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Suzan Lori Parks already has a Pulitzer. Now she's getting a Mimi. The much lauded dramatist has been chosen as the 2018 recipient of the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, to be given on Dec. 3. The prize is among the richest in theater a 200,000 cash award from the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust (hence its nickname, Mimi). Ms. Parks is best known as the author of "Topdog/Underdog," a pointed comedy about two black brothers that ran on Broadway in 2002 and won the Pulitzer that same year. Earlier this year, a group of New York Times critics chose it as the best American play of the last 25 years. She also co wrote a new adaptation of "Porgy and Bess" that opened on Broadway in 2012, and her other plays include the acclaimed "Father Comes Home From the Wars (Parts 1, 2 3)." The distinguished playwright award, designated for "an American playwright whose body of work has made significant contributions to the American theater," is given every other year; in the alternating years, the foundation gives an award for rising American playwrights. Past recipients of the distinguished playwright award include Tony Kushner, Lynn Nottage, David Henry Hwang, Stephen Adly Guirgis and Sarah Ruhl.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
From the time they were middle school students in Manhattan, Arielle Patrick and her brother, Andrew, had an agreement: come college graduation, if they weren't married they would share a "bachelor/bachelorette pad" in the city. They were serious enough about the matter to put the pact in writing on a piece of loose leaf paper and, with great earnestness, to sign their names at the bottom. So it was that in September 2012, a dozen years later, the Patricks signed their names at the bottom of a lease for a fourth floor walk up in Midtown East. "We'd always dreamed of being cool single adults together in New York," said Ms. Patrick, 23, who works for a public relations firm. (Mr. Patrick, 22, is a legal assistant at a law firm.) "Some people at my office are so surprised that I live with my brother. They're very interested in how we make it work." Earlier avatars of the sibling roommate phenomenon include the McKenney sisters, whose move to Manhattan in the 1930s formed the basis of Ruth McKenney's memoir "My Sister Eileen." The book, which went on to become a play, a musical and a short lived television series, chronicled their life together in a tiny apartment in the big city. For the McKenneys then, like the Patricks today, there was safety, security and (perhaps) solvency in togetherness. In fact, many young adult siblings in New York are doubling up for just those reasons. With rents sky high and entry level salaries low, togetherness makes economic sense. But it makes emotional sense, too. Familiarity breeds content: with that long shared history, brothers and sisters can serve as one another's sounding board, confessor, fashion adviser and, every so often, caretaker. Of course, there's always the chance that one or the other will go blabbing to Mom and Dad about overdue loans and overnight guests. "It used to be that brothers and sisters who lived in the city wanted to live apart and have their own lives," said Julia Bryzgalina, the director of sales and leasing at Platinum Properties. "But in the last six months I've seen a huge jump in siblings moving in together." In large part, that huge jump has to do with rent. The average monthly charge for a studio now is 2,346, up 12 percent from 2011, and the average monthly rent for a one bedroom is 3,330, up 10 percent from 2011, Ms. Bryzgalina said. Rents, she said, have become "unmanageable for a lot of people who have just graduated from college and are looking for a place to live." Share a bedroom? Seriously? For Whitney Noziskova, 32, an entrepreneur, the idea would be unthinkable if the roommate in her one bedroom Greenwich Village apartment were anyone but her sister, Kasey, 28, a wallpaper designer. "We're definitely on top of each other," she said. "It's forced intimacy, but I think it's a good thing. The boundaries you have with any other person have been permeable with your sibling your entire life, and it stays that way into adulthood." According to Ms. Bryzgalina, parents buying an apartment for an older child often want to make sure it has enough space for the next oldest one. Some are focusing on two bedroom units to avoid the added expense and hassle of having to buy a second co op or condo down the road. Similarly, parents who are helping with the rent may be disinclined to lay out the going rate of about 2,400 a month for individual studio apartments. They're finding considerable cost benefit in settling their offspring under the same roof, said Geraldine Onorato, a sales agent at Rutenberg Realty. She speaks from experience. Her daughters, Alexandra Newman, 24, a tutor, and Victoria Newman, 22, a marketing coordinator for ESPN, and their cousin Chrissy Anderson, 24, share a three bedroom walk up in Gramercy Park that rents for about 4,800 a month. "They each have their own room," Ms. Onorato said. "There's a washer and dryer and two bathrooms. They're each paying 1,600 a month or so, and a studio would be so much more. And if a studio were 1,600, it wouldn't have as nice a kitchen or a washer and dryer." The upfront hassles are minimized as well. You don't have two families paying the guarantor application fee or two families submitting to a credit check. "This was clean," Ms. Onorato said. "It was my husband and me. It's our children and our responsibility. There isn't that unknown, like the roommate who lost her job and can't pay her share of the rent." As for siblings who are assuming full responsibility for their monthly nut, they feel a sense of financial trust they might not have under other circumstances. It's a safe bet that a sibling won't announce on Thursday that she's leaving Friday to get her doctorate or to be married and has no intention of continuing to pay rent. (Alexandra Newman is heading out of town for graduate school in the next few months, but her roommates already know that another cousin will be taking over her room.) At the same time, the sibling living arrangement is about comfort level. Better to go with the slob/neat freak/penny pincher/spendthrift you know well than to take your chances with the idiosyncrasies of a colleague from work or someone you found on Craigslist. "We don't have to worry about who bought the milk," said Alan Glick, 24, a consultant who shares a two bedroom in the East 30s with his brother, Arnold, 22, a digital media specialist. "We're brothers. We're not keeping score." In the one bedroom West Village apartment shared by Gigi Campo, 24, an editorial assistant at Penguin Press, and her sister, Katie, 27, a journalism student, it's an article of faith that if you finish the Trader Joe hummus, you go out and buy more, and that no one but Katie touches Katie's good Scotch. And when conflicts do crop up, it's emotionally safer to dress down your sister or brother for neatness noncompliance than to go mano a mano with a friend who, after one too many arguments about whose turn it is to clean the kitchen, may no longer want to be friends. "When it's your sibling, it's easy to fight and pout, and 20 minutes later, it's fine," said Claire Burke, 30, a member of the information technology staff at the New Museum. She shares a two bedroom in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with her sister Ellen, 25, a production assistant at MSNBC. "If it's a roommate who isn't a family member, it's a slightly different scenario." Clay Elliott, 33, a nursing student who shares a two bedroom Upper East Side apartment with his half sister, Emily Thompson, 28, puts it a bit more bluntly: "You can tell your sibling, 'Shut up,' and you'll still be related." But you can't always tell your sibling to break up. "The previous apartment that my sister, Lily, and I shared was much smaller than the one we share now," said Louis Mandelbaum, 26, a D.J. and writer. "Her boyfriend, whom I wasn't in love with, was basically living with us, and I wanted him to start paying rent. "We tried to set boundaries like he could only be there three or four nights a week," he said. "It was the most tense time we had, but there was nothing to be said until she realized he wasn't the right guy for her." Brothers! But Ms. Mandelbaum, 23, who with her mother founded stylelikeu.com, a Web site devoted to personal style, displays fair mindedness, a good quality in a roommate. "I think I went a little overboard with the amount of time I spent at the apartment with my boyfriend," she said. "I feel bad. But I think Louis is a little bit picky about his living space. I'm not sure if it would have mattered who my boyfriend was." For some siblings, living together as adults seems like the normal course of events. Colleen and Suzanne Dengel, 20, twins, actresses they played Meryl Streep's bratty daughters in "The Devil Wears Prada" and seniors at the Fashion Institute of Technology, live in the financial district in a penthouse studio they fashioned into a two bedroom. Sometimes, no one is more stunned or delighted about the success of the arrangement than the parents. "As children they fought like cats and dogs," said Beth Sievers, an agent for Halstead Property, of her daughters, Amanda, 22, and Victoria, 25, who along with a friend share an apartment on the Upper West Side. "I was worried about putting them together, but I wanted Amanda out of the dump she'd been in prior to this. There are a few disagreements, but nothing like when they were younger." "If I have a crush on a boy and I tell my sister in confidence," Gigi Campo said with a laugh, "my parents will call the next day asking about him." When Clay Elliott didn't like the behavior of his sister's ex boyfriend, "he'd call my mother and tell her about it," Ms. Thompson said. "He says I was the tattletale when we were growing up. Well, he's the tattletale now." Still, the compensations are many. "We're each other's mother, sister and friend," Suzanne Dengel said. "We take care of each other when we're sick." More than anything, living with a sibling seems to be a graduate program in human relations. Until Noelle Gentile, 34, a drama teacher, got married last year, she shared a Park Slope apartment with her sister, Amanda, 31, who works for a nonprofit. "I learned a lot of my conflict resolution skills living with her," Ms. Gentile said, "because she was a safe person to figure things out with. I used to be more fiery than I am, more temperamental. Thanks to Amanda, I went from slamming doors to going for a walk to having a calm conversation." Through it all, she knew her sister would be there. "It set me up for who I would be when I found a romantic partnership," she said. "To have that kind of stability while you're flailing around the biggest city in the world is a really amazing thing."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Indiana Woodward has had two life changing moments in her relatively young career. One was a summer spent at the Bolshoi Ballet Academy in Moscow when she was 15. The other was when she was 9 and found herself in a class that, as she put it in a recent interview: "Made my love for ballet dim. So intensely." She doesn't remember what went wrong exactly "everything's the end of the world at 9," she said but it was enough to make her quit. After a couple of months, her mother intervened: She took her to see a performance of "Romeo and Juliet" featuring the delicate, passionate Romanian ballerina, Alina Cojocaru. It was Juliet both the part and Ms. Cojocaru that convinced Ms. Woodward, now a 24 year old soloist at New York City Ballet, to take another stab at ballet. And now the role is hers. On Feb. 21, Ms. Woodward will make her debut as Juliet in Peter Martins's production of "Romeo Juliet" opposite Taylor Stanley. "That ballet really did change my life when I was young," Ms. Woodward, the only new Juliet this season, said. "To be doing it is a pretty insane feeling." This has been a standout season for Ms. Woodward, who has made alluring debuts in George Balanchine's "Apollo," as Calliope; and as the shivering, fetching lead in the "Winter" section of Jerome Robbins's "The Four Seasons." But "Romeo Juliet" because it is a full length ballet and requires such emotional layers is another matter entirely. Ms. Woodward possesses the requisite emotional breadth and more. Trained by Yuri Grigoriev, who danced with the Stanislavsky Ballet in Moscow, she has the precision of classical ballet and the speed and attack of George Balanchine's neoclassical tradition. Her footwork and turns aren't just properly placed, they sparkle with fluid musicality. It's lovely to watch because it's so natural. "I was always a bit of a kamikaze as a ballerina as a kid," she said, adding that she still tries to channel that, "but if I'm too excited it can overpower my actual show. That's definitely something for me to work on. I just get so happy when I dance that it explodes." Mr. Martins, who retired under pressure last month as ballet master in chief of City Ballet after allegations of sexual harassment and abuse, chose Ms. Woodward as Juliet before he left. Kathleen Tracey, a former company member turned ballet master, has coached Ms. Woodward in several roles including this one. She said she has come to realize how right Mr. Martins was to pick Ms. Woodward. "Indiana has depth," Ms. Tracey said. "While on the surface she is a very bubbly, lovely, charming kind of person, she is starting to be able to find her way through the harder scenes, which are when she refuses Paris and when she actually has to be faced with 'Do I drink this potion, do I not?' " Ms. Tracey says this is a ballet for a dancer to evolve in, asking a profound question of its lead: How much do you do for love? "It's about finding those real human feelings and showing the pain she would feel or the despair," she said. "We're getting there." It's a matter of braiding dancing with nuanced acting, in which a quick glance or hesitation can make the story come alive. As a coach, Ms. Tracey is understated and deceptively casual. When, at one point during a recent rehearsal, Ms. Woodward was struggling with spacing, Ms. Tracey told her: "Center schmenter. Be where you are." The two have a lighthearted back and forth, which was evident as Ms. Tracey, who is known as Katey, focused on helping Ms. Woodward give her reactions more texture. In an early scene in which Juliet's parents tell her that marriage to Paris is on the horizon, Ms. Tracey wanted Ms. Woodward to show how Juliet was part girl, part woman. "Don't be afraid to use your face," she said. "I love the moment when you cross over and pause, like, no, I'm just a kid." She smiled encouragingly. "I'm just planting seeds." The next day, Ms. Woodward talked about emotions of the role. "There's the sense of being trapped in your own skin and within your family," she said. "There's no escape. So in theory the potion and waking up and running away is the best thing that could ever happen. But it's also scary. What if you die?" Ms. Woodward has a particular mix of good cheer and glamour that comes partly from her upbringing. She was born in Paris, where she lived until she was 3 1/2 with her French filmmaker father and her mother, a dancer from South Africa who performed with the choreographer Roland Petit among others. Her parents, who met on a dance film set, relocated to Philadelphia, where Ms. Woodward's brother was born. But when they split up Ms. Woodward was 7 her father returned to Paris. Until she was 15, she lived in Los Angeles with her mother and brother. "We were in Europe with my dad for every vacation or holiday, and in America, we were always with my mom," she said. "Sometimes it was hard, because you're just growing up. You don't want to leave." But she's grateful now. "I feel like I have two cultures ingrained in me and South African culture too," she said. "I'm very open to everything." Ms. Woodward, who lives in the West Village with her rescue dog, Luna, may have been partly raised in America, but she's not exactly an American girl. Her gracious manners have a European ease, and her spirit and frequent smile bring to mind the French ballerina Violette Verdy, who danced with City Ballet from 1958 to 1977. All of that shows up in her performances. And if the ballet world can seem small and closed in the work it takes to thrive in it requires total focus Ms. Woodward dances like she knows that the real world is a big place. Her time at the Bolshoi Ballet Academy helped her realize that. "It's about being able to adapt wherever you are," she said. It was while she was on her way to Moscow that she decided to stop in New York and audition for the City Ballet affiliated School of American Ballet, which she had learned about through a friend. She was accepted on scholarship. "I'm so thankful," she said. "Otherwise I don't think I would have discovered this style." She joined City Ballet in 2012 and was promoted to soloist a year ago. It's been a transition. Soloists perform less often than members of the corps de ballet. "Not being in the corps every night makes you a little tentative when you do go onstage," she said. "You have so many emotions. Katey helped me find a way to channel them in a more calm way." And that is seeping into her Juliet too. "Katey does say, 'You can just be free when the time comes for you to dance the whole ballet, you can do what you want to do,'" Ms. Woodward said. "That's crazy. Having the whole stage to do the interpretation of my dream role?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
PARIS Sheer joy. That's the effect of William Forsythe's new "Blake Works I" for the Paris Opera Ballet, which had its premiere at the Palais Garnier here on Monday night. It was a moment as important as the premiere of Mr. Forsythe's "In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated" for the same company, in the same theater, in 1987. What Mr. Forsythe did then was radical: He moved ballet into new, utterly contemporary terrain. Almost 30 years later, he has done something just as startling with "Blake Works I": He has taken a long and loving look at ballet's past, and moved it into the future. "Blake Works I" is the first ballet that Mr. Forsythe has created since 1999, when he choreographed "Woundwork I" and "Pas./Parts" for the Paris Opera. Benjamin Millepied, the outgoing director of dance, can count it as a major achievement to have brought Mr. Forsythe back to this company. "Blake Works I" is the final piece on an all Forsythe program that includes the magisterial "Of Any if And" (1995) and "Approximate Sonata" (1996), both set to music by Thom Willems. This new ballet is done to seven songs by the English musician James Blake, who writes delicate, poetic ballads over electronic keyboard and syncopated percussion. The choice of music, with its allegiance to popular culture and its narrative implications, harkens back to Mr. Forsythe's 1979 "Love Songs," set to songs by Aretha Franklin and Dionne Warwick. But the mood of "Blake Works I" is entirely different from the mordant humor of "Love Songs": It is light, joyous, hopeful a celebration of the youth, spirits, talent and collective knowledge of a new generation of Paris Opera dancers, who have never, in my experience of the company, looked better than they did throughout Monday's performance.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
With the Mandarin language skills of a buffalo, I began chatting with my taxi driver in Shanghai, a polite man with plenty of questions about the United States. It was early 2007, and sitting in a back seat that reeked of stale cigarettes and body odor, I certainly didn't see a financial epiphany coming. Then, the driver went straight for the jugular. "How much money do you make?" Like many Americans, I was happy to talk about macroeconomics, such as the dazzling growth of China's G.D.P. at the time, the increasing cost of living in Shanghai or how his country's trade relations were knotted with those of mine. But when it came to the more micro, as in the very digits in my bank account, I felt an urge to jump out of the moving cab. (I was a student at the time, so an honest answer was easily at hand: "None.") Since then, a recession has come and gone, and I think of this cab ride often. Many of my 20 and 30 something peers struggle with student loan debt and high rent, and more than once I've erupted in laughter at the idea that I will collect any Social Security in my Betty White years.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Mercedes Benz couldn't have known it at the time. But from the moment the SL300 flashed its novel gullwing doors at the New York auto show of 1954, this sports car began building Mercedes from an American obscurity into the luxury powerhouse it is today. Mercedes hadn't planned to build street versions of the SL racecars that heralded its triumphant postwar return to motorsports. But after securing a promised order for hundreds of cars from Max Hoffman, the influential New York based importer who also convinced Porsche and BMW to create sports cars for Americans, Mercedes approved production of the SL. That coupe, followed by a roadster, became a Hollywood star through associations with celebrities like Clark Gable and Natalie Wood. Movie cameos followed, from the SL's appearance as a racecar in Elvis Presley's "Viva Las Vegas" to Grace Kelly driving Frank Sinatra in one in "High Society." A year ago, a rare alloy body SL300 Gullwing fetched a record 4.6 million at a Gooding Company auction in Arizona. Like Mercedes itself or Elvis in a jump suit the modern SL has grown fat, rich and happy. Now sold exclusively as a hardtop convertible, the SLs of today are powerful, technically advanced two seaters with V 8 or V 12 engines. Yet they are to sports cars as the Vegas Elvis is to rock 'n' roll a flashy, bulging facsimile, as much about comfortable seats for patrons as about hip shaking performance. In other words, the SL is as establishment as it gets. If the message isn't clear, the big Mercedes star on the front drives it home like a silver plated belt buckle. Then there's the price: 106,405 to start, rising to 123,445 for the SL550 that I tested. Entering its sixth generation, the 2013 SL is two inches longer and wider than the previous version. Yet even Mercedes has realized that the SL has raided the fridge too many times. Its new aluminum chassis and body the first mass produced aluminum structure in Mercedes history trims 275 pounds compared with the departed model. That still leaves the SL550's claimed weight at just under two tons, about 600 pounds more than, say, a Corvette. Yet this new version actually feels more agile and less ponderous. Thank the aluminum diet, suspension trickery and the sort of overwhelming power once reserved for high performance AMG editions. That aluminum structure is a science fair's worth of cast, extruded and sheet pieces; just 10 percent of the car's weight is conventional steel. The new twin turbo 4.7 liter V 8 amasses 429 horsepower, up from 382 horses of the bigger, naturally aspirated 5.5 liter in the 2012 model. The bigger gain is in torque, which rises to an almost ridiculous 516 pound feet, a 32 percent increase. (For full bore ridiculousness, the SL63 AMG version makes up to 557 horsepower). Lashed to a discreet shifting 7 speed automatic transmission, even the base model SL550 scampers to 60 miles per hour in barely four seconds, on virtual par with last year's SL63 AMG model. Like one of its main rivals, the BMW 6 Series, the Mercedes feels impervious. This SL's light but strong structure barely quivers over railroad tracks or potholes. Its steering is protected from unwanted intrusions like a hip hop mogul surrounded by bodyguards. And like a nightclubbing star, the steering rack seems lubricated with a rare, expensive brand of liqueur. So yes, the SL550 drives as a six figure, grand touring convertible should: beautifully. It's too bad the beauty ends there. Sneak up from the side, as though the SL were a grazing thoroughbred, and this Benz still looks awfully good. The profile is low and lean, with classic long hood, short deck proportions. But to quote Cher Horowitz, the deceptively canny Valley Girl in "Clueless," the SL is a full on Monet: from far away, it looks all right; up close, it's a big old mess. But regulators can't be blamed for the SL's disjointed appearance, especially a front and back that are the design equivalent of a blind date: these two strangers aren't about to get along especially if the rear end should ask, "Does this composite deck make me look fat?" The interior is much easier on the eyes, including the test car's sumptuous three way of red and black leather with black ash wooden trim. The seats are eye popping and back comforting. A stubby metal joystick of a shifter is new. A standard Harman Kardon sound system nestles enormous 7.9 inch subwoofers inside the footwells, using the enclosures to amplify the bass. Wind buffeting in the cabin is minimal. The Airscarf system, with headrest fans to warm your neck on chilly top down days, is standard. The roof opens or closes in less than 20 seconds. Another 2,500 brings Magic Sky Control, which darkens the clear glass sunroof at the touch of a button. A stop start system shuts down the engine, to save fuel, when the car is halted. The federal fuel economy rating is 24 m.p.g. on the highway and 16 in town. Electric power steering, a first on the SL, has a variable ratio, delivering faster response over the first few degrees of steering input. That makes for quicker turn in when you first crank the wheel and for easier low speed parking maneuvers. Adaptive cruise control with pre collision braking, blind spot monitors and a lane departure monitor are part of a 2,950 Driver Assistance Package. Given all the advanced engineering, it's amazing that some simple details slipped Mercedes's attention. For years, critics have complained that it's too easy to confuse the turn signal stalk with the adjacent cruise control lever. This SL fails to remedy the situation. And now a third stalk is wedged onto the column to electrically tilt and telescope the wheel. The three stalks together create a kind of unholy Jenga arrangement. Some other longtime SL annoyances remain, including triangle shaped rear side windows that you barely notice until you return to the parked car to find they've been open for hours, leaving your car vulnerable to thieves. That mistake happens, invariably, when you close the roof and forget to retoggle the window switch after the main glass rises. You'd think Mercedes would discover the wonders of a universal windows up switch, like the one in Audi cabriolets. The cup holders are shallow and often powerless against rising G forces. Hermetically sealed java is in order when a driver treads on the gas. The SL is explosively quick, and the optional Active Body Control ( 4,090) pins it to the pavement. Yet both despite and because of electronic distractions, the SL still doesn't drive like a Porsche or other pure sports cars. The throttle can feel indecisive, granting too little or too much power, the latter upsetting the balance. The Benz feels supersonic over twisty roads, but can also feel as if it's not fully connected to the pavement. That's largely due to the active steering, which is quick but smothers road feel in pools of digital butter. None of this will surprise the doctors, athletes and entrepreneurs who choose the SL for what it is: a classic, comfortable roadster that confers instant status. For such buyers, the SL's irreproachable status has long been a key. I'd say "more power to them," but the SL has that covered as well.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
SAN FRANCISCO Last August, Twitter's top executives gathered at the company's headquarters to discuss how to make the site safer for its users. Two attendees proposed banning all speech that could be considered "dehumanizing." For an example of what they meant, they showed a sample post that featured the words President Trump used to compare certain nations to excrement. By January, Twitter had backed off from deeming that sample tweet dehumanizing. Instead, the post was included in an internal company slide show, which helps train Twitter moderators, as the kind of message that should be allowed on the platform. And on Tuesday, when Twitter rolled out its first official guidelines around what constitutes dehumanizing speech on its service, the sample post was nowhere in sight. The company had narrowed its policymaking to focus only on banning speech that is insulting and unacceptable if directed at religious groups. "While we have started with religion, our intention has always been and continues to be an expansion to all protected categories," Jerrel Peterson, Twitter's head of safety policy, said in an interview. "We just want to be methodical." The scaling back of Twitter's efforts to define dehumanizing speech illustrates the company's challenges as it sorts through what to allow on its platform. While the new guidelines help it draw starker lines around what it will and will not tolerate, it took Twitter nearly a year to put together the rules and even then they are just a fraction of the policy that it originally said it intended to create. Twitter said it had ratcheted down the policy's scope partly because it kept running into obstacles. When the company sought users' feedback last year on what it thought such speech might include, people pushed back on the proposed definitions. Over months of discussions late last year and early this year, Twitter employees also worried that such a policy might be too sweeping, potentially resulting in the removal of benign messages and in haphazard enforcement. "We get one shot to write a policy that has to work for 350 million people who speak 43 plus languages while respecting cultural norms and local laws," Mr. Peterson said. "It's incredibly difficult, and we can't do it by ourselves. We realized we need to be really small and specific." Twitter unveiled its new policy ahead of a social media summit at the White House on Thursday that is likely to thrust it and other Silicon Valley companies under the spotlight for what they will and won't allow. For the event, Mr. Trump has invited conservative activists who have thrived on social media, such as Charlie Kirk, president of Turning Point USA, which advocates limited government and other issues. Many of the attendees have accused social media companies of anti conservative bias. Twitter declined to comment on the meeting. In the past, Twitter has focused its removal policies on posts that may directly harm an individual, such as threats of violence or messages that contain personal information or nonconsensual nudity. Under the new rules, the company is adding a sentence that says users "may not dehumanize groups based on their religion, as these remarks can lead to offline harm." Twitter said that included any tweets that might compare people in religious groups to animals, insects, bacteria and other categories. "Dehumanization is a great start, but if dehumanization starts and stops at religious categories alone, that does not encapsulate all the ways people have been dehumanized," he said. Twitter's work around a dehumanization policy began in August after the company faced a firestorm for not immediately barring Alex Jones, the right wing conspiracy theorist, when Apple, Facebook and others did. Twitter eventually did bar Mr. Jones, and its chief executive, Jack Dorsey, said at the time that the incident had forced the company to consider "that safety should come first." "That's a conversation we need to have," he added. Mr. Dorsey delegated the task of figuring out what makes up dehumanizing speech on Twitter to the company's legal, policy and safety teams, which are led by Vijaya Gadde. Mr. Dorsey took a hands off approach because he wanted to empower Ms. Gadde to make the decisions, a Twitter spokeswoman said. The discussions began with the meeting at Twitter's headquarters, which included the sample tweet featuring Mr. Trump's unflattering description of nations such as Haiti. At the end of that meeting, executives agreed to draft a policy about dehumanizing speech and open it to the public for comments. In September, Twitter published the draft policy of what dehumanizing speech would be forbidden. It included posts likening people to animals or suggesting that certain groups serve a single, mechanistic purpose. "I like to think of this as us trying to be experimental, the way that our colleagues in product and engineering are very experimental and they're trying new things," Ms. Gadde said in an interview at the time. The response from users was swift and critical. Twitter received more than 8,000 pieces of feedback from people in more than 30 countries. Many said the draft made no sense, pointing out cases in which the policy would lead to takedowns of posts that lacked any negative intent. In one example, fans of Lady Gaga, who call themselves "Little Monsters" as a term of endearment, worried that they would no longer be able to use the phrase. Some gamers complained that they would be unable to discuss killing a character in a video game. Others said the draft policy didn't go far enough in addressing hate speech and sexist comments. In October and November, Twitter employees began revising the policy with the public input. "We knew the policy was too broad," Mr. Peterson said. The solution, he and others decided, was to narrow it down to groups that are protected under civil rights law, such as women, minorities and L.G.B.T.Q. people. Religious groups seemed particularly easy to identify in tweets, and there were clear cases of dehumanization on social media that led to harm in the real world, Twitter employees said. Those include the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, which was preceded by hate campaigns on social networks like Facebook. Early this year, Twitter further limited the scope of the policy by carving out an exception. The company prepared a feature to preserve tweets from world leaders, like Mr. Trump, even if they engaged in dehumanizing speech. Twitter reasoned that such posts were in the public interest. So if any world leaders tweeted something insulting and unacceptable, their posts would be kept online but hidden behind a warning label. Twitter then trained its moderators to spot dehumanizing content, using a list of 42 religious groups as a guide and the tweet of Mr. Trump's uncomplimentary phrase about certain countries as an example of what to allow. It assigned 10 engineering teams to design the warning label and to make sure that any offending tweets would not appear in search or other Twitter products. It announced the exception for world leaders last month. On Tuesday, Twitter also said it would require the deletion of old tweets that dehumanize religious groups but would not suspend accounts that had a history of such tweets, because the rule did not exist when they were posted. New offending tweets, however, will count toward a suspension. "We constantly keep changing our rules, and we try to improve across the product," said David Gasca, Twitter's head of product health. "We're never fully done."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
There Are No Games. But Basketball Coaches Are Still Busy. None Oklahoma City Thunder Coach Billy Donovan invited about 1,000 people into his home recently while still practicing social distancing in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Through videoconferencing, Donovan, 54, gave instruction for more than 80 minutes on the Coaches Clinic site, discussing his offensive philosophy and answering questions submitted to a moderator all from the comfort of his home in Crescent Beach, Fla. Coaches routinely give such clinics, with U.S.A. Basketball, for example, holding an annual academy. But with the N.C.A.A. men's and women's tournaments canceled, the N.B.A. suspended and the W.N.B.A. postponed and basketball coaches finding themselves with more spare time they're turning to virtual clinics and instruction. "Now that everybody's home, it's a great way to kind of connect," said Donovan, whose Thunder were fifth in the Western Conference when the N.B.A. suspended play. "So I think everybody's trying to get creative and look at different ways to utilize their time." The sessions on Coaches Clinic began last month as an idea on Twitter, evolving into an online replacement for the Professional Development Series run by the National Association of Basketball Coaches each year at the men's Final Four. The day the N.C.A.A. canceled the men's and women's basketball tournaments, Lason Perkins, the head boys' basketball coach at Cary Academy in North Carolina, tweeted, "OK, who is up for having some online basketball discussions/clinics via Whereby or Google Hangouts over the next few weeks? Topics?" Perkins then contacted Wade Floyd, who had already established a site devoted to providing online courses in several sports. Next, Floyd reached out to Leigh Klein, the chief executive of the Five Star Basketball Camp in New York, because of his vast contacts in the coaching world and his experience in moderating discussions. By March 16, Floyd had built out the Coaches Clinic site, with Klein moderating the clinics. "A community was formed to allow the growth to continue despite the ball stopping bouncing," Klein said in a telephone interview. "Growth has happened in this medium with coaches sitting in front of the computer to learn about the game. And a variety of coaches have contributed to that." The site held 258 basketball clinics from March 16 to April 4, Floyd said, for an average of about 13 per day. He provided data showing the site had more than 24,000 registered attendees, including coaches from Australia, Brazil, Israel, Spain and the Philippines. Speakers have included South Carolina's Frank Martin, Penn State's Pat Chambers, the W.N.B.A. champion coach Lin Dunn and the trainer Chris Johnson, who has worked with LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Jimmy Butler. Lin Dunn receiving a high five from President Barack Obama when her Indiana Fever team visited the White House after winning the 2013 W.N.B.A. title. Dunn has appeared as an instructor on the new Coaches Clinic site. For the attendees, the clinics provide instruction on all aspects of basketball, including offensive and defensive techniques, running a program and handling time management. Kellen Fernetti, the women's basketball coach at Lamar Community College in Colorado, has already participated in about 10 sessions. "I have seen tons and taken notes," Fernetti wrote in an email. "There is no doubt this has made me better during this difficult time. Every aspect of basketball has been covered, and what I like is every level of basketball has had coaches be a part of it." The coaches see the clinics as a way to give back during this downtime. "Part of coaching, normally, is you value teams," said Tim O'Toole, an associate head coach at Pittsburgh, who spent two seasons at Duke under Coach Mike Krzyzewski. "And one of the things that Coach K used to talk about all the time was great teams share energy. You share things. And here we are in this age of social distancing, which is so opposite of what we're used to doing." Both Coaches Clinic and SportsEdTV, a similar site, offer their services for free. SportsEdTV, which has featured talks from athletes like the former N.B.A. player Tim Hardaway, has seen a bump in traffic of about 18 to 20 percent since early March. By charging for lifetime access to all of the recordings, Coaches Clinics has also raised almost 30,000 for charities like Coaches vs. Cancer, the Jimmy V Foundation and Soldiers to Sidelines, Floyd said. Klein has devoted up to 10 hours a day moderating the talks but isn't earning income from it. That didn't stop him from lining up future moderating gigs with other sites. "My wife looks at me like I'm crazy," he said. "It's the type of thing you do it because I believe in why we're doing it. And then we'll see if from that, hey, maybe we can keep doing virtual free clinics."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Women working in fields in northeastern Syria in 2010. A new report suggests extreme drought in Syria was most likely a factor in the violent uprising that began there in 2011. Drawing one of the strongest links yet between global warming and human conflict, researchers said Monday that an extreme drought in Syria between 2006 and 2009 was most likely due to climate change, and that the drought was a factor in the violent uprising that began there in 2011. The drought was the worst in the country in modern times, and in a study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists laid the blame for it on a century long trend toward warmer and drier conditions in the Eastern Mediterranean, rather than on natural climate variability. The researchers said this trend matched computer simulations of how the region responds to increases in greenhouse gas emissions, and appeared to be due to two factors: a weakening of winds that bring moisture laden air from the Mediterranean and hotter temperatures that cause more evaporation. Colin P. Kelley, the lead author of the study, said he and his colleagues found that while Syria and the rest of the region known as the Fertile Crescent were normally subject to periodic dry periods, "a drought this severe was two to three times more likely" because of the increasing aridity in the region. Martin P. Hoerling, a meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration whose earlier work showed a link between climate change and aridity in the Eastern Mediterranean, said the researchers' study was "quite compelling." "The paper makes a strong case for the first link in their causal chain," Dr. Hoerling said in an email, "namely the human interference with the climate so as to increase drought likelihood in Syria." Some social scientists, policy makers and others have previously suggested that the drought played a role in the Syrian unrest, and the researchers addressed this as well, saying the drought "had a catalytic effect." They cited studies that showed that the extreme dryness, combined with other factors, including misguided agricultural and water use policies of the Syrian government, caused crop failures that led to the migration of as many as 1.5 million people from rural to urban areas. This in turn added to social stresses that eventually resulted in the uprising against President Bashar al Assad in March 2011. What began as civil war has since escalated into a multifaceted conflict, with at least 200,000 deaths. The United Nations estimates that half of the country's 22 million people have been affected, with more than six million having been internally displaced. The researchers said that there were many factors that contributed to the chaos, including the influx of 1.5 million refugees from Iraq, and that it was impossible to quantify the effect of any one event like a drought. Francesco Femia, founder and director of the Center for Climate and Security, a research group in Washington that has long argued that the Syrian drought had a climate change component, said the new study "builds on previous work looking at the impact of drought on agricultural and pastoral livelihoods." "There's no question that the drought had a role to play in the mass displacement of people," he said. The link between climate change and conflict has been debated for years. A working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change wrote in 2014 that there was "justifiable common concern" that climate change increased the risk of armed conflict in certain circumstances, but said it was unclear how strong the effect was. The United States military has described climate change as a "threat multiplier" that may lead to greater instability in parts of the world. Earlier studies trying to show a link between climate change and conflict have been rebutted by some scientists, and it is not clear how far this new study will go toward settling the issue. Thomas Bernauer, a professor of political science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich who has been critical of some earlier studies, said he was skeptical about this one as well. "The evidence for the claim that this drought contributed to the outbreak of civil war in Syria is very speculative and not backed up by robust scientific evidence," he wrote in an email. Mark A. Cane, an author of the study and a scientist at Lamont Doherty, which is part of Columbia University, defended the work. "I think there's a really good case here," he said. "But I think we've tried to explain that the connection from an extraordinary climate event to conflict is complex and certainly involves other factors."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Over the years, the property at 142 North Sixth Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, has gone through many changes. It has been a popular flea market, a condominium development with a bamboo garden, and, most recently, luxury rental apartments. Now, the 44 unit building has changed hands once again. Steiner NYC closed late last month on a 38 million purchase of the building, which it intends to keep as a rental property. It is the developer's latest residential acquisition in the borough, and part of its larger strategy to reposition its portfolio into multifamily properties in Manhattan and Brooklyn and out of suburban office buildings. Recently, Steiner NYC has been on a buying spree. It acquired a vacant building at 815 Broadway in Bushwick that it will gut and renovate into a rental building with 40 to 60 units, and a 60 unit rental building at 204 Huntington Street in Carroll Gardens that it plans to renovate. It also plans to break ground next year on the Hub, a 720 unit rental high rise at 333 Schermerhorn Street in Downtown Brooklyn and is in the midst of closing on its first Manhattan site, land south of 23rd Street where it will build a 100 unit luxury rental building. "Residential properties are the future of this company," said Douglas Steiner, the company's chairman, perched on a chair in his sprawling office at Steiner Studios, the Hollywood style movie and television lot he opened in 2004. The Williamsburg property, known as Jardin, also includes two retail units and an underground parking garage. It had been marketed as condominiums and was about half sold when, about six months ago, the developer rescinded the purchases and converted the property into rentals. It leased the units in just three weeks, according to David Behin, president of investment sales and capital advisory at MNS, who represented Mr. Steiner and the seller, the Read Property Group. "In my world, if you rent something very quickly, typically it means it is undermarket," Mr. Behin said, adding that the units rented for roughly 53 a square foot, about 10 to 15 percent below their market value. "It is a great building in a perfect location, and Doug saw an opportunity to increase the value of the asset by buffing up the rents," he said. Founded in 1907, Steiner NYC was originally Sudler Construction. Mr. Steiner's father, David, 82, was Samuel Sudler's partner for more than 40 years. In 1996, shortly after Mr. Sudler's death, the Steiners took over the company and created the Steiner Equities Group; it later created Steiner NYC as its New York arm. In addition to development, the company also does property management, leasing and construction. Originally focused on industrial real estate, in recent years the company has become a large holder of commercial office parks and retail properties. Now, Douglas Steiner hopes to shift the focus again, toward residential real estate. "There is infinite demand for residential properties, it is just a question of price," Mr. Steiner said. "Over the years, many families in New York have built vast fortunes by investing in residential rental properties here." He added that office properties, on the other hand, "have a limited universe of tenants, and manufacturing is slowing and it is difficult to find large industrial sites." The company also hopes to continue investing in retail properties, which Mr. Steiner calls "a noncommodity business where, if you do it right, you can gain a monopoly." A Stanford graduate, Mr. Steiner, 51, has worked at his family's company off and on since high school. He splits his time between an East Village apartment and a suburban New Jersey home where he lives with his three children. He is perhaps best known for Steiner Studios, a 20 acre complex inside the Brooklyn Navy Yard that employs 1,300 people, where the likes of HBO's "Girls" and the film "Mr. Popper's Penguins" have been produced. Mr. Steiner, who enjoys driving his golf cart around the lot and peeking into the sets, is currently overseeing the studio's fifth expansion and hopes to enlarge the business over the next decade to 50 acres and as many as 6,000 employees. He is hoping to use the name recognition he has earned with Steiner Studios to sell apartments. "Just as Donald Trump gets a premium for his name, we also want to brand ourselves," he said. The company's only condominium project, for example, at 58 and 80 Metropolitan in Brooklyn, features the Steiner name and an article on the developer in its marketing materials. "In so many condominium developments, you never know who is behind the project, but we want people to know what Steiner stands for," he said. Mr. Steiner has been using proceeds from the 100 million sale in April of a 265 acre commercial building complex in Middletown, N.J., to finance the bulk of these recent purchases. "We used to be rigid about not selling any of our properties, but we have become more pragmatic," Mr. Steiner said. In many cases, Steiner NYC has been using so called 1031 exchanges for the recent deals. In a 1031 exchange, a seller can defer paying capital gains taxes on a sale by plowing the money directly into a new real estate purchase. It is possible to continue investing proceeds from sales into new acquisitions, and in that way defer the taxes indefinitely. While 1031 exchanges can provide major tax savings, "there are several hurdles to completing these transactions, such as a tight timeline," said Wayne B. Heicklen, a partner at the law firm Pryor Cashman, who does not represent Mr. Steiner. To complete a 1031 exchange, a seller must identify new properties within 45 days of the sale and close on the acquisitions in 180 days. "It was quite a puzzle. I didn't sleep for months," Mr. Steiner said of trying to complete the deals in time. The first transaction the firm completed using a 1031 exchange was the acquisition of the land on which it is building the Hub, the rental project, near the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In this case, Steiner NYC needed to buy the Downtown Brooklyn site, where there are existing buildings and a parking lot, before the sale of the New Jersey complex closed, said Michael Utevsky, Mr. Steiner's lawyer on the deals. So a third party intermediary bought the site, and when the sale closed, Steiner NYC took over ownership, in what is known as a 1031 reverse exchange. The purchases at 204 Huntington Street and 142 North Sixth Street also involved 1031 exchanges. The use of a 1031 exchange to acquire the Hub is unusual, said lawyers who structure these deals, because it is a development site. Usually, sellers use proceeds from a sale to invest in something safe, like a chain of drugstores or a rental property that produces income, Mr. Heicklen said. But in this case, Mr. Utevsky said, "Doug is a developer and he is eager to add value to his investments." Proceeds from the sale of the New Jersey property have now been used up, but Mr. Steiner said he continued to look for new residential deals. As for selling another commercial property as part of the overall strategy to reposition the portfolio, the company does not currently have any properties for sale, but Mr. Steiner said, "We will consider sales from the existing portfolio if the right opportunity comes along."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
In recent weeks, Britney Spears has burst back into the spotlight, as her private turmoil has led to several court hearings, spawned viral hashtags and fueled frantic fan speculation about her well being. The renewed preoccupation follows her abrupt announcement that her planned "Britney: Domination" performance residency in Las Vegas was being put on hold indefinitely, new concerns about her mental health and questions about the role her ill father, and conservator, can continue to play in managing her financial and personal life. At the age of 16, with the release of the song and subsequent album "... Baby One More Time," Spears became an international sensation and would go on to become one of the best selling artists of all time. But her career shifted dramatically amid reports of drug and alcohol abuse and a rash of erratic behavior in 2007 and 2008. Those events led to multiple psychiatric evaluations and, eventually, a court ordered conservatorship, which is designed for people who are unable to take care of themselves. (Spears's father, Jamie Spears, acts as his daughter's conservator, meaning that he is in charge of her finances, as well as her physical and mental health.) Now it appears that Spears, after 11 years, has asked the judge to consider ending the conservatorship. Why now? How do her mother and father feel about the request? Much of this celebrity saga is happening behind closed doors, and Spears's family, managers, lawyers and publicists have declined to discuss her status. But here is what we know. What is the FreeBritney campaign? This phrase originated in 2009, when a Spears fan site, BreatheHeavy.com, started a campaign to "Free Britney" from the constraints of her new conservatorship setup. The website's owner, Jordan Miller, said at one point that he received an irate call from Jamie Spears, who threatened to have the website taken down. Fast forward 10 years: In that time, Britney Spears has released three major label albums, appeared frequently on television (including a stint as a judge on the singing competition "The X Factor") and performed live several times a week as a star attraction in Las Vegas. Through all that, Spears lived under the constraints of a complex legal arrangement in which her father and a lawyer acted as her guardians. In April, the call to "Free Britney" was revived after a fan podcast dedicated to playfully analyzing Spears's Instagram, called "Britney's Gram," released audio of a voice mail message from someone described as an anonymous paralegal who claimed to have been involved in the conservatorship. The voice mail raised concerns about Spears's well being and personal autonomy. The hosts of the podcast speculated about why Spears's Instagram, usually a free spirited diary of her life with her two sons, had been mysteriously inactive for months. The cryptic account spurred some Spears fans to object to the continued restrictions on the pop star's life, given what, until recently, appeared to be a period of stability and success following earlier meltdowns. Why is this issue surfacing now? In October, Spears's team announced that she would start a new Las Vegas residency called "Britney: Domination" in Las Vegas, moving from Planet Hollywood to the new Park MGM's Park Theater. But in January, Spears, 37, said that the residency would be put on hold and she would begin an "indefinite work hiatus," citing the declining health of her father, who had recently suffered a ruptured colon. Last month, TMZ reported that Spears had checked into a mental health facility, leading to an uptick in fan speculation about the reason for her stalled residency. That fervent speculation only intensified after the release of the "Britney's Gram" episode. Spears responded to the online speculation in an April 23 Instagram post. "I am trying to take a moment for myself, but everything that's happening is just making it harder for me," the post said. "Don't believe everything you read and hear." Spears's mother recently involved herself in the case, requesting that a lawyer appear on her behalf at a status hearing on May 10, according to court documents. CNN, citing two anonymous sources close to the singer, reported that at the hearing Spears asked the judge to consider ending the conservatorship. As the hearing proceeded, fans representing the FreeBritney campaign marched outside the courtroom with protest signs that seconded that request. What exactly is a conservatorship? A court approved conservatorship, known in other states as a guardianship, is typically used to protect the elderly, the mentally disabled or the extremely ill. This arrangement means that Spears cannot make personal or financial decisions without the oversight of her father. The details of Spears's conservatorship have not been made public, nor has her mental condition or diagnosis. But based on the arrangement, Spears's financial and personal lives, including her health, have long been overseen by two people appointed as her conservators her father, and, until recently, a lawyer, Andrew M. Wallet. They are required to submit accountings of her finances to the court, down to the minor expenses she makes at places like Mrs. Fields, Sonic and Six Flags Magic Mountain (she has two young sons, remember). The idea is to safeguard her fortune that she has earned but does not control. The lawyer, Wallet, resigned as a co conservator last year and no one has been appointed to replace him. That leaves Jamie Spears, whose health had been a recent concern, as the sole conservator. In addition, the court appointed another lawyer, Samuel D. Ingham III, who reviews the actions of the conservatorship as an independent advocate for Spears to ensure there is no exploitation of her money or other abuses of power. What happens next? At the May 10 court hearing, Judge Brenda Penny ordered an expert evaluation of the case, likely in response to Spears's reported request that it end. Some have speculated that the evaluation Judge Penny ordered will include a psychological assessment of Spears, but court documents do not specify the nature of the evaluation.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
