text
stringlengths 1
39.7k
| label
int64 0
0
| original_task
stringclasses 8
values | original_label
stringclasses 35
values |
|---|---|---|---|
LONDON The stage filled with women in Princess Diana masks, smashing VHS cassettes with hammers. A dancer wove her way through a bar, muttering about kittens. A figure wrapped in a filthy comforter emerged from a tent, crawling among clubbers dressed in fetish gear. Welcome to The Yard: London's only theater slash nightclub. The Yard opened in 2011 in a warehouse in Hackney Wick a district of East London that was once run down but has recently gentrified. The theater venue, with a 110 seat, purpose built auditorium inside a former warehouse, was meant to be temporary; eight years later, it still has a rough and ready feel, all recycled wood and corrugated roofing. Beyond staging some of London's most avant garde theater productions, there is a large bar that hosts club nights for as many as 250 people. The Yard's artistic director, Jay Miller, 34, said the festival was "really the more radical end of our program," made up of "innovating and risky" work. So far, this year's festival, which runs through Feb. 16, has featured "Diana is Dead" by F.K. Alexander the aforementioned royal revenge fantasy as well as an evening of contemporary dance: Jamila Johnson Small, performing as Last Yearz Interesting Negro, and Rowdy S.S., a musician and performance artist, writhed across the stage in front of close up video images of dreadlocks and nipples. Highlights yet to come include a show by the performance artist Ira Brand about dominance and submission, and a playful monologue about time travel from the celebrated experimental theater company Forced Entertainment. Everything The Yard does is underpinned by three values, Mr. Miller said. The first is that "the stories we tell have to feel like they aren't being told by mainstream culture," Mr. Miller said. "The second is we create a space where audiences and artists feel able to take risks together. The third is we really celebrate the idea of the live moment, and what that means in a society mediated by technology." This can result in work that feels modish, with recent shows about social media and selfie culture. But the Yard has also produced acclaimed productions driven by bold directorial choices a relatively rare thing for new writing in British theaters, where the director is more often expected to invisibly "serve" the script. The theater's hip, edgy work attracts an unusually young crowd: 70 percent of the audience is under the age of 35, according to Mr. Miller. And it is breaking down the boundaries between watching a play, hanging out with a beer and raving till 6 a.m. "Audiences are cross pollinating," Mr. Miller said. "We're creating a new theater audience, who see that it can be as invigorating as dancing in a club." Communicating the unusual dual nature of The Yard has proved tricky, he added. Marlen Pflueger, a dance student who stuck around after a for a recent "Lates" offering, said she'd been to the Yard before for dance parties. "I didn't know it was a theater," she said, adding, "I think it's such a good idea to have this combination of a club and performance space," she said. Although it receives about 150,000 pounds, or nearly 200,000, a year in government funding, Mr. Miller said that the Yard made more money from running its own parties and renting out the bar space for events than it did from the theater, where ticket prices never go above PS20. Putting on plays and club nights can be "exhausting" he said, but doing so allows the Yard to stage the kind of work that other London theaters don't. Mr. Miller was drawn to Hackney Wick because it was cheap, he said. The Yard initially moved in for free. Warehouses were often broken into, and their owners were spending a lot on security, Mr. Miller said, adding, "Us being here meant there was less chance of that happening." He founded The Yard in 2011 with just PS9,000 and no idea how long he could keep it going. But additional money from the government and private donors allowed Mr. Miller to turn it into something permanent at a time when Hackney Wick was changing drastically. The area's revival began with construction for the 2012 Olympics, which were largely held in East London. Today, there are plenty of trendy bars, restaurants and clubs, as well as luxury apartment developments. Mr. Miller said the changes made him uneasy. "Artists go to places that are free, and then they're not free for other people," he said. Ben Bishop, The Yard's music and events coordinator, was hired in 2017, having run off grid warehouse parties for years. He said that he had always liked to collaborate with performance artist friends, and that working at an arts venue like The Yard seemed like a good way to blend both worlds. Mr. Bishop said he saw The Yard as playing an important role in supporting London's subcultures, through nights such as Pride of Arabia, which defines itself as being for "queers from the Arab world," or Murder on Zidane's Floor, an event run by Goal Diggers, an East London soccer club for women and people who identify as nonbinary. Ben Bishop, The Yard's music and events coordinator, said the venue played an important role in supporting London's subcultures. Andrew Testa for The New York Times The recent narrative around London's night life has been a largely pessimistic one, with many venues closing for good, and others facing soaring costs or the denial of licenses because of concerns about noise. Mr. Bishop said that if the city's late night culture is to thrive, rather than just survive, artists and late night venues needed to collaborate. "We should be seeing more types of art and expression in clubs," he said. Such cross pollination is rare in London. But The Yard is encouraging it, whether that's getting techno clubbers to buy tickets for a play, or encouraging theatergoers to stick around for a late night event. It may be an unusual vision for the future of theater but it's happening right now at The Yard. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
When Julian Olidort returned to his Manhattan office after a business trip to Israel five years ago, he said his first priority was "to assemble a team of co workers" to assist in the delicate handling of a once in a lifetime opportunity that emerged 6,000 miles away in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. It was an investment he was eager to pursue. Her name was Sivan Aloni. "She was a very beautiful and intelligent woman with a very different outlook on life," Mr. Olidort said. "She lived every day at her own pace, and that was something I deeply admired, so I thought if there was ever a chance to meet her again it would be so magical, so worth it." Mr. Olidort, now 29 and an associate at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Ms. Aloni, now 31 and the adviser to Ambassador Dani Dayan, consul general of Israel in New York, met in Jerusalem in May 2014 at the first Genesis Prize award ceremony. The annual event recognizes achievement steeped in Jewish values. (Michael R. Bloomberg was the first recipient.) "Looking back, that was a lot for a young guy to handle," Mr. Olidort said with a chuckle, "but then again, so was Sivan." Ms. Aloni, then a 26 year old student at Hebrew University of Jerusalem working for the Israeli production company that produced the event, was stationed in the guest relations area in charge of coordinating the flow of journalists, panel judges and other attendees during the course of the evening. "I saw her standing there and just kind of froze for a moment," Mr. Olidort recalled. "I immediately told myself, 'If this girl could be the one, then I'm satisfied, I'm set for life.'" Unsure how he might relay that sentiment to a woman he had never met in a room teeming with security guards and media personnel, Mr. Olidort continued to stare squarely at Ms. Aloni as he began walking in circles. "I wanted to look busy," he said, "so I walked out of the room three times, and each time I had to re enter through security." Ms. Aloni, who was in the company of several colleagues, could not help but notice the peripatetic stranger who appeared to not know whether he was coming or going. "I glanced over and saw this guy who looked dashing in his suit," she said. "He also looked like he was half the age of everyone else in attendance." Mr. Olidort decided the best plan would be to make a beeline for Ms. Aloni, and upon arrival, he did not mince words. "Look, I don't want to embarrass you in front of your friends," he said to her, "but may I have your number, I'd love to take you out." Ms. Aloni, who said she found Mr. Olidort's bold approach "rather charming," agreed to have a drink with him later that night, which was a Thursday, but in the company of friends. Mr. Olidort, scheduled to return to New York the next day, chose to join her friends. Despite the fact that he did not get the alone time with her that he desired, he said he awoke the next morning "feeling that she was someone I would flip the whole world over to be with." He rearranged his travel plans, canceling a trip to Turkey and extending his time in Israel by three more days until a Tuesday to get to know Ms. Aloni on a more personal level. He told her he was staying to take care of some unfinished business, but failed to tell her that she, in fact, was the unfinished business. He asked her out to dinner on a Saturday evening, and though Ms. Aloni accepted the invitation, she arrived with several friends in tow, leaving Mr. Olidort a bit flustered. He explained his frustration to her the next morning, on a Sunday, two days before he was to return to New York, and followed his one on one request with yet another dinner invite, this one to Manta Ray, a restaurant on the beach in Tel Aviv. Ms. Aloni accepted, agreeing to go solo, she said, "because I could tell by then that Julian was a very sincere person, and a really nice guy." Mr. Olidort settled in and the two got to know each other. Ms. Aloni told him that she was born in Petah Tikva, a city in the central district of Israel, and raised in Tel Aviv, the only daughter of Zivit Furstenberg, her mother, who lived in Korazim, Israel, and Raviv Aloni, her father, an information technology specialist who remarried after divorcing Ms. Furstenberg and moved to Brisbane, Australia. Ms. Aloni spent many of her summers in the company of her stepsister and stepbrother in Australia. She graduated from Thelma Yalin National High School of the Arts in Tel Aviv, before serving two years in the Israeli Army, where she was a sergeant in its Yiftah unit, which developed materials for special infantry operations. She went on to Hebrew University, earning a dual degree in Jewish thought and political science. Ms. Aloni and Mr. Olidort soon realized that art played an integral role in both their lives. Her mother was an independent jewelry artist. His mother, Nadia Klionsky Olidort, was a landscape artist and the senior studio artist for the Echo Design Group in New York, where she designs scarves. She inherited her artistic talent from her father, Marc Klionsky, a Soviet born artist who developed a nuanced form of American Realism through the eyes of new immigrants in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s. Mr. Klionsky, who died at age 90 in 2017, painted the portraits of many notable leaders and musicians, including Golda Meir, B.B. King and Dizzy Gillespie the latter still hanging at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. Mr. Olidort, the younger of two sons born to Ms. Klionsky Olidort and Joseph Z. Olidort of New York, graduated from Brandeis University and received a master's degree in international finance and economic policy from Columbia. He was a Fulbright scholar in Sweden, where he conducted economic research on the Swedish glass industry while blowing glass at a factory in the southern Smaland region. He later told Ms. Aloni that after meeting her in Jerusalem, he returned home so fearful of losing her "by saying the wrong thing," that he turned to his co workers "for some advice and coaching," on what they felt were the proper things to say to maintain his newfound, long distance relationship. "For two months, people kept popping into my office with new ideas, new things to say to her via phone or text," Mr. Olidort said. Six months later, Mr. Olidort's emotional investment began paying dividends, as he and Ms. Aloni arranged for a second official date in Venice, Italy. "He was always up front about his feelings for me," Ms. Aloni said. "So at that point, I had put a lot of trust and faith in him." Their rendezvous in Venice, Mr. Olidort said, "felt more like an incredible honeymoon than a second date." In February 2015, Ms. Aloni visited Mr. Olidort in New York, where she did some sightseeing, job hunting and soul searching. In October of that year she returned once more, this time considerably shortening the distance of their long distance relationship by moving into Mr. Olidort's Manhattan apartment. She had also accepted a job as a director in the public diplomacy department of the Israeli consulate. "Throughout our relationship Julian kept talking about getting serious and wanting us to have a great life together, and that always felt right with me," Ms. Aloni said. "So I moved in with him without hesitation and without worry." They were married on a Tuesday morning, April 2, by Rabbi Haskel Lookstein at Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in Manhattan. The couple were joined by the groom's parents and his grandmother, Irina Klionsky, who is also the widow of Marc Klionsky. Renee Schreiber and Eran Polishuk, colleagues and friends of the bride, also attended. The bride's mother tuned in via Skype from her home in Israel. "By the power vested in me as a rabbi and because of the fact that I registered with the city clerk 60 years ago in order to be able to do such a ceremony, I now pronounce you husband and wife, according to the law of the State of New York," Rabbi Lookstein said playfully. "You are not yet married according to the law of Moses and Israel." When the brief ceremony ended, the small wedding party went to a nearby deli to celebrate over coffee and bagels. "We fell in love with Sivan the moment we met her," said the groom's mother, Ms. Klionsky Olidort, who was seated inside the deli next to her husband, Joseph Olidort, a civil engineer at Aecom, an engineering firm in New York. "She is his sunshine, the person who brings him the most joy." The newlyweds would eventually call a cab for Irina Klionsky, 82, and escort her back to her SoHo apartment, where she and Mr. Olidort manage her husband's art estate. It was also the place where Mr. Olidort proposed to Ms. Aloni in March 2018. (Mr. Olidort said he hoped to put together an exhibit in the near future of Mr. Klionsky's works, several pieces of which have never been on public display.) "The Jewish community is an important part of our lives," Mr. Olidort said. "We are both passionate about the continuity of the Jewish people and innovative Jewish education to inspire and engage young people to remain involved with their Jewish heritage." On April 16, the bride and groom will take part in a celebration ceremony in Jerusalem before 300 family members and friends. Rabbi Lookstein will officiate again at a traditional huppah and reception at Olmaya, an events space there. "I only wish my husband was here to see all of this," said Irina Klionsky, smiling before her cab arrived as she stared across the crowded deli at the bride and groom. Standing side by side at the noisy deli counter after their wedding, the couple laughed as they pointed to a variety of bagels and other tempting choices on a menu hanging high on a wall above a colorful and somewhat chaotic New York scene. This was modern day portrait of youthful exuberance the likes of which Marc Klionsky might have captured in his heyday. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Josh Lindblom, a pitcher for the Milwaukee Brewers, was not expecting a lot last weekend when he turned on his television looking for sports. But what he found was a bit much. "They had two guys on there playing Tetris against each other," Lindblom said, laughing. But now, American sports fans starved for live games may find a measure of salvation from an unlikely source: South Korean baseball. The Korea Baseball Organization season begins Tuesday, and ESPN has announced plans for live broadcasts of its games. Lindblom, 32, planned to be watching. The right hander, currently riding out the pandemic with his family in Lafayette, Ind., pitched four and a half seasons in the South Korean league, winning back to back Choi Dong won awards (given to the league's best pitcher) in 2018 and 2019 and the league's Most Valuable Player Award last year. On behalf of baseball aficionados eager for some live action, then, The New York Times asked Lindblom and a group of insiders for advice on how best to savor the South Korean brand of baseball. "People are clearly looking for something to cheer for," Lindblom said, "something to follow other than the news." Baseball on the other side of the world is still baseball even if spitting on the field has been temporarily banned. But American fans will notice subtle differences and quirks in the South Korean game. There is, for example, a ton of variability in talent on K.B.O. lineups. A team might field a player who could be a star in Major League Baseball but also play someone who would just barely make an M.L.B. bench and others who would fit best in the minor leagues. "There's 65 or 70 high schools that play baseball in Korea, so they're drawing from a much smaller talent pool," said Aaron Tassano, an international scout for the Samsung Lions, whose season opening game against the NC Dinos aired on ESPN on Tuesday. The K.B.O. is regarded as an offense centric league, with cozy ballparks. But the league has taken steps in recent years to shift the advantage away from its hitters, including "de juicing" the ball and expanding the notoriously small strike zone. And while the Korean game has more firepower and players swinging for the fences than the Japanese league, it might still come across to fans as "refreshingly old school," Tassano said. "There's bunting and stealing," he said. "Their game has not been taken over by launch angles and spin rate to the degree it has here. I love those things about the game here, but there's a purity to the game there that I enjoy." Every person interviewed for this story rued the same thing about Korean baseball's current chance in the spotlight: the lack of fans because of restrictions related to the virus. Korean games provide nine innings of near constant noise and color: Each club has a cheerleading team that guides fans through buoyant singing routines, with bespoke songs for every batter who steps up to the plate. "And they'll be singing even if you're losing, 15 0," said Brett Pill, who played for the Kia Tigers from 2014 to 2016 and is now the hitting coach for the Tulsa Drillers, the Los Angeles Dodgers' Class AA team. The typical K.B.O. game, then, combines the raucous energy of a college football stadium with the subject specific singing of an English soccer match. "They can make a 20,000 seat stadium sound bigger than the 50,000 seat stadiums we have in the States," said Eric Hacker, who pitched in South Korea from 2013 to 2018. For now, though, the ballparks have been so quiet that the sound of players swearing and umpires making calls could be clearly discerned on preseason broadcasts. Who are the Yankees of the K.B.O.? Dan Kurtz, a stay at home father in Tacoma, Wash., created the website MyKBO.net in 2003 for the small community of English speaking fans of the league. These days, the website, which maintains its charmingly homemade aesthetic, remains one of the best sources of up to date results for teams and players. Asked which teams American fans might want to follow, Kurtz noted that fandom does not always adhere to some complex logic. He joked, for instance, that anyone who used a Samsung phone could root for the Samsung Lions. The Doosan Bears have had the most success recently, making it to the championship series in each of the past five seasons and winning it three times. And the Kia Tigers have the most historical success, with 11 championships, leading fans to compare them to the Yankees, even if they have been less than stellar in recent years. Kurtz said Mets fans, on the other hand, might relate to the L.G. Twins, who play second fiddle to the Bears in Seoul, have not won a title since 1994 and, to really drive home the comparison, have a reputation for falling short of expectations. Most baseball fans now know that celebratory bat flips, frowned upon or worse in the M.L.B., are prevalent and accepted as harmless in South Korea. Korean baseball, then, clearly has its own decorum. For instance, if a pitcher hits a batter with the ball, there is an expectation that he will tip his cap or make some other conciliatory gesture toward his opponent. And in a country where age based hierarchies often dictate interpersonal behavior, apologies toward older opponents tend to be even more pronounced. "If you're a 24 year old pitcher and you hit Lee Dae ho, you better take off your hat and bow," Kurtz said, referring to the 37 year old slugger for the Lotte Giants. "Benches have cleared because of things like that." Lindblom said he embraced opportunities to offer displays of sportsmanship to highly regarded opponents like Lee Seung yuop, the K.B.O. career home runs leader, who retired after the 2017 season. "Every time he would step in the box, I would bow, just as a sign of respect," Lindblom said of Lee, who hit a combined 626 homers in Korea and Japan. Get to know South Korean stars. Fans in the United States might naturally be drawn to the American players in the league teams can have up to three international players on their rosters or Korean players who spent time in the major leagues. But our experts encouraged fans to learn more about lesser known South Korean players. Pill was most enthusiastic about a pudgy 33 year old pitcher for the Doosan Bears named Yoo Hee kwan, who throws a curveball that sometimes hovers around 50 miles per hour. "He's this very small, little left handed pitcher, who probably tops out at 83," Pill said, referring to his fastball velocity. "But he would hit the inside corner every time and then throw a changeup that just fell off the plate. You saw the ball well, but you couldn't hit it." Lindblom said the best overall player in the K.B.O., in his opinion, was Yang Eui ji, the 32 year old catcher for the NC Dinos. "He's a really smart player, a great situational hitter and is also a guy who's got some power." Lindblom said. "He's just a tough out. He's one of the better defensive catchers, also." Kurtz mentioned three Korean players who seemed most likely to make the jump to America in the coming years: Kim Ha seong, 24, a gifted shortstop who batted .307 last season, with 19 home runs; Na Sung bum, 30, an athletic outfielder with good power and a strong arm, who is trying to come back from a serious leg injury he suffered in 2019; and Yang Hyeon jong, who compiled a 2.29 ERA and 163 strikeouts in 184.2 innings last year and has won two Choi Dong won awards in his career. "You've got to have an open mind," Kurtz said "You're going to see some good players, and you're going to see some stuff you've probably never seen, even in the minor leagues. But that's why you watch." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
ONE LONG RIVER OF SONG Notes on Wonder By Brian Doyle If you are in love with language, here is how you will read Brian Doyle's posthumous collection of essays: by underlining sentences and double underlining other sentences; by sometimes shading in the space between the two sets of lines so as to create a kind of D.I.Y. bolded font; by marking whole astonishing paragraphs with a squiggly line in the margin, and by highlighting many of those squiggle marked sections with a star to identify the best of the astonishing lines therein; by circling particularly original or apt phrases, like "this blistering perfect terrible world" and "the chalky exhausted shiver of my soul" and "the most arrant glib foolish nonsense and frippery"; and, finally, by dog earing whole pages, and then whole essays, because there is not enough ink in the world to do justice to such annotations, slim as this book is and so full of white space, too. Brian Doyle died in 2017 at 60 of complications from a brain tumor. He left behind seven novels, six collections of poems and 13 essay collections. The whole time he was writing, he was also working full time as the editor of Portland Magazine. This collection was one of our most anticipated books of December. See the full list. It's an amazing creative output, but Doyle was never famous. In 2012 The Iowa Review called him "a writer's writer, unknown to the best seller or even the good seller lists, a Townes Van Zandt of essayists, known by those in the know." If there is a God and Doyle fervently believed there is "One Long River of Song" will change all that. This book is what Van Zandt's greatest hits would look like had he lived to be 60, and if every song on the record hit the bar set by "Pancho and Lefty." Doyle was a practicing Catholic who wrote frequently about his faith, but this book carries not a whiff of sanctity or orthodoxy. The God of "One Long River of Song" is a kindergartner wearing a stegosaurus hat, a United States postal worker with preternatural patience ("God was manning the counter from 1 to 5, as he does every blessed day"), the "coherent mercy" that cannot be apprehended but may be perceived by way of "the music in and through and under all things." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Sharon Tate, the tragic ingenue who epitomized the breezy Hollywood style of the late 1960s, has been gone for nearly five decades, but these days she seems anything but dead. With the approach of the 50th anniversary of her gruesome 1969 murder at the hands of the Manson family, which to many symbolized the end of the '60s, Ms. Tate is the subject of three coming films, including Quentin Tarantino's star studded "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood," with Margot Robbie as Ms. Tate. But fans who cannot wait for the screen bonanza can get their own piece of the Tate legacy on Nov. 17, in an auction of a vast trove of designer clothing and personal possessions at Julien's Auctions in Beverly Hills, Calif. (Online and telephone bids will also be accepted.) The artifacts, which have been in the Tate family for five decades, are a boutique's worth of period fashion collectibles: Betsey Johnson minidresses (estimate: 600 to 800), a black Christian Dior minidress Ms. Tate wore to a film premiere in 1966 ( 15,000 to 30,000) and the ivory silk moire minidress from her 1968 wedding to Roman Polanski ( 25,000 to 50,000), as well as mod era sunglasses, scarves and jewelry. This a huge collection. Does it represent basically everything Sharon owned at the time of her death? Pretty much. I had it in my home for the longest time, and my home was broken into. Three pieces were stolen the wedding dress, the mink coat and then a mink that Sharon had made for my mother, which is in the sale. The police apprehended the culprits, and I got the items back. But that put me on high alert, and I went and rented a cold storage facility to store everything properly. Why did your family decide to keep so much of her stuff in the first place? There are people that cherish and almost worship and revere the circumstances of her death, so any of her possessions are extremely valuable to those kinds of people. This is why the family guarded them literally with our lives for all these years. I prefer to call it "re homing" her possessions. I was diagnosed with breast cancer, which also took the life of my younger sister at 42 years old. That was the first time I ever faced the reality that I wasn't going to be here forever, and what would I do with all of this stuff? I toyed with the idea of doing a museum so her fans could come, but as I looked into those type of things, they fail rapidly. So I decided it was much better to re home the collection to people that will love and adore and cherish these things as much as I have. It's time to share, right? Do you worry about pushback from the public over selling this treasured collection? I take a lot of guff from the trolls, people trying to blame my motivations. They are extremely insensitive. Honestly, I want it to go to people that will be in a better position to love it and cherish it as my family has, as Sharon did, and see it go into the future as far as possible. A lot of these designer clothes would look utterly on trend today. Do you think anyone might actually buy these items to wear, not just collect? If they have the right dimensions they might. But the fact of the matter is, it's all over 50 years old, so they're very delicate. I don't know if I should tell you this, but I had one of the best patternmakers in the industry look at the garments, take measurements, and I made patterns on everything in the collection. So if I have the energy after all of this is done, I would like to do a little Sharon line for the everyday gal. Sifting through all these personal effects must have brought back a flood of memories for you. Just about everything did. Sharon and I had a unique relationship, because we were military brats my dad set up missile stations for the NATO nations so we were always traveling, often into a different country, and that makes it hard on keeping friends. So the only thing that you have really is each other. I was at the house in Los Angeles, where the pregnant Ms. Tate was murdered most of the summer. I actually wore some of these things. When they would go out to a private club, I'd often dress in one of her minis to go to the Candy Store, or the Daisy, or the Factory. And then fashion took a huge swing, and it was freestyle, and minimalistic. They needed a face and a body that was equally free spirited and un coifed, but yet beautiful and gentle, which is what the '60s were all about, right? I know your old brother in law Roman Polanski long ago signed over these items to your family. Are you still in touch with him? I have a great relationship with Roman. When we get together, it's like time stood still. I can see Sharon in Roman's eyes, and he evidently said the same thing about my eyes he could see her as well. Aside from his legal troubles, there have been allegations over the years that Roman lured Sharon into a seamy Hollywood scene. What was your view of their marriage? Sharon absolutely adored Roman. She was head over heels in love with Roman. There are a whole lot of people that have said things, but it's pure fabrication. Roman and Sharon were a true love story, that's what I observed. And I was there, the first person to meet him when she brought him to Sausalito to meet my mom and dad. Apparently you endorsed the Tarantino film after some initial doubts. Why? I had reservations about it at first. It's what I said to Quentin: "Given your name and your style and the name Manson, people are going to have a natural assumption." Which I did as well. But he gave me the script to read. I did not have to sign an NDA. He trusted me, and I trusted him, and I think it's a wonderful story. I gave him my word that I would not discuss it. The only thing I can say is, it's a love story to the Los Angeles of that era. He's gone to great lengths to recreate entire streets of the period. I mean, everything about this movie is going to blow your mind. Back to the auction: Is there anything you are keeping for yourself? There are a few things that I just couldn't give up, so they will live with me, like her Chanel bag and a coverlet that was on her bed. When I go, I will pass those things to my daughter. Everything that I do with victims' rights, and my mother did before me, and my little sister, is not something that I want to pass on to the next generation. I don't want the burden to be passed on, you know what I mean? This interview has been edited and condensed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The Aman Spa at the Connaught hotel in London, part of the Maybourne Hotel Group, is such a proponent of the benefits of meditation that it is opening its doors to the public for the first time with free 20 minute classes every weekday. The sessions are held at 1 p.m. in a treatment room at the spa and are limited to eight participants. They are led by therapists trained in mindfulness meditation, which is an adaptation of Buddhist meditation that encourages one to focus on the moment rather than being consumed by the pain of the past or anxiety over the future. Guests should reserve a spot through phone or email and will be welcomed in the lobby by an Aman representative and ushered to the spa. They can arrive 10 minutes early to enjoy lemon grass or ginger tea or stay to drink a cup after class. Meditation can help renew your mind and spirit, according to the spa manager, Rene Van Eyssen. "It encourages you to observe your emotions, which improves awareness of the present moment, bringing clarity and peace," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Not since the invention of penicillin, or maybe even Play Doh, has an accidental discovery been as epic as the revelation that the Academy Awards show doesn't need a host. Just visualize it: No host. O.K., not a great visual but it's only TV. Blind luck has often played a role in world changing breakthroughs and, in the case of the Non Hosted Oscars, blind luck drizzled with bad taste, bad vetting, bad foresight, bad values, pitiless social media and widespread early onset flop sweat, added up to a delightfully obvious remedy to a 91 year old problem: The Academy Awards as drying paint. Now, with momentum at its back, the academy should ride its sudden wave of innovation. With a few more newfangled tweaks, the Academy Awards telecast can someday be right there on the cutting edge of passe. Which brings us to the other fangle that the academy should consider: the No Thanks Amendment, in which Oscar winners are forbidden to thank anyone. Unlike most new laws, grasping the rationale behind this prohibition requires insight as unexceptional as the no host verdict. First: The typical, lifelong Academy Awards show viewer a demographic couched somewhere between Lipitor and Synthroid has lost roughly three weeks of life to the phrase "I would like to thank ..." These viewers deserve to be made whole. They are the people who still watch movies in theaters. They read reviews written by people paid to be film critics. They know who Irving Thalberg was and vaguely who Kevin Hart is. They are even savvy enough to find it refreshing if, say, a makeup artist accepts an Oscar and says: "The truth is, this film was not a total team effort. My work with facial toner is all that saved this project from complete disaster." Traditionally, after saying, "I would like to thank ..." Oscar winners mention 10 to 50 names. Unfortunately, American viewers tend to have little awareness of anonymous people. There are at most six documented cases of a Michigander saying, "Oh, she's repped by Ben Anderson at C.A.A. Now it all makes sense." Hence, in the unlikely event Emma Stone ever needed help in her career, the No Thanks Amendment would compel her to thank her agent at the valet stand. Or at the Vanity Fair after party. Or over the phone months later. After thanking their professional hangers on, winners thank spouses, parents and children. In an industry at demonstrable odds with most family values, such gratitude rings hollow and stupefyingly meh. Sure, there are instances when something super fun occurs during these moments like when Hilary Swank thanked everyone on two coasts except her husband but such anomalies hardly offset a thousand hours of "All right, enough already." Home, or ski home or Martha's Vineyard home or Malibu home is where the heart is. Families thanked at all four will most likely get over their nationally televised snub. Finally, there's the ultimate in pointless gratitude: "I would like to thank the academy." A) Just because you "would like to" do something, doesn't mean you have to. B) It's quite possible you would be thanking a body in which only half the voters chose you. In fact, with potentially 10 best picture nominees, Oscar winners could wind up expressing heartfelt gratitude to seven of 10 people who didn't like their film in the least. Note to academy: Go back to five best picture nominees. This is an Oscar, not a participation trophy. What was "an honor to just be nominated" is now "a slap in the face" not to be nominated. C) In thanking the academy, you don't know who you're thanking. We all get academy screeners that we illegally mail out to relatives in other cities. But who are these people who actually vote? No one knows. Rumors of a Hollywood skin deep state crop up but go unconfirmed. Someday the truth will emerge. In the meantime, unless an Oscar winner is so richly undeserving (oh, say, "The Artist" as best picture, 2012) that the academy deserves thanks purely for its horrific taste, we can toss this bit of obligatory politeness out with the others. O.K., that's the broad strokes of the No Thanks Amendment. Not bad, huh? Well, in fairness, there is a potential downside. Judging from scattered reports that reach Los Angeles, America is going through troubled times, and movie people tend to take all forms of injustice more personally than those victimized. With the No Thanks Amendment freeing up much of the 45 seconds allotted for acceptance speeches, political speechifying could become highly oppressive, possibly polarizing and certainly incoherent. Consider the idea of enclosing in the winner's envelope a list of three issues affecting our nation from which the Oscar recipient must either choose one to spout off on or none. Oscar winners, accustomed to working off a script may very well choose none, then have little else to say before leaving the stage. And really, isn't that the dream? In fact (oh my God!) here's another brilliant innovation: If you win an Oscar and simply grab your statuette and walk offstage without saying a word, you get one past violation of political correctness expunged from your record and 10 percent off the 30,000 fee for your star on the Walk of Fame. Wow, beyond mere progress being made, we could be inching toward a revolution. A revolution that will be televised. And draw incredibly modest ratings. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
People of all ages fell for the cute gnome like alien at the center of Steven Spielberg's 1982 movie "E.T. the Extra Terrestrial." But some fell extra hard; Katherine Bernhardt, who turned 7 the year the movie premiered, was smitten enough to paint portraits of E.T. in art school. In her latest show, "Done with Xanax," she returns to him, pushing her distinctive fusion of Pop Art, Color Field and graffiti toward a more vulnerable, narrative expression and more complex painting process. Ms. Bernhardt has at times seemed stuck in her signature patterns formed by repeating images of popular commodities and motifs cigarettes, sharks, cellphones, slices of fruit and floating emojis on expanses of bright color. She has painted fictional figures like the Pink Panther, Babar the Elephant and Garfield, but E.T. is more dimensional, complicated by a kind of saintliness, otherness and conflict: He is a stranger in an inhospitable land who has healing powers and wants to go home. Ms. Bernhardt renders E.T. single and large, like an icon, often outlined in gold or silver spray paint and frequently raising his glowing forefinger in benediction. She evokes but also takes liberties with moments from the movie, making them vaguely recognizable in the way that scenes from the Bible can be. For example, the paintings "Halloween in California" and "Halloween E.T. Strawberries" show the extraterrestrial wearing the blond wig from the dress up session in Gertie's bedroom and a patterned muumuu that suggests suburban California of a certain era. In others, he's famously aloft, in the basket of Elliott's bicycle, or surrounded by push button telephones reflecting his oft stated desire to "Phone home!" Especially good is "Sick," where E.T. is shrouded in a brilliantly white blanket that is unpainted canvas. It symbolizes the way Ms. Bernhardt has opened up her work and her style. Hopefully, her progress will continue. Last year, Michael Rakowitz got more attention for his protests than his participation in New York museums. He was the first artist to withdraw from the 2019 Whitney Biennial, providing a template for others whose departures eventually helped drive a tear gas magnate from the museum's board; later, in a move aimed at a board member of the Museum of Modern Art, Mr. Rakowitz tried to pause his own video work from a show at its sister institution, PS1. Mr. Rakowitz's current show at Lombard, at least, lets us assess his work on its own terms. Here the Chicago based artist is showing the latest chapter in an ongoing project, "The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist," which reconstructs looted or destroyed Iraqi antiquities out of humble materials. An earlier exhibition focused on objects stolen from Baghdad's National Museum; here, he and a team have remade reliefs of an Assyrian palace that was blasted by the Islamic State out of packets of mixed herbs, newspapers and other scraps from the regional economy. I suppose the colorful reliefs have a baleful relevance for those of us already incensed by the cultural (and human) devastation of Iraq. But they are also rehearsed and self contained, and that goes double for "The Ballad of Special Ops Cody," a haughty work of stop motion animation filmed at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, which depicts a U.S. Army toy figurine inspecting the museum's Near Eastern collection while a voice over recounts various lootings and atrocities. Mr. Rakowitz is better when he pushes his historical and political engagement into generosity, as he did in his moving "Return," his contested video at PS1, which allegorizes the Iraq war and refugee crisis through his red tape choked efforts to import Iraqi dates to Brooklyn. The life altering peculiarities of the American immigration system collide, in Hunter East Harlem Gallery's group show "The Extraordinary," with the slippery problem of defining artistic success. The show, curated by Arden Sherman with Nora Maite Nieves, began with an open call to artists who had or were pursuing the O 1 visa for extraordinary ability: Promising works by Yue Nakayama, Woomin Kim, Shimpei Shirafuji, Firoz Mahmud, Catalina Tuca, Anna Parisi and Sarah Mihara Creagen might earn them permission to live and work temporarily in the United States, or renew the permission they already have, if their inclusion in the show helps persuade the immigration service that they're renowned in their field. Ms. Nakayama's video of child actors performing incongruous monologues is strangely fascinating, as are the tabletop "minerals" that Ms. Kim makes from everyday materials like colored chalk or acrylic nails. But the show's distinct highlight is a short narrative video, "The Challenges of Imagination," made by the Iranian artist Ramyar Vala, who has an O 1 visa with no re entry stamp, with his older brother Rambod, whose O 1 was rejected. The only piece to treat the show's premise explicitly, the video includes amazing real life details like an immigration officer pointing out to Ramyar Vala that he's not as famous as Jeff Koons. But it's equally a critique of the art world itself, which can be just as blithe about treating market success as a proxy for inherent merit. As an Iranian exile, Mr. Vala would clearly find the most success here by making work about his situation but what if he wants to make work about something else? The video's last scene, which captures Rambod Vala in the tub, eating Haagen Dazs and singing along to Lou Reed's song "Perfect Day," is an exhilarating rebuke to the very notion of success. What if Max Beckmann had made a painting about illegal abortion? He might have produced something like Juanita McNeely's 1969 "Is It Real? Yes It Is," a magnificent nine panel installation showing now at James Fuentes Gallery in collaboration with Mitchell Algus. A squatting skeleton, pinioned women with buckled knees and crows picking the flesh from a prone female body are all rendered with Beckmann's crashing color scheme and Expressionist urgency. But they don't come across as allegories they look like facts. In the central canvas, a hand holding glittering silver forceps reaches toward a woman's naked crotch under an oversize Donald Duck toy. Altogether it's a searing evocation of the fractured way we remember traumatic experiences and of the many bloody realities most people prefer not to look at. In 1985, after an accident put Ms. McNeely in a wheelchair, a doctor told her she'd never make another large painting. She responded with "Triskaidekaptych," which comprises 13 substantial canvases parading edge to edge around two full walls of the gallery. Contorted female figures are still here, along with torture, medical horror and a screaming baboon's face. But the introduction of softer blues and pinks, and of a cloudiness in the way those colors are applied, changes the tone, and these writhing figures could very well be dancing. Two faceless women on trapezes, swinging through banks of mirrors, add a heavy note of self consciousness: If "Is it real" is the moment of trauma, in all its kaleidoscopic brutality, "Triskaidekaptych" is the elaborate mental process a person goes through to make sense of it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
LONDON This year's Oscar nominations have generated little controversy, with one exception: "Detainment," named in the best live action short category, an accolade that has offended many in Britain. On Wednesday, The Daily Mirror called the film's nomination an "Oscars insult." "'Hang your head in shame, Hollywood ... this is off limits,'" read a headline in the tabloid newspaper. An online petition calling for "Detainment" to be removed from the nominations, had attracted over 150,000 signatures by Friday. Opinion pieces and radio programs have debated the film extensively. The 30 minute movie caused such a stir because it is about one of Britain's most notorious and troubling crimes. In 1993, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson were convicted of murdering James Bulger. The killers were just 10 years old at the time; James was only 2. The images of Venables and Thompson leading James from a mall while his mother was distracted captured on security cameras and widely shown on TV news at the time are seared in many people's memory here. The pair walked James several miles before torturing and murdering him with, among other things, bricks and a metal bar, the police investigation and the boys' testimonies revealed. They left his body on a railway line. When they were released from prison in 2001, Venables and Thompson were granted lifelong anonymity. Still, the decades old case keeps being revisited: Venables, now 36, was jailed in 2010 for possession of child pornography, and was charged with the same offense last year, prompting the case to be revisited. There have also been attempts, both legal and amateur, to reveal the pair's new identities. A court order that applies worldwide prevents anyone publishing images that claim to identify them. The Bulger killing has already been the subject of a play, which also caused complaints in Britain's tabloids, as well as numerous books. But none have caused such an outcry as "Detainment," which has been accused of humanizing or being sympathetic to the killers, even though only its trailer and a few short clips can be seen online. "Detainment" has won awards, including a special jury prize at Cannes, but it started to attract criticism in Britain after it was nominated for an Oscar. This month, Denise Fergus, James Bulger's mother, called for the film to be pulled from the Oscars and complained that the family was not consulted about it. "It's one thing making a film like this without contacting or getting permission from James family, but another to have a child re enact the final hours of James's life before he was brutally murdered and making myself and my family have to relive this all over again," Fergus said in a statement posted on Twitter on Tuesday. Albert Kirby, the detective who led the investigation into the killing, told the BBC that the events shown in the film were accurate, but still called for its withdrawal from consideration. "It's causing so much unnecessary upset," he said. The 38 year old Irish director Vincent Lambe said in a telephone interview that in 2012 he started researching the murder, which also dominated the news in Dublin during his childhood. "I wanted to try and understand what could have led two 10 year old boys to have done this," he said. There has never been a proper debate about why the killing happened, despite its prominence, he added. He considered contacting the families involved, he said, but decided it could harm the film. "We wanted to make a film that was factual and impartial," he said. "I think if we did contact them there'd be pressure to tell it the way they wanted it to be told." "We never meant any disrespect," he added. "I hope people can see it with an open mind," he said, "but that might not be possible now." In a statement, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which organizes the Oscars, said in part: "The academy offers its deepest condolences to Ms. Fergus and her family. We are deeply moved and saddened by the loss that they have endured, and we take their concerns very seriously." Carter Pilcher, the president of ShortsTV, which distributes the nominated short films to theaters, is a voting member of the academy. In a telephone interview, he said that he did not expect the film to be dropped. "The academy can't be in the place of deciding which stories can be told," he said. There have been similar protests in the shorts category before, Pilcher added. Last year, with the MeToo movement at its height, pressure mounted to remove Kobe Bryant's short film "Dear Basketball" from the running, because he had been accused of rape in 2003. Bryant won best animated short. Pilcher added he had sympathy for the Bulger family, but felt "Detainment" was deserving of its nomination. "I think it's a very well made film," he said. "It certainly puts these questions in front of you," he added. "If you're 10, how can you do something like this?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
For some publishers unsettled by a fast changing online advertising business, sponsored content has provided much needed relief. In recent years, publications large and small have invested in teams to make sponsored content written stories, videos or podcasts that look and feel like journalistic content hoping to make up for declines in conventional advertising. To varying degrees, they have succeeded. Younger companies like Vice and BuzzFeed have built whole businesses around the concept. The Atlantic expects three quarters of its digital ad revenue to come from sponsored content this year. Slate, the web publisher, says that about half of its ad revenue comes from native ads, as sponsored content is also called, and the other half from traditional banner or display ads. Many major newspapers, including The New York Times, have declared sponsored content to be an important part of their strategies. But as the relationship between publishers and social platforms like Facebook grows closer and as more straightforward forms of advertising are devalued by ad blocking and industry automation, the role, and definition, of sponsored content has shifted. Now, publishers, social media companies and advertisers are negotiating new relationships. Audiences have migrated away from news websites and toward Facebook and other social media destinations, which for a competitive price can provide advertisers access to larger and more finely targeted groups of people, challenging the value of a publisher's own channels. With a weaker claim over audiences, publishers have been left to compete for advertising on different terms, leaning less on the size or demographics of their readerships, and more on the sorts of campaigns they can engineer for advertisers campaigns that are then used across the internet. "The differences between five years ago and now, in client expectations, are enormous," said Keith Hernandez, the president of Slate. The resulting arrangements are more client agency than advertiser publisher, and advertisers are looking to media companies for a full range of services, from the production of campaigns to the often paid for placement of the content across the internet and social media. "We have the basic building blocks of a full service agency," said Jon Slade, the chief commercial officer of The Financial Times. And The New York Times recently characterized the work of its T Brand Studio as "platform agnostic." As it has for traditional editorial content, Facebook has become a primary distributor for many publications' sponsored posts, even though outside sponsored content was not officially permitted until April, when the social network published formal guidelines. Facebook's welcome of sponsored posts was broadly seen as a promising and necessary development. But some publishers were troubled by the manner in which Facebook said it would display sponsored posts and by how much power it put in the hands of advertisers. Under Facebook's system, all advertisers must be disclosed and displayed as co authors under the post or video, a level of disclosure that is required by the Federal Trade Commission. In addition, these advertisers are now privy to a wide range of information about their sponsored content posted on Facebook something that once was visible only to the publisher. They also get a deeper and more profound layer of data: They can see how much money was spent on Facebook promotion to drive traffic to the post in order to meet targets, a common and sometimes lucrative practice for publishers, who have been able to significantly mark up the price on such distribution. What's more, Facebook invites the advertiser to pay to promote their sponsored content on their own, making them less reliant on the publisher for distribution. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. From Facebook's point of view, this transparency eliminates inefficiency why let middlemen charge extra for an audience that Facebook is selling? But for publishers who sold advertisers on their ability not just to create posts but to make sure they are seen, either through clever promotion or paid placement, such visibility can be deflating. This change poses a persistent and tantalizing question to increasingly savvy advertisers: Could we just attract eyes to our posts ourselves? And if not now, maybe soon? The change also discourages any illusions about how easy it could be for publishers to make money from native advertising. Sponsored content which, in 2016, often means video is expensive to produce and difficult to do well. Controlling distribution, albeit through Facebook, was for some a more profitable lever, and a way to pad deals that, while often growing in size, offered thin margins. This is, of course, a boon to advertisers. "Many native campaigns are quite expensive, and if you limit the work you're doing to the creation of content, and leave the distribution to the brand, then it can become more affordable," said Stephanie Losee, head of content for Visa. With less ability to charge for distribution, on their own channels or others, and a growing dependence on margin squeezing outside platforms, publishers may be left to compete with creative agencies on their turf. Publishers becoming ad agencies, in other words, means competing not just with one another, but with the agencies that already exist. In this nascent new order, competitors are defined largely by their limitations. While the terms and prices that publishers can accept from advertisers are set by the need to support a connected news or entertainment organization the reason they chose this controversial path in the first place conventional agencies are hampered by a dependence on lucrative TV work, from which they are accustomed to low volumes and high margins. Accordingly, publishers' pitches often focus on price: their ability to create more content for less. Such a situation, in which publishers join a broader competition for advertising production dollars, would be a testament to how much and how quickly media distribution has changed. Publishers may get back in the running for advertising deals lost in recent years, but much like the editorial content they produce, their ads will succeed or fail in contexts over which they have less and less control. Bryan Goldberg, founder of the women's website Bustle, views these changes with optimism, at least as far as they affect larger publishers. "Gross margins have slightly decreased, but not anywhere near enough to offset the upward movement in scale," he said. For smaller publishers, or those without backing from venture capital, the situation is less heartening. "Running a full scale sales, marketing and operations team requires tens of millions of dollars of annual expenses," Mr. Goldberg said. Facebook, for its part, has provided a preview of how such a system might mature. A program that the company calls Anthology is meant to help video publishers "lend brands their creativity, storytelling expertise and video production know how." It is being used by companies like Vox Media and Vice with advertising clients to produce videos that will then be promoted on Facebook. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
A California judge has ordered the ailing 92 year old media mogul Sumner M. Redstone to undergo a medical examination, a major development in the continuing legal battle over his mental competence. In a tentative ruling on Friday, Judge David J. Cowan of the Los Angeles County Superior Court granted permission for a doctor to examine Mr. Redstone's mental health. Mr. Redstone's nurses and speech therapists may attend the evaluation, which should last an hour, the judge said. The decision adds a new twist in the suit filed in November by Mr. Redstone's former companion, Manuela Herzer, that describes him as a "living ghost." Lawyers for Mr. Redstone have called the suit a "meritless action, riddled with lies" and have filed a motion to dismiss it. The medical examination is expected to occur in the next 10 days. A hearing on the motion to dismiss has been pushed to Feb. 29. Last month, Judge Cowan rejected a petition to have Mr. Redstone interviewed by a geriatric psychiatrist. But on Friday, the judge said that a medical examination was necessary so that both sides had access to all the facts. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
