct," Mr. Breuer said. But several state officials told the panel that federal action had come too late a point made by the commission's chairman, Phil Angelides, who said the head of the F.B.I.'s criminal division had warned in 2004 of an "epidemic" of mortgage fraud that, if unchecked, could match the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s in magnitude. "In the years preceding the crisis, federal regulators often showed no interest in exercising their regulatory authority, or worse, actively hampered state authority," Lisa Madigan, the Illinois attorney general, told the commission. The Federal Reserve failed to tighten underwriting standards, while the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision were "actively engaged in a campaign to thwart state efforts to avert the coming crisis," she said. John W. Suthers, the Colorado attorney general, described the fallout from the housing crisis. He spoke of "a dramatic shift in consumer complaints" in the last two years.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Audience members sit at a circular table surrounding Alison S. M. Kobayashi and take on roles in "Say Something Bunny!" A suburban family invites the neighbors to dinner. There are jokes and slights and a brief mention of the football game. Someone asks for a cake recipe. Someone else sings a song. It sounds punishingly ordinary. It is. It is also an out and out thrill. That long ago dinner party fills out the first act of "Say Something Bunny!," a play by Alison S.M. Kobayashi and Christopher Allen that is part documentary, part puzzle and part time traveling immersion, with a passing foray into adult entertainment. A few years ago, Ms. Kobayashi found herself in possession of a wire recorder, an obsolete magnetic device that enjoyed a quick midcentury vogue, and two reels. She played those reels and through the hissing and the overtalk, she could just make out a conversation. So go ahead and think of "Say Something Bunny!" as a detective story, but know that its mysteries are mellower and stranger than what a census search can solve. And by the way, you are part of the solution. Ms. Kobayashi and Mr. Allen, her co writer, co producer, dramaturge and husband, stage "Say Something Bunny!" in a small space in Chelsea up a small flight of stairs. The room only holds 24 people and as your name is called, you can choose a seat at a circular table painted black and white to resemble a wire reel or behind the music stands arrayed in the back. Ms. Kobayashi, dressed simply in a white T shirt and white jeans will play the reels for you, inviting you to read along in the script and occasionally pausing to explain her research or to show a photo, a video, a few frames of sprightly animation. Though audience members are made to stand in for each of the characters, the participation phobic should know that only Ms. Kobayashi moves and speaks. For the rest of us, presence is enough. (Me? I was cast as a dog. I liked it.) I want to tell you so much more about "Say Something Bunny!" but for those of you who will be lucky enough to see it (it's been playing since the summer, closes in April, tickets are only 40, hurry hurry hurry) ruining its surprises would be like stamping on a souffle. I'm not that kind of monster. I will tell you that Ms. Kobayashi's tender obsession with this material is as catching as the chickenpox, and if the piece is forthrightly funny and briefly pornographic, it is also sneakily moving. Toward the end I found myself fighting back tears. I hadn't really met any of these characters; most of them have been dead for decades. I'd only heard them and seen Ms. Kobayashi's exaggerated re enactments. (She is an expert guide and maybe a less than expert actress.) It still felt like a loss to leave them behind and as soon as I was home I Googled one. Because my sleuthing can't rival Ms. Kobayashi's I'll never know if he fulfilled his boyhood dream and became a radio announcer. I hope he did. If "Say Something Bunny!" feels sui generis, there are a few theater pieces, like Doug Wright's "I Am My Own Wife" or the work of W. David Hancock, that have previously meshed drama, documentary and off kilter investigation. (Some movies and podcasts have done it, too. I was often reminded of the classic "This American Life" episode, "House on Loon Lake.") Like these works, "Say Something Bunny!" is about more than the particulars. It's a low key ontological thriller about how we live and what we leave and how we account for ourselves when some kid comes at us with a microphone. "What do you want me to say?" Bunny, the neighbor's girl, asks at the end of that first dinner. More than 60 years later here we are, in a second floor room on the West Side of Manhattan, breathless to know what she comes up with.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
"Coherence" being the operative word here, and something that was notably lacking in the brand's most recent show, which featured footwear by Mr. Andrew and clothes by Mr. Rigoni, and was generally perceived as making no sense. What does make sense is that Mr. Andrew would come out on top, given the number of editors in the audience wearing his latest Ferragamo shoes (you could tell by the gold flower shaped heel), and the fact that Salvatore Ferragamo himself, a shoemaker, built his brand on footwear. Also the fact that in the first six months of 2017, apparel both men's and women's was responsible for only 5.8 percent of group revenues, while footwear was responsible for 43.6 percent. Still, the numbers indicate that Ferragamo has not, at least since the turn of the millennium, had any real identity in clothing. Beyond a certain facility with leather, there seemed to be very little ambition to define a point of view on women's wear, or on how Ferragamo could reflect the exigencies of women's lives. Mr. Andrew's job will be to inject an actual signature idea (or three, or five) into the collection. Whether he can do with skirts what he did with shoes, however, is now the question. There is precedent: Though Mr. Andrew is the first designer to come specifically from the footwear sector in recent years, a number of recent creative directors for major brands have come from accessories: Alessandro Michele at Gucci, Maria Grazia Chiuri at Dior, Pierpaolo Piccioli at Valentino, and Stuart Vevers at Coach. Even more pointedly, back in 2004, Kering then PPR, owner of Gucci Group named three designers to take over at Gucci after Tom Ford left: Frida Giannini for accessories, John Ray for men's wear and Alessandra Facchinetti for women's wear. Within two years Ms. Giannini was the only one left (she was fired in 2014). Which suggests that, although Guillaume Meilland remains the design director for men's wear at Ferragamo, another change could be in the offing. Those who don't learn from history, etc.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
The federal aid to unemployed workers that President Trump announced last weekend looks likely to be smaller than initially suggested and it remains unclear when the money will start flowing, how long it will last or how many workers will benefit. The uncertainty comes at a delicate time for the economy. New applications for state unemployment benefits fell below one million last week for the first time since the pandemic took hold in March, the Labor Department said Thursday. But filings remain high by historical standards, and other measures show the economy losing momentum. "The status of the financial relief is a huge question mark hanging over the economy," said Daniel Zhao, senior economist for the career site Glassdoor. Mr. Trump said Saturday that he was taking executive action to provide unemployed workers with 400 a week in extra payments, on top of their regular state jobless benefits. He did so after talks on a new round of pandemic relief stalled in Congress. The Senate adjourned on Thursday until early September, and House members had already left Washington. The departures all but end any chance of a quick agreement on sending stimulus checks to American taxpayers, reviving lapsed unemployment benefits and providing billions of dollars for schools, testing, child care, small businesses, and state and local governments. In the meantime, states are scrambling to figure out how to carry out Mr. Trump's plan, with unemployed workers wondering whether the money will arrive in time to prevent lasting financial harm. Here is what we know about the program and how it will work. The benefit will be 300 for most workers, not 400. When Mr. Trump announced the program, known as Lost Wages Assistance, he said it would add 400 to workers' weekly unemployment checks. But unlike the earlier supplement, which was fully funded by the federal government, the program called for states to chip in a quarter of the cost. Governors from both major parties balked at being asked to spend billions of dollars when tax revenues have plunged because of the economic collapse. So this week the administration offered new guidance: Rather than adding 100 a week on top of existing unemployment benefits, states could count existing benefits toward their share. In other words, unemployed workers would get an extra 300, not 400. States still have the option of providing an extra 100, but few if any are expected to do so. "They're stretched," said Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who has been studying the unemployment system. "They don't have money for masks for the teachers in their schools. They're probably not going to come up with an extra 100 for everyone on unemployment insurance." The lowest paid workers won't qualify for the extra money. Under guidance released by the Labor Department on Wednesday evening, the new program will be available to people who certify that they are "unemployed or partially unemployed due to disruptions caused by Covid 19" but only if they already qualify for at least 100 a week in unemployment benefits. That provision would exclude roughly one million people, nearly three quarters of them women, according to Eliza Forsythe, an economist at the University of Illinois. "They're the people who need it the most," Ms. Forsythe said. "They were low paid to begin with, and then being singled out for not getting this benefit I think is really cruel." 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. It isn't clear why the 100 minimum was established. Mr. Trump established the benefit under a federal disaster program that requires states to cover 25 percent of any costs. But that rule applies to the overall program, not to individual recipients. People receiving money under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, for example, qualify for the 300 a week even though that program is entirely funded by the federal government. Even for those who qualify, it could be weeks or even months before they begin receiving any extra money. States will need to adjust to the new provisions when they are already overwhelmed by unemployment filings. It took months for some states to begin paying benefits under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program which extended benefits to cover independent contractors, self employed workers and others left out of the standard unemployment insurance system in part because of archaic computer systems that are difficult to reprogram. "We think it would take months," William G. Kunstman, a spokesman for the Hawaii Department of Labor and Industrial Relations, said in an email. He cited the difficulty of reprogramming the state's computer system to comply with federal requirements. Even states with more modern computer systems said it could take weeks to get the new supplement started. Bill McCamley, secretary of the New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions, said that his state was among the first to get the pandemic assistance program up and running, but that it still took nearly a month. "Even in our system, which is very modern in the unemployment world, it's still going to take us time to do it right," he said. Mr. McCamley also warned that a murky timeline could prompt further confusion and distress for people seeking the new benefit. After Mr. Trump signed the 2.2 trillion stimulus into law on a Friday in March, Mr. McCamley said, his office returned Monday to thousands of calls seeking the aid even though it would take about a month to streamline the new benefits and programs. "The message went out that this was done, and there was not a concurrent one saying this doesn't happen at the flip of a light switch," he said. Trump administration officials contend that the new program will be faster to put in place because states have gained experience during the pandemic. But even these officials say it will probably be weeks before workers start receiving the money. The program is retroactive to Aug. 1, meaning that workers should eventually receive payments for all of August. But Mr. Trump's executive action caps spending on the program at 44 billion, enough to cover five or six weeks of benefits, assuming all states sign up. That means the program could end almost as soon as it begins. It is still possible that Congress could either revive the original unemployment supplement though probably at less than 600 a week or appropriate more money for Mr. Trump's replacement. But any deal appears far off. Democrats in the House voted in May to extend the 600 a week enhancement through the end of the year as part of a 3.4 trillion stimulus measure, but Senate Republicans have refused to take up that bill. The 1 trillion proposal unveiled by Republicans last month calls for a supplement averaging 200. Democrats argue that a legislative solution is the only way to provide workers with certainty. "The Labor Department's new guidance leaves many unanswered questions," said Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, who helped negotiate the original 600 benefit. "Workers struggling to pay rent and buy groceries are not going to see benefits they were promised any time soon." For unemployed workers, the uncertainty over benefits means not knowing when they will be able to pay down the credit cards, or whether they will be able to make rent on Sept. 1. For those already struggling to get help from overwhelmed state unemployment offices, the prospect of further delays is even more frustrating. David Moniz started a job in March as a resident chef at Sur La Table, the kitchen goods retailer, in San Jose, Calif. His timing was terrible: After he spent one day on the job, the store shut down because of the virus, and he was furloughed. It took Mr. Moniz, 29, weeks of calling to get through to California's employment office and file an unemployment claim. Then, after a few weeks, his benefits abruptly stopped. His file is shown as "pending" on the state website, and despite endless hours of calling, he has been unable to get through to address the problem. He hasn't received a check since June 1. Without any money coming in, Mr. Moniz has burned through his savings and racked up debt. He has 28 left before he hits his credit limit, he said, and owes 200 in late fees and penalties to his bank, Wells Fargo. "Wells Fargo calls me more than anyone in my family does because of my account right now," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Ordinarily, this column has rules, an enclosed rhythm: visit store, take in its offerings, offer impressions. But this is not how most of my or anyone's actual shopping is done. It is a longitudinal, polyvalent process. It happens on the couch or on the phone as often as in a store. It is about chasing a specific thing as often as it is about the happenstance of discovery. And it is about failure. So much of shopping is about coming up short. By percentage, most of my time devoted to shopping is unsuccessful: styles that don't work, garments that don't fit well, wild goose chases. Since last fall, I've been failing in spectacular, repeated, mortifying fashion in the pursuit of one particular item: Balenciaga Triple S sneakers, in the beige, green and yellow colorway. But all those disappointments made for an excellent case study on the way we shop today: the collapse between the luxury marketplace and street wear inspired drops, the ways in which the perfect information promise of internet commerce is a sham, how the hype cycle has become a series of unnavigable spikes and also a long arc all at once. From that day, I remember mostly that the sales clerk was tall. With a blend of exuberance and pity, he told me no, the shoes were just for show. They'd sold out. I left my number, hoping for a call. It never came. When I want something badly, it becomes an unbearable itch. When it involves solving an unsolvable puzzle, good sense goes out the window. I set useless Google alerts, called Balenciaga customer service a couple of times, searched Grailed, eBay and so on. No dice. By December, I got serious. I called every Balenciaga store in the country. Some snickered, some were helpful, some told me they already had "presold" their restock orders. A couple had unspoken for pairs, but not the colorways I wanted. Only one store, the SoHo location, said it was planning to restock and simply put them out on the floor. I stopped in with a friend to sniff around and struck up a conversation with a friendly young clerk named Maya who offered to reach out if my preferred colorway ever came back in stock, which it almost certainly would not. Still, a couple of weeks later, I got a text asking if I was interested in the all black version of the shoe a compromise, but not a terrible one. I headed over on a filthily rainy day to try them on. There were two options: one distressed and one more polished. I went with the more polished one because it felt more versatile, and because I thought that might answer the bell that had been ringing in my head for months. At a party one night in January, I saw Pusha T wearing the Dover Street Market limited edition Triple S in my size you can read the size right on the toe box, one of the shoe's signature filigrees and seriously considered asking to buy them from him when he was through wearing them. At a certain point, unable to sate my desire, and long past reason, I decided to investigate the world of bootlegs, in search of a fake that was extremely credible or extremely noncredible. On Tmall, I found what felt to me like the ne plus ultra of bootlegs: a shoe made in the style and colors of the Triple S, but with " KANYE YEEZY " stitched where "BALENCIAGA" was meant to be. I ordered two pairs (and a third, an imaginative version of the Yeezy 350s) for 230 via a proxy service, TaobaoAge. (Tmall is based in China.) For about six weeks in December and January, I emailed with the anonymous agents faithfully. They followed up on order updates, letting me know about items that were out of stock, or were slightly different than advertised. It was, up until that point, the most reliable and satisfying human exchange I'd had on this whole quest. They arrived, three crushed shoe boxes in a heavily taped cardboard box covered in Chinese lettering. The sneakers themselves were made carelessly, with paint where it's not supposed to be and stitching that comes apart, but they make me laugh every time I look at them. I wore them to MoMA's bootleg party in January, and no one noticed. My phone quickly turned into an heavy traffic orchestra, notifications dinging at all hours. More than once, I was rousted from sleep by an alarm, and I instinctually grabbed the phone and looked at the screen through mostly shut eyes to see if it was about the pair I was still craving. Many times I clicked through immediately, only to find that it was already sold out. Once, when I was up writing at around 4 a.m., an alert came through for a Barneys listing of the black and pink women's Triple S, and I snapped up the biggest available size, hoping they might fit. When they arrived, I tried them on, and they were like sausage casings. I was worried they'd split if I ever had to run in them. I mournfully returned them. A week or so before that, I'd set bids on StockX for both the original and the reissue versions of my preferred colorway. StockX is a middleman website for sneaker resale that provides verification: The seller ships to StockX, the company verifies the shoes' authenticity, then sends them to the buyer. For a sneaker that's being aggressively bootlegged and judging by the pictures on Russian and Chinese web stores, at a reasonably high level this was a service I would have happily paid for. (It is free when you purchase.) In March, out of nowhere, someone accepted my totally reasonable, not outlandish bid. I was excited, but maybe a bit wary. A couple of days later, they arrived with a StockX tag dangling from the left shoe. They were beautiful, but they felt a bit too clean, and the stitching of the size number on the left toe box was slightly distressed. I held them up against the real ones I'd bought at the SoHo store, and they were eerily similar. I searched YouTube for videos offering guidance on how to spot fake Triple S's there are oodles for Yeezys and Jordans but the only ones I could find appeared to have been made by bootleggers themselves. (Nice try!) I sat on them for a few weeks, slightly skeptical. Eventually, I sold them. And then, in early May, the deluge finally came. First, a random late evening notification led to the exact pair I craved on the Saks Fifth Avenue website, which I ordered and which never came. The FedEx tracking page was a grueling taunt. At one point, on the day of alleged delivery, I went downstairs from my apartment to meet the FedEx truck, which turned out to be nothing more than a Budget rental truck with an ocean of boxes in the back and two extremely harried workers trying to sort through them, all of this at around 9 p.m. It didn't help that in the public imagination, they were coveted, then memed, then played out, then strangely forgotten. There was a new generation of bulky sneakers, some even more absurd: the Dior Homme B22, the Versace Chain Reaction, the Guccis with the Sega font crisscrossed by bands of crystal. Also, now, nine months from when I first put a pair on my feet, only to be told they couldn't stay there, they were suddenly everywhere. They mocked me in the ads on my Instagram feed, and in the ones that trail me across the internet. Here we are! Easily available! I began to resent them, sitting in a box I'd opened only once, on the day I picked them up from the store. One day last month, though, I was wearing something with a hint of bright green and I realized that I had the perfect sneakers to go with it. Lacing them up didn't provide quite the same thrill as when I pranced around the Upper East Side Balenciaga store. Instead, the satisfaction was something different, like wearing something you've had for so long that it's become familiar, a foregone conclusion.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
These costumed New Yorkers or are they? got a jump on the action this weekend. Halloween, like adolescence and the electioneering season, gets longer each year. It also appears to get older. It is now totally common in big cities to see absolutely adult size people roaming about in costume at any hour within a two week period. Is that a vampire on the subway, or is it your accountant? In New York City, it's a bit jarring for the first two days. Then it becomes real tiresome. Then, as we hit costume saturation right before Halloween itself, it's totally hilarious and wonderful. You're all great! What's it all about that many fully grown people are pleased to wander public transport in adult diapers, clutching our boxes of Scooby Snacks? Are we a town of shameless exhibitionists, or permanent adolescents? Is New York a college campus, or a community of really inventive artists? Maybe it's all of these things. The long season of adult dress up is a link back to Halloween's long past as a time to flirt. Inside your goofy homemade robot suit, under your basic Daenerys wig, behind your Vladimir Putin mask, you're going out to be outgoing. As silly as you may look, you're breaking up the monotony of life the rotten jobs, taxes and public benefit corporations trying to run subway systems that allow and make impossible our every day. Every costume offers an opportunity for conversation. We hope you all met each other and went home safely. Jonathan Mehring for The New York Times Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion and Weddings) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