At least four big events are planned in Las Vegas in July. But these are no bubbles like in the pros there are no mandated coronavirus tests or restrictions on where players may stay. During a normal summer, Chet Holmgren would be getting ready to play in front of a who's who of college basketball coaches during the month of July. North Carolina, Memphis, Georgetown, Michigan, Gonzaga, Ohio State and Minnesota are the universities in contention to land the 7 foot Holmgren, ESPN's No. 1 player in the Class of 2021 out of Minnehaha Academy in Minnesota. But this isn't any normal summer given the coronavirus pandemic. If Holmgren and his Grassroots Sizzle team travel to youth hoops events in Las Vegas and elsewhere next month, they won't compete in front of college coaches or large groups of fans. "If my team decides to play it shouldn't be weird not having coaches around because coaches are only around a small percentage of A.A.U. weekends anyway, but with this pandemic, live streams seem to be the best option for coaches to tune in and I wouldn't expect any other method," Holmgren said. Brian Sandifer, the director of Grassroots Sizzle, said his team was considering playing events in Iowa and Las Vegas. The Sizzle, which also include Hercy Miller, a son of the rapper Master P, are slated to play in the Las Vegas Big Time Tournament, scheduled from July 23 to 26. Three other major showcases are also slated for Las Vegas in July, including the Main Event, scheduled from July 8 to 12. Nevada has had more than 17,000 confirmed coronavirus cases, with just over 500 reported deaths, mostly in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas. Gary Charles, who runs the Big Time event, said he was surprised to see the demand among teams for the Las Vegas events. Normally, Charles said, he would take 1,000 teams for his event, but this year he will cap the number at 300. So far, more than 100 have committed, Charles said. Of those, 25 have already paid an entry fee of 475 or 675, depending on the age bracket. "I'm going to have to stop this at some point," Charles said in a phone interview. "Because of social distancing and the fact that I'm going to have to change game times to allow us to clean out the gyms after every game, we're not going take as many teams as we normally do. So there's going to be some disappointment." Often, gyms for high profile summer A.A.U. events can be packed with fans and celebrities interested in seeing the next big college or N.B.A. stars before they get famous. When Zion Williamson's team played LaMelo Ball's squad in Las Vegas in 2017, the gym was so packed police officers had to barricade the doors and push back against a standing room only crowd. N.B.A. players Damian Lillard and Andrew Wiggins sat courtside. Charles said he hopes to know by July 10 whether any fans will be allowed to attend the games. Referees, players and other officials will have their temperatures checked before entering the gym. And to participate, players will have to sign waivers saying they will not hold Charles or the tournament responsible if they get the virus, a practice that has received pushback in college sports. "Ten fans per team might be able to get in, which is obviously family members," Charles said. "But it's not confirmed yet. The governor has to make that decision." There will be no bubble, like the N.B.A. is planning for its restart near Orlando, Fla. Teams will stay at a variety of hotels and other locations around Las Vegas, and figure to be in contact with employees at local restaurants and stores, Charles said. David Holmgren, Chet's father, said he believed the Las Vegas events would be shut down before being allowed to begin. "I would consider not sending him, absolutely," David Holmgren said in a phone interview. "When he asks, I say there's no point in talking about it now until it gets to be the time because I think it's all going to be shut down anyhow." At least one East Coast team, the Boston Spartans, has already dropped out because of the prospect of traveling during the pandemic. "The numbers have spiked in Nevada, it's not worth it," said Joe Chatman, the director of the Spartans. Nick Tsikitas, the director of the Long Island based Heat Elite A.A.U. program, said he was not only considering flying his players to Las Vegas, but also planned to take his team to events in Georgia and Boston before then. He said he would have players take coronavirus tests, wear masks and sign an additional waiver saying that Heat Elite was not responsible if anyone gets sick. "We actually bring them to the facility in New York to get them tested," said Tsikitas, who personally funds the 128 player Heat Elite program. "We're going to take every precaution necessary." Tsikitas said his overriding motivation is to help his players get seen by college coaches, even if only possible on live streams.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
The drugmaker Moderna announced on Monday that its coronavirus vaccine was 94.5 percent effective, joining Pfizer as a front runner in the global race to contain a raging pandemic that has killed 1.2 million people worldwide. Both companies plan to apply within weeks to the Food and Drug Administration for emergency authorization to begin vaccinating the public. Officials said the two companies could produce enough vaccine for a little more than 20 million people in the United States by sometime in December, with the first doses going to people with the highest risk, like health care workers, emergency medical workers and frail residents of nursing homes. But a vaccine that would be widely available to the public is still months away, while the need for one is becoming increasingly urgent. The pandemic has infected more than 53 million people around the world so far. U.S. cases are soaring, setting records every day. There have been more than 11 million cases and 246,000 deaths. Covid 19 is killing more than 1,100 Americans a day, and the last million cases occurred in just six days. Some states and cities are reinstating lockdowns, restricting gatherings, issuing mask mandates, setting curfews for bars and restaurants, and closing schools once again. Hospitals in some areas are overwhelmed, scrambling to find enough beds for the severely ill. Major grocery chains like Kroger and Wegmans have begun reimposing limits on purchases of household supplies like paper towels and tissues. Despite those sobering measures, the stock market rallied on Monday, fueled by Moderna's news. But businesses and others braced for what could be a bleak holiday season with Covid's grip on the nation's citizens and its economy. Public health officials greeted Moderna's news with a modicum of excitement, especially when viewed alongside the data released last week by Pfizer, which, in collaboration with BioNTech, reported that its vaccine was more than 90 percent effective. The two companies were the first to announce interim data from large studies. Ten other vaccine makers are also conducting big Phase 3 trials, including efforts in Australia, Britain, China, India and Russia. More than 50 other candidates are in earlier stages of testing. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines far exceeded the Food and Drug Administration's requirement that coronavirus vaccines be at least 50 percent effective to receive approval. Moderna also reported on Monday that its vaccine had a longer shelf life under refrigeration and at room temperature than previously reported, which should make it easier to store and use. Based in Cambridge, Mass., the company developed its vaccine in collaboration with researchers from the Vaccine Research Center, part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the institute, said in an interview: "I had been saying I would be satisfied with a 75 percent effective vaccine. Aspirationally, you would like to see 90, 95 percent, but I wasn't expecting it. I thought we'd be good, but 94.5 percent is very impressive." Researchers test vaccines by inoculating some study participants and giving others placebos, and then watching the two groups to see how many people get sick. In Moderna's study, 95 people contracted the coronavirus: five who were vaccinated, and 90 who received placebo shots of saltwater. Statistically, the difference between the two groups was highly significant. And of the 95 cases, 11 were severe all in the placebo group. The 95 cases included 15 people 65 or older and 20 people who were Hispanic, Black, Asian or multiracial. The company said the vaccine appeared equally safe and effective in all the subgroups. The results were analyzed by an independent data safety monitoring board, appointed by the National Institutes of Health. At a news briefing on Monday, Dr. Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, emphasized that the hopeful news did not mean people could let down their guard. On the contrary, they implored the public to "double down" on mask wearing, social distancing, hand washing and avoiding crowds, and to stay that course until vaccines become available. That message was echoed by the head of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who said in a video, "A vaccine on its own will not end the pandemic." Stephane Bancel, the chief executive of Moderna, said in a statement that the results had provided "the first clinical validation that our vaccine can prevent Covid 19 disease, including severe disease." But the companies announced the findings in news releases, not in peer reviewed scientific journals, and did not disclose the detailed data that would allow outside experts to evaluate their claims. Therefore, the results cannot be considered conclusive. The figures on effectiveness may change as the studies continue. The companies' products open the door to an entirely new way of creating vaccines and creating them fast. Both use a synthetic version of coronavirus genetic material, called messenger RNA or mRNA, to program a person's cells to churn out many copies of a fragment of the virus. That fragment sets off alarms in the immune system and stimulates it to attack, should the real virus try to invade. Although a number of vaccines using this technology are in development for other infections and cancers, none have yet been approved or marketed. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. "The fact that two different vaccines made by two different companies with two different kinds of structures, in a new messenger RNA concept, both worked so effectively confirms the concept once and for all that this is a viable strategy not only for Covid but for future infectious disease threats," said Dr. Barry R. Bloom, a professor of public health at Harvard. Natalie E. Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida, said an important finding was that the vaccine appeared to prevent severe forms of the disease. Pfizer did not release information about disease severity when reporting its results. Researchers say the positive results from Pfizer and Moderna bode well for other vaccines, because all of the candidates being tested aim at the same target the so called spike protein on the coronavirus that it uses to invade human cells. Dr. Bloom said that the success of the two vaccines meant that measures of immunity used in earlier phases of the studies participants' antibody levels were reliable, and that other companies could use those measures as proof of effectiveness to shorten the testing and approval process for their vaccines. It will be important to determine whether the vaccines work equally well in older and younger people, experts say. Researchers also want to know if the vaccines prevent people from spreading the virus an ideal result that could help quash the pandemic. Another big unknown is how long the immunity provided by the vaccines will last. An additional concern is that both vaccines must be stored and transported at low temperatures minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit for Moderna, and minus 94 Fahrenheit for Pfizer which could complicate their distribution, particularly to low income areas in hot climates. Although both vaccines are made of mRNA, their temperature requirements differ because they use different, proprietary formulations of fat to encase and protect the mRNA, Ray Jordan, a Moderna spokesman, said. Other coronavirus vaccines being developed will need only refrigeration. If handled improperly, vaccines can become inactive. But on Monday, Moderna said researchers had found that its vaccine had a longer shelf life in the refrigerator than previously thought: 30 days, not seven. And it will last 12 hours at room temperature, the company said. Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University, said the relative ease of handling the Moderna vaccine would give it a big advantage. "This vaccine presents the opportunity of using doctors' offices, clinics and pharmacies as vaccination sites," he said, adding that he would not be surprised, should both vaccines become available, if vaccination sites requested Moderna's. Moderna's study did not include children. Dr. Tal Zaks, the company's chief medical officer, said the company planned to test it in them in the coming months, starting with adolescents. Moderna said it would have 20 million doses ready by the end of 2020; Pfizer said it would have about 50 million by then half for Americans. Both vaccines require two shots, so 20 million doses would be enough for 10 million people. On Friday, Moncef Slaoui, the chief scientist for Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration's program to accelerate development of vaccines and treatments for Covid 19, said that if any early vaccine candidates received permission for emergency use, immunization could begin sometime in December. The U.S. government will buy the vaccines and give them to the public for free. But both companies expect to profit, and not to provide their products at cost. Moderna said it would charge other governments from 32 to 37 per dose. The charge to the United States, which has already committed about 2.5 billion to help develop Moderna's vaccine and buy doses, comes out to about 24.80 a shot, according to Mr. Jordan, the company spokesman. Pfizer did not take any money from the U.S. government to develop or test its vaccine. But Operation Warp Speed has promised Pfizer 1.95 billion to provide 100 million doses, which comes out to 19.50 per dose. Both of the companies' vaccine candidates began large human trials on the same date, July 27. Moderna had planned a first interim analysis of its trial data when the number of Covid 19 cases among participants reached 53. But the accelerating surge in coronavirus cases drove the number to 95, and it is likely to speed completion of the study, which was designed to stop after 151 cases. The company announced on Oct. 22 that it had completed enrollment of its 30,000 person study, and that 25,650 participants had already received two shots. The company had slowed enrollment in September to ensure diversity among participants, and ultimately included 37 percent from communities of color, and 42 percent from populations considered at high risk because they were over 65 or had conditions like diabetes, obesity or heart disease. As in Pfizer's study, half of the participants were given the experimental vaccine and half a placebo shot of saltwater, with neither the patients nor their doctors knowing which one they had received. Moderna's vaccine requires four weeks between shots, and Pfizer's needs three weeks. Dr. Zaks said Moderna's study results were so strong that the company felt an ethical obligation to offer the vaccine to the placebo group as soon as possible, if the F.D.A. allows it. Moderna said it could produce 500 million to one billion doses in 2021. The company is working with the Swiss company Lonza and Laboratorios Farmaceuticos Rovi of Spain to make doses of the vaccine outside the United States. Dr. Bloom, the Harvard professor, noted that Moderna had never marketed a vaccine before, and he questioned whether the company had the capacity to manufacture hundreds of millions of doses. Moderna has received a commitment of 955 million from the U.S. government's Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority for research and development of its vaccine, and the United States has committed up to 1.525 billion to buy 100 million doses. Moderna has already taken the early steps needed to apply to government agencies in Britain, Canada and Europe to market its vaccine, and the company has made deals to sell 50 million doses to Japan and unspecified amounts to Qatar and Israel.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
NEW DELHI For decades, India embraced many of the ideals that are the hallmarks of a liberal democracy. But since the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party in 2014, we have experienced a breathtaking erosion in the rule of law and civil and political rights and the unleashing of a wave of intolerance against religious minorities. Sadly, much of the Indian media has been complicit in the B.J.P.'s assault on democratic and secular values, either by actively promoting the narrative of Mr. Modi and his party, or by censoring itself to avoid being punished. There are still journalists who maintain their integrity and work to uphold the democratic ideals of the Indian Constitution. For these independent journalists, it has become something of a rite of passage to have the police come after them for speaking out against the ruling establishment. As a founding editor of The Wire, an independent online news portal, I have had my own brushes with the law, chiefly in the form of defamation complaints. At one point, we faced 14 defamation cases, all of them frivolous, seeking damages totaling 1.3 billion. The cases were filed by people who are either a part of the ruling establishment or considered close to it. Seven cases have since been withdrawn. A few weeks back, the harassment took a darker turn. On April 1, I was accused by the police in Ayodhya, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, of several serious crimes: using a computer to impersonate someone and transmit obscene material; disobeying the instructions of a public official; spreading panic about an impending disaster; and spreading rumors with intent to cause a riot. Some of these crimes carry a three year prison sentence. The police complaints, though vaguely worded, made it evident that the government was angered by an article in The Wire on March 31 about coronavirus infections at the Delhi headquarters of a Muslim religious organization, the Tablighi Jamaat. The article noted, by way of background, that religious leaders and groups in India had been slow to wake up to the dangers of the coronavirus. The chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath, who is a priest and a prominent Modi ally, had taken part in a Hindu religious gathering in Ayodhya along with dozens of people on March 25 the first day of the national lockdown to stem the spread of the virus. Mr. Adityanath had tweeted video of himself surrounded by priests, officials and journalists. A handful of those present wore masks, but the gathering was a blatant violation of the government's advisory on social distancing. The article misattributed a quote to Mr. Adityanath. The words had been uttered by another priest from Ayodhya. We published a clear and swift correction. We mentioned Mr. Adityanath in our report because the Tablighi Jamaat infections were being exploited by the Islamophobic establishment and its spear carriers to generate hostility against Muslims. We were reminding our readers that no religion has a monopoly on ignorant or complacent followers. That, I believe, is the real crime the Hindu fundamentalists who rule India and Uttar Pradesh think we have committed. The establishment is much more comfortable with the propaganda campaign against Muslims immediately started by a section of the Indian media, vilifying members of the Tablighi Jamaat, targeting mosques and seminaries. This quickly morphed into a vicious social media campaign with fake videos carrying hashtags like CoronaJihad. Predictably, the online hate spilled over to the real world. There are reports from Uttar Pradesh and other parts of India of vigilantes attacking Muslims and enforcing a boycott of Muslim vendors. Two babies have died after hospitals allegedly refused to treat their Muslim mothers. A cancer hospital announced that it would not admit Muslim patients unless they provided proof of having tested negative for the coronavirus. None of this has stirred the Indian government or the state authorities to firmly enforce the rule of law. Instead, amid the lockdown, policemen were dispatched from Ayodhya to my home in New Delhi, 435 miles away, to summon me to answer the charges. The date they chose for my appearance happened to fall within the lockdown, so they knew I would never be able to make it across state lines. They also knew I would be unable to approach the courts because of the lockdown, making me potentially liable to arrest for not responding. Fortunately, the civil society outcry over this intimidation forced the police to backtrack. Thirty six hours before the deadline, I was informed that I could submit a statement through email, which I have done. The ball is now in the Uttar Pradesh government's court. But given the B.J.P.'s general intolerance of criticism, I do not expect officials there to back off just because of the public health emergency. Across India, the pandemic and lockdown have provided an occasion for the free play of authoritarian impulses. Despite the Supreme Court of India urging the authorities to empty the prisons because of the coronavirus, the human rights activist Gautam Navlakha and Anand Teltumbde, a management professor and leading intellectual, were taken into custody last week under a draconian antiterrorism law on the flimsiest of evidence. Sadly, neither in their case nor indeed in a raft of rights related cases has the Supreme Court of India chosen to intervene. The lockdown, which Mr. Modi announced on March 24, with four hours' notice, rendered hundreds of thousands of migrant workers without work, food and shelter, forcing them to set out on crushing journeys to their villages on foot. A public interest case was filed in the Supreme Court of India seeking support for the distressed workers. The court meekly accepted the Indian government's unsubstantiated claim that the exodus of migrant workers was caused by "fake news" by the media and not by the lack of preparation or warning by the government. The police are targeting journalists and even citizens using social media for reports and comments that show the government in poor light. Last Wednesday, the police in the state of Gujarat, charged a respected lawyer with hate speech for a sarcastic tweet. Most of these cases fizzle out, but India's police know that the process is the punishment. A national lockdown is precisely the time when journalists in a democracy need to be free to write and report without worrying about a midnight knock. Only by doing our jobs can we ensure not only that ordinary citizens come out of the pandemic alive, but that their democracy does so, too. Siddharth Varadarajan is a founding editor of The Wire and a former editor of The Hindu newspaper. 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
With her director of photography, Andrew Commis, Murphy creates a visually cohesive world filled with lambent images that almost but not quite feel as if they had been caught on the fly. She's attentive to color, light and texture, as is evident from the shots of a child waiting alone, a bee struggling in a pool. These pinpricks of beauty are appealing but because Murphy is trying hard to avoid obviousness they soon feel like swirling dust motes. The movie has texture but no depth, tears but no snot. Who are these people, I kept wondering. What's ailing Milla? Does Moses ever shower? Scanlen can be appealingly vibrant and spiky, as she showed with her performance as a feral baby doll in the HBO series "Sharp Objects." (She also played Beth in the recent "Little Women.") But in "Babyteeth," Murphy has solicited a largely recessive turn from the actress, whose masklike face often remains locked in neutral. Time and again, you look for some feeling to break through and help anchor Murphy's expressionism, with its narrative ellipses and colored lights. Instead, as the attractive first hour gives way to the repetitive second, it just drifts and drifts and, alas, so does your attention. Babyteeth Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. Rent or buy on iTunes, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Two news organizations have acknowledged that they knew about the negotiations between the United States and Iran over a prisoner exchange that included a Washington Post reporter before the arrangement was announced. But they chose not to publish information about the talks. The Huffington Post wrote on Saturday that it did not run an article about the prisoner swap negotiations though it had learned about the talks in the fall from a State Department official who spoke on the record. The Huffington Post also wrote that American government officials had said earlier that reporters from The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal were withholding details about the talks as well. The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post declined to comment on Saturday. CNN said in a statement that it had been "aware of the ongoing negotiations," adding that it "did not report on this information in order to avoid any possibility of interfering in the negotiations." The Huffington Post published its article about its decision soon after Iran's announcement that it had released four Iranian Americans, including Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post reporter, as part of a prisoner swap arrangement with the United States.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
But the country club aura and high real estate prices did nothing to dampen Ms. Sher's enthusiasm. An aesthetician who is the single mother of two daughters, she fled political unrest in Armenia during the early 1990s, before she had time to complete her university studies, eventually settling in Bronxville because, she said, "I wanted to live where ambitious people who are driven and smart can show my children what it means to work hard and get ahead." Ms. Sher pays 3,250 a month for a three bedroom two bath apartment, which elsewhere in the county would rent for substantially less. The average for that size apartment in Westchester as of 2011 was 1,928, according to Westchester Residential Opportunities, a nonprofit agency in White Plains. Her daughter Allison, 19, graduated from Bronxville High School and attends Hunter College; Ariana, 16, is in 10th grade. Residents like Ms. Sher represent a social and demographic shift in the village, said Ed O'Toole, a Manhattan lawyer who grew up in Bronxville and moved back to raise his family. Remembering the Bronxville of his boyhood years, Mr. O'Toole said: "I think it is more diverse, even if it still has an overall appearance of affluent homogeneity. I think there are more single parent families, more small families and more families that reflect a multiplicity of ethnic and religious backgrounds."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
I posted a picture in March of the New York Times headquarters looking serene before a snowstorm to my Instagram account. The photo attracted 11 comments, all from strangers. "Very nice!" a monthly cocktail delivery company in San Francisco wrote. A cosmetic tattoo artist in Vancouver, British Columbia, posted three fire symbol emojis, and a vintage furniture seller in San Jose, Calif., left an emoji of a heart with a bow around it. I like to leave my apartment for cocktails, I don't have any tattoos and I've never been to San Jose. So, what was up? The answer, as with so many things online, came down to marketing. Many people with public accounts on Instagram may not realize that when random users follow them or like or comment on their posts, it is often the work of a cottage industry of websites that, for as little as 10 a month, send their clients' accounts on automated liking, following and commenting sprees. It's a rogue marketing tactic meant to catch the attention of other Instagram users in hopes that they will follow or like the automated accounts in return. The fake activity has long violated Instagram's rules but has proliferated nonetheless. In the last seven weeks, however, Instagram, the Facebook owned app with 700 million users per month, has been cracking down on such businesses. It's led to the shuttering of anonymously run sites with names like Instagress, PeerBoost, InstaPlus, Mass Planner and Fan Harvest, though others remain. But marketers have started to wake up to how the system can be gamed. "The follower count is really completely meaningless," said Bob Gilbreath, chief executive of Ahalogy, a marketing technology company in Cincinnati. "It's untrustworthy for the true following, and it's certainly untrustworthy for the quality of the creative work." Instagram has been tight lipped about why it is just now going after such sites but said that "fostering authentic community activity is a priority and our policies reflect that." A spokeswoman for the company said it views "any service that allows people to create bots to gain inauthentic followers as spam," and pointed to guidelines that prohibit users from artificially collecting likes and followers and posting repetitive comments. Several of the shuttered sites posted notices online saying they closed at Instagram's request but did not elaborate or respond to requests for comment. But some see them as fueling a disconnect from real human effort and interest on Instagram, even cheapening the platform. Calder Wilson, a professional photographer, wrote a post on PetaPixel, an industry blog, in April that described his two year experiment with running an Instagram account that relied on Instagress to attract followers and likes. With only 10 a month and five minutes of his time per week, it quickly beat his carefully curated personal account on both measures. Instagress enabled the user name canon bw to target users based on a long list of hashtags like blackandwhite or IGdaily, commenting on some with "Nice!" or strings of emojis. (These services can also target followers of large accounts like their competitors or, say, nytimes.) In one 30 day period this year, the canon bw account liked more than 27,000 photos and left almost 7,000 comments, some of which led to enthusiastic responses. Mr. Wilson, 28, found it unethical, comparing "botting" to steroid use by athletes and lamenting the broader impact on Instagram's culture. Calder Wilson, a photographer, set up an Instagram account two years ago that relied mostly on automation services to attract more than 11,000 followers. "If you're a photographer trying to build a following or anyone trying to get your work out there and meet new people, when you get a genuine interaction, that feels good," Mr. Wilson said in an interview. "When you have Instagress coming in there and leaving fake comments like 'stunning photo' and 'stunning gallery' and there's no one behind it and then the likes it's as if they hijacked that personal neuropathway in your brain." Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. Sara Melotti, another photographer, wrote a confessional blog post recently that outlined other methods influencers use to increase their numbers so brands will work with them. She said the practice accelerated after Instagram stopped showing posts chronologically last year and started ranking them by what its data said people wanted to see or click on. Many panicked after seeing their engagement drop after that, she said. In addition to automation, she described buying followers, joining pods of 10 to 15 people who commit to liking and commenting on photos as soon as they are posted, and participating in bigger groups that coordinate posts and comments for the same time in hopes of appearing on Instagram's "Explore" tab, where they will reach even more people. "It doesn't make sense what we're doing for these numbers," Ms. Melotti, 29, said. She decided to reveal the tactics and stop using them, she said, because the focus on so called Instafame stopped rewarding original work and seemed to be having a toxic effect on other artists' self esteem and perception of reality. These discussions have not been lost on marketers, which spent more than 570 million on influencer marketing on Instagram last year, according to estimates from eMarketer. Mr. Gilbreath of Ahalogy recently introduced a service for agencies and brands to verify quality, traffic and other metrics around influencer marketing campaigns. He recommended identifying powerful creative work through such users and paying Instagram to promote sponsored posts from them, rather than relying on endorsements to their accounts based on their numbers. To be sure, the bot enabled activity might well be the internet's most pleasant form of spam, particularly compared with the nefarious Twitter bots designed to spread propaganda. But it can be annoying and intrusive. Even as many automated services have closed, others appear ready to take their place. Ads for two, named Gramista and Robogram, appeared recently after searching Google for "Instagress." Gramista's website said that for 1.79 a day, it would "automate liking, following and unfollowing just like a human being would." Another, named Archie.co, which bills itself as a "liking application," said it works with both Twitter and Instagram and would help users "find real eyeballs in a much cheaper way than paid advertising."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
African American picture books have always been successful at capturing the breadth, depth and beauty of the black experience, allowing children to gain much needed access to the strong legacy and vibrant history of African American art and storytelling. But how we present this story is always undergoing revision and refinement, as four new books from a closer view of plantation life to a visually rich depiction of the history of hip hop show. In these books, word and art combine to give us fresh insight into the lives, creativity and achievements of a truly resilient and profound people. James E. Ransome's THE BELL RANG (Atheneum, 40 pp., 17.99; ages 4 to 8) beautifully captures several days in the life of an enslaved girl living with her family on a plantation. Plantation life is seen through the innocent yet fiercely observant eyes of the young, nameless narrator. Each day begins with the ringing of a bell, a warm hug, a loving kiss on the forehead or a gentle touch on the shoulder, followed by a simple goodbye from her big brother, Ben. Ransome doesn't shy away from the trauma of slavery, but he balances the terror that sits at the core of the story with moments of joy, skillfully painting a subtle smile across the young girl's face when she's given a doll, or the shadows of children running, skipping rope and playing hopscotch. We don't witness the daily, backbreaking work in the field, and a whipping happens offstage, but we do see the pervasive, watchful overseers, with their guns and their hound dog. At one point Ransome paints tears streaming down Mama's face, Daddy's bowed head against a wall with our narrator leaning against him, and an overseer with clenched fists standing in a doorway. "No sun in the sky. Mama crying. No Ben. Daddy crying. Ben ran," he writes. LET 'ER BUCK! George Fletcher, the People's Champion (Carolrhoda, 40 pp., 18.99; ages 4 to 8), written by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson ("Bad News for Outlaws") and illustrated by the Newbery Honor winner Gordon C. James ("Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut"), tells the story of the black cowboy George Fletcher, whose journey began when his family set out on the Oregon Trail from their Kansas town. After they met with racism, young George found solace among the children on the Umatilla Indian Reservation in eastern Oregon. There, he nurtured his love of riding with a make believe bronco, but over time, the tribal horsemen taught George how to "buck." He became a star at local rodeos, even while being shut out of more popular ones, which opposed black cowboys competing against white cowboys. But in 1911 the 21 year old George competed against the fiercest cowboys in the Northwest: the Nez Perce Indian Jackson Sundown and the white rancher John Spain. What follows is a detailed account, rendered adroitly through Nelson's clear prose and James's elegant paintings, of one of the most important rodeo shows in American history, which established Fletcher as the "people's champion" even though the judge declared Spain the winner. With its energetic pairing of words and art, "Let 'er Buck!" comes alive to unearth an unsung American hero. Gwendolyn Brooks, who died in 2000, was one of the most important, prolific and distinguished poets of her time, and as with most brilliant artists, her creative force was evident when she was a child. In A SONG FOR GWENDOLYN BROOKS (Sterling, 32 pp., 17.99; ages 4 to 8), Alice Faye Duncan and Xia Gordon unfurl Brooks's evolution from a precocious girl growing up in Chicago through her boundary breaking accomplishments, including the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1950. "Sing a song for Gwendolyn Brooks. Sing it loud a Chicago blues," Duncan's text begins. Gordon's soft, velvety, earth toned illustrations convey the sweetness and innocence of Gwendolyn's imagination, set against the vibrant urban landscape of her childhood. Duncan mimics the short, poignant stanzas and lyrical observations in many of Brooks's poems a few of which are placed throughout, beginning with "The Busy Clock," written in 1928 when she was 11. Yet it is the way Duncan conveys the unwavering family support of Brooks's creativity that most stands out. "Her parents are wise and see the light. ... Gwendolyn is free to sit and think," she writes. Brooks writes and rewrites a poem titled "Ambition" between 1930 and 1933, as she went from 13 to 16 years old, and Duncan uses it to illustrate the persistence, isolation and deep self reflection that poetry required of Brooks. As she goes on to achieve fame, we are reminded that the joyous freedom of her work traces back to the remarkable achievements of a child poet. THE ROOTS OF RAP: 16 Bars on the Pillars of Hip Hop (Little Bee, 32 pp., 18.99; ages 4 to 8) captures a specific African American experience one that is rooted in jazz, hip hop and the liveliness of urban culture. Carole Boston Weatherford's 16 bars of homage to the history of hip hop accompany the celebrated illustrator Frank Morrison's pulsing and vibrant images, which not only convey the development of hip hop, they dance on the page. The opening pages are a tip of the baseball cap to the poets Langston Hughes and Paul Lawrence Dunbar, as well as to James Brown innovators of spoken word and funk music, and thus contributors to the roots of hip hop. Graffiti figures prominently throughout the book, too, as it is a foundational aesthetic in hip hop, and provides a colorful backdrop to the groovin' and movin' black children who populate the illustrations. The well placed centerfold illustration is of a cool and smooth DJ Kool Herc, known as the founding father of hip hop, with his turntable and mic. "DJ Kool Herc in the Bronx, block party under his command, rocks and rocks nonstop; mic clutched in his hand," Weatherford writes. While "The Roots of Rap" certainly does document the history of hip hop, Weatherford forgoes the ingenious wordplay, jazzy meter and funky rhyme scheme found in early rap songs like the Sugar Hill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" and Kurtis Blow's "The Breaks." It is Morrison's illustrations that give "The Roots of Rap" its beat, its bass, rhythm and soul.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Short Stories has a few tales to tell. The multiuse space, which was formerly Wise Men, opened in March and wants to become a Parisian style brunch spot and a pop up for rotating restaurants, along with its current incarnation as a late night bar. It draws an energetic crowd of creative 20 somethings in dressed up stilettos and oversize hoodies. It is set on a lively stretch of the Bowery that swells with boisterous bar crawlers on weekend nights. The decor inside the narrow space is very millennial du jour: walls the color of Whispering Angel rose, circular mirrors, exposed brick, plants galore and bookshelves lined with vintage books and magazines (Pud, Crazy Compositions, i D). The long and skinny layout doesn't leave much room to congregate. Groups will breathe easier in the spacious pockets near the front and back.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
For the first tim e, more than half of the television episodes produced in a year were directed by women or people of color, according to a new report by the Directors Guild of America. The report found that of 4,300 episodes produced in the 2018 19 season, some 50 percent were directed by women or people of color, a record high and up from 21 percent five years ago. Of the 3,081 episodes produced at the eight major studios, Disney gave women and people of color the most directorial opportunities; 40 percent of its episodes, which include shows like "Grown ish," were directed by women, and 29 percent by people of color, figures that were trailed closely by HBO's numbers. Looking at the demographics of first time television directors, the report found that women made up about half, another record, and that people of color comprised less than a third, down slightly from the previous year.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
What books are on your nightstand? I'm currently reading "Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence," by Max Tegmark. What's the last great book you read? I really loved Andy Weir's new novel, "Artemis." What influences your decisions about which books to read? Word of mouth, reviews, a trusted friend? All of the above! I constantly seek out new books by authors I already admire as well as new titles with lots of positive buzz. These days, I'm also lucky enough to receive a lot of advance reading copies of books. I always seem to have far more books on my nightstand than I have time to spend reading them a problem I've always had.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
WASHINGTON "This is my first and only book party, and I didn't do the invites," the former F.B.I. director James Comey said Tuesday night, peering out over a sparse crowd on the seventh floor of the Newseum. (This was easy for him to do as he is, famously, 6 foot 8.) Mr. Comey, by now a bona fide bipartisan pariah, was sipping California pinot noir from a paper cup and celebrating the remarkable success of his juicy new memoir, "A Higher Loyalty," with perhaps the last crowd left in town who will gladly have him: journalists. In a city not known for snappy dressing, Mr. Comey cut a sharp figure in a bespoke blue plaid suit made by the haberdasher The Tailored Man of Alexandria, Va., and brown R.M. Williams Chelsea boots he says were given to him by friends from the Australian police force (not to be confused with the black Chelsea boots Mr. Comey wore for his prime time "20/20" interview, which earned him plaudits from Esquire and GQ). As a late April rain lashed the museum's panoramic windows, the man of the hour cheerily recounted tales from his whirlwind media tour. "The clutch of people coming up to me in airports, that's probably the hardest thing to get used to," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
IT'S July, prime time for swimming, hiking and slurping watermelon. But if both you and your spouse work and you have school age children, you may have another perspective on summer: as the season when you must juggle your schedule and scrounge up affordable child care until school reopens. In about 60 percent of two parent households with children under 18, both parents work, according to Pew Research Center, a subsidiary of the Pew Charitable Trusts. For them, the typical 10 week summer break is no picnic. "Summer is really hard, because we often have these fantasies of summer the way it's supposed to be: getting ice cream, watching the sun go down, being at home," said Ellen Galinsky, president of the nonprofit Families and Work Institute. "But it's not that way." Not everyone has nearby relatives who can provide child care, or the budget for a full time nanny. So families often rely on summer day camps. The number of summer day camps has grown by 40 percent over the last four years, according to the American Camp Association, which accredits both overnight and day camps.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
"Star Trek: Picard" opens with Jean Luc Picard, former captain of the Starship Enterprise, having a nightmare, and doesn't that sound right. Through seven seasons of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and four movies, Starfleet's most stalwart officer seemed always to be tripping out at key moments: pinging between time streams or dreaming alternate lives; forced into hallucinations by the Ferengi or assimilated by the Borg. It was a storytelling device that reflected the endearing, if slightly contrived, makeup of the "Star Trek" franchise's most popular character. Picard always did the right thing, but his moral certainty, bordering on self righteousness, was balanced by doubt and guilt that could become temporarily crippling when it served the writers' purposes. And in "Star Trek: Picard," which begins its 10 episode premiere season Thursday on CBS All Access, there's a full complement of doubt, guilt and feelings of uselessness. Picard may be enjoying retirement on his family's lovely French vineyard, but he's not content. In the time since his last appearance (in the film "Star Trek: Nemesis" in 2002), calamities have transpired, involving an exploding star and a compromised rescue mission, that have tarnished his reputation. This cannot stand, of course, and before long or at least by the end of Episode 3, the last one given to critics he's found a ship, put together a ragtag crew and set out on a mission of redemption. The arrival of a new "Star Trek" series (the seventh), especially one whose roots go back to the 1980s, is an obvious occasion for nostalgia and Easter egg hunting, and "Picard" does not disappoint. The dream scene brings Picard (Patrick Stewart) together with Data (Brent Spiner), the loyal android who sacrificed himself at the end of "Nemesis." Poker, Earl Grey tea and "Blue Skies" are offered up as tokens for the faithful.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
The weather outside is frightful, but merchants are making shopping this week so delightful. Shake off the cold at Artists Fleas, which is ringing in the last days of its "Not So Secret Sale" with a Last Chance Sip and Shop event Thursday from 6 to 9 p.m. Scoring deep discounts of up to 70 percent on items like sea glass necklaces ( 22, originally 38) and photo prints of vintage toys ( 13, originally 26) from a variety of clothing, accessories, art and home goods vendors will be even nicer with a glass of bubbly or a Sixpoint beer in hand. At Chelsea Market, 88 10th Avenue. Then brave the slush puddles to go around the corner to the Shop at the Standard, High Line, which is hosting a book signing and celebration, also from 6 to 9 p.m., for Cheryl Dunn, the documentary filmmaker and street photographer. Her new monograph, "Festivals Are Good" ( 40), documents some of the country's major music festivals, beginning with Woodstock '94. At 442 West 13th Street. WHIT, a women's wear label that always serves up fashion with a dose of fun, has some whimsical pieces like a dress with polka dots layered over plaid ( 498) and a button down in a custom deer print by the illustrator Ping Zhu ( 298) at its pop up shop that is closing Sunday. Either is sure to beat the January blues. At Seaport Studios, 19 Fulton Street.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Beyonce and Jay Z, here performing in New Jersey in October, called out the watch brand Richard Mille in their recent song "Everything is Love." The track has been viewed more than 130 million times on YouTube. More than 135 million people have heard that Jay Z and Beyonce spent "250 for the Richard Mille" in one song on the YouTube post of their surprise summer release, "Everything Is Love." And more than 36.6 million have played "New Patek," Lil Uzi Vert's latest single, on YouTube since it appeared in September. Rappers mentioning watches isn't new but the volume certainly keeps increasing. What's this all about? (Lyric statistics from Lyrics.com as of Nov. 15, unless specified.) With 1,102 mentions in rap and rock anthems since the 1970s and a further 681 shout outs to Rollie, its urban slang name, Rolex is top of the drops. Worn, bought or "bust down" (with diamonds), the independent brand remains the most potent symbol of music, money and sexual success. "We see massive jumps in social media and in enquiries when tracks start to become well known on playlists and when people talk about them," said Richelle Pitt Chambers, head of watches at the pre owned luxury e tailer Xupes like the Rollie reference in "Bad and Boujee" by the rap trio Migos (Franck Muller showed up in that one, too). And female artists like Cardi B, who rapped "Rollie got charms, look like frosted flakes" in her Grammy nominated "Bodak Yellow," are "making luxury watches look cool and on trend for women who usually buy fashion watches," Ms. Pitt Chambers said. With 201 shout outs since 1987 140 of them on the Billboard chart last year alone, according to the lyrics website Genius, Patek Philippe is on its way to stealing the hip hop crown. But then, rappers "want to align themselves with the best of the best," said Jonathan Darracott, global head of watches at Bonhams auction house in London. Having the name of the family owned watch business used by the likes of Lil Uzi Vert (who is 24), or by Young Thug (27) and Future (35) in their song "Patek Water," "allows Patek to reach a younger audience of 16 to 40 year olds that they would have struggled with," said Gen Kobayashi, head of strategy, communications at the advertising and marketing agency Ogilvy UK. The age group may not be able to afford a Patek now, Ms. Pitt Chambers of Xupes said, but they "may do in 20 years time when they want a luxury product as the name is stuck in the head." Even mashing up the name with explicit lyrics is good for business, she added, because "it's free advertising." Consider Young Thug's "STS": "Hop out with a Patek on my wrist and keep the .44." While clients "wouldn't know or care" about a rap reference, Mr. Darracott said, businesses probably feel differently. "Any way it can get clients, they are happy," he said. "Same with auction houses. Every brand wants to be alive and relevant." According to Ms. Pitt Chambers of Xupes, the 271 shout outs for Audemars Piguet since 2002 has done a lot for the family owned brand because "it is not the brand that is in everyday conversation but is more niche," she said. Name drops by major artists like Jay Z, ASAP Rocky and even the dance D.J. David Guetta have created awareness of the watch house as "the bigger the artist, the bigger the following," she said. (Mr. Guetta alone has 8.5 million Instagram followers.) There have been model mentions, too, with the Brooklyn rapper Maino singing in "I'm About Cream" about his "Offshore Royal Oak, I got diamonds in 'em." It can only help sales, Mr. Darracott of Bonhams said, "as the artists are pinning it down to a particular thing, it's easier to find." Ever since Jay Z and Kanye West shouted out Hublot as a "new watch alert" in 2011, the LVMH owned brand has "become cool among rap fans" with more than 80 track mentions, Ms. Pitt Chambers of Xupes said. (Including "that Hublot looking like a Heisman," in Jeezy's "Black Eskimo.") British musicians like their Hublot watches, too, with the artist Stormzy, who performs a hybrid of hip hop and English club music called grime, adding a new twist in "Big For Your Boots" by mocking people who say "HUB lot" rather than the correct "oo BLOW": "Little man, that's a Hublot, not a Hublot/What? Pronounce it right ..." Mr. Kobayashi of Ogilvy said Hublot, with its grime and rap associations and a longtime role as the official World Cup timekeeper, has "a relevancy beyond Bond Street and where they are sold, which means they are part of pop culture, so they are speaking to a wider audience outside of just luxury watch buyers." "Fat Richard Mille on my wrist," the rapper Young Thug, known for his gender fluid style, wrote in "Tsunami," released in August just one of the 42 shout outs (19 this year alone) that the independent watchmaker has received since 2001. And some were even more specific: Pusha T lauded "Richard Mille tourbillon, remarkable timing" while Pharrell Williams called out the "Flat double skeletal tourbillon" showing that they "know what a complication is," Ms. Pitt Chambers of Xupes said. The artists who sing about Richard Mille are clients, according to an email from the company. A rap fan himself, the 38 year old Mr. Kobayashi of Ogilvy, checked out the style and prices of Richard Mille watches "because Jay Z raps extensively around them," he said. "It made me look them up to see what one was, and saw it was an expensive watch." Since 2010, Vacheron Constantin has seeped into rap lyrics with 10 mentions by musicians, including Kendrick Lamar and Rick Ross. In the 2017 watch laden track, "Iced Out My Arms," DJ Khaled was "'Bout to swap the Patek for a Vacheron (switch it!)." The name drops have come as a surprise to the Richemont owned company as "we are understated and not bling and not something we do actively or with intent," said Laurent Perves, Vacheron Constantin's chief marketing officer, adding that the business is only aware of a shout out after the music's release. "If they talk about us," he said, "they know us," although he wouldn't confirm whether they were clients. Mr. Perves added that he does not know of any direct effect on sales as, he said, there has been no feedback from the field. Yet, he said, "at the same time, it is something organic that we shouldn't try to control."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