A woman with a roll of toilet paper around her neck. A man with lettuce on his head, bare chested in a sheet, delicately holding a large goblet of red wine. A child with small lilac angel wings posed atop a mound of again toilet paper, with siblings and parents looking on in the background. For weeks, people have been recreating works of fine art using household items and posting their tableaus on social media. At a time when museums are closed, galleries have shuttered and art education has largely moved online, these images have formed a living archive of creativity in isolation. Tens of thousands of recreations appear under the hashtags mettwinning, betweenartandquarantine and gettymuseumchallenge. Some have been made by arts professionals, but many of them are the skillful works of amateurs. Anneloes Officier believes that her household in Amsterdam started this spontaneous wave of imitative works. For a month, she has been collecting submissions and posting them on the Instagram account tussenkunstenquarantaine (a reference the Dutch television program "Tussen Kunst en Kitsch," whose title means "between art and kitsch"). "Over 24,000 contributions have come in through our hashtag," Ms. Officier, 31, said, adding that staff members from the Rijksmuseum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre, the Getty and the Hermitage have taken part. The creators sometimes impose their own rules and restrictions, such as limiting the number of props or the time allotted to create a replica. These recreations recall the work of the artist Nina Katchadourian, whose series "Lavatory Self Portraits in the Flemish Style" was shot entirely in airplane bathrooms. They're part of a larger body of work, called "Seat Assignment," in which she creates art during commercial flights. "I was trying to make art under circumstances where art doesn't seem possible. It involves a kind of magic trick," Ms. Katchadourian said. "It's not unrelated to the constraints people are under now." She's "delighted and charmed" to see that others are taking to the form. Francesco De Grazia, a 25 year old classical guitarist from Sicily, said that almost every concert and artistic event he had been looking forward to has been canceled, leaving him with plenty of time on his hands to dress up like a Caravaggio painting. "The only possibility is to make use of the tools offered by the web while waiting for this nightmare to pass," he said. "I hope I was able to make someone laugh." Although not normally a big fan of social media, Crystal Filep, a 36 year old urban planner from Wellington, New Zealand, decided to join in after her mother encouraged her to try her hand at the challenge. "I was attracted to the bodily, tactile nature," she said. "I had been spending an unhealthy amount of time in front of screens for virtual meetings, emails, spreadsheets." Turning away from work to take part in a creative exercise "helped lighten things, and put things in perspective," Ms. Filep said. In interviews with more than a dozen participants in the challenge among them a Japanese actor living in London and a social worker from Azerbaijan every person mentioned the sense of lightness that came from pretending to be someone else for a moment. They also spoke about their love for art and museums. There are so many people who miss the quietly social act of looking at art with others. For now, they will have to make do with virtual gallery tours and riffs on famous paintings posted to Instagram. These embodiments of artworks have a historical precedent. Long before we were dabbing eye shadow on our lips and posing with toilet paper, people were donning makeup, holding props and posing rigidly in place for up to a full minute as part of a dramatic practice known as tableau vivant, or living picture. Historians have traced evidence of the phenomenon back to the 1700s, where it served as a form of entertainment and instruction. In 1760, a group of Italian comedic actors recreated Jean Baptiste Greuze's painting "The Village Betrothal in Les Noces d'Arlequin" as part of larger theatrical performance, and in 1781, children at the Royal Palace of Versailles supposedly participated in a series of tableaux vivants inspired by the paintings of Jacques Louis David and Eugene Isabey. The hobby picked up steam during the 1800s, and reached its peak around the turn of the 20th century. While the widespread use of photography and the availability of the cinema made the practice of tableau vivant seem less engaging, it never fully faded from sight. Every year, residents of Laguna Beach, Calif., dress up for the Pageant of the Masters, an event that has been referenced in popular culture (including on episodes of "Arrested Development" and "Gilmore Girls"). When restrictions on public life are lifted, participation in this social media challenge and several others that have emerged over the last month will surely wane. But some educators are hoping to keep the recreations going long after stay at home orders end. "I'm definitely going to keep assigning this project," said Stacy Antoville, who teaches art at the Clinton School, a 6 12 public school in Manhattan. Like the rest of the city's residents, her students are "dealing with a lot of trauma right now." Some are grieving losses; others are anxious about the future. They're having trouble focusing on schoolwork and art, but they rose to the tableau vivant challenge in a way Ms. Antoville didn't expect, gamely fashioning themselves as famous subjects like Frida Kahlo and Salvador Dali. "I hope this can give them one good memory from this time," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Regulators on four continents are preparing for a long awaited showdown with Facebook, after years of disinterest and half steps. They largely have the same goal: changing the social media company's behavior. Figuring out how is the hard part. Members of the Federal Trade Commission in the United States are weighing what sorts of constraints they would put on Facebook's business practices. But there is not agreement on those terms within the F.T.C., according to two people familiar with the internal talks who were not allowed to discuss them publicly. Facebook said this week that it expected that the agency would impose a fine of 3 billion to 5 billion for violations of a privacy settlement from 2011. It would be the highest penalty in the United States against a tech company. The company and F.T.C. officials have discussed additional mandates that would constrain how Facebook's handles data, strengthens security and monitors its privacy practices, according to the two people familiar with the discussions. Joseph J. Simons, the F.T.C. chairman, has been determined to get consensus from the five member commission and is facing resistance on the proposed settlement from within the agency, according to the people. The potential settlement is seen as a landmark privacy decision and a referendum on the nation's ability to police the powers of Big Tech and protect consumers. The conditions on a deal with Facebook would have far reaching impact, setting standards for future privacy violations and influencing the creation of privacy regulations in the United States and other countries, legal experts say. "It will set the bar," said David C. Vladeck, former head of consumer protection at the F.T.C. "Once the F.T.C. creates a consent order, it levels the playing field so that any other party that engages in the same behavior will have every expectation that the prior order will apply to them." In Europe, officials in Britain, France, Germany and Ireland are scrutinizing the social media company's practices. Governments in Australia, India, New Zealand and Singapore have passed or are considering new restrictions on social media. Facebook has shown its willingness to fight charges of privacy violations. On Thursday, Facebook disputed findings by Canada's privacy commissioners in an investigation into how Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm that worked for the Trump presidential campaign, gained access to information about Facebook users. The privacy commissioner of Canada and the information and privacy commissioner for British Columbia said Facebook violated national and local laws in allowing third parties access to private user information through "superficial and ineffective safeguards and consent mechanisms." The Canadian regulators, who have limited power to force Facebook's compliance, plan to take the company to a Canadian federal court. The court, which focuses on regulatory issues and lawsuits against the government, may impose fines. The revelations of data misuse by Cambridge Analytica also set off the investigation at the F.T.C. But regulators expanded it to include other privacy violations by Facebook that were reported, almost monthly, according to a person familiar with the investigation. Among conditions that are being discussed by the F.T.C. are stronger monitoring of Facebook's privacy practices and greater restraints on how the company shares data with third parties, according to the two people familiar with the discussions. But the conditions are not finalized and could change, as could the amount of the fine, which Facebook said was a projection. The agency and Facebook could decide to go to court over charges if an agreement is not reached. The two sides were close to concluding settlement talks earlier this month, according to a person familiar with the talks. The company's guidance to investors of the financial penalty also indicated a conclusion is near. But disagreements over final terms of a settlement have complicated the conclusion of the F.T.C.'s one year investigation. At least one member of the five person commission has called for direct punishment of Facebook's chief, Mark Zuckerberg, and believes the proposed fine would not change Facebook's behavior, the people said. In fact, the member would be willing to fight in court for stronger controls over the company, the two people said. Agency officials are determined to keep the discussions with Facebook private, and the F.T.C.'s inspector general has started an investigation into leaks of the talks, according to a person familiar with the investigation. Also on Thursday, the New York attorney general's office said it was investigating how Facebook gained access to the email address books of more than 1.5 million users without permission. Facebook is already fighting a lawsuit by the attorney general of Washington, D.C., Karl Racine, for the misuse of data by Cambridge Analytica. Immediately after Facebook's announcement of the projected fine, Democratic lawmakers and privacy advocates said the punishment was too weak. Marc Rotenberg, president of the nonprofit privacy group EPIC, said a large fine was an insufficient solution to Facebook's repeated privacy violations. He and others have called for constraints on the structure of Facebook's business. Mr. Zuckerberg has come out in support of global privacy and content regulations, joining a growing chorus of tech chief executives who now hope to shape federal and global regulations for the internet. "The real challenge facing the F.T.C. right now is whether to allow Facebook to integrate WhatsApp and Instagram with Messenger," Mr. Rotenberg said. "The commission has the opportunity because of the pending enforcement action to stop that. If they don't, Facebook's dominance of the internet economy will only increase." Dipayan Ghosh, a former economic adviser on tech issues during the Obama administration, said the conditions laid out in the F.T.C. order would also guide federal legislation. "Enforcement actions have a broad impact on the entire industry. They can set norms," Mr. Ghosh said. The F.T.C. action foreshadows problems for Facebook across the Atlantic, where European regulators have sharply criticized the social media giant's handling of user data, harmful influence on elections and vulnerability to the spread of extremist ideologies. In Ireland, home to Facebook's European headquarters, the company is facing several investigations into whether it is complying with European data protection laws. Just this week, the Irish Data Protection Commission started a fresh inquiry into Facebook exposing user passwords. Under European privacy law, Facebook could be fined up to 4 percent of global revenue, or about 2.23 billion. British authorities last year gave Facebook the maximum possible fine of 500,000 pounds, worth about 645,000, for allowing Cambridge Analytica to harvest the information of millions of users without their consent. The country is also considering naming a new internet regulator who could issue fines and hold individual executives legally liable for harmful content spread on their platforms. In France, where the government has passed laws to stop the spread of misinformation on social media close to elections, officials are investigating Facebook's content moderation policies. And in Germany, which adopted an anti hate speech law that requires Facebook to screen out posts considered harmful, antitrust authorities forced Facebook to adjust its data collection policies after determining the company was exploiting its market dominance to profile its users and sell advertising. The efforts are part of a broader effort to clamp down on social media around the world. Ben Scott, a former State Department official in the Obama administration, said the global scrutiny represented "a massive wave of outrage that will crash straight into the central premise of the company's business model." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The story of the striving, first generation kid made good is a familiar one; Alvarez makes his ache. He excels in honors classes and is aware from a young age of a yearning to free his mother from "the assault of the fruit industry." To do so, he knows he must outrun his geography a metaphor he comes to embrace literally when in high school he becomes a serious runner. "When the rhythms of working class life cut inside me like broken beer glass, I run," he writes. He wins a full scholarship to Whitman College in Walla Walla, but is thwarted by his own high expectations and shame about his upbringing. The dining hall presents a challenge, as does going to class and staying on top of assignments. Only while running does he feel solid in his skin. At a conference, he learns about Peace and Dignity Journeys, a six month long quadrennial run through the whole of North America, in which "numerous and diverse Indigenous nations reunite and reclaim dignity for their families and communities." Pacquiao, the calm young man in charge of the journey, speaks of running as "connective tissue," "a form of prayer" that "renews our responsibility to community." Alvarez drops out of college to join the group, never more than a couple dozen runners, in one of its early stops in British Columbia, and the intricately threaded narrative about his family morphs into a journal of his travels on foot, and also, at times, in the vans the runners use to transport themselves and their supplies in their relay style race across the continent. As they go, they learn the different ways "the rain strikes, strums and plucks at our skins." They run through mountainsides, forests, small towns and large urban blocks. When they are dropped off for a shift, they receive few instructions. "When in doubt, turn left," is a motto. Food is scarce. Sometimes Alvarez's language seems vague and overly laden with the weight of his mission. ("People's paths are unique, beautiful," he notes to himself upon meeting a new recruit to the team.) At other times, it's not clear how this epic run, with its attendant difficulties, relates to Alvarez's desire to help his family. At one point, alone on the trail in Oregon, he meets a snarling mountain lion. At the last minute, recalling instructions from an older runner about surviving such encounters, he remembers to "thank the animal." Moreover, some of the marathon's leaders behave in ways that border on sadistic. The majority of the runners are recovering addicts or otherwise seeking redemption, and, like many of them, Alvarez believes in the transformative power of extreme sacrifice. "I run to follow as closely as I can the path of those who came before me," he insists. "I run to find fragments of my own parents sprinkled over the earth." When the group enters his home state of Washington after a month of running, he realizes he is "submerging myself in pain ... so that I may control the turmoil within me." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Richard Easton, left, and Robert Sean Leonard in Tom Stoppard's "The Invention of Love" at the Lyceum Theater in New York in 2001. Mr. Easton, who won a Tony for his performance, played A.E. Housman as an old man; Mr. Leonard played the youthful version. Richard Easton, whose frequent appearances on Broadway across 50 years included a Tony winning turn as the poet A.E. Housman in Tom Stoppard's "The Invention of Love," died on Dec. 2 at his home in Manhattan. He was 86. Jonathan Walker, executor of his estate, said the cause was congestive heart failure. Mr. Easton also appeared on television and in films; his movie credits included "Henry V" (1989) and "Dead Again" (1991), both directed by Kenneth Branagh, with whom he had acted on the stage in England. But he was first and foremost a stage actor, turning in memorable performances in both classical and modern fare, aided by a vocal dexterity that might find him booming in one scene, comically sputtering in another. "He was a wonder," Ethan Hawke, who was cast with him in several plays, said by email, "and like many other young actors, I quickly became a disciple. His intelligence, wit, experience, honesty and his voice rendered him a commanding presence in our lives." One of Mr. Easton's most famous moments onstage, though, was of a kind no actor wants. During a preview performance of Part 1 of Mr. Stoppard's "The Coast of Utopia" at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center in October 2006, he collapsed in midperformance, the result of an arrhythmia. Mr. Hawke and Martha Plimpton were onstage, their characters having just received a tongue lashing from Mr. Easton, who was playing their father. "I said, 'This is my last word,' and I took two steps towards the wings, one, two, and crashed like a tree in the forest," Mr. Easton recalled in a 2010 video made for Lincoln Center Theater. "Ethan has always been grateful to me because he had the opportunity to say the immortal line 'Is there a doctor in the house?,'" Mr. Easton continued. "And I said to him afterwards: 'Are you kidding? On the Upper West Side of New York City, is there a doctor in the house? Of course there's a doctor in the house.'" Several audience members did indeed step forward, Mr. Hawke recalled, although he said it was a member of the stage crew who initially administered crucial CPR. The play's formal opening was delayed three weeks, until Nov. 27. The production was the first part of "The Coast of Utopia" trilogy. Parts 2 and 3 opened soon after, and the plays ran in repertory. Mr. Easton, newly fitted with a pacemaker, was in all three. Jack O'Brien, who directed Mr. Easton in "The Coast of Utopia" and many other productions, including "The Invention of Love" in 2001, shared a list of practical advice for young actors that Mr. Easton had drawn up years ago when they worked together at the Old Globe in San Diego and Mr. Easton taught at the University of San Diego. One Easton rule advised, "When it comes to a coin toss (which it does, most of the time!) to decide casting between one actor and another, 'Very good actor but rather difficult' will lose out, nine point six times out of ten, to 'Pretty good and really very, very nice!'" Mr. O'Brien, in a telephone interview, added, "There's a generation of young men and women indebted to Richard, not only for his friendship but for professional specifics." John Richard Easton was born on March 22, 1933, in Montreal. His father, Leonard, was an engineer, and his mother, Mary Louisa (Withington) Easton, was a homemaker. Mr. Easton began acting as a teenager, working with a children's theater and the semiprofessional Montreal Repertory Theater, commanding attention despite his youth. One play he was cast in was "The Rivals" by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, in which he played the squire Bob Acres. (Christopher Plummer, another young actor working his way toward stardom, was also in that production.) Some 55 years later, in 2004, Mr. Easton would be in "The Rivals" again, in a different role, that of Sir Anthony Absolute; this time the production was on Broadway. "Mr. Easton's alternately blustery and delicate rendering of Sir Anthony's outraged dignity and wounded pride is priceless," Charles Isherwood wrote in his review in The New York Times. But Broadway was still a ways in the future. At 17 he moved to Ottawa to work in a repertory company that put on 33 plays in 35 weeks, a crash course in all things theatrical. In 1953 he performed with the company of the newly created Stratford Festival in Ontario, then won a scholarship to study at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. He worked in England for two years, at one point playing opposite one of his heroes, John Gielgud, in "King Lear." He returned to Canada, then signed on with the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Conn., where John Houseman was artistic director. (Mr. Easton was later able to say that he had worked at all three Stratfords: in Ontario and Connecticut and at Stratford upon Avon in England.) In 1957 Mr. Houseman took "Measure for Measure," "The Taming of the Shrew" and "The Duchess of Malfi" to Broadway; Mr. Easton was in all three, his first Broadway credits. He appeared regularly on Broadway for the rest of the 1950s, throughout the '60s and into the early '70s, in plays that included "Pantagleize" (1967), "The Misanthrope" (1968) and "Hamlet" (1969). He spent much of the '70s back in England, where he was part of the cast of "The Brothers," a BBC drama that ran from 1972 to 1976. He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in the mid 1980s and stayed for four years before joining Mr. Branagh's breakaway theatrical troupe, Renaissance Theater. Then came a decade in San Diego, working with Mr. O'Brien. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Ryan Hunter Reay made a breathtaking pass of Helio Castroneves with one lap to go and held on to win Sunday in one of the closest and fastest Indianapolis 500 races ever. Hunter Reay's victory margin of 0.06 second denied Castroneves a fourth victory in the 500 mile race. The winner's average speed of 186.563 miles per hour was second only to the pace of the 2013 race. Most of the race was run at a furious pace, in excess of 220 m.p.h., including the caution free first 350 miles a record. Third went to Marco Andretti, followed by Carlos Munoz, Juan Pablo Montoya and Kurt Busch, the Nascar driver who raced not only at Indy on Sunday, but also in a 600 mile Nascar race later that day in North Carolina. Busch, who finished 2.2 seconds back, was the race's highest finishing rookie. A restart after a red flag stoppage of the race set up a wild six lap dash to the finish, with a record 20 cars still on the lead lap. The lead changed hands with each successive lap, until Hunter Reay made a shocking dive almost into the infield grass to take the lead. "It is a dream come true," said Hunter Reay, the first American born driver to win the Indy 500 since 2006. "It hasn't really sunk in yet. But the dream has finally come true here today." In other racing news from a busy weekend: Jimmie Johnson furthered his aspirations of winning a record tying seventh driving championship by taking the checkered flag Sunday night in the 600 mile Nascar Sprint Cup event at Concord, N.C. A new qualifying system for a season ending playoff places a premium on winning races during the first two thirds of the campaign. Johnson, who notched his sixth Nascar title last year, had been winless through the first third of the 2014 season. Johnson took the lead with eight laps left in the 400 lap event, then held on to beat Kevin Harvick, Matt Kenseth, Carl Edwards and Jamie McMurray, who rounded out the top five. The race ended in disappointment for Kurt Busch, who had to start last after missing a mandatory prerace drivers meeting because he had been competing earlier in the day in the Indianapolis 500. He had worked his way through the field to challenge the leaders, but his car's engine expired two thirds of the way into the race. Nico Rosberg, the pole qualifier, managed to hold onto his position throughout Sunday's running of the Monaco Grand Prix and score a victory over his Mercedes teammate, Lewis Hamilton, and Daniel Ricciardo of Red Bull. Hamilton was within a second of the lead for much of the race. But he slowed in the late going, complaining of having something in his eye. He just managed to hold off Ricciardo; Sebastian Vettel, the defending champion of the Formula One series, retired with a mechanical failure. Rounding out the top five were Fernando Alonso of Ferrari and Nico Hulkenberg of Force India. Rosberg, Monaco's defending champion, broke the four race winning streak that Hamilton had going, and took over the points lead in the battle for the 2014 driver's title. Courtney Force won Sunday's Funny Car duel at the Kansas Nationals drag races, and in the process scored what the National Hot Rod Association said was the 100th victory for women in series competition. The achievement capped a run that began in 1976 with the pioneering racer Shirley Muldowney. A total of 14 women have added their names to the roster of N.H.R.A. final round winners over the years. "This is for all the girls out there," Force said, "in any type of sport." In other pro categories at Kansas, Spencer Massey won Top Fuel and Allen Johnson was tops in Pro Stock. Liam Dwyer drove his Mazda to victory Saturday in an International Motor Sports Association sports car race at Lime Rock Park in Connecticut. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
As tomato growers in Florida and some other states fight a 16 year old agreement that they contend allows farmers in Mexico to export tomatoes at a price below their costs, the Mexican farmers are finding allies in the United States. The trade dispute highlights the network of interlocking interests between the countries under the North American Free Trade Agreement. Trade across the Mexican border is now worth more than 1 billion a day. American producers of corn, soybeans, apples, pork and chicken have increased sales to Mexico greatly over the years as trade barriers have been dismantled. But at the same time, Mexico has become a fast growing supplier of produce to American supermarkets and restaurants. Tomatoes lead the list: exports have doubled and their value has tripled since the mid 1990s, to almost 2 billion. That has been aided by a complex arrangement dating from 1996 that established a minimum price at which Mexican tomatoes are permitted to enter the American market. Florida farmers are leading a campaign to persuade the Commerce Department to scrap the accord. They won a victory in September when the department announced a preliminary decision to end it. Lawyers in the case say a final decision may be issued in the next few weeks. But other United States interests are lining up in support of continuing the agreement. For example, Richard Fimbres, a member of the Tucson City Council who is usually more concerned with improving city streets than with the minutiae of international trade law, recently sponsored a resolution asking the Commerce Department to continue the agreement. Then he wrote to President Obama last month, declaring that "we can't turn our back on the global economy now." The reason is that fresh Mexican tomatoes are big business in Arizona. Much of the 2 billion in business passes through the state, benefiting local importers and distributors. But the benefits go beyond them. More than 370 businesses and trade groups from small family run importers on the Mexico border to Wal Mart Stores have written or signed letters to the Commerce Department in favor of continuing the deal. "Yes, Mexico produces their tomatoes on average at a lower cost than Florida; that's what we call competitive advantage," Mr. Ahern said in an e mail. Without the agreement to provide "stability to a volatile market, Mexican tomato acreage destined for U.S. markets will decline," he said, and that would damage his business. While Florida tomato growers contend the accord is hurting their business, the broader trade dynamics are generating business for other companies in the United States. "A lot of what is produced and harvested in Mexico is put in the ground with U.S. money and intended for U.S. markets," said John McClung, the president and chief executive of the Texas International Produce Association. "The garden simply happens to be across the river." NatureSweet Ltd., which is based in San Antonio, grows cherry and grape tomatoes under 1,200 acres of greenhouses in Mexico for the American market. It employs 5,000 people, although all but about 100 of them work in Mexico. 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. "We couldn't survive without Nafta," said Bryant Ambelang, the company's chief executive. Mr. Ambelang said that Mexican grown tomatoes were more competitive because of lower labor costs, good weather and more than a decade of investment in greenhouse technology. "Here we went and signed an agreement called Nafta, and now we're going to go and wave our finger in one industry where Mexico has superiority?" he said. Mr. McClung said that even though Texas lost much of its commercial fresh tomato industry years ago, "we can do quite nicely importing Mexican tomatoes." He acknowledged that growers in Florida and elsewhere were "going slowly under." But, he added, "my job is to protect Texas importers." The complex 1996 trade accord was struck after Florida farmers asked the Commerce Department to impose antidumping duties on Mexican tomatoes. Their complaint was suspended after Mexico's largest producers agreed to ship their tomatoes at a minimum price, ensuring they could not sell at prices that might undercut Florida production. But Edward Beckman, president of Certified Greenhouse Farmers, a trade group for American and Canadian growers, argues that conditions have changed since then. The "current playing field is tilted completely against domestic interests, and we need to quickly address the unfair trade that exists," he said in a recent statement. Consumers have come to expect year round tomatoes, said Bill Piper, the vice president and general manager of Grant County Foods in Dry Ridge, Ky., a large produce wholesaler and repacker that buys tomatoes from Florida and Mexico. If it becomes harder to import Mexican tomatoes, he said, "people will have to put up signs: 'We have tomatoes today' or 'We don't have tomatoes today.' " Scott DeFife, executive vice president at the National Restaurant Association, said that "people want tomato based dishes all the time." He added, "You plan over the course of the year where you are going to get your supply in the winter, the spring, the fall." Without tomatoes from Mexico, a winter freeze in Florida, for example, would send prices shooting up, he said. If the 1996 deal were canceled, importers, distributors and retailers said they suspect that American growers would file a new antidumping complaint against Mexican tomatoes. Under that process, the Commerce Department could impose tariffs on Mexican tomatoes if it determined that the Mexicans were selling below their costs. Even if the department eventually found that the Mexicans were not dumping, a complaint itself would have a chilling effect on trade. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
BOSTON "Matisse in the Studio." An exploration of this path blazing artist's creativity unites 36 paintings and 50 other artworks with the textiles, pitchers, masks and other objects he displayed as inspiration. April 9 through July 9. Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Avenue; 617 267 9300, mfa.org. BOSTON "Dana Schutz." The dark humor, vibrant color and eccentricity that are hallmarks of Ms. Schutz's imaginative narrative paintings, which mix abstraction and figuration, will be fully on view in this show of her recent work. July 26 through Nov. 26. Institute of Contemporary Art, 25 Harbor Shore Drive; 617 478 3100, icaboston.org. BRUNSWICK, ME. "The Ivory Mirror: The Art of Mortality in Renaissance Europe." This exhibition of some 80 carved ivories, prints, jewelry and other items depicting death and decay sheds light on the centrality of the macabre in the culture of the 14th to 17th centuries. June 23 through Nov. 26. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 9400 College Station; 207 725 3275, bowdoin.edu/art museum. SALEM, MASS. "Ocean Liners: Glamour, Speed and Style." Nearly 200 paintings, sculptural works, models, furniture, textiles, photographs and other items will illustrate the design, engineering, personality and opulence of these ships during their heyday, the mid 19th century through the mid 20th century. May 20 through Oct. 9. Peabody Essex Museum, 161 Essex Street; 978 745 9500, pem.org. WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS. "As in Nature: Helen Frankenthaler Paintings." Large paintings from the 1950s through the 1990s illustrate Frankenthaler's inventive, poetic use of color in abstractions inspired by nature. July 2 through Oct. 9. A companion show, "No Rules: Helen Frankenthaler Woodcuts," showcases experiments that stretched the medium, resulting in painterly images. July 2 through Sept. 24. Clark Art Institute, 225 South Street; 413 458 2303, clarkart.edu. WORCESTER, MASS. "Renaissance Woman in Asia: Florance Waterbury and Her Gifts of Asian Art." Reflecting increased art historical interest by collectors, this exhibition reveals a woman who, in the first half of the 20th century, traveled the world, painting and collecting, eventually becoming a scholar of Chinese art who donated many works to this museum. May 13 through Aug. 20. Worcester Art Museum, 55 Salisbury Street; 508 799 4406, worcesterart.org. MONTCLAIR, N.J. "Matisse and American Art." From Maurice Prendergast and Stuart Davis to Andy Warhol and Faith Ringgold, generations of artists have taken cues from Matisse to experiment with wild colors, fluid lines, strong structural components and varied subjects, as manifested in this exhibition of 19 works by Matisse and 44 by Americans. Through June 18. Montclair Art Museum, 3 South Mountain Avenue; 973 746 5555, montclairartmuseum.org. NEW YORK "Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends." Spanning six decades, this retrospective brings together more than 250 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs and recordings that illustrate the ways Rauschenberg's use of everyday objects and his interdisciplinary approach broke ground and influenced many other artists. May 21 through Sept. 17. Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street; 212 708 9400, moma.org. NEW YORK "The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s." The bold, colorful designs that characterized the heady days of the Roaring Twenties are highlighted here in a show of 350 pieces of jewelry, fashion, furniture, textiles, paintings, posters and other items. (An article on the exhibition is on Page 8.) April 7 through Aug. 20. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 2 East 91st Street; 212 849 8400, cooperhewitt.org. PHILADELPHIA "American Watercolor in the Age of Homer and Sargent." With fragile works that are rarely on view, this exhibition shows how an enormously creative band of American watercolorists like Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent led to a new vision of art that was later adopted by Modernists like Charles Demuth and Edward Hopper. Through May 14. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway; 215 763 8100, philamuseum.org. WASHINGTON "Frederic Bazille and the Birth of Impressionism." In the first major American exhibition of Bazille's work in almost 25 years, he is shown as a central figure in the Impressionist era through the display of 75 works, including several by contemporaries such as Monet and Renoir and by predecessors like Courbet. April 9 through July 9. National Gallery of Art, Constitution Avenue NW, between Third and Ninth Streets; 202 737 4215, nga.gov. WASHINGTON "Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors." This traveling exhibition features six of Ms. Kusama's immersive "Infinity Mirror Rooms," as well as many other key paintings, collages and works on paper from the early 1950s to the present, and several recent large scale paintings that have never been shown in the United States. Through May 14. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Independence Avenue at Seventh Street SW; 202 633 1000, hirshhorn.si.edu. DALLAS "Mexico 1900 1950: Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Jose Clemente Orozco and the Avant Garde." An attempt to broaden the perception of Modern Mexican art, this exhibition of more than 200 paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings and films celebrates the work of lesser known pioneering artists, as well as the recognizable titans. Through July 16. Dallas Museum of Art, 1717 North Harwood Street; 214 922 1200, dma.org. FORT WORTH "The Polaroid Project." This debut of an international touring exhibition demonstrating the cultural power of Polaroid showcases about 150 photographs by more than 100 artists, including Robert Mapplethorpe, William Wegman and Barbara Kasten, along with cameras, prototypes and ephemera from Polaroid's corporate archive. June 3 through Sept. 3. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, 3501 Camp Bowie Boulevard; 817 738 1933, cartermuseum.org. FORT WORTH "Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture." Renowned as a master of light and space, Kahn celebrated here in drawings, models, photographs and films created many beautiful, important buildings, including the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., and the National Assembly Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, as well as single family homes. Also on view are watercolors, pastels and charcoal drawings Kahn created on his travels. March 26 through June 25. Kimbell Art Museum, 3333 Camp Bowie Boulevard; 817 332 8451, kimbellart.org. HOUSTON "Between Land and Sea: Artists of the Coenties Slip." In the late 1950s and the '60s, Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly and other artists and writers congregated in spaces near the lower tip of Manhattan. Their views of the sea and the Brooklyn Bridge inspired experimentations with abstraction, as seen in the 27 works on view. April 14 through Aug. 6. The Menil Collection, 1533 Sul Ross Street; 713 525 9400, menil.org. HOUSTON "Adios Utopia: Dreams and Deceptions in Cuban Art Since 1950." More than 100 paintings, photographs, installations, videos and other works, created by more than 50 artists who remained in Cuba after the 1959 revolution, demonstrate the ways they dealt with their aspirations for social utopia and with their disappointment over the failure to attain it. Through May 29. Museum of Fine Arts, 1001 Bissonnet; 713 639 7300, mfah.org. MIAMI "John Dunkley: Neither Day Nor Night." An exhibition of 30 of his 50 extant paintings, along with 10 sculptures, introduces this self taught Jamaican artist, born in 1891, to American museumgoers. One of Jamaica's most important historical artists, Dunkley deployed a dark palette to create imaginative, highly detailed, psychologically tinged works. May 26 through Jan. 14, 2018. Perez Art Museum Miami, 1103 Biscayne Boulevard; 305 375 3000, pamm.org. NEW ORLEANS "A Life of Seduction: Venice in the 1700s." Travelers flocked to Venice in the 18th century, enticed by its street life, festivals, gala balls and fashions. Here, paintings including several never seen in the United States costumes, furnishings, glass, masks, a puppet theater and ceremonial regalia celebrate the city that was home to Casanova, Vivaldi and Tiepolo. Through May 21. New Orleans Museum of Art, 1 Collins Diboll Circle; 504 658 4100, noma.org. CINCINNATI "A Shared Legacy: Folk Art in America." With more than 60 works created by self taught or minimally trained artists between 1800 and 1925 including rare canvases by Ammi Phillips and John Brewster Jr. this display illustrates American ingenuity. June 10 through Sept. 3. Cincinnati Museum of Art, 953 Eden Park Drive; 513 721 2787, cincinnatiartmuseum.org. CLEVELAND "Brand New Terrific: Alex Katz in the 1950s." While other artists were creating abstractions, Mr. Katz insisted on making art with recognizable images, but pared them down to their most fundamental elements prefiguring the development of Pop Art, as seen in the 70 works in this exhibition. April 30 through Aug. 8. Cleveland Museum of Art, 11150 East Boulevard; 216 421 7350, clevelandart.org. DETROIT "Art of Rebellion: Black Art of the Civil Rights Movement." Commemorating the 50th anniversary of this city's riots, this exhibition presents about 25 paintings, sculptures, installations and photographs made by African American artist collectives of the 1960s and '70s that were intent on stressing black identity and civil rights. July 23 through Oct. 22. Detroit Institute of Arts, 5200 Woodward Avenue; 313 833 7900, dia.org. MILWAUKEE "Frank Lloyd Wright: Buildings for the Prairie." Drawn from the famed Wasmuth Portfolio of lithographs, considered the most significant collection of Wright's early work, this show of his designs for furniture, stained glass, textiles and architecture celebrates the 150th anniversary of his birth. July 28 through Oct. 15. Milwaukee Art Museum, 700 North Art Museum Drive; 414 224 3200, mam.org. MINNEAPOLIS "Merce Cunningham: Common Time." This exhibition chronicles the life and work of the renowned choreographer who expanded the boundaries of dance with collaborators in music and visual arts. It presents moving image presentations, stage sets, costumes and some 60 works by Morris Graves, Jasper Johns, Bruce Nauman and others. Through July 30. Walker Art Center, 725 Vineland Place; 612 375 7600, walkerart.org. A companion show of the same title runs through April 30 at the Museum of Contemporary Art/Chicago, 220 East Chicago Avenue; 312 280 2660, mcachicago.org. MUSKEGON, MICH. "Edward S. Curtis: The North American Indian." For 30 years, beginning in 1906, Curtis traveled the United States, photographing portraits, landscapes and the daily lives of 80 Native American tribes, images that were collated in a 20 volume history and 723 photogravure prints. All will be on view, along with his recordings of Native American music and artifacts, and objects from his life. May 11 through Sept. 10. Muskegon Museum of Art, 296 West Webster Avenue; 231 720 2570, muskegonartmuseum.org. ST. LOUIS "Degas, Impressionism and the Paris Millinery Trade." With paintings and drawings by not only Degas but also Manet, Renoir, Cassatt and others as well as a sampling of 19th century chapeaus this innovative show explores the period's artistic fascination with high fashion hats and the industry that made them. Through May 7. Saint Louis Art Museum, 1 Fine Arts Drive, Forest Park; 314 721 0072, slam.org. DENVER "The Western: An Epic in Art and Film." How the mythology of the western was forged not just by cowboys and Indians but also by gun violence, gender roles and race relations is examined in this exhibition featuring 160 works, from paintings by Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Remington and Ed Ruscha to films by John Ford. May 21 through Sept. 10. Denver Art Museum, 100 West 14th Avenue Parkway; 720 865 5000, denverartmuseum.org. LOS ANGELES "Eyewitness Views: Making History in Eighteenth Century Europe." In the 1700s, princes, popes and others of high rank commissioned large "view paintings" of ceremonies and important moments a regatta on the Grand Canal, an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Paris, Venice, London and other notable spots. Some 50 such works, many never seen before in the United States, are gathered here. May 9 through July 30. J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive; 310 440 7300, getty.edu. LOS ANGELES "The Inner Eye: Vision and Transcendence in African Arts." Celebrating artists as agents of insight and transformation, this exhibition of 100 masks, initiation objects, reliquary guardians, iconic sculptures and textiles explores the ways they enabled growth from one life stage to another. The subjects include spirit realms, esoteric wisdom and the afterlife. Through July 9. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Boulevard; 323 857 6000, lacma.org. PORTLAND, ORE. "Constructing Identity." Works by more than 80 artists, from Elizabeth Catlett and Romare Bearden to Kara Walker and Mickalene Thomas, drawn from the Petrucci Family Foundation collection, focus on the identity and narratives of African Americans. Through June 18. Portland Art Museum, 1219 Southwest Park Avenue; 503 226 2811, portlandartmuseum.org. SAN FRANCISCO "Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed." Through the lens of Munch's own insight that despite early success, his breakthrough came late in life this exhibition of 45 key paintings re evaluates his career. June 24 through Sept. 24. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third Street; 415 357 4000, sfmoma.org. SAN JOSE "The Water Cycle." With California experiencing at least five years of drought, three related exhibitions examine issues surrounding water use. The shows are devoted to photographs by Ansel Adams, Ernest H. Brooks II and Dorothy Kerper Monnelly (through Aug. 6); to videos and installations by five young artists (through Aug. 27); and to a monumental sculpture by Diana al Hadid (through Sept. 24). San Jose Museum of Art, 110 South Market Street; 408 271 6840, sjmusart.org. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Two hours before the W.W.E. Live Road to WrestleMania took over Madison Square Garden last month, John Cena, its star wrestler, burst into a backstage room. Stopping only for a quick handshake and amiable greeting ("Grab a seat! Let's talk!"), he sat before a stack of self portraits, grabbed a Sharpie and began feverishly scribbling his autograph like a teenager rushing to finish his homework. Dressed in a neon green T shirt, matching wrist bands, denim shorts and black kneepads, Mr. Cena looked like an action figure version of himself, as he pumped himself up for a long night of engagements, both in and out of the ring. There was a fan meet and greet for Make a Wish, wrestling executives to confer with and a promotional video to shoot, not to mention a Mixed Tag Team Match before 13,000 fans with his fiancee, Nikki Bella. They would face off against the guitar strumming Elias and Bayley. Mr. Cena's schedule had been nonstop in recent days. After a 30 hour stay in London to promote the film "Blockers," a raunchy comedy about parents hellbent on saving their teenage daughters' virginities (he plays one of the overbearing fathers), he was in New York to reclaim his wrestling throne. For more than a decade, Mr. Cena has been one of the most bankable faces on the W.W.E. circus of oiled up pectorals. On a roster that leans heavily on burly windbags spewing sarcastic quips, he stands out as the squeaky clean, flag saluting role model devoid of divisive edge. His catchphrase is "Hustle, Loyalty, Respect." The do gooder shtick may explain his wide appeal to preteen boys and their parents alike. But now he is expanding his reach, starring in more adult minded comedies like "Blockers," in which he stuffs a pair of panties in his mouth in the opening scene. (The movie opens April 6.) "I'm a 40 year old man," he said with a brutish laugh, pausing to look up from signing autographs. "I have an adult sense of humor, O.K.?" After finishing up the autographs, he popped out of his seat and made his way deeper backstage, past giant forklifts that were prepping the Garden for the big wrestling night. A jittery talent wrangler in a dark suit finally appeared to escort him to the Make a Wish meeting on the other side of the arena. But he kept getting interrupted. Cesaro, a wrestler from Switzerland wearing a too small gray tank top and tight black shorts, stopped him outside the stage entrance to inquire about dinner plans. "No matter how hard pressed you are or how early your flight is, every time after the Garden we go out and get dinner," Mr. Cena said. "Come hungry and leave satisfied." A few minutes later, Michael Hayes, a W.W.E. executive in a white trench coat and black bowler hat with bleached blond hair spilling out, came up to discuss Mr. Cena's debut match that evening with Ms. Bella. They talked in hushed tones, as if conspiring on a top secret plan. "You're cool with that?" Mr. Hayes said, after they apparently reached an agreement. "Yessir! And there ya go!" Mr. Cena said. His own journey was not so neatly choreographed. Raised in the suburb of West Newbury, Mass., Mr. Cena began weight lifting at age 12. After graduating from Springfield College, he moved to Los Angeles, toyed with becoming a professional bodybuilder, but switched his focus to wrestling after striking up a friendship with the wrestler Mike Bell, who died in 2008. Mr. Cena briefly wrestled for Ultimate Pro Wrestling, an independent outfit based in California, before signing with W.W.E. in 2001. He made his television debut a year later when Vince McMahon, the chairman of W.W.E., agreed to let him replace a wrestler who had come down with the flu. He lost the fight but won over fans when he began trash talking opponents using freestyle rap. As his fame grew, Mr. Cena evolved his character and, in an effort to appeal to younger fans, became a brute with a bleeding heart. He was now one of the good guys. Back at the Garden, Mr. Cena finally made it to the Make a Wish meet up, which took place in a classroom outfitted with rows of chairs and a W.W.E. backdrop. He greeted Garrett Richardson, a 15 year old in a wheelchair who wore a baseball cap that read "Never Give Up," another one of Mr. Cena's catchphrases. Mr. Richardson and his family had flown in from Charlotte, N.C., to meet Mr. Cena and see the match. Mr. Cena has granted more than 500 Make a Wish requests over the years, so when Mr. Richardson was left speechless by the larger than life celebrity in the room, Mr. Cena knew just how to respond. "Ah, I see your strategy," Mr. Cena said with a wink. "You're saving all your energy for tonight's show. If you get too excited now, you'll have no voice by the third match." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
For the many feminist critics who have excoriated Ted Hughes's treatment of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, there was poetic justice of a sort in the auction of the poets' belongings by their daughter, Frieda Hughes, at Bonhams in London in March. Ms. Plath's lots, which included clothes, jewelry and childhood drawings, outsold Mr. Hughes's mostly literary remnants (which is to say, books) twice over and then some, earning 551,862. The pleated green tartan kilt Ms. Plath wore as a Smith College undergraduate, with blue lettered name tape affixed to the waistband, swished home with A.N. Devers, a writer and rare books dealer based in North London, for 3,012. (To Ms. Devers's surprise, it fits.) Peter K. Steinberg, an archivist in Boston and an editor of "The Letters of Sylvia Plath," paid 885 for her fishing rod. To Plath devotees, the necklace is a tantalizing totem of the pyrotechnics generated by her relationship with Mr. Hughes. A Maltese cross flanked by two dragons, the baroque design is completely unlike Ms. Plath's other accessories, a mostly feminine assortment of rhinestones, hearts and flowers. "The pendant has a Hughesian sensibility. It's a little edgy for the time, and even has a whiff of the occult," said Heather Clark, whose biography "Sylvia Plath: The Light of the Mind," is forthcoming from Knopf next year. "Maybe Hughes gave it to her. Or maybe she chose it with him in mind." Ms. Plath wears the pendant in several well known photographs taken after she was married, including two by Rollie McKenna at the National Portrait Gallery in London, in which she appears both knowing and impossibly young. Why would a daughter choose to part with such meaningful objects? Ms. Hughes, 58, a painter and poet herself, was a sleeping toddler when her mother committed suicide with a gas oven at age 30 in 1963, and in her 30s when her father died in 1998, of cancer. Her younger brother, Nicholas, a biologist, hanged himself in 2009. She declined to comment on the sale further than her introduction to the auction catalog, in which she writes movingly that it all began with the Victorian mahogany armchair her father bought for Ms. Plath, originally covered in "a coarse, shiny black fabric worn through at the front edge of the seat," which she remembers scratching the backs of her legs as a child. Once she was an adult, she had the chair reupholstered in pink, for her bedroom. "It recently occurred to me that this chair would vanish into the mass of other furniture I own, and become invisible, as would the jewelry, when one day I was in no position to explain their provenance," Ms. Hughes writes. "If I wished to sell some items, then others would have to go too, because presented together, they made up a snapshot of a mutual history." And so they went: Ms. Plath's heavily underlined thesaurus ( 19,491); her battered gray leather wallet stuffed with ID cards ( 12,403); her "Joy of Cooking," with "Ted likes this," scrawled next to a recipe for breaded veal slices ( 6,201); a yellow checked summer frock ( 1,417); the Victorian armchair ( 1,599). The top lot was Ms. Plath's signed prepublication copy of her autobiographical novel, "The Bell Jar," which first appeared in Britain in 1963, a month before her death, and today is a staple of high school English classes. It sold to an anonymous buyer for 124,150. That a collegiate kilt was deemed valuable signals a possible paradigm shift in the rare books industry. When Ms. Devers entered the field last year, she immediately noted that the sexism pervading all other workplaces applied there as well, resulting in a gender imbalance of representation and sales. Her business, the Second Shelf (the title is borrowed from an essay by Meg Wolitzer), traffics exclusively in rare books by women, with the hope that paying attention to women's literature will increase its market price in all realms. Ms. Devers has also observed a gender difference in collection habits. "Broadly speaking, men want pristine copies without dedications or signatures, while women are moved by beautiful dedications and also the normal wear and tear that tells a story of a book being valued," she said. In the skirt, she saw not only Ms. Plath's background, but also the struggle of an era. "My mom had that skirt. It was worn by an entire generation of women who had to present as perfect all the time," Ms. Devers said. "Plath was miserable, but she created art, and the skirt is a representation of that struggle." For now, Ms. Devers is wearing it around the house, and in Instagram photos. Accustomed to studying papers in archives, Ms. Crowther appreciates how objects offer a visceral understanding of a subject. "You can see her physical dimensions in a dress in a way you can't get from a photograph," she said. "Clothing can almost reanimate someone." She noted that Ms. Plath's mother, Aurelia, kept everything of her daughter's, even crumpled bits of tracing paper that Sylvia scribbled on as a child, giving scholars unusual access to her material world. People outside the literary field were also drawn to the sale. Suzanne Demko, who lives in Silver Spring, Md., and leads clinical teams in rare tumor research at the Food and Drug Administration, paid 7,087 for three well worn wristwatches, their thin leather bands cracked and fraying. "I went bananas looking through the catalog, and when I saw the watches I thought, 'I have to have these,'" she said. "There's just something about them the juxtaposition of a day to day object marking time, and marking her time, until she died." She plans to display the watches at home in a vitrine, and eventually leave them to Smith College, Ms. Plath's alma mater. Among the Plath items the college already holds are her Girl Scout uniform and prom dress, acquired in 1985 and available for the public to see by appointment. Kiki Smith, a theater professor at Smith, has curated the Smith College Historic Clothing Collection since the mid 1970s, when it began with costumes salvaged from the theater department; today it contains 3,000 pieces. Of special interest are what she calls "women's uniforms" the everyday clothes that shape a woman's life, from maternity clothes and housedresses to waitress uniforms and the suits female lawyers wore when first appearing in court. "It's an archive of women's lives told through objects, offering a tangible connection to history," she said. Ms. Plath's prom dress is a novella about promise and defeat rendered in nylon net and silver lame. She bought it in downtown Northampton, Mass., on Feb. 28, 1953, marked down from 50 to 30, which we know because of a letter she wrote to her mother: "I am most elated today, for this morning I bought the most exquisite formal on sale." The next morning, she rhapsodized about it in her diary: "Sunlight raying ethereal through the white net of the new formal bought splurgingly yesterday in a burst of ecstatic rightness. Silver high heels are the next purchase symbolizing my emancipation from walking flat footed on the ground. Silver winged bodice of strapless floating net gown. it is unbelievable that it could be so right!" By the time it appears in "The Bell Jar," however, the dress is a symbol of dashed illusions, "a skimpy, imitation silver lame bodice stuck on to a big, fat cloud of white tulle." Ms. Plath's Girl Scout uniform also speaks volumes. Until May 20, it can be seen at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington as part of the eclectic "One Life: Sylvia Plath" exhibit. When asked why she chose the uniform over the prom dress, Dorothy Moss, a curator at the Smithsonian, noted the plethora of badges, which could be read as evidence that the poet was Type A from the start. To Ms. Moss, those badges reveal something more than mere ambition that Ms. Plath's curiosity and embrace of learning were also bottomless. "She threw herself into experience for experience's sake," she said. Presumably, a mind so voracious might approve of her clothing going to the highest bidder. After all, Ms. Plath was once a fan herself. When she lived in New York City during her infamous Mademoiselle internship, she haunted the West Village trying to meet Dylan Thomas. She was thrilled to later move into Yeats's former house. The narrator of her poem "Last Words" writes of not trusting the spirit, which "escapes like steam" and "won't come back." But They stay, their little particular lusters Warmed by much handling. They almost purr. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Brooklyn's real estate market continued its ascent in the fourth quarter of 2017, even as the markets in Manhattan and surrounding areas stumbled, according to recent industry reports. The median sales price in Brooklyn rose to 770,000, up 2.7 percent from a year earlier, the third highest price ever recorded in the borough, according to a report from Douglas Elliman. The record was set in the second quarter of 2017, when the median sales price reached 795,000. Jonathan J. Miller, president of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel, which prepared the report, said that while price growth has slowed, tight inventory suggests the upward trend will continue. There were 1,711 homes for sale in the fourth quarter, down 23 percent from the previous year, making it the 10th straight quarter of declining inventory. "Normally, when you go that low, sales taper off," Frank Percesepe, who oversees Brooklyn sales for the Corcoran Group, said about buyer tendencies. "But they're buying anything they can get their hands on." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
NASA has urged spectators to stay away from the Kennedy Space Center for Wednesday's SpaceX launch to limit the spread of the coronavirus. But officials from cities and counties around the launch site, an area known as Florida's Space Coast, are expecting large crowds to gather to watch the country's first astronaut launch in nine years. The size of the crowds could still be affected by the weather, local officials said. People would be less likely to make the trip if it looked like the forecast might delay the launch. But local news outlets reported launch viewers were already gathering along the beaches and roadways in prime viewing areas on Wednesday morning. Last month, Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, asked people to watch the launch from their homes. "When we launch to space from the Kennedy Space Center, it draws huge, huge crowds and that is not right now what we're trying to do," he said at a news conference. The visitor center at Kennedy, usually a prime spot for spectators, will remain closed to the public. The launch of SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule, carrying two NASA astronauts, Douglas G. Hurley and Robert L. Behnken, is scheduled for 4:33 p.m. But outside Kennedy Space Center, NASA has little control over crowds. Peter Cranis, executive director of the Space Coast Office of Tourism, said he expected a couple hundred thousand people to flock to the beaches and parks, noting that launches in NASA's glory days had drawn as many as half a million spectators. Mr. Cranis said he anticipated that the coronavirus might deter some, but that many would still come to witness the historic launch. More than a dozen beachside hotels each with several thousand rooms reported that they were fully booked before the launch, he said. "Judging from the crowds on Memorial Day weekend, I would say that people are ready to get out," Mr. Cranis said. "They seem to be very happy to be able to be out." Law enforcement officials did not provide their own projections of expected crowd sizes. Don Walker, the communications director of Brevard County Emergency Management, said that he was also anticipating big crowds on beaches and roadways, and that departmental staff would ask spectators to keep at least six feet of distance. Kennedy Space Center is in Brevard County. "Obviously, we cannot be everywhere at once," Mr. Walker said. "But where we can and where we see groups in proximity and in violation of C.D.C. recommendations, the plan is to simply remind people to take heed." At a May 1 news conference, Brevard County's sheriff, Wayne Ivey, encouraged people to come watch the launch in person. "We are not going to keep the great Americans that want to come watch that from coming here," Sheriff Ivey said. "If NASA is telling people to not come here and watch the launch, that's on them. I'm telling people what I believe as an American. And so NASA has got their guidelines, and I got mine." Officer Tod Goodyear, a spokesman for the Brevard County Sheriff's Office, said that concerns about the coronavirus prompted the department to seek law enforcement officers from several jurisdictions to be on the ground to help monitor crowds. Officer Goodyear said he expected some people would wear masks and most would be mindful of keeping distance. The sheriff's office will also be distributing up to 20,000 masks to those who request them. With around 400 recorded cases, Brevard County hasn't been hit hard by the virus. And since Gov. Ron DeSantis began reopening the state on May 4, Officer Goodyear said he had noticed more people out and about. Ben Malik, the mayor of Cocoa Beach, about a 40 minute drive south from the space center, said he was expecting several thousand people to visit its beach, which is about six miles long. "It's physically impossible to manage," Mr. Malik said. "We don't have the police resources to go out there and keep everyone apart. The best we can do is try to manage the traffic and crowd control." Lt. Kim Montes, a spokeswoman for the Florida Highway Patrol in Orlando, said the agency was focused on monitoring traffic and making sure people wouldn't stop their cars on bridges. In addition to the couple dozen officers normally on duty, an additional 30 troopers from other parts of the state will assist during the day, she said. "With the pandemic, we really don't know what kinds of crowds we are going to have," Lieutenant Montes said. "The weather is going to play a lot into it. Are people going to stay home? Is it going to rain?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The first thing a visitor to Suerte might notice after opening the menu is a section cheekily titled "Vitamin T" a collection of the restaurant's takes on a variety of regional Mexican classics: tacos, tostadas, tamales, tlacoyos. But those dishes have something in common that could have resulted in a "Vitamin M" section: masa, the corn based dough that is their central focus and, indeed, the restaurant's. The mission of Suerte, which opened in March in East Austin, said Fermin Nunez, its 30 year old executive chef, is "creating this beautiful thing called masa, which is the canvas for so much Mexican cooking." The masa is made in house, using corn sourced from two local producers: red corn from Richardson Farms, and heirloom white and green from Barton Springs Mill. "Every night and into the next morning," Mr. Nunez said, "we make masa." On a summer visit to Suerte, the various iterations of masa were indeed delicious, both earthy and sweet. Carnitas tlacoyo, shaped like elongated footballs, were pleasantly soft and refried beans and salsa verde added extra character. Less successful was the quesadilla del tule, a taste muddle of squash, Oaxacan cheese, peppers and a pumpkin seed and pistachio salsa. But the star of the T dishes was the suadero tacos, packed with meltingly soft confit brisket, an avocado salsa cruda and something the menu calls "black magic oil" (actually a combination of morita chile, fermented black beans, black sesame seeds and oil). It is also worth venturing beyond the Vitamin T section. From "Frio Raw," we tried the bright and spicy aguachile, with royal red prawns in a cascadel chile broth, topped with a dark, crunchy cracker (made from masa, of course). Out of "Specialties" we sampled a wildly flavorful barbacoa of goat ribs, served with two types of salsa, housemade queso fresco and a basket of tender tortillas. And the "Vegetables" section yielded a perfect stand in for dessert: peaches and mangos, which arrived prettily dressed in a Latin spin on green goddess dressing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