The markets are suffering from information overload. Investors have been receiving guidance about the future, but it's not clear what they should do about it. I'm thinking of the guidance coming from two sets of important sources. One is the Federal Reserve, which controls short term interest rates and influences longer term rates, too. The other is the array of publicly traded American corporations reporting earnings for the last three months of 2014 and opining about earnings prospects well into the future. Because investors should care about what will happen to their money in the future, all of this guidance could be very helpful. Yet, except as an exercise in elaborate signaling behavior, there's little evidence that it has been useful. First, let's look at what the Fed has been saying. Janet L. Yellen, the Fed chairwoman, testified before Congress on Tuesday and Wednesday and issued the Fed's semiannual Monetary Policy Report. She disclosed a great deal of background about the Fed's analysis of the economy and its own intentions on interest rates. Unless you're an inveterate Fed watcher, those thousands of words and numbers may need deciphering. They boil down to this: The Fed won't raise short term rates in its next two meetings but might raise them in June. Then again, it might not. Edward Yardeni, an independent market researcher, put it this way: "She said the Fed will be 'data dependent' and basically that means that once the Fed knows what it's doing, it will let the rest of us know." There's more to the Fed guidance, including new market signals, which Ms. Yellen explained. It centers on the word "patient" the Fed's characterization of its attitude about raising rates. When Fed policy makers meet in March, they will decide whether to include that word in their communique. If they keep it, she said, the Fed won't raise rates for at least two more meetings. If they remove the word, they could raise rates two meetings hence in June or anytime thereafter. At that point, if the Fed judges that the economy is strong enough, inflation is high enough and the unemployment rate is low enough, it might begin raising rock bottom short term rates, which it has held near zero since late 2008. For the moment, the stock market took the new Fed information as a signal that nothing much had changed. It barely moved over the course of the week, although stocks fell a bit on the second day of Ms. Yellen's testimony, when she had spirited exchanges with House Republicans who criticized the Fed's expansive monetary policy. Laszlo Birinyi, an independent strategist, says that in the months before an interest rate increase, markets have tended to rise. Douglas Healey for The New York Times The market has been rising for the most part since March 2009, in no small measure because of that policy, which makes stocks and other assets relatively attractive, compared with low yielding fixed income instruments. Ms. Yellen's prepared testimony seemed aimed at keeping the market calm not only now but whenever the Fed actually decides to raise interest rates. Recently, the market has been rising despite a barrage of corporate reports that might suggest that stock prices are overextended. After all, growth in both revenue and earnings for the last quarter has decelerated. For the 440 companies in the Standard Poor's 500 stock index that had reported by Wednesday, revenue for the fourth quarter rose only 1.5 percent over the period a year ago, compared with a 4.1 percent growth rate for the third quarter at the same point in the previous earnings season, Mr. Yardeni said. Comparable numbers for earnings were an annual increase of 5.9 percent in the fourth quarter, versus a 10.4 percent rise at the same point in the previous earnings season. The strong dollar, falling oil prices and a sluggish global economy have all taken their toll. What's worse, guidance for future earnings turned extremely pessimistic. Bespoke Investment Group examined 1,680 publicly traded companies that reported earnings between Jan. 12 and Feb. 19. After subtracting downgraded guidance from upgrades, it found that, on average, companies had downgraded their earnings prospects by "a ridiculously low" net 9.5 percentage points. Corporate guidance hasn't been that bleak since the end of the financial crisis in the first quarter of 2009. Companies that lowered their guidance were punished for it. On average, this earnings season, their shares declined 2.7 percent on the day of the announcement. Yet despite the mediocre profit performance and warnings of worse to come, the market has remained buoyant. "We're in danger of a market melt up," a surge that isn't supported by fundamentals, Mr. Yardeni said. "The problem with a melt up," he said, "is that it will lead to a meltdown." Of course, corporate executives have been known to engage in signaling behavior of their own deliberately lowering expectations ahead of time so their company will register "a positive earnings surprise." Companies facing an earnings squeeze may be paving the way for positive surprises later.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
The mighty 16 trillion American economy can easily shrug off a snowstorm or two, even in regions unaccustomed to wintry snow and ice. But a prolonged bout of unusual weather is taking a toll, especially on small businesses like Abbadabba's, a shoe store chain in Atlanta, which has weathered two major storms this year. "It's been bad, but it goes back even further than just this winter," said Kristen Dellaporta, the chief financial officer, explaining that two years of mild winters had prompted the store to cut back on cold weather gear, and an exceptionally rainy summer had helped to squelch profits in 2013. This year, the company has lost business not only because it had to shut down during the storms but also because it couldn't meet customer demand. "Last year we had boots and no winter, this year we had winter but no boots," Ms. Dellaporta said. "We all need to start buying the Farmer's Almanac, I guess." Abbadabba's, where a wall of spring flip flops is on display, generally places orders six months in advance and cannot restock on short notice. "When you're small retail, your real business is inventory management, just having the right things at the right time," Ms. Dellaporta said. "I would have loved to have been stocked up on nothing but rain boots, but that wouldn't be practical." Economists have placed much of the blame for a recent spate of weak economic data on the effects of the unseasonable cold in the Northeast, Midwest and South, which they project will shave a few tenths of a percent off the growth of gross domestic product in the first quarter. But much of the sudden slowdown in hiring, industrial production and retail sales, they hope, will be shrugged off come spring. Consumers seem to believe this, too. The Thompson Reuters University of Michigan preliminary index of consumer sentiment for February, released on Friday, showed that a slight drop in satisfaction with current economic conditions was offset by an uptick in optimism for the future. Many weather effects are either transient (a snowstorm may keep you from the car dealership for a day or two, but it probably won't cancel your plans to buy a car) or self balancing (a hardware store may sell less paint and drywall but more shovels and salt). If a factory shuts down for a couple of days, chances are it will simply fill its orders a little later. But in some industries, losses cannot be made up so easily. A restaurant forced to shutter on a Tuesday is not going to sell twice as many burgers on Wednesday. At London Grill, a restaurant in the Fairmount section of Philadelphia, revenue is down 10 percent more than in the usual January slump, said Terry Berch McNally, a co owner. But weather can also be fickle: On Thursday, just as Ms. McNally was fretting about whether her Valentine's Day bookings would fall through, the afternoon brought twice as many drinkers as usual because local employers had closed early. Thankfully, Ms. McKee said, the biggest day of the year for florists would not be a bust. But her revenue for 2014 is down about half from what it would usually be. Inventory has been hard to get because of grounded planes. Walk in sales have been slow. "It's crushing me," she said on Thursday, when Philly was blanketed by snow and ice. "I have thousands of dollars invested in perishable gorgeous flowers that I can't get anywhere. I have three trucks parked outside the store, and I can't move the trucks. This day is lost. There was no revenue today." Elizabeth Holmes Hones Her Defense in Day 2 of Testimony Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Nonstop Couriers, a same day delivery company that operates within 100 miles of the Philadelphia, has lost about 20,000, or around 3 percent of annual revenue, since this winter's snow storms began in December, said Rick Slowicki, the president. The storms have also pushed back Mr. Slowicki's plans to hire two new drivers and kept him from expanding his customer base because he doesn't want to risk providing a late delivery for a new client. His drivers have been affected, too as have millions of other hourly workers, who make up about 60 percent of the work force. Rich Ludwig, a Nonstop employee, said the storms had cost him 800 in lost wages. He has pulled back on socializing and groceries, cutting spending to "the bare necessities," he said. It is not yet clear how much of the poor showing in recent data is the result of bad weather, and how much the bad weather may simply be masking softer demand. On the one hand, said Ian Shepherdson of Pantheon Economics, weather "affects pretty much everyone all the way up the supply chain." On the other hand, he said, "It's completely impossible to disentangle weather effects from everything else." The effects can be tricky to nail down. In one analysis, economists at Capital Economics, a research firm, noted that through a series of complex chain reactions, a heavy blanket of snow might drive gold prices up and wheat prices down. Speaking to Congress earlier this week, Janet L. Yellen, chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, said that weather might have been a factor in the weak jobs reports in December and January, but warned the public not to jump to conclusions. In a report this week, retail sales made a poor showing as well, decreasing 0.4 percent last month from December, and spending in December was revised downward to make the 2013 holiday shopping season the weakest since 2009. Manufacturing also declined in January, despite a large jump in output from utilities because of the cold, with many economists concluding that the weather was not causing the retreat but making it look worse. Mr. Shepherdson ticked off indications that some of the growth in the latter half of last year would not be sustainable: Manufacturing output was fed by a buildup in inventory, not demand, and increased spending by consumers was fed by a decline in the savings rate. The construction industry, which is particularly sensitive to weather, added jobs in January, which some economists said was evidence that the weather was not the problem. Jed Kolko, the chief economist for Trulia, agreed. "There are plenty of other factors that have held back sales in recent months," including low inventory and pullback by investors, he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
LONDON A bright and noble passion floods the Jamie Lloyd Company's ravishing "Cyrano de Bergerac," starring a fiercely romantic James McAvoy in the title role. Contrary to expectation, it is not the passion of a man for a woman. Or a woman for a man. Or for that matter, two men for each other, though all these feelings are freshly and revealingly considered in the production at the Playhouse Theater here. What instead animates and illuminates Martin Crimp's postmodern retooling of Edmond Rostand's classic is spelled out for the audience. Literally: Early in the show, while the rest of the cast is performing downstage, a lone actor with a paint brush is quietly daubing seemingly disconnected strokes in black Gothic lettering on a blank white wall. It takes a while for the markings to assemble themselves into a coherent sentence. But when they do, it's as if lightning has torn open the night. The statement is a naked and simple confession: "I love words. That's all." That was the moment in this production, directed with transformative audacity and insight by Lloyd, when I, a weary theater critic who had seen two earlier versions of "Cyrano" in the previous few months fell in love all over again with a play I thought I had outgrown years ago. And I remembered what had excited me so much about Rostand's script when I was a boy. For although the rapier wielding Cyrano had physical courage and athleticism to burn, they weren't the sources of his most prodigious and irresistible skill. It was his ability to speak extempore with an eloquence and inventiveness unrivaled in 17th century Paris. For clumsy, weedy kids like me who spent hours alone reading the dictionary, the silver tongued, homely Cyrano opened a glorious new vista on possibilities for becoming a hero. You might think that such a word centric point of view is an anachronism in the 21st century, when transmittable and carefully curated images have become the dominant form of self expression. Yet during the past several decades, vigorous, spontaneous rhymed poetry has become a fixture of mainstream playlists, via hip hop recordings and the biggest Broadway hit in years, Lin Manuel Miranda's "Hamilton." Lloyd's "Cyrano" presents this empowering art as a natural successor to the competitive poetics of Rostand's drama. I couldn't help thinking of another recent Miranda project on Broadway, the improvisational rap fest "Freestyle Love Supreme," in the early moments of this "Cyrano." The set here (by the omnipresent Soutra Gilmour), like that of "Freestyle," is a nearly empty box with a row of microphones as its principal adornment. This amplified speech dazzles, seduces and destroys. And no one tops McAvoy's Cyrano, who is described with awe as the "all time crazy genius of the spoken word." He is also said to have an impossibly large nose, about which he is exceedingly sensitive. McAvoy, whose screen credits include the "X Men" series and M. Night Shyamalan's "Split," possesses a leading man handsomeness that is not disguised here; there's no prosthetic schnoz. Yet once he starts talking, in a sonorous voice that leavens shiny bravado with shadows of self loathing, you never doubt he has a nose that is, as he puts it, permanently "set to the max." That's because in this production, words and the tone and cadence with which they are spoken are what shape reality. During the past decade, Lloyd has been moving steadily toward elegant and deep simplicity, evident in his recent revival of Harold Pinter's "Betrayal." His "Cyrano" has the audiovisual wit that characterized his 2019 take on the Pinter radio play "A Slight Ache." You could close your eyes and still completely follow the story of this production. But that doesn't mean it's ever physically static: Lloyd works his cast (and those mics, and a few chairs) into emotionally resonant, almost balletic patterns. I have never seen a "Cyrano" that so wrenchingly captures the tragic loneliness of not just the title character, but also that of the beautiful, intellectual woman he adores, Roxane (a vibrant Anita Joy Uwajeh) here an overalls wearing proto feminist and the handsome, inarticulate man she thinks she loves, the young soldier Christian (Eben Figueiredo, deeply touching). As usual, Cyrano courts Roxane, who is as word crazy as he is, by proxy for the tongue tied Christian. Freed of the tethering constraints of period scenery (including that famous balcony), the deception feels newly and unusually convincing. In the scenes of verbal lovemaking, the performers look not at each other but straight ahead. Cyrano, pretending to be Christian, says to Roxane: "Let's be like the blind / and see each other in the dark spaces / of each other's mind." The pulsing susurrus in McAvoy's delivery of such lines makes this the most erotic "Cyrano" I have seen. It makes perfect sense that toward the end, amid harrowing scenes of soldiers under siege during battle, even Christian feels the sensuous tug of Cyrano's words. "Is there a version of life where two men can live as one person?" Christian asks Cyrano in the early morning darkness before a fatal battle. The question resonates on many levels, including ones Rostand probably never consciously intended, and it leads to a kiss of unsurpassed tenderness. Crimp, the adventurous author of "The Treatment" and the sexual role play drama "When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other," finds depths of ambiguity in "Cyrano" that you may not have ever realized were there. His era scrambling cleverness also evident in his 1999 adaptation of Moliere's "The Misanthrope" can initially feel off puttingly arch. The rhyming dialogue embraces an assortment of latter day slang and obscenities, along with copious references to the evolving forms of poetry (with a riff on Emily Dickinson) and contemporary cultural ideas like gender fluidity and "women and the male gaze in poetry." Ultimately, though, such academic game playing comes to feel part of a bottomless obsession with language and its possibilities to match Cyrano's. As rendered here, the play's final scene is heartbreaking in fresh ways, which include a chilling presentation of the later life of an independent woman like Roxane in a male universe. And the production ends not with a triumphant declaration, but the ellipsis of an incomplete rhyme. The rest is silence. Nonetheless, you're likely to leave the theater with words, spoken and unspoken, resounding in your ears glorious, pyrotechnic words ringing, exploding and shape shifting forever and ever.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
SAN FRANCISCO Even before 8chan, the anonymous message board, went dark early on Monday morning, the scramble to keep the site online had begun. The message board, which had hosted the anti immigrant manifesto of the man accused of the El Paso shooting and the hateful messages of other attackers, had gone down after Cloudflare, a security company, decided it would no longer provide it with its services. That left 8chan vulnerable to cyberattacks that could knock it offline. Another internet firm, Tucows, which helps companies register their web addresses, also pulled its support for 8chan on Monday, leaving the message board without a functioning web address. Why banning 8chan was so hard for Cloudflare. To stay online, 8chan's administrators raced to find alternatives. They went to Epik, a technology company that could help the site register its web address again. Epik's subsidiary, BitMitigate, could also protect it from cyberattacks, an 8chan administrator said in a tweet. After 8chan migrated to Epik and BitMitigate, the site flickered back online in some regions. But its return was brief. Voxility, a company that provides computing services to Epik, was criticized by internet executives for indirectly helping to keep 8chan on the web. In response, Voxility severed its relationship with Epik, taking BitMitigate offline in the process and making 8chan go down again. The behind the scenes digital domino effect illustrates how websites like 8chan rely on a complex network of internet infrastructure companies that are unseen by most people but are crucial to keeping these sites around. Dozens of these companies, which are often small and privately owned, provide web addresses, cloud computing power and other basic mechanisms that websites need to exist. Without the backing of these companies, 8chan has limited options for survival. "Some of the biggest service providers of the internet on the planet are generally completely unknown to the average user," said Tarah Wheeler, a cybersecurity policy fellow at New America, a public policy think tank. She said the infrastructure companies enabled sites of all kinds to be quickly and easily accessible at a low cost. A version of 8chan was still available on Monday afternoon on the so called dark web, the home of many illegal websites. 8chan is a megaphone for gunmen. "Shut the site down," says its creator. Bad actors have thrived on the dark web because the technology allows website owners and visitors to obscure their location and internet address, making it harder for law enforcement to find them. The dark web version of 8chan, which was surfaced by the intelligence firm Terbium Labs has the site's familiar battle cry across the top: "Embrace infamy." The top headlines on Monday afternoon were all about the weekend shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio. But even on the dark web, companies need service providers to keep their sites up reliably. And the 8chan site was only intermittently available and slow to load, making it nearly impossible to click on the site's links. Ronald Watkins, an administrator for 8chan, said on Twitter on Monday afternoon that he would wait to see if BitMitigate would be able to restore its services. If not, 8chan would try to get online again anyway, he wrote. Mr. Watkins is the son of Jim Watkins, the owner of 8chan. As of 6 p.m., the message board remained offline. Rob Monster, the chief executive of Epik, said in an email that he had not solicited 8chan's business and had not decided whether to keep the site as a customer. "Our services fill the ever growing need for a neutral service provider that will not arbitrarily terminate accounts based on social or political pressure," he said. "Our philosophy is, if the customer is not breaking the law, providers of technology should apply discernment in determining whether or not to service." At Voxility, Maria Sirbu, the vice president of business development, said it would not work with Epik or BitMitigate again even if those companies ended their relationships with 8chan. "We're totally against hate speech," she said. "We are free to terminate the service as we like." The internet infrastructure companies have distanced themselves from toxic websites before. In 2017, The Daily Stormer, a neo Nazi forum, was booted off Cloudflare after the site mocked Heather Heyer, a woman who was killed during a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va. The Daily Stormer initially struggled to find companies that would provide the infrastructure it needed to remain online. BitMitigate, which says its services come with "a proven commitment to liberty," and Epik eventually stepped in to protect it. The Daily Stormer now uses dark web services and overseas hosting providers to stay afloat. But it went offline on Monday after Voxility terminated its business with Epik. 8chan is in an even more delicate position than The Daily Stormer because it appears to help mass killers by providing them with a place to air and spread their violent and often racist messages. Other recent shootings including at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and at a synagogue in Poway, Calif. were all announced on 8chan before they began. Over the weekend, even one of 8chan's own founders, Fredrick Brennan, disavowed the online message board, saying, "Shut the site down."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Robert Ryman, one of the most revered artists of his generation, takes painting to places where the air is thin and the view can be vertiginous. "It helps to think of Mr. Ryman as a kind of philosopher carpenter, with an inborn, almost mystical love of paint as paint," Roberta Smith wrote in 2015 in The New York Times. "'Is this a painting?' 'Is that a painting?' could be taken as the main credo of his art. He doesn't always provide easy answers." Robert Ryman, "Tower II," 1976. In Mr. Ryman's artworks, even the fasteners that connect a painting a wall are part of the essence of the piece. 2017 Robert Ryman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Bill Jacobson, Studio, New York, Greenwich Collection, Ltd, Dia Art Foundation, New York But for anyone who wants to ask the questions, Dia:Beacon, the Dia Art Foundation's sprawling upstate outpost, has been an essential Ryman pilgrimage site since it opened in 2003, with rooms full of natural light dedicated to his mostly white, mostly square minimalist works. And now Mr. Ryman, 86, is cementing that status with a donation to the foundation's permanent collection of the 21 works on view, which will remain on display along with another painting Dia already owns. Taken together, the paintings represent a sweep of Mr. Ryman's career unparalleled in any other public collection and now virtually impossible, given prices for his work, to assemble on the market, where they might collectively reach into nine figures. (A 1980 painting sold for 20.6 million at auction in 2015.) Mr. Ryman who has said "I am involved with real space, the room itself, real light, and real surface" has long believed his works are best seen in number, in their own galleries, so that viewers can tune in to their countless subtleties and their relationships with their surroundings. In 2009, he reinstalled the paintings himself at Dia:Beacon, a rawboned former Nabisco box printing factory in Beacon, N.Y., that includes pieces by many of his contemporaries, like Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin and Donald Judd. Mr. Ryman, a native Tennessean who has lived and worked in New York since 1953, arranged the works not chronologically but in groupings that emphasize their surfaces and materials, including the fasteners that connect them to the walls, which are as much a part of their essence as the paint. Jessica Morgan, the director of Dia, whose collection centers on the Minimalist and Post Minimalist generation, said the foundation had long hoped that the Ryman works would remain in that configuration and never leave. "But as art history has taught us," she said, "you're never sure of anything until you have an absolute commitment." She added: "Ryman is so completely central to Dia's mission. This is a culmination of almost 30 years of the foundation's involvement with his work." While institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam have substantial holdings, the closing in 2014 of the Hallen fur Neue Kunst, a contemporary museum in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, with the largest public display of Mr. Ryman's painting, leaves Dia as the only remaining site with an extensive permanent grouping, featuring works made as early as the late 1950s and continuing up to 2003. "The hope is that eventually someone in Europe somewhere will want to do a similar thing," said Robert Storr, former dean of the Yale University School of Art and president of the Greenwich Collection, a nonprofit organization that oversees Mr. Ryman's work. "His paintings make most sense when they're experienced like this. The space, the light, the fact that they can really be seen on their own terms are things that Bob has thought about very hard." Cordy Ryman, one of Mr. Ryman's three sons, said his father had long felt that the works should enter the permanent collection at Beacon. But Dia experienced some instability in recent years, with the loss of a major patron, Leonard Riggio, and several changes in leadership, and the Ryman family felt it wise to wait. "At the moment this is the only remaining installation he put together himself, which makes it incredibly important, in a place he has a lot of respect for," the younger Mr. Ryman said, speaking on behalf of his father, whose ability to communicate has been hampered by a stroke. "And Dia now seems solid. You never know what's going to happen with an institution, long term. In a hundred years, they could be doing car shows. But I kind of doubt it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