By the time Ghislaine Maxwell was fighting allegations that she had procured underage women to provide sexual services for her ex boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein, there was a new man in her life. His name was Ms. Maxwell, according to her friend Christopher Mason, described him sometime around 2015 as a "Navy SEAL," though he was actually a former Coast Guard officer. It didn't exactly surprise Mr. Mason (or others she described Mr. Borgerson to in the same way) when this fact came to light. Ms. Maxwell had always been known among her friends as a person with a singular ability to mythologize her own reality. In an effort to rebrand herself from jet setting cosmopolitan to oceanic conservationist, Ms. Maxwell had in 2012 founded and appointed herself C.E.O. of the TerraMar Project, an opaque organization that had no offices and gave no grants to other organizations. It was disbanded in 2019. Its biggest accomplishment was helping Ms. Maxwell maintain social capital. Associating herself with Mr. Borgerson the founder of a maritime investments company called CargoMetrics and a former fellow in residence at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he wrote about oceanic issues added to her credibility. Mr. Borgerson was called a director at the TerraMar Project, although he never had a job there. Ms. Maxwell supplied him and CargoMetrics with introductions to people on her contacts list. When Mr. Epstein died from an apparent suicide while in jail in 2019, Ms. Maxwell became a subject of intense public interest: Why, given the volume of accusations leveled against her by women who said they had been abused by Mr. Epstein as minors, had she been able to avoid charges? Where was she hiding? How did a self possessed woman of immense privilege come to be involved in the sex trafficking of teenage girls? A year later, on July 2, Ms. Maxwell, 58, was arrested in New Hampshire by agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and charged with conspiring with Mr. Epstein to sexually abuse minors. At a bail hearing shortly afterward, Ms. Maxwell pleaded not guilty. Prosecutors in the case also dropped a bombshell: Ms. Maxwell said to them that she was married but would not divulge the identity of her spouse. Speculation immediately turned to Mr. Borgerson, 44, although no record has been found of any marriage. Mr. Borgerson (who did not respond to two interview requests) has denied dating Ms. Maxwell, saying repeatedly that they were "friends" and that he didn't know where she was. But according to two friends of Ms. Maxwell who asked to remain anonymous because of the furor surrounding the allegations around her, Mr. Borgerson and Ms. Maxwell began sharing a 6,000 square foot, five bedroom home in Manchester by the Sea, Mass., after Ms. Maxwell sold her 7,000 square foot townhouse on the Upper East Side for about 15 million in 2016. (That was the same year she struck confidential settlements in civil court with two women who said she participated in Mr. Epstein's sexual exploitation of them.) In December 2019, prosecutors say, she used an anonymous L.L.C. called Granite Realty to buy a mansion in Bedford, N.H., in a 1.07 million all cash deal, about an hour away from the home she shared with Mr. Borgerson. Recently, Mr. Borgerson was photographed walking a dog that friends of Ms. Maxwell's recognized as her champion bred vizsla. Publications around the world staked out his home. According to a 2016 profile in Institutional Investor, Mr. Borgerson grew up in rural Missouri. His father was a former Marine infantry official, and his mother taught high school French and Spanish. The family was Presbyterian, and Mr. Borgerson told the publication that in high school he considered becoming a priest before deciding instead to attend the U.S. Coast Guard Academy. "There's a lot that motivates me, including if I'm honest I have a big chip on my shoulder to beat the prep school, Ivy League, M.B.A. crowd," he said. "They're bred to make money, but they're not smarter than everyone else; they just have more patina and connections." Not that his own education was shabby. In 2001, he enrolled at the Fletcher, the graduate school of global affairs at Tufts University, where he earned a master of arts degree in law and diplomacy. After that, Mr. Borgerson taught history at the Coast Guard Academy for a few years. In 2007, he became a fellow in residence at the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank whose officers and directors have included Colin Powell; the philanthropist David Rockefeller; and Robert Rubin, the secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton. While at the the Council on Foreign Relations, Mr. Borgerson wrote for a magazine it publishes called Foreign Affairs about the effect of global warming on the Arctic region. His residency as an International Affairs fellow ended in 2008, a spokeswoman for the organization said, and Mr. Borgerson spent another two years as a Visiting Fellow for Oceans Governance, working offsite. In 2010, he founded Cargometrics, a "maritime innovation company" that uses data systems to study shipping patterns, from which the company determines what goods are being sent where and in what quantities and then bases investment decisions on the results. (For example, in February of this year, the firm used its data on cargo from China to surmise that imports from there were "in free fall" because of the coronavirus.) Back when Mr. Borgerson was writing for Foreign Affairs, there weren't a lot of articles being published about oceanic conservation, said Dagfinnur Sveinbjornsson, the C.E.O. of the Arctic Circle, an organization dedicated to economic and environmental issues in the region. Mr. Borgerson's were "among the most prominent," he said in an interview. "That's what led to his involvement in the Arctic Circle." Mr. Borgerson was picked to serve on its advisory board and moderate a discussion about "Business in the Arctic" at the organization's annual assembly in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 2013. Conferences are a strange business. Big issues are often on the agenda, but the events can also (in prepandemic times) serve as glorified cocktail hours and public relations opportunities for people seeking to make connections and enhance their reputations as philanthropists, whether or not they even have a substantial record of working on the causes they're discussing. This category included Ms. Maxwell, who spoke at the Reykjavik conference and did not have the organization's endorsement, according to Mr. Sveinbjornsson. According to British tabloids, it was there that Ms. Maxwell made the acquaintance of Mr. Borgerson. He was the father of two young children with his wife, Rebecca, to whom he had been married since 2001, public records show. In 2014, he filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. Ms. Borgerson obtained a restraining order from Mr. Borgerson. (It was later dismissed.) In legal filings, she claimed that he drank too much, hit her and threatened to beat her in front of the children. Ms. Maxwell was smitten with Mr. Borgerson, stating over and over again how "hot" and "brilliant" he was, according to a person who worked with the TerraMar Project and agreed to speak to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity, concerned the association would draw censure from environmentalists. One is that spousal privilege can prevent prosecutors from compelling a husband to testify against his wife. Second, he said, "it makes moving money around much easier." This would be advantageous if Ms. Maxwell pleads guilty to any crimes or gets convicted of sex trafficking. If that happens, said Mr. Chabrowe (who, like Mr. Hammer, is not working on Ms. Maxwell's case), she will likely have to deal with numerous civil suits from victims of Mr. Epstein who say she facilitated his crimes. "Not only does it mean the civil cases likely ramp up, but new ones likely emerge, because there's blood in the water," Mr. Chabrowe said. "Epstein is gone, so they're going for her. "	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Six Michigan doctors have been charged with insurance fraud and unnecessarily prescribing opioids to patients in a 464 million scheme, according to court documents filed this week by federal prosecutors. The 56 count indictment, filed on Tuesday and made public on Thursday, named Dr. Rajendra Bothra, 77, of Bloomfield Hills, who owned and operated the Pain Center USA in Warren and Eastpointe, Mich., and the Interventional Pain Center in Warren. The other five doctors were employed by the clinics, which catered to patients with joint and spinal injuries. As part of the scheme, Dr. Bothra "sought to bill insurance companies for the maximum number of services and procedures possible with no regard to the patients' needs," the United States attorney's office for the Eastern District of Michigan, which filed the charges, said in a statement on Thursday. Jeffrey Crapko, a lawyer for Dr. Bothra, declined to comment on the case. An after hours operator at the Pain Center USA said the federal authorities had raided and closed the offices.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Americans who wish to read the findings of the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III already have a wealth of options. This week, two different published versions of the report appear in the top ten on Amazon's best seller list; Google around and you'll find an untold number of outlets (including The New York Times) offering digital versions. There are even audiobooks. But an upcoming version might be most dramatic of them all. Beginning Saturday night and running through Sunday, the theater companies New Neighborhood and Slightly Altered States, along with the arts and media company DMNDR, will host a 24 hour public reading of the Mueller report in Queens. "Filibustered and Unfiltered: America Reads the Mueller Report" will take place at the Arc, a Long Island City venue . The director Jackson Gay conceived the project, which started as her half serious Facebook post but has grown into an event with over 100 volunteer readers. Participants are scheduled to include the theater directors Anne Kauffman, Leigh Silverman and Annie Dorsen; Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater; the actor Michael Urie; and the playwrights and performers Taylor Mac and Eisa Davis. Mac's own marathon show, "A 24 Decade History of Popular Music," became a 24 hour long must see in 2016. Ms. Gay said musicians will play during some portions of the report that have been redacted. Yet despite the music, and the heavy participation of theater world figures, the intention isn't to dramatize, she added.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
ASBURY PARK DANCE FESTIVAL at the Carousel Building and at the House of Independents in Asbury Park, N.J. (Sept. 13, 6:30 and 7 p.m.; Sept. 14, 7 p.m.). In the year following Paul Taylor's death, many of his longtime dancers retired from his company, but not from dance. Two of them, Laura Halzack and Michael Trusnovec, are launching this festival, along with the film executive V J Carbone and Michelle Fleet, a current Taylor company member who will retire this fall. This inaugural Jersey Shore outing includes works by Pam Tanowitz, Caleb Teicher and Bryan Arias, as well as performances by Doug Varone's company and a Martha Graham duet featuring a current member and a former member of the Graham company. A wait list is available for Saturday's sold out show, but two short, free performances will take place on Friday at Asbury Park's Beaux Arts carousel. apdancefest.org FOR THE MOMENT at Gibney (Sept. 19, 7 p.m.). The esteemed writer, curator and community educator Eva Yaa Asantewaa recently came on board as Gibney's new senior curatorial director, and this first season fully under her stewardship begins with the series "For the Moment," which proposes a subject or idea that artists respond to in short solos. This iteration's theme, "Untranslatable ... Over the Roofs of the World," comes courtesy of Walt Whitman, and the participating artists are Joey Kipp, Troy Ogilvie and Jaime Yawa Dzandu. 646 837 6809, gibneydance.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
The first is an absence of trust between Washington and Kabul. The longer the Americans stayed the more difficult it became to persuade Afghans that their presence was helpful and their purposes benign. Over time, Hamid Karzai, the West's chosen leader of "liberated" Afghanistan, came to see the United States as an occupying power part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. Karzai believed, not without reason, that United States officials paid lip service to his concerns, were willing to cut deals behind his back and on occasion plotted to replace him with someone more accommodating. For their part, Americans who dealt regularly with Karzai concluded that he was indecisive, unstable and given to bouts of paranoia. When he first became leader of Afghanistan in December 2001, Washington had celebrated Karzai as an Afghan Mandela. By the time he vacated the premises 13 years later, he had become in American eyes an Afghan Mugabe. Of even greater significance, in Coll's view, is Washington's dysfunctional relationship with the government of Pakistan, or more specifically with the Pakistani Army, which effectively calls the shots on all matters related to internal and external security. Pacifying Afghanistan was always going to pose a challenge. Absent full throated Pakistani collaboration, it would become next to impossible. The United States needed two things from Pakistan: first, that it would permit supplies bound for coalition forces in landlocked Afghanistan to transit its territory; and second, that it would prevent Qaeda and Taliban remnants from using Pakistan as a sanctuary and operating base. From Washington's perspective, these expectations, premised on an assumption that Pakistan could be cajoled into complying with America's purposes in Afghanistan, seemed eminently reasonable. Yet that assumption proved wildly off the mark. While the generals commanding the Pakistani Army and directing the Inter Services Intelligence made a show of cooperating, they were simultaneously working to undermine coalition military efforts. Imbued with the conviction that Afghanistan is vital to Pakistani national security, they had no intention of allowing the United States to determine its fate. So while accepting subsidies amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars Washington even elevated Pakistan to the status of "major non NATO ally" the Pakistanis still actively supported the Taliban. Pakistan's military leaders were playing a double game. United States officials knew they were being had, yet could do little about it. With its own well established record of having broken promises to Pakistan, Washington was not exactly in a position to call in any markers. Despite being nominally the superior power, the United States found that it could exert minimal leverage. Officials could ask, but not demand, while Pakistan's nuclear arsenal limited its susceptibility to threats and sanctions. Although American officials went to almost comic lengths in attempting to befriend or flatter their Pakistani counterparts Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called on Pakistan's army chief no fewer than 27 occasions such efforts proved to no avail.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Arte Johnson, right, on the set of "Rowan Martin's Laugh In" with Bob Hope, one of the show's many guest stars. Mr. Johnson was a one man ensemble on "Laugh In," playing a range of characters with accents, but he was probably best known for the helmeted German soldier who would peer through bushes before slowly uttering, "Very interesting." Arte Johnson, a comic actor who won an Emmy for playing a diverse troupe of characters on the groundbreaking comedy show "Rowan Martin's Laugh In," died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 90. His death was announced by a spokesman, Harlan Boll, who said Mr. Johnson had bladder and prostate cancer. A diminutive, bespectacled man with sandy hair, Mr. Johnson summoned everything from manic energy to an old man's tired shuffle in films and television shows of the 1950s and '60s. But he was largely unknown until he became part of a cast that included Goldie Hawn, Lily Tomlin, Ruth Buzzi and Alan Sues on "Laugh In," the manic and at times surreal sketch comedy show that inspired later successes like "Saturday Night Live." After opening with patter between the hosts, the comedy team of Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, each week's episode quickly degenerated into a torrent of humor both physical and topical, punctuated by often groan inducing jokes, surprise guest stars (including, on one memorable occasion, Richard Nixon), catchphrases and brief shots of dancers in bikinis. Mr. Johnson was a one man ensemble, delivering lines that might otherwise fall flat in more accents than a United Nations meeting. His characters included Tyrone Horneigh, a lascivious old man who accosted a woman played by Ms. Buzzi with amorous one liners; Rosmenko, a Russian with tortured syntax; and Rabbi Shankar, a blissed out guru. But his most popular character was probably Wolfgang Busch, a helmeted German soldier (named after his brother in law) who would peer through bushes at the end of a sketch before slowly uttering, "Very interesting," often followed by a qualifier like "but stupid" or "but not very funny." The phrase was so popular that Mr. Johnson recorded a song, "Very Interesting," with Ms. Buzzi. (The B side was a song on which Ms. Buzzi sang lead called "Don't Futz Around.") Mr. Johnson said he wasn't sure where the phrase came from but thought it was from a World War II film in which Allied soldiers had to cross Germany after their plane is downed. He said he had used it as an interjection at a party and George Schlatter, the executive producer and creator of "Laugh In," overheard and decided to incorporate it into the show. In an interview for this obituary in 2013, Mr. Johnson said he had developed his aptitude for accents while taking public transportation in Chicago as a young man. "Chicago is made up of many ethnic islands, and people would be sitting around me and talking in their various ethnic dialects," he said. "To me it was like music." Arthur Stanton Eric Johnson was born on Jan. 20, 1929, in Benton Harbor, Mich. His father, Abraham Lincoln Johnson, was a lawyer. His mother was Edythe Mackenzie (Goldberg) Johnson. He originally billed himself as Art E. Johnson because there was another Arthur Johnson in the actors union. (The later "Arte" was pronounced "ART ee.") He later lived in Chicago, where he graduated from Austin High School before receiving a bachelor's degree in radio journalism from the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign in 1949. He worked in public relations in Chicago for a time before moving to New York. His performing career began, he said, when he was walking back to a dull entry level job at Viking Press after lunch and stumbled on an open audition for the Broadway musical "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes." He auditioned on a whim and won a small, uncredited part. He developed his characters at resorts in the Pocono Mountains and appeared Off Broadway in "The Shoestring Revue" and on television shows including "The Jack Benny Program," on which he leapt onstage and loudly corrected Benny as he told a joke, and "The Twilight Zone," on which he played an unhappy car salesman, before his break on "Laugh In." Mr. Johnson parted ways with "Laugh In" before the show's last season a decision he said he came to regret. "It wasn't the brightest move of my life," he said. "If I had to do it over again I wouldn't have left." His success on "Laugh In" led to a half hour special in 1971; stints hosting other programs, including the short lived game show "Knockout;" and repeat appearances on series like "The Love Boat" and "General Hospital." He voiced a character named Tyrone on the cartoon series "Baggypants and the Nitwits," which also featured the voice of Ruth Buzzi, in 1977, and played Renfield in the vampire movie comedy "Love at First Bite," with George Hamilton as Count Dracula, in 1979. Mr. Johnson kept acting into the 2000s and also recorded books on tape, including Gary Shteyngart's "Absurdistan," for which he used his mastery of accents to great advantage. He did voice over work on cartoon shows like "Justice League Unlimited," on which he reused his Teutonic timbre, and "Animaniacs." He married Gisela Busch in 1968. She survives him, as does his brother, Coslough, a comedy writer who won an Emmy for his work on "Laugh In."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
THE PROBLEM OF DEMOCRACY The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality By Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein Many Americans might be surprised to learn that neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution includes the word "democracy." The gentlemen authors of those documents conformed to an 18th century understanding of the term and regarded the prospect of rule by the people as tantamount to anarchy. It took decades of political, economic and social change to redefine democracy away from an inherently unstable form of government and make it the bedrock of American politics. Or so goes the usual historical narrative. According to Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein, however, the notion that "the United States is a democracy today" is as much a myth as the assumption that the founding generation ever wanted it to be one. Isenberg and Burstein, who have both separately and together written several notable books about America's founders, present their provocative argument in "The Problem of Democracy: The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality." This detailed "interdependent portrait" of John and John Quincy Adams tracks the careers of the equally ambitious father and son, who both rose to the nation's highest office and were ousted after a single term. Criticized by contemporaries and posterity alike for their difficult personalities, the two Adamses certainly nurtured a powerful sense of grievance as they assessed the political developments of their day. Yet their curmudgeonly characters likely predisposed them to discern genuine problems in government that their adversaries preferred to exploit for their own advantage rather than correct for the good of the nation. Born 31 years apart in Braintree, Mass., the two Adamses stayed connected to their New England roots, no matter how far from home they journeyed. And journey they did, beginning with John Adams's decision to bring his 10 year old son along on a diplomatic mission to Paris in 1778. Both of them subsequently lived for extended periods in the Netherlands and England, and John Quincy went on to represent American interests in Berlin and St. Petersburg for more than a decade. The remarkable parallels between their careers extended beyond lengthy European travels and one term presidencies. Both men negotiated peace between the United States and Britain John in 1783, with the Treaty of Paris ending the War of Independence, and John Quincy in 1814, with the Treaty of Ghent concluding the War of 1812. Each served as America's minister to the Court of St. James's. Drawing on a shared love of classical learning, especially Cicero's exhortations to put nation above self, the two Adamses also regularly took up their pens to expose ominous developments that in their view imperiled the young Republic. Neither man questioned the necessity of popular consent, but both thought democracy ought to be just one part of a properly balanced government. Around the time of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, John argued that a new national legislature must have a senate with "illustrious" and well educated members serving as a counterweight to representatives elected to a lower house by "credulous" voters. Nearly 40 years later, in his 1825 Inaugural Address, John Quincy seemingly diverged from his father's discomfort with a fickle populace by commending "a confederated representative democracy" that had proved itself "competent to the wise and orderly management of the common concerns of a mighty nation." Yet he delivered this speech in the wake of the highly contentious election of 1824, decided not by the voters but by the House of Representatives, when no candidate won a majority in the Electoral College. None of John Quincy's opponents least of all his archrival Andrew Jackson would have agreed that the voice of the people had actually been heard. Jackson, however, epitomized the dangers of an unchecked democracy. The belligerent Tennessean, who defeated Adams in a landslide in 1828, joined a parade of charismatic figures who over the years brazenly courted popular opinion to distract voters from recognizing the Adamses' superior claims to leadership at least from their own jaundiced perspective. First in line was a lazy and flirtatious Benjamin Franklin, whom John Adams accused of hogging the limelight when the pair sought a wartime alliance with France. Father and son later agreed with barely disguised envy that the renown enjoyed by John Hancock and Thomas Paine was undeserved. "It is melancholy to observe," the younger Adams groused, "how much even in this free country the course of public events depends on the private interests and passions of individuals." What transformed a vexing cultivation of celebrity into genuine peril for the Republic was the rise of political parties, which deliberately appealed to the "passions" of voters rather than their good judgment. Members of the founding generation abhorred the very idea of party, a term that conjured up shady cabals placing self interest ahead of the public good. But parties emerged nonetheless, beginning with the Federalists and Republicans in the 1790s. A flood of partisan newspapers widened the political divide, stirring up the populace to worship some men as heroes and denounce their opponents as villains. John Adams's effort to rise above the fray while in office only served to make him a target for both factions' leaders, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Matters had worsened by the second Adams's presidency. The Jeffersonian Republicans renamed themselves Democrats to advertise their anti elitist devotion to the people and immediately started a campaign to elect their champion, Andrew Jackson. A relentlessly partisan press manipulated readers' loyalty with appeals to emotion, exaggerations and outright lies. According to one senator appalled by Jackson's authoritarian bent once he achieved office, "The more arbitrary the measures become the less the laws, the Constitution and the principles of civil liberty are regarded." Sound familiar? Although the current occupant of the White House is nowhere mentioned by name in this book, his prodigious shadow looms large. The trends that so distressed the Adamses in the nation's early years have intensified to a degree they could scarcely have imagined, thanks to virulent social media, the injection of vast sums of money into American campaigns, a politicized judiciary and rising economic inequality. We can only be grateful that father and son were spared this vision of their worst fears coming true. Washington, Jefferson and other prominent early Americans (with the likely exception of Jackson) would no doubt be equally horrified by modern developments. But would a 21st century version of either Adams or of Washington be able to redirect the nation away from destructive partisanship toward a disinterested pursuit of a common good? Despite the contemporary inspiration for their positive reassessment of the Adamses, Isenberg and Burstein wisely avoid making such a claim. If there is any lesson to be derived from this book, they assert, it is that the Adamses "were onto something when they observed that the errors of the people threatened 'government by the people.'" This leaves open the possibility that the people might have the capacity to recognize their mistakes and correct them a democratic solution to the problem of democracy. Even the famously dour Adamses might be tempted to hope for such an outcome, however unlikely it seems at present.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
The gasps, shudders and yells at the screen could be heard straight from the Twitter scroll as one by one over the weekend viewers watched "The Perfection," Netflix's latest horror film to follow the success of "Bird Box." It's a movie designed for real time online reaction and thus totally of the moment. "The Perfection" stars Allison Williams ("Girls," "Get Out") and Logan Browning ("Dear White People") as young cello prodigies who, after connecting at a concert in Shanghai, return to their cutthroat music academy to seek revenge on an abusive teacher. It's gruesome, violent, erotic and totally bonkers. The plot is almost impossible to describe without spoilers, but "Black Swan" and "The Fly" have both been invoked in reviews. MeToo was very much on the minds of its creators, and it ends with a feminist exclamation point. Yet when the movie opens, Browning said, they wanted viewers to think "this is some jealous rivalry. Then you're immediately bombarded with the notion that it's not. Each plot twist is a feminist statement." Stacey Reiss, one of the producers, said the movie was filmed right as Harvey Weinstein was being accused of sexual abuse (he has pleaded not guilty and trial is set for September), and the creative team was well aware of the issues raised by his case. Shepard noted that "genre movies are able to talk about subjects that are maybe a little too difficult to talk about in other ways," and that the women in the movie "are able to correct wrongs that have happened in their lives, and that's a powerful message." Reiss added, "This is a film about women supporting other women. It's this idea that we're all in this together." They chose classical music as a backdrop, Shepard said, because it's a world that emphasizes effortlessness and obsession, and yet there's a heightened ugliness under the surface because of all the grueling work it takes to perfect their art. Like the church, it is an insular community that holds sway over young people. The two characters can speak through their instruments, but are otherwise silent about their pasts and the costs of becoming stars. Shepard drew on a number of influences, including "The Keepers," a documentary series that involves sexual abuse at a Catholic school, as well as the work of the directors Park Chan wook (particularly his erotic thriller "The Handmaiden") and Brian De Palma. "This movie could easily have been trash, and some people might think that, but I think it's more than that," Shepard said. "It's got a lot going on." The story is told through seemingly unconnected chapters that take you from a concert in Shanghai to a bus ride through rural China that goes haywire, complete with a butcher cleaver and flesh eating vermin, back to suburban Minneapolis and the music academy where the women each began and where they eventually confront their teacher, played by Steven Weber. In the process, you figure out the horrors that were inflicted upon them in their quests to become artists. For Williams, part of the appeal of working in horror is that women get a lot of opportunities to show their range and complexity. "One of the greatest gestures of love a filmmaker can give to a female character is just attention and time," she said, along with "nuance, where women are not always one way or another." In her view, her cellist in "The Perfection" somewhat resembled her racist girlfriend in "Get Out" because neither character is rendered to the audience in a complete way until the end of the movie. "Not knowing who these people are is part of the plot," she said. When she first read "The Perfection," she said, "I couldn't get a handle on this person, because the movie doesn't want you to. The movie wants you to resist the sense that you know this trope of a character, and it's constantly upending your assumptions. And that's how people are. They traffic in different personalities or emphasize different sides of themselves to survive." The movie shows a lot of violence, but Shepard said steps were taken to make sure everyone felt comfortable, a sign of how sets are adjusting in the wake of MeToo. Shepard said he understood that "as a 54 year old white male, I have a specific point of view. But that's not the world we live in." He added, "We had very strong women on set, with very strong opinions about things, and they helped inform how we told the story." Williams said she and Browning were both involved in the script and brought into the editing room, where they had a say and also were given final cut on a sex scene. For Browning, it also meant making sure there were women of color who helped her prepare for her role and helped teach her the cello, which both she and Williams learned to play. She also worked with Shepard to adjust the script to give her character more autonomy. "With me as a black woman," she said, "we wanted to make sure the story wasn't a white savior film, and so scenes were inserted and changed." That extends to the very end, which, without giving the whole thing away, has caused the strongest reaction. The women get their revenge and the catharsis comes with a MeToo message: The man who tortured them is forced to listen. It's one shot that says everything. Part of the reason it has hit a nerve, Reiss speculated, is because "it mirrors what's happening right now. A lot of men have been forced to take a seat and watch, and women are having their moment." Reiss added, "A lot of women who came to screenings came out with that reaction of 'wow.' There are a lot of days where I feel like I want to scream, and this allows you to scream."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Martha Rosler's conceptual photography and video art have been as disruptive as they've been influential since the 1960s. The first major New York survey of her art in over 15 years has opened at the Jewish Museum. " Pretty much everyone hated my work when I made it, except for feminists," the artist Martha Rosler said, sitting in the living room of her house and studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. "I'm used to a minimum 10 year lag before anyone has anything good at all to say about anything I've done." This doesn't especially seem to bother Ms. Rosler. Her conceptual photography and video art were as disruptive as they were influential, and her politics she's a self described socialist feminist and anti militarist have long existed outside of the mainstream. But her work has been canonized by museums and galleries, and feminist slogans are enshrined on T shirts. "The negative is that you become, shall we say, depoliticized," she explained. On the other hand, Ms. Rosler now has a wider audience. So where does that leave Ms. Rosler? Carrying on as she always has: making complex political art in dark times. The first major New York survey of Ms. Rosler's art in 18 years has opened at the Jewish Museum, and runs through March 3. For some, the show, "Martha Rosler: Irrespective," may be an introduction to the prolific artist whose caustic work in addition to photomontage and video, she creates installation, sculpture, performance and digital media has been alternately admired and reviled by the public and the art world since the 1960s . Her exhibitions have focused on tenant struggles and homelessness; the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; public space; and very often the experiences of women. Now, her work is being seen against the backdrop of the MeToo movement and its backlash. "I don't think I could have anticipated how relevant her work would feel when we took on the show," said Darsie Alexander, the Jewish Museum's chief curator. "The same themes, the same concerns, the same tensions are with us today as they were when she started out. " Not that Ms. Rosler is expecting people to like all of it. "They're going to hate the reinterpretation of an old work I did from the early 1970s," based on women's clothing, she said. The piece, "Objects With No Titles" (1973/2018), features fabrics and bags of batting stuffed into bras, pantyhose and lingerie gesturing at the confining of the female form. Her living room is defined by 30 years of accumulation: her own art, newspapers, odds and ends, books she has about 7,500, which formed part of an exhibition called the "Martha Rosler Library," though some are stored elsewhere. Her work can be formally complex, politically powerful and uncannily funny sometimes all at once. She is a master manipulator of images: cutting, pasting, decontextualizing, mimicking, rearranging our expectations. In her video piece "Semiotics of the Kitchen" (1975), she illustrates the alphabet with an apron for "A," a hamburger press for "H." She gesticulates and stabs the air and bangs the kitchen implements . This video is highly formal, drawing on relations between sign and signifier; it is a fairly direct critique of the domestic sphere of food production. But it's also parodic, the anti cooking demonstration video. She's deadpan. In a catalog essay for the exhibition, Ms. Rosler wrote that this and some of her other pieces have "often left audiences wondering whether it is acceptable to laugh." In person, too, Ms. Rosler has the occasional cutting wit, as well as the polished cadence of a professor, which she was until retiring a few years ago. Throughout our conversations, she drew on many references theorists, painters, scholars, American suffragists. She's older now, in her mid 70s, though she said she rejects the periodization of female artists, from "emerging artist" in their 20s, to the doldrums of middle age and then, at a certain age, "which is, I'd say, not only postmenopausal, but even older, you're in a category of 'living treasure.'" Still, she has lived and worked and protested through cycles of gains and losses for feminism . These days, she said she has a near obsessive pulse on the news, national and international. She recently presented a paper titled "Will This Time Be Different?" Asked if she had the answer, she said, "I've never been any good at predicting, only at diagnosing. I tend to be a pessimist." Some of her politics, Ms. Rosler said, are rooted in a set of notions that came from her childhood in an Orthodox family in Brooklyn in the 1950s, and her yeshiva education. "I wasn't happy," she said, noting restrictive gender norms. But: "I came to this realization very late, and there's no question my sense of justice came from my religious background," she said. "If you think about Judaism, this is a really central component. It has to do with just behavior and a certain kind of righteousness and communitarianism." She began making s ome of her best known pieces, photomontages, after graduating from Brooklyn College. She cut out images from magazines, including lingerie ads in The New York Times Magazine. "It really struck me as a young person that this was a very serious publication," she said. "Why were all the big colorful ads of women in lingerie appearing as though they were preteens? It was the infantilization of women and the endless sexualization of women." She collaged them and developed a series, which was later called "Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain." Many featured women's body parts, chopped and isolated and rearranged, along with domestic products: a woman's buttocks on a wastebasket, or her torso on the metallic front of a stove. Truncated and strange, these pieces manage to feel both satirical and violent. She used the technique again in a 1970s series called "House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home," in which she pieced together interiors and photojournalism from Vietnam, mostly from Life Magazine. "I first saw some of these works in underground or left wing publications in the '70s," said the art historian Rosalyn Deutsche, a professor at Barnard and Columbia. "They're very representative of her work because they're socially concerned, but they're dealing with social issues not just in an illustrative way. They're using techniques that ask viewers to think, and they undermined the messages of the media." Professor Deutsche said Ms. Rosler was a pioneer in addressing representation from a feminist and antiwar perspective. Ms. Rosler returned to photomontages again in 2004 and in 2008 to protest the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Jewish Museum exhibition will also feature two recent political pieces. One is "Point n' Shoot," in which the text of a quote from Donald J. Trump made during the 2016 Republican primaries is emblazoned over a screenshot of Trump. (It reads, in part: "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters, O.K.?") Photoshopped into the background are the names of people of color who have been killed by the police in recent years. "Martha has been steadfast, really since the 1960s, she has remained dedicated to engaging in critique through her art," Ms. Deutsche said, adding, "I think that steadfastness, that fact that she's endured, is something that we have to hold onto in the present moment."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
As a songwriter, SZA is known for her acute self awareness she writes about the mechanics of desire and insecurity with such a penetrating gaze, her music can feel almost indecent to listen to. But that extraordinary instinct for self examination can cause complications, too. The R B singer, born Solana Rowe, second guessed her debut album so thoroughly that it was delayed for a year. The head of her record label says that self doubt is her "kryptonite." In a rehearsal space on the edge of Manhattan in December, where the Los Angeles based artist was practicing for a performance on "Saturday Night Live," her kryptonite announced itself. She recalled the stinging experience of working on her album "Ctrl," released last summer. "My anxiety had been telling me the whole time that it sucked," said the singer, 27, soft spoken and unreserved in a fluorescent lit office. In an oversized woolly sweater, with one foot in a chunky Balenciaga sneaker slung reflexively over the top of a wooden desk, she could still enumerate the record's flaws. But the opposite happened. "Ctrl" emerged as one of the year's most critically acclaimed albums and became a talisman for young women, particularly young women of color, who saw themselves in its unflinching parables of sexual liberation and emotional liability. At the 60th annual Grammy Awards on Sunday night, she is the most nominated woman, with five nods, including best new artist. After last year's ceremony, where Beyonce's best album faced defeat and Frank Ocean's abstention prompted sharp criticism and sparked the GrammysSoWhite hashtag, SZA is at the forefront of a wave of ethnically diverse young artists (including the 19 year old singer Khalid and Donald Glover's hip hop adjacent alter ego Childish Gambino) who swept nominations in many of the top categories this year. All the accolades have left her inner critic bereft. SZA said the experience of persistent self suspicion colliding with overwhelming external praise had so unmoored her that she came up with a name for the condition: "dysmorphia." "You wonder, 'Are you delusional? Is something wrong with you?' " she said. "I never imagined anything like this would happen in a million years." Part of her still can't. "I guess I'll have to re evaluate my life," she said, asked what she'll do if she ends up winning a Grammy. A compliment, for her, has become a kind of crisis, too. "Because then the dysmorphia would really be hitting a peak." In an industry where the youngest stars radiate the most heat, SZA was a relatively late bloomer. She self released her first EP at 22 and came to music as a refuge from jobs as a bartender and a sales assistant on the floor at Sephora. She was born to a Catholic communications executive mother and a Muslim television producer father in St. Louis. The family moved to suburban Maplewood, N.J., when she was 10. As a child, her life was circumscribed by gymnastics practice and Islamic prep school, realms where discipline and accountability were sacrosanct. Music was freeing, low pressure. "I was just kind of stumbling through it, very novice," she said of the first songs she wrote at the urging of her brother, a rapper. "It was music made in a closet with beats stolen off the internet." In 2011, SZA was working part time for a streetwear company in New York when she met the president of Top Dawg Entertainment, Terrence Henderson, known as Punch. He was in town for a concert headlined by the label's star artist, Kendrick Lamar, which happened to be sponsored by her employer. Mr. Henderson heard SZA's music a friend took the initiative and played it for him, to the singer's horror and didn't bite at first. But he kept in touch and ended up signing her three years later. The two EPs SZA released on her own in the interim "See.SZA.Run" (2012) and "S" (2013) were early salvos in a revolution in R B. They shared as much DNA with hip hop, Bjork and left of center electronic music of artists like Toro y Moi and Purity Ring, as they did with Brandy or Jill Scott, inspiring comparisons to contemporary iconoclasts like the Weeknd and Frank Ocean. Her lyrics at the time were a world away from the open diary of "Ctrl." Songs like "Time Travel Undone" and "Aftermath" were saturated in oblique imagery and abstract symbolism. And, as if to complete the obfuscation, her vocals were submerged in reverb and atmospherics, giving them a disembodied quality. When critics accused her of mistaking style for substance, she took it to heart. "People would say expletive like 'I don't know who she is, I don't know what she's talking about, this is boring,' " SZA said. "And I realized that I was bored with myself. I was just feeling and emoting with no structure and no intent." On "Ctrl," her objectives were transparency and humanity. She wanted to exhibit a red blooded mind and body at work, to give voice to everything that she had once concealed. On "Supermodel," the album's opening track, she jabs an absent beau with spiteful taunts ("You was a temporary lover") before turning the knife on herself ("Why am I so easy to forget?"). On the single "Drew Barrymore," a confession of putative sins ("I'm sorry I'm not more ladylike, I'm sorry I don't shave my legs at night") becomes a defiant rallying cry. The writer and producer Issa Rae, who used multiple songs from "Ctrl" in Season 2 of her HBO series "Insecure," said it was SZA's sharp turn toward candor that made her take notice. "It felt like ours," Ms. Rae said of the album. "She was talking about experiences that I could relate to, and that the women that I know can relate to, and that was just such a pleasant surprise." SZA said "Ctrl" was inspired in part by stereotypes about overbold black women and her desire to reclaim them in her personal life. It's a theme she had previewed before, in songs that ended up on projects by Nicki Minaj and Beyonce ("Feeling Myself," 2014) and Rihanna ("Consideration," 2016). "I don't feel ashamed to be loud, which is an argument I've had with lots of men, who thought I was too sassy and unladylike," she said. "A lot of black women get that rap, 'You're loud, and unsavory, or crass or abrasive.' But I feel like that expletive is beautiful as hell." Mr. Henderson said that SZA's most passionate admirers are often the most vulnerable. "A lot of what she says is what people think but can't articulate," he said. The outpouring has shifted the artist's estimation of her work. If "dysmorphia" is a distortion of perspective, the treatment may simply be recognizing that the distortion is there, and surrounding yourself with reliable witnesses. Recently, they've given her inner critic some competition. "It's like God is slapping you in the face," SZA said of the response to "Ctrl." Then she translated what God had to say: "There's something happening and you need to be grateful and you need to be present. I'm sorry that you're scared, but this is your job.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Lisa Vanderpump doesn't merely walk. She strides, almost gallops. She did so one afternoon through the lobby of the Plaza Hotel in Midtown Manhattan (staying there is like having "a bedroom off of Bergdorf," she said), as if she owned the joint, balanced on her vertiginous Gucci stilettos, carrying a purple Chanel bag in one arm and cradling a fluffy if lethargic rescue Pomeranian named Puffy in the other. A public relations wrangler attempted to guide her to a table at the Palm Court, the opulent tea parlor within the hotel, but Ms. Vanderpump, a reality television star, pushed ahead, confidently, toward a banquette in a far corner. With her lustrous mane the color of dark roasted coffee, her glinting blue eyes, her hip hugging Victoria Beckham pencil skirt and her floral Dolce Gabbana pussy bow blouse, she was a queenly sight to behold. The whole room turned to gaze at her, as if on cue, but it didn't appear to bother her. After all, she is used to being watched. She laughed before pausing and dropping her voice to a whisper. "Then, I got it. Everywhere you go people stare at you and are very aware of you being on the show," she said. "You start to choose your vacation based on where the show wasn't aired. You start to live your life differently." The show, of course, is Bravo's hit reality series "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills," now in its eighth season, which chronicles the boozing and brawling among a group of privileged female frenemies in the luxurious Los Angeles enclave. It has helped transform Ms. Vanderpump from glamorous restaurateur into an avatar of the city's obsession with wealth, good looks and success. She is also the producer of the popular spinoff "Vanderpump Rules." That show focuses on the mudslinging between the hard drinking staff at her restaurant SUR, which she owns with her husband, Ken Todd. Ms. Vanderpump, however, made it clear that she's not complaining. She not only embraces her peculiar form of fame, she also capitalizes on it. Ms. Vanderpump uses her celebrity to promote her restaurants (she is also an owner of Villa Blanca); the magazine Beverly Hills Lifestyle, of which she is editor; and most recently Vanderpump Rose, a libation that matches her feminine and bubbly worldview. It's a fitting tie in. During one recent season, her tag line during the show's title sequence was "Life isn't all diamonds and rose. But it should be." She also uses her platform to champion causes important to her, like gay and lesbian equality, AIDS awareness and animal rights (she has seven dogs, two miniature ponies and eight swans). Last year she opened Vanderpump Dogs in Los Angeles, a rescue and shelter tricked out with luxurious trappings like velvet sofas and chandeliers. Ms. Vanderpump ordered tea at the Plaza, but on the show she's best known for spilling it, aided by her quick wit and way with a bon mot. Upon seeing the hotel had yet to take down its Christmas trees a week into January, for example, she said, "I liken Christmas decorations being up too long to watching a porno after an orgasm. It's just not the same." She has honed a television persona charismatic enough to demand ample screen time without resorting to confrontational theatrics. "I've been accused of being cold or removed, but I think that's because I wasn't as volatile or I don't have a knee jerk reaction," she said, her hands glistening with jewels and her lips glossy and pink like a glazed French confection. She remembers the first time she watched two co stars verbally spar during filming. "I sat there and thought, I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like this in my life," she said. "After we stopped filming, I went to the elevator and thought, Oh God, I don't think I can do this. I phoned my husband and said, 'That was bizarre.'" She paused and added: "But that was eight years ago." Since then, she has found herself at the center of plenty of arguments, broadcast for public consumption. And she hasn't made it out unscathed, either. At times she has been portrayed by her co stars as outwardly warm but secretly Machiavellian. When a reporter suggested that maybe they're jealous of her position as the show's de facto star, she was too savvy to take the bait, perhaps proving her co stars' point. "Anybody who says it's jealousy is stupid because you're setting yourself up for failure," she said. "The next statement is, 'What have you got to be jealous of,' right?" "They don't have to produce us," she said, leaving a platter of crustless sandwiches untouched, adhering to the unspoken "Real Housewives" rule that one should eat out often but not be seen actually eating. Ms. Vanderpump noted that her dual role doesn't mean she has any control over how she is portrayed on "Real Housewives." "I have been told that I am one of the only Housewives to never have asked to have anything edited out," she said, proudly. "But I have asked for things to be kept in." The afternoon had dissolved into early evening, and Ms. Vanderpump needed to ready herself for her appearance on "Watch What Happens Live." As she left the Palm Court, tourists and patrician patrons alike stopped to tell her how much they love her. She handled it with the diplomacy and efficiency of an experienced politician. With the gap between reality TV and politics forever closed, Ms. Vanderpump even teased a run for office, possibly as governor of California. "Could you imagine me? I'd love it," she said, laughing. However, she did have one concern. "Would I be a governess? Because I'm British, and that's like an old nanny."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