WASHINGTON When it comes to regulating Facebook, Congress is in over its head. But does that matter? This week's marathon testimony by Mark Zuckerberg, the social network's chief executive, revealed the limited understanding many lawmakers have of what Facebook is and how it works. Members of Congress came with a mixed bag of concerns for Mr. Zuckerberg, including a few incisive points about Facebook's privacy and data collection policies and a lot of off topic ramblings about how computers work, but these questions never amounted to a unified theory of Facebook's troubles, or suggestions of how they might be solved. It's tempting to claim that technological illiteracy is the problem that some older and tech phobic lawmakers are fundamentally incapable of regulating Facebook properly. But I want to suggest another takeaway. The biggest obstacle to regulating Facebook is not Congress's lack of computer literacy, which gave Mr. Zuckerberg the upper hand this week. It's a lack of political will, and an unwillingness to identify the problems they're trying to fix in the first place. After all, Congress typically does not require subject matter expertise of its members. Most politicians in Washington did not understand the complexities of mortgage backed securities in 2009, when Wall Street executives testified in the wake of the financial crisis. The lawmakers also are not pharmaceutical experts, or transportation policy wonks or deeply knowledgeable in many of the other complex issues that come before them. And yet, Congress with the help of staff experts and outside advisers has managed to pass sweeping legislation to prevent excesses and bad behavior in those sectors. "It's never an issue of the members being able to do it their staff is often incredibly dedicated and can dig into these issues," said Ashkan Soltani, a former chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission. The challenge, Mr. Soltani said, is that there's a "lost in translation" problem of trying to condense complex, multifaceted issues into easily digested sound bites that will play well with constituents. Members of the Energy and Commerce Committee pressed Facebook's chief executive on data privacy, security and political bias on the social media platform. "You and your co founders started a company in your dorm room that's grown to be one of the biggest and most successful businesses in the entire world. While Facebook has certainly grown, I worry it may not have matured. I think it's time to ask whether Facebook may have moved too fast and broken too many things." "Who do you think owns an individual's presence online? Who owns their virtual you? Is it you or is it them?" "Congresswoman, I believe that everyone owns their own content online. And that's the first line of our terms of service, if you read it, says that." "After this new algorithm was implemented, that there was a tremendous bias against conservative news and content and a favorable bias towards liberal content. Was there a directive to put a bias in and first are you aware of this bias that many people have looked at and analyzed and seen?" " Congressman, this is a really important question. There is absolutely no directive in any of the changes that we make to have a bias in anything that we do." "Well, you have a long history of growth and success. But you also have a long list of apologies. In 2003, it started at Harvard. 'I apologize for any harm done as a result of my neglect.' 2006: 'We really messed this one up.' 2007: 'We simply did a bad job. I apologize for it.' This is proof to me that self regulation simply does not work." "Are you aware of other third party information mishandlings that have not been disclosed?" "Congresswoman, no, although we are currently going through the process of investigating every single app " "So you're not sure?" that had access to a large amount of data." "All right, but I only have four minutes. Was your data included in the data sold to the malicious third parties? Your personal data?" "Yes." "If you don't, you're not listening to us on the phone, who is, and do you have specific contracts with these companies that will provide data that is being acquired verbally through our phones or now through things like Alexa or other products?" "Congressman, we're not collecting any information verbally on the microphone, and we don't have contracts with anyone else who is." "Facebook has detailed profiles on people who have never signed up for Facebook. Yes or no?" "Congressman, in general, we collect data from people have not signed up for Facebook for security purposes to prevent the kind of scraping that you were just referring to." "As C.E.O., you didn't know some key facts. You didn't know about major court cases regarding your privacy policies against your company. You didn't know that the F.T.C. doesn't have fining authority and that Facebook could not that have received fines for the 2011 consent order. You didn't know what a shadow profile was." Members of the Energy and Commerce Committee pressed Facebook's chief executive on data privacy, security and political bias on the social media platform. "This isn't just about news," Mr. Soltani said of Facebook's issues. "It's not just about privacy and commercialization, it's not just about political speech. It's all of those things and more." If Congress wants to rein in Facebook's enormous power and the questions lawmakers asked left little doubt that it does then the first step is identifying what, specifically, they think is wrong with Facebook. Is it that Facebook is too cavalier about sharing user data with outside organizations? Is it that Facebook collects too much data about users in the first place? Is it that Facebook is promoting addictive messaging products to children? Is it that Facebook's news feed is polarizing society, pushing people to ideological fringes? Is it that Facebook is too easy for political operatives to exploit, or that it does not do enough to keep false news and hate speech off users' feeds? Is it that Facebook is simply too big, or a monopoly that needs to be broken up? All of these are concerns lawmakers brought up during this week's hearings, and they would all require different and narrowly tailored regulatory solutions. For example, Congress's goal may be to stop outside companies from getting access to people's Facebook data avoiding another scandal like the one involving Cambridge Analytica, the political consulting firm that improperly obtained data on up to 87 million Facebook users. Lawmakers could propose a bill that would prevent large social media platforms from opening themselves up to outside developers. (They should note, though, that Facebook has already limited the data available to outside companies, so this would not necessarily have the intended effect.) Congress could address the issue of data collection by adopting European style data protection policies, requiring stronger user controls for personal information or requiring social networks to delete certain types of user data automatically after a given time. If it wanted to, Congress could address the issue of hateful content by adopting strict hate speech laws like the ones that exist in Germany, which make social platforms liable if they fail to remove hate speech in a timely manner. It could address the problem of transparency in political ads by passing the Honest Ads Act, a bill that would subject online political ads to similar disclosure standards as TV and radio political ads. (Mr. Zuckerberg has already indicated that he supports the measure, so this should be an easy one.) Or, if it decides that Facebook is just too darn big, Congress could spearhead an effort to break it up. All of these are theoretically possible outcomes, depending on which of Facebook's many issues lawmakers decide to address. Lawmakers do not need to be computer scientists, or to come up with an omnibus bill to address all of Facebook's flaws in one fell swoop. It could pick off one issue at a time, consult with the experts and take a piecemeal approach. But first, it needs to understand which pieces need fixing, and how to carry out fixes without creating unintended consequences. And it needs to demonstrate that it has the political resolve to push these changes through, even as the tech industry furiously lobbies against them, as it undoubtedly will. Perhaps the most dispiriting exchange all week was when Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, asked Mr. Zuckerberg about Facebook's market power, and the notion that it is too dominant for any other social network to compete with. "Is there an alternative to Facebook in the private sector?" Mr. Graham asked. Mr. Zuckerberg dodged the question, saying that people use lots of apps to communicate. "You don't feel like you have a monopoly?" Mr. Graham wondered. "It certainly doesn't feel that way to me," Mr. Zuckerberg said. By raising the issue of Facebook's lack of competition, Mr. Graham was circling around an important point. Facebook has, indeed, taken steps to acquire or crush multiple apps that have posed a competitive threat. It even runs a service called Onavo, which allows it to keep tabs on which other apps its users are using and functions as a kind of early warning system for possible competitors. But when it came time to draw the conclusion his questions had been leading to that Facebook's primary problem was its size, and that regulation should address its anticompetitive tendencies Mr. Graham pulled his punches, even asking Mr. Zuckerberg for advice about regulating his own company. "Would you work with us in terms of what regulations you think are necessary in your industry?" Mr. Graham asked. This week's hearings proved that a groundswell of support is building on Capitol Hill to regulate Facebook and other internet companies. But until Congress stops asking these companies how they want to be regulated and starts making its own decisions about what problems it wants to fix, its targets will continue to slip through its fingers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
THE FAVOURITE (2018) Stream on HBO Now and HBO Go; rent on Amazon, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube. Emma Stone, Rachel Weisz and Olivia Colman star in this unsettling, darkly comedic drama set in 18th century Britain. Queen Anne (Colman) is neurotic, self pitying and in failing health, yet is wildly spirited. She finds a lover and adviser in her lifelong friend Sarah Churchill (Weisz). But when Sarah's cousin Abigail Hill (Stone) appears at the palace looking for work, it isn't long before Abigail rivals Sarah, politically and romantically, for her position with the queen. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, the film "is a farce with teeth," A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The Times, "a costume drama with sharp political instincts and an aggressive sense of the absurd." WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1958) 8 p.m. on TCM. A DuPont Show of the Month in 1958, James Costigan's adaptation of "Wuthering Heights" has not been seen since the single date it aired: 61 years ago. Daniel Petrie directed this rendition of Emily Bronte's novel, in which Heathcliff played by none other than Richard Burton falls in love with his stepsister Cathy, played by Rosemary Harris . When Cathy instead marries a wealthy man, Heathcliff enacts revenge. Costigan has been "widely praised" for this adaptation, Margalit Fox wrote in The Times. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
PARIS European Aeronautic Defense and Space, the parent company of Airbus, said Friday that buyers of its A400M military transport plane had agreed to a 10 percent price increase, a measure that will help cover substantial cost overruns and allow the troubled project to continue. The company said the seven European governments that signed on as customers for the A400M announced in Berlin that they had agreed to the increase for the 180 planes on order. They will also provide 1.5 billion euros ( 2 billion) in loans in exchange for a share of the revenue from future exports. "EADS considers this a sound basis for a successful evolution of the A400M program," the company said. EADS said it would also absorb some of the cost overruns by taking a write off of 1.8 billion euros ( 2.5 billion) for the project, a provision that would cause it to post a loss for 2009. The A400M project is nearly four years behind schedule and more than 7 billion euros over budget, and the plane itself is several tons overweight. EADS has already written off 2.4 billion euros in costs. The project was expending cash at a rate of about 100 million euros a month. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
In the first bars of Webern's arrangement of "Tranenregen," a clarinet solo answered by an oboe vividly renders the two lovers sitting by a stream who become the subject of the song. In "Des Fischers Liebesgluck," in a 2015 arrangement by Alexander Schmalcz, a plaintive theme is picked up by different instruments. When it is finally played up by the flute, it seems to lift up, its inherent melancholy sublimated into a spiritual dimension. Mr. Goerne's singing amply complements the full orchestral palette. His baritone has an earthy solidity in its low range, but can lighten to a soft ribbon of sound. With his striking command of legato, melodies flow in a broad stream, embedded in but never overpowered by the ensemble. The Strauss selections have Wagnerian heft and churn built into them. "Ruhe, meine Seele" came across as stormy and claustrophobic at once in Mr. Goerne's powerful rendition. Mr. van Zweden drew beautifully nuanced playing from the Philharmonic musicians. In "Morgen," it was the orchestra's concertmaster, Frank Huang, who brought the song to a close with a solo of hushed mystery. The orchestra sounded less assured in Webern's cerebral arrangement of the Fugue from Bach's "Musical Offering," which opened the program. Here, Webern isolates musical molecules and distributes them across the ensemble in a way that is devilishly hard to balance. But the textures were evenly weighted in the unfussy, stylish reading of Mozart's Symphony No. 40 that ended the evening. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The pigs, all 14 of them, are doing fine. Considering they'd been retrofitted with bone grown in a laboratory, that came as a pleasant surprise. "The pigs woke up, and a half hour later they were eating," said Gordana Vunjak Novakovic, a professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia University. "We thought they would be in pain. But no, they're doing great." Dr. Vunjak Novakovic and her colleagues have managed to create living bone from stem cells. First, they made a CT scan to create a 3 D image of each pig's jaw. From cow bone, they sculpted a "scaffold" a three dimensional copy of the pig bone. They put the scaffold in a nutrient solution along with stem cells extracted from the pigs. The cells attached to the scaffold, forming a new bone identical to the original. Then the researchers implanted the new bone in each pig. They reported their results in Science Translational Medicine. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The Coen Brothers film "Fargo" ends, touchingly, with Marge Gunderson, the small town police chief played by Frances McDormand, talking to a criminal sitting in the back of her squad car (Peter Stormare). She had never witnessed the kind of violence that he and other men have perpetuated, and the events have shaken her, even as her infallible instincts have led her to the right conclusions. She inventories the five people dead over a failed kidnapping scheme. "And for what?" she asks. "For a little bit of money. There's more to life than a little money, you know. Don't you know that?" The montage that opens the disappointing final episode of this season's "Fargo" has Johnny Cash asking the same questions. ("What is man? What has he done?") And we get a tribute to the dead, most of them men in fedoras, with the exception of Swanee Capps: Doctor Senator, Gaetano Fadda, Rabbi Milligan, Odis Weff and Deafy Wickware, just to name a few major players. The war between the Cannons and the Faddas has resulted in heavy losses on both sides, all over "a little bit of money," and there are still more losses to come, including the second Fadda brother, a local politician, the hospital administrator and the naughty nurse, Oraetta Mayflower. And for what? That's a question we might be asking of "Fargo" this season, but not in the way its creator, Noah Hawley, probably intended. From the start, this season posited itself as a story about American immigration and prejudice, about the alternative paths entire ethnic groups have had to take in order to gain legitimacy and how even those paths are limited for Black citizens. Ethelrida Smutny lays out those themes explicitly in the narration that opens and closes the season, every bit the good student with her thesis and concluding paragraphs. And yet, the body of the essay has been a bit of a mess. The missing element may be the lack of a Marge Gunderson, the sensible and relatable soul at the center of the chaos. There are some characters who might have qualified, like Ethelrida or Satchel or maybe even Milligan, but the action has been spread thinly across the ensemble, and a cartoonishness has ruled the day. Tonight's episode was the shortest of the season 39 minutes without commercials and felt the most deeply impoverished, with all the loose ends tied up hastily and a bow stuck on by Ethelrida in the final moments. Some of the plotting gets a little dodgy, too. Last week, Ethelrida gave Loy the pinkie ring that Oraetta lifted off Donatello Fadda, which relieved the Smutnys of their debt to the Cannons by providing Loy a much needed trump card. A lot of this strains credulity: Unless Ethelrida is a truly omniscient narrator, she knows nothing about the Faddas' business until her trip to the library, and even then she has an incomplete understanding of the situation. The fact that Oraetta kills patients as a matter of course makes it less outwardly likely, too, that she was in cahoots with Josto over his father's death. Nevertheless, it's plain that Ebal Violante should have been in charge of the family business all along, no matter his excuse for seizing power. After Loy spent a season gaining leverage by setting the Fadda brothers against each other and seizing on their weaknesses, Violante simply exercises the overwhelming power at his disposal. The way he frames it, the Cannons are like a ma and pa operation competing against one of the big chains: The Faddas are in every city and have the resources to crush the little guy. Kansas City is just a small piece of the business. He sees reneging on his deal with Loy as an act of mercy. ("We are not taking half. We are leaving half.") So much of the reckoning in this episode feels obligatory when it ought to be powerful. Josto gets a more muted version of a Bernie Bernbaum death march when he and Oraetta are marched to pit for execution, though it's funny, as a final act of perversity, for Oraetta to request watching him die before she takes her own bullet to the head. (We've been searching for motives for Oraetta all season, but the simplest explanation is that she was just a homicidal maniac.) Loy's death at Zelmare's hands seems like an egregious loss, too, after the ups and downs of watching him lose his business and regain his son. At best, the moment reads like another piece of Satchel's origin story, suggesting who he might become as an adult. (And the post credits scene, starring Bokeem Woodbine as the Season 2 character Mike Milligan, confirms it.) The season ends as Ethelrida puts the finishing touches on her "history report," asking questions about who gets to tell histories about Americans whose pasts are segregated from one another's. But maybe the truest lesson comes from the Coens' brilliant "Burn After Reading," which also ends as characters try to make sense of senseless violence. The question is, "What did we learn?" The answer: "I guess we learned not to do it again." None Though Josto's death has the flavor of Bernie Bernbaum's being taken to the woods, the exact words Josto uses to plead for his life, "You don't have to do this," is a callback to "No Country for Old Men." Before his final hit in the film, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) reflects on how all his victims "always say the same thing" before he kills them. Chigurh does not have the capacity for pity. None Plaintive renditions of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "God Bless America" on the same episode suggest the too muchness that has dogged the season over all. None "Why didn't you tell me you're a demented hag?" In Josto's world, where murder is business, it can't be easy to sort out the psychopaths from the garden variety murderous hoodlums. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Roseanne Barr has been a main attraction in ABC's annual presentations to advertisers the last two years. What It Was Like to Work on 'Roseanne' It was an incredibly exciting time to be a writer on "Roseanne." The revived ABC sitcom was the No. 1 new show in the country, delivering an audience that network television had not seen in years. The show was quickly renewed for another season, giving everyone a sense of accomplishment, not to mention job security. But for all the success, there was also a vague sense of foreboding. The writers' social media accounts were flooded with negative comments. Articles posted online criticized jokes and plots. Their friends in the liberal enclave of Los Angeles would occasionally tsk tsk that they worked on the show. And, of course, there was Roseanne Barr, the show's star and co creator, and her history of volatile public comments. "It was hard for us once we started airing and we started to see some of the stuff that came out," said Bruce Rasmussen, an executive producer of the series. "It was just brutal: 'How dare they give her a show? How dare they write for her?' "It was a certain amount of pressure," he continued. "You're the No. 1 show, and people are coming after you on the web and you're getting attacked by 50 percent of the press." "In the end, it came down to doing what's right and upholding our values of inclusion, tolerance and civility," Ben Sherwood, the head of ABC's television group, said in an email to employees on Wednesday. He added, "The last 24 hours have also been a powerful reminder of the importance of words in everything we do online and on the air." By late Tuesday, Ms. Barr had returned to Twitter and, over several hours, sent or retweeted more than 100 messages. In one, she apologized to her crew for costing its members their jobs, and in another she apologized to Ms. Jarrett, blaming the drug Ambien for her racist tweet. But she also responded to a message falsely claiming that the ABC entertainment president Channing Dungey consulted with Michelle Obama about the show's cancellation. "Is this true?" Ms. Barr asked. She also retweeted a message from President Trump that said the Disney chief executive Robert A. Iger had never apologized to him "for the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC." And on Wednesday afternoon, Ms. Barr hinted that she might not leave ABC quietly. "You guys make me feel like fighting back," she wrote. "I will examine all of my options carefully and get back to U." One of the show's executive producers, Tom Werner, said in a statement that he hoped "Roseanne seeks the help she so clearly needs." Ms. Barr's often controversial Twitter presence she is an outspoken supporter of Mr. Trump and has tweeted out messages espousing fringe conspiracy theories was nothing new to ABC. The network proudly promoted Ms. Barr as part of a broader strategy to appeal to more of the country after Mr. Trump's presidential election win. 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 show's rebirth was the brainchild of Sara Gilbert, the actress who plays one of Roseanne Conner's daughters. Ms. Gilbert and other producers for the show felt that a comedy centered on a working class family would be perfectly timed to a moment when the country was so divided. But after the show premiered, there was growing frustration among ABC executives that Ms. Barr's Twitter controversies continued. Still, the network desperately needed a hit, perhaps a reason it was willing to let some of Ms. Barr's more outlandish statements go. "Roseanne," along with the rookie drama "The Good Doctor," has helped put the network on better footing, though it will finish the 2017 18 TV season in last place for the third straight year. Initially, the writers on "Roseanne" were able to work within a bit of a blissful vacuum. The entire season had been written and shot before the premiere episode aired in late March. Ms. Barr's on set presence had also mellowed significantly from what it was during the show's initial run in the 1990s, when she developed a reputation for being difficult to work with and treating her writers with little respect. Mr. Rasmussen, who was a supervising producer for one season on the old show before being fired, said there was a sense of purpose this time that the show could speak to a segment of the country that was often overlooked in prime time TV. "Everyone trusted each other, and we were all on the same team," he said. But by time the show aired, things had changed, and the show had become a lightning rod. Mr. Trump and conservative commentators praised the show for its depiction of a Trump supporter, while some on the left expressed reservations about even watching it. And then there was the nagging, relentless presence of Ms. Barr's Twitter feed. "We didn't know what was going to happen," Mr. Rasmussen said of her Twitter account. "She would tweet stuff, then apologize and get off Twitter, and then it would get better. And then it would blow up again. I followed her to just see what was coming. Some of the other writers couldn't do it, just because they couldn't handle the stress of it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
In interviews with The New York Times after Mr. Amato's resignation, five current or former Billboard employees described an environment in which corporate meddling in editorial decisions was not limited to the coverage of Mr. Walk. Now Ms. Karp has a chance to set things right at the leading trade music publication. "As a journalist, I'm really excited to lead a really amazing team of people and expand and deepen our coverage of the music business itself, which is going through such an exciting and fascinating transformation," Ms. Karp said. Deanna Brown, the managing director at Valence Media, said the company had consulted over several months with the Poynter Institute, which teaches journalistic ethics and practices, on how to reinstate a healthy relationship between Billboard's business and editorial divisions. "I think the culture has changed," Ms. Brown said. "We're going back to basics." By promoting Ms. Karp, Ms. Brown said, the company is reinforcing its commitment to disinterested news coverage. "I wouldn't do this without knowing that we would have full editorial independence," Ms. Karp said. "I feel confident that we will have that." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Ever since the race to develop a coronavirus vaccine began last spring, upbeat announcements were stalked by ominous polls: No matter how encouraging the news, growing numbers of people said they would refuse to get the shot. The time frame was dangerously accelerated, many people warned. The vaccine was a scam from Big Pharma, others said. A political ploy by the Trump administration, many Democrats charged. The internet pulsed with apocalyptic predictions from longtime vaccine opponents, who decried the new shot as the epitome of every concern they'd ever put forth. But over the past few weeks, as the vaccine went from a hypothetical to a reality, something happened. Fresh surveys show attitudes shifting and a clear majority of Americans now eager to get vaccinated. In polls by Gallup, the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Pew Research Center, the portion of people saying they are now likely or certain to take the vaccine has grown from about 50 percent this summer to more than 60 percent, and in one poll 73 percent a figure that approaches what some public health experts say would be sufficient for herd immunity. Resistance to the vaccine is certainly not vanishing. Misinformation and dire warnings are gathering force across social media. At a meeting on December 20, members of an advisory panel to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cited strong indications that vaccine denouncements as well as acceptance are growing, so they could not predict whether the public would gobble up limited supplies or take a pass. But the attitude improvement is striking. A similar shift on another heated pandemic issue was reflected in a different Kaiser poll this month. It found that nearly 75 percent of Americans are now wearing masks when they leave their homes. The change reflects a constellation of recent events: the uncoupling of the vaccine from Election Day; clinical trial results showing about 95 percent efficacy and relatively modest side effects for the vaccines made by Pfizer BioNTech and Moderna; and the alarming surge in new coronavirus infections and deaths. "The Biden administration, returning to listening to science and the fantastic stats associated with the vaccines," she replied. The lure of the vaccines' modest quantities also can't be underestimated as a driver of desire, somewhat like the must have frenzy generated by a limited edition Christmas gift, according to public opinion experts. That sentiment can also be seen in the shifting nature of some of the skepticism. Rather than just targeting the vaccine itself, eyebrows are being raised across the political spectrum over who will get it first which rich individuals and celebrities, demographic groups or industries? But the grim reality of the pandemic with more than 200,000 new cases and some 3,000 deaths daily and the wanness of this holiday season are perhaps among the biggest factors. "More people have either been affected or infected by Covid," said Rupali J. Limaye, an expert on vaccine behavior at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "They know someone who had a severe case or died." Dr. Limaye concluded: "They are fatigued and want to get back to their normal lives." A barrage of feel good media coverage, including rapt attention given to leading scientists and politicians when they get jabbed and joyous scrums surrounding local health care workers who become the first to be vaccinated, has amplified the excitement, public opinion experts say. There remain notable discrepancies among demographic groups. The divide between women and men has become pronounced, with women being more hesitant. Black people remain the most skeptical racial group, although their acceptance is inching up: In September, a Pew Research poll said that only 32 percent of Black people were willing to get the vaccine, while the latest poll shows a rise to 42 percent. And though people of all political persuasions are warming to the vaccine, more Republicans than Democrats view the shot suspiciously. A brighter indication, he said, is that two thirds of the public say they are at least somewhat confident that a coronavirus vaccine will be distributed in a way that is fair, up from 52 percent in September. The most pronounced pockets of resistance include rural residents and people between the ages of 30 and 49. Timothy H. Callaghan, a scholar at the Southwest Rural Health Research Center at Texas A M School of Public Health, said that rural residents tend to be conservative and Republican, characteristics that also show up among the vaccine hesitant. They also include immigrants and day laborers, many of whom do not have college degrees or even high school diplomas and so may be more dismissive of vaccine science. "They appear less likely to wear masks, less likely to work from home and there is an opposition to evidence based practices," Dr. Callaghan said. The resistance also springs from their hampered access to health care in remote areas. In addition, the need to take off several hours of work from the inflexible demands of farming for travel and recovery from vaccine side effects makes the shots seem even less compelling, he added. About 35 percent of adults between 30 and 49 over all expressed skepticism about the vaccine, according to the Kaiser poll. Dr. Scott C. Ratzan, whose vaccine surveys in New York with the City University of New York Graduate School of Public Health echo findings similar to the national polls, noted that this group doesn't keep up on flu shots either. They are well out of the age range for routine vaccines. "There is no normalizing or habit for this age group to get vaccinated," he said. Black people have remained the most resistant to taking a coronavirus vaccine, largely because of the history of abusive research on them by white doctors. But their willingness to consider it is ticking up. In the Kaiser poll, the share of Black respondents who believe the vaccine will be distributed fairly has nearly doubled, to 62 percent from 32 percent. Mike Brown, who is Black, manages the Shop Spa, a large barbershop with a Black and Latino clientele in Hyattsville, Md. This summer he told The Times that he was happy to sit back and watch others get the vaccine, while he bided his time. "The news that it was 95 percent effective sold me," Mr. Brown said. "The side effects sound like what you get after a bad night of drinking and you hurt the next day. Well, I've had many of those and I can deal with that to get rid of the face masks." Still, he says, many customers remain skeptical. He tells them: "What questions do you have that you're leery about? Just do your investigation and follow the science! Because if you're just talking about what you won't do, you're becoming part of the problem." Another group that has been uncertain about taking the vaccine is health care workers, who typically have high rates of acceptance for established vaccines. In recent weeks, some hospital executives have said that many on their staffs were balking. ProPublica reported that a hospital in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas had to offer some allotted doses to other medical workers in the area, because an insufficient number of their own workers came forward. A sheriff's deputy and a state senator got in line. But other hospitals say that staff time slots for the vaccine are becoming a hot commodity. For months, Tina Kleinfeldt, a surgical recovery nurse at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, a hospital in the Northwell Health network, had absolutely no intention of getting the vaccine until long after the science and side effects had been established. Last week, she was randomly offered a rare vaccination slot. Still she refused, despite the admonitions of envious colleagues. Then she began thinking of all the Covid 19 patients she had cared for and the new ones she would inevitably encounter. She thought about her husband and three children. She thought: Well, I can always cancel the appointment at the last minute, right? Then she realized that doses were still so scarce that she might not get another opportunity soon. So she said yes. She became the first nurse on her unit to get the shot. Afterwards , she felt some muscle soreness at the site of injection. But she also felt elated, excited and relieved. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
At the Dance for George in Harlem on Sunday the mood alternated between euphoric and somber. As protesters streamed through the streets of New York on Sunday afternoon, one group's chants of "Black lives matter!" and "No justice, no peace!" gave way to a sound more often heard at weddings and block parties. On 125th Street in Harlem, hundreds of people, many of them professional dancers, had congregated for a peaceful march across town and a collective performance of the Electric Slide. The sea of grapevining, step touching demonstrators, who filled a plaza near Malcolm X Boulevard, had been called together by two New York dancers, Sheen Jamaal, 27, and Alison Bedell, 24 (also known as Buttons). The event, Dance for George, paid tribute to George Floyd and called attention to the work of black artists at the heart of the dance and entertainment industries. Every so often the jostling line dance would reshape itself into a circle, with dancers freestyling at the center as the packed crowd cheered them on. (A mix of "Electric Boogie" spliced with hip hop and R B classics had been prepared for the occasion.) The alternately euphoric and somber gathering after the dancing came a silent, nine minute kneel is just one instance of dance intersecting with protest over the past two weeks of global demonstrations against racism and police brutality. Widely shared videos have shown a rendition of the Cupid Shuffle on the streets of Newark; an offering of bomba, an Afro Puerto Rican tradition, from a young protester in Loiza, Puerto Rico; and a jingle dress dance, a healing practice rooted in Ojibwe culture, performed in Minneapolis as a prayer for Mr. Floyd's family Scroll through social media, and you might also find twerking in New Orleans, Senegalese Sabar in Los Angeles and the Haka (an ancient Maori war dance) in New Zealand, all proclaiming through the body that black lives matter. The examples are so abundant that one hip hop dancer and scholar, MiRi Park, has created a public Google document listing occurrences of dance as protest since May 26, together with further reading on the subject. It expands every day. At the center of many of these videos are dancers expressing pain and joy affirming that they are alive. Some came to the streets with the purpose of dancing. Others were moved to dance more spontaneously, and surprised to find themselves seen by millions online. Dancers from three cities, featured in three videos, spoke about what it has meant to them to dance in protest. At a march in Lower Manhattan last week, three men who had never met were drawn to the same drumbeat. Fabricio Seraphin, Nathan Bunce and Areis Evans had gathered around a group of musicians, and during a pause in the procession, they broke into dance. A video of their exuberant, unplanned dance circle recorded and shared on Instagram by another protester, Antoinette Henry has now been viewed well over two million times. In phone interviews, Mr. Seraphin, Mr. Bunce and Mr. Evans said they were not dancing with cameras in mind. "It all came together naturally," said Mr. Bunce, 47, an artist and teacher who lives in Brooklyn. "It was a big release for me." Each dancer brought a distinctive style to the circle. Mr. Bunce said he was paying homage to New York's underground house scene, while invoking Haitian, South African and West African traditions of honoring ancestors through dance or as he put it, "speaking to those that were here before me." Mr. Seraphin, 25, a contemporary dancer and circus artist living in Brooklyn, added ballet to the mix, with an ecstatic grand jete that translated the words on his T shirt "black boy joy" into movement. For him, joy is a form of resistance. "You can take from us, but you cannot take our joy," he said. "That is ours to give, ours to do with what we please." Mr. Evans, 33, a fitness and hip hop instructor who lives in Harlem, described expressing joy and pain at once. In his emphatic solo, he did not hold back. "I was in tears," he said. "The way my style is, I really want people to see the hurt." He tapped into these feelings with the support of strangers. "I saw three black men actually come together; we didn't judge each other," he said. "It was a brotherly moment, and I loved that." One night last week, Karma Munez, a dancer in Chicago's vogueing ballroom scene, proposed an idea to two of her best friends: to dress up, find a protest and vogue in the streets. The next day, the three put on their thigh high black boots, grabbed their speakers and joined a march in the city's Bronzeville neighborhood. The results have circulated in numerous videos online, in which the dancers fearlessly strut, spin, kick and dip, letting their bodies crash to the pavement, as other protesters cheer them on. In one moment, Ms. Munez (who also goes by Gorgeous Mother Karma Gucci, her ballroom name), dances in front of a row of police cars, flipping her hair in front of their flashing lights. "I thought it was the best way to make a stand with the talent that we have," said Dhee Lacy (a.k.a. Adonte Prodigy), when the trio got together for a FaceTime interview a few days later. "I didn't want to have to riot, and I think that ultimately people have different ways of speaking out." With its origins in black and Latino, gay and transgender communities, vogueing has always been a mode of resisting oppression. The dancers said that through their street performance, they were advocating for black L.G.B.T.Q. people, who are sometimes pushed to the margins of the Black Lives Matter movement. "We wanted to stand up for ourselves, as well," said Amya Jackson (a.k.a. Amya Mugler), pointing to the brutal attack of a transgender woman, Iyonna Dior, by a group of black men during a recent Minneapolis protest. "What about us?" Ms. Munez noted that some online viewers mistook the performance to be celebratory. "I feel like people misunderstand dancing, and they automatically assume that if I'm dancing, I'm happy," she said. "Dance is not a celebration; it's an expression." The group known as Kalpulli Yaocenoxtli, which practices Mexican Nahua dance, song and drumming, is a frequent presence at Black Lives Matter protests in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Its dancers first took to the streets in solidarity with the movement after the death of Jamar Clark, who was shot and killed by Minneapolis police in 2015. "An injustice to one of us is an injustice to all," said Sergio Cenoch, who directs the group with his wife, Mary Anne Quiroz, when the two spoke by phone just before a vigil for Mr. Floyd in Minneapolis. "That's the message we want to convey when we're out there supporting." A recent video posted on Instagram by a Kalpulli member, Samuel B. Torres, shows the dancers in bright regalia, kneeling outside the Fifth Precinct of the Minneapolis Police Department. After leading protesters in a chant of "George Floyd! Say his name!" they leap to their feet to an accelerating drum beat. "One of the dances that we do a lot is called Tletl, which is fire," Mr. Cenoch said. "We do that to spark fire and have it be felt across everybody that is watching, to try to get them connected to what is going on, and get that fire within their soul lit." Ms. Quiroz added that the dances they bring to protests "have survived colonization, have survived over 500 years." To keep them alive "is a symbol of resistance," she said, noting the connections between the struggles of black and Indigenous people. "It's a symbol of resilience." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
If, between now and Sunday, you're crossing one of the plazas at Lincoln Center exiting a matinee of "My Fair Lady," say, or a Dance Theater of Harlem show and you notice some especially bold public displays of affection, don't be shocked. You've likely happened upon a performance of "Pop Up Duets (fragments of love)." This, too, is a show: an acclaimed, internationally touring work by Janis Claxton Dance from Edinburgh. It's a sequence of five minute love duets six in this version for Lincoln Center Out of Doors, as many as nine in previous ones. The performances are timed around the starts and stops of other events at Lincoln Center, ensuring a crowd from which Ms. Claxton's vivid dancers can emerge. There are four of them, two men and two women. And the duets form a chain, with a dancer from the first duet joined by another for the second, and so on, cycling through all six possible pairings. The location of the duets shifts around the plaza, unannounced, but you can follow the dancers, or, more reliably, the music: purpose composed songs by Pippa Murphy (some with Bjork like vocals by Kathryn Joseph) coming out of a portable speaker shaped like a suitcase. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The irony is not lost on Ian Wardropper, the director of the Frick Collection: The very gated garden that upended the museum's previous attempt to renovate its 1914 Gilded Age mansion is now the centerpiece of its revised design. In 2015, preservationists, designers, critics and architects successfully opposed the Frick's plans to remove the garden on East 70th Street, designed by the British landscape architect Russell Page, to make way for a six story addition, by Davis Brody Bond. The new plan, by the architect Annabelle Selldorf which the Frick board approved Wednesday has situated several new elements precisely so that each provides a tranquil view of the garden: a renovated lobby; a newly created second level above the reception hall; and a new education center, cafe and expanded museum shop. In addition, the garden will be restored by Lynden B. Miller, a garden designer and preservationist, in keeping with Page's original vision. And rather than build over the garden, as previously planned, the Frick will now build beneath it, creating a 220 seat underground auditorium to better accommodate educational and public programs. "The garden becomes the new center of the campus," Mr. Wardropper said in a recent interview at the museum. "It's a beautiful garden always was. Now we're going to make the most of it." The Frick ended the last design process feeling battered by and somewhat bitter about critics, including the Times's own, who raised concerns about protecting the museum's intimate scale and preserving the garden. "Gardens are works of art," Robert A.M. Stern, the dean of the Yale School of Architecture, said in an interview at the time. "This one is in perfect condition by Russell Page, one of the pre eminent garden designers of the 20th century, and it should be respected as such. It's as important as a tapestry or even a painting, and I think the museum is obliged to recognize its importance." Had the museum been able to build its addition in the garden, Mr. Wardropper said last week, the Frick would have gained "a proper loading dock" and "we wouldn't have to close" for an estimated two years during construction. (The museum is talking to other institutions about continuing its activities in borrowed spaces during that hiatus.) But he said he doesn't feel as if the museum is settling for less. Instead, he said, the Frick has had to be more resourceful in repurposing 60,000 square feet of existing space and surgically adding 27,000 square feet, in part by building in the rear yard of the museum's art reference library on East 71st Street. "We're able to achieve everything we need," Mr. Wardropper said. "I think we've come up with a more elegant plan and a more rational one." Construction, which is expected to cost 160 million, is to begin in 2020 and take about two years to complete. Mr. Wardropper said he still firmly believes in the reasons behind the effort: to increase exhibition space and to improve circulation, amenities, infrastructure and wheelchair accessibility trying to meet the needs of modern audiences while honoring the building's jewel box quality. For the first time in its history, the Frick family's private living quarters on the second floor will be open to the public, helping to create 30 percent more exhibition space including a permanent gallery for the new Scher Collection of portrait medals and highlighting the experience of seeing art in an elegant home. "The Frick has always been one of my favorite museums because you get up close to the art and you can respond to the domestic spaces in your own way," Ms. Selldorf said. "You'll be able to come to the museum and do the exact same thing you do today, except that you'll be able to go up the stairs and see these rooms." The new design seems less likely to prompt outrage, given that the garden will be preserved, the new second level will raise the height of the lobby by less than five feet, and the museum is adding just two more floors above the mansion's music room. Moreover, both of these additions will be set back from the street. "You will only see it if you're all the way back at the corner," said Ms. Selldorf, who is working with Beyer Blinder Belle, the executive architecture firm on the project. "The closer you get, the less you see of it." The building addition behind the library will be the same height as the library: seven stories. The renovation's aesthetic will also be understated and honor the original building's aesthetic, using materials like Indiana limestone. "You want it to be part of the existing volume, but have its own identity," Ms. Selldorf said. "It's not apologetic, but at the same time it's not about style." The renovation will open the reception area, which currently becomes congested, by removing the existing circular stair to the lower level and relocating the gift shop to the second floor. A new staircase will lead down to the new coat check, bathrooms and auditorium. (The current 147 seat music room is acoustically challenged and so small that the museum must constantly turn people away.) The newly configured underground spaces will eliminate the low ceilinged galleries that could not accommodate certain works. The current show of life size portraits by the Spanish master Francisco de Zurbaran, for example, had to be displayed on the main floor, displacing a portion of the permanent collection. The Frick will also get its first dedicated space for the 100 school groups that visit every year. (They will enter the new education center through the library's 71st Street entrance.) Mr. Wardropper said the Frick's 30 million operating budget is expected to increase by 1 million or 2 million after the renovation, and its 22 admission fee is likely to go up by an undetermined amount. Given its three previous attempts to expand in recent years in 2001, 2005 and 2008 the Frick is hoping to get it right this time. "This is the one," Mr. Wardropper said. Over the next few months, the Frick plans to meet with some 75 community organizations and others to present the project. Museum officials have already had initial informal discussions with the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, which has to approve the project since the Frick is in a landmark mansion, designed by Carrere and Hastings for the industrialist Henry Clay Frick. Three former members of that commission opposed the previous plan, along with a coalition, Unite to Save the Frick, that included architects and designers. Facing what the museum called "protracted legal battles" in pushing its plan forward, the Frick decided to go back to the drawing board. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
I'm a Doctor in Italy. We Have Never Seen Anything Like This. MILAN None of us have ever experienced a tragedy like it. We know how to respond to road accidents, train derailments, even earthquakes. But a virus that has killed so many, which gets worse with each passing day and for which a cure or even containment seems distant? No. We always think of calamity as something that will happen far from us, to others far away, in another part of the world. It's a kind of superstition. But not this time. This time it happened here, to us to our loved ones, our neighbors, our colleagues. I'm an anesthesiologist at the Policlinico San Donato here in Milan, which is part of the Lombardy region, the heart of the Italian coronavirus outbreak. On Feb. 21, the day on which the first case was recorded, our hospital, which specializes in cardiac surgery, offered to help with the care of patients with Covid 19. Along with other hospitals, we created a task force of intensive care doctors to be sent to hospitals in the "red zone." All planned surgeries were postponed. Intensive care beds were given over to the treatment of coronavirus patients. Within 24 hours, the hospital created new intensive care places by converting operating theaters and anesthetic rooms. And 40 more beds were dedicated to patients suspected or proven to have the virus, though not in a serious condition. The patients who arrive remain for many days, straining medical resources. Already across northern Italy in Lombardy, Veneto, Emilia Romagna and Marche health care systems are under enormous stress. Medical workers are exhausted. As the virus spreads, other regions will soon find themselves in the same situation. Fortunately, Lombardy and the national government adopted aggressive containment measures 10 days ago. By the end of this week after 15 days, the incubation period of the infection we will see whether such measures have been effective. Only then might we see a slowing down in the spread of the virus. It cannot come too soon. There has been speculation that doctors may be forced to decide whom to treat, leaving some without immediate care. That's not my experience: All patients at my hospital have received the treatment they require. But that may not last. If the number of patients infected does not start to drop, our resources won't stretch to cover them. At that point, triaging patients to give priority to those with more chances of survival may become standard practice. My colleagues, at the Policlinico and throughout the country, are showing a great spirit of sacrifice. We know how much we are needed right now; that gives us strength to withstand fatigue and stress. How long such resistance will last, I cannot say. Some colleagues have tested positive for the coronavirus, and a few have needed intensive care. For us all, the dangers are great. As an anesthesiologist devoted to surgical emergencies, I haven't had many direct dealings with coronavirus patients. But there was one. An elderly man in a fragile condition, he was set to have tumor removed. The surgery proceeded as normal: I put him to sleep, and he awoke four hours later, without pain. That was in mid February. A week later, the telltale symptoms began to show: a high fever, a cough. Before long, pneumonia. Now he's in intensive care, intubated and in a critical condition. He is one of many who have become a number without a name, one of those that represent the worsening of the situation. I hope the beginning of the end of this outbreak will be soon. But we will know that it's coming only if and when the infections begin to decline. The population's calm response to the restrictive rules imposed by the government, the experience gained in the management of critically ill patients and the rumors of new treatments for the infection are grounds for hope. Perhaps the containment measures will work, and the news at the end of the week will be good. But for now, we are in the thick of tragedy. 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. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
WASHINGTON Move over, millennials. The centenarians are coming. The number of Americans age 100 and older those born during Woodrow Wilson's administration and earlier is up by 44 percent since 2000, federal health officials reported Thursday. There were 72,197 of them in 2014, up from 50,281 in 2000, according to the report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 1980, they numbered about 15,000. Even demographers seemed impressed. "There is certainly a wow factor here, that there are this many people in the United States over 100 years old," said William H. Frey, the senior demographer at the Brookings Institution. "Not so long ago in our society, this was somewhat rare." Not only are there more centenarians, but they are living even longer. Death rates declined for all demographic groups of centenarians white, black, Hispanic, female, male in the six years ending in 2014, the report said. Women, who typically live longer than men, accounted for the overwhelming majority of centenarians in 2014: more than 80 percent. Centenarians are an elite group. Most people born in 1900 did not live past 50. But chances of survival to such ripe ages have improved with the rise of vaccines and antibiotics, and improvements in hygiene, medical treatments and technology. There are exceptions: The explosion of opioid overdose deaths in recent years has erased progress for some groups, particularly young and middle age whites. Malvina Hunt, a resident of central New York, who turned 100 in October, said her secret was vigorous exercise. Every morning, she does leg lifts and rapid arm raises to get the blood flowing. Now that it is winter, she does not venture out very much, except to the mailbox. But in summer, she spends a lot of time outside, gardening and mowing the lawn. And she still works as a greeter in a winery. She also helps build cartons used to ship wine. "My motto was always, 'If I could do it today, I'll be able to do it tomorrow,' " she said. She said she knew two other centenarians, a friend from high school and a friend from college, both women. Whites are driving the aging of America. In the last full census in 2010, the median age for whites was 42, far older than the Hispanic population, whose median age was 27. Baby boomers, a large bulge in the population, have started to enter retirement and will soon be bumping up the numbers of the elderly to record levels. Experts are warning that the United States is unprepared to handle such large numbers of seniors, especially as the life expectancy of older people continues to rise. "We are moving into a very different country this century," Mr. Frey said. "It's the very tip of the iceberg." Even for centenarians, life spans are growing longer. Death rates for centenarian women dropped 14 percent in the six years ending in 2014, to 36.5 per 100 women, and by 20 percent to 33.2 per 100 men. Among racial and ethnic groups, Hispanic centenarians had the lowest death rate, 22.3 per 100 people, compared with 39.3 per 100 whites and 28.6 per 100 blacks. Death rates from Alzheimer's disease increased the most over the period of the report, up 119 percent from 2000 to 2014. Death rates from hypertension also jumped 88 percent over the period. Death rates for influenza and pneumonia fell by 48 percent, for stroke by 31 percent and for heart disease by 24 percent. Even so, heart disease remained the leading cause of death for centenarians in 2014. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
In "Healing Wars," which draws parallels between the American Civil War and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, she incorporates movement, storytelling, music, digital projections even flying hospital beds above the stage. Behind is an area that theatergoers will visit en route to their seats and where they will come into contact with characters played by, among others, the actor Bill Pullman; the dancer Tamara Hurwitz Pullman, his wife; and Mr. Hurley, one of several veterans who have contributed their stories in the project's development. "This has always been part of Liz's thing, that it matters who's doing the performing," said Mr. Pullman, whose wife has a long association with Ms. Lerman. "Whoever is doing the movement brings their own personal richness to it all." They've brought their own research, too: Mr. Pullman's father was a Navy surgeon in World War II, and he also based his "Healing Wars" character on Dr. Richard Jadick, a Navy surgeon in Iraq. Ms. Lerman's father, too, was a World War II veteran. Like many of their generation, neither man talked about his combat experiences. Which is a point of the show. "When my father was on his deathbed he said, 'Bury me in my uniform,' " Ms. Lerman said. "We'd never heard anything about the war, but this was obviously huge to him. And what we find with the vets we've talked to is that once they start talking, they can't stop." This includes Mr. Hurley, who has tended to run long during rehearsals with the story of his injury the result of an attack in Bahrain in 2006, in which a close friend died. "I kind of get in the moment," Mr. Hurley said, "and watching Bill, I feel he kind of elevates everyone's level. There's a lot of creativity flowing back and forth. He might do something that makes me think of something, and I'll drift off and remember details and have to pull myself back in. But I think we've rehearsed enough where I'm pretty comfortable." He may be, but "Healing Wars," whose official opening is next Thursday, was in a semi amorphous state during a tech rehearsal last week. Across the mostly bare stage on which spoken narratives will move back and forth between the Civil War and the present, and alternate with dance Keith A. Thompson performed a pas de deux with Mr. Hurley. Ms. Pullman interpreted Clara Barton, the Civil War nurse who went on to found the American Red Cross. The entire company, led by Ted Johnson, danced to Lady Gaga's "Telephone," closely following a projection of a viral 2010 "Telephone" video by Aaron Melcher danced by American soldiers in Afghanistan. Music was being finalized. So was movement. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Revolution has come to Bucharest, and a society has exploded into shards. A multitude of writhing, flailing, falling bodies fills the screen during the climax of the second act of Ashley Tata's fervently inventive new streaming version of Caryl Churchill's "Mad Forest," a coproduction of Theater for a New Audience and the Fisher Center at Bard College. This is not, however, your average mob scene. Each of the participants in this upheaval and there are a dozen, to be exact, though they feel like many more is isolated in one of those separate, self contained frames many of us now identify with Zoom conferences. They all seem to share an astonishment, mixed with elation and terror, at the chaos that has descended upon what had been a rigidly regimented world. One is locked in a self stranglehold; another appears to be wiping the window of the lens that separates us, trying to get a clear view; others claw the air and scream silently, while yet another would seem to be vogueing. While these achingly young looking people are all responding to the same cataclysmic events, their reactions are so isolatingly different. It has seldom felt lonelier in a crowd. The cast of this streamlined, Zoom formatted version of Churchill's 1990 play a portrait of Romania before and after the fall of the Ceausescu dictatorship in December 1989 is made up of college students in the Bard Theater and Performance Program. (The production will be streamed again on Sunday at 5 p.m. and Wednesday at 3 p.m., via tfana.org.) And as they deploy their varied, idiosyncratic gestures, you can imagine the workshop improvisation from which they sprang. It's a style of performance that might come across as embarrassingly earnest on a stage. But in this context, all that quirky, mismatched intensity felt deeply moving. The cast members were portraying witnesses to and participants in the Bucharest uprising who had been interviewed by Churchill, the director Mark Wing Davey and a team of 10 acting students shortly after those events occurred. The part of "Mad Forest" shaped from those interviews evolved from Churchill, her team and their subjects trying to make sense of something that seemed to make no sense at all. Now, some 30 years later, a group of students roughly the same age as many of the scene's characters is trying to make personal, individual sense of the same material. "Mad Forest" seen in Manhattan in a New York Theater Workshop production in 1991 has always been about the difficulties of translation, in several ways. And be warned, this mixture of documentary, domestic and surreal drama can feel bewildering even in conventional stagings. Each of the scenes in the first and third acts portraying the fictional stories of two Romanian families of different classes is preceded by a guidebook like sentence spoken in Romanian and then in English. So you are always aware of "Mad Forest" occurring through various filters of interpretation, as it confronts an elusive, very tangled reality. (The title comes from a description of the woodland where Bucharest was built that "was impenetrable to the foreigner who did not know its paths.") Tata's version which achieved its present form when the stage production in rehearsal had to be canceled because of the pandemic adds still another layer of interpretive tools and filters. Each of the performances, by actors sheltering in place in different locations, is occurring separately. It's only the inspired work of the technical team that creates the illusion of their inhabiting the same space. The conjured landscapes include both urban streetscapes and countryside idylls; claustrophobically cozy apartments and hospital corridors. They have been summoned via green screens and projections under the supervision of Afsoon Pajoufar (sets), Abigail Hoke Brady (lighting) and Eamonn Farrell (video). Just as startling is the meticulous choreography of the ensemble (by Daniel Safer, with nerve scraping music and sound by Paul Pinto). Money seems to change hands between an abortion provider and his client in adjacent frames, a vampire bites a dog, a ghost visits a nurse in a hospital, and a wedding erupts into a body slamming free for all. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