In 1937, the writer E.B. White described Snedens Landing as "steeped in Hudson Valley mists and memories people make their own wine, stamp out their own copperhead snakes, go picking Dutchman's breeches in the spring. On summer evenings, you can hear the trains across the river, grumbling. There is a good deal of talk about shad." More recently, conversations have turned to house colors and speed limits, but the tiny riverside enclave in the hamlet of Palisades, N.Y., in Rockland County, 12 miles north of the George Washington Bridge, still has snakes and wildflowers and residents tethered to the past. Hilly, leaf encrusted and less than perfectly groomed, the Landing, as locals call it, incorporates about 100 houses with the informal, romantic aspect of books in an antiquarian shop. The place has long attracted cultural lions. Katharine Sergeant Angell, The New Yorker magazine's fiction editor, who married White in 1929, began renting there in the 1920s with her first husband, Ernest Angell, when it was an artists' summer colony. So did John Dos Passos, Aaron Copland and Noel Coward. But let's face it: The houses here are the real personalities. Diana Green, who grew up in Snedens Landing and runs the local Children's Shakespeare Theatre, recalled youthful sleepovers with a friend whose family owned the Captain John House near the river. (Many of the houses have names, just like people.) The circa 1830 Greek Revival building had long ago been a tavern, and Ms. Green said she saw the ghost of a woman in a Civil War era gown with a mobcap there. "There is so much history and so many generations of people who have taken care of these houses and moved from house to house," said Kris Haberman, who lives with his husband, Ernest de la Torre, and their 3 year old son, Parker, in a 1957 ranch house called the Clock House (an actual clock sticks out of the roof). Playing musical homes "happens a lot in the Landing," Mr. Haberman said. "We are hoping to do the same thing." He explained: The couple bought the three bedroom house in 2004 for 1.2 million, and Mr. de la Torre, an interior designer, overhauled it, brightening the dark lower floor with a double height ceiling and a wall of steel framed casement windows. In summer, the couple likes to throw open the French doors they installed so they can smell the gardenias and daphnes planted outside. Now Mr. de la Torre is ready for another project, and Mr. Haberman, a senior account director at the New York design company ESI, is hankering after some kind of antique home "where the floorboards creak a little bit and there's wear marks on the windowsill," he said. In March, they put the Clock House on the market for 3.6 million. But they like that the Landing knits Democrats and Republicans and artists and lawyers into a solid community. On top of that, it has a heck of a Halloween celebration. "It's a live and let live kind of place," said Jane Herold, a potter who turns out dinnerware from her home studio at the top of Ludlow Lane. The building, which she has rented from the sculptor Grace Knowlton since 1980, used to be the machine shop on a gentleman's farm. Ms. Knowlton lives in the former barn, and her concrete, clay and metal spheres lie like meteorites around the property. "You have lot of privacy without being isolated," Ms. Herold noted. Tolerance has it limits, though. The Town of Orangetown's Historic Areas Board of Review keeps a strict watch on exterior renovations. (The hamlet of Palisades is in Orangetown). The residents who recently painted their clapboard house (which previously belonged to Bill Murray) an intense shade of yellow without seeking approval will have to face that seven member governing body next month. Isolation is on the rise, judging by the number of fences and gates that homeowners have built in the past two decades. Ms. Green recalled a more porous time, when children and their pets freely crossed property lines. "My dog, whose name was Tiggy, would spend nights at other people's houses," she said. One neighbor who lived between Lawrence Lane and Ludlow Lane routinely took Tiggy in. "He called her Miss Garbo and sent her home with garlands of flowers." The enclosures are a natural outgrowth of greater prosperity, Ms. Herold said: "This was a little artists' community. I think when properties become expensive, they're going to attract people who like gates." Snedens Landing lies east of Route 9W and west of the Hudson River, between Tallman Mountain State Park to the north and Columbia University's Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory to the south. Apart from the Palisades Presbyterian Church, an 1863 Gothic Revival building, and the Tennis Association, a single outdoor court, the enclave is made up of private residences. And because there are no attractions to draw visitors down Washington Spring Road, the main access route, the neighborhood keeps its quiet character. "It's hard to get into Snedens," said Chris Day, the supervisor of the town of Orangetown. "You need a reason to be there, but it's not gated. The roads are narrow. There is no public beach. No one will be going through the community to get somewhere else." Richard Ellis, of Ellis Sotheby's International Realty, whose office is involved in most of the local home sales, said properties in Snedens Landing date from the 18th to the 21st centuries, with the majority originating between the 1800s and World War II. A wing of a 1730s building on Route 9W known as the Big House is even older, Mr. Ellis said. It appears on a 1685 map. Residents tolerate a lack of shops and services at their toe tips. They drive two and a half miles north to the village of Piermont, N.Y., for restaurants. (Ms. Herold, the potter, also goes there for the rowing club.) They buy groceries at the Stop Shop in Orangeburg, N.Y., or the ShopRite in Northvale, N.J., or the new Whole Foods Market in Closter, N.J. each less than 10 minutes away. Across Route 9W, in "downtown" Palisades, are the public library and post office. The Palisades Community Center, in a circa 1870 onetime schoolhouse, holds a winter farmers' market, antiques sales, a festival of short films and a variety of classes. A historic cemetery tucked behind Closter Road is the resting place for members of the Sneden and Dobbs families, who transported colonialists back and forth across the Hudson, laying the groundwork for the communities of Snedens Landing and Dobbs Ferry on either side. After decades in private hands, the cemetery is now owned and managed by a nonprofit corporation run by the community. Graves are for sale for 2,000 each. In addition to mingling at library lectures or community center yoga classes, Snedens Landing occupants join the many cyclists and hikers at the popular 9W Market, a cafe and specialty food store, and the Filling Station next door, a hamburger place in a former gas station. These spots are easy to reach on foot. However, accidents at the intersection of Washington Spring Road/Oak Tree Road and Route 9W have led Mr. Day and other officials to accede to community demands and persuade the New York State Department of Transportation to lower the speed limit from 45 to 40 miles an hour on the northbound route from the New Jersey border to that intersection. Mr. Day said a further reduction, to 35 miles an hour, is essential, in both directions and on a longer stretch of road. Because it is minuscule, Snedens Landing has only a few available homes at any time. Expensive and eccentric, the properties often stay on the market for months. As of Nov. 20, six houses were listed. The Big House, considered the neighborhood's most historic (Martha Washington certainly came to tea, Mr. Ellis said), is priced at 2.25 million. Seven Oaks, an 1862 Gothic Revival house with nine bedrooms and 12 fireplaces, is 3.595 million. And the two bedroom Henry Dobbs House, which is built into a hillside and has Hudson River views, is 895,000. Mr. Ellis said that between October 2017 and October 2018, seven properties were sold, ranging from 1.6 million to 4 million, with a median price of 1.83 million. In the preceding 12 months, there were three sales, for 1.65 million, 1.8 million and 3.21 million. Carol Baxter calls it the "golden day": that single day in autumn when a gust of wind blows the yellow leaves off her giant ginkgo tree and onto the lawn of her 1850s house by the river. Ms. Baxter, the president of the Palisades Community Center and a longtime Snedens Landing resident, said she lives in a microclimate, where fall color lasts longer than it does up the slope. It is both a natural phenomenon and a symbol of the neighborhood, a place that is beautifully and dramatically out of step with surrounding areas. Children who attend public school rotate among the four institutions that make up the South Orangetown Central School District. Tappan Zee High School, in Orangeburg, has about 1,070 students in ninth through 12th grades. The average SAT scores for the class of 2017 were 572 reading and writing and 579 math, versus 528 and 523 statewide. Rockland Coaches runs daily buses between the intersection of Route 9A and Oak Tree Road in Palisades and the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan. Five buses are scheduled during the weekday morning rush hours (arriving at Port Authority by 9 a.m.). Travel time is about 50 minutes. Among Snedens Landing's many colorful figures, particular note should be made of Marian Grey, a celebrated British lace maker and sister of the writer John Cowper Powys, who bought an unpainted, ramshackle house across from the Palisades Presbyterian Church and lived there until her death in 1972 at the age of 89. Alice Gerard, a local historian, recalled how Mrs. Grey would have the neighborhood children to tea: "She wasn't fastidious about washing things up. We were always afraid that the kids would catch something terrible." For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
THE CONFOUNDING ISLAND Jamaica and the Postcolonial Predicament By Orlando Patterson For a tiny island in the Caribbean, Jamaica has long enjoyed an outsize global reach there are the songs of Bob Marley and the gold medals of Usain Bolt, as well as the millions of sun seekers flocking to the island's pristine beaches. It is quite an accomplishment for a nation "barely the size of Connecticut," as Orlando Patterson notes in his fascinating study, "The Confounding Island: Jamaica and the Postcolonial Predicament." But shadows hang over this sunny picture, not least distressingly high rates of poverty and homicide. Patterson is a Jamaican who has long lived in the United States, working as a sociology professor at Harvard University, which allows him both an intimacy with the island and a degree of distance through which to analyze it. Although he provides extensive citations and robust discussions of theoretical frameworks, he also offers a personal story of affection and frustration, perhaps most evident in the questions that form all but one of the eight chapter titles. These include: "Why Has Jamaica Trailed Barbados on the Path to Sustained Growth?" and "Why is Democratic Jamaica So Violent?" Indeed, these two questions are so significant, he devotes the first half of the book to them. Patterson starts by comparing Jamaica with its fellow former colony Barbados, which is 25 times smaller in area and, with under 300,000 inhabitants, possessing only one tenth the population. Yet Barbados has more than twice the per capita G.D.P. of Jamaica and none of the political violence. To explain this, Patterson pursues lines of investigation that are not strictly economic. The themes of slavery and freedom run through his analysis; it is impossible to discuss contemporary Jamaica without their inclusion. Although Patterson's time frame is postcolonial, to get to Jamaica's economic present he navigates the pothole strewn road of its troubled past.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
LONDON Novartis, one of Switzerland's biggest drug makers, said Tuesday it scrapped a planned 78 million payment to its departing chairman because of pressure from shareholders and lawmakers. Novartis said it cancelled an agreement with Daniel Vasella to pay him 72 million Swiss francs over the next six years to keep him from sharing his knowledge with competitors. The decision comes three days before the company's board is to face investors at the annual shareholder meeting. "We continue to believe in the value of a non compete, however, the decision to cancel the agreement and all related compensation addresses the concern of shareholders and other stakeholders," Novartis's vice chairman, Ulrich Lehner, said in a statement. The size of the planned payment, which was revealed last Friday, had outraged investors just two weeks before a Swiss referendum to give shareholders more power to determine executive compensation. Mr. Vasella had previously said that he would step down as chairman at Novartis's shareholder meeting on Friday. In a statement on Tuesday, Mr. Vasella said he understood that many in Switzerland found the amount of the compensation "unreasonably high, despite the fact I had announced my intention to make the net amount available for philanthropic activities." On Friday, Mr. Vasella had said the annual payments were "according to fair market value" and that it had been important to Novartis that he refrains "from making my knowledge and know how available to competitors and to take advantage of my experience with the company." Swiss lawmakers and shareholder activists criticized the company over the weekend and on Monday for not making the amount of the planned payment public earlier. They also contended that the payment was just the latest of several bad decisions by Novartis on executive pay. Ethos, a Swiss group of investors, on Monday called on Novartis to immediately cancel the contract with Mr. Vasella and take back any money already paid. Christophe Darbellay, president of the Christian Democratic People's Party, told a Swiss newspaper, SonntagsZeitung, that Mr. Vasella's compensation was "beyond evil." Simonetta Sommaruga, the Swiss federal justice minister, told another newspaper, SonntagsBlick, that the payment was an "enormous blow for the social cohesion of our country" and that such "help yourself mentality" was damaging confidence in the economy. Even before the latest revelation, Mr. Vasella's pay had been at the center of shareholder complaints. Mr. Vasella is currently receiving 12.4 million Swiss francs, or about 13.4 million, a year, according to the company's 2012 annual report. The board has promised to consider changes in the way it pays its senior executives next year. Pressure on companies to cut executive pay and give shareholders a greater say on the compensation levels is mounting. Recent opinion polls showed that Swiss voters were likely to approve changes at a referendum on March 3 that would effectively allow shareholders to determine executive pay. The referendum also proposes no payments when new executives join or executives leave, and no payments in advance. At least five of Europe's 20 highest paid chief executives work for a Swiss company, including the food company Nestle and the drug maker Roche, according to Bloomberg News. Swiss business lobby groups warned that such a change would harm the Swiss economy by discouraging companies from moving business to Switzerland. Mr. Vasella helped orchestrate the merger between Sandoz and Ciba Geigy that created Novartis in 1996 and was chief executive of Novartis for 14 years after that. He was named chairman in 1999. Jorg Reinhardt, who was once in the running to become the Novartis chief executive but then left to run the drug division at Bayer, is to replace Mr. Vasella.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
There was an oddly somber feel to preshow proceedings at Alexander Wang this season, his usual downtown crowd muffled in big black coats under the cool cloistered ceilings of St Bartholomew's Church on Park Avenue. The Wang Gang had shown up in their droves to support their friend on Saturday night, including Kylie Jenner and her rapper boyfriend Tyga, the singer Beth Ditto, Zoe Kravitz and Taraji P. Henson, the actress lately known for playing the ferocious matriarch Cookie Lyon in "Empire." Head to toe in a black and studded Alexander Wang shift dress, Ms. Henson appeared delighted to be at the designer's show for the very first time. Everyone seems quite subdued tonight, but you seem very cheerful. Well, I'm feeling happy. I get to be here and support Alex. I am never in town for fashion week. I wasn't even meant to be this weekend. But now I am, and when he heard, he just said "You must come." And so here I am. I am honestly his biggest fan, both as a designer and a man. What else are you going to do while you're in town? It's been a huge year for you. Are you happy with the way Cookie has worked her way into fans' consciousness?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
AUTOMOTIVE writers are often asked what vehicle to buy. Considering the bounty of choices versus needs, wants, budgets and brand loyalties, it's akin to querying your barista on whom to marry. That understood, here's counsel from a reviewer who has driven more than 500 cars over the last 10 years: No vehicle makes life easier for families than a minivan. While Americans have abandoned them for crossovers, my advice is sincere. Minivans are nimbler than large sport utility vehicles, low floors make for easy loading, and children can't ding other cars with sliding doors. Kia labels the new Sedona a multipurpose vehicle. Let's be clear, though: It's a van, and let's drop "mini" since the Sedona and its competitors, the Honda Odyssey, Toyota Sienna and Chrysler Town Country, are big rigs. Children are unaware that their future college dorm rooms may be smaller than the vehicles in which they ride to soccer practice. Kia's design team has created a deceptively elegant people hauler. It's as fashion forward as it gets in this segment. An upward kink in the lower glass beltline is in chic contrast to the Odyssey's jolt of a lightning bolt. The Sedona's cabin quality has gone from worst to first. Plastic lumber trim looks real, leather on the SX Limited is as smooth as the baby bottoms it will haul. It's fancy enough that parents might designate Sedona a child free zone.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
BRAD SACKS brought in two family friends who were older and wiser when he started his sauce company, More Than Gourmet, in 1993. They didn't invest any money, Mr. Sacks said, but for their help, he gave the men half of the company. Two decades later, the company, in Akron, Ohio, was booming, with lines of demi glace and cooking stocks that were being used at the Capital Grille and the Hilton Hotel chain and sold at supermarkets like Wegmans. But Mr. Sacks said the two original partners were reaping the benefits of his work even though they were no longer advising the business. "The company had huge growth, but they weren't interested in me buying the company back," Mr. Sacks said. He called the negotiations "ugly." When the two sides finally agreed on a price, Mr. Sacks had to find a way to pay them without crippling the company, which has annual revenue of 25 million. His situation is typical of people who become wealthy through starting private companies but whose wealth is tied up in those companies. While the value of the company may continue to grow, the founders can only borrow so much against it before they are stymied. They can generally cover their expenses. But getting money to buy out existing partners or to invest in other businesses is another story. It gets more challenging if they don't want to give up control of the company. Mr. Sacks knew one thing: He didn't want to sell his business to buy out his partners. Soon after he started More Than Gourmet, the owner of the sauce making plant he used sold to a larger competitor. The sauce maker thought he had freed up some of the money from the business and shed the burden of running the company. Six months later, the buyer ousted him. The best strategy for buying out partners is, not surprisingly, to have an arrangement set up in advance, advisers say. Rick Marcatos, senior vice president at UBS Wealth Management, said that there should be legal documents that discuss just how any buyout would occur. "To not hamper the company, you can do some payment structure 'I've been given 12, 18 months to pay you back,' " he said. But, of course, that requires planning at a time when entrepreneurs are scrambling to bring their idea to life. When a buyout isn't so clearly delineated, the options are more complex. Banks will lend, but they are constrained as to how much. Part of the money Mr. Sacks needed was arranged as a loan from Key Bank, which is the company's bank. But the bank couldn't lend all that he needed without putting the company's debt ratio above the limits set by the Dodd Frank financial reform law. Mezzanine financing is another option. This type of financing looks like debt but the mezzanine lender has the right to convert it to equity. That conversion happens when the company is doing better than expected, since it increases the return for the lender. "If the company is projected to be at 2 million to 3 million in a couple of years and it's at 5 million to 6 million, the mezzanine lender is going to convert to equity and there's nothing you can do about it," Mr. Marcatos said. "They dictate the terms because you need the money." Mr. Sacks kept searching for other options. He could have ended up paying as much as 30 percent on the money from the mezzanine lender if the company performed as he expected it to. The other problem with using mezzanine debt to buy someone out is deciding on the value of the firm, said Ryan Budlong, managing director at Harris Williams Company. He said he often advised clients to get two appraisals and then split the difference. Short of turning to a private equity firm, there are family offices and other private lenders willing to acquire companies and give the founders the opportunity to sell some portion of their company yet remain involved. William J. Kidd, the founding partner of Kidd Company, a family office in Greenwich, Conn., said he looks to buy companies with net income of 3 million to 20 million a year that have more potential. "The businesses we're interested in have been taken by the founder from the floor to the table," he said. "They haven't been taken to the ceiling for a number of reasons. It takes a different skill set to take a company from the table to the ceiling." Kidd Company generally pays the founder 70 percent of the price in cash and then structures the remaining 30 percent as a five year note, which could pay the founder above that amount if the company does well. "The key when you do this is to make sure the person we're dealing with has a role in the business that is meaningful to them and fun," he said. In the end, Mr. Sacks found a niche firm, New York Private Finance, part of Emigrant Bank, that was willing to structure something creative: It would make a personal loan to Mr. Sacks using his ownership in the company as collateral. When he then put that money into the company to buy out his partners, it would appear on the balance sheet as an infusion of equity. "The only real negative was the fact that it was a personal loan so you couldn't get away from it if everything fell apart," he said. "But I was all in." Leigh Hoagland, chief executive and chief credit officer at New York Private Finance, said the firm sought out entrepreneurs and lent to them personally, not to an operating company. While the borrowers will be responsible for the loan, they will not have to contend with the lender taking a board seat or exerting control over the company. Mr. Hoagland would not disclose the interest on the loan but said that there was a cap on how much the lender would be paid back, even if the company did better than expected. And the overall cost is less than mezzanine financing. "For people for whom this product works, it's an extremely important part of their wealth creation," Mr. Hoagland said. The loans are generally 4 million to 20 million for periods of three to seven years. Mr. Hoagland said the firm preferred to lend to people who had multiple businesses to act as security. That was the case with Joe Cambi, a private investor in Springfield, Mass., who built up a food service company there and sold it to Sysco in 2001 for 100 million. After the deal was done, he found he couldn't retire. "I like the building process," he said. That led him to invest in several businesses, including a minor league hockey team and a mortgage banking company. In 2008, the mortgage business was struggling and he took on an outside investor, whose money stabilized it. Last year, the investor, a billionaire, wanted to cash out his stake and wasn't inclined to wait. "Banks aren't going to lend to someone like me to take out a partner," Mr. Cambi said. "We needed to go to a private equity firm, but we didn't want to give up a lot of equity." Like Mr. Sacks, Mr. Cambi got a loan from New York Private Finance to bridge the gap, in his case for 5 million of the 25 million the company needed to buy out the investor. Personally guaranteeing the money, he said, was worth it to regain control of the company. "He had 70 percent and we had 30 percent," Mr. Cambi said. "Now, we have a lot of debt. It's heavy to bear, but it was better than having him in the nest." Mr. Sacks shared that feeling. "I was running this business and there was this shadow over my head," he said. "The company was limited based on that situation. By changing it, it changed the overall outlook."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