The Names and Faces of the Incoming Class of 2015 Small is big for 2015, at least in the auto industry, where companies will be flooding dealerships with the car based compact utility vehicles known as crossovers. Of course, the new model year brings changes for vehicles of all types and sizes. Both General Motors and Ford are freshening some of their biggest trucks, and a redesigned Mustang heads the list of sporty cars. These are among the new names and faces for 2015: ACURA TLX While competitors' lineups balloon, Acura is condensing its compact TSX and midsize TL into a single sedan that aligns better with the established industry segments. ALFA ROMEO 4C The 55,195 4C is a bargain bin Ferrari. Carbon fiber construction keeps weight low enough that a 237 horsepower 4 cylinder slings the midengine sliver to 60 m.p.h. in a scant 4.3 seconds. AUDI A3, S3 After eight years of pushing A3 hatchbacks, Audi has made the latest model a proper sedan for the American market. The 292 horsepower S3 will appeal to fans of effortless, refined speed. AUDI Q3 Audi aimed its shrink ray at the Q5 and borrowed the A3's mechanicals, establishing a new entry level crossover. BMW 4 SERIES GRAN COUPE The sixth body style for the BMW 3 and 4 Series lines is perhaps the oddest. In profile, the Gran Coupe mimics a sedan, but a roof hinged hatch replaces the usual trunk lid. BMW X4 The X4 is to the X3 as the X6 is to the X5. In other words, this small S.U.V.'s steeply raked roof cuts rear headroom and cargo space in order to look different. CADILLAC ATS COUPE The smallest Cadillac takes over two door duties from the CTS coupe, which ends production before 2016. CADILLAC ESCALADE Critical measures for Cadillac's rolling status symbol: seats up to eight, tows up to 8,300 pounds and rides on wheels as large as 22 inches. CHEVROLET COLORADO, GMC CANYON Once left for dead, the midsize truck segment is revived with modern engines and technologies lifted from full size pickups. CHEVROLET SILVERADO HD AND GMC SIERRA HD Updated interiors and new sheet metal stampings imitate last year's redesign of the Silverado 1500 and Sierra 1500. CHEVROLET TAHOE AND SUBURBAN, GMC YUKON AND YUKON XL G.M.'s big body on frame utility vehicles are all new, doubling down on cavernous interiors and prodigious hauling capability with body sides as straight and bold as ever. CHEVROLET CORVETTE Z06 America's supercar returns with a 650 horsepower supercharged V8, and for the first time is available as a convertible and with an automatic transmission. CHEVROLET TRAX An encore to the Encore, this reskinned Chevrolet version of Buick's subcompact crossover uses the same hardware, including a 1.4 liter turbo 4 cylinder. CHRYSLER 200 Worthy of a Most Improved award, the midsize sedan goes from worst in class to something substantially better. FERRARI CALIFORNIA T It's not the first turbocharged Ferrari, but the California T is a turning point for both the Italian marque and for exotics in general. Expect to see more boosted engines in high end cars as even the most exclusive automakers try to meet elevated fuel economy standards. FORD EDGE This midsize two row crossover undergoes an attractive restyling. In Sport trim, a turbocharged 2.7 liter V6 replaces the 3.7 liter V6. FORD EXPEDITION, LINCOLN NAVIGATOR Subbing a 3.5 liter twin turbo V6 for a V8 is a nod to modern realities, but these huge S.U.V.s look like relics from another era. FORD F 150 America's best selling vehicle could revolutionize the truck business with an aluminum cab and bed over a steel frame. Ford says the truck is 750 pounds lighter, so it now comes with engines as small as a 2.7 liter turbo V6. FORD MUSTANG As Ford takes its American pony car global, the Mustang gets an independent rear suspension and a turbocharged 4 cylinder. While the former tames the ride, the latter won't dethrone the rowdy 5 liter V8 anytime soon. FORD TRANSIT Big brother to the Transit Connect, this van brings European sensibilities to American work fleets as it replaces the tired, overworked E Series. HONDA FIT The Fit has delivered class leading dynamics and exceptional value since its 2008 arrival, and the latest version does not disappoint. HONDA HR V The HR V has the same clever interior packaging as the Fit it is based on. Specifically, placing the fuel tank under the front seats allows the rear seats to fold lower and flatter than competitors'. HYUNDAI GENESIS The second edition of this upscale sedan reads like a different story. With an assist from Lotus Engineering, engineers mastered the car's chassis dynamics. It's not as overtly sporty as some in its class, but the Genesis can skim over a pothole as effortlessly as any Lexus. HYUNDAI SONATA After scoring a breakout hit with its 2011 Sonata, Hyundai has toned down the styling and power of the new version to pursue a more refined experience. HYUNDAI TUCSON FUEL CELL Hyundai will buck the trend of using battery electric vehicles to meet California's zero emission vehicle mandate, instead leasing a hydrogen fueled electric drive S.U.V. to beta testers in Southern California for 2,999 down and 499 a month. JEEP RENEGADE The designers and marketers have drawn a clear connection to the epitomic Wrangler, but the true test of Jeep's smallest S.U.V. will be whether the engineers erased all ties to the unwieldy Fiat 500L that the Renegade is based on. KIA K900 Kia may have bucked its dollar store reputation, but that doesn't make this 60,400 sedan any less of a stretch. The structure and suspension need more starch, and the sales pace has been glacial. KIA SEDONA After a brief hiatus, the Sedona returns with a new look that's as close as any minivan comes to stylish. A "First Class" seating option equips the second row seats with recliner style legrests. The Lexus NX 200t enters the booming market for upscale compact crossovers. KIA SOUL EV This electric conversion with 93 miles of range will initially be sold only in California. At 27 kilowatt hours, its battery is the second largest among E.V.s, after the Tesla Model S. LAMBORGHINI HURACaN LP610 4 The Huracan replaces the Gallardo as Lambo's junior sports car, though there's nothing small about its 602 horse V10 engine. LEXUS NX 200T, NX 300H Slotted below the popular RX, the NX enters the hotly contested small crossover class with turbocharged or hybridized 4 cylinder engines. LEXUS RC 350, RC F Desperate to shake its sedate reputation, Lexus has turned to a pair of sporty coupes. The RC F turns up the heat with a 460 horse 5 liter V8. LINCOLN MKC It's still assembled from a parts bin shared with Ford, but the MKC is the first Lincoln in a long time to exude a style and feel all its own. MCLAREN 650S This restyled and renamed McLaren 12C brings 25 additional horsepower for a total of 641. TOYOTA CAMRY The powertrains largely carry over, but America's favorite sedan gets a radical cosmetic facelift and subtle tweaks to the suspension and steering. VOLKSWAGEN GOLF, GTI The seventh generation Golf is still an upscale outpost among economy cars; the GTI remains the quintessential hot hatch. VOLVO S60, V60 The first big news since Geely took over in 2010 is a new 4 cylinder engine line, including a 302 horse unit that is turbocharged and supercharged.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
COSTA MESA, Calif. The virtues of "Whipped Cream," American Ballet Theater's new two act creation, are many and important though it's bizarre to speak of "importance" in a piece about a sweetshop coming to life. Alexei Ratmansky, resident artist with the troupe since 2009, is the choreographer: The world premiere occurred on Wednesday here at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts. The score is Richard Strauss's "Schlagobers" (1924) surely until now the most generally forgotten ballet music by a major composer. There's so much to say that one could almost overlook the way that Wednesday's performance gave David Hallberg, the American star dancer long absent with injury, his first ballet appearance in the Northern Hemisphere since July 2014. As Prince Coffee, he looked as if he'd never been away: jumping, turning and partnering with ease, an effortless source of singing line. His first appearance was applauded, as were his later appearances. But "Whipped Cream" is not a Hallberg vehicle, and waves of applause, reasonably, greeted much else throughout the evening. The story of "Whipped Cream," closely following Strauss's scenario, concerns a Boy (Daniil Simkin on Wednesday) who, having overindulged at a confectioner's shop, falls ill and is carried away on a stretcher. At night, the shop's sweets come to life. There are quartets of marzipan, sugar plums and gingerbread men; Princess Tea Flower (Stella Abrera), Prince Coffee (Mr. Hallberg) and Prince Cocoa (Joseph Gorak) are luminaries; Act I ends with a new scene for the dancing Whipped Cream of the title, a corps de ballet of 16 women. Act II grows more surreal: The Boy is in the hospital; his doctor takes to alcohol. The liquor bottles come to life comically. But in a festive finale the Boy joins the bonbons, becoming the consort to Princess Praline (Sarah Lane) in her domain. Their fantasy world becomes the ballet's new reality. The subject matter, therefore, is kitsch, not because it's fantasy but in the word's original sense of mass produced popular art, culture marketed for shopping. And yet this production is a triumph of stylishness. Sets (several in each act) and costumes by Mark Ryden are fantastic in color, line and detail. Ultrasweet kiddie type cuteness is constantly invoked there are giant toys, a carriage horse played by two dancers, and cupcake children but so much careful affection is evident that kitsch is both triumphant and transcended. This narrative about a child protagonist amid dancing confectionery raises the question of whether "Whipped Cream" will be widely likened to "The Nutcracker." But before 1934, that Tchaikovsky ballet was scarcely known in the West. Strauss, who composed his score and scenario in 1921 22, is more likely to have taken the idea from Diaghilev's smash hit 1919 ballet, "La Boutique Fantasque," about a toy shop come to life, choreographed by Leonide Massine. (In the surreal final scene, the dolls take over and join the shopkeeper in throwing out the foreign tourists who purchased them in the opening scene.) Strauss was also celebrating his beloved Vienna and its pastry shop tradition. The ballet's peculiar layerings the poetry of sweets, the surrealism of fantasy subverting reality grow from his vision. His score, conducted on Wednesday by Ormsby Wilkins with terrific color and swing, was sensuously played by the Pacific Symphony. Especially in Mr. Ratmansky's dances, abundant marvels of style keep turning the light story into poetry. Although Ballet Theater has presented many new Ratmansky productions since 2009, this one goes furthest in making the company look more brilliantly refined than ever. Though there are exciting steps here, all of them come in intricate, dense phrases. The upper body continually complements the lower body; torsos tip, twist and fold; wrists circle and flourish; angles of the head and eyes are a constant pleasure. Not all Strauss's dances have easy dance meters, but Mr. Ratmansky invests some of the trickiest sequences with a rhythmic structure that feels inevitable. Will we ever come to the end of Mr. Ratmansky's fascinating self contradictions? In his 2013 "Shostakovich Trilogy" and his 2016 "Symposium After Plato's Symposium" (both for Ballet Theater), he took ballet to new kinds of expressive seriousness. And yet "Namouna: A Grand Divertissement" (2010, New York City Ballet) and now "Whipped Cream" show his tender appetite for frivolity, for the inconsequential, but above all for high style that turns frothy nonsense into inspired enchantment. There's also much to admire in Mr. Ryden's designs, which on Wednesday prompted applause throughout the evening. The sweetshop is a memorable marvel in the packed fun of its details, but then the world onstage changes into an astonishing mountainous whipped cream landscape, with 12 of the corps dancers (dressed with all the peaks and froth of beaten egg whites) making their first entrance down a slide. Act II travels from the nightmare darkness of the hospital there are 12 cartoonlike nurses with syringes as big as their arms and a doctor with a fabulously outsize head to the jubilant urban square of Praline's principality. The tiny pendants on Tea Flower's tutu and the gorgeous chocolate doublet, hose, boots and cloak of Cocoa's attire are among the my favorite marvels here. Ballet Theater is fielding multiple casts for the four leading roles this week; and further interpreters (including Misty Copeland and Marcelo Gomes) will perform when the company dances this work in May and June in New York. As the Boy, Mr. Simkins finds a perfect vehicle for his winsome facility; his high energy and nervous tension carry the ballet. Likewise Ms. Lane's noble prettiness has never looked subtler or more endearing. Mr. Ratmansky gives them virtuoso challenges that delight and excite without falling into bravura cliche, as he does Ms. Abrera (merrily polished) and Mr. Hallberg, who have the chief dance honors in Act I. My only cavil is that Mr. Hallberg has retained his worst mannerisms, of letting his mouth hang open (it looks foolish) and attempting an array of charming facial expressions. Even apart from the temptations of multiple casts ahead, it's evident that the ballet's cornucopia of invention can only be skimmed on a first viewing. It will be fun to see at later performances whether so much deliberate sweetness cloys or ravishes or both.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman, the top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council, told House impeachment investigators on Tuesday that the White House stymied his efforts to ensure that a transcript of a July call between President Trump and Ukraine's president did not omit crucial details. Some conservatives, including the Fox News host Laura Ingraham, cast aspersions on Colonel Vindman's loyalties because he emigrated from Ukraine as young child. " Imitating Trump What do you mean, he's an immigrant? I didn't know those came in white. You know what? He must be it must be some sort of Man lania." STEPHEN COLBERT "He says he reported it out of a 'sense of duty' to the country. To which Trump said, 'a sense of what to the who?'" JAMES CORDEN "He has a Purple Heart and he has a Harvard degree or as Trump put it, 'Psh, who are you going to believe: him or me?'" JIMMY FALLON "But what does he know? He's just a decorated war veteran. He's never even bankrupted a casino." JAMES CORDEN "So of course the first question for these Republicans is 'How do we destroy this man?' The patriots over at Fox News found it very suspicious that our top Ukraine expert is from Ukraine. And it is suspicious when you learn someone in the Trump administration has actual expertise in his field." JIMMY KIMMEL "Now, mind you, uh, he was 3 years old when he came to the U.S., so he didn't move here he was moved here by his parents. Right? Because now they're making it seem like he was like a double agent for Ukraine. Like, what kind of baby spy thriller were you watching?" TREVOR NOAH "Hey, Laura Ingraham, you're attacking a decorated veteran to protect Donald Trump. Who do you think you are, Donald Trump? And by the way, yes, Colonel Vindman emigrated from Ukraine when he was 3. Nobody even remembers where they were when they were 3, with the possible exception of you. I'm sure when you were 3 you were already at Saks Fifth Avenue making a salesperson cry." SETH MEYERS "And hey, do you really think it's smart to attack veterans on Fox News? Veterans make up a pretty good chunk of your audience. I think it goes veterans, people visiting their elderly relatives, and rage aholic golfers age 73 and up." SETH MEYERS "Somehow the Ukrainians managed to indoctrinate a toddler to use our potties and do their bidding to one day bring down the president of the United States." JIMMY KIMMEL "The president and first lady were handing out candy. What kind of music do you play when you have a bunch of little kids coming over? That's right Michael Jackson. I guess maybe they don't get HBO at the White House." JIMMY KIMMEL "As you can see, Trump is dressed in the same unconvincing president costume he's had on since 2016." JAMES CORDEN "And the kids were super excited, until they got the bill." SETH MEYERS "It's true yesterday, kids trick or treated at the White House. Yeah, Trump only gave the kids candy if they promised to investigate Joe Biden." CONAN O'BRIEN "Some of them were disappointed and asked, 'What happened to that nice family that used to live here?'" CONAN O'BRIEN "Melania handed out candy, while Trump took it back. As Trump 'Sorry, kid, executive privilege.'" SETH MEYERS "What a spooky experience for those children. 'It's that big creepy house on the end of the block. They say the old man who lives there wears hair made from dead people." STEPHEN COLBERT "But the kids got candy, songs, the rare opportunity to see Rudy Giuliani bite the head off a pigeon." JIMMY KIMMEL The "Tonight Show" guest Reese Witherspoon joined Fallon in a game of "Can You Feel It?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Betty Dodson, a feminist sexologist and evangelist of self pleasure who taught generations of women how to masturbate in workshops, books and videos, seeing the do it yourself climax as a liberating social force, died on Saturday at a nursing home in New York City. She was 91. The cause was cirrhosis of the liver, said Carlin Ross, her business partner. Ms. Dodson was a second wave feminist making erotic art when she began hosting consciousness raising groups but with a twist in her Manhattan apartment. The method involved a genital show and tell, so that women could see that vulvas came in all shapes, sizes and colors; this was followed by clitoral attention with a vibrator. As she refined her teaching, she realized that she had found her calling. "This masturbation business," as she liked to say, was a kind of social justice work. If women could learn to pleasure themselves properly, she reasoned, they could end their sexual dependence on men, which would make everybody happy. "The most consistent sex will be the love affair you have with yourself," she wrote in "Sex for One" a quasi memoir and how to guide that began as a short primer in Ms. Magazine and that has been translated into 25 languages since Random House first published it in 1987. "Masturbation will get you through childhood, puberty, romance, marriage and divorce, and it will see you through old age." Gloria Steinem, a co founder of Ms. Magazine, wrote in an email: "Betty Dodson was a brave and daring advocate for women's right to sexual knowledge and pleasure. Her workshops turned women on to the beauty of our own bodies, and her outrageous honesty allowed more women to speak our truths." It was Ms. Dodson's experience with orgies group sex, in the parlance of the day that brought home to her the fact that even in such a free spirited setting, women were performing their orgasms and didn't seem to have a clue about how to get there on their own. Also, she said, the women always ended up in the bedroom examining her collection of vibrators while the men talked shop stocks and sports, mostly in the living room. "Organized group sex is a little bowling league kind of thing," she told Enid Nemy of The New York Times in 1971. "It's super compulsive there's a frantic quality to it. It's weird." Ms. Dodson enraged some second wave feminists, who conflated her work with pornography, a bugbear for that generation. (Her slide show of vulvas at a National Organization for Women conference was particularly controversial, though a vibrator demonstration was quite popular, and she sold out the box of devices she'd brought with her.) But later generations have been inspired by her sex positive teachings, and the internet continues to buoy her fame and promote her mantra: "Better orgasms, better world." Carol Queen, a sex educator and activist, recalled meeting Ms. Dodson in the late 1980s as part of her doctoral work in sexology at the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco and being captivated. (Ms. Dodson would receive an honorary doctorate from the institute.) "Once she was on this path, she absolutely embraced it," Dr. Queen wrote in an email. "She found it important, she saw it was important to others, and that was it she basically never stopped. Women flocked to her workshops, and some stayed around to develop their own styles of teaching, or activist work, or went back to school so they could be therapists or midwives or whatever style of work that would let them be themselves and make a difference. I'm not sure there's anyone I know of in the sexuality activists of my generation who wasn't inspired (and in many cases egged on) by Betty." Annie Sprinkle, the 1970s porn star and prostitute turned sex educator, was also a Dodson acolyte. "To teach sex in such an explicit hands on way requires enormous courage, experience and conviction," Ms. Sprinkle said in a phone interview. "Betty had it all. She popularized the clitoris and clitoral orgasms and gave the clitoris celebrity status." Last year, at age 90, Ms. Dodson famously made the actress and entrepreneur Gwyneth Paltrow blush when Ms. Dodson appeared gruff voiced in her signature pixie cut and clad in a denim jacket emblazoned with patches ("Come Together," read one) on an episode of Goop Lab, Ms. Paltrow's six part Netflix series. She was there to explain her method and her workshops, now in their 50th year and taught not just by Ms. Dodson but by bodysex leaders, as they are known, all over the world. What happens in a workshop? Ms. Paltrow asked Ms. Dodson. "Everyone gets off," Ms. Dodson replied. It was a remarkably moving and educational episode, which surprised many viewers, since Ms. Paltrow has promoted practices vaginal steaming, for one that have irritated sex educators, feminists and doctors. There was a lesson in female anatomy (the vagina and the vulva are different things, Ms. Dodson told Ms. Paltrow), a photo montage of vulvas and a finale that showed Ms. Dodson helping Ms. Ross, her business partner, achieve a climax. Netflix declined to say how big the episode's viewership was, but a spokesperson for Goop said that anecdotally it was the most popular episode in the series. Shown in a Manhattan movie theater last December, the episode received a standing ovation. Betty Anne Dodson she was proud that her initials spelled BAD was born in Wichita, Kan., on Aug. 24, 1929. Her mother, Bess (Crowe) Dodson, worked in a dress shop; her father, Frank Dodson, was a sign painter and an alcoholic. She had three brothers, Rowan, Billy and Dickie, and leaves no immediate survivors. Ms. Dodson said that she and her brothers played as equals when they were children, which not only developed her muscles but "added to my sense of entitlement as I got older," she wrote in "Sex by Design: The Betty Dodson Story" (2010), her second memoir. When she was in the ninth grade, she recalled, a family friend and drinking buddy of her father's shoved his hand into her pants when she had asked to drive his car. She kept silent, she wrote, because she felt complicit in what she experienced as a transaction. But when the same man groped the breasts of her best friend in her kitchen, she threatened him with a knife. "You'd better get out of here before I shove this knife in your stomach," she said she had told him. In 1950, at age 20, Ms. Dodson moved to New York City to become an artist, supporting herself as a freelance illustrator of lingerie ads and studying at the Art Students League of New York. She married an advertising executive, but they were sexually mismatched, she said, and her unhappiness and shame about it accelerated her drinking. After they divorced amicably, she got sober, and it was in a meeting for alcoholics that she met a man who would teach her about self pleasure. They maintained a sexual relationship until his death in 2008. (Ms. Dodson was essentially agnostic about the gender of her partners, describing herself as a "heterosexual bisexual lesbian.") Her art career floundered in the 1960s and '70s a representational artist of erotica was out of step with the art world's appetites at the time. But the workshops were taking off. Vibrators were the key to her method. Her first devices were the so called scalp massagers of the day, but they got too hot workshop attendees had to hold them with pot holders and vibrated too powerfully. Once she found her go to, the Hitachi Magic Wand which she liked because it was easy to hold and dispersed its vibrations she never looked back. She called it the Cadillac of vibrators. In the last decade or so, as the sex toy industry has evolved to produce ever more design forward, feminized devices, the Wand retains a quaint, gawky look. Eager for her imprimatur, manufacturers have regularly sent her products hoping for an endorsement. Ms. Dodson always tried every one, Ms. Ross said, but none was ever up to snuff. A curved wand came close, but its shape caused it to slip at the crucial moment and turn itself off. "I would never represent this product," she told Ms. Ross, and tossed it in her "toy chest," where she kept her collection of rejects. "She could have signed on with any of the companies," Ms. Ross said, "but you couldn't buy her, and you couldn't script her." In a profile that ran last March, just as the country was shutting down in quarantine, Ms. Dodson told Ruth La Ferla of The New York Times, "Partner sex, that's over now. But I wouldn't turn down a good looking guy if he walked in now."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Most choreographers celebrating a 50th anniversary season revisit the past, but when it came time for her turn last fall, Twyla Tharp, with typical daring, created two new dances. This summer, however, she's looking back to a point. "Twyla Tharp and Three Dances," opening at the Joyce Theater on Monday, July 11, features the New York premiere of "Beethoven Opus 130," which showcases the dancer Matthew Dibble Ms. Tharp discovered him in 1995 at the Royal Ballet along with her virtuosic 1980 work "Brahms Paganini." Even more rare is the quartet "Country Dances," from 1976, which highlights her longtime dancer John Selya whom she first spotted at American Ballet Theater in 1989. And Kaitlyn Gilliland, the former New York City Ballet dancer who joined the Tharp group for its 50th anniversary tour, performs in all three works. On a recent afternoon, the choreographer and her dancers gathered at Ms. Tharp's apartment overlooking Central Park to talk about the program it's a jewel and more. Clearly, Ms. Tharp doesn't like to park herself in the past. And as for her legacy? "I hate that word, because it somehow implies that which has passed," she said. "It's only useful if it's useful right now. I'm pulling this stuff out of the attic and seeing if it stands the light of day." These are edited excerpts from the conversation. How did you put this program together? TWYLA THARP There are three pieces, and they have to do with time. "Country Dances": When our hearts were young and gay. The Brahms: When we push our prime. And the Beethoven: When the inevitable became obvious or, should we say, the obvious became inevitable. Kaitlyn is both young and gay of heart, in the prime pushing and dealing with the inevitable. John does young and gay. He makes a face of disbelief. Right, you can tell by looking at him. And Dibble has obvious and inevitable. How difficult is it to perform all three pieces? KAITLYN GILLILAND The dancing is certainly a challenge, but a lot of it is not letting them bleed into each other. In each piece, there is definitely a different flavor and a different energy and a different wisdom. The Beethoven is an emotional work, perhaps about a man at the end of his life looking back and feeling something like resignation. Why did you choose Matt for the lead? THARP Matt chose me. Matt wanted to work, and Matt's capable of working. That's a rare combination. Mr. Selya laughs. You think this is a given here? MATTHEW DIBBLE What's interesting about this piece more than anything for me has been obviously, I'm not at the beginning of my career, I'm at the end of it. I'm looking at this more as an actor discovering something. It's an amalgamation of 20 years of dancing. My relationship with Twyla goes back to when I was 19. It's a long time. What has it been like to put "Country Dances" back together? JOHN SELYA We were up in the country in Hunter Mountain in New York while we were remounting this piece, so that informed a lot of it. Any time I was lost, I could go outside and breathe in the air and go look at the scenery and get some kind of clues or hints of what I should be doing with the dance. SELYA No. We're watching a tape from the '70s, and I'll tell you, it is daunting looking at somebody and trying to decipher what they're doing and why they're doing it and what effect it should have. You're like, what can I bring to this piece? What's my intention? How can I get the piece across without really being a facsimile of it? THARP When we were in Hunter, I was working on a new piece, and I sent them off: "Go work on the old piece in the corner." The point here is that in order to find the old for them, I wanted them first to realize themselves in the current moment. To take the future with them as they're looking at the past. Because the past can be very depressing. And you don't want to be intimidated by the past. Did you bring in anyone to help restage it? THARP In the beginning, we did not. I am always exploring the far future. I'm not always going to be here. So I look at how these pieces go up while keeping myself out of the picture. The style of movement from the '70s is very much an absorbed technique. There's a lot of classical training in it, but it's very much embedded underneath a more naturalistic veneer. We actually performed "Country Dances" at an informal showing and then, when these last weeks of rehearsals started, the former Tharp dancer Shelley Washington came in. Ordinarily, she would have been teaching it from the get go. This work process is certainly not as efficient in a certain kind of sense, but I think makes for a deeper experience. SELYA Yes. We were left on our own for just long enough, then we felt how an audience would react to it and then Shelley came in. She would clearly express what I should not do, and that was so helpful. If you're left on your own as long as we were, bad things creep in. GILLILAND My role in this piece is cast against type, which is really refreshing because I have some experience with inheriting roles that have been done by great dancers. It's given me a little bit more confidence in my ability to inhabit it as me. One of the great things Shelley did once we mounted it was clarifying the essence of the humor or the joy in the piece, which really originates from our relationships. That's something that you can't mimic. We have to find that chemistry.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
The congressional agreement on a 900 billion dose of aid to fuel the slowing economic recovery has probably spared millions of Americans from a winter of poverty and kept the country from falling back into recession. For much of the economy especially people and industries that have been insulated from the worst effects of the pandemic the deal on Sunday may provide a bridge to a vaccine fueled rebound. That is especially likely if the vaccine is quickly and widely distributed, and the swelling number of coronavirus cases doesn't force another round of widespread shutdowns. The injection of money comes months too late for tens of thousands of failed businesses, however, and it may not be enough to sustain unemployed workers until the labor market rebounds. Moreover, it could be the last help from Washington the economy gets anytime soon. The package requires a vote in both houses, and its text was still being finalized on Sunday. But it is expected to include most of the elements that economists have long said were crucial to avoiding further calamity and aiding a recovery. It extends unemployment benefits for millions at risk of losing them, and adds money to their checks to help pay their bills. It revives the Paycheck Protection Program, which kept many small businesses afloat last spring. It continues the eviction moratorium and expanded nutrition benefits that have kept many of the most vulnerable families fed and housed during the crisis, according to a statement on Sunday evening from the Democratic leaders in the House and the Senate. It also provides a new round of direct payments to most Americans. That element was a lower priority for many economists, since many families have maintained their jobs and income through the highly unequal rebound from the shutdowns of the spring. Still, the checks will inject billions of dollars into the economy and will help people who have kept jobs but lost hours or income. But the aid may not be sufficient to propel the economy beyond the kind of grinding rebound that followed recent recessions. Already, there are signs that the crisis is leaving a lasting economic toll: Long term joblessness is rising, racial gaps are widening and more people particularly women are leaving the labor force. The cash payments in the new package up to 600 a person for households and a 300 weekly supplement to unemployment benefits are half the size of what Congress provided last spring. That means they will provide less of an economic jolt, and won't do as much to help replenish the savings of jobless workers getting by on benefits that typically total a few hundred dollars a week. The recovery may also be hurt by what Congress chose not to do. Looming largest is negotiators' inability to reach agreement on hundreds of billions of dollars to patch holes in state and local budgets that have cost 1.3 million jobs since March. Forecasters say the shortfall in revenue makes continuing layoffs likely. "Things are not as bad as they looked in the dark days of March and April, but there still are risks," said Tracy Gordon, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute in Washington. "It takes a while for things going on in the economy to wend their way into state budgets." President elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. and congressional Democrats have characterized the aid package as a down payment to avoid short term economic harm, an effort that should be followed by further aid to ensure a robust recovery. But Republican opposition and rising optimism that vaccine deployment could begin to arrest the pandemic and kick start tourism, live events, indoor dining and other slumping industries early in the new year makes it likely that Congress will have a hard time passing another large aid package. Achieving that goal in Mr. Biden's early days as president could hinge on whether Democrats win two runoff elections in Georgia that will determine control of the Senate. Lawmakers reached quick agreement on the 2.2 trillion CARES Act in March, but they were deadlocked for months on a second round of relief after the Democratic controlled House passed a 3 trillion version in May. The delay took a toll on the recovery, hurting both households and business owners. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. The recovery got off to a fast start when businesses began to reopen in May and June, but it has slowed sharply, and in recent weeks there have been signs that it is going into reverse. Layoffs are rising, retail sales are falling and the surge in virus cases has led many states to reimpose restrictions on business and consumer activity. Data from business owners collected by Alignable, an online network for small businesses, showed steady improvement in their operations over the summer as the economy reopened and then renewed distress since September as aid dried up, virus cases rose and consumers pulled back. "A lot of these businesses that thought they saw the light at the end of the tunnel in June or July are now looking back and realizing it was just a train heading at them," said Eric Groves, Alignable's chief executive. An analysis of 40,000 small businesses tracked by Homebase, which provides scheduling and time tracking software for businesses, shows that nearly half of companies that shut down in March, at the dawn of the pandemic, either did not reopen or reopened but then shut down again. The smallest businesses were the most likely to stay closed or close again, said Jesse Rothstein of the University of California, Berkeley, who is on the team of economists that studied the data. "Small businesses have just been getting by, and now we're entering a precarious phase where many of them cannot expect a full return in revenues for six months at least, depending on when we roll out a vaccine," he said. "'Did we lose in the seventh inning?' is I guess the question we'll find out here." There are reasons for optimism. The economy has proved more resilient than many forecasters expected earlier this year. The unemployment rate fell to 6.7 percent in November from a high of nearly 15 percent in April, and economists, including those at the Fed, have repeatedly raised their economic projections. Many businesses have found new ways to operate; the recent increase in layoffs is far less severe than the job losses in the spring. That resilience is partly a result of earlier rounds of government aid, which proved to have lasting benefits. Household savings swelled in the spring when stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment benefits began appearing in Americans' bank accounts, and while they have since fallen, the typical family's checking account balance in October remained above pre pandemic levels, according to data from the JPMorgan Chase Institute. But the effects have not been evenly spread and even if the latest round of relief helps achieve a full recovery, scars will remain. "I don't think we can reverse the damage," said Michelle Holder, an economist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. "The damage is done." Researchers estimate that millions of families have slipped into poverty during the pandemic. While a new round of government aid could lift many of them back above the poverty line, they say, there will still be lasting effects. "The best case scenario is we look back on this and say, 'Well, an ounce of prevention would have been worth a pound of cure,'" said Elizabeth Ananat, an economist at Barnard College who has studied the effects of the pandemic on low income households. "The more likely scenario," she added, "is that we all spend the next 30 years documenting all the harm that was done because of this."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
This week I had a conversation that left a mark. It was with Mary Louise Kelly and E.J. Dionne on NPR's "All Things Considered," and it was about how past presidents had handled moments of national mourning Lincoln after Gettysburg, Reagan after the Challenger explosion and Obama after the Sandy Hook school shootings. The conversation left me wondering what America's experience of the pandemic would be like if we had a real leader in the White House. If we had a real leader, he would have realized that tragedies like 100,000 Covid 19 deaths touch something deeper than politics: They touch our shared vulnerability and our profound and natural sympathy for one another. In such moments, a real leader steps outside of his political role and reveals himself uncloaked and humbled, as someone who can draw on his own pains and simply be present with others as one sufferer among a common sea of sufferers. If we had a real leader, she would speak of the dead not as a faceless mass but as individual persons, each seen in unique dignity. Such a leader would draw on the common sources of our civilization, the stores of wisdom that bring collective strength in hard times. Lincoln went back to the old biblical cadences to comfort a nation. After the church shooting in Charleston, Barack Obama went to "Amazing Grace," the old abolitionist anthem that has wafted down through the long history of African American suffering and redemption. In his impromptu remarks right after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy recalled the slaying of his own brother and quoted Aeschylus: "In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." If we had a real leader, he would be bracingly honest about how bad things are, like Churchill after the fall of Europe. He would have stored in his upbringing the understanding that hard times are the making of character, a revelation of character and a test of character. He would offer up the reality that to be an American is both a gift and a task. Every generation faces its own apocalypse, and, of course, we will live up to our moment just as our ancestors did theirs. If we had a real leader, she would remind us of our common covenants and our common purposes. America is a diverse country joined more by a common future than by common pasts. In times of hardships real leaders re articulate the purpose of America, why we endure these hardships and what good we will make out of them. After the Challenger explosion, Reagan reminded us that we are a nation of explorers and that the explorations at the frontiers of science would go on, thanks in part to those who "slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God." At Gettysburg, Lincoln crisply described why the fallen had sacrificed their lives to show that a nation "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" can long endure and also to bring about "a new birth of freedom" for all the world. Of course, right now we don't have a real leader. We have Donald Trump, a man who can't fathom empathy or express empathy, who can't laugh or cry, love or be loved a damaged narcissist who is unable to see the true existence of other human beings except insofar as they are good or bad for himself. But it's too easy to offload all blame on Trump. Trump's problem is not only that he's emotionally damaged; it is that he is unlettered. He has no literary, spiritual or historical resources to draw upon in a crisis. All the leaders I have quoted above were educated under a curriculum that put character formation at the absolute center of education. They were trained by people who assumed that life would throw up hard and unexpected tests, and it was the job of a school, as one headmaster put it, to produce young people who would be "acceptable at a dance, invaluable in a shipwreck." Think of the generations of religious and civic missionaries, like Frances Perkins, who flowed out of Mount Holyoke. Think of all the Morehouse Men and Spelman Women. Think of all the young students, in schools everywhere, assigned Plutarch and Thucydides, Isaiah and Frederick Douglass the great lessons from the past on how to lead, endure, triumph or fail. Only the great books stay in the mind for decades and serve as storehouses of wisdom when hard times come. Right now, science and the humanities should be in lock step: science producing vaccines, with the humanities stocking leaders and citizens with the capacities of resilience, care and collaboration until they come. But, instead, the humanities are in crisis at the exact moment history is revealing how vital moral formation really is.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
ROME One sunny day in September, Pierpaolo Piccioli, the creative director of Valentino, was sitting behind a modern light wood desk in the brand's headquarters on the Piazza Mignanelli, the square off the Spanish Steps, when the strains of a Frank Sinatra song drifted in through an open window from an accordion player busking on the cobblestones outside. "I'll do it my way" went the tune as Mr. Piccioli began to discuss that for the first time in 26 years as a member of a design partnership, he would be alone at the head of a house: Last summer, his design partner, Maria Grazia Chiuri, was tapped to become artistic director of Dior, and he was given control over Valentino. Finally, he was getting to do it his way, gearing up for his first solo show on Sunday in Paris. John Williams could not have written a better soundtrack if he had tried. The design divorce of one of the industry's most successful teams who were responsible for catapulting Valentino to billion dollar status caught fashion watchers by surprise, sparking rumors of in house squabbles. There was much hand wringing of the what is Batman without Robin or Sherlock without Watson (or Angelina without Brad) kind. But Mr. Piccioli thinks another breakup comparison is more accurate. "Even if together the Beatles were the Beatles, I don't think they could ever have written 'Imagine,'" he said of the classic song, written when John Lennon was a solo artist. Of his particular separation, Mr. Piccioli said: "It was more like both of us taking our own path, to follow our own direction. Because it was the natural continuation of our journey, there was nothing traumatic about it." It wasn't as if he was itching to be on his own, he said. But "naturally in a moment of success, it is obvious that there are opportunities that can come up, and then you can choose whether to take them or not," he said, an oblique reference to job offers that came his way. "For me it was more important remain in this place: It's where I chose to be," he said. "It's more important to be here, than to be alone." That said, it hasn't been business as usual at Valentino. After Ms. Chiuri's departure in July, Mr. Piccioli shifted gears to move the brand "into something more similar to me." On the surface, the office that he once shared with Ms. Chiuri hasn't changed much. He moved the desks (the two had faced each other), so he now looks onto a fireplace with a striking gold framed 19th century painting of a woman, a vestige of the brand founder Valentino Garavani's occupancy of the office before he sold the company. And there are still many photographs, mostly black and white, of Mr. Piccioli and Ms. Chiuri at various stages of their career. "Some photos remained, others changed, there's no damnatio memoriae," he said with a laugh, referring to the ancient Roman tradition of erasing the memory of a betrayer or traitor. "For me, experimenting is fundamental, always, everything is valid, always," Mr. Piccioli said. "I listen to everyone's points of view, not just those who are designated to have a point of view. Then I decide." That modus operandi was in full force in September during two days of fittings, meetings with department heads over the coming collection, deliberations over seating at the Paris show, which will take place in the Hotel Salomon de Rothschild, and not the usual tent in the Tuileries Garden to mark a new beginning. "It seems to me it's all a bit more fluid, perhaps," he said of working without Ms. Chiuri. When they worked as a team, he said, they discussed decisions ahead of time, "so they were filtered, or at least already shared or elaborated," he said. Now, it's a direct line from Mr. Piccioli to his team. "The exchange is immediate, it's direct." And fast, which is what Mr. Piccioli had to be after he found himself on his own in July with a ready to wear collection to create for Paris, and several others to conceive, including a pre collection that he plans to present via a small fashion show in New York in January. Summer was a blur, he said, a quick vacation with his wife and three children before plunging into a transformation of Valentino. "You know, I started drawing again this summer," he said, acknowledging that after years of working as part of a duo, he had lost sight "of the person who sits down alone to think and draw." He opened a sketchbook to show a series of mannequins, the embryo of what would become the Paris collection. He decided, he said, "that the runway show couldn't be an inspiration too far from me and this first moment of my journey. I didn't want it to be distant, but starting from the idea of metamorphosis." Hence, his desk was piled high with art books about notable Renaissance artists, as well as a tome about the 15th century Venetian editor Aldo Manuzio, and Mr. Piccioli said he had read Ovid's "Metamorphoses" this summer. "I wanted to highlight change as a value," without denying the past, he said. "I think that change is a statement in this moment, but the value is not in the aesthetic change. The value is in evolution." Final fittings of the collection last week with the chiefs of various departments were a constant back and forth of last minute musings. Sitting on a wheeled chair and twisting his legs like a gangly teenager, Mr. Piccioli was generous with praise. "Bello" and "Bellissimo" he enthused as a variety of laces, velvets, tulles and brocades were fashioned into final form. Rumors of ill will with his former partner were unfounded, Mr. Piccioli said. His exchanges with Ms. Chiuri used to be lively, even argumentative, the team agreed, but the discussions fueled their creativity, producing a unique vision out of diversity. "We worked together cultivating differences," Mr. Piccioli said. "That was our strength. We never tried to be similar, but to bring out the various facets that made us diverse. It wasn't the simplest thing in the world, but it made working in two more interesting." Now, the work will necessarily have to be "more intimate, more personal" to his style. Rockstud Spike, the leather bag that came out this summer with Mr. Piccioli's imprint, is a case in point, with an ad campaign by the photographer Terry Richardson responsible for the last few Valentino accessories campaigns and inspired by Brandon Stanton's "Humans of New York" blog. Models were chosen off the streets in July. "There was the value of real individuality," Mr. Piccioli said. Mr. Piccioli made the videos for the campaign, a nascent foray into a genre he intends to pursue in the future, eventually making the videos for the company's digital communications strategy. For now, he is curating the content of the company's online presence, which includes a revamped website, to go online Sunday. That said, Mr. Piccioli said he did not have any social media accounts, instead using his 19 year old daughter's when he wanted to "give it a go." If Mr. Piccioli was nervous about his debut, it wasn't evident. "I want to arrive in Paris without thinking about how others will react, wondering whether there is a change, or there isn't," he said, acknowledging the growing buzz. "What's important for me is to preserve an aesthetic that I have always liked, a certain taste that was formed by a journey, and that will continue because it is tied to me, and also to Valentino and the way in which I interpret Valentino."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