"We are confident that the good men and women of the Bronx will hold Fox accountable for what we believe to be its abhorrent racist conduct, reminiscent of the Jim Crow era," the plaintiffs' lawyers, Douglas H. Wigdor and Jeanne Christensen of the Wigdor law firm, said in a statement. The firm also represents two employees of The New York Times in a pending federal lawsuit against The Times, alleging age, race and gender discrimination. Ms. Brown and Ms. Wright are suing Ms. Slater, Fox News and its parent company, 21st Century Fox, claiming that Ms. Slater's superiors did little to address her behavior, which created a hostile work environment that resulted in "severe and pervasive discrimination and harassment." Ms. Wright, who joined Fox in mid 2014 and had spoken up about Ms. Slater's behavior, was transferred out of the payroll department on Monday, a move the lawsuit described as a demotion. The company described it as a lateral move. While the suit contends that Ms. Brown, who joined Fox in late 2008, was fired on Monday, the company said on Tuesday night that she remained employed. Both women declined a Fox settlement offer, according to the suit. The company said on Tuesday night that it took immediate action after learning about the allegations against Ms. Slater and fired her on Feb. 28. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Having sold out at event screenings since December, "They Shall Not Grow Old," which opens for a full run this week, is poised to become the only blockbuster this year that was filmed from 1914 to 1918, on location on the Western Front. Commissioned to make a movie for the centennial of the Armistice, using original footage, Peter Jackson has taken a mass of World War I archival clips from Britain's Imperial War Museum and fashioned it into a brisk, absorbing and moving experience. How he has done this is simultaneously novel and destined to earn the justifiable quibbling of purists. Although the film is book ended by black and white footage of men going off to war and then returning home, the battlefield sequences have been substantially doctored, with the ostensible goal of making them more immersive and appealing to modern audiences. Given how few films from the 1910s are showing in multiplexes, the intent is at least arguably noble, although you wonder how Jackson would feel about his "Lord of the Rings" being tinkered with 100 years after its making. Jackson has adjusted the frame rates (the speed at which a film is projected, which wasn't standardized until the sound era); added color in ways said to comport with the actual hues of uniforms and landscapes; given the film a 3 D conversion that can be seen in select theaters; and dubbed in voices for the soldiers, with the aid of forensic lip readers employed to figure out what they were saying. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
HATTIESBURG, Miss. Scott Phillips had to close his small plumbing company after the housing bubble burst and his business dried up. Roshonda Bolton lost her job when the garment and uniform factory where she had worked for 16 years shut down last August. Hunting for work just as the nation's economy was shedding eight million jobs, they found little besides discouragement. "I applied for everything, found nothing," said Ms. Bolton, 37. That finally changed when the two were hired by a paper napkin factory here last month, placing them in the vanguard of a new approach that Mississippi and a growing number of states are taking to get people working again. Their salaries will initially be paid by the State of Mississippi, which is tapping into a relatively small pot of welfare money in last year's stimulus package that can be used to subsidize jobs directly. Now they are being trained on the machines here at the Hattiesburg Paper Company, learning to turn mammoth rolls of paper into folded dinner napkins and toilet paper. The general manager, Steve Swiggum, said the state's offer to subsidize the salaries helped push the company to accelerate its hiring. "We kind of held back a little bit in the midpart of the fall," he said, "just to wait to really see what the economy was going to do." The debate over a new jobs bill in Congress where the Senate is considering a wavering agreement supported by the Obama administration largely centers on other approaches, like modest payroll tax breaks for businesses that hire and more spending on infrastructure. Lee Celano for The New York Times Lately, however, with the unemployment rate stubbornly hovering near 10 percent, some liberal economists have urged the Obama administration to take a more direct tack: they want the government to spend money directly to create jobs, much as it did during the New Deal. Some call it the most cost effective way for the government to create jobs. The idea has gained little traction in Washington. But on a small scale, some 21 states are already taking the direct approach, using a sliver of the 5 billion in welfare money in last year's stimulus act that can be used to pay governments and private employers to hire people. Florida recently announced that it would use up to 200 million to create thousands of jobs in the public and private sectors. Los Angeles County set itself a goal of putting 10,000 people to work with its money. Tennessee focused its initial efforts on Perry County, a small rural county where the unemployment rate rose above 25 percent after an auto parts plant closed. After Perry County paid for roughly 400 jobs, as varied as road workers and pie bakers, the unemployment rate dropped to 18 percent. But local officials worry about what will happen when the subsidies end. Here in Mississippi, state officials have come up with a novel approach that they hope will improve the chances that the jobs they create will outlast the subsidies. Labor experts say the experiment is being watched with interest by other states. The Steps program, as Mississippi calls it, focuses on private sector jobs. There are limits as to what kinds of work can qualify no strippers or bartenders need apply. And the program is set up to reduce the subsidy for each new worker over time: employers will be reimbursed for each new worker's full salary for the first two months of work, and then the monthly reimbursement will be scaled back gradually until it drops to just a quarter of the salary in the sixth month. After that, the employer must pay the full salary. Scott Phillips, who closed his small plumbing business amid the housing bust, was eventually hired by Hattiesburg Paper. Lee Celano for The New York Times The program is basically open to almost all for profit businesses and nonprofit groups, as well as public hospitals, that are in good standing with the state. To increase small business participation, officials said they were giving priority to employers with 25 employees or fewer, and barring companies where the work force has gone on strike or been locked out. No more than half of a business's work force can participate. For now, stimulus money is paying the salary of Edgar Herring, a 49 year old who lost his job of 18 years when a local lumber company shut down last fall, at his new job on the housekeeping staff at King's Daughters Medical Center in Brookhaven. It is also paying the salary of Roger Thomas, 36, who lost his job as a car salesman, at his new sales job with National Collection Systems, a locally owned waste management company in Jackson. And it is paying Johnny B. McGowan, 59, Curtis R. Williams, 43, and John McCoy, 46, to install metal studs and Sheetrock in the old Standard Life building in downtown Jackson, an Art Deco tower being converted to apartments. The challenge with subsidized work programs is to make sure that the government does not wind up paying for jobs that would have been created without public money, said Richard A. Hobbie, the chief executive officer of the National Association of State Workforce Agencies, which represents state labor departments. The last big federal subsidized jobs program, signed into law by President Richard M. Nixon, ended during the Reagan administration after critics charged that it was paying local governments for jobs they would have filled in any case. If the idea of subsidized jobs is seen as liberal in some circles, it seems to have bipartisan appeal at the state level. Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, one of the nation's most prominent Republicans, said he saw the state's program as being in the spirit of the welfare overhaul. "It's welfare to work," he said. The state can spend up to 43 million on the program, which officials estimate could create as many as 3,500 jobs the equivalent of several factory openings, but only a small dent in the problem for a state that had 133,000 unemployed residents in December. Only a few dozen workers have been hired since the program began last month after receiving federal approval. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
WASHINGTON At a virtual conference in September, Adam Boehler, chief executive of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, described his nascent agency as a bulwark against China's "economic colonialism" with 60 billion in annual lending authority to counter Beijing's strategy of spreading its global influence with low interest infrastructure loans. But in recent months, Mr. Boehler, a former health care executive, has repurposed the international agency into something far from its intended role: a financing arm for projects inside the United States. Working closely with Jared Kushner, the president's son in law and senior adviser, Mr. Boehler helped draft an executive order over the summer that, for the first time, gave the agency authority to issue loans to U.S. companies for projects on American soil. The move was billed as a way to boost President Trump's "Buy America" ambitions during a time of economic crisis. Now, Mr. Boehler's agency is embroiled in controversy over its first domestic loan 765 million for Kodak, which was intended to help the once iconic photography company transform into a pharmaceutical firm that could lessen America's reliance on foreign countries for generic drugs and coronavirus treatments. The Securities and Exchange Commission is probing allegations of insider trading by Kodak executives ahead of the deal's announcement, and the Development Finance Corporation's inspector general is looking into how Kodak got the loan. The funding has been put on hold and Mr. Trump, who hailed the loan as "momentous," has distanced himself from the decision. The questions about the Kodak project highlight the risks inherent in the Trump administration's strategy to build American manufacturing by embracing the type of industrial policy that other nations have long employed one that the United States has traditionally avoided in favor of free markets. Mr. Trump has taken aggressive measures to prop up flagging sectors and companies, including supporting steel and aluminum by imposing global metal tariffs. He has funneled nearly 30 billion in subsidies to prop up struggling farmers who were hurt by his trade war with China. And this summer, Mr. Trump's Treasury Department gave a 700 million stimulus loan to a struggling trucking company, YRC Worldwide, under the questionable rationale that it was critical to national security. In May, the Trump administration found a new way to support domestic companies: The Development Finance Corporation. The agency had been created by Congress in 2018 to replace the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, which had encouraged American companies to invest in developing countries. Congress gave the new agency 60 billion to bankroll international infrastructure projects and a mandate to coordinate more closely with the State Department on loans that, ideally, would help to curb Chinese influence and support American foreign policy. The agency has funded 80 overseas projects totaling 4.8 billion in places like Mozambique, Kenya, Colombia and Costa Rica this year. But top Trump officials had long been eyeing the agency's pot of money as a potential source of cash for domestic projects. In 2019, as Mr. Trump was seeking more funding for his wall along the Southern border with Mexico, Mr. Kushner approached Ray Washburne, who was then leading the agency as it began transitioning from the O.P.I.C. to the International Development Finance Corporation, to see if financing might be available. The company had been producing some pharmaceutical ingredients for several years and had begun making hand sanitizer and face shields since the pandemic took hold. Kodak officials told the administration that the loan would be part of a larger corporate reinvention that entailed converting vast chemical facilities once dedicated to their print business to produce raw ingredients used in pharmaceuticals. By July, after a byzantine application process, Kodak had won a "letter of intent" to receive government support. Administration officials saw the loan to Kodak as dual victory a way to both help restore America's factory capacity and lessen its reliance on China and India for critical drugs. In a White House briefing on July 28, Mr. Trump said the administration had taken "a momentous step toward achieving American pharmaceutical independence" and called it "one of the most important deals in the history of U.S. pharmaceutical industries." But critics immediately questioned why Kodak could not secure financing through the capital markets and were dubious the effort would help address the immediate health crisis. "The Kodak loan didn't seem directly relevant to the crisis that we're in," said Clemence Landers, policy fellow at the Center for Global Development. "This feels like part of the administration's broader onshoring agenda." "I wasn't involved in the deal," Mr. Trump said on Aug. 4. "Kodak has been a great name, but obviously pretty much in a different business." Democrats, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have been scrutinizing Mr. Kushner's medical supply chain projects and his close ties to Mr. Boehler. They have raised suspicion that personal ties, rather than economic considerations, were the main factor in granting the International Development Finance Corporation a prominent new domestic mission. At Ms. Warren's request, the agency's inspector general is reviewing the loan process. Mr. Navarro, in an emailed comment, said that "a key mission of the Trump administration is to bring home our medical supply chains." He said the White House was "pursuing numerous projects to advance this mission, with Kodak now far in the rearview mirror." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Peter Martins, the ballet master in chief of New York City Ballet, loves to give his dancers happy surprises. On Tuesday evening, moments before the curtain rose on "Hallelujah Junction," Mr. Martins's brisk, galvanic work set to John Adams, he promoted Taylor Stanley, one of its leads, to principal dancer. Filling in at the last minute for an injured Gonzalo Garcia, Mr. Stanley was making his New York debut in the role, at the David H. Koch Theater. Mr. Martins's decision was spontaneous, a City Ballet publicist said. But it makes sense: The debonair Mr. Stanley has an affinity for speed and drama and has been frequently featured in the ballets of Justin Peck, the company's resident choreographer. His sharp attack was apparent in "Hallelujah"; later that night, in "Western Symphony," George Balanchine's 1954 homage to the Wild West, he showed some spunk, loosening up to find the cowboy within. In that ballet, which remains a delight, Brittany Pollack made her debut in the second movement opposite Jared Angle, gamely leaping headfirst into his arms with little fear and an ever gleaming smile. (Her perpetually happy expression can seem one note.) In the final movement, the willowy Teresa Reichlen, though she faltered uncharacteristically in her fouette turns, and a devilish Andrew Veyette imbued their frisky pas de deux with a spirit that showed they weren't just executing moves, but reacting to each other. The program, which included Sterling Hyltin and Robert Fairchild in an admirable rendition of Balanchine's 1972 "Duo Concertant," led with his "Serenade." It, too, featured a debut, this time by Tiler Peck in the role that is traditionally called the Russian girl. In 2004, Ms. Peck made a glittering impression in the part at her School of American Ballet workshop performance. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
More than half his life ago, when he was 19, Conor Oberst and his band Bright Eyes released their breakout album, the intricately morose "Fevers and Mirrors." Already a veteran of several Omaha bands, he had been putting out music since he was 13 one of those impressive if slightly unsettling talents that gets described as a "wunderkind." Oberst wrote like a punk rock Rimbaud and sang like he was perpetually on the verge of sobbing. Parents wondered why he sounded like that; a certain kind of depressed, literate adolescent saw him as a prophet. "This room seems even smaller now than I remember it, hung mirrors on the walls and the ceiling," Oberst, now 40, sings on "One and Done" from "Down in the Weeds Where the World Once Was," the new Bright Eyes album the band's 10th and first after a nine year hiatus. The song, like much of this record, is about returning home and assessing the damage: The aching chasm of what is now missing, and the strange, unexpected spoils of what still remains. What allowed him to grow into an artistic adulthood more successfully than most of his perpetual adolescent emo peers was the way he continuously widened his aperture beyond just heartbreak and teen angst to interrogate the bigger picture of why, exactly, he was so sad. By "I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning" in 2005, he had arrived at a compelling answer: Because he was a human being at the dawn of the 21st century, living in America. Oberst evolved into a W. Bush era bard of personal politics, but whether an act of self sabotage, artistic integrity, or a little bit of both he also never quite grew out of the more polarizing tendencies of his music: the suicidal imagery, the general sense of maximalist excess, the tantrum hoarse vocals. He gradually settled into becoming a street preaching curmudgeon of the Anthropocene, a role he easily picks up on "Down in the Weeds." "Found the through line for all humankind," he declares over a strummed acoustic guitar at the beginning of the swaying dirge "Just Once in the World." "If given the time, they'll blow up or walk on the moon it's just what they do." Lyrics that might have branded him a nihilist 15 years ago now, in the age of climate doom, ring with realism: "Look now as the crumbling 405 falls down, oh when the big one hits," he sings on "Mariana Trench," which pairs a driving tempo and hummable melody with visions of impending apocalypse. But Oberst has just as much catastrophe to explore on a more intimate scale. He's endured a particularly rough stretch in the past few years: He had a brain cyst removed, he got divorced, and, in 2016, his older brother Matthew one of the people who'd first inspired him to make music died suddenly in his sleep at 42. He seems to be the subject of one of the most affecting tracks on this album, "Stairwell Song," an openhearted elegy with an ever intensifying melody. "Nothing changed, you just packed your things one day," Oberst sings at the end. "Didn't bother to explain what happened, you like cinematic endings." And with that cue, the producer Mike Mogis and the arranger and pianist Nate Walcott play him out in style with a sweeping orchestral movement. With their shape shifting, collagelike arrangements, Bright Eyes' instrumentalism often approximates some sort of sonic primordial ooze. Found sounds and out of context conversations are the band's signatures: The opening number, "Pageturner's Rag," layers Walcott's ragtime piano beneath snippets of Oberst, his mother and his ex wife chatting while on mushrooms together (imagine!). Sometimes it works (the sudden intrusion of bagpipes on "Persona Non Grata"); sometimes it's all a bit too much and the songs feel excessively crowded. But many of the most powerful moments on this record are uncharacteristically straightforward. "Hot Car in the Sun" is one of the saddest Bright Eyes songs in ages, because its sadness comes not from macabre imagination but from vivid banality. "Chopped celery and made the soup, didn't have much else to do," Oberst sings plaintively. "I was dreaming of my ex wife's face." There is something wonderfully disarming about hearing the word "ex wife" in a Bright Eyes song. Her presence and eventual absence leads Oberst, as he puts it in the closing "Comet Song," to "vacuum up all of the fairy dust." Earlier in the song, during an argument, she'd insulted him by calling him Peter Pan. But Oberst has heard that one before; he's survived much worse. What saves "Down in the Weeds" from despair is its stance of battered optimism: "This world is waving goodbye, so cut a rug, let's throw a party," Oberst sings with a shrug. And while it can't quite match the potency of their mid aughts records, "Weeds" is certainly a more festive victory lap for Bright Eyes than the underwhelming, supposedly final 2011 album "The People's Key." There's no better time for a parade: In the past few years, Oberst's influence has crystallized in a new generation. He's collaborated with Phoebe Bridgers and been sampled by Young Thug; the emo rap warbler Post Malone recently admitted a habit of "drinking and crying my expletive eyes out" to "I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning." Oberst is still sometimes written off as death obsessed, but maybe his most subversive act has been, all these years, keeping some uncompromisingly youthful part of himself alive. Bright Eyes "Down in the Weeds Where the World Once Was" (Dead Oceans) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
A group of crazies tries its hand at social engineering in "1BR," a claustrophobic thriller set in a Los Angeles apartment complex whose evils the sun never comes close to disinfecting. For Sarah (Nicole Brydon Bloom), recently arrived in Hollywood with plans to become a costume designer, her new home seems idyllic. The upbeat manager (Taylor Nichols) has chosen her over dozens of applicants, and her handsome neighbor (Giles Matthey) is almost uncomfortably solicitous. The other residents can't do enough for one another, sharing barbecues and loving concern for the aging actress (Susan Davis) who appears to be everyone's favorite. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
It was Saturday night at Danspace Project in St. Mark's Church, and Ms. Rainer was with her old friends Simone Forti and Steve Paxton. In the cultural sphere of Danspace Project, the slice of the dance world sometimes known as "downtown" or "postmodern," there are no more esteemed living legends than these three. And though they had performed together in various combinations over the nearly 60 years since they met, their first outing as a threesome came only last year in Los Angeles. Saturday was the third and final evening of the New York iteration. In other words, "Tea for Three," as they called the event, was a historic occasion, sold out well in advance, the kind of show in which a standing ovation at the end is guaranteed. The audience on Saturday included several luminaries of the performers' vintage (David Gordon, Valda Setterfield, Carolee Schneemann), as well as many younger dancers there to learn from the masters. This was the most receptive of crowds, the sort that would, as Ms. Rainer quipped, "laugh at anything." That was her dry, anxious way of acknowledging that the mostly improvised performance might not have been going as well as the audience's eager chuckles suggested. I'm sorry to say it wasn't the best night for her or for Mr. Paxton, the more talkative and in charge two thirds of the trio. Perhaps they were worn out. Ms. Rainer and Ms. Forti are in their early 80s, Mr. Paxton only a few years younger. That day, the church had hosted a memorial for their beloved colleague, Trisha Brown, who died in March. The evening began with a moment of silence. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
We Asked Golden Globe Nominees About Sexism. Here's What They Said. At the Golden Globes, the first major awards ceremony to be held since the sexual harassment accusations against Harvey Weinstein were revealed, the red carpet was transformed into a place to take a political stand. I asked attendees actors and actresses, directors and showrunners about sexism in Hollywood, the MeToo moment and TimesUp, the initiative started by powerful women to combat harassment in the entertainment industry and other industries across the country. Here's what they said. Meryl Streep, a nominee for her performance in "The Post," was one of several actresses who brought women's rights advocates as their dates. Ms. Streep's guest was Ai Jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. "The work has been going on for so many years. To be able to include Times Up, we fully welcome that," Aj Jen Poo. Meryl Streep: "we're only at the beginning. It feels like molecules have changed." Aj jen: "when women have this kind of unity, we can't be stopped." goldenglobes pic.twitter.com/W4tmc1DpzN Cara Buckley ( caraNYT) January 7, 2018 Both Kerry Washington, the "Scandal" star, and Lena Waithe, creator of the new series "The Chi" and a star of "Master of None," talked about the call to wear black on the red carpet, in solidarity with victims of sexual harassment. Michelle Williams was on the red carpet with Tarana Burke, the MeToo founder, and they both spoke out: Emma Watson, Belle in last year's "Beauty and the Beast," was accompanied on the red carpet by Marai Larasi, who works to end violence against black and minority women in Britain. Susan Sarandon, who is nominated for her turn as Bette Davis in "Feud: Bette and Joan," brought Rosa Clemente, a community organizer on issues like Puerto Rican independence and voter engagement. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
From about 1,755 Hong Kong dollars (or about 225, at 7.8 Hong Kong dollars to the dollar) Opened last year, the 32 room Olympian Hong Kong offers a rare amenity in one of the densest, most property crunched cities in the world: breathing space. An enormous five tiered chandelier, elegant wingback chairs, and overflowing bouquets of (very realistic) fake flowers complete with customized scent adorn the serene, marble clad entrance lobby; hotel guests go up an escalator for check in with a dedicated "guest ambassador." All rooms are on the second floor of the One Silversea private residence building, with cushy seating areas overlooking the lobby. This is clubby, apartment style living for less, made possible with a quieter location just off the beaten path. West Kowloon, on the water with tree framed views of the Kowloon skyline anchored by the distinctive 118 floor International Commerce Center tower, known for having a rooftop sky bar that's the tallest in the world (it's so tall that it's often shrouded in clouds). Across a pedestrian footbridge from the hotel is the Olympian City mall and the Olympic MTR subway station, with easy access to Kowloon and Central stations. It's also close to the glittering shopping bazaar of Tsim Sha Tsui, and convenient to the China Macau Ferry Terminal and to the airport by train or taxi. Massive and opulent, with 11 foot ceilings, lacquered wood sliding doors and gold accented everything, from the bird sculpture art pieces to the blackout curtains. Our room, in the lowest "deluxe" category, was more of a suite: 463 square feet with floor to ceiling windows and a city view. Just off the hallway from the front door is a kitchenette, with full size fridge, pantry space, microwave, Nespresso machine and teakettle. Down the hallway is an enormous bathroom, a separate living room with a couch and table, and the bedroom. Sadly, the generous wraparound outdoor patio is not accessible to hotel guests because of the upper floor residences. Our host, Yoyo, told us that housekeeping has found cigarette butts and eggs "you know, like a sunny side up egg?" on the deck, tossed out by residents above. The bathroom alone is the size of a Manhattan studio. But it actually contains multiple rooms: a toilet (with telephone), a massive glass doored rainhead shower room that might as well have its own ecosystem, and a separate spa tub with headrest. Each room has a complimentary smartphone for you to use out on the town, with free calls and Wi Fi it comes preloaded with helpful features like maps, city guides, shopping and ticket discounts, currency calculators, and a local phone number for people to reach you. There's also a fitness center, and a laundry room for guest use extremely rare in Hong Kong, and tremendously useful for those staying longer than a week. The hotel also offers Rolls Royce limousine service (for roughly double the price of a taxi). A 24 hour private lounge serves complimentary drinks and snacks. There's also room service, offering an all day menu of items including soy sauce chicken wings (88 Hong Kong dollars), spaghetti Bolognese (108 Hong Kong dollars), and grilled minced beef and potato (88 Hong Kong dollars). But you're in Hong Kong and Kowloon has some of the best eating districts in Hong Kong so the street is really your restaurant. Room to roam apartment style living in a city where space is at a serious premium. Convenient to the airport and Kowloon's attractions, it's a luxuriant, calm oasis amid the Hong Kong hubbub, and surprisingly affordable. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
In March 2017, Carol Reyes, global education director at Miami Dade College, organized what she called a "summit" to inform students on the benefits of studying abroad. "We wanted to explain the importance of how it would enhance their education, the skills they would learn and so forth," she recalled. The afternoon of the event, she met a student in the halls and invited her. "I told her, 'We have free dinner.' Students love free food," Ms. Reyes said. The student agreed to attend, and expressed interest afterward in joining one of the classes going abroad that summer. At the end of the conversation, she told Ms. Reyes, "Oh by the way, I'm homeless, is that a problem?" Ms. Reyes was taken aback. She knew challenging backgrounds were not uncommon among the 165,000 students at Miami Dade, a two year college that focuses on associate degrees but that also offers several bachelor's programs. But she hadn't realized any of the students were homeless. This young woman was part of Educate Tomorrow, a Miami based nonprofit group that operates on Miami Dade College's eight campuses, offering about 400 people mentoring and support for academic and life skills. "These are students who were in foster homes, or a series of temporary homes, or maybe they were raised by a grandmother," said Wendy Joseph, who oversees the Educate Tomorrow program at the college. (Tuition is also waived for these students.) Ms. Reyes approached Educate Tomorrow about creating a program that would enable its students to study overseas. Although Ms. Reyes later left Miami Dade to pursue graduate studies at Dartmouth College, the resulting partnership, called Educate Tomorrow Abroad, is now in its third year. The program covers the eligible students' travel expenses, with assistance from Delta Air Lines, which pays their airfare. By the end of this summer, Educate Tomorrow Abroad will have sent nine students on study trips to Europe and Central America (including the young woman who attended the 2017 summit and went to Costa Rica as part of an environmental class that summer). The six week summer class was built around a 12 day trip to London, Edinburgh, Belfast and Dublin. Ms. Prevert a native of Haiti who spent much of her childhood in a foster home hadn't been on a plane since arriving in Miami as a child. "At first, I was scared," she said. "It was something I'd never done before." But after seeing actual castles used in the filming of "Game of Thrones" (not to mention Windsor Castle, which the class visited on a side trip); sailing on a Scottish lake; and visiting the Balmoral Hotel suite in Edinburgh where J.K. Rowling wrote "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," she was as spellbound as a first year Hogwarts student. "You see these places on TV or in the movies and then in real life, it's so different," said Ms. Prevert, an Educate Tomorrow student who graduated with her associate degree from Miami Dade and intends to get a bachelor's. Of course, that's what studying abroad is supposed to be; but few community college students, homeless or not, have typically had the opportunity. According to the Institute of International Education, community college students represented only about 2 percent of the more than 332,000 American students who studied abroad in 2016 17. That's in part because many students at two year institutions work and come from lower income households. But community colleges are trying to increase international educational opportunities, and in a 2016 study the American Council on Education found that 31 percent of community colleges provided funding for study abroad, up from 24 percent in 2011. One Miami Dade student eager to take part in its growing opportunities to go abroad was Naf Luyeye Makabu. Born in the Republic of Congo, Mr. Makabu emigrated to the United States in 2012. After living with relatives for two years, he, his American born mother and two siblings were forced to leave that home, and spent most of Mr. Makabu's adolescence in a tiny apartment they could not afford. When he heard about Educate Tomorrow Abroad, he jumped at the chance. Once accepted for the grant, he chose the same English class as Ms. Prevert. "It was a great experience to see how other countries function, how things are managed," Mr. Makabu said. He was impressed, in particular, with the London Underground. "There's no subway in Miami!" he said with a laugh. Mr. Makabu, 21, is now at Florida International University, where he hopes to earn his bachelor's degree in international business. And then? "I'd love to live in London," he said. Neither Ms. Prevert nor Mr. Makabu (both of whose living conditions are now more stable) had traveled since arriving in Miami as children. They adjusted quickly, though, in part because Educate Tomorrow Abroad gives students an orientation before their trips, with details on concerns like applying for passports and dealing with jet lag. But it also speaks to their life experiences in general. "Can you imagine the challenges these students have faced?" asked Liza Carbajo, executive director for M.D.C.'s office of international education. "And then to be exposed to this international experience? To me, it's just wonderful and inspiring." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
The tennis player Madison Keys, 21, who is competing for the United States in the Rio Olympics, will also be one to watch at the United States Open, starting at the end of this month. The hard hitting upstart has been making waves with her baseline game since she turned pro at 14 and has been hailed as the face of the next generation of American women's tennis. When it comes to tending to her actual visage, Ms. Keys, who grew up in Iowa and now lives in Boca Raton, Fla., says her beauty regimen is a mix of her upbringing and her demanding practice and travel schedule. Since I practice early in the morning on most days, I wake up and wash my face with Clean Clear Morning Burst. I feel like it actually does wake me up a bit. Then the first thing I put on is sunscreen. I do it within 15 minutes of waking up so I'm protected by the time I'm out the door. I use the Neutrogena oil free sport formula for the face. For the body, I use Neutrogena Wet Skin spray. I try to get at least SPF 50 on me. After practice, I hit the shower, of course. I'm obsessed with the Bath Body Works Warm Vanilla Sugar line. Someone gave it to me when I was 14, and I've been using it ever since. I use the sugar scrub and body wash and lotion. Sometimes you think maybe you should outgrow certain products and try something else, but I still really like it. I use moisturizer only at night Philosophy Hope in a Jar. Two or three times a week, I do a Caudalie face mask. It's a purifying one because I have combination skin, and I'm sweating so often. It can be really tough to keep clear skin, especially if you're wearing a visor. It's just sitting on your head, and you break out underneath it. It can be a disaster. I have pretty even skin tone, but being out in the sun all the time, I get red cheeks and a red nose. I don't like heavy foundation, but if I use something tinted, it helps blend everything together. I've been using Urban Decay One Done it has primer, SPF and a tint in it. For eyeliner, I use the Urban Decay 24/7 pencils. I use black or brown most of the time, but if I'm going out, I like purple because it sets off my green eyes. I also use Benefit They're Real mascara. For eye shadow, I love the Urban Decay Naked palette because it has so many colors all right there. Then I use the Urban Decay setting spray. It's so good. Otherwise, living in Florida, you'll go outside for 20 minutes and realize, "Oh, my mascara is sliding off my face." I tend not to wear blush, but I do love highlighter: Benefit Watt's Up. If I'm going out, I put it on my nose, my cupid's bow, under my brows and on my cheekbones. I've always been more of an eye person, but recently I've been really getting into lip colors. I like the Tarte matte lip stains. They travel well and stay all day. I'm on Instagram a lot. There are so many makeup artists doing looks, and that's why I'm so into lip color now. Sometimes I'll just go in my "Explore" page and look for videos, but mostly I follow WakeUpandMakeup. When I was at the Australian Open this year, one of the player gifts was a department store voucher. I wanted a new fragrance. The second I tried Giorgio Armani Si, I loved it. I've been wearing it for six or seven months now. It's usually straight up into a bun when I wake up. But at the end of the day, I let it down. Every girl who has really curly hair fights it at some point, but I've become way more open to wearing it natural, and I'm loving it. I use the Bumble and bumble curly hair line that's shampoo, conditioner and styling. I'm constantly in the sun, and my hair is pulled back tight, which can cause so much breakage. Sometimes I'll just leave the conditioner in for an entire day. I also love putting in coconut oil. My natural color is a really, really dark brown. Right now, it's dark at the roots, but I wanted to go a little lighter for summer, so there are some blond pieces, like balayage. I get manicures and pedicures every two weeks. For my manicures, I get gel. Colors, I usually go with black and dark purple, but sometimes I do a navy. I really like Lincoln Park After Dark by OPI. I have a physical therapist who travels with me. He's actually a chiropractor, but he also does acupuncture, so I get acupuncture almost every day. I've had lots of injuries in the last couple of years, so I had to take that extra step to hire somebody. I hate needles, but this doesn't hurt. It's really interesting how one day acupuncture can be used to treat muscle soreness, and another day for relaxation, and it'll put me right to sleep. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
ANN ARBOR, MICH. Lance Bowles knew his son Caden loved cars, but he didn't realize just how much until the summer when Caden was 6. "This guy was driving by, and Caden said, 'Hey, Dad, there's an Isetta!' " Mr. Bowles said, referring to a rather obscure Italian designed microcar from the 1950s. "The guy turned the car around and said, 'Did he just call this an Isetta?' He couldn't believe it." Caden Bowles was, by all accounts, a smart, precocious and joyful boy with extraordinary ardor for automobiles. Though only 11 when he died last fall while awaiting a heart transplant, Caden left an enduring impression on nearly everyone his life touched, including the staff at the University of Michigan C. S. Mott Children's Hospital here, and Jean Jennings, the well known automotive journalist who runs the JeanKnowsCars website and is a judge on TruTV's "Motor City Masters." Ms. Jennings's friendship with Caden resulted in a car show in his honor, held at the hospital last Saturday. Largely unpublicized and closed to the public, Caden's Car Show was intended to give young patients and their families a diversion from medical ordeals, and to raise awareness for organ and blood donations. At Mott, 26 children await transplants. A dozen of them need heart transplants. Held atop a parking structure on a sultry Saturday morning, the show featured nearly 60 cars most of them privately owned including classics, new models and novelties with child appeal. They included a 1922 REO Speed Wagon fire truck, a 1991 Ferrari Testarossa, a 2008 Lamborghini Reventon, a 1981 DeLorean, a 1975 Plymouth Fury police car, a 1930 Ford Model A and a 1925 Detroit Electric Model 95. A Mopar Muscle Ram monster truck and an Oscar Mayer Wienermobile sat at the valet entrance. The show required months of planning and had 16 sponsors, including several automakers. Even Mark Reuss, General Motors' executive vice president for global product development, joined the cause, driving to the hospital in his personal black 1954 Chevrolet Corvette from his home an hour away. "This was her first road trip," Mr. Reuss said, smiling beside the car he had bought last year. "Jean asked me to come, and I said yes," he explained. Patients were brought out in wheelchairs, sometimes shielded from the sun by umbrellas. Alexander Mugg, 5, sat for a photo session inside a '63 Corvair Greenbrier van that had been converted into a photo booth. Wearing a Detroit Pistons jersey, Alexander, who has cystic fibrosis, said he looked forward to the fire truck because he hoped to become a fireman. Quentin Zanders, 17, of Roswell, Ga., had been in intensive care after an abdomen procedure, but hoped to go home soon. He grinned behind the wheel of a 1965 Shelby Cobra 427 owned by John and Ann LaFond of Plymouth, Mich. "I like the stripes," said Quentin, who expects to get his learner's permit this year. "It looks like the kind of car you'd see in a James Bond movie." Patients unable to leave the hospital could see the cars from their windows or watch a video feed. Indoor activities included a photo booth, slot car racetrack and video games. "I should tell my dad about this one," said Gavin Grubaugh, 7, of the racecar he propelled around the slot car track. "I drifted!" he exclaimed as his car went sideways, then shared a fist bump with his mother, Theresa Grubaugh of Standish, Mich. Gavin had gone through brain surgery a week earlier. Each of Mott's 350 patients received a bag of treats and toys, including Chevrolet trading cards and a Ford GT die cast model provided by Edsel Ford II. The night before, an event at Zingerman's Cornman Farms, a working farm and event venue in nearby Dexter, raised more than 50,000 for research on pediatric heart transplants and congenital heart disease. Called "Full Throttle," after a name Caden gave to his written critiques and drawings of cars, the event featured a dozen vehicles, some owned by surgeons who had known Caden his whole life. Caden was born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, meaning his heart's left side had failed to develop. He needed, and received, a transplant, and lived a relatively normal life. But at 7 he was found to have cancer linked to immunosuppressant drugs. He overcame the cancer, but last year his heart began to fail; after a few months awaiting a new one, Caden died of a stroke on Sept. 11. Dr. Richard Ohye, head of the pediatric cardiovascular surgery division at Mott and the surgical director of the pediatric heart transplant program, brought his 1997 Ferrari 550 Maranello to the fund raiser. Overcome with emotion, Dr. Ohye said of the event, "This is I can barely speak." The weekend was conceived by Ms. Jennings and facilitated by Dr. Edward Bove, chairman of the cardiac surgery department of the university's medical center. Ms. Jennings, whose cellphone screen saver is Caden's picture, met the young enthusiast when he was recovering from cancer. The friendship began with Meg Zamberlan, pediatric nurse practitioner and pediatric heart transplant program coordinator at the U M congenital heart center. She had been astounded by her young patient's sophisticated car chatter. "He'd bring in this car encyclopedia, a foot and a half long, and he knew where each car was he wanted to talk about," she said. "He had these long fingers and he'd point to this spec and that spec." She told a friend, who told Ms. Jennings, who wrote a column about Caden for Automobile magazine, where she was editor in chief at the time. Last year, when she learned Caden's heart was being rejected, she brought supercars the magazine was testing to the hospital. One time, Ms. Jennings brought an Aston Martin Vanquish and arranged for him to see it up close. "The nurses were putting him in his wheelchair, and the whole time he was having this erudite conversation about engine displacement," she said. "He figured they were just taking him for another test. Then they rolled him outside. I told him, 'Get out, go see it.' " The next day, she brought an SRT Viper. "He got in the driver's seat, and we arranged his little sweatshirt and socks and I took his picture," she said. "Then I told him to push the start button, and he jumps about six inches out of his seat." Soon, doctors began bringing their own cars. Caden had many interests, including science, and especially the solar system. But most of all he loved his family and cars, and he didn't have a favorite. "When he was very little, he used to wind up Matchbox cars and put them on our window sills and get at eye level and watch the wheels go around," said his mother, Shannon. "His first words were "round, round." Caden grew up in Fort Wayne, Ind., with his sister and two brothers. When Caden was hospitalized, Mr. Bowles, an accountant, and Mrs. Bowles, then a part time dietitian, often drove 2.5 hours to Mott. Caden, who dreamed of owning his own car company, to be called Bowleswell, had been hospitalized four months when he died. His eyes were donated, and his memory will live on through Caden's Car Show. "It's humbling to think that Caden is the face of all this," Mrs. Bowles said Saturday, adding, "It is his legacy, through this show, to help other kids going through what he went through." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
El Capitan rises over 3,000 feet above the floor of Yosemite National Park in California. Scaling this granite edifice is considered a rite of passage among elite climbers, who come from around the world to test themselves on its sheer face. But this towering behemoth is the site of frequent rockfalls. Over 20 have occurred in the last decade, including one in 2017 that killed a climber. The majority of these falls have been linked to rock formations known as flakes, sheets of rock that are peeling off El Capitan like layers of onion skin. With infrared imaging, scientists have now essentially peered behind two of the largest flakes, Boot Flake and Texas Flake, to determine how well they're connected to El Capitan. The results, presented at a meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna in April, suggest that the underlying structures linking each flake to the 100 million year old granite are surprisingly small. By visualizing these attachment points, scientists can monitor them to keep climbers safe. "This is a beautiful study," said Allen Glazner, a geologist at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill not involved in the research. It shows how much "glue" is holding these rocks up, he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
AUSTIN, Tex. Ask any Texan and they'll tell you: Buc ee's is no ordinary convenience store. Sure, it sells the usual gas, gum and candy. But most of its goods can't be found in your average side of the highway shop. There are fresh barbecue sandwiches prepared by employees in cowboy hats at the Texas State Roundup counter; refrigerated sausage wraps and turkey bites; shrink wrapped pork tenderloin and crawfish fettuccine. You can buy jars of peach cobbler, pickled quail eggs and candied jalapenos. Beyond the foodstuffs, you can find camo print neck pillows, sleeping bags, throw blankets, dove hunting stools and aprons emblazoned with the mantra "Hunting is life." There are accessories that show allegiance to the state's college athletic team s, Texan home goods (cowhide rugs) and a hot pink flask that says "Don't mess with Texas women." And, of course, there's merch. You can buy Buc ee a bucktoothed beaver in a red baseball hat printed on a tent, an eraser set, a toothbrush and three styles of bikinis. There are Buc ee soccer balls, softballs, Frisbees and footballs. And then there's the plush, grinning Buc ee, which comes in sizes small enough for a key ring and big enough to stand eye level with a toddler. "Today, I just came in here for my grandson," said Dan Bradshaw of Houston on a recent Saturday, wearing a green T shirt that reads, "GRANDPA. THE MAN. THE MYTH. THE LEGEND." His grandson Austin, 2, threw a foam Buc ee's football into the air nearby. "Other convenience stores just have small stuff. You go in there and you leave," Mr. Bradshaw added. "Here, especially with grandkids, they have such a ball. You could spend an hour here. It goes by quick." Mr. Aplin had been frustrated by the quality of roadside restrooms when traveling with his young daughters. So, in 2003, the company opened the first Buc ee's travel center, a larger version of their convenience stores, where they offered barbecue, beaver printed apparel and a commitment to clean toilets. (The bathrooms remain a point of pride: A team of custodians cleans the facilities around the clock at each location; billboards, visible from the highway, have read, "TOP TWO REASONS TO STOP AT BUC EE'S: 1 AND 2," "YOUR THRONE AWAITS," and "ONLY 262 MILES TO BUC EE'S. YOU CAN HOLD IT.") "It's almost a sin to drive past Buc ee's on the highway," said Shayla Garner of The Woodlands, Tex., who planned her route home specifically so she could restock her favorite snack: Buc ee's butter toffee peanuts. Balancing five bags of nuts, a brisket sandwich and a mini apple pie on one arm, Ms. Garner pulled her phone out of her purse. "I texted my sister, 'hey, I'm stopping at Buc ee's, give me your list,'" she said, then grabbed two more bags of the sweetened nuts. "Anytime anybody in our family drives this way, we have to stop," said Ms. Garner, who regularly gives Buc ee's T shirts and platters as gifts. "You go out with more than what you intended, but you're never dissatisfied at Buc ee's," she said. Buc ee's has evolved from a convenience store and gas station to a Disneyland of roadside capitalism. All Buc ee's are larger than the industry standard; each of the 14 supersized travel centers measures at least 50,000 square feet, more than 15 times the size of the average convenience store in 2018, according to statistics from the National Association of Convenience Stores. The Buc ee's location in New Braunfels has 50 toilets, 80 soda fountain dispensers and 120 fueling positions. At 68,000 square feet, it's the largest convenience store in the world. They say everything's bigger in Texas. Beyond the state's cowboy hats and pickup trucks, the adage also applies to the Texan's outsize conviction that this state is unequivocally superior. There's an abundance of pride here in the state's brief history as a nation, its superior way of life and, yes, its gas stations. Sure, there are other beloved regional convenience stores some shoppers in the mid Atlantic region swear fealty to Wawa, and ABC Stores has a strong fan base in Hawaii. Some franchise roadside refuel stations (Dunkin' Donuts, Sheetz) or supermarkets (Wegmans, Piggly Wiggly) capitalize on a shared geographic identity. But there's something different about Buc ee's. "I thought it was like a super Wawa, but this is the size of about 22 Wawas," said Jack Willard of Voorhees, N.J., during his first Buc ee's encounter, while visiting friends in Houston with his wife. "It's not a convenience store at all it's like a department store, almost." The success of Buc ee's is built on two distinctly Texan features: its unmistakable character and its reliance on highways. In such a big state, the competing visions of what it means to be a Texan are separated by hundreds of miles. Yet all Texans identify with the open road. There's the lived polyphony of Houston, a city known for its diversity and its sprawl, defined by the loop of Interstate 610. There's the stark drama of Big Bend National Park, which contains an entire mountain range, a four hour drive from the nearest commercial airport. There's the quiet immensity of the state's border with Mexico, which stretches for 1,254 miles along small town roads from El Paso to South Padre Island. While their visions of the state differ, Texans see it from the same vantage point: through a car windshield. This year, for the first time, Buc ee's hopes to expand its fandom to customers outside its home state. In January , the first store outside of Texas opened in Robertsdale, Ala.; the company plans to start building three stores in Florida this year. Early signs are promising. At the opening in Robertsdale, traffic backed up as lines of eager customers from Alabama, from Louisiana, even some from Texas waited to try the heralded Beaver Nuggets and sparkling restrooms. Buc ee's hopes to be the go to stop not only for those driving across Texas, but across the Southeast and beyond. "Our owners have made it clear that as long as they're still having fun building new stores, they'll continue doing it," said Jeff Nadalo, the general counsel for Buc ee's. And they shouldn't have trouble filling those stores with employees. Buc ee's workers are guaranteed a 13 an hour starting wage, and a benefit package that includes three weeks of paid vacation and 401(k) matching. But many join the staff for the love of the brand. Delia Gaona Villarreal , who chops brisket at the Temple, Tex., location, became a Buc ee's regular in high school, when she'd pick up an Icee on her way home from soccer tournaments. Cristina West, who primarily works at the fudge counter in the same shop, was first "blown away" by the convenience store when she visited it on her honeymoon. "It's a very warm feeling when you come in here everybody greets you, and they're sincere about it," said Ms. West as she handed out samples of Beaver Buddies animal crackers. "It's just your typical Texas thing. We love our state, we love our home and we want everybody to feel welcome here." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Sail on, pushed by the wind of sunlight. Over the past week, engineers have demonstrated how they can steer LightSail 2, a small privately financed spacecraft with a billowing silver sail. The technology could be used to propel future space probes through the solar system. Most space missions today are propelled by engines that provide bursts of acceleration with limited amounts of fuel. The rest of the time, the spacecraft are coasting. By contrast, with LightSail 2, particles of light from the sun bounce against the spacecraft's 344 square feet of sails roughly the area of a boxing ring generate a modicum of force, the equivalent of the weight of a paper clip pushing down on your hand. But because the sun always shines, the sail offers a continuous nudge that adds up over time to faster speeds all without needing any fuel at all. Officials at the Planetary Society, the nonprofit organization that is running the mission, announced the achievement during a telephone news conference on Wednesday. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Tom Wolfe, chief concierge at the Fairmont San Francisco, greeted me in the lobby of the palatial hotel, which opened in 1907 atop the expensive Nob Hill enclave. Impeccably dressed in a three piece suit festooned with decorative pins, Mr. Wolfe claims to be first concierge in the United States the concept didn't exist in American hotels until the 1970s, he said. Richard Swig, who was then the owner of the Fairmont, asked Mr. Wolfe to create a concierge program in the image of hotels he had seen in Europe, where the service concept of "one stop shopping," as Mr. Wolfe put it, already existed. "Before concierges, sometimes hotels would have an airline desk, or a shipping desk," he said. "But there wasn't one place where you could get a shoe repaired, a dinner reservation and, oh yeah, I'd like a Ferrari GTO." That actually happened, he added, when he was at the Plaza Hotel in the early 1990s, right after Donald Trump had purchased it. Mr. Wolfe found the car, in the color the client wanted. The client then purchased it for 6 million. The key to being a good concierge, he said, is motivation. You have to want to help. That, and good planning. "Anticipation is key. Have a Plan A and a Plan B. And also a Plan C and D." Mr. Wolfe recommended taking the Powell Hyde cable car ( 7) to the end of the line and walking over to the Buena Vista Cafe for breakfast and one of their famous creamy Irish coffees. Arriving early should allow you to nab a table with a view fairly easily. Breakfast for one, Irish coffee included, will run around 40 with tax and tip. I took a cable car, too the Powell Mason line but to the AA Bakery Cafe on Stockton Street in Chinatown. A casual Chinese bakery with communal tables and serve yourself coffee, this place can get crowded and you have to be a little aggressive to get served don't be offended if a tiny 90 year old woman pushes past you in line. For your perseverance, you will be rewarded with fresh, tasty, absurdly inexpensive baked goods. My breakfast a savory bacon and onion roll, a custard roll and a hot, chewy sesame ball filled with bean paste was enough food for two people and cost, with coffee, 4.10. I bought a one day pass ( 20) for the Muni, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. Twenty dollars might seem steep, but keep in mind that individual cable car rides cost 7 if you ride even three times (which you should do, because cable cars are a blast), it makes good economic sense. The pass also gives you unlimited access to the Muni bus system, light rail and streetcars. Note that the pass does not allow you free use of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART). While BART is far more efficient if you want to get from, say, the Embarcadero to the Mission quickly (and it's the best way to get to the San Francisco airport), Muni can usually get you where you need to go. Pro tip: Routesy is a good (and free) app to give you a comprehensive sense of the Bay Area's transit options, but its constant updating of the latest route information can cause load times of a minute or two every time you open the app. Mr. Wolfe recommended that his fictitious client board a private sailboat tour from Pier 39, observing the bay, Alcatraz, the Bay and Golden Gate Bridges, and Angel Island. From there, the client would disembark at Sausalito, a former artists' colony with excellent shopping and a luxurious flair. Total cost: around 400. If you're eager to explore the bay and feel the salty sea air on your face, just take the San Francisco Bay Ferry to Oakland, with regular departures from the Ferry Building to Jack London Square. I found the ferry ( 6.40 each way) to be an enjoyable ride with great views, though I didn't get that Instagrammable shot of the Golden Gate Bridge. There's plenty to do when you reach Jack London Square after the approximately 30 minute trip. London, who was born in San Francisco, is honored with a cabin (reassembled with materials from his original cabin in Alaska) and Heinold's First and Last Chance Saloon, a 19th century watering hole the writer once frequented. I enjoyed a blond ale from Federation Brewing ( 5, plus 1 tip) before heading back to San Francisco. If you have the patience, head to the corner of 18th Street and Guerrero in the Mission District and proceed to the back of what is probably an extremely long line. Everyone there is waiting for the sandwiches, bread and pastries at the much acclaimed Tartine Bakery, owned by the baking virtuosos Elisabeth Prueitt and Chad Robertson. I met up with my brother, Loren, and we picked up a couple of sandwiches to take over to nearby Mission Dolores Park. For 14.50, I had pastrami loaded up with horseradish, mustard and Gruyere; it was positively awesome. The bread (which, as everyone knows, makes or breaks a sandwich) was particularly good: chewy but yielding, with a crusty exterior. The view from the southwest corner of the park was spectacular. While you're in the neighborhood, you might as well walk off the sandwich and get a little history lesson, too. San Francisco City Guides provides free walking tours of the Mission; they begin at the golden hydrant on Church Street that, as the story is told, saved the Mission after the 1906 earthquake. Mr. Wolfe recommends a private car to Mill Valley for a walk through Muir Woods National Monument, known for its majestic redwood trees. From there, the driver heads back to San Francisco over the Golden Gate Bridge for a tour of Golden Gate Park and afternoon tea at the beautiful Japanese Tea Garden. Total cost: 200. I wanted to see Golden Gate Park too, so Loren and I headed to Stow Lake Boathouse, which has stood at the heart of the park since 1893. There, we rented a rowboat for 20 and took a spin around the lake (there are also pedal boats and electric powered boats for rent that are more expensive). It took us awhile, taking turns to row, but we made it around without capsizing. And we traded redwoods for wildlife: From the boathouse, we headed over to the bison paddock on John F. Kennedy Drive. They were there, grazing (I counted six of them), none too excited to see us, but I was amazed that such a thing existed in the middle of San Francisco. Finally, we took in the de Young Museum ( 10) and its impressive collection of American art. A friendly security guard tipped me off that the museum, which closes at 5:15, is free after 4:30 we took advantage and saved ourselves the admission fee. Forty five minutes was a good amount of time to survey the indoor collections and outdoor sculpture garden. Giancarlo Paterlini and Suzette Gresham Tognetti own what Mr. Wolfe declares "the finest Italian restaurant in town." Indeed, Acquerello, on Sacramento Street, received two Michelin stars this year. The seasonal tasting menu, which includes licorice smoked lamb loin, ridged pasta with foie gras, and seared scallop with Perigord truffles, will run around 250 with a glass of wine or two. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