As the final, frenzied week of spring ready to wear shows began in the French capital, the country's most influential stylist was nowhere to be found. He wouldn't be in the front row (he never attends the shows). He might not even be in town. And even if he were, he would make a point of staying below the radar. Now that stylists are media stars in their own right, that's a rare situation. Consider the surging profile of the self described illusionist Arianne Phillips, the costume designer for Katy Perry, Madonna, "Kingsman" and more. Or that of Karla Welch, who has engineered red carpet looks for Elisabeth Moss, Ruth Negga and Sarah Paulson as well as Justin Bieber and Lorde. But as the stylist that Brigitte Macron the first lady of France, one of the inspirations for the new acronym WHIP ("women who are hot, intelligent and in their prime") enlisted, Mathieu Barthelat Colin has somewhat different priorities. Powerful public relations executives deny knowing him (if they even return an inquiring call). Ask in person and they change the subject. Designers whose clothes the first lady has worn are quick to say they have never met him, either (they're dying to, obviously). Locate a willing intermediary and Mr. Barthelat, as he is known, will decline politely, firmly, repeatedly to be interviewed. Like Meredith Koop, the stylist to Michelle Obama from 2009 to 2016, he prefers life behind the scenes. Even online, he hasn't left many traces. Aside from references to long ago stints in the communications departments at midlevel brands like Zadig Voltaire, Cerruti and Loft Design By, scant details turn up in a Google search. On Instagram, Mr. Barthelat is more inclined to post scenes of his home in Burgundy than anything fashion related. It's as if the 34 year old materialized out of nowhere when, in June, the website of the French magazine Gala posted a video in which the tall, dashing, bearded stylist was shown (for a couple of seconds) helping a candidate for the French version of "The Bachelor" into a white jacket. Compared with the bachelor, Mr. Barthelat, who was wearing a white oxford shirt and gray V neck sweater, was noticeably ill at ease in front of the camera. He has also dressed both jury members and candidates for the French version of "The Voice" in a mix of styles and price ranges. But reality TV is not what paved his way to the Elysee Palace. Mr. Barthelat recognized Mrs. Macron at the theater late last year, before she became a media darling. In a fan moment, he worked up the courage to introduce himself. The call came shortly thereafter. Mrs. Macron's style has always skewed less is more. Judging by her public appearances since they began working together this year, Mr. Barthelat's influence has been both subtle and significant. The first lady has been loyal to Louis Vuitton, wearing designs by its artistic director, Nicolas Ghesquiere, a friend whose runway shows she attended before becoming a public figure. Other classic French names in her wardrobe include Balmain, Courreges and Dior. But recently she has also taken to wearing sharp jackets by lesser known designers and labels: Alexandre Vauthier (in red or black), Stefanie Renoma (powder blue) and the tailoring specialist Pallas (beige, at the G20 meeting in July in Hamburg, Germany), the better to cast a halo around a larger group of French names. And it's not just about high fashion. Jewel neck tops and other separates by midrange French brands like ba sh, Sandro, Georges Rech and Paule Ka have appeared in the mix. On a state visit to Greece in September she was spotted wearing a Greek coin "Profile" ring by Marc Auclert, whose designs incorporate antique artifacts and who is one of the few designers willing to discuss the effect of her favor.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
For the small but devoted band of Duckie Brown fans (I count myself among them), the last few years have been fallow ones. It has been mostly out of stores, even those, like Barneys New York, that had been its staunchest supporters. Steven Cox and Daniel Silver, the Duckies of Duckie, have not staged a runway show since 2016. These are challenging times for the fashion business in general, and especially for those fashion businesses that are small and independent, not flush with investment capital or the leverage of a luxury group. And Mr. Cox and Mr. Silver's designs have never been accused of playing it safe. They did not want for critical raves, nominations for fashion's top awards (they were in the running for the Council of Fashion Designers of America's Men's Wear Designer of the Year award most recently in 2013) or creative energy. But even a pair of the most talented men's designers in New York had to reassess. "After 17 years, we were struggling to continue to make a viable situation," Mr. Silver said. "So we took a pause to rethink our business. We love what we do, we just have to think about it in a different way. We couldn't just keep trying to hang on, trying to find more retailers, doing a show. If you keep doing something the same way hoping for a different outcome, isn't that the definition of insanity?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
A roundup of motoring news from the web: According to a Reuters source, Daimler has plans to bring back its ultraluxury Maybach brand, which was discontinued in 2012. With the number of millionaires rising in the United States and Asia, the source says Daimler will unveil the S Class based Maybach at the Guangzhou and Los Angeles auto shows in November. (Reuters) AT T announced this week that it had struck a deal with a global automaker that would use AT T wireless technology in its vehicles. The company did not name the automaker, but already has connected car technology deals in place for some models from automakers including General Motors, Volkswagen and Tesla Motors. (Bloomberg) With 3,500 advance orders for its vehicles coming in every month, Maserati says it will increase production and add a new sports car, the Alfieri, to its lineup. The new car would compete with cars like the Jaguar F Type and Porsche 911. (Automotive News, subscription required) Harald Krueger, a BMW board member, said Tuesday that the automaker has increased production of the i3 electric car to 100 units per day. The i3 is scheduled to be introduced this month in the United States, which BMW says it expects will be the car's largest market. BMW has already built 5,000 of the cars and has orders for about 11,000, the automaker said. (Reuters)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
After it was forced to retreat from an effort to make challenging labor practices harder in many workplaces, the National Labor Relations Board is moving to achieve the goal through other means. The board announced on Thursday that it was set to publish a proposed rule redefining a company's responsibility under labor law for workers engaged at arm's length, such as those hired by contractors or franchisees. The proposal, reversing an action taken during the Obama administration, would make it less likely that a company in such a situation would be deemed a joint employer liable for labor abuses like firing workers seeking to unionize. In February, a majority on the board voted to vacate its earlier attempt to change the policy, in a decision involving a company called Hy Brand, after the agency's inspector general concluded that one of the board members appeared to have had a conflict of interest and should have recused himself. But the board has authority to change policy both by deciding cases and by putting forth rules. Having been stymied in its initial approach, it has decided to rely on another. Philip A. Miscimarra, who was chairman of the board when it issued the Hy Brand decision, said that rulemaking was justified and that the task was urgent because the current policy had created uncertainty among employers, workers and unions. "The agency has to fix it," Mr. Miscimarra, who was elevated to chairman by President Trump, said in an interview this year. Mr. Miscimarra left the board when his term expired at the end of 2017. Critics accused the agency of seeking to bring about an essentially illegitimate policy. "After getting caught violating ethics rules the first time, Republicans on the board are now ignoring these rules and barreling towards reaching the same anti worker outcome another way," Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a statement. Ms. Warren and a fellow Democrat, Senator Patty Murray of Washington, played a crucial role in drawing attention to the apparent conflict of interest that undermined the board's first attempt to revise its joint employer standard. Before 2015, the law typically required a company to exert direct and immediate control over workers at a franchise or subcontractor to be considered a joint employer. But in a ruling that year, when the labor board had a Democratic majority, it altered the standard so that even employers that controlled other companies' workers indirectly say, through software that locked franchisees into certain scheduling policies could be considered joint employers. The board also said that a company could be considered a joint employer if it had a right to control working conditions at a franchisee's place of business, even if it didn't exercise that right. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. This more liberal standard, in addition to potentially exposing more companies to legal liability, made it easier for workers to unionize at fast food restaurants and hotel chains. It may be illegal for a parent company to terminate a franchise agreement in response to a union campaign by employees of a franchisee if the parent company is considered a joint employer. Last December, the Trump board under Mr. Miscimarra reversed the Obama era ruling, reverting to the earlier, stricter standard. The ruling was vacated over conflict of interest questions involving William J. Emanuel, a board member whose former law firm had played a role in a related case. The proposed rule could be even stricter than the pre 2015 standard because, according to the board's announcement, it adds the word "substantial" to the words "direct and immediate" in listing the criteria for whether a company exercises enough control to be considered a joint employer. Once the proposed rule is published on Friday, the public will have 60 days to submit comments, which the agency is supposed to consider in formulating its final rule. The rule could be challenged in court on procedural grounds, an outcome that Wilma B. Liebman, a Democratic former board member who served as chairwoman under Mr. Obama, said was likely. Ms. Liebman said groups representing workers would probably argue that the conflict of interest problems that undid the earlier attempt to change the joint employer standard also doom the rule making approach in light of Mr. Emanuel's significant role.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
On January 7, 2016, a group of tourists set out to visit Chapman's Baobab, one of the oldest and mightiest trees in Africa. Visible from miles away, it had long served as a landmark for travelers and explorers, including David Livingstone. The cavity inside its trunks with an outer circumference of more than 80 feet reportedly served as one of the continent's first post offices. Botswana considered the tree a national monument and promoted it as a sightseeing attraction. As the visitors neared that day, they heard a cracking boom like thunder. A cloud of dust obscured the site: Chapman's Baobab had collapsed. Across Africa, the oldest and largest baobabs have begun to fall and die, according to new research in the journal Nature Plants. Scientists believe that prolonged droughts and increasing temperatures may have parched the trees, leaving them unable to support the weight of their massive trunks. "The largest and oldest trees are more sensitive to changing climatic conditions because of their large dimensions," said Adrian Patrut, a chemist at Babes Bolyai University in Romania and lead author of the new study. After Chapman's Baobab collapsed, for example, Dr. Patrut found that the tree's water content was just 40 percent, compared to 79 percent for healthy baobabs. Dr. Patrut and his colleagues did not set out to document the death of Africa's "wooden elephants," as the species are sometimes called. Instead, they wanted to date them. "There were some fairy tales and folklore that these trees could be as old as 6,000 years," said Karl von Reden, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and co author of the new paper. "We were interested in finding out if there's some upper age limit, at least for the existing ones." Baobabs do not regularly produce tree rings, so the team turned to radiocarbon dating. The scientists compared carbon 14 levels from small samples taken in the oldest parts of the trees to samples from other tree species whose age had been determined by counting their rings. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. In 2005, the researchers began collecting samples from more than 60 of the largest African baobabs those with trunk circumferences of at least 65 feet. The oldest trees, they found, were around 2,500 years old. The scientists also confirmed that baobab's unique structure they often have hollow centers are formed when the trees generate new stems in a ring shaped pattern. Over time, those stems may fuse together, creating an open or closed circle. As the study progressed, though, the researchers were shocked to find that a number of their subjects the largest and oldest trees began to fall. Eight of the 13 oldest and five of the six largest have died or partly collapsed in the past 13 years. The trees did not simply succumb to old age, the researchers believe. "The fact that these trees just suddenly died in the early part of this century is to me a canary in the mine," Dr. von Reden said. While he and his colleagues have yet to determine what is causing the deaths, they have largely ruled out disease. Instead, they suspect climate change. "The new paper nicely brings together information showing that the death of the millennial baobabs is likely due to an unprecedented combination of temperature increase and drought," said Jens Gebauer, a horticulturist at the Rhine Waal University of Applied Sciences who was not involved in the research.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Morgan Sarah Spicer and Zachary Evan Brown were married Aug. 18 at the Estate at Farrington Lake in East Brunswick, N.J. Michael A. Smith, a friend of the couple who became a Universal Life minister for the event, officiated. She is a daughter of Margaret Stempler Spicer and Gregory B. Spicer of Tinton Falls, N.J. The bride's father is the president of Wellesley Financial Planners in Red Bank, N.J. Her mother is the owner of Distinctive Toys, a children's specialty toy store in Fair Haven, N.J. Mr. Brown, 28, is a financial planner and tax preparer at Wellesley Financial Planners. He is the son of Karen Ahern Brown and Richard D. Brown of Scarsdale, N.Y. The groom's mother is a dental hygienist at the New York practice of Dr. Moe R. Vokshoor. His father is a broker for commercial sales and management at Levites Realty in New York.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
If you've received a bouquet from that special someone this Valentine's Day, or any other special occasion, you may be looking for ways to extend the gesture as long as possible. Just like hangover cures, there are many theories about the best method for keeping flowers fresh. I wanted to find out if one method reigned above all. So I asked some flower experts and tried my own (not very scientific) homegrown experiment. To start, I bought nine stalks of chrysanthemums from a grocery store and put each stalk in a clean glass bottle with about 12 ounces of warm water and the following common treatments: Water and putting flowers in a refrigerator every night There's some science behind these methods. But a word of caution before you try one: That little packet of flower food that came with the flowers may be your best bet. It likely has the right blend of antibacterial agents, a sugar source for food and an acidifier that will extend the life of your arrangement. "The problem with home remedies is it's difficult to get the proportions right put in too much bleach, and you might kill your flowers," said Mary Hockenberry Meyer, a professor of horticulture at the University of Minnesota. But if you didn't get one of those packets or if you are harvesting flowers straight from the garden here are some things you should know. If you're using an old vase, wash it thoroughly because "whatever's left over from your last batch of flowers has a lot of bacteria in it," said Chris Wien, a professor emeritus of horticulture at Cornell University. Those bacteria block water flow in the flowers' stems, causing your blooms to wilt sooner. Right away, cut off half an inch to an inch of the stems at a diagonal, using sharp scissors or a knife. Make sure to cut "in a tub or under running water, which prevents air bubbles from getting into the stems and blocking the flow of water," said Amy Jo Detweiler, an associate professor of horticulture at Oregon State University. Remove any leaves or florets that would sit in the water, because those will cause bacterial buildup. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Ideally, you should first put your flowers in water around 110 degrees (and your additives, of choice), and then keep the vase in a cool place for at least a couple of hours. This process, called "hardening" or "conditioning," helps because warm water molecules move up the stems more quickly, while a cool environment minimizes water loss through the flowers' petals and leaves. Though you might intuitively want to place flowers by a window, direct sunlight can actually stress cut flowers more than helping them remember, your blossoms are not really photosynthesizing anymore so they don't need sun to make food. Normal indoor lighting works just fine. Change the water at least once a week, recutting the stems and adding more preservative or food each time. In total, I kept my flowers for 10 days. Every day I randomly shuffled the flowers around, to ensure that positioning wouldn't explain the outcomes. On Day 5, I fully replaced the water and treatments for each vase. So how did my treatments fare? In theory, soda, vinegar and aspirin should acidify the water so it more closely resembles the sap inside plant cells, helping the flowers take up fluid more easily. Vodka is thought to inhibit the production of ethylene, a gaseous hormone that causes flowers to mature and fruits to ripen. Copper, bleach and vinegar are antibacterial, and refrigerating should slow water loss and the breakdown of tissues. By far, the worst performers were aspirin and vinegar with added sugar. Flowers in the aspirin solution started wilting just four days in, while flowers in vinegar and sugar started wilting on Day 6. The aspirin treatment likely failed because it lacked sugar, and the vinegar treatment may have contained too much acid, said Neil Anderson, a professor of horticulture at the University of Minnesota. "For the water volume you used, you'd maybe want a teaspoon of vinegar at most." Though the flowers in the Sprite treatment stayed healthy, the solution had spots of fungus on its surface, which was not surprising because it contained a lot of sugar but no antibacterial ingredients. The flowers in the penny solution also looked good, though the water appeared slightly cloudy, likely because the copper didn't dissolve enough to provide any antimicrobial effects. "It's a great psychological remedy, perhaps," said Dr. Wien. Because of genetic differences, certain flowers like chrysanthemums and carnations simply last longer than others, Dr. Anderson said. Though roses are a favorite for some holidays, they usually don't last longer than a week, he added, a bit shorter than many other flowers. "Their petals aren't as tough and waxy, so they lose a lot of water and wilt fast." Of course, even if you pull out all the stops, you won't be able to ward off the inevitable. So, smell your roses while they last.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