All of those vital signs are within the normal range, said Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious disease physician based in South Carolina. But the numbers represent only a snapshot in time, she added. More telling would be statistics charting the president's vital signs while he was moving around, Dr. Kuppalli said. "When he walks, does his oxygen fall?" she said. "Does his heart rate go up? Does he have to work harder? That would be important to know." If the president recently came off dexamethasone, a steroid normally administered only to severely sick Covid 19 patients, his well being could take a dip in the next couple of days, Dr. Kuppalli said. Dr. Conley's statements on Monday suggested that Mr. Trump might be at risk through Saturday and Sunday. "We're looking to this weekend," he said at a news conference. "If we can get through to Monday, with him remaining the same or improving, better yet then we will all take that final deep sigh of relief." An inappropriately expedited return to the public for Mr. Trump could also imperil others through close contact. According to C.D.C. guidelines, people with mild to moderate cases of Covid 19 most likely "remain infectious no longer than 10 days after symptom onset." Dr. Conley's statement cited Saturday as "day 10 since Thursday's diagnosis." Dr. Tien said she was skeptical of such an assessment. The slew of treatments Mr. Trump received, she said, suggest that his disease was severe, which could extend the duration of his recommended isolation to 20 days after the onset of symptoms. Mr. Trump might be able to end his isolation early if he tested negative for the virus, using a very accurate laboratory test, Dr. Tien said. But no such results were reported in Thursday's memo, which mentioned only a "trajectory of advanced diagnostics."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Think of it as the flight to safety every investor would like a seat on. The only problem? Nothing is taking off. Investors are seeking alternatives to United States Treasury bonds as worries escalate that lawmakers will fail to reach an agreement to rein in the deficit and raise the federal debt limit in the coming days. Some have shifted funds into corporate bonds, others are forgetting about yields entirely and parking their money in cash, and more are looking to those classic safe havens of yore, gold and the Swiss franc. Investors are getting leery of stocks, however. Shares dropped on Wednesday amid growing worry about the deadlock in Washington and the economic outlook for the country. The broader market as measured by the Standard Poor's 500 stock index closed 2.03 percent lower, or 27.05 points, to 1,304.89. The Dow Jones industrial average was down 198.75 points, or 1.59 percent, to 12,302.55, its fourth straight decline. Still, Treasury bond prices remained firm on Wednesday, with the benchmark 10 year bond rising two basis points to 2.98 percent. That shows demand is still healthy for the roughly 10 trillion of United States government debt circulating in the global financial system. Investors are concerned that a downgrade of United States government debt by the rating agencies, or even the more remote possibility of a default, would erode the value of Treasury securities, which have long been considered virtually risk free. The trouble is that in the end, safety is hard to find. "Where are you going to go?" asked Carl Kaufman, who helps manage just under 2 billion at the Osterweis Strategic Income fund in San Francisco. Mr. Kaufman said he was loading up on high yield bonds, like those issued by HCA, the hospital operator, and Dollar General, the retailer. Other institutional investors are looking to faster growing emerging markets. Daniel Arbess, manager of the 3 billion Xerion fund at Perella Weinberg Partners in New York, is investing in companies that are benefiting from strong growth overseas, especially in countries like China and other Asian markets. Another strategy he favors is investing in natural resources and precious metals like gold that will preserve their worth even if paper currencies decline in value. "These are our safe havens, not U.S. Treasuries," he said. "You've got to hold your positions with conviction and concentrate on the fixed points on the horizon." Gold, already trading near record levels, dipped slightly Wednesday to close at 1,615 but is still up about 40 percent from a year ago. The Swiss franc, another classic refuge for safety conscious investors, has jumped nearly 17 percent this year versus the United States dollar. Corporations are also striking a defensive posture, stockpiling cash at record levels. And as the deadline for Washington to reach an agreement on raising the debt ceiling nears, many could start taking action, according to a survey this month of 305 large corporations by the Association of Financial Professionals. Nearly one quarter of the companies said they would sell some or all of their holdings of Treasury securities, while another 28 percent said they would not add Treasuries to their portfolios. A little fewer than half of the companies said they would not make any significant changes to their positions. Even though default on government debt remains a remote possibility, some companies are already trying to get out in front of the market jitters. Capital One Financial, for example, moved up a 5 billion sale of billions in stock and bonds to avoid possible turbulence ahead of the Aug. 2 deadline the Treasury had set for lawmakers to raise the 14.3 trillion debt ceiling. Money market funds, which traditionally have big holdings of short term Treasury bills, are increasing their cash positions in anticipation of possible investor redemptions, said Joseph Abate, money market strategist at Barclays Capital. Government only money funds are now holding about 70 percent of their assets in securities that mature in less than a week, up from nearly 50 percent three months ago. The funds are shifting more of their assets into securities with a duration of one day, rather than run the risk of holding positions for a week or longer. They are also steering clear of government notes that are due in the first two weeks of August, fearful that a breakdown in the debt talks could force the government to miss a payment. "The anxiety level around potential money fund redemptions is certainly higher than it's been," Mr. Abate said Wednesday. Fears of a potential government default are showing up in the derivatives market, too. For instance, there are 4.9 billion euros worth of derivatives known as credit default swaps, which insure against a default of government debt and will most likely pay out if the nation does not make its bond payments. That is 1 billion euros higher than in May, according to the Markit Group, a financial data firm based in London. As the summer has progressed, the cost of buying that sort of insurance, which is essentially a bet that the United States government will default on its debt, has risen to 84,000 euros a year ( 121,450) to insure Treasuries valued at 10 million euros, up from 35,000 euros ( 50,600) in June. Along with credit default swaps, big investors and corporations are also eyeing so called political risk insurance, which pays out in a government default. In the past, customers largely inquired about coverage for developing countries, like Nigeria or Kazakhstan. Two years ago, they called about Greece, Portugal, and Spain. But in the last few months, some foreign investors who rely on the government's clean energy subsidies to profitably develop wind and solar farms have asked the insurance giant Marsh McLennan about political risk coverage on payments made by the United States. "Out of the blue, this has come to my desk," said Stephen Kay, senior vice president for the political risk division of Marsh. Retail investors are largely staying on the sidelines, at least for now. Some, according to interviews with brokers and asset managers, are moving into six month and one year certificates of deposit.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Andrew LaMar Hopkins portrays the significant role Creoles played in the civic life of New Orleans. "Edmond Dede Piano Recital" (2019) shows the freeborn Creole musician and composer in his elegant salon. NEW ORLEANS Dressed as his alter ego, the modish matron Desiree Josephine Duplantier, the artist Andrew LaMar Hopkins is a familiar presence on this city's arts scene. His paintings, faux naif renderings of 19th century life in the city particularly the vanished culture of New Orleans's free Creoles of color also keep good company. You can see these works in Nadine Blake's gallery on Royal Street in the French Quarter, on the art filled walls of Dooky Chase's Restaurant in Treme, and in the rooms of collectors like the designer Thomas Jayne and the food stylist Rick Ellis. When a dozen of Mr. Hopkins's paintings appear at the Winter Show at the Park Avenue Armory on Jan. 24 they will be making their first foray north. Placed alongside 18th and 19th century portrait miniatures in the booth of Elle Shushan near the entrance of the show, these small works portraying daily life in New Orleans, circa 1830, will enact their own sly magic, inserting themselves into the stream of art history as if the visual record of people and places in antebellum Creole culture had not been lost. "This is what these lives looked like, and no one else was doing it," Mr. Hopkins, 42, says of both white Creoles and Creoles of color in his work. "I wanted to do them justice." Creole is a long embattled term, perhaps best defined now as a person whose background and identity is traceable to colonial French Louisiana and/or its Franco African culture. William Rudolph, the chief curator at the San Antonio Museum of Art and an early enthusiast about the work of Mr. Hopkins, says this artist "has used his work to interrogate Creole history." He added, "He has deconstructed the past." And yet these paintings are also very much of the present. Recreating or revising a lost or mangled history is something contemporary artists are often compelled to do. Last fall the Brooklyn based artist Dread Scott (Scott Tyler) assembled a cast of some 500 to re enact the 1811 Louisiana slave rebellion. More recently, Kent Monkman, a Canadian artist of Cree descent, created two monumental works for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Great Hall that appropriate the conventions of history painting to revise North American colonial history and the place of indigenous peoples in it. For his part Mr. Hopkins has employed the conscious archaism of a folk art style to furnish the quotidian world of a culture mostly erased by the Civil War. The carefully researched furniture, fashionable clothes and street scenes in his compositions present themselves as settled history. And when the 6 foot 2 artist dons the high heels and 20th century fashions that Desiree Josephine Duplantier favors, he brings that history forward almost as if there had been no rift with the past. It is not a historical recreation. It is a continuum. Mr. Hopkins's journey into Creole history began in Mobile, Ala., where he was born in 1978. Mobile was the first capital of colonial French Louisiana, something the artist was aware of at an early age. In the 1970s it was taken for granted there that a boy's leisure time would be spent in boisterous street games. "I didn't do any of that," Mr. Hopkins recalls. "I was always in the library reading about neoclassical furniture and antebellum architecture." He joined a local preservation society, made clay models of the furniture and architecture he admired and dreamed about France and the French connection to Creole culture. When he began researching his family's history, he made an exciting discovery. "I found that I was a part of all that," said Mr. Hopkins. He was able to trace his paternal lineage back to a Frenchman, Nicholas Bodin of Tours, who received a Louisiana land grant in 1710. In 1830, the moment in time Mr. Hopkins is fond of using for many of his creations, free Creoles of color in New Orleans owned some 15 million of property in the city. Mostly French speaking, these artisans, shopkeepers and artists were in no small part responsible for the look of the French Quarter its ironwork, decorative plaster, its architecture and fashionable shops. Like white Creoles, some owned slaves, and some later fought for the Confederacy. Despite many laws restricting their rights they played a significant role in civic life. It's a big story rarely told. Neither the New Orleans Museum of Art nor the well heeled Historic New Orleans Collection has mounted an exhibition resurrecting this culture. "It's a wonderful topic, but a great deal of work needs to be done," said Mel Buchanan, the RosaMary curator of decorative arts and design at the New Orleans Museum. There is, however, a house museum in the city, Le Musee de f.p.c./Free People of Color Museum, which has made a modest beginning at doing so. A more vivid account can be seen in a Hopkins painting, "Edmond Dede Piano Recital," of the fashionably dressed freeborn Creole musician and composer (1827 1901) who was raised in New Orleans and studied in Paris. He is shown as a young man in his salon here surrounded by neoclassical furnishings that strike an elegant yet matter of fact note. Moving to New Orleans as a teenager was something of a cultural homecoming for Mr. Hopkins. At 20, he and a friend opened an antiques shop on Magazine Street, filling it with furniture and decorative arts acquired on trips to France. By the time Hurricane Katrina hit, the antiques business had mostly faded away. In the wake of the storm, life in the city became unendurable. Mr. Hopkins left to stay with his sister in Baltimore and that is where the call to painting began. The road back to New Orleans was a long one, but when he returned in 2012 he brought 30 paintings with him. Katrina had simply been one more obstacle obscuring an important past. Stepping away from its devastation, Mr. Hopkins was able to bring Creole culture into view, depicting in his work both white Creoles and free Creoles of color, sometimes together as they often were, and sometimes separately. The city of New Orleans historically demanded detailed inventories of the possessions of deceased citizens, and he studied these lists to ground his rooms, from their locally made armoires and Campeche chairs to neo Classical French porcelain and wall clocks. The furniture is as important as the people, whether it appears in the cottage of the powerful voodoo queen Marie Laveau or in the salon of John James Audubon, the white Creole naturalist renowned for his "Birds of America." It secures their place in history, and is, as Mr. Hopkins says, his way of doing them justice. Mr. Hopkins's work is also his way of doing justice to the tolerance of New Orleans, then as now. "I would never have survived or thrived in Mobile," he acknowledged. His self portrait as Desiree Josephine Duplantier is a testament to that, respectful rather than satirical. Recently, Mr. Hopkins's work has undergone a sea change of sorts. Having established the look and life of 19th century Creole New Orleans, he has gone back in time to create a mythological past. Drawing upon Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus," he asked himself, "How can I make it Creole?" His "The Birth of Creole Venus" is the result a big, bold and witty composition. His goddess emerges from an oyster shell surrounded by Creole angels of color, a brown pelican, a pair of doves with sassafras leaves, and, says Mr. Hopkins, ever the master of the convincing detail, "the water is muddy." His work can be seen at the Winter Show, Jan. 24 Feb. 2, Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan, thewintershow.org.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
An installation view of "How to Do Nothing With Nobody All Alone by Yourself," by Yto Barrada. The show takes up three floors at 32 East 57th Street, the site of three Pace operations. The Upper East Side the area called "above East 50th Street" on gallery apps like See Saw and Artforum is thriving. It's also experiencing an art fair effect, with international galleries opening project spaces or satellite galleries in a highly concentrated area: where collectors and curators stay when visiting New York. The galleries that have opened additional spaces on the Upper East Side in recent years include Almine Rech, Boers Li, Clearing, Galeria Nara Roesler, Galerie Buchholz, Mendes Wood DM and, next month, Kurimanzutto, from Mexico City. I chose shows that were viewable at the time, and I could have provided a list of another 10 galleries just as strong and another 10 after that. Here is what you can see right now. GITTERMAN GALLERY through May 12; 41 East 57th Street, gittermangallery.com. The Art Deco Fuller Building at 41 East 57th Street has historically been an art gallery hive. One of its tenants is Gitterman, a gallery devoted to photography and now showing the work of Khalik Allah, a young filmmaker and photographer. (Mr. Allah's most recent film, "Black Mother," was shown at this year's edition of New Directors/New Films.) The photographs here were shot in Harlem, at 125th Street and Lenox Avenue, an area that was also the subject of his 2015 film, "Field Niggas." Together, they are like a sheet of drawings by an old master, a study in facial expressions that suggests a range of experiences, from the ecstatic to the infernal. DAG through June 15; 41 East 57th Street, Suite 708, discoverdag.com. Also in the Fuller Building, DAG has locations in New Delhi and Mumbai and added New York to its roster three years ago. Its current show is devoted to Chittaprosad (1915 1978), an Indian artist and Communist activist whose pen and ink drawings and prints document historical moments, and political movements, from the struggle for independence in India to the Bengal famine of 1943. (Chittaprosad's work was included in Documenta in Kassel, Germany, last year in a section titled "Hunger.") Writing newspaper articles as well as drawing nuanced portraits of emaciated adults and children, Chittaprosad showed in smart ways how phenomena like famine in India were intertwined with geopolitics and economics. PACE through May 5; 32 East 57th Street, pacegallery.com. Three floors, at 32 East 57th Street, occupied by different Pace operations, including Pace/MacGill and Pace African and Oceanic Art, are devoted to "How to Do Nothing With Nobody All Alone by Yourself," a terrific survey of art by Yto Barrada. Her canvas works recall the striped paintings of Frank Stella but also, pointedly, pieces by artists in 1960s North Africa. Her photographs document seemingly mundane events, as in "Marks Left by a Football" (2002), taken in Tangiers. Ms. Barrada's films feature toys and other objects that conjure childhood and personal and political histories. Gentle and often funny, her work demonstrates a stubborn refusal to settle down in a place, a time, or a medium. ANTON KERN through May 19; 16 East 55th Street, antonkerngallery.com. Last year, Anton Kern moved from a ground floor gallery in Chelsea to this elegantly updated townhouse on 55th Street. The space, markedly more vertical, is currently filled with photographs by Anne Collier, an artist who injects the mass media appropriations of the Pictures generation with emotion and gender politics. Her "Crying Women" series, for instance, depicts subjects you would not see in magazine advertisements: They're having minor (or perhaps major) meltdowns. Here, she also plays off Roy Lichtenstein's paintings. Photographing images of crying women from early 1960s comic books, with tears dripping from their sexy lashes, she turns them into formal fodder, mixing the lugubrious with the languorous. BERTHA AND KARL LEUBSDORF GALLERY through May 6; 695 Park Avenue, leubsdorfgallery.org. Hunter College has two notable galleries: The Artists Institute and the Leubsdorf Art Gallery, which has a wonderful exhibition, "The School of Survival: Learning With Juan Downey," that focuses on this artist's teaching projects in the 1970s. Mr. Downey (1940 93) was one of the wilder post 60s artists. (At one point, he lived with the Yanomami people of the Amazon rain forest.) Here, he is represented by cybernetic drawings, documentary photographs and a video that shows him making an inflatable plastic sculpture with his students. An official Hunter course observation, written by a professor who sat in on one of Mr. Downey's classes, adds period character . CRAIG F. STARR GALLERY through May 25; 5 East 73rd Street, craigstarr.com. Although Eva Hesse (1936 70) is best known for her sculptures and installations using latex, fiberglass and other unorthodox material, she was also an inventive painter and draftswoman. "Eva Hesse: Arrows and Boxes, Repeated" at Craig F. Starr includes early grids and abstract gouaches and a 1968 version of her "Accession" series of boxes. In each of these open steel mesh containers, she would weave rubber tubes through the grid, creating a minimalist form that looked as if it were growing hair or coming alive. MICHAEL WERNER through May 5; 4 East 77th Street, michaelwerner.com. If the Upper East Side is filling up with all kinds of newcomers, the German art dealer Michael Werner represents the new old guard: He opened his first gallery here in 1990. His current show, "Per Kirkeby: Paintings and Bronzes From the 1980s," reflects Mr. Werner's stable of (mostly male, mostly European) artists. The dark, murky canvases and expressive abstract bronzes are drawn partly from Mr. Kirkeby's studies in the 1960s, when he traveled in Greenland and the Arctic while working on a master's degree in geology. HALF GALLERY through May 9; 43 East 78th Street, halfgallery.com. A pocket size gallery that lives up to its name, Half Gallery shows a solid lineup of young painters who approach the canvas with conviction and a twisted vision. In Ginny Casey's "Skeleton Key," the murky hued paintings are populated with curvy, vaguely surrealistic objects, like a chair with arms, a metronome the size of an armoire or a key too large for any human's door. GAGOSIAN through May 25; 976 Madison Avenue, gagosian.com. In the portfolio of galleries that make up the Gagosian empire, the bookstore might be the most fun. This is at least the case with the display of Jonas Wood's prints that is thereright now. The works spill into the book selling space, which Mr. Wood has covered with wallpaper in a tennis ball motif. Other prints play around with images of vases, remaking historical Greek versions or those painted by Matisse into goofy creations, like a vessel that has the words "Diet 7Up" on it. Sports, often ignored in "fine" art, is also a favored theme; Mr. Wood conjures the image of the slacker artist sitting on his couch, watching basketball, tennis or gymnastics, if he must.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Just beyond the medieval ring wall of the Tuscan town of Lucca, the city rapidly gives way to country villas and agrarian pastures. Among these fertile hills, a flourishing cooperative community of biodynamic vineyards and farms has taken root with several of them now welcoming guests for farm stays. These local farmers despite ostensibly being in competition turned to each other for help in adopting a chemical free, biodynamic system, which treats the farm holistically as one big organism of plants and animals. They established friendships and then in 2016, formally established the Lucca Biodinamica, capitalizing on the rising interest in natural wines. One of the pioneers of the Lucca Biodinamica movement, Giuseppe Ferrua runs Fabbrica San Martino, along with his wife Giovanna Tronci. In summer, the farm is a teeming, arcadian slope of greenery, where donkeys graze amid wildflowers and white blossoming olive trees, and meadows of jade colored grapevines blanket the terrain up to the woodland's edge. The couple's 1735 Baroque chateau neighbors the former peasants' home where, from March through November, visitors rent humble accommodations filled with recouped country furnishings enjoying the farm's sylvan hush, learning about biodynamic agriculture, and tasting wines. Following the tenets of biodynamic vinification, the wines are fermented with naturally occurring yeasts, and bottled with much less sulfites and none of the 60 additives of industrial production. "These wines express their territory and history," Mr. Ferrua said. "A commercial cabernet tastes the same whether it's from California or New Zealand. That's not really wine. That's just a beverage." Mr. Ferrua and another local winemaker, Saverio Petrilli of Tenuta di Valgiano, were the first in Lucca to turn their farms biodynamic under the tutelage of Alex Podolinksky, an evangelist of the movement. "In one year, I witnessed the soil darken," Mr. Ferrua said. "The plants were healthier, and the grapes took on a deeper flavor." In biodynamic practices, originally espoused by the wide ranging thinker Rudolph Steiner (who also inspired the Waldorf schools), San Martino's farm animals, swallows, honeybees and plants contribute to a thriving ecosystem. To the mystification of skeptics, the farming calendar is determined by the heavenly bodies: growers harvest when the moon is full and sap rises in plants, mirroring the tides. Cow horns are packed with compact amounts of fertilizing manure or sunlight attracting quartz and buried underground over winter. In springtime, their contents are sprayed with rainwater on the land. "Everyone in our circle converted to biodynamic because they could see and taste the difference," Mr. Ferrua said. Of Lucca's 18 winemakers, 13 are in the Lucca Biodinamica network, rendering it the most concentrated biodynamic cluster in Italy. Fabio Pracchia, a Lucca local and editor of the Slow Wine guide, credits the movement to this corner of Tuscany's less established wine status. "There are no big, external investors like in Montalcino or Chianti owners work the land themselves," he said. "They experience the improvements firsthand so they're motivated to make the switch." Currently heading Lucca Biodinamica are Mina Samouti and her husband Matteo Giustiniani of Fattoria Sardi, who praise the willingness of the group's many producers to share seeds, equipment, techniques and experiences. Fattoria Sardi, family owned for more than 200 years, occupies two antique farmhouses a winery and a guesthouse encircled by grapevines where crimson clover and golden mustard flowers naturally fertilize the terrain for the vineyard's much loved rose wines. In their lodgings, guests can cook vegetables from the garden to accompany the wine, or receive cooking lessons or meals from the produce growing team of another Lucca Biodinamica farm, Maesta della Formica. The more modern Tenuta Mareli occupies the rebuilt former carriage house of a neighboring church in Lucca's countryside. Owners Francesca Tomei and Daniele Lencioni created rustic style rooms sloped wood beam roofs, quilt topped iron frame beds, and terra cotta tiles but with air conditioning, heated floors, and a diminutive basement spa. Overlooking a hill of olive trees and a garden full of rosemary, lavender, and rosebushes, guests enjoy tastings of Mareli's own honeys, jams, and wines, plus local pecorino and cured meats.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
28 08 and 28 10 38th Avenue and 38 09 and 38 11 28th Street (southeast corner of 38th Avenue at 28th Street) A Chinese real estate crowdfunding platform, which is also completing a nearby condominium project, has bought this five building assemblage on the same tax lot within the Dutch Kills Special Use District. The assemblage includes a single story warehouse at 38 09 and 38 11 28th Street on the corner; two three story apartment buildings at 28 08 and 28 10 38th Avenue, dating to the early 1900s, with a total of four floor through market rate apartments and two ground floor offices; and a metal shed behind all the buildings. The property, which went for 500,000 above the asking price, offers about 35,000 buildable square feet for residential use and 13,000 square feet for commercial use.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Archaeologists have discovered a large trove of mammoth skeletons north of Mexico City, possibly shedding new light on the hunting habits of prehistoric communities. Researchers from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History say they have uncovered what could be the first human made traps used to capture the Pleistocene animals. The finding represents a significant turning point in researchers' understanding of the relationship of hunter gatherer bands with the mammoths, Pedro Francisco Sanchez Nava, the institute's national coordinator of archaeology, said in a statement on Wednesday. Previously, there was little evidence that hunters intentionally attacked mammoths, an archaeologist with the institute, Luis Cordoba Barradas, said to reporters on Wednesday. "It was thought they frightened them into getting stuck in swamps and then waited for them to die," he said, according to The Guardian. "This is evidence of direct attacks on mammoths," he added. "In Tultepec we can see there was the intention to hunt and make use of the mammoths." Mr. Cordo b a said hunters may have traveled in groups of about 20 to 30, and used torches and branches to force animals into the traps. It is possible, he said, that a chain of traps had been built to increase the odds of capturing prey, and that more could be discovered. Adam N. Rountrey, a collection manager at the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology, said in an email that the new find was "certainly interesting." While there are numerous "mammoth megasites" in Eurasia and North America where humans have "processed" carcasses, he said, "there has been debate about whether the remains represent hunted animals or scavenged natural deaths." At this point, he added, none of those sites have been considered human made pits. "We are looking forward to seeing a peer reviewed publication that presents the evidence for human construction of the traps," Dr. Rountrey said of the site in Mexico. Woolly mammoths, elephant like creatures that once inhabited nearly every continent, went extinct about 4,000 years ago. Several competing theories explain their demise, but it was likely a combination of climate change, which created untenable conditions for the animals and also killed off a plant based diet, as well as the birth of humans that sought their skin and meat. Recently, scientists have discussed plans to revive the elephant like animals through genetic engineering. One scientist even dreamed of creating "Pleistocene Park," a preserve in Siberia where they could roam. So far, no births have been reported.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
NEXT month, many parents will drop off their children at college, laden with newly bought sheets, lamps and hampers. They're as ready as they'll ever be to start their new lives. That is, until the next phone call or text asking why the clothes came out of the dryer an odd shade of pink. Or why is the microwave buzzing in that weird way? Or, even more scary: what exactly does the car insurance cover? I'm a few years away from seeing my firstborn off, but in the downtime between worrying about SATs and G.P.A.'s I may as well arm my son with the skills he needs to venture out on his own. First, I had to figure out what those skills should be. Some are no different from what I needed to learn before my freshman year, oh so long ago. But many things have changed. Microwaves were rarer then, for instance, so my generation probably had a better idea of how to cook. We were also expected to do chores. Sadly, many teenagers don't even make their beds anymore. Nor did we have to deal with online banking and debit cards or the ability to just click a mouse and buy something and the ensuing problems these conveniences can bring. And there was little expectation that our parents would be there to clean up every mess or solve every problem. So what does the recent high school graduate need to know? I asked some experts I've interviewed in the past as well as some newly wised up parents to draw up a (highly subjective) list. Laundry, certainly not newfangled, was surprisingly high on many lists. Know how to do the basics like separating colors, darks and whites and what water temperatures to use, as well as what shouldn't go in the dryer. My friend Miriam, whose was attending a college orientation for her son when I posed this question, suggested loading up on Shout Color Catchers. I'd never heard of these, but apparently they absorb loose dyes in the wash water to prevent discoloring, in case your daughter throws that bright red top in with the whites. Also, as a previous article of mine noted, there is no need to fill up the soap container in the washing machine. Less is better in this case clothes come out cleaner, the machine lasts longer and everyone saves money. Speaking of money: if your teenager is opening her first checking account, make sure she knows how to make out a check properly. Most teenagers won't go to college with their own credit cards, but they may have a parent's debit card or a bank account they can access with an A.T.M. card. Of course, they'll need to keep track of their spending. But Lewis Mandell, an emeritus professor of finance and dean emeritus at the University at Buffalo, said he didn't think balancing a checkbook was such a necessity anymore. "They need to have some sort of budget and a general concept of how much they need to get through each period, and what large payments need to come out," he said. "But they don't have to balance to the penny." Greg Daugherty, the executive editor of Consumer Reports, said that students still needed to monitor their accounts to see if there were any A.T.M. or debit transactions that didn't ring true. "Pay attention," he suggested, "and if there's a problem, get in touch with the bank right away." Professor Mandell, who has taught financial literacy for years, said it was crucial to emphasize to your child that credit records get established very early, in ways they may not realize. "If they're late on payment for a cellphone or a cable bill, they begin to injure their credit rating, and it can be on their record for seven to 10 years," he said. And that can really hurt down the line. He also urged parents to teach their children to have "a healthy dose of skepticism" when buying anything, whether it be a shirt online or a service from their own university. "Check out all hidden fees," Mr. Daugherty said. "Know return policies, and find out if the company charges a restocking fee for returns," which is becoming more common both online and in stores. And if they're unfamiliar with a company, go online and search for the company's name along with "scam" or "rip off" to see the company's reputation on the Web. What about driving? Many students won't have their own cars or even need to drive, particularly if they go to colleges in cities. But in other cases, some will be driving frequently, far from home. I figured that most parents made sure their teenager knew the basics, like how to fill up the gas tank (shame on them and you if they've been driving and have no idea how to do that), and where the jumper cables are in the car. But Philip Reed, senior consumer advice editor for Edmunds.com, offered some suggestions I never thought of. Here's one: What to do if stopped by a police officer. First, though you may panic if you see the red flashing lights in the mirror, be sure to pull over safely. "It's a scary situation," Mr. Reed said. "Keep your hands in sight. Don't get out of the car. Roll down the window." "I told my kids that they will be very nervous and they should know where the insurance and registration cards are," he said. "We always keep one insurance card in the car and one in a wallet." What if you have an accident? First, safely get out of traffic if you can. If there are injuries, immediately call 911, he said. If not, exchange insurance information and take photos with your cellphone of any damage. While it may be helpful to know how to change a flat, even better is to make sure your teenager knows whom to call (besides you) if he needs roadside assistance, like AAA. A number of years ago, I wrote a column about how I was once caught without brakes on the Long Island Expressway and had to sort it out by the side of the road. It was not a pleasant experience. Also, Mr. Reed suggested that carrying a tire inflation kit in the car could spare you the need to change a flat on the spot. I will end with a bunch of random, yet helpful, tips garnered from a variety of sources. Make sure your son or daughter knows how to sew on a button or a repair a hem, change a light bulb (yes, honestly some have never done that at home), tie a tie, defrost a refrigerator (some dorm fridges aren't self defrosting) and judge how long different foods can stay in a refrigerator before going bad. And here are a few more: How to tip properly, use a microwave safely, strip and make a bed, pack a suitcase and safeguard valuables. That might even include getting a lock for the computer. I heard stories of them being stolen from dorm rooms. And what do parents need to learn? To step back. Try not to fix every problem. Saying "figure it out yourself," or nicer words to that effect, is perfectly acceptable. And believe it or not, somehow they will just as we did.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
INGRID GOES WEST (2017) on Hulu. Matt Spicer's debut feature is a sendup of social media culture. Aubrey Plaza stars as Ingrid, a smartphone addicted young woman whose obsession with digital timelines and appearances amplifies her envious personality. After Ingrid moves to the West Coast (and kidnaps a social media influencer's dog in order to meet her), it becomes clear that Ingrid curates her life with the same destructive care that many spend on their Instagram profiles though, at least for her, the separation between profile and person is slim. "Ms. Plaza is a whiz with timing and does a deft job of shifting viewers' sympathy," Ben Kenigsberg wrote in his review for The New York Times. "Still, Mr. Spicer cops out by going with the obvious ending." ZODIAC (2007) on Amazon and Hulu. For a different kind of ruthless obsession, see David Fincher's thriller about a team of San Francisco journalists who hunted the infamous California serial murderer known as the Zodiac killer. The team, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo, is led primarily by Mr. Gyllenhaal, who portrays a cartoonist who becomes immersed in the investigation. In her review for The Times, Manohla Dargis wrote that those actors are "all at the top of their performance game," and that the story's structure, which includes flashbacks and other narrative flourishes, is "as intricate as the storytelling is seamless."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Wasn't it just the other day that teachers confiscated cellphones and principals warned about oversharing on MySpace? Now, Erin Olson, an English teacher in Sioux Rapids, Iowa, is among a small but growing cadre of educators trying to exploit Twitter like technology to enhance classroom discussion. Last Friday, as some of her 11th graders read aloud from a poem called "To the Lady," which ponders why bystanders do not intervene to stop injustice, others kept up a running commentary on their laptops. The poet "says that people cried out and tried but nothing was done," one student typed, her words posted in cyberspace. "She is giving raw proof," another student offered, "that we are slaves to our society." Instead of being a distraction an electronic version of note passing the chatter echoed and fed into the main discourse, said Mrs. Olson, who monitored the stream and tried to absorb it into the lesson. She and others say social media, once kept outside the school door, can entice students who rarely raise a hand to express themselves via a medium they find as natural as breathing. "When we have class discussions, I don't really feel the need to speak up or anything," said one of her students, Justin Lansink, 17. "When you type something down, it's a lot easier to say what I feel." With Twitter and other microblogging platforms, teachers from elementary schools to universities are setting up what is known as a "backchannel" in their classes. The real time digital streams allow students to comment, pose questions (answered either by one another or the teacher) and shed inhibitions about voicing opinions. Perhaps most importantly, if they are texting on task, they are less likely to be texting about something else. Nicholas Provenzano, an English teacher at Grosse Pointe South High School, outside Detroit, said that in a class of 30, only about 12 usually carried the conversation, but that eight more might pipe up on a backchannel. "Another eight kids entering a discussion is huge," he noted. Skeptics and at this stage they far outnumber enthusiasts fear introducing backchannels into classrooms will distract students and teachers, and lead to off topic, inappropriate or even bullying remarks. A national survey released last month found that 2 percent of college faculty members had used Twitter in class, and nearly half thought that doing so would negatively affect learning. When Derek Bruff, a math lecturer and assistant director of the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University, suggests fellow professors try backchannels, "Most look at me like I'm coming from another planet," he said. "The word on the street about laptops in class," Dr. Bruff added, is that students use them to tune out, checking e mail or shopping. He said professors could reduce such activity by giving students something class related to do on their mobile devices. Besides Twitter, teachers have turned to other platforms for backchannels, some with more structure and privacy. Most are free on the Web and so far free of advertising. Google Moderator lets a class type questions and vote for the ones they would most like answered. Today's Meet, used by Mrs. Olson, sets up a virtual "room." Purdue University, in Indiana, developed its own backchannel system, Hot Seat, two years ago, at a cost of 84,000. It lets students post comments and questions, which can be read on laptops or smartphones or projected on a large screen. Sugato Chakravarty, who lectures about personal finance, pauses to answer those that have been "voted up" by his audience. Before Hot Seat, "I could never get people to speak up," Professor Chakravarty said. "Everybody's intimidated." "It's clear to me," he added, "that absent this kind of social media interaction, there are things students think about that normally they'd never say." But the technology has been slow to win over faculty. It was used in just 12 courses this spring. Sandra Sydnor Bousso, a professor of hospitality and tourism management, said Hot Seat did not mesh well with her style of walking around class to encourage a dialogue. "The last thing I want to do is to give them yet another way to distract themselves." In high schools and elementary schools, teachers try to exercise tight control over backchannels, often reviewing a transcript after class for inappropriate remarks. Even schools that encourage students to use mobile devices prohibit gossip during class. A backchannel discussion about the death of Osama bin Laden. In Exira, Iowa, Kate Weber uses the technology for short periods almost daily with her fourth graders. "You'd think there's a lot of distraction, but it's actually the opposite," she said. "Kids are much quicker at stuff than we are. They can really multitask. They have hypertext minds." During a reading lesson, she recalled, a story included the word "queue." Using a school issued Macbook, "one student asked, 'What is a queue?' " Mrs. Weber said. "If they'd have read that individually they wouldn't have been brave enough to raise their hands. They would have just read over it. But another student answered, 'It's a ponytail.' The whole class on the backchannel had an a ha moment." "I am in awe at how independent they've become using that as a means of comprehension," she added. The 11th graders in Mrs. Olson's class said the backchannel had widened their appreciation of one another. "Everybody is heard in our class," said Leah Postman, 17. Janae Smith, also 17, said, "It's made me see my peers as more intelligent, seeing their thought process and begin to understand them on a deeper level." On Friday, their teacher continued to develop a semester long theme: how free the individual is in society. Students watched a YouTube video that compares how much humanitarian aid could be bought for the 150,000 cost of a slick music video. Earlier in the week, students had staged a rally to support American troops in response to picketing they had seen on the news by the fringe Westboro Baptist Church of Kansas at a funeral for an Iowa soldier killed in Afghanistan.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
Buress is not one to get on a soapbox. What makes him such an unusual comedic voice is that he has built his distinctive sensibility on a quality rare among stand ups: Nonchalance. Buress talks about anxiety provoking subjects like dying, asthma attacks and run ins with the police with casual ease, countering the tension of danger with a deep well of silliness. When he says that he asked the rapper 2 Chainz an important question "Do you feel pressure to wear multiple chains all the time?" it's clear he means the opposite. He works extremely hard to make you laugh but can seem like he's barely trying. His jokes are tightly honed, but the funniest part about them can be the offhanded swagger with which he delivers them. "Miami Nights" is not the lo fi production you expect from YouTube. It's actually his slickest special yet, complete with jokes that use Auto Tune, multimedia, some "Miami Vice" era retro visuals and dreamy camerawork. Kristian Mercado's playfully flashy direction warms up the crowd with bursts of neon and hip hop, and often positions the camera at a mouse's eye view. It's amusingly apt that the first special that films Buress in a way to make him look like a glamorous star is on a site known for homemade cat videos. Buress has the kind of gifts that seemed destined for superstardom (that's why I made him the first subject of this column), but he never exactly got there, which is curious only if you think fame is distributed fairly. His particular level of success is a recurring theme in this hour. The special begins with a shot of him doing jokes as a teenager, and then it pivots into an opening bit, in which he says he gets asked to host game shows twice a year. His response, in a computer generated demonic bass voice, is: "The prophecy will be fulfilled but the time is not now." Buress has become a go to performer for supporting roles in offbeat shows like "Broad City" or "The Eric Andre Show" as well as Hollywood comedies like "Tag," but not the focus of his own vehicle, beyond comedy specials. His most viral moment might have come when he responded to Bill Cosby's scolding of young people by reminding the audience of rape allegations against him, a comment made before prosecutors looked again at the accusations. Underneath his nonchalance, Buress can be a brutal counterpuncher. He shows that off again in the standout section of this special when he recounts the story of his arrest in Miami for disorderly intoxication. (Early on, he says he is now sober.) For more than 20 minutes, he describes a confrontation with a police officer that gets hostile after he jokingly asks him to get him an Uber. It eventually leads to the officer arresting Buress after he spoke to the man's body camera as opposed to his face, which Buress explains as a result of his career in show business. "I'm a professional," he says with mock umbrage.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
The artist KAWS (Brian Donnelly) with pieces from his personal art collection in his Williamsburg studio. From left, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein's "No. 866, March 23, 1960" (1960) and Ed Ruscha "Bail Jumper" (1990). As KAWS, Brian Donnelly creates cartoon colored reworkings of well known pop culture characters rendered slightly askew through recurring motifs cauliflower ears and XXs for eyes that give the effect of a dream half remembered. His popularity, based on the raft of toys, fashion collaborations and multimillion dollar auction results, hovers somewhere near the mesosphere. That Mr. Donnelly, who got his start writing graffiti in his native Jersey City, has recently joined the American Museum of Folk Art's board may sound incongruous for someone routinely designated (and euphemistically maligned) as a street artist. But in fact he collects the work of self taught and outsider American artists. In an upstairs living space in his Williamsburg, Brooklyn, studio, paintings by Joe Coleman and Susan Te Kahurangi King share the wall with large scale canvases by Peter Saul, while R. Crumb comic panels mix with sketchbooks from graffiti legends like Phase 2 and Dondi White. By joining the folk art trustees, Mr. Donnelly traces a neat concentricity with a board predecessor and shaper of an art movement, Andy Warhol, who could often be found at the Chelsea Flea Market loading his Dodge convertible with Americana and folk pieces. "When I think of how I collect, it isn't that I'm trying to be a part of some group or collect some type of work," he said in his second floor aerie, as assistants quietly colored paintings downstairs. "I just like collecting. It's led me to a place where some of the stuff I collect is self taught. I can't compartmentalize it. For me, I just think of people making stuff. I find a lot of the self taught stuff is a nice rabbit hole to go down." These are edited excerpts from the conversation. What was your interest in joining the folk art museum? I think how I came to be in touch with the museum was their shows of Henry Darger and that kind of work. I feel like, if anything, maybe I can cross pollinate some people who are familiar with my work and introduce them to the great things that are happening at the museum. What sort of outsider art do you gravitate toward? A lot of stuff is turning over, new stuff is coming to market. There are great Martin Ramirez drawings that have come up. I was collecting Imagists, and drawing connections between, say, Ramirez and Jim Nutt. What really got me into it was Susan King's work, and that was only a few years ago. I was collecting Peter Saul and really like his '60s works on paper, and I saw images of King's work, and what she was doing in the '60s was amazing. It felt like it could have the best conversation with all this Saul stuff. These drawings hold their weight with Peter, with the Chicago Imagists. Do you feel a kind of stewardship in collecting and preserving work that does not always get institutional representation? I feel that about every work I collect. It's not to be taken lightly, to be the custodian of a work of art, whether it's a piece made just now by some young kid, or something from the '50s. For me, it's not like there's an end goal, but it informs me as an artist. I get really interested in what shows were these works in, and the trajectory of an artist. Also, just having it around and seeing the marks in person. Joe Coleman's Darger portrait you could see in a show, but you're spending, what, two minutes with it, max? Do you consider graffiti an outsider art? I always think: Where does graf fall? You can't look at it the way you do artists coming out of art schools. With graffiti, you're making work to reach people, you have this bravado, you want to dominate spaces, but with self taught, often people are making work to pass their days; sometimes it's only discovered after they've passed. Say Darger for example: Only after death are you finding all that work. People get out of it what they need. I don't think there's been a lot of great literature about graffiti. You need to have enough distance to look back objectively. I think Henry's Henry Chalfant show at the Bronx Museum was a great entry point for people. I mean, I'm far from the person who's going to tell you the definition of outsider art. It's endless. Helen Rae did you see her stuff at the Outsider Art Fair? She does these amazing drawings in colored pencil that when you see them they just destroy so much other stuff and you've got to say: when? I'm always thinking about how artists are making different work in other parts of the world, but it seems like they're feeding off each other, like some of the '60s paintings of Tadanori Yokoo, they're very similar to Karl Wirsum in the '60s, and there's no way they're overlapping. There's no internet; it's not like Karl was in the art magazines at the time. You just wonder, what is that? R. Crumb is another who's a complete anomaly. Paul Morris repositioned him, but the work was always there. Sometimes it takes somebody to put it into the system. It's interesting seeing what gets taken into the gallery world.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
A roundup of motoring news from the web: Although there has been some speculation that an aluminum body Jeep Wrangler could feature unibody construction in the future, a report from Automotive News has confirmed that the next Wrangler will keep the traditional body on frame layout, even if the body is made from aluminum. That means production for the compact 4 wheel drive truck is likely to remain in Toledo, Ohio. (Automotive News, subscription required) The advertising agencies that work with Toyota and Lexus said this week that they would open offices in Dallas. Toyota announced this year that it would move its United States headquarters to Texas. (Ad Age) Ford announced new technology on Thursday that it said would help drivers of its vehicles avoid certain types of front end collisions. Pre Collision Assist with Pedestrian Detection is a system created to warn the driver of an impending collision, and, if necessary, apply the brakes automatically. Ford said the system would be introduced on its European market 2015 Mondeo sedan. (Ford) After a fifth recall for the Honda Fit, the automaker said this week that it was creating a new, executive level quality control position. Koichi Fukuo, Honda's chief of large vehicle development, will take on the quality control role in addition to his other duties. (Automobile Magazine)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