HIGHLAND FALLS, N.Y. The Storm King Highway, a twisting two lane ribbon carved into a mountainside here nine decades ago, hardly seemed the place to test the roadworthiness of a hot rod that looked to have just escaped the junkyard. Of greater concern, perhaps, was that Peter Duvaloois had never traveled this road, some 50 miles north of Manhattan, before bringing his 1946 Chevrolet "rat rod" truck here to meet a reporter. On the Storm King Highway a four mile stretch of Route 218 that snakes along 400 foot cliffs overlooking the Hudson River and passes the United States Military Academy at West Point drivers must resist staring into the breathtaking vistas, even while keeping their distance from the low stone wall that serves as a guardrail. To Mr. Duvaloois, 62, rat rods like his home built pickup represent a return to the roots of hot rodding. Rat rod builders embrace vehicles that display a rebellious attitude, along with loud manners and an intentionally distressed appearance, not necessarily the qualities needed to deal with a demanding road better suited to sports cars or motorcycles. But Mr. Duvaloois seemed pleased, and possibly relieved, that his hot rod had taken the curves so competently. The hot rod movement that emerged after World War II drew young men it was overwhelmingly a man's pursuit who bought the hulks of prewar cars out of scrapyards for a few dollars and modified them for more speed. Fords from 1932 40 were preferred, especially for their flathead V8 engines, which were readily tuned to increase power. The bodies were stripped of fenders and hoods for a leaner look. By the late 1950s, hot rods were becoming elaborately customized vehicles, a trend that evolved to the point that pristine machines costing six figures and up became commonplace the antitheses of the genre's origins. Mr. Duvaloois is no stranger to that kind of car. Several years ago, he built a show quality hot rod and then barely drove it. "I was afraid to park it anywhere," he said. "I wasn't having any fun with it." He turned his skills to building rat rods, a growing branch of the hobby that is as dedicated to drivability as it is to individual expression. "Rats are really back to basics," he said. "You scrounge around or trade for parts, and what you can't find you make yourself. That's a big part of the fun." The scavenger hunt and hand building aspects come naturally to Mr. Duvaloois: With his wife, Cathy, he restored their 308 year old house in Saugerties and built period style furniture for it. The house had belonged to his father, who worked on it for many years before Alzheimer's limited him. "We finished it, and my father was able to see it completed before he died," Mr. Duvaloois said. "That's something I'm really proud of." From his father, he also picked up his affection for cars. "As a kid, I'd be in the garage with my dad in middle of winter, working on engines," he said. "He could build anything." Building a rat rod, Mr. Duvaloois said, begins with an inspiration, usually a favorite body style or even one part. "It can be just a grille or a headlight shape or taillight design you really like," he said. "You create your vision around that." Inspiration for the vehicle he was driving this day, one of four that he has built, came from the cab of a derelict 1946 Chevrolet truck that he bought locally for 200. The floors had rusted out and there was no chassis. That didn't matter to Mr. Duvaloois, who builds his own steel frames. "It's much stronger than the original chassis ever was, and it allows me to set the vehicle stance and height to get the particular look I'm after," he explained. Mr. Duvaloois installed a 1937 Ford front suspension and built his own rear suspension. And he made just about everything else, always with an eye toward creating a certain vintage patina. "If you do it correctly, people think you found it in a barn," he said. "You make it look like it's been around for 50 years." Mr. Duvaloois, who worked for many years as a mechanic in pharmaceutical packaging, lays out the chassis and body relationship using wood and paper forms. In his workshop, he altered the cab considerably, slicing it lengthwise to take out 6 inches of width. He also narrowed the hood and metal dashboard and lowered the roof by 4 inches. The welded seams were left exposed. The bed was fabricated from sheet steel, then distressed to match the cab. What little paint remains on the cab is original. Surface rust was left untouched, per the rat rodder's credo conveyed on a windshield decal: "In rust we trust." Despite the truck's deliberate lack of polish, the builder's attentive touch is revealed in various details. The taillights, for instance, come from a utility trailer, but their intricate spider web garnishment is Mr. Duvaloois's own metalworking. "I see rats as works of art, and there's a cartoonish aspect I really like," he said. Mr. Duvaloois acknowledged that he and other rat rodders took inspiration from the exaggerated forms of the Rat Fink cartoons of Ed Roth, known best by his Big Daddy signature. While many rat rodders install Chevrolet V8s for their affordability and vast availability of parts, Mr. Duvaloois prefers an engine noted mostly for its brawn: Chrysler's Hemi V8 of the 1950s. His truck uses a 241 cubic inch Dodge version called a Red Ram. "You really have to look for these things," he said, reveling in the challenge of the hunt. "It's harder to find parts." He also relishes the sound of old Hemis, a distinctive dialect among American V8s, one that's especially memorable when blasted through his truck's minimalist mufflers. On the road, the unruly rappatta, rappatta, rappatta at low speeds evened out to a baritone bellow at cruising speed, then escalated to a peculiar warbling snarl as speed increased. Mr. Duvaloois wears earplugs on long highway drives. While the racket might connote 400 horsepower to passers by, a more realistic figure would be more like 150, less than even the typical 4 cylinder family sedan has today. That suits Mr. Duvaloois: His truck weighs just 2,500 pounds, and he feels it is quick enough. He did add a later model four barrel carburetor for a bit more power. The electric choke it came with helps the engine start quicker in cold weather. Inside the original air cleaner housing, a low maintenance paper cartridge filter from a 1980s Mazda diesel pickup replaces the original's oil bath filter. "I don't care much about speed," he said. "I'm more interested in reliability and gas mileage, because I drive a lot. My '46 gets 23 miles per gallon." Grinning, he added: "And if you're going too fast, people can't see how cool you look." For reliability, Mr. Duvaloois replaced the old style generator and weak 6 volt electrical system with a more modern alternator and 12 volt setup. The upgrades made it possible for him to install a later model Chrysler electronic ignition and an electric windshield wiper, which covers only the driver's side. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Uber Is Said to File for an I.P.O. as It Races Lyft to a Public Debut SAN FRANCISCO Uber confidentially filed paperwork on Thursday to go public, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, officially moving toward what is expected to be one of the biggest and most anticipated tech company stock market debuts ever. The ride hailing company filed its paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission on the same day that its rival Lyft also filed for an offering, said the people, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Each company is rushing to beat the other to the public markets in the first half of next year amid a fair climate for technology I.P.O.s and worries of a potential economic recession. Uber and Lyft declined to comment. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier that Uber had filed its public offering documents. Uber, the world's biggest ride hailing company, has been told by investment bankers that it could be worth as much as 120 billion in an I.P.O. At that valuation, it would be the biggest offering since the Alibaba Group of China began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in 2014. It would dwarf the market capitalization of more established companies such as Goldman Sachs, putting it at around the same value as I.B.M. or McDonald's. And it would likely bring enormous windfalls for many of its investors, founders and employees. It would also be a steep jump in what private investors thought Uber was worth. In August, when Toyota made a 500 million investment in Uber, the company was valued at 76 billion. Uber and Lyft are expected to presage a wave of I.P.O.s by other tech start ups, many of which have delayed going public for years because of the plentiful availability of private capital. But as these companies mature and their early investors push to cash out their stakes, many are readying for their stock market debuts. Airbnb, the online room rental company, is among those that have made little secret that they are also preparing to become public companies. Slack, a workplace collaboration software company valued at 7.1 billion, recently hired Goldman Sachs to lead its I.P.O., said a person with knowledge of the plans. Slack declined to comment about hiring Goldman, which was reported earlier by Reuters. "It is like the graduation. The adolescents have become adults," said Mamoon Hamid, a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers. "The longest bull run in history is now culminating with a whole slew of I.P.O.s." He added, "Uber is in the same ballpark as Facebook and Google." Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have submitted proposals to take Uber public. Lyft, which was last valued by private market investors at 15 billion, recently picked JPMorgan Chase to lead its I.P.O. Yet Uber faces a huge hurdle as it aims to go public: It is deeply unprofitable. Uber said last month that it lost 1.07 billion in the third quarter. As a privately held company, Uber is not obligated to report its earnings, but it has made a habit of doing so. Ride hailing where people hail rides through their smartphone and drivers with their own cars supply the rides is an inherently expensive business because the company has to pay to recruit drivers, expand in new markets and beat back rivals. Uber's chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, has focused on paring back the unprofitable segments of the company's business. He has sold off its operations in Russia and Southeast Asia, where it faced heavy competition from local rivals, while expanding into potential new businesses like food delivery and bike and scooter rentals. Wall Street investors and others are still expected to snap up Uber's stock because it is growing quickly in a consolidating stock market with fewer I.P.O.s. Uber's executives have said it is profitable in cities where it has operated the longest, but chooses to burn money on increasing revenue faster. "Revenue growth is significantly more important than worrying about the bottom line at this point," said Barrett Daniels, a partner at Deloitte who advises on I.P.O.s. Uber began as a ride hailing service for upscale clientele in 2009, the pipe dream of Garrett Camp, an entrepreneur who eventually tapped a friend, Travis Kalanick, to run the company. They quickly pushed the service into numerous cities with little regard for local laws, causing tension with established taxi companies, lawmakers and regulators. As competitors like Lyft appeared, both rushed to compete for smaller fares. The rivals have since spent billions of dollars on fare subsidies to attract people to their platforms. Passengers loved Uber's convenience and embraced it in cities such as San Francisco, New York and London. Uber now operates in more than 600 cities across 63 countries, providing more than 15 million trips a day. Venture capitalists and other investors, seizing on Uber's rapid growth, shoveled billions of dollars into the company to help it dominate. The company's investors include the venture capital firm Benchmark, First Round Capital, TPG, SoftBank, Toyota and Fidelity Investments. Many of them are set to reap big returns from an I.P.O. "Uber's stock is widely distributed, and it will transform the lives of many thousands of families who have worked hard for this outcome," said Matt Ocko, a venture capitalist who invested in Uber when it was a young company. Many Uber employees will go on to start other companies, he said. "This 'virtuous cycle' is still a big part of what makes the Valley great," he added. Over time, Uber branched out into different areas, like food and retail delivery, e bike and scooter rentals, trucking and freight management and autonomous vehicles even trying to build flying automobiles. Some of these efforts have run into difficulties, including earlier this year when an Uber driverless car killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Ariz. Uber underwent a rocky 2017 when its workplace culture faced scrutiny for sexual harassment and for putting growth above all other considerations. Mr. Kalanick was ousted in June 2017 after shareholders staged a revolt against him. Mr. Khosrowshahi was appointed Uber's chief executive a few months later. He has vowed to improve the company's culture and mend broken relationships with regulators, lawmakers and others. Uber's backers are eager to put last year's troubles behind them. "I know Dara has the full trust of investors and employees, and we are confident he knows what he's doing," said Chris Sacca, an early investor in the company. "We're not done by any means, but if you look at where we were one year ago, we were dealing with fundamental issues of governance, of board alignment, of these continuing battles amongst power brokers on our board and whether or not we were going to have SoftBank with us or against us," Mr. Khosrowshahi said in an interview with The New York Times earlier this year. "Those were very important issues to deal with and to resolve, and I think we resolved them quite effectively in a positive way." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
In the first story, Mr. Jones recalls how he and his siblings addressed his mother in her open coffin in low murmurs that edged "close to hysteria as the coffin's lid was slowly closing." Some, he said, tried to stop it. Mr. Jones described himself as an observer of the scene until there was "one more voice crying, pleading for more time to look, to touch," he said. "It was my voice." As Mr. Jones works his way through his material, slowing down or speeding up according to length, the text sometimes has the feel of a news report: There are descriptions of his garden, of an Ellsworth Kelly show ("clear, accomplished and well presented," as he sedately puts it), of a trapped hummingbird. After many of his observations, you think: Is that all there is? His dancers, surrounding his desk, connect to one another in the shadows, pulling and pushing against each other with refined, pulsating partnering. There are daring torpedo leaps, as when one flies into the arms of the others, but they also linger in stillness. At times, they illustrate the text. In describing how his mother, after the death of his father, "threw herself on the floor and proceeded to roll from one end of the hallway to the other," the dancers roll, too. But there's a twist: Smoke swirls from Antonio Brown's collar and soon the theater is filled with haze. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Why Work From Home When You Can Work From Barbados, Bermuda or ... Estonia? When Lamin Ngobeh, a high school teacher at the Freire Charter School in Wilmington, Del., saw a social media post last month about working remotely in Barbados for 12 months, his interest was piqued. "My school probably won't open for in person classes at least until February 2021, and I want to be in a country that's safer health wise and also enjoy the quality of life," he said of the reasons for considering a temporary relocation. "I reached out to my school leaders and they were very supportive of my decision." When it announced its 12 month Welcome Stamp program in mid July, Barbados became one of the first of several countries, in regions from the Caribbean to Eastern Europe, to create programs for remote workers. The programs employ either special visas or expand existing ones to entice workers to temporarily relocate. Other countries offering similar visas currently include Estonia, Georgia and Bermuda. A substantial drop in these countries' tourism numbers is a key reason for the new programs. "Tourism is the lifeline of the country," said Eusi Skeete, the U.S. director of tourism for Barbados. Tourism accounted for 14 percent of the country's annual gross domestic product in 2019, according to data published by the Central Bank of Barbados, and had a record number of international arrivals of more than 712,000. But in 2020, the number of visitors during the months of April, May and June were near zero. Mr. Skeete said that the country's new remote worker visa program will help with those numbers. "A 12 month period will allow visitors to experience the country in a holistic way," he said. More than 1,000 applications from around the world were submitted within the first week, the country said, with the majority of responses from the United States, Canada, and Britain. Mr. Ngobeh's application was approved on Monday. He plans to move mid September. Even before the pandemic, the number of remote workers worldwide was growing: Research from the consulting firm MBO Partners found that the number of independent workers in the United States, which includes consultants, freelancers and temporary workers, was around 41 million in 2019. More than 7.3 million workers in the United States described themselves in 2019 as "digital nomads": those who chose to embrace a location independent lifestyle that allowed them to travel and work remotely. David Cassar, MBO Partners' chief operations officer, notes that the international leverage of freelancers is increasing considerably. "We absolutely expect interest in becoming a digital nomad to spike among independent workers in the coming years. Covid 19 has accelerated the adoption of widespread remote work, and independent workers will be among the first to take advantage of a location independent, technology enabled lifestyle," he said. Many workers are drawn to the lifestyle of digital nomads because of a lower cost of living. Maggie Turansky, whose hometown is Phoenix, currently lives in the Republic of Georgia. She runs a website, The World Was Here First, with her partner, and rents a brand new apartment in Tbilisi for about 500 a month. They stayed there during the pandemic. "I can't think of any other major city in a Western country that would be comparable," she said. "The utilities on top of that rarely go above 50 a month, and the Wi Fi is great. Georgia is appealing and there's so much to see and do, and we kind of fell in love with it." Mr. Ngobeh noted that he has found decent two to four bedroom apartments that rent from 500 to 1,500 a month. Amanda Kolbye, another United States citizen, currently works from Malaysia as an online business coach. She has enjoyed living and working overseas for the past two years, living in six countries, including Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Qatar and Taiwan. "I'm not planning to return to the U.S. for the foreseeable future," Ms. Kolbye said. "I'm considering running my business in another country, like Estonia or Barbados or Bermuda that will allow me to be closer to home." Some criteria for international visitors who seek these extended stays are similar. While all countries require proof of health insurance and negative virus tests (either pre arrival, upon arrival, or both), some require an application fee and proof of a monthly salary, complete with bank statements. For Barbados, prospective remote workers need to fill out an online application form and submit photos, they also need to supply proof of employment and an income declaration of at least 50,000 annually during the period that they are on the island. An application fee of 2,000 per person is only payable after he or she is approved; families pay a fee of 3,000, irrespective of the number of members in their household. In 2019, Bermuda reported 419 million in leisure tourism revenue and more than 808,000 visitors the most in the country's history. Not surprisingly, the pandemic has depressed these numbers. In the first quarter of 2020, Bermuda's tourism spending was 19.8 million compared to 32 million the previous year, and leisure air arrivals fell by nearly 44 percent. "Tourists during the months of April, May and June were nearly zero," said Glenn Jones, the interim chief executive officer of the Bermuda Tourism Authority. "I can tell you that we live on air arrivals. In July, our airlift capacity the number of commercial airline seats flying to the island was just 10 percent of what it was last July. August will be just 20 percent." Within days of announcing its residential certificate program, Bermuda received 69 applications from around the world. Unlike Barbados, Bermuda does not require a minimum monthly income for extended stay remote workers. Estonia's new digital nomad visa, which began Aug. 1 and is an extension of its e Residency program, will allow visitors to stay in the country legally and work remotely for their employer for up to 12 months. The application fee is 125, and applicants need to demonstrate proof of a base salary of at least 4,150 per month. But Americans will need to be patient as they are currently not allowed to enter Estonia, which follows European Union regulations, for its digital nomad visa program. The Landscape of the Post Pandemic Return to Office None Delta variant delays. A wave of the contagious Delta variant is causing companies to reconsider when they will require employees to return, and what health requirements should be in place when they do. A generation gap. While workers of all ages have become accustomed to dialing in and skipping the wearying commute, younger ones have grown especially attached to the new way of doing business. This is causing some difficult conversations between managers and newer hires. How to keep offices safe. Handwashing is a simple way to reduce the spread of disease, but employers should be thinking about improved ventilation systems, creative scheduling and making sure their building is ready after months of low use. Return to work anxiety. Remote work brought many challenges, particularly for women of color. But going back will also mean a return to microaggressions, pressure to conform to white standards of professionalism, and high rates of stress and burnout. "If you see the countries offering remote worker visas, they are the ones highly dependent on tourism," said Ott Vatter, the managing director of eResidency in Estonia. "While Estonia is not that dependent on the tourism sector, people are realizing the potential and the need for this type of offering; after Covid, the need accelerated." Tourism accounted for around 8 percent of the national G.D.P. for Estonia in 2019; and the Ministry of Internal Affairs expects at least a 50 percent reduction in tourism revenue in 2020 compared to 2019. Georgia's program, called "Remotely from Georgia," allows workers to stay and work there for up to six months. Like Bermuda, Georgia currently does not require that applying workers show a monthly minimum income; applicants however need to make the case that they have sufficient means to support their lifestyles. Diana Zhgenti, the Consul General of Georgia in New York, says that while there are no such financial restrictions for remote workers, the program is only available to citizens of 95 countries that are allowed to travel there visa free. Long term business workers will be required to quarantine for a period of 14 days upon arrival at their expense. It may not be for everyone Neville Mehra, hailing from Washington, D.C., left his last corporate job in 2017 and has since done remote digital strategy work through his company, Nampora. He currently lives and works in Valencia, Spain, though he has worked in more than 50 countries, including Georgia, and plans to return there with the new "Remotely from Georgia" program. "Over time, freelance digital nomads have started to ask what's the best quality of life, instead of 'where are the jobs'?" he said. "This is not about moving to a country and taking a job away from a local, but about spending locally at a higher level with a stronger currency." But while working remotely may be attractive to those who are able do their work with a laptop and a zippy internet connection, it may not be as easy for all professionals. Mr. Cassar also notes that living and working remotely in another country will carry some risks. "If I'm traveling across the country, even as a company employee, workers' comp may not cover me," he said. "If I am classified as an independent worker in the U.S., having that freelancer status of 'LLC' may not be recognized in other countries." Language can also be a barrier. Ketevan Buadze, who co founded the BSH law firm in Georgia that works with immigrants and remote workers, says that the country is extremely friendly to noncitizens, but noted that more "young people speak English, not so much the older folks." Those with children could have additional headaches. Families who plan on schooling their children from another country remotely may experience issues with time zone differences. Or those who would like to enroll their children in local schools may face limitations: Bermuda and Estonia have restrictions on what types of schools are open to enrollment of foreign children. "International families cannot access public schools, but the private school system," said Mr. Burt, the Bermuda premier. Estonia offers a few schooling options for international students including the Tallinn European School and the International School of Estonia (there are tuition fees for each). But in the end, the tipping point to temporarily relocate to a different country may just come down to safety. Sadie Millard, a New York City resident who has been in Bermuda since the pandemic started, said she plans to apply for the remote worker visa since her broker dealer firm remains closed. "There have been about 100 cases here in total," she said, "and although it is as expensive here as in New York City, I feel a lot safer. The only thing I've had to adjust to is driving on the other side of the road." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values . It is separate from the newsroom. From the start, the Trump Russia story has been both eye glazingly complex and extraordinarily simple. Who is Oleg Deripaska? What's the G.R.U. again? Who owed what to whom? The sheer number of crisscrossing characters and interlocking pieces of evidence the phone calls, the emails, the texts, the clandestine international meet ups has bamboozled even those who spend their days teasing it all apart. It's no wonder average Americans tuned out long ago. A bipartisan report released Tuesday by the Republican controlled Senate Intelligence Committee cuts through the chaff. The simplicity of the scheme has always been staring us in the face: Donald Trump's 2016 campaign sought and maintained close contacts with Russian government officials who were helping him get elected. The Trump campaign accepted their offers of help. The campaign secretly provided Russian officials with key polling data. The campaign coordinated the timing of the release of stolen information to hurt Hillary Clinton's campaign. The Senate committee's report isn't telling this story for the first time, of course. (Was it only a year ago that Robert Mueller testified before Congress about his own damning, comprehensive investigation?) But it is the first to do so with the assent of Senate Republicans, who have mostly ignored the gravity of the Trump camp's actions or actively worked to cast doubt about the demonstrable facts in the case. It's also a timely rebuke to the narrative that Attorney General William Barr has been hawking since before he took office early last year that "Russiagate" is a "bogus" scandal. Mr. Barr and other Trump allies claim that the Russia investigation was begun without basis and carried out with the intent of "sabotaging the presidency." That argument has been debunked by every investigative body that has spent any time looking into what happened, including the nation's intelligence community, Mr. Mueller's team, the Justice Department's inspector general and now the Senate Intelligence Committee. In fact, the committee report, which is nearly 1,000 pages long and is the fifth in a series examining Russian interference in 2016, goes further than Mr. Mueller's investigation. For example, Mr. Mueller declined to say whether Mr. Trump had lied under oath when he said that he did not recall speaking with Roger Stone, his longtime aide and confidant, about WikiLeaks, which released the batches of emails stolen by the Russians. But the Senate committee found that the president "did, in fact, speak with Stone about WikiLeaks and with members of his campaign about Stone's access to WikiLeaks on multiple occasions." The committee documented that, on Oct. 7, 2016, Mr. Stone received advance notice of the impending release of the "Access Hollywood" tape, in which Mr. Trump brags about sexually assaulting women. In response, Mr. Stone made at least two phone calls arranging for WikiLeaks to release stolen internal emails from the Democratic National Committee. The report also found that Konstantin Kilimnik, a longtime business associate of Mr. Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was a Russian intelligence officer, and may have been linked to the Russian military's hacking and leaking of the D.N.C. emails in the first place. Mr. Trump and his allies will parse and prevaricate forever. Ignore them. If it wasn't already overwhelmingly clear what was going on, it is now. As the Democrats on the committee put it in an appendix to the report: "This is what collusion looks like." Alas, the Republicans refused to join in on this straightforward assessment, stating in their own appendix that "we can now say with no doubt, there was no collusion." That is to insist that up is down. But call it whatever you like: The Intelligence Committee report shows clear coordination between Russians and the Trump campaign, though there is no evidence of an explicit agreement. The evidence the report lays out suggests Mr. Trump knew this at the time. Whether or not it can be proved that he ordered this interference or violated the law in doing so, the fact remains that neither he nor anyone else in his campaign alerted federal law enforcement authorities, as any loyal American should have. And remember: Mr. Trump tried this scheme again. The president was impeached for his efforts to invite foreign interference in the 2020 election, this time by Ukraine, again on his behalf. Part of that requested interference involved an attempt to smear Joe Biden. But the other part involved pinning the 2016 election interference on Ukraine rather than on Russia. Who was "almost certainly" one of the primary sources spreading that claim in the media, according to the senators' report? None other than Konstantin Kilimnik. There has never been any reliable evidence that Ukraine interfered in 2016; the Senate committee concluded as such, in line with all previous investigations. Russia is now attempting to help Mr. Trump again this November, according to American intelligence assessments reported in The Times. For any normal president, that would be a top of mind concern, and he or she would be marshaling all available resources to thwart it. What has Mr. Trump done? On Sunday night, he retweeted Russian propaganda that the U.S. intelligence community had already flagged as part of that country's efforts to skew the election. On Monday, Miles Taylor, a former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security in the Trump administration, wrote that the president "showed vanishingly little interest in subjects of vital national security interest, including cybersecurity, domestic terrorism and malicious foreign interference in U.S. affairs." He added, "the country is less secure as a direct result of the president's actions." There's no way to sugarcoat it. In less than three months, the American people could re elect a man who received a foreign government's help to win one election and has shown neither remorse nor reservations about doing so again. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
The warning labels were a minor addition to Mr. Trump's tweets, but they represented a big shift in how Twitter deals with the president. For years, the San Francisco company has faced criticism over Mr. Trump's posts on his most favored social media platform, which he has used to bully, cajole and spread falsehoods. But Twitter has repeatedly said that the president's messages did not violate its terms of service and that while Mr. Trump may have skirted the line of what was accepted under its rules, he never crossed it. That changed Tuesday after a fierce backlash over tweets that Mr. Trump had posted about Lori Klausutis, a young woman who died in 2001 from complications of an undiagnosed heart condition while working for Joe Scarborough, a Florida congressman at the time. As part of his long running feud with Mr. Scarborough, a host for MSNBC, Mr. Trump had posted false conspiracy theories about Ms. Klausutis's death in recent days suggesting that Mr. Scarborough was involved. Early Tuesday, a letter from the widower of Ms. Klausutis addressed to Jack Dorsey, Twitter's chief executive, became public. In it, Timothy Klausutis asked Twitter to delete Mr. Trump's tweets about his late wife, calling them "horrifying lies." Mr. Scarborough also called the tweets "unspeakably cruel." Others, including Katie Couric and the CNN anchor Jake Tapper, expressed sympathy for the Klausutis family, with Mr. Tapper calling Mr. Trump's tweets "malicious lies." Twitter said it was "deeply sorry about the pain these statements" were causing the Klausutis family, but said that it would not remove Mr. Trump's tweets because they did not violate its policies. Instead, the company added warning labels to other messages posted by the president on Tuesday, where he claimed the mail in ballots themselves would be illegally printed. Twitter determined that those unsubstantiated assertions could lead to voter confusion and that they merited a correction, said a person with knowledge of the deliberations who was not authorized to speak publicly. The changes immediately set off accusations by Mr. Trump, who has more than 80 million followers on Twitter, and his 2020 re election campaign that the company was biased against him. In a tweet, Mr. Trump said the company was "interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election" and added, in another post, that it was "completely stifling FREE SPEECH." Brad Parscale, a manager of the Trump 2020 campaign, said, "We always knew that Silicon Valley would pull out all the stops to obstruct and interfere with President Trump getting his message through to voters." A Twitter spokesman said Mr. Trump's tweets about mail in ballots "contain potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labeled to provide additional context." Disinformation experts said Twitter's move indicated how social media platforms that had once declared themselves neutral were increasingly having to abandon that stance. "This is the first time that Twitter has done something that has in some small way attempted to rein in the president," said Tiffany C. Li, a visiting professor at Boston University School of Law. "There's been a gradual shift in the way that Twitter has treated content moderation. You see them taking on more of their duty and responsibility to create a healthy online speech environment." Twitter faces singular pressure because it is Mr. Trump's most frequently used method of communicating with the public. Early in his presidency, he tweeted about nine times a day. He has since accelerated his pace, averaging 29 tweets a day this year and posting up to 108 times on May 10, according to a tally by The New York Times. Mr. Trump's high level of activity has brought attention and growth to Twitter. If the company deleted his tweets or altered them, it would escalate accusations from conservative politicians that it censors their political views or was biased against them. But by doing nothing, Twitter was also being "misguided," said Joan Donovan, research director at Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center, who studies disinformation. "If world leaders are not kept to the same standard as everyone else, they wield more power to harass, defame and silence others." The dilemma with Mr. Trump has put Mr. Dorsey under scrutiny. In a series of tweets last October, Mr. Dorsey said the company would ban all political ads from the service because they presented challenges to civic discourse, "all at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale." He worried such ads had "significant ramifications that today's democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle." Yet Mr. Dorsey had appeared unwilling to tackle Mr. Trump's tweets even though disinformation experts said political tweets from world leaders often reach a wider audience than political ads and have a greater power to misinform. Still, election misinformation is a sore spot for Twitter and Mr. Dorsey. The company faced heavy criticism, along with Facebook, for allowing Russian disinformation to run rampant on the platform during the 2016 presidential election. In 2018, Mr. Dorsey testified before Congress that he would put a stop to social media campaigns that sought to dissuade voters from participating in democracy. "We have learned from situations where people have taken advantage of our service and our past inability to address it fast enough," he said. Twitter is not the only tech company struggling with moderating Mr. Trump's threats and falsehoods online. Over the past few days, Mr. Trump posted identical comments about Ms. Klausutis's death on Facebook. One of his posts there gained about 4,000 comments and 2,000 shares and was not mentioned by Mr. Klausutis. On Twitter, that same post, which questioned whether Mr. Scarborough had gotten away with murder, was shared 31,000 times and received 23,000 replies. For years, Twitter took a hands off approach to moderating the posts on its platform. That brought it acclaim when it enabled dissidents to tweet about political protests, like the Egyptian revolution in 2011. But it also allowed trolls, bots and malicious operatives onto the site, making Twitter an epicenter for harassment, misinformation and abuse. In 2018, after all the criticism about the platform following the 2016 election, Mr. Dorsey said he would focus on molding Twitter to support "healthy" conversations. But Mr. Trump himself largely escaped enforcement. Although he sometimes deleted his own tweets when they contained misspellings, Twitter mostly left his posts alone. That hands off treatment was controversial inside Twitter. In 2017, a rogue Twitter worker deactivated Mr. Trump's account. The account was reinstated in about 10 minutes. Last year, Twitter said it would hide tweets of world leaders behind a warning label if their messages incited harassment or violence. It did not apply those labels to Mr. Trump's tweets. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Nearly a century ago, the publisher Alfred A. Knopf released a slim book of spiritual fables by an obscure Lebanese American poet and painter named Kahlil Gibran. Knopf had modest expectations, and printed around 1,500 copies. Much to his surprise, the book titled "The Prophet" took off. It became a huge hit, and went on to sell more than nine million copies in North America alone. Until now, the publishing house that still bears Knopf's name has held the North American copyright on the title. But that will change on Jan. 1, when "The Prophet" enters the public domain, along with works by thousands of other artists and writers, including Marcel Proust, Willa Cather, D. H. Lawrence, Agatha Christie, Joseph Conrad, Edith Wharton, P. G. Wodehouse, Rudyard Kipling, Katherine Mansfield, Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens. This coming year marks the first time in two decades that a large body of copyrighted works will lose their protected status a shift that will have profound consequences for publishers and literary estates, which stand to lose both money and creative control. But it will also be a boon for readers, who will have more editions to choose from, and for writers and other artists who can create new works based on classic stories without getting hit with an intellectual property lawsuit. A 1923 copy of "The Prophet." The work will enter the public domain on Jan. 1. "Books are going to be available in a much wider variety now, and they're going to be cheaper," said Imke Reimers, an assistant professor of economics at Northeastern University who has studied the impact of copyright. "Consumers and readers are definitely going to benefit from this." The sudden deluge of available works traces back to legislation Congress passed in 1998, which extended copyright protections by 20 years. The law reset the copyright term for works published from 1923 to 1977 lengthening it from 75 years to 95 years after publication essentially freezing their protected status. (The law is often referred to by skeptics as the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act," since it has kept "Steamboat Willie," the first Disney film featuring Mickey, under copyright until 2024.) Now that the term extension has run out, the spigot has been turned back on. Each January will bring a fresh crop of novels, plays, music and movies into the public domain. Over the next few years, the impact will be particularly dramatic, in part because the 1920s were such a fertile and experimental period for Western literature, with the rise of masters like F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf. "Eventually, these books belong to the people," said James L. W. West III, a Fitzgerald scholar. "We can have new attempts to edit and reinterpret all of these iconic texts." Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. Once books become part of the public domain, anyone can sell a digital, audio or print edition on Amazon. Fans can publish and sell their own sequels and spinoffs, or release irreverent monster mash ups like the 2009 best seller "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies." Vintage Classics is publishing a new edition of Robert Frost's "New Hampshire," which will feature the original woodcut art and some of his best known poems, including "Nothing Gold Can Stay" and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." Theater and film producers can adapt the works into movies, plays and musicals without having to secure rights. Rival publishing houses can issue new print editions, and scholars can publish new annotated versions and interpretations. Free digital copies will circulate online. At the start of the new year, Google Books, which has more than 30 million works scanned in its vast online digital library, will release full digital editions of works published in 1923, among them Edgar Rice Burroughs's "Tarzan and the Golden Lion" and Edith Wharton's "A Son at the Front." It's difficult to say exactly how many works will enter the public domain this January, because some authors and publishers allowed their copyright to lapse, and some foreign language books first published overseas in 1923 may remain under copyright for now, like Felix Salten's "Bambi." More than 130,000 copyright registrations were filed in 1923 for various creative works, but most of those were not renewed, according to John Mark Ockerbloom, a digital library strategist at the University of Pennsylvania. Some publishers and the writers' heirs fear that losing copyright protections will lead to inferior editions with typos and other errors, and to derivative works that damage the integrity of iconic stories. "Publishers are right to be concerned about a proliferation of unreliable editions, some of them probably not very good," said John Kulka, the editorial director of Library of America, a nonprofit organization that publishes American literary classics. Still, many scholars and legal experts argue that American copyright law, which is mind numbingly complex, has skewed toward enriching companies and the heirs of writers and artists at the expense of the public. When the first Copyright Act was passed in the United States in 1790, the maximum term was 28 years. Over the decades, lawmakers repeatedly prolonged the terms, which now stretch to over a century for many works. "It's worse than the tax code," said Rebecca Tushnet, an intellectual property expert at Harvard Law School. "The copyright term is way too long now." Next year, Penguin Classics is publishing new editions of several works from 1923, including Jean Toomer's "Cane." Some studies show that extending copyright can actually have a negative impact on the sales and availability of books. A few years ago, Paul J. Heald, a law professor at the University of Illinois, used software that randomly sampled books available on Amazon, and discovered that there were more new editions of books published in the 1910s than from titles published in the 2000s. Publishers often stop printing books that aren't selling, but still retain the copyright, so no one else can release new editions. Once the books enter the public domain, a wider variety of new editions become available again, filling in a hole in the public and cultural record. Legal experts say that Congress is unlikely to pass yet another copyright extension because the political dynamics have shifted over the decades, with growing public opposition to stringent intellectual property protections. For readers and book buyers, the proliferation of competing texts and editions will mean more selection and cheaper books. In 2019, the digital publisher Open Road Media is publishing around a dozen newly available works from 1923, including e books of Jean Toomer's "Cane," Gibran's "The Prophet," Sigmund Freud's "The Ego and the Id," P. G. Wodehouse's "The Inimitable Jeeves" and Christie's "The Murder on the Links," one of her early novels featuring the detective Hercule Poirot. Legacy publishers are also snapping up newly available works. Penguin Classics is releasing new editions of "Cane," Gibran's "The Prophet" and Proust's "The Prisoner." Vintage Classics is publishing a new edition of Robert Frost's "New Hampshire" which will feature the original woodcut art and some of his best known poems, including "Nothing Gold Can Stay" and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" as well as Dorothy Sayers's "Whose Body?" and three new editions of classic Agatha Christie novels. In anticipation of a flood of new editions of Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" when the copyright expires in 2021, the Fitzgerald estate and his publisher, Scribner, released a new edition of the novel in April, hoping to position it as the definitive version of the text. The novel has sold around 30 million copies worldwide, and continues to sell more than 500,000 copies a year in the United States alone. But in two years, anyone with a laptop will be able to publish an e book of the text, or sell fan fiction based on the story. An early copy of "The Great Gatsby," whose copyright expires in 2021. Fitzgerald's estate and his publisher, Scribner, released a new edition of the novel in April, hoping to position it as the definitive version of the text. Blake Hazard, Fitzgerald's great granddaughter and a trustee of his estate, said she hoped some interesting new interpretations of the story would emerge. But she also worries about what would happen to the novel's legacy when the inevitable homages and retellings land, which will probably include unauthorized Gatsby sequels or novels told from Daisy Buchanan's perspective. "I hope people maybe will be energized to do something original with the work, but of course the fear is that there will be some degradation of the text," Ms. Hazard said. But publishers who specialize in classics see a tremendous opportunity to reintroduce old works. Some have been planning for this moment for decades. Penguin Classics had a number of 1923 titles lined up for 1998, when the copyright for books published that year was set to lapse, but those plans were scrapped after Congress extended protections. About three years ago, Penguin's editorial team went back to their list of 1923 titles and began looking for classics that still resonate and sell well. Several jumped out, including "The Prophet." John Siciliano, the executive editor of Penguin Classics, wanted something to distinguish its edition of "The Prophet" from the others, so he decided to commission a new introduction from a contemporary poet. "I'd been thinking of who the perfect person would be, someone like Kahlil Gibran, a poet with mass appeal," he said. "It became obvious that Rupi Kaur was the one." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
The New York attorney general subpoenaed more than a dozen telecommunications trade groups, lobbying contractors and Washington advocacy organizations on Tuesday, seeking to determine whether the groups submitted millions of fraudulent public comments to sway a critical federal decision on internet regulation, according to a person with knowledge of the investigation. Some of the groups played a highly public role in last year's battle, when the Federal Communications Commission voted to revoke rules that classified internet service providers as public utilities. The regulations, made under President Barack Obama, were meant to guarantee full and equal access to the internet, a principle known as net neutrality. The telecommunications industry bitterly opposed them and enthusiastically backed a repeal under President Trump. The attorney general, Barbara D. Underwood, is investigating the source of more than 22 million public comments submitted to the F.C.C. during the battle over the regulations. Millions of comments were provided using temporary or duplicate email addresses, while others recycled identical phrases. Seven popular comments, repeated verbatim, accounted for millions more. The noise from the fake or orchestrated comments appears to have broadly favored the telecommunications industry: One recent study, by a researcher at Stanford, found that virtually all of the unique comments submitted to the F.C.C. the ones most likely to be bona fide opposed repeal. In September, The New York Times sued the F.C.C. to obtain digital records that would help trace the source of the public comments. The case is continuing. Most strikingly, many comments on net neutrality were falsely submitted under the names of real people, in what amounted to mass acts of virtual identity theft. Some comments used the name of dead people. Ms. Underwood's investigators have estimated that almost half of all of the comments more than nine million used stolen identities. The investigation has traced comments submitted through bulk uploads and through an F.C.C. service that allows advocates to solicit public comments on their own websites and then transmit them to the agency. Investigators have identified four buckets of apparently fraudulent comments, each of which appears to have been associated with a particular network of advocacy organizations, trade groups and consultants, including at least some on both sides of the debate. "The F.C.C.'s public comment process was corrupted by millions of fake comments," Ms. Underwood said in a statement. "The law protects New Yorkers from deception and the misuse of their identities. My office will get to the bottom of what happened and hold accountable those responsible for using stolen identities to distort public opinion on net neutrality." The companies and groups subpoenaed on Tuesday, according to the person with knowledge of the investigation, include Broadband for America, Century Strategies and MediaBridge. Broadband for America is a coalition supported by cable and telecommunications companies; Century Strategies is a political consultancy founded by Ralph Reed, the former director of the Christian Coalition; and MediaBridge is a conservative messaging firm whose website boasts of helping to place hundreds of thousands of comments on net neutrality during Mr. Obama's presidency on behalf of one client. In a statement, Century Strategies said it did not reveal the identity of clients as a matter of policy but defended its advocacy work. It said Ms. Underwood should focus her investigation on fraudulent comments submitted by groups supporting net neutrality. "We have worked to encourage citizens to contact government officials to oppose government regulation of the internet," the statement said. "We have directed our partners and vendors to follow above industry standards and protections, including requiring individuals to provide name, address, email and phone number to verify who they are. We perform extensive data validation to verify all names and addresses using public databases." Ms. Underwood, according to the person familiar with the investigation, also demanded records and communications from a collection of nonprofits, consultants and vendors that her office has linked to the Center for Individual Freedom. The center, an advocacy group created in the 1990s by a former tobacco lobbyist, set up efforts last year that yielded thousands of identical comments to the F.C.C. Records are also being sought from a Republican consulting firm called Vertical Strategies. The attorney general is also seeking records from several pro neutrality groups, including Free Press and Fight for the Future, a group that advocates for digital rights. Those groups are chiefly funded by foundations and individuals. Tim Karr, senior director of strategy and communications at Free Press, said his group would cooperate with Ms. Underwood. "We are responding to their requests and welcome this inquiry into the F.C.C.'s net neutrality comment process," he said. The net neutrality battle thrust a spotlight onto the grimy but increasingly high tech world of regulatory influence campaigns, in which industry and advocacy groups try to build a record of public support or opposition for proposed policies. Federal agencies and commissions that issue regulations are generally required to circulate them for public comment, creating an incentive to inundate agencies with millions of scripted comments that purport to come from real people. Digital messaging firms can generate thousands or millions of authentic seeming comments. Some use software to build unique seeming comments out of related phrases and words. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Responding to calls to make French industry more competitive by reducing labor costs, the Socialist government of President Francois Hollande said Tuesday that it would cut payroll taxes for businesses. But the government stopped short of adopting the broader changes that an expert panel led by a prominent business executive, Louis Gallois, recommended a day earlier in a report that called for a "competitiveness shock" to the French economy. Prime Minister Jean Marc Ayrault, after a meeting of officials to discuss the economy, said in a statement on Tuesday that the government had to act because "France has known 10 years of industrial stagnation." If the trend were allowed to continue, he added, the country's decline "would be a certainty." The government's plan to cut payroll taxes by 20 billion euros, or 25.6 billion, over three years is "a cultural shift for the French Socialists," said Gilles Moec, an economist at Deutsche Bank in London. "They've always looked with suspicion on the idea that there was a labor cost problem in France." To make up for the revenue shortfall, the government plans to raise the main sales tax while also making budget cuts. The Gallois report notes that France has lost 750,000 industrial jobs over the last decade as the country's trade balance has deteriorated. Prominent among the report's criticisms is that the tax burden borne by businesses and their employees as well as contracts and rules that make it difficult to fire workers renders French industry uncompetitive. The centerpiece of the response announced by Mr. Ayrault is a payroll tax cut that will lower the cost of labor for French companies. In theory, that would encourage new investment and reinvigorate exports. The first stages of the tax break will be applied to businesses' 2013 taxes when they file in 2014. By 2016, the 20 billion euro tax break would be fully in place and offset by 10 billion euros of yet unspecified spending cuts and at least 3 billion euros in environmentally focused "green taxes," as well as money from the higher sales tax. The size of the payroll tax reduction is in line with the recommendation of the government commissioned report prepared by the panel led by Mr. Gallois, a former chief executive of European Aeronautic Defense and Space. The report offered proposals meant to revive the French economy. But its prospects for success remain to be seen. The government chose to phase in the reduction over three years, rather than the one or two years Mr. Gallois said was necessary for the full impact. And it rejected his proposal that the share of payroll taxes paid by employees be cut by 10 billion euros. Mr. Ayrault said the tax credit would work out to a 6 percent reduction in social security charges on workers who make up to 2.5 times the minimum wage, which is now 9.40 euros an hour. Paying for the measures will require the government to break a vow by Mr. Ayrault in September that there would be no increase in sales taxes during Mr. Hollande's five year term. The decision could prove highly unpopular on the left because sales taxes are among the most regressive levies a state can impose, with the burden falling disproportionately on the poor, who spend a higher portion of their income than the rich do. The main sales tax, the value added tax, will rise in January 2014 to 20 percent from 19.6 percent, but the minimum value added tax, on basic needs like food, will fall to 5 percent from 5.5 percent. 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. The "intermediate tax," which covers things like restaurant meals and home renovations, will rise to 10 percent from 7 percent. Mr. Hollande won the French election in June, and the confidence of many investors, with a promise to bring France's 2013 budget deficit down to 3 percent the standard set by the European Union from about 4.5 percent this year. But many economists and some of his allies on the left have argued that cutting spending and raising taxes could weaken the economy further at a time when the euro zone is in recession and the global economy is faltering. The focus on cutting labor costs "is an economic misdiagnosis, it's a social error," Jean Claude Mailly, secretary general of Force Ouvriere, a relatively militant union, told Europe 1 radio on Tuesday. It will lead to "social dumping," he said, because the Germans will feel obligated to cut their own labor costs. "It will never end," he added. France's welfare state, one of the world's most generous, is largely financed by payroll taxes. And the so called social wedge the reduction in workers' take home pay that results from the taxes paid by them and their employers is among the largest in the world, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Unions and others on the left fear that reductions in financing for the system could lead to pressure for reduction in benefits for workers that include universal health care and solid pensions. Jorg Kramer, chief economist at Commerzbank in Frankfurt, noted that Germany had gone through its own labor market restructuring over the last decade. A core element of that program, he said, was a sharp reduction in benefits to the long term unemployed and a wider availability of temporary work, which put pressure on the unemployed to take any job. The result was a more flexible labor market and more moderate wage demands. The International Monetary Fund forecast on Monday that the French economy would expand 0.4 percent in 2013, after 0.1 percent this year. Mr. Moec of Deutsche Bank said the government's action would probably have little immediate economic effect. "I don't want to diminish the symbolic significance of what they've announced today," Mr. Moec said, "but the impact will probably be less than what the government would like to communicate." For one thing, he noted, businesses are already facing a tax increase next year, "and this will partially offset that." To some extent Mr. Hollande's government is giving back what it has already taken away. It raised business taxes in July as part of a supplementary budget. The 2013 budget that was introduced in September ended the full deductibility of interest payments, a de facto tax increase. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