THE 81st Geneva Motor Show is being promoted as a window into the future of a more environmentally responsible and sustainable auto industry. But should a 1,115 horsepower supercar that runs on ethanol be counted among the 40 or so new "green" machines at the show? If so, then what does green really mean? The Geneva show is renowned as a showcase for exotic niche vehicles from customizers, tuners and boutique manufacturers. Still, this year's gathering includes such a bumper crop of powerful supercars it seems to be sending a mixed message. These are wildly impractical cars whose premieres might have seemed inappropriate, to say the least, at auto shows during the last two recession scarred years. At Paris, Los Angeles, Detroit and Chicago, precious few supercars were unveiled. At Geneva, such a robust new generation has been born that the breed could be perpetuated for years. Jaguar introduced the XKR S, which it billed as the most powerful Jaguar ever. Although the price was not mentioned, the car will easily be the most expensive Jag as well. With a top speed of 186 miles per hour, it will not be particularly fuel efficient, either. The 700 in the Aventador's nomenclature alludes to its horsepower output. Though engineers have made the car 500 pounds lighter than the Murcielago, any weight savings seems to have been devoted to making the car capable of going faster, not to saving fuel dollars. But at a price of 370,000, the cost of fuel would seem to be a trivial concern for anyone able to afford the car. There seems to be no shortage of buyers for these high end supercars. A report by IHS Global Insight, an automotive research firm, predicted a 140 percent increase this year in sales of cars priced above 100,000. But the most over the top example of automotive excess at Geneva is the Swedish made Koenigsegg Agera R. Because it can run on biofuel, the Agera R is considered a green vehicle. But the E 85 ethanol blend the car uses actually makes it less fuel efficient: running the ethanol blend through the twin turbo 5 liter V 8 pushes its output to 1,115 horsepower. The Agera is also capable of running on premium gasoline, in which case it would make only 940 horsepower and its top speed would be much less than the theoretical limit of 273 m.p.h. that its engineers have calculated. No track has been found where it could be driven that fast. But business is good; the floor model was already sold to a Scandinavian businessman for more than 1.6 million. Perhaps a more sincere effort at environmental sustainability comes from Rolls Royce, which introduced the 102EX, an electric version of its Phantom sedan. Though the 102EX is just an experimental vehicle, Rolls Royce said it had identified a need to explore cutting edge methods of propulsion. Though the show includes vehicles from manufacturers in 31 countries, the largest and most flamboyant contingent is certainly from Europe. Several Chrysler vehicles were on display, but they had been rebadged as Lancias. Since the Fiat Group assumed control of Chrysler, the Italian company has been looking for a way to leverage its American affiliate's vehicles into its existing brand structure. Lancia, which was sorely in need of new products, was deemed the most obvious fit. Fiat's most notable introduction here was, without a doubt, the new Alfa Romeo 4C, an evocative sports car slotted into its lineup below the sensational limited edition 250,000 8C sports car, but above Alfa's mainstream models. The Renault Nissan Alliance offered two eye catching concept cars. The Renault Captur takes the rakish, offbeat style of the Nissan Juke in a more extreme direction, and the Nissan Esflow offered a hint of what an electric sports car could be. The fledgling American electric vehicle industry was represented by two companies: Tesla, which presented the latest underpinnings for its coming Model S sedan, and Fisker, which displayed the latest version of its promised Karma sport sedan. A former Fiat executive, Gian Mario Rossignolo, was on hand for his revival of the De Tomaso marque after the brand's nine year absence. German automakers each had a few offerings, but they may be holding back products until the big Frankfurt show in September. Notable new models here included the Audi A3 concept, the BMW Vision ConnectedDrive concept and the Mercedes Benz C Class coupe. The Bulli, Volkswagen's latest effort to recreate the beloved Microbus of decades past, attracted large crowds but mixed reviews. Even though the show seemed to take itself and the environment in the industry, if not the cosmos quite seriously, there was some of the whimsy that the event was known for. Two Swiss automakers, Rinspeed and Sbarro, had fun with two concepts intended to produce smiles, if not buyers. Sbarro showed a two seat bubble roof concept car called the Two for 100, which could easily be confused with George Jetson's flying car from the cartoon series. Rinspeed offered the BamBoo beach cruiser, which seemed a bit out of place considering the snow flurries outside the show hall.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Scientists have decoded the genome of the axolotl, the Mexican amphibian with a Mona Lisa smile. It has 32 billion base pairs, which makes it ten times the size of the human genome, and the largest genome ever sequenced. The axolotl, endangered in the wild, has been bred in laboratories and studied for more than 150 years. It has the remarkable capacity to regrow amputated limbs complete with bones, muscles and nerves; to heal wounds without producing scar tissue; and even to regenerate damaged internal organs. This salamander can heal a crushed spinal cord and have it function just like it did before it was damaged. This ability, which exists to such an extent in no other animal, makes its genes of considerable interest. Now researchers, using one genetic sequencing technique to do their analysis and then another to "proof read" it, have provided researchers with the tools to study and manipulate the genes of the axolotl. Their study appears in Nature.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
The birth process of sea turtles provides some of the most endearing images in nature. Mother turtles trudge up on to the beach at night, dig a nest and lay their eggs, then haul themselves back into the ocean. Weeks later, dozens of adorable little hatchlings, tiny flippers churning through sand, scamper into the sea for the first time. But we rarely see what happens immediately after the mother lays her eggs and before she slides back into the sea. "People find that stage boring, and they just don't understand it," said Malcolm Kennedy, a zoologist and professor of natural history at the University of Glasgow. "The turtles flap around, and that's it. Everyone goes home." But that flapping and scattering of sand fascinated Dr. Kennedy, who released a study last week in Royal Society Open Science with Tom Burns, also a zoologist at the University of Glasgow. They found that the turtles are actually creating decoy nests designed to fool predators like mongooses, dogs and wild pigs, and prevent them from sniffing out the real nests and devouring their eggs. Their findings challenge earlier theories that the turtles were disguising their nests and, in some cases, easing hatchlings' trips to the water. Dr. Kennedy and Dr. Burns observed two species of sea turtles the massive leatherbacks and the smaller hawksbill in Trinidad and Tobago from 2013 through 2019. They found that the turtles did not linger near the nests they had just dug up. They moved as far as several feet, in multiple random directions, stopping to scatter sand at various "stations" along the way, ranging from two to more than a dozen. The turtles also spent a good deal of energy and time roughly 30 minutes on this endeavor, exposing themselves to dangers from predators and the hot, rising sun. "It just emphasizes how important this activity is for them," Dr. Kennedy said. "Why would they spend that time disguising an area that is not near their nests?" They think that a predator might dig into one or two enticing spots left by a sea turtle, and give up. "If a species of turtle always did the same thing, then a predator could learn it, and track back to find where the nest is," Dr. Kennedy said. "But if they move randomly, then the predator can't learn any patterns." Dr. Kennedy said the leatherbacks and hawksbills are related by a common ancestor over 100 million years ago, and added that it is possible they learned the decoy behavior in order to thwart small predators from digging after their eggs during the age of the dinosaurs. There are more than a half dozen species of sea turtles, and others may not engage in such behaviors. Roldan A. Valverde, a biologist at Southeastern Louisiana University and the scientific director of the Sea Turtle Conservancy, said that the olive ridley turtle tends to lay her eggs and head straight back to the ocean. Dr. Valverde said he is "skeptical" of the study and noted that the leatherback's enormous size they can grow to over 1,000 pounds and exaggerated movements could account for the seemingly random sand scattering. Alexander Gaos, a research ecologist for the federal Marine Turtle Biology and Assessment Program, praised the new study's methodology, but wondered if its finding was mostly "a matter of semantics." "Whether you call it decoy or a disguise, it's still the same activity," he said. Dr. Kennedy said he welcomes these challenges, but believes most turtle scientists need to study this behavior more rigorously. "That's the fun thing about science," he said. "Who wants to do just what everyone else believes."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Quick, think about disinformation. What comes to mind? "Vladimir Putin, president of Russia." But in 2020, many experts are more concerned with disinformation coming from our very own backyard. Like this guy, who, with a single tweet, disrupted a governor's race in Kentucky. "Oh I'm just a broke college student, basically." "He had 19 followers. It's slightly absurd. But it's also slightly terrifying." What makes misinformation truly dangerous is that it doesn't need to hack into the actual infrastructure of an election. It only needs to hack the brains of voters. "A seed of doubt is sowed into the democratic process of elections. People just don't trust the process anymore." "The purpose is to confuse people, to cause chaos and to cause division. The hope with disinformation is that a country will kind of fall in on itself." And the coronavirus pandemic has made things even worse. To understand how we got here, we have to go to a key battleground in this election, one that has no state boundary. The internet. Remember the internet in 2016? The year that gave us these? "Damn, Daniel." "What steps will your energy policy take to meet our energy needs?" Well, it also gave us a flood of election disinformation created by a Russian troll factory, a.k.a. a Kremlin linked company called the Internet Research Agency. "It was essentially a gray office building in St. Petersburg in Russia." This is Claire Wardle. She's a disinformation expert and educator. "People were paid to sit all day, pretending to be Americans, creating social posts and memes and videos, and pushing that out. They could just throw spaghetti at the wall. Many of the posts didn't succeed, but other things really did." Russians developed a simple, but effective playbook. "They basically inflamed existing American divisions. A lot of these accounts actually got in the hundreds of thousands of followers." By the end of the 2016 election, Russian trolls could reach millions of Americans through their social media accounts. Crucially, what they managed to do was use online disinformation to organize dozens of real life political rallies. Attendees had no idea they'd been set up by Russians. This was one of them, filmed by a Houston TV station. "I'm in downtown Houston right by the Islamic Da'hwa Center. There's protests going on, on both sides of the street." Russian trolls did all of this, not with particularly sophisticated spycraft, but with tools available to everyone. Pretty soon, their disinformation, spread with the intent to deceive, became misinformation, as real people unwittingly started engaging with the material. All the while, social media companies denied there was a problem. Speaking days after the 2016 election, Facebook C.E.O. Mark Zuckerburg struggled to articulate a defense. "I think the idea that fake news on Facebook of which, you know, it's a very small amount of the content influenced the election in any way, I think is a pretty crazy idea." In the years since, there has been a slow recognition. "We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. And it was my mistake. And I'm sorry." "We found ourselves unprepared and ill equipped for the immensity of the problems that we've acknowledged. And we take the full responsibility to fix it." Some lessons were learned. "The companies have been a lot tougher on election misinformation, especially when they can tie it to foreign interference." But those policies aren't applied in the same way when the source of the misinformation is within U.S. borders. In certain cases, like with an unsubstantiated New York Post report, some platforms have taken drastic measures to restrict access, and face charges of censorship. But generally, the platforms try to avoid being seen as arbiters of truth. "When it comes to domestic and homegrown misinformation, social media companies still do err on the side of free speech." So in the last four years, America's election disinformation problem didn't go away. It evolved. "Unfortunately, the landscape looks and feels very different now, because you've got all sorts of actors using the platforms in the ways that we learned the Russians did in 2016. And we see that playbook being used by political operatives in the U.S. And we see that same playbook being used by individuals in their basements who are angry and frustrated with life." Sometimes it's just one guy, sending one tweet from hundreds of miles away. That actually happened in 2019 in Kentucky. To tell this story, let's first meet three people. The New York Times reporter who covered the Kentucky election. "My name is Nick Corasaniti." The election administrator. "My name is Jared Dearing." And the internet troll. "I am Overlordkraken1." We're not showing his face, and only using his first name, because he says he's afraid for his safety. On Nov. 5, 2019, Kentucky voters went to the polls to pick their next governor. "The race for governor in Kentucky in 2019 featured a very unpopular governor, Matt Bevin, who is a Republican." "We're just getting started." "Facing off against Andy Beshear, the Democratic attorney general." "We can't take four more years." "Every Democrat in the country was viewing the opportunity to deliver a blow to Mitch McConnell, and give him a Democratic governor as a real win. National money flooded this election." "The day started well. I drove in around 4 a.m. Election Day is more like game day for me." "I woke up, got ready for school, went to school." "When the polls close at 6, the day's not even halfway through at that point." "I got on Twitter, and I saw the Kentucky election, what's going on. And then I saw that the race was very close." "It was neck and neck. They were maybe 1,000 votes here, 100 votes there, separating them." "When an election is close, there's a lot of pressure and stress that's put onto the system." "As soon as Republicans in the state started to see the possibility that they might lose the Statehouse, social media kind of erupted a little bit. People were looking for reasons as to how this could possibly be happening. How could a Democrat be winning in deeply red Kentucky? Emotions were high. It was kind of the perfect environment for any kind of disinformation or misinformation about the results to take hold." "I decided that it would be a funny idea that if I made a fake tweet, spread it out to bigger accounts. I thought it was the perfect situation for it to go viral. I don't remember how many followers I had, but I know it was less than 20." "He had 19 followers." "I set my geolocation to Louisville, Ky." "He claimed he was from Louisville, but it was misspelled." "It was just a typo. I've never been to Kentucky." "And he sent out a simple tweet that said, 'Just shredded a box of " "'Republican mail in ballots. Bye bye Bevin.'" "There's so many checks and balances that we've built into the system over the past decades that we kind of know where all the ballots are at all times. So this is obviously a false claim." "I've never seen a mail in ballot." "I probably never will know what their intentions were." "All I really wanted to do was just get a few reactions out of some Boomers." "Irresponsible. Frustrating. Damaging. Not helpful." "I just thought it was funny." "So Kentucky election officials found this tweet about an hour after polls closed, and they immediately notified Twitter." And like that, the tweet was gone. But the story didn't end there. It had actually just begun. "A few conservative accounts began screenshotting the tweet. And and when they screenshot that tweet and sent it around to their tens of thousands of followers, hundreds of thousands of followers, it was like a spark in a brushfire. And the tweet was everywhere." "When we called Twitter to then take those screengrabs down, Twitter then said that it was commentary on the original tweet itself, and were unwilling to take the screengrabs down. So it's a pretty big loophole, as far as I'm concerned." "Election security officials kind of refer to these networks of accounts as a Trump core. And what they do is they wait until there is a debate, or a discussion, or a controversy, and they will immediately go to the conservative side and amplify it." Throughout the evening, a single atom of disinformation opened the door for more stories that muddied the waters in an already close election. "While this was happening, it was now reaching a pretty broad narrative. It wasn't only restricted to the conservative internet. There were normal voters who were seeing this, there was news outlets who were seeing this." At the end of the night, Matt Bevin, who was trailing behind his opponent by just 5,000 votes, contested the results. "There have been more than a few irregularities." "He didn't offer any evidence. He didn't say what those irregularities were. But it was because of those irregularities that he requested a re canvass of all of the vote." Bevin never specifically mentioned the tweet, but it was one of the most viral pieces of disinformation raising doubts about the election. "Bevin basically refused to concede, and left the election in question." "My intention was never for it to get as big as it did. But I guess it was a lot easier than I thought." For the next few days, talks of election fraud hurting Bevin kept going. "There was a time in the middle there, where there was a lot of squoosh. Both sides had the opportunity to create their own narrative. And unfortunately, part of that narrative was being driven by misinformation." Bevin's supporters staged a press conference, alleging fraud. But again, offered no evidence. "Are you really under the belief that hackers couldn't hack our votes that are uploaded to a cloud?" "There is no cloud involved in the election tabulations in Kentucky." Eventually, after re canvassing of the results concluded nine days later, Bevin conceded the race. "We're going to have a change in the governorship, based on the vote of the people." Andy Beshear is now the governor of Kentucky. But it's hard to remove the various claims casting doubt on the election, once they're out there. Videos alleging fraud in Kentucky's governor's race are still gaining more views and comments. Fast forward to 2020. "I don't think the question of misinformation is whether it's going to happen. It will happen." Election officials across the country are gearing up for a difficult fight against disinformation ahead of the election. Like in Michigan. "We anticipate challenges coming from multiple different angles. Whether they come from the White House, whether they come from foreign entities, whether they come from social media voices." And Colorado. "We really need federal leadership. There's bills just sitting in the House and in the Senate that are never going to get heard, never going to get their chance. And meanwhile, our democracy is under attack." After countless investigations, hearings and public grillings of social media executives over the past four years, the U.S. is still ill equipped to deal with the problem. "I feel like the analogy here is someone taking a bucket of water and throwing it in the ocean." Election officials are competing on social media against people with larger followings, like President Donald Trump himself. "President Trump has used his Twitter account and his Facebook account to spread falsehoods about voting." In 2020, President Trump has tweeted election misinformation or claims about rigged elections about 120 times. Twitter has put warnings on some of President Trump's tweets and Facebook has added labels that direct people to accurate election information. "There really isn't a uniform policy that they apply evenly across the different social media companies." "It's pretty depressing to sit where we sit right now, heading into this election. We have failed to do enough to secure the election in a way that we needed to." On top of that, the Covid 19 pandemic is making the misinformation problem even worse. For example, the pandemic has forced many states to expand vote by mail on a large scale for the first time. And that's resulted in a surge in false or misleading claims about mail in voting, according to media insights company Zignal Labs. Of the 13.4 million mentions of vote by mail between January and September, nearly one quarter were likely misinformation. The pandemic has led to another important shift, as different conspiracy communities are emerging and working together. Here's a look at how domestic misinformation gained more reach on Facebook during a single month this summer. These are groups that are prone to share misinformation about the election. These are anti mask groups that tend to share content like this. Then there are the QAnon groups, a pro Trump conspiracy group that promotes, among other things, the false idea that America is controlled by a cabal of globalist pedophiles. Facebook says all QAnon on accounts would be banned on its platforms. But what we found is these seemingly disparate conspiracy groups are increasingly connected by crossposting the same content, forming "A huge tent conspiracy." For example, this piece of disinformation, claiming that Barack Obama created antifa, was shared in all three types of communities. "A lot of people who will believe that the coronavirus is a hoax will also believe that the elections process is not to be trusted." "The theme here is that more and more Americans feel like they cannot trust institutions." And that could have serious consequences around Election Day. "What that does is that will create a big uncertainty, and allow any bad actors to spread more disinformation in an already charged electorate. It will also give people the opportunity to say they've rigged an election, when it's so much harder to actually rig an election." Social media companies are preparing for the scenario that President Trump, or other candidates, will falsely declare victory. Or worse, where the losing candidate refuses to concede, and claims election fraud. The 2019 Kentucky election avoided that, but the 2020 presidential election may not. "If we were to insert President Trump and months of undermining the electoral process into the Kentucky election, there probably would have been even more users who believed Overlordkraken1's tweet that he shredded ballots. It could have gone from thousands to millions." "Will you pledge tonight that you will not declare victory until the election has been independently certified?" "I hope it's going to be a fair election. If it's a fair election, I am 100 percent on board. But if I see tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated, I can't go along with that." "It's something we've never seen before, and it sets a runway for the kind of disinformation that has disrupted other elections to really take off at a level we've never seen." "I'm Isabelle Niu, one of the producers of this episode. There's a lot going on in this election, and we want to make sure we take a deep dive into the major issues. Check out the other episodes of Stressed Election. We cover voting rights, voting technology and vote by mail."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Credit...Ricky Rhodes for The New York Times Carlos Maza believes that YouTube is a destructive, unethical, reckless company that amplifies bigots and profits off fascism. Now it's also his meal ticket. Mr. Maza, 31, announced several weeks ago that he was leaving Vox, where he had worked as a video journalist since 2017, to become a full time YouTube creator. The move shocked some of Mr. Maza's fans, who have watched him become one of YouTube's most vocal critics for failing to stop a right wing pile on against him last year. The controversy that followed that campaign, which was led by a prominent conservative YouTuber, turned Mr. Maza into a YouTube mini celebrity and made him a sworn enemy of the site's free speech absolutists. He received death threats and was temporarily forced to move out of his apartment. Rather than swearing off YouTube, Mr. Maza, who is a New York based socialist, decided to seize the means of his own video production. "I'm going to use the master's tools to destroy the master's house," he said in an interview. "I want to build up an audience and use every chance I get to explain how destructive YouTube is." It's not rare for YouTubers to criticize YouTube. (In fact, among top creators, it's practically a sport.) But Mr. Maza's critique extends to the traditional media as well. He believes that media outlets have largely failed to tell compelling stories to a generation raised on YouTube and other social platforms, and that, as a result, they have created a power vacuum that bigots and extremists have been skilled at filling. "On YouTube, you're competing against people who have put a lot of time and effort into crafting narrative arcs, characters, settings or just feelings they're trying to evoke," he said. "In that environment, what would have been considered typical video content for a newsroom news clips, or random anchors generically repeating the news with no emotions into a camera feels really inadequate and anemic." In response, Mr. Maza compiled a video of Mr. Crowder's insults and tweeted them out, blaming YouTube for its inconsistent enforcement of its hate speech policies. (One tweet read: "YouTube is dominated by alt right monsters who use the platform to target their critics and make their lives miserable.") After an investigation, YouTube found that Mr. Crowder's videos did not violate its rules. That set off an avalanche of criticism, and provoked backlash from L.G.B.T. groups and YouTube employees, who urged the company to do more to protect Mr. Maza and other creators from harassment. The controversy even ensnared Susan Wojcicki, YouTube's chief executive, who was forced to apologize. Late last year, the site revised its harassment policy to address some of the concerns. Inside the world of YouTube partisans, Mr. Maza's feud with Mr. Crowder made him a scapegoat. Some creators blamed him for setting off an "adpocalypse" a YouTube policy change that resulted in some videos being stripped of their ads. Others wove elaborate conspiracy theories that NBCUniversal, an investor in Vox, was using Mr. Maza to drive viewers and advertisers away from YouTube and toward its own TV platform. In July, Vox ended Mr. Maza's show, and after a few months in limbo, he decided to hang his own shingle. He set up a YouTube channel and a Patreon crowdfunding account, bought a camera and hit record. For all its flaws, he said, YouTube is essential for people who want to get a message out. "The one thing that YouTube offers that's really good is that it does give a space for independent journalists to do important work and build an audience without requiring a huge investment of capital," Mr. Maza said. YouTube can be harsh terrain for a professional leftist. The site is nominally open to all views, but in practice is dominated by a strain of reactionary politics that is marked by extreme skepticism of mainstream media, disdain for left wing "social justice warriors" and a tunnel vision fixation on political correctness. But these creators are still much less powerful than their reactionary counterparts. Mr. Maza attributes that gap to the fact that while a vast network of well funded YouTube channels exists to push right wing views, liberal commentary is still mainly underwritten by major news organizations, which have been slower to embrace the highly opinionated, emotionally charged style of content that works well on YouTube. "People understand the world through stories and personalities," he said. "People don't actually want emotionless, thoughtless, viewpoint less journalism, which is why no one is a Wolf Blitzer stan." In order to reach people on YouTube, Mr. Maza said, the left needs to embrace YouTube's algorithmically driven ecosystem, which rewards "authentic" and "relatable" creators who can connect emotionally with an audience. "There is a need for compelling progressive content that gives a young kid on YouTube some sense that there is a worldview and an aesthetic and a vibe that is attractive on the left," he said. Mr. Maza's first video, a five minute introduction to his channel, hints at how he intends to do that. The video is half political manifesto, half self deprecating monologue. Playing all three parts himself, he has an imagined conversation with his "left flank," a hammer and sickle socialist, and his "right flank," a tie clad centrist, along with his therapist, who warns him that YouTube can transform decent people into "cruel, ego driven" attention seekers. It's a funny, knowing skit, and it shows how familiar Mr. Maza is with the customs and culture of YouTube. He doesn't wear a suit or plaster himself with stage makeup. He doesn't take himself too seriously, or adopt a Walter Cronkite like pose of objectivity.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