PARIS Something like shock swept through members of the fashion crowd arriving here for the fall men's wear shows last week when they learned of a fire at the Ritz hotel. It took 66 firefighters and much of the morning on Jan. 19 to put out the blaze at the storied hostelry, for decades a bivouac for many in the business, which had been scheduled to reopen in March after a four year, 150 million renovation. While the Ritz's general manager, Christian Boyens, had no comment on a revised timeline for the reopening, he played down the episode. "The incident under the roof of the Cambon building is all under control," he wrote in an email. As of Jan. 20, 1,200 workers employed for the renovation were back on the job. People with knowledge of the fire who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject confirmed that the roof at the rear side the side facing Rue Cambon, from whose doors Princess Diana exited just before the car crash that took her life in 1997 had been destroyed by the blaze, which began on the seventh floor and spread through the attic. Its origin has not been established. The fire apparently gutted luxury suites beneath the hotel's raked mansard roof; flooding damaged the floors below. More than 100 workers were evacuated from the construction site and from the 18th century building that houses the Ministry of Justice nearby, both of which are on the Place Vendome, one of Paris's most elegant squares and the location of many boutiques run by some of the world's top jewelers. Famous almost since it was founded in 1898 by Cesar Ritz in collaboration with the chef Auguste Escoffier, the Ritz has long been a byword for luxury. Coco Chanel and Marcel Proust lived there, and Ernest Hemingway was so frequent a guest that they named a bar for him. While the Ritz is thought to have been the first hotel in Europe to have en suite bathrooms and a telephone in every guest room, its luster had become tarnished in recent years, and the Ritz faced threats from new entrants in the Paris luxury market, among them the five star Mandarin Oriental hotel. Still, the Ritz remained a caravansary beloved of those in the fashion industry. Designers, stylists, editors and models all put up there, and Kate Moss, Donatella Versace, Anna Wintour and Oscar de la Renta occupied favorite suites. For years, Valentino staged his couture shows at the Ritz, and members of the fashion flock could be relied on to alight at the hotel whenever the ready to wear and couture seasons brought them to Paris. Anticipation of the Ritz's reopening intensified among those in the business after many joined a boycott of Le Meurice another fashion industry favorite here in protest against its parent company, the Dorchester Group. That company is run by an investment fund led by Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah of Brunei. In 2014, citing Shariah law, the sultan put in place a penal code in his country with punishments that included public flogging, amputation and death by stoning for offenses such as adultery, abortion and homosexuality. The Dorchester Group also owns the Milanese bolt hole, the Hotel Principe di Savoia, whose bar has been a fashion week destination for decades. When companies like Kering, which owns or has significant stakes in brands such as Gucci, Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen, signed on to a boycott of Le Meurice, pent up desire for the revamped Ritz became greater than ever. A statement on social media issued by Saint Laurent at the time of the sultan's decree noted that its employees would not be allowed to stay in Dorchester hotels because the Brunei laws "have no place in a civilized society." The renovation of the Ritz has been a long time in coming. Supported by the hotel's owner, the Egyptian billionaire Mohamed al Fayed, Mr. Boyens took the unusual step of closing the hotel altogether in 2012 for its first full scale revamp since the 1980s. Hiring the French architect Thierry W. Despont, Mr. Boyens has overseen a reduction of the number of guest rooms, to 143 from 159; added new luxury suites to a roster that included chambers named for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor; rewired and replumbed the building; acquired an adjacent historic structure; created a new garden; and built a discreet private tunnel entrance to the hotel with access from a guarded subterranean parking garage. For all that, as Mr. Boyens told this reporter last spring, the "Ritz will always be the Ritz," right down to its signature peach color bath towels. "It's all very strange, just a month before they're supposed to open," Michel Gaubert, house D.J. for many major designers, said of the fire. Carlos Souza, Valentino's brand ambassador, noted that the Ritz had welcomed the fashion house's staff for so long that they even took meals in its underground kitchen. "Tuesday nights were Carlos Couscous night," Mr. Souza (who lodges at the Hotel Costes himself) said before the Valentino men's wear show the next day. "It's a disaster because for so many the Ritz was like home."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Susan Kamil, an editor and publisher of celebrated authors whose effusive praise for her in their books' acknowledgments made her name familiar to readers, died on Sunday in Manhattan. She was 69. The cause was complications of lung cancer, her husband, Bob Kohn, said. Ms. Kamil (pronounced like camel) was a writer's editor, wielding her red pencil on nights and weekends and even by flashlight in movie theaters as she performed surgery on sentences, by all accounts conscientiously, constructively and considerately. Her writers would say she spilled minimal blood and left few visible scars. "They trusted her honesty, her keen eye and her elegant sensitivity to language and story," said Joni Evans, for whom Ms. Kamil worked at Simon Schuster and who wooed her to Random House. "They were her family, and this loss will be deeply personal to all of them." Most recently, she was executive vice president and publisher of Random House, which includes the Random House, Dial Press, Spiegel Grau, One World and Hogarth imprints.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Van Gogh's "Almond Blossom" (1890) shows a strong Japanese influence. But it is based on the trees he saw in Saint Remy de Provence, France. AMSTERDAM In the soft, clear light of Provence, France, Vincent van Gogh saw the crisp skies of Japanese woodcut prints. The almond blossoms, gnarled trees and irises that dotted the French landscape reminded him of nature scenes painted in Kyoto. And in the locals who drank in cafes of Arles, he saw resonances with the geishas and Kabuki actors of a country he'd never visited. "My dear brother, you know, I feel I'm in Japan," van Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo, on March 16, 1888, not long after he had settled in Arles, an ancient city built on Roman ruins by the Rhone River in France. By June he was urging Theo and other Impressionist artists in Paris to join him in there. "I'd like you to spend some time here, you'd feel it," he wrote. "After some time your vision changes, you see with a more Japanese eye, you feel color differently." For at least a year, van Gogh lived in Provence in a kind of Japanese dream. It was not a delusion, but rather an imaginative projection of an idealized vision of Japan onto the French landscape, said Nienke Bakker, curator of paintings for the Van Gogh Museum. The painter had been bitten by the bug of "Japonisme," a mania for Japanese aesthetics that swept Europe in the 19th century, and which also afflicted painters such as Claude Monet, Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, in collaboration with three Japanese museums, has mounted the most comprehensive exhibition to date to explore that inspiration, "Van Gogh Japan," which runs through June 24. It tracks the Dutch artist's early fascination with imported Japanese "Ukiyo e" prints colorful woodblock prints on handmade paper that were very popular in Europe in the late 19th century and shows how, little by little, van Gogh integrated elements of Japanese art into his own style. "It's hard to imagine what his works would have looked like without this source of inspiration," said Ms. Bakker, one of the exhibition's four curators, referring to the influence of Japanese prints. "It really helped him to find the style that we all know," she added. "He really chose that as the way to go." Van Gogh first encountered Japanese prints in 1885 while he was working in the Belgian port city of Antwerp, whose docks he said were teeming with Japanese wares: They were "fantastic, singular, strange," he wrote. The Van Gogh Museum exhibition begins about a year later, when he moved into his brother's apartment in Paris and discovered that the German art dealer Siegfried Bing who sold Japanese artworks and decorative objects had an attic full of Japanese woodcut prints at very reasonable prices. He immediately bought about 660 prints for just a few cents a piece. Ms. Bakker said that van Gogh originally held an exhibition trying to resell the prints, but it wasn't successful, and instead he hung onto them, tacked them to the walls of his studio and used them for inspiration. About 500 survive, and are now part of the Van Gogh Museum's permanent collection. At first, van Gogh simply copied the works in both sketches and oil paintings: For example, in 1887 he traced in pencil and ink the cover of an issue of the magazine Paris Illustre devoted to Japan and also made a large scale oil painting, "Courtesan (After Eisen)," based on the image. The Japanese art he pinned to the walls of his studio also appears in the backgrounds of a number of his portraits, such as his "Portrait of Pere Tanguy," who sits in front of a wall of prints. (This is the only major painting with Japanese influences that the Van Gogh Museum could not get for the exhibition; it belongs to the Musee Rodin in Paris, and according to Ms. Bakker was too fragile to travel.) By the time the artist moved to Arles a year later, he was fully in the thrall of Japan. On the train from Paris, he repeatedly checked out the window, he wrote to his friend Paul Gauguin, "to see 'if it was like Japan yet'! Childish, isn't it?'" "The first year in Arles, everything is Japan," said Bakker. "Later, after his breakdown, that changes, and he still refers to it but it's less important. The nature of his admiration had changed. It has become integrated into his style but it's no longer his artistic model." The impact was more subtle, more buried in his technique: For instance, he sometimes divided the canvas using diagonal lines, rather than using horizontal perspective planes, as was the norm in western painting, and he would streak his paintings with diagonal rain, as he had seen in Japanese prints.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Many people have pieced together their own family tree. But how much do you really know about the early lives of your living relatives, especially those with decades of stories to share? To learn more, take the time to talk during family gatherings over Thanksgiving and the holiday season. And make sure to save that oral history for future generations: Record and preserve it with a multimedia digital archive , with video or audio, or with both. Here are five simple steps to get you started. Do everyone a favor and plan ahead. To be as thorough and efficient as possible, you'll want to know what to ask before you whip out the recorder to interview the family matriarch over her pumpkin pie. And find a relaxed setting to calm any stage fright. Ask your relatives to dig back in their pasts: What's your first memory? What was your favorite song growing up? How did you win that medal? If you don't want to put your interviewees on the spot, send them the questions ahead of time. And ask them to tell treasured family tales in their own words.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Built in 1896, this six story, mixed use building in SoHo has 15,451 square feet. Five floors are leased out to Knotel, a company that provides flexible office space. It also has one retail space on the ground floor leased to a gallery, and a basement that has 2,200 square feet. Brokers: Robert Burton and Bobby Carrozzo of Cushman and Wakefield	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
If you didn't scoop up a 200,000 Paul Newman model Rolex Daytona a couple of decades ago, when they were selling for a tenth of that price, you missed your chance. You can read all about how wealthy people use watches to grow wealth here. All is not lost, however. W e asked prominent dealers and experts to identify six up and coming vintage watches that are still reasonably priced at least by high end watch standards and that stand a chance to outperform as investment assets. Vintage Seiko diver's models such as the 6105, the 6217 and the 6309 offer a tremendous bang for the buck proposition, with prices from around 1,200 to 4,000. With classic no nonsense tool watch looks and tough as nails Japanese mechanical movements, these watches are high on style and value, as well as offering some rich history in a field dominated by their Swiss counterparts which, of course, come with much higher price tags. The key in collecting here is to make sure you're buying untouched, honest examples. The market is rife with refinished dials and aftermarket components. James Lamdin, founder, Analog/Shift, New York The Camaro had a distinctive cushion shape that seems like a perfect companion to the fashion of the late 1960s and 1970s. Designed and produced by Piquerez, a famed manufacturer of watch cases, it was introduced in 1967, and seems to be a clear predecessor of the celebrated Monaco, the famous square watch Steve McQueen wore in "Le Mans." While other Heuer models such as the Autavia and Carrera have gotten serious attention from collectors, the Camaro remains a model that has quietly gained its own cult following. Eric Wind, founder, Wind Vintage, West Palm Beach, Fla.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
With the Major League Baseball season becoming more precarious seemingly by the day amid a slow but steady stream of new coronavirus cases among the teams, the league's commissioner, Rob Manfred, issued something of a rallying cry. "We are playing," Manfred told ESPN on Saturday. "The players need to be better, but I am not a quitter in general and there is no reason to quit now. We have had to be fluid, but it is manageable." Those words bothered some players in the sport and some health experts outside it. Two outbreaks 20 cases among the Miami Marlins and six among the St. Louis Cardinals, as of Sunday afternoon less than two weeks into the season have wreaked havoc on the schedules of eight teams and raised questions about M.L.B.'s protocols and the role of the players' individual responsibilities in stopping the virus. In saying the games would go on, Manfred thrust the onus on the players. "I don't know Rob's situation, and I don't want to put my foot in my mouth on that one," Chicago Cubs pitcher Jon Lester told reporters on Saturday. "But I do know we not only the players, but families are making sacrifices day in and day out. I don't want to put my foot in my mouth. I guess I'll stop there." M.L.B.'s 113 page operating manual for the 2020 season, which was crafted with input from the players' union, has details on everything from how a team should travel to proper spacing in the dugout to what to do if a player tests positive. But it does not explicitly state what should happen after an outbreak or what the threshold is for postponing games. Kathleen Bachynski, an assistant professor of public health at Muhlenberg College, took issue with Manfred's comments, writing on Twitter that the virus thrives "when people insist on sticking with a poor plan to the bitter end." Bachynski said in a phone interview that her biggest concerns were about the plan itself. She said she was shocked when she read that the M.L.B. manual did not detail steps for the league and players to follow after an outbreak. None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. "You can certainly say you want to encourage safe personal behaviors," she said. "There's nothing wrong with that. But that doesn't make up for not having a written policy. And the responsibility has to be on the league to provide safe conditions to play in. "I just don't think it makes sense to put the burden of all of this on the players." M.L.B. stopped the Cardinals, who registered their first two positive cases on Friday, from playing the Brewers, and put the brakes on the Phillies, who have not had a player test positive, for seven days because of their exposure to the Marlins. Since their series against the Marlins a week ago, the Phillies have had three staff members test positive. But M.L.B. said on Saturday that it appeared that two of those tests were false positives, and "it is unclear if the third individual contracted Covid 19 from Marlins players and staff based on the timing of the positive test." The Phillies are set to resume play on Monday against the Yankees. "The protocols are a series of little things that people need to do," Manfred told The Associated Press on Saturday. "We've had some problems. In order to be better, it's another series of little things. I think it's peer pressure. I think it's players taking personal responsibility." He said he also had a "constructive conversation" with the players' union chief, Tony Clark, on Friday. Several players have decided to opt out of the season after seeing the virus infiltrate team rosters. Yoenis Cespedes of the Mets on Sunday became the fourth player to opt out since the Marlins' outbreak, joining more than a dozen who had made the decision before opening day. After news of the Marlins' outbreak surfaced, David Price, the Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher who opted out of the season before it began, tweeted: "Part of the reason I'm at home right now is because players health wasn't being put first. I can see that hasn't changed." Among those who are still playing, there is some acknowledgment that both protocols and personal behavior can improve. "Everyone can do better. This is a learning process," Yankees outfielder Giancarlo Stanton said on Sunday. "We learn things every day from how to do better with this on both sides. Both sides can be better. And by the time the season is over, there can still be improvements of what we could've done better." From the start, M.L.B. and the players' union recognized the season's policies would evolve. The manual's opening page states that it does not address every aspect of the season's operations and that additional guidance may come throughout the year. Last week, M.L.B. informed teams of tightened regulations, including designating a compliance officer for each club. More changes could be coming. The Marlins were found to have been lax in following protocols: At least some of them did not strictly adhere to all of the rules. But players on many teams have been spotted high fiving or spitting or getting too close too often in the dugout all in violation of the manual. Even diligent teams and conscientious players are worried about contracting the virus unknowingly while in their community or traveling. The Dodgers have gone above and beyond the M.L.B. rules, deciding as a team to require all players to wear face coverings in the dugout and limit when coaches can be there during games, according to third baseman Justin Turner. "If your leadership is showing how important it is and you've got the front office, like we have here, taking it very seriously, then that'll trickle down to the players taking it seriously," said Yankees pitcher James Paxton, who sits on the players' union executive subcommittee. Mike Zunino, a catcher for the Tampa Bay Rays who has two young children, said he thought often about not continuing to play this season after the Marlins' and Cardinals' outbreaks. "I'd be lying if I told you it didn't cross your mind every day when you see positive tests come out," he said, adding later: "I have a lot of trust in the team here, the guys, we're doing stuff the right way. It's a real conversation I have every day just to see how the dynamic of the league is going." While he is not opting out, the Boston Red Sox' top pitcher, Eduardo Rodriguez, will not play this season because he is still recovering from myocarditis, the inflammation of his heart, which he developed after contracting the virus before the season. "Hopefully if somebody does test positive, we don't just immediately point the finger that they're doing something wrong," Lester told reporters on Saturday. "They could have gone to Target and needed soap and got it there. Hopefully, we can get away from pointing fingers immediately to the bad side of things. Hopefully, the real stories come out, and maybe they're good. And if they are bad, then that sucks it's unfortunate that guys made bad decisions on that."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
River House, the majestic 1931 co op tower at the north corner of the East River and 52nd Street, is taking the unusual step of offering the River Club complex on its lower floors as a 130 million apartment, which would close one of the most luxurious clubs in New York. Few who pause in front of the building's sumptuous drive in courtyard think to turn around to see River House's older and shorter sibling, the 1927 Campanile, at the south corner of 52nd Street. It, too, took the painful step of closing its riverfront club decades ago. The East River was bubbling with unusual projects in the 1920s, especially after the redevelopment of Sutton Place with townhouses brought attention to what had been industrial waterfront. The Campanile was built by the developer Joseph B. Thomas, a star polo player at Yale; in 1925 he had built the riverside Beekman Terrace at 455 East 51st Street, the first of the swank apartment houses on the East River. Renderings show a garden and a yacht landing directly on the river, apparently for common use by the residents. A 1926 advertisement in The New York Times described the Campanile as "architecturally reminiscent of Venice and its Grand Canal." There were to be only eight apartments, each a duplex of 12 to 15 rooms, some with 19 foot high living rooms of 35 feet by 21 feet providing "palatial entertaining possibilities." Prices ranged from 50,000 to 72,000, and the building sold out. Early shareholders were people like Joshua Cosden, described by The Associated Press at his death in 1940 as the " 'rubber ball' of the oil industry" because he made and lost two fortunes, his net worth once as high as 50 million. Another was Alice Duer Miller, a member of an old and distinguished New York family. A writer and critic, she came out in 1915 with a book of poems, "Are Women People?" that mocked The Times's editorial attacking female suffrage as flouting "the admonitions of common sense." Her opening verse runs: Oh, that 'twere possible/After those words inane/For me to read The Times/Ever again! For the water frontage, Thomas went one better than Beekman Terrace, building a riverside club and an extensive dock with tie ups for boats. The Montauk (later Mayfair) Yacht Club allowed Campanile residents and others to wake up in their Long Island country houses, step onto their yachts in their dressing gowns and arrive in New York, showered, dressed and breakfasted. In 1930 The Guard of Eugene, Ore., described an early evening visit to the club, at which the reporter found the crew of the yacht Vampire furiously wiping down its mahogany and brass and then standing at attention as Ralph Pulitzer, the publisher of The World, stepped aboard and sat down on a chair on deck. The club had a waterside dining room with a dance floor. A 1932 ad in The Times described it as "New York's First and Only Marine Rendezvous." When Prohibition agents in evening clothes raided the club in 1933 and found 250 bottles of liquor, they said they had been tipped off by someone who was angry that the cheapest thing to drink, a beer, cost a dollar. The Times reported that "in spite of the prices, however, lines of automobiles, some bearing Connecticut and New Jersey license plates, came to the club from 9:30 p.m. until midnight." The book "As Ever Yours: The Letters of Maxwell Perkins and Elizabeth Lemmon," edited by Rodger L. Tarr, quotes a 1934 letter from Perkins describing the restaurant as "a silly one with men wearing sailor suits a bar like the prow of a ship." Even the bridge and tunnel crowd could not keep the club afloat, and in 1935 it was converted to apartments. There must have been some sort of vestigial boat landing, because in 1939 a ferry service ran to the New York World's Fair in Flushing from the Campanile, 3 round trip. By then, the East River Drive was snaking along the East River waterfront, destroying many picturesque dead ends and riverside gardens. The Times prettied this up in 1940, describing how the Campanile was going to "benefit" from the drive because it would open up more space. But, based on a visit several years ago to the River Club, the advent of the road created a prisonlike yard and a deafening racket. More traffic than ever runs past River House, and it will be a measure of what our billionaires will put up with to see who buys, and for how much, what the Brown Harris Stevens listing describes as, at 62,000 square feet, the largest single family home in New York.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
When the Broadway set designer, John H. Young, affixed his name to a four story studio in 1904, in what today is known as West Chelsea, it was surrounded by warehouses and horse stables. It was the ideal location for him to create meticulous backdrops and props for plays by Florenz Ziegfeld, George M. Cohan and other marquee names, away from the bustle of the theater district. Now the narrow strip of 29th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, is chockablock with luxury apartments, and the whir bang of construction in nearby Hudson Yards signals more to come. So the roughly 6,400 square foot building is listed for 18.5 million, in part because recent zoning allows roughly 18,500 square feet to be developed on the lot. The property taxes are 42,790 a year. But the current owners, artists themselves, looking to spare Young's studio from the wrecking ball, are hoping its quirky interior may be enough to deter speculators. "I would cry if someone tore down the building," said Nadine Knudsen, who, along with her business partners, moved their fashion and textiles business into the building at 536 West 29th Street about 20 years ago, and bought it in 2008, after a complicated lease agreement with the previous owner. City records show a 500,000 transaction, but she said millions were spent to bring the commercial space into good condition. "Walking through that front door is like: Wham," said Ms. Knudsen, who was in awe of the 34 foot high ceilings, across a 25 foot wide expanse without a single vertical column. "It's like a fantasy for a designer," who can configure the space in seemingly endless permutations. Oversize windows pour in northern light, prized by photographers. The absence of pillars, designed so that Mr. Young could rig massive scrims from the ceiling, allows for flexibility in reconfiguring the space . Currently it's divided into a fashion studio on the lower level; a kitchen with over 20 foot ceilings on the mezzanine that leads to a terrace overlooking a 750 square foot private garden; a combined great room and dining area; a top floor library, two bedrooms, four bathrooms and an office. "It had to be someone who had courage and stupidity combined," said Ms. Knudsen, who spent over a decade adding modern features and peeling back layers of midcentury faux pas. Even though the studio is dwarfed by nearby mid rises, two large skylights brighten the interior, and they are aided by glass and glass like cutouts in parts of the floor that give lower levels a solarium quality. Because of the unusual floor plan, visitors can look straight through the skylight from the first floor den, more than 30 feet below. Relics of the past are venerated in the rear garden, which is decorated with giant gears that were once part of a pulley system for hauling stage settings. Mr. Young, whose best known scenes were produced around 1900 to 1915, was praised for his deft "mechanical displays," like a scene involving a race between trains and motorcars, according to his 1944 obituary. A trap door in the floor, used by a previous owner and photographer, still functions. Ms. Knudsen, who has split her time between this space and a home near San Francisco, has left her own mark. The master bedroom has 13 foot wooden doors that were salvaged from a convent's motherhouse in California. The upstairs library is made of walnut wood that was crafted and sourced from upstate New York. The rear private garden has a mature cherry tree and organic soil that Ms. Knudsen shipped from Maine, because it had bits of colorful seashells and peat. "You have no idea you're in New York," while in the garden, she said with the occasional exception of clanging construction nearby. To counter the changes around her, she installed Cor ten steel walls on three sides of the garden, which rust to a bark like color and add privacy to the space. Ms. Knudsen and her partners are selling the property because they are winding down their fashion business and plan to spend more time in California. A sale at this price, on this once largely commercial stretch, would have been unthinkable several years ago.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
David Brooks lists daunting societal challenges, from economic depression to the deadly virus. But none of these crises, he argues, is quite so threatening as the current "Social Justice" movement and its "symbolic gestures." Mr. Brooks draws a false dichotomy between symbolic work and structural change. The truth is, you can't have one without the other. People who have studied the history of oppression understand the power of symbols. How many social services were gutted after Ronald Reagan popularized the racist symbol of a "welfare queen"? How many Black children set their ambitions one notch higher when they saw a Black president in their textbooks? Telling activists to forgo symbolic gestures is like telling a company that sales will go up if they stop advertising. It betrays a basic misunderstanding of what it takes to create political change.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
The Astros, Suddenly Dominant at the Plate, Are Back in the A.L.C.S. When the Houston Astros qualified for the postseason last month, their many detractors were annoyed. Then, when they won their wild card series against the Minnesota Twins, those same critics grew even more agitated. Now, to paraphrase shortstop Carlos Correa, what will they say? Behind another strong outing by Correa, the Astros stunned the Oakland Athletics, 11 6, in Game 4 of their American League division series at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles on Thursday, winning the best of five series and qualifying for the American League Championship Series for the fourth straight year. That made for a happy day in Houston, and also in the Astros' clubhouse in Los Angeles, where the celebration could be heard during the video interviews with players and their first year manager, Dusty Baker. "It's been a long, tough road," said Baker, who last reached a league championship series 17 years ago as the manager of the Chicago Cubs. "But we're halfway there." In the rest of the country, where the Astros are considered cheating villains for their sign stealing scheme during their championship winning season in 2017, their victory qualified as a reason for dread. After all, most fans had left the Astros for dead when they lost their final three games of the regular season to fall below .500. But the Houston Astros are somehow back among baseball's final four. Correa was less strident on Thursday than he was after the Astros beat the Twins, saying that the team's only motivation was to keep winning. "It's a special feeling," Correa said. "But we're not done yet. We want to strive for more." To do so, Houston will now have to beat the winner of the division series between the Yankees and the Tampa Bay Rays, who will play a decisive Game 5 on Friday night in San Diego. None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. Correa hit a three run home run and knocked in five runs on Thursday, Michael Brantley hit two homers and Jose Altuve added a two run shot for the suddenly slugging Astros. The same team that ranked 19th out of 30 teams with 69 home runs in the regular season, blasted 12 in the four game series, including three by Correa. In six playoff games, Correa is 10 for 20 with four home runs, 12 runs batted in and a staggering 1.715 on base plus slugging percentage. During the 60 game regular season, Correa hit just five homers and his O.P.S. was .709, but he noted that the season is only into its third month, and for many players that is when they start to become their most productive. Still, the Astros barely qualified for the playoffs with a 29 31 record, tied for the worst mark among any postseason team. But they have won five of their six games in the playoffs none of them at home and look very much like their old selves, marching confidently through October while pounding baseballs over fences. After batting .240 during the regular season, they have hit .281 in the postseason, and .322 in the division series. When they secured the final out Thursday to send the third seeded A's home, they held a muted celebration on the field, as if it were a regular season game. Brantley said that was because of concerns over the coronavirus, but he said they found their celebratory voices later on. "It's a little different this year, and we respect that," Brantley said, and added: "But in the locker room we're dancing, and we're enjoying this." Perhaps some of the joy is also a cathartic release after what has been a stressful year for Houston. The Astros drew the wrath of opposing players, executives and legions of fans for their sign stealing caper in 2017, the year they won the World Series. While there had been rumors for years, confirmation of their use of illicit means to steal opposing teams' signs did not come until Oakland pitcher Mike Fiers, a former Astro, revealed the scheme in an article in The Athletic. At that point, the Astros instantly morphed into everyone's most hated rival. Fiers' accusations were confirmed in January after an investigation by the commissioner's office, but no current players were punished, which only added to the fury of opposing fans. Then, after Houston beat the Twins a week ago, Correa seemed to taunt his critics. "I know a lot of people are mad," he said, and he asked what they would say about the team now. The comments only further enraged Astro haters, but Correa has backed up his bravado, as have his teammates. The entire series was played at Dodger Stadium one of the four locations for the Major League Baseball postseason to minimize travel and try to reduce risk of coronavirus infections and the warm, dry, daytime conditions were beneficial for the long ball. The teams combined for 24 home runs and hit at least five in all four games. Fiers was the only pitcher on the A's roster not to play in the series, and he never faced Houston in 10 games during the regular season, either. The A's won seven of those games (and the American League West), and were favored to win this series, too, even at a neutral site. Jon Wilson, an A's fan from California, was not happy about the Astros advancing. During the regular season, Wilson had hired an airplane to drag a sign chastising the Astros over Oakland's stadium during an A's Astros game. He felt the modified rules for the 2020 season unfairly favored the Astros, including the new playoff format. "On top of not having to hear from fans this year, the Astros were allowed into the playoffs despite not having a winning record," Wilson said Thursday in a text message, "and they were able to play an opponent in the playoffs that wasn't allowed home field advantage." But like the Twins, Wilson and the A's can only watch as Houston advances. Baker, 71, took over in January after the Astros fired the former manager A.J. Hinch for his role in the sign stealing scandal. Baker is still searching for his first World Series championship in 23 years of managing five different teams, having lost to the Angels with the Giants in 2002. On Thursday, he was asked why the Houston offense was starting to produce in volume, and his response could have answered larger questions about his life and career. "Better late than never," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
BAOTOU, China When Japanese mineral traders learned in late September that China was blocking shipments of a vital commodity, the word came not from a government announcement but from dock workers in Shanghai. And on Thursday, the traders began hearing that the unannounced embargo of so called rare earth minerals was ending again, not from any Chinese government communique, but though back channel word from their distributors. Throughout the five weeks of the embargo, even when China expanded the rare earth shipping halt to include the United States and Europe, Beijing denied there was a ban. Whatever it was called, a shipping suspension that started amid China's diplomatic dispute with Japan over a wayward fishing trawler escalated into a broader international trade issue. The episode alarmed companies around the world that depend on rare earths, minerals that help make a wide range of high tech products, including smartphones and smart bombs. China currently controls almost all of the world's supply of rare earths, for which demand is soaring. To many outsiders, the undeclared embargo looked like a pure power play a sign China would wield its growing economic might and apply its chokehold on an important industrial resource with little regard for the conventions of international trade. The export quotas China continues to impose on rare earths, even when it does let ships leave the docks, are restricting global supplies and causing world market prices to soar far beyond what Chinese companies pay. From the Chinese perspective, though, the issue looks very different. China feels entitled to call the shots because of a brutally simple environmental reckoning: It currently controls most of the globe's rare earths supply not just because of geologic good fortune, although there is some of that, but because the country has been willing to do dirty, toxic and often radioactive work that the rest of the world has long shunned. Despite producing 95 percent of the world's rare earths, China has only 37 percent of the world's proven reserves. Sizable deposits are known to exist in the United States, Canada, Australia, India and Brazil, among other places. Many of those countries, responding to the rising demand for rare earths and alarmed by the recent embargo, are now scrambling to develop new mines or renovate ones long considered not to be worth the effort. That includes an abandoned mine in California that the American company Molycorp is trying to refurbish. But experts say that any meaningful new production from outside China is at least five years away, and that it will come with its own environmental cost calculus. "China's rare earth output cannot be raised fast enough to meet the entire world's needs, as there are environmental factors to be taken into consideration with an increase in rare earth production," said Zhang Peichen, the deputy director of the government backed Baotou Research Institute of Rare Earths, the main research group for the Chinese industry. Across China, rare earth mines have scarred valleys by stripping topsoil and pumping thousands of gallons of acid into streambeds. The environmental costs are palpable here in Baotou, a smoggy mining and steel city in China's Inner Mongolia, where the air this week had an acrid, faintly metallic taste. Half of the global supply of rare earths comes from a single iron ore mine in the hills north of Baotou. After the iron is removed, the ore is processed at weather beaten refineries in Baotou's western outskirts to extract the rare earths minerals. The refineries and the iron ore processing mill pump their waste into an artificial lake here. The reservoir, four square miles and surrounded by an earthen embankment four stories high, holds a dark gray, slightly radioactive sludge laced with toxic chemical compounds. Even before the Hungary disaster, Baotou authorities had begun a program to reinforce the levee here. Huge bulldozers are adding a thick surface layer of crushed stone to the embankments to protect them from the region's harsh weather. But the bottom of the reservoir was not properly lined when it was built decades ago, according to a rare earth engineer who insisted on anonymity because of the Chinese government's sensitivity about the problem. The sludge, he said, has caused a slowly spreading stain of faint but detectable radioactivity in the groundwater that is spreading at a rate of 300 yards a year toward the Yellow River, seven miles to the south. Much of the radioactivity associated with rare earths comes from the element thorium, which is not a rare earth but is typically found in the same ore. With the exception of unusual clay formations in southern China that contain medium and heavy rare earths with virtually no thorium, every other known commercial grade rare earth deposit in the world is laced with thorium. In Australia, engineers and lawyers have been working for three decades to find a safe, legal way to produce rare earths from a very rich deposit in the center of the country at Mount Weld. The mine's current owner, Lynas Corporation, hopes to begin small scale production there late next year, although technical challenges remain. The only American rare earths mine, the Molycorp complex at Mountain Pass, Calif., was at one time the world's leading producer. That was before it leaked faintly radioactive fluid into the nearby desert in the late 1990s, causing a costly cleanup that contributed to the mine's closing in 2002. By then, very low Chinese prices had made the mine less economically viable. Now Molycorp, which raised money in a public stock offering this past summer, is hoping to re open the mine with higher safety and environmental standards. And it is betting that new technologies can drive its operating costs lower than the level of Chinese mines. Large scale production, though, may still be several years away. The mines of southern China are essentially free of thorium and have rare earths that are easily separated from the clay by dumping the ore in acid. But this relatively easy process, and soaring prices on the world market, has led to the development of many illegal mines, which sell to organized crime syndicates that pay for rare earth concentrate with sacks of cash. Beijing officials have sent out police squads since May to shut down the outlaw mines, arrest their operators and destroy their equipment with blowtorches, rare earth industry officials said. "The damage that has been done in south China is considerable," said Judith Chegwidden, a managing director specializing in rare earths at the Roskill Consulting Group in London. To point out China's environmental and supply concerns is not to overlook the economic benefits the nation accrues by restricting exports. The global shortage gives foreign companies a reason to move even more of their rare earth dependent operations to China, to produce key components for a wide range of products. A Chinese official has acknowledged as much. "To use moderation in the control of the production of rare earth resources and reduce exports to an acceptable level is to attract more Chinese and foreign investors into the region," Zhao Shuanglian, the vice chairman of Inner Mongolia, said last year, according to China's official Xinhua news agency. Meanwhile, China's own fast growing manufacturing industries now consume more rare earths than the rest of the world combined. And Beijing has done nothing to curb that domestic demand. That apparent double standard could prove important if, as some trade experts have predicted, the United States, Europe and Japan bring a World Trade Organization case accusing China of unfairly restricting exports through a system of quotas and duties. Alan Wolff, a former American trade official who now heads the international trade practice at the law firm Dewey LeBoeuf in Washington, said China might face a skeptical audience at the W.T.O. "A panel would sympathize with a genuine environmental objective," Mr. Wolff said. "But I do not think it would sympathize with cutting off supply disproportionately to foreign users in the name of saving the environment."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
As the virus surges around the country and near team facilities the league's efforts to complete the season on schedule will be severely tested. The N.F.L. Has Prevented Coronavirus on the Field. Off It Is Another Matter. Before the N.F.L. season began, one of the big questions the league faced was whether a close contact sport like football, with 22 players on the field and dozens more on the sidelines along with coaches and trainers, could avoid a coronavirus outbreak stemming from a game. That has largely been answered: yes. Yet as the season passes the halfway mark, and more than 200 people on or affiliated with teams have been infected, the N.F.L. has been grappling with controlling the virus not just on the field but off it, sometimes far from it. And players are far from the only problem. Between Aug. 1 and Nov. 7, 218 out the nearly 8,000 players, coaches and personnel have been infected, with players making up about one third of the positive cases. Only one player is known to have been hospitalized, and most players have had mild symptoms and returned after their mandatory isolation. League officials have said there is no evidence of players transmitting the virus on the field despite the close contact between teams, and there has been little transmission inside team facilities, where social distancing guidelines are in place. Instead, the 78 players and the 140 staff members who support the teams, including coaches, trainers and employees, have picked it up outside the facilities, either when they congregated in restaurants or shared car rides, or came in contact with people outside the N.F.L., like nannies. In response, the N.F.L., which has had to postpone but so far not cancel games, has expanded testing, and adopted and strengthened rules for isolating infected people or those in close contact with them. Coaches and players have been fined tens of thousands of dollars for failing to wear protective equipment properly on the field and outside team facilities. But as the number of infections in the country skyrockets yet again, so too have the number of infections in the N.F.L. This will test the league's efforts to keep the coronavirus at arm's length in the second half of the season as teams exhaust their bye weeks, which were used earlier this season to reschedule games. "Tip of the hat for their success so far, but it's something that requires consistent vigilance," said Dr. Michael Saag, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. "These mitigation strategies are tenuous. They are guesstimates in terms of what will work. If I were the N.F.L., I wouldn't be too comfortable, because all it takes is one super spreader event to shut down a facility or two." League executives say their measures are working because thus far few infections have been transmitted inside a team complex. The biggest scare came in Tennessee, where two dozen Titans players, coaches and staff were infected in October, though the league has not disclosed specifically what it learned about the origin of the outbreak. The league is also making contingencies for an incomplete regular season. On Tuesday, the 32 owners approved a plan that would add one more playoff team in each conference if some teams are unable to complete their 16 game schedule and end up playing an uneven number of games. The surge in coronavirus cases, coupled with the lack of flexibility in the league's schedule, makes that more than a possibility. When an outbreak shut the Titans facility for about two weeks, the league postponed two Titans games by reordering bye weeks and shuffling the schedules of other teams. After this weekend, though, only six teams will still have a bye week. If outbreaks occur on the other 26 teams, the league will have to shuffle its schedule to fit their games in or delay the start of the playoffs by one week and add an 18th week to the regular season for makeup games to be played. It would be yet another wrinkle in an already rumpled 2020 season, another acknowledgment that despite the league's success at containing outbreaks thus far, risky days and weeks lie ahead. "We're seeing the benefits of the concepts we've implemented," Dr. Sills said. But "it is hard because we're all tired of this, everyone's tired of the pandemic, we're tired of the procedures we have to go through on a daily basis." He added: "It continues to feel very unusual and abnormal because it's not normal for us."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Outrage mixes with despair in "Dark Waters," an unsettling, slow drip thriller about big business and the people who become its collateral damage. It's a fictional take on a true, ghastly story about a synthetic polymer that was discovered by a chemist at DuPont, which branded it Teflon. One of those seemingly magical substances of the modern age, Teflon was advertised as an "amazing new concept in cooking," a 20th century wonder meant to make life easier. "Choose a pan like you choose a man," a British ad for a Teflon coated pan suggested. "It's what's on the inside that counts." What was inside Teflon, anyway? In "Dark Waters," the answer starts with cows that belong to Wilbur Tennant (Bill Camp), a West Virginia farmer engorged with rage, whose animals (and livelihood) are horribly and inexplicably dying on his pastoral looking land. He has his suspicions about the cause, but the deaths are an enigma that becomes a murder mystery that, in turn, opens into a legal inquiry into corporate malfeasance and government accountability. Leading the charge is Rob Bilott (Mark Ruffalo), a corporate lawyer in Cincinnati who defended chemical companies but became an unlikely crusader for the other side when he went up against DuPont. Opening the story with a spooky prologue right out of the horror handbook, the director Todd Haynes makes it clear that here be monsters: It's 1975 and a gaggle of young trespassers venture onto fenced off property to go for a night swim. (The script is by Mario Correa and Matthew Michael Carnahan.) Soon after the swimmers splash into the dark, oily waters (kids do the stupidest things), they are rousted by a booming male voice of authority. Given the horror film setup, you half expect a creature from this dark lagoon to rise up or a chain saw killer to buzz into view. Instead, men in a boat marked "containment" glide in, spraying something on the slicked surface.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
SEATTLE After conducting a yearlong search for a second home, Amazon has switched gears and is now finalizing plans to have a total of 50,000 employees in two locations, according to people familiar with the decision making process. The company is nearing a deal to move to the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens, according to two of the people briefed on the discussions. Amazon is also close to a deal to move to the Crystal City area of Arlington, Va., a Washington suburb, one of the people said. Amazon already has more employees in those two areas than anywhere else outside of Seattle, its home base, and the Bay Area. Amazon executives met two weeks ago with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in the governor's Manhattan office, said one of the people briefed on the process, adding that the state had offered potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies. Executives met separately with Mayor Bill de Blasio, a person briefed on that discussion said. Long Island City is a short subway ride across the East River from Midtown Manhattan. Read more on the fast growing Queens neighborhood of Long Island City could be doing to prepare for Amazon. "I am doing everything I can," Governor Cuomo told reporters when asked Monday about the state's efforts to lure the company. "We have a great incentive package," he said. "I'll change my name to Amazon Cuomo if that's what it takes," Governor Cuomo said. "Because it would be a great economic boost." The need to hire tens of thousands of high tech workers has been the driving force behind the search, leading many to expect it to land in a major East Coast metropolitan area. Many experts have pointed to Crystal City as a front runner, because of its strong public transit, educated work force and proximity to Washington. Crystal City's upsides: good transit, diverse residents, a friendly business climate and a single developer with a big chunk of land. JBG Smith, a developer who owns much of the land in Crystal City, declined to comment, as did Arlington County officials. Amazon declined to comment on whether it had made any final decisions. The Wall Street Journal earlier reported Amazon's decision to pick two new locations instead of one. About 1,800 people in advertising, fashion and publishing already work for Amazon in New York, and roughly 2,500 corporate and technical employees work in Northern Virginia and Washington. Amazon narrowed the list to 20 cities in January, and in recent weeks, smaller locations appeared to fall out of the running. For example, although Denver made the initial cut, Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado said last month, "Wouldn't they rather have their second big hub on the East Coast?" Amazon announced plans for a second headquarters in September 2017, saying that the company was growing faster than it could hire in its hometown Seattle. The company said it would invest more than 5 billion over almost two decades in a second headquarters, hiring as many as 50,000 full time employees that would earn more than 100,000 a year on average. HQ2 would be "full equal to our current campus in Seattle," the company said. If Amazon goes ahead with two new sites, it is unclear whether the company would refer to both of the locations as headquarters or if they would amount to large satellite offices. Picking multiple sites would allow it to tap into two pools of talented labor and perhaps avoid being blamed for all of the housing and traffic woes of dominating a single area. It could also give the company greater leverage in negotiating tax incentives, experts said. "Even if the most obvious reasons appear to be about attracting more tech workers, the P.R. and government incentives benefits could help, too," said Jed Kolko, chief economist at Indeed, the online jobs site. With big presences in two cities, the local governments "might feel pressure to increase the incentives they are offering Amazon, and the surprise is yet another news cycle for the Amazon headquarters process," he said. The HQ2 search sent states and cities into a frenzied bidding war. Some hired McKinsey Company and other outside consultants to help them with their bids, investing heavily in courting Amazon and its promise of 50,000 jobs. Even half of that would amount to one of the largest corporate location deals, according to Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, which tracks corporate subsidies. "These are very big numbers," he said. As Amazon's search dragged on, residents in many of 20 finalist cities worried about the impact such a massive project could have on housing and traffic, as well as what potential tax incentives could cost the community. The decision to split into two sites could alleviate some of that resistance. Seattle has been one of the fastest growing cities in the country, in part because of Amazon's growth. The company has about 45,000 employees in the city, and the company said it needed to hire more employees than the city could attract or absorb. "Not everybody wants to live in the Northwest," Jeff Wilke, the head of Amazon's retail division, said at a conference last year. "It's been terrific for me and my family, but I think we may find another location allows us to recruit a different collection of employees." Amazon gave cities six weeks to pitch themselves in a public courtship. Almost 240 municipalities responded, trying to lure the tech giant with marketing gimmicks, promises of new transit lines and, as proposals trickled out, billions in tax incentives. The details of most bids are not public, to the frustration of even some lawmakers. A few elected officials from the short list of 20 cities signed what amounted to a mutual nonaggression pact, trying to avoid a bidding war that would give up too much from taxpayers. But mostly, cities continued their hard sell, showing Amazon executives around their proposed sites and trying to assure the company that the region had sufficient housing and transportation. Since wrapping up visits with cities in the spring, Amazon has been almost silent on the search. That led journalists, residents and politicians to look for clues in new job postings and the flight path of the corporate jet used by Jeff Bezos, Amazon's chief executive.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