And they're off! It's an exciting day in this sleepy Connecticut harbor town, folks, as the fighting Tyrones bolt from the starting line as if there were a pack of demons at their backs. That's because there is a pack of demons at their backs. I did say their name is Tyrone, right? Which means the odds of this hard working home team outstripping their nasty pursuers are, exactly, nil. That doesn't keep the scrappy marathoners from acting as fast as they can. Such were my impressions watching the highly adrenalized first half of the British born revival of Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night," which opened on Saturday night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theater. With the eminent stage and film stars Jeremy Irons and Lesley Manville leading the charge, O'Neill's autobiographical clan feels as jumped up as a startled racehorse. That's the case, anyway, during the first two (of four) acts of Richard Eyre's intense, imbalanced version of this most harrowing of family portraits, written in blood by O'Neill in the early 1940s but not unleashed on Broadway until 1956, three years after his death. From the moment the Tyrones make their entrances, fresh from the breakfast table, it feels as if nobody pauses to take a breath. What did the servants put into the Tyrones' coffee that morning? Maybe the same stuff with which the bartenders are spiking the rotgut in George C. Wolfe's current Broadway revival of "The Iceman Cometh," another lugubrious O'Neill masterpiece. Normally, these heavy lifting dramas have the pace of a funeral march. But like the newly energized "Iceman," this "Journey" is often downright sprightly. That doesn't mean that after three and half hours in the company of the Tyrones you don't still feel numb with fatigue. Mr. Eyre whose excellent, streamlined interpretation of Ibsen's "Ghosts," starring Ms. Manville, was seen at BAM three years ago has endowed the journey of this play's title with an early, unorthodox burst of frenzy. Though I didn't have the leisure to sort out just who these people onstage were in the opening scenes, I had no difficulty discerning the rhythms of their behavior. To wit: make nice with the enemy, then retreat, then attack. Repeat until everyone falls down from exhaustion. The enemy, in this case, are the members of a single internecine family, vis a vis one another and their own sorry, self defeating souls. They are spending what promises to be one very fraught summer together in their shabby family vacation home, by the docks, where the foghorns wail. (John Leonard is the first rate sound designer.) Each, it might be said, is in the throes of addiction. The men are heavy drinkers, while Mary, newly released from a sanitarium, is fighting a dependency on morphine. But the most poisonous addiction is one they all share: the irresistible urge to stab at one another's most vulnerable points, and then pretend they didn't really mean it. That inexorable cycle of recrimination and consolation is what gives the play its genuine pity and terror. Mary is the fulcrum of this circular process. And as soon as Ms. Manville opens her mouth, it is evident that in this "Journey," which originated at the Bristol Old Vic in Britain, its tragic patterns will take shape on fast forward. The idea seems to be that Mary thinks that if she moves quickly enough, and keeps deflecting the attention from herself to the others, the suspicious men in her life won't be able to tell if she's using again. Ms. Manville a paradigm of steely indirection in her brilliant Oscar nominated performance in last year's "Phantom Thread" is in fully aggressive attack mode as Mary, and she sets the pace for the others. For a while, it's a gripping, oddly enjoyable approach. I've never seen a "Journey" in which the characters are so literally up in one another's faces, pushing and pulling and scratching, before retreating into corners to regroup, before pouncing again. If the menfolk seem to disappear in the blaze of Mary's febrile energy, well, perhaps that's as it should be. Mom on dope is ultimately a solo act, a notion nicely underscored by Peter Mumford's shadow sectioned lighting of Rob Howell's oddly expressionist set, all reflective surfaces and towering bookcases. (Did the Tyrones really read that much?) In the play's second half, the Walpurgisnacht of reckoning to the first acts' dance of evasion, the action slows down to allow each character an aria of self explanation. And it's then you begin to sense that something's off kilter in this production. Could these people really be members of the same family, or even the same play? The willowy Mr. Beard's Edmund has a Method, 1950s twitchiness and whininess that bring to mind James Dean in "East of Eden." Mr. Keenan's Jamie is a relentless vaudeville shtick artist, all funny voices and rimshot gestures. In the meantime, Ms. Manville becomes increasingly Southern sounding and shrill, as if she were channeling an agitated Blanche DuBois. The other characters (rounded out by the folksy maid, Cathleen, given a broad comic spin by Jessica Regan) may speak of Mary as an absent presence, a ghost haunting her own past. But this Mary never seems to fully retreat into a reality denying haze, even when she's recalling her happy days as a convent girl. Mr. Irons, a Tony and Oscar winning actor for all seasons, turns in the most convincingly realized performance. His James is the usual vain, dashing skinflint, yes. But he is also a man of touchingly willful optimism, a professional actor who keeps putting on his best happy face until it melts right off him. This James and Mary, it must be said, are an unusually sexy old couple. The production is never more affecting than when the erotic chemistry that first brought them together flickers into fitful flame. That light is soon extinguished, of course. And by night's end, the cast looks so very, very tired from its sustained exertions. It's definitely time for everybody to go to bed, including the audience. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Sia the enigmatic, soulful singer songwriter who conceals her face behind wigs while belting out lines like, "there's a scream inside that we all try to hide" was "expelled from ballet at age 5," as she put it in an email interview, "for disrupting the class." Happily, the experience didn't stop her from loving dance. Over the past few years, Sia, with her choreographer, Ryan Heffington, has done more to raise the standards of dance in pop music than nearly any current artist integrating the forms. For Sia, dance is more than a way to give a music video a splash of pizazz; instead, it's "an expression that crosses all language barriers," she said. "If people can't understand the words, they will understand the content." The Sia Heffington approach will be on ample display in Sia's new show, opening Sunday, July 24, as part of Panorama at Randalls Island and will tour Europe and the United States through November. Sia calls the concert, choreographed from start to finish, "performance art that is dance driven." That's not a bad description of her videos and live performances on programs like "Saturday Night Live." Raw emotion bubbles inside of stringently built movement. And the real difference: She's not afraid of ugly. "I really like to support Ryan's freak flag," she said. "The weirder the better for me." Maddie Ziegler in Sia's "Chandelier" spinning and hopping madly while wearing a nude leotard is a far cry from the typical dance in a pop video, where militaristic arrangements of backup dancers follow the beat like human metronomes or, on the opposite end, sultry, slow motion movement borders on soft porn. The look of the touring show, which features five dancers, including Ms. Ziegler (also formerly of the TV show "Dance Moms") is straightforward. As Sia sings her hits and songs from her latest album, "This Is Acting," she is joined by dancers on a generally bare, rectangular stage. (The cast also highlights Nick Lanzisera and Wyatt Rocker, who appear in Sia's "Cheap Thrills" video.) "There's not a lot of wild lighting," Mr. Heffington said. "There are these interstitial moments that are either choreography or verbal sounds breathing, text, mumbling that kind of are an extension of the piece either prior or post." Mr. Heffington's choreography is either new or based on what he has made for her videos. Beyond that, he is reluctant to give too much away. "There's magic in it," he said with laugh. "What I love about Sia is that her concepts are absolutely simple and so engaging and so smart. Even 'Chandelier': It's the most simple concept." In that video, Ms. Zeigler is Sia's doppelganger. With bare feet, thrashing legs and a wild child innocence Sia described it as a "person on the verge of a nervous breakdown" she seems primal, even awkward, but in no way erotic. Mr. Heffington doesn't believe that dance is underused in pop music more that it is abused much of the time by adhering to an easy formula. "We established the artist and backup dancers, I believe, in the early '80s," he said. "There has to be evolution, and there is. We're doing it." He added: "I'm impressed when I go and see Beyonce in concert I'm absolutely floored by the spectacle. I'm not emotionally charged or engaged at all." Mr. Heffington calls his approach to choreography human based. "When you do gestures, everyone knows what that feels like," he said. "It doesn't become a superhuman exercise onstage, but rather a story that we all know. Even if you haven't been through it, you understand the emotion." Sia discovered Mr. Heffington when she attended a performance of his 2013 production of "KTCHN," a dance installation inspired by the works of the visual artist Nolan Hendrickson, in Los Angeles. At that point, Sia said, she "logged him in my mental Rolodex for future collaboration." She added: "I was so so inspired by that show. I felt a connection to his work that I rarely, if ever, feel watching other dance." Mr. Heffington, 43, began his dance training at the age of 8 in Yuba City, Calif.; after moving to Los Angeles in 1991, he found the commercial dance world lacking and began to choreograph on his own, creating pieces for clubs and showcases. In the '90s, along with Bubba Carr, he created "Psycho Dance Sho," an adventurous cabaret act that touched on violence and comedy while experimenting with gender bending. As he put it, there were no rules. His aesthetic, which wouldn't feel out of place in the downtown New York dance scene, is a poetic mix of Yvonne Rainer, the postmodern dance legend who embraced pedestrian movement, and Darcel or Darcel Leonard Wynne the glamorous "Solid Gold" dancer. (She is one of his favorites.) Mr. Heffington, who has choreographed for many artists, including Arcade Fire ("We Exist") and Florence and the Machine ("The Odyssey"), is increasingly in demand. Recently, he worked on Kenzo's new perfume campaign, which includes a film directed by Spike Jonze. On Saturday, July 30, he is to unveil a dance at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles for its Summer Happenings series. As for Sia, Mr. Heffington said he grasped her music visually. "It's really easy for me to translate," he said. "It's almost always instant. I trust; I feel something. Of course, there is a lot of direction from Sia. It's not a long, painstaking rehearsal process. It comes and, sure, I fine tune, but I don't work on something and go, 'Oh my God it's not working.' It's like an inner voice. I can't nitpick, and I can't deconstruct. It kills it for me." So far, Sia has left the dancing in her videos to others. "I love to dance," she said. "I have always been the first on the dance floor, but I'm not teachable. I couldn't learn 'five, six, seven, eight' if my life depended on it. Ryan keeps trying to convince me to do a video myself, and I find that so flattering, but I'm too afraid or lazy." (Please give it a whirl.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Three women suffered severe, permanent eye damage after stem cells were injected into their eyes, in an unproven treatment at a loosely regulated clinic in Florida, doctors reported in an article published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine. One, 72, went completely blind from the injections, and the others, 78 and 88, lost much of their eyesight. Before the procedure, all had some visual impairment but could see well enough to drive. The cases expose gaps in the ability of government health agencies to protect consumers from unproven treatments offered by entrepreneurs who promote the supposed healing power of stem cells. The women had macular degeneration, an eye disease that causes vision loss, and they paid 5,000 each to receive stem cell injections in 2015 at a private clinic in Sunrise, Fla. The clinic was part of a company then called Bioheart, now called U.S. Stem Cell. Staff members there used liposuction to suck fat out of the women's bellies, and then extracted stem cells from the fat to inject into the women's eyes. The disastrous results were described in detail in the journal article, by doctors who were not connected to U.S. Stem Cell and treated the patients within days of the injections. An accompanying article by scientists from the Food and Drug Administration warned that stem cells from fat "are being used in practice on the basis of minimal clinical evidence of safety or efficacy, sometimes with the claims that they constitute revolutionary treatments for various conditions." Kristin C. Comella, the chief science officer of U.S. Stem Cell, said in an interview that the clinic did not need F.D.A. approval because it was treating patients with their own cells, which are not a drug. She said the stem cell treatments were comparable to patients' receiving grafts of their own skin a procedure not a drug. Two of the eye patients sued the clinic and settled, but it has faced no other penalties. Ms. Comella said it no longer treats eyes, but continues to treat five to 20 patients a week for other problems like torn knee cartilage and degenerating spinal discs. All three women found U.S. Stem Cell because it had listed a study on a government website, clinicaltrials.gov provided by the National Institutes of Health. Two later told doctors they thought they were participating in government approved research. But no study ever took place, and the proposed study on the site had no government endorsement. Clinical trials do not need government approval to be listed on the website. Promising stem cell research in eye disease and other conditions is taking place. But researchers and health officials have been warning for years that patients are at risk from hundreds of private clinics that have sprung up around the United States and overseas, offering stem cell treatments for all manner of ailments, like injured knees, damaged spinal discs, neurological diseases and heart failure. Businesses promising "regenerative medicine" have multiplied, with little or no regulation. Stem cells, which can develop into many different types of cells, are thought to have tremendous potential to repair or replace tissue damaged by disease, injury or aging. But so far, the F.D.A. has approved only a few stem cell products to treat certain blood disorders. The women in Florida suffered detached retinas, in which the thin layer of light sensing cells that send signals to the optic nerve pulls away from the back of the eye a condition that usually needs prompt surgery to prevent blindness. Doctors who examined the patients said they suspected that the stem cells had grown onto the retina and then contracted, pulling it off the eyeball. One woman had such high pressure inside her eyes about three times the normal level that it may have damaged her optic nerves. Doctors operated quickly to relieve the pressure, but she became blind. "The really horrible thing about this is that you would never, nobody practicing good medicine would ever do an experimental procedure on a patient on both eyes on the same day," said Dr. Thomas A. Albini, an author of the article who saw two of the patients, at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. Standard practice, he said, is to treat one eye at a time, usually the worse eye first, so that if something goes wrong at least the patient still has one eye left with some vision. Dr. Albini said his team alerted the F.D.A. after the second patient showed up. "They did send an investigator who took statements from us," he said. "They apparently wrote up a report, which as far as I know is still not finished or available for public consumption." Andrea Fischer, a spokeswoman for the F.D.A. said the agency could not comment on whether an investigation had been conducted. Two of the women were not available for interviews because their lawsuit settlements in 2016 included nondisclosure agreements, according to their lawyer, Andrew B. Yaffa, of Coral Gables, Fla. He also was barred from discussing the case, but a publicly available complaint he filed in July 2016 details one patient's story, and states that the injections were performed by a nurse practitioner who was introduced as a physician. The third patient did not sue, but did not respond to a request for an interview made through her doctor. (The patients were not named in the journal article.) Ms. Comella, from U.S. Stem Cell, said that an independent review board had approved the proposed eye study, including the plan to treat both eyes at once. She said a total of three patients ever received eye injections at the clinic, and were not part of a trial. She declined to confirm that they were the same three patients described in the journal article, but the article links the women to the clinic. She declined to discuss the cases further, citing the nondisclosure agreement. But she said that U.S. Stem Cell had successfully treated thousands of patients for other conditions, and that it was misleading to draw attention to "a handful of adverse events." U.S. Stem Cell also makes money by training doctors to extract stem cells from fat. And in a blog post on Tuesday its chief executive, Mike Tomas, said the company expected to open clinics throughout the Middle East, in Kuwait, Dubai and Qatar. But the company, which is a penny stock, is struggling financially, and as recently as last fall warned investors that its poor financial situation put it at risk of going out of business. Clinics like U.S. Stem Cell that extract stem cells from fat fall into a gray zone. Regulations say stem cells do not have to be F.D.A. approved if they are the patient's own and are "minimally manipulated" but some clinics may stretch that term to suit their own purposes. The F.D.A. website has a page that warns "the hope that patients have for cures not yet available may leave them vulnerable to unscrupulous providers of stem cell treatments that are illegal and potentially harmful." The F.D.A. article in The New England Journal of Medicine suggested that adverse events from stem cell treatments "are probably much more common than is appreciated, because there is no reporting requirement when these therapies are administered outside clinical investigations." Like the Florida patients, people who consult clinicaltrials.gov may assume that the studies listed there have been approved by the F.D.A. or the National Institutes of Health, but that is not necessarily the case, Renate Myles, an N.I.H. spokeswoman, said. In an email, Ms. Myles said, "The information on ClinicalTrials.gov is provided by the study sponsor or principal investigator and posting on ClinicalTrials.gov does not necessarily reflect endorsement by the N.I.H. ClinicalTrials.gov does not independently verify the scientific validity or relevance of the trial itself beyond a limited quality control review." Ms. Myles said that the site urges patients to consult their own doctors about joining studies and includes caveats in multiple places. "However, we agree that such caveats need to be clearer to all users and will be adding a more prominent disclaimer in the near future," she added. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Danielle Deadwyler is an actress juggling theater roles with recent television opportunities in "Greenleaf" and Tyler Perry's "The Haves and the Have Nots." ATLANTA Danielle Deadwyler dreamed of being an actress, but in 2008 when she was a teaching assistant at a charter school, it seemed like an impossibility. Yes, the theater scene here was budding, but film and television opportunities were few and far between. Still, she took a chance. She landed a role in a production of "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf" at Kenny Leon's True Colors Theater Company. That was all the confirmation she needed to make acting her life's work, even if the way forward was unclear. Fast forward a decade, and Ms. Deadwyler is juggling roles and auditions for both stage and screen, while developing her passion projects. Like many of her fellow performers, she can thank the huge increase in movie and television filming in Georgia. She's LaQuita "Quita" Maxwell on Tyler Perry's "The Haves and the Have Nots," the crazy sister of the actress Tika Sumpter's character's even crazier ex boyfriend. It's not a big role, but during the show's five years and counting run, it has allowed her to remain a fixture on the local theater scene while exposing her to casting opportunities on many other projects being shot in the state, and beyond. In the last few years she's been in the Pulitzer Prize winning play "Clybourne Park" at Aurora Theater, in nearby Lawrenceville; portrayed an actress injured doing Shakespeare in "Smart People" at True Colors; and played multiple roles in "The Temple Bombing," at the Alliance Theater, one of her regular acting homes. She also received a fellowship to produce a series of performance art pieces about the ways women's bodies are used for labor. It was practically impossible to make a full time living as an actor in Atlanta, and performers often had to travel to New York for regional theater, television and film auditions. But in 2008, everything changed. The governor signed a new tax law, allowing for up to 30 percent of Georgia production spending to be transferred into tax credits. Everything from recording a film score to catering on a set can qualify for a credit, with no dollar amount limit, as long as a Georgia vendor is used. Yellow production signs started appearing all over the city, and beloved theater actors started appearing on the silver screen. "My OGs tell me stories of the days you had to drive two plus hours for an audition every time, callbacks included," Ms. Deadwyler said. "Now, I'm able to take my son to school, go prep for my audition, do the audition and pick him up to be home to make dinner." According to the Georgia Department of Economic Development, the film and television industry made a 9.5 billion impact on the state in fiscal year 2017, making the state the top filming location in the world. Some 40 major movies and network television shows are now shooting in the state, and countless more independent projects. Among those recently filmed: "Black Panther," "Hidden Figures," "The Real Housewives of Atlanta," "Stranger Things," and, of course, the Emmy winning FX comedy "Atlanta." The flood started with a trickle, thanks to movies like "Drumline" and "ATL," which showcased the city's cultural landscape. The emergence of Tyler Perry Studios in 2008 marked a colossal turning point. The original studio was located in southwest Atlanta; in 2016 Mr. Perry completed construction on a facility that sits on more than 300 acres of an old army base near the airport. Mr. Perry has three shows on the Oprah Winfrey Network right now; and in the past year, 33 different productions have filmed at the studios. Bethany Anne Lind and her husband, who is also an actor, moved here from North Carolina in 2006, just before the industry boom. She got her first day player role on Lifetime's "Drop Dead Diva"; the director of her episodes found a spot for her in the cast of the ABC Family (now Freeform) network's "Mean Girls 2" in 2011. Last year, she appeared on five episodes of "Ozark," the Netflix series with Jason Bateman and Laura Linney. She recently filmed "Lore" for Amazon Prime, and this spring is working on two independent films. She also found time to star as Viola (the Gwyneth Paltrow role) in Alliance Theater's stage version of "Shakespeare in Love." "No one can earn their living doing theater in Atlanta, because there's not enough work," Ms. Lind said bluntly. "So if you're going to make a living as an actor, you have to be on camera." "I think I got here at just the right time," she added. "Three or four years ago, all of the agencies in town were swamped and couldn't keep up, but they're figuring it out now." Enoch King, who has been acting in the Atlanta market for 20 years, filmed alongside Jason Ritter on ABC's "Kevin (Probably) Saves the World" last October while he was onstage in Lucas Hnath's play "The Christians" at Actor's Express theater. By the time the episodes aired, he was in rehearsals for "A Raisin in the Sun" at American Stage in St. Petersburg, Fla. "I thought that my talent only translated in Atlanta, but film and television has shown me that I can do this anywhere," said Mr. King. "It's really invigorating." Actors' Equity recently released its first regional theater report, which compared the number of union members in a given market to the number of work weeks per year. Although there are two dozen professional theater companies in metropolitan Atlanta, the 520 union members in the Atlanta area average 5.6 weeks of stage work per year. That leaves a lot of room for work in non Equity stage productions, as well as film, television, commercials and industrials. Some actors try to balance it all by negotiating a "hard out" that allows them to be released from the set of a TV shoot at a certain time. But that's a risk one that Andrew Benator took while he was on set for a recurring role in Fox's "The Gifted," while in the Alliance's productions of "Crossing Delancey" and "A Christmas Carol" last fall. (He has also appeared in "Stranger Things," "Tyler Perry's House of Payne" and "Being Mary Jane.") "I was on set for 12 hours filming that day, left at 5:30 p.m., picked up some Chick fil A, cleared my head and did opening night of 'Crossing Delancey,'" he recalled. Even with the long hours, Mr. Benator, like most actors, enjoys the variety. "If I was doing a lot of TV, I'd want to do a play and if I was doing a lot of theater, I'd want to do film and TV," he said. "I just like to do good writing." Ms. Deadwyler is optimistic as well. "I can do theater, film and TV in this city," she said. "I can do indie, experimental and commercial film projects in this city. Atlanta has its limitations and challenges. However, with work and ingenuity, an artist can craft a creative life." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Three diseases, leading killers of Americans, often involve long periods of decline before death. Two of them heart disease and cancer usually require expensive drugs, surgeries and hospitalizations. The third, dementia, has no effective treatments to slow its course. So when a group of researchers asked which of these diseases involved the greatest health care costs in the last five years of life, the answer they found might seem surprising. The most expensive, by far, was dementia. The study looked at patients on Medicare. The average total cost of care for a person with dementia over those five years was 287,038. For a patient who died of heart disease it was 175,136. For a cancer patient it was 173,383. Medicare paid almost the same amount for patients with each of those diseases close to 100,000 but dementia patients had many more expenses that were not covered. On average, the out of pocket cost for a patient with dementia was 61,522 more than 80 percent higher than the cost for someone with heart disease or cancer. The reason is that dementia patients need caregivers to watch them, help with basic activities like eating, dressing and bathing, and provide constant supervision to make sure they do not wander off or harm themselves. None of those costs were covered by Medicare. "It's stunning that people who start out with the least end up with even less," said Dr. Kenneth Covinsky, a geriatrician at the University of California in San Francisco. "It's scary. And they haven't even counted some of the costs, like the daughter who gave up time from work and is losing part of her retirement and her children's college fund." Dr. Diane E. Meier, a professor of geriatrics and palliative care at Mount Sinai Hospital, said most families are unprepared for the financial burden of dementia, assuming Medicare will pick up most costs. "What patients and their families don't realize is that they are on their own," Dr. Meier said. Everything gets complicated when a person has dementia, noted Dr. Christine K. Cassel, a geriatrician and chief executive of the National Quality Forum. She described a familiar situation: If a dementia patient in a nursing home gets a fever, the staff members say, "I can't handle it" and call 911, she said. The patient lands in the hospital. There, patients with dementia tend to have complications they get delirious and confused, fall out of bed and break a bone, or they choke on their food. Medical costs soar. To obtain cost estimates, Dr. Kelley and her colleagues used data from the Health and Retirement Survey, a federally funded study that conducts detailed interviews every two years with a nationally representative sample of older people, getting an average response rate of 86 percent. It collects data on participants' incomes, health and needs for care. It includes data on subjects' cognitive functioning and the likelihood that they are demented, and on their total out of pocket spending. The survey links to the Medicare database, which provides data on participants' total medical costs, and to the National Death Index. After people die, their families are questioned again about health care spending, including spending on nursing homes and home health care. To estimate the costs of unpaid care a daughter who leaves her job to care for a mother with Alzheimer's disease, for example the researchers used 20 an hour, the average for a home health care aide. The reason for the big disparities in out of pocket costs for the three diseases, Dr. Kelley said, is that Medicare covers discrete medical services like office visits and acute care such as hospitalization and surgery. Expenses for cancer patients and heart patients tend to be of that sort. They often do not need full time home or nursing home care until the very end of their life, if at all, so do not have that continuing cost. Dementia patients, in contrast, need constant care for years. They may not be sick enough for a nursing home but cannot be left alone. When they are sick enough for a nursing home, that cost is not covered by health insurance. More than half of patients with dementia and three quarters of those from racial minorities spend down, using savings to pay for the nursing home until nothing is left. Then Medicaid, the federal state program for low income people, takes over. "It's a terribly expensive disease," said Virginia Benson, whose 91 year old husband, George, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, has Alzheimer's. Mr. Rakis remains actively involved in his mother in law's care, overseeing her needs, including going with her when she ends up in an emergency room. He speaks regularly to doctors, nurses and social workers from Mount Sinai's Visiting Doctors Program who make house calls. He has what amounts to a second job taking care of her, despite the full time home health care aides he pays for. "We were fortunate," he said. "The money was there. But it went pretty quickly." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Jaclyn Backhaus, who wrote "India Pale Ale," often brings food from a favorite deli to members of the cast during rehearsal. This Playwright Has Been Listening to Her Mother Scrunched up against a counter at the Punjabi Grocery Deli, an East Village hole in the wall, Jaclyn Backhaus tucked into a vegetarian lunch she had handpicked for two: saag curry, chana paneer, pakoras and daal. The 32 year old Punjabi American playwright, whose breakout "Men on Boats" was a 2015 Off Broadway hit, is very familiar with this place, as she often takes out food there for the cast of her new play, "India Pale Ale," opening Oct. 23 at the Manhattan Theater Club. The drama, which earned Ms. Backhaus the prestigious Horton Foote Prize, is about a Punjabi community in Wisconsin and one young woman's quest to resist family pressure to get married. Nearing 30, Basminder "Boz" Batra (played by Shazi Raja) wants to forge her own path, which in this case means leaving her hometown and opening a bar in Madison. "The play is a really personal exploration of essentially my story," Ms. Backhaus explained, "but also an alternate reality." Speaking of which: In several scenes cast members play pirates, a loving tribute to those who sail the seas without adhering to a traditional lifestyle. South Asian stories in American film and theater remain fairly scant; it's often marriage tales arranged or otherwise that break through, whether in Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon's Oscar nominated "The Big Sick" or 2007's "The Namesake," starring Kal Penn and based on the novel by Jhumpa Lahiri. While the outlines of Ms. Backhaus's play seem similar, it's a departure in a few ways. More often than not, the stories are told from a male point of view. In addition, this is a second generation story, not a first. Basminder's immediate family, including her parents Deepa and Sunny (Purva Bedi and Alok Tewari) were born in Wisconsin and are largely assimilated. They know their Fiona Apple; Deepa understands her daughter's desire to leave their small town. The playwright herself grew up in the suburbs of Phoenix, the product of an interracial marriage. Bhira is from Yuba City in Northern California and Ms. Backhaus's father, Andrew, is a German Catholic from New Jersey. "My first reaction when I read it was, 'Wow, you've been listening,' " Bhira said in a phone interview. Ms. Backhaus's parents never urged her to marry a Punjabi man. In fact, it was Bhira (now a novelist and English professor) who was ostracized for marrying outside the community, to a man she met in college. (Andrew works at a Tempe based company that specializes in high altitude training.) Bhira's father was among the earliest Punjabi immigrants to the United States. Neither parent met her husband until Bhira's mother was dying of breast cancer. Her father died 11 months later, never having explicitly forgiven her. Bhira wanted a different experience for her own daughter. "She always said, 'You can do whatever you want to do. You can believe whatever you want to do. We'll support you in that,'" Ms. Backhaus said of her mother. Her parents encouraged her to pursue theater at New York University and never pressured her to attend engineering or medical school, a story many first generation South Asian children know well and is winked at in the play. She wasn't brought up practicing Sikhism, her mother's faith, or really any sort of religion at all. But that doesn't mean Ms. Backhaus has fully rejected the culture of Bhira's youth. "As I've become older, there's something that connects me to it," Ms. Backhaus said. She began writing plays when she was 8. An early effort was a musical starring her hamster, her little brother, and, of course, herself. Her first full length play, written as a high school senior, was about two men on sabbatical from Merrill Lynch who move to Tibet to write a novel. "India Pale Ale" was initially set in California, where her mother grew up, with Basminder written as a middle schooler. Ms. Backhaus eventually shelved the project after 10 pages. Years later, in 2017, Ms. Backhaus started over, partially inspired by President Trump signing an executive order banning travel from several majority Muslim countries. She wrote a full length draft in just a week on a retreat with other playwrights. The play was now set in Wisconsin, and a plot element was added, inspired by the 2012 shooting at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek that killed six. The shooting viscerally impacted Bhira, who wrote a New York Times Op Ed in the aftermath. "I saw the faces of my own brothers and sisters, aunties and uncles, contorted with terror," she wrote. Ms. Backhaus said she chose to include it because of another childhood memory: The murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh gas station owner, just days after Sept. 11 in Mesa, Arizona, near where she grew up. "That underbelly of fear and disgust at how members of the same country can turn on each other was shocking," she recalled. As for those pirates, Ms. Backhaus said she is drawn to figures who sail their own way. ("Men on Boats" had women playing the explorers of the title.) Remind you of anyone? "It's a pirate attitude that got my mom to where she is," Ms. Backhaus said. "It's a pirate attitude that lot of people with dreams face when they're trying to attain them." Ms. Backhaus isn't quite the buccaneer. She did go off on her own but with the approval of her family. She and her husband, Andrew Scoville, a theater director, are raising a 2 year old in Ridgewood, Queens. But she's tried to keep up some Punjabi customs, especially when it comes to food. Her mother regularly cooked chicken curry, aloo gobi and roti for the family. Last Christmas season, Ms. Backhaus prepared a big pot of lamb curry, saffron rice and aloo gobi for her own brood. Her mother flew across the country to be there and to take the pressure off. "We didn't make the roti," Ms. Backhaus reported. "I said, 'We're making roti!' She was like, 'No, it's too much work. You don't want to stress out.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
In his 20s and early 30s, Eric Sirota was a single physicist who lived alone and often felt like Victor, the solitary scientist in Mary Shelley's novel "Frankenstein." Mr. Sirota, who also composes musicals, even began working on one inspired by the Frankenstein story. "The message is that everyone deserves a chance at love," he said of his interpretation. "You have to go find it and nurture it but it's something people are entitled to, and it makes them better people." His own search for love was an endurance test: He estimated that in the 1980s and early '90s, before internet dating sites even existed, he went on 110 dates, most of them blind and so uninteresting, he thought about science experiments during them. "I wanted someone who was exactly like me, who thought like me," said Mr. Sirota, 58. "I now know that would be easier, but incomplete." When he met Cara London in 1991 at a crowded singles event aboard the Intrepid, the aircraft carrier docked in the Hudson River, he didn't recognize himself in her at all. Mr. Sirota is meticulous, mathematical and alphabetizes everything; she was a "flighty artist," she said, who was mystified by physics and had never alphabetized anything in her life. At the time, she lived in an Upper East Side apartment with a Westie named Rocky. He disliked dogs, and cats too. They had almost nothing in common but liked each other immediately. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
A Broadway revival of "My Fair Lady" will close on July 7, about 16 months after it began performances. The widely praised revival, produced by the nonprofit Lincoln Center Theater, was nominated for 10 Tony Awards, but won only for its costume design. At a moment when the gender politics of classic musicals came under new scrutiny, it managed to reframe the relationship between the flower seller Eliza Doolittle and her mentor, Henry Higgins. The show was grossing more than 1 million a week for much of its run, but recently has softened at the box office, last week pulling in 773,979. Lincoln Center's production is the fifth Broadway edition of the beloved musical, which first opened in 1956. The show, based on George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion," features music by Frederick Loewe, with book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner. Bartlett Sher is the director. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
AMERICAN BALLET THEATER at the Metropolitan Opera (through July 6). The company continues its Lincoln Center spring season with "Le Corsaire" through Saturday, followed by eight performances of Kenneth MacMillan's sumptuous "Manon" beginning on Monday. In that performance, Hee Seo makes her debut in the titular role, opposite Roberto Bolle as Des Grieux. The full length production is also Bolle's swan song at Ballet Theater: On Thursday, he gives his farewell performance. And Wednesday's matinee will surely be a hot ticket, too, with debuts by Misty Copeland, Catherine Hurlin and Calvin Royal III. 212 362 6000, abt.org AURELIEN BORY AND COMPAGNIE 111 at BAM Howard Gilman Opera House (June 20 22, 7:30 p.m.). Bory, a circus artist, returns to Brooklyn with "Espaece," inspired by the work of the French writer Georges Perec specifically "Species of Spaces," his essay collection. The title combines two French words, espece and espace ("species" and "space"), and is related to Perec's belief that "to live is to pass from one space to another while doing your very best not to bump yourself." In the piece, three acrobat dancers, joined by the actor Olivier Martin Salvan and the opera singer Claire Lefilliatre, attempt to move and scale a large black wall; as Bory sees it, this action reveals their humanity. 718 636 4100, bam.org JACOB'S PILLOW DANCE FESTIVAL in Becket, Mass. (June 19 Aug. 25). This festival opens its 87th season with the Canadian contemporary ballet company Ballet BC, which celebrates 10 years with Emily Molnar as artistic director. The program includes the United States premiere of "Bedroom Folk" by the Israeli choreographers Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar, as well as Medhi Walerski's "Petite Ceremonie" and Molnar's most recent piece, "To This Day," set to songs from Jimi Hendrix's "Blues." Other offerings include Circa, based in Brisbane, Australia, performing "What Will Have Been," a work for three acrobats and a violinist, as well as two Inside/Out presentations: Kotchegna Dance Company from Africa's Ivory Coast (Wednesday) and the tap dancer and choreographer Luke Hickey (June 20). 413 243 0745, jacobspillow.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Compared with some of the larger, more ostentatious resorts in nearby Montego Bay and Ocho Rios, the Melia Braco Village has a laid back vibe befitting Jamaica, birthplace of reggae. Opened in January 2016, after a reported 23.5 million overhaul of an existing resort site, the 84 acre property put the emphasis on "village" the outdoor decor has the feel of a 1950s American suburb, with gazebos, fountains, neatly manicured lawns and two pools with covered swim up bars. The main attraction, of course, is the private beach, all white sand and turquoise water, with a long, narrow cove stretching into the Caribbean Sea. (Snorkeling, sailing, canoeing and other sports can be practiced for additional fees.) The 232 rooms are mostly in three story tan buildings, set along gray cobblestone paths near palm and banyan trees. Melia Hotels International, a 60 year old Spanish chain, took over the government owned property, the Grand Lido Braco, in small, lush Trelawny Parish, boyhood home of the Olympic track star Usain Bolt, after its previous owner, SuperClubs, reportedly ran into problems with its lease. Last spring, the resort opened 876 Prime, a high end steakhouse (no flip flops allowed); a 10,000 square foot meeting space for large business groups is under construction. Like most of the beachside resorts near Montego Bay and Ocho Rios, the Melia Braco is secluded and encourages guests to remain on the property behind tall fences and a security booth. It's about 33 miles east of Sangster International Airport, a bit removed from the more expensive properties that include Sandals and Iberostar. Renting a car gives you the flexibility to head out to attractions such as a tourist village along the nearby Martha Brae River, known for its rafting. But residents frown on tourists motoring about, given the crazy, pedestrians and goats in the highway quality of Jamaican traffic. Of the driving time to reach our hotel, an airport rental car employee told me: "For us, 25 minutes; for you, 45." Frills were clearly played down during the Village's overhaul, and that approach was evident in the rooms off white walls, hardwood floors, small white table and chairs, a small piece of art depicting a palm tree at sunset and nondescript light fixtures. We switched from a second floor, one bed Deluxe Garden Room, with a balcony overlooking the sea to a two bed Premium Beachfront room on the first floor. The first room had a better view, but both were equally comfortable (plenty of pillows on the beds) and distraction free. The point of this resort is the sun and the ocean, not lounging around in the rooms. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
There were three winners at Sunday's Marathon Project, a bright spot in an otherwise uncertain year for professional runners. Sara Hall, racing just 11 weeks after her second place finish at the London Marathon, won the women's race in 2 hours 20 minutes 32 seconds, a personal best and the second fastest time ever run by an American woman. Martin Hehir, a fourth year medical student who was coming off weeks of treating Covid 19 patients in an intensive care unit in Philadelphia, ran the race of his life in 2:08:59, also a personal best. But perhaps the biggest winners were the organizers themselves, coaches and agents who pulled off a world class marathon in a year lacking racing opportunities. As they watched other sports and leagues return, they realized that if their athletes were going to have a chance to race before the end of the year, they were going to have to make it happen themselves. Runners were suffering amid the uncertainty, said Josh Cox, an agent to many professional runners. "I served as part agent, part therapist for my athletes this year." Ben Rosario, head coach of Northern Arizona Elite, a professional training group based in Flagstaff, said some of his runners were feeling low. "Athletes need to perform," he said. "When you take away the race piece, training is no longer fun." Rosario initially envisioned holding the race on a motor racetrack, but Matt Helbig of Big River Race Management pointed him to a road he had been studying on the Gila River Indian Community. "We rode the course in a golf cart and I called Matt and Josh and said, 'This the place,'" Rosario said. The road was flat with no potholes and few turns. David Katz, a course measuring expert, spent the days before the race making the turns on the 4.26 mile circuit more gradual and therefore faster. Katz wanted to be on site to place the mile and kilometer markers himself, and he even marked the first hundred meters for the pacesetters. The safety precautions mirrored those seen in other athletic facilities. Everyone on site including the 40 women and 48 men racing had to submit negative coronavirus tests. The pre race news conference and technical meeting were held through video calls, with athletes logging in from their respective hotel rooms. Course monitors wore masks, and volunteers handling the athletes' water bottles wore masks and gloves. Some runners were masked as they warmed up among the cactuses and shrubs. While the prize purse was minimal 5,000 for first place, 2,000 for second, 1,000 for third time bonuses, contract obligations and Olympic spots for the Canadian and Mexican athletes were on the line. Runner took risks from the gun. It's 2020, after all. There was nothing to lose. Twelve women ran under 2:30 and seven men finished faster than 2:10 the first time that's happened in U.S. history, reshuffling the American career lists for both men and women. Andrea Ramirez Limon (2:26:34) and Ursula Patrica Sanchez Garcia (2:29:11) of Mexico and Natasha Wodak (2:26:19) of Canada hit the Olympic standard of a time under 2 hours, 29 minutes and 30 seconds, with hopes of earning a spot on their Olympic teams. Hall, 37, had requested a pace group aimed at taking down Deena Kastor's American record of 2:19:36. She held on for the win, missing the record by 56 seconds, but became the second fastest American female marathoner at 2:20:32. Keira D'Amato, who came into the race with the American record in the 10 mile, landed a second place finish in 2:22:56, setting a personal best time by 11 minutes. A large group of men went out on a 2:09 pace, including the eventual winner Hehir, followed by a chase pack aimed at 2:11, just under the men's Olympic standard of 2:11:30. Hehir, 28, tucked into the back of the pack, letting the pacers do the work as he tried to burn as little energy as possible. Hehir moved to the front through miles 20 and 22 and took the lead when the pacers dropped off. He crossed the finish in 2:08:59, a personal best by two and half minutes. "This race was really a validation of my whole running career," said Hehir, who took sixth at the U.S. Olympic marathon trials in February. To be able to race safely amid the pandemic was a gift, he said. While his wife and two young daughters fed his spirits in the evenings, his training runs fired him up in the early mornings, keeping him afloat at the hospital as the coronavirus continued to surge. "The organizers deserve a standing ovation," Hehir said. "Josh and Ben knew exactly what we athletes needed. They thought through every detail. It was a real testament to the sport, to see it go from being really knocked down, to seeing this grass root, bottom up effort done so the sport could advance." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
This article is part of our continuing Fast Forward series, which examines technological, economic, social and cultural shifts that happen as businesses evolve. In the vast ocean of modern online commerce, Candis Jones, who designs and makes women's jewelry, is a minnow. No venture capitalist will ever come knocking on her door in Westerville, Ohio. But with skill and hard work, digitally amplified by her website, online store and Instagram account, Ms. Jones has transformed a basement craft project into a healthy little business. All that is in doubt now as the economic fallout from the coronavirus outbreak worsens. Her business has not fallen off a cliff yet, down about 20 percent so far but slowing further in the last couple of weeks. Every sale, Ms. Jones said, is cause for "celebration" and "a vote for us to make it through this." There are millions of small, digitally enabled ventures like hers across America. New research, based on data from 20 million websites, found that these small scale entrepreneurs generate significant spillover benefits to their communities. The analysis also concluded that counties with more of these ventures experienced stronger recoveries from the last recession than elsewhere, suggesting that "these small web businesses can be an important buffer for individuals and local communities facing economic challenges," said Marcela Escobari, an economic development expert and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who was not involved in the new study. The new analysis, conducted by researchers at Arizona State University and the University of Iowa, is based on a data set assembled and provided by GoDaddy, a large retailer of internet domain names and a website hosting service. The company is making the data publicly available on a website with quarterly and later monthly updates. So while the analysis predates the coronavirus outbreak, the regularly refreshed data should help track how a little studied sector of the economy weathers the downturn. The new data, the researchers said, adds an important dimension to understanding the digital economy. It is, they said, a counterpoint to recent studies that show the clustering of leading edge technology, investment and employment in a handful of superstar cities. "While that's true, there is also this digitally enabled economic activity at the grass roots level that we haven't really been able to see clearly before," said Karen Mossberger, a professor of public policy at Arizona State. The data set from GoDaddy includes information on its customers combined with third party data and surveys, all stripped of personally identifying information. It includes estimates of website activity like traffic and links, location by county and ZIP code, and the purpose a commercial site, a nonprofit or for personal or family use. Each active website, in GoDaddy's labeling, is a "venture." An estimated three quarters are business related. Its intent, GoDaddy said, is that researchers and lawmakers will use the data to inform public policy to nurture small web enabled entrepreneurs. The company said the initiative was mainly an "educational research project," though GoDaddy stands to gain if the ranks of web entrepreneurs grow. The company shared the data set initially with Ms. Mossberger and Caroline Tolbert, a professor at the University of Iowa, who are scholars of "digital participation" in economic, political and civic activity. GoDaddy did provide modest grants to the universities for support costs like compensating graduate students working on the study. The company, the academics said, had no say in their research. The study is now a working paper, written with a third co author, Scott LaCombe, a doctoral graduate student at Iowa. They plan to publish their research in scholarly journals and present it at conferences. Digital participation research, Ms. Tolbert said, has often focused on access to broadband technology and its impact on communities. The new data, she said, affords a deeper look. "It's a measure of community human capital," Ms. Tolbert said. "Having the technology is one thing, but can they use it? This gives us a powerful new window into local economies." For economic development, the data may offer a fresh perspective on where technology fits in. Trying to lure a big tech company with tax breaks to make an investment may be misguided, Ms. Mossberger said. A better option for most communities, she said, could well be programs geared to helping tiny ventures and skills development. In recent years, academic, government and corporate researchers have experimented with anonymized data from bank and credit card accounts, credit rating agencies and other sources to try to get a more detailed picture of the small scale entrepreneurial activity. Some of that recent research suggests a sharp increase in female and minority entrepreneurs in a trend that cannot be captured by standard government surveys alone. "Traditional sources are not accurately reflecting who the new entrepreneurs are," said Claire Kramer Mills, director of community development analysis at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. A Maryland cheesecake business, founded last year by two sisters, is one of them. Nikki Howard and Jaqi Wright were federal workers on furlough during the 35 day government shutdown that ended in late January 2019. During the budget standoff, Ms. Howard baked cheesecakes for a church social. Her mother tried a piece and told her that it tasted good enough to sell. The out of work sisters decided to give it a try, and they named their fledgling venture the Furlough Cheesecake. They bought the domain name, built the website using simplified templates and set up online billing and payment accounts by themselves. Ms. Howard's daughters, both in their 20s, created the company logo and handled the Facebook, Instagram and Twitter outreach. It got noticed, and appearances on local television and "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" followed. Last year, the sisters, who quit their government jobs, sold nearly 6,000 cheesecakes. The most popular lines sell for 35 each plus 5 for packed in dry ice shipping. Before the coronavirus outbreak, Ms. Howard and Ms. Wright were looking for a permanent space to combine baking, freezing and packing, with room for a retail shop as well. But those plans are on hold now. Sales have fallen 50 percent. They have taken inventory out of their freezers and donated cheesecakes to a home for older people and to a local police station. The sisters have looked at government loan programs for businesses affected by the pandemic. But theirs is a new company without full time employees. They don't yet own buildings or equipment assets to serve as collateral for loans. "We don't seem to quite qualify yet," Ms. Howard said. Most small online ventures, according to the GoDaddy data, remain side hustles. About one fifth of the entrepreneurs surveyed said their web businesses were their main source of income. But more than half said their web ventures generated some household income. For Ms. Jones in Ohio, her necklaces have found a market with women like her, mothers who wanted something attractive yet sturdy enough to withstand a toddler's tug. Her business is a pillar of income, along with her husband's salary as a high school art teacher, to support their household with two young children. Total sales last year were more than 100,000. She supports a full time contractor to help make the jewelry. Her offerings, mostly priced from 17 to 35, could be pitched as inexpensive pick me up purchases in bad times. But she has cut back her online promotions as the pandemic has spread, not wanting to strike an insensitive note. "The health and success of my business is so important to my family and our livelihood, but this virus is taking people's lives," Ms. Jones said | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
NEW ORLEANS A panel of federal appeals court judges on Tuesday sounded likely to uphold a lower court ruling that a central provision of the Affordable Care Act the requirement that most people have health insurance is unconstitutional. But it was harder to discern how the court might come down on a much bigger question: whether the rest of the sprawling health law must fall if the insurance mandate does. In 90 minutes of oral arguments on whether a federal district judge in Texas was correct in striking down the Affordable Care Act in December, two appellate judges appointed by Republican presidents peppered lawyers with blunt questions while the third judge, appointed by President Jimmy Carter, remained silent. The two Republican appointees, Jennifer Walker Elrod, appointed by President George W. Bush in 2007, and Kurt Engelhardt, appointed by President Trump in 2018, seemed particularly skeptical of the Democratic defendants' argument that Congress had fully intended to keep the rest of the law when it eliminated the penalty for going without insurance as part of its 2017 tax overhaul. The arguments in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit were a stark reminder of the enormous stakes of the case, not only for millions of people who gained health insurance through the law but for the political futures of Mr. Trump and other candidates in the 2020 elections. The case, which could make its way to the Supreme Court ahead of those elections, threatens insurance protections for people with pre existing medical conditions and many other sweeping changes the 2010 law has made throughout the health care system. It was filed by a group of Republican governors and attorneys general against the federal government, which carries out the law. But the Trump administration refused to defend the full law in court, initially saying only its provisions protecting people with pre existing conditions should be struck down. Then, this spring, it said it agreed with the ruling that the law's requirement for people to buy insurance was unconstitutional now that Congress eliminated the penalty for going without it, and that as a result, the entire law must be dismantled. That has left a group of 21 states with Democratic attorneys general to intervene to defend the law, along with the House of Representatives, which entered the case after Democrats won control of the chamber last fall. A question at the heart of the case that was much discussed during Tuesday's arguments is whether the Affordable Care Act's mandate requiring most Americans to buy health insurance or pay a tax penalty remained constitutional after Congress eliminated the penalty. When the Supreme Court upheld the mandate in its landmark 2012 ruling that saved the law, its decision was based on Congress's power to impose taxes. If the mandate is indeed unconstitutional, the next question is whether the rest of the Affordable Care Act can function without it. In December, Judge Reed O'Connor of the Federal District Court in Fort Worth said it could not and declared that the entire law must fall. On Tuesday, Douglas N. Letter, a lawyer for the House of Representatives, was particularly insistent that Judge O'Connor had been wrong, telling the appeals panel that "the burden is on the other side to show Congress wanted this entire statute to be struck down." The arguments did reveal some tensions between the Republican states that brought the case, led by Texas, and Mr. Trump's Justice Department. For example, a lawyer for Texas took issue with a puzzling new Justice Department position revealed in a May brief that the ruling should apply only in the 18 plaintiff states, not nationwide. The Republican states would need to evaluate if they had "been the victim of a bait and switch," said the Texas lawyer, Kyle D. Hawkins. In another wrinkle, August E. Flentje, a lawyer for the Justice Department, appeared reluctant to answer questions from Judge Elrod about how applying the ruling only to the plaintiff states would work. He was also vague about another new and surprising position the administration mentioned almost in passing in its May brief: that some pieces of the health law, though not its insurance provisions, should be preserved. "A lot needs to get sorted out and it's complicated," Mr. Flentje replied. Judge Elrod also asked how the federal government would respond if a stay issued by the lower court after Judge O'Connor's decision was lifted and its order striking down the law took effect. "We think it's great the stay is in place," Mr. Flentje said. "Those things don't need to get sorted out until there's a final ruling." Over all, though, the panel spent the most time on the question of whether the rest of the law should fall if Judge O'Connor was correct in scrapping the insurance mandate and Judge Elrod and Judge Engelhardt, based on their questioning, seemed to firmly believe he was. Judge Engelhardt asked Mr. Letter, the House lawyer, why Congress could not remedy the situation by writing a new health law or set of laws. "They could do this tomorrow," Judge Engelhardt said, leading Mr. Letter to dryly point out that Mr. Trump would need to sign off on new laws, too. But Judge Engelhardt and Judge Elrod kept referring to past statements, including from Supreme Court justices in an earlier case questioning the constitutionality of the health law, King v. Burwell, suggesting that the law's other insurance provisions cannot work without the mandate. Those provisions include one that requires insurance companies to sell health coverage to anyone who wants to buy it, including people with pre existing medical conditions, and another that requires the companies to charge the same price to everyone who is the same age. Judge Engelhardt twice asked Mr. Letter why, if Congress fully intended to keep the rest of the health law when it eliminated the penalty for going without insurance in 2017, the Senate, which is controlled by Republicans, had not also sent a lawyer to make that case. "Why would the Senate not also be here to say, 'Oh, this is what we meant when we wrote this?'" he asked. "They're sort of the 800 pound gorilla that's not in the room." The appeals panel also spent a good chunk of the allotted 90 minutes asking questions on a third topic: whether the Democratic states and House of Representatives even have standing to appeal Judge O'Connor's ruling. To establish standing, a party has to show it has suffered a concrete injury that a ruling in its favor would redress. Samuel P. Siegel, a lawyer for California, told the appeals panel that throwing out the law would clearly injure the defendant states because they would lose hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funds they have received through the expansion of Medicaid and other provisions. The court had also asked the parties in a letter last month what the appropriate conclusion of the case should be if the Justice Department, by no longer defending any part of the law, has "mooted the controversy." But it barely addressed that question on Tuesday. If the appeals court ultimately decides that neither the House nor the intervening Democratic states have standing, it could either let Judge O'Connor's ruling stand or vacate it. In any event, the losing party will almost certainly appeal to the Supreme Court. "All of this is going to be playing out against the backdrop of the 2020 presidential election," said Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan. He was among a bipartisan group of professors who argued in an amicus brief last year that the rest of the law should survive even if its mandate to buy insurance was found unconstitutional, and who have criticized the plaintiffs' case as weak. Democrats are already running ads against Mr. Trump and other Republicans over the case, including five state attorneys general who signed on as plaintiffs and will be up for re election next fall. Protect Our Care, an advocacy group that supports the law, will start running digital ads this week against Republican senators considered vulnerable next year: Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Joni Ernst of Iowa, Cory Gardner of Colorado and Martha McSally of Arizona. "The case, if successful, would result in a humanitarian catastrophe in this country," Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, said on the Senate floor on Tuesday. "Because the plaintiffs in the case, backed by the Trump administration, are arguing that the court should throw out the entire Affordable Care Act with nothing to replace it." The appeals court could take months to decide, but the Trump administration has said it will continue to enforce the many provisions of the law until a final ruling is issued a position about which Judge Elrod expressed curiosity. "It's a choice, right?" she said to Mr. Flentje, the Justice Department lawyer, asking why the administration would keep the law afloat even after it had changed its position and agreed it was fully unconstitutional. If the appeals judges uphold Judge O'Connor's decision, the number of uninsured people in America would increase by almost 20 million, or 65 percent, according to the Urban Institute, a left leaning research organization. That includes millions who gained coverage through the law's expansion of Medicaid, and millions more who receive subsidized private insurance through the law's online marketplaces. Insurers would also no longer have to cover young adults under their parents' plans up to age 26; annual and lifetime limits on coverage would again be permitted; and there would be no cap on out of pocket medical costs people have to pay. Also gone would be the law's popular protections for people with pre existing conditions, which became a major talking point in last fall's midterm elections, as Democratic candidates constantly reminded voters that congressional Republicans had tried to repeal the law in 2017. Without those protections, insurers could return to denying coverage to such people or to charging them more. They could also return to charging people more based on their age, gender or profession. The Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan research organization, has estimated that 52 million adults from 18 to 64, or 27 percent of that population, would be rejected for individual market coverage under the practices that were in effect in most states before the Affordable Care Act. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