This is the fifth in a series of interviews with religious scholars exploring how the major faith traditions deal with death. Today, my conversation is with Brook Ziporyn, the Mircea Eliade professor of Chinese religion, philosophy and comparative thought at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Professor Ziporyn has distinguished himself as a scholar and translator of some of the most complex philosophical texts and concepts of the Chinese religious traditions. He is also the author of several books, including "The Penumbra Unbound: The Neo Taoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang" and "Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings," as well as two works on Tiantai Buddhism . All previous interviews in this series can be found here. George Yancy George Yancy: For many Westerners, Taoism is somewhat familiar. Some may have had a basic exposure to Taoist thought perhaps encountering translations of the "Tao Te Ching" or Chinese medicine or martial arts or even just popular references to the concept of yin and yang. But for those who haven't, can you give us some basics? For example, my understanding is that Taoism can be described as both a religious system and a philosophical system. Is that correct? Brook Ziporyn: "Taoism" (or "Daoism") is a blanket term for the philosophy of certain classical texts, mainly from Lao tzu's "Tao Te Ching" and the "Zhuangzi" (also known in English as "Chuang tzu"), but also for a number of religious traditions that adopt some of these texts while also producing many other texts, ideas and practices. This can make it difficult to say what the attitude of Taoism is on any given topic. What they have in common is the conviction that all definite things, everything we may name and identify and everything we may desire and cherish, including our own bodies and our own lives, emerge from and are rooted in something formless and indefinite: Forms emerge from formlessness, the divided from the undivided, the named from the unnamed, concrete things from vaporous energies, even "beings" from what we'd call "nothing." Some forms of religious Taoism seek immortal vitality through a reconnection with this source of life, the inexhaustible energy that gave us birth. Many forms of cultivation, visualization and ritual are developed, with deities both inside and outside one's own body, to reconnect and integrate with the primal energy in its many forms. The philosophical Taoism of the "Tao Te Ching" seeks to remain connected to this "mother of the world," the formless Tao (meaning "Way" or "Course"), that is seemingly the opposite of all we value, but is actually the source of all we value, as manure is to flowers, as the emptiness of a womb is to the fullness of life. In all these forms of Taoism, there is a stress on "return to the source," and a contrarian tendency to push in the opposite direction of the usual values and processes, focusing on the reversal and union of apparent opposites. In the "Zhuangzi," even the definiteness of "source" is too fixed to fully accommodate the scope of universal reversal and transformation; we have instead a celebration of openness to the raucous universal process of change, the transformation of all things into each other. Yancy: In Taoism, there is the concept of "wu wei" ("doing nothing"). How does this concept relate to what we, as human beings, should strive for, and how is that term related to an ethical life? Ziporyn: Wei means "doing" or "making," but also "for a conscious, deliberate purpose." Wu wei thus means non doing, implying effortlessness, non striving, non artificiality, non coercion, but most centrally eschewal of conscious purpose as controller of our actions. So in a way the idea of wu wei implies a global reconsideration of the very premise of your question the status and desirability of striving as such, or having any definite conscious ideals guide our lives, any definite conscious ethical guide. Wu wei is what happens without being made to happen by a definite intention, without a plan, without an ulterior motive the way one does the things one doesn't have to try to do, what one is doing without noticing it, without conscious motive. Our heart beats, but we do not "do" the beating of our hearts it just happens. Taoism says "wu wei er wu bu wei" by non doing, nothing is left undone. Theistic traditions might suggest that what is not deliberately made or done by us is done by someone else God and done by design, for a purpose. Even post theistic naturalists might still speak of the functions of things in terms of their "purpose" ("the heart pumps in order to circulate the blood and keep the body alive"). But for Taoists, only what is done by a mind with a prior intention can have a purpose, and nature isn't like that. It does it all without anyone knowing how or why it's done, and that's why it works so well. Yancy: How does Taoism conceive of the soul? Ziporyn: Taoism has no concept of "the" soul per se; the person has many souls, or many centers of energy, which must be integrated. All are concretizations of a more primal formless continuum of energy of which they are a part, like lumps in pancake batter. These are neither perfectly discontinuous nor perfectly dissolved into oneness. Ancient Chinese belief regarded the living person as having two souls, the "hun" and the "po," which parted ways at death. Later religious Taoists conceived of multitudes of gods, many of whom inhabit our own bodies multiple mini souls within us and without us, which the practitioner endeavored to connect with and harmonize into an integral whole. Yancy: The concept of a soul is typically integral to a conceptualization of death. How does Taoism conceive of death? Ziporyn: In the "Zhuangzi," there is a story about death, and a special friendship formed by humans in the face of it. Four fellows declare to each other, "Who can see nothingness as his own head, life as his own spine, and death as his own backside? Who knows the single body formed by life and death, existence and nonexistence? I will be his friend!" We go from formlessness to form this living human body then again to formlessness. But all three phases constitute a single entity, ever transforming from one part to another, death to life to death. Our existence when alive is only one part of it, the middle bit; the nothingness or formlessness before and after our lives are part of the same indivisible whole. Attunement to this becomes here a basis for a peculiar intimacy and fellowship among humans while they are alive, since their seemingly definite forms are joined in this continuum of formlessness. The next story in the "Zhuangzi" gives an even deeper description of this oneness and this intimacy. Three friends declare, "'Who can be together in their very not being together, doing something for one another by doing nothing for one another? Who can climb up upon the heavens, roaming on the mists, twisting and turning round and round without limit, living their lives in mutual forgetfulness, never coming to an end?' The three of them looked at each other and burst out laughing, feeling complete concord, and thus did they become friends." Here there is no more mention of the "one body" shared by all even the idea of a fixed oneness is gone. We have only limitless transformation. And the intimacy is now an wu wei kind of intimacy, with no conscious awareness of a goal or object: They commune with each other by forgetting each other, just as they commune with the one indivisible body of transformation by forgetting all about it, and just transforming onward endlessly. Death itself is transformation, but life is also transformation, and the change from life to death and death to life is transformation too. Yancy: Most of us fear death. The idea of the possible finality of death is frightening. How do we, according to Taoism, best address that fear? Ziporyn: In that story about the four fellows, one of them suddenly falls ill and faces imminent death. He muses contentedly that after he dies he will continue to be transformed by whatever creates things, even as his body and mind break apart: His left arm perhaps into a rooster, his right arm perhaps into a crossbow pellet, his buttocks into a pair of wheels, his spirit into a horse. How marvelous that will be, he muses, announcing the dawn as a rooster, hunting down game as a pellet, riding along as a horse and carriage. Another friend then falls ill, and his pal praises the greatness of the process of transformation, wondering what he'll be made into next a mouse's liver? A bug's arm? The dying man says anywhere it sends him would be all right. He compares it to a great smelter. To be a human being for a while is like being metal that has been forged into a famous sword. To insist on only ever being a human in this great furnace of transformation is to be bad metal good metal is the kind that can be malleable, broken apart and recombined with other things, shaped into anything. I think the best summary of this attitude to death and life, and the joy in both, is from the same chapter in "Zhuangzi": This human form is just something we have stumbled into, but those who have become humans take delight in it nonetheless. Now the human form during its time undergoes ten thousand transformations, never stopping for an instant so the joys it brings must be beyond calculation! Hence the sage uses it to roam and play in that from which nothing ever escapes, where all things are maintained. Early death, old age, the beginning, the end this allows him to see each of them as good. Every change brings its own form of joy, if, through wu wei, we can free ourselves of the prejudices of our prior values and goals, and let every situation deliver to us its own new form as a new good. Zhuangzi calls it "hiding the world in the world" roaming and playing and transforming in that from which nothing ever escapes. Yancy: So, through wu wei, on my death bed, I should celebrate as death isn't an ending, but another beginning, another becoming? I also assume that there is no carry over of memory. In other words, in this life, I am a philosopher, male, etc. As I continue to become a turtle, a part of Proxima Centauri, a tree branch will I remember having been a philosopher, male? Ziporyn: I think your assumption is correct about that: There is no expectation of memory, at least for these more radical Taoists like Zhuangzi. This is certainly connected with the general association of wu wei with a sort of non knowing. In fact in the climax of the same chapter as we find the death stories just mentioned, we find the virtue of "forgetting" extolled as the highest stage of Taoist cultivation "a dropping away of my limbs and torso, a chasing off my sensory acuity, dispersing my physical form and ousting my understanding until I am the same as the Transforming Openness. This is what I call just sitting and forgetting." And the final death story there describes a certain Mr. Mengsun as having reached the perfect attitude toward life and death. He understands nothing about why he lives or dies. His existence consists only of waiting for the next unknown transformation. " H is physical form may meet with shocks but this causes no loss to his mind; what he experiences are morning wakings to ever new homes rather than the death of any previous realities." The freshness of the new transformation into ever new forms, and the ability to wholeheartedly embrace the new values that go with them, seems to require an ability to let go of the old completely. I think most of us will agree that such thorough forgetting is a pretty tall order! It seems that it may, ironically enough, require a lifetime of practice. Yancy: Given the overwhelming political and existential global importance of race at this moment, do you have any reflections on your role as a white scholar of Taoism? In other words, are there racial or cultural issues that are salient for you as a non Asian scholar of Eastern religious thought? Brook Ziporyn: A very complex question, probably requiring a whole other interview! But my feeling is that, when dealing with ancient texts written in dead languages, the issue is more linguistic and cultural than racial. This goes for ancient Greek, Hebrew, Sanskrit and Latin texts as well as for ancient Chinese texts, all of which bear a complex historical relation to particular living communities and their languages, but all of which are also susceptible to fiercely contested interpretations both inside and outside those communities. I think it's a good thing for both Asian and non Asian scholars to struggle to attain literacy in the textual inheritances of both the Asian and the non Asian ancient worlds, which is "another country" to all of us, and to advance as many alternate coherent interpretations of them as possible. These interpretations will in all cases be very much conditioned by our particular current cultural situations, and these differences will certainly be reflected in the results which is a good thing, I think, as long as we remain aware of it. Writing about Taoism in English, one is speaking from and to an English reading world. Doing so in modern Chinese, one is speaking from and to a modern Chinese reading world. Working crosswise in either language, as when a culturally native Anglophone like myself writes about Taoism in modern Chinese, or when a native Mandarin speaker writes in English about Taoism, or for that matter in either English or Chinese about ancient Greek philosophy or the Hebrew Bible, the situation will again differ, and the resulting discussion will reflect this as well.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
No matter how much free time you have this weekend, we have TV recommendations for you. Come back every week for new suggestions on what to watch. This Weekend I Have ... a Half Hour, and I'm an Early Adopter 'Comedy Central Stand Up Presents: Jaboukie Young White' When to watch: Friday at 11 p.m., on Comedy Central. This is the first stand up special from the comedian Jaboukie Young White, but you might already recognize him from "The Daily Show," his late night appearances or his Twitter presence. The set is breezy and assured, youthful and offbeat. Young White is also part of the mini trend of multimedia comedy see also: Hasan Minhaj and Julio Torres and the highlight of the set is his silly slide show about the sexuality of various insect species. (Wasps, straight; bees, gay.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
THE FOLLY AND THE GLORY America, Russia, and Political Warfare, 1945 2020 By Tim Weiner Tim Weiner's "The Folly and the Glory" provides a sweeping, lively survey of the worldwide competition between the Soviet Union (and later, Russia) and the United States since the end of World War II. Weiner has, in abundance, the knowledge and experience required to write such a book. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 while at The Philadelphia Inquirer. Later, he worked for The New York Times from various parts of the world and then became its national security correspondent. His 2007 history of the C.I.A., "Legacy of Ashes," won a National Book Award. That was but one of his many acclaimed books. His latest, "The Folly and the Glory," covers numerous landmark events dating back to the beginnings of the Cold War rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States. These include the creation of the Marshall Plan and NATO; the 1953 C.I.A. backed coup in Iran that restored the shah's monarchy; the Red Army's crushing of revolts in East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia; the rise of Poland's anti Communist Solidarity movement; Mikhail Gorbachev's failed reforms together with the Soviet Union's implosion; and Vladimir Putin's land grab in Ukraine as well as his meddling in the 2016 American presidential campaign. The odds of doing justice, in a relatively short book, to such multitudinous and tangled events over 75 years are slim. Occasionally, Weiner slows his speedy stride through history for deeper probes into particular episodes, but one wonders why those, rather than others, merit case studies. The murder of the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba and Washington's embrace of his kleptocratic successor, Mobutu Sese Seko, occupy virtually an entire chapter; Libya's civil war rates barely a page, and Syria's not even that. Weiner skillfully shows that subversion, the dissemination of disinformation and military interventions were standard fare in the competition between Moscow and Washington, and he enlivens his story with vivid portraits of the main characters. Readers looking for a quick overview of the Cold War will find "The Folly and the Glory" informative and entertaining.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. Across much of California in the last two weeks, many of my friends and neighbors have faced a dead end choice: Is it safer to conduct your life outdoors and avoid the coronavirus, or should you rush inside, the better to escape the choking heat, toxic smoke and raining ash? Such has been the gagging unwinnability of life in the nation's most populous state in the sweltering summer of 2020, in what I have been assured is the greatest country ever to have existed. The virus begs you to open a window; the inferno forces you to keep it shut. When the coronavirus first landed in America, California's lawmakers responded quickly and effectively, becoming a model for the rest of the nation. But as the early wins faded and the cases spiked, each day this summer has felt like another slide down an inevitable spiral of failure. The virus keeps crashing into California's many other longstanding dysfunctions, from housing to energy to climate change to disaster planning, and the compounding ruin is piling up like BMWs on the 405. For decades, California has relied on conscripted prisoners as a cheap way to fight its raging fires. But to stave off coronavirus outbreaks in our long overcrowded prisons, authorities released thousands of inmates earlier this year. Now, as climate change has ushered in a new era of "megafires" that includes some of the largest blazes the state has ever faced, the early release of inmates has left the state dangerously short of prisoners to exploit in battling the flames. As California's problems grow, we risk becoming a national pinata. At the Democratic National Convention last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom phoned in from Watsonville, Calif., near the scene of a wildfire, to castigate Donald Trump and the Republican Party for ignoring climate change and fighting California's efforts to reduce emissions. At the Republican convention, Kimberly Guilfoyle, a fund raising official for the Trump re election campaign who is also Newsom's ex wife, shouted the opposite claim that "socialism" had turned the state into a disaster of "discarded heroin needles in parks, riots in streets, and blackouts in homes." I found Guilfoyle's speech hilariously unhinged and off base, and Newsom certainly has a point California's efforts to solve its many problems, including the virus outbreak, have often been frustrated or undone by Trump's shortcomings. Still, it's worth remembering that Trump has been president only since 2017, and the seeds of California's undoing were planted long before. By reducing the cause of California's many issues to cartoon villains, both Guilfoyle and Newsom obscured the bigger picture. What is California's fundamental trouble? Neither socialism nor Trumpian neglect and incompetence, but something more elemental to life in the Golden State: A refusal by many Californians to live sustainably and inclusively, to give up a little bit of their own convenience for the collective good. The climate, and the world, are changing. What challenges will the future bring, and how should we respond to them? What should our leaders be doing? Al Gore, the 45th vice president of the United States, finds reasons for optimism in the Biden presidency. What are the worst climate risks in your country? Select a country, and we'll break down the climate hazards it faces. Where are Americans suffering most? Our maps, developed with experts, show where extreme heat is causing the most deaths in the U.S. What does climate devastation look like? In Sept. 2020, Michael Benson studied detailed satellite imagery. Here's the earth that he saw and the one he wants to see. This is a hobbyhorse of mine, but I'm committed to riding it until people in my home state begin to change their ways. Californian suburbia, the ideal of much of American suburbia, was built and sold on the promise of endless excess everyone gets a car, a job, a single family home and enough water and gasoline and electricity to light up the party. But it is long past obvious that infinitude was a false promise. Traffic, sprawl, homelessness and ballooning housing costs are all consequences of our profligacy with the land and our other resources. In addition to a hotter, drier climate, the fires, too, are fanned by an unsustainable way of life. Many blazes were worsened by Californians moving into areas near forests known as the "urban wildland interface." Once people move near forested land, fires tend to follow either because they deliberately or inadvertently ignite them, or because they need electricity, delivered by electrical wires that can cause sparks that turn into conflagrations. As the fires blazed around us this time last year, I warned of the "end of California as we know it" that if we didn't begin to radically alter how we live, the climate and the high cost of living would make the state uninhabitable for large numbers of people. Of course, California hasn't yet ended. Through virus and flame, the state has kept lurching along in the same haphazard way it always has, and here we are again to face another burning season. It is my hope, though, that with each year we burn, each new wildfire year that we live through, Californians start to recognize the mistakes that are central to our way of life. And perhaps, this year, the disturbing national political conversation might finally force my fellow Californians to reckon with how they live. In many ways the 2020 election is shaping up to be a fight over the soul of the suburbs their role in America's future, and who they are for. At the Republican convention this week, Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the couple who brandished guns at protesters in St. Louis, asserted that liberals want to "abolish the suburbs" by ending single family home zoning. The liberals who live in California's suburbs may not identify with the McCloskeys, but their ugly spectacle has helped unmask NIMBYism, one of California's most reckless ideologies, for the racist vision it has long been. It just isn't true that Joe Biden and the Democrats want to abolish the suburbs, or even improve them, which is a shame. Neither Biden nor his party nor just about anyone else in national or state politics has been willing to honestly discuss the incalculable damage that California style suburban life has wreaked on our world. In California, if anything is going to ruin the suburbs, it is more likely to be a wildfire than a new president. Farhad wants to chat with readers on the phone. If you're interested in talking to a New York Times columnist about anything that's on your mind, please fill out this form. Farhad will select a few readers to call.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