The word "this" is specific: It refers to a person, a thing, an experience. It's also exceedingly vague. How telling it is that the choreographer Neil Greenberg, whose dances defy obvious meaning, has slyly christened his new work just that? In "This," an austere yet airy dance performed Wednesday at New York Live Arts, there is not just one object, but many. They come in forms of movement, courtesy of four dancers. The stage is bare except for two lighting towers that delineate the space into three sections: the center, or the main dance floor, and two exposed wings. The panoramic view allows the eye to discern the air between bodies; in this sense, space is part of the choreography. As his movement phrases build and recede, Mr. Greenberg, even within this wide lens, frames sections as a filmmaker might to isolate bodies like sculptures. Steve Roden, a sound and video artist, supplies the spellbinding, subdued score, in which ambient noises drift in and out to make one startlingly aware of silence. Three sets of costumes, credited to James Kidd Studio, feature sporty chic ensembles in blue, aqua green and beige. But if the costumes and score are the texture of "This," Mr. Greenberg's four dancers, Molly Lieber, Omagbitse Omagbemi, Mina Nishimura and Connor Voss, complete its fabric. While Mr. Greenberg is not onstage himself a program note stated that another piece, "This Solo," which he was to dance, was edited out of the evening the dancers, namely Ms. Lieber and Ms. Nishimura, hint at his presence by the way they elongate every stretch and twist of the body. For years, Mr. Greenberg has videotaped himself improvising and, with his dancers, tried to learn his movement verbatim. Now, the dancers improvise, too. The choreographic process for "This" also included, for the first time, duet improvisations.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Could pernicious anemia, a disease caused by a vitamin B12 deficiency, have explained the many strange behaviors of Mary Todd Lincoln? She was not exactly a model first lady. Historians have had a field day describing her violent temper, wild shopping sprees (she owned 300 pairs of kid gloves), depressed moods and all consuming fears of burglars, storms and poverty. Late in life, at her son's urging, she was committed to a mental hospital for several months. Plenty of theories, none proven, have been floated. She was bipolar. She had syphilis or that well known cause of feminine madness, menstrual trouble. She was spoiled and narcissistic. She never recovered from a road accident in which her head hit a rock. She lost her mind grieving the deaths of three of her four sons and her husband's assassination. The latest addition to the list of possible diagnoses comes from Dr. John G. Sotos, a cardiologist, technology executive at Intel and one of the medical consultants who helped dream up the mystery diseases that afflicted patients on the television show "House." Dr. Sotos has long been interested in difficult diagnoses, and has written a self published book suggesting that Abraham Lincoln had a genetic syndrome that caused cancers of the thyroid and adrenal glands. In an interview, Dr. Sotos said that while he was studying President Lincoln, he came across something that intrigued him about Mrs. Lincoln: an 1852 letter mentioning that she had a sore mouth. He knew that vitamin B deficiencies could cause a sore tongue, and he began looking into her health. Pernicious anemia could explain many of her problems, both mental and physical, he reported in an article published this week in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. The disease develops gradually in people who cannot absorb enough vitamin B12, which the body needs to make DNA. Deficiencies impair the ability to make red blood cells and can affect every organ, including the brain and nervous system. Severe cases are not often seen now because blood tests can diagnose the disease early and doctors can treat it. But that was not so in Mrs. Lincoln's day. "With any complex disease that affects so many organs, you get a long list of symptoms," Dr. Sotos said. "Mary had just about all of them." Among her symptoms: pallor, weakness, fatigue, fevers, headaches, rapid heartbeat, swelling and puffiness in her hands and face, periods of unexplained weight loss and eye trouble. Her mental symptoms also fit the bill irritability, delusions and hallucinations, but with a clear mind much of the time. Photographs of Mrs. Lincoln are portraits of the disease, Dr. Sotos said. He writes, "she was stocky, with a wide face, wide jaw, and widely separated blue eyes," adding that those characteristics are common in people with the disease, though no one knows why. In addition, he said, her parents were cousins, with ancestors from a part of Scotland where pernicious anemia was found in the 1960s to be unusually common. Dr. Sotos said he hoped the diagnosis would lead historians to look more kindly on Mrs. Lincoln as "simply a woman with a biochemically injured mind." He said his findings had changed his own attitude. At first, when he read accounts of her hitting her husband and insulting him in front of guests, Dr. Sotos said, "I really didn't like her very much. I feel bad about that now." Dr. Christopher Crenner, a physician and medical historian, called Dr. Sotos' work "ingenious, meticulously researched and argued," and said the diagnosis was medically plausible. But he went on to say in an email, "it still amounts to little more than a parlor game for smart physicians. Diagnosing famous figures from the past is entertaining, but it rarely adds much to understanding history." Dr. Crenner, who is chairman of the department of history and philosophy of medicine at the University of Kansas Medical Center, and president of the American Society for the History of Medicine, said it was already widely recognized that Mrs. Lincoln was mentally ill, though the exact nature of her illness was not known. History should regard her with sympathy regardless of the cause, he said. A physical illness that can affect the mind like B12 deficiency is not more deserving of compassion than one that is strictly mental. "Perhaps we might better engage in fighting the stigmas of mental illness directly," Dr. Crenner said, "regardless of whether it might have been confused with what we now call pernicious anemia."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Nana Kwame Adjei Brenyah is not an easy read. That's not a comment on his literary output. Mr. Adjei Brenyah, the author of "Friday Black," a much lauded collection of short stories exploring themes of violence, racism and the excesses of American consumer culture, arrived for an interview at The New York Times wearing an acid washed jacket, a black hoodie and jeans, his outfit so standardized, so coolly underplayed, that it defied interpretation. "I'm on tour, and this is what's clean," he said. But of course there was more to it than that. Like some of his characters, Mr. Adjei Brenyah, 27, spent a portion of in his teens and young adulthood selling lofty down parkas at a mall, in his case the Palisades Center in West Nyack, N.Y. Keenly aware as a salesman, and as a black man, that clothes can be decisive in the way one is perceived, he has mastered the arcana of racial coding sartorial profiling, that is a skill he exploits in his life and his fiction to comic and often unnerving effect. Sure, his turnout last week was a nod to practicality. "I guess I could have imagined looking more business y, but I'm wearing what makes sense for where I'm going to be doing today," said Mr. Adjei Brenyah, who was bound that afternoon for Philadelphia. But it was also a statement. "If he wore wing tipped shoes, smiled constantly, used his indoor voice, and kept his hands strapped and calm at his side, he could get his Blackness as low as 4.0," Nana Kwame Adjei Brenyah writes in "Friday Black." "I'm not anything less than I might have been because I'm wearing a hoodie," he said. That phrase might have resonated with Emmanuel, the conflicted protagonist of "The Finkelstein 5," the first story in the collection, the character playing up or tamping down his blackness at will. "If he wore a tie, wing tipped shoes, smiled constantly, used his indoor voice, and kept his hands strapped and calm at his side, he could get his Blackness as low as 4.0," Mr. Adjei Brenyah writes. To show solidarity with his radicalized peers, Emmanuel wears loosefitting cargo pants, patent leather Space Jams, a black hoodie and a snapback cap. He steps out into the world, "his Blackness at a solid 7.6." Prepping for a job interview, he would look for something at the mall "to bring him down to at least a 4.2." But along the way, he resorts to a challenging gesture, flipping his cap backward and "feeling his Blackness leap and throb to an 8.0." The notion of dialing one's racial profile up or down along a sliding scale may seem over the top. "You can't reduce blackness to numbers," Mr. Adjei Brenyah acknowledged. "But in writing, that's the wit, part of the fun of it, pointing up how absurd it is what people are doing when they're judging you." Still, from time to time he engages in his own form of self profiling, adjusting his garb to chime with other people's expectations. "You learn quickly that your success, your opportunities, even your safety depend on it," he said. His perceptions stem in part from his vantage as an outlier. Mr. Adjei Brenyah, who is of Ghanaian descent, became aware of his difference early on. "My parents being African, you had the sense that that already was not good," he said. "That kind of thinking, unfortunately, is built into society." He teaches creative writing at Syracuse University, where "just being young and black makes me an outsider," he said. "Still, I've been allowed into a space that's denied to many people." That awareness, he said, was amplified when he entered the work force. When he was trying to get his first job, he moderated his look and his mannerisms "to mirror the person I was trying to be, to adopt what I assumed is the standard," he said, "and that standard can be pretty homogeneous." As he matured, he discovered, he said, "how to get good at learning whatever you need to be down, to be accepted, whatever it is that gets you in." In his fiction such experiences are heightened to harrowing, even nightmarish effect, his suburban malls littered with lifeless or mangled bodies, the casualties of unfettered greed. "Have you ever seen people run from a fire or gunshots?" he writes. "It's like that, with less fear and more hunger." In his title story, "Friday Black," his hero keeps his cool in the face of a stampede. The furiously gabbling crowd is a challenge to his sales craft: "I can speak Black Friday," the narrator says. "Or I can understand it at least. Not fluently, but well enough." "I hear the people," he says, "the sizes, the model, the make, and the reason. Even if all they're doing is foaming at the mouth." Mr. Adjei Brenyah's own retail experiences were less fraught, only fueling his ardor and sharpening his knack for discerning just what is that his customers want. As a merchant, one of your goals, he said, is to lead a customer physically to a mirror. "But some guys don't need to look at the mirror," he said. "They just look at their wives." In retail, he added: "You've got to find out who the decider is. You need that person on your side." A hybrid of showman and shaman, he learned to upsell or downsell, he recalled, adjusting his tactics to the client's tastes and needs. He learned as well to project an aura of earnestness and cool authority, along with a generous dollop of fashion sense. "I used psychology," Mr. Adjei Brenyah said, "and a few little tricks."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
The Giants, who joined the N.F.L. in 1925, have become known for a staid, prudent management style. True to form, on Tuesday morning, the team was expected to do something predictable: Hire Matt Rhule, the former Giants assistant coach who has become a rising star after rebuilding downtrodden college football programs at Temple and Baylor. But early Tuesday, Rhule jolted the N.F.L. coaching carousel by agreeing to coach the Carolina Panthers. Roughly an hour later, the normally judicious Giants had some thunderbolt news of their own: The 19th coach in the team's 95 year history would be Joe Judge, a special teams coordinator and wide receivers coach for the New England Patriots who has no head coaching experience at any level. The Giants confirmed the hire on Wednesday. "The mission is clear, to win games," Judge said in a statement. "There is a process to reaching that objective, and we will implement that process and work that process starting today." Judge, 38, has been a part of three of the Patriots' Super Bowl championship teams and was on Coach Nick Saban's staff during two of the University of Alabama's recent national championship seasons. Before Judge interviewed with the Giants on Monday, team officials had reached out to Patriots Coach Bill Belichick, a former Giants assistant, who gave Judge a glowing recommendation. There was also the possibility that the Giants' current and longstanding management structure in which the coach reports to a general manager, in this case Dave Gettleman had become an impediment to attracting a new coach. Increasingly, teams have begun allowing head coaches to handle many personnel matters once reserved for general managers. Jed Hughes, a leading coaching and executive search consultant for the sports industry, said on Tuesday that the momentum of the N.F.L. was carrying it toward a model in which the head coach runs the football operations. "Having the head coach in control is important," Hughes said. "The coach has the ability to create the culture." It is not clear whether Judge, especially given his lack of head coaching experience, will be granted any added off field duties with the Giants. In a news conference last week, the team's co owner John Mara, speaking alongside his ownership partner, Steve Tisch, conceded that he would consider altering the power dynamic within the organization. "I'm always willing to look at whatever's going to improve the team," Mara said when asked about making such changes, "and if I felt that there was somebody coming in here as a head coach who wanted a different role and he could convince Steve and I that that would make sense for our organization, we would certainly consider that." Whatever Judge's specific role will be, the Giants acted swiftly after the news that Rhule would be going to Carolina, agreeing to hire Judge by midday, although ESPN reported that the Giants and Judge began negotiating contract terms on Monday night. The Giants had no comment on Judge's hiring Tuesday, but it's possible they saw an inspiring example in one of this season's strongest teams. A leading candidate for the Coach of the Year Award in the N.F.L. this season is Baltimore's John Harbaugh, a former special teams coach. Harbaugh won the Super Bowl seven years ago with the Ravens, who have boldly built their current offense around the second year quarterback Lamar Jackson. They are the top seeded team in the A.F.C., and Jackson is the prohibitive favorite to win the league's Most Valuable Player Award. But Giants fans could be forgiven if Judge's hiring resurrects some uncomfortable recent memories. When Ben McAdoo was named the successor to Giants Coach Tom Coughlin before the 2016 season, he had been a longtime assistant and coordinator, but it was widely noted that he had never been a head coach at any level of football. He lasted less than two full seasons, departing with a 13 15 record. A native of Philadelphia, Judge attended Mississippi State, where he played a variety of positions. After graduating in 2005, he became a graduate assistant with his alma mater, before moving to Birmingham Southern as a linebackers coach. He then became an analyst at Alabama for three seasons under Saban, who is a close friend of Belichick's. Judge joined the Patriots in 2012.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
WASHINGTON Receiving a Jazz Master accolade from the National Endowment for the Arts this spring at the Kennedy Center, Abdullah Ibrahim delivered his acceptance speech in under two minutes. The South African pianist thanked his mother and grandmother, then his fellow musicians and fans. All of them had fed his quest, he said, "to strive for perfection." Leave it to Mr. Ibrahim a master of understatement and balance to make the impossible sound simple, and vice versa. Sitting down for an interview at a nearby hotel earlier that day, a pastel scarf slung around his neck and a thicket of white hair tousled on his head, he had been similarly epigrammatic. He named the values underpinning his music: "ancient tradition, new elements." Mr. Ibrahim, 84, is cool and serious by nature; he smiles often, but only halfway. At Jazz Standard starting Thursday with Ekaya, his longtime septet, he'll likely keep his interactions with the audience to a minimum, focusing intently on the keys instead, rummaging through a vast repertoire of original compositions, seeking perfection. Earlier this year he released "The Balance," a coolly disarming record featuring Ekaya performing tunes from his catalog, all arranged with a gentle touch. Combining church hymns, South African marabi and postmodern jazz, Mr. Ibrahim doesn't play with obvious ease of motion. Instead he seems to hang back, suspending relief , beckoning you in. It makes sense that he found his place in a kind of musical middle state: Under apartheid, ambiguity felt as if it were resistance . Looking back on a career that began in the 1950s, he recalled: "You had to perform for your own ethnic group, and only musicians of your ethnic group were allowed onstage. People started breaking this. It was part of this greater reaffirmation of our souls." Born Adolph Johannes Brand in 1934 to a Sotho father and a "colored" mother ( an apartheid era label), he was raised in Kensington, a rough suburb of Cape Town. When he was 4, his father was killed; he grew up believing his grandmother was his mother, and his mother, Rachel, was his sister. The government passed its most explicit restrictions on black and brown lives during his adolescence, but his hometown didn't easily accommodate separations. "Cape Town is very cosmopolitan," he said. "I had the privilege of transcending all these barriers, because I could move around." Inspired by his mother's piano playing in the A.M.E. Church that his grandmother had helped found, and in the nearby cinema, where Rachel improvised along to silent films he earned the nickname Dollar because of his penchant for buying jazz albums off international sailors docked in the city's port. By his late teens he was touring with dance bands, including the popular Tuxedo Slickers. He formed the Jazz Epistles in the late 1950s, with the soon to be famous Hugh Masekela on trumpet and Kippie Moeketsi on saxophone. The Epistles turned around bebop ideas, giving them a thumping, warm toned sound that reflected South African musical heritage and the fast developing present. But the band was hounded by the police, partly because it played for mixed crowds and because it defied what Mr. Ibrahim called "the mantra" of apartheid: that black people ought to stick to so called traditional forms of art. The Epistles' only album was immediately banned by the government, and only a few hundred copies were printed. After the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, when the police killed almost 70 protesters in a Gauteng township, Mr. Ibrahim's band mates fled the country. He stayed behind, focusing on his piano playing for a year "I did nothing else but just eat, sleep, drink, 10 to 15 hours solo practicing a day" before moving to Zurich . He embedded himself in the thriving Continental jazz scene, and met greats like Dexter Gordon, Ben Webster and Duke Ellington. Ellington's music had meant the most to Mr. Ibrahim, and the elder pianist became his biggest booster. It was in Europe that Mr. Ibrahim also wed Sathima Bea Benjamin, the vocalist; they were married for decades until divorcing in 2011. Living at the Chelsea Hotel and working with the likes of Don Cherry, Archie Shepp and Max Roach, Mr. Ibrahim became a force on the jazz avant garde, and adjacent to it. He laid claim to an American piano tradition that encompassed Ellington, Thelonious Monk and Randy Weston, but stayed adjacent to that, too. Nobody in this era made levitating, landscaped piano music whether in full size bands or solo like he did. All the while, Mr. Ibrahim longed for home. He mentioned the image of a house in Kensington that returned to him in dreams throughout his years away it symbolized "some kind of resilience" to him, and in 1963 he wrote a tune inspired by it called "The Dream." Beginning and ending with a jolt of Messiaenic alarm, the piece drifts and fades through mysterious keys and shapes. "When you wake up, you have to deal with the reality, that you're not there," he said. He spent a brief time in Cape Town in the 1970s, and finally returned in 1990, when Nelson Mandela was freed from prison. In 1994 he played at Mandela's inauguration as president. In addition to his solo work and his work with Ekaya, Mr. Ibrahim ministers to students, and has started some education and research based initiatives, though many were short lived. Recently he has found himself seeking answers in the traditions of southern Africa's San people, among the most ancient groups on earth. "The understanding of the self during apartheid, we were stripped of that dignity," he said. He sees music as a way back to "the wisdom of the ancient ones." Now as ever, he insists, "We are playing traditional music." Abdullah Ibrahim and Ekaya At Jazz Standard in Manhattan, Thursday through Aug. 4; jazzstandard.com.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Military experts said comparisons of underground nuclear tests over the past several decades suggested that the North Koreans were exaggerating their claim on Wednesday to have successfully detonated their first hydrogen bomb. In 1971, when the United States detonated an H bomb deep beneath the Alaskan island of Amchitka, the colossal upheaval of earth that it caused was typical for a class of weapons whose destructive power is roughly a thousand times greater than the atom bomb that leveled Hiroshima in 1945. The H bomb was detonated more than a mile down. Gargantuan shock waves radiated outward, throwing solid rock and dense earth into bizarre states of fluidity for many miles. The magnitude of the American blast was 6.8. In contrast, South Korea estimated that the bomb detonated on Wednesday had a magnitude of 4.8 on the logarithmic scale of earthquake magnitude, an enormous drop in explosive power. Kenneth W. Ford, an American physicist who worked on the nation's first hydrogen bomb and last year published an H bomb memoir, called the North Korean claim highly suspect. "How could a thermonuclear blast trigger such a weak seismic signal?" he said. "I agree with the suspicion that it was not a true H bomb." The club of nations that possess thermonuclear weapons has only five known members: the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China. All are permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington research group, said North Korea "may be bluffing" in making very large claims for what was actually a small atom bomb. "This possibility," he said, "should be carefully considered." South Korean experts put the blast's energy as equivalent to six kilotons of high explosives. In contrast, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was nearly three times as powerful, with a force of about 15 kilotons. Many nuclear experts, including Dr. Ford and Mr. Albright, suggested that the North Korean test might have involved putting a tiny amount of tritium, or heavy hydrogen, into the core of an atom bomb. Such a technique is known as boosting. But such a boosted device, by definition, is not a true H bomb, even though the added thermonuclear reactions can modestly increase its destructive power. Philip E. Coyle III, a nuclear expert who directed the Alaskan H bomb test of November 1971, said the seismic signature of the North Korean test was "low enough so that it will be difficult to tell if the device was boosted, thermonuclear, just fission or whatever." The world's largest and most sensitive network meant to detect nuclear blasts, run out of Vienna by the United Nations, uses hundreds of global sensors to detect underground shock waves, track undersea explosions, sniff the air for telltale radioactivity and listen for loud sounds in the atmosphere. The array is designed to detect nuclear blasts as small as one kiloton, or equal to 1,000 tons of high explosives. Deciphering all the signals can take days to weeks, experts say, and even then the clues might not add up to hard conclusions since the work of interpretation is often as much of an art as a science. That uncertainty goes especially to small hydrogen bombs, which seismically can be indistinguishable from atom bombs. Nuclear experts say ambiguity also surrounds India's claims to have developed a true H bomb, based on an underground test in 1998. The reported energy release of that blast was dozens of kilotons versus the hundreds of kilotons typical of large H bombs. In all, India claims six nuclear tests. Pakistan also claims six tests. North Korea now claims four tests. In an official statement, Pyongyang asserted that its successful H bomb test meant the nation has now "proudly joined the advanced ranks of nuclear weapons states."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
For the past several summers, dance collaborations have blossomed on a stage nestled in the Rocky Mountains. The Vail International Dance Festival, led by Damian Woetzel, brings together dancers, choreographers and musicians for a most worthwhile purpose: artistic discovery. "I love that idea of taking a dancer and saying, 'Now we can take another step,'" Mr. Woetzel said. At Vail Dance Festival: ReMix NYC, which opens at City Center on Thursday, Nov. 3, Mr. Woetzel's eclectic vision will be on display with new casts of familiar ballets Herman Cornejo, for one, will dance in Balanchine's "Apollo," with the birth scene intact. There will also be a dance that was seemingly lost: Carla Korbes will perform Balanchine's "Elegie," created for Suzanne Farrell in 1982 but not seen since. Mr. Woetzel's history is in ballet he was a longtime principal at New York City Ballet but the festival goes beyond it, honoring a range of music and dance, with tap (Michelle Dorrance), jookin' (Lil Buck), tango (Gabriel Misse and Carla Espinoza) and modern (Fang Yi Sheu). Mr. Woetzel, in his 10th year as festival director, discussed his eclectic programming, his love of music and how his own dancing career informs his choices. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation. Why has it taken so long for you to present the festival in New York? I've always felt a little reticent simply because what goes on in Vail it's very much a lab atmosphere. But then it started to feel that there were a number of things that haven't been seen in New York. What we do in Vail is based on the specificity of where we are, but at City Center I thought, O.K., let's do "Apollo" with the birth like it was done in the 1950s, specific to City Center where City Ballet performed before the opening of Lincoln Center . That's City Ballet coming into its own. It's such a dynamic moment in the history of City Ballet but also of 20th century art. Why are you attracted to that version? Partly it's that idea of placing it in a space and time, but it's also to expand certain aspects of dancers' lives. Robbie Fairchild has danced "Apollo" many times, but he's never danced the birth. I think that's primary in the way I approach directing this festival. I remember my own gigs. Some were about showing up with your costume and doing your thing, and with others you had an opportunity to extend yourself in some way. A new partner, a new place something that made it more than the rest. I always wanted that for the dancers who came. How do you think of casting? A guiding principle is the idea of people who ordinarily don't get to work together. It's definitely a shuffling of the deck. You incorporate a lot of styles, so that it's really dance that you're celebrating. How do you see that aspect of programming? It's definitely just dance, but it's also music. A big example is the "Jookin' Jam" with Buck and different musicians. It's a little bit risky. Something that takes their own work a little bit further. The music really comes through for me as being primary. It's my heritage to some extent at City Ballet. The stage in Colorado is outside and gorgeous. How do you approach that as well as a more traditional theater? Working in that atmosphere, you're conscious of light. Half of the program is in the light, or the sun is setting, and you're trying to think about how that's going to work and what would be better served at one side of the evening or the other. You're also constantly surprised. Sometimes you think, we need lighting for this, and then it ends up in the first half of the program, and you're like, that's crazy! We're going to be in an indoor theater, but not just any theater. It's City Center, where history was created. I have worked on some scenic design elements, but most of all I decided it was the dancers and the musicians that were primary. That spirit was what I was hoping for. What is the spirit of the festival? Adventurous is certainly one of the words that comes to mind. Just that idea that people are risking things, taking chances, trying new roles without a net. In Vail, people come together in a teamlike atmosphere. It's very Olympics in a funny way. It's a village of people working together. What made you think of casting Carla Korbes in Martha Graham's "Lamentation"? Oh, just dreaming. I also have her doing the "Elegie" solo by Mr. Balanchine. To have her also do "Lamentation" the idea of interpretation through the same magnificent dancer really appealed to me. How did she end up doing "Elegie"? I'm always looking back in programs and books, and "Elegie" was one of those things: What was that? There's a ballet, and it doesn't seem to have lived, and it was right at the end of Mr. Balanchine's life. How is that possible? It turned out there was a film, and I knew immediately it was for Carla. It hasn't been seen in New York since Suzanne Farrell did it when Mr. Balanchine was still alive. How did you come up with the format of molding partnerships and giving opportunities to dancers and choreographers? Is this what you would have wanted as a dancer? Exactly. I wanted to create an arc of opportunity that could really address next steps for people. Whether it's a dancer, a choreographer, a musician, a composer, a visual artist, a photographer, there are lots of ways that there can be more for everybody. I'm so proud of Tiler Peck, a principal at City Ballet . She was so young when I was dancing with her before I retired, and now she's grown into this ballerina that has an enormous repertory and an enormous career and still shows up, comes to Vail. Takes her leg warmers off and goes, "O.K., here we go."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
"UNTIL my dad got hold of that Pontiac," said the late Marv Jenkins, "it was a car for retired ministers." Jenkins, who died in 2008, told me this while leaning on the tire of the imposing Mormon Meteor III land speed racecar parked in the garage of his St. George, Utah, home. He was speaking about his father, David Abbott Jenkins, whose record setting feats behind the wheel of a plain looking sedan gave General Motors' Pontiac Division a well deserved name for its flagship performance model of 1957, the fuel injected Bonneville the car today considered the origin of the Pontiac performance legacy. The senior Jenkins is often called the father of salt racing because of his one man campaign to establish the Bonneville Salt Flats in western Utah as a fixture of the international racing scene. The success of Jenkins, known universally as Ab, is evident to this day. On Saturday, some 500 vehicles of all descriptions will line up here for record setting attempts at the 63rd annual Speed Week, where more than 15,000 spectators will enjoy more than 400 daily speed runs.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
In May 2017, Jia Tolentino declared the personal essay dead. "The personal is no longer political in quite the same way that it was," she wrote in an essay for The New Yorker's website. Five years ago, readers salivated over "it happened to me" essays posted daily on women's websites. But after the 2016 presidential election, such pieces started to seem petty, self indulgent, naive. Still, Tolentino, who once edited this kind of writing for The Hairpin and Jezebel, found herself occasionally nostalgic for the authorial voices that developed during the personal essay's heyday. "I am moved by the negotiation of vulnerability," she wrote. "I loved watching people try to figure out if they had something to say." Now a staff writer at The New Yorker, Tolentino has made her own foray into self study in her absorbing first book, "Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion." The book is a collection of nine original essays, some of which have their roots in writing she's done for The New Yorker; each is a mix of reporting, research and personal history. Her voice here is fully developed: She writes with an inimitable mix of force, lyricism and internet honed humor. She is the only writer I've read who can incorporate meme speak into her prose without losing face. Unlike the digital personal essayist in her description, Tolentino considers the modern self not as something to be exposed or exploited, like a mineral deposit, but as something to construct and critique. She finds her subject in what she calls "spheres of public imagination": social media, reality television, the wedding industrial complex, news coverage of sexual assault. Tolentino wants to know how Americans, particularly those of her generation, have adjusted to life under late capitalism. What happens to people when they are forced to compete for the smallest bit of security? Who do we become when we're always being watched? "Trick Mirror" was one of our most anticipated titles of August. See the full list. The brief answers to these questions are: not very good things, and not very good people. The book's first essay, on the "feverish, electric, unlivable hell" that is the internet, makes a good case for the degradation of civic life in Mark Zuckerberg's America. Posting on Facebook or Twitter "makes communication about morality very easy but makes actual moral living very hard," Tolentino argues, in part because so many jobs require online engagement which in turn lines the pockets of tech moguls. We often confuse professing an opinion posting, liking, retweeting with taking political action. Meanwhile, social media makes us feel as if we're perpetually onstage; we can never break character or take off our costumes. Channeling the sociologist Erving Goffman, Tolentino explains how "online, your audience can hypothetically keep expanding forever, and the performance never has to end." The work of being yourself online is relentless, exhausting. Women, she suggests, are especially familiar with this kind of "self calibration." Some, like Kim Kardashian, manage to profit off self exposure, while other women (or sometimes the very same) endure digital harassment. Even as online movements such as MeToo have forged female solidarity, they have also pressured women to be vulnerable, to cede control of their own stories in the same way, not incidentally, that the online personal essay industry once did. And if the personal essay is dead, the internet is still very much alive. Tolentino concludes that only "social and economic collapse" could rid us of this digital plague. This kind of fatalism, dispiriting but perhaps fair, runs through the book. (In the introduction, Tolentino describes writing the book in the spring of 2017 and the fall of 2018, a period that included the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville and the Kavanaugh hearings, and that produced so much despair.) In an essay on exercise culture and "optimization," Tolentino notes how her own exercise regime, which consists mostly of expensive barre classes, is both "a good investment" and "a pragmatic self delusion" she is training herself to "function more efficiently within an exhausting system" from which she cannot escape. Later, in an essay on scam artists and confidence men, she depicts capitalism as the ultimate scam one exposed once we reckon with the arbitrariness of success, or even of survival. We're not all Billy McFarland, the scammer behind the Fyre Festival, but, in a country transformed by financialization and the gig economy, we're all making risky bets. Tolentino persuasively compares betting on stocks to crowdfunding money for medical emergencies: "if you're super lucky, if everyone likes you, if you've got hustle ... you might end up being able to pay for your insulin, or your leg surgery after a bike accident." Overwhelmed by the injustice she sees around her, she reflects on her own "ethical brokenness": "I have felt so many times that the choice of this era is to be destroyed or to morally compromise ourselves in order to be functional to be wrecked, or to be functional for reasons that contribute to the wreck." You can refuse on principle to use ridesharing apps or to rent from Airbnb, but you might end up panicked and sweating on another broken down subway train, late to a job that doesn't cover your travel expenses but that expects that you, like a savvy scammer, will figure something out. These are distinctly millennial sentiments, the complaints of a generation that has come into political consciousness only after investing so much in false meritocratic promises. Tolentino's earnest ambivalence, expressed often throughout the book, is characteristic of millennial life writing, and it can be contrasted with boomer self satisfaction and Gen X disaffection in the same genre. Though she never presumes to be anything like the voice of a generation, Tolentino is a fair representative: Now 30, she graduated from college into an economic recession, watched her parents sink into debt and from the age of 16 has worked multiple jobs simultaneously. In many ways, "Trick Mirror" is a cri de coeur from a writer who has been forced to revise her youthful belief in American institutions. Several of the essays are about losing faith: in institutionalized religion, in the American dream, in the fundamental kindness of others. In "Ecstasy," a lovely meditation on selflessness in all its forms, Tolentino writes movingly about leaving the evangelical church in which she was raised. In her post religious life, she has sought and found bliss elsewhere: during late evening walks, at music festivals, on drugs. It's the book's strongest essay, as well as its least vexed. In it, Tolentino dwells more easily among contradictions: "I can't tell whether my inclination toward ecstasy is a sign that I still believe, after all of this, or if it was only because of that ecstatic tendency that I ever believed at all." She writes beautifully about her desire for self transcendence and how it led her to writing, a tool she uses to understand herself. As a reader (and a fellow millennial), I could have done with more essays like "Ecstasy," in which contradiction felt enriching, or generative, rather than imprisoning. I credit Tolentino for examining her complicity in the structures she critiques, but at times I wished she would go easier on herself, or that she'd keep working to transcend the contradictions she observes. I'm not sure that criticism is always a form of amplification, as Tolentino fears it is, or that the line between feminism as politics and feminism as branding is as "blurry" as she at one point suggests. She has realized that moral purity is a "fantasy," but she might also acknowledge a more hopeful truth: Though the shearing forces in our lives inevitably compromise us, they need not paralyze us. "I am complicit no matter what I do" can be both a realization reached after rigorous self reckoning and something like a dead end. Just because you can't fix climate change with your own consumer choices doesn't mean there's nothing to be done. With this in mind, Tolentino's insistence that we move beyond the personal may be her most trenchant political insight. "Feminism that prioritizes the individual will always, at its core, be at odds with a feminism that prioritizes the collective," she writes in her essay on scammers. Elsewhere, she underscores the importance of building solidarity among different social groups. What she likes about a drug like Ecstasy, she explains, is that it literally produces empathy. While on it, you care about more people than you would think possible: "It makes the user's well being feel inseparable from the well being of the group." Ecstasy expands our understanding of the collective. This is a productive self delusion, the kind of fantasy that inspires rather than cripples. It is a personal experience that Tolentino gracefully politicizes an ephemeral feeling that, if we take it seriously, we might use to bring about a better world.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Sutter Health, the large hospital system in Northern California, said Friday that it had agreed to pay 575 million to settle claims of anti competitive behavior brought by the California state attorney general as well as unions and employers. In addition to the settlement amount which will go to compensate employers, unions and the state and federal governments Sutter will also be prohibited from engaging in several practices that the state attorney general and others said the hospital system used to ensure its dominance. It will be barred from so called "all or nothing" agreements, which the attorney general said required insurers to include all of Sutter's medical facilities if they wanted to include some of the system's hospitals. And it will be required to limit what it can charge patients for out of network services, which the state said would prevent people from facing surprise medical bills. "If we're going to treat something that's precious and lifesaving like a business, then the marketplace for health care must be vibrant and competitive so that the best in the business can rise to the top naturally," Xavier Becerra, California's attorney general, said in a news conference Friday. "This first in the nation settlement is one of the largest actions against anti competitive conduct in the health care marketplace across the country."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Mr. Kushner, 35, is the president of the Kushner Real Estate Group, which owns and manages more than 12 million square feet of commercial property in the New York area. It is involved in several projects in northern New Jersey. The company, based in Bridgewater, N.J., is the successor to SK Properties, which his father, Murray Kushner, helped found in 1979. Q. What roles do you and your father, the chairman, play in the company? A. I oversee all of the acquisitions, design, development and management; my father oversees the general finances. A. It's great it's better than it's ever been since I started working full time in 1999. We made a shift in the early 2000s to go from being suburban builders in New Jersey and Pennsylvania to being also urban builders. We've built an urban brand and we have about 12 projects in different stages from Bayonne, Jersey City, West New York, Hoboken and Fort Lee along the Gold Coast of New Jersey. All of our locations are transit oriented, where you can walk to mass transit and be in Manhattan. Q. Most of what you're doing now is residential. A. The lion's share of what we're doing is residential in focus and rental apartments. Our current holdings consist of about six million square feet of office, warehouse and retail space and roughly 10,000 apartments. In addition to that we have over 7,000 apartments in different phases of design and construction. Q. Let's talk about some of these developments. A. We're under construction on 18 Park in Jersey City; we're about 75 percent complete. That'll be opening in March or April. It's 550,000 feet and it's 422 apartments, all rentals, plus 30,000 feet of retail. And at the base of that building we're building a new Boys and Girls Club. We just broke ground on Journal Square, a three phase, 2.4 million square foot project. The first phase is a 640,000 square foot residential tower 54 floors and 540 rental apartments, next to the train station. The other two phases are probably three and five years out; we're going to build one rental tower at a time. The second tower is going to be 70 floors and 700 units, and the third tower will be 60 floors and 600 units. We're in construction drawings on 235 Grand and 101 Grove 688 rentals in two towers, a 45 story tower and a 10 story tower. That project will have stunning views. We will probably break ground the summer of '14. Q. Why the focus on Jersey City? A. It's all about transportation. If you live in Jersey City and work downtown or even Midtown South, you get to work quicker from our buildings than if you lived on the Upper East or West Sides and the rents are half. Q. Like what, for instance? A. Our rents start in the 1,700 range for studios and they go up to 4,000 a month for three bedrooms. So the high 30s to low 40s per foot. Q. Any plans to develop in Manhattan? A. We have a couple of buildings that we own in Manhattan, and we have a site in Lower Manhattan where we are going to be building. We've assembled a site with Ironstate. We can build about 100,000 square feet. We're in the design process now. It'll probably be a condominium. Q. Why are you not living in Jersey City? A. It doesn't suit our religious lifestyle. We're sending our children to Jewish school so it's easier for us to live on the Upper East Side where there's a Jewish school in walking distance. Q. Could you see your three children in the business someday? A. It's too early to tell. But every day that they don't have school or camp or something, they come to work with me. I grew up going to job sites with my father from as early as I can remember and my children are doing the same with me. They seem to enjoy what we do. And that's what it's about: being together as a family. I love working with family. My brother, Marc Kushner, is an architect and has designed many of the projects I'm building right now. Q. Speaking of family, have you had any communication with your first cousin, Jared Kushner, since the rift between your father, and uncle Charles Kushner? A. Unfortunately the families are no longer in partnership as a business. We grew up very close and we come from the same place, which is a rich tradition in family, and they're doing fine and we're doing fine. It's just better to be apart at this point. Q. Where do you see your company in the next five to 10 years? A. We're going to continue to grow in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York. The goal is be home every night, so we pretty much stick within 100 miles from Manhattan.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
As artists looked for new formats in the late 1960s and early '70s, Dorothea Rockburne continued to make paintings and drawings, but she used novel materials and approaches. An installation of Ms. Rockburne's works from this period on view at Dia:Beacon shows her inventiveness. The works perch high on the wall, slide onto to the floor or occupy space in between. Some of the most artfully simple objects are a series of folded paper drawings. Yet they also reveal Ms. Rockburne's interest in mathematics, inspired by meeting Max Dehn at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where she studied in the early 1950s. Dehn's concepts of harmonic intervals, topology and set theory entered her work; Ms. Rockburne started thinking of artworks as "visual equations." She also began to use industrial materials rather than fine art ones and drawing with crude oil. You can see the mathematical influence in titles like "Domain of the Variable" (1972/2018), "Set" (1970/2018) or "Ineinander Group" (1971). But Ms. Rockburne also got down and dirty with her materials, ripping, staining, scraping and nailing. The heavy process approach is reminiscent of a "Verblist" (1967 68), handwritten by Richard Serra, the artist with whom Ms. Rockburne might best be compared, and which asserts drawing and painting as actions rather than completed objects. Of the many artists getting revivals or renewed attention at the moment, Ms. Rockburne feels particularly relevant to younger artists. Her rough but deliberate process signals not the end of object making, but a renewed and invigorated approach. Combining mathematics with art might be an age old move. But hers carries a new attempt at left brain right brain unity: measured and thoughtful, but also bodily, raw and visceral. MARTHA SCHWENDENER What is the relationship between blondness and whiteness? That's the question driving this exhibition by the filmmaker John Lucas and the writer Claudia Rankine, who are married and are two of the founders of the Racial Imaginary Institute. The artists take a dual approach to their subject: photographs and videos of blond hair, sometimes printed on stamps, and audio snippets of Ms. Rankine asking people about their fair hair. The imagery is closely cropped and nearly abstract, giving it a scientific quality. This is clever framing: It suggests that Mr. Lucas and Ms. Rankine are studying a natural phenomenon, when in fact, blondness is rare among adults. (According to the artists, natural blonds account for just 2 percent of the world's population.) At the same time, the pictures reveal the artificialness of the color, highlighting darker hair strands to some degree in every piece. The use of stamps is less successful. Both blondness and postage have societal value, but that analogy isn't specific enough to be meaningful. The recordings are the richest part of the show. Ms. Rankine is warm but firm, starting with small talk about why people have dyed their hair before asking about the connections between blondness and whiteness. Most interviewees profess ignorance, discussing their choices in aesthetic terms. But as Ms. Rankine pushes, stereotypes come to the fore: Blond is spontaneous; it's "one step closer to being accepted." Such answers beg further questions accepted by whom? After a woman says blond is fun, Ms. Rankine asks, "What is fun?" It still is possible, despite everything, to find uncomplicated pleasure in art. Or at least that's how it feels right now inside Klaus von Nichtssagend, where obsessive, exuberant and faux naive artworks, by 23 artists, make up a florid, occasionally cloying but always heartening summer group show. (Its actual title consists of a string of summery emojis, including a whale, a rainbow and a beach umbrella.) Juliet Jacobson's graphite drawings of blank computer screens very nearly impart the serenity of a Vija Celmins night sky to an ordinary instrument of monotony and overwork, and two finger thick but otherwise meticulously realistic sculptures of lined paper by Joshua Caleb Weibley, fit together like puzzle pieces from strips of Corian and colored epoxy, find virtuosity in sublimation. Nancy Brooks Brody's wonderful "Merce Drawings" as in Merce Cunningham are reprinted photos in which she's made the dancer a kind of levitating tightrope walker by drawing a line around his body, from the soles of his feet to the tips of his fingers to the top of his head. Clintel Steed's "Olympic Series, 300 Relay 1" (2017) an outlandishly impastoed, jagged kaleidoscope of a painting based on a found photo of Olympic swimmers springing off their platforms, suggests a moment of excitement and urgency almost more than it literally depicts it. But in all this art for art's sake, Jared Buckhiester's glazed stoneware sculpture "Urinal (Full Back)" (2016) stands out for the power with which it leverages its formal idiosyncrasy to emotional ends. Imagine a plucked chicken in football pads with a tube shoved down its throat: At once totally vulnerable and deeply strange, the piece lets you inhabit an unfiltered piece of the artist's psyche without forgetting for a moment its otherness. WILL HEINRICH	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Researchers have found that over half the world's "Nutcracker" productions take place in the United States. What matters, though, is that a high proportion of American "Nutcrackers" are good. I've seen many European versions of the ballet British and Russian included and remember the early onset of "Nutcracker" fatigue. Here, however, I've found myself hungry to keep seeking more productions and to revisit the best ones. Nutcrackering became for me a British dance critic working in New York since 2007 a happy way to discover America. On Sunday, as my last task as the chief dance critic of The New York Times, I chose to take the ferry to Staten Island to see the Vicky Simegiatos Dance Company perform the ballet at the St. George Theater. This was at least my 35th American production in 12 years; both the theater and the production justified the trip. The St. George is a marvel too little known outside Staten Island. The 2,800 seat theater, built in 1929, was intended as a home for vaudeville and cinema to vie with those across the water on Broadway. After coming close to demolition at the start of this century, it has been lovingly restored. The foyers and balconies are fabulously ornate. Auditorium, front of house areas and even restrooms are spectacular. The Simegiatos company, founded in the early 1980s and based in Brooklyn, is something of a family industry. It's a matriarchal organization: Vicky, the president, artistic director, and main "Nutcracker" choreographer, is assisted by her daughters, Matina (first vice president, ballet mistress, and co choreographer of "The Nutcracker") and Despina (second vice president). Matina and her husband, Voytek Sporek, play Frau and Dr. Silberhaus, the parents often named Stalhbaum in other productions of Clara and Franz. On paper, this all might sound parochial. Onstage, the levels of technique and theatrical projection are remarkably high; and there are dozens of adorable and well drilled children. At one point in the Battle of Mice and Toy Soldiers, 12 truly tiny child mice crawled on all fours, very precisely, across the stage, unable to hide their complete delight at contributing to the show. (This will remain one of my favorite "Nutcracker" memories.) Act 2 started with 12 equally tiny angels some of them the same performers from the mouse scene now upright but no less blissful, through whom six larger cherubs danced in bigger steps. These children were already good professionals: Later in Act 2, when two child Gumdrops lost their headdresses (one also lost a shoe), they handled the situation adeptly, kicking or throwing the items out of view as quickly as possible. The child performer Alisa Zakovics was an exceptional Clara: a lovably innocent character with astonishingly proficient dancing. Like so many "Nutcracker" productions, the Simegiatos version is performed for just one weekend, but surely is the result of months of industrious rehearsal. It has charming scenery and good costumes, but its Tchaikovsky music is taped, with long pauses between numbers. I found myself going along with all its directorial decisions but two: Patricia Casola, a woman in male attire, made a schoolmasterly Herr Drosselmeyer without fantasy, while the prolonged silence before the Waltz of the Flowers gave cause for alarm. The staging, among other virtues, showcases the company's many admirable young adult dancers. The guest Sugar Plum couple, Teresa Reichlen and Ask la Cour from New York City Ballet, were in excellent form, dancing the pas de deux, choreographed by George Balanchine. Though Ms. Reichlen and Mr. la Cour epitomized the high standards to which all dancers aspire, the Simegiatos dancers were not seriously outshone. Beautiful arms (firmly sculptural) and strong pointwork were widespread. Three impressive young ballerina technicians took the roles of Spanish Chocolate, Arabian Coffee and Dewdrop. Few "Nutcrackers" tell the same story or even use quite the same score. (For connoisseurs, this is part of the fun: Which music will we hear next?) I enjoyed the overture being used to show us the magician Drosselmeyer at work on his four dolls. As it concluded, when he sprinkled silver dust, they came to life and danced offstage. So, yes, another good American "Nutcracker." I come from the land where Richard Buckle once wrote, "Well, we are one more 'Nutcracker' nearer death." What is it about "The Nutcracker" that suits the United States? The ballet's love of hospitality, its innocence, travel adventure and transformations, its positive, outgoing energy and its cornucopia of stylistic diversity are all right for this country (which Tchaikovsky visited, enjoying immense success, between composing the two acts). I have seen, but without pleasure, Realms of Sweets that are fenced or walled enclosures. The decor for the Colorado Ballet production, if memory serves, is the opposite: a spreading landscape, with islands and meadows and mountains all made of confectionery, as endearing as sweet. Just now it's particularly good to see a Realm of Sweets that admits characters from many nations. On the way back from Staten Island, the Statue of Liberty seemed a perfect part of a "Nutcracker" day. Like the Sugar Plum Fairy, she welcomes strangers and embraces diversity.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