El Espace is a column dedicated to news and culture relevant to Latinx communities. Expect politics, arts, analysis, personal essays and more. ?Lo mejor? It'll be in Spanish and English, so you can forward it to your tia, your primo Lalo or anyone else (read: everyone). The other day, Jeff Roth, an editor at the Times in charge of our photo archives, came across some never published images of the founders of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe on Manhattan's Lower East Side. The subjects sought to build a creative, social space in the city for Puerto Ricans, where patrons could bear witness to what the writer David Vidal called " a new, intensely cathartic poetry that was born on New York City's streets." The cafe is frequently packed on Friday nights. Outside, long lines of people wait to get into the weekly spoken word competitions, and many of the young faces in the audience and onstage are black or brown. For many spoken word performers of color especially those of Latinx and black descent the Nuyorican Poets Cafe is what the Comedy Cellar has been for stand up comics: a place to cut their teeth and test the resonance of their work in front of a live audience. It's come a long way from its humble beginnings in a poet's living room. In the early 1970s, Miguel Algarin, born in Puerto Rico but raised on the Lower East Side, began inviting other Nuyorican poets to his apartment on East Sixth Street for readings and performances. Algarin and his contemporaries, including Miguel Pinero, Pedro Pietri and Lucky CienFuegos, were part of a growing artistic scene in what was then a primarily Puerto Rican neighborhood, drawing on their identities and daily struggles for their work. The salon quickly outgrew Algarin's living room, so he and a few other artists began renting an Irish bar down the street to fit more people. In 1981, they bought their current building on East Third Street and, after a lengthy renovation process, formally opened it to the public in 1990 as a space for Nuyorican poets to experiment and hone their craft. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
I have been planning for awhile now to propose to my girlfriend, Molly, this spring. I had always planned to take her to dinner at Lucky Lou's, a restaurant in Wethersfield, Conn., where we went on our first date, and every year for the last four years on our anniversary. However, the current state of the world caused me to make an adjustment to my plans. As news about the coronavirus spread and quarantine restrictions became stricter, I began to worry that if I did not propose soon I may not have the chance to do so for a while. I had friends text her earlier that week to suggest a "socially distant" approved dog walk through Wethersfield. She quickly bought into the idea, and off we went Saturday morning. She was dressed in leggings and a sweatshirt, clearly suspecting nothing, but still looking absolutely beautiful. As we approached our friend's neighborhood, I took a left rather than going straight and pulled into a parking spot right outside the restaurant. She quickly asked "What are you doing? They live straight!" I told her that we just had one thing to do before our walk, and in that moment, she knew. We got out of the car, she cried, then I cried, then I got down on one knee, and she said yes! Being that we are both extremely close with our families, she quickly followed up the proposal asking if our families knew that this was happening today. Little did she know that our families were in town already, all set up for a car parade past our condo to celebrate. Given the circumstances, it may not have been the typical perfect proposal, but to us, it was perfect and we would not change a thing. I had planned my proposal to Clare about three months ago. Clare is always inspiring my creativity, in particular creative writing, so I wrote her a children's book in the style of one of our favorite authors, Dr. Seuss. The book captured the evolution of our relationship from the beginning to present day, and it ended with the big question. My original plan was to walk her on a (hopefully) warm March day to the North Meadow of Central Park, one of our favorite areas to walk our dog, and propose to her on one of the green benches with the picturesque Central Park lamps in the background. I coordinated with one of Clare's favorite photographers, Sophie Kaye, and the date was set for Sunday, March 29. Then Covid 19 hit. Clare and I live together on the Upper West Side, so I had to figure out a way to get her to Central Park, with us both wearing clothes other than sweats, in order to make this work. A few days before the planned date, the weather for the weekend was looking awful low 40s and rain. But Thursday, March 26 looked like it was going to be a perfect evening. To get Clare and I to Central Park in more socially acceptable clothing, I faked a Cornell alumni interview (they wanted to run a feel good story about an alum who was 10 years out of college, and they liked the fact that we met at work so they wanted her to come along for the photo shoot). Luckily this also meant I could unsuspiciously carry a backpack with my Cornell hockey jersey and sweatshirt while also hiding the children's book and engagement ring. When we approached the target bench in the North Meadow, Sophie was already hiding nearby (appropriately socially distanced). We sat on the bench, and I came clean about not really having an interview but that I wanted to celebrate my first published book. I read her our relationship story, "Oh, the Places We'll Go." The places we've been. Oh, the places we'll go! Together, let's adventure through sun and through snow. No matter the ups, and no matter the downs. No matter the cities, and no matter the towns. At the end I got down on one knee asked Clare to marry me. She said yes! For years, we'd been saying, "What's the rush?" But after Conor's uncle passed away suddenly in January, we both started thinking, "What are we waiting for?" Conor thought we'd never get engaged, and would simply start planning a wedding. While he started casually looking at venues online, I avoided the conversation and started planning a proposal. The most important piece was family and friends, so I organized a surprise engagement party at a restaurant we both like in our neighborhood. I picked the first Saturday that every member of our families could attend, April 4. The guest list was roughly 50 people, including nearly 20 surprise guests from out of town parents, siblings, a niece and nephew, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends. But when the coronavirus crisis became a pandemic, it was clear that our in person party of hugs and toasts wasn't in the cards. The plan was always to propose privately at home. We bought a one bedroom condo last summer on the southern edge of D.C.'s Columbia Heights neighborhood. We've made it our own, and it feels meaningful to own something together for the first time. Without a party to waltz into, Zoom was the best way to see everyone's face and celebrate together. Since nobody had to travel, I bumped up the timing and told everyone to meet me on Zoom at noon on March 21. That morning I made breakfast. We listened to a Dolly Parton podcast. We started getting dressed to go on a walk. Looking for ways to not look anxious, I cleaned the counter and folded laundry. Around 11:45 a.m. I turned on a playlist I made the night before with some of our favorite songs, and we danced around the apartment. When Elton John's "Are You Ready for Love" came on, I directed Conor to a small marquee sign on the top of our bookshelf where I had changed the letters to read "Are You Ready?" When he found two rings I had placed next to the sign, he assumed it was a practical joke. I asked if he would marry me. He didn't believe me. It took roughly 30 seconds and some tears to get an answer. He said yes, of course! We opened up my laptop to see dozens of our relatives and closest friends smiling onscreen. We toasted, we laughed, we shared stories. We cried talking about how lucky we are to have not just each other, but the love and support of our families. We looked forward to the incredible party we'll throw someday, once we can gather in groups again. In dark times, I think we all could use something to look forward to. Conor and I have been talking about marriage for years it was time to make moves. I simply don't think we could wait any longer. Love is not just a feeling, it's a choice. We chose each other long ago. It was time to make it official. After years of dating and living in Washington, San Francisco and Boston, we moved in together in July to Dumbo, Brooklyn. This is our home and I knew I wanted to do it somewhere special. We live on Washington Street with the iconic bridge shot that is normally flooded with tourists. We had planned to travel to Florida to be with her family and then my family was coming up to New York City to celebrate my fathers birthday the following weekend. So I wanted to propose before those events so we could all celebrate. Once I had the blessing from her mother and father, and sister and brother, the plan was in place. The challenge was the pandemic forced both family trips to be canceled, with fear of the virus swarming the city and people fleeing the city I decided I wasn't going to let a virus get in the way of love love will go on. We made plans to move out to Long Island for a bit so we were still in proximity to the city for work. On March 26, before we left while we were walking our dog, I had a friend in my building hiding out with an N95 mask on and sunglasses. Before we got in the car to leave the city, I pulled her into the middle of the street and asked her to marry me. She said yes! All of the love from friends and family came pouring in. Everyone was saying this is just what they needed after weeks of coronavirus hysteria and that made it even more special that we brought joy to so many people during this extraordinary time. I had been working for weeks to plan a proposal that recreated our first date. A walk in Central Park, drinks at Tavern on the Green, and dinner at Strip House in Midtown. After recently taking a fellowship at Harvard's Institute of Politics, I was living in Cambridge, Mass., and luckily had plenty of time to get it planned out just right. Once the situation started to look more dire in New York, Krysten and I knew we could more effectively distance ourselves from others in Cambridge, so we encamped at the apartment Harvard has generously provided. I should note, after more than a year of dating long distance (me in D.C. and she in N.Y.C.), this was our first time living together. As we saw that it would be a while before we got back to New York, I took advantage of a very nice day outside to pull off an impromptu change of plans. After lunch, I emailed the Kennedy School's photographer to see if she'd be available to capture the moment for us (at a distance, of course). We had already agreed to a "date night in" with steak and good wine, so the food was ready to go. One other key element of my previous plan was to gather friends for a toast after the proposal. Once I had the photographer all lined up, I set up a Zoom meeting and was able to invite an even bigger group. With the plan set, all I had to do was convince Krysten to come outside for a quick walk. Since the weather was fantastic, and we had been cooped up inside for a few days, she happily agreed. We walked over to the Weeks Footbridge maintaining a careful six feet distance from anyone around us and avoiding any contact with surfaces. Our photographer was laying in wait and had graciously marked the perfect spot with an X. As we got there and I reached in my pocket for the ring, our photographer had to quickly reposition me to capture the moment well, which gave some levity in the moment and has maintained its hilarity as we've recounted the story. To my delight, Krysten said yes. At a distance, I introduced her to our photographer and we proceeded to take a few photos around the bridge. The few other people around remained safely away from us with a couple of nods and notes of congratulations. Walking back, we FaceTimed with Krysten's parents to share the news. With family informed and the steak ready to cook, I let Krysten know that all of our friends would join us on Zoom after dinner for a quick toast. About 50 people from all over the country joined us and shared in some favorite moments from their own engagements and weddings. It was a bigger and more diverse gathering than we ever could have arranged in person and saved some significant time with phone calls to friends and relatives to share the news. Now we just have to figure out how to plan a wedding while socially distanced. I originally had planned to propose to Cass at the end of April. I am not the planner in the relationship so I knew she would be particularly surprised if I had organized something special from end to end. We were booked to go to our dream resort in Antigua. Everything was arranged besides secretly coordinating with her business partners for vacation time. A couple we're close to, one of her best friends and her husband, had also helped me plan a surprise engagement party for all of our friends and family for the night we returned to New York. An eternal optimist, I kept hoping that the situation would improve and I could keep the original plan alive. But eventually I caved; the situation in New York continued to decline. Pragmatism was necessary. My family was due to fly in from Australia, where I'm from, and that no longer felt safe. I canceled everything. The ring had been burning a hole in my mind since January when family friends brought it over from Australia. With each passing day the risk of Cass finding it (she is hyper organized and loves to "purge" the apartment) increased. Most importantly, I didn't want our life put on hold more than it already felt like it was. I wanted to bring some joy to the situation. It was a couple of days after I made the call to cancel everything. On Friday, March 20, after a particularly draining day working from home, I took Cass up to our building roof on the Lower East Side to watch the sunset with wine and enjoy the unseasonably warm weather. The great weather meant the roof was a little busy with our neighbors. I couldn't find a private space. One man in particular was hovering around on what felt like the longest conference call of all time. We finished our wine and Cass was growing impatient (and hungry). She started to walk back to the elevator and I practically had to grab her back. I had to make a decision on a location and fast. The best out of site option was between two grills. I dropped down to one knee, at a loss for words for the first time in my life and handed her the ring box. I forgot to "pop the question," didn't say anything I had rehearsed, and put the ring on the wrong finger, but fortunately she got the idea. In the end, it was perfect. She said she wouldn't have had it any other way. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Our public messaging about the virus should explain the real costs in graphic terms of catching the virus. I still remember exactly where I was sitting decades ago, during the short film shown in class: For a few painful minutes, we watched a woman talking mechanically, raspily through a hole in her throat, pausing occasionally to gasp for air. The public service message: This is what can happen if you smoke. I had nightmares about that ad, which today would most likely be tagged with a trigger warning or deemed unsuitable for children. But it was supremely effective: I never started smoking and doubt that few if any of my horrified classmates did either. When the government required television and radio stations to give 75 million in free airtime for antismoking ads between 1967 and 1970 many of them terrifyingly graphic smoking rates plummeted. Since then, numerous smoking "scare" campaigns have proved successful. Some even featured celebrities, like Yul Brynner's posthumous offering with a warning after he died from lung cancer: "Now that I'm gone, don't smoke, whatever you do, just don't smoke." As the United States faces out of control spikes from Covid 19, with people refusing to take recommended, often even mandated, precautions, our public health announcements from governments, medical groups and health care companies feel lame compared to the urgency of the moment. A mix of clever catchphrases, scientific information and calls to civic duty, they are virtuous and profoundly dull. The Centers for Diseases Control urges people to wear masks in videos that feature scientists and doctors talking about wanting to send kids safely to school or protecting freedom. Quest Diagnostics made a video featuring people washing their hands, talking on the phone, playing checkers. The message: "Come together by spending time apart." As cases were mounting in September, the Michigan government produced videos with the exhortation, "Spread Hope, Not Covid," urging Michiganders to put on a mask "for your community and country." Forget that. Mister Rogers type nice isn't working in many parts of the country. It's time to make people scared and uncomfortable. It's time for some sharp, focused terrifying realism. "Fear appeals can be very effective," said Jay Van Bavel, associate professor of psychology at New York University, who co authored a paper in Nature about how social science could support Covid response efforts. (They may not be needed as much in places like New York, he noted, where people experienced the constant sirens and the makeshift hospitals.) I'm not talking fear mongering, but showing in a straightforward and graphic way what can happen with the virus. From what I could find, the state of California came close to showing the urgency: a soft focus video of a person on a ventilator, featuring the sound of a breathing machine, but not a face. It exhorted people to wear a mask for their friends, moms and grandpas. But maybe we need a P.S.A. featuring someone actually on a ventilator in the hospital. You might see that person "bucking the vent" bodies naturally rebel against the machine forcing pressurized oxygen into the lungs, which is why patients are typically sedated. Another message could feature a patient lying in an I.C.U. bed, immobile, tubes in the groin, with a mask delivering 100 percent oxygen over the mouth and nose eyes wide with fear, watching the saturation numbers rise and dip on the monitor over the bed. Maybe some P.S.A.s should feature a so called Covid long hauler, the 5 percent to 10 percent of people for whom recovery takes months. Perhaps a professional athlete like the National Football League's Ryquell Armstead, 24, who has been in and out of the hospital with serious lung issues and missed the season. These P.S.A.s might sound harsh, but they might overcome our natural denial. "One consistent research finding is that even when people see and understand risks, they underestimate the risks to themselves," Mr. Van Bavel said. Graphs, statistics and reasonable explanations don't do it. They haven't done it. Only after Chris Christie, an adviser to President Trump, experienced Covid, did he start preaching about mask wearing: "When you have seven days in isolation in an I.C.U. though, you have time to do a lot of thinking," Mr. Christie said, suggesting that people, "follow C.D.C. guidelines in public no matter where you are and wear a mask to protect yourself and others." We hear from many who resist taking precautions. They say, "I know someone who had it and it's not so bad." Or, "It's just like the flu." Sure, most longtime smokers don't end up with lung cancer or tethered to an oxygen tank either. (That, in fact, was the justification of smokers like my father, whose two pack a day habit contributed to his death at 47 of a heart attack.) These new ads will seem hard to watch. "We live in a Pixar era," Mr. Van Bavel reflected, with traditional fairy tales now stripped of their gore and violence. But studies have shown that emotional ads featuring personal stories about the effects of smoking were the most effective at persuading folks to quit. And quitting smoking is much harder than social distancing and mask wearing. Once a vaccine has proved successful and enough people are vaccinated, the pandemic may well be in the rearview mirror. In the meantime, the creators of public health messaging should stop favoring the cute, warm and dull. And at least sometimes scare you. 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. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Anna and Jim Nadler moved to Harding Township in 2014, from Kinnelon, N.J., to be closer to their youngest son's private school in neighboring Morristown. In the process, they got an additional 1,100 square feet of living space, three acres of land, a lower tax rate and the sense that they had moved to a rural setting that didn't feel like New Jersey. "Everyone's so spread out," said Ms. Nadler, 55, a language tutor who regularly bicycles through town and went snowshoeing in Jockey Hollow park after a freshly fallen snow in early March. "I love that it feels like the country, but it's sophisticated at the same time." With all three sons now out of the house, the Nadlers decided to downsize, but had no intention of leaving Harding Township. "This is my hometown," Ms. Nadler said, explaining their recent decision to buy a four bedroom house on three acres for 1.2 million, and to put their five bedroom, 4,828 square foot house, on four and a half acres, on the market for 1.895 million. In the last several weeks, the governing body has received final approval on its latest affordable housing plan. It has also reached an agreement to redevelop a beloved historic estate the township once sought to preserve, and set aside a piece of land in the historic center for a proposed 120 foot cell tower. Mayor Christopher Yates said that on March 1 almost four years after discussions began about how many affordable homes Harding Township needed to add to satisfy mandates by the state's Fair Housing Act court approval was received on a plan to build 176 units, just over half the original requirement of 350. Most of those homes will be built at the southern end of Route 202, the mayor said, where zoning allows for six to eight homes on an acre, compared to the three acre minimum zoning in most of the rest of the township. "The building continued to deteriorate, and the cost quickly got well beyond what the town was willing to spend," Mayor Yates said. Now the township is hoping to sell Glen Alpin, which has been designated as a redevelopment area, to a private buyer after other land preservation obligations with the state are met. There is also a cellphone tower that, if approved, will go up in the New Vernon section of the township, not far from the post office, something the mayor described as simply a matter of progress. "We're no longer the isolated little burg we once were," he said. "But even with all these things coming, I don't think Harding is going to change much." 29 SAND SPRING LANE A Georgian revival home with seven bedrooms and seven full and two half bathrooms, built in 1938 on 32 acres, listed for 3.75 million. 908 400 2346 Horse crossing signs are a common site in Harding Township, which covers more than 20 square miles. Many properties include permanent easements for the public horse trail that runs through much of the township. Most of the homes are large and sit on lots of more than three acres, although there are two townhouse developments Shadowbrook and Harding Green along Route 202. In the Mount Kemble Lake community, 96 bungalows and cottages, some dating to the 1920s, sit on the banks of the lake. There has been little new construction in Harding in recent years, the newest being 20 large homes at Hartley Farms, each on a three acre lot surrounded by open space, as part of a 25 year plan to develop a portion of a 171 acre estate once owned by the Dodge family. Many of Harding's homes have their own septic systems and wells. The minimal public water service, along with volunteer staffed public services and the absence of a high school, helps keep property tax rates significantly lower than those in surrounding areas. Because the post offices that serve the township are in neighboring towns or in New Vernon a desirable, unincorporated community in the center of Harding, which virtually anyone can use as a mailing address by renting a postal box virtually no one receives mail addressed to Harding Township. 76 EAST LAKE TRAIL A three bedroom bungalow with two full and one half bathrooms, built in 1965 on a half acre, listed for 850,000. 973 723 5700 "Most people who live in town have a post office box," said Gerry Jo Cranmer, an agent with Turpin Realtors. "It gives them a good excuse to stop by and chat." The entry point for a home in most parts of Harding is north of 1 million. As of mid March, there were 37 homes on the market, with an average asking price of 2.3 million. The highest priced listing was just under 5 million for a 7,215 square foot house built in 1990 on six and a half acres; the lowest was a three bedroom 1932 colonial on a half acre, listed for 499,000. There is also a 20 room house on 32 acres owned by the family of Peter Frelinghuysen Jr., a former congressman who died in 2011, on the market for 3.75 million. 77 PLEASANTVILLE ROAD A five bedroom house with four and a half bathrooms, built in 1988 on 3.27 acres, listed for 1.48 million. 973 214 1411 According to the Garden State Multiple Listing Service, 45 houses sold in Harding Township in 2018, at an average price of 1.527 million; in 2017, 56 homes sold, at an average price of 1.395 million. Jennifer Pollaro, 39, who moved to Harding Township in 2010, said she likes to take her daughter, Eleanora, 2, and son, Frankie, 4, on guided nature walks in the 7,768 acre Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, and to the weekly story hour at the all volunteer Kemmerer Library. "We love the big, wide open space here, where you're not on top of each other," she said. "The properties are large and provide privacy, but we also have big backyards where we can have great summer parties." Volunteerism is big in Harding. Along with the library, the two fire departments, in New Vernon and Green Village, are staffed entirely by volunteers, as is the first aid squad in New Vernon. The Harding Land Trust, a nonprofit group, focuses on land preservation and water protection. The New Vernon Volunteer Fire Department holds two big fund raisers every year an auction in September and a lobster and steak dinner in June that draw so many visitors, there isn't enough room for them all to park, so they have to be bused in, said Tawnya Kabnick, an agent with Coldwell Banker, who lives in the Mount Kemble Lake area. There is little commercial activity in Harding, but Bernardsville, Basking Ridge, Madison and Morristown are all about a 10 minute drive away. The Harding Township School serves 315 students from prekindergarten through eighth grade. With so few students, residents say, it operates almost like a private school, with abundant individualized attention. Driving into Manhattan, about 35 miles east, during rush hour can take over an hour. Harding does not have its own train station, so commuters take New Jersey Transit trains from stations in Bernardsville, Morristown, Madison or Chatham. Travel times and costs vary: A direct train from Chatham to New York City takes about 50 minutes and costs 10.75 one way or 310 for a monthly pass; a train from Bernardsville with one stop takes 80 to 100 minutes, and costs 15 one way or 436 a month. During what has been called the "hard winter" of 1779 80, Henry Wick's 1,400 acre Jockey Hollow farm served as campgrounds for George Washington and the Continental Army, which cut down some 600 trees to build cabins and provide fuel for fires. More than 100 soldiers died and are buried on the property north of the Wick House which is also where Mr. Wick's daughter, Temperance, hid her horse from mutinous soldiers who tried to steal it from her, thus becoming a young hero of the Revolutionary War. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Before the end of life as we knew it, Ady, an 8 year old who lives in the Bay Area of San Francisco, read a biography of Anne Frank. When she realized that she, too, was living through what would soon become history, Ady started keeping her own diary. In one early entry, she recorded that the judging for her county's science fair would be conducted over the phone, rather than in person. "Not 'fair'!!" she wrote. "Har, har, very funny." As the coronavirus continues to spread and confine people largely to their homes, many are filling pages with their experiences of living through a pandemic. Their diaries are told in words and pictures: pantry inventories, window views, questions about the future, concerns about the present. Taken together, the pages tell the story of an anxious, claustrophobic world on pause. "You can say anything you want, no matter what, and nobody can judge you," Ady said in a phone interview earlier this month, speaking about her diary. "No one says, 'scaredy cat.'" When future historians look to write the story of life during coronavirus, these first person accounts may prove useful. "Diaries and correspondences are a gold standard," said Jane Kamensky, a professor of American History at Harvard University and the faculty director of the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute. "They're among the best evidence we have of people's inner worlds." History isn't usually told by the bigwigs of the era, even if they are some of its main characters. Instead, it is often reconstructed from snapshots of ordinary lives. A handwritten recipe. A letter written by a soldier at the front. A drawing of a kitchen sink. One of the most famous works of academic history "A Midwife's Tale," by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich came from the diary kept by a woman living in Maine from 1785 to 1812. It won a Pulitzer Prize. "The personal that is presented in diaries gives us the truth of the era," said Carole Ione Lewis, a diarist and the author of "Pride of Family: Four Generations of American Women of Color," which she wrote using her relatives' diaries. Today's journals convey the shared experience of life in isolation. Some diarists record statistics: the number of infections, the number of deaths. Others keep diaries that are part shopping list, part doodle pad. Unidentified phone numbers are scratched out in the margins of punctuation less pages filled with the frustration of being separated from family and friends. Among these accounts, anxiety is the constant. Now back in Pittsburgh, where she grew up, Ms. Monti is self isolating in her childhood bedroom. "You look at this painting of a person looking out a window and you think, like, 'Oh, how romantic. This person is able to just daydream,'" she said. "But for me, it's so all of a sudden. It makes me feel so suffocated and restrained." For some visual diarists, making new work has been a way to stay connected with other artists in isolation. In Manila, before the outbreak, Patricia Joyce V. Salarzon, a 27 year old production editor, would meet her friends to draw outside. Now they all agree to sketch at the same time, just to feel like they are together. That these accounts are recorded on paper is crucial to their longevity. "People think the internet is going to be permanent, but we're already starting to lose things that were committed to bits and bytes," said Shane Landrum, who holds a doctorate in American history from Brandeis University. "Even with the danger of your house burning down with all your written records inside, I still think paper is valuable as a practice," Dr. Landrum said. The weight of a personal diary is familiar to Frank Herron, a 67 year old book publisher who lives in Winchester, Mass. He has studied the journals his great aunt kept in the early 20th century. In one entry, she wrote about seeing Austrian royalty from a tailor's window. "The procession was like a fairy tale," she wrote on June 14, 1900. "I never expect to see such a fine one again anywhere." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
In any other year, N.F.L. facilities across the country would be buzzing this week, when teams are allowed to begin their off season workout programs, the first organized football activities since they ended the prior season. Normally, this is a time when teammates are reunited for workouts and position meetings. Coaches get their first in person look at free agent signees, and trainers assess how injured players are recovering. But like nearly all other nonessential businesses in the country, N.F.L. teams are in lockdown, with all coaches, players and staff working from home. This has thrown one of the most critical stretches of the league's calendar into flux, and forced the N.F.L. and its players' union to develop a host of rules changes. Teams have scrambled to adapt to working from home, and the coronavirus advisories have put the N.F.L. at the mercy of government and health officials. Unlike other pro sports leagues, whose seasons were fractured by the pandemic, the N.F.L., despite the turmoil, has had an easier time so far. Its first game isn't until Sept. 10. Still, the league and the N.F.L. Players Association had to create one set of guidelines for 32 teams, 2,000 players and hundreds of coaches, trainers and other staff. "We're going to treat all 32 teams the same way," Jeff Pash, the N.F.L.'s general counsel, told reporters last week. "We'll do it in a way that does preserve competitive equity." The league said its three week virtual off season, which is voluntary for players, would include classroom instruction with digital playbooks as well as workouts and nonfootball educational programs. The league has given teams the autonomy to organize their own training sessions and classes. They can send players workout equipment worth up to 1,500. While the off season workouts are voluntary, every team is expected to take part, especially this year, when coaches are prevented from meeting players in person. This is particularly true for teams with new head coaches, who were able to start on Monday, while all other teams can begin next Monday. Teams that do not take part in the off season workouts in the first three week period cannot take part in the second phase of the off season, which begins on May 18. Without in person accountability, the remote work will compel teams to determine how to validate that players have participated. Players who take part in the virtual off season minicamps and workouts will receive 235 per day. But players who are eligible to earn additional off season workout bonuses, which can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, must take part to be paid. Teams specify a percentage of workouts that players must complete to receive contract bonuses. Teams are also facing the prospect of losing out on the intangible interactions that can unite players ahead of a long season. 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. "We're going to miss that camaraderie, the badgering that goes back and forth, and the direct communication with the coaches, teammates who lean over and whisper to help out on a play," John Schneider, general manager of the Seattle Seahawks, said. Schneider said he was trusting players to follow the workouts given to them by the strength and conditioning staff members, who are emphasizing flexibility and core strength. "This isn't going to be a virtual workout that we monitor," he said. "In this day and age, these guys do such a good job taking care of themselves anyway." The Seahawks, like other teams, are focused on having coaches meet online with players, individually and in groups. That starts with meetings by position, as well as meetings for offensive, defensive and special teams squads. As he does when the Seahawks are together in Renton, Wash., Coach Pete Carroll will drop in on different meetings during the day. Peter Ruocco, senior vice president for labor relations at the N.F.L., said teams could also send players video to watch. Teams can work with players online for two hours a day within a four hour window, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., Eastern time. "They can also take two hours where they would identify, OK, here's the time frame that you will be participating in club directed activities," Ruocco said last week. "That would be classroom activities, or if they are doing a virtual workout, they could direct them for the virtual workout. But it could be either or, it could be live or it could be taped." One question left unanswered is how the league will monitor teams to ensure they do not ask their players to do work outside the established guidelines. "Teams try to get every competitive advantage they can get," Gabe Feldman, the director of the Sports Law Program at Tulane University, said. "The players may have too much time on their hands, but also the teams could load up the players with too much work." After the first part of the virtual off season ends on May 15, teams that took part can continue for another six weeks. If state governments do not lift their stay at home orders by then, teams will have to continue working virtually. To maintain fairness, if even one N.F.L. team is unable to reopen its facility, then all franchises will have to continue following the virtual off season guidelines. This requirement, while entirely understandable, means the league must follow the instructions of health officials in the 24 states where its teams train. The challenge for the N.F.L. is that while the number of cases appears to be cresting in cities like Seattle, it is rising in other N.F.L. cities, including the smallest, Green Bay, Wis. The number of cases in Brown County, where Green Bay is, increased more than fourfold from April 7 to 17. While the absolute number of cases is relatively low, health investigators, including those from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reportedly visited Brown County over the weekend, according to The Green Bay Press Gazette. The wave of hot spots in N.F.L. cities makes it more likely the league will have to extend its virtual off season training program past May 15, and force the league to yet again adapt to circumstances out of its control. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Three people died last week during the middle stages of the grueling, two week long Dakar Rally. A Belgian motorcyclist, Eric Palante, 50, was found dead along the course Friday, after most competitors had completed the fifth stage. The cause of his death is under investigation. Earlier, a 19 year old freelance journalist and his driver were killed as they tried to follow the rally through difficult terrain in northern Argentina. The rally covers a course of more than 1,200 miles through the back country of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile. Nani Roma, the Spanish driver, held the automobile category lead through Sunday's stages, driving an all wheel drive Mini Countryman. Marc Coma, riding for KTM, topped the bike riders. In other racing news last week: Eddie Irvine, a former driver for the Ferrari Formula One team, was sentenced last week by an Italian court to six months in jail for his role in a nightclub brawl in Milan in 2008. Irvine, 48, of Northern Ireland, is appealing the verdict. The Italian news agency Ansa reported that even if Irvine did not prevail on appeal, he is not likely to spend time in jail under the Italian justice system. Such sentences are often suspended instead, Ansa said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
WASHINGTON The World Trade Organization will grant the United States permission to impose tariffs on the European Union as part of a prolonged scuffle over subsidies given to European plane maker Airbus, European officials said Monday, a move that is likely to exacerbate trade tensions across the Atlantic. The ruling, to be published in the week of Sept. 30, is the global trade body's final decision in a 15 year old dispute over the government assistance that Europe provides to its major plane manufacturer. It will clear the way for the United States to impose tariffs on European goods, worsening tensions that have become strained under President Trump's confrontational approach. The W.T.O. still must authorize a specific dollar amount that the United States can recoup through tariffs. But the United States Trade Representative has already prepared two lists of up to 25 billion worth of products that it can tax, including airplanes, fish, wine, leather purses, carpets and clocks. The trade body opened the door for the Trump administration to impose billions of dollars in retaliatory sanctions last May, when it ruled that Europe had illegally subsidized Airbus to the detriment of its American competitor Boeing. The ruling could become fodder for Mr. Trump's growing trade fight with the European Union, which he has accused of weakening its currency and criticized for exporting more goods into the United States than it buys. In retaliation for the harm Europe's trade actions have caused the American economy, the United States is proposing putting tariffs on a wide variety of European products, including helicopters, airplane fuselages, Parmesan cheese, olives, wine, handbags, sweaters, glassware, clocks, Irish and Scotch whisky, and copper alloys. The United States Trade Representative held hearings in May and August to allow companies and groups that might be affected by the tariffs to plead their case, and the final list could change. The Trade Representative is expected to release the final list after the World Trade Organization announces its official decision. Mr. Trump has already rankled European leaders by imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum imports and threatening to tax European automobiles before the end of the year. His administration's attempt to negotiate a trade deal with the bloc has also faltered as the two sides continue to disagree about which industries, like agriculture, should be included in any deal. The Airbus ruling threatens to set off a tit for tat tariff exchange between the two major trading partners that may further weigh on trans Atlantic business and global economic growth. The W.T.O. is also considering a parallel case that the European Union has brought against the United States for providing subsidies to American plane maker Boeing. The E.U. claims that the United States provided 20 billion in illegal subsidies to the American plane maker, including through Washington state tax breaks. A decision in that case is expected early next year and could authorize European retaliation against the United States. 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 E.U. has already drawn up its own list of 20 billion of American imports it plans to tax after the Boeing ruling is announced, including aircraft, food and chemicals. Speaking in Brussels on Monday, Cecilia Malmstrom, the outgoing European commissioner for trade, said the E.U. had tried to negotiate a way out of retaliatory tariffs in response to both the Airbus and Boeing rulings, but that the United States had not responded to these requests. Ms. Malmstrom told reporters in Brussels on Monday that she had approached American officials "long before this summer" to discuss a resolution to the tariff spat. "It's not that they said 'no,' it's that they have not engaged on this, and we have provided them paper and proposals and so on," she said. "We would propose that we both freeze or suspend our tariffs while we talk, until we come to an agreement, and that remains to be seen." She added that both governments "need to discipline our air industries" and work to reform subsidies. "And it would be good to do that together," she added. "It is sometimes a little bit hard to predict the next step by the U.S. administration," Ms. Malmstrom said. Ms. Malmstrom also said Monday that negotiations on a free trade agreement with the United States had stalled. American officials want agricultural goods to be included in any trade discussion, saying that a deal that excludes farm goods would be unlikely to be approved by Congress. The European Union has refused to put agriculture on the table and pushed for the pact to cover industries where the two governments already agree, namely non auto industrial goods. European officials had hoped for a fresh start with the United States earlier this month, after a positive visit by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Brussels on Sept. 2. Ms. Malmstrom said Monday that Gordon Sondland, the American ambassador to the European Union, had told her that the United States wanted to "restart" their relationship with the European Union. But imposing tariffs on aircraft could make any resolution more difficult. The Trump administration has already levied a 10 percent tariff on aluminum and 25 percent tariff on steel from the European Union, and it is scheduled to make another decision about whether to impose tariffs on cars imported from Europe and elsewhere in November, taxes that could be devastating to major auto exporters like Germany. Mr. Trump decided in May to postpone those levies for six months, arguing that his administration wanted to see how trade talks with Europe progressed. The administration has cited national security as justification for the metal and auto tariffs, saying that imports have degraded the American industrial base, putting the country's ability to supply critical goods and technology to the military at risk. That rationale has been controversial, and many critics argue that the tariffs violate the W.T.O.'s international trade rules. New tariffs as a result of the Airbus case would be different, in that they will be undertaken with the World Trade Organization's permission. The organization allows its members to levy tariffs on each other to recoup trade losses when it finds a country has broken its trade rules. Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, said that tariffs on European exports in response to the Airbus decision would be very different legally from the tariffs on European steel and aluminum, though "neither is a good economic idea," he said. "In the Airbus case, the U.S. is imposing tariffs only after it went through all of the W.T.O.'s legal steps proving its case and getting an official ruling and only after Europe was asked and refused to comply," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
A winning celebrity profile requires a number of stars aligning: a subject willing to be transparent, a writer interested in challenging received wisdom, a circumstance that's not constrained or contrived. It's more rare than you might think. Our culture is suffused with celebrity coverage, but much of it is similar, or intra referential or pro forma. Especially in a time where celebrities via social media are becoming quasi publishers themselves, is there a future for the old school celebrity profile? On this week's Popcast, Mr. Caramanica discusses how the celebrity profile has changed in recent years with two of its most insightful practitioners: None Vanessa Grigoriadis, a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and the author of "Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
I understand that people would think the Met should be free, as I do. But in reality, a museum can only squeeze so much out of the Kochs and the Sacklers and then you're on your own. It's a symptom of a systemic problem: monetizing things that should be a right, like health care, education and, now, culture. Why wouldn't people expect culture to catch up with the rest of it all, and the mall ing of New York City? We will get used to it, as we have so much in this last year. And that will be that. Sad but true. Ross Bleckner, New York When I lived in New York in the 1980s, economically it was very bad for me. But I would come to the Met all the time and pay a penny. And when I could afford to I paid more. When I was back in China, I would very proudly show them this pay as you wish policy as an example of what was positive about the U.S., that even in this capitalistic society, there was a door, a light. To stand in front of a Van Gogh or a Jackson Pollock, or African sculpture, it gave you hope and you were not judged by your economic status but by how much you loved those works. It was a treasure, not a privilege. This new way totally ruins this belief. It's like taking the jacket off a poor person. If they do this, I will never go to the Met. Am I calling for a boycott? No. But I myself will not go. Ai Weiwei, Berlin The very artists we are being asked to pay to see, would in today's time be the least likely to afford the fee for entry. I can distinctly remember visiting the Pompidou and other Paris museums. As a young artist, I didn't have to pay. It was a shock and then a relief when the money I had cobbled together could go back in my pocket. It was not only critical as "research" for my craft; that moment empowered me as a human. It said that not only did I matter, but the role of artists also mattered. Artists generally don't occupy that space in American society. What are we valuing in this difficult political and economic moment? And for young people, especially little black and brown bodies, they are receiving more and more messages that they don't belong. Amanda Williams, Chicago, an artist and architect, will be an exhibitor at the United States pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale in May. This is a moment to reflect on much more than the economics of a great public institution such as the Met. The role of the museum is to reach out into the world, spilling out, rather than centralizing and closing itself off to various groups of people. Sudarshan Shetty, Mumbai, curator of the 2016 Kochi Muziris Biennale in India. Now that this "pay what you wish" policy is being taken away, it appears markedly progressive, in retrospect. What was good about the Met's old policy is that people had to ask themselves what something was worth to them. It could be interesting to turn this question around. Instead of blaming the Met for changing its policy, perhaps we could ask why more museums have not adopted a "pay as you wish" plan. John Miller, New York In Article 6 of the Met's mission statement, the museum expresses its intent to "reach out to the widest possible audience in a spirit of inclusiveness." The new system will diminish that inclusiveness by restricting access of foreigners and out of state visitors unable to pay the set admission fee. Will Cotton, New York I know from our experience running a cultural organization in Red Hook that 25 really cuts a whole part of the population out. What about the person who has never been to a place like the Met and then walks out of there with a passion to create? If the Met has an object in storage that is not going to be seen for 100 years, put that in private hands then use the money to let people access the other thousands of objects. Dustin Yellin, artist and founder of the cultural organization Pioneer Works, Red Hook, Brooklyn I am not in favor of free admission, except in the case of students who universally should have access to all museums. In most countries, museums are designed and programmed to be accessible to the elite and privileged groups, which can easily afford to pay. To address why museums are not attended more by ethnically diverse backgrounds, one has to address the fundamental questions of representation, nationhood, patronage and more. Reza Aramesh, London Art should be treated like a library of images or history; one goes there to learn and to become a more educated person. Can you imagine a library where you have to pay? Ghada Amer and Reza Farkhondeh, New York | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Going into the headquarters of the designer Thom Browne, whose spring 2018 men's wear collection will be unveiled in Paris on Sunday, is like falling down a rabbit hole. Not just because it is in the garment district of New York rather than the Ecole des Beaux Arts in the Sixth Arrondissement, but also because when you step off the elevator on the 15th floor of his building, you find yourself in front of a glass door without a sign or a logo but with a doorbell and the kind of white louvered shades you normally find in a dentist office or an accountancy firm. And because behind that door is a long gray walled corridor with a gray terrazzo floor, leading at the far end to two facing doors, which open to reveal men and women running about in variants of the same uniform: gray tailored Buster Brown shorts or trousers cropped to show the ankle; white shirts; gray ties with tie clips, often tucked into the high waistbands of their trousers; shrunken schoolboy jackets; knit vests; pleated gray skirts; and black brogues, all of them working in rooms with the same gray terrazzo floors, gray marble walls and louvered blinds, all of them speaking in hushed tones, united in a single mission: to disseminate the Look of Browne as widely, and virally, as possible. It's easy to dismiss that ambition as fashion fantasy. In fact, up to now it has been largely dismissed, most often with an aside about fashion insiders and those damning words "conceptual" and "niche." Except, it turns out, this niche is a rapidly expanding territory. "I was talking to someone about Thom Browne the other day, and they said, 'But that business is not that big,'" said Danielle Vitale, chief executive of Barneys New York. "And I said: 'What? It's huge!'" "Huge" may be something of an exaggeration, but it is probably not overstating the matter to say that Thom Browne may be the most underestimated not just a men's wear designer in New York. Which is partly why he is moving his women's wear show to Paris, too. After all, though Mr. Browne is widely seen as one of the most influential men's wear designers of the past 10 years, his shrunken midcentury modern silhouettes as popular as midcentury modern furniture; though he has been nominated eight times for the men's wear designer of the year award by the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and won three times; and though his women's wear collections are routinely lauded as among the best in New York (retailers like Sebastian Manes, the buying director of Selfridges, say, "He is one of the main reasons I come to New York Fashion Week"), he has never been nominated for a women's wear designer of the year award. He has never been approached by a big brand to take the reins of a heritage house. When rumors start about what brand might hire what buzzy, young New York name, his never comes up. No conglomerate like LVMH or Kering has ever tried to buy him. And yet last year, his company (which was founded in 2001 and is profitable) brought in 100 million in revenue and is on track to increase that to 120 million to 125 million this year, of which 70 percent is men's wear sales and 30 percent is women's, even though women's wear was just introduced in 2011. (It is currently growing at 30 percent a year.) Thirty percent of the sales occur in the United States, 40 percent in Europe and 30 percent in Asia. Mr. Browne is opening six new stores in the second half of 2017, following three openings so far this year. That makes Thom Browne much bigger than the Row, bigger than Altuzarra and bigger even than Proenza Schouler, and nearly close to the size of Alexander Wang, whose former chief executive, Rodrigo Bazan, left in May 2016 to become the C.E.O. at Thom Browne, an acknowledgment of sorts that of all the third generation American brands (those that came after the Ralph/Calvin/Donna and Marc Jacobs/Michael Kors eras), Mr. Browne's may be the one to watch. "It's a rare brand that is bigger than it appears," said Kenneth Suslow, a founding managing partner of Sandbridge Capital, the private equity firm that last year bought a majority stake in the company from Mr. Browne's former majority investor, the Japanese company Stripe International. It was the most significant investment in Sandbridge's initial portfolio. (It also holds stakes in Derek Lam, Karl Lagerfeld and Tamara Mellon.) Mr. Bazan thinks sales will triple in the next five years. Fans of Mr. Browne's clothes include not just fashion people like Andrew Bolton, his partner and the curator in charge of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Solange Knowles, who wore a Thom Browne puffer tuxedo to the last Met Gala, but also LeBron James; Steve Ells, the chief executive of Chipotle; Laurene Powell Jobs; Michelle Obama; and Janis Leigh, the chief human resources officer for Hudson's Bay Company. At Barneys, where Thom Browne men's wear is among the top five most popular brands, Ms. Vitale said she believes his women's wear can easily occupy the same place. "There's no one else that does what he does," she said, referring to his emphasis on classic tailoring with a twist and extreme interior construction. It is possible no American designer has created as fully realized a world in which to frame his work since Ralph Lauren. Indeed Mr. Browne, like Mr. Lauren, was not classically trained, began his career in men's wear and then moved into women's wear. Mr. Lauren's ethos is also rooted in a peculiarly American mythology, though where Mr. Lauren went west, Mr. Browne took on the rise of corporate culture and the suburban dream, then twisted it. Instead of making the wearer seem like a cog in a wheel, Mr. Browne's suits made him or her stand out. "My first employee once wore pink socks to work," Mr. Browne said. "I told him he couldn't wear those socks. It was ruining the message." Getting that message out is part of the rationale behind the move to the Paris shows next season, much to the delight of Ralph Toledano, the president of French fashion's governing body, the Federation Francaise de la Couture, du Pret a Porter des Couturiers et des Createurs de Mode. Mr. Toledano had been discussing the possibility of joining the Paris schedule with Mr. Browne for a while. "He belongs in the Paris family," Mr. Toledano said with satisfaction, taking a bit of a dig at the politics of fashion weeks. "He is about creativity, fabric, point of view." The Tortoise and the Hare When asked if he felt overlooked or stereotyped by his home industry, Mr. Browne paused for a moment and then shrugged. "Well, yes, a little," he said, sitting at a white Eero Saarinen table in his showroom, wearing a gray suit, the buttons on the cuffs undone, a white handkerchief folded into a square and peeking out of his pocket. (He doesn't like handkerchiefs folded into triangles; he considers them too "fancy.") "We do care. I've never been interested in cool, but I know other people are." Part of the problem is that fashion loves the myth of the boy wonder (see: Mr. Jacobs, Mr. Wang, Tom Ford), the story of designers having a moment and seizing it, the buzz of the millions of followers who may or may not actually ever make a purchase. That has never been the Thom Browne narrative. Not to mention the fact that at 51 he's not exactly a boy. Every time it seems as if Mr. Browne is on the verge of some breakthrough into the popular imagination winning a Cooper Hewitt National Design Award, having Michelle Obama wear his coat to her husband's second inauguration in 2013 (and his dress to the final presidential debate in 2012) it never quite happens. But then he has never been interested in the machinery that makes it happen: the red carpet and Instagram and Facebook and influencers. He has a social media account, but it belongs to his dog (and handbag model), Hector. His biggest current investment, 2 million to 3 million, is in digital, but it is not the digital of documenting his fabulous life; it is the digital of e commerce. Instead of opening more elaborate stores, he and Mr. Bazan plan to keep them small, like little windows on his world, with approximately 500 women's (and many more men's) products available online via a partnership with Farfetch. It is a direct reversal of the traditional equation in which a few pieces are sold via e commerce, with most held in physical back rooms. Every piece is photographed in house (two floors above the main offices) before being uploaded, and Mr. Browne oversees the shoots. He is his own stylist. His interest is above all in controlling the message. This is a man who runs eight miles every morning and eats exactly the same breakfast. It took him two years to decide that taking on Sandbridge as an investor would be a good idea. That refusal to compromise has arguably helped create the idea that his vision is inaccessible (or cultlike and uncomfortable) and not relevant to someone just looking for, say, a nice jacket. Or some cool striped socks. His women's runway shows reinforce this idea: They have historically taken place in the basement of a Chelsea art gallery that Mr. Browne has retrofitted to resemble a Palm Beach swimming club or Washington Square in the Henry James era with a gray flannel pondscape. Occasionally they also involve men in cat and bird costumes. Once there was even a white rabbit. Though, in the fable of fashion, those are probably the wrong animals. Really, Mr. Browne may be a tortoise. The question now is whether he will likewise win the race. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Captoria Porter of Bolingbrook, Ill., has seven children ages 11 to two months and experienced no depression during or after her first five pregnancies. But during her sixth, things were different: "I was really sad. I didn't want any company." Depression During and After Pregnancy Can Be Prevented, National Panel Says. Here's How. As many as one in seven women experience depression during pregnancy or in the year after giving birth. Now, for the first time, a national panel of health experts says there is a way to prevent it. Some kinds of counseling can keep some women from developing debilitating symptoms that can harm not only them but their babies, the panel reported on Tuesday. Its report amounted to a public call for health providers to seek out women with certain risk factors and guide them to counseling programs. The recommendation, by the United States Preventive Services Task Force, means that insurers will be required to cover those services with no co payments under the Affordable Care Act. "We really need to find these women before they get depressed," said Karina Davidson, a task force member and senior vice president for research for Northwell Health. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Perinatal depression, as it is called, is estimated to affect between 180,000 and 800,000 American mothers each year and up to 13 percent of women worldwide. The condition increases a woman's risk of becoming suicidal or harming her infant, the panel reported. It also increases the likelihood that babies will be born premature or have low birth weight, and can impair a mother's ability to bond with or care for her child. The panel reported that children of mothers who had perinatal depression have more behavior problems, cognitive difficulties and mental illness. "This recommendation is really important," said Jennifer Felder, an assistant professor of psychiatry at University of California, San Francisco, who was not on the panel. "This focuses on identifying women who are at risk for depression and proactively preventing its onset, using concrete guidelines." The panel recommended counseling for women with one or more of a broad range of risk factors, including a personal or family history of depression; recent stresses like divorce or economic strain; traumatic experiences like domestic violence; or depressive symptoms that don't constitute a full blown diagnosis. Others include being a single mother, a teenager, low income, lacking a high school diploma, or having an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy, panel members said. It highlighted two specific programs, which were similarly successful, Dr. Davidson said. They counsel first time mothers and those who already have children. They are available in Spanish and focus on low income women, about 30 percent of whom develop perinatal depression, experts say. One program, "Mothers and Babies," includes cognitive behavioral therapy in eight to 17 group sessions, often delivered in clinics or community health centers, primarily during pregnancy with at least two sessions postpartum. "It's really meant to break down this idea that talking about your thoughts and behaviors is scary," said Darius Tandon, an associate professor at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine and principal investigator of several "Mothers and Babies" studies. So far, health and human service agencies in over 175 counties in 21 states have been trained to implement the program. It is also being evaluated in Florida and the Midwest to see if it works when administered one on one by home visiting caseworkers instead of groups run by psychologists or social workers, Dr. Tandon said. The other program, "Reach Out, Stay Strong, Essentials for New Moms" or ROSE, typically delivered in four sessions during pregnancy and one postpartum, can be administered in groups or one on one by nurses, midwives or anyone trained to follow the manual, said Jennifer Johnson, a professor of public health at Michigan State University. So far, women in Rhode Island, Mississippi and Japan have participated, said ROSE's creator, Caron Zlotnick, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University. She and Dr. Johnson are testing its expansion to 90 clinics throughout the country. Karla Manica, 30, a single mother of four in Detroit, participated in "Mothers and Babies" when pregnant with her youngest, who is now 1. She said she experienced abuse as a child and in relationships, attempted suicide by drinking cleaner, lived in homeless shelters after being laid off from her job as a dementia caregiver, and has had bipolar depression. "It was good to come to the table and share," Ms. Manica said. The counselor texted uplifting messages between sessions, and "homework assignments" to engage in stress relieving activities were useful. When Ms. Manica learned her baby's father had another girlfriend, she said, the group "gave me hope." After her daughter Kathryn was born, "I was well," Ms. Manica said. "If I hadn't got with the Mothers and Babies, would I have been prepared, would I have gotten the confidence I have now? No." Experts and leaders of the programs, whose curriculums and counselor training are free, said financial and other obstacles exist. "Cost is definitely still an issue," said Dr. Tandon. He said one prenatal session costs clinics delivering the counseling 40 to 50 to provide mothers' transportation and child care, and Medicaid doesn't have a reimbursement code for preventive counseling, so clinics often absorb the cost of staff time to provide it. Even in some cases in which it doesn't prevent depression, counseling may be beneficial, said Dr. Melissa Simon, a task force member and vice chairwoman of research at Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine's obstetrics and gynecology department. "It provides the pregnant person with education and coping strategies," she said, and can encourage those who develop depression to seek treatment faster. Captoria Porter, 28, of Bolingbrook, Ill., who has seven children, ages 2 months to 11, experienced no depression during or after her first five pregnancies. But during her sixth, life became more tumultuous, with marital problems and the need to move in with her sister because the housing project where she was living was closing. After the birth of Myla, now 1, "I think I had symptoms of depression," said Ms. Porter, who has worked as a telemarketer selling sanitizer dispensers. "I was really sad." Fortunately, the pre birth "Mothers and Babies" sessions helped her recognize signs like "you don't want to brush your hair or you don't want to be bothered with the baby," she said. "I would find myself feeling that way." Ms. Porter met twice with a community center counselor, but realized the program had already taught her the practices he recommended: "Reaching out to family and friends. Learning that I can't control everything. Eating when the baby eats, sleeping when the baby sleeps, laying the kids down for a nap and calling it 'me time.'" That warded off full blown depression. "I caught it early," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Noah Baumbach knows how it looks. The director, 50, has a new movie out, "Marriage Story," that seems, on the surface, very "Noah Baumbach." There are the usual Baumbauch ian characters artistic, bourgeois, alternately sympathetic and repellent caught in scenarios that feel naturalistic to the point of suspicion, as if torn from the pages of an unsparing notebook. In "Kicking and Screaming" (1995), made shortly after he'd graduated from Vassar, his subject was twentysomethings fresh out of an elite college, struggling to accept a world beyond their unbounded egos. In "The Squid and the Whale" (2005), it was an erudite Brooklyn family in the 1980s, mired in the circular firing squad of a bitter divorce. The patriarch, played by Jeff Daniels, wore a sport coat that belonged to Baumbach's actual father. With "Marriage Story," a probable Oscar contender for best picture and original screenplay, available on Netflix Dec. 6, Baumbach has returned to divorce once more. The film captures a marriage as seen in the rearview, as both partners, a New York theater director and an actress with a past and potential future in Hollywood, veer in opposite directions and toward opposite coasts. Its verisimilitude has inspired comparisons to the director's own marriage, to the Los Angeles born actress Jennifer Jason Leigh, whom he divorced in 2013. Would you believe it if he told you that even though the movie's central characters, Charlie (played by Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), share biographical details with Baumbach and Leigh, their actual stories don't have all that much in common? "I couldn't write an autobiographical movie if I tried," Baumbach said when we sat down for a conversation (edited excerpts below) at his favorite Italian bistro in Manhattan's West Village. He was wearing a dark, wool suit, and a strand of his silver streaked black hair fell over one eye, framing the dramatic angles of his jaw. "This movie is not autobiographical; it's personal, and there's a true distinction in that." Can you elaborate on what you see as the difference between autobiographical and personal? I think when people say autobiographical, they're assuming it's one to one, which none of my movies are in the slightest. I might use autobiographical details at times, but any extrapolation beyond that has no meaning to the work or to me or anything else. Why do you think you're more vulnerable to that sort of extrapolation than other filmmakers? I guess partly because my movies take place in some version of the real world, so there's a kind of identification. If you're watching a David Lynch movie, you're not like, "Oh, that just happened to me," when, if you watch "Marriage Story," you might think, "Oh, I've had that experience." What kinds of things make you stop and say, "This should be in a movie?" This is a small one, but I grew up in Brooklyn. At some point, walking out of a subway up to the street, to me, felt like something I wanted to put in a movie. I love the idea of rising out of the earth something about the way the emotion and the imagery come together for me. Other times, there might be something that feels like fodder for a scene. With "The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)" from 2017 , I had been spending a lot of time in hospitals his father, the novelist Jonathan Baumbach, died in March and was thinking of a doctor going on vacation when you need them most, or the nurses switching over and you don't like the new nurse. That kind of thing can be incredibly frustrating, but it feels alive in some way, like a wire of electricity you can use to activate something else. Is it ever disruptive to your life when you're thinking in those terms? It can be. But to me it's almost an affectionate response to something. And it doesn't really take me out of the experience, it's just a kind of a companion thought to what I'm going through. How did you go about getting into Charlie and Nicole's heads? It was a lot of research. Talking to friends, and then to friends of friends, and then to the lawyers and mediators of friends. I would talk to both the women and the men to get all of the different perspectives, which helped externalize things. The actors were incredibly helpful, as well, Adam and Scarlett. I brought in Scarlett and Laura Dern, who plays Nicole's high powered lawyer early on, and they would talk about their experiences in relationships, and divorce, and career, and just being human beings. I also live with Greta Gerwig, the actress and director, who co wrote "Frances Ha" (2013) and "Mistress America" (2015) with Baumbach and she and I are very involved in each other's projects, so I often would show her things to read, or talk it out with her and get ideas. When you're writing characters who are inspired by people in your life, do you think about the moment when they'll see it? What do you see as your responsibility in that situation? Well, the characters are always a kind of stew, not a one to one stand in for a real person. But if I use a specific detail from someone, I'll definitely ask their permission. But really the only times people have come up to me and said, "Hey, you based this thing on me," were times when I didn't. Did you get feedback from your ex wife? Well I showed her the script and I showed her the movie, just so she would know what it is. No, but I could've still made changes. But I didn't have any concerns about it, and she really liked it, because it isn't about our marriage. That's not to say that there aren't emotional connections, things that happened to me emotionally that are going to be translated in some way into this story, but I think that's true for every writer who's gone through breakups or been in love. How does it feel when people assume that it's about the two of you? Well people have been doing that, in some way, with every movie I've done. Sometimes I think it's a compliment that people are engaged or interested, that it must feel true because it provokes this feeling of wanting to know where something came from. It doesn't bother me, but it's also not something I can even answer to. It's a work of fiction, but it is extremely personal at the same time. Looking back at your work, there's that stretch "The Squid and the Whale," "Margot at the Wedding" and "Greenberg" where you were writing particularly biting, unkind or narcissistic characters. Critics at the time often wrote about the movies themselves in similar terms. I wonder if you see a link between those movies, or if, in hindsight, you think they're reflective of a particular phase in your life. No, I don't. I think it happens when you make a few movies, people start linking things up. I probably do it too with other people's movies. But I don't think of them that way. For me, it's just sort of a clash of ideas, or an actor, or things I was interested in then. "Squid" makes me very emotional, because it reminds me of the time I was writing it and feeling like it was my last chance after having struggled for a bit. When the film was released, in 2005, Baumbach hadn't made a feature in eight years. And I have a lot of affection for Margot and Greenberg. What made those characters so empathetic to me was that they were their own worst enemies. I don't know, do you see a connection between them? I see a few connections. But I think, certainly from "Frances Ha" onward, there started to be more lightness, or heart, or optimism in the work. I'm curious whether you attribute that shift if you acknowledge a shift to any particular change in your life or your thinking. Well, I'm sure there must be something to why I make the movie I make at the time that I make it. There must be something to that. But I don't analyze it. I don't think about it, really. "Greenberg" came up the other day with Greta, and we were talking about what we saw in it, how lonely those two characters were. I don't think I would make that movie now, but I'm glad I made it then. How do you think working with Greta has affected your outlook? I mean, she's a singular influence on me, as a creative person and as a person. Even when she was an actor in "Greenberg," I recognized a familiarity to the way she played the part. Adam is that way, too they're in the language in a way that feels like they wrote it, even though they didn't. When Greta and I started actually writing together, it felt like a similar kind of natural extension. I think I've always recognized something in her the way that I would like to be, both as a person and, now, as a filmmaker. I think I grew up in a way where there was this idea that you shouldn't celebrate. "Don't celebrate because it all might just fall apart anyway." Or "Don't celebrate because something better will come and that'll be the thing you'll celebrate." Of course, that just leads to death laughs . Greta knows how to celebrate. She is so enthusiastic and engages so much with the present that it helps me kind of appreciate what's going on in a way. I haven't always been good at enjoying everything, but I think I enjoy more now because of her. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Why pay for an overnight hotel stay when you need a room during the day for only a few hours or even just a few minutes? It's an idea that is likely to appeal to many consumers, according to a handful of companies that sell hotel rooms for short blocks of time. By the hour hotel rooms aren't a novel concept. In fact, they have a reputation for being used for illicit reasons, said Sean Hennessy, a hotel consultant and an assistant professor of hospitality at the Jonathan M. Tisch Center for Hospitality and Tourism at New York University. But while these brief rentals are traditionally found at budget hotels, the enterprises today involve higher end properties and are targeting middle class to affluent customers for considerably different purposes. "Now, more than ever before, the hotel industry is focused on trying to generate as much revenue as possible, and taking advantage of empty rooms during the day is one way to do that," Mr. Hennessy said. The guests who might book these rooms, he said, include travelers with layovers, corporate travelers who need a quiet place to work and don't have an office in town, and locals who are seeking some downtime during the day and find it more convenient to check into a hotel near where they are rather than go back home. Mr. Hennessy said that it can often be too logistically challenging for hotels to try sell rooms for small pockets of time on their own, and instead, a growing number of properties are collaborating with companies that can help them. One example is HotelsbyDay.com, with a presence in more than 60 cities in the United States, including New York City, Chicago and Denver, as well as in London and Paris. The brand works with more than 600 hotels in the three to five star categories, and rooms are available to book for a minimum of four hours between 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. Pricing varies by destination, but the chief executive officer, Yannis Moati, said that the national average is 90 for four hours. Dayuse.com, available for 4,000 hotels in 22 countries, also partners with three to five star properties, with a three hour minimum on reservations. And now, with the app Recharge, users can book rooms by the minute at luxury properties in New York City and San Francisco. Intrigued by the idea, I used Recharge to book stays at three hotels in New York City, where I live. My visits were all under a half hour, and over the course of a weekend, I got the feel of what it was like to be a by the minute hotel guest. Recharge launched in San Francisco in 2016 and last April in New York City and can be used to book rooms by the minute in about 20 hotels in each destination, at any time of day or night. Many are five star properties, such as the Surrey and the Pierre in New York City and the Taj Campton Palace in San Francisco, and some are in the four star category. In 2018, the service will expand to Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami and Washington, D.C. The company's co founder and chief executive officer, Manny Bamfo, said that he started Recharge because he believed that there was a demand for hotel stays in minute long increments. These stays can be booked for immediate visits or for ones up to a day in advance, but booking is only through the app. Recharge's customers more than 30,000 as of November are mostly locals and include mothers who want a clean place to nurse their babies or pump their breast milk, people seeking a quiet space to take a phone call and those seeking a midday reprieve. "We've even had fathers who need to change their child's diaper and would rather do it in a hotel room than in a coffee shop bathroom," Mr. Bamfo said. "You pay for the amount of time you need and nothing more." Hotels benefit, too, Mr. Bamfo said: According to the company's research, a 250 room property can get almost 275 rooms' worth of revenue in one day from these short stays. Every hotel listed on Recharge's app has a service fee, ranging from 30 to 50. The more luxurious the hotel, the higher the fee. After the service fee, per minute prices for the stays range from 50 cents to 2. Pricing for the same property can fluctuate throughout the day, depending on supply and demand, and some hotels may have a minimum charge at certain times of the day. I tried Recharge on a weekend when I had to hit different neighborhoods in Manhattan for various errands. My first trial was on a Saturday afternoon after I unexpectedly spent two hours at the Apple store on Fifth Avenue in Midtown, getting my iPhone fixed. There was just an hour before my dinner reservation on the West Side, and going back to my East Side apartment only to leave again almost immediately for the meal seemed like a waste of time. Here was my opportunity to turn to Recharge. The app showed availability in a dozen hotels, including the Pierre, just a few blocks away. I reserved my room, showed up five minutes later and was warmly greeted at the front desk by an employee, who had a record of my booking and offered me a bottle of water. Although my room overlooked a wall, it was well appointed with silk fabrics, wood furniture and a white marble bath stocked with toiletries from the luxury brand Etro. I relaxed on the bed, weary from my long wait at Apple, and after channel flipping for 15 minutes, I was somewhat revived and ready to enjoy my night out. Checking out, which involved clicking one button on the app, couldn't have been easier, and once I did, I got an email receipt for my 69.95 stay. The next day, between returning clothes at multiple stores, buying baby gifts and restocking my spices with a trip to Kalustyan's in the Curry Hill neighborhood, I checked into two hotels when I needed a break. The first one was Fifty NYC, an Affinia hotel , in Midtown East. Recharge listed the property in the four star category, and it was indeed less lavish than the Pierre, although the service was just as warm. My room's simple decor didn't bother me, but the lack of light did: on a bright, sunny day, my view of a wall made it feel like it was dark outside. I caught up on emails during my 14 minute, 45.03 stay, and although it was time well spent, more natural light would have made that time more pleasant. Would I fare better at the Michelangelo, on the West Side? No, as it turned out. The property, with gleaming marble floors and gilded elevators, was opulent, and my room was spacious, but it was the darkest of the three. I spent 61.05 for my 20 minutes there, which I used to call my mother in law in India, and truthfully, I couldn't have stayed much more the ambience was too gloomy. Mr. Bamfo said that my rooms were not reflective of the typical Recharge experience. "Hotels put our customers in any available rooms, even if they're not in the entry level category," he said. "It's unusual that you would be in a string of dark rooms." Recharge is easy to use and has an appealing list of hotels. In a market in which companies sell stays at properties for small chunks of time, the brand's by the minute feature helps it stand out. I can't necessarily justify paying to use it on a regular basis, but I can see why some people would. When you need a place to put your feet up or are seeking privacy for another reason, checking into a fancy hotel room for as little as a few minutes may be just the thing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
There's a downtown vibe to the newest 21c Museum Hotel. Contemporary artworks fill the public gallery spaces in a former factory building. The restaurant features an open kitchen, white subway tiles and stout concrete pillars. Guest rooms above look like lofts with platform beds and floor to ceiling drapes to draw across expansive steel framed windows. A trendy boutique hotel in New York or Los Angeles, perhaps? Try Oklahoma City, where the rates start at the comparatively modest 219 a night. Like similar small but growing hotel brands, 21c has taken the lifestyle hotel more common in big cities to secondary in size locations, offering smart design, destination restaurants and local programming where few comparable options existed. And the choice of location for these boutiques, in cities like Lexington, Ky., and Madison, Wis., and sometimes in seasonal resort areas, makes for attractively priced weekends, especially for travelers used to paying big city prices. One of the earliest of its ilk, Ace Hotel (acehotel.com) opened in 1999 in Seattle, and has since progressed to both large cities, including London and New York, and smaller ones, such as Pittsburgh. The new Ace New Orleans opened in March in a former furniture store in the Warehouse District with retro design from the firm of Roman and Williams, a music venue, a New Orleans accented Italian restaurant, a rooftop pool and rooms from 189. In some ways, the spread of design hotels reflects a maturing market. "Hotels are slow to adapt because of the amount of capital required to produce a hotel," said Ben Weprin, the chief executive and founder of Graduate Hotels, which are in college towns. "With a restaurant, you need hope and a dream and a credit card. In hospitality it's a significant capital investment, so it's a much slower process, especially in tertiary or secondary cities." Steve Wilson, a founder of 21c Museum Hotels, said: "There are a lot of cities in the country without a great hotel and they happen to be in secondary cities. It's sort of an untapped segment of the industry." Here are three small hotel companies tapping it. Major contemporary art collectors, Mr. Wilson and his wife, Laura Lee Brown, opened their first 21c Museum Hotel in Louisville, Ky., 10 years ago to help revitalize downtown and create a cultural center in the community through their art holdings, now found throughout each of six hotels. "We are about revitalizing city centers," said Mr. Wilson, who had no prior experience in hotels when he started. "We thought if we were able to be successful in downtown and make the city center more interesting to live and work in, we'd be preventing sprawl." Most of the 21c hotels (21cmuseumhotels.com) occupy repurposed buildings, such as an automobile factory in Oklahoma City, which opened in June, and a former bank building in Lexington, which debuted this year. Each hotel (there are also locations in Cincinnati; Durham, N.C.; and Bentonville, Ark.) employs a curator, and the museum at each is free and often holds events like docent tours and yoga in the galleries. Restaurants tend to have independent identities from the hotels and draw a large share of local patrons. "We get a lot of people who don't think of themselves as interested in art and wouldn't go to museum for a special trip but realize with us that it can be funny, sexy, a little uncomfortable and it brings people back," he said. The company plans to open hotels next in Nashville, Kansas City and Indianapolis, though Mr. Wilson added that he has looked at property in Brooklyn, Miami and Los Angeles and expects to move into a major city soon. Most college towns are the domain of undistinguished chain hotels, which the new Graduate Hotels (graduatehotels.com) aims to change. Graduates impart a sense of place through design and food in six locations including Tempe, Ariz.; Charlottesville, Va.; Athens, Ga.; and Madison, Wis. "People want to come to these towns and live like a local," said Mr. Weprin, Graduate's chief executive. "They want a hotel that captures the moment." Graduates do that with eclectic design, including flea market art at the Graduate Tempe, wooden canoes affixed to the lobby ceiling at the Graduate Madison, and a mix of antiques and modern furnishings at the Graduate Charlottesville. They also focus on communal spaces and local food and beverage options. The new Graduate Ann Arbor in Michigan features a 40 foot communal table in the lobby where coffee from Zingerman's Deli, a local institution, is served (rooms from 209). The Graduate Oxford in Oxford, Miss., has a Southern restaurant in a barn wood paneled room modeled on an old general store. And the Graduate Athens features live bands at its restaurant to reflect the local music scene. Started in 2014, the company serves university visitors; alumni, especially on football weekends; local business communities; and at least one surprising group: wedding parties. "We had no idea," said Mr. Weprin. "We get a lot of destination weddings in these places that have an emotional connection to the bride and groom." In this and next year, Graduate Hotels are coming to Berkeley, Calif.; Richmond, Va.; Durham, N.C.; and Lincoln, Neb. Lark Hotels (larkhotels.com) stakes out its territory largely in New England resort destinations and small towns. Since opening four years ago, it has grown to 18 locations, including the new Summercamp that revitalized a historic hotel on Martha's Vineyard (rooms from 149) and Field Guide, which replaced an English style inn in Stowe, Vt., with more rustic, woodsy design. "The motivation was basically to bring a new, fresh, modern take on what has been happening in New England forever, which is hospitality," said Rob Blood, the chief executive of Lark Hotels. "We didn't see a space in the upper part of the market with updated fresh design and unpretentious service." All of the properties have a relaxed feel and whimsical design elements that reflect their location, such as mounted deer heads made of cardboard and wallpaper with bird patterns at Field Guide. The just opened Blue on Plum Island, Mass., has 10 mostly white rooms with ocean blue accents and rugs the color of sand. Playful amenities at Summercamp include a game room with Ping Pong and Twister. Service is casual and friendly, and the staff will never call you "Sir" or "Ma'am." "I think the psychology of travelers is changing," Mr. Blood said. "We talk about millennials as a demographic but I think of it as a psychographic. People are looking for a stronger connection with the stay experience." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
FRANCOPHILE Ed Perzel of North Carolina fell for Citroen 2CVs in Paris, but bought his '64 model from the restoration shop in Toms River, N.J. OF all he could have fallen in love with during his trip to France in 2001 the food, the wine, the architecture, the women Ed Perzel became smitten with a tin snail. Much to the relief of his wife, Elli. Tin snail is a nickname for the Deux Chevaux, a charismatic French car manufactured in 1948 90. Produced by Citroen, it has been called a frog, a goat, mon petit and a student Jaguar. In the United States, it is known as a 2CV. Deux Chevaux or more completely, Deux Chevaux Vapeur indicates an official rating of two taxable horsepower, a modest number that conferred the benefit of a lower tax assessment based on the car's small size, light weight and tiny engine. "I knew what a 2CV was, but had never actually seen one until our first trip to Paris in 2001," said Mr. Perzel, 74, a retired college professor and a lover of eclectic cars. "I said to Elli, 'I've got to get one of those.' " The 2CV was to France what the Volkswagen Beetle was to Germany and the Ford Model T to America inexpensive transportation for tough economic times. Depending on how many variations of the basic model are counted, production estimates for the 2CV can exceed seven million. The Toute Petite Voiture, or very small car, development program was conceived in 1934 with its original design brief calling for "four wheels under an umbrella." It was to be a minimalist car that could equally haul four adults wearing proper hats to church on Sunday or 50 kilos of potatoes to market on Monday. The mission of the 2CV's lanky yet compliant suspension was to assure that it could be driven across a plowed farm field with a basket of eggs on the seat, not breaking a single one. Being easy on eggs meant it would be comfortable for humans, too. The car was equipped with an air cooled 2 cylinder engine that powered, more or less, the front wheels; output peaked at about 30 horsepower by the time production ended. To Citroen enthusiasts, however, traditional measures of performance are not the point. They say a 2CV can accelerate from 0 to 60 "in a day," but it produces more smiles per mile than any car. On subsequent trips to France, Mr. Perzel looked into buying a 2CV that he could ship home to West Jefferson, N.C. He even considered a 2CV restoration project from a junkyard in Provence before deciding that project would be too complicated. An Internet search eventually led Mr. Perzel to Noel Slade, owner of Eurocar Imports, a Citroen specialist in Toms River, on the Jersey Shore. Mr. Slade, a native of Essex, England, inherited a love of 2CVs from his father, who operated a Citroen repair shop. The younger Mr. Slade brought his skills to the United States after marrying an American working in England who yearned to return to the New York area. Mr. Slade, 38, refurbishes 2CVs, importing derelict hulks by the container load from France, Germany, Spain and Belgium. When they arrive in New Jersey, the cars are disassembled and sandblasted to remove corrosion. The rust prone original frame is replaced with a new galvanized steel unit. "We're not just doing paint jobs; we're completely remanufacturing the whole car from the ground up," Mr. Slade said. "It's like a giant Lego set, just parts, nuts and bolts," he added. "We've shipped finished cars all over the United States, Canada, South America, across Europe and Australia. California is our most popular state." Each 2CV gets new body panels and upholstery reproduction parts are readily available and the engine and suspension are rebuilt. Mr. Slade sells most of his remade cars for 20,000 to 25,000, depending on the paint configuration and optional equipment, which may include higher grade interior trim and engine modifications. The Perzels ordered a 1964 2CV in classic burgundy and black, a color combination with an Art Deco riff that Citroen used on the Charleston models. "The reality is that I bought a 2CV before I ever drove one," Mr. Perzel said. "I made one quick trip to Toms River to check out his operation. I ordered the car in June 2009, and it was delivered the following February." Mr. Perzel has been driving his 2CV around the North Carolina mountains ever since. "It's a fun car to go out and play in," he said. "Everyone who sees it does a double take." Mr. Slade said he's had a customer waiting list for the cars since he opened for business in 2003. Even though it takes only about eight weeks to completely rebuild a 2CV, customers ordering a car today will wait six to eight months for delivery. He and his staff restore some 25 to 30 2CVs a year, and the shop works on the delivery truck version as well as other Citroen models. Those waiting times may be extended as a result of recent events. The shop suffered severe damage in October from Hurricane Sandy. "Water flooded the building," Mr. Slade said. "I lost or sustained damage on 40 2CVs, and I lost most of my tools and equipment." The pressure to get the shop back in operation may not be as dire as it would be for conventional repair businesses because Mr. Slade's 2CVs are often bought as hobby vehicles. But customers soon discover the cars are competent as daily drivers, he said. "A 2CV can get 45 to 48 miles per gallon and can travel at highway speeds," he said. One customer, Sam Scribner, bought a yellow and black 1975 2CV from Mr. Slade last spring. Mr. Scribner, the American owner of a furniture business in Panama, decided to treat himself to a car he had admired for years after retiring to Maitland, Fla. "I bought it to keep company for my 1970 VW Beetle convertible," said Mr. Scribner, 64, whose 2CV has its steering wheel on the right. "Most people have no idea what kind of car it is. People take pictures of me at traffic lights." Mr. Scribner says he regularly reaches 60 miles per hour when taking his wife to work at Disney World in Orlando, 32 miles from home. "It's designed to be driven hard," he said. Mr. Slade also services 2CVs bought elsewhere. Ben Boyle, a high school English teacher from Kingston, Mich., bought his red 1986 2CV nine years ago from a private owner in Atlanta. Mr. Slade has not only replaced the car's frame, he also made a house call to rebuild its engine. "As long as it's not snowing, I'm driving that car," said Mr. Boyle, 32, whose collection includes such disparate vehicles as a 1980 Chevy Chevette and a Russian S.U.V. called the Lada Niva. "I've driven 90,000 miles in my 2CV since I bought it," he said. "It's a car full of quirky features, like windows that flip up, a quirky suspension and a quirky shifter that comes out of the dashboard. It's a collection of simple parts that are put together in an unorthodox manner. "I can understand how the new versions of the Mini Cooper and Fiat 500 drive up the value of older models, but thankfully there is nothing culturally I can identify that will drive up the prices of 2CVs," Mr. Boyle said. Whatever happens with 2CV values, there are orders waiting to be filled, so for the near term, Mr. Slade said, he will rebuild the business at his current location. But he hopes to sign a lease soon for a new shop five miles farther inland, in Manchester, N.J. "I'll be up and running 100 percent within four weeks," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Fox News struck back against the former anchor Andrea Tantaros on Monday, filing a motion to move her sexual harassment lawsuit into arbitration. In papers filed in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan, the network said, "Tantaros is not a victim; she is an opportunist." Last week, Ms. Tantaros filed the lawsuit in the same court, accusing Fox News of operating like "a sex fueled, Playboy Mansion like cult" and said that she had been sexually harassed by Roger Ailes, the network's former chairman, Bill O'Reilly, the anchor, and others. In the suit, she claims that, after complaining about harassment, she was eventually marginalized and removed from the air. The lawsuit names Mr. Ailes; Bill Shine and Suzanne Scott, two programming executives; Dianne Brandi, the legal chief; and Irena Briganti, the network's top communications executive. In the motion filed on Monday, lawyers for Fox News said they had looked into her harassment claims and found nothing, and that she had been let go for violating a major part of her contract: She did not get approval for a book she wrote titled, "Tied Up in Knots: How Getting What We Wanted Made Women Miserable." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Both Had Something to Say. Finally, They Said It at the Same Time. Caroline Kitchener understands better than many that love, millennial style, can come with inconsistencies. For her, they started showing themselves just after college, in 2014. Ms. Kitchener, 27, a staff writer at the Lily, The Washington Post's platform for millennial women, moved to Washington that year to be with her college boyfriend, Robert Marshall. Landing in New York would have been a smarter career move, she said. But taking the world by storm professionally no longer seemed a great idea if it meant living apart from Mr. Marshall. "In college, it was just expected that my women friends and I would strive for the best possible career, that career was the priority over romantic relationships," she said. For men who followed their girlfriends, the judgment looked different. "People say, that's so sweet. Or, wow, he really loves her." Mr. Marshall made a powerful first impression. Yet it was not the kind that might prompt someone like Ms. Kitchener, whose work explored serious topics like whether the term "partner" is rightfully eclipsing "husband" and "wife," to one day uproot herself. "The first time I met Robert, I was opening my dorm room door as a freshman, and he was standing there with a bunch of other people wearing short shorts and no shirt," Ms. Kitchener said. He also had a portrait of Jack McCoy, the character played by Sam Waterston on "Law and Order," painted on his back. Mr. Marshall was wearing Mr. Waterston's likeness as a way of getting into the spirit of his mock trial team, a campus club that prepares and tries legal cases. Ms. Kitchener had tried out days earlier and made the team. Mr. Marshall was at her dorm alongside a half dozen teammates to deliver the good news. "Only a few people get picked," said Mr. Marshall, now a law student at Georgetown. Since he was 14, Mr. Marshall knew he wanted to be a criminal trial lawyer, so mock trial had "been my thing for a really long time," he said. For Ms. Kitchener, the appeal was public speaking. "I've just always loved writing speeches and delivering them," she said. "Almost everyone I've ever dated has been a public speaker, someone who could speak well." Mr. Marshall, with his years of practice, was an obvious candidate for a first college boyfriend. But Ms. Kitchener already had a boyfriend. A shift in their relationship occurred in February 2012 when Ms. Kitchener and Mr. Marshall took a walk to a CVS. "I needed ear plugs and Caroline needed feminine hygiene products, and we didn't have a car, so we walked," Mr. Marshall said. The 25 minute trek took place along a roaring highway in Orlando, Fla., where they were competing at mock trial regionals. Despite the setting, the conversation flowed. "We talked about everything but mock trial," Mr. Marshall said. By the time they rejoined their team with their drugstore supplies, he knew he wanted to date Ms. Kitchener. But back in Princeton, when he told her he felt a spark and asked if she did, too, she said no. "I was in my first serious relationship, and I didn't really understand how you could have feelings for two people at the same time," she said. Mr. Marshall adopted a strategy of persistence. "I was like, I'm going to keep telling her how I feel. It just felt very right to me. I really felt like I was going to be able to win her over." They were thousands of miles apart by the time he did. Ms. Kitchener grew up with her parents, Nancy and John Kitchener, and had two half sisters, Milly Smyth, who died in 2016, and Sarah Robbins. She spent the summer of 2012 teaching public speaking in China. While there, she said, "it became really clear to me that Robert was the person I wanted to talk to. I wrote him an email. Then we ended up writing each other these beautiful emails." By the beginning of her junior year, they were a couple. But it wasn't until spring of 2013, when Ms. Kitchener returned to China to study abroad, that she knew she had fallen unstoppably in love. Mr. Marshall flew to China to visit her at the end of that semester. On their itinerary were stops at a few of the homes of her public speaking students. "Robert at the time was a very picky eater," she said. "His diet consisted of pizza and whole wheat Goldfish. My students in China had very little money, and they were inviting us to their homes for these nice meals, and I was so afraid he was going to say, 'I can't eat this, I can't eat that.'" Instead, "he ate everything. Pigs blood. Everything." "I had stomachs, I had fish eyes, I had lots of intestines," Mr. Marshall said. "And it turned out I really liked Chinese food." To Ms. Kitchener, his willingness to adapt to the local culture felt supportive. He showed the same support for her future career when, just before her 2014 graduation, she was offered a book deal. "I thought for sure I was going to be a domestic violence lawyer," she said. But based on an article she wrote for The Atlantic about gender dynamics in social spaces on college campuses in 2013, she was commissioned to write "Post Grad: Five Women and Their First Year Out of College," published by HarperCollins in 2017. During the two years it took to complete, she decided to move in with Mr. Marshall, who had an internship at a health policy law firm in Washington after graduating from Princeton in 2013. (She has never regretted it, as she pointed out publicly in 2017 in a monologue on PBS NewsHour titled "Why I Followed My Boyfriend to a New City After College.") "To me the most important decision you make in your life is who you're going to be with," she said. "When you find that, there should be no shame. There should be joy and celebration." She does acknowledge that timing can be important. In the summer of 2017, Ms. Kitchener was working as an associate editor at The Atlantic, and Mr. Marshall was on break from his law classes at Georgetown, where he expects to finish in 2020. They took a vacation to China, to visit friends. Mr. Marshall secretly packed an engagement ring he had bought at Brilliant Earth, a sustainable jewelry store. At their first stop post landing, a hamburger place where they once made a practice of stealing coasters from, he proposed. "I had been convincing Caroline forever that I didn't want to get married until I was at least 32, so I thought this was going to be the most surprising surprise," Mr. Marshall said. It was. But she had a surprise in store for him: She said no. "I was delirious from lack of sleep and jet lag," Ms. Kitchener said. "I didn't exactly say no. I said, 'Not at this moment.' I was 25 at the time, and knew I wanted to marry him, but we had talked about waiting till 30." Mr. Marshall admits he felt hurt. But "I sort of reflexively make things that could be sad into jokes," he said. "The next day I was fine." Ms. Kitchener felt terrible regardless. "A lot of my friends were like, You know you're going to marry this person. Why not say yes now?," she said. "But I wanted the prevailing emotion of the moment not to be shock. I wanted it to be profound joy." On Dec. 16, 2017, she did her best to orchestrate such a moment. It started with recruiting Mr. Marshall on a road trip to visit their friend Ray Chao, a one time mock trial team member and close friend who had moved to Manhattan. On the way, they stopped in Princeton. "I told Robert we needed to stop because the mock trial team wanted to practice with us and needed our help," she said. When they arrived, she duped Mr. Marshall into thinking she was meeting with a professor. Actually, she was hurrying to the mock trial practice room, where they had spent countless hours strategizing together as students. There, she lit 100 candles. She also made a sign that said, "Marry me." When Mr. Marshall approached the building, "I was like, What the hell," he said. "They must have redone the lighting in here. It looks really weird. Then I opened the door and I was like, Oh, God." "He said yes immediately," said Ms. Kitchener, who had unearthed the Brilliant Earth ring from Mr. Marshall's underwear drawer, where he had been hiding it since the first proposal. Mr. Chao, who hosted a party for them that night at his Manhattan apartment, was relieved the second proposal was successful. "I did know about what happened in China," he said. "But there was never a doubt in my mind that they would end up together." On May 25, at their wedding at the Inn at Mount Vernon Farm in Sperryville, Va., 120 friends and family also felt assured. Ms. Kitchener walked down a grassy aisle with her father to a pergola built by Jim Marshall and woven with colorful wildflowers and greenery; the green hills and blue skies beyond her seemed limitless. She wore a sleeveless long white sheath with a plunging back from Kleinfeld's. Her blond hair was pulled back in a French knot. Her six attendants, in floor length marigold dresses, included Mr. Marshall's only sibling, Mary Marshall. Mr. Marshall, in a light gray suit, his curly hair flopping in the late spring breeze, awaited her alongside six groomsmen in floral ties and lavender suspenders. Mr. Chao, who became a minister online, by the Universal Life Church, performed a short ceremony punctuated by a pair of readings, one a Chinese love poem read by a former student who had flown in from China. Ms. Kitchener and Mr. Marshall wrote their own vows; Mr. Marshall's included a promise that, on rare occasions when he offers her edits on her articles and she rejects them, he will not take offense. Ms. Kitchener, through tears, told Mr. Marshall that, should they ever get trapped in a rhythm that feels overly predictable, she will push them to take risks. "Our lives will never be boring," she said before they recessed into the Inn, Mr. Chao having pronounced them "partners for life." Where The Inn at Mount Vernon Farm, Sperryville, Va. Second (Secret) Ceremony Ms. Kitchener and Mr. Marshall were married, legally, by Sandra Cartwright Brown, a court appointed celebrant in Rappahannock County, in a short, private exchange just after the outdoor wedding. The county does not recognize officiants from the Universal Life Church. Like a Magazine A cocktail hour and reception were held at the Inn's barn, a long, narrow structure with exposed beams and whitewashed walls. Ms. Kitchener knew it wasn't exactly an original concept. In 2018, she wrote a story titled, "Why Is Everybody Getting Married in a Barn?" for The Atlantic. Of a Feather Mr. Marshall is a bird enthusiast. "He's always stopping midsentence to show me a bird he sees somewhere," Ms. Kitchener said. So one of her vows was, "I will always come look at the bird." As a surprise to Mr. Marshall, she found a local artist who makes bird greeting cards. A card printed with the words, "I will always come look at the bird," was placed at each guest's seat before dinner. Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion and Weddings) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
"We're going to help you understand that you can have a soft drink, but please know that when you drink it, you may be drinking well in excess of the federal government's daily recommended allowance of sugar," said Ron Shaich, the founder and chief executive of Panera. Mr. Shaich noted, for instance, that a 20 ounce serving of Dr Pepper contains 64 grams of added sugar or 14 grams more than the maximum amount recommended for daily consumption under the United States Dietary Guidelines for 2015 20. "We're not playing the food police here," he said. "But we do want to make you aware of the sugar in what you're drinking." He said a customer would get less added sugar eating one of Panera's chocolate chip cookies, bear claws or blueberry muffins than drinking a 20 ounce serving of Pepsi. "I would much rather have a pastry than a soda not that I'm encouraging people to eat more pastries," said Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a food advocacy group. "People should think of a soda as a cookie and make the same choice about drinking it as they would about eating a cookie." Panera said its labeling is starting with sugary beverages because they are among the top sources of calories and added sugar in the American diet. The move comes in advance of a May deadline for complying with federal regulations requiring restaurant chains with 20 or more stores and other retail food establishments to post calorie counts on their menus and at soda fountains. Many restaurant businesses, including Panera, have already added calorie counts to their menus, but those regulations do not require disclosure of added sugars. (Restaurant companies are required to provide customers with additional nutritional details about items on their menus if asked for them but do not have to post them, Ms. Wootan said.) Under regulations established by the Food and Drug Administration during the Obama administration, makers of packaged foods like cereal, cookies and spaghetti sauce will have to add a line to the nutrition panels on their products disclosing the amount of added sugar. Companies have until mid 2018 to comply; it is unknown whether the Trump administration will alter the initiative. Moreover, it doesn't apply to restaurants. As part of Panera's drive to improve the nutritional quality of the food it sells, in 2014 the company began stripping its menu of artificial sweeteners, preservatives and other ingredients on what it calls its "no no list." That task finished, the company now is turning toward the beverages it sells. "We think there isn't enough transparency and that people don't know what's going on nutritionally with what they're drinking," Mr. Shaich said. Panera has also reformulated two of its proprietary drinks, Passion Papaya Green Tea and Agave Lemonade, reducing their sugar content by roughly 40 percent. Passion Papaya now contains 30 grams of added sugar in a 20 ounce serving without ice, while the same size serving of Agave Lemonade contains 34 grams of added sugar. Those drinks, together with Blood Orange Lemonade, will be labeled "medium sweetened" with the amount of added sugar in them noted. Panera is also offering three drinks with no added sugar Iced Black Tea, Plum Ginger Hibiscus Tea and Prickly Pear Hibiscus Agua Fresca. The first two will be labeled "unsweetened," while the third, which contains naturally occurring sugar, will be labeled "lightly sweetened." All other beverages will be labeled "fully sweetened." "We're going to sell less soda," Mr. Shaich predicted. "But we're also going to offer customers other choices." Asked whether he expected any blowback, Mr. Shaich offered the vocal equivalent of a shrug. "I get to meet a lot of people who offer me their opinions about what we're doing," he said. "I have yet to meet a person, though, who has come up to me and said, 'Can you put those chemicals and preservatives back in your food?'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
As colleagues at Yale University, the former New York City Ballet dancer Emily Coates and the particle physicist Sarah Demers have collaborated on classes, lessons and a textbook. The course they designed and taught together, "Physics of Dance," introduced students to concepts from each discipline using the other. Taking that teamwork to the stage, Ms. Coates unveils a new work at Danspace Project starting Thursday, March 16. Part lecture, part performance, "Incarnations" addresses topics ranging from Newton's corporeality to the Higgs boson particle. An early showing of the piece, in 2015, included a winning demonstration of how George Balanchine, who defined a high speed American style of ballet, finessed the physics of the pirouette. Ms. Coates will be joined by Ms. Demers and the dancers Lacina Coulibaly, Irene Hultman and Jon Kinzel and the music director Will Orzo. The postmodern visionary Yvonne Rainer, with whom Ms. Coates has danced, will also make a brief appearance. (danspaceproject.org) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
WASHINGTON The world's largest known listeria outbreak has spread throughout South Africa for 15 months, killing 189 people. Health officials believe they have identified the source: bologna. Since January last year, 982 confirmed cases of listeriosis had been recorded, the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in South Africa reported on Thursday. The infection, caused by food that has been contaminated with the bacterium Listeria monocytogenes, is often lethal. A cluster of gastroenteritis cases among toddlers in a Johannesburg hospital this January led authorities to the sandwich meat in a day care center's refrigerator and in turn, to a meat production facility in the northern city of Polokwane. There, officials said they detected traces of LST6, the listeria strain identified in 91 percent of the outbreak's cases. The South African meat processor, Enterprise Foods, issued a recall of some of its processed products in early March. Food safety experts at the World Health Organization plan to review the company's exports to 15 countries across Africa, many of which lack reliable disease surveillance systems and diagnostic tools. Namibia recently reported one listeriosis case; its link to South Africa's outbreak is uncertain. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
At the beginning of every project, the choreographer Tere O'Connor asks himself a basic question. As he said recently over coffee near his West Village apartment: "What am I doing? What is dance trying to do?" "Dance doesn't do a lot of the things that people think they'd like it to do," he said. "I don't think it tells stories very well, but people would really like it to." You won't find a story, the linear kind, in the choreographic suite that Mr. O'Connor is bringing to the American Dance Festival in Durham, N.C., this week. The four parts of his "Bleed" project amount to a more porous kind of whole. Mr. O'Connor, a major force in contemporary dance, began the project in 2012, with what sounds like a simple, if ambitious, idea: creating three different works with three different casts, then folding those into a fourth. While each of the four "Poem," "Secret Mary," "Sister" and the culmination, "Bleed," featuring all 11 dancers has been presented individually, the Durham engagement, beginning Sunday, brings them together in one place for the first time. On paper, it may sound like cut and paste choreography: Take three parts, and combine. But Mr. O'Connor, known for his radically multifaceted movement and exquisite craftsmanship, wouldn't devise anything so easy to imagine or describe. Talking with him about "Bleed" is not unlike watching it. Images proliferate, overlap, dissipate: Some of them you grasp; others pass you by. The words "essences" and "ghosts" come up a lot, as in, "the essences and ghosts of past work." One impetus behind "Bleed," Mr. O'Connor said, was to examine what endures or disappears from one creative process to the next, not movement itself as much as how it's structured, what it evokes. At 56, in the 33rd year of his career, with a resume full of accolades Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Bessie awards; his recent election to the Academy of Arts and Sciences he has resisted settling into a single choreographic approach, so that his work, in some ways, remains a riddle even to him. "I think he's trying to get everyone and himself lost," said Ryan Kelly, a dancer in "Secret Mary," describing Mr. O'Connor's methods of generating layer upon layer of movement. "That's my speculation. Any preconceived notion of how a piece should be structured, how it should go, gets washed out by so many layers." Karsten Moran for The New York Times Cynthia Oliver, Mr. O'Connor's colleague at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, where both are professors of dance, echoed those observations, noting his skill in subverting "rote or default movement." She described the rehearsal process for "Sister," a duet for her and David Thomson, as "fascinating, luscious, terrifying." "The amount of material that comes out of his body it's a constant wave of physical, intellectual, visual information," Ms. Oliver said. "It requires a lot of you on every level." (Those demands are eased, she added, by Mr. O'Connor's "wicked sense of humor.") The premise of "Bleed" allowed Mr. O'Connor to pursue a few of his many ideas at once. The crystalline "Poem," for five dancers, grew out of a reawakened interest in what he calls old school formalism, while "Secret Mary," a quartet, came from a desire to collaborate with artists whom he had mentored. (Young choreographers flock to his composition classes, both in New York and Illinois.) Reviewing these works at New York Live Arts in 2012, Alastair Macaulay, who has not always praised Mr. O'Connor, wrote in The New York Times, "The creative mind we sense behind the two pieces is sensuous, investigative, playful, subversive, witty, provocative, fresh, intense." Jodee Nimerichter, the director of the American Dance Festival, was also in the audience at that time. Mr. O'Connor hadn't intended to show the "Bleed" project as a full series, but Ms. Nimerichter was so enthralled that she approached him about the possibility. "It seemed like an amazing opportunity to share his work in an in depth way," she said, adding that she was equally excited for a talk that Mr. O'Connor will give on Thursday. (This is also his company's festival debut, though he has taught there in past years.) "Sister," which hasn't been seen in New York, evolved through conversations with Ms. Oliver and Mr. Thomson; the three are old friends. "We know each other, and we also come from really different experiences," Mr. O'Connor said. Mr. Thomson is from Jamaica and Ms. Oliver from the Caribbean island of St. Croix; Mr. O'Connor grew up near Rochester. In "Sister," he harnessed that almost familial tension, "where things are very much the same, but just dissimilar enough to create difference," he said. That kind of multiplicity suffuses "Bleed," which steers clear of what Mr. O'Connor calls "the palace of cogency," home to structural conventions like variations on a central theme. (He favors no theme, all variation.) Where his work lives, paradox governs. Erasure is a form of construction; tangents are integral; ephemerality is "not a romantic thing" but "a substantive element that can be used": just a few thoughts that came up in the making of "Bleed." But cogency isn't entirely out of the picture. Mr. Kelly, the dancer, remembers his first encounter with Mr. O'Connor's work, a performance of "Wrought Iron Fog" in 2009. "I thought, 'This is really failing at being abstraction,' " Mr. Kelly recalled. "There were all of these nascent stories, the beginnings of stories, overlapping, interlaced." And hazy representations: "Was that a 19th century dress I saw walk by? Was that a dragon? Was that a Merce Cunningham piece? It's almost in the past tense in your mind did I just see that? because it came in and out of the ether." That's one thing that dance does well, Mr. O'Connor said: "Things come up and go away." Not unlike, well, everything in life. "It's something that dance can teach us about a way to experience our presence on Earth," he said, referring to that fleetingness. "As opposed to looking only for the story to work out. Because that doesn't happen." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Subsets and Splits