'EPILOGUES AND EPITAPHS' at the Green Wood Cemetery (June 24 26, 7:30 p.m.). The violinist Augusta McKay Lodge is joined by the ensemble Voyage Sonique and the countertenor Daniel Moody for this Angel's Share series concert, deep in the catacombs of this Brooklyn cemetery. Performances start at 9 p.m., after a sunset whiskey tasting, and include arias by Purcell, Handel and Dowland, and instrumental works by Rebel and Vivaldi. deathofclassical.com MAKE MUSIC NEW YORK at various locations (June 21). This event has become an essential part of the city soundscape, showcasing all kinds of music all over the city every solstice. Check the website for the full schedule, but highlights include a participatory, meditative offering of Pauline Oliveros's "The Heart Chant" at the Oculus (noon), a bring your instruments and voices Mozart "Requiem" at the Naumburg Bandshell (6 p.m.) and Eric Whitacre's "Water Night," performed by vocalists floating on canoes up the Gowanus Canal (8 p.m.). Walk around the city, and you're bound to find something else, too. makemusicny.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
AMC made it official on Friday and announced that it had hired the former Fox executive David Madden to be its new head of original programming. In late August, Fox announced that Mr. Madden would leave as the head of its in house TV studio, and that Michael Thorn would replace him. Mr. Madden was already in advanced talks to take the AMC job, which was vacant after Joel Stillerman left the cable channel to head up programming for Hulu. Mr. Madden will take over a lineup that includes "The Walking Dead" (a huge hit, but with a viewership that has shown signs of wear and tear recently) and "Better Call Saul" (up for best drama at the Emmy Awards on Sunday). He will also have a big role at AMC's in house studio, and will oversee programming at Sundance TV. At Fox, Mr. Madden helped develop shows like "The Shield" and "The Americans," and his interest in grittier shows is said to be better aligned with cable programming than with a broadcast network.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
If dance is a kind of knowledge, what kind is it? Who has the right to dance what? Is a legacy public, and what can legitimately be done to it? What do staged bodies signify, other than mere form? These are some of the questions projected before the start of Netta Yerushalmy's "Paramodernities," a six part work, nearly four hours long (including two intermissions), that had its New York debut at New York Live Arts on Thursday. Those are really big questions, and this is an excitingly ambitious work. Each segment takes on a canonical choreographer: Vaslav Nijinsky, Martha Graham, Bob Fosse, Merce Cunningham, George Balanchine, Alvin Ailey. But even to list all those names is only to hint at the enormous chunk of ideas that the production bites off and tries to chew. It's not easy to say what "Paramodernities" is. It's the kind of work that keeps asking the question of itself not implicitly but verbally, because each section is centered on one or two scholars who deliver something like a lecture. At the same time, there are dancers onstage, and what they are doing is not exactly a demonstration. To what extent Ms. Yerushalmy can be said to be the author of the resulting collage is another question the production keeps asking. But certainly she has put together something that holds your attention, surprisingly, even at this length. All the scholars (who include Claudia La Rocco, a former dance critic for The New York Times, and on Friday, Bill T. Jones, the artistic director of New York Live Arts) are smart and engaging. They give you much to think about, whether you know a lot about each subject or only a little, whether you buy their theories or not. And the cast of dancers is equally excellent and diverse so much to look at. As wordy as the production is, it's also intensely physical. The exhaustion of the dancers, their sweat and effort, is yet another theme. Inevitably, the words and the dance fight for your attention. This, too, is explicit. In the Graham section, which comes second, Ms. Yerushalmy and Taryn Griggs, dancing, crawl all over the scholar Carol Ockman. At one point, Ms. Yerushalmy rips the script from Ms. Ockman's hand, temporarily rendering her mute. The section about Balanchine which expands from a theory connecting the choreography of his seminal "Agon" and the polio of his wife, Tanaquil LeClerq, to broader ruminations on disability and race offers another angle. The scholar Georgina Kleege, who is blind, asks if sighted people might benefit from improved versions of the audio descriptions sometimes provided to blind audience members at dance performances. Since this section comes next to last, the idea resonates that "Paramodernities" has been doing something analogous all along. Do the words enrich the experience of the dance or get in the way? Both. I often found my attention divided. As a writer who writes about dance, my loyalties were divided, too. For me, the words won. Ms Yerushalmy's structural ideas, a grab bag of postmodern gambits, don't equal the scholars' intellectual variety; despite the continually rearranging surface (new combinations of scholar and dancer, new arrangements of where the audience sits, attempts to thread the sections together), a sameness sets in. And so both the canonical choreography and the wonderful dancers, each endlessly deep in different ways, ultimately seem hemmed in, unable to expand in the viewer's imagination. One appeal of the production is its tone: wry, ironic. Even when the scholars are citing theorists, the show is never academically dry. Even as it's taking on sex, death, commodification, the closeting of homosexuality, cultural appropriation and all the evils of capitalism, it keeps a sense of humor. That tone, however, is also another limitation. The exception comes in the final segment, about Alvin Ailey's "Revelations," when the scholar Thomas F. DeFrantz, talking about slavery and blackness, gets angry and nearly unhinged. As much as his words question transcendence, his delivery reaches for it. "Don't you want to be free?" he yells, over and over. And in a show of questions, a show that in falling short of its crazy ambition gives more than smaller shows that fully succeed, that final question echoes poignantly.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
This article was updated on July 12, 2019. For more than two decades, the R B singer who performs as R. Kelly has faced allegations of sexually abusing minors. First there were rumors, and reports of a secret marriage to a teenager. Then there were lawsuits, and a high profile court case, in 2008, that culminated in his acquittal on child pornography charges. Through it all, Robert Kelly, 52, continued to perform and release albums. But a grass roots movement against him and a documentary series, "Surviving R. Kelly," amplified the voices of his accusers. Last year, he finally found himself confronting a reckoning. Mr. Kelly is now facing a raft of federal and state charges. He was arrested by federal agents on July 11 in Chicago on charges related to child pornography and other crimes. He is also accused of paying off the family at the center of the earlier child pornography trial. Here's a look at the accusations against him. Mr. Kelly's first solo album, "12 Play," was released in 1993 and propelled the singer to fame with chart topping singles including "Bump N' Grind" and "Your Body's Callin." In 1994, when Mr. Kelly was 27, he reportedly married Aaliyah Haughton, who was 15 but was listed as 18 on a wedding certificate, according to Vibe Magazine, which published the certificate. The magazine later reported that Ms. Haughton's parents annulled the union. Ms. Haughton, who performed as Aaliyah, became a popular singer but died in a plane crash in 2001. And in 1996, Mr. Kelly, then 29, married a dancer, Andrea Lee, who was 22. They divorced in 2009. In December 1996, a lawsuit filed against Mr. Kelly claimed that he had had sex with a 15 year old girl when he was 24, The Chicago Sun Times reported in 2000. The reporter and music critic Jim DeRogatis, who worked on that story, never stopped investigating the accusations against Mr. Kelly and has spent years bringing women's claims against him to light. In January 1998, Mr. Kelly settled with the woman who had sued him, Tiffany Hawkins, after she gave a long deposition about the alleged abuse in court. The next month, he won three Grammys for his hit single "I Believe I Can Fly." In 2001 another lawsuit, filed by Tracy Sampson, accused Mr. Kelly of coercing her into sex when she was 17. The case was also settled out of court. In 2002, a video that appeared to show Mr. Kelly having sex with a teenage girl and urinating in her mouth was sent to Mr. DeRogatis at The Chicago Sun Times, which reported that the footage was being investigated by the Chicago police. The same year, The Chicago Tribune and The Sun Times reported on two more lawsuits: one filed by a woman who claimed she was underage when Mr. Kelly impregnated her and forced her to have an abortion, and another by a woman who said she was videotaped during sex without her knowledge. Both suits were settled. In June, after a police investigation into the video footage, Mr. Kelly was indicted by a grand jury in Chicago on 21 child pornography counts. He was arrested in Florida, where the police found more evidence. (The singer was charged with 12 more counts of child pornography, but those were later dropped.) Mr. Kelly pleaded not guilty, and for more than five years his case did not make it to trial. During that time he released albums including "Chocolate Factory," which included the chart topping song "Ignition (Remix)," and the gospel influenced "Happy People/U Saved Me." In May 2008, the trial began. Arguments centered on whether the man shown in the video was indeed Mr. Kelly, and whether the girl's identity or her age could be verified. The jury decided in June that the girl, who did not testify, could not be identified with certainty, and Mr. Kelly was found not guilty on all counts. Over the next few years, the singer continued to perform and release music, including a well received album called "Love Letter." He performed at the World Cup in 2010 and the Pre Grammy Gala in 2011. He was hospitalized briefly for throat surgery in 2011. In 2012 he released his autobiography, "Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me," in which he described his rise to fame. He also wrote and detailed in a later interview with GQ that during his childhood, he was regularly sexually abused by an adult woman. Mr. Kelly performed at Pitchfork Music Festival in 2013, at Lollapalooza in 2014 and at the Soul Train Awards in 2015. The time of MeToo and MuteRKelly In July 2017, a BuzzFeed article by Mr. DeRogatis, "Inside the Pied Piper of R B's 'Cult,'" reported on allegations that the singer was living with several young women and controlling them by taking away their phones, limiting contact with their families and having them abide by restrictive rules.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
WASHINGTON President Trump lashed out Thursday at the appearance and intellect of Mika Brzezinski, a co host of MSNBC's "Morning Joe," drawing condemnation from his fellow Republicans and reigniting the controversy over his attitudes toward women that nearly derailed his candidacy last year. Mr. Trump's invective threatened to further erode his support from Republican women and independents, both among voters and on Capitol Hill, where he needs negotiating leverage for the stalled Senate health care bill. The president described Ms. Brzezinski as "low I.Q. Crazy Mika" and claimed in a series of Twitter posts that she had been "bleeding badly from a face lift" during a social gathering at Mr. Trump's resort in Florida around New Year's Eve. The White House did not explain what had prompted the outburst, but a spokeswoman said Ms. Brzezinski deserved a rebuke because of her show's harsh stance on Mr. Trump. The tweets ended five months of relative silence from the president on the volatile subject of gender, reintroducing a political vulnerability: his history of demeaning women for their age, appearance and mental capacity. "My first reaction was that this just has to stop, and I was disheartened because I had hoped the personal, ad hominem attacks had been left behind, that we were past that," Senator Susan Collins, a moderate Republican from Maine who is a crucial holdout on the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, said in an interview. "I don't think it directly affects the negotiation on the health care bill, but it is undignified it's beneath a president of the United States and just so contrary to the way we expect a president to act," she said. "People may say things during a campaign, but it's different when you become a public servant. I don't see it as undermining his ability to negotiate legislation, necessarily, but I see it as embarrassing to our country." A slew of Republicans echoed her sentiments. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who, like Ms. Collins, holds a pivotal and undecided vote on the health care bill, tweeted: "Stop it! The presidential platform should be used for more than bringing people down." Senator Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican who opposed Mr. Trump's nomination during the presidential primaries, also implored him to stop, writing on Twitter that making such comments "isn't normal and it's beneath the dignity of your office." Senator James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma, added, "The president's tweets today don't help our political or national discourse and do not provide a positive role model for our national dialogue." Mr. Trump's attack injected even more negativity into a capital marinating in partisanship and reminded weary Republicans of a political fact they would rather forget: Mr. Trump has a problem with the half of the population more likely to vote. Christine Matthews, a Republican pollster who specializes in the views of female voters, said the president's use of Twitter to target a prominent woman was particularly striking, noting that he had used only one derogatory word "psycho" to describe the show's other co host, Joe Scarborough, and the remainder of his limited characters to hit upon damaging stereotypes of women. "He included dumb, crazy, old, unattractive and desperate," Ms. Matthews said. "The continued tweeting, the fact that he is so outrageous, so unpresidential, is becoming a huge problem for him," she added. "And it is particularly unhelpful in terms of building relationships with female Republican members of Congress, whose votes he needs for health care, tax reform and infrastructure." But it was unclear whether the vehemence of the president's latest attack would embolden members of his party to turn disdain into defiance. 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. Senior Republicans, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, cycled through what has become a familiar series of emotions and calculations after the Twitter posts, according to staff members: a flash of anger, reckoning of possible damage and, finally, a determination to push past the controversy to pursue their agenda. "Obviously, I don't see that as an appropriate comment," the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, said during a Capitol Hill news conference. Then he told reporters he wanted to talk about something else. Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, demanded an apology, calling the president's Twitter posts "sexist, an assault on the freedom of the press and an insult to all women." A spokeswoman for the president, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, urged the news media to move on, arguing during the daily White House briefing that Mr. Trump was "fighting fire with fire" by attacking a longtime critic. Ms. Brzezinski had called the president "a liar" and suggested he was "mentally ill," added Ms. Sanders, who defended Mr. Trump's tweets as appropriate for a president. Melania Trump, the president's wife who has said that, as first lady, she will embark on a campaign against cyberbullying also rejected claims that her husband had done what she is charged with undoing. "As the first lady has stated publicly in the past, when her husband gets attacked, he will punch back 10 times harder," Mrs. Trump's spokeswoman wrote in a statement, referring to the first lady's remarks during the campaign. Current and former aides say that Mr. Trump was chastened by the furor over the "Access Hollywood" tape that emerged in October, which showed him bragging about forcing himself on women, and that he had exhibited self restraint during the first few months of his administration. But in the past week, the sense that he had become the victim of a liberal media conspiracy against him loosened those tethers. Moreover, Mr. Trump's oldest friends say it is difficult for him to distinguish between large and small slights or to recognize that his office comes with the expectation that he moderate his behavior. And his fiercest, most savage responses have almost always been to what he has seen on television. "Morning Joe," once a friendly bastion on left leaning MSNBC, has become a forum for fiery criticism of Mr. Trump. One adviser to the president accused the hosts of trying to "destroy" the administration over several months. After lashing out at Mr. Scarborough and Ms. Brzezinski at one point last summer, Mr. Trump told an adviser, "It felt good." Even before he began his campaign two years ago, Mr. Trump showed a disregard for civility when he made critical remarks on television and on social media, particularly about women. He took aim at the actress Kim Novak, a star of 1950s cinema, as she presented during the 2014 Academy Awards, taking note of her plastic surgeries. Chagrined, Ms. Novak later said she had gone home to Oregon and not left her house for days. She accused Mr. Trump of bullying her, and he later apologized. As a candidate, Mr. Trump was insensitive to perceptions that he was making sexist statements, arguing that he had a right to defend himself, an assertion Ms. Sanders echoed on Thursday.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
What if Your Environmentally Correct Shoes Were Also Cute? While waiting to board a flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco, Dr. Karli Cleary was approached by two 20 something women. They wanted to know, needed to know, where her pointy toe red camo flats came from. "They're Rothy's," she enthusiastically told the women, peeling the shoes off her feet and encouraging the women to try them on. Before the plane had taken off, the two women had ordered their own pairs online. Rothy's ballet flats are elegant, breathable and so comfortable that Dr. Cleary, a pediatrician who typically works 10 hour days, wears them almost every day. They also happen to be made from recycled plastic water bottles. The two men behind Rothy's, Roth Martin and Stephen Hawthornthwaite, are not typical designers, and they don't aim to be. Five years ago, Mr. Martin, a former director at Hedge Gallery, a midcentury design gallery in San Francisco, and Mr. Hawthornthwaite, who had worked in finance for more than 20 years, teamed up, motivated by the desire to build something together. Having watched their wives fret over finding the perfect "out for the day" footwear, the men decided and why not? to pursue shoe design. More innovative, technological entrepreneurs than fashion designers, they spent four years trying to create a shoe that would be comfortable and stylish, but also environmentally friendly. "No one takes four years to develop a shoe," Mr. Martin said, laughing. "We didn't know what we were doing, but it was also completely unchartered territory." It was four years of trial and error in design and manufacturing they tried, but failed, to find a way to manufacture the shoes in the United States but by last summer, the start up was in business, with the shoes being made in China. Rothy's process is novel. Plastic water bottles are sourced from recycling centers, hot washed and sterilized, then chipped into flakes and extruded into little pellets. The pellets are heated, then drawn into soft filaments of plastic. The shoes are then knitted by a computer program that has different settings for pattern, color, design and size. Nike uses a somewhat similar method to make its Flyknit line, which was introduced in 2012. But unlike Flyknit, and other recycled material athletic shoes, which are made in two dimensions, Rothy's are knit in three dimensions and come out of the 3 D knitting machine seamless the whole process takes six minutes using almost the precise amount of material required. There is no cutting, which is the most wasteful part of normal footwear manufacturing. "We have virtually no waste," Mr. Martin said. "And as adhesives get greener or as waterless dyeing comes to fruition and is commercially viable, we can add it to our program." For now the shoes, which feel like fabric, not plastic, come in just two designs: pointy toe, called the Point ( 145), and round toe, called the Flat ( 125). Because they're knitted, they breathe like mesh. They are also machine washable and take about 40 minutes to air dry. The shoes have amassed a loyal global clientele, many of whom can't stop talking about them online and off. Alexandra Legrain, who lives in Barcelona, Spain, heard about Rothy's from her sister in California. Eager to support brands that are environmentally responsible, she bought two pairs of Rothy's in the past three months. "They are just so comfortable," she said. "They are the shoes you could wear at home, but you can wear them out to dinner and they complement an outfit." It was through word of mouth that Jeremy Liew, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, heard about Rothy's. "Women are the arbiters of popular culture, so we pay a lot of attention to the kind of the opportunities we see in which women are talking about how great a product is," Mr. Liew said. In May, Rothy's secured a 7 million Series A round of financing from Lightspeed. Other investors including Finn Capital Partners, M13 and Grace Beauty Capital invested about 2 million combined through a convertible note before the Series A funding. Mr. Liew, who is best known as Snapchat's first investor, thinks Rothy's has the potential to be as successful as iconic labels like Vans, Toms and Uggs. "They really go beyond being a shoe," he said. "They get into the mainstream of recognition rather than just being something people know about as a shoe."