In 1804, the Corsican upstart Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself as France's emperor. His mother, born Letizia Ramolino, did not attend the coronation. Informed of her son's self elevation, she is said to have remarked coolly: "Let's hope it lasts." In conversations with conservative friends about the Trump presidency these last three years, I often found myself thinking about Mother Bonaparte. Before Donald Trump's election I made a lot of dire predictions about how his mix of demagogy and incompetence would interact with real world threats: I envisioned economic turmoil, foreign policy crises, sustained domestic unrest. Having lived through the failed end of the last Republican presidency, I assumed Trump's administration would be a second, swifter failure, with dire consequences for both the country and the right. In 2017, 2018, 2019, those predictions didn't come to pass. Trump was bad in many ways, but the consequences weren't what I anticipated. The economy surged; the world was relatively stable; the country was mad online but otherwise relatively calm. And as the Democrats shifted leftward and Trump delivered on his promised judicial appointments, many conservatives who had shared my apprehensions would tell me that, simply as a shield against the left, the president was doing enough to merit their support in 2020. To which I often murmured something like, "let's hope it lasts." It hasn't. Now we are in the retreat from Moscow phase of the Trump presidency, with crises arriving all together pandemic, recession, mass protests and the president incapable of coping. If the election were held today, the result could easily resemble 2008, the closest thing to a landslide our divided system has recently produced. Meanwhile across corporate and journalistic and academic America, a 1968 ish spirit is pulling liberalism toward an uncertain destination, with what remains of conservatism turtled for safety or extinct. In this environment, few conservatives outside the MAGA core would declare Trump's presidency a ringing success. But many will stand by him out of a sense of self protection, hoping a miracle keeps him in the White House as a firewall against whatever post 2020 liberalism might become. This is a natural impulse, but they should consider another possibility: That so long as he remains in office, Trump will be an accelerant of the right's erasure, an agent of its marginalization and defeat, no matter how many of his appointees occupy the federal bench. In situations of crisis or grave difficulty, Trump displays three qualities, three spirits, that all redound against the movement that he leads. His spirit of authoritarianism creates a sense of perpetual crisis among his opponents, uniting left wingers and liberals despite their differences. His spirit of chaos, the sense that nothing is planned or under control, turns moderates and normies against him. And finally his spirit of incompetence means that conservatives get far less out of his administration than they would from a genuine imperial president, a man of iron rather than of pasteboard. You can see the convergence of these spirits in the disaster at Lafayette Park, where an authoritarian instinct led to a chaotic and violent police intervention, a massive media freakout, blowback from the military and left the president with an impious photo op and control of six blocks around the White House to show for it. That last image, the president as a dictator of an island and impotent beyond it, seems like a foretaste of what would await conservatives if Trump somehow slipped through to a second term. Maybe he would get to replace another Supreme Court justice maybe. (In a Democratic Senate, not.) But everything else the right needs would slip further out of reach. Conservatism needs a response to the current movement for social justice that answers just claims and rejects destructive ones. Trump delivers a conservatism of Confederate war memorials that vindicates the left. Conservatism needs new ideas about how to use power, a better theory of the relationship between state, economy and culture than the decadent Reaganism that Trump half overthrew. Trump offers only a daily lesson in how to let power go to waste. Conservatism needs a way to either claim more space in America's existing elite institutions, or else a path to building new ones. Trump offers a retreat to the fortresses of OANN, TPUSA, QAnon. Above all, conservatism, now a worldview for old people and contrarians in a country trending leftward, needs a mix of converts and sympathizers to be something other than a rump. Trump did win some converts in 2016, but he has spent four years making far more enemies, and their numbers are growing every day. What we are seeing right now in America, an accelerated leftward shift, probably won't continue at this pace through 2024. But it's likely to continue in some form so long as Trump is conservatism, and conservatism is Trump and four more years of trying to use him as a defensive salient is not a strategy of survival, but defeat.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Disaster relief works like this: There is a flood, a drought, an earthquake, a famine, an exodus of refugees. Reporters swarm in, broadcasting images of suffering. Humanitarian workers on the ground analyze who needs what relief and draw up plans. The government asks for help. The United Nations coordinates international pledges. Relief comes in money, bags of grain, medical supplies. But by that point, weeks or months have gone by. Rarely is there preplanning, pre fundraising, or pre agreement on a plan. "This is medieval," said Stefan Dercon, a professor of economic policy at Oxford and a former chief economist of Britain's bilateral aid agency, the Department for International Development. He and Daniel Clarke, head of the London based Center for Disaster Protection, wrote the book "Dull Disasters? How Planning Ahead Will Make a Difference." "It is as if financial instruments such as insurance do not exist," they wrote. "This is begging bowl financing at its worst." But here's what can happen instead what, in fact, did happen in the Kurigram district of northwest Bangladesh in July. With colossal rains predicted, the United Nations World Food Program and the Bangladesh government identified about 5,000 particularly vulnerable families. Three days before the flood hit, they used mobile phone banking to send each family the equivalent of 53. With that money, the families secured their houses and belongings for example, buying materials to lift their furniture off the ground. And they could pay the costs of taking their livestock and fleeing. Instead of getting relief after they were wiped out by the flood, the residents were able to avoid much of the loss for 10 per person. The accomplishment in Bangladesh is one of a handful of examples worldwide of anticipating disaster. But it doesn't have to be the rare exception. If disasters take us by surprise, it's because we weren't looking. With satellite data and mathematical modeling, we can now know about a flood or drought days or even weeks in advance. "We've improved so much in getting the precise likelihood of this particular area being flooded, and the number of people affected," Dr. Dercon said of the Bangladesh case. "We probably couldn't have done this 10 years ago." We can't predict the first case of a new outbreak of Ebola, but we can know where that deadly disease recurs and use that first case to predict later ones. Using satellite data, scientists can anticipate cholera outbreaks days, even weeks, in advance. When violent conflict breaks out or terrible drought sets in, we can plot the mass movement of refugees. An early response can prevent suffering. With famine expected in Somalia in 2017, for example, U.N. and other aid agencies sent 600,000 families vouchers by text message redeemable in local markets. (All hail mobile phone banking!) The vouchers fed families and the local economy, and famine was averted. Anticipating disasters can also help when they continue. In Kenya, rural herders can buy subsidized insurance that pays them automatically by mobile phone when satellites determine that the available forage in their area is too scarce to support livestock. A payout in time to buy food for a cow is vastly preferable to a payout after the cow dies. It's health insurance, not life insurance. We can even prepare for unexpected disasters. Mexico can't predict a specific earthquake. But it knows that the country is an enormous earthquake zone. So in the late 1990s, the government established the Fund for Natural Disasters, or Fonden. It allows Mexico to make action plans and money available in advance of any quake, as well as to start relief and reconstruction immediately when one occurs. In 2006, Mexico issued the world's first government catastrophe bond, a form of insurance that pays out when an earthquake strikes. 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. Caribbean countries can buy policies from the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility to insure against cyclones, earthquakes and very heavy rains. In Africa, the African Risk Capacity pays countries when rain is scarce. Mark Lowcock, under secretary general of the United Nations for humanitarian affairs the U.N.'s emergency relief coordinator is trying to push the relief system toward anticipating disasters. He said that one sign of progress is the growth of the U.N.'s Central Emergency Response Fund, which he administers. Its funding has been roughly steady since 2006 at about 500 million a year, but in 2019 donors contributed 828 million. Other groups are also trying anticipatory action. Red Cross and Red Crescent societies in several countries have piloted forecast based financing, providing aid in advance of floods, mostly, but also heat and cold waves. But getting ready for a disaster is still a tiny part of the world's response to the likelihood of one. "We've got quite a lot of very persuasive examples," Mr. Lowcock said. "It's nice to have 25,000 people in Bangladesh, but most situations have caseloads in the millions. There is much more scope to do this than is happening at the moment." In general, we don't plan enough for disasters largely because we've assumed our political processes demand those visible victims. Political systems are notoriously bad at long term thinking. It's hard to raise money in the abstract. Politicians know you don't get credit for prevention. "We've learned in other areas of development to be more sophisticated in our use of financial instruments," Dr. Dercon said. "Somehow in the humanitarian space we just never embraced this. The humanitarian sector has lots of really good people, but it's built around the emotion of helping people in need." How we react to disasters matters more than ever. This year, 168 million people will need disaster assistance, a record high. Mr. Lowcock said that in two years, that could rise to 200 million people. He said the main reasons for the increase are droughts and floods related to climate change, large outbreaks of infectious disease (often related to climate as well) and protracted violent conflicts which are increasingly killing children, he said. New research shows that how we respond or not to a disaster can follow people for the rest of their lives. A 2017 World Bank report found that prosperous countries are the ones lucky enough to avoid crises that set them back. Just as a fall can permanently damage the health of an older person, conflict, drought or epidemic can permanently make a country poorer. Drought, particularly, is crippling, because it creates lasting malnutrition, leading to permanent cognitive and physical damage. Researchers found that without relief, a drought causes a 4 percent drop in the income of affected people for the long term. And a speedy response is crucial. "A response time that is one month quicker has a benefit of 0.8 percent of income per capita in the long run," the study says. There is wide agreement on the value of having money set aside, a plan for what to do and agreement on what triggers action. But what's needed to get that done isn't always present. Mr. Lowcock gave the example of drought in Somalia: It's not enough to predict hunger and famine. "We need to know at the village level who are the most vulnerable," he said. "We're trying to build models to answer that question for us." U.N. agencies are getting creative with the challenge of knowing when to help. Rebeca Moreno Jimenez, the U.N. refugee agency's first data scientist, recently traveled to Ethiopia to interview Somali refugees, hoping to identify something measurable that can signal relief is needed. What she found was the price of goats. Refugees told her that before people flee, they sell their goats, which are too fragile to make the trip. So the crash in goat prices that would accompany a mass sell off means people are getting ready to move. We know they will end up in Ethiopia several days later. This work is still experimental. "We are bothering our colleagues in the Food and Agriculture Organization," she said. "Every month, we're asking for goat prices in Somalia." Her program has now established an interagency dashboard where everyone can track the prices F.A.O. posts. "Cynical people think politicians are prompted to action only when they see the starving kid in the street," Mr. Lowcock said. "But when I talk to politicians and confront them with the fact that we can anticipate problems better than that, they get it. That's why my fund is bigger this year than last and we are able to fund more experiments. No one wants to see a starving kid on the street and think, 'If we'd done something earlier, we might have been able to stop that.'" Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book "The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism." She is a former editorial writer for The Times and the author, most recently, of "Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World" and the World War II spy story e book "D for Deception." To receive email alerts for Fixes columns, sign up here. 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
SAN FRANCISCO Uber, the ride hailing company, sidestepped a full shutdown of its self driving car efforts on Monday when a federal judge stopped short of issuing a temporary injunction against the program. But the court mandated that Anthony Levandowski, a star engineer leading the program, be prohibited from working on a critical component of autonomous vehicle technology for the duration of the litigation, a setback that could hamper Uber's development efforts. The decision was in a case that has underlined the increasingly bitter fight between Uber and Waymo, the self driving car business that operates under Google's parent company. The companies have been competing in the development of autonomous vehicles, which many consider the future of transportation. The outcome of the case may affect who wins or loses in the technology, which has also drawn other tech companies, automakers and start ups. For years, Google had an advantage as an early entrant in autonomous vehicle research. But more recently, Uber has poured millions of dollars into bringing self driving cars to the mainstream, with Apple and others also diving in. Automakers, including General Motors and Ford, have invested in artificial intelligence start ups like Cruise Automation and Argo AI in hopes of building the software that will run self driving cars. Over the last few months, Uber and Waymo have traded barbs and legal maneuvers to gain the upper hand. Waymo accused Mr. Levandowski of downloading thousands of its documents and using the findings at Uber. Mr. Levandowski decided to plead the Fifth Amendment in the case, exercising the right against being compelled to incriminate himself. In the ruling on Monday, Judge William Alsup of Federal District Court in San Francisco, said, "Waymo L.L.C. has shown compelling evidence that its former star engineer, Anthony Levandowski, downloaded over 14,000 confidential files from Waymo immediately before leaving his employment there." He added, "Significantly, the evidence indicates that, during the acquisition, Uber likely knew or at least should have known that Levandowski had taken and retained possession of Waymo's confidential files." Judge Alsup also ruled that Waymo significantly "overreached" when it asked for protection on more than 120 patents it called trade secrets. "General approaches dictated by well known principles of physics, however, are not 'secret,' since they consist essentially of general engineering principles that are simply part of the intellectual equipment of technical employees," Judge Alsup wrote. He directed Uber to produce a timeline of the events leading to Mr. Levandowski's hiring, including all oral and written discussions between the parties about an important self driving technology called lidar, short for light detection and ranging, which Mr. Levandowski has been accused of stealing. The judge also ordered Uber to do what it could to ensure the return of the files to Waymo, including the possibility of terminating Mr. Levandowski's employment at Uber. "Competition should be fueled by innovation in the labs and on the roads, not through unlawful actions," Johnny Luu, a Waymo spokesman, said in a statement. "We welcome the order to prohibit Uber's use of stolen documents containing trade secrets developed by Waymo through years of research, and to formally bar Mr. Levandowski from working on the technology." Despite the judge's ruling on Mr. Levandowski, Uber also had cause for celebration because its self driving research program was not shut down, which would have been a more serious blow. "We are pleased with the court's ruling that Uber can continue building and utilizing all of its self driving technology, including our innovation around lidar," Niki Christoff, an Uber spokeswoman, said in a statement. The ruling compounds a troubled few months for Uber, which is also grappling with allegations that its workplace is ridden with sexual harassment. Travis Kalanick's leadership as chief executive of Uber, is under scrutiny. And the company is facing a Justice Department inquiry into Greyball, a tool that Uber used to deceive authorities worldwide. Judge Alsup's ruling followed his decision on Thursday to deny Uber's request to send the case against Waymo to arbitration. The judge set a series of deadlines in the next two months for Uber to produce additional evidence before the case moves to a public trial. Legal specialists who are following the case questioned whether a day in court is the best course of action for Uber. "I think Uber has to seriously consider whether they even want to have that trial, or whether they'll be able to settle it," said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia. "If you read between the lines, it's pretty clear the judge hints at some wrongdoing by Uber, and he wants to see more evidence which could come in at the trial." Uber and Waymo are unlikely to appeal the ruling given that the case is continuing, legal specialists said. Neither company may want to risk a worse outcome. For Mr. Levandowski, the situation is precarious. Last week, Judge Alsup referred the matter to the United States attorney's office for possible theft of trade secrets, raising the possibility of criminal charges for those involved if the Justice Department decides to take up the case. Miles Ehrlich, a lawyer representing Mr. Levandowski, did not respond to a request for comment.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
DETROIT Stephen J. Girsky, G.M.'s vice chairman and interim chief executive of Opel, laid out a new product strategy to dealers at a meeting in Germany on Wednesday, outlining plans to introduce 23 new vehicles in the European market over the next four years. He also reaffirmed G.M.'s determination to turn around its European business despite losing 16 billion in the region over the last dozen years. "We are making a commitment to Opel and a commitment to Europe," Mr. Girsky said in a phone interview after the meeting. "But I don't want to leave anyone with the impression that we will be satisfied continuing to lose the amount of money we are losing." Like many European automakers, Opel is struggling with overcapacity in its factories at a time when car sales have tumbled to their lowest point in 15 years. European auto sales fell 9 percent in August, the 11th consecutive monthly decline in the region. G.M.'s sales dropped 18 percent during the month. While G.M. has trimmed work schedules in its European plants and announced plans to shut down one German factory by 2016, industry analysts contend that broader cuts are needed to make the unit profitable. One prominent analyst, Adam Jonas of Morgan Stanley, recently urged G.M. to sell or close Opel before its failures dragged down the rest of G.M., the largest American automaker. Mr. Girsky declined to say whether further plant closures were being considered, but said Opel was preparing to make "significant" reductions in its salaried work force. "We think there is opportunity to take significant people out of the administrative functions," he said. "And we're taking out as many chiefs as Indians." G.M. employs about 40,000 people in Europe, with half of those in Germany. About one third of the work force is salaried personnel, and the rest are hourly employees. Unions across Europe have resisted closing auto factories at beleaguered carmakers like G.M., the Ford Motor Company, Fiat and PSA Peugeot Citroen. Mr. Girsky said G.M. was grappling with how to better use its factories in Europe, possibly by adding products like Chevrolet vehicles to its production lines."There are opportunities to increase production," he said. "We are exploring a non Opel branded product coming into traditional G.M. facilities in Europe." But one German auto analyst said that G.M. could not fix Opel without sizable reductions in plant capacity and hourly employees. "The next step must be that G.M. finally looks the union in the eye and says, 'This is what's going to happen in the future,' " said Ferdinand Dudenhoffer, a professor at the University of Duisburg Essen who follows the German car industry. Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. Mr. Girsky said talks with union leaders were continuing, and he compared the discussions to how G.M. shared its internal financial problems with the United Automobile Workers to gain concessions on health care and wages in the United States. "We are doing the same thing with the union here that we did in the U.S., which is transparency," he said. "The facts are not good, but you need to know them." G.M. ousted Opel's chief this summer, and Mr. Girsky took over as the division's interim chief executive. Since then, the company has further cleaned house at Opel by replacing its chief financial officer and several other senior executives. Mr. Girsky said he was recruiting a permanent chief executive for the unit from outside the company, and hopes to hire someone by the end of this year. Until then, Mr. Girsky is pushing Opel officials to tighten controls on expenses. He has demanded reductions in costly inventories of unsold vehicles. And he has required that any purchase order of more than 20,000 euros ( 26,142) be submitted to him for approval. He said the biggest challenge that Opel faced was changing an entrenched attitude about losing money on operations. "We're trying to change the culture here," he said. "And it's making some people uncomfortable because you're putting restraints on an organization that didn't use to have restraints." Like Ford, its leading American rival, G.M. is also trying to bolster its product lineup in Europe. Ford recently announced several new or refreshed models for the European market, and G.M. did the same on Wednesday. In a meeting with about 250 of its largest European dealers, Mr. Girsky showed off 23 new vehicles and 13 new engine configurations that will be introduced by 2016.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
"Dead Astronauts" pointedly inhabits these strange, nonhuman consciousnesses. Swaths of text appear in different shades or zigzag across the page; other pages contain only single paragraphs or single sentences. Scenes are even narrated in verse: A young Botch "evaded toad and frog to scuttle crawl between holding ponds / flop plopped into water deft of fin / mud clear as bright sun / cavorted with others of his kind." VanderMeer, a committed environmentalist, is a master at describing the pungent immediacy of being, say, a salamander. "The thrill of liquid against the body, the constraint of that. The way it reminds you the world matters in a way that breathing air cannot." Violence and horror and death suffuse the book, in a cyclical, inevitable pattern perpetrated mostly by humans who don't value other forms of life. One section, narrated by an animal, consists only of the sentences "They killed me. They brought me back" repeated 185 times. But Charlie X, the deranged Company scientist who performs those experiments, is haunted by a father who performed equally sadistic experiments on him: "And he would stave in my skull and I would wake up on the slab. And he would drive a kitchen knife into my heart and I would wake up on the slab." Abuse spawns abuse no matter who, or what, the victim is. For some horror writers, including VanderMeer, nothing is scarier than a changing planet. Amid all its grimness, the novel finds some small redemption in the power of love. But VanderMeer's brilliant formal tricks make love feel abstract and unconvincing by the end, a flimsy human ideal. Late in the book, the blue fox recalls his capture by the Company, staring into his mate's eyes as he's dragged away from her. "The sentimental tale," he tells us coolly. "The tale you always need to care. Which shows you don't care. Why we don't care if you care." It's precisely that ferocity that makes "Dead Astronauts" so terrifying and so compelling.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Jaap van Zweden, the music director designate of the New York Philharmonic, built up good will with the orchestra's extended audience on Tuesday evening when he announced the details of his first season, which begins in September. He enthusiastically discussed his plans and programming, including five premieres he will conduct, the introduction of two new music series tied to themes the season will explore, and much more. It was an auspicious occasion for the Philharmonic. Less auspicious was Mr. van Zweden's conducting on Wednesday night at David Geffen Hall. The concert, a program pairing the New York premiere of a short, recent work by John Luther Adams with a concert performance of Act I from Wagner's "Die Walkure," was an opportunity to find out more about what he might bring to the Philharmonic, and to New York audiences. If anything, Mr. van Zweden can be too feisty and forceful in his performances of the standard repertory. So I was surprised that his account of this 70 minute Wagner act often lacked tension and urgency. The performance started strongly. In the dark, pulsing orchestra music of the opening scene, Wagner simultaneously depicts the stormy weather that pummels a wounded young Siegmund as he is pursued through a dense forest, and the internal despair that never leaves him. Mr. van Zweden conducted this music with lean textures and crisp attacks. But once Siegmund (here the veteran tenor Simon O'Neill), seeking shelter in a hut, chances upon the fearful young Sieglinde (the radiant soprano Heidi Melton), Wagner's music turns mysterious and quietly suspenseful. The isolated Siegmund and beaten down Sieglinde, who is trapped in a marriage to the bullying Hunding, look at each other longingly. In fact, they are twins, separated since their early childhood. And during these passages Mr. van Zweden's performance often went slack.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
The new movie "Cut Throat City," directed by RZA, whose artistic renown began with the hip hop group Wu Tang Clan, opens as heist pictures sometimes do with some friends talking things over. The four guys don't yet know that they're going to become criminals. Rather, they're discussing a graphic novel that one of them, Blink (Shameik Moore), is drafting. Blink's description of it reminds them of their favorite movies. They mention the "realness" of "The Godfather" and side eye the overuse of a racial epithet in some Quentin Tarantino movies. In their everyday New Orleans lives, Blink and his crew are hopeful strivers; after Hurricane Katrina hits, they're in desperate straits. "First they flood us, then they push us out," one character observes of what's happening in their Black neighborhoods. They make a tentative, terrifying alliance with a local crime lord, "Cousin" Bass (the rapper T.I.), whose method of keeping underlings in line is demonstrated in a cringe inducing scene.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
A preterm birth appears to be an early warning signal of a woman's risk for heart disease, a new study shows. The study, published online in the journal Circulation, was based on data from 70,182 women. The study found that compared with women who delivered full term babies, women who gave birth earlier than 37 weeks had a 42 percent increased risk of stroke or heart attack later in life. Among women who gave birth at 32 weeks or sooner, the risk was more than doubled. Notably, the higher risk of heart disease was independent of the mother's pre pregnancy lifestyle and other heart risk factors. The data adjusted for a number of factors that could influence heart disease risk, including race, age at first birth, education, hypertension before or during pregnancy, diabetes, physical activity, smoking and other pre pregnancy health and behavioral characteristics. "Women who are delivering a preterm infant have an early warning signal for their future health," said the lead author, Lauren J. Tanz, a doctoral candidate at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a researcher at Brigham and Women's Hospital. "They may want to take special care with their hearts and adopt a heart healthy diet and lifestyle."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
WASHINGTON After years of relentless growth, the number of opioid prescriptions in the United States is finally falling, the first sustained drop since OxyContin hit the market in 1996. For much of the past two decades, doctors were writing so many prescriptions for the powerful opioid painkillers that, in recent years, there have been enough for every American adult to have a bottle. But for each of the past three years 2013, 2014 and 2015 prescriptions have declined, a review of several sources of data shows. Experts say the drop is an important early signal that the long running prescription opioid epidemic may be peaking, that doctors have begun heeding a drumbeat of warnings about the highly addictive nature of the drugs and that federal and state efforts to curb them are having an effect. "The culture is changing," said Dr. Bruce Psaty, a researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle who studies drug safety. "We are on the downside of a curve with opioid prescribing now." So far, fewer prescriptions have not led to fewer deaths: fatal overdoses from opioids have continued to rise, taking more than 28,000 lives in 2014, according to the most recent federal health data. That number includes deaths from both prescription painkillers, like Percocet, Vicodin and OxyContin, and heroin, an illegal opioid whose use has been rising as access to prescription drugs has tightened. While experts agree that the decline is real, they differ on what it means for patients. Some say opioid prescribing has been too loose for too long, and that it must be tightened, even if that means extra hurdles for patients in pain. "The urgency of the epidemic, its devastating consequences, demands interventions that in some instances may make it harder for some patients to get their medication," said Dr. Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. "We need to set up a system to make sure they are covered. But we cannot continue the prescription practice of opioids the way we have been. We just can't." Others argue that efforts to rein in prescribing have gone too far and are penalizing patients who take the medicines responsibly and need them for relief. "The climate has definitely shifted," said Dr. Daniel B. Carr, the director of Tufts Medical School's program on pain research education and policy. "It is now one of reluctance, fear of consequences and encumbrance with administrative hurdles. A lot of patients who are appropriate candidates for opioids have been caught up in that response." Opioid painkillers present a uniquely difficult public policy puzzle, in part because they became so essential to so many Americans and health officials remained deadlocked for years over how to handle them. In the past, prescribing of opioids was limited, often aimed at the pain that comes after surgery or with terminal illnesses like cancer. But it took off in the 1990s, as drug companies and medical experts argued that opioids could be used to treat chronic conditions like back pain without addicting patients. Medical residents began learning that pain was the "fifth vital sign" a body function to be assessed after temperature, heart rate, respiration rate and blood pressure and that opioids could help mitigate it safely. Sales of the drugs exploded, rising to nearly 10 billion in 2015, from 1 billion in 1992, according to IMS. But recently, some doctors say they have detected a shift in the attitudes of some patients toward opioids. "It used to be that people would come in and sometimes be quite insistent" about receiving opioids, said Dr. Wanda Filer, the president of the American Academy of Family Physicians. But in the past year or two, she said, "I think we've seen some dampening of that effect. It's all anecdotal, but I'm hearing it state by state, all around." One important development that may have helped propel the decline came in 2014, when the federal government tightened prescribing rules for one of the most common painkillers: hydrocodone combined with a second analgesic, like acetaminophen. In the first year after the measure took effect, dispensed prescriptions declined by 22 percent, and pills by 16 percent, according to an analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine. Refills which the change made much more difficult accounted for 73 percent of the decline. Over the past few years, medical schools have stepped up efforts to impress upon students the dangers of opioid prescribing. Dr. Jeanmarie Perrone, a professor of emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine, predicted the next generation of doctors would be appropriately "much more sparing" in their use of opioids. "When I was a resident, treating patients' pain as a vital sign was assumed," said Dr. Branson Page, an emergency medicine doctor in Raleigh, N.C., who finished his residency in 2008. "Now, more of us are aware that even prescribing a small number of opioids to a patient who's never taken them before is rolling the dice on whether that patient will become addicted." Still, Dr. Perrone, who helped review new federal guidelines on prescribing opioids for chronic pain, said there was some risk in making young doctors "too cautious." "Sometimes now I will see a patient with a resident who says, 'I don't want to give them opioids,'" she said. "But of course they need opioids they have lung cancer and worsening pain." The ever noisier public debate is changing minds in other medical practices, too. Dr. Mitchell Stark, an oral surgeon in Rockville, Md., said he cut his opioid prescribing this year after reading an article about teenagers getting addicted after having their wisdom teeth removed. Now he tells even patients recovering from multiple extractions to try prescription strength ibuprofen first. "I don't want to be the person who gets a call from someone saying, 'My kid had an overdose with the Vicodin he had left from getting his wisdom teeth out,'" Dr. Stark said. State prescription drug monitoring programs, online databases that let doctors check whether a patient is getting prescriptions from other doctors, have also helped drive declines. Tennessee tried hard to get doctors to consult the database it set up in 2006, to no avail the number of doses prescribed rose by 12 percent from 2010 to 2012, state officials said. So in 2013, the state made checking the database mandatory, and the number of doses declined by 14 percent from 2012 to 2015. Many experts say that the drop in prescribing is at best a half victory, in light of the rise of deaths from heroin and illicit fentanyl, a powerful synthetic painkiller. Some addicts who started with prescription painkillers are merely turning to such street drugs or getting their hands on prescription drugs by other means. "We are seeing, in our area, many more pharmacies being robbed," said Dr. Richard Vaglienti, the director of outpatient pain services at WVU Medicine, a health system in West Virginia.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Thomas Ades conducted the Boston Symphony on Wednesday in a performance of his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, featuring Kirill Gerstein. Many composers also perform on an instrument and conduct. But, in two recent concerts at Carnegie Hall, Thomas Ades took this to another level, demonstrating yet again his extraordinary skill as an all around musician. Last week at Carnegie's Zankel Hall, he more than held his own as a pianist alongside the virtuoso Kirill Gerstein in a demanding program of works for two pianos. And on Wednesday, on Carnegie's main stage, Mr. Ades led the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the New York premiere of his new Concerto for Piano and Orchestra written for Mr. Gerstein, who exhilaratingly dispatched this joyous and audacious piece's formidable solo part. Read our review of the concerto's premiere in Boston. To end that program, the second of two Boston Symphony concerts at Carnegie this week, Mr. Ades conducted Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony. It makes sense that a composer leading this staple would bring heightened insights into how the music goes, and how the details add up to the whole. Composers wrestle with these issues in their own scores all the time. The brass fanfare (the "fate" motif) that opens the first movement was lean, mean and loud. Yet the mood changed entirely during the sighing, restless main theme, played with yearning. There was nothing smooth, sleek or familiar about this interpretation. During episodes of development, Mr. Ades emphasized the tangled complexity of crisscrossing lines. During the slow movement, which has a wistful theme like a Russian folk song, Mr. Ades drew rich, deep tones from the strings. Yet he also teased out intricacies you seldom notice in other performances of this symphony, even if this meant the overall arc of the music lost some continuity. The scherzo, with its pizzicato strings, was crisp and playful, made intriguing by a hint of obsession. Mr. Ades and the players went all out during the frenetic finale. And why not? Knowing that Mr. Gerstein also plays jazz piano, Mr. Ades plays to that style in this work. From the start of the bustling first movement, with a theme that seems to nod to the jerky rhythms and rising melody of "I Got Rhythm," there are echoes of Gershwin, the jazz inspired Ravel and more. This breathless, 20 minute concerto, structured in three essentially traditional movements (fast, slow, fast), comes across as zesty and accessible. But don't be fooled. Just below the surface, the music sizzles with modernist harmonies, fractured phrases, gaggles of counterpoint and lyrical strands that keep breaking into skittish bits. The finale is a riotous, clattering, assaultive romp. I can't wait to hear it again. Read more about how the concerto was written. The Boston Symphony's concert on Tuesday was led by the orchestra's music director, Andris Nelsons. It was an all Richard Strauss program highlighted by the star soprano Renee Fleming singing a concert version of the closing scene from his final opera, "Capriccio," which she triumphed in at the Metropolitan Opera in 2011. This scene's radiant, gorgeous soliloquy in which Countess Madeleine mulls which suitor, a poet or a composer, to favor, and in the process debates whether poetry or music is the greater art was made to order for Ms. Fleming's plush, lyrical voice. She sounded wonderful. Then she paid tribute to Andre Previn, who died recently, by singing a deeply expressive account of final aria from the opera he wrote for her, "A Streetcar Named Desire." Mr. Nelsons also led a pulsing, dramatic account of "Also Sprach Zarathustra," though I found some of the playing rough and jittery. During this performance, as on other occasions, Mr. Nelsons seemed to be physically uncomfortable, sometimes propping himself up by placing his left hand on the rail around the conductor's podium. But that doesn't mean the orchestra isn't thriving under his leadership. The Boston Symphony recently picked up yet another Grammy Award for its series of Shostakovich recordings. And the latest installment featuring the composer's Sixth and Seventh Symphonies was just released.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Adapted from "Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe," which will be published on April 2 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. When my children were young, they liked to stare at a pie plate hanging in our kitchen, with the digits of pi running around the rim and spiraling in toward the center, shrinking in size as the numbers swirled into the abyss. Pi, as we all learned in school (and are reminded every March 14, on Pi Day), is defined as the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. Denoted by the Greek letter p, this curious little number is approximately 3.14, although computers have calculated it out past 22 trillion digits and counting: 3.141592653589793238462643383279502..., a sequence never repeating, never betraying any pattern, going on forever, infinity on a platter. For some people, Pi Day is an occasion to marvel at circles, long revered as symbols of perfection, reincarnation and the cycles of nature. But it is the domestication of infinity that we really should be celebrating. Mathematically, pi is less a child of geometry than an early ancestor of calculus, the branch of mathematics, devised in the 17th century, that deals with anything that curves, moves or changes continuously. As a ratio, pi has been around since Babylonian times, but it was the Greek geometer Archimedes, some 2,300 years ago, who first showed how to rigorously estimate the value of pi. Among mathematicians of his time, the concept of infinity was taboo; Aristotle had tried to banish it for being too paradoxical and logically treacherous. In Archimedes's hands, however, infinity became a mathematical workhorse. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. He used it to discover the area of a circle, the volume of a sphere and many other properties of curved shapes that had stumped the finest mathematicians before him. In each case, he approximated a curved shape by using a large number of tiny straight lines or flat polygons. The resulting approximations were gemlike, faceted objects that yielded fantastic insights into the original shapes, especially when he imagined using infinitely many, infinitesimally small facets in the process. To get a feeling for this world changing idea, imagine measuring the distance around a circular track near your house. To obtain an estimate, you could walk one lap and then consult a pedometer app on your phone to see how far you traveled. A pedometer computes the distance straightforwardly: It estimates the length of your stride based on your height (which you typed into the app), and it counts how many steps you've taken. Then it multiplies stride length times the number of steps to calculate how far you walked. Archimedes used a similar method to estimate the circumference of a circle, and so to estimate pi. Again, imagine walking around a circular track. The resulting path would look something like this, with each step represented by a tiny straight line. The perimeter is exactly six times the radius r of the circle, or 6r. That's because the hexagon contains six equilateral triangles, each side of which equals the circle's radius. The diameter of the hexagon, for its part, is two times the circle's radius, or 2r. Now recall that the perimeter of the hexagon underestimates the true circumference of the circle. So the ratio of these two hexagonal distances 6r/2r 3 must represent an underestimate of pi. Therefore, the unknown value of pi, whatever it equals, must be greater than 3. Of course, six is a ridiculously small number of steps, and the resulting hexagon is a crude caricature of a circle, but Archimedes was just getting started. Once he figured out what the hexagon was telling him, he shortened the steps and took twice as many of them. Then he kept doing that, over and over again. A man obsessed, he went from 6 steps to 12, then 24, 48 and ultimately 96 steps, using standard geometry to work out the ever shrinking lengths of the steps to migraine inducing precision. By using a 96 sided polygon inside the circle, and also a 96 sided polygon outside the circle, he ultimately proved that pi is greater than 3 10/71 and less than 3 10/70. Take a moment to savor the result visually: The unknown value of pi is being trapped in a numerical vise, squeezed between two numbers that look almost identical, except the first has a denominator of 71 and the last has a denominator of 70. By considering polygons with even more sides, later mathematicians tightened the vise even further. Around 1,600 years ago, the Chinese geometer Zu Chongzhi pondered polygons having an incredible 24,576 sides to squeeze pi out to eight digits: By allowing the number of sides in the polygons to increase indefinitely, all the way out to infinity, we can generate as many digits of pi as we like, at least in principle. In taming infinity, Archimedes paved the way for the invention of calculus 2,000 years later. And calculus, in turn, helped make the world modern. Archimedes's mathematical strategy is used in computer generated movies, approximating Shrek's smooth belly and trumpet like ears with millions of tiny polygons. The smooth glide of an Ella Fitzgerald song is digitally represented in streaming audio by an enormous number of bits. In every field of human endeavor, from reconstructive facial surgery to the simulation of air flowing past a jet's wing, billions of tiny, discrete elements stand in for an inherently smooth and analog reality. It all began with the computation of pi. Pi represents a mathematical limit: an aspiration toward the perfect curve, steady progress toward the unreachable star. It exists, clear as night, with no end in sight.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Working overtime to keep its season intact, N.F.L. officials on Monday afternoon introduced additions to existing coronavirus protocols established with the players' union following a call between the league office, team owners, general managers and head coaches. N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell said the changes included the introduction of a leaguewide video system to monitor whether players and staff were wearing personal protective equipment like masks while inside team facilities and while traveling. The league is also limiting the number of free agent tryouts per week and placing bans on gatherings outside team facilities. "Protocol violations that result in virus spread requiring adjustments to the schedule or otherwise impacting other teams will result in additional financial and competitive discipline including the adjustment or loss of draft choices or even the forfeit of a game," Goodell said in a memo sent to teams on Monday. Goodell used the meeting and the memo that followed to ramp up efforts to enforce the following of coronavirus guidelines and to emphasize the impact to the N.F.L.'s business. The hastily called virtual meeting came after a tumultuous week that included the league's first team outbreak on the Tennessee Titans and two games this week having to be postponed the Titans Pittsburgh Steelers game to Oct. 25 and the New England Patriots Kansas City Chiefs matchup to Monday night. Patrick Mahomes threw for 236 yards and two touchdowns in a 26 10 win for Kansas City. Going forward, if outbreaks on teams require that a game be postponed, the league will continue to move games to Monday or Tuesday, or later in the season by juggling bye weeks. None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. After last week's positive tests to more than a dozen Titans players and team personnel and to one of the league's biggest names, Patriots quarterback Cam Newton, the league has increased its efforts to police the following of health related guidelines. Goodell and Troy Vincent, the executive vice president in charge of football operations, have sent a ream of memos reminding teams to wear masks properly, physically distance where possible and limit access to locker rooms and other places where players and coaches congregate. The league also continues to fine coaches and teams that have not abided by its rules, penalizing head coaches seen during games not wearing masks properly 100,000 and their teams 250,000. The call on Monday was a sign that the league was not satisfied that its memos were being taken seriously enough, and that lax adherence to health protocols could jeopardize the goal of playing a full calendar of games at teams' home stadiums, ending with the Super Bowl in February. Football executives emphasized yet again that the virus is spread in myriad ways and demanded vigilance from franchises. Those rules have been broken several times, most notably in Las Vegas. Last week, the league fined the Raiders 50,000 after an unauthorized person entered the team's locker room, potentially exposing players and staff to the virus. Nine players were also fined 15,000 each for attending a charity event that was held indoors last week with hundreds of people who were not wearing masks. A 10th player, Darren Waller, who hosted the event, was fined 30,000. The N.F.L. has said for months that it expected some players, coaches and staff members would test positive for the coronavirus, in part because team owners and players chose not to create a closed community, or "bubble," and instead have allowed personnel to leave the relatively secure team facilities after practice every day, dramatically increasing the odds of exposure. "The big thing for us is to not get comfortable," Goodell said before the start of the season. "We're dealing with a lot of uncertainty." The inevitable became the inescapable last week when nine players and nine staff on the Tennessee Titans tested positive for the virus, the league's first full fledged outbreak of the season. Soon after the league postponed the Titans' game against the Steelers (which had been scheduled for last Sunday), the N.F.L. was forced to push back the New England Patriots' game against the Kansas City Chiefs to Monday night after Newton's positive test. There were no further positive tests over the weekend, so the Patriots were allowed to fly to Kansas City, Mo., but in two separate planes one for players and staff who were exposed to Newton and a second plane for everyone else. In response to the outbreak in Nashville, the league on Friday told teams that players and coaches cannot leave their team's city on bye weeks, and those exempt from testing are still required to report to the team's facility for daily screening and temperature checks. The team reported no new positive tests on Monday, a sign that the outbreak may now be confined, and none of the Minnesota Vikings, who played the Titans on Sept. 27, tested positive. Still, there are many other opportunities for players to be exposed to the virus when they are away from N.F.L. regulated facilities. For now, the league's approach appears to be to tighten its grip on the spaces it controls continually reminding players, coaches and staff to adhere to health guidelines, watching them on video and threatening penalties if they don't to keep the season on track. "That's the right decision to make, before you have to do something more drastic," said Steve Smith, a sports law attorney at Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner who advises teams and leagues on media contracts, stadium operations, licensing and naming rights. "If you have double digit attacks on six, eight teams, you might have to postpone the season and pick back up. That's what you have to avoid." The unblinking focus on test results comes as a growing number of teams allow fans to attend games in limited capacities. On Sunday, the Carolina Panthers and Houston Texans joined about 10 other clubs in welcoming fans into their stadiums. Fans as well as members of the news media and many others are not allowed anywhere near the players while they're working. But the return of paying customers to games is a way for the N.F.L. to reduce some of the billions of dollars in revenue losses this season, even if it means increasing the risk that fans will be exposed by attending large gatherings. "No one wants to lose billions of dollars," Smith said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
The Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance started out in the early 1950s as a showplace for some of the finest contemporary automobiles on the planet. Since then it has morphed into one of the world's most prestigious vintage car shows, but it still hosts some significant new product reveals as well. The McLaren P1 GTR was one of this year's most interesting Pebble Beach introductions. It was shown in concept form on the front lawn of the Lodge at Pebble Beach. A track focused car that in production form will be available only to existing McLaren clients, the P1 GTR will come complete with a slate of driving events, training and factory support. In an interview last week at The Quail, a Motorsports Gathering, in Carmel Valley, Calif. part of a full week of events that has grown around the Pebble Beach concours Frank Stephenson, McLaren's design chief, discussed some of his touchstones in conceiving both the P1 and a broader brand identity for McLaren.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles

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