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Stuart Gordon, a director best known for lavishly lurid horror films with a piercing sense of humor, notably the cult favorite "Re Animator," died on Tuesday in Van Nuys, Calif. He was 72. His wife, Carolyn Purdy Gordon, an actress who appeared in many of his films and with whom he founded the Chicago based Organic Theater Company, said the cause was multiple organ failure brought on by kidney disease. Mr. Gordon's generally low budget films often combined the body horror of John Carpenter or David Cronenberg's films with the titillation found in Roger Corman's. He said that surprising moviegoers was an important part of his work, and he did his best to exceed the everyday terrors of many slasher movies. "There is a side of me that likes to break through cliches and wake people up," Mr. Gordon told Rolling Stone in 1986. Before turning to film, he directed experimental plays at the Organic Theater Company in the late 1960s. The company produced original works, like the comic book themed trilogy "Warp," one third of which briefly made it to Broadway in 1973; it also staged the first production of David Mamet's breakout play, "Sexual Perversity in Chicago," in 1974. "Re Animator" (1985), Mr. Gordon's first feature film, was based on a serialized story about human revivification by H.P. Lovecraft. He wrote the adaptation with Dennis Paoli and William Norris. The movie centers on Herbert West, a medical student played by Jeffrey Combs (he would become a stock player of sorts for Mr. Gordon) who discovers a chemical reagent that returns dead bodies to life. His experiments with it yield ever more grotesque results, culminating in a gang of marauding undead. One unforgettable scene involves the severed head of a reanimated corpse and a captive young woman. "'Re Animator' has as much originality as it has gore, and that's really saying something," Janet Maslin wrote in her review in The New York Times when the movie opened in New York theaters. The film, she added, "has a fast pace and a good deal of grisly vitality" and even "a sense of humor, albeit one that would be lost on 99.9 percent of any ordinary moviegoing crowd." Mr. Paoli, who also worked with Mr. Gordon on later Lovecraft adaptations, said in a telephone interview that the humor horror hybrid in "Re Animator" and other Gordon films was similar to that in his theater work, which often straddled the line between the serious and the hilarious. "If you watch someone laughing and you don't hear them, it looks like they're screaming," Mr. Paoli said. "The fact is they're both releases of tension, and Stuart was a genius at storing up that tension and then releasing it over the line in one direction or another." That same combination of mordant comedy, graphic violence and cosmic horror turned up in Lovecraft derivations like "From Beyond" (1986), about a doctor who uses a device to see into alien dimensions and whose pineal gland bursts through his forehead; and "Dagon" (2001), about a village of human fish hybrids who enjoy procreating with people and sometimes skinning them. Not all Mr. Gordon's films were creature features. He, Brian Yuzna and Ed Naha came up with the story for the hit Disney film "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" (1989), and he was an executive producer of the sequel, "Honey, I Blew Up the Kid" (1992). He also made science fiction films, like "Fortress" (1992), about a high tech prison in a dystopian future; and nightmarish dramas, like "Stuck" (2007), about a woman who crashes into a homeless man with her car while intoxicated, then drives home with him trapped in her windshield and barely alive. Mr. Gordon adapted the work of other authors, like Edgar Allan Poe ("The Pit and the Pendulum," 1991) and Ray Bradbury ("The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit," 1998). He returned to the work of Mr. Mamet with the film version of his one act play "Edmond" (2005), about a man, played by William H. Macy, who renounces his strait laced life and goes on a wild tear that ends with murder and a long prison sentence. To Mr. Gordon, the goal of supposedly highbrow theater was not much different from that of a blood soaked horror film. "I have never separated art from having a good time," he said in 1986. Stuart Alan Gordon was born in Chicago on Aug. 11, 1947, to Bernard and Rosalie (Sabath) Gordon. His father was a supervisor at a cosmetics factory, his mother a high school English teacher. He graduated from high school in Chicago before studying theater at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. At the university Mr. Gordon formed Screw Theater, an experimental troupe that incensed the college authorities with a 1968 production of "Peter Pan" that featured a nude dance sequence. Mr. Gordon and Ms. Purdy, who was in the show, were arrested after the second performance, and the university demanded that Mr. Gordon submit future scripts in advance and allow faculty members into every rehearsal. Mr. Gordon declined and left the university.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Anywhere one looks around the world, the soccer industry is struggling with the financial effects of the coronavirus. Leagues are counting their losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Stadiums remain empty. Staff members are being furloughed. And players, even those at the richest clubs, have agreed to millions of dollars in pay cuts or salary deferrals. But there is one group that has proved bulletproof from the costs of the pandemic: FIFA's top executives. While cost cutting, resource saving and painful decisions have become the norm in most of the soccer world, the men and women who sit on FIFA's 37 member governing council continue to collect six figure salaries that, for some, will amount to 250,000 this year but require their attendance at as few as three meetings. The most senior officials, who have added responsibilities, will earn even more; FIFA pays its vice presidents 300,000. And merely showing up has been easier this year: With most international travel restricted or ill advised, council members need only an internet connection and a comfortable chair to take part. Asked about the lack of belt tightening among its leaders, a spokesman for FIFA said the organization had achieved significant cost savings through the reduction of travel and the hosting of virtual meetings, rendering a re evaluation of compensation unnecessary. "No additional major cost cuts were needed to secure FIFA's continuous support to the global football community throughout the pandemic," the spokesman said. For top executives, FIFA work is often only one of several hefty paydays. Several officials on the council also sit on the executive boards of their regional governing bodies, positions that offer their own significant financial benefits. Executive committee members at UEFA, Europe's governing body, for example, receive salaries of 160,000 euros a year (about 194,000), and its vice presidents are paid 250,000 euros (just over 300,000). South America's governing body, CONMEBOL, pays the members of its executive board 20,000 a month, while CONCACAF, which is responsible for the sport in the Caribbean and Central and North America, distributes 135,000 a year to its senior leaders. The size of such compensation packages was highlighted recently when it emerged that Greg Clarke, who was forced to resign as chairman of England's Football Association after making inappropriate remarks during a parliamentary committee hearing, received more for the few days of work he contributed as one of FIFA's vice presidents than he did in his day job leading English soccer. He was scheduled to earn even more next year, once he completed a planned move onto UEFA's executive committee. Yet among FIFA and its six regional confederations, only UEFA instituted cuts to executive pay this year: a reduction of 20 percent for the three months while its competitions were suspended. Still, at a time when the soccer industry is expected to contract by billions of dollars, and when leagues and teams large and small face challenges that threaten their futures, FIFA's decision to continue paying its executives six figure net salaries has been brought into even starker focus. Only last week, Barcelona announced its players had agreed to pay cuts that would save the club almost 150 million. "We've seen a lot of calls for solidarity and that we are in the same boat this definitely contradicts that narrative," said Ronan Evain, executive director for Football Supporters Europe, an umbrella body for fan groups. Fans across Europe, he said, have been asked to bear some of the pain affecting their teams by, in some cases, writing off some of the value of season tickets for games that they have not been able to attend. "There's definitely a contradiction being asked of fans, and not everyone is contributing the same," Evain said. On Friday, the FIFA Council held the last of its three scheduled meetings of the year. Like the others, it took place via videoconference. During the pandemic, the calls have been shorter than ever, according to attendees. Most members never speak; some, in fact, have not said a word during one in years, longtime members say. And even before they meet, most of the important decisions have already been made by the bureau of the FIFA Council, a smaller group consisting of the FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, and the presidents of the six regional confederations. (Africa is not now represented on that body because its current president was barred from soccer last month.) At Friday's virtual gathering, for example, the council members ratified several proposals approved by senior leaders last month that will provide new protections and benefits for female players, including paid maternity leave. They were also asked to sign off on several scheduling and disciplinary matters. As sports governance posts go, a FIFA Council seat is one of the most coveted sinecures in global sports. In most years, members are flown to exotic locations and housed in the finest hotels, and at meetings they often follow the lead of their regional presidents on votes. Now grounded, their only financial sacrifice appears to be the inability to claim the per diems available on every foreign trip. Beyond the pay, though, the lifestyle enjoyed by FIFA Council members extends to privileged access and status that money can't buy, including access to the best seats and the biggest matches. Miguel Maduro, the former FIFA governance chief, said the pay and perks were parts of a system that rewards loyalty and ensures power is concentrated in a small group of top leaders. "The narrative is one of representation from bottom up, a body where you have elected representatives that will in theory discuss and deliberate on the crucial issues of football," Maduro said this week. "Instead, as we know, it doesn't happen like that."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
THE terrorist attacks in Paris last week that killed 130 people and injured hundreds more instilled fear in millions of people who weren't anywhere near the attacks. That, of course, is the point of terrorism. The sheer randomness of the attacks will persuade some people who may be at higher risk to dismiss any chance that they could find themselves in a similar situation, while others with no need for concern will worry excessively. "We as human beings don't perceive risk rationally," said Martin Hartley, chief operating officer of Pure Insurance, an insurance company aimed at wealthy clients. The Paris terrorism, he said, "makes the risk seem far worse by its magnitude not by its probability. That's the challenge of risk." Which risks are worth guarding against and which ones aren't? For a fee, various consultants are offering to answer that question. The very wealthy are among those at some risk. In September, the terrorist group Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula called for the assassination of various billionaires in the United States, including Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Warren E. Buffett and the Koch brothers. It's not an insignificant threat, said Christopher Falkenberg, president of the security and risk management firm Insite Security and a former Secret Service agent. "They're looking for the easiest target with the highest yield," he said. "If you subscribe to the theory in the magazine, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula will succeed in the U.S. by disrupting its economic system, and one way to do that is to kill successful businesspeople. It puts a large target on them." Mr. Falkenberg, whose clients include a list of hedge fund managers, said personal security could reduce the likelihood of an attack. It can also make one prominent person less desirable than one without security. "One billionaire is equal to another in the minds of the Al Qaeda guys," he said. If you're not a billionaire, chances are you won't be singled out by terrorists and probably don't need a security detail that Mr. Falkenberg said would start at 180,000 a year. But that doesn't mean people won't try to prey on your fear to make a sale. "For the average wealthy person, there is a complete huckster industry to sell them protection against Islamic terrorism that they don't need," said Roderick Jones, a former British intelligence agent and now chief executive of Concentric Advisors, which provides digital and personal security services. "Terrorists are very selective on how they train and deploy against a rich person," he said. "If you've gone to the trouble of infiltrating America and training, you want bang for your buck." Still, some affluent people may want to consider spending on one off protection programs for travel abroad. "It's been obvious for a long time that someone needs security if they're going to Mexico City," Mr. Jones said. "It wasn't obvious before these attacks that you needed security if you were going to Europe. You need a more critical mind set about Europe. Americans are used to going to Europe and not worrying." The cost for this varies widely. Mr. Jones said it could be as little as 2,000 to find a safe car to pick a couple up at the airport and check that they made it to their hotel, to nearly 1 million to organize coverage for a large party traveling to an event for a long time. He said his firm was working on one such case for the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. But Tim Horner, managing director and practice leader of security risk management at Kroll, urged people who might run out and try to hire a security detail for their next vacation to think it through. People need to do due diligence on the quality of the adviser providing the assessment, he said, to put the fee in context. After that process, when a client calls for travel advice, the fee could range from nothing to give a simple assessment of risk to 100,000 or more to investigate a trip and provide security for, say, a group of affluent people traveling together in a dangerous area. For most people, even very wealthy people, the bigger risk is being a victim of online crime. "The real threat to rich people is digital crime," said Mr. Jones, whose company has formed an alliance with Pure Insurance called CyberSafe to help with such crimes. "If you build a bunker to protect against an AK 47 but don't protect your Internet browser, you're missing the point." He said he had met with a group of private banking clients in Portland, Ore., and the majority of them had been victims of some digital crime. "A lot of the news is about this sophisticated cyberwar and what the Chinese and Russians are doing," he said. "But in reality, people are getting robbed blind out there, and it's an economic crime." He said the common thread in that group was they were over 55 and had poor technology skills. Through the CyberSafe partnership, his firm offers a home online security audit, which starts at 1,500 a day, and a monitoring program that costs 500 to 3,000 a month. One of its focuses is on regularly updating security systems, given how quickly hackers can get around existing systems and firewalls. Mr. Hartley said the impetus for the alliance was an insurance customer who lost 100,000 from his bank account, wired out by a hacker who had so much information that he was able to pass as the man, including getting the person's assistant to confirm the transfer. The bank refused to refund the money since it said the proper protocols were followed. "With credit card fraud, you're not going to be out of pocket," Mr. Hartley said. "This sort of regulation has not reached cybertheft with money and banks. There is no such protection today. It's on the good will of the bank." For the average person, phishing scams remain a persistent and often successful threat. They generally come as emails that look as if they are from a financial institution or social networking site and include a request for passwords or other personal data. Tim Bloechl, who spent 20 years in Army intelligence and now leads CyberDx, a division of Quantum Research International, that does vulnerability assessments of networks, said he adapted a program he worked on in the military to test employees' willingness to click on phishing scams. Despite repeated warnings not to click on links in unknown emails, people continue to do so. In CyberDx's exercise, the employees are taken to a screen that admonishes them for clicking. In real life, he said, those clicks are how hackers get into personal or professional computers and networks. In most cases, people could make themselves the online equivalent of the billionaire with the bodyguard with solid enough defenses so that hackers move on to easier targets. Neal O'Farrell, chief executive of Privide, a security consultant, and founder of the nonprofit group Identity Theft Council, said apathy was the biggest problem to digital protection. "The financial services community has been very good at persuading consumers that zero liability means zero responsibility about identity theft," he said. "One of the biggest challenges is to get consumers to believe that it will happen, and it will be painful. But you can minimize the down time." Mr. O'Farrell said simple steps included monitoring or freezing your credit with the three reporting agencies. Another is to guard your password. Still, in the world of risk assessment, attacks from hackers and terrorists compete with more traditional risks. For Mr. Hartley, the insurance executive, car accidents are his biggest concern. And Mr. Horner at Kroll worries about theft by domestic help and threats from terminated employees. And if those risks are not scary enough, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the leading cause of death continued to be heart attacks.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
A rendering of a seven story, 38 unit building at 75 Kenmare Street in NoLIta. The condos will combine a sense of the area's scruffy art fueled past with the lavish finishes of luxury Manhattan apartments. When Dan Hollander began planning a condominium to replace a parking garage at the northeast corner of Mulberry and Kenmare Streets in NoLIta in 2015, he wanted a designer who intimately knew the area and exuded an aura of downtown cool. He didn't have to look far. Just blocks away, on Crosby Street, was Kravitz Design, an interior and product design firm helmed by the Grammy Award winning rocker Lenny Kravitz. "They're kind of choosy about what they take on, but they loved the site," said Mr. Hollander, the managing principal of DHA Capital, which is developing 75 Kenmare with AMS Acquisitions and First Atlantic Real Estate, pointing out that it sits directly beside DeSalvio Playground. "They got the project right away. We shared a vision." "It's really about trying to capture some of that original downtown feel that I experienced in the '80s," Mr. Kravitz said. "I remember when it was all my friends squatting in lofts that now cost 10 million. People were just painting and sculpting." Of course, buyers who spend millions of dollars on an apartment typically desire a level of polish absent from abandoned lofts. So, Mr. Kravitz's strategy was to juxtapose rough and refined surfaces, and install materials in creative ways. In the lobby, for instance, a shimmering wall of mirror and iridescent mosaic tile will play off an exposed concrete ceiling, while the floor will consist of four different types of natural stone set in a geometric pattern. In individual units, kitchens will have a mix of matte white lacquer and elm millwork, and white marble islands will be paired with wood breakfast bars. Master bathrooms will be bisected by dark titanium travertine walls and flooring on one side, and creamy French vanilla marble on the other. "We definitely wanted to mix several different things together to get a more sensual feel," Mr. Kravitz said. "Things you can touch and feel. I wanted it to be moody, sexy, warm." Since founding Kravitz Design in 2003, Mr. Kravitz's many projects have included wallpaper for Flavor Paper, furniture for CB2 and Kartell, door levers for Rocky Mountain Hardware, a chandelier for Swarovski, a watch for Rolex, public spaces for Miami's Paramount Bay condo building and penthouse hotel suites for SLS South Beach. This is his first multiunit residential project in New York. On the outside, the seven story, 38 unit building, designed by Andre Kikoski Architect, will be clad in sandblasted precast concrete panels with deep vertical grooves. Mr. Kikoski said the treatment was inspired by the area's traditional masonry construction as well as newer neighbors, such as Tadao Ando's concrete and glass condo building at 152 Elizabeth Street. "We asked ourselves: What can we do to create a facade that relates to the history and fabric of NoLIta, but at the same time might set the tone for what will follow," said Mr. Kikoski, who traveled to Montreal last month to personally oversee the sandblasting of samples for a suitably eroded appearance. The rear of the L shaped building will include an outdoor courtyard designed by Future Green Studio. Below grade, four levels of automated mechanical parking will offer space for about 165 vehicles, open to the public. Construction is underway, and Mr. Hollander expects the project to be completed in the second half of 2018.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Harvey Frommer in 2005. He maintained a torrid pace of writing for 40 years, with dozens of books about sports and several oral histories about New York. Harvey Frommer, a sports historian who wrote extensively about the Yankees and collaborated with his wife on lively oral histories of Brooklyn, the Catskills and Broadway, died on Aug. 1 at his home in Lyme, N.H. He was 83. His son Frederic said the cause was metastatic lung cancer. Mr. Frommer's fascination with baseball began in Brooklyn during the 1940s and '50s, when the Dodgers, Yankees and Giants dazzled New York City with star players like Jackie Robinson, Joe DiMaggio and Willie Mays. In his book "New York City Baseball: The Last Golden Age, 1947 1957" (1980), Mr. Frommer described a three team universe captured by radio. "Radio was always on, always ritual," he wrote. "Followers of the New York City teams could go to a butcher shop, a candy store, a laundromat, moving from one to another virtually without missing a pitch." Mr. Frommer (pronounced FROME er) maintained a torrid pace of writing for 40 years. His dozens of books include an exploration of Robinson's breaking baseball's modern color barrier in 1947 and Shoeless Joe Jackson's banishment from baseball for his supposed role in fixing the 1919 World Series with seven Chicago White Sox teammates. He also wrote autobiographies of Hall of Fame personalities like the fireballing pitcher Nolan Ryan, the Dallas Cowboys running back Tony Dorsett and Red Holzman, who coached the Knicks to their only two N.B.A. championships. Mr. Frommer focused on the Yankees in the 1990s with books like "The New York Yankee Encyclopedia" (1997); "A Yankee Century: A Celebration of the First Hundred Years of Baseball's Greatest Team" (2002); "Five O'Clock Lightning" (2008), about the slugging 1927 team led by Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig; and "Remembering Yankee Stadium" (2008), in which he combined oral and narrative history. Mr. Frommer's celebration of the old Yankee Stadium was published in 2008, a year before its replacement opened. For his celebration of the stadium before it was razed and then replaced in 2009, the Yankees refused to cooperate with him, he said, despite his long association with the team, during which he wrote articles for Yankees Magazine. (The Yankees had been preparing their own book on the stadium at the time.) So he sought stories from people out of the team's reach, like Duke Sims, a Yankees reserve catcher who hit the last home run at the original Yankee Stadium in 1973 before it closed for two years of renovations. "I ran around the bases thinking that I would be going behind the plate for two more innings," Sims told Mr. Frommer. "It never crossed my mind that I might have hit the last home run in 'The House that Ruth Built.' " Harvey Frommer was born on Oct. 10, 1935, in Brooklyn and grew up in the Williamsburg neighborhood. His father, Max, drove a cab; his mother, Fannie (Wechsler) Frommer, was a homemaker. Though living in Brooklyn, young Harvey was not a fan of the Dodgers; he followed the St. Louis Cardinals because of their star slugger, Stan Musial. Still, it was Red Barber, the Dodgers' famously literate radio announcer, who inspired Mr. Frommer. He said that hearing Mr. Barber call play by play and tell stories "got me interested in speech, in literature and also baseball," he told The New York Times in 1980. Mr. Frommer graduated from New York University with a bachelor's degree in journalism and then earned a master's in English before becoming an English teacher, first at New York City high schools and then at what is now called New York City College of Technology, a part of the City University of New York. He went on to study for a doctorate at N.Y.U. in the 1970s, writing his dissertation on the intersection of sports and television. It whetted his appetite for writing, and his first book, "A Baseball Century: The First 100 Years of the National League," was published in 1976. By 1989, after publishing more than a dozen more sports books, he and his wife, Myrna Katz Frommer, had begun their oral history collaborations with "It Happened in the Catskills" (1991). They had planned the book as a conventional history of the summer resorts and bungalow colonies known as the Borscht Belt, but realized that the stories told by the owners, guests, tummlers and waiters would be better told in oral history form. "We became captivated by the people we spoke to, so distinctive in voice, so specific in recollection of detail, so accurate in description and evocation of time and place," the Frommers wrote. They followed the book with "It Happened in" oral histories of Brooklyn, Broadway, Manhattan and Miami.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